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

Nakszynski wore a shaggy coat made from grizzly hide, tailored with pockets for concealed hold-out pistols and lengths of cheesewire. The lining sheathed sufficient knives to serve boneless duck and fish at a Lord Mayor’s dinner and have enough left over to perform emergency amputations on a cartload of railway-crash wounded. He performed a familiar ritual — loading and checking guns, spitting on blades. His murder tools were in order, ready for use. Stoke stood by his man like a prize-fight trainer, happy to dispense advice on the theory of fisticuffs yet happier still not to be the fellow stepping into the ring to put the advice into practice while another bludgeon-fisted ape pounded on his head.

Most of the household were here to see off our expedition. Mod planted a crafty kiss on my cheek, and slipped a hand into my trousers to administer a secret squeeze. Stoke scowled at the intimacy he could see, but losing a poke-partner came a long way down his list of frets. I reckoned he’d retreat inside and have the Hall barricaded until we came home with Red Shuck hanging upside down from Venn’s stave.

We set off across the lawn, and paused in the shadow of The Chase.

‘This is a truly venerable tract of forest,’ Saul announced, as if lecturing sightseers, ‘one of the few remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primeval date, wherein Druidical mistletoe is still found on aged oaks. Enormous yew trees, not planted by the hand of man, grow as they did grow when they were pollarded for bows.’

He made a few more remarks about ‘sylvan antiquity’. I disregarded them like the steam of his breath. The tall stark trees were more black than green. Within the woods, groundmist was waist high. The Chase showed its true self.

It was not a forest. It was an English jungle.

XI

Saul — smallest, least encumbered of the party — bent low and scurried through his famous badger runs. Venn, the Albino and I had to take less thorny paths through the dripping woods.

We could scarcely have got wetter if it were raining.

The morning mist didn’t burn off, which made looking out for beast’s spoor an iffy prospect. Exposed roots and the mouths of rabbit-warrens became mantraps. A sane hunter was exceedingly careful where he put his boots.

Sunlight was intermittent. Every step took us back in time. All Saul’s rot about Druidical mistletoe and pollarding for bows brought to mind high old merrie England. Flagons of foaming mead and clots in armour gallantly clouting each other. This was more savage, cold and bloody uncomfortable. As Stoke had warned, it stank like a tannery.

‘What is that smell?’ I asked Venn.

‘What smell?’ he responded. His nostrils must have been burned senseless by living with the stench. In fact, now I came to think of it, the reddleman had the pong on him like the stain on his face.

I like jungle, but The Chase was a Pit of Hell on a wet Wednesday.

After an hour of slow going, we felt we had travelled ten hard leagues but might well have only penetrated a few hundred yards into the wood. Venn tapped his stave against an oak, signalling a halt. We had found an open space about fifty paces across. The trees were so tangled above, the clearing was like a leaky cathedral. Shafts of light poured down through a ceiling of woven wood.

‘Here be the place,’ the reddleman said.

‘Temple Clearing,’ Saul said, popping out of his badger-run. ‘Where Venic turned and Red Shuck killed Sir Pagan. They found that Lazy-Eyed Jack fellow here with his gizzard gone.’

Venn walked slowly, stirring the mist with his stick.

‘Mattie were here,’ he said, ‘lying on this.’

He knelt and waved mist away from a long, flat stone — the size of a table or a tomb. Hewn from rock, smoothed by time. Someone had taken the trouble to haul it here from a quarry.

‘Scary Face Stone,’ Saul said.

I looked at it several ways, but couldn’t see it. Cracks in rock or knots in wood can pull a face, but this was featureless.

‘The name is a corruption,’ Saul went on. ‘Originally, it was Sacrifice Stone. Old even in Sir Pagan’s time. Our Palaeolithic ancestors used it. It’s been washed over and over in blood.’

There were traces of blood on it now.

‘You say the woman was lying here?’ I addressed Venn. ‘How? Arms and legs out, as if thrown away? Or tucked straight, as if on display?’

Venn thought about it, red brows knitting. ‘The second way.’

‘Her hands? Show me how her hands were. By her sides, or…?’

I made defensive claws, as if shielding my throat. Venn crossed his wrists, palms flat against his breast.

‘Never known an animal arrange kill for a funeral,’ I said.

Venn nodded. ‘Only one do have such a habit. That be a human man. But a human man don’t bite out a woman’s throat.’

That showed how limited the reddleman’s experience of the world was. As Moriarty and I learned during the Affair of the Hassocks Hobgoblin, some specimens of ‘human man’ have exactly that predilection. In this case, I’d seen Mattie’s wound and concurred that no man had done that damage.

‘Only a beast could have killed Mattie, but only a man would have laid her out,’ said Saul. ‘In the story of Red Shuck, Venic was sometimes man and sometimes beast.’

Nakszynski spat tobacco at Scary Face Stone, unimpressed.

I was conscious of my silver-loaded revolver. As if on cue, the howling started.

The others had heard this before, but all bristled. Even Nakszynski’s white hair rose under his patched hat.

I don’t know what men mean by fear. My nerves aren’t plumbed in that way. But that howling — softer, more expressive than I’d imagined from reports — pricked an instinct I’d thought dead. It was as if a sail-maker’s needle slid into the nape of my neck then drew down, scraping every bone-knob in turn. My wet skin crawled in disgust at myself, the others, the noise…

We looked around, but it was impossible to tell where the howling came from. I fancied it might be high up, in the trees — but dogs, no matter how big, don’t climb. Red Shuck wasn’t a cat — they scratch as well as bite and Mattie had no claw marks on her. Besides, I know cats. You can live with cats if you’re wary, but you can’t use them the way you can dogs. Red Shuck was being used.

Nakszynski, guns in his hands, wheeled about, scanning for movement. Venn stood slowly, in a fighter’s stance — a double-grip on his stave. The howl died down. There was a noise of birds taking flight. The Albino aimed upwards, but didn’t waste a shot.

Saul, not at all concerned, whistled shrilly.

It was a wonder Nakszynski didn’t shoot him there and then. I knew at once what he was doing.

In answer to his trilling came another howl. Longer, and closer.

With the mist and the trees and the wet, even the best tracker wouldn’t be able to run down Red Shuck in his own woods. But bringing the beast to us was easy. All we had to do was sound a dinner gong.

Saul whistled again.

XII

In the Carpathians, they say this about werewolves: there’s always a tree between you and it, but never a tree between it and you.

I tugged off my right glove with my teeth and stuffed it in a pocket. I like a naked finger on the trigger, no matter the cold. I unslung my rifle and took a firing position, stock to shoulder. Beyond the gunsight, I saw only trees. Thick black pillars in white mist.

There was movement in the mist.

We could still hear howling, but Temple Clearing was confusion to the senses. The noise didn’t seem to come from the moving shape.

I kept my gun up. Eddies and waves in the mist told me something big was coming, careening between trees, picking up speed. We heard crashes, saw lower branches shake. The thing was running blind.