“Poor devil!” he shuddered. “What did he take it for at first? Some monstrous species of Drosera? That stuff like fungus reminds me of those ghastly frilled lizards they have in Australia. But then these writhing tubes? If you think of an ultra-ghoulish octopus as well, you’ve still not sized this nightmare up. There’s something horrible beyond—”
“Yes,” mused Aitchison solemnly, “ ‘something beyond.’ ”
“I almost feel that you are right,” said Drury reluctantly, “but I don’t quite grasp your supernatural basis for all this.”
“Well,” answered Aitchison, ‘even in the modern texts we have Bede’s word for it that Farne Island was haunted in St. Cuthbert’s time. But I confess it was a reference in this antiquated folio here that first made me read between the lines. Look at it yourself.”
Here he passed his friend the book in which that ugly photograph had long been kept. After glancing with some curiosity at the title page (A Discreet Inquirie into the Spiritual Topographie of the Northern parts of Englande, by the Revd. Dr. Wm. Danby, 1579), Drury turned to the place inside, which Aitchison had found, and read:
Evil report was knowen of this same islande of Farne in old time. Baeda well notyth it, spirituum malignorum frequentia humanae habitationi minus accommodus. HIST. ECC. iv, 28.
Again wher he writyth of the sojourn of the holie Cuthbert therupon he bearyth witnes how that, afore this Servant of the Lorde, no man was ther ever so bold to dwell on this islande alone by reson of the foul fiends ther resident. VITA CUTHB. 17.
Truely, as he saith, No phantasie so grievous but this good man by spiritual stryving might put to flyte. Howbeit the faithfull Herefrid, when he comyth to him on the Farne, findyth his dyeing master sore pressed. That holie man had ther but five onions beneath the truckle bed, the which he bringyth forth as token of meate enogh to keep him lively. Therat, quoth Herefrid, methoght one of them to be a litle gnawed yet certeinly not more than half bitten uppon. Then spake the sainte, Never in all my sojourn in this islande did mine enimyes so hardlie plague me as uppon these last five dayes. Nor yett, saith Herefrid, was I bold enogh to ask him what manner persecucions he thus endured. VITA CUTHB. 37.
“Ah! I begin to see it now,” murmured Drury in reverie, as his host rose and put both book and photograph away. “That’s where your Scallion Stone comes in. So, Demon Number Five, that gave old Cuthbert the slip, has now done his damnedest and been put to rest. But what a sinister thing to know when you stood that morning looking at the last fossil, clammy and vacant, that Thing was still at large!”
“Aye,” said Aitchison, “and what of Calladine who knew it? He asked me once what sort of hell hag an ‘amphibian vampire’ would be to dream about.”
THE INGLORIOUS RISE OF THE CATSMEAT MAN
by Robin Smyth
Robin Smyth is a Britisher whose “The Inglorious Rise of the Catsmeat Man” is a superior effort in black humor, and the reader response to its appearance in Whispers made it one of the most popular tales I published. I have read this story well over a dozen times, and it still tickles the Ambrose Bierce within me. I trust it will yours as well.
Back in nineteen thirty-five it was. Year of the Silver Jubilee. That’s when it all started. Thirty-five was a year of ups and downs for most people. It was a year of ups for dear old King George the Five because he’d lived it up for twenty-five years as Fid. Def. Ind. Imp. and it was a year of downs for my old man, downs and outs you might as well say, as this was the year he fell in the giant mixer at Bleeson’s Cement Works, which annoyed the Bleeson board of directors no end because dad’s blood and bones messed up a ten-ton consignment of cement and cost the Bleeson mob somewhere in the neighborhood of ninety quid gross profit. Not that I missed me old man much mind you (well, old I call him, he was only just forty when he toppled overboard) even though I was only a boy of fourteen at the time of the mishap. Fourteen being the start of crucial times in a boy’s life, or so all the head-shrinkers say. Well, he was a violent, drunken old pig, see, used to thump Huckleberry out of my dear, beautiful mother and she used to cry real tears and sometimes the salt tears were red-running with blood from cuts he inflicted on her pale face. And I hated him.
