Most days Caleb was still a football field’s length from Shadow Alley when he had to pause, take a shuddering breath and shove his hands deep into his pockets. It was the only way he could keep them from shaking. Today, though, he’d promised himself it would be different. He’d be different. His birthday would change things.
‘You’re eleven now, Caleb, and you need to grow up and stop being a crybaby,’ he told himself. ‘Pa’s gone and you’re the man of the house.’
It was late afternoon but the sun baked down on his thin brown shoulders. The sky and the landscape were the colour of old clothes. The rain fell less often with each passing year. Eventually it would stop altogether and then the world really would end, just as they’d claimed it would all those years ago when the oil ran out.
Passing the scarred outline of concrete and mangled metal that had once been the zoo, Caleb tried to bolster his courage by imagining the strength of will it must have taken for lions, bears and tigers to spend a lifetime imprisoned in tiny cages, like murderers or thieves, far from the jungles or African wilderness of their birth. Caleb had never seen such a wild animal except in books. Outside of a few reserves and zoos, most were extinct. Caleb couldn’t understand what sort of people his parents’ generation and that of his grandparents and great-parents must have been to stand by and allow creatures as heart-stoppingly beautiful as a snow leopard, a jaguar, a golden eagle, a dolphin, or an oryx gazelle to be wiped from the face of the earth by hunters and quack medicine men, but they had.
‘We thought they’d always be there,’ his mother would say with a shrug when he asked her about it. ‘We kept waiting for someone to save them.’
‘Why didn’t you save them?’ Caleb wanted to know.
‘I wish I had,’ she’d told him sadly. ‘I wish I had.’
The animal Caleb would have most like to have seen was a tiger, but the tigers had escaped and most of the other zoo inmates either starved to death or had been lost to illness or fighting during the last Water War, back when Caleb was three. His father had been killed in battle not long afterwards, defending the local lake. Now the lake was all dried up. To Caleb, it was as if he’d died for nothing.
The tigers had died for nothing too. They’d fled into the mountains, where they’d been cornered by Levi and his dad. Levi couldn’t have been more than ten at the time, but he claimed to have shot a pouncing tiger as his dad finished off the other one. The skins were said to be magnificently displayed in their mansion.
At the thought of Levi, Caleb swallowed hard and shoved his hands deep into his pockets. It didn’t work.The closer he got to Shadow Alley, the more he trembled. He was tempted to run home with some excuse about how the flour seller at the market was ill, but his mother, who knew nothing of the horrors of the underpass, would only send him back the following day and he’d have to run the gauntlet again.
In Shadow Alley, it was cool, airless and dark. Caleb smelled Levi’s cologne before he saw him. Every hair on his body stood on end. He put his head down and walked quickly and purposefully towards the silvery shaft of daylight at the far end.
‘I’m eleven now,’ he reminded himself. ‘Nobody can touch me, nobody can touch me, nobody can touch me.’
‘Why the hurry, Caleb?’ asked Jeb, stepping out in front of him. At seventeen, the Sandler boy was all muscle and no sense. It was like being confronted by a boulder.
‘Yeah, Caleb, why the rush?’ demanded Zach, Jeb’s smarter, slimmer twin.
‘Leave me alone,’ Caleb pleaded.
Levi strolled from the shadows. He was a year older than the brothers and as handsome as a Greek god. It was only on closer inspection that you could see that his eyes were flat and hard and his mouth sulky and spoiled.
‘I wish we could,’ he told Caleb, ‘but, you see, Jeb hereis bored and that can be dangerous. Zach and I like to keep him entertained and we think you can help us. Plus, it’ll be lots of fun for you. So how about it? Why don’t we play: Where shall we go today?’
‘No!’ To Caleb’s shame, his eyes filled with tears. He was sweating with terror. ‘I don’t want to play. Please let me go. I only want to buy flour at the market.’
Levi grinned. Nothing gave him more pleasure than watching people squirm or beg. ‘Of course you can go to the market, Caleb,’ he said. ‘But not today. Today we’re going on a little journey. A magical mystery tour. We think you need a little fun in your life, Caleb. We think you need to grow up and be a man.’
* * *
Forty days and forty nights. That’s what they told him as they drove away and left him to his fate, and the only thing Caleb was proud of was that he’d somehow managed to keep from crying until the sound of their engine faded and he was alone in the vast, blue-grey emptiness of the mountains. Then he didn’t just cry, he sobbed, because in the end they’d taken everything from him—and this time they might just have cost him his life.
They’d started by stealing his school fees and books from him on the very first day of term. His mother, who with Caleb’s assistance, scraped a meager living running a bakery from their kitchen, had saved for months to raise the funds for her son to attend the local school. He hadn’t had the heart to tell her that he’d been robbed of all of it. Consequently, he set off every weekday morning as if he was going to class, and spent the day hiding in an old barn, hot and hungry. To keep his mind occupied, he’d invent lessons he could tell his mother about in the evening.
