The Drowning Earth

Chapter 2

2

Putting The Dot into first gear I drove towards what used to be the Toll Bridge when the world had worked properly and people lived in harmony. The wind was whipping up ripples on the Marsh. Startled by the low growl of the DUKW, a heron flew up and flapped lazily away. A good omen.

My route took me down a shallow waterway with rosebay willow herb lashing about in the rain on either side in the pale late afternoon sunlight. In different circumstances it might have seemed an autumn-into-winter idyll. Donnie was asleep behind my seat, sated by the steak he’d wolfed down gratefully before we left the Keep.

Heading for deeper water, I saw Oxford’s ruined spires jutting skywards like broken teeth, blurry in the rain beyond the floodplain. Oxford had been submerged soon after London but not to the same depth. A scavenger society still made a living in a few of the colleges there in a nightmare parody of Town versus Gown.

My destination was the Evenlode Floodplain, the place where Tom had met his Folan girlfriend before disappearing without trace. A strange coincidence meant I had to sail through a stretch of water where, in better days, I’d taught Tom to swim. This was during the period I’d helped Bob after his wife Andrea disappeared. I had to take a deep breath against the rising sadness the memory of those swimming lessons invoked in me.

The light on the breeze-agitated water and the jagged towers on the horizon were strangely beautiful in the westering sun. The effect was enhanced by Donnie’s gently whistling snore behind me where he was curled up on a mattress in the rear of the DUKW’s drive compartment. We purred along in a seductive calm for a while. It gave me time to think about what I owed Bob, and also what I owed to myself. Because I would be putting my life on the line. I knew that with a cold certainty.

When we reached the watery intersection I was aiming for, it was already twilight. Strong winds had brought down trees and I had to detour several times, on one occasion motoring around a fallen willow blocking the channel. I had provisions enough for three days in the DUKW but I wanted to find Tom and get this all over with ASAP, in 24 hours if possible. It wasn’t good to leave the Keep undefended for any length of time, even though I’d left all my booby traps primed and well-maintained.

I wasn’t expecting to pick up any clues to Tom’s fate just by reconnoitring the Evenlode Floodplain from a safe distance in the DUKW. My plan was to swim through it in the hope of finding evidence that would shed light on Tom’s disappearance. I’d be clutching at straws but it was better than nothing.

As I looked out at the waterscape in a twilight fast giving way to the darkness of night, I began questioning the wisdom of what I was proposing to do. It was beyond foolish. There were a hundred and more ways to die out there once I left the relative safety of The Dot. The cold realisation of that fact brought me close to a panic attack.

Why was I here, alone other than for Donnie, searching for a young man who’d gone missing on the Evenlode Floodplain, the most dangerous zone of the drowned South of England?

What chain of events had led to this near-suicidal exploit?

The answer hit me between the eyes like a diamond bullet.

It was all down to Zoe. Bob would never really know how much I owed him after he helped me try to find Zoe, my former partner, girlfriend, and best friend. I’d thought she’d be my lifetime companion until the day that she, like so many others, disappeared and met an unknown fate.

Losing Zoe devastated me, and Bob was the rock I leaned on for support. He consoled me as much as I could be consoled, and helped me look for her. We never found her, of course, but without his help and support throughout that time, I wouldn’t have stayed sane. The debt I owed Bob and his family was incalculable. When Zoe went missing they took me in like one of their own. There was nothing forced about it. It came naturally to them. I nearly developed a drink habit then, and without Bob’s support and guidance the drink would have taken me, and I would never have emerged from that dark depression.

That’s why I got so closely involved with Bob’s sons when the same thing happened to his wife Andrea. And it was why now, even if I died trying, I had to search for Tom and do my level best to bring him back safe. My self-respect was on the line. I couldn’t live with myself unless I gave it my best shot. If I did, I would have paid back Bob and his family.

Life is hard and then you die, as the old joke runs. At the end of the day, we have to live with ourselves. I couldn’t listen to Beethoven and drink Johnny Walker Double Black in those blissful evenings alone at the Keep unless I laid it on the line here and now.

A breeze was picking up outside The Dot in the near-dark. I forced myself to put an end to my introspection. It was time to act.

It was just as well I’d given The Dot a fresh lick of camouflage paint earlier in the year between storms, and it helped that night was just about on top of us. These circumstances gave me good prospects of concealing her from prying eyes. Having tied up in a leafy spot with rushes and a fallen oak that would just about hide the vessel, I donned my wetsuit and opened the roof hatch, leaving Donnie asleep on the floor, then pushed aside a few brambles and leaves of early autumn.

