The Fabulous Beast (12 page)

They sat and drank tea, while R. answered the questions, and then asked a few of his own.

Finally, he confessed to the man of the cloth.

‘My pet’s been killed,’ he said. ‘Out back.’

The vicar looked suitably shocked.

‘Any idea who did it?’

‘Who? I rather think
what
. There’s some sort of beast out there, I’m sure of it. The area is covered with bones of all kinds. Why, the whole scene is . . .’ R. had a sudden and chilling thought.
He hadn’t noticed any skulls. Plenty of legbones, spines, pelvises, but no skulls. H.’s head had been missing. Eaten? A HEAD? What sort of beast eats only the heads of other beasts?

‘Are you all right?’

‘Eh?’ replied R.. ‘Oh, yes. Tell me, did the last occupant of this cottage have any pets?’

The vicar looked uncomfortable.

‘Not that I know of.’

‘You don’t happen to have his – or her – phone number do you? I could give them a ring and have a chat.’

‘No – no, I don’t. Wouldn’t do any good.’ The vicar cleared his throat and put down the mug of tea he was holding. ‘You see the last person who lived here, simply disappeared one night. A Welsh gentleman. Never saw him at the church. Chapel, I expect. A writer like yourself, came out here to get away from the noise of the city just like you. Vanished. No one knows why. I’m told he never contacted the estate agent again.’

‘Skipping rent?’

‘Apparently his rent had been paid in advance.’

‘He didn’t go out back, did he?’ said R., jokingly.

The vicar failed to be amused. ‘I’m fairly new here. I’m sure I don’t know the details, but I do know that Mr E. took none of his possessions with him. It was indeed as if he had simply walked out of the door wearing what he stood up in.’

The hairs on R.’s neck stood on end.

‘Which door? Front or back?’

‘No one knows. Both doors were found open. He simply – vanished. The police were called, of course. They searched the house, the surrounds, even dredged the marshes. No trace of Mr E. was ever found.’ The vicar sighed. ‘You hear of these cases, someone goes out for a newspaper and never returns. Never to be seen again by loved ones and those who know them. The brain is a delicate instrument. Something tips it this way or that, and the owner wanders off not knowing who he is, where he lives, or where he’s going. It’s my belief Mr E. is probably now one of those poor creatures you see in city centres wearing a beard, rags and smelling of alcohol.’

The vicar left half-an-hour later, but he told R. that the pork chops probably would not work.

‘You need warm-blooded bait. You know, a live rabbit or something. Dead meat is often ignored by wild beasts. They sense a trap. They’re very wily creatures with sharp instincts for survival.’

R. sat down after the vicar had left. He considered what the man had left him as a parting suggestion. A live creature? No, he couldn’t do it. It would mean buying an animal at a pet shop and leaving it out, like a sacrificial goat, to be decapitated. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. What he should do, now rather than later, was pack his bags and leave this unholy place before something else happened. Something a little more terrible. Where was Mr E.? Was his skeleton out back somewhere, perhaps at the bottom of some boggy sinkhole, minus its skull? How very strange. R. tried to think of some animal that might want to eat another animal’s head and could not come up with any answer.

The next village was seven miles away. R. decided to walk there along the marsh-edge footpaths. He would not need to go out back to do this. There was a well-defined walker’s path at the front. He would have a pub lunch, perhaps talk to one or two of the locals and try to gauge their reaction to his experiences, then come back and call a taxi to take him to the nearest railway station. It seemed a sensible plan. Perhaps the death of poor old H. had unbalanced the situation in his mind somewhat? Maybe a walk would clear his head and help him to see things in perspective? After all, the evidence for a single assassin being responsible for all those rotting carcasses was very thin. It could be that all those dead remains had been the result of foxes or badgers, or some other natural carnivorous beast.

As he stepped out along the track, painfully aware that his right foot was not in prime condition since he had suffered unwelcome visits from gout ever since he’d started spending every New Year in G.s place in Spain (oh, that Andalucian red wine!), he carefully considered his last thought.
Natural.
Why had he used that word?
Natural
carnivorous beast. An unusual adjective in the context. Was there some idea deep in his subconscious, perhaps even deeper in his id, that there was something
unnatural
about H.’s death? Something preternatural? A headhunting ghoul? R. searched his encyclopaedic mind for a supernatural being that bit off the heads of living things. He could think of none.

