The Beasts of Clawstone Castle (17 page)

But if Rollo heard her, he took no notice. When she looked again, she saw that he had left the hill and was running down the beach towards the causeway.

‘Come back,’ she yelled. ‘Come back at once.’

But Rollo went on running.

‘We can’t let him go alone,’ said Ned.

‘One day I’m going to kill him,’ said Madlyn, as they set off in pursuit. ‘What’s more, I shall enjoy doing it. I shall enjoy killing him.’

They caught up with him as he crouched behind a boulder overlooking the bay and the jetty, and dropped down beside him. The boat was still tied up, there were no signs of any preparations for loading the cattle.

‘What on earth are you up to?’ said Madlyn angrily.

But before Rollo could explain, they heard a hissing noise – a noise like ‘Psst’ but not really an English ‘Psst’. Then a swarthy face with a curving black moustache appeared round the side of the boulder, followed by a second face like the first.

It was the two men who had caught them and taken them to Dr Manners, but they looked different. Not fierce now but almost smiling – and they carried no pitchforks or wooden sticks.

‘You come with us,’ said the first man. ‘We show you something. Quick! We not hurt you.’

‘We not hurt you,’ repeated the second man. ‘Please, you come. Now.’

The children came.

They were led into a low wooden hut. They had seen it when they were looking for the cattle, but it hadn’t seemed like the sort of place that people lived in; it looked more like a shed for animals, a chicken house or a pigsty.

But people certainly lived in it. They not only lived in it, they were having a party. There were candles on the table and a wooden platter piled with pancakes. Red and green and purple paper streamers were tacked to the walls. In one corner a man was playing a mouth harp, making music that was both reedy and exciting, and the men were dancing, their arms resting on each other’s shoulders, while the women twirled round and round, sending their heavy skirts spinning. From the crackly radio came the sound of an excited voice talking in a language the children had never heard. Then the voice stopped and a blaring military tune was played, and when it came on everybody stopped dancing and stood to attention and the women beat their chests.

The children were completely bewildered. Why had they been brought here? Were they going to be frogmarched away, or beaten, or tied up as part of this strange feast? But instead they were handed glasses of a colourless fiery liquid and told to drink a toast.

‘Mundania – the Motherland!’ cried their hosts, and tossed their glasses over their shoulders, and the children did the same.

But at last there was a lull, the radio was turned down and packing cases were pulled out for the children to sit on while the Mundanians explained what had happened.

‘Is revolution in our country,’ said Slavek – and to make it clear he stuck out two fingers and said, ‘Bang, bang!’

‘Bad man has gone – dead,’ put in Izaak happily.

With all the Mundanians helping out with words and gestures, the children gathered that the dictator who had terrorized their country had been overthrown. It was news of the revolution that they had heard on the radio, and now they were free to go home.

‘Home,’ they repeated joyfully, nodding their heads and smiling. ‘We go home.’

But the children had not been called in just to hear the good news. There was something which the Mundanians wanted them to do and it was important.

‘We call you because you must see what is here happening. You must tell and you must make stop.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said the other Mundanians. ‘You must go quick from island and make it to stop.’

‘But what is it?’ asked Madlyn. ‘What is it we must stop?’

Slavek’s face was grim.

‘We show. Now. But you must very quiet be. You must cripp.’

‘Cripp?’

‘Cripp like mouses. And stay behind from me.’

He turned and took a bunch of keys from a shelf.

Then he led the children from the hut across a covered way and unlocked a door.

‘Zis,’ he said. ‘Zis you must stop.’

The children never forgot the sight that met their eyes. They were in an experimental chicken house but the birds, each in a separate cage, were not really like chickens. They were much larger, and a flap of skin had formed across their claws so that they had become web-footed. But the horrifying thing was their beaks. Their beaks had been stretched and on some of the birds a strange, shovel-like protrusion had been grafted on.

‘But what is it? Why are they like that?’ asked Madlyn.

Rollo was shivering.

‘I know why. I know what the experiment is for. They’re trying to turn the chickens into dodos.’

Slavek nodded. ‘Yes. Yes. Dr Manners he makes dodos because they are not any more.’

‘They’re extinct,’ put in Ned.

But the dodos were only the beginning. Slavek’s key now unlocked a steamy room in which a small alligator lay on the edge of a shallow pond. He was absolutely still and pressing down on his snout was a heavy weight. A clamp fixed it and it was connected to a pressure gauge.

Even Rollo did not know what was happening here.

‘They make heavier and then more heavy, so snout is flat. Make new animal.’

The creature lay still, unable to move; its yellow eyes were dull. It was completely helpless.

Rollo had connected now. ‘I know. A gavial. They’re becoming extinct. They have these long flattened snouts. Oh God, the poor beast can’t move.’

But that was not nearly the end.

They passed through two double doors into an aviary. The grey parrots who sat there were chained tightly to their perches. Their eyes were shut. One had fallen over sideways and could not right itself. And all the time, relentlessly, they were being squirted with jets of dye from a computerized spray: jets of crimson, of violet, of blue ...

‘Here he makes – how do you call it? – Imperial Parrot. Not any more in jungle, all gone. So people want and they come and buy. Buy for much, much money.’ Slavek shook his head. ‘Many die, but they get more.’

Now came the worst of all. A gorilla, lying slumped in the corner of his cage. One foot was bandaged, his eyes were glazed, his breath came in shallow gasps.

‘He’s going to die,’ said Rollo.

