Kim Newman - Professor Moriarty The Hound of the D'Urbervilles

Sir Pagan reached for his sword. Venic wrapped the dog-hide around his shoulders, until it was tighter than his own skin. Then his eyes got big. He had more and longer teeth. He was covered in red fur. He was, in fact, Red Shuck, walking on his hind legs like a man. Baring-Gould’s version is that the dog was the monk all along, but Orderic Vitalis has it that Venic commingled with Red Shuck just as the top dog had taken on the strength of the pack — by consuming his flesh and spirit. At any rate, this thing which was both Red Shuck and Venic fell upon wicked Sir Pagan and tore out the knight’s gullet. To finish off his meal, the big dog ate d’Urberville’s still-beating heart.

Since that day, the legend goes, Red Shuck has lived in The Chase, snacking off lost children, feasting on d’Urberville meat whenever the family produces a tyrant or villain. Which, as you might expect, has happened often.

Over the centuries, dozens of dastardly d’Urbervilles have been killed in circumstances ambiguous enough to allow the legend of the avenging demon dog to enjoy periodic revivals. Few of the family died in bed — unless you count those stabbed by their popsies like Alec Stoke-d’Urberville or poisoned by impatient heirs like Puritan General Godwot d’Urberville. No wonder the true line was extinct when Shylock Si was rooting for a new name. It’s a mystery the d’Urbervilles lasted as long as they did, considering an apparently hereditary predisposition to suspicious accident, outright homicide, unusual suicide (Sir Tancred d’Urberville arranged to be eaten by rooks), inexplicable mutilation and unsolved disappearance.

The phantom coach is a sixteenth-century addition to the family’s spectral register, summoned by Lizzie d’Urberville to fetch her naughty children off to Hades. When you say ‘naughty children’, you mean broken crockery and pulled pigtails… when my sanctimonious pater said ‘naughty children’, he meant gambling debts and housemaids in the pudding club… when a sixteenth-century d’Urberville said ‘naughty children’, she meant violated churchyards, drowned schoolfellows and a castle burned to the ground.

Before and after the story of the coach was put about, the primary d’Urberville ghost was Red Shuck. However, upon examination of first-hand accounts, the spook tales mostly amount to a d’Urberville dying and within three months someone seeing a dog in the dark which might have been red but might equally not, or could also have been a large goat or a stile with a blanket thrown over it.

It’s on record that, at various times, rashes of savage attacks on animals and people have taken place in or near The Chase. In the 1820s, the naturalist Dunstan d’Urberville advanced a theory that the legend of ‘Red Shuck’ related to some as-yet uncatalogued animal found only in the thick of the ancient woodland.

In clubrooms, I’ve run across the odd sportsman — Long John Roxton comes to mind — obsessed with hunting specimens which aren’t in the books. Undeterred by the obituaries of predecessors who actually have pre-deceased them on the trail of monsters, they set out to bag Scotch lake serpents or the Beast of Gévaudan. Few of these Nimrods bring back trophies which don’t look like they’ve been sewn together for a funfair. However, every year, in unexplored corners of the globe, new creatures are catalogued by intrepid men of science — shortly followed by intrepid men of sport, like yours truly. Sticking a Latin name on a lemur or warthog or dragonfly is all very well, but it can’t compete with the honour of being the first to pot the marvel and mount it over the mantelpiece. As a veteran of a couple of go-rounds with the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, I know whereof I speak.

Duffer Dunstan posited the existence in The Chase of a large, unusually hardy wolf species which had survived the extinction of wolfkind in the rest of the British Isles. While tracking his ‘Wessex Wolf’, Dunstan tripped over a tree stump and broke his fool leg. He expired, without heir, of odoriferous gangrene and that was the last of the d’Urbervilles.

…Until Simon Stoke saved up his pennies.

IV

Having outlined the Red Shuck legend, as told by Parson Tringham in the Red Dog, Jasper Stoke continued his own story.

‘Two nights later, there was a howling in The Chase. I’ve heard coyotes and I’ve heard Injuns pretending to be coyotes. This was different. You know that animal screech you hear after someone’s been tortured a spell?… After the tough leather has gone out of a hard customer, but before the body’s completely done for?… The deep-lungs scream that comes when the mind cracks like a walnut?’

Professor Moriarty nodded, with a tiny smile.

‘Well, the howling was worse than that. The whole house stirred from their beds, or whoever’s beds they were in, and clattered about in nightshirts and boots. We found guns and gathered in the great hall.’

‘I fetched Gertie,’ Dan’l said.

‘Howling seemed to come from all around, as if it had got into the house like a draught. Nakszynski, the coolest of hands, let shot fly and pimpled a suit of armour. The maids quacked like geese. Saul, who isn’t all there, sat by a window, gazing out at the bright moon. He looked like a ghost himself. He uttered “Red Shuck”, which was the first I heard the name. I asked what he meant, but he was dreaming out loud. Mod stopped me from shaking an answer out of her brother, saying Saul always comes over queer on full-moon nights. Just one more piece of f--ing information calculated not to set the mind at ease.

‘The howls were going on full-throat and the Albino firing a shotgun indoors hadn’t soothed the ears any. Lazy-Eye Jack heard “Red Shuck” and dug up what he recollects of Tringham’s yarn. The phrase “ghost dog” gave me a sudden insight. I was being fooled with by someone who wished ruin to my prospectus for Trantridge. I don’t credit tales of infernal animals or a d’Urberville curse. I’m more inclined to lay my troubles on the corporeal, contemporary Diggory Venn. I suspected red-stained fingers in the puddle. I told the boys to track down the howling c-t and put it out of its misery.’

Dan’l looked sheepish at this.

‘I expect a deal of smart snapping-to when I give out an order,’ continued Stoke. ‘On this occasion, there was general hesitation. Though Lazy-Eye hadn’t seen fit to pass the parson’s ghost story to me, he’d spread it round the bunkhouse, with embellishments to frighten superstitious, ignorant morons…’

He looked at Dan’l.

‘Mod and her brothers knew the tale from childhood. So did the servants. I was the only prick to whom Red Shuck was fresh news. As master, it fell to me to venture out with my Winchester and see off the howling nuisance. Braham advised against it, and he’s supposed to be the sensible, educated one in his family. Nakszynski was fired up to shoot something which would bleed. We stepped out the big front door. As soon as we were outside, the howling shuts off… and the rest of the yellow-livered curs joined us in the drive…’

‘Was anyone absent?’ asked the Professor.

‘No,’ responded Stoke. ‘I counted heads and checked off names. I thought, like you, that it was an inside job. But we were all present. At sun-up, two maids and a stablehand gave notice and hared off as if there was an Earp price on their heads. One dolly didn’t even stay to pick up her wages. The other said she’ll be safer on the game in Casterbridge. Which gives you an idea of what I’m facing.’

‘All this from a noise in the night?’ I snorted.

‘Something got into the chicken coops and tore apart the poultry…’

‘Feathers and guts and beaks and eyes everywhere,’ elaborated Dan’l. ‘Like to put me off mah feed!’