Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (15 page)

‘Tell me one thing?’ I asked. ‘Have I been here before?’

The doctor put his thumbs in his waistcoat and stared me hard in the face.

‘Not that I recall.
Your name is not on my register. But I have been practising for three decades and have not always been as careful with my paperwork as I must be these days. Can
you
ever remember coming to see me?’

‘No,’ I croaked. ‘I have no such recollection.’

‘Then let us say this was your first visit.’

I begged the doctor’s forgiveness and left the premises. On my way past the picture, I averted my face, not wishing to be reminded of my terrible ordeal.

Three months passed before I once again found myself in the City of Beasts. The terrier was waiting for me. He led me to the council room. This time I noticed that although the beasts walked upright and talked like humans, they wore no clothes. They did not smoke pipes, nor play flutes, nor drink ale. They were closer to beasts than they had been on my first incarceration.

‘Have you killed him yet?’ bleated the goat.

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘I didn’t think you were real—I thought you were all from a dream.’

‘Don’t make that mistake again,’ hissed the cat, and she drew a set of claws across my forearm, scratching me deeply.

This time, when I returned to my own world, I found myself on a park bench. It occurred to me that I had dozed off in the warm sun. I immediately inspected my arm and found blood. The skin was scored where something or someone had scratched me. It took me half an hour to run all the way to my psychiatrist.

‘Are you sure you haven’t come into contact with a local cat?’ he asked, as his receptionist dressed my wound. ‘What about a stray in the park? Some feral animal that might have attacked you while you slept? Or perhaps it’s not a cat scratch at all? Maybe you caught yourself on some barbed wire...?’

This time he was not so convincing. It was as if my stories were changing
his
beliefs. He asked me questions about the City of Beasts in a way that made it seem as if he were satisfying his own curiosity, about an exotic land he would never be able to visit, like tenth century Africa, or medieval Japan. Far from attempting to assure me that I was merely ill, and could be cured, he seemed intrigued by my adventures.

‘What am I to do?’ I asked him. ‘You told me I wouldn’t return to that place.’

‘I said I’d be surprised if you did—and I am.’

When I left his office I glanced up at the picture in the hallway. It had been changed. There was now an innocuous woodland scene—a shady path through a rough avenue of trees at the end of which was a shining lake. At least, it seemed innocent enough until I studied it more closely, and then it seemed to me that some of the shadows formed faces, and bodies, and were in fact animals hiding amongst the trees, waiting for someone to pass by the spot. Where they about to ambush a victim? That’s what it looked like to my eye.

This time I did not return to the office to confront the doctor, but hurried away, anxious to get home and amongst familiar surroundings. That night the wound on my arm pulsed and throbbed. I hoped it would not make me sick and put me into a fever. I was afraid of what might happen if my mind were in febrile state. While my head was clear and open, I could deal with this terrible ordeal, but I did not trust myself to remain sane were I to go into the drugged half-sleep that fever brings.

Another month passed, during which I did little but wait anxiously for any sign of the animals. In that time I went through the motions of researching my potential victim, just in case I was being watched. I discovered his whereabouts, his family circumstances and his habits.

He was a relatively young married man, with two small children. He lived in Shooter’s Hill and actually walked to work each day across Eltham Common to his company’s head office on Rochester Way. His morning walk was early—he began it at seven-thirty—and I saw possibilities in this walk should I ever have to carry out the deed.

Of course, I never expected to do that, but just when I thought I was rid of the nightmare, I once again found myself amongst those grotesque creatures in their city. This time they were not only without clothes,
but
on all fours. When I stood before the council, they were in a bare room, without furniture, and stood before me like a domestic farmyard group.

‘Have you killed him yet?’ whined the cat.

‘No,’ I moaned. ‘I cannot.’

‘You
must
,’ she screeched.

I found myself in a department store, walking around as if in a dream, staring at leather coats and handbags. An assistant asked me if I was all right. She took me to a staff room where they gave me a cup of tea and a biscuit. Eventually I made my way back to the street, but I felt sick inside.

This time I did not go to the psychiatrist. It had occurred to me that the attacks were becoming less surreal. That is to say the animal world was becoming more like the actual world with every visit. In the City of Beasts they now looked like animals and walked like animals. It was only in their speech that they became preternatural and even that was changing. I decided that the next time I visited them they would be in some meadow, surrounded by wildflowers and hedgerows, making animal noises. I felt no desperate urge to carry out their command, since here I could not be touched. All I had to do was
keep making
promises until they went away.

That was before I visited my nephew.

Peter, fourteen years of age, met me at the station and carried my bags to the taxi.

‘I’m glad you come to us, uncle,’ he said. ‘Mother was beginning to remark on how down you have sounded on the phone lately.’

His mother was my sister Alice.

‘How’s Toby?’ I asked
,
enquiring after the terrier I had bought him. ‘Still boisterous?’

‘Oh yes, you know how silly terriers can get, uncle.’

