The Plague Dogs

Westcott. With a spasm of horror he recognised the features of which he had read in thd paper--the green plastic collar, the split head, the air of gaunt, crazy savagery. Even as he cried out and ran, Snitter leapt into the car, jumped over the back of the driving seat and, slavering, began to drag the soft, squashy, meat-reeking parcels out of the wicker basket on the back seat.

Rowf, up beside him in a moment, gripped a joint of mutton in his jaws and sprang with it out of the car door. As they gulped and chewed, the snow grew dappled red with blood, brown with fragments of sausage, chocolate and kidney, it-yellow with butter and biscuit-crumbs. Plastic wrappers fG>and shreds of paper blew away on the wind.! r. "Look out, Snitter, the man's coming back!" a; "I don't care. Tell him I want a blanket as well! A rifarfoud would do--ashes, hay, newspapers tell him--" ||;, "Snitter, he's got a gun!

That's a gun!" If Snitter looked up quickly. "No, it isn't. I've seen those fiat, black boxes before. Lots of men have them. My master had one. They just make little snicking noises, that's ill."

"But he's pointing it at usf"

"I know. I tell you, they do that. You needn't worry: it's not a gun. There-- did you hear that little click? That's all they do. Anyway, that's the lot now, except for what's left of this great lump of meat here. You licked up the I eggs off the back seat, didn't you?" § "Of course I did. What d'you take me for? Better than the tod's eggs, those were. You grab that soft stuff and I'll carry this great bone here. Come on!"

They vanished into the whirling desolation as Mr. |Westcott supported his sobbing, trembling lady passenger '• back towards the road. It had indeed been a terrible experience, and Mrs. Green might very well have wet her knickers if she had had anything left to wet them with. The driving door was swinging ajar and the back seat looked like a field of war and if it was not Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, that redoubtable pair would certainly not have been ashamed of the job. Shocked and dazed, but nevertheless deeply thankful at least to have escaped contact and infection, the two of them left the deadly, contaminated vehicle where it stood and set out to walk the four miles to Keswick through the snow.

Five minutes later Snitter reappeared, followed by the ^reluctant Rowf, and set to work to finish off the scraps.

"I'm not leaving anything, I tell you!"

"It's not safe, Snitter! They'll come back, or another 'car will stop."

"I don't care! I shall have eaten the lot, and nothing can alter that."

"Come on! Don't overdo it! There's a man coming!"

"I'll sing him a song!

"O I'm a bold dog with a skull like a drain, ' (Sing chompety, chumpety, piddle-de-dee!)

I'm horribly wild and completely insane, (Sing wiggety waggety, hark at him braggety, Mumble a bone on the lea!)"

Nevertheless when, a minute later, the police Jaguar drew up to see why an empty car, with headlights on and driving door wide open, was parked on the hard shoulder, the only canine traces were two lines of paw-marks disappearing into the mirk.

The telephone rang. Digby Driver picked it up.

"Driver Orator."

"Is that Mr. Digby Driver himself speaking?"

"It is indeed. Who might I--"

"Mr. Driver, you don't know me, but my name's West-cott, Geoffrey Westcott, and I believe I've got something of considerable interest both to tell and to show you. My landlady and I were attacked and robbed this morning by your Plague Dogs. They drove us off and then ransacked my car,"

"Christ Almighty! Where?"

"It was during a snowstorm, near Smaithwaite Bridge, a little north of Thirlmere. We'd stopped the car and got out for a minute, when the dogs just appeared and fell on it."

"But you say ransacked and robbed? What of, for God's sake?"

"All my landlady's shopping, out of the back of the car. Everything that was edible, that is. They ate the lot."

"You sure it was the Plague Dogs?"

"I'm as good as certain, Mr. Driver. But more than that, I've got several photographs of them, taken from about twenty-five to thirty yards' distance.

Would you be interested in acquiring those for your paper?"

"I'd like to meet you right away. Where are you?"

Mr. Westcott gave an address in Windermere.

"I'm on my way," said Digby Driver, and slammed down the receiver.

Vaguely aware of the two glimmering squares of the case-; merits opposite and of the wash-basin between and below them--its waste-pipe an elephant's grey trunk curving downward into the floor--Mr. Powell staggered on through the snow, shivering with fever and tormented with a sick headache that never left him. Sometimes he clutched a drift of cotton snow about him for warmth. Anon, he flung it aside as he clambered, sweating with the effort, out of the piled heap of snow into which he had fallen and become engulfed to the neck.

