Chapter Seventeen
The phone’s beep woke her from a dream of Doofus chasing tiny apples round and round the orchard. A dim grey light was just beginning to scrub the darkness from the barn. She could see Clive curled up in the other sleeping bag, an empty banana skin beside him. Without his glasses he did not look like Clive.
“Hey,” she said, giving him a nudge. “Wake up, Clive. Dawn chorus time.” For someone nocturnal, he took a long time to wake.
“Ergh,” he said, reaching for his glasses. Then he ate a muffin, washed it down with apple juice, and turned into cheerful Clive again.
“We’ll try recording in the orchard,” he decided. “Bound to be birds there.”
There was one, at least, a single blackbird belting out a song to the silent trees. A net of light, damp mist hung limply over everything.
While Clive was recording, Holly ran over to the farmhouse through the dewy grass and crept inside to use Ailsa’s toilet. Creeping out again, she looked around the yard. All quiet. She walked across to the paddock and looked into it over the wall. All quiet there too, although she could not see the lame sheep. The veil of mist lay heavy on the fields and hillside.
She walked back to Clive, who pressed a finger to his lips. More distant birds were starting up now, in answer to the blackbird in the orchard: they seemed to echo in from miles around. Something quick and piercing as a sewing-machine needle rang out sharply from a nearby tree and made her jump.
“Wren,” mouthed Clive.
Holly listened. Nan would love this. It was a rippling, sparkling river of birdsong – there was perhaps a tractor engine faintly purring, far away, but otherwise nothing but birds, all vying in song with each other.
It was a shame about that engine. She heard it again. Like a deep, distant growl.
And again. Perhaps it wasn’t as distant as she thought. What was it? She didn’t think it was a tractor, after all.
She listened. And again.
Holly put out a hand and touched Clive’s arm.
“Clive? Can we go back into the barn now?”
“Ssh.”
“Clive?”
He pressed pause on the tape recorder. “What? We’ve only got about twenty minutes’ worth.”
“That’s enough,” said Holly. “I’m hungry. Let’s go back and have some breakfast in the barn.”
“Okay.” Clive began to stroll towards the barn, pausing to tilt an ear. “Greenfinch,” he said, nodding.
“Come on,” said Holly, who was listening too, but for something else. In the orchard, the blackbird’s stream of song turned to a strident chuck chuck chuck. “Clive? Please.”
At last Clive began to move again. It seemed to take him forever to get back into the barn.
Meanwhile Holly, still straining her ears, heard nothing else out of the ordinary. Maybe she’d been mistaken. By the time they’d climbed the ladder and were up in the loft amongst the straw, she’d convinced herself that she had been wrong.
“I suppose we ought to listen to the tape,” said Clive, unpeeling a boiled egg, “while there’s still time to go back and record some more if it hasn’t come out properly.”
He pressed the play button and turned the volume up. A blackbird filled the barn like an over-eager choirboy in a cathedral. A huge blackbird, thought Holly, about the size of a turkey.
“That’s not bad,” said Clive, after a few minutes; and then she heard it, magnified: the growl.
Clive frowned. “Shame about that engine. I don’t remember hearing that.”
“Is it an engine?” Holly said.
“Well, what else would it be?”
The recorder growled again. The sound echoed round the barn.
“You know, that’s like,” said Clive, and stopped.
It growled again.
And this time, from outside the barn, there came an answering growl.
No, not a growl, thought Holly in growing alarm. It was more like a roar, deep and long and rasping; and it was far too close for comfort.
“Switch it off,” she said quickly, and reached over to the recorder. It growled again just before she could press the stop button.
And in the sudden dusky silence, there came the replying roar outside.
Clive’s mouth was open.
“I didn’t bolt the door,” he said quietly. “The barn door.”
They stared at each other. The door was underneath and behind them, and therefore invisible from where they were. In the silence that followed there was a stealthy shifting.
“It might be a cat,” breathed Clive uncertainly.
“We can’t bolt the door now,” whispered Holly. “Can we pull the ladder up?”
They both reached for the ladder. It was hooked over the edge of the platform, but when they unhooked it they could not pull it up. It was too long and heavy.
There was a creak. It did not come from the ladder. It came from the door.
Something was opening the door wider, and coming in.
“Let go,” said Clive. He stopped trying to pull the ladder up and gave it a sharp push instead. The ladder teetered and then keeled over slowly the other way, like a tall, thin man fainting. It clattered against the far wall.
For a moment there was dead silence. The children crouched on the platform, motionless and rigid, listening.
