The Fabulous Beast Read online

  A big cat comes and tries to intimidate the pack, tries to chase them away from their kill, but they know their combined strength is too much for the intruder and ignore her fierce hissings and spittings, and the show of teeth and claws. One wolf would have backed away, but several do not. The big cat waits on a high rock until the last of them leaves, before she lopes down to pick at the bones and gnaw on the skin.

  The seventh day arrives and the pack settle on the rocky plateau of a high fastness and wait for the night. There’s nervousness amongst them, which manifests itself in snapping at each other for minor irritations. Darkness descends like a heavy weight upon the earth. The sky is clear, the stars in their sets. With wild thoughts and a deep sense of fear of the unknown, the wolves wait for a stalking moon to rise above the tallest trees and relight the world. Once the orange disk shows its face, there occurs the thing that has been burning coldly in the alpha wolf’s memory, the thing that makes every wolf in the pack want to flee this place and find a cave in which to hide itself. Yet none do, no one leaves, for there is a duty to the clan general to remain and face the threat. In this lonely place, far from the world of two-legs, they circle one of their own with bared teeth, snarling and growling deeply, and view the transformation frightened by their own shallow breath.

  He suddenly stands up tall on his hind legs in the centre of the circle and his howls are now weak and deeper in tone. The younglings of the pack yelp in terror to see their cousin towering over them, strutting within the circle of the pack. The erect wolf glares around him with fierce eyes full of hatred for his kin. Hair falls from his body as he begins moulting, until his coat has gone and a pink under-hide covers form. His paws grow out at the bottom of his hind legs and his foreleg paws elongate into long thin appendages. The marvellous snout that has sniffed so many trails, has unrooted and uprooted many a prey, begin to flatten into his face until it is but a small nodule above a pair of rose-coloured fleshy lips. The brave flag of his body, that fine-haired flying tail, drops off and shrivels to a thin black vine. His wonderful pointed ears become ugly stunted growths that resemble tree fungi.

  Now he is what he is, no longer a wolf, but the one creature on earth that the wolves fear and despise.

  The beast that has grown out of moonshadows runs around the circle of savage mouths, trying to find a way out. He wants to get past snarling fangs that would tear the flesh from his bones and tries to find a weak wolf who, in its fear, might turn and flee, and leave an escape hole. There is none. They are steadfast. They are true to their clan. The alpha female howls encouragement, telling them in her own way that their fear must be conquered for just this night, calling on deep courage, on valour of the best and strongest kind, to maintain the prison ring.

  The beast has to be kept there at all costs. They know he can smell iron, from a long way off, and he wants that iron. It wants it in order to destroy as many wolves as he can before the dawn comes back. Here is the wolf nightmare, the loathsome brute of the wolf world, the archetype of all killers. This is the creature who has stripped the earth of its forests and covered the plains with its foul dens. This is the beast who more often kills just for the inexplicable pleasure of taking life. In him is the power of craft and guile, the most cunning and devious of living things, that loves to dominate and through its strength and intellect eradicate anything that gets in its way. Even the terrible polar bear can’t compete with him. Nor the mighty grizzly, nor the deadliest of sly insidious poisonous snakes, nor the biggest of the big cats, not shark, not killer whale. None can compete with this soft pink-skinned creature that now shouts at them in a loathsome language no one understands.

  They keep him at bay for the whole time that the moon crosses overhead. The night is long and they grow weary but their vigilance never flags. They are the pack and he is their burden. They do not try to kill him for deep within their psyche they know that if his blood mingles with theirs, they too will become the creature he represents. Every stalking moon they will go through what their cousin has gone through and change as he has changed. So they keep their distance, snapping savagely at his naked form if it approaches them, but never actually biting into his flesh. It is good that their prisoner does not understand the rules of the game, for in his present shape he is a demented mindless creature. If were not he would simply run through their ranks. All he sees is the ring of ferocious jaws snapping and grinding every time he advances towards them. So mercifully for all, he does not attempt to break through with sheer bravado, but approaches them tentatively, cowering and wimpering, retreating when he is met with fury.

  At one point he feigns sleep, lying on the churned snow, yawning and closing his eyes, but they know all his tricks. He is one of the cunning ones. One of those who have whose conniving ways are legion and the mind that devised all those intricate traps that have been set for wolves over the centuries is now put to devising a method of escape. No matter there is madness in that skull, there is also a thousand artful ways to evade captivity there too. When his pretence at sleep does not work, the creatures tries smiles, and gentle talking, and humming to himself, and acrobatic movements, and threatening a single small wolf in that dark incomprehensible language, and laughing loudly, and letting his tongue loll out, and even making believe his heart has stopped and he is dead. All to no avail, for the wolves are steadfast in their duty.

  All night they keep him locked within, until the moon dips down below the distant peaks of the mountains. Then finally he stops his wild shouting, his wild limb-waving, his furious and frustrated screaming. The yellow flaming eyes now dim to a dull red glow. A puzzled expression replaces one of baffled rage. He falls back to the earth on all fours, natural again at last. Hair sprouts along his mane, under his belly, along the trailing edges of his legs. His beautiful snout returns, jutting from his face, the fulsome jaws packed once more with handsome fangs. His cowl gets back its blue-grey colour, his mutated paws shrink back to normal size, his ears sprout skywards, pointed now. Finally his tail sprouts from his backbone and once again flies like a banner.