The Evenlode Floodplain beckoned. Was I willing to answer its call? To do so was tantamount to inviting death to take me, but I had no choice. It was either this, or admit I wasn’t willing to lay it all on the line for Bob, who’d laid it all on the line for me.

The water was cold as I slipped in slowly up to my chest, pausing a moment or two to acclimatise and to let my eyes get used to the grey-silver light off the water. The Marsh had many moods. This time of day at this season was among my favourites. But my mission didn’t allow time for contemplative musing so I gritted my teeth and moved forward as quietly as I could, with a controlled breaststroke that was very nearly noiseless.

Some animal – small, thank God – appeared a couple of yards ahead of me. Straining my eyes to see what it was, I made out the unmistakable shape of a rat, head held high, its scaly tail trailing behind it in the water. It was an unusual sight. Once common in this part of the marshland, they had largely disappeared, possibly because of the rise in the number of Coypu.

After half an hour or so, by which time I was completely acclimatised to the cold, I saw a faint luminescence ahead and heard the sounds of crude music and singing, drums mainly, the occasional yell, and laughter punctuated by roaring. As I got closer I made out the glow from a fire on a raft on which drunken figures were dancing, one of them carrying a jug he passed around at intervals. That was when I realised I’d stumbled across one of the ramshackle floating rafts of the Folan Family. The primitive life of the Folan Family always put me in mind of that old joke from before the Storm. It went like this: ‘When is a hovel not a hovel? When it is home.’

To see a group of them celebrating like this was rare. I retreated to the cover of a fallen tree, soundlessly as I could, moving slowly to make as few ripples as possible. I thought I’d become acclimatised to the low temperature but I’d been kidding myself. The water was beginning to feel like a series of knives in my collarbones.

A movement at the edge of the Folans’ floating encampment, in a patch of river illuminated fleetingly by their firelight, caught my attention. It was no more than a silent splash and a blur of silver-black. As I watched, a lithe figure reared up from the water, clutched a seated figure on the edge of the Folan raft, then fell backwards into the water without a sound, silently taking the seated person – a dirty unkempt woman – with it. This was a practised manoeuvre, expertly executed.

Too late, I understood what was happening and my stomach knotted with so much fear I nearly threw up. Barely in control of my emotions, I tried to shuffle further behind the rotting oak tree that formed my cover in the darkness, but by then a steel-like grip had tightened around my chest and shoulders and I felt myself being pulled backwards.

I had no time to register what was going on when a second unexpected thing happened. The foliage in front of me broke open in a rustling explosion of leaves, audible rather than visible, lit up only by the flickering firelight some distance away. A giant mink was looking directly at me.

Worse than the eyes and teeth was the stench. Like ammonia and dung mixed, the reek from its filthy pelt caught me at the back of my throat. The fetid breath from its half-open mouth, close enough to touch if my arms had not been pinned, was even worse.

The raider’s grip tightened, which told me he had no idea a giant mink was about to tear my face off. As it leapt I leapt too, desperately twisting to my left, forwards-bent at the waist, in a clumsily executed judo manoeuvre, hurling as best I could the body on my back to put it between me and the beast. The throw would win no prizes for technique but, fuelled by adrenaline strength, it was enough to do the trick. The weight went off me and I heard a muffled gasp of pain, not mine.

Sculling backwards with my arms and legs furiously, I put as much distance between me and the mink and the man it was eating alive, pitting my attackers, human and animal, against each other. It was no contest of course. If it’d been a soccer match the score would’ve been: Animals 10, Humans 0.

In a near-panic, I windmilled backwards like a paddle-steamer until I was well away from the fallen oak, the firelight, and the combatants. The sounds of their struggle, muted and feeble now, with no screams or gasps but only bones crunching at intervals, were still coming from the foliage as I swam madly away in a fear-fuelled front crawl, my breath coming in great rasping sobs.

I was desperate to get back to the safety of The Dot.

Only it was not that simple. Other mink were pursuing me, their dark forms the size of jaguars visible on the trunks of the floating trees on my right and left where the channel narrowed.

Two more snorkelers reared up ahead of me.

It was a raiding party of Kwanon Demon-Commandoes, as they styled themselves. In point of fact, they were no more demon or commando than I was, being ruthless thugs at best. Granted though, they were extremely fit. Some of them could swim underwater for more than five minutes. They must have been circling the Folan shanty-town looking for sacrifice-victims to kidnap when I’d observed the first one snatch a drunk from the edge of the raft. I guesstimated there had been a squad of three, and one had been accounted for by the mink. That left two for me to deal with. The odds weren’t good.