It wasn’t that Caleb had been singled out for bullying. Shadow Alley divided the old and new sections of the town. For the past two years, Levi and his friends had controlled the underpass like highwaymen, taking what they pleased and beating up anyone who resisted, regardless of age or status. Their favourite game was ‘Where Shall We Go Today?’ Twice before Caleb had fallen victim to it. Once they’d put him in the metal scoop of a builder’s crane, raised it up to two hundred feet and left him there overnight. Another time, they’d blindfolded him, shoved him into a sack, and dumped him on the rubbish tip in the next town. It had taken Caleb nearly two days to get home, stinking and covered in flies. His mother had been out of her mind with worry.
‘Please don’t do this,’ he’d begged when it became clear that they were serious about subjecting him to what Levi called a “test of manhood” by leaving him in one of the bleakest, most inhospitable mountain ranges in the country with nothing more than a box of matches and a single bottle of water. ‘My mum needs me to help her in the bakery. She’s old and her health is not good. If she thinks I am missing or dead, the shock could kill her.’
‘Well now, we wouldn’t want your mother on our conscience,’ scoffed Levi as he bit into a lamb chop. When Levi’s electric-powered Land Rover had climbed as high as it could go on the crumbling mountain road, he’d parked on a flattish section of gravel and Jeb and Zach had cooked up a meaty feast on a makeshift barbecue. Caleb had never eaten anything that came from an animal, but the cooking smells were a torturous reminder of how hungry he was. His captors ate without offering him any food, however, leaving him tied up and shivering as the sun set and a mountain chill descended.
Blood dribbled down Levi’s chin and he licked it up greedily. ‘Don’t worry, Caleb,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell your mum that you’re going to be working for my father for the next forty days. She won’t even miss you.’
It took Caleb all the courage he possessed to say: ‘She’ll want to know where my wages are. When I come home, I mean.’
Levi gave an impatient growl and drop-kicked the lambchop bone off the edge of the mountain. ‘You’re not going to be going home, you idiot,’ he muttered under his breath.
Zach said: ‘Maybe forty days is too long, Levi. He’s a runt of a kid. He could starve or be eaten by one of the feral creatures out here.’
Jeb threw his head back and laughed like a deranged hyena.
Levi rolled his eyes. ‘And your point is?’
‘How much are you going to pay me?’ Caleb asked again. He wanted to keep them talking in the hope that they’d change their minds about abandoning him to almost certain death.
Zach grinned. ‘Yeah, Levi, if he survives the forty days without his mommy, how much are you going to pay him?’
Levi mentioned a sum so large that Caleb gasped. It was more than his mother’s bakery earned in a whole year.
Levi jingled his car keys as Jeb stamped out the fire. ‘There’s a condition,’ he told Caleb with an evil smile. ‘You have to be alive to collect the money. If you’re dead, it doesn’t count.’ He climbed into the Land Rover, still laughing.
An hour after they’d driven away and left him in the eerie dark of the mountains, freed from his bonds but with nothing but his matches and bottle of water to sustain him, the cruel jeers of the three still echoed in Caleb’s ears. He had no hope of being rescued. Apart from the occasional hunter, nobody ever came to these mountains. Few people were wealthy enough to afford an electric four-wheel drive vehicle capable of making the climb and there’d be no other reason to visit such a barren, hostile place. Unless his captors had an uncharacteristic attack of conscience, he was on his own.
Caleb sniffed, dried his eyes on his sleeve and looked up at the rocky outcrop above him. In amongst the crags and scrub were several caves. For as long as he could remember, there’d been rumours among the townspeople that feral and mutant predators—some from the old zoo—stalked the mountains. He would have liked to use a cave to shelter from the night wind, but dared not risk it. Instead he stoked up the remnants of his tormentors’ fire and lay down beside it. In spite of the extreme cold and his very real fear that he could die of hypothermia or be attacked by wild beasts before morning, he was asleep and dreaming almost instantly.
In the dream, he was an observer in a post-apocalyptic, Middle Eastern landscape of unrelenting bleakness. Apart from a hot breeze sifting through the dust, nothing stirred. Out of nowhere, a boy of about thirteen appeared. He walked away down the main street, his back to Caleb. He was small for his age but very strong, and clad only in a loincloth and dusty sandals. A sleeve of arrows was slung across his shoulders.
Some invisible enemy began to throw stones at him. Without looking round, he deflected them with the palm of his hand. The stones were followed by arrows, but the boy never used his own to fight back. He simply continued his calm, purposeful walk. Even when gunfire shattered the silence, the boy never broke his stride. He deflected bullets and, later, missiles, as effortlessly as a character in a video game. They glanced off the palm of his hand. Eventually, the biggest bomb on earth was sent to destroy him. The boy dispatched it as if it were nothing.
