Moby Jack & Other Tall Tales (42 page)

‘Eeerchh!’ whined the owl, through the tiny, white, even teeth.

Tim’s own teeth started chattering and he bit his tongue several times. Sensing his distress, the owl’s human face produced a savage smile. Then some strange creaking words came from its mouth and Tim found to his horror that he understood them. Hypnotised, he closed the wardrobe door gently and went into the kitchen.

There he walked straight to the fridge and selected a piece of liver still swimming in a pool of blood. Taking some scissors from the cutlery drawer, he cut the raw liver into slivers and carried them back to his bedroom. He opened the wardrobe door again to find the terrible owl still there. Tim fed it the strips of raw liver, watching in disgust as it snatched them from his hand and swallowed them like worms.

When the creature was satisfied, it shuffled on its perch, said something in its dark, ugly tongue and closed its eyes. Tim shut the door on it and crept away, still chilled to the marrow by the encounter.

He went straight to the living room and stood in front of his mother. Her head was bend over her work but eventually she looked up at him.

‘Goodness, Tim!’ she cried. ‘Are you all right? You look so pale.’

Tim wanted to tell her about the horrible thing in his wardrobe but his tongue would not let him. Instead he heard himself say, ‘I’m fine, Mum. Just a bit tired. I think I’ll skip dinner.’

‘Skip dinner?’ she said. ‘You must be ill. Go to bed. I’ll bring you something.’

He stumbled out of the living room, half in a dream, and went to his bedroom. There he changed into his pyjamas and got into bed. Later his mother brought him some turkey soup and he ate it. Then she pulled the curtains and left him alone.

That night he hardly slept at all.

Over the next few weeks
Tim was haunted by the owl
. It sat on the headboard of his bed at night and kept him awake by whispering foul things in his ear. It made demands on him, urging him to bring it pieces of raw meat. The creature began to grow at an alarming rate, until it was as large as a pillow, its creased, wizened face becoming more evil-looking with every passing night. It devoured everything that Tim could find in the house, until eventually he had to begin begging for meat from other places.

Tim himself began to change too, both in appearance and attitude. He was morose and glum, avoiding his friends until they began to shun him. His teachers became worried about him and sent notes home to his mother, telling her that Tim was falling asleep in class. These he threw away on the way home from school.

Eventually a teacher went to Tim’s house and had a long talk with his mother, who confessed that she had had a crisis at work and had not noticed that her son was looking unwell.

‘I’ll take him to the doctor in the morning,’ she promised.

When she finally did take time to notice him, she saw how hunched he was, his head sunk between his shoulders and his arms dangling by his sides.

‘Why are you standing like that?’ she asked. ‘Oh, Tim, you do look a bit grey and worn. We’ll have to see what the doctor says.’

The doctor gave Tim a check-up but could find nothing wrong with him.

‘It’s probably one of these new viruses,’ he said. ‘They sap one’s energy and leave one feeling listless and apathetic. Give him three of these tablets a day and see how we go on. If he needs rest, you’d better let him stay off school for a while. We’ll have to play this one by ear. All right Tim?’

Tim gave the doctor a tight, wan smile, as weak as a winter sun. He had the words ready in his head to tell them all—the teachers, his mother, the doctor—but nothing would come out of his mouth. He longed to tell someone, to ask anyone what he could do about this dreadful
creature which
was destroying his life, but he couldn’t. So he simply hunched deeper into himself and shuffled his feet, like an owl settling on a perch.

That night, when he took the owl some raw lights, the creature made Tim eat some too. Together, the human-faced creature and Tim tore at the soft giblets and intestines of
animals which
Tim had begged from the butcher, the juices dribbling down their chins and dripping on to the bedroom carpet. Tim had told the butcher that the raw innards were for his pet bird.

‘What have you got? A kestrel hawk or something?’

Tim had nodded and muttered, ‘
Or
something...’

He wanted to be sick when the slimy giblets slid down his throat but the owl stared into his eyes and he found he could not bring up the disgusting raw meats and had to digest them.

‘I hate you,’ he whispered to the owl and its old woman’s face snarled and spat at him, telling him he was hers to use and he would have to eat far worse things before too long.

Anyone walking into Tim’s room that night would have been shocked to the core at the scene.
On one end of the bed sat the terrible owl, hunched into its feathers. On the other end of the bed sat the boy, hunched into his shoulders. Both creatures were uttering strange black words at each other, like two demons
who
despise each other yet are forced to live under the same roof. They hissed and spat and ground their teeth, the boy rippled his arms like wings and the owl shuffled her feet and sneered like a human. It was the most appalling and terrifying sight to witness.

Tim began to grow desperate. There was no one he could talk to about what was happening to him. No one would understand. He himself didn’t understand. He began frequenting libraries and reading books on mythology, determined to discover what this creature was and where it had come from. Day after day he searched, but found nothing.

One day, Tim was lying on his bed trying to get some rest when his mother came into his room. She had his coat in her hands and she made straight for the wardrobe. Tim knew the owl was perched inside and he sat up expectantly as she opened the door.

She looked inside, gave a high-pitched scream, dropped the coat and ran from the room.

