Read The Fabulous Beast Online
Authors: Garry Kilworth
The Fabulous Beast (10 page)
It’s obviously not easy to accept the presence of malevolent supernatural beings. Although, as I said, I’m not a thoroughly pragmatic person, I’m not exactly psychic either, and like most people I’m sceptical when it comes to the paranormal. Ordinarily, I do not believe in ghosts, ghouls, spectres or any of those creatures of the night. But either there was devious human trickery going on, and my search had revealed no evidence of this, or this was something beyond normal, rational understanding. I couldn’t simply straighten my back and discount the idea that there was something in this house, something in Moretta’s bed, which had its origins in a place other than this world. My friend was lying in hospital. I had been with him in the room.
‘It,’ had tried to kill James.
Looking round me at the dried bats and other stuffed wildlife, thinking about the dark nature and foul, unspeakable atmosphere of her weird residence, Moretta might as well have invited ghouls to inhabit its confines. It beckoned to those beyond the grave to come and make their lair in some nook or cranny of this hideous dwelling. Now, having accepted that there was an unwelcome presence from beyond inhabiting the place, it seemed it was up to me to exorcise it. Since I was a complete amateur when it came to the spirit world, I had no idea how to carry this out, but for James’s sake I had to try.
Switching on all the lights the first thing I did was inspect the walls for any hidden panels, just in case I had missed something on my earlier search. This exercise took me all day and half the evening. Besides filth, I found very little, until I came to a small cupboard up on the landing. It was hidden behind a chest which, going by the dead spiders and dirt beneath, had not been moved in a long time. The little door was locked, so I forced it with the spike on my jack-knife that one is supposed to be used by boy scouts for removing stones from horses’ hooves. Inside the cupboard was a stack of papers. I took the lot down to the living-room, dumped them on the table next to a vase full of artificial black tulips, intending to go through them. Then there was a power cut. I was too exhausted to peer at papers by torchlight.
I took myself off to bed. Despite my trepidation I intended to sleep in Moretta’s bed. What I had asked my friend to do, I had to do, otherwise I would have had to call myself a coward. I felt I had a moral duty to use myself as bait for this fiend, or whatever it was, that took human life so easily and without compunction. I was fully alert to the dangers I was subjecting myself to and had decided that the moment I felt unusual going on, I would vacate the bed with alacrity.
Was I scared? I was bloody petrified.
It doesn’t matter what you say you don’t believe in when you’re standing in the bright sunshine, amongst the company of friends. It doesn’t matter how much you extol rational and logic, and scorn the mystical when you’re out and about in a sane and ordinary world. In a dark, creaking old house, amongst the clutter of a dabbler in the occult, your disbeliefs vanish at the going down of the sun.
I climbed the stairs with leaden feet and stood in the doorway of Moretta’s room, my torchlight on the bed. It looked innocent enough. What was it about this antique piece of furniture that attracted such violence from the otherworld? Apart from the fact that it was an ancient four-poster it looked very ordinary. Where was the cabalistic magnet? In the ornate and handcarved woodwork? In the ropes that (‘Night, night, sleep tight!’) served as springs? Who knew?
Conquering my terror I undressed down to my underwear and crawled between the sheets. There I lay under the bedclothes, unwilling to switch off the torch. My heart was in a race against itself. My blood was pumping round my body in a torrent. There was a sharp, sickening pain over my right eye: the sort of headache I used to get before going into battle. I wanted to get up and run away, but I had to stay where I was and wait for whatever might be sent to haunt me. This was not an easy thing to do. It was like awaiting an enemy attack.
Gradually the torch battery ran down. The light became dimmer and dimmer until it was a faint glow reminiscent of one of my lit cigarette ends in the days when I used to smoke. Then it went out altogether. Midnight, and I was in complete darkness. The sweat ran cold and clammy down the channel of my spine.
I stared up into the blackness in the direction of the velvet ceiling to my four-poster bed, unable to sleep. I must have lain there for at least another two hours, then my eyes closed and finally I dropped off.
I woke suddenly, with a loud grunt of pain.
