The Fabulous Beast

The Fabulous Beast

To SH.

(The following passages have been taken from a journal found in a fireproof box in the smouldering ruins of Chalkdown Farm. I trust you to assess their worth, both as a possible record of actual events and of their financial value if the contents are proven to be factual. I would be grateful for your complete discretion on this matter until we have established those two points. How you proceed to reach a conclusion I have no idea, but I have been told you are the best person to approach on matters of this kind. I shall be in London until the end of the year and await with anticipation your findings).

Yours, R.L.S.

~

I have a room here in Amman in Khalid Ibn Al Walid Street (few of the road names consist of only single words) overlooking a market. The noise is bad but the privacy good. My Palestinian landlord is a discrete individual who knows of my interest in the Dead Sea scrolls and is of the opinion that those who sold the scrolls on the black market ought to have important parts of their anatomy removed and displayed for the benefit of the populace. He is a Christian but believes the scrolls should have remained in Jordanian hands, in the country where they were discovered.

At the time the scrolls were found at Qumran, on the north west shore of the Dead Sea, modern Jordan was only a few months old, having been governed by the British since they had wrested it in 1922 from the Ottoman Empire. The Turks had administered it as part of Syria; the British called it Transjordan. In the winter of 1946/47 it became the independent Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan under the rule of King Hussein.

A Bedu shepherd boy named romantically Muhammad-the-Wolf found the scrolls in a cave after one of his flock went missing. The archaeological treasures were in sealed earthenware jars, a total of seven, wrapped in linen. The scandal that followed the discovery, of marketing the scrolls, procrastination, incompetence, secrecy, and a host of other unfortunate occurrences, is now part of history. Those few scrolls which did remain in Jordan had been placed at my disposal due to the influence of an acquaintance of Colonel Douglass. I was in Amman to study
The War scroll
– to search for references for a book Douglass was writing. I had found nothing really to excite him in this scroll, though the passages where
the sons of light
fought with
the sons of darkness
might hold some interest. I had also however obtained a single fragment of a leather scroll found later in one of the nine further caves – Cave 7 in fact – on which there was a reference to a
strange and marvellous beast
. This was the kind of information Colonel Douglass was desperate to obtain, thin though it appeared to me.

Yesterday evening, while I was studying this fragment which, like all those in found in Cave 7 was in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic, there was a sharp knock on the door. I pulled back the bolt, fully expecting to see my landlord only to find a stranger confronting me.

The man stepped smartly into the room without being invited and shut the door quickly behind him.

'Mr
David Wilkins? My name is Abdulla Rashid,' he said in a low tone, 'and I am known to your master, Colonel Douglass.'

'You are mistaken,’ I said.

He had been in the process of undoing a hessian sack and he gave a little cry and started to re-tie the bag.

'You are not Mr Wilkins?'

'I am David Wilkins,' I replied, to put him at his ease, ‘but Colonel Douglass is not my master, nor anything like it – I'm a freelance researcher, not a slave.'

He smiled at this, revealing several gold teeth 'Ah-ha, you joke with me, Mr Wilkins. But I have here in this bag something you will not laugh at. I have found another amphora at the Pharos site . . .’

Something dawned in my memory. ‘Ahhh, you're the man Colonel Douglass met in Egypt! I remember he told me you had found several ancient parchments for him.'

Rashid gave a little bow and smiled again.

He began undoing the sack. 'What I have here for you, this time, are two parchments – no, not parchments,
hides
-from the ancient time of Jesus Christ – such as those you have come to see in Jordan.'

'You mean
scrolls?
' I said, excitedly.

He shrugged. 'I think so. These are not made of paper or bronze, like some, but of animal skin – you know? The language is Aramaic – I have looked at it myself. The writer is talking of a strange animal that roamed the Earth before we came here – before men walked in the world.'

'You understand Aramaic?'

'And Hebrew, and Ancient Greek – what, you think I am ignorant? why do you think I peddle in such things? – because I know the worth of my goods? If I were a goatherd, I would give them to you for nothing, but unfortunately for you,' he grinned gold at me again. ‘I am a learned man.’

'Can you leave them with me until tomorrow morning? I'll meet you at the coffee shop on the corner of the market. If the scrolls are any good to me, I'll pay you then – if not, you can have your goods back.'

'You think I can trust you?' he asked, but with a trace of humour in his voice.

'You most certainly can. Colonel Douglass will be my bond – you know that.'

He nodded and handed over the sack. 'Treat my goods well, until they are yours, then you may burn them for all I care.'

With that he left. I bolted the door behind him.

~

Feverishly I opened the sack and took out the two scrolls, wrapped in linen. I carefully removed the first one from its protective cover. Under the dim light of a twenty-five watt bulb I attempted to decipher the Aramaic script. The contents appeared to be a list, of arms and men, and I wondered if what I had here was simply another War Scroll, a kind of quartermaster's inventory.

The second scroll, which I laid carefully alongside the first on the wooden table top, disappointingly seemed to be a continuation of the first, though I did find a reference to ‘the creature which we call The Mother’ which seemed to me to be promising.

While I stared at the second scroll, my eyes sore from working under such poor light, something happened to make me jerk backwards and stare in disbelief. It seemed to me that the two scrolls had moved closer together, independently, as if attracted to each other magnetically.

Indeed, I subsequently only managed to keep them separated by some effort. It seemed as if the edges were melding together, melting into one another, as if made of soft hot wax.

Unsurprisingly, this strange phenomenon interested me more than the texts on the hides. I studied the edges of the scrolls and found their rippling hems locked easily together like pieces of a jigsaw. From their markings they appeared to be two halves of one animal skin – possibly a goatskin, or gazelle hide – which had been cut right down the middle into two sections.

I placed the two edges together again. Once more they merged at the edges. It was astonishing. This time I left the two parts to join thoroughly, seeing no harm in allowing their union. Within in an hour it was impossible to part them without the use of a sharp implement.

This incredible curiosity excited me a great deal and I knew now that Rashid had made a definite sale, whatever his price.

~

I have acquired three more pieces of the strange hide. One was a covering for a scabbard which sheathed an antique Oriental sword belonging to the Museum