Inside, a lighthouse keeper watches over the little port. He keeps
guard over the people of the village inland. He sits in his study drinking tea
and watching his black and white television set, the squall of the sea-wind
reduced to a faint hiss passing through imperfections in the window, like a
slick tongue of cool breath.
As the man sits there flicking through the channels, observing the
ancient images of laughing celebrities, advertisements for butter substitutes
and indigestion tablets, and smiling women sat beside thick-haired men driving
convertibles, he hears a noise from the lighthouse crown. He immediately mutes
the television.
I swear it came from upstairs,
he thinks. He supposes he’s hearing things, but it was a single low thud, against
the rattling wind. He’s sure of it. As if something had flown into the crown of
the lighthouse. Worried, he creeps upstairs to investigate, bracing himself for
a maelstrom of wind, expecting to see a glass slat missing from the thick dome
of glass.
But all is calm, apart from the wind lapping against the lighthouse outside, now reduced to a low rush as the periphery of the storm begins to pass
overhead. He sniffs. An odd smell lingers in his nose: sour, like gone off
milk. And then he hears the noise again, startled. He twists on the spot, mouth
agape as if his mandible has been cracked open. He searches the dome
frantically, as the beam of the light’s eye pulses steadily into the night.
And then comes the noise a final time. He looks up and sees the
outline of a limpid thing covering the dome, one wing splayed out as it raises
the other into the darkness. It comes down and the glass cracks. The thing
swipes a second time and the panel falls through. And then it pushes itself off
violently from the dome, shrieking, taken into the updraught.
The man falls down, covering his ears, and crawls to the low wall,
girded above by the fractured eyeball of glass. Wind howls in through the break
in the sphere. He fumbles for the cross inside his denim jacket and grasps it
in his palm. Holy Mother of God,
he says in his head. God,
protect me! But then, from
somewhere out there in the dark, he hears a terrible sound, like a hurricane
being channelled through a keyhole. The cry is so piercing that he holds his
ears again, but still his bones quiver inside his flesh, resonant with the note
of fear.
Something white materialises, rushing towards the dome. It breaks
through in a halo of glass. The searchlight stops pulsing. The sea-bleached
teeth find their purchase.
***
The village is a place where once a great race of hunters lived. A
noble race, stewards of the land, respectful to their quarry. But then came the
age of greed. Now is the time of the great darkness, all memory of the time
before vanquished for ever. Fear rules this land, and all people are too afraid
to venture into the old places: the forests are forbidden. There’s nothing
there but ghosts and goblins, the village women tell their children. And wolves. The most fearsome, giant
wolves. With blunt, bone-crunching teeth, bigger than butchers’ knives, ready
to chew their tender hides to gristle.
One night in the
village, a young boy named Lucas lay sleeping, his dreams wracked with terrible
visions. He dreamed of the lighthouse keeper, who had disappeared only a few
days earlier. He saw him screaming for his life and protecting his face from
something. Then he saw a vision of the ship that had run aground the night
after the lighthouse keeper disappeared. All fourteen souls on board were
unaccounted for when a search party went to recover the fishing vessel the next
morning. The lighthouse keeper was nowhere to be found. All traces of the
fish-stock were gone, too, and the men reported that an unearthly smell seemed
to linger on the deck, some acrid aftertaste stinging their nostrils.
Lucas stirs, turning
over in his sleep. He is inside a cave, a floating perspective consumed in the
cavernous dark, and he can sense that something is stirring. He sees a grey
sac, swelling on the surface of the water like a pustule, rolling over and
over, accumulating into a moist and pallid cocoon. Tossed about in the increasing
violence of the waves, it’s washed up onto a platform of rock, like some
sinister offering. Lucas can now see that something is awakening inside,
growing, pulsating, its milky limbs tracing their blind trajectories across the
inner surface of the sac. Lightning illuminates the cave and the crackling
storm outside booms and bays. The flabby seal of the grey mass starts to tear.
And now, the thing, previously cocooned in its slime, breaks
through the limpid seal. It wriggles out onto its stomach, finding its bony
feet, its two soft pallid wings slowly stretching out into the cool draught of
the cave. Eyeless, sexless, its teeth like shards of bleached bone or
alabaster, it snaps and snarls in agony, its cries drowned out by the sea
squall. Furious at its pain, unable to express its agony in words, it calls out
the name of its maker in a series of howling cries and terrible screeches, some
breaking out into the mute beyond of ultrasonic.
