Chapter 33
Deadlier than a unicorn
I woke in the dark to the sound of a rumbling almost too deep to hear.
First instinct was that it was the thunderstorm arriving to clear the air at last. Second, correct and much less welcome thought was that it was the noise of Digger growling at something.
It was a growl pitched so low that I felt rather than heard it.
I rolled slowly to my feet, cursing myself for having gone to sleep without having laid out the weapons I had meant to put close to hand.
I had meant to have the boar spear and my bow and arrow and even the guns with me as I stood watch through the night.
I’d also meant to have some of the fat torches ready to light so that we could see what was out there if anything actually came looking for us in the dark.
Not only that but I knew that wild animals didn’t like fire and could well be frightened off by the flames alone.
But I had done none of that. I had let exhaustion take me and put us all in harm’s way.
And now the harm had arrived
That wasn’t my imagination any more. There were undoubtedly things or a thing out there in the dark.
They were very close and though I could not see them I knew they were there with absolute certainty: I can’t explain what it was, whether it was a smell, a noise or something I caught with the tail of my eye but I knew without the tiniest piece of doubt that I was being watched, and that the watcher did not have my best interests at heart.
Digger sensed exactly what I did. I felt her growling deepen as she got to her feet and stared out into the full dark of night beyond the patchwork wall of windows.
We watched for a long time. Nothing happened.
Nothing moved or howled or attacked. And eventually tiredness trumped fear again, and my head began to drop.
I jerked myself awake a couple of times, and I remember praying the babies would sleep until daylight and thinking I should go and talk to Cat about all of this, but before I did, I must have fallen into a deep sleep.
It’s unnerving when you’re jolted out of a deep dream in the dark by your dog barking at something out there that you can’t see.
It’s much, much worse when the dog just growls.
That’s what Digger was doing again, deeper than before, if that were possible.
The bass note of it was now so fathomless that I knew things were deadly serious.
Barking is a warning shouted into the dead of night.
It says: Whatever you are, go away because I know you’re out there.
A growl on the other hand is a whispered promise.
It doesn’t have to be loud, because the unseen enemy is now close enough to hear it.
And it says: Whatever you are, you’ve come too close, and I will fight you and I will not stop until you’re gone.
Digger was stiff and quivering and making that growl.
I stayed still, hardly breathing, aware that just as I was peering into the blank mosaic of windows trying to see what was out there, so whatever that was was also looking in.
The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up just like the hackles on Digger’s back.
I was reacting with my animal brain, knowing not thinking.
And then I heard the smallest softest crunch of sun-baked grass as something moved off to my left beyond the windows where I hadn’t been looking, and suddenly I knew too, and my mouth was dryer than any of that grass and my heart was stuttering as if it couldn’t decide whether to speed up or just stop dead.
And then the whole patchwork wall of windows creaked alarmingly and there was a sound like branches cracking and I was simultaneously aware of how cobbled-together the hotch-potched wall actually was, and that something was rubbing itself along it, bringing the creaking of old wood and rusting nails closer and closer to us with each step.
I had a very clear vision of the whole thing being pushed in and all the glass sharding, and wood splintering and I knew I had to move, I had to get a light and a weapon and stop being stuck waiting for something I couldn’t see.
I tore myself away from Digger and ran into the kitchen area: I didn’t need to look to see where the fat-soaked torches were, and my hands found the flint and steel on their own.
I didn’t have time to hesitate, knowing deep in my animal mind that as soon as the sound of metal on stone cut through the furtive noises on the other side of what I now thought of as a dangerously thin and breakable glass barrier, then whatever was out there would stop having to be stealthy, and things were likely to get extremely noisy and serious very quickly.
There was a part of me that wanted to grab the gun and trust that it would fire because the sound of that thunderclap ripping the world apart was sure to send anything out there running off in terror, but then the other part of me remembered that if it didn’t go bang, if the bullet misfired, all I had to defend us then was a handful of metal that was less use than a hammer.