A partridge clattered out of a bush startling him as he skirted a dark woodland grown to weakness in the centre. He shook himself, physically, and told himself to get a grip. What the hell was he doing, seriously considering something out of folk lore, myth or the spirit world. He
wrote
about such stuff, he didn’t
experience
it. Fact was fact, fiction was fiction. He’d been too long on his own. He needed to get back to the sensible and practical company of S. She would put his feet back on the ground and very soon the world would cease to tilt.

The Wild Boar pub turned out to be virtually empty. Apparently there was a carnival on in Lowestoft and everyone had gone there for the day. The only other occupant of the bar was an elderly farm labourer who drank half pints of warm bitter. R. bought the old boy one or two halves, but got nothing out of him regarding the cottage and its surrounds. It turned out the man, in his eighties, had never been more than five miles from his own back door. He had never been to Iken, let alone Lowestoft, which accounted for his presence in the Wild Boar on a day when village excitement was at fever pitch. The barman was an Australian youth in his early twenties and was ‘just passing through the county of Suffolk, mate’. They talked cricket for a while, with the Aussie making disparaging remarks about the English team, while R., being English, made polite remarks about the Baggie Greens.

Before he left though, a there was a shock to come. As he waved goodbye to the old boy, the Suffolk yokel called to him, ‘By the by, did they ever find that young fellah who went a-missin’ from Iken?’ He pronounced the word ‘find’ as ‘fyund’ making it a double-syllabled word. The local accent tended to do that.

‘You mean the Welshman, Mr E.?’ R. said.

‘No, no, weren’t no Welshman. Went by the name of R. K.. Just disappeared into the mist, so’s I bin told.’

A sort of electric tingling went through R.’s skull.

‘Are you sure it wasn’t Mr E.?’

‘Positive. Doctor told me. Doctor Williams didn’t ever tell lies, lad, he were a good Christian soul. Seven year ago, now, it were. An’ I may now be goin’ on a bit, but the noddle’s still workin’.’ He tapped the side of his heavy grey head. ‘I never heard of no Mr E..’

‘Shit!’ murmured R., under his breath, realising that the old boy was talking about an earlier incident which had probably happened before the Iken vicar took over his church. For some reason the news of Mr E.’s later disappearance had not reached the farm labourer. Perhaps Dr Williams, bearer of news beyond the pale of the Wild Boar and confines, no longer resided in the vicinity? (Or something worse.)
Was
a good Christian soul? Perhaps the doctor himself was dead?

R. moaned, ‘Oh, holy shit.’

The walk back to Iken was blisteringly hot despite the month, not improving R.’s mood as he tried to cover the ground at a Olympian pace. As R. approached the cottage he could see something white and fluttering pinned to the front door. It was a note. When he ripped it off and read it, R.’s sweat turned cold and clammy. It was from a friend, a good friend, a writer like himself.
Couldn’t get an answer
, read the note.
You’re obviously out somewhere. Had a look along the marshes, then went out back to see if you’re there. If you return before me, go out back and give me a shout. G.

R.’s hands shook as he read the note over and over again.

He then opened the front door with the old iron key and rushed to the back of the house, opening the back door.

‘G!’ he called. ‘Are you out there? G?’

No answer.

‘This is stupid,’ R. said to himself. ‘What am I getting so worked up about. I’ll just go out there and find him.’

He strode purposefully into the wasteland out back, calling G’s name every few yards. When he reached the shallow gully where H.’s body had lain, he stumbled over something and almost fell full length into a patch of nettles. At first he gave a strangled cry, thinking it was a dead animal, but it turned out to be a rotten log. Just a lump of wood. He sat up, his head aching, and stared around him. Evening was coming on now: the gloaming settling in. Shadows slid like fat black snakes along the ground, between the gorse bushes. R. realised he hadn’t drunk anything since the pub, four hours ago. He felt giddy and sick. Alcohol dried man out. He actually needed fluid. Water, preferably. Climbing to his feet he stared ahead, seeing something on the far side of a hump. It wasn’t clear in the dying light, but the shape suggested a body.