Tim followed her out a few moments later. At last, he thought, someone would do something to help him out of his nightmare. Instead, his mother was beside herself with anger. She was furious with Tim. He stood by helpless as she berated him.

‘How could you?’ she cried, shaking with annoyance.

‘What?’ pleaded
Tim.

‘You know very well—that horrible mask. You hung it in your wardrobe to frighten me. I don’t know what’s happening to you lately, Tim. You used to be such a nice boy. Now you’re lazy and full of silly tricks like this. Mr James, the butcher, said you’ve been asking for meat from him for an eagle or something. I told him we hadn’t got any kind of pet. What are you playing at?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Tim, close to tears.

‘Well, I certainly don’t know either,’ replied his mother. ‘Now if you’ll go to your room, I’ll try to get on with earning us some money, though I’m sure I don’t feel like it after that ugly scare.’

Tim lurched from the
living-room
, tears in his eyes. The owl seemed to have him trapped. He was its slave and he was becoming more owlish every day. He could no longer go to the butcher’s so he would have to start trapping mice and rats. The owl’s and, indeed, his own appetite was voracious. That evening he found some
mouse traps
in the garden shed and set them in likely places. Lately he had found his movements becoming quicker and his hearing and smell more acute. Perhaps he would soon be able to hunt without traps.

Just before the summer holidays, Tim finally discovered what he was up against. He found a book in the school
library which
somehow he’d missed before. It was entitled
Local Myths and Folk Lore
. Delving into it he came across a section entitled THE MEGOWL. It seemed that King Arthur’s half-sister, the witch Morgan le Fay, had once passed through a remote corner of Essex. She had become displeased with one of the local witches, an old woman named Meg Hopkins, whom she had changed into an owl.

The Megowl was a bird with a human
face which
laid one egg on Halloween, then lived only until Christmas Day, dying the moment the new chick was born. It was, in fact, a rebirth—the old Megowl giving birth to herself through her own egg. Sometimes the egg lay dormant, waiting for centuries, for it had to be nurtured by a human child. Once the child was found, the Megowl gradually turned it into a creature like itself, so that it could more easily obtain food to feed her. And the worst thing of all, was that there was no way
of
destroying it.

Tim put the book back on its shelf and left the library, feeling bleak. He was indeed caught by a fiend, a demon who refused to let him go. Some of his former friends were off to the pitch to play football. They saw Tim staring after them and yelled cruelly, ‘There’s the boy-bird of Ashingdon! Why don’t you flap your arms for us, Sully?’ Tim bared his teeth like a savage animal and moved so swiftly towards the jeering youths that they ran off, leaving their football on the ground. Tim pierced it with his sharp fingernails, puncturing it. Then he made for the nearest ditch to hunt rats.

Several days later,
Tim was called to the front of the class by the geography teacher
.

‘Tim, you don’t seem to be paying attention. Are you sure you’re well?’

‘I’m never well,’ muttered Tim, burying his head in his shoulders and flexing his clawlike fingers.

‘I see. Well, if you’re ill you’d better go home, but we hardly see you lately, do we...?’

The teacher stopped in mid-sentence, for Tim had begun a peculiar movement, now familiar to him but so far not witnessed by anyone else. His throat was pulsing and his chest heaving violently. A kind of shudder was going through his whole body.

‘Are you going to be sick?’ cried the teacher, stepping back in alarm.

Suddenly the boy gave a kind of strangled cough and spat a large pellet at the teacher’s feet. The
wad which had come out of his mouth
was made of fur and bones, packed together into a tight pellet. It was in fact the regurgitated remains of a mouse that Tim had eaten earlier that morning.
He had been unable to digest this pellet and, just like an owl’s
,
his body had rejected it
.

The teacher took Tim’s hand and led him immediately from the room. His mother was called on the telephone and came to collect him half an hour later. On the drive home, she questioned him.

‘What have you been eating, Tim?’ she asked, her eyes fixed on the road.

‘Nothing,’ said Tim, sullenly.

‘Tomorrow,’ said his mother, nodding, ‘tomorrow,
we’re
 
going
to the doctor’s.’

Hope surged through Tim’s breast. He had been eating mice, voles and other small creatures for several weeks now. He knew exactly what he needed to do.

That night he climbed out of his bedroom window, under the sharp, piercing eyes of the Megowl. He had told her in her own tongue that he was going hunting. This was true enough. Tim intended to catch several small mammals.

He crawled into the nearest ditch, on all fours like a wild animal, and waited in the moonlight. When he heard a rustling in the hedgerow, his hand flashed out and snatched the small creature. It was a vole. The speed of his strike would have electrified any human witnessing this scene. Tim’s movements were as fast as any wild predator’s. He waited for a second creature to come along. Animals tend to use pathways they have made for themselves rather than cross open country, and Tim was waiting by one of these busy highways.

When he had several small, limp bodies, he went back to his room where the wizened-faced owl was licking her lips in anticipation. Tim fed her three of the mammals and ate two
himself
.

The following morning he was driven to the doctor’s. In the waiting room, he felt like regurgitating the pellet of bones and fur, but held it down until he was ushered into the surgery. As soon as he was standing in front of the doctor he let go and vomited the bolt of waste matter on to the desk. As expected, the doctor jumped backwards out of his chair.