I couldn’t move my arms. They were pinned tightly to my sides. Under its loose coverlette it seemed the quilt had moulded itself around my body. I was mummified and the quilt was shrinking, squeezing the breath and life from my lungs. My knees, my ankles, my feet, all were jammed hard against each other, grinding the bones together. It was as if I were in a rope cocoon that was gradually tightening, tightening. You would think I could just break loose but the strength of simple ordinary fabric is actually incredible and the force behind this action to crush me was unstoppable. It was as if I were in the grip of an anaconda snake which was trying to pulp me before devouring me.
‘Help!’ I gasped. ‘Somebody help me!’
Then to my horror I was suddenly aware of the weight of some stinking creature squatting on my chest, staring down into my face. Even though I couldn’t see it, I was sure it was grinning. Fuseli’s nightmare! The demon on the maiden’s breast. Though this monster had not just one, but several heads. I could feel only one form, but many disgusting exhalations on my face. I could feel bony haunches, digging into my ribs, and then my terror increased as coarse, hairy knuckles brushed my brow, as if I were being stroked into the realms of death.
It was not the demon who was crushing me, however, but an innocuous quilt. I felt sure the fiend was just there to watch, a curious witness to my helpless struggles against an ugly death.
The pain increased until I let out a scream that filled the room. The monster on my chest laughed: a deep guttural sound that filled my head. My scream had taken all the breath out of my lungs and in that moment I knew I couldn’t fill them again. I was swiftly dying. My bonds were impossible to dislodge. I prayed in those few moments. I tried to invoke the power of good over evil. I called on God to help me. I pleaded for my fading life. My attempts failed. There were bright flashing lights in my brain which I knew to be portents of death. It was being starved of oxygen. My heart felt ready to explode. I was going and the fear that had been gripping me suddenly evaporated. Only the agony remained and soon that would leave me too. I was leaving this world, going on to the next. Only a step, no further. I managed to whisper a faint ‘Goodbye’ to no one in particular.
Just as I finished that last feathery farewell, the electric light flashed on and the room was flooded with brightness. Whatever was squatting on my chest fled. A wisp of mist he flew, into the cracks and fissures of the walls. The quilt dropped away and was now loose and free. Light had conquered the forces of darkness. I blessed the brilliance that was blinding me and cleansing the room of evil.
For a long while I was forced to stay where I was, until regular breaths restored the use of my lungs. Gradually, gradually I was able to get back to a normal rhythm. As soon as I was able I got out of that bed, determined never to return to it. I had been saved not by God, nor by his son, but by the restoration of the electricity. The power cut had ended just when I needed it to most, the light being already switched on.
Then I remembered the old joke about the man who refused to be rescued three times, saying God would do it, and when he was drowned by the flood God told him, ‘I sent three rescue parties for you and you ignored them.’ Maybe some deity had heard me after all?
I left the house and went to the hospital, where they let me have a bed next to my friend James. We exchanged similar experiences, then both slept like tops, though my dreams at least were fearful. In the morning James and I left the hospital and went back to the house, to try to discover its terrible secret. We found it, amongst the papers and files that I had discovered in the hidden cupboard.
Indeed Moretta had brought the haunting on herself.
We went reluctantly to Moretta’s bedroom and under a thin top coverlet we uncovered the blood quilt. There were brown marks still visible on some of its patches. They looked like maps of unknown regions. Not every patch had an old blood stain though, for there were those malefactors who had been hung, and not shot, and others who had suffered strangulation by the garrotte. Still, a good many however bore the evidence of the former owner’s execution. Several still had their bullet holes, even now unstitched. Just one patch, from some country which had yet to reach a humane way of executing its murderers, had the jagged rent of a sharp instrument just below the position of the heart.
In her untiring search for ever more experiences of the macabre, Moretta had made a patchwork quilt. A friend of hers had written to her and told her that she was making a bedspread out of T-shirts purchased in cities around the world.
I LOVE NEW YORK.
I LOVE LONDON.
I LOVE ISTANBUL.
