Chapter Five
After that, Holly was reluctant to take Doofus up on to the moors or anywhere near Turnpike Farm. Luckily the weather colluded with her. There was day after day of low, grey cloud that draped itself miserably over the hills like a soggy handkerchief, now and then sputtering out a bit of drizzle.
Easter passed in gloom. She spent much of the week lying on her bed with supplies of books and chocolate eggs: she was reading for school, she informed Mum. One of the books was for school, anyway.
Matt was glued to the computer. Next door, Clive was busy in his shed working on an armadilladarium, which was, disappointingly, a home not for armadillos but for woodlice.
Meanwhile Doofus slunk around the house, eating, growing – he filled the doorways now – and occasionally howling. Sometimes he howled quite quietly. Even so, every time he did it, Holly felt the world around her darken until she was lost on a lonely, gloomy inward sea.
She told herself that she was doing as much for him as any dog could reasonably expect. He was well cared for. But whenever she tried half-heartedly to play with him, he showed no interest, and she soon gave up with a mixture of resentment and relief.
Still, she took him daily to the park and playground, where he trotted dutifully round the rosebeds. Often she pushed Nan’s wheelchair down there too. Nan was supposed to go out regularly, like Doofus, though minus the running around.
Nan seemed to enjoy being outside. However, pushing Nan’s wheelchair to the park wasn’t Holly’s favourite activity. Whenever she took Nan out, she worried that something dreadful would happen. It was a stupid worry. What could happen, after all, unless she pushed Nan into the pond?
Wheeling her past the flowerbeds on one of these trips, she kept a wary eye on the group of teenagers who hogged the swings, talking over-loudly and smoking. Dad always said just ignore them, they’re harmless. Holly wondered if Matt was like that when he was with his friends.
After parking Nan in front of the tulips, she threw a stick for Doofus, which he retrieved without enthusiasm. She threw it further, into the dried-up fountain.
Doofus glanced at it, gave a sort of shrug, picked up another stick exactly the same size and brought it over to her.
“You’re not daft, are you?” said Holly thoughtfully. She tried to give him a pat, but he pulled away.
“Godda dod,” said Nan. She held out a thin, quivering hand to Doofus. Doofus walked over to her, sniffed her fingers and let himself be stroked.
Holly felt a momentary, shocking pang of jealousy. Why Nan and not her? “Yes, good dog!” she said.
“Good doggie!” shouted one of the boys on the swings. “Heel, doggie! Heel!” The others sniggered.
“Catch the stick, doggie!” A stick was flung from the swings, narrowly missing Doofus.
Doofus picked it up in his teeth. He strolled over to the teenagers and dropped it. Then, standing perfectly still, he looked at them.
They went quiet. The swinging stopped.
“Heel,” she called, and Doofus swung his shoulders round and trotted over to her. The boys were silent. A minute later they slid off the swings and slunk away.
Holly did not throw any more sticks. She began to push Nan home, with Doofus following on the lead. She noticed that one or two people crossed the road to avoid meeting them. Of course, not everybody liked dogs; or maybe it was just because of the width of the wheelchair.
But Doofus seemed to fill the path with more than just his body. It was like being followed by a thundercloud. The park wasn’t big enough for him, Holly thought. She didn’t want to take him there again.
Next day, however, the sun reappeared, weak and listless, like a flu patient after a long sleep beneath grey quilts.
“What are you two layabouts doing in the house?” demanded Mum, as if they’d been hiding in a cupboard for a week and she’d only just noticed them. “Spring’s come bounding in, and you can go bounding out. Off you go, the pair of you! Get some fresh air! Take that dog out for a proper walk.”
Matt moaned.
“We’ll get Clive to come with us,” said Holly. She was thinking that she might encourage Clive to do the dog-walking for her.
When they wriggled through the gap in the back fence, they found Clive in his garden wheedling a baby crow. Matt held Doofus tightly by the collar, but Doofus wasn’t interested in the crow. The crow certainly wasn’t interested in Doofus. Maybe it didn’t recognise dogs.
Clive was holding out a saucer to it. “Come on, come on, then, Stupid!” he urged.