A human corpse? He peered hard. Surely not? But it had to be. However, the contours were strangely misshapen. What was it? Yes –
yes
. There was no head, not even a neck. Surely that slick-looking black patch of shadow was a pool of blood?
Some creature with enormous strength had physically torn G.’s head from his shoulders
. R. let out a terrible scream and began running, back towards the cottage. He could sense something behind him, in the tall grasses, watching him intently. A monster was out there, its hot breath fouling the afternoon air. R. felt he had escaped a horrible death by the merest split second. Had he not turned and run when he did, he felt sure his headless corpse would lay beside that of G.’s, their blood staining the dirt together.

R. reached the cottage and ran inside, slamming the back door behind him. He leaned against it, gasping for breath. Shit. That was G. back there, headless. Poor bastard. Poor sodding bastard. What the hell had done that? What manifestation of evil was out there ripping the heads from the shoulders of the living? A werewolf? Did werewolves do that? There was indeed a moon, if not full. Vampires simply drank the blood of their victims: they didn’t bury their faces in gore. What else was there of that ilk? Banshees. R. had no idea what banshees did. Or was it just
one
Banshee, like the Grim Reaper. You couldn’t have two Grim Reapers, could you? Two harbingers of death. Well then, perhaps a wild man, the Green Man, the wodwo of Ted Hughes’ poem? He knew how to kill a werewolf and a vampire. How did you kill a wodwo?

‘It knows I’m here,’ he croaked. ‘It knows I’m in here.’

He felt dreadfully thirsty and went to the brass kitchen tap serving that big white square chipped enamal basin, and drank the running water. Then he stuck his head under, to cool it, hoping the cold water would help clear his thoughts and give him the ability to think through his problem clearly. Water cascaded over his brow, soaking what was left of his hair, washing away the sweat and the dust of the last few hours.

‘ARE YOU IN THERE?’

R.’s body jerked upright sharply with shock. He struck his head on the spout of the brass tap. Silently, he slid to the floor, unconscious. There were various dreams of the telescope kind, where events fold into one another and make no sense whatsoever. R. woke on the floor to find G. standing over him with a wet sponge. R. face was running with cold water and he spluttered as it entered his nose and mouth.

‘You’re drowning me,’ he protested.

‘Sorry,’ said G., ‘but that’s a horrible crescent moon cut you’ve got there from the edge of the tap.’

touched his forehead and felt the bloody indentation.

‘Ow, that hurts.’

‘It looks as if it does.’

A memory came shooting through R.’s pain.

‘Wait a minute . . . you’re . . . you were . . . that is, I thought you were dead.’

‘Dead?’ G. looked shocked.

‘You left a note to say you were going out back.’

sat up and felt his wound again.

G. said, ‘I did, but I couldn’t get past the gorse bushes, so I turned

around and went to the church instead.’

‘But I saw – that is, I thought I saw . . .’

G. made him a cup of coffee and they sat on an over-stuffed sofa and talked. R. told him everything that had happened since he’d been at the cottage. G. listened thoughtfully, before saying, ‘So you thought that was my headless body, lying out back?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now then,’ said G., thoughtfully, ‘let’s go over this carefully. First H. was killed. There’s no doubting that. You saw the headless carcass. Then you heard about Mr E., who went missing and this was tied in with another missing person from this very same village – but not necessarily from this address? Right?’

nodded.

‘Okay, fine. H. is dead. But that doesn’t mean Mr E. is also a headless corpse, now does it? And this second missing person – R. K. – why, he simply went missing from the village. I would say you’ve been on your own too long. You’ve started tying things together that just don’t go – like a fishing line and wharf rope. My guess is your brain is feverish and throwing out all sorts of images, all kinds of scenarios. Dammit, you’re a creative writer for God’s sake. A
fantasy
writer. We both are. I know if I spent a few weeks in this place I’d be imagining things too. Listen, that
body
you saw out back. My guess is it was made of bits of old branches, rocks and shadows. Believe me.’

‘You – you think so?’

R.’s head was pounding.

‘Listen man, you’ve just lost your pet cat – in a horrific way. I’d be devastated if it was me. And I bet you haven’t told S. yet? Am I right?’

‘Right.’

G. glanced towards the window. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘there’s a moon out there. Almost as clear as daylight. Let’s you and I go out back and find your so-called headless body, and I’ll prove it to you. Are you on?’