21
The Last Lap
Colin had been right to boast about his dogs. Darth and Terminator did pick up the scent again. When they were taken back to the place where they found the flannel, they circled for a while and then took off at speed, running out of the copse across the open moors.
Colin still held them on the lead, and Kevin ran beside him, but poor Sprocket lagged badly behind. He was cold and hungry and tired, and his hand was wrapped in a handkerchief because Terminator had bitten him.
“Call that a bite?” Colin had jeered when Sprocket had cried out. “You wouldn’t have a hand left if he’d bitten you. It’s just a little nip, playful-like.”
It had happened when Sprocket put his hand in his pocket to get out an indigestion pill, and Terminator thought he was reaching for a biscuit which didn’t seem to be coming his way.
I ought to get myself to a doctor and have an injection, thought Sprocket as he panted after the others. I could be in danger of getting tetanus, or even rabies.
And what was this mad runaway boy doing? He seemed to be heading towards the coast – but why? Was there a boat waiting to take him off? Was he part of an organized gang? The picture Curzon had shown him had been of a small, ordinary boy, but he seemed to be turning into a maniac.
The children left the monastery in high spirits. The sun was shining, larks sang, the heather was green and fresh after the rain. A well-made track led them gradually off the moor and down towards farmland. Hal knew that in a few hours he would be sitting in his grandfather’s kitchen.
They passed a few isolated cottages and a farm, and then, at a place where the road curved round the hillside, they saw it at last – the sea! The North Sea can be grey and forbidding, but today it was like an ocean in a dream, blue-green and glittering with light, the white horses curling on to the golden sand. Hal had never visited his grandparents, but they had told him so much about where they lived, had drawn so many maps and pictures, that he felt as though he was coming home.
“Do you see that bay – the far one?” said Hal. “That’s where the cottage is. Behind those dunes. I think we can take a short cut across country.”
They left the track and started to walk over rough pasture towards the coast.
But the dogs had become restless. They stopped with their noses in the air, sniffing and listening. And then the children heard what the dogs had already been aware of: the baying of hounds.
At first they took no notice. It was probably some kind of local hunt, people chasing after hares. Then they looked back and saw, rounding the bend on the road, three distinct figures. Two of them were in front, leading a couple of dogs. Now they stopped at the place where Hal and Pippa had left the track, while the dogs sniffed the ground, trying to pick up a scent.
Then suddenly one of the figures shouted and pointed while the other bent down and slipped off the leashes. The next moment, two dark, squat shapes leaped the low stone wall, and howling like creatures from the netherworld, they began to streak off down the hill.
Even then the children could not at first believe what they were seeing – it seemed impossible. Then suddenly they understood. It wasn’t hares or foxes that these hellhounds were chasing.
“It’s us they’re after,” shouted Pippa. “They’re hunting us!”
Terrified, they began to race and slither down the steep slope and all the time the baying became louder. There was no moment when they dared to look behind them, so they did not notice that Otto was no longer there.
He had stopped at the edge of the last steep scramble down to the beach and was standing as still as if he were Barry, his stuffed ancestor in the Natural History Museum, his silhouette outlined against the high blue of the early summer sky.
The two hellhounds ran straight as arrows towards him, ignoring gorse, cowpats, a clump of barbed wire. The muscles in their chests and forelegs were bunched, their upper lips curled back, showing even more of their fearsome teeth. Their eyes were red, saliva streaked down their necks and they had stopped barking. The shouting was over; the tearing and rending was about to begin.
Otto waited, perfectly still.
The pursuing beasts were only a few feet away from him now. With an immense effort they managed to stop themselves and adjusted their legs for the leap which would finish Otto and allow them to continue their headlong race for the boy. But for a moment they hesitated. The pit bull in them was ready for murder, but the bloodhound part wanted to get on with the chase.
And in this moment of indecision, Otto spoke. The growl started from somewhere in the lower abdomen and when it finally reached his voice box and emerged into the outside world it was like the sound of a mighty river swollen by rain as it thunders over great falls to the plain below.
At first nothing happened. The furious attacking dogs slavered and rumbled and grimaced. Then as Otto’s endless growls rolled out over the grass, their attitude slowly changed. Their upper lips covered the ghastly fangs, their breathing quietened, their brows wrinkled in puzzlement. A small nervous yawn escaped them and slowly their gaze dropped to Otto’s feet.
And then the two satanic beasts sank first their buttocks, and then – with their forepaws pushing gingerly forward – their bellies to the ground. They tried a last tremulous growl but it had more than a touch of squeak in it.
As if to say, “No. Not a single word more,” Otto finally lowered his head, took a step forward and opened his mouth. And at the other end of these two terrors of the night, something odd occurred. A small tremor seemed to affect their stumpy tails. Could it be a nervous twitch? But no. It came again, and it was getting stronger … and stronger still.
For the first time since they were puppies playing happily at their mother’s side, Darth and Terminator were wagging their tails.
Down on the beach, Hal and Pippa and the other dogs raced along the sands, burst through the doors of the cottage and tumbled in a heap into the hall.
22
The Sea, the Sea!
Hal’s grandmother was crying. She wasn’t pretending not to as she bustled round making tea, buttering bread and opening biscuit tins. Throughout the ghastly week in which they had waited for news of Hal, Marnie had been brave and hopeful for her husband’s sake, but now she let go.
The kitchen of the cottage seethed with dogs and children. Otto had padded in quietly when his job was done, and Meg the old Labrador had come out from under the sofa and was doing her best to be polite to the newcomers.
In the middle of the throng sat Fleck, looking very pleased with himself. Hal’s grandfather had greeted him by name as soon as he had stopped hugging Hal.
“Hello, Fleck,” he had said, picking him out as the dog who mattered, whose place this was. “Welcome to our home.” Already Fleck had taken charge of one of Marnie’s slippers and was keeping it safe.
Hal, perched on a stool by the kitchen table, was completely happy. It was all as he had hoped. His grandparents, so warm and understanding, the crackling fire, the view outside the window of the sea and the islands and the scudding clouds… Only it was even better than he had imagined because he had saved not only Fleck but the other dogs, and he had found Pippa!
But when the children began to speak of their adventures, the horror of the last hour came back in full force.
“We were chased by tracker dogs,” said Pippa. “Honestly. We couldn’t believe at first that it was us they were after.”
“It was as though we were criminals,” said Hal. “You never saw such animals. If it hadn’t been for Otto—”