K-9 by Rohan Gavin Page A

travelled up through his body and was beating in the back of his throat.
    With unspoken trepidation, Darkus and Wilbur followed the track downhill between several ancient mounds of clay, feeling the temperature drop as they moved into the long shadows of the tree-covered firmament. One after another, they lost their balance on the loose earth, as they descended into the dark heart of the Heath.
    They reached the bottom of the dell, where an ancient tree with three gigantic branches, all covered in thick ivy, extended upwards in a devil’s fork. Spooked, Darkus held up his binoculars again, scanning the woods, but finding no sign of his dad.
    Wilbur pulled him off to one side, past a small footbridge, through a tangle of reeds, following the barren course of a forgotten riverbed. They were moving with stealth, zigzagging to avoid twigs that would break underfoot, until Wilbur led him up a steep incline to an empty clearing surrounded on all sides by a high wall of thickets.
    Darkus recognised it as the clearing he’d found the last time he was searching for his dad – only this time they’d approached it from another direction.
    Wilbur came to a halt and sat perfectly still. Darkus looked down and noticed Wilbur’s nostrils narrowing, and his jowls rising up to bare his teeth in a silent growl. He was facing off with something, but Darkus couldn’t work out what it was. Then Darkus’s visual faculty was bypassed by another one, as he smelled what Wilbur had already detected.
    It was the smell of death , plain and simple. The putrid, damp stench of rotting flesh. Darkus attempted to move forward, but Wilbur wouldn’t budge.
    Darkus followed Wilbur’s line of sight and realised on closer inspection that one wall of the clearing was actually a makeshift blockade, constructed out of branches, vines and leaves. How could he not have noticed that before? Darkus tried to lead Wilbur forward, but the dog stayed frozen on the spot like a statue.
    Darkus let the lead fall to the ground beside Wilbur, and reluctantly walked forward alone, trying not to let the smell invade his nostrils; but it was impossible, and he felt the foul aroma laying siege to his palate, engulfing his senses and overpowering his brain. He tasted a sour flavour at the back of his throat as his stomach threatened to send its contents back up towards his mouth.
    Not wanting to touch anything, he took a silver Parker pen from his top pocket and extended it in front of him like a wand, until it made contact with a curtain of foliage that acted as a doorway – but a doorway into what? The catastrophiser thumped mercilessly, telling him to run away, but curiosity got the better of it.
    Darkus gently parted the curtain with the pen and peered in.
    The darkness suddenly came alive in a high-pitched chorus of buzzing as hundreds of bluebottle flies flooded through the gap in the curtain, colliding with Darkus’s eyes, nose and mouth. He tried to cry out but couldn’t for fear of them entering his throat. He pursed his lips, removed his hat and swatted at them as more and more billowed out in black clouds of bristly hair and coarse, veiny wings. He systematically brushed them out of his eyes, nose and ears.
    Wilbur turned tail and ran in the opposite direction.
    Darkus felt the flies hitting his face, but the torrent seemed to be subsiding a little. He took another step forward, parting the curtain further, until the foliage slid to one side – to reveal what was behind it.
    Within seconds, Darkus realised he could no longer control the contents of his stomach and was violently sick on the ground.
    Above him, dangling from the makeshift rafters of a cramped, improvised hunting lodge, were dozens of animals – if you could still call them that. They were hung, flayed and disembowelled, all in various states of decomposition – some were only skeletons. Their once pristine fur coats were hung neatly all around, stretched out like perfectly symmetrical