The creature
blindly traces the outline of its birthing place in high-pitched clicks, and
then it lurches its head upwards, making a single jump towards the roof of the
cave. It holds on to the slick-rock by its limb suckers. As the lightning
pulses, Lucas can make out remains littering a platform: the carcasses of
sea-trout, bream, mackerel and other fish. And larger bones – unmistakeably
human.
The creature
hangs there, shrieking above the sea squall. It seems to pulsate whitely, the
illusion of reality breaking as the dream heightens. And just before Lucas
awakens in a patchwork of sweat, the creature turns its gaze toward him, and he
sees its face. Small black fleshed-over patches stare blindly where its eyes
should be, and its mouth is stuffed full of shards of haphazard teeth.
Lucas shoots back into consciousness, transported from
dream-visions to the moonlit emptiness of his room. Sitting there, breathless,
he can feel a dampness in between his legs, and the faint odour of urine fills
his nose.
That’s when he decides to find the creature.
***
When the sun rises Lucas is ready, sitting on his bed and watching
the light peer up over the horizon in a faint red blaze. He has even prepared a
note for his mother and father, which he leaves on his pillow:
Tell Granddad and Brother not
to worry about me. Father, I shall bring back the body of this beast, and you
shall find your boy a man. And Mother, I just want you to know I love you the
most. Tell father not to try to find me – I will do this for you both. With
love,
Lucas
The task of killing the beast lies before him. He takes his
father’s best hunting blade for protection. He also takes a length of rope –
about forty metres – to lower himself down to the cave. He packs a lunch of
pork pie, pickles, celery and a small loaf of sweet-meal bread, all tossed into
a shoulder sack. He puts on his fur boots, gloves and hat and takes the
oil-lamp from the cabinet by the front door.
By the time he has reached the edge of the village, Lucas can hear
the rising cries of sea birds. As he turns back, he sees seagulls, whirling and
wheeling above the mist-enveloped buildings in the slowly lightening morning
sky. They wait for their chance to snatch, sniffing out the unusually thin
catch that will soon be displayed in the market square.
Walking down the path to the coast, Lucas starts thinking about
something his father once said: One
day, you’re going to have a title, son. And the only person who can decide that
for you is yourself. The man you’ll become is the man you make. And then he
thought about the livelihood of the village: the hunting of game and fishing,
the culls, the superstitious old wives’ tales. And the fear: the fear was the
thing that most unsettled him. How everyone was so afraid of the old forests,
of their own shadows – of each other. His father talked of bravery: he’d show
him what true bravery meant!
Idling like this, Lucas eventually reaches bridge that crosses the
river, about a mile from the shore. He follows the bend in the river for a
while and then heads up into the cresting hills that rise on the headland above
the water. He can still recall vividly from his dream a vision of the coast: he
remembers a single apple tree, thick with blossom and perched a few feet away
from the craggy outcrops. And now, as he walks along the cliffs, the sea
booming against rock and chalk somewhere beneath his feet, he can see in front
of him that very tree.
He approaches it and sits down, resting against it. Taking off his
pack, he takes out the pork pie and bites into it, satisfied. He then takes out
the celery. He chomps into it but chews it idly before spitting the pulp out
and sitting there. Lucas then hears a low thud, and another. He looks around
him and sees that the apples are starting to fall. He stares up in wonderment
at the fruit-laden tree, then he plucks one from a bough, wiping it on his
shirt before sinking his teeth into the sweet crunchy flesh. He takes a couple
more and stuffs them into his pack.
Once full, he sits there deliberating briefly, looking out at the
slightly overcast sky and the endless sea. He wonders what awaits him down
there. Whether he should turn back. But
it’s thoughts like that that make the boy, he thinks.
He stands up and takes the rope from the pack, tying it around the
tree twice and looping the end into a figure-of-eight knot. He then tightens
the other end around his waist, knotting it, and steadily inches his way
towards the edge of the cliff. He gazes down at the sprawling sea beneath him
and has to steady his nerves. He calms himself with reassuring words and
breathes through his nose. And then, he closes his eyes, holds the rope tightly
and takes one step back, onto his right foot.
His foot slips and he plummets, the rope too short and snapping clean
just before he hits the water. Lucas has the vague understanding that he is
under water, the world drowned out in incoherent murmur. And then everything
goes dark.
