The Fabulous Beast Read online

  It was then I heard a sound, a low moan. I looked at her straw bedding and shining my torch I saw a naked form there, slick with afterbirth. It was the latest arrival from her anomalous womb, obviously abandoned by the mother when she panicked and crashed through the wall of the barn and out into a dark night on the plain. I stared at the creature caught in my torchlight. It blinked and then did something that chilled me to the bone, a signal that this new ‘mythical’ creature was more than just another fabled animal. There was astuteness there and other major differences. I knew for one thing for absolute certainty, that though it might have originally been born androgynous, somewhere in its history on the Earth it had developed the means to procreate.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I whispered.

  I stood staring down at this fresh birth in horror. The implications raced through my mind as the creature reached out to touch me with one extended limb. William was just coming through the barn doorway carrying rifles and saying, ‘Horses are saddled and ready, sir.’ He stepped up beside me and looked down at the thing lying in the straw.

  William let out a strangled cry, then croaked, ‘Lord have mercy!’

  I believe his next action was instinctive rather than deliberate. The rifle shot sounded monstrously loud in my ear and I reeled backwards half-stunned by the sound. When I had gathered my wits it took me some long moments before I realised that William had shot the creature through the head. There were shards of bone and pieces of flesh flying everywhere. Despite my feelings of revulsion, I half-understood why William reacted thus.

  But William was gone from my side. When I ran out of the barn he was already riding through the gateway, out onto Salisbury Plain.

  He shouted over his shoulder, ‘We have to kill her too, Mr Wilkins. She’s breedin’ monsters. We have to kill her and burn her.’

  Then he and his horse was swallowed by the darkness.

  I carried the remains of the creature William has shot to the burning piggery and threw them into the flames. The place was still blazing and hot enough to melt the iron hinges on the doors. Such a fire would soon destroy any evidence and we could return later and bury the ashes out on the plain.

  Staring at the blackened carcasses of our erstwhile brood of so-called myths, I could make out certain shapes and suddenly realised what had started the fire. It must have been the small green dragon, of course, who no doubt had just discovered his special gift. The dragon would have experimented with its fiery breath, once its throat had developed its potential to blast away, thus destroying not only its siblings, but itself in the bargain.

  I now had to ride out and find William, before he killed the mother beast and . . . what was it he intended to do? Burn her? Had he taken inflammable liquid with him? There was plenty of it lying around. Paraffin for the lamps. Petrol for the farm machinery. I realised the urgency now. I had to stop him destroying my chance of fame and fortune. Possibly William, who was not a stupid man, believed that if humankind were to discover we are not a natural species, but an aberrant lifeform produced by a deviant offshoot from what is regarded as normal and scientifically sound, then society would descend into chaos.

  It is possible that such a revelation might eventually be welcomed as a wonderful and marvellous thing, but initially it would undoubtedly send the human race reeling from the shock of a discovery that might take decades and many violent upheavals to overcome. Old religions, cultures, beliefs and scientific philosophies would fall, new ones arise, and in that terrible mix there would be chaos and confusion, madness, terror and despair.

  Yet, we had been through many shocks in our history on the Earth and have managed to overcome them without.

  I swung myself into the saddle, just as a new dawn was putting her torch to the sky in the East. There is absolutely no doubt that what we had seen, that final birth of the mother before she stampeded from the barn, was mankind’s close kith and kin. I saw the expression on the creature’s face, clearly in the torchlight. There was no mistaking what kind of being lay in that straw at my feet.

  We are the only animals on earth able to smile.

  Murders in the White Garden

  I stood disconsolate, miserable, under the linked statues of Pan and Syrinx, envious of the hold the cloven-hoofed god had over his lover. Syrinx was looking into his eyes as if she adored him with all her being. Would that a certain someone might look into my eyes with that adoring gaze, instead of those of another.