The two in front of me weren’t aware that a pack of mink were flanking us. My best hope was that they’d delay the mink and buy me time to reach the DUKW. A large gleaming black body shot through the water like a missile towards one of the snorkelers. The diver was, I now realised, brandishing a knife with a saw-tooth edge. Before he could wield it, the beast was tearing at his throat. He went under with barely a splash, the knife falling from nerveless fingers. The mink plunged beneath the black water with him.

The other snorkel diver struck off to the left, trying to reach what safety there might be in the floating trees and, wait, something else. A dinghy? It was only a vague outline in the gloom. Risking all by following the mink in order to get close, I saw it was dark green with the initials RB on the bow. They stood for Robert Bagnall, aka Bob Bagnall. It was Bob’s dinghy, the one Tom had ventured out in. It was a safe bet that Tom had been taken by the Kwanon, like the Folan woman I’d seen pulled from their raft by a snorkel diver. That being the case, he had no more than two weeks left on this earth. In two weeks he’d be sacrificed, along with many others, in a ritual conducted by the Kwanon that involved acts of breath-taking savagery. The Kwanon liked to mutilate their victims and to inflict a slow and painful death on them to please Dagon, their ridiculous fish-god.

But there was no time to reflect on the implications for Tom now. I swam against the current up the channel again, hearing branches breaking and the splashing of mink pursuing the snorkel diver amongst the leaves.

I was still a fair distance from the DUKW and could only hope the mink pack would stay to feed on the snorkel divers. That thought gave me hope and a frantic energy. A few times on the way back I thought I heard the splashing of pursuit but each time it was a false alarm. At last I clambered, gasping, onto the sill of the DUKW and fumbled the roof-hatch open with numb fingers. Donnie barked sharply from inside the cabin as I did so – not a bark of greeting but a warning. I knew my dog. Next moment, a blinding flash of pain. A steel trap had fastened on my hip. No, a mink had me by the hip.

I fell backwards off the sill of The Dot, gasping, my hands letting go of the hatch, but not before the blur of Donnie’s powerful form streaked up and out of the craft. The mink opened its jaws as we hit the cold water together and I heard Donnie’s vicious snarling modulate to a hate-filled gargle as he fastened his own jaws on the cheek of the mink and they went thrashing underwater together, a boiling ball of combat.

My hip was spewing a waterfall of blood but at least my legs were working. Moving awkwardly, chest heaving and with a pounding in my ears, I managed somehow to get back on the sill of The Dot then flat on the roof and through the roof hatch. Slithering down the ladder like a giant b****y snail, I landed heavily on the floor of the cabin.

My g*n. I had to find my g*n.

The seconds it took me to clamber with it back to the roof hatch seemed like minutes. Steadying the handgun, a Magnum 44 with more than enough firepower to take out a mink, was a pain-filled ordeal. My hands were shaking and the long g*n barrel wobbling as I tried to sight it up.

Donnie and the mink were still going at it furiously, thrashing and breaking the surface in a shared frenzy. The mink seemed to be worrying one of Donnie’s front paws at the shoulder. Donnie had his teeth sunk deep into the nape and side of the throat of the beast. The shot I had to make was difficult and risky to boot, and it would cost me my one remaining round of ammunition. But I took it anyway. What better use was I likely to find for it?

The mink’s face came away and the creature went suddenly limp. Donnie yelped and let go. I could hear at once he was hurt bad. I shouted his name and waited till he reached the side of The Dot, where he flailed with one front paw and his back legs, unable to climb aboard. His left front leg was hanging by a tendon at the shoulder and looked ready to fall off.

Dropping the handgun, I let it clatter down the blood-slick ladder into the cabin. It took me an age to shimmy out on the roof, exhausted as I was, still bleeding from the hip. I grabbed Donnie by his spiked leather collar and managed to haul him onto the sill using close to the last of my strength. When I did I saw that sure enough, his leg was dangling precariously, blood flowing from it, but there was less of it now, and the white tendon was exposed at the shoulder. I got him down the ladder, strapped his wound, and wrapped him in a blanket.

But it wasn’t enough. Donnie bled out and died on the floor of the cabin almost as soon as I got back behind the wheel. I wasn’t in much better shape than Donnie. Realising I was in no state to make the journey to the Keep, I headed to Bob’s place, which was relatively nearby, in Blenheim Palace, now flooded, hoping he’d done as I’d predicted and gone home with James.

In the dark night with a storm picking up, blacking out from the effort and loss of blood at intervals, it was the only hope I had.