  He is himself again.

  They come to him with yelps and whines, licking their cousin, welcoming him back to his own form.

  He stands there, bemused by their attention, enjoying it but not knowing why he’s receiving it. His mind seems to be thawing out of a winter state, a numbed brain returning to awareness and the quickness of the world. Finally, he shakes off his clan, wondering, wondering, and goes to be on his own for a while, trying to rid himself of the strange feeling in his limbs and torso: trying to help his mind reach his fast-beating heart to tell it to calm itself. There is no reason for it to force his blood to race like mountain streams through his veins.

  And once the morning has come and the sun has chased away the greyness, he does indeed feel his strangeness has fled.

  Soon after this the alpha female gathers the clan together, under the black pine, and speaks to them in the way that wolves speak to each other, telling them they must find better hunting grounds now the danger is over, and the menace within them has been contained.

  12 Men Born of Woman

  They were milling around the coffee urns, rather than sitting where pens, white paper, glasses and jugs of water had been immaculately placed so that there was exactly two feet between each juror. Twelve leather-padded, leather-backed chairs had been arranged at a round table, as if we were King Arthur and his knights, but people seemed to prefer to stand, talking to each other in the vicinity of the stainless steel hives containing that brown nectar which men like me preferred to honey. And we were all men. I have written people but there were no women. It was an all-male jury.

  ‘Guilty as hell,’ said the chubby man in the large check suit. I wanted to tell him that if he wanted to look slimmer, he should try a narrow stripe pattern. Or even plain. ‘Can’t be anything else.’ He took a long sip of his coffee and obviously burnt his tongue, because he made a face and stuck the tip of that organ through his teeth.

/>   The chap he was speaking to was not much leaner but he was a more sensible dresser, in a blue sweater and jeans.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied in a cultured voice, the kind of accent which one heard at county fairs. ‘I thought that’s what we were here to discuss. I mean, what about this cloning thing? Do you think there’s anything in it?’

  He was talking about the case for the defence. Let me tell you the story first and then you’ll soon be up to speed, even if you’re a little lost at present.

  You must remember the case? Four men went out on a yacht to do some sea fishing. It was a very expensive boat, owned by a millionaire’s son, who was not actually on board at the time of the incident. He had loaned it to a politician friend of his, who had in turn invited three companions to join him. One was an important civil servant, the second a well-known Mafia head, and the third the gangster’s bodyguard who it seemed he never went anywhere without. What they were all doing on the yacht can be only surmised, but since the story broke the civil servant has resigned and the politician is leaving the country after the trial is over. They all said they were simply keen fishermen. Ha, say I and many others.

  The mobster’s name was Freddie Lazarus. I say was. He’s now dead. He originated in some South American country, no one is quite sure where. But it’s his bodyguard who’s on trial, for murder he’s accused of committing on board the yacht. No, no, he didn’t kill his boss, some Eastern European rivals did that, awhile after this particular murder. The man the bodyguard murdered is still a mystery, a complete unknown, having no identification on him whatsoever at the time, and whose prints, dental records and DNA are unregistered anywhere. Various media agencies, publishing his picture, have not received any satisfactory replies. No one seems to know who he is or where he’s come from. It was as if he’d crawled out of the sea.

  How did he get on board, this victim of Mickey Kyle, the hoodlum who hacked him to death?

  The prosecutors tried to assert that the man must have been on board when the yacht set out. Yet two independent ‘valets’ from a boat cleaning firm, who were on the yacht right up until it left the harbour, and maintained there was no one else on board. All four passengers and crew – evidence was forthcoming from Lazarus before he was gunned down in a night club – staunchly maintained that they also searched the boat thoroughly before setting out, fearing eavesdroppers and spies. This could be a bunch of lies of course, but their stories were consistent.

  So, if not there at the outset, he must have got on board sometime during the trip out to sea. Helicopter? A fast vessel of some kind? Submarine? No evidence has come to light to support any idea that he was transported to the boat by another craft.

  Did he swim there and climb on board while they were distracted by their ‘meeting’?

  No answers have been forthcoming, not to anyone’s satisfaction. I and the other jurors in this room have so far been kept apart. The trial has thus far been conducted in conference mode on a closed TV network, to protect the judge and jury, and prosecuting counsel, from harassment. There have been threats against our lives, which I’m sure would have been carried out, had our names not been kept secret. We don’t know each other. Until we were locked in this room, just an hour ago, we’d never met. Kyle has ‘goodfellow’ friends, naturally, who’ll stop at very little to influence the outcome.

  So far as I know we’re anonymous. I hope it stays that way.

  An obviously very nervous little man in Cuban heeled boots came and stood by me.

  ‘What about this theory, eh? You understand it?’

  ‘I don’t think anyone understands it,’ I replied.

