Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition (26 page)

'I'm glad to see you've retained your sense of humour in spite of your arduous adventures, Francis,' replied the bass voice. 'You're lucky there. I've got a sense of humour too.'

Oh yes, I thought, and so did Caligula. Then he leaned very slowly forward into the light, and I realized I was not in fact meeting a monster but a Lynx canadensis, or in the vernacular a lynx, more specifically a Canadian lynx. So the creature I'd taken for a monster was only a lynx after all - though what was the difference? He had a thick tawny coat with shadowy patches. His tail was short, with several dark rings and a dark tip. Black tufts of hair grew from the tips of his ears, and he had a striking ruff of fur round his neck.

A series of deafening claps of thunder penetrated the cave from outside. So the storm had finally broken.

'It's funny you're so scared of me, Francis. After all, it was I who saved you from your pursuers this morning.'

'So you wouldn't have to share my flesh with anyone else?'

'What would you do if I said yes?'

'Pray, maybe.'

'Pray?' He laughed bitterly, as if that was a bad joke. But his gaze clouded; my words seemed to have struck a sad note in him. 'If it's God you want, Francis, you must go to church. For all I know he holds audience there, playing his own sound-track on the organ, but he's never been seen out here.'

'OK, why do you want to eat me?'

'The old, old story. I'm hungry.'

'What's your name, Mighty One?'

'Eight.'

'Eight? That's not a name, it's a number.'

'You don't say, clever-dick!'

Then he did something which was almost enough to send me into premature rigor mortis. He jumped down from his high perch, and for a moment I asked myself the very reasonable question: was this tawny-coated giant of steely muscle and sinew the last thing I'd ever see? Bright, flashing eyes flew towards me, got bigger and bigger and didn't stop until they were the size of powerful floodlights. When I summoned up the courage to look again, I saw his gigantic head hovering over me like some gloomy planet. He was observing me irresolutely, as if wondering whether his mouth would take my head all at one gulp.

'Listen, Eight, or was it Nine? Sorry, but I can't seem to concentrate on the higher mathematics right now. Listen, you didn't mean that about being hungry, did you? I mean, you look as if you could lose a few kilos and not notice it.'

'Don't worry, Francis. I'm not going to hurt you. Anyway, I ate Zack an hour ago. He was badly injured and could only stagger about bleeding, so I put the poor thing out of his misery.'

'Very altruistic of you. I must say I'm glad I don't happen to have a pimple on my nose. It would probably have brought out the Good Samaritan in you again. And how about these two ...?' I nodded at the skeletons. 'Did they beg for the neck-bite too?'

'No idea. They were already lying there when I found this cave years ago while I was looking for a safe place to sleep. The forest was still healthy then, and the whole of this cliff was overgrown with vegetation, so it made a good hiding place. These days it sticks up like a bare bum on the beach, positively inviting closer inspection.'

'Do you know whose the bones are?'

'Of course. They're the bones of the Black Knight and his mastiff. The fools out there say they're still happily prowling the forest, but whenever I turn up and try to tell people the truth they all skedaddle as rapidly as if I'd been offering them parts in a gay hard-porn film. I left the skeletons exactly as I found them because I respect the dead. I didn't want to deprive them of their dignity. I imagine they were attacked somewhere in the forest and then just managed to drag themselves back to this cave, so even in their death they were not divided.'

'So who do you think is happily prowling the forest instead of them now?'

'Heaven knows. I take no further interest in the whole silly farce.'

'Why not?'

'Because I'm about to set off on a long journey, and I shall never come back to this accursed spot.'

'Sounds as if you don't fancy telling me just what kind of bloodhounds were after me last night either?'

He smiled slyly and gave me a knowing wink.

'A clever-dick like you can work that out for himself, Francis. You don't need my help. I've been watching you ever since you emerged from the sewers, and I have to say I've never before met anyone willing to take on such murder cases out of sheer curiosity. Well, I did try to prevent the murders myself, as far as I could, but every time they either outnumbered me or I arrived too late, as you saw after yesterday's massacre in the farmyard.'

'Then tell me who
they
are! If you had a spark of responsibility you would.'

'I can't, Francis.'

'Why not, for heaven's sake?'

He raised his right paw aloft, his face twisted into a painful grimace. It was like the expression of anguish on the face of a father who can't tell his child the whole truth for fear it would send him mad. Then he laid his paw carefully on top of my head and patted me kindly.

'Because it would be the death of you, Francis. If I've assessed your character correctly, you'd insist on confronting them, and to hell with the consequences. But you don't know what they're like. They're beyond control, and a life means no more to them than a withered maple leaf trodden underfoot. Blood has become their drug, murder and butchery a compulsive ritual. They're monsters, and hatred of the unharmed who live a life proper to their species has made them even more monstrous. Their god is the god of pain because they've had to endure so much of it themselves. But pain doesn't often make people wise, Francis. It turns most of them into torturers possessed by the wish to harm others. Forget them, my friend. They won't survive anyway, because they can't adapt to nature. They'll soon be wiped off the face of the earth. A few more murder victims are neither here nor there.'

A dismal sense of failure came over me. To think I'd been so bloody near solving the case at the very start. For there was only one set of people who fitted Eight's description: the Company of the Merciful. They'd sneakily acted me a Passion Play fit to melt a heart of stone down in the sewers. But in fact they regularly left the underworld to go on performing their blood-thirsty rituals out on the farms. They used the legend of the Black Knight as a red herring so as to keep their good name intact. Very likely they worked hand in glove with some accomplice out in the world of day. And they'd used me for their pernicious ends too. The harder I pursued my inquiries out here, getting lost in a maze of byways, the further was any suspicion from falling on them. Shame and rage were mingled in my feeling of failure: I'd never been duped like this before in my entire life.

