It laughed one more time and then he was upon it, tearing at its ghastly red flesh with his fingers and with his teeth.
In spite of the cold, Ritchie slept better in that terrible skeleton of the old Sachs house than he’d done in his apartment for months. The Nain had fought, of course it had, it was well known throughout history for its viciousness. But he must have prevailed because he was still alive even though his body hurt and he could see a spider’s web of small scratches on his hands. Amazingly, to Ritchie, he’d had neither a stroke nor a heart attack. Maybe killing the Nain had somehow, magically, restored him to full health again.
But then what did he mean by ‘killing the Nain’? Now that he was sober, there was surely no more craziness and so therefore no more Nain? He had a bunch of small cuts all over the backs of his hands, but then he probably got those scrambling up into the old Sachs place. How he’d remembered where to find the house after so many years, especially drunk out of his gourd, was hard to work out – until he remembered. He’d followed the Nain. But then that wasn’t really possible, because the Nain Rouge didn’t exist. It was just a folk tale.
Ritchie stood up and felt the rotted floorboards splinter underneath his feet. If he remembered correctly, the Sachses had had a basement. Ritchie moved as carefully as he could until he felt he was on rather more solid footing. He’d just congratulated himself on surviving that particular ordeal when his eyes were caught by the sight of a tattered, miserable bundle underneath the remains of a great bay window. It was very, very red, and although Ritchie knew that it couldn’t possibly be the Nain, because the Nain didn’t really exist, he knew that he feared examining it.
For what seemed like hours he tried to formulate an excuse he could give to himself for not seeing what the bundle contained. But he couldn’t. On the one hand he never wanted to see what was in there, while on the other he wanted to do that more than anything else in the world. If it was the Nain all his preconceptions about reality and the world he thought he lived in would be shattered. If it wasn’t…
As quickly as he could, before fear consumed him, Ritchie reached down with one shaking hand and pulled the thing apart. When his hands came away, they were covered in thick, crimson arterial blood. In slow motion, or so it seemed at the time, the tiny head rolled out of the rags that had once constituted the little girl’s tattered clothes and fell to the floor at Ritchie’s feet. Her long, thick, bright red hair had been hiding the terrible stump that had been her neck, that he had hacked and hacked and hacked at until it came away in his hands…
Ritchie Carbone dropped to his knees as the thundering of his own blood threatened to deafen him. She had to be seven years old at the most! A tiny child, probably the daughter of some spaced-out junkie, playing with him, taunting him, being the Nain Rouge and…But had it been like that, or had he made her run?
He didn’t know! He couldn’t remember! Not like that, not in any detail! He looked down into her glassy-eyed, horrified little face, and the hammering in his head became a wild, discordant cacophony. Suddenly weak, Ritchie Carbone tipped forward and lay across the tiny body, twitching and unable to speak. Later it snowed and so neither of them were discovered for well over a week. A ghastly and macabre tableau that the police, when they attended, could only speculate about.
Come the Vernal Equinox, the Marche du Nain Rouge still managed to banish the little horror for another year. Everyone saw the evil dwarf burn, in effigy, on a big bonfire in Cass Park, just minutes from where Carbone’s old Coney Dog place used to be. A lot of the revellers said that it was a pity there was nowhere left in the Cass Corridor to get a decent Coney any more. But then they all agreed that it had probably been meant to be. Why, after all, should anyone get a lovely hotdog treat after burning even a mythical being, in effigy, to death?
THE KING OF OUDH’S CURRY by Amy Myers
SO THIS WAS Oakham Manor. Auguste Didier was already having doubts about the wisdom of his journey. Not only had he come at great inconvenience to cook a banquet for a quiet but prestigious wedding, but the promised carriage to meet him at the Kentish railway station of Maidstone had not awaited him. Instead he had been forced to take an omnibus, alight some distance away and trudge the remaining mile with his baggage in what for England was extraordinary heat. Now at last he had arrived at the gates of the Manor with the delights of a refreshing tisane and then of preparing a sumptuous banquet before him.
“Are you the new chef?” an anxious voice enquired.
Intent on studying the façade of the Palladian mansion before him, Auguste had not seen the vagrant sitting propped up against the high brick wall to one side of the imposing iron gates. He looked to be a man of at least sixty, with tattered clothes which hung loosely on his shoulders, implying that his girth had once been considerably wider. Mild eyes in a wrinkled face, topped by a battered and old-fashioned white cook’s hat, gazed up at him hopefully. Cook’s hat? Could this sad-looking man be the former chef?
“Only for the next four days,” Auguste replied truthfully.
The vagrant (or chef) shook his head sadly. “Four days… I doubt if you’ll last that long, sir. Why, I saw a chef go in these very gates three days ago, and he’s gone already. Then there was William; he went after a month, and before him one called Tom spent only two days here.”
“Why did all these cooks leave so suddenly? Were they dissatisfied with the kitchens?” Auguste was aghast. This sounded ominous. He had been relying on finding the very latest equipment there.
The vagrant looked perplexed. “They’re all dead, sir, so I never asked them. If only they’d taken my recipe, it might have been different. But they wouldn’t. I did tell them it was Sir Oliver’s favourite… And now the latest has dropped dead. Let me see.” He paused, deep in thought, then pronounced in triumph: “Alfred Hogg! That was his name. A gloomy sort of person. Unlike his late Majesty the King of Oudh, who was a very jolly gentleman.”
Auguste began to feel distinctly uneasy. Nothing had been mentioned to him about this disastrous procession of chefs when Sir Oliver Marsh had so desperately begged him to cook the wedding banquet at the union of himself and his housekeeper. Such a ceremony was unusual enough in itself, without this vagrant’s revelations. Who was he? Another chef, as he had implied? And what did the late King of Oudh have to do with Oakham Manor? Oudh had once been part of the Moghul Empire but was now a region of India and thus a province of the British Empire. Its late king, so far as Auguste could recollect, had been Wajid Ali Shah who died some years ago in the 1880s, and who had indeed been jolly but was unlikely to have travelled to Kent.
He decided to adopt a jovial tone. “I shall take great care not to drop arsenic into the soup.”
There was no answering mirth, and perhaps, Auguste conceded, rightly so in the circumstances. Instead the vagrant looked most distressed. “Please do, sir. You will take my recipe yourself, won’t you?”
“I beg your pardon?” Auguste stared at the grubby piece of paper that was pushed towards him.
“My recipe, sir. I do assure you, it is superb. If only they would have taken it, as I asked, all those chefs might still be with us.”
“Recipe for what?” Auguste asked cautiously, taking the piece of paper.
“The King of Oudh’s curry, sir. He gave this recipe to my father with his own royal hands. That’s why he died.”
“Who? Your father?” Auguste looked at the recipe in trepidation.
“No, sir, Prince Albert, Her Majesty’s late husband. They must have mixed up the ingredients at Buckingham Palace and put arsenic instead of pounded mace in it. As one chef to another, sir, you’d agree that’s not wise.”