Mad Dog Moonlight (23 page)

‘Leave this to us,' said Phaze II. ‘You won't need doctors. We can sort this out.'

‘We understand what's going on, because we've been here too,' said Abren. ‘Trust us.'

And that's what Aunty and Uncle did. Maybe, at some deep level, they understood that the sailors hadn't just turned up tonight to return a stick, but for this as well. Or maybe they trusted them because they knew they had no choice. But, either way, they ushered a frightened and crying Elvis back into the vardo, and closed the door, calling to the sailors, ‘You know where we are.'

After that, the night became very still, as if holding its breath. The lights in the hotel went out, then they went out in the vardo and still the sailors stood on either side of Mad Dog, never asking anything, never saying anything, simply being there.

Finally Mad Dog stopped shaking and his name stopped leaking out of him. He looked up at the sailors, as if seeing them for the first time.

‘You told me once that some people leave Plynlimon but never really get away,' he croaked. ‘I didn't know then what you meant – but I do now. It's
him
, isn't it? The Manager. He's the one you can't get away from. But who is he?'

The sailors glanced at each other as if this was the one question, above all others, that they'd been waiting for, not knowing quite how they were going to answer it. Then Abren took a deep breath and said, ‘It would be easy to tell you that he's some high elf-lord out of a book – the Red Judge of Plynlimon, or someone like that, and his dogs the
c^wn y wbir
, the legendary Dogs of the Sky …'

‘Easy to tell you that he's any of the other names that people have for him,' Phaze II joined in. ‘And there are plenty of them, believe me – king of conjurors, tricky trickster, king of thieves, mountain man – you name it, he's been called it …'

‘But, underneath the names that people have for him,' Abren added, ‘there's more to it than that. There are truths behind old stories that people rarely see. And the truth behind your Manager is that he's not that different to you and me. He may be every nightmare that we ever dreamt. But, beyond the lies that roll so easily off his tongue, beyond the cruelty, beyond the games for power and control, is a living, breathing being with hopes and fears, people that he loved once, people that he lost, choices he made and choices that he could have made but never did. And what he is we could all become, sucked in without a whimper – unless we do what you've just done.'

‘And what's that?' Mad Dog whispered, scarcely daring to speak out loud.

‘Make a stand. Be yourself. Nothing else will do,' Abren said.

She shivered. Mad Dog shivered too. There were things here that he didn't understand, and maybe never would. Words like
king of conjurors
and
Red Judge of Plynlimon
whirled about his head, but suddenly he could feel autumn blowing up the garden and he found himself prepared to let them go. Another time, he thought. He could think about them then. Think about the Manager, and what he'd done, and about himself and what he'd done as well, defeating him with nothing but a name.

But, just for now, all Mad Dog wanted was
ordinary life again – not this talk of living, breathing beings and the choices that they made, but supper and his bed.

‘Let's go inside,' he said.

The sailors said that was a good idea and turned towards the vardo. Before they could get to it, however, a long, wispy sheet of what looked like paper came blowing along the ground between the kitchen and the cliff. Mad Dog stooped to pick it up, and saw that it was covered in red lines. He didn't know what it was but, at the sight of those lines, he shivered and took an instinctive backwards step.

‘What have you got there?' Abren said.

Phaze II picked up the paper. Abren said she thought it was a map. Phaze II said he knew a thing or two about maps and it wasn't like any map he'd ever seen. Mad Dog agreed, but Abren insisted that she was right. Look. Here. She'd found the River Severn, she said. Her river, she called it. And then Phaze II pointed out what he thought might be the Wye, and perhaps they both were right because suddenly Mad Dog started seeing things too – roads and contours, woods and villages, towns and bits of ocean, valleys and hills.

It
was
a map, like Abren had said. Mad Dog picked out Devil's Bridge. He picked out Aberystwyth. He even found the Rheidol and traced its path through the harbour out to sea, then looked the other way and traced it back up to the place from which everything on the entire piece of paper, parchment, linen or whatever it was, radiated like the hub of a giant wheel.

