Under the Rock by Benjamin Myers

Author:Benjamin Myers
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783963638
Publisher: Elliott & Thompson

A LOCAL DOG goes missing. It is a tan-brown terrier cross, female, about the same age as Cliff, spooked by the fireworks that whip-crack down the stone barrel of the valley without warning for weeks on end, a little earlier each year, the luminous paroxysms reflected in the eyes of trembling fox cubs born last spring, and sending the deer of The Rock into bounding frenzies over crag and wire in search of escape.

The squirrels scarper to the canopy, and another distant unidentifiable animal screams a fearful alarm.

But even as they run or burrow, or scatter from their crag-edge eyries, the wild creatures still find themselves pursued by booms and whistles and blood-red flashes, the sound of these cheap Chinese pyrotechnics bouncing off The Rock below, the gritstone reflecting rather than absorbing, and echoing back a mindless mortar attack on the nerve centres of all animals.

The missing dog sparks a Facebook campaign, and I coax Cliff from his cellar dwelling to spend three days wandering Scout Rock Woods as I shout ‘Pickle!’ in an attempt to draw out a dog whose picture I have only seen online, yet feel somehow compelled to help find, as I routinely follow the progress of the scores of similarly sentimental animal lovers. I know no one else will think to search these woods. I doubt anyone else would dare.

For several days the search becomes an all-consuming, ever-shifting narrative whose conclusion I must know. After several days of terrible rain Pickle is found, shaken and half starved, but otherwise well. One sighting suggests we came within 100 yards of each other, my calls and whistles perhaps muted by the roar of the rain, or the missing dog merely looking on from a warm corner as I stumble and slip past it through the endless fucking mud.

AND STILL THE rain falls. It puddles and pools. Sits.

New streams emerge and stay for weeks.

The sky becomes a long and boring story without an ending. It just goes on and on, dispersing its wares, filling every nook and fissure, every trench and gulch, every divot, cleft and hollow.

It scours old rock and finds whorls there – grainy geological fingerprints free of the gelatinous algae that coats everything during the shorter days. It runs beneath our street, as ancient subterranean waterways are flooded back to life, and the old stone-lined springs and troughs where inhabitants drew their supply, and at which thirsty, steaming horses once lapped, are first refreshed and then overflow.

The woods below The Rock become a dank and desolate church of persistent dripping and leafless branches stripped bare, and the washed-away mud banks send me slipping arse-about-tit with increased regularity, thudding onto my shoulder one day, landing on my wrist the next.

Reanimated by the rain, the old town tip further reveals another trove of grubby treasures, as more junked pieces of the past poke through, including a very large moss-covered bone, one scorched-looking end the size of my fist. Species unknown.

Feeling like a meddling academic protagonist in a M.

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