Mad Dog Moonlight (14 page)

Reaching the point where the newly formed Rheidol started its tumbling journey down to Nant y Moch, Mad Dog said goodbye to the lake. The sky was darkening now, and the stars coming out. The valley ahead of him looked thoroughly unwelcoming, and Plynlimon didn't feel holy any more. It felt like an old witch of a mountain that had cast a spell on him. Either that, or a spider of a mountain that had caught him in its web.

Mad Dog started down the valley just as the last light faded and night came in its place. He couldn't see the Rheidol any more and, worse still, it wasn't long before he couldn't hear it either. Somewhere in the darkness it had simply disappeared.

Mad Dog stopped to listen, but the silence created by the absence of the river was overwhelming. It was a silence that changed everything. Even the shape of the valley seemed different without the sound of the Rheidol running through it.

Where had it gone? The river had been his lifeline and, without it to steer by, the mountain around him seemed huge and formless. He set off again, edging his way forward with nothing to steady himself. Not even his
ffon.

His
ffon!

What had happened to his
ffon?

In a moment of panic, Mad Dog spun round and
almost lost his balance. At first he thought he must have dropped it on the ground, but it wasn't anywhere that he could see, and he couldn't remember the last time he'd had it either. Had it been at Llyn Rheidol, where he'd slept on that rock? Or by his clothes when he'd gone swimming? Or had he lost it earlier than that – by that crystal pond, say, where he'd stopped to drink? Or, even before that – had he left it down at Nant y Moch?

Mad Dog couldn't remember, but it was too dark to mount a search party now, which meant that he was going to have to spend the night on Plynlimon and start afresh in the morning.

‘No way,
no way
, am I going home without my
ffon
,' he said.

The idea was unthinkable. But what if he never found it? That idea was even more unthinkable and, cursing himself for having brought it with him in the first place, Mad Dog looked around for a place to spend the night.

At first, however, there was nothing. Mad Dog stumbled down the valley with nothing but vast emptiness around him and darkness pressing in. Not a tree or ruined cottage caught his eye, not a cave or any other place of shelter. Finally, the best he could find was a broken-down old sheep's pen with a low scrub of bushes growing behind it. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing.

Mad Dog curled up tight in the side of the wall, hoping that it would shelter him if the wind blowing up the valley got any worse. What am I doing here? he thought. This is crazy. How did I ever get myself into this mess?

The grass beneath him was soft and mossy, but the ground beneath that was decidedly damp. Mad Dog shivered, imagining a soft, warm bed and lots of food. It was hours now since he'd eaten, and hours longer, he guessed, before he would again.

Mad Dog dug out his phone to check the time, but found the battery flat. He closed his eyes, exasperated that this too seemed set against him, and started counting off the minutes in his head. Somewhere out there at the end of them was morning. All he had to do was count, and it would finally arrive. He got to three minutes thirty-seven seconds. Three minutes thirty-eight. Three minutes thirty-nine – and then, despite the cold and the damp, exhaustion took him and he was asleep.

Sometime during the night Mad Dog awoke to find himself under attack. A monster came at him in the darkness, all shrieks and claws. He woke up fighting, trying to shake it off. He wanted to believe that it was only a dream, but the monster was too real for that. It was shaking him awake, yelling at him, clinging to him, shouting in his face.

What was going on?
It took Mad Dog moments to grasp that the monster wasn't trying to kill him and wasn't even a monster, anyway. But the realisation brought no comfort.

For the monster was Grendel Griffiths.

Grendel Griffiths! On the mountain. In the night. Lost, like him. Frozen, like him. Scared, like him.
How could this be?

Before he could work it out, Grendel hit him with a stick – and then flung herself into his arms.

‘This is all your fault!' she cried, clinging on tight and refusing to let go. ‘I hate you!'

Mad Dog didn't know what was worse, fighting Grendel or being hugged by her. She pinned him with one leg and hit him with the stick, which she clutched in her spare hand. Her breath on his face smelt of chewing gum, and her voice carried on about what she was going to do to him when they returned to civilisation. But, even so, she wouldn't let him go.