He was at Stalingrad, lost, out of touch with his unit and as a last hope of making his way back to 6th Army headquarters. The enemy were shaggy, black dogs, armed with casks of hot whisky slung round their necks, the terrible effect of which was to intensify headache and induce nausea and vomiting. They could be seen everywhere. •--dark shapes scudding down from the bitter hills to cut ' communications on the roads, or skulking in the balance-: cupboards behind isolated cylinders, to ambush any fugitive who might try to seek shelter. All organised resistance had broken down and the stragglers were wandering to the rear in desperate search of relief. But there was no relief for Mr. Powell.

"The tanks!" muttered Mr. Powell, tossing from side ' to side. "Too many tanks--too many dogs in tanks!"

As he spoke he came in sight at last of headquarters, a s huge, grey ruin standing alone in an expanse of white snow.; He floundered towards it, scratching, through his sweat-'jf Sodden pyjamas, at his unwashed, itching body, and as he jr came closer saw that it was, or had once been, a cathedral.

Struggling, he turned the heavy, iron ring of the door and I stumbled inside.

At first he could perceive nothing, but then, raising his ^.. eyes to the source of the dim light, he saw, with a sense of fe recognition and relief, the rabbits--row upon row of them--gazing gravely down from the hammer beams and the lamp-lit reredos. Even here it was very cold and throughout the building there was not a sound save that of his own coughing, which echoed in the nave. • "Help me!" cried Mr. Powell to the ranks of silent heads.

They gave no sign of having heard him and he fell on his knees.

"Help me! I'm ill! Can't you see me?"

"We can't see you," said a rabbit. "We can't see anyone. We're drafting a personal letter to the Secretary of State."

"I've brought you some tea," said a dog with a slung tommy gun, entering the nave from behind him. "How are you feeling?"

Mr. Powell sat up, coughed, spat yellow into his handkerchief and looked confusedly round the cold, darkening room.

"Oh, fine. I'll be all right a bit later, love," he replied. "Sorry--I had a lousy dream--not too good at all. Must be tune to draw the curtains, isn't it?

Tell Stephanie she's a sweetie, won't you, and I'll try to be fit enough to read her some more about Dr. Dolittle tomorrow? I must aim to get back to work by Tuesday, I really must."

FIT 9

(From the Sunday Orator)

AT LAST!

THESE ARE THE PLAGUE DOGS!;: ASTONISHING PHOTOGRAPHS BY BELEAGUERED MOTORIST Wlndennere bank executive Geoffrey Westcott and his landlady, 1 Mrs. Rose Green, returning home by car through snow which for past twenty-four hours has held Lakeland In its Icy grip, got terrifying shock yesterday. The reason? You can see it here, for ilankman Geoffrey possesses not only courage and presence of but a camera In whose use he is expert, for which the public re much cause to be grateful to him.

"You could have knocked me down with a feather," said Geof-depicted here recovering yesterday from his ordeal at his tollable flat in Mrs. Green's Windermere home, where he is lodger. "I'd driven Mrs. Green over to Keswkk to do some ping and pay a visit to a friend, and on the way back we'd got out of the car for a moment, about five miles north of lil Raise, when all of a sudden I saw these mad dogs--and Ps what they were, make no mistake--rushing down on us. were two of them, bom as wild and ferocious as wolves on Russian steppes. I don't know if plague sends its victims mad, I wouldn't be surprised to team that it does--not after what I've seen. They tore every scrap of Mrs. Green's shopping out of the car--meat, butter, biscuits, the lot--and ate It in about three minutes flat In fact, they were so busy that I risked getting close enough to take some photographs. The car? Ob, it just about breaks my heart--my super-tuned Volvo sports--but PU just have to write it off. I could never bring myself to risk sitting in it again, whatever tests the local authority may carry out and whatever assurances they may see fit to give me. I mean, you never know, do you--bubonic plague?"

Time for Action

You never know--that shrewd comment of bankman Geoffrey, ace amateur cameraman and sports car driver, might well go for many other people in England today.

You never know--where these dangerous brutes--themselves insane from the terrible disease they are carrying--may attack next: what harm they may do; and uho may be their victims. SEE these ghastly photographs of wild beasts at large--supplied exclusively to the Orator by Intrepid Geoffrey Westcott HEAR what the Orator has to say about the danger to our fair land and its people.

SMELL the stink of evasion and bureaucratic We-Know-Best which is still drifting, all-pervasive, from Lawson Park to Whitehall and back. Suppose j-our child were to TOUCH one of these dogs? No danger of that, you say? But how can you be sure? And others may well be less fortunate. The TASTE of danger is all abroad in Lakeland, and where its deadly flavour may next seep-- "Yeah, well, all right," said Digby Driver, throwing down his copy of the Sunday Orator with satisfaction. "And the photographs look first-rate. Lucky the bigger dog's in front--it looks a lot fiercer than the little one. Tom's touched out that cleft in the head quite a bit, too: good idea--some readers might have started feeling sorry for it. O.K., let's get on the blower to old Simp, the agony king."

