* * *
Rising ocean levels conspire with a tidal surge from a storm stalled over northern England and Scotland. The River Tyne breaks over its banks and floods the Quayside in Newcastle. The low-lying area between the Tyne Bridge and the Millennium Bridge is hit the hardest, with floodwaters reaching up to five feet in height. Roads are washed out. Dozens of businesses are forced to close while hundreds must evacuate their homes and seek higher ground. Four motorists and one jogger drown in the flash flooding. It takes two weeks for the Tyne to recede from its highest level in recorded history.
While flooding wreaks similar havoc in ten-year-old Lily’s hometown of South Shields, she is most upset—in the charmingly plucky way only ten-year-olds can be—that her school trip to the Newcastle is postponed for two months. It’s not that the Newcastle Castle is her favorite castle, not by any stretch. It’s actually quite small as castles or forts go, and Hadrian’s Wall and the Roman fort Arbeia [both in South Shields] are more impressive, even awe inspiring.
It’s the creature that resides near the Newcastle Castle that Lily wants to show her snotty friend Robert. He doesn’t believe it exists.
* * *
Poor Mrs. Brehl and the overmatched chaperone Mrs. Budden [Gary’s fussy mum, who refers to her son as “Gare Bear”] have their hands full with the class. So, too, the uninspiring tour guide who is dressed as a Roman or Anglo-Saxon or Norman soldier, Lily is not sure which. She did not pay attention when he identified himself, and to be fair, she’s distracted by his voice cracking and the dusting of acne on his forehead, which doesn’t really lend him soldierly gravitas.
Laird and John race each other from room to room, playing a two-person game of tag. Julia spits over the edge of the railing while on the roof. Lydia throws a wad of tissue into a hidden, nonfunctional pre-medieval toilet. Andy flicks his mates’ earlobes as the tour guide drones on and pinches ankles and the backs of knees as kids walk up the stairs. Camille taps on shoulders and then jams her flashlight directly into her victims’ eyes. Even Gare Bear gets into the act and repeatedly asks the guide about a ghost named Chauncey.
The children don’t normally misbehave to this extent. The truth is, without being able to verbalize this, they are sensitive to the miasma of unease within the city. They felt it as soon as they stepped off the train: the weight and weariness of the flood and the resigned fear of more and worse floods sure to come. Being in the castle, this living bit of history, is actually ramping up this ineffable fear of the future; this structure that has survived for more than one thousand years now represents the impermanence of the city, of everything. In the face of this, the children react in the only way they can: they laugh and they fool around and they rebel because they have to live forever.
The tour ends in a dark basement with a film and presentation that is to last twenty minutes. As the teacher and chaperone are distracted with the throng of giggling and hand-fighting kids, Lily tells Mark that if the teacher asks, she went to the toilet. Then she grabs Robert’s hand. Having been in the castle before and in possession of an unerring sense of direction and place, she leads him from the basement and out of the castle. No one stops her because she walks like she knows where she’s going, which is, in and of itself, an accurate assessment.
Once outside in the cool, gray damp air, Robert repeatedly asks what she’s doing and where they are going. Last night he had dreadful nightmares in which the black waters of the river swallowed him and the city whole.
Lily says, “Not far. You’ll see. Quit whingeing.”
They make an odd pair. Robert is fair-haired and creeps along like a rodent in an open field echoing with the hungry calls of hawks and owls. He is a full head shorter than Lily, who could pass for a new teenager. Her long brown hair is woven into a thick single braid that no one dares pull on. Lily-punches hurt the most.
Two streets from the castle they turn right and walk a narrow road behind the sprawling Cathedral Church of St. Nicholas.
Robert whispers, although there’s no one around. “This is barmy. We need to go back.”
Lily pulls Robert into the middle of the road, stops, and points up. “Have a look.”
Across from the cathedral is a set of brick structures associated with the church. They’ve stopped in front of one building’s front door adorned with ornate stone arch work, colored pink and white. Perched at the top, front paws with nails wrapping over the arch, staring down from above a circular window and the front entrance, is the Vampire Rabbit of Newcastle.
Robert laughs once. He looks at Lily as though seeing her for the first time. Then he laughs again. “That’s—that’s a rabbit, innit?”
Lily crosses her arms over her chest; her smile could power a hydroelectric plant.
The Vampire Rabbit is a stone gargoyle painted black. Its nails and teeth are blood-red. The eyes are wide and menacing. Its ears are long, like a hare’s, and if you stare long enough, you can imagine them as bat’s wings, or belonging to a demon.
Robert jokes, “Look at its teeth. Does it have the rabies, then?”
Lily groans and whacks his shoulder. Lily-shoulder-whacks hurt the most too. Robert doesn’t let on how much it smarts by not rubbing his arm. She says, “We’re not in America,” out of the side of her mouth, as though she’s embarrassed to be saying so.
Lily tells Robert a brief and to-the-point story about the city once having had a big problem with grave
