The Fabulous Beast Read online

  What have I done to deserve this?

  For the next two hours he rambled about his work. It seemed he owned a spice stall and had done so since the age of sixteen. Thus, for his whole working life he had imported and dispensed spices. As with always I learned a great deal about a new subject. With my talons carefully hooked into the rafter I allowed myself to be educated by this old man on his deathbed.

  It seemed that spice was a dried seed, fruit, root, bark or vegetative substance that was used to flavour or colour food, or disguise poor tasting ones. It was distinct from a herb which was a leafy green part of a plant, though this mortal’s stall sold some herbs as well as spices.

  Spices could also be used for preserving food, cosmetics, perfumery, medicine or religious purposes.

  Well, this much was interesting, but there was more.

  Tastes and smells were described to me, lovingly and at length, by my teacher. He spoke of several kinds of peppers, of nutmeg once more valuable than gold, of saffron still more valuable than gold, of cinnamon bark, cloves, ginger, mace, caraway and turmeric. His stale dying breath carried on it magical names, such as dukka, ras el hanout, sansho, szechuan pepper, malabathrum, epozote and za’atar. They flowed from his mouth in a river of eloquent poetry, these labels of his stock in trade. Oh how mystical they sounded, coming from an exponent of the art of mixing spices.

  Bell, chilli, chocolate, cocoa. These were apparently late-comers to this part of the world, arriving not from the Spice Islands, nor even by way of the Silk Road, but carried by ship from the Americas.

  Chocolate!

  How he made that word sound as if it could possess your whole being, body and spirit, and how you might be glad if it did.

  Cocoa!

  To chew the beans of this plant was to dine at the tables of Elysium.

  I counted three-hundred-and-fifty spices before he faltered, yet still others came though now it was clear that he was straining to remember the more obscure powders and seeds.

  Finally the list stopped, there was a pause, before he continued to enthral me with facts.

  ‘Nutmeg from the Banda Islands is a Sanskrit name, you know – the oldest language in India – it shows its ancient lineage.’

  Indeed it must have and I did not know that.

  Fascinating.

  ‘The early Egyptians fed their slaves on spices to give them the energy to build the pyramids.’

  Absolutely intriguing, listening to this lecture in the squalid, ugly confines of a House of Death.

  ‘Cloves are mentioned in the ancient Indian epic of Ramayana.’

  Interesting, but I would have liked to have heard more.

  My victim suddenly sat bolt upright.

  ‘My wife poisoned me!’

  After this explosive accusation he stared hard at the dingy wall running with dirty water, then turned his head this way and that, before saying, ‘She did, you know. Why will no one listen to me?’

  Then he lay back down with a long sigh, which at first I thought was his final breath, but then heard the faint flap of the tired lungs in his chest and realised I was being premature. He was silent now and I realised he had gone into himself, into a coma or a sleep from which he might not emerge. I waited patiently. We are ever patient.

  From down below the sweaty beds wafted up their smells, which were signals to us. I could tell when a mortal expired simply by the fragrance that rose to my snout at the moment of death. My companions in the rafters were possessed of the same attributes of course and the passing of a particular inmate was greeted with a sharp click of teeth from the creature next to me, indicating glee. The next morning the cadaver below was taken away and my neighbour followed it, using all his skills to remain unseen, even in the disgusting light of day.

  My spice merchant died the next evening. A woman came in and ordered the corpse to be taken away and buried immediately. This was unusually swift, even for some religions, and I wondered if this female was the wife of the deceased. In which case her actions confirmed the dead man’s suspicions. He had no doubt been poisoned and she wished the evidence to go into the ground before any investigation could be initiated. They had a name, these investigations. Autopsy. Indeed, the body went not to the mortuary but to the graveyard, where it was interred by a waiting sexton, no priest or relative being present. The woman herself hurried away after the last clod was in place. She spoke no orisons, nor wept no tears. Poisoned then, but that meant nothing to me, for my iron belly can take any amount of arsenic or strychnine.