He’d now reached the end of the street. All was still and quiet. As Caleb watched, the boy sat down on the steps of a ruined building. Over the roofs behind him came a tiger. Against the beige of the surroundings, its burnished burnt-orange and jet-black-striped coat seemed to blaze like a naked flame. Caleb tried to yell a warning. The boy had survived every weapon that the world could throw at him, but he was no match for the tiger stealing up behind him.
The tiger jumped onto the step. The boy reached out and put his arm around the beast and cuddled it, and Caleb realized with awe that the tiger was the boy’s friend. It was then that Caleb had a premonition. He saw that in the future tigers would once again roam the earth and he would walk among them, unafraid.
* * *
So real was the dream that when Caleb woke to find a tiger looking down on him, he just smiled and murmured: ‘You’re as magnificent as I always imagined you’d be.’
The tiger snarled and snapped at Caleb’s jugular vein in a way that caused his heart to stop beating for at least a minute before it started up again, irregularly. He had time to think, ‘So Levi and his dad lied about killing the tigers—or at least one of them,’ before the tiger grabbed him by the belt and began hauling him up the mountain. Bumping along the gravel in the rosy glow of dawn, Caleb felt peculiarly unafraid. The dream had left him peaceful. If the tiger was planning to eat him, there was not a lot he could do about it.
The cave had a leathery, mossy smell to it. Once inside, the tiger did not eat Caleb right away but lay down and contemplated him with a slightly puzzled air. Caleb, for his part, lay unmoving, drinking in the beauty of the animal: its strength, its grace, its huge paws, green eyes and dramatic colouring. He did not pray to be spared by it. Rather he prayed that he would live as long as possible so he could savour every second he spent in its presence.
An hour went by and nothing happened. The tiger watched him and he watched the tiger. But as the temperature rose, he became increasingly hungry and thirsty. He thought of his bottle of water. Could he get it without being attacked? He stood up. The tiger bared its fangs but did nothing more. Caleb set off down the mountain, followed at a distance by the tiger. Beside the ashes of the fire, he found his bottle of water. It had been broken in the night by marauding beasts, possibly attracted by the meat bones. Caleb knew very well that without water, he’d be dead in days.
He looked at the tiger. ‘Where do you drink?’ he asked her. ‘Where do you find water?’
The tiger growled, but it was not a growl of rage. It returned to its cave, with Caleb following. Together they spent a long, quiet, hot day. However, Caleb was used to those. He thought about his mother and hoped that Levi had done as he promised and she wasn’t worrying. In the afternoon, the tiger got up and climbed the mountain, keeping to the shadows. Caleb went after her. She entered a narrow space between two rocks and set off along a dank, claustrophobic tunnel. Suddenly the space widened and became lighter. Caleb’s mouth dropped open in amazement. They had entered in a vast cavern illuminated by a shaft of sunlight. In the centre of it was a spring that fed a clear pool.
The tiger immersed herself in the water. After a moment’s hesitation, Caleb did the same, drinking his fill as he did so. Thirst quenched, he and the tiger lay studying one another. Caleb would willingly have drowned in the sacred green depths of the tiger’s eyes. It was beyond his comprehension that Levi and his father could have taken the life of her mate.
When darkness fell, they returned to the cave. The tiger disappeared for a long while and reappeared with a rabbit she had killed for food. When she had eaten her fill, she seemed to have no objections to Caleb taking the rest. She watched as he built a fire at the cave entrance and cooked it. The eating of meat, of flesh, was repellant to him, but he knew it was his only chance of survival.
The tiger enjoyed the warmth of the fire. The flames lent a fiery sheen to her coat. When Caleb grew tired, he lay down beside her, resting his face against the silken fur of her muscular shoulder. In his dreams he thought he could hear her purring.
For forty days and forty nights, this was the pattern of their existence. They swam, they ate, they slept, they enjoyed one another’s company. Caleb marked the passage of time with small stones. When at last a plume of dust signaled the return of the Land Rover, he wept not with fear—he knew he would never be afraid again—but because the most magical month of his life was almost over. He and the tiger hid in the darkest corner of the cave. Outside, he could hear the teenagers arguing as they searched for him.
Levi said: ‘I don’t know why we’re even bothering to look for his bones. That little runt couldn’t have survived a storm in a teacup. Let’s tell his mother he was abducted by water raiders and hasn’t been seen since.’
The tiger growled.
‘What was that?’ asked Zach, alarmed. ‘It sounded like a wild cat.’
Levi marched into the cave, the twins following reluctantly behind. ‘Well, it won’t be anything larger than somebody’s missing moggie,’ he assured his friend. ‘My father and I have shot everything else.’
The tiger gave a savage roar. She would have clawed the three in an instant had Caleb not kept a soothing arm around her. The roar echoed around the cave, causing the teenagers to scream like girls.
