Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

“Never seen owt like it, Veterinary. Not in fifty years of farming. Knew something wasn’t right when it hit the cobbles. Birth waters scorched the floor stone-white clean.” He coughed and spat a mouthful of phlegm into the mud.

“How was the mother?”

“Cooked from the inside out. Like she’d been in one of those microwave ovens.”

Malcolm pulled his coat tighter.

Bill undid the padlock on the double doors. The broken boards scraped on the floor. Malcolm waited for Bill to go first, but the old hill farmer just stood there.

“Aren’t you going to show me the animal, Bill?”

Shaking his head, Bill stayed exactly where he was.

“Seen it once. Don’t need to see that again.”

Malcolm noticed an old leather-bound book under Bill’s arm, King James in faded gold on the cover.

Reaching into a pocket for his torch, Malcolm stepped into the shed. The smell was worse now. As a country vet, he was used to rot. Hoof infections, orf, or abscesses, his work year was filled with the scent of decaying flesh. This was something else. Like bathing in abattoir waste.

Inside, the temperature rose, first to a pleasant glow, then more furnace-intense as he walked deeper inside. His eyes stung and his throat gagged.

Hilary had taken the phone call, scribbling the details on the Welcome To Yorkshire writing pad and shouting up the stairs. Malcolm had come down, wrapped in a towel, roughly drying his hair. Squinting to decipher her writing, he read the note, making out Bill’s name and the farm, Crop Hill, underlined three times.

“You haven’t written down what the problem is,” he said, walking to the living room door.

Turning the sound down on the TV, Hilary turned round on the sofa.

“Bill never told me. Before you say anything, I did ask. He just said for me to get Veterinary up to the farm fast.”

Malcolm sighed, already getting cold, and went upstairs to find some warm clothes.

Using an old cloth handkerchief, Malcolm covered his face and walked deeper into the barn. The remains of the mother slumped in the corner, steaming in the cold, limbs half-gnawed.

None of his training had prepared him for this. None of his training had prepared him for being a rural vet full stop. He’d learnt how to recognize ringworm and deliver a calf. Learnt about anatomy. But his studies never covered how to translate Swaledale dialect and how it differed from Wharfedale, or how to keep your fingers working at three in the morning in a fierce moor wind. No, you picked that up as you went along. He wiped his forehead and turned the torch on. The light caught on the air. The bulb faded until the flimsy filament glow was the only thing visible and he remembered not picking up the newly charged batteries before he’d left the house.

He could hear the creature breathing, creaking out each broken lungful of air.

Malcolm creased his ammonia-burnt eyes. The beast’s hide was sticky with amniotic fluid, membrane caught between yellow teeth. Fur tar-black, apart from the ears, stained clot-red.

Malcolm started breathing again — shallow, though. He knew what waited in the corner. Not from Stickland’s book on anatomy or Cunningham’s Veterinary Physiology, but tales told over pints of sour beer, in polished wood taprooms.

Only a handful of days had passed from arriving in the Dales for him to hear the first tales of bargests, the red-eared, shape-changing hell hounds that skulked the stones of Troller’s Gill and the streets of Thirsk. There were stories of them hunting travellers across High Moss and carrying trusting cattle herds into tannin-stained water. Of course, they were just one of a cast of thousands, alongside boggarts, giants, cursed chairs, all used to scare children to bed and incomers from the fields. He’d paid these folk stories little attention. His countryside was one of dirt tracks and distemper, not hell hounds and hauntings.

Malcolm could do nothing here apart from become food. He kept the creature in line of sight and backed up to the door, reached behind him and pushed. The thick planks gave, then held.

“The door seems to be stuck, Bill,” he said.

“Not stuck, Veterinary. Locked.”

“Well, unlock it, then.”

“Can’t do that, Veterinary.”

“What do you mean, you can’t do that? Open the door, Bill,” Malcolm said, trying to keep his voice even.

“Got family to think of. Yon beast needs feeding,” the farmer said, pausing. Through the boards, Malcolm could smell tobacco burn as Bill sucked on a hand-rolled cigarette.

“Stop messing about, Bill. I’ve got family, too. Open this door,” Malcolm said. The creature’s eyes started to open.

“Not my problem,” Bill said.

Malcolm undid his jacket and reached into his pocket for his mobile phone from under old receipts. Tissues fluttered to the floor like anemic, torn butterflies. With his right hand steadying the left, he turned the phone on, the small screen pulsing faint light. The stack of lines in the top corner refused to appear. No signal. He waited, staring, not wanting to look round, giving the phone screen all of his attention. It stayed blank, no service provider name or EMERGENCY CALLS ONLY appearing like a hidden portal to transport him out of this place. His fingers went numb. The phone clattered, back popping off, spitting the battery across the dirt.

He collected the phone up and dropped the shattered plastic into his pocket, then banged on the door.

“Bill? Are you still there?” he asked.

“I am, veterinary. I’m not going anywhere,” the old farmer said. Malcolm could picture him leaning against the wall, cap pulled down low against the ice that laced the air up here, no matter what the time of year.

“I know you’re not going to let me out, but can you do me a favor? Can you get my vet’s bag out of my car? The door’s open,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady.

“Don’t think I can. I know what you carry in that black bag. Surgical tools, syringes, tranquilizers. Get that for you, and you’ll try and stop the beast. You’re too good a bloke. I don’t want you suffering, thinking you can get out. Just go over there. Let the creature do its thing. All nice and quick-like.”

Malcolm checked his pockets for bubble packs of ketamine, finding two, both empty.

Crouching low, he looked around the shed. The walls looked ramshackle, but the planks were thick and soaked with a hundred years of creosote. There was no way he was going to break out by hand. Squinting, he scanned the walls for tools. A muck crome or a silage knife, anything he could use to prize his way out.

“You still there, Veterinary?” Bill said.

For a moment Malcolm thought about not answering.

“Yes,” he said, still scanning round for tool racks.

Slipping on the cobbles, Malcolm walked to a side wall and got his fingers behind one of the planks. The wood stayed where it was, pushing a splinter the length of a scalpel into his palm, blood pooling. He wiped his hand on his jacket and sat down, back against the wall. The bargest was in no rush to move, its eyes not leaving him once. Damp from the floor seeped through Malcolm’s trousers, turning his skin to ice.

Try as he might, he couldn’t rationalize this. Here was just another creature. Shaped by story and drunken bragging but a creature of flesh and bone, nonetheless. Even so, the cunning burning in the newborn, thousand-year-old creature’s eyes charred his marrow with fear.

It was hopeless. He was stuck in here with this animal. Animals were his work. His life. He’d spent the last ten years tending them, keeping them alive, even when he knew most of them were destined for the slaughterhouse. He pulled out his wallet, hand shaking as he undid the clasp. His hand spasmed, tipping coins and credit cards around him in a fan. Reaching down, he picked up a photo, now coated with half-rotten straw. He tried to clean the dirt off, so he could see Hilary and Tamsin properly, but they just became more obscured under a fine brown film of decay.