Malcolm undid his jacket and reached into his pocket for his mobile phone from under old receipts. Tissues fluttered to the floor like anemic, torn butterflies. With his right hand steadying the left, he turned the phone on, the small screen pulsing faint light. The stack of lines in the top corner refused to appear. No signal. He waited, staring, not wanting to look round, giving the phone screen all of his attention. It stayed blank, no service provider name or EMERGENCY CALLS ONLY appearing like a hidden portal to transport him out of this place. His fingers went numb. The phone clattered, back popping off, spitting the battery across the dirt.
He collected the phone up and dropped the shattered plastic into his pocket, then banged on the door.
“Bill? Are you still there?” he asked.
“I am, veterinary. I’m not going anywhere,” the old farmer said. Malcolm could picture him leaning against the wall, cap pulled down low against the ice that laced the air up here, no matter what the time of year.
“I know you’re not going to let me out, but can you do me a favor? Can you get my vet’s bag out of my car? The door’s open,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady.
“Don’t think I can. I know what you carry in that black bag. Surgical tools, syringes, tranquilizers. Get that for you, and you’ll try and stop the beast. You’re too good a bloke. I don’t want you suffering, thinking you can get out. Just go over there. Let the creature do its thing. All nice and quick-like.”
Malcolm checked his pockets for bubble packs of ketamine, finding two, both empty.
Crouching low, he looked around the shed. The walls looked ramshackle, but the planks were thick and soaked with a hundred years of creosote. There was no way he was going to break out by hand. Squinting, he scanned the walls for tools. A muck crome or a silage knife, anything he could use to prize his way out.
“You still there, Veterinary?” Bill said.
For a moment Malcolm thought about not answering.
“Yes,” he said, still scanning round for tool racks.
Slipping on the cobbles, Malcolm walked to a side wall and got his fingers behind one of the planks. The wood stayed where it was, pushing a splinter the length of a scalpel into his palm, blood pooling. He wiped his hand on his jacket and sat down, back against the wall. The bargest was in no rush to move, its eyes not leaving him once. Damp from the floor seeped through Malcolm’s trousers, turning his skin to ice.
Try as he might, he couldn’t rationalize this. Here was just another creature. Shaped by story and drunken bragging but a creature of flesh and bone, nonetheless. Even so, the cunning burning in the newborn, thousand-year-old creature’s eyes charred his marrow with fear.
It was hopeless. He was stuck in here with this animal. Animals were his work. His life. He’d spent the last ten years tending them, keeping them alive, even when he knew most of them were destined for the slaughterhouse. He pulled out his wallet, hand shaking as he undid the clasp. His hand spasmed, tipping coins and credit cards around him in a fan. Reaching down, he picked up a photo, now coated with half-rotten straw. He tried to clean the dirt off, so he could see Hilary and Tamsin properly, but they just became more obscured under a fine brown film of decay.
The photo was of Tamsin’s graduation. The proudest day of his life, watching his daughter follow in his footsteps. He stared at their faces. Every few moments, he closed his eyes to try and recall them, but they stayed out of sight, reluctant shadows of a past cut off by these wooden walls. After a while, he kept his eyes shut and sobbed his throat raw.
Outside, he could hear Bill mumbling to himself. He sounded as scared as Malcolm felt.
The beast acted like it had all the time in the world, sitting on its haunches. There was no need to rush. Malcolm was going nowhere.
A drunken memory surfaced through the panic and, under his breath, Malcolm thanked Old Marley. Cut hand cradled in his lap, he pushed himself up from the floor, cramp bringing him tumbling down more than once. Crouching, he let his fingers drift across the floor like dangled puppets. Straw stuck to the cobbles in patches, layered and thick. It came away in strips, each laminate clouding the air with the stench of animal waste. Using small movements, Malcolm worked his way across the barn, pulling up decades of trampled bedding and dung, piling the fragments in stacks behind him. All the time, the creature watched, steam condensing against Malcolm’s skin.
Not many listened to Marley. Not many understood the creased shepherd, anyway, much less when he was on the outside of half a bottle of scotch, but Malcolm took the time and paid for the drinks. Marley cared for his animals more than anyone Malcolm had met. Get past the slurring and he could tell a good story, for the price of a single malt, of course.
Marley was the first to mention the bargest to Malcolm, first to describe the red ears and the culling stare. He didn’t know if Marley’s story of being pursued over the moors was true. He didn’t know if the whispered story of keeping one side of Moor Gill, the beast the other, was an embellishment. At the moment, he had little to lose and little left to try.
Outside, he could hear Bill stumble his way through the Lord’s Prayer. If it weren’t so serious, it would be funny. Dale gossip whispered the only time Bill saw the inside of church was to dip the collection plate.
Shifting along the ground, Malcolm carried on pulling fragments of dirt from the floor, slowly revealing the channel. Only shallow, the drain carried water along the barn to a stone slab trough at the other end. Now out of sight of the creature, Malcolm reached under the wall and pulled away fifty years of mud, the dirt pushing nails away from his fingers.
Only a trickle came at first, water the color of port. He wiped his face, leaving a stain across his forehead, scrabbled back and banged against the door. The creature looked up at the noise, spit dripping onto the floor.
“Don’t be struggling, Veterinary. If it were me, I’d be scooting across that barn. Get it over and done with,” Bill said, his voice close as if he were trying to peer through the gaps.
“Well, I’m not you, Bill,” Malcolm said, his teeth grinding as he tried to keep from shivering.
“Ay, you’re right at that, Veterinary. I’m outside; you’re stuck in there.”
“Might get out, yet.”
“Might be pigs fly. I’d rather bet on that than you making through the night,” Bill said.
Malcolm listened to him pause as he took another drag of his cigarette.
“Don’t drag it out. I know it’s not fair on you, but I don’t want you to suffer more than you have to, Veterinary. I’m not a cruel man.”
Malcolm ignored him.
He knew time was running low. His movements had been slow, trying to disturb the fetid air as little as possible. The creature might be less than twelve hours old, but the thing that clung inside was older than the hills themselves. The bargest blistered with cunning.
Cold mud coated Malcolm’s hands up to the knuckles, all feeling gone. He pressed on, scooping up handfuls of muck, throwing them over his shoulder, getting careless. Outside, Bill stopped stumbling his way through scripture and listened to the dirt slip down the walls.
The folk tales never came with specifics, or volume tables. Never said how much liquid needed to flow. Whether a river or a stutter. Malcolm kept digging the channel free.
The water was sticky, more sludge or soup, but it flowed, nonetheless. He watched it creep across the floor, rivulets spilling between the cobbles until the stone submerged below the neonatal stream.
An expression passed across the creature’s face, one Malcolm had never seen on an animaclass="underline" confusion. Not the dislocated confusion of pain. Genuine wonderment at the lack of its own comprehension of the situation. Then anger.