The Kennels, Chapter 7 (Finale)

7.

Sitting on one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs of the ER, waiting for his name to be called, he told himself he would go to the kennels the following day and confront these people. He was thinking of the anguish and despair on the woman’s face when she realised her plan to get help wouldn’t work, and that she was alone with her problems and with the men who profited from it once again.

Tom went home with seven stitches on the back of his head, the area feeling blissfully numb thanks to the superficial anesthetics he had been given. He felt determined and rage made him brave. A few hours later, the effects of the anesthetics had worn off, the stitches pulled and the area throbbed. The dressing bulged and every time he turned in bed it reminded him of what had happened. He was unable to sleep. In the morning he had a hammering migraine. He couldn’t even open his eyes without a moan. He took everything he had been prescribed until his belly rattled, and laid in bed telling himself there was no way he could get up and face the people at Ickfield. He spent all day in bed, in the dark, trying to sleep. Every time he heard a car outside he gave a start, his pulse rushed wild and his forhead pearled with sweat.

On Monday he dragged himself to the office, still with the migraine’s hangover and a bandage on his head to explain. He said he had tripped in the shower, and yes he was alright, and no he didn’t rather go home thank you. He said he couldn’t stay another day in bed. He didn’t say he felt safer among people. When it was time to leave he felt an almost overpowering urge to ask Jack if he could crash in his settee. He then remembered Jack’s wife’s obsessions with chicken broth and how very much attentive she could be with recovering patients, and he decided to risk his own place after all.

He unlocked his door that evening with a shudder. The door opened like a mouth to a place that was dark, quiet and unwelcoming, full of corners and hiding places where desperate, evil men could be lurking from that very second. When he locked the door behind him, the warm, yellow lights of the streetlamps were locked out with it. He switched on every light as he moved around the house, and left them on. He looked at every window with a shiver. How accessible his house was, how easy to break into. He wouldn’t see a marauder in his back garden until the trespasser’s nose was stuck to the French doors’ glass. Would the neighbours do something. Would they stay put and ignore the noises, like they did, like he himself did, that time when a group of teenagers smashed a car’s window and drove away with it, the alarm booming, the boys laughing. Wasn’t his home supposed to be a sanctuary. Should a sanctuary have bars on every window. Should he have gotten another dog. He was sitting on the settee, the telly on mute, looking at the dining chairs and wondering if they would make a good barricade. He felt ridiculous and cried. Out of the corner of his eye he had seen Baloo’s leash still hanging from the rack in the hall. He had left it there and stopped seeing it after a while. Tonight it flashed, silver and red, and made Tom feel incredibly lonely.

On Tuesday he looked like a racoon –he hadn’t slept a wink, again-, and his workmates struggled not to insist for him to go home. Tom didn’t feel half as bad as he looked, but he allowed them to believe it. By noon the boss told him go home Tom really. He accepted, smiling tiredly, sheepishly. He didn’t go home though. He headed for Ickfield instead. He didn’t phone the police. He wouldn’t have known what to say.

He turned at Touchwood Lane into Ickfield Road and he smelt it. Smoke. He could even smell how black and thick it was. Then he saw it, like a dark, ominous tower climbing over the trees, a tongue of flame licking its walls every now and then. He heard it. It creeped and thrummed like war drums, like an army of insects. The bulging belly of the grey clouds was tainted rust red, like old, dry blood. He heard the sirens and saw the orange and blue flashes of the police and the firemen.

He got to the beginning of the bumpy private road leading to the kennels. A young police constable walked towards the middle of it to stop him from going further. Tom jumped out of the car, looking upwards, mesmerised by the flames he could finally see, although he coulnd’t see the buildings because the meandering road flanked with trees disguised them.

‘There is a fire, sir, you can’t get through.’ said the young PC, stating the obvious. ‘You need to move your car.’

Tom only half listened to him. He was drawn to the fire like a moth. The PC stood right in front of him and thrusted his hands forward. Another step and he’d grab Tom’s arms.

‘Sir! You can’t get through. Move your car now, please.’

Tom stopped. He looked at the PC for the first time. He looked a bit out and the PC wondered if he was on something. He saw the dressing at the back of his head and drew a few mistaken conclusions. Wondered if he had to caution him about driving under the influence.

‘What about the owners?’ was all Tom said.

‘There was nobody in, that we know of.’

Tom was puzzled. He accepted to remove the car. He stayed by the road, waiting for new developments. He wondered whether there were any dogs left in there, roasting, but didn’t ask. He didn’t want to know the answer.

It took hours before the firemen declared the fire extinct. By then a little crowd had gathered and there was mess and confusion. The young PC was overpowered, and before reinforcements arrived, Tom had already gone through, crossing the fields, to examine the wreck with his own eyes. The long flat house was a ruin. Only the stone foundations had survived. The roof had collapsed and the wood frame was gone. Perhaps the firemen had pushed in a few walls, making some furniture topple, because there were objects scattered outside the house like a very off sort of flotsam. The cells compound was blackened, the metal grids flagging like a windless sail, the metal shed deformed by heat. Behind the compound, the woods had become an ink illustration in a book of Gothic tales. Tom walked towards it. Nobody stopped him.

There was a feverish, sickening heat radiating from the ground. The burnt undergrowth cracked and broke as he walked through it. Twice he heard thundering and realised it was some big old tree falling over. He realised he could be crushed. He ignored it. He realised he could be poisoned with the smoke. He put a handkechief to his mouth when he started coughing and kept walking. He reached the stream. The long planks of wood where two thinned bars of coal. He descended the four feet towards the water dragging on his back, wetted his hands and face and handkerchief with the drip of water still running in the stream, climbed the four feet of red clay with protruding, untouched roots that fed no living thing anymore. He didn’t think twice about his suit. He rushed forward without realising when he saw the hill. He walked around it like last time. There it was, the clearing.

The ancient, twisted oaks were still standing. A few younger, twiggy trees had fallen off, making the clearing wider. On the ground, the things, the lichens, the meat flowers were blackened, smoky bulges, like burnt jacket potatoes, whistling, an odd purring noise emerging from deep inside them. Tom felt once again about to be sick. Under a thick veil of fungish-like smell, and smoke and ashes, one could feel the stench of burnt flesh. However, the growths and shapes that would appear in Tom’s nightmares for years to come were unrecognisable. He realised there was no way he would convince anyone that the thing two feet away from where he stood had been a dog’s head, with eyes and teeth and the suggestion of hair, like a half-formed horror, the foetus of an entity Tom would forever more try to ignore and forget, a thing existing in this world he could not explain, and that he feared.

When he read on the local newspaper the police was quite sure the fire had been provoked, and that it had started in the woods, Tom wasn’t surprised. When he didn’t hear a word about the things in the clearing, he was suspicious. When rumours appeared about the owners disappearing with a large amount of cash, he wasn’t so sure. He wondered if it was true. He wondered whether Mr. Ickfield would forgive Mrs. Ickfield for burning the chicken with the golden eggs. He wondered what would happen with the puppies from Ickfield, those weird animals who had come out of thin air, and might propagate a hybrid species of god knows what, with god knows what consequences. And he hoped he would stop some day waking up in the dead of night, with his pulse rushing, because he had dreamed of Baloo’s red eyes glaring at him from the end of the flower of flesh, twisting and screeching because it was being burnt alive.

THE END.