instant, before even I had time to react, Judy Juice spun round and shoved Jubal crying, 'Leave the little girl alone, you cockroach!'
Judy Juice was quite a big girl and Jubal fell back in surprise and over into some sacks of refuse left out for the bin men. Calamity made a move towards him but I held her back. He lay there dazed for a second or two as Judy Juice stepped into a taxi, and then he stumbled to his feet, ran towards the car and shouted, 'But Baby I'm sorry! Please, Baby ...' The car sped off and Jubal sank to his knees, shouting 'Baby, I'm sorry, I beg you!' And then, still kneeling, he buried his face in his hands and wept.
Back at the office, once I'd convinced her I'd had enough rum, Calamity told me what Custard Pie had said. Told me the news that made my heart stop for so long that I sat there listening for the beat to start again like a hundred-metre sprinter listening for the gun.
'This 'thing' out at the sanatorium,' she said. 'It's Herod Jenkins, your old games teacher. He's still alive.'
Chapter 14
I tossed and turned all night and cried out in that half-asleep, half-awake state in which the night terrors visit us. And maybe an hour before dawn — the darkest hour — I slipped beneath the membrane of sleep and dreamed of a day in late January many years ago when the whole school was kept in during afternoon break. An eerie hush consumes the old school building, a silence so absolute you can hear the footfall of the spiders in the cupboards where the Latin books are stored. Forbidden to move from our desks, or even look at the window, we hold our breath and strain to hear above the deafening drumbeats of our own hearts ... and then there it is, at first so faint as to be almost imperceptible, but growing and growing, getting louder until there can be no mistake: thwump, thwump, thwump! The sound of choppers. Suddenly, in a cacophony of slamming desklids that drowns out the shouting of the teacher, we all dash to the window. Thwump, thwump, thwump! The dying sun has turned the frosty sky amber like a puma's eye; spread beneath it the iced-over games field sparkles like frozen lemonade... thwump, thwump, thwump! From far in the glowing west, growing all the time, getting bigger and bigger, that small speck that grows and slowly resolves itself into the shape of a helicopter, flying in low over the trees. Realities merge in the way they do in dreams, so that the chopper is now silhouetted against an orange tropical sky, like the film poster to
*
Llunos was hunched over a pint in the Castle pub, just inside wooden doors. He looked up, smiled, saw the expression on my face and lost the smile. 'Oh,' he said. 'Looks like you found out. Should have known you would.'
'All I want to hear from you is it's not true.'
'It's true. No one in town wants more than me to say it's not. But that doesn't change a thing. It's true.'
'Didn't we push him out of a plane?'
He nodded glumly. 'I thought we did.'
'How long have you known?'
'Six months or so. At first it was just rumours ...'
'Why didn't you tell me?'
He took a while to speak, as if he knew the answer but had forgotten it. 'What good would it have done?'
'How could this happen? From a plane, for fuck's sake!'
He picked up his pint and brought it to his lips and then stopped. He spoke over the top. 'It's not that rare to fall out of a plane and survive. Read the
'Wouldn't the concussion kill him?'
'A normal person, perhaps. But a games teacher ... ?' He stopped and took out a card and wrote an address on the back. 'Look, I can't say any more at the moment. It's better for you to hear the whole story. What you've heard so far is nothing. Meet me tomorrow at this address, at 10 am.'
He handed me the card and stood up to leave. The address was a room in the old college building. 'In the meantime, keep it under your hat. We don't want to start a panic'
*
The old college stretched along the Prom from the pier to the putting-green. With its massive stone walls and conical turrets it looked like a Rhineland castle and had stood up well to the flood. It had originally been built as a hotel and when they found they couldn't make it pay by accommodating folk taking a two-week vacation from the real world they used it instead to house the dons who took one for a lifetime. Inside the main building bronze statues of long-dead and forgotten academics gazed down at me with looks of stern and vague disapproval. An attitude built on the failsafe premise that whatever it was I was doing or thinking they would almost certainly have disapproved of it. The floor squeaked as all floors in buildings devoted to serious study should and the walls were hung with wooden boards gilded with forgotten acts of sporting glory. All from a distant time when athletic prowess for students entailed more than a run from the pie shop to the pub.
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,
