“Jesus Christ!” he shouted as his heart thundered in his ears. The seatbelt cut into his chest as his neck whipped forward, clobbering the back of his skull against the headrest in recoil. “What the fuck is this?” Cecil shrieked. In his blood a mixed cocktail of rage and fright jolted him up a notch, but just as he was about to hook his fingers around the door handle, he realized that the man had disappeared. As angry as Cecil was, a rush of unknown terror seized him, and instead, he locked the doors.
In the road he could see a torn sheep, its entrails traversing the entire span of the backroad. “Fresh kill,” he murmured as he surveyed the situation. The innards of the animal were still steaming; evidence of a recent slaughter, but there was more. Behind the animal, in the shadow made my Cecil’s high beams, another sheep was lying dead and stiff.
All around the SUV the darkness closed in, and Cecil felt like a stranger in the alien landscape of his home island. A plethora of synopses from various horror films darted through his mind, unwelcome as they were at the worst times. The silence of the night terrified him most. Such absence of movement in the grasses somehow implied a lack of breath that made his lungs feel thick just considering it. It was an uncomfortable peace that he was suddenly jerked from by a loud thump against his window that made him jump.
“Oi! You!” the man from the road exclaimed angrily. “What do you know about this?”
Cecil frowned in befuddlement. “What do you mean?”
The old man, scrawny and wide-eyed, just stared at him, waiting for an answer.
“What do you mean?” Cecil repeated.
The old man shook his head under his narrow-brim leather hat. “I can’t hear a bloody word you are saying. Get out of your goddamn car, boy!”
“No fucking way!” Cecil retorted, adamant that the old man meant him harm.
“Did you do this?” the old man shouted, hammering on his doorframe with the side of his fisted hand. “Did you kill my sheep? You fucking city people. What are you? A tourist?”
“Hey, piss off, you grumpy old bastard!” Cecil growled at his window. His breath blossomed out on the glass. When it faded, he noticed the old man’s twelve gauge yawning at him. “Christ! Are you crazy?” he screeched, throwing up his hands in surrender and falling back toward the passenger seat.
“Get out!” the old man ordered.
“Why?” Cecil wailed.
“If you don’t get out, I will blow out your tires, boy!” came the answer with a series of sharp taps of iron on glass from the barrel. “You can’t go any further anyway, until my animals are out of the road.”
Cecil was not about to push his luck with the frenzied old man. “Alright, okay!” he shouted, still holding his hands in full view when he could. The door opened and Cecil dreaded the cold air that came with its liberation, but he had to deal with this now. He did not want to die hungry.
“I did not run your animals over,” he promptly told his accuser. Pointing to his grill, “Don’t you think my car would have been full of blood and shit if I had killed your sheep?”
The tiny old man, no taller than five feet and weighing less than a wet poodle, leered at the fancy stranger through sunken eyes. For a moment he was pondering on the theory, studying the front bumper and plates with his eyes.
From where Cecil stood, the old man’s face looked like a skull. His gaunt features of deep ocular cavities and protruding cheekbones aged him considerably, but in the slight light of the beams, the shadows only emphasized how underweight he was. His neck, especially, was stringy, covered in stretched skin.
‘He looks like a living mummy,’ Cecil reckoned in thought. ‘Doubt he ever eats his own sheep.’
“I suppose you are right,” he told Cecil reluctantly, lowering his gun. “Like I don’t already have just enough livestock to make the year. My God, I am losing so much money here.”
Cecil knew he was not going to get anywhere with his father’s gate and he was not going any further up the road. He figured it best to stick with the old man for now and at least get some information; maybe even something to eat.
“I tell you what,” he offered, “I can help you ate least get them out of the road.”
The old man shrugged. “What is the use? It will just clear the road for you to leave. And I’ll never know who killed my animals. I keep them inside the fence, you know, penned up. I do my best, but I am just one man tending to all my livestock and sometimes,” he sighed, “they just wander off.”
By the old man’s pitiful tone and body language, it was hard even for Cecil not to feel sorry for him. “Listen… uh, sir… I am a veterinarian by trade. Let me help you get them off the road and then I’ll have a look for you, you know, see what killed them.”
“I don’t have money, son,” the old man sighed. “Do you think I could afford a bloody vet?”
“Do you have dinner and a brandy?” Cecil asked.
Lighting up, the old man replied, “I have shepherd’s pie and beer, son.”
“Good, then you have a vet,” Cecil smiled. It was clearly great news to the old farmer, as he almost skipped forward to put his gun down before gesturing to the stranger to roll up his sleeves.
“Nigel Cockran,” the old farmer smiled as he held out his hand to introduce himself properly.
“Cecil Harding,” Cecil replied. “How do you do?”
Happy to at least get some chow from the deal, Cecil quickly got his coat off and tossed it in his rental.
“Back up your truck, Mr. Cockran,” Cecil suggested. “Then we can try to get them on the bed with as little possible interference to their injuries.”
For over 40 minutes, the two men struggled to get the dead animals on Nigel Cockran’s truck, and when they finally completed their task, Cecil was surprised to find that he had, in fact, passed the Cockran farm an hour before. Following the old roughshod Ford, Cecil realized that Cockran’s farm had no signage or visible gateposts, as he had been looking for. It was just a double-track dirt lane off the bush road that ran between their farms. With rather high growing grasses running a green stripe down the middle of it, Cecil could not help but assume that the road was not used much. Either that, or Nigel was just not bothered with landscaping to ease the overgrowth of his driveway. He relished the thought of filling his belly soon, especially after his hard work that now left the whole rental reeking of animal guts.
At the end of the road, after enduring potholes and dangerously overreaching thorn branches, Cecil was a nervous wreck. He feared for his deposit again, as the hardened stems of foliage and bristles grazed the sheeny surface of the paint job on the SUV, threatening to engrave their names in the car’s body.
As the two vehicles pulled into the gaping door of the small barn to the left of an old farmhouse, Cecil felt an overwhelming sense of fear grip him. All that kept him going was the promise of food and drink. Much as his body would enjoy nourishment, such would his heart be deprived of peace, because he could not shake the feeling that something terrible had befallen his family on the farm while he was helping to clean up a mess in the road.
5 Unexplained and Unwarranted
The night was ripe already, but with all the excitement, Cecil was far from tired. After he pulled his car in where the farmer directed, he helped old Cockran to cover the truck’s bed with tarp until the morning. Around the walls of the sturdy wooden structure, a furor of barking ate up their conversation.
“Bella! Hunter! Shut up, you fucking runts!” Cockran shouted at his dogs. Immediately, their boisterous barking fell silent.
“I’ll examine the livestock tomorrow morning,” he told the old man. “They should be fine here, unless you cannot lock the barn. We don’t want anything tearing them up before we know for sure what happened to your sheep, Nigel.”