'One more question: how does a Canadian lynx get from Canada to this European forest?'

'By air.'

'I don't suppose you run a lynx airline of your own, so the whole thing must be something to do with your unusual name.'

'Right first time. Does the expression "reintroduction to the wild" mean anything to you?'

'As far as I know, it means re-settling a natural environment with animal species which were once native to it but then became extinct there. Humans want to see real animals back in their eco-Disneyland. It doesn't usually work.'

'No, it doesn't usually work,' he said sadly, taking a step towards the mouth of the cave and turning his back to me. 'I was the eighth of a group numbering eight in all. They captured us with anaesthetic darts and flew us here. For a while they kept us in a huge cage to acclimatise us. But we realised from the first that our main source of food was almost never found in this type of forest. That was a black joke if you like! Normally, we feed almost exclusively on snowshoe hares. If need be we fall back on ptarmigan or grouse, and there are practically none of them in this cultivated forest either. So our fate was sealed from the moment we arrived. When they freed us we tried to keep going on voles, squirrels and fawns for a while. But it wasn't good enough. Two females starved to death in winter. We were so desperate that we attacked farm livestock, and the farmers shot three more of our group. The three of us still left lost sight of each other at some point, without conceiving any young. We simply declined to bring more misery into the world, just to help a few self-styled conservationists fulfil their quota and get awarded gongs for professional virtue. We know how to regulate our population growth, which is more than you can say of human beings. There they go, over-populating the Earth by the billion, but no disaster can stop them producing hideous replicas of themselves. Well, anyway, I stayed in the forest myself, the only one of us left there, and since I had no rivals for the territory any more my bag improved.'

'But you're lonely,' I said sympathetically. He turned to me, and I saw tears trickling from his eyes.

'You're right, Francis, I am the loneliest lynx on God's earth. Whether I'm surviving a phase of famine or celebrating a kill, I do it on my own. I never feel a female's hot breath on my cheek, I've never looked into my cubs' bright, expectant eyes. I weep alone at night, and when I laugh it's the laughter of a deranged creature, abandoned by all, who can only laugh crazily at his cruel fate. I long for my brothers and sisters more than life itself, Francis. Death will be welcome if I can only meet another of my kind first, a female with black tufts of fur on her ears, and greet her with a hiss. This cave would have been ideal for a litter of four cubs, and I'd have done all I could to provide for them and their mother. But instead the place was pre-ordained to be my cell, a cell where I've lived in solitary confinement, and the forest outside a lonely prison yard. I curse mankind for doing this to me and my race. I curse all mankind. And I curse the God they say made them. The only way he could prove his existence would be to wipe them off the face of the earth again. Can you imagine what the world would be like then, Francis?'

'Paradise,' I said. He padded over to the crack in the rock, where he turned back to me again. In the dim light coming in from outside he looked like a ghost, or rather like someone who was the very last of his species.

'Yes, Paradise ... I am drawn to my own kind, friend. I have no idea where to find them, but I will search for them until my life's end. Which will probably come sooner than expected, since this continent really does not provide a suitable environment for - well, let's say for any missing lynx. But the quest will give new meaning to my life, and hope will invigorate me. Who knows, perhaps I really will meet some of my brothers and sisters one day, and then we'll start a fur farm in the grand style - farming particularly hairy specimens of
Homo sapiens
for their skins, of course. Goodbye, Francis, little clever-dick! Leave this cave, this forest, this whole accursed place and run back to your master as fast as you can, or some genuine monster may have your guts for garters.'

He turned, on the point of leaving.

'Just one more thing!' I called after him.

He looked back.

'Were you and the others kept captive in that derelict cage in the forest after you arrived?'

'No. They took our cage down when they had to admit that the lynx project had failed.'

'So it wasn't just lynxes they were reintroducing to the wild?'

'Oh no,' he said, with an ironic undertone in his voice. Then he winked at me and disappeared through the crack into the pouring rain. One more person saying goodbye to the forest for ever. I wanted to leave as soon as possible myself, too. If this went on there'd be no one left in the forest at all except for greenfly and people playing Gotcha! Yet the wish for a final answer burned in me like a throbbing wound. Everything certainly seemed to point to those blind, stinking sewer-dwelling devils as the only possible murderers, but who could confirm it for me beyond any possible doubt?

The Black Knight! The real one might be dead, but there was still whatever talented actor was impersonating him with such deceptive verisimilitude. He and only he could answer the riddle, since he was working on behalf of those behind it. I closed my eyes, switched off completely, and concentrated on the experiences that had come so thick and fast over the last couple of days. I went through it all in my head, step by step, going back over every detail, however tiny. I was often close to seeing some connection, some logical link between all the people I'd met. But then my theories collapsed again: they either seemed too far-fetched or they were obviously specious explanations devised under pressure. And there was no point in deceiving myself.

When I opened my eyes again, I found I was looking straight at the cave paintings. I remembered Gustav and the way we used to leaf through his books together. Of course the fool never noticed I was studying; I used to pretend I was just sleeping on his open books. In fact I always kept an eye secretly open, and I read and read and read. I was much struck again by the picture of the man who'd put on the bearskin. It was like the Black Knight's trick. Which brought me back to the same old subject.

Black Knight. Black Knight. Black Knight ...

...
black ink!

Black ink? What on earth put black ink into my mind? Oh yes, Ambrosius used black ink for his scribbling. That was it. And there was a paddock for sheep outside the house in the forest, and one of those sheep was black.