The Mammoth Book of Monsters (Mammoth Books) by Jones Stephen

Author:Jones, Stephen [Jones, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Constable Robinson
Published: 2011-07-04T04:00:00+00:00

They were tender to Jim Hardy, but the hard-tongued doctor whisked him off to the hospital.

Later the policeman, augmented by two more senior others from Hodcieux, interviewed the village, and subsequently the three of us at the house.

I have no clue what Swange said, or Doris, (though I suspect it was very little.) I merely told the truth, which is usually the easiest way, where one can.

The village man nodded when I said I too had afterwards gone to look at the broken graves, and seen how the grass and ivy were disturbed. One of the senior officers, he who had already demanded why I had gone to the village at all in the middle of the night – my answer, to see what was wrong, made him snort – now commented sternly that for so curious and prying a woman, I appeared unnmoved. I replied that in my work, curiosity is not a fault, but that also I had learned some self-control.

(Doris told me after, with a strange momentary pride in me, that she had heard the village policeman remark to the less favourable other that I was, “The best type of Englishwoman”. I had gone fearlessly to the village in order to help, and confronted by horror had not lost my nerve. With the aid of such “handmaidens, young or old” the Empire had been forged. This amused me rather. My ancestry is mixed, and certainly I do not regard myself as particularly British, let alone English.)

The police departed and we were left alone.

The scalding day passed uncomfortably. The animals of Cha-zen’s menagerie seemed all of them unsettled. The cats in the wood were shrilling, the other cat, for which at last the tunnel had been unlocked in daylight, skulked and now refused to leave the pen for the trees. Neither would the small bears come down from their high perches, even when tempted with food. The beetles, rats and snakes kept intransigently to inner refuges of the cages from which they could not be seen. Various other species, including the lizards, appeared to have dug pits in the earth of their pens and hidden. Swange was in a stiff, cold rage. One could see it from his stalking about the lawns. He was like a guardian forced to take charge of unruly children he disliked. Later he too disappeared, as he so often did. Doris, when I met her, was pale and anxious.

By now I had abandoned my efforts on the library. Instead I’d searched among the crates of books, attempting to find anything that would throw light on those travels the professor had previously made, and so on the collections of curios, and animals, thereby accumulated.

I did locate certain texts relating at least to some of these. The corracats, for example, hailed from South Africa, where they were known to live in prides. Hunters and carrion-eaters both, sometimes they would climb trees, and in the heart of certain jungles, they were said to be the servants of a particular god, who, taking cat-shape, troubled the afterlife of men.

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