  ~

  Like the rest of my kind I am expert at exhuming a corpse from its earthen tomb and replacing the soil so that nothing appears amiss. And the judgement of when to begin devouring is crucial. That first bite into decaying flesh is a telling one. I have to catch the remains when they are well beyond the turn, but yet not running to fluids.

  I removed the winding sheet delicately, so as not to disturb the tender parts, to find my banquet ready for the eating.

  Here was my feast.

  The maggots had already made inroads into various areas. Their presence does not disturb me in the least. They garnish a rotten liver or decayed lung.

  I decided to begin with the fingers, not for any special reason, but because the first part I lifted to my mouth was a hand on the end of an arm. I am careful not to mark any bones when I eat, because it’s possible the corpse might be exhumed by authorities or relatives in the future – these things happen on occasion – and we are secretive, cryptic creatures who wish to remain a myth, a nightmare, a fable of the mad.

  Putting the right hand forefinger into my mouth, I stripped meat and nail clean from the bone, sucking down the flesh.

  Squatting there, beside the gravestone, I had an epiphany.

  The taste was exquisite!

  I had never experienced anything like it before.

  Recalling the ramblings of the dead man, the descriptions of spices he took pains to express in detail when lying on his death bed, I believed what I was tasting was cinnamon. It had been layered under the corpse’s fingernails. Then other flavours came through: possibly cardamom and coriander, with a bitter hint of quassia? There were so many spices embedded in the skin it was difficult to pick out a single essence. Oh how excellent it was to sit and idle over my food for once.

  Instead of gorging on quantity, I found myself taking time to savour quality. And though I had never experienced the taste of spices before now, my senses were aflame with them. My kind have senses unknown to mortals. Not just the sixth that many of them wish for, but several. We could not survive or remain as shadows without them. It was having these intrinsic gifts that had allowed me to draw from the living man the names of the spices and herbs that I was enjoying while eating the lifeless one. Being conscious of a name is the difference between a gourmet and one who scoffs his fodder. You must accept that being aware you are eating kumamoto oysters or dancing-dragon prawns makes them taste that much better than if you are simply eating shellfish.

  I looked around me, jealously, to see if any of my companions who were tearing at their corpses that night had witnessed my shock of delight. I wanted no other creature of my stamp desiring to share my feast. This had to remain a secret, or they would descend upon the cadaver I owned like vultures on carrion.

  Over a lifetime this mortal had imbibed the powders and essences of his profession. Over the years he worked the pestle in mortar, crushing seeds and stamens, petals and leaves, and had in consequence inhaled the golden filaments that came from the saffron crocus, the blushing dust that rose from the chilli peppers, the virgin-white garlic that floated from ransoms and the blue strains transferred from fenugreek. He had breathed camphor fumes, the perfume of jasmine, the scent of lemongrass. Spice had filled his lungs, his stomach, his blood stream, burned through his body entering muscle, fat and bone, until his carcass was saturated with that irresistible sublimity that even now tingled on my tongue, the piquancy which coursed through my veins.

&nbs
p; Oh how fabulous such discoveries of mortals!

  We creatures of the night sit and scorn mankind’s puny efforts at existing in their substandard three-dimensional world and wonder why they bother to exist at all. Our own world is a kaleidoscope of marvels and magic, which keep us interested in being attached to the Earth, and could not bear to live the humdrum day-to-day life that humans have to put up with. The boredom would surely drive us insane. We need the remarkable, the extraordinary, in order to be ourselves.

  Yet clearly mortals have hidden depths if they have the power to season their food with such awe-inspiring condiments.

  I ate my fill that night, but kept in check the glutton that had inhabited my form for so long. I wanted many more nights of the same. My graveyard larder would keep me for at least a month if I ate sparingly. The pleasure would be all the more satisfying for not stuffing food down my gullet in the way I was used to do.