  Eros and Psyche too, were in a similar passionate embrace, and not far away Meleager and Atalanta were wound around each other’s forms,

  ‘Dinner is ready, sir,’ said Simon, tripping over the lawn towards me. ‘I brought your coat, as the evening has lost its warmth. And with your advanced years . . .’

  He held the garment out towards me. I ignored it.

  ‘Thank you, Simon,’ I said, coldly, ‘I am well able to withstand a temperate evening without my topcoat.’

  ‘As you wish, sir, but Autumn is arriving.’

  Let her come, I thought, wearily, I shall welcome her to my door as readily as I do her sister, Winter.

  At dinner she appeared to ignore him as he stood behind my chair, but I knew those smiles she cast around the table were all for him. My own position was excruciating. I could not turn and look at Simon: that would have given him enormous pleasure. Yet I felt him to be smirking behind my back. I wanted to kill the smug libertine where he stood: stick my dinner knife in his back; ram my silver fork in his eye. He was making my life an utter misery. She was making my life a misery.

  Count Von Friedrich’s daughter was unbearably beautiful. You could proclaim no more or less. Were I able to launch into similes and metaphors which would have poets biting their lips in envy I would be no closer to the truth. Her loveliness was as pure and understated as a snowdrop. Sofia was 19, had the softest eyes I have ever seen and her smile could not have been more enchanting if her parents had been fay. My heart yearned for one of those smiles, yet I knew that Simon gathered in each and every one. He was their sole recipient, and he knew it, and revelled in it.

  In the sweetest tone I could muster, I said, ‘Simon, I should like some more consommé, if you please.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ came his infuriatingly compliant voice, ‘at once, sir.’

  A serving girl was signalled behind my back and the soup, which I did not want, was very soon ladled into my plate.

  As you may have gathered Simon and Sofia were lovers, one being the manservant, assigned to me by the count for the length of my stay at Friedrichschlosschen, the other being the German aristocrat’s nonpareil daughter. Simon was of course tall and very handsome, I have to concede him that, and but a handful of years older than Sofia. But he was of peasant stock, a hill farmer’s son, of no worth whatsoever. They were doomed but seemed totally careless with the future, which made it all the more hurtful to me. If she could deliberately risk all – her wealth and position in society – she must have been so very deeply in love with the youth.

  A buttered green fish was passed under my nose. The chatter around me seemed to increase in volume. Then Simon jolted my chair and I realised I was being asked a question.

  ‘Herr Maurer,’ the count was saying, ‘are you any closer to discovering the identity of the murderer?’

  The clink and clatter of silver cutlery on bone china ceased for a moment. I was suddenly aware that all eyes around the dinner table were on me. The question had caught me in the middle of my contemplations and I was unprepared for it. However, I rallied quickly, knowing that she would be listening and assessing my own worth. I wiped my lips on my table napkin to give me more thinking-time, before replying.

  ‘Count, my analysis has not yet reached the stage where I can announce the results of my research. I hope to do so within the next two or three weeks, but of course as you well know, these murders stretch over three centuries, and therefore we are looking for several murderers, most of them long gone to their maker themselves.’

  ‘Yes o
f course,’ replied the count in that silky tone he used when he was annoyed, ‘while I understand your interest in historical killers, my personal concern is the current one. I have a wife and daughter to protect.’

  ‘My detections have not yet reached the stage, count, where I can with all confidence provide you with my deductions.’

  ‘Two or three weeks?’

  ‘Yes, count.’

  He dismissed me with a wave of his fork and a shrug, and then lost interest and went back to his meal. The rest of the table continued to stare but for a moment or two longer at me, then returned to chattering with their neighbours. I sat miserably stirring my soup, despising Simon, the count, and everyone in the room except the lovely Sofia, whom I loved as much as I hated.