I love my dear mother, see. Really, I do. Some blokes think you’re a bit mad when you say things like that. Girls do too. Especially girls. Girls get jealous, see. Why, when I tell girls I can actually remember my moment of birth, they look at me all peculiar, like . . . but, it’s true. I do remember! Beautiful it was. Like plunging out of a dark, silent tunnel into the light of life. Love my mother, I do. Yes.
That’s why I was a bit choked when dear mother married again. So quick, too. Only just three months and a day after father’s messy passing. Not that I was worried about the old rats memory, it was just . . . well . . . I liked being alone in the house with dear mother. Liked her just being with me. Near me. Close. Didn’t really want anybody else sort of intruding.
Actually, though, the bloke she married, he wasn’t too bad when I really recollect it. Used to call me “mister” instead of “sonny” or “boy” and during the first months of the marriage he bought me a cricket bat and a Hornby clockwork train set and often he would take me to see a circus or the latest Marx Brothers picture. Mind you, he had bundles of money. Hundreds! So he could afford these luxuries, really. He was in the catsmeat business, see. That’s what he was called: Hollins the Catsmeat Man. Big bloke he was, all red-faced and black, brilliantined hair and he used to wear a brown warehouse overall down to his ankles and a great pair of brown, polished boots and a brown bowler hat with a dent in the middle and round the town he would go with his great tray of meat on his head and a big bell, swinging and clanging at his side and all the time he’d holler: “Ceeeee . . . aaaaaaaaaats meat for seeeee . . . aaaaaale! Beeeeee . . . eeeeeeest ceeeeee . . . aaaaaaaaaats meat!” And people would come from all over to buy his stringy red meat at sixpence a pound for their pet moggies if they was well-off clients and for their own consumption if they weren’t.
I used to work in the shop. Well, it wasn’t a shop really . . . it was the front room of Hollins’s little terraced down Mafeking Avenue, which was where me and dear mother moved soon after she was wed. The house was one of them two up-two down efforts with a lavatory out back and a yard the size of a fourpenny postage stamp. This front room was my bedroom too. I mean, I had to sleep somewhere. Hollins put the tin hat on me sharing with dear mother and him. First of all it was a bit uncomfortable having your bed set up amongst a stack of horseflesh and mutton . . . especially during the summer months when the old bluebottles used to come sucking and buzzing about, crawling all over your face and hands, bloated with butcher’s blood and, cor! The stink was enough to putrefy a graveyard. But I got used to it and I even started a lucrative sideline . . . breeding maggots . . . which I used to sell, a farthing a pokey bag to all the fishing kids around. Always had a cunning business brain, I did . . . suppose it’s that what took me where I am today. Any old rate, to cut the boasting and get back to the originals, Hollins the Catsmeat Man, also being a shrewd nut where business was concerned, told my mum that I would keep the front room rent free, plus grub and six bob a week pin money if she and me would run the “shop.” Dear mother, being as dumb as she was beautiful, agreed, not realizing that foxy old Hollins had a bounden duty to succor and provide for his stepson during his formative, early-work years and, indeed, should not have been seeking profit from the sweat and labor of one so young. Still! That’s life! And every morning come the dawn, I’d thrust up me window and slap a few trays of catsmeat on the sill and by eight, darling mum’d come and join me and whilst Hollins was out on his rounds, swinging his bell and bawling his head off, mum and me’d sit chopping up great chunks of meat into slices and slabs, all friendly and cosy together, like a couple of surgeons in the window, and folks would come from ours and the neighboring streets and buy from us and the men would say that it was a treat to be served their catsmeat by such a lovely gal as my mum . . . and they’d wink and crack little jokes and that . . . and as the months went by, Hollins’s trade perked up no end, but Hollins, instead of getting grateful and being pleased with dear mother and me, grew sullen and churlish and started calling my mum horrible names like: slut! and, tramp! and, Jezebel! . . . and I just couldn’t understand the change in the man. Sort of just like my old feller used to be.