The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Mundanians had gone. The three children huddled together in the empty hut, stunned by what they had seen. They had to get back to the mainland and tell the world about this evil place — and quickly.

Ned opened the door a crack.

‘There’s no one about. If we drop down on to the beach and go round by the shore we should make it.’

They hadn’t gone far when they heard a sound which brought them up short: the desolate yet frantic mooing of a cow who has been separated from her calf. Then men shouting orders, the stamping of hooves…

‘It is big what will happen with the cows,’ the brothers had said. ‘It is big and it is soon. Perhaps it is tonight.’

Without hesitation, the children turned and ran back towards the buildings.

They had come to a kind of forecourt, a concreted yard with drainage channels which had been swabbed down with disinfectant. A big incinerator took up one side of the courtyard. On the other side was a very large building: grey and forbidding and windowless. It looked like an aircraft hangar or an industrial workshop.

Beside the incinerator was a row of large waste bins. The children ducked down behind them and waited.

They waited for what seemed a very long time. And then slowly — very slowly — the huge steel double doors began to draw apart. The gap grew wide, and wider — and there, as on a stage, lit up by arc lamps more brilliant and dazzling than any daylight, they saw an operating table, high and clinical and white. Chrome cylinders of oxygen stood beside it, and pressure gauges and trolleys loaded with jars of liquid and coils of rubber tubing. And close by was a rack of glittering, outsize instruments: scalpels and scissors and forceps and clamps.

Rollo gasped and Madlyn put an arm round his shoulder.

There was no one in the lab at first, but then a man in a white coat came in from a door at the back and walked over to a large sink and pulled out a long curled horn that had been soaking there.

The man turned, and they saw his face.

It was the vet with the black beard who had come to Clawstone to tell them that the cattle were sick. He had shaved off his beard but they knew him at once. It was this man that Rollo had glimpsed out of the window of the hotel.

But before they could work out what this meant they heard the sound of hooves and, walking past them, his head hanging, came a calf, led by a man in overalls.

The calf was snow-white and it walked as slowly as the beasts must have walked in the olden days on the way to the temple to be sacrificed, sensing their terrible fate. When it reached the stream of light coming from the double doors, it stiffened its legs and tried to dig its hooves into the concrete, but they slipped on the wet floor and the man jerked the rope and led it forward.

Rollo had recognized it at once. It was the youngest calf, the one he had watched being born. His calf.

Ned held him back as he tried to leap out of his hiding place.

‘Wait,’ he hissed. ‘We have to know.’

The man leading the calf tugged at the rope once more and the calf was dragged into the operating theatre.

The door on the right opened again and Dr Manners came in. He was dressed in a high-necked operating gown; a surgical mask was strung round his neck.

‘Is everything ready, Fangster?’ he asked, and the vet who had called himself Dr Dale nodded and lifted up the curled horn with the pointed end which he had taken from the bag that the whalers had brought ashore.

‘This is the smallest. We’ll need to pack the wound tight, but it should close over all right. And if not…’ He shrugged.

‘Quite so,’ said Dr Manners.

The calf was dragged up on to the operating table. It was mad with fear, fighting every inch of the way.

Dr Manners was filling a great syringe. The vet picked up the narwhal horn and held it above the head of the tethered beast.

And in that instant the children understood everything.