25. CHOWCHOW’S RETURN

The final part

There never was a clergyman so confused as the Reverend Peter Pringle when the creature like a monkey together with a rather attractive schoolgirl disappeared in the twinkling of an eye.

It reminded him of angels and demons and wars in Heaven, and he found himself shaking at the enormity of what it could have been. Had they been summoned to another place? Heaven, maybe or hell? It never crossed his mind that it was something as simple as the pressing of a button on a remote control.

And the woman who was with him, the lovely Artemis who quite often liked to consult him on deep matters that usually ended with a locked door and an array of underwear on the vestry floor, was shaking as he led her away from the scene of the disappearance. Maybe this time words would have to be enough. Sad, but God might be watching and judging…

The light from the star of Bethlehem caught his eye as they walked along, and he knew it was a reproving sign.

But that was the priest and his dreams, and the end of their contribution to the unexpected appearance of a monkey from truly ancient and forgotten times.

Because Sally and Chowchow were in exactly the same place as they were, but at a totally different time. Once there had been flows of lava where the church now stood, then, if an all-seeing eye were allowed to rove over the years as if it was seeing a map of time itself, the lava cooled, rocks, once molten, solidified and eventually green shoots appeared.

Long ages after that, so long that time wasn’t even measured in millennia, the first trees appeared, and that was long, long before gigantic creatures stomped here and there, lived for millions of years themselves, roared and fought, bled and died, then finally passed into a long past. More years rolled along, centuries, millennia, many of them, and the monkey people arrived and stayed for a moment or two. Times changed, evolution persisted and the monkey people became human. It was then that wars were fought, battles raged, men killed and were killed, trees were flattened, buildings thrown up to fall down soon enough … except an old church that was sturdy enough to see the centuries out.

And for a fractured moment of that time, a hominid of the dim past together with a schoolgirl of the twenty-first century (as mankind measures his little bit of time) appeared and were gone leaving a randy priest to ponder on the miracles of Heaven.

And Sally pressed a button on her uncle’s time remote control. In her good heart she wanted to take Chowchow back to his home, where he would be safe. And as her thumb pressed on a shiny button, and everything she could see, the pews, the church, the dirty old vicar, flickered out of being and she was somewhere else.

The very next thing that she did was trip over a broken branch in a primeval forest in which the air was fragrant with dead leaves and decomposing fecal matter. It was a sharp reminder that a place may be the same geographically but its appearance and just about everything about it changes with time. And this broken branch had been long buried in the past over four million years later where her real home was. Not even one molecule of it survived to be part of what was looked on as an ancient church.

Chowchow grinned at her and helped her to her feet, but as he did so she became nothing. One moment she was there and spluttering, the next she was gone leaving only a couple of footprints to record that she’d ever existed.

He shook his head and looked around him. The strange creature from the nightmare place he’d just spent several days in was gone, and in a way he felt sorry. He would like to have said goodbye or at least grunted some kind of goodbye.

“Goodbye Sal-ly...” he rumbled in his own strange language.

Then he looked about him in order to get his bearings.

This was a strange part of his forest. He usually recognised certain patterns of trees, arrangements thrown into being by the casual hand of nature, but this part was totally unfamiliar to him.

He looked around him and weighed things up, then he selected the tallest tree and climbed into its higher branches before lodging himself into a fork where he knew he’d be safe from predators, and decided to think things out.

There was the shining star. The one in the … he had no word for church or even large building. He’d been sitting on a … he had no word for chair or pew … and in front of him, dazzling and hypnotic … he had no word for hypnotic, but that’s what he meant in his head … was the brightest, most glorious of stars, brighter than any in the heavens above his head in the forest when he lay on a shiny warm evening on the soft turves of home and gazed up, trying to see what his ancestor Chimpo had seen.

If stars had a boss-star, he thought, a star above all other stars, a light for the boss of the gods, to help him see through the blackness of the night sky, then that must have been it. And he had seen it. He still could visualise its splendour and the image surrounding it, the faces of creatures frozen for eternity as the star shone on them.

“Chowchow! Chowchow!”

The cry in the coarse guttural voice of a b***h came faintly to him through the forest, and he knew with a certainty that no amount of future logic would be able to dislodge, that the great star, the boss-star, had guided the b***h of his dreams to him and had saved him from the dangers of an unknown corner of the vast forest where wild boars and maybe bears hunted and sniffed and found a monkey out.

Then he jumped down and ran up to the b***h and knew her straight away.

He had a great deal to tell her, of a world from far away and a star so bright it would dazzle gods, but he lacked the vocabulary to even begin. So he smiled at her and grunted I love you, which he hoped would explain enough, and from her smile he knew it did. The odd thing was, he had no idea what the word love meant, but she seemed to.

In a parade of short years they had a family, loads of nippers, all bright as shiny hopes, and all fascinated by the tales of their father’s star. Bright, it was, like their futures...

And his vision of that brightest star persisted, got told to other generations, recounted in a myriad forms as the monkey evolved to be a man, and was still there in ancient tales, written down, worshipped, the one persistent remnant of time from an age so long ago it might have been forgotten but for the retold sagas of a tribe of simple primates.

THE END

© Peter Rogerson 23.11.19