Night of the Animals(34)
After a nervous, exhilarating hour, the sunlight was beginning to fade. They started frankly to run; despite Drystan’s brave words, the prospect of getting caught in the Wyre after nightfall scared them. Worse, if too late, they knew there would be trouble once they got back to the cottage. The belt might come out.
As they ran through the Wyre, Drystan seemed more agile, humming to himself as he hopped over rocks and brush piles and lost antlers and the scat of badgers and stoats. “I’m a deer!” He flowed as a boy-sirocco, crunching down branches and grasses, as fast as the footwork of Roy Race on the football pitch, as dangerous as Dan Dare dashing across a Venusian no-man’s-land to do battle with the green Mekon. He was giggling, couldn’t seem to stop.
“It’s funny this—funny, funny, funny,” he cried. “Kill the Mekon, kill the Mekon!” he was yelling.
“Wait!” screamed Cuthbert, breaking into giggles that slowed him down. “Wait for me!” They charged up and up and up a worn-down red-sandstone escarpment, and dolphin-arched over it, and then they crossed to a half-dissolved railroad track that hadn’t been used for a hundred years, and they roved steadily downhill now, their knees wobbly and ticklish and bending so easily. They were laughing their heads off. The trees were centuries old, taller, the ground entirely grown over with vines and maidenhair and bracken of all sizes and shapes, and everything at heights never any less than their knees, and they ran and laughed and ran and laughed and it was as if they were beating a path through a flood of green and fields of glee that would go on into the millennia.
Then, Drystan disappeared.
Cuthbert foot-planted to a stop. He sucked air in great gobs, his tiny lungs heaving, still grinning. He said, “Wha?”
Where was Dryst?
His brother had simply dropped through the floor of the forest. That’s what Cuthbert saw. So overgrown was this section of the forest over the less acidic soils around Dowles Brook, that the tributary—coursing fast and wide and flush with rainwater from heavy recent storms—was completely obscured.
He ran a few steps more, and then Cuthbert was shouting out in pain and terror, smacking and rolling down a precipitous bank into a brook engorged and irate, the water pressing against him like icy stones. Neither city boy could swim. Little Cuddy grabbed at branches and grasses, but they were all too slippy or too slight or they cut into his tender boy-fingers. All at once, water rushed up his nostrils and into his mouth. It was sweet-tasting and cold but thick with flora and bugs.
He was immersed in five feet of freshwater, and he was scarcely four feet high. He tried to stand up, but he slipped and fell back, his arms winging. He could not find up. The water rushed into him in gales, in potent torrents, rotating him. His eyes opened wide. Suddenly, as Cuthbert remembered it years later, he was gazing upon a fluid face, a being of brown and white and green wearing a momentary smile, then anger, a pale hand—or a paw?—reaching toward him, desperately.
“Dryst!”
Was it Drystan, in Dowles Brook with him, drowning, or someone else? The visage let out a tremendous gurgling noise and vanished in the water. Ga go ga maga medu, the creature must have said. Isn’t that what was remembered? Surely, that was it—the being’s underwater code—the very voice of otterspaeke: Ga go ga maga medu.
Cuthbert had breathed deeply at that moment and felt the pain of deathly green-waters entering him—this was it. Drystan gone, and he was drowning, too, and it all felt freezing and it hurt, and darkness everywhere now—then abruptly, a force, some physical force seemed to throw him onto his knees, right-side-up, as if in prayer. Something pulled him out, and it wasn’t Drystan. It was rough and animal and very strong. The boy had been pushed up to his feet by an animal. Or was it by Dryst?
But now his brother was gone. He had reached for Cuthbert, and the younger boy had tried to reach back, and he had failed.
He began coughing the water out, struggling to his feet, falling against the brook’s bank. He was bleeding a bit from his lip. There were pink mallows across his forearms. Fly larvae cases made of sand grains and leaf pieces clung to his clothes like burrs.
“Drystan!”
There was no answer, and Cuthbert began to sob loudly and wetly.
The visible effects of his tumble seemed slight. Up the slick bankside was a provisional path through the hairgrass and broken reedmace where he had rolled down. A trio of white-throated dippers a bit farther downstream kept submerging their heads in and out of the water.
“Drystan!”
For many, many years after, the next few moments played time and again in Cuthbert’s mind until it nearly obliterated him. As the ordinary world came back into his young consciousness, he heard the liquid snorts of Drystan coughs—a sound that still rang, unmistakably and unaltered, in his adult ears today. It was a sickening—a moaning, diaphragm-sucking, braying gurgle that was distinctly mulish and utterly Drystan.
Gugga-hurr-gugcaacaa-hurr!
Poor Cuthbert, erstwhile brave boy, believed his elder brother had been spirited away by the Boogles and was being strangled by them. He was beside himself, a six-year-old in a new world of trapdoors through which older brothers could vanish.
He cried and cried for his brother, but he couldn’t see him.
And next, Cuthbert climbed the slippy bank, trying to make it fun, but he felt scared and worried about Drystan. Steaming green liverwort furred up everything, giving all the rocks and logs a coldblooded, snaky feel.