“Shouldn’t we call an ambulance?” Oscar said.
“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” I replied. “What about the ferret? There’s no way it’ll be allowed inside a hospital. I think we’d better call Aunt Isa.”
“But she doesn’t have a phone,” Oscar objected.
Actually, she did. Last autumn I’d convinced her to buy a mobile, but she lived so far off the grid that she could use it only if she climbed the hill behind her farmhouse. She could call me, but I couldn’t call her – not unless she just happened to have trudged up to the top of the ridge to admire the view.
Even so I gave it a try. Crackle, crackle. “We’re currently unable to connect you to the number you have called…” What a surprise.
I touched Shanaia’s cheek again. She was still ice-cold and showed no signs of coming to.
“Eh…” Oscar said. “Clara… it’s getting darker, don’t you think? And… foggier?”
I looked up. He was right. The sky was leaden, black almost, and thin, grey fingers of fog were creeping towards us across the muddy grass. There was nothing unusual about the sky darkening less than half an hour before sunset, but those weaving, grey tentacles… It was almost as if they were searching for something. One of them wound itself around Oscar’s ankle, and he instinctively lifted his leg.
“Gross…” he exclaimed.
The black sky suddenly cracked with a hollow boom and ejected a wedge of white. My jaw dropped as I stared at the whiteness hurtling towards us like a nose-diving jet plane. Within seconds, we were surrounded by a blizzard of huge, white birds.
“What…?” Oscar began, but before he’d finished his question, the first bird had crashed into his chest and sent him reeling. The air was filled with screaming, flapping, pecking seagulls with red eyes and yellow, red-stained beaks. At first Woofer let out a couple of aggressive barks, then he howled pitifully and attempted to make his escape. The yank on the leash jerked Oscar completely off his feet, and the seagulls pounced on him as if he were a pile of especially delicious kitchen scraps on the top of a skip.
They didn’t touch me. Only Oscar, Woofer and Shanaia.
“Go away!” I yelled at them, waving my arms around. “Back off! NOW GO AWAY!” It was the only wildwitchery I had ever been any good at, making animals – and some people – go away when I shouted at them.
Only this time it didn’t work. Or maybe it did, they kept away from me. But not from the others. I grabbed a flapping white wing and pulled a giant herring gull off Oscar. Woofer howled and yelped and tried to get away, but couldn’t because his leash was still wrapped around Oscar’s wrist. Slam – slam – peck, slam – peck – peck, one after the other, the seagulls pounded them like feathered bombs with their long, hard beaks, and Oscar was yelling and shouting and rolling around, flailing his arms to try and keep them off him.
“CAT!” I shouted. “Cat, help!!”
I had no idea where he was or if he could hear me; all I knew was that I couldn’t handle this alone. I tore at the pecking seagulls, yanking them off Oscar, Woofer and Shanaia with panicking hands, grabbing greasy white wings, stumpy tails, knobbly, yellow legs, I didn’t care what, all that mattered was to get them off.
“CAT!” I yelled again, louder this time. “HELP!”
And suddenly I was no longer alone. No longer the only one fighting the seagulls. Blackbirds, sparrows, bullfinches with beaks like secateurs, two ginger urban foxes, four feral tabbies hissing and snarling, a black and white flock of magpies, a heron with a massive wingspan and a neck like some prehistoric flying reptile… More animals joined me, rooks, crows, even a couple of mallards and a dozen brown rats, a flapping, snapping, biting, heaving army erupting from the earth and the sky, the bushes and the trees. And Cat. Cat was here too.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. He struck the mob of seagulls like a black torpedo, as big as a panther and with claws like fishhooks. Back off, birdbrains! She’s mine! I could hear his thoughts much more clearly than Oscar’s incoherent shouting.
The seagulls retreated. Many had been injured, blood stained their white feathers red and one of them was dragging its entrails and two broken wings behind it in the gravel. They looked like normal seagulls now, with normal pale yellow eyes, and those who could, flew off. Cat snapped the neck of the eviscerated gull with a single violent swipe from his paw, and one of the foxes ran off with another feathered and bloody bundle in its jaws. The magpies pursued a weakened, barely airborne tern through the leafless bushes and I think they caught it somewhere behind the rhododendrons.
Cat sniffed the dead seagull on the path. I was more worried about Oscar, who was sitting up slowly, but definitely didn’t look his best. His baseball cap had come off and his hair, quite upright and tufty at the best of times, was a mess of reddish clumps. Blood trickled from his nose and from one eyebrow, and all of his face and both his hands were covered in scratches. It was just as well that it was February and he had been wearing winter clothing – his puffer jacket had suffered multiple tears from which man-made fibres stuck out, but it had undoubtedly protected him against a lot of the pecking and scratching.
“Ouch,” he winced. “That really hurt. Stupid, sodding seagulls!”
I took it as a good sign that he could still swear. Woofer licked Oscar’s cheek and looked somewhat contrite and defeated.
Oscar touched his nose gingerly.
“What is up with those seagulls?” he wanted to know. “Was it more of that wildwitch stuff?”
Though he was the one who was bleeding, he didn’t seem nearly as shaken as I was. Perhaps he didn’t understand just how close he’d come to being pecked to death. I could never have managed to fight off the seagulls on my own; I’d only succeeded because I’d had help.
“Was that Chimera?” I asked Cat. “Did she make the seagulls attack us?” I knew they would never have done so of their own accord.
Cat merely hissed and bared the claws on one of his black front paws. He didn’t know who was behind it, but if he ever found out, then the sneaky little rat had better watch out.
Oscar got up.
“So now what?” he said. “Are you sure we shouldn’t call an ambulance?”
Cat arched his back, then stretched. Isa, he said. You need Isa.
I couldn’t agree more. Only I didn’t know how to get hold of her, did I?
At that very moment my mobile rang.