  That night I lay in the blackness of my room, any light from outside the window completely obscured by huge, thick, dusty velvet curtains, forcing myself to think about the murders in the Weissgarten. There were three in the castle records, but there had probably been more over the centuries, which had been lost to memory and had never been recorded. The first in the Friedrich family memoirs had been a maidservant, hurrying home late at night after a liaison with a married innkeeper. Her skull had been crushed. This incident had occurred exactly 87 years before the second victim was found with his neck broken, lying appropriately amongst the lilies.

  Now, 134 years after that murder the castle had witnessed a third, this time a gardener in the early hours of the morning. His smoking pipe was still clenched between his teeth when they found him, his chest battered in by some heavy instrument. Evidenced by the garden flowers, he had died in terrible agony, thrashing around for a very long time, his breath and blood bubbling from the injury, for the single blow had not only smashed his rib cage into his lungs, it had left a ragged hole the size of a fist.

  All these killings – one assumes murders – occurred in the garden which was reserved exclusively for white flowers. White roses, lilies, ox-eye daisies, jasmine, white lupins, and so forth and so on. The surrounding gardens of the castle boasted amongst its other treasures two orangeries (upper and lower), a water park with channelled streams running from the hills behind down into pools within the gardens, a haha, woodland walks, a natural open-air theatre. There were deep-green hedges of myrtle and yew to scent the air.

  Apart from the natural wonders there was also an abundance of Greek statues in the baroque gardens: entwined lovers such as Orpheus and Eurydice, Narcissus and Echo, Bacchus and Ariadne and others already mentioned, along with single figures such as Zeus, Heracles and Artemis.

  Finally, in the sunken garden, there was the Silent Orchestra: a set of beautifully sculpted statues of cherubs ‘playing’ musical instruments. This last set piece, positioned down below the marble staircase alongside which the obsidian aqueducts ran, was famous throughout the empire and visiting kings and queens came just to look and ‘listen’ to the silent music of these works of art, carved by that wonderful sculptor Georg von Richtendorf.

  After receiving the invitation from the count to investigate the murder I left Dresden the following day, to find on my arrival that the scarlet stains on the white petals were still there.

  ‘We didn’t pick them,’ explained one of the undergardeners, ‘so you could see the exact spot where he died.’

  The exact spot was indeed visible. The shape of his dead form remained indented in the crushed foliage. The deep footprints of the monster who had caved his chest also remained. On either side however were solid paths which of course showed no such depressions. The prints went right across the White Garden, but vanished on the stone walkways. Searching the rest of the enormous gardens, I was surprised and frustrated to find that no further footprints could be found. It was as if the murderer remained, somewhere in the castle grounds: as if he had hidden under some slab or stone, waiting for an opportunity to escape the scene.

  Whoever had carried out this terrible deed, he was a big man – a very big man – no doubt with great strength and not even a kernel of a conscience. To strike someone dead with a blow to the head would seem to me to be more humane than crushing his chest and leaving him to die slowly in terrible pain.

  On questioning the gardeners I was told that they often found footmarks in the White Garden, the plants beaten down. It was now so common they simply accepted it and repaired the damage. Attempts to find the culprit had always ended in failure, since the nights on which these tramplings occurred were always moonless, starless nights.

  So there I lay in the dark, going over these thoughts in my head, wondering about the connection between the old murders, and this new one. Coincidences rarely happen in threes. Two bodies separated by a century laying in the same garden would be a coincidence. Three was extraordinary. There had to be some link, however small, and I was determined to find it. I had been here a month now. The night of the murder had been peat black, the sky obscured by cloud. I was waiting for just such another night, before going out to the White Garden and just sitting, listening, letting my mind absorb all that went on around me, hoping for insight.

  At about one o’clock I rose from the four-poster bed and went to the window, drawing back a curtain. The reward was here at last. The dark night I had been waiting for. Not a sign of the moon, nor the stars, just an impenetrable inky blackness. Why then did I hesitate? Was I afraid? Yes, my fast-beating heart attested to that. I was scared. It’s a very brave man who can revisit the scene of a murder in complete darkness. What if he were still out there, waiting for his next victim? Surely he was an unreasoning creature, whose motives for killing were locked in a chamber of insanity deep within his brain, for the murdered man had had no enemies, no wealth, no wife or lover with a surplus of passion, only a simple love of flowers.