  ‘No, what I mean is, I haven’t the foggiest about it. How does it help the defence? Y’know, what’s in it for Kyle? After all, he’s admitted he took a chopper from the galley and split the guy’s skull with it. Hacked off his arms and legs – and’ he gulped for breath, ‘his head, and chucked the lot with the torso overboard, hoping for the sharks to do the biz. There’s not much defence against that sort of confession, is there? I mean, he did it, he said he did it. How’s this theory goin’ to change that?’

  I remember the sky was a cobalt blue (Kyle was no ignoramus, he was an educated thug: he had majored in art) which made me think a storm was coming. We’d already been out there four hours and the sea began to grow dark along the edge of the horizon. A fresh wind sprang up. It really did look like dirty weather was on the way. Then I saw him, sneaking around the stern of the boat. An intruder. An intruder who’d managed to board us without been heard or seen. How sinister was that? It appeared to me, though I was mistaken, he had a weapon in his hand. I was in the galley at the time. Cooking. I like to cook. I specialise in oriental dishes. Anyway, I grabbed the nearest piece of cutlery – it just happened to be a chopper – and went out to confront the guy. He raised his hand, the one with the weapon – which turned out to be a small fish, bait we were using – and I struck him down. It was self defence. I thought he was going to stab me. A stranger’s hand going up, a flash of silver? In my profession if you don’t act quickly, decisively, you end up dead. I split his skull.

  There were five jurors huddled together in one corner of the room and a lively debate was going on between them. I wanted to hear what they had to say. They looked a little brighter than this little twerp. It would have restored a little of my faith in justice to hear an intelligent conversation going on, about the real issues behind this murder. If murder it was. The short man had raised one of the key points. Was it indeed murder?

  ‘What they’re saying,’ I told him, my eyes still on the group of five, ‘is that if he was a clone, he wasn’t in the strict sense a human being. Our laws are there to protect people . . .’

  ‘Life, surely? To protect life? Kyle took a life.’

  I was being patient as hell. ‘A cockroach has life.’

  ‘Ah, I see what you mean.’ There was a pause. ‘But he was a man, not an animal.’

  ‘You have to look at the definition of what constitutes a man. If he was a clone, he was not born of woman. Does a true man have to be born of woman? you have to ask yourself. If the answer’s yes, then you can’t call a clone a man.’ I hesitated, knowing I was getting into deeper water. ‘Especially the kind of clone the defence are putting forward.’

  ‘Oh yeah, what did they call it? S.R.C.?’

  ‘R.S.C. – Random Spontaneous Cloning.’

  ‘Several people go into a confined space and more come out – in this case four men in and five men out.’

  I nodded. ‘Exactly. The fifth man has been accidentally cloned from the four birthright men. No one’s sure of the science yet, but they talk of electro-genetic fields producing a rapid cell creation. They say it’s happened at several large gatherings: night clubs, parties, even in elevators and offices. In all cases they have been single-sex gatherings: all men or all women. The clone looks like none of the makers because he or she is an amalgam of all of them. Yet the clone has knowledge of their memories, skills and habits: a vessel for their collected attributes and faults.’

  The little man licked his lips. ‘That would make him very clever. It’s not clever to get murdered. You have to be very stupid to do that.’

  ‘If he’s a new creature it’ll take time for him to learn that there’s danger all around him. When men first arrived in New Zealand the birds came right up to them and looked them in the eyes. See if they do it today, now they’ve learned what predators we are. The next clone that comes along will be more cautious, will have more of a sense of self-preservation.’

  ‘How come? How?’

  ‘Who knows? But creatures learn from the history of their kind. It’s passed on somehow. One of the mysteries of life. Well,’ I started to walk away, ‘we need to talk to others.’

  His eyes darted round the room and back again.

  ‘Hey, hey – don’t go yet – answer me this – how does something like this happen? I mean, it sounds like hocus-pocus – creating a man out of
thin air. I can’t think they’re serious. It’s just another get-out clause for the criminal elements in our society, isn’t it?’

  ‘It could be. Or it’s a new phenomenon created some say by overstimulation of the body tissues – constant use of new artificial drugs and medication – combined with a change in atmospherics. Even a slight alteration in the layers that protect our planet from the sun’s rays affect us a great deal. Static electricity increases in quantity and power. Other waves and rays increase or decrease in value. Anything that upsets the balance interferes with the natural laws of physics as we know them will have consequences we won’t have experienced before now.’

  ‘Wow, you talk like a scientist. Are you a scientist?’ he stuck his hand forward to be shaken. ‘My name’s Archie by the way.’

  ‘We’re not supposed to give names,’ I reminded him, ignoring the hand. ‘Look, I’m no scientist. I just read magazines. I haven’t really any idea what all that stuff really means – like you, I can only guess. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it is a get-out clause. Kyle is using it, isn’t he? It’s the basis of his defence. He’s saying he killed the guy, but it wasn’t murder because his victim wasn’t a real man, he was some accident of nature, a freak of physics.’ I took a long draught of coffee. It smelled better than it tasted. ‘That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To decide whether to accept that as the truth, or whether we think it’s just a load of crap.’