So I put the gun down, grabbed my bow and arrows and the boar spear and went back to the kitchen bench, striking the flint before I could think of more reasons not to do so.
It took two fast hits of metal on flint before the spark lit the tinder on the torch and then I grabbed it, not bothering to blow on it but sawing it through the air instead, waving it alight as I ran forwards towards the dark wall that now burst into mismatched shards of flame as the glass windows reflected the torch back at me—
—and then a lot happened, too fast.
Digger barked. The first proper bark she ever managed.
The babies started crying in the back of the Bunker.
And whatever the wolves were doing beyond the glass was not quite invisible any more because I could definitely see something moving, fur of some kind on the other side of the glass, pressed hard against it, making it move like wind through the barley as the animal lazily rubbed along the other side.
And then, before I could take in any more thought other than the one telling me it wasn’t a wolf because wolves just didn’t get anywhere near that big – it was gone.
It all happened too fast for me to believe that it was over. I looked at Digger.
What was that? I said.
Digger just kept staring out of the window, quivering. Like every muscle fibre in her body was stretched to breaking point.
And then I said:
Fuck.
I gripped the spear with one hand and held the torch high in the air with the other, casting it right and left, trying to confirm that – whatever the animal was – it had really gone.
Digger coiled back and forth around my legs, her eyes fixed on the dark flame-lit world beyond the glass, and once again I realised I’d forgotten to keep breathing, and sucked in a huge lungful before letting it go in a shaky out breath of pure relief.
It’s gone, I said. We’re OK.
But Digger hadn’t stopped pacing, and her growling slowly intensified, now so low and so deep I seemed to hear it with the soles of my feet instead of my ears, feeling the reverberation tremoring up from the floor beneath us, a deep bass running beneath the high-pitched crying of the babies, which was intensifying in the dark behind us.
It’s OK, I shouted, hearing the shakiness in my voice. It’s gone. There was something, but the fire frightened it off.
I strained to hear Cat’s response, but nothing came.
I still hadn’t had enough time to decide what it had been on the other side of the glass, other than huge.
And then I had no time at all because the torch broke, which is something they sometimes did if you hadn’t wrapped them tight so the fire burned through the handle instead of the fat-soaked rags swaddling it.
I was still slowly waving it from side to side as if I could somehow throw its light further into the night and see into the most distant shadows beyond the Tanglewood bramble patch, so the flaming head didn’t drop as much as get thrown to the right-hand end of the window wall, where the door was.
Digger and I found ourselves momentarily in the dark again as the torch head rolled beneath the chair, the one with the books on it.
And then the torch caught on some old paperbacks that I’d piled against the wall, and I saw the danger before I realised I’d done so and was running the length of the window wall to stamp the fire out before it took hold and burned the Bunker.
Stamping on a fire with bare feet is not a good idea, so I swore and winced and grabbed the first big thing that came to hand and went down on my knees, batting at the fire with it.
It was our oldest friend, First Aid and Safety for Dummies but I didn’t have time to worry about harming it as it was doing good safety work tamping out the dangerous flames.
By the time I had the fire under control the chair legs were charred and the paperbacks and the torch had scattered, smouldering but extinguished, and the only light was coming from the burning yellow cover of the book and I was about to put that out too when Digger barked properly for the second time in her life, which jolted me into a belated awareness that she’d been doing her strangled barking noise for a while but I hadn’t had space in my panicked firefighting head to let it in.
But this was a real bark, the noise other dogs make, it was short and ragged and I think it only ripped out of her jaws because she was really, really trying to save my life.
I stopped and looked at her, but she was hunched down, teeth bared, rumbling a warning again, her eyes fixed on the glass door beside me.
I stumbled back, grabbing my spear on instinct and stood with the burning First Aid book still flaming at my feet.
I stared through the glass door expecting to see animal eyes reflecting the fire back at me.