The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Dr Manners stepped up to the operating table. He pulled on his rubber gloves. He smiled.

The calf lay helpless and tethered, silent now, its eyes rolling in terror.

‘Time to anaesthetize the patient,’ he said.

This was the beginning: the first calf in the world to be turned into a unicorn. They had chosen a young one because the tissues were soft — it would be easier to make a hole in its forehead and implant the narwhal horn — and because its own horns were not yet formed, it would not be necessary to scoop them out, as they would have to do with the larger animals. Of course, being so young, it was more likely to die during the operation, but there were plenty more of the beasts in the paddock.

Five million pounds’ worth of beasts…

The sawn-off narwhal horn was ready in its jar of disinfectant. It was incredible how like a unicorn’s horn it was: no wonder narwhals in the olden days had been called the unicorn fish. An assistant, also gowned and masked, had laid out the sterile instruments: the razor to shave a patch between the creature’s ears; the drill to bore a hole in its skull, the scalpels and sutures and pads of cotton wool. A cylinder of blood for emergencies stood on a trolley close by.

‘See to the doors,’ ordered Manners. The assistant pressed a button and the doors to the forecourt moved together.

Outside, the children threw themselves frantically against the heavy steel partitions, trying to push them apart.

It was impossible. There was only a small gap now and it was shrinking fast. Rollo managed to slip through, and then Madlyn.

But not Ned. Before he could follow, the doors clanged relentlessly shut and Ned was left outside.

Dr Manners had reached for the syringe. It was poised above the head of the little calf; he was about to plunge the needle into a vein on its throat.

It was at this moment that Madlyn and Rollo almost fell into the room.

‘Well well, what have we here?’ the doctor said. And then in his usual calm voice: ‘Tie them up. We’ll deal with them later.’ He turned to the children. ‘Since you’re here you might as well watch. It isn’t every nosy child who sees the creation of a completely new beast.’

‘You can’t,’ shouted Rollo. ‘You—’

And then a hand came down over his mouth.

The children had no chance against Fangster and the assistant as they were thrown to the floor and trussed up with surgical tape. They were as defenceless as the wretched beast on the operating table.

And there was nobody to help them. They were quite alone.

The operation was going forward now. Fangster had selected his razor, the assistant had taken the drill out of its sterile wrapping.

Manners had put the syringe down on the trolley to deal with the children. Now he put out his hand to reach for it.

Except that it wasn’t there. It had rolled over twice on a perfectly flat surface and crashed on to the floor.

‘What on earth are you doing, you idiot?’ shouted Manners.

‘It wasn’t me,’ said Fangster angrily. ‘I didn’t touch it.’ He turned to the assistant. ‘You must have knocked it with your arm.’

‘No, I didn’t. I wasn’t anywhere near.’

‘Prepare another one,’ ordered Manners.

A second syringe was taken from its wrapping and filled with anaesthetic. Manners was angry now. He jabbed the point of the needle hard into the throat of the little calf, which gave a bellow of pain.

But before he could press in the plunger, the syringe jerked itself out of his hand, flew up into the air, and impaled itself in a fire bucket.

Manners took a deep breath. There wasn’t really anything wrong. It was just operation nerves. People didn’t realize that even the most famous surgeons felt anxious before an important operation. He was seeing things.

Fangster had pulled the narwhal horn out of its jar and was holding it. And then suddenly he wasn’t holding it any more. The horn was floating quite by itself up into the air… high it floated and higher, before it did a somersault and came down again behind him.

‘Ow, ow — what are you doing?’ yelled Fangster at the assistant. ‘Stop it, that hurts!’

‘I’m not doing anything,’ said the assistant. ‘It’s the horn — it’s digging itself into your backside.’

Madlyn managed to turn her head and look at Rollo. They had felt alone and friendless and they had been wrong.

Manners had pulled himself together. If he couldn’t make the syringe work, he’d have to stun the creature instead.

‘Get me a hammer,’ he shouted.

But before the assistant could obey him, a coil of rubber tubing had unwound itself slowly… very slowly, like a snake uncoiling from a long sleep, and then — still slowly — it rose, floated dreamily across to Manners and began to wind itself around the doctor’s neck.

‘Ugh! Glup! Let go,’ spluttered the doctor.

‘Brenda,’ whispered Madlyn. ‘She does so love strangling.’

Fangster was going wild. He went to pull a scalpel out of the rack, determined to make an incision and implant the horn somehow — but before he could reach for the scalpel, the scalpel reached for him. It moved by itself out of the rack and came towards him, and he just had time to duck as it flew past him and embedded itself in the wall.

An arc lamp on the ceiling swayed, then crashed to the ground. Sunita always did her best work on ceilings. A second lamp followed it — and a splinter of glass hit the assistant on the shoulder.

‘I’m off,’ he cried, and disappeared through the door at the back.

A cylinder of blood fell on its side. The sticky liquid oozed out on to the floor and Fangster slipped and lay on his back.

‘Stop it,’ he screamed to the empty air. ‘Get off me. I know you’re there, I can feel you. Stop tramping on my chest.’