Struggling to get her off him, Mad Dog reached for
the stick – only to recognise it.

‘My
ffon
!' he cried out. ‘That's my
ffon
! Where did you find it?'

He tried even harder to grab the stick, but Grendel clung on tight. She wouldn't say where she'd found it, only that it was hers. The two of them rolled over on the ground, Grendel shrieking, ‘Get off me!' and, ‘It's mine,' and, ‘Find your own stick,' until finally Mad Dog wrenched it out of her grasp.

At this, Grendel started crying that everything that had happened to her was all Mad Dog's fault. She started hitting Mad Dog's chest with her balled-up fists.

‘What's my fault?' he demanded to know.

‘Everything,' Grendel repeated, ‘beginning with Mrs Heligan blaming me for your getting lost. She said that, as my partner, you were my responsibility, and she made me go back and find you.'

‘She made you do
what
?' Mad Dog said.

Grendel bawled. ‘It was terrible,' she wept. ‘First I lost the map, and then the heels came off my boots – both my boots, which means you owe me, by the way, because they were new – and then I don't quite know what happened but every track I took always turned out wrong. And then, finally, it got dark. It was cold and scary, and I couldn't see where I was going, not until I found that stick shining in the long grass. And now you've taken it and its light has gone out.'

Mad Dog didn't know what light she meant, and Grendel was in no mood to explain. ‘When I get home, I'm going to set my dad on you,' she said.

Mad Dog shivered at the mention of Grendel's father, who was not a man to be messed with from
what he'd heard. Grendel said again that she hated him – but that didn't stop her pressing herself against him on the principle that two bodies were better than one, and he was warmer than nothing.

She was right too. Mad Dog closed his eyes and prayed for dawn. The knack, he discovered, was to try and pretend that Grendel was someone else – his mother, for example, rocking him to sleep, or Aunty, or a nice warm fire. He prayed for morning too, or, at least, for Grendel to fall asleep, but her voice went on and on, covering every subject from sore feet to the recurring threat of what her father would do when Mad Dog came within his grasp.

The only small pleasure Mad Dog could glean from the situation came from imagining what her father might do to Mrs Heligan as well, not to say anything of the school. Hopefully they'd sack her and she'd never teach again. After all, she was the one who'd sent Grendel back.

But she wasn't the one, according to Grendel, who'd end up getting sued. ‘Just you wait,' she breathed into Mad Dog's face. ‘By the time my dad's finished, you and your family won't have a penny between you!'

Mad Dog tried to sleep, but lay awake for most of the night. When Grendel finally dropped off, he still couldn't sleep, not even when he tried counting. But it wasn't her father he was thinking about, or what would happen when the school found out he'd spent a night alone on a mountain with Grendel Griffiths. It was his
ffon
that occupied his thoughts – the strange way that it did that, come back to him every time he thought he'd lost it. And that thing Grendel had said
about the light – what had
that
been all about?

By the time that dawn broke, Mad Dog was worn out with thinking, as stiff as a board and soaked through from lying on the edge of what turned out to be a bog. As soon as it was light enough, he left Grendel snoring like a prize fighter with blocked sinuses and went to work out where they were. Below the sheep's pen, he could make out what looked like a major crossroads between valleys with a river running through it that, he guessed, had a good chance of being the Rheidol. If it was, Mad Dog told himself, and he could find a way down to it, then he and Grendel could be back in civilisation in no time.

Mad Dog set off to investigate. The valley turned out to be easier to get down than he'd expected, but the river was bigger than it appeared from a distance, and too deep to breach. Mad Dog had to cross two other streams before he could even get to it, then wade upriver to a place where it looked shallow enough to pick his way across – except that it wasn't as shallow as it looked, which meant he suddenly found himself up to his waist in water.

Mad Dog clambered out, frozen and gasping, and started running on the spot, trying to keep warm. A small hillock stood on this side of the river and he started up it, hoping to find the waters of the reservoir when he reached the top. Cliffs rose on one side of him and sloping grassland ran down the other to the river. A stony track lay ahead of him and, tucked into its side, lay the ruins of a cottage with collapsed walls and the broken remains of a chimney breast with a blackthorn tree growing out of it.