‘Yes. They try to take foot and move it so toes go other way. They try to make – how do you say? Abominable Man.’

‘An Abominable Snowman,’ said Ned. ‘A yeti. Their feet are supposed to be back to front.’

Slavek locked the door of the room and turned to the children.

‘There is more,’ he said. ‘It is for money, money, money ...’ He made a gesture rubbing his fingers together. ‘People come – they want what is not. They pay and they pay and they pay and Dr Manners he grow very rich.’

‘A centre for making extinct animals,’ said Ned. ‘It’s incredible.’

But they could believe it. People paid fortunes for rare and unusual animals. How much more would they pay for animals which were extinct – or mythical?

Back in the hut they saw that the Mundanians’ few possessions had been packed away. There were only three bags on the floor, which seemed to contain their worldly goods. The women wore their shawls, the men had buttoned up their jackets.

‘You must go quick and tell police,’ they said again. ‘We could not – we haf no money, no papers, we were as slaves, and now we go home. But you will tell.’

‘But how will you get home without money?’ asked Madlyn. ‘What will you do?’

The men smiled. ‘We haf plan,’ said Slavek, tapping the side of his nose, and the others nodded and said, ‘Yes, we haf plan.’

It was only now that Rollo was recovered enough to ask the question that burned him up.

‘But what about the cattle?’ said Rollo. ‘What will happen to them? Why have they brought the cattle here?’

Remembering what he had seen, he began to shiver again.

The Mundanians exchanged glances.

‘We do not know,’ said Slavek, ‘but it is big what will happen to the cows. It is very big, very important. It is big and it is soon. He waits for the boat to bring him what he needs, and now the boat has come.’

His brother nodded. ‘It is big with the cows,’ he said. ‘I think perhaps it is tonight.’

Then they shook hands one by one. ‘You can rest here,’ they said. ‘But soon you must go back and tell.’

And the children were left alone.

T
he Mundanians had gone. The three children huddled together in the empty hut, stunned by what they had seen. They had to get back to the mainland and tell the world about this evil place – and quickly.

Ned opened the door a crack.

‘There’s no one about. If we drop down on to the beach and go round by the shore we should make it.’

They hadn’t gone far when they heard a sound which brought them up short: the desolate yet frantic mooing of a cow who has been separated from her calf. Then men shouting orders, the stamping of hooves ...

‘It is big what will happen with the cows,’ the brothers had said. ‘It is big and it is soon. Perhaps it is tonight.’

Without hesitation, the children turned and ran back towards the buildings.

They had come to a kind of forecourt, a concreted yard with drainage channels which had been swabbed down with disinfectant. A big incinerator took up one side of the courtyard. On the other side was a very large building: grey and forbidding and windowless. It looked like an aircraft hangar or an industrial workshop.

Beside the incinerator was a row of large waste bins. The children ducked down behind them and waited.

They waited for what seemed a very long time. And then slowly – very slowly – the huge steel double doors began to draw apart. The gap grew wide, and wider – and there, as on a stage, lit up by arc lamps more brilliant and dazzling than any daylight, they saw an operating table, high and clinical and white. Chrome cylinders of oxygen stood beside it, and pressure gauges and trolleys loaded with jars of liquid and coils of rubber tubing. And close by was a rack of glittering, outsize instruments: scalpels and scissors and forceps and clamps.

Rollo gasped and Madlyn put an arm round his shoulder.

There was no one in the lab at first, but then a man in a white coat came in from a door at the back and walked over to a large sink and pulled out a long curled horn that had been soaking there.

The man turned, and they saw his face.

It was the vet with the black beard who had come to Clawstone to tell them that the cattle were sick. He had shaved off his beard but they knew him at once. It was this man that Rollo had glimpsed out of the window of the hotel.

But before they could work out what this meant they heard the sound of hooves and, walking past them, his head hanging, came a calf, led by a man in overalls.

The calf was snow-white and it walked as slowly as the beasts must have walked in the olden days on the way to the temple to be sacrificed, sensing their terrible fate. When it reached the stream of light coming from the double doors, it stiffened its legs and tried to dig its hooves into the concrete, but they slipped on the wet floor and the man jerked the rope and led it forward.

Rollo had recognized it at once. It was the youngest calf, the one he had watched being born. His calf.

Ned held him back as he tried to leap out of his hiding place.

‘Wait,’ he hissed. ‘We have to know.’

The man leading the calf tugged at the rope once more and the calf was dragged into the operating theatre.

The door on the right opened again and Dr Manners came in. He was dressed in a high-necked operating gown; a surgical mask was strung round his neck.

‘Is everything ready, Fangster?’ he asked, and the vet who had called himself Dr Dale nodded and lifted up the curled horn with the pointed end which he had taken from the bag that the whalers had brought ashore.

‘This is the smallest. We’ll need to pack the wound tight, but it should close over all right. And if not ...’ He shrugged.

‘Quite so,’ said Dr Manners.

The calf was dragged up on to the operating table. It was mad with fear, fighting every inch of the way.

Dr Manners was filling a great syringe. The vet picked up the narwhal horn and held it above the head of the tethered beast.

And in that instant the children understood everything.

I
t had begun in a faraway country, in the Kingdom of Barama, with a small, unhealthy prince who could not sleep.

Barama is in South America and it is very beautiful. It lies between Venezuela to the east and Guyana to the west and many people have not even heard of it, although the man who rules it is possibly the richest person in the world.