Just what he did out there all the hours of the day was something else. If his foster-parents asked him, he would say, ‘Playing,’ and that was all. But Carol wanted to know what it was he played at. It was beyond her that he could find anything more interesting than the pool. So she went out after him, tiptoeing past her parent’s room, into the early morning light where dawn hadn’t long cracked the horizon with its golden smile.
Johnny went down past the pool under its polythene blister to the garden wall. He climbed the high wall at a well-known spot, jumped down the last few feet on the other side. And he started out along the overgrown hedgerow into the maze of fields shimmering in the morning light. And Carol right after him.
Half a mile into the fields, at a junction of ancient, rutted, overgrown tracks, the jumbles of a ruined farm lay humped and green with flowering brambles and clumps of nettles, where sections of broken, grey-lichened wall and the buttressed mass of an old chimney poked up in teetering stacks of stone. Johnny cut diagonally through a meadow and only his dark head, shiny with sweat, could be seen above the tall, swaying grass.
From where she balanced precariously on top of a disused stile, Carol saw where he was heading and resolved to follow him. The old ruin was obviously Johnny’s secret place, where he played his secret games. But they wouldn’t be secret much longer.
Johnny had disappeared somewhere into the tumble of fallen, weed-grown walls by the time his sister came panting out of the meadow. She paused a while and looked this way and that, along the tracks which had once serviced the farm, then made to cross them to the ruins . . . and paused again!
What was that! A cry! The cry of a cat? Moggit?
Moggit!
Carol’s hand flew to her mouth. She drew a gasping breath and held it. What, poor little Moggit, lost somewhere in the shell of this crumbling old pile? Maybe that was what had drawn Johnny here: the sound of Moggit, jammed in some hole, trapped and starving in this tottering ruin.
Carol thought to call out in answer to Moggit’s strange, choking cries and maybe bring him a little hope; but then she thought no, for that would only make him struggle the harder and perhaps get himself in more of a fix. Maybe he was only crying like that, so urgently and piteously, because Johnny was already trying to rescue him.
Holding her breath, Carol crossed the hard-packed, dusty tracks to what once would have been a wide entrance through high farmyard walls to the cluster of buildings within. Now the gap was a mass of collapsed stone choked by brambles and bolting ivy, with a few hazelnuts and straggly elders crushed under the weight of parasitic green. Broken bricks and rubble shifted underfoot where a well-marked trail had been worn through the undergrowth, Carol supposed by Johnny.
Dusty and cobwebbed, the trail in through the foliage was almost a tunnel; the light was shut out; seven-year-old Carol felt stifled as she forced her way through. But when she might have faltered, Moggit’s howls (she was sure it must be Moggit, while at the same time praying it was not) drove her on. Until finally she broke cover into yellow sunlight, and blinking the grit out of her eyes saw Johnny where he sat in the central clearing. And saw the …
. . . The things he had there; but without really seeing them at first, because her child’s mind couldn’t conceive, couldn’t believe. And finally she saw . . . but no, no, there was no way that this could be Moggit.
What, Moggit of the snow-white belly and paws, the bushy tail and Lone Ranger masked face, the sleek, gleaming black back and neck and ears? This tortured, dangling thing, Moggit? Carol almost fainted; she slumped down behind a broken wall and knocked loose a brick, and Johnny heard the clatter. When his head snapped round on his neck to look Carol’s way, he didn’t see her at first, only the ruins in the clearing as he’d always known them. But Carol still saw him: his bloated face, bulging, emotionless eyes, and bloody, clawlike hands. His penknife lying open beside him on the wall where he sat, and the sharpened stick with its red point clutched tight in one hand.