Mad Dog slowed down when he saw the cottage. It
was the first sign of human habitation he'd come across since yesterday but, instead of warming to it, he found himself going as cold on the inside as he was on the outside.

What was the matter with him? Mad Dog pressed on up the hillock, telling himself that what he felt was nothing to do with the cottage itself, and all to do with having spent a night out in the open. But, as the cottage grew closer, he slowed down until, by the time he was level with it, he'd stopped altogether, feeling physically sick.

‘Come on,' he goaded himself. ‘You're nearly there. At the top of the hillock, you'll see Nant y Moch. And there are farms beyond Nant y Moch. You could get down to them in an hour. Then you'll get breakfast and a bed, and they'll come and rescue Grendel, and phone Aunty and the school, and everything will be all right.'

Mad Dog tried again, but with no success. It was as if a physical barrier was stopping him from going any further.

Finally, feeling as if monsters of the order of the Red Judge of Plynlimon and his Dogs of the Sky lay on the other side of that hillock, Mad Dog turned back. The crossroads between valleys stretched out before him, with the river flowing through it and the cottage in the centre of his vision. And suddenly it all looked so familiar that Mad Dog cried out. If he'd been standing on the path to No. 3, the view couldn't have looked more familiar.

‘I don't understand!
What's going on here?
'

After that, everything became a bit of a blur. Mad Dog started running back down the track as if the
Dogs of the Sky really were after him. He'd no idea where he was going, but somehow he made it back across the river, and found himself at the sheep pen again, where a furious Grendel, thinking that he'd abandoned her, waited for him.

‘I was getting worried. Where've you been?' she shrilled at him.

‘Nowhere,' Mad Dog cried, trying to extract himself. ‘I've been nowhere. Believe me –
it was nowhere.
'

He grabbed his things and tore off. Grendel tore after him. ‘Where d'you think you're going?' she shrieked. ‘What about me? Hey, wait!'

After that, they ran for hours, getting twice as lost as they'd been before. One valley led to another, one river to another. The ground was rough and the going hard. There were no more ruined cottages or other signs of civilisation. Sometimes they found themselves on open grasslands that seemed to stretch for miles, sometimes running over heather, sometimes wading through peat bogs.

Finally they ended up in forestry commission land on the far side of Plynlimon. Grendel pleaded with Mad Dog to stop, certain that they were running round in circles. But Mad Dog didn't even want to slow down. A shadow had fallen over him when he'd reached that ruined cottage, and it refused to go away. If those legendary Dogs of the Sky – the Red Judge's
c
ŵ
n y wbir
– really had been after him, Mad Dog couldn't have felt more frightened. Anything could happen on a mountain like this.
Unpredictable
was the word that Mrs Anwen Jones had used for it. And she hadn't been far wrong.

By now, Mad Dog was so scared that he could
almost see the Red Judge of Plynlimon along with his dogs, stalking through the misty forest with deadly intent. He could almost hear their breath. Almost smell them. They were that real.

Trees shivered as he tore past, and he shivered too and so did Grendel. His panic was a disease, and she had caught it. The two of them ran together, stumbling and falling, tripping and crying.

Not even when a road appeared beneath them did they stop. A road. A proper, tarmac, made-up road! At the sight of it, Grendel's legs almost gave way but Mad Dog pulled her on, yelling at her that she mustn't give up now.

They reached the road, and started racing along it. By now their clothes were torn and their legs scratched and bleeding. A village sign came into view, announcing OLD HALL, but they scarcely noticed it. They passed a group of cottages without stopping. Passed a school, a church and a farm with barns on the road.

They would have carried on too, if someone hadn't stopped them.

‘Hey, you two? Where are you going? Are you all right? What are you up to? Stop right there!
Stop, I say!
'

It was Grendel who stopped first. She turned her head and saw an elderly woman heading towards them from the back of a parked car, and a second woman, obviously her sister, straightening up from unpacking bags of shopping.