  And so it was. I ate every fibre of him until his skeleton was clean and white. Then against all the rules I cracked open the bones and sucked out the marrow. After which I went back to Sago Street and scoured the Houses of Death for another of his kind. Not finding one I took an ordinary corpse for my next meal. It was incredibly bland.

  All my existence I had been eating dull tasteless fare and now my senses had been awakened by an experience that had set them ablaze. I consumed lacklustre meat which tasted liked ashes in my mouth. I yearned for another corpse of a spice merchant. The need burned like a fire within me. Soon, nothing else mattered but to satisfy the craving that now filled my waking and sleeping dreams. My thoughts whirled in a spiral that forever centred on gratifying desire. It was no longer a simple case of nourishment, but a terrible obsession that refused to be ignored.

  The Houses of Death were all I had. I could not move to other cities. Such journeys are not possible for our kind. I tried looking for deaths elsewhere in the same city, but finding the right house at the right time with the right corpse proved impossible. I worked the streets, sliding from shadow to shadow, studying the faces of men and women who might be ill or old and ready to die. But even were I to find one ready to depart for the next world, who was to say the flesh of he or she would be inundated with the culinary mixtures after which I hungered? Every avenue ended in disappointment and despair, anguish and rage.

  I hung about the grave of my spice trader as if a miracle might happen and the corpse might regenerate itself. It did not, of course. Though miracles are not out of the question when it comes to rewarding mortals, we creatures of the night are not in favour with those who dispense such bounty. So I was left to squat on the merchant’s tombstone, wallowing in my misery, even going so low as to beg the help of passing demons, who simply sneered and scorned my request.

  One evening, while I was mooning around the tomb, the unbelievable happened. Out of the twilight a figure appeared. When she drew closer I could see it was the merchant’s wife. She had come to visit the grave at last. She carried no flowers nor wore clothing suitable for such a visit. Her garb was that of a woman about to go out on the town for the night. I hid myself behind a stone nearby and watched and listened as she approached the grave.

  She smelled deliciously of spices!

  She stood there in silence for a few minutes, her expression one of contempt.

  Then I heard her say in a low voice, ‘I’ve got a new man. He’s better than you – younger. I just wanted you to know that.’

  A faint smile appeared on her features. ‘All those years–but it was worth it in the end. The business is mine and I am free to do what I want.’ Then she turned and left the graveyard to my kind.

  On impulse, I followed her, a plan swiftly forming in my head. We never use physical violence to obtain our food. Such behaviour is unknown amongst us. But there are other means of getting what we want. The important thing is the lack of compassion in us, for that which eventually becomes a meal. We have our devious ways.

  Through the narrow streets of the city she scuttled, until she came to a house near the centre. By the time she put the key in the lock of her door, the dark night had descended. I didn’t follow her through the same doorway, but found a crack in an ill-fitting window and squeezed inside to find myself on an upstairs landing. There were two doors off the landing. One led to a toilet. The other I presumed was the bedroom. Flitting beneath the door to this second room I skittered up the wall and clung to the ceiling with my four sets of talons.

  There I waited for the woman to retire for the night.

  Late, very late, she ascended the stairs chattering to someone. When they entered the room, she giggling and her paramour touching her hair and whispering inane words in her ear, I could sense they had been imbibing alcohol. I hoped this induction of poisonous fluid would do nothing to spoil the taste of her. The lamp was lit, briefly, while they undressed, then the pair of them climbed into bed and began to copulate, after which they both fell asleep, she on her back, the man – indeed a younger mortal than her husband – curled on his side.

  I waited until the moon had climbed high enough to send its beams through the skylight.

  The woman was snoring loudly.

  Dropping from the ceiling heavily onto the bottom of their bed I spread my limbs and flared the grey flaps of skin–those under my armpits and those between my legs. I let out a loud ear-piercing screech and put on my most hideous expression, lips curled back, yellow fangs bared, eyes wide and baleful.

  The woman woke up, saw my monstrous form at her feet, and screamed high and loud in fear. Her facial expression twisted and warped into hammered metal. She was absolutely terrified and her scream only ended when the air in her lungs was exhausted.