Plynlimon Mountain.

Somewhere behind him, Mad Dog heard Abren say, ‘What
is
this thing?' Thing, she called it this time. Thing, not map.

Mad Dog put his face up close to it, looking for a clue. A smell came off, which he'd smelt somewhere before. For a moment, incongruously, it was the smell of boiled cabbage. Sharply Mad Dog found himself drawing in his breath.

‘What's the matter?' Phaze II said.

Mad Dog shook his head. ‘It can't be,' he said.

‘Can't be what?' Phaze II said.

‘
It isn't possible
,' Mad Dog said.

‘What's not possible?'

Mad Dog stared at the map, and all sorts of memories came into his head, starting with the smell of cabbage and ending in the conservatory with the smell of candlewax and a man at a piano.

‘Of course!' he cried out. Suddenly it all made sense. Beyond the kitchen, he could see the windows of the conservatory. They were dark now, but once they'd glowed with candlelight and in it the Manager's tattoos had glistened like a road map drawn in blood. That was what Mad Dog had called it at the time.

‘
A road map drawn in blood
,' he said out loud.

The sailors stared as if they didn't understand. ‘This isn't a map,' Mad Dog explained. ‘It's the Manager's tattoo.'

‘It's his
what
?' they said.

‘
It's his skin
,' Mad Dog said.

He stepped back, physically repulsed. The sailors stepped back too. The thing on the ground lay between them all, old beyond years; old and yellowing like a piece of parchment, or a snake's discarded skin.

‘But
why
?' Mad Dog said at last, breaking their long silence. ‘Why would anyone do a thing like this – tattoo a mountain and its rivers all over himself? I mean, look! It's everywhere. And it covers everything. There's the Gap, and there's No. 3. And there's Devil's Bridge and the Falls Hotel. Look, there's even Old Hall, where the old ladies live, who rescued me. And the crossroads between valleys, and the ruined cottage where my parents spent the last night of their lives. But why would anyone do a thing like this? Their entire skin, from head to foot, covered in the high roads, low roads and mountain rivers of Plynlimon. And why, having gone to all that trouble, would they leave it behind? It makes no sense.'

Phaze II shook his head. It made no sense to him either. But Abren shook her head because it
did
make sense. Perfect sense, she said – and she was shaking with anger.

‘It's obvious,' she explained. ‘Don't you see? This is his way of telling us he owns it. Plynlimon, I mean. By charting the mountain on his skin, he thinks he's staked his claim to it. All its woods and roads and mountain glens – he thinks they're his. And its rivers and their journeys to the sea. He's had them drawn up in his blood, Red Judge that he is, according to a law of his own making. And his claim is indisputable, or so he thinks, because this tattoo here is their title deed.'

She shivered. A little bit of night breeze got up behind her. It came rustling across the hotel garden, fetching the first few leaves of autumn down from the trees and blowing them across the lawn. Dust flew up between the kitchen and the cliff, and the map
trembled, caught up in it all. For a moment it seemed to hover, inches above the ground, then it started breaking up and there was nothing any of them could have done to stop it, even if they'd wanted to.

Suddenly, like a snowstorm, a thousand tiny flakes of skin filled the air, swirling round and round. For a moment the air was thick with them, then the wind died down and it was as if the title deeds to Plynlimon Mountain had never existed. The flakes disappeared, every last yellowing little bit of them. Then leaves rattled along the ground again, and dust blew over the place where the map had lain, leaving nothing behind, not a single tattooed line.

Mad Dog stared at the bare ground, afraid to speak for fear of what might happen next. ‘This
is
over, isn't it?' he whispered at long last. ‘He has really gone this time? This really is the last of him?
Promise me that nothing like this will ever happen again
.'