‘Calm down,’ Caleb instructed from the shadows. An idea had come to him.
‘Caleb!’ cried Levi looking around frantically. ‘You nearly scared the life out of us. Why are you making that hideous noise? Where are you? I can’t see a thing in here.’
The tiger snarled again. ‘You mean, why do I sound like a tiger?’ Caleb asked. ‘Simple. After you left me here to die, my body was inhabited by the spirit of the tigers you killed. You remember them, don’t you, Levi? You had at least one of them stuffed and mounted, and it’s hanging on a wall in your home. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Levi, but the spirit of that tiger wants revenge.’
Jeb cried: ‘Didn’t I tell you that them stuffed tigers always look at me funny?’
Levi went white. ‘You’re lying, Caleb,’ he accused. ‘I don’t know how you’re still alive, you little weasel, but when I get my hands on you, you’ll be sorry.’
Caleb lit a match. He’d positioned himself so that his head was concealed by the tiger’s. When the yellow light flared, Levi and the twins saw a tiger’s head on a boy’s body.
There were more screams. The match went out.
‘It was my dad, not me,’ cried Levi. ‘He shot one of the tigers and wounded the other one and I guess it probably died from its injuries. We bought an extra tiger skin on the internet. I’m sorry, tiger spirit. I’m so, so sorry. Please don’t hurt me. Caleb, ask it to eat Jeb instead. He has more meat on his bones.’
‘What does it have to do with Jeb?’ Zach said angrily. ‘He didn’t shoot any tigers.’
‘Yeah, I don’t wanna be no dinner for no tiger,’ protested Jeb.
The tiger pulled from Caleb’s grasp and let out another blood curdling roar.
Levi burst into tears. ‘Make it stop,’ he pleaded with Caleb. ‘What does it want? What do you want?’
‘We only want what’s fair,’ replied Caleb. ‘The tiger spirit wants to be left in peace on this mountain, with no one disturbing her ever. As for me, I want the money you promised my mother…’
‘It’s in the Land Rover,’ interrupted Zach. ‘Levi tried to get out of bringing it on the grounds that you were likely to be dead, but I told him a promise was a promise. I said that if you survived forty days in this hellhole, you’d have earned it.’
‘Take the money,’ Levi sobbed. ‘It’s all yours.’
‘That’s not all,’ said Caleb. ‘I also want my school fees and books and I want you and your two thugs to agree never to hurt or bother anyone passing through Shadow Alley ever again.’
‘Fine,’ sniffed Levi.
‘Agreed,’ said Zach.
‘Uh huh,’ grunted Jeb.
Under cover of darkness Caleb hugged the tiger, pressing his face to her silken fur. Tears ran down his face and it seemed to him that she was crying too. One day, tigers would roam the earth again and he’d walk among them unafraid, but until then, they were on their own.
He stepped from the shadows and the teenagers gasped. In the forty days he’d spent with the tiger, Caleb had changed from a boy to a man and filled out with muscle, but that was not what shocked them. What surprised them the most was that he had an aura of invincibility about him. Strength and calmness emanated from him.
‘Let’s go,’ he told them in a tone that brooked no argument. ‘My mum will be expecting me.’
Levi stumbled wordlessly after him, like a man who has found himself in one of his own nightmares. Zach and Jeb plied him with questions. How had he survived? What had he eaten? Why did he look so fit and well and confident? What was his secret?
Caleb said nothing. He just climbed into the Land Rover and counted his ‘wages.’ He couldn’t wait to see his mother’s face light up when he walked in the door with money that would transform their lives for the first time since his father died. He couldn’t wait to go to school again. But although he was looking forward to a fresh, bright start, and a big plate of his mum’s vegetarian food, nothing could erase the agony he felt at being parted from the best friend he’d ever had. His heart felt as if it were being ripped from his chest. He knew even then that he would have laid down his own life for her.
Absorbed in his own thoughts, he barely noticed the engine start up, and it was not until they were bounding down the rough road that he realized Levi wasn’t with them.
‘It’s time he had a taste of his own medicine,’ Zach was saying. ‘Forty days and forty nights. Let’s see if he makes it.’
Caleb sat up. ‘No,’ he cried. ‘He’ll never survive. Don’t leave him out here.’
‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’ said Zach. ‘If you can do it, so can he. That was our challenge to him. Don’t worry, we won’t really abandon him for forty days, even if he deserves it for offering Jeb to the tiger spirit for a meal. We’ll come back and get him in the morning. By then he’ll have learned his lesson.’
Before they rounded the first bend, Caleb looked back. Silhouetted on the boulder behind Levi was the tiger. It could have been a trick of the light but it seemed to Caleb that, as the eighteen-year-old set off in the direction of the cave, swagger gone, the tiger was eyeing him with more than a modicum of interest.