  In the meantime her lover woke up and leapt from the bed with astonishing alacrity. He looked wildly at the scene before him, then fled naked from the room.

  I rose up higher on my legs and hovered over my victim, hissing foul breath into her face. Then, as she screamed again, I matched her scream, tone for tone, length for length. My mouth was split wide from ear to ear, my nostrils dilated forming caverns from which mucus flowed and had confluence with the drool from my thick lips. My eyes bore into hers with an intensity which I knew was utterly shocking. An involuntary shudder then went through her whole frame as I loured over her prostrate form, every fibre in me quivering with threat and menace.

  She died of fright.

  Relaxing now, I stared at her inert body. A sniff of her skin revealed the same delightful odours that I had smelled on her husband. Unable to help myself, even though she was freshly-dead, more raw than any of us enjoyed, I took several bites out of her upper arm. Delicious. Not as appetizing as her husband, but she satisfied my immediate craving for the kind of food I had hungered for months now.

  Staring down at my bite marks I wondered if the lover would now be in trouble? Would the authorities think him a cannibal? Not that it mattered to me. I would simply follow the corpse to its final resting place, leave her for a few weeks, then . . .

  But.

  But what would I do once she too was gone?

  Never again to taste divine food?

  I breathed deeply, trying to imagine an existence in which I was deprived of my need. I could not. It was unthinkable.

  Yet, as the dawn came up and the morning light showed its grey face at the skylight, the scents of spices came flooding into the room. The carcass? No. Not that. There was more than just a fragrance in the air. It was an aromatic invasion. But from where?

  I sniffed deeply. It did not seem to be coming from within the house. The odours were entering from outside somewhere. I clawed my way up the inner wall to the skylight and sniffed at the narrow crack through which a gentle breeze was blowing.

  Yes, from the outside.

  I peered downwards into an open square below. There were stalls being set up, some of the wares already on display. Yellow ochre and burnt sienna powders filled shallow metal bowls. Open-necked sacks of black seeds were on show. Tubs and baskets full
of dark and light green leaves. Brown roots that echoed the shape of a man. Tree barks of many deep tints and shades. More and more came into view as the merchants revealed their wares to early shoppers.

  A spice market.

  Sighing deeply, I remained staring down at the dozens of men and women below, some of them fortunately quite long in years, as they prepared their stalls in the early morning light, the sunbeams sliding gently over saffron, cinnamon, carom seeds, alkanet, calabash nutmeg, jimbu, sumac, vanilla and many, many more. I watched keenly as a little smoky cloud of turmeric dust rose in the breeze and wafted over traders who were lovingly laying out their merchandise.

  Here, with judicious management, was my eternal larder.

  Out Back

  The cottage was everything that R. had expected it to be: remote, comfortable and unfussy. He had a book to finish. Ten-thousand words. The other ninety-thousand had been difficult. This last tenth seemed impossible. His plot had become derailed. He was unable to see his way through the smoke and coke dust of a mythical railway track that should stretch ahead. Yes, the characters were there, good and solid. Indeed, the story’s engine was strong and had shunted yet forward and forward, with only one or two sharp halts. But six weeks ago they he met the bumpers. R. was now stuck in a deserted station, his progress blocked.

  So, he had come out here, beyond the real marsh country of Snape, where Benjamin Brittan had built his concert hall out of derelict malting houses. The village, some few miles back down a dusty track, was called Iken: an old Anglo-Saxon cluster of dwellings whose only claim to any sort of fame was its church, in which yard Aberdeen Angus cattle roamed, keeping the grass short around the graves. It had been a difficult place to get to, this Iken hamlet, but it might be worth the journey. Here there were no distractions, as there had been in London, especially now S. was working at home. They got in each other’s way, entangled mentally if not physically, and R. was sure with his mind freed from traffic noise, neighbourhood noise, postmen, plumbers, random religious sects knocking on the door and various other infuriating interruptions, he would be able to grasp the vision of his novel’s final destination.