The crow flapped and hopped around the patio and wouldn’t come near.
“What’s wrong with it?” asked Matt.
“It’s Stupid,” said Clive. “It fell out of the fir tree. Its mother’s sitting up there cawing at it for all she’s worth as if she thinks it can fly back up. But it can’t fly. And she won’t come down to feed it.” He was tense and impatient. “I’ve given her two hours. Now it’s up to me. But it won’t take food off me either. Come on, Stupid! Lunchtime!”
He laid the saucer, full of red bits of something, on the patio near the crow. It flapped its useless wings anxiously and skulked behind the pot-plants.
“What are you trying to feed it?” Holly asked.
“Chopped worm.” Clive exhaled. “Renaldo died.”
“Oh, Clive, I’m sorry! What of?”
“Being chopped up and fed to crows,” said Matt.
“I think he ate a slug pellet,” said Clive.
Holly looked at chopped Renaldo in the saucer, and Stupid refusing to eat him. “Has Doofus’s howling bothered you at all lately?” she asked casually.
“No more than usual.”
“I don’t think he howls as much as he used to,” said Holly. She wished this was true. “Sometimes he doesn’t howl so loud,” she added, and this was true. Sometimes the howls were so quiet they were almost under his breath. But they were still howls, and they still made the blood seem to slow and chill in her body.
Quite apart from the blood-chilling effect, his howling worried her for another reason. It was a reason she had not yet tried to share with Matt or Clive. She wasn’t even sure about it herself. It just seemed too far-fetched…
“You’re right,” said Matt. “I hadn’t thought about it. He hasn’t howled as loudly as he did at Jarvis Turnpike.”
“Up by Barges Bridge?” asked Clive. “That frog-spawn you found for me there all hatched, you know. Twenty-one tadpoles. I named two of them after you, but the biggest one is called Tiger. Do you want to see them?”
“Later,” said Holly. “We’ve got to take Doofus for a proper walk. Mum won’t take him running any more. She keeps saying it’s my job.”
Clive’s eyes lit up. “I’ll come with you,” he offered, as she had hoped. “Just let me get my binoculars and my notebook. I can do some bird-watching.”
As he disappeared into the house, Matt said, “I’m not going if Clive brings his binoculars. He’ll have to stop this stuff before he goes to High School. Bird-watching! And worms and tadpoles! I’m serious, Holly! He’ll get slaughtered.”
Privately, Holly agreed with him. Although she liked Clive and his enthusiasms, it was a worry. But High School was still six months away.
“Have fun,” said Matt. He delivered Doofus’s lead into Holly’s hand and dived back through the fence before she could argue.
Clive reappeared with a pair of huge, ancient binoculars dangling from his neck. “Ready. Where are we going?”
“Miller’s Clough,” said Holly. This was the forest park where Mum had taken Doofus running. It was a steep wooded valley made by the stream – the same one that flowed under Barges Bridge – as it tumbled down from the moor, gathering volume and force until it met the river. Miller’s Clough had waterfalls and waymarked paths and was popular with tourists.
As they set off, she asked Clive, “Would you like to take Doofus for his walks? On your own, I mean?”
Clive looked with longing at Doof
us, who was trotting obediently on his lead. “Would you pay me?”
“Pay you?”
“Dog-walking fees.”
Holly gritted her teeth. “All right. A pound a walk.”
Clive sighed. “I’m tempted. But he’s your dog. You’re the one he’ll want to have taking him for walks.”
“He won’t mind!”
“He will. He’ll think you don’t care about him.”
“Well, I don’t care about him!” Holly bit her lip as soon as she had blurted the words out. She couldn’t take them back. But they were true. Clive stopped walking to stare at her in surprise and reproach.
“You chose him,” he pointed out.
“Only to shut Mum and Dad up and keep them happy.”
“But you still chose Doofus over all the others! You could have said no. You had the choice of all those dogs. You’re so lucky. I don’t have any real pets, only worms!”
“You’ve got Mr Finney,” Holly said.
“If only he wasn’t so nocturnal,” muttered Clive.
“Then why don’t you borrow Doofus?”