Maybe the noise has frightened it away, thought Holly, whatever it is; but before the thought had time to reassure her, she glimpsed a movement.
Between the slats of the platform, down below her, something was creeping, creeping. She could see only narrow slices of it at a time. It was something with sandy-coloured fur. Something that looked as broad as a cow, though it was not a cow, nor anything like one.
Now she could smell it: a rank, dark, cloying smell that she recognised. It was the scent of the creature that had met her underground, in the dark, stone tunnel.
And it was right beneath the platform. She watched slice after slice of it pass by below, trying to fit the slices together in her mind; but she could not, she could only guess that it was big, until it moved across the floor into full sight.
Clive gasped. Holly could not make a sound. Her brain seemed frozen, half in terror, half in trying to fix a label on this creature. She tried to concentrate on the label. It was preferable to terror, but the terror kept breaking through.
The animal was nosing at the fallen ladder. Clive had been right, in one way: it was indeed a cat.
It was a big cat – an impossibly big cat. It was long and heavily built, with thick sandy fur, and a gently swaying tail. It was like a lioness, but bigger than the lions she had seen once in the zoo. More muscular, more stocky: far, far too big.
It turned its head, and Clive’s hand gripped her shoulder. Two huge fangs curved down from its upper jaw. Lions had fangs; but not like these.
The creature saw them. Its slanting golden eyes, unblinking, seemed to drink them in. Then it drew back its head and snarled at them, showing off not just the enormous fangs but many other over-sized and vicious teeth. Padding round in a semi-circle, it stopped and crouched below the platform, gazing up at them.
She saw the massive haunches bunch. She shrieked and pulled Clive backward as it leapt.
Claws scraped at the edge of the platform. Then the cat fell back to the ground, everything vibrating as it landed. It disappeared below them, and she saw it through the slats, prowling round again beneath: she glimpsed a narrow slice of golden eye.
Clive was scrabbling for the camera.
“No, Clive!” she said, but too late. He was already hanging his head over the edge of the platform to take a picture. The camera whirred and flashed, and then there was a roar. Clive pulled himself back up in a hurry and threw himself against the straw bales as the creature leapt again.
This time it was attacking from the wrong angle, and did not even come close: but the camera went tumbling from the platform to the ground.
The creature ignored the fallen camera.
Prowling back into their sight, it turned its deliberate gaze upwards, studying the children.
“Oh my God,” said Holly. “Oh my God. What is it?”
Clive looked both sick and excited. “Sabre-tooth.”
“What? As in prehistoric? A sabre-tooth tiger?”
“Cat, not tiger. But yes. I’m pretty sure of it. Where’s your phone?” Grabbing it, he fumbled at the screen. As the cat padded round the barn again, he began to take more pictures with the phone.
“Stop it,” Holly said. “Oh, stop it, stop it, Clive.”
“I’ve got to,” said Clive, snapping repeatedly. White flashes filled the barn like multiple lightning.
The creature did not like the flash. It drew back, glaring up at them; and then its mouth yawned open in a harsh, rasping roar that shredded what little composure Holly had left. She flinched back at the sight of those exposed, curved fangs, each longer than her hand.
The cat crouched low: she knew what it meant to do, and she could not prevent it. Every muscle in her body tensed as she watched it launch itself into the air a third time.
This was its best attempt yet. The unsheathed claws clutched at the edge of the platform. The massive head came partly into view: the eyes fixed on her. Its impossible fangs looked even bigger this close up.
But its hind feet had nothing to grip. They were dangling. A small domestic cat might have pulled itself up from that position by its front claws alone: this giant cat could not.
“Get off!” shouted Clive. Holly picked up the thermos flask and threw it at the staring head. The flask bounced off one ear. The cat snarled: and dropped.
For the third time, it fell back to the floor with a thud that shook through Holly like a drumbeat.
She waited fearfully to it to try again; but abruptly it seemed to lose interest in them. Lowering its head, it sniffed its way around the tubs lining the barn, pushed one over and investigated the contents. Then it disappeared from sight. There was a creak at the door – and silence.
After a while Clive hung himself upside down over the edge of the platform.
“It’s gone out,” he said. He did not sound relieved.
Holly began to shiver. She pulled the sleeping bag around her, but it didn’t help.
“What do we do? Give me my phone,” she whispered. Who could she ring, though? It wasn’t even five o’clock in the morning.
But she needed to warn people. She needed to warn her family. So she stabbed at the phone with fumbling, clumsy fingers. First she would ring home, and then she would dial 999 and ask for the police.
