Mad Dog Moonlight by Pauline Fisk

Author:Pauline Fisk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

18

A Monster on the Mountain

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.

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