Toby met us at the garden gate and leapt up and down in the excited way that terriers do. I threw a chewed tennis ball for him, already sodden with saliva, mentally grimacing and wanting to wash my hands immediately. He brought it back instantly, putting it in front of me and looking up eagerly, yapping when I ignored the offer to continue the game.

Alice fed me and I went to bed early. I woke the next morning feeling remarkably refreshed. Alice and Peter had to go to town, to get Peter some shoes, and I was left sitting in a deck chair in the garden, soaking in the country ambience. I guessed Toby would be bothersome, but I actually did not see him until he came sidling round the corner of the cottage close to noon. He came round to the front of me and sat on the lawn, his head on one side,
his
mouth partly open. He was panting as if he had been running from a distant place.

I felt it best to ignore him and continued reading the
paper which
had been delivered shortly before.

After a while he was so quiet I thought he had gone away, but when I slowly lowered the newspaper, he was still there, staring up at me. There was such a look of malevolence on his canine features I started backwards and let out a little cry. He continued to glare at me, ferociously. Then just as Alice and Peter came in view, walking up the lane, he spoke.

‘When are you going to kill him?’ he growled, quietly.

My nightmare was beginning to materialise. The beasts were able to get at me in the real world. They were penetrating what I believed to be a safe haven—sanctuary—and I knew then that I would never be let alone until I did as I had been ordered to do.
It was true
,
I had no choice
. The council had known that from the start and had told me so.

That weekend, in the peaceful atmosphere of the cottage, I devised a scheme to murder the pharmaceutical manufacturer. I have always been a meticulous planner and I doubt anyone could have faulted my detail. I was to follow him one morning from his home to his office and on the way push him under a bus. It was a simple but I hoped effective plan.

A week later, in the early dawn, I stalked the victim from his house, tracking him across the common. While he was waiting to cross Rochester Way, busy even at that time of the morning, I bent down as if pretending to tie a loose shoelace and butted him hard in the back with my head. The blow sent him flying out into the traffic. He was hit first by one car, then another from the opposite direction.

Tossed into the air like a run-over rabbit, he landed almost at my feet again. His bloody face stared up at me with surprise on his features. It was certain he was dead.

I hurried away from the scene, hoping my part in his death had not been noticed. My suitcase was ready in a locker at the train station and I went there immediately. I caught a train to my sister’s house. Toby was there, waiting at the gate for me when I arrived at dusk. I looked him directly in the eye.

‘It’s done,’ I said.

He did not reply, but merely seemed eager for me to throw his damned ball for him. I did it to get rid of him while I entered the garden, actually feeling less revulsion for his toy than I had the first time. Later I caught him staring at me, as I moved around the house, in a quiet, understanding way.

Nothing happened for a few days. Then at dusk one evening I was trying to watch television, but was experiencing difficulty in focusing. I could hear the words plainly enough though and I recognised the voice of my politician friend. It seemed that he had been for a long time an executive on the board of a pharmaceuticals company. He was holding forth to the correspondent on the terrible circumstances of the death of the firm’s late chairman. My acquaintance said he was preparing to leave politics to become the new chairman of that company, to fill the
void which
the tragedy had left.

‘What a remarkable co-incidence,’ I said to Toby. ‘I had no idea of a connection there—had you?’

Toby refrained from answering me, possibly because there were other humans in the house, but I knew what he was thinking.

‘I expect,’ I said, ‘we might have to do something about the
new
chairman, too? And we mustn’t forget the psychiatrist. My sessions with him are supposed to be all strictly confidential, but really, he knows far too much...’

At midnight, just after the church clock had struck ten, I discovered the nature of my reward from the Council of Beasts. As I took off my shoes and socks I noticed that my feet had begun to shrink and harden. I stood up quickly and stared into the dressing-table mirror. The pupils of my eyes were no longer round, but were vertical ellipses. On top of my head two small bumps were beginning to poke through my scalp.

I turned to Toby, sitting in the doorway.

‘Maaaahhhh,’ I said to him. ‘Maaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh...’

Toby smiled.

I share David Attenborough’s love of frogs, toads and natterjacks. In this age of genetic engineering I have written several versions of the following story, but this is the one I like best.

Isabel Fairfax woke by the large pond in her garden to find a beautiful young man asleep beside her. He was dandelion-haired and handsome, and completely naked. She marvelled at the way the droplets of water on his skin glistened with rainbow colours in the sunlight.
Skin that was pale to the eye and firm to the touch.
Beneath it were tight muscles, smooth as
stepping stones
across a stream. He had small hips, a flat stomach, slim strong shoulders and hard rounded buttocks with a shallow dimple in each.

Isabel wished she were twenty instead of forty as she carefully picked a piece of green pond weed from behind the youth’s ear and threw it back where it belonged.

‘Wake up, sleepy head,’ she said drowsily. ‘You’ve wandered into the wrong garden. You’re lying on my book of Tennyson’s poems and dampening the pages.’