Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

“There she is,” said the landlord, proudly.

The cat was brown, and it looked, at first glance, as if it had been constructed out of tendons and agony. The holes that were its eyes were filled with anger and with pain; the mouth was wide open, as if the creature had been yowling when she was turned to leather.

“The practice of placing animals in the walls of buildings is similar to the practice of walling up children alive in the foundations of a house you want to stay up,” explained the muttonchop man, from behind him. “Although mummified cats always make me think of the mummified cats they found around the temple of Bast in Bubastis in Egypt. So many tons of mummified cats that they sent them to England to be ground up as cheap fertilizer and dumped on the fields. The Victorians also made paint out of mummies. A sort of brown, I believe.”

“It looks miserable,” said Shadow. “How old is it?”

The landlord scratched his cheek. “We reckon that the wall she was in went up somewhere between 1300 and 1600. That’s from parish records. There’s nothing here in 1300, and there’s a house in 1600. The stuff in the middle was lost.”

The dead cat in the glass case, furless and leathery, seemed to be watching them, from its empty black-hole eyes.

I got eyes wherever my folk walk , breathed a voice in the back of Shadow’s mind. He thought, momentarily, about the fields fertilized with the ground mummies of cats, and what strange crops they must have grown.

“ They put him into an old house side, ” said the man called Ollie. “ And there he lived and there he died. And nobody either laughed or cried. All sorts of things were walled up, to make sure that things were guarded and safe. Children, sometimes. Animals. They did it in churches as a matter of course.”

The rain beat an arrhythmic rattle on the windowpane. Shadow thanked the landlord for showing him the cat. They went back into the taproom. The dark-haired woman had gone, which gave Shadow a moment of regret. She had looked so friendly. Shadow bought a round of drinks for the muttonchop man, the white-haired woman, and one for the landlord.

The landlord ducked behind the bar. “They call me Shadow,” Shadow told them. “Shadow Moon.”

The muttonchop man pressed his hands together in delight. “Oh! How wonderful. I had an Alsatian named Shadow, when I was a boy. Is it your real name?”

“It’s what they call me,” said Shadow.

“I’m Moira Callanish,” said the white-haired woman. “This is my partner, Oliver Bierce. He knows a lot, and he will, during the course of our acquaintance, undoubtedly tell you everything he knows.”

They shook hands. When the landlord returned with their drinks, Shadow asked if the pub had a room to rent. He had intended to walk further that night, but the rain sounded like it had no intention of giving up. He had stout walking shoes, and weather-resistant outer clothes, but he did not want to walk in the rain.

“I used to, but then my son moved back in. I’ll encourage people to sleep it off in the barn, on occasion, but that’s as far as I’ll go these days.”

“Anywhere in the village I could get a room?”

The landlord shook his head. “It’s a foul night. But Porsett is only a few miles down the road, and they’ve got a proper hotel there. I can call Sandra, tell her that you’re coming. What’s your name?”

“Shadow,” said Shadow again. “Shadow Moon.”

Moira looked at Oliver, and said something that sounded like “waifs and strays?” and Oliver chewed his lip for a moment, and then he nodded enthusiastically. “Would you fancy spending the night with us? The spare room’s a bit of a box room, but it does have a bed in it. And it’s warm there. And dry.”

“I’d like that very much,” said Shadow. “I can pay.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Moira. “It will be nice to have a guest.”

OLIVER AND MOIRA both had umbrellas. Oliver insisted that Shadow carry his umbrella, pointing out that Shadow towered over him, and thus was ideally suited to keep the rain off both of them.

The couple also carried little flashlights, which they called torches. The word put Shadow in mind of villagers in a horror movie storming the castle on the hill, and the lightning and thunder added to the vision. Tonight, my creature, he thought, I will give you life! It should have been hokey but instead it was disturbing. The dead cat had put him into a strange set of mind.

The narrow roads between fields were running with rainwater. “On a nice night,” said Moira, raising her voice to be heard over the rain, “we would just walk over the fields. But they’ll be all soggy and boggy, so we’re going down by Shuck’s Lane. Now, that tree was a gibbet tree, once upon a time.” She pointed to a massive-trunked sycamore at the crossroads. It had only a few branches left, sticking up into the night like afterthoughts.

“Moira’s lived here since she was in her twenties,” said Oliver. “I came up from London, about eight years ago. From Turnham Green. I’d come up here on holiday originally when I was fourteen and I never forgot it. You don’t.”

“The land gets into your blood,” said Moira. “Sort of.”

“And the blood gets into the land,” said Oliver. “One way or another. You take that gibbet tree, for example. They would leave people in the gibbet until there was nothing left. Hair gone to make bird’s nests, flesh all eaten by ravens, bones picked clean. Or until they had another corpse to display anyway.”

Shadow was fairly sure he knew what a gibbet was, but he asked anyway. There was never any harm in asking, and Oliver was definitely the kind of person who took pleasure in knowing peculiar things and in passing his knowledge on.

“Like a huge iron birdcage. They used them to display the bodies of executed criminals, after justice had been served. The gibbets were locked, so the family and friends couldn’t steal the body back and give it a good Christian burial. Keeping passersby on the straight and the narrow, although I doubt it actually deterred anyone from anything.”

“Who were they executing?”

“Anyone who got unlucky. Three hundred years ago, there were over two hundred crimes punishable by death. Including traveling with Gypsies for more than a month, stealing sheep – and, for that matter, anything over twelve pence in value – and writing a threatening letter.”

He might have been about to begin a lengthy list, but Moira broke in. “Oliver’s right about the death sentence, but they only gibbeted murderers, up these parts. And they’d leave corpses in the gibbet for twenty years, sometimes. We didn’t get a lot of murders.” And then, as if trying to change the subject to something lighter, she said, “We are now walking down Shuck’s Lane. The locals say that on a clear night, which tonight certainly is not, you can find yourself being followed by Black Shuck. He’s a sort of a fairy dog.”

“We’ve never seen him, not even on clear nights,” said Oliver.

“Which is a very good thing,” said Moira. “Because if you see him – you die.”

“Except Sandra Wilberforce said she saw him, and she’s healthy as a horse.”

Shadow smiled. “What does Black Shuck do?”

“He doesn’t do anything,” said Oliver.

“He does. He follows you home,” corrected Moira. “And then, a bit later, you die.”

“Doesn’t sound very scary,” said Shadow. “Except for the dying bit.”

They reached the bottom of the road. Rainwater was running like a stream over Shadow’s thick hiking boots.

Shadow said, “So how did you two meet?” It was normally a safe question, when you were with couples.