Digby Driver made his way to the hotel call-box and reversed the charges to the Orator.

"Desmond? Yeah. Yeah, I've seen it. Glad you're pleased. Oh, fine, thanks.

What now? Well, I thought Westcott might be good for a bit more, properly shoved and guided from behind, you know. What? Yeah, he's stimulatable all right. Sure. A yibbedy yobbedy, out to be |ck)bberdy, up in the courts young man. What? Patience, sDesmond. No, I said Patience. No, not patience, Patience.? Oh, skip it! Oh, you don't think he'll do? You want it J stronger? Stronger than that? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I see--Ijprce their hand, eh? But that's a bit of a tall order, isn't it? fWell, dammit all, Desmond, I just got you the photo-": graphs, didn't I? O.K., O.K., never mind.

You say Sir Ivor

• wants a disaster? Something the Government can't duck;: out of? Well, that is a tall order, Desmond, but I'll do my •• level best. Yeah, that's about it--pray for something to f turn up. Never know what the dogs themselves might get t. up to, of course, specially if this snow goes on. Father for-f give them for they know not what they bloody do, eh?

O.K. Desmond, do my best. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye." I Having rung off, Digby Driver remained musing in the |call-box for fully half a minute, tapping his front teeth gwith his pencil. At length he once more, and resolutely, grasped the receiver.

"The time has come the walrus said," he remarked, and ^proceeded to put a call through to Animal Research. "Lawson Park? Yes, that's right, duty officer, I said.

•ndon Orator here. Yes, of course I know it's Sunday. Look, can you give me the home phone number of the young fellow I talked to at Broughton last week?

No, not Boycott, no, his name's--er--yeah, that's it, Powell, Stephen Powell.

What? You say he's sick? Oh, is he? Sick,! What's he sick with? You don't know? I see! And you iWon't give me his number? Right, thank you. Thank you pery much. Good-bye."

What is the mysterious illness afflicting young research ientist Stephen Powell?" muttered Digby Driver to him-'

'Animal Station Preserves Suspicious Secrecy.' Well, 'ell play it for what it's worth, but it's not really what ismond's after--not for a body-blow. It's got to be igger than that. What we ought to be praying for is imething nasty, nasty--really nasty, oh yuck! Come on, iver, get with it! But what, what, what?" Mr. Driver, smiting his forehead with an open palm, •oceeded to seek inspiration in the bar. don't think we shall ever be able to find the tod now," said Snitter. "If I were a mouse I couldn't even run as far as the gully in the floor."

He sat up, looking round uneasily at the sky. "I suppose the buzzards will come,-but I hope we're properly dead first. Tug tug, munch munch, I say, Beakrip, old chap, which d'you like best, Snitter or Rowf?"

"Shut up."

"Have you ever thought, though, Rowf, we shan't need food or even names when we're dead? No names--like the tod--just the wind making those little whistling noises along the ribs, like that yow's bones last night that had nothing left on them. Nothing--not even maggots. That'll be us. Thank goodness we're out of the wind here. It's enough to blow a cat over the hill into the tarn. Here I come help miaow oh splash how did that happen?"

Rowf said nothing, licked Snitter's ear for a few moments and then let his head fall back between his numbed paws. "Rowf, do you--"

"I can still smell that stuff you said the whitecoats put into the hole in your head."

"You weren't cut open. All the dogs who were cut open smelt of it. If you'd been cut open you'd have it too and you wouldn't notice. Rowf, d'you really think it's because of us that the dustbins had been taken indoors last night?"

"Probably. They're all afraid of us, aren't they?"

"So they all know--every one of them--about me killing people?" A few moments later Rowf was asleep again--a light, wary sleep, in which exhaustion barely turned the scale against hunger and the fighting animal's fear of being surprised and killed without the chance of a struggle. Snitter pressed himself deeper into the cleft between Rowfs shaggy coat and the base of the crag and lay gazing out over the fell and the dark tarn below. The sun, which had been shining from a clear sky during the early afternoon, was now hidden behind a bank of clouds like an arctic sea. From height to height, across the bitter waste, the snow lay austere and silent, knowing neither hate nor pity for whatever creatures it would kill during the darkness of the coming fourteen-hour night.

"I'm a whitecoat," murmured Snitter drowsily, looking down at the slate-coloured surface of Levers Water, like an eye-socket in a skull, surrounded by its white, still shores. "I need to find out how and in what way you two dogs are going to die under this particular crag. You'll •have noticed that I smell very smooth and clean, which is just as it should be: and that I cover everything up. You must understand that I'm not insensitive to the situation of my charges. My experiments have taught me great respect for all creatures. Your life certainly won't be wasted. Even your bones will have a use--you should feel proud and interested. Let me explain. There's a kind of buzzard that looks like a maggot--flying, of course--"