Moretta went one better. She made a quilt, not of love, but of hate. Moretta had researched and located the shirts and vests of executed murderers. She had then purchased these items from those who had removed them from the corpses hoping to turn a profit. There are always people in this world who know the symbolic value of evil, to worshippers of religions like voodoo and other cults that follow Satan’s teachings.
Moretta’s blood quilt became more than a symbol.
She had fashioned an instrument of execution for the pernicious dead who wanted revenge on the living.
~
Elaine had the quilt burned on a bonfire. Then the house was boarded-up and never again rented it out to anyone. She called me two years later and told me that the sea had at last claimed yet another victim. A storm had eaten away a chunk of the cliff and Moretta’s house had joined the rest of the town that was under the waves. James and I drove down to look at the spot, but there was actually nothing to see.
Spice
They call us ghouls or creatures-of-the-night.
Those epithets suggest malevolence, but there is no malicious evil in us, nor do we intend harm to any mortal. We simply exist in the twilight world which most humans fear. Yes, we might be grotesque, even bestial in physical appearance to those unused to the sight of us, but there are other ghastly-looking creatures which exist without censure. I give you the angler fish or the cockchafer as examples of repulsive forms. They are not looked upon with utter revulsion. Only distaste.
Fortunately, we are very rarely, if ever seen. Our camouflage is the shadows, into which we fold ourselves in order to remain hidden from human eyes. One of you might catch a glimpse of shifting shade, out of the corner of an eye, but by the time you turn to stare we have vanished within pools of darkness.
You are so slow to react, so incredibly dull witted and sluggish of thought, and we so swift, so magically quick, in movement.
Yes, those habits which you call might call unspeakable, like the devouring of the flesh of the dead, are part of our culture, but it is with you the problem lies, not with us. We are doing what we have always done, what our ancestors have done over past millennia, what we
have
to do in order to survive. The vampire must have his blood. The werewolf must have his raw human meat. So must we have the putrid detritus of a human’s corpse in order to survive.
I have a favourite haunt, where the poor die in dozens of malnutrition, disease and neglect. Singapore’s Sago Street is where I squat nightly high up in the rafters of a house. Sago Street is known as the Street of the Dead. Here are the Death Houses where the old and terminally ill go to make their final journey at the end of their lives. In the hovels of the poor, still struggling to keep body and soul together there is precious little room for the living, let alone the dying. More importantly, a death in the house brings bad luck. Such a house must afterwards be cleansed by fire or the occupants will never know good fortune or peace of mind again. Fire is expensive.
Thus poverty and ritual ensure that sentiment is set aside. A dying man or woman must drag his or her ailing form to Sago Street, where a last breathing place will be found in one of the Death Houses. There the dying must lie amongst others whose lungs are fighting for every thin draught of oxygen, until the last hissing exhalation when spirits are free to fly to some place beyond human understanding.
~
There was an elderly man who was brought in during the dark hours. I marked him as mine from my roost. Then I positioned myself over his deathbed and studied him. His wrinkled skin was as pale and thin as tissue paper. When he moved a limb, he did so with great effort and distress. There are those very rare ones who are brought in who miraculously recover and I searched his form for signs of such, gratified to discover none were visible. His eyes were devoid of hope. Nothing but despair showed in his features, his gestures, his manner.
He lay below me, looking up into what would be darkness to his poor eyes. His arms were by his sides, palms upturned. His thin legs were apart, the feet turned outwards. I could only imagine what was going on inside his mind, but having seen so many of these I knew that there was either bitterness or a dumb acceptance of his own mortality. Humans are either enraged to find that they are not immortal or they give in to the inevitable and simply wait helplessly for what they cannot thwart.
This one did not look angry. He looked resigned to his fate.
‘I was a good businessman.’
Either he was talking to himself or trying to communicate with those who lay beside him. If it was the latter, they were not interested. They were too much concerned with themselves, with their own deaths, to think about another. One of them was indeed freshly-dead and his spirit could hear nothing but the rush of black noise as it sped away elsewhere.
‘I worked hard.’
A statement that was actually a question.
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.
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.
