Night of the Animals(149)

“No!” Astrid cried. Without a moment’s pause, she blinked 999 over her corneas, and sent out emergency double-orange-freqs.

Cuthbert lay on the floor, looking up at the white ceiling, struggling to breathe, but not feeling any real pain. His mind began to travel.

He and Drystan had been so perfectly happy, so rarely happy, ambling on a different scalding day in the Wyre Forest. 1968. He remembered again a little detail from that afternoon, how Drystan quite inadvertently stepped on a young snake—an adder—and killed it—oh, they should have turned back then, Drystan had said. It was a complete accident, blameless—the snake had been totally hidden—but Cuthbert instantly saw Drystan’s recognition that he had tread upon a living forest creature. Drystan had jumped in horror, drawn himself back.

“Oh no,” Drystan had said. “I hurt something, Cuddy. Oh, no.”

The venomous adder hadn’t bitten him, but the thought of what he had done seemed to annihilate him.

“It’s only a snake,” Cuthbert had said. “Wasn’t you, Drystan. It’s like a cricket or something, that’s all. A snake is a snake. It’s not even a good animal.”

But no consolation seemed to touch Drystan.

Cuthbert remembered how he had run his finger down the cool scales of the snake, whose upper body had been given a grotesque crook. The string of black diamonds on its back were so perfect and ordered, like some optical art. But Drystan would not touch it. He looked devastated, clutching his cheeks and pulling his own ears.

The two boys had buried it quickly, dug a little hole and covered it in pink mallows and purple betony, but Drystan would not stop weeping. Cuthbert had almost forgotten that, and now he could see Dryst’s face above him, weeping again. He was a brilliant child, and could go from hard lad to sensitive so quickly, Cuthbert remembered—he could be so terribly sincere. He was a good boy, a very good little lad.

“A’m worse than evil,” Dryst had said as they brushed soil over the snake, so genuinely remorseful. “I’ll pay for this—yow’ll see. Them Boogles will get me. Maybe both of us.”

After the burial, they went on exploring the forest. Drystan did seem to lighten up a bit—just a bit, at first. Cuthbert found pieces of old charcoal around some of the old woodland hearths, and he beaned Drystan with them a few times rather beautifully, and eventually Drystan fought back, and they were having fun again. Then they were laughing again, running down that hill in the forest like young puppies, not minding their bearings, speeding through the waist-high maidenhair and bracken, and they ran and laughed and ran and laughed and it was as if they were carving a path through a flood of green and fields of glee that would go on and on and on. Drystan turned around and looked at Cuthbert, and it was the last time he saw his brother’s face alive. He was smiling, but he looked sad, too, as if he knew.

He went back in his memories to the terrible walk back to the cottage, after Drystan vanished. He saw, on its hind legs, the same giant river otter he’d seen and heard under the water with Drystan, trying to save him, or to take him to the animal world. There, near a bend in the brook he could see and hear, again, more softly now, more sweetly, how Drystan had called out underwater to him, and how the words sounded like gagoga maga medu, at least as Cuthbert came to remember them.

There had been an inquest by the county authorities. The death was ruled a “misadventure.” Cuthbert, only six years old, could not be persuaded that “Boogles” hadn’t murdered Drystan. His granny said it wasn’t so, again and again, until the day she died, soothing Cuthbert as best she could.

“Inna wasn’t them Boogles, Cuddy. It wasn’t nothing with the forest.” But he never wholly believed it, and he didn’t think his granny did either.

He thought of his gran for a moment as he gazed at the whiteness above. He wondered if he might see her in the next world. Winefride Wenlock had leaned even more heavily upon “owd” Wyrish folkways after Drystan’s drowning. She used to tell Cuthbert that she had been careful to make sure neither his brother nor he had gazed at a looking glass before age one, but somehow she must have failed with Drystan, she must have. She claimed that white birds were a sign of death, and if Cuddy were playing alone in the garden and a seagull or white owl appeared, he was to “scrobble indoors” right away. One time, when Cuthbert was down with bronchitis, his gran came into his room late at night with scissors. Her Alfie had died of pneumonia, and lung ailments in general obsessed her. He felt her bend down and carefully clip hair from the nape of his neck. He asked her, the next day, why she had taken the hair, and she related that she counted out twenty pieces of the sweet brown strands, folded them into a slice of buttered bread, and fed it all to a stray dog. The dog would take the disease “back to the Boogles,” she said.

“Astrid,” Cuthbert gasped, raising his hand up toward this stranger, this kind soul who had come to love him, for no apparent reason, at the end of his life. The cat, Muezza, sat on the bed, paws in front, looking puzzled and detached.

“Yow, love,” said Cuthbert. “Yow. My answer to gagoga maga medu. My answer is . . .”

But he was gone.

“Gagoga maga medu,” she said. “I hear you.”

It was the life-phrase, the blessing, the secret otterspaeke of visions. It came from the same eternal underwater world of the forest, where Drystan and his gran and his lost grandfather’s body lived, where the Wonderments lived, and where Cuthbert could now return.