“Because he’s your dog.”
They stopped speaking as they entered the Miller’s Clough car park. She scuffed her feet, feeling conspicuous with her forbidding dog and Clive’s huge binoculars.
But the walkers thronging the car park were too busy to take much notice. They looked bright and purposeful in sturdy boots and bulging rucksacks. They wrestled with huge rustling maps that fought back, trying to envelop them, and queued for the ice-cream van. Some of them had shorts on. Some of the shorts were rather strange. Holly and Clive looked at each other and grinned.
“Do you want an ice-cream?” she said. It was a peace offering.
The ice cream cheered Clive up. “Stupid might eat Renaldo while I’m away,” he said hopefully.
Holly fed Doofus her empty cone, to prove to Clive that she did care. Doofus chewed it, spat it out and went back to inspecting a puddle.
“He still has this thing about water,” she said.
“Maybe he’s a water-dog,” suggested Clive. “You know, like a spaniel is bred to fetch ducks.”
“He’s nothing like a spaniel!”
“He might be some sort of gun dog, though, or a hunting dog.”
It occurred to Holly that whatever Doofus hunted, she would not want to be it. She shook the thought away. “He’s just a mixture. I don’t know what he is.”
“He’s a shuck,” said a voice next to her. She turned and saw a thin old man in long green shorts, like a spindly gnome. “All right, old shuck?” he inquired.
Doofus raised the edge of one ear disdainfully.
“What’s a shuck?” asked Holly.
“It’s what we call a dog like that, back home in Norfolk. That’s a shuck if ever I saw one.” He had a strange, slow accent.
“A dog like what?” said Holly sharply.
“Like that. A black dog.” He smiled at her. “Only joking, m’duck. Don’t look so worried. That’s a fine dog. Have a good walk.”
“Only joking about what?” said Holly, but the man had hoisted his rucksack and was marching away.
“Have you heard of a shuck?” she asked Clive.
“Nope. Must be a dialect word for a black dog. Come on, let’s avoid the tourists and take the old path.”
Turning away from the walkers, they entered the forest by a narrow, overgrown track. Like Clive’s pets, this forest wasn’t quite the real thing. It was really just a plantation of fir trees, so close together that nothing much would grow in the narrow darkness between them. As they walked, the trees seemed to march past in tight military rows. In the distance, the huddled trunks appeared to form a solid wall of grey.
Nevertheless, despite its formal ranks of trees, the forest still had a pleasantly creepy feeling of age and hidden eyes. Holly liked its disinfectant tang and the softness of the pine needles underfoot. It seemed that Doofus liked it too, for his ears pricked up and he gazed keenly through the shadows.
“I’m going to let you off the lead,” Holly told him, “but you mustn’t run away.” As she released his collar Doofus went to sniff at the tree trunks and raised his leg.
“Cuckoo!” said Clive excitedly. “Can you hear it? Listen!”
Holly listened. It sounded as if the cuckoo was singing down a wooden tunnel. She wondered why bird-song echoed in the open air, and since it did, why didn’t it bounce off a thousand tree-trunks and surround her with cuckoos?
Clive put the oversized binoculars to his eyes and scanned the treetops. “Can’t see anything,” he muttered. “Hang on! There we go! I think it’s a siskin.”
“Clive? When you start High School, will you tell people you go birdwatching?”
“Sure,” said Clive. “Loads of people go birdwatching.”
“Not at High School.”
“So?”
“So they’ll think you’re a dork.”
“So?” said Clive. With his binoculars pressed against his eyes, she couldn’t see his face.
“Yes, but Clive–” Holly broke off. Doofus had sprung off the path into the forest as abruptly as if somebody had fired a starting pistol.
She thought he would smash into a tree-trunk, so recklessly headlong was he running; but he swerved, twisted, and disappeared into the grey wall of trees like a piece fitting into a puzzle. And was gone.
“Doofus!” yelled Holly in exasperation. “I should never have let him off the lead. Doofus!”
“Ssh! You’ll disturb the birds. I think the mother’s just left the nest.”
“Doofus! Here, boy! Heel!”
