“Don’t cry, Dryst,” said Cuthbert. “I’m coming. I’m all right, you sprog!” This is what he must have said. This is what he needed to think he said—again, for decades to come.
Cuthbert sensed he was lucky—even blessed. Yes, that diamond-dotted, sacred sense—that, too, became a psychic imperative, a way for Cuthbert to face so very many coming years of despair.
When Cuthbert finally emerged from the green tunnel, it was as if he were rising from the floor of the forest.
He waited for Drystan to run up to him, snorting phlegm. A dear boy in forever beauty, forever joy, and forever bluster. But Drystan never came.
“I’m not crying,” Cuthbert wailed. “That was good, that. Was it—” He wiped his arm across his runny nose. “Was it fun, was it? Are you all right, you shitehead?”
He swallowed the lump building in his throat. “I saw one of them Boogles,” he screamed. “I’d bet all the mu-nay in the world on it. It saved me!”
After an hour of waiting, Cuthbert backed away from the brook until he found the disused rail line and followed it to the right, back toward Bewdley. The line’s rails were long gone, but the path was partially marked with orange strips of cloth. It was in the preliminary stages of being turned into the Wyre Walk No. 3 trail by the Forest Commission.
Cuthbert was talking to himself. “It weren’t bad, Drystan. The Boogle, he was more wike an angel from God, but sort of a mardy angel.” He could not comprehend that his brother had drowned, and he kept talking to him. “Is there other things here, other than Boogles? There’s animals, isn’t there? There’s things with no names and all.”
When he approached a curve in the brook, he saw a farmhouse. A couple hundred meters away or so, the rushing Dowles Brook emptied into the Severn. Cuthbert felt great relief and real exhaustion.
That’s when he saw the creature again, the dark liquid swoosh of an animal flying out of the forest. It looked like a hyper little man with a chunky living rudder. It ripped through bracken fronds, low and unseen, but making the bracken wave and jerk like a hundred green pennants. It emerged again and plunged headfirst into the water.
It was a giant, Cuthbert saw, at least a meter long, with a head nearly as big as Drystan’s. Cuthbert knew that face instantly: it was the good Boogle under the water wot saved him. Or was it Drystan, become a kind of giant dark cat?
The creature vanished and a few seconds later popped up on the opposite bank of the brook, where it raced angrily back and forth, glowering at him and yikkering in its odd, squeaky manner. The lush vegetation on the other side of the brook, all blue with bugle and speedwell, seemed like a special effect of the sky itself, lowered down for the otter to try flying upon.
He had not seen or heard anything like it in his short life. He was speechless, and soon Cuthbert ran off, screaming and pure doolally. It was as if all the day’s events had finally rubbed the last trace of West Brom tough away.
Shadows were beginning to take over the Wyre. For ten minutes, he kept calling out and circling around.
“Where are you? Dryst!”
There was no answer. Cuthbert had cried out his loudest cries, and now he was sobbing, and then he began to settle down.
He would have to retrace his steps and bring back help. It would inconvenience the old relations and his mother. His father would kill him. He thought of his mad aunt Millie, petting her white cat, speaking of the King of Night. That seemed a kinder fate than his father’s thin black belt.
He started calling as loud as he could, “Bloody hell, Drystan!”
Cuthbert kept thinking he would find him, in some brambles, gulping for air and shuddering, but West Brom tough and proud. Drystan would hug him and pat his back hard. “Chin up, Cuddy,” Drystan would say to him. “You’re safe now. No blarting now, Cuddy. We’ve got to get back.”
“I saw Satan,” he would tell Drystan. “Or some Head Boogle or something.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
He could hear his brother now. “Of course. How often do you get that? Besides, you said it was more of an angel kind of thing.” Drystan would push his lips out, making a kind of snout the way he did. “Must be a bit of both.”
Cuthbert would smile, his pale cheeks still shiny with tears, and they would go home. And had Drystan not drowned, they would have done just that. They would have gallivanted home with wild yewsticks in their hands and otter scum in their nostrils, and God’s bow in the clouds above the Wyre.
three
two kinds of triangles
CUTHBERT STOOD UP HALFWAY IN THE ZOO SHRUBBERY and leaped forward. The process of getting in had been like being unwound into something; he arrived dragging a spool of wet vines and scratches with him, his head squeezed to a screaming red bolus. He tumbleswivled through the holly, away from the perimeter fence, holding his arms over his face.