Josh twisted around and seized the collar of the dog that was raging on top of Nancy. He wrenched it clear off the ground and slapped it across the side of the head, twice. The dog went into a frothing fury, snarling and clawing and whipping its body from side to side, but Josh raised it right up to eye level and pointed his finger at it and said, “Stop.”
He had no idea if his usual dog hysteria management was going to work. Most of the dogs that he had dealt with before had been the neurotic pets of frustrated middle-aged women from Marin County. They hadn’t been trained to rip people’s hearts out, the way this animal obviously had, and he had never in his life encountered any animal in such a rage.
“Stop,” Josh told it. But the dog kept on snarling and twisting and trying to take a bite out of Josh’s forearm.
“Stop!” Josh yelled at it; and quite unexpectedly, it stopped, even though it was still swinging around in the air and half-strangling in its collar. “Stop,” Josh said again, much more quietly. He turned around, stretching out his right hand, and pointed one by one at the jumping, barking animals.
“Listen to me!” he yelled at them. “You are going to be calm!” Then, as their barking diminished, “You are going to be calm. You are going to be reasonable. Listen to me. Don’t move. You are going to think this through.”
The thin young man came backing toward him, his knees bent, still waving his craft-knife from side to side. He glanced at Josh but he obviously couldn’t think of anything to say. The eight attack dogs were now milling around in front of them, their tongues hanging out like red neckties, confused. Their handlers were walking across the street now, their black capes billowing, snapping their leads.
The drummers beat a long, savage roll and then they were silent. They opened their ranks so that the Hooded Men could walk between them, with their swords raised.
“Go on, Max!” shouted one of the dog-handlers; and the other one shouted too, and whipped his dogs across their backs with his lead.
Josh kept his hand raised. In spite of the noise, in spite of the confusion, he tried to radiate calm, as if he were the center of all tranquility. “You are going to stay where you are until I tell you to move. You feel happier, being calm. You feel much more fulfilled.”
Strangely, he could feel the same rapport that he felt with the overfed lapdogs of Marin County, but this was even stronger, in a way. These were real dogs, little more than wild, and they had never been treated as if they were human – as if they were capable of thinking for themselves. It was a new experience for them, and they were bewildered.
“They’re bewildered,” he told Nancy.
“They’re bewildered?” said the thin young man. “I’m bleeding mystified.”
Josh dropped the dog that had attacked Nancy and it shook itself and trotted back toward its handler. The man threw back the hood of his cloak. He was shaven-headed and scarred, with a heavy gray moustache, and half of one of his ears was missing. Without taking his eyes off Josh, he reached down and looped the dog’s lead around its neck, and twisted it tight. Then, with a grunt, he started to throttle it.
The dog made a thick choking noise and struggled wildly, but the handler kicked it in the stomach. He kicked it again and again, until the animal was limp, and then he picked it up by its hind legs, swung it over his head, and smashed its skull against the granite curb. There was a hollow crack! and bright red blood and bright beige brains were spattered all over the other dogs, who visibly flinched. “Go!” the handler screamed at them, “Go! Or the same thing’s going to happen to you!”
The dogs hesitated, confused, yipping and yapping and thrashing their tails.
“Go!” screamed the handler; and it was now that the Hooded Men approached, their sackcloth faces blank and threatening, their swords held high.
“Take them!” ordered a harsh, thick voice. Josh couldn’t tell who it was, but one of the Hooded Men kicked the dog’s carcass to one side and deliberately stepped on its shattered head, so that its one remaining brown eye was squeezed out of its socket.
The thin young man took two or three steps back. “I hope you’re light on your feet, missus,” he told Nancy.
“Let’s just get out of here, shall we? You direct us, we’ll follow.”
“They’ll have you, if they catch you. You’ll wish you was dead, believe me.”
The Hooded Men were beginning to circle them now, but they were playing their attack very cautiously. Their swords were very long, thin-bladed, with plain cruciform handles, and they looked extremely sharp. Because of their hoods, their faces seemed even more threatening, like scarecrows that had come to life, to seek their revenge.
One of them said, in a muffled voice, “In the name of the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth you are detained for trespass. Come quiet, and you will have nothing to fear, so help me God. Resist, and your fate will be the talk of all damnation.”
Josh kept his hand raised and his eye on the dogs. Their handlers were whipping them now, and cursing them, and he knew that he couldn’t control them for very much longer. “When I say ‘run’,” said Josh, “don’t even think about it – go like hell.” He paused for two or three seconds, and then he shouted, “Run!”
Nancy galloped up Star Yard with her buckskin fringes flying, and even though she was wearing high-heeled boots Josh found it almost impossible to keep up with her. The thin young man was right behind him, his coat whirling up. The dogs were so close that they were almost biting at their heels, barking hysterically, but all the barking and the shouting of their handlers and the jingling of swords and scabbards were drowned out by a shattering drumbeat. Ratta-tatta-ratta-tatta-tat!
As they rounded the first corner, the thin young man said, “In here!” and pushed open a flaking, black-painted door. Nancy had run so far ahead that Josh had to give her a sharp dog-whistle to call her back.
The thin young man slammed the door behind them and jammed it with a broken chair. “Where does this lead?” asked Josh, as he stumbled along a hallway stacked with faded rolls of floral wallpaper, paint-caked buckets and stepladders.
“Upstairs, guvnor,” panted the thin young man. “Upstairs and over the roof. Dogs can’t follow you through thin air.”
Gasping for breath, they climbed up one bare-boarded flight of stairs after another. There was a strong smell of damp and mildew in the building and as they climbed higher, Josh could see that half of the slates were missing, and the attic was open to the sky. On either side they passed derelict rooms with no floorboards, still decorated with faded wallpaper, their fireplaces clogged with ash.
Four floors below them, they heard the front door being kicked open, and the wild barking of dogs. The thin young man said, “Follow me,” and led them up a narrow staircase into the attic. Again, all of the floorboards were missing, and they had to cross the attic by balancing from one joist to the next, taking care not to catch their feet on any protruding nails. They could look down and see the rooms two and even three floors lower down, and hear the clattering of dogs coming up the stairs.
The far side of the roof was already stripped of tiles, and the wind made gusty, fluffing noises through the rafters. The thin young man led them out on to the narrow parapet, ninety feet above Chancery Lane. “Oh God, Josh,” said Nancy. “You know how much I hate heights.”