The children turned to each other. So The Feet too had put aside their own troubles and come to help.

Manners had managed to tear himself free from the rubber tubing. But now he went berserk. He seized the drill with its lethally sharp point and rushed at the children. It was their fault. This madness had started when they got in. Crunching through broken glass, slithering, cursing, Manners lifted his arm, ready to bring the point down on Rollo’s head.

What happened next was so ghastly that Manners thought he would die of it. His head was thrust back by an invisible hand. He was seized and shaken, and beaten and punched… but that was not the worst of it. As he fell back against the wall there was a kind of flurry as though something was being dislodged.

And then he felt claws scrabbling across his face. He could not see them but he knew that they were there — grey and vile and utterly obscene. And after the claws, trailing across his cheek, came something long and cold and scaly. A tail…

Then, from the dark nothingness that was attacking him, there came a scream.

Ned had wasted no time after the doors clanged shut and left him outside.

Somehow he had to get a message through to Sir George and the police — but how? And then he remembered the whaler tied up to the jetty. All seagoing ships had a short-wave radio. If only he wasn’t too late.

The boat was still there — but there were signs of activity; ropes being coiled, the sound of an engine starting, and men moving purposefully on the deck. It was only now that he was afraid that they wouldn’t let him use the radio. Men who poached the rarest and loveliest of whales would not be the kind that helped people in need.

Then, as he ran along the jetty, he noticed something strange. The Norwegian flag had gone and a new flag had been hoisted in its place.

It was a most unusual flag, made up of a pair of long red underpants, a green scarf and a purple cap.

Where had he seen those colours before? Of course! On the walls of the Mundanians’ hut. They were the national colours of Mundania! And now the man who had been coiling the rope turned.

‘So! What you do here?’ said Slavek. ‘You must go to tell—’

Ned in a rush of words explained. ‘I need to use the radio. I need someone to send a message, please, please. They’re in such danger!’

Slavek nodded. ‘Come with me.’

He led him into a cubicle where a man in oilskins was sitting, guarded by one of Slavek’s cousins with a gun.

‘We have taken over boat,’ said Slavek cheerfully. ‘Now we go home.’ He prodded the radio operator. ‘When he has sent your message we throw him in sea with the others.’

‘Really?’

‘Of course. We need boat.’

‘But what will happen to them?’

Slavek shrugged.

‘They can swim, perhaps. Is pity, because they are bad men.’

The last thing Ned saw as he raced back to the lab was the old lady with the gold tooth leaning over the railings, waving goodbye.

The steel doors were open. The lab was a welter of broken glass, spilt liquid and upturned furniture. Rollo was hanging on to the rope of the calf. Madlyn was bent over a sink, trying not to be sick.

And the ghosts had become visible — but although they had saved the children and the calf, they did not look triumphant or victorious.

They were clustered anxiously round Ranulf, who was sitting on a locker with his head in his hands. No wonder that this stately and dignified ghost had given such a dreadful scream. Ranulf’s shirt was open, and something — obviously — was most seriously wrong.

Of Manners and Fangster there was no sign.

They had locked themselves into the cloakroom. It was the room where they scrubbed up before operations: white and clinical and disinfected. There were a row of basins, a shower and two toilets in adjacent cubicles.

They were safe here. The door of the cloakroom was barred, and if necessary they could retreat further, into the toilets, and lock them too.

‘They won’t… get us… here,’ said Manners. His teeth were chattering and he had bruises on his cheek from one of the canisters which had flown through the air and hit him. The vet was the colour of cheese and was trembling uncontrollably. Both men had forgotten unicorns and the millions of pounds they had hoped to make. All they wanted now was to save their skins.

And then they saw that something had happened to the door. It was still tightly shut, but in the wooden panel there had appeared a kind of fuzziness… a shimmering shape which leaped down on to the floor and crept towards them.

‘It’s a rat,’ screeched Manners, backing away.

But not an ordinary rat. A rat out of the vilest of dreams: huge and misshapen and scabrous, with yellow teeth and with a body that wavered and flickered and disappeared and then re-formed itself.

Slowly, it crawled forward, opening its mouth, searching — and then stopped.

‘Shoo! Shoo — go away.’

Fangster grabbed the toilet brush and hit the animal hard across the back. There was a strange, squelchy sound and the rat vanished.

‘It’s gone!’

‘No. No. Look, it’s re-formed itself. Oh Lord, it’s obscene!’

The rat moved closer and the two men backed away, gibbering with fear. This was the worst thing so far, this disgusting, shape-changing thing, looking for something to chew.

‘Maybe we could jump over it and make a dash for it,’ suggested Manners.

But as soon as they moved, the rat moved too — sitting up on its hind legs, chomping… seeking…

It had come very close to Manners’s foot; it opened its mouth.

But what it found was wrong. It did not want hard non-ectoplasmic shoes; it did not want trouser legs smelling of disinfectant.

The rat wanted what it had always had and needed. It wanted what had violently and suddenly been torn from him. It wanted the familiar hairy chest and well-known heart of the man to whom it belonged.

Shaken and upset and displaced, Ranulf’s rat held the two men prisoner and waited.