***
When he awakens, Lucas is inside the cave. He has shivered himself
into consciousness, it seems. He feels around him and his hands describe the
vague outlines of jagged objects: bones – animal, and human. And, sitting there,
entombed in the darkness, he can sense somehow he is not alone. As his eyes
sharpen to the darkness and his other senses become attuned, he can hear every drop
of water in the cave, can feel the shudder of every wave breaking on the cliffs
outside. And he can detect the low breathing of something else apart from
himself, just in front of him. It lingers there, foul-smelling. In the
darkness, something approaches, and as it does Lucas can make out the faint
outline of a pale skull, the holes of two black eyes peering blindly out at
him.
The boy remembers his pack. He fumbles around him. Please be here. Please be here. And
please don’t be broken. Aha! He’s
found it. He reaches inside for the lamp and, miraculously, it is still intact.
He ignites it and holds it up in front of the beast. The creature recoils,
lurching off into the shadows, clinging to the roof of the cave and making terrified
noises. The boy laughs to himself, feeling superior to the dumb beast. But then
he realises it is just scared. He lowers the flow of gas slightly, and the lamp
burns just brightly enough to illuminate the darkness surrounding them.
‘Are you scared?’ he coos. ‘Are you frightened?’ The boy feels
terrible. ‘Don’t be frightened. Honest.’
The creature begins to tentatively climb down the wall. The boy
holds out the lamp and, gradually, he can make out the creature approaching in
the darkness. It looks like some great oversized albino bat, with two beady
glazed-over eyes like cataracts, and a mouthful of jagged teeth that seem to
grin out at him, glinting like silver. It sniffs at the lamp, and the boy reaches
out to touch it. It recoils slightly as he does, but eventually the boy touches
its face. The skin is cool and damp.
‘There, there,’ he says. He reaches down towards his bag with one
arm and fumbles inside. His hand trembles over the sheathed hunting blade then
rests on something cool. He brings it out: an apple.
‘Here you go,’ says the boy. ‘Not everything you eat has to be
flesh.’
But then the creature lurches back, screeching. Loud voices rise
sonorous outside the cave, and suddenly the entrance is illuminated. Several
men in a small boat plough in, and at the prow is the boy’s father. ‘There’s
the beast!’ he roars.
Lucas runs to stand in front of the creature, but the creature
swipes him away.
‘Kill the beast!’ his father hollers. They subdue it into a corner
with flame and volleys of stones. The beast defeated, the father produces a
spear from the boat. Mounting the platform, he approaches and thrusts it into
the creature’s torso, piercing its heart. It screeches in fear and confusion as
he thrusts it in deeper and deeper, breaking the metal point off inside its
body. The creature convulses and heaves as its final cry echoes throughout the
cave, as if the rocks have absorbed the sounds of its anguish. Its mouth hangs
open emptily. Still holding the broken spear, the man turns towards his son.
‘Son,’ he cries, ‘you had me and your mother worried sick.’ He
holds out his arms, out-stretched. But the boy is reticent to accept his
father’s embrace, still horrified at the creature’s cruel and pitiable death.
‘Come son,’ says the boy’s father, staring into his eyes. ‘Come. Your mother is
expecting you.’
***
The village is uproarious with their return, the folk amazed that
the boy is still alive, and incredulous as to the existence of this monster. What happened? What do you
remember? Is it true that the beast breathed fire? When the men lift the carcass from
the cart, cries of astonishment were heard, and one old lady faints cold.
‘Look at that beast,’ cries the boy’s father. ‘Look at those
teeth, and then tell me of this creature’s innocence.’ His gaze shifts to the
boy, then back to the crowd. ‘It is a beast, I tell you! Beast!’ he roars.
The men hang the creature upside down from a gibbet, and it stays
on display in the market square for several days. It hangs there, wings
slackened, slack-jawed, and its pale skin begins to darken gradually with rot.
Lucas goes out each night just to stare at its lost camera-hole eyes, its dead
expression.
They cut it down once the townsfolk become bored of it. They
quarter it and then whittle it down into bits, carting the remains to the four
corners of the outskirts of the village, deserted spots on the edges of dark
and ancient forests where terrible wolves are said to prowl. They scatter the
remains, and in time four orchards grow there, flourishing on a meal of spoiled
flesh and unearthly bone.
The apples gradually become known for their sweetness. But so unnaturally
grey-green, and prone to ripening too quickly.
Each autumn, after harvest, the village has a market fair, the
air filled with the scents of sweet pickles and preserves, fruits, breads,
salted meats – and yet still, occasionally, there comes a sickly scent, seeming
to drift in on the sea wind. It over-layers all else, carrying the faint but
unmistakeably sharp odour of sour milk.