At home, nobody answered. They were all asleep. After six rings the answerphone invited her to leave her message after the tone.
“Hi it’s me,” said Holly breathlessly. “We’re okay we’re still in Ailsa’s barn don’t worry but–” And then her phone went dead.
She shook it. It had been at least half charged last night. But the camera flash ate up battery power.
“We can’t ring anyone,” she said blankly. “What can we do?”
“We’ll wait for Ailsa to come and find us in the morning,” said Clive. He had a look of dreamy ecstasy on his face. Holly wanted to shake him.
“But what if that thing eats Ailsa?” she wailed. “What if it lies in wait and pounces on her?” She could feel tears welling up, but she knew she mustn’t cry. She had to stay calm in order to think.
“It’ll have found something else to eat by then,” said Clive.
Holly was not comforted by this theory. She peered down from the platform. It really was very high; and there was no way to climb down the barn’s stone walls, which was fortunate, because otherwise the sabre-tooth might have climbed up. But if she let herself over the edge of the platform until she was hanging by her fingers, then the drop would not be so great. She could tip some straw bales down beforehand, to land on.
And while she was dangling there, like helpless bait on a fishing line, the sabre-tooth might prowl back through the door. No. There was nothing to do but wait.
So she huddled, shivering anxiously, in her sleeping bag. Clive stretched out luxuriously in his.
“I can’t believe it,” he murmured after a while, as if he had seen Paradise.
“We have to believe it,” she said grimly.
“A sabre-tooth. Imagine. They haven’t been alive for maybe thirty thousand years. Whoever bred the wolves must have bred this as well. Maybe they managed to get DNA from fossils and clone it. Wow. Just unbelievable.” He was in bliss.
Holly did not answer. But, scrunched up in her sleeping bag, hugging her knees, she began to think.
It seemed unlikely to her that Clive’s scientific explanation was the right one. Cloning prehistoric beasts would be a very difficult and expensive business, surely? She didn’t see how you could breed all those wolves and a giant cat in total secrecy. It would be a big operation, not easy to hide. Somebody would have found out. It would be all over the internet.
And while an eccentric millionaire might want to reintroduce wolves into the wild – who on earth would want to introduce a sabre-tooth? On the other hand, if they had escaped from some research lab, why had nobody turned up to claim them?
The animals had appeared from nowhere, all at once: not long after Doofus had arrived. Holly was sure the sabre-tooth had come, like the wolves, from the gap in the ground at Barges Bridge. She recalled her glimpse of a long, lithe, sandy body…
They had all emerged from the past at Barges Bridge, through a gap, not just in soil and rock, but in time. That was the only explanation.
But why now? Why there? Streams had dried up before. Caves had fallen in. There were holes in the ground all over the moors, but they didn’t have prehistoric creatures creeping out of them.
There must be something else about that place, she thought, something special about Barges Bridge, where Doofus was found, where Jarvis shot and killed a black dog, perhaps Doofus’s mother. Perhaps there have always been black dogs there.
She felt the cogs of her brain spin and whir as they swiftly slotted ideas together, impelled by adrenalin and fear.
If it was called Barges Bridge after the black dogs – the Bargests – maybe that was proof that black dogs had hung around there for ages. Hadn’t Ailsa seen one, years ago? Maybe people had been seeing Bargests there for centuries, or longer. Romans had marched across the moors two thousand years ago, but they hadn’t been the first inhabitants by a long way. She thought of rugged people dressed in furs, wielding their stone axes on the trees – building the first bridge across the stream.
Maybe the Bargests were there for a good reason: because that was where the past leaked through. But she had never heard of anybody seeing wolves up on the moor before. And certainly there had been nothing like this…
She seemed to feel the cat’s long body, huge and heavy, slinking silently below her, and had to roll round in her sleeping bag and look down to check it wasn’t really there.
The barn was empty. She rolled on to her back, and thought about a golden eye, watching her between the slats of wood.
A golden eye, looking out at her – or in at her – through a pierced blue stone.
That bluish stone on the Turnpikes’ windowsill. The stone that Jarvis had dug up on his land. The golden eye that she had seen through it had not been her imagination. It had been real. It matched the eyes that had glowered hungrily at her from the edge of the platform, before the sabre-tooth lost its precarious grip and fell. That stone had something to do with it all.
There was an argument of birds outside; a distant car revved its engine; a cow mooed mournfully. The world was waking up. And somewhere in that everyday world a sabre-tooth cat stalked. She looked across at Clive, who was gently snoring.
What was the stone? And even if she knew – how would it help?