“No point shouting. He’ll come back,” said Clive, still glued to his binoculars.
“There he is,” muttered Holly in relief. She took a few steps into the forest, straining her eyes in the gloom. “I just saw him over there – no, hang on!” She glimpsed another movement further away: a grey flicker as something slipped between the trees. And there it was again, but on the other side...
Suddenly she felt as if the whole forest was moving around her, rippling with grey shadows. She broke into a sweat and felt the hair prickle on the back of her head.
“Give me the binoculars!” she said urgently.
“Just a minute.” Clive tipped his head back. “I think I can see the cuckoo.”
A howl came from the trees to their side, long and drawn out.
“Doofus!” Holly cried.
The only answer was another howl, more high-pitched this time. It didn’t sound like Doofus at all. Then a third howl came from away in the distance.
“Sounds like he’s met some friends,” said Clive.
“Come here, Doofus! Heel! Bad dog!”
“He’s not a bad dog,” Clive objected.
“He mustn’t howl like that!”
“But lots of dogs – oh, look, look! It did it! Yes!” Clive punched the air. Throwing down the binoculars, he ran over to the base of the tree. He squatted down and carefully picked up something small from the carpet of pine needles.
“What did what?”
“The cuckoo! It pushed the baby siskin out of the nest. I saw it!” Clive held out his hand triumphantly. On his palm lay a shred of fluff with a beak. It was obviously dead.
“I feel sick,” said Holly.
“It’s just nature,” said Clive. “We couldn’t have prevented it.”
Holly stared at him. Then she whirled round.
“Doofus! Doofus! DOOFUS!” she screamed. She began to run after him, through the forest, away from Clive and the dead bird.
Hurtling past the lines of shadowy grey trunks, she kept shouting for Doofus. Around her, beyond the thudding of her feet, she seemed to hear other swift footsteps pattering. She stopped: so did the feet. She started up again, and so did they. Again she saw the strange grey flicker of a body through the trees. Was that Doofus?
It was big enough, but it wasn’t black enough. The trees closed in around her like the bars of a cage. Suddenly
, unreasonably, Holly was frightened. There was something about those shifting, hidden shapes that made her hair stand up on end. She felt that if she stopped again, she might be caught.
They were just dogs, she told herself. Just a few dogs having fun. So she ran on, trying to ignore the fear that surged through her and whispered to her that the trees would never end; which of course they did, abruptly.
Holly emerged into glaring sunlight that made her wince. She was back on the main path, near the waterfalls where the stream made its last long leap towards the river. There was nothing strange here. Everything looked normal. A few people were tramping along the bank or dibbling fingers in the water. No dogs. Where was Doofus?
She ran upstream, and then back down: no Doofus. There were no dogs at all. Where had they all gone? Holly spun round in a circle, furious with herself for being so scared, and with Doofus for being the cause of it. She found that she was trembling, and she did not like it.
Then she saw him. He was standing at the top of the main waterfall, high above her on the far bank with his head turned, looking away upstream, up towards the moor.
“Doofus! Doofus!” she yelled furiously above the noise of tumbling water. At last he heard: the black head swivelled round towards her. Without hurry, he came scrambling down the rocks at the far side of the falls, sure-footed and careful. Then he shook himself and sat on his haunches, gazing at her across the stream with his unreadable black eyes.
“Why did you run away like that?” said Clive’s indignant voice. He puffed up behind her with his binoculars swinging from his neck.
Holly ignored him. “Come here!” she yelled harshly at Doofus, who stood up, stretched and stepped deliberately through the stream, which was fast and broad but not deep, to reach her.
“Bad dog!” Her voice was thick with fear and anger. “Sit! And don’t you dare move until I say!” Doofus sat down with a casual air.
“What are you so het up about?” asked Clive in surprise. “All he did was go off to meet some other dogs. That’s only human. I mean only canine.”
“I didn’t like those dogs. Anyway, it’s not just that!”
“What, then? Why are you so angry with him?”
“Because Doofus makes bad things happen.” Holly’s voice was shaking. “Like that baby bird you found. Because every time he howls – something dies!”