Abren put an arm round him. She closed her eyes and said she wished she could, but, ‘There'll be other people,' she said, ‘other places, other seesaw struggles for possession and control. It isn't only here that these things happen. They happen everywhere – battles for land and wealth and people's sense of who they are. The world is full of it. It's full of managers and conjurors, tricksters, thieves and judges red in tooth and claw. But at least the struggle's over for Plynlimon Mountain. And down here on the Rheidol, it's over too. The mountain's free, and so are we.

‘
So let's live like it, shall we?
'

Mad Dog didn't know the first thing about living as if he was free but, that night – sitting through the long hours until dawn with Aunty, Uncle, a sleepy and thoroughly confused Elvis and the sailors – he made a first stumbling step towards it, opening up the dark places in his life and bringing out his secret stories one by one.

By morning, every last thing he could tell about himself, his past, his memories, his family and his fears, the things he'd done, the things he'd failed to do and even his hopes for the future had all come spilling out. Beyond the windows of the vardo, the birds started singing and sunlight heralded the new day. But, in the little living room, Mad Dog was too tired to notice. He could scarcely keep his eyes open and couldn't sit upright any more.

The sailors, who'd been telling stories too, weren't much better, saying that all they wanted now was to return to the hotel and find their beds. Uncle said that after a night like this, full of strange stories and even stranger lives, he needed bed as well – not just to sleep, but to spend a few hours on his own getting his head around some of the things that had been said.

But Aunty said she had a business to run and there could be no bed for her. It might be Sunday, and everybody else's day of rest, but there'd be guests wanting breakfast before too long; crises in the kitchen
that only she could deal with; old arrivals who needed signing out and new ones needing signing in; even friends and family needing phone calls to assure them that Mad Dog really was all right after yet another of his disappearances at the campsite.

Mad Dog slept all day, awoke for Sunday afternoon high tea – which was a special occasion at the Falls Hotel – then slept again, not waking until the following morning when he found a newly labelled school uniform laid out at the bottom of his bed and realised it was time to face yet another change in his turbulent life.

He couldn't have felt less ready for the new school that awaited him, but faced it in true Trojan spirit. The key, he decided, pulling himself into his new clothes, was to put into practice what Abren had said about living as if he was free. Running wild on lonely mountaintops wasn't all that freedom was about. Sometimes it was about thinking hard thoughts and making hard choices. And that was what he was doing now, picking up his new school bag and allowing himself to be driven down to Aberystwyth to start something that, if he gave it a chance, he just might like.

And his first day in the new school was better than Mad Dog expected. He returned home full of news about the number of playing fields, the rugby cups on the wall, the size of the art block, the sheer scale of the library with all its books and computers and the dizzying array of fellow pupils and teachers whose names all had to be learnt.

Aunty, in turn, had news about the sale of No. 3, which she'd put on hold, until they'd had time to talk about it properly. And the sailors had news too,
having done a bit of hard thinking and choosing of their own – and now stood, coats on, ready to depart!

Mad Dog felt as if a bucket of cold water had been thrown over him. Where were the sailors going, he demanded to know. And
why
were they going? How could they do this to him? Didn't they know that their lives were bound with his? The three of them together, Plynlimon's children, breathing the same air, and growing old together. They couldn't leave, he said. Didn't they know that? And surely, after all they'd been through – all the stories they had shared, and the things they'd faced together – they wouldn't
want
to leave!

The sailors tried explaining that being children of Plynlimon didn't necessarily mean hanging to the mountain's skirts, as if afraid of growing up, and being bound together didn't mean staying together all the time. The way they put it sounded worthy and excusable. They said that it was possible to be as close-knit as a family and yet still live separate lives.

But Mad Dog failed to be impressed. Beneath their fine-sounding words, he reckoned, the real truth was that the sea had got to them. He could smell it on them, and smell a new adventure far beyond the rivers of Plynlimon, and hear its siren call.

They were off for fun, weren't they? Off to their boat, harboured at Aberystwyth, thinking only of themselves. Anger welled up in him. The sailors promised they'd be back, but he felt betrayed. When they tried giving him a farewell gift, he thrust it back at them, saying he didn't need any more porcelain teacups, thank you very much.