The room looked out over the ocean through arched, leaded lights with panes of stained glass. There were seven people waiting in the room when I arrived, seated around a table on which stood a movie projector. Llunos motioned me to take a seat and introduced me to the others. There was professor of some sort from the Clarach Institute. A Tillamook Indian with a face the colour of polished rosewood and wearing a racoon-skin hat. There were also two lab technicians and some men in dark suits who looked like they came from the security services.
'The first thing you need to know about this meeting', Llunos began, 'is it never took place.' The people round the table nodded grimly. 'We never met, we never spoke, and we're not here now.' More nods. 'I don't wish to make this any longer than it has to be, but not everyone is up to speed here and so I will need to fill in some of the background.' He walked to the front and stood in front of a blackboard.
'At first it was just a few rumours. Some of the peasant communities in the hinterlands beyond Nant-y-moch started reporting strange sightings. A manlike creature loping through the forest, usually at dusk, a shy creature that shunned human contact and used the cover of twilight to get about. Such reports were easy enough to dismiss at first — especially by people who didn't want to look too closely. Then there were the odd footprints — big ones, and even the deep wide imprint in the mud of a waterhole of his backside.' Llunos gave a signal to the lab technicians who lifted a plaster-of-Paris cast the size of a small card-table. Llunos continued. 'Farmers also reported losses among their livestock, but of course such things are commonplace.' He turned towards the man in the racoon-skin hat. 'Laughing Bear has experience with the sasquatch of North America, popularly known as Bigfoot. Laughing Bear, I imagine the pattern I'm outlining is familiar to you?' The man nodded gravely and lines appeared in the corners of his eyes.
'As I said, it was easy enough to dismiss at first. But then this happened.' He gave another hand signal and the blackout curtains were drawn. One of the technicians started up the projector and we watched a grainy, ghostly 8mm film of a family horsing around beside a lake at nightfall. They had that awkward jerky movement of people shot with old cine cameras and were laughing and playing tag and pulling faces for the camera the way all families do.
'At the time they saw nothing unusual but when the film came back from the chemist, they saw this.' He pointed his stick at the tree-line behind the family antics. It was a forestry plantation with the characteristic uniform rows of conifers. Where the tree-line stopped there was a wire fence and some fire-beating equipment. And there, moving uncertainly between the trees, was a figure. If it had been any more shadowy it would have been imperceptible. If it had stood still it probably would have never been noticed. But the very act of moving detached it from the background gloom and give it substance.
'The quality's terrible, of course. But anyone can see that this is no fox, or deer, or any of the explanations people normally like to pin on things like this. We had it image-enhanced and analysed and all the usual stuff. The boffins couldn't tell us much, except to say it's definitely a biped.' Llunos paused for a second and pressed his fingertips together as if the next sentence was especially difficult for him. 'Gentlemen, we had reason to suspect, and we soon came to know, that this was Herod Jenkins. And that he had survived his fall from the plane.' No one said anything and the film ran out, filling the silent room with the repeated clack, clack, clack of the revolving celluloid whipping the tabletop.
The man in the racoon-skin hat was invited to take the stand. I half-expected him to speak with the heap-big Hollywood accent used to accuse us of speaking with forked tongue. But he just sounded like any other well-educated Canadian.
'This is the point where I was called in,' he began. 'I spent some weeks in the Nant-y-moch badlands tracking the creature. I found out that although the adults were scared of him, the children knew him well. They called him Mr Dippetty-doo — a helpless happy old fool eating dirt and wearing clothes of woven twigs. In stark contrast to his former persona, about which you are all better informed than me, Dippetty-doo would happily tousle the hair of the village urchins, or pull out pennies from behind their ears ... even the farmyard dogs would no longer bark at his passing but would scamper up and lick his hand ... in short, gentlemen, it became clear to me that the fall from the plane had caused him to lose his memory and no trace of it remained. He was in fact harmless.'
The woodsman sat down and there was a mild ripple of table-rapping in applause, although I didn't see what for.
Llunos stood up and cut the applause with his hand. 'This left us with a serious problem. What guarantee was there that at some point he wouldn't recover his memory? The prospect was alarming and in order to allay our fears we contacted Doctor Pritchard who is an expert on neurophysiology at the Clarach Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience. What he told us hardly put our fears at rest. Doctor.'
The man in the white lab-coat stood up and smiled thinly. 'I'll try and do this in lay terms as far as I am able. No doubt you are all familiar with the TV-soap version of memory loss. The patient lies on a hospital bed and his family sit around him showing him old photos and playing the records that were once his favourites in the hope that some emotionally charged event will somehow turn the key that opens the gates of memory. It's actually not as fanciful as it seems and is a well-proven clinical technique. But have you ever wondered what would happen if the family sitting round the hospital bed were impostors? And the lost memories they patiently tried to coax back were bogus? All those old songs he never sang and the specially doctored photos showing cherished childhood moments that never took place? That in essence was what we did.' There was a subdued gasp round the table at the audacity of what the doctor was telling us. He continued unabashed as if used to such a reception and perhaps slightly proud. 'The project was conducted under the supervision of Doctor Faustus from the sanatorium — a very brilliant and unconventional neuroscientist who has done some pioneering work on false-memory syndrome and who kindly agreed to undertake the mapping of Herod's psyche.'
One of men in dark suits asked a question. 'How did you get him to the sanatorium?'
The scientist smiled in acknowledgment, pleased at being given another opportunity to show off.
'Good question! Actually, it wasn't too difficult, we used a technique suggested to us by our friend here from the Tillamook Indians. Basically the same used for trapping mink. Laughing Bear told us that during his observation of Dippetty-doo he noticed his quarry was secretly engaging in an occasional lover's tryst with a local woman. We approached her and outlined to her out desire to make Herod well again and she was happy to assist us in our efforts by acting as a form of bait. I believe some of you may know this woman, Mrs Bligh-Jones from the Meals on Wheels.'
This was greeted with snorts from around the table of the sort that suggested 'rather you than me, mate'.
There were no further questions so Doctor Pritchard carried on. 'Once we had successfully installed the subject in the sanatorium we invented a new past for him and hired a group of actors to sit round his bedside from dawn till dusk pretending to be his family. They were called the Flying Laszlofis — a troupe of Magyar circus performers. Day by day they sat there drip-feeding him the sweet balm of memory of all those lost tender cherished moments — hunting the black bears of the Carpathian Hills with his grandfather, Vadas; learning to dance the polka in the rustic parlour at the age of six; his old dog Цcsi, and that first sweet kiss with the seventeen-year-old Ninбcscska. It was an audacious undertaking but, amazingly, it started to produce results. Before long Herod took up the violin and soon mastered the rudiments of a number of Hungarian folk songs. He began to express pangs of homesickness for those far-off Carpathian Hills. He refused to eat the hospital food and insisted on goulash and pickled cabbage.