  After dressing and arming myself I left my room where I encountered Simon sneaking down the hallway in his stockings.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I whispered, fiercely, the jealousy rising like lava in my breast. ‘Answer me!’

  ‘Where have I been?’ he corrected me, smiling. ‘Ask me that, though I won’t promise to answer.’

  ‘I’ll inform the count,’ I told him.

  His face clouded over in dim light thrown out by my lamp.

  ‘Do that and I’ll run off with her. She’ll come you know. She loves me. I’ll run away with her and they’ll not find her again. I think you couldn’t stand that, sir. Not knowin’ where she is. What you can be sure of is we’d be locked in poverty. She’d become a drab, sitting in some greasy scullery waitin’ for me to come back from the inn, an’ me a drunk with no prospects. Is that what you’d want for the love of your life? You’d pine away, you would. I seen how you look at her. Like all the others. You tell the count about us and you’ll bring down ruin on her.’

  I could have shot the impudent swine, there and then, and most certainly would have done it. The pistol was in my shaking hand, pointed at his insolent heart. But then a draught fortuitously blew out the flame in my lamp. I relit the wick with trembling fingers. Was murder so near at hand then? Was it so easily provoked? Simon was gone, back his own room I hoped, for I could not bear the thought that he had returned to Sofia and told her what I had said. They would laugh at me. She would laugh at me. It was positively unbearable, this corrosive ardour in my breast.

  Out in the gardens it was cool. My passion wafted away and my analytical brain took over. That was good. That was how it should be. Get rid of the ardour, replace it with cold hard reasoning. I found myself a place in the White Garden and doused the light. There in complete darkness I sat and waited, listening hard, hearing the occasional hoot of a tawny owl, the carolling of amorous foxes, the whispers of the breezes. All night I sat there, awake, letting my senses absorb secrets amongst the blooms, hoping for revelations to soak into my brain by osmosis.

  It must have been about two hours later that I sensed, and heard, someone running past me through the flowers. Startled, I was instantly alert, my pistol at the ready. Feet thumped on the e
arth near me. Plants were swished aside. Here, surely was the murderer? I hastily lit my lamp, shone it over the scene, found nothing. I moved about, searching, looking behind the statues of cherub and Greek lover. Nothing. Nothing. Footprints were there. White blooms lay crushed and scattered. But there was no figure hiding amongst the hedges. No human form attempting to leave the grounds. No skulking killer on his way to the woodland walks. Surely, surely I had provided light quick enough to catch the creature? Yet there was no one. Only the silent statues witnessing my agonising frustration.

  Dawn came. In the early light I tracked the deep footmarks. This time I could see where bits of soil led. The gardeners had obviously swept the paths before my first visit, thus obscuring these traces of earth. I followed the short track which led from one statue, standing near an aspen, to a pair of others, on the far side of the Silent Orchestra. No trail went beyond these two points. It was a clear line between the entwined Apollo and Daphne, and the statue of Heracles. I stood by Heracles and looked across and could see the face of Daphne, looking back. She was not admiring her partner, Apollo. Her attention, her shy knowing smile, was on the marble Heracles.

  ‘What are you doing out here, sir?’ came an admonishing female voice which sent my heart flying. ‘You will catch your death! Such a heavy morning dew is bad for the chest of man of mature years.’

  It was Sofia, out for an early morning stroll before breakfast. She had a maid in attendance. I bristled a little at the words ‘mature years’, since I was not yet in my middle thirties, but made no protest.

  ‘I am at my investigations,’ I replied. ‘My eagerness to work does not pay any attention to concerns for my health.’

  ‘Then you are most foolish, Herr Maurer. And have you discovered the identity of the horrible man who killed our gardener?’

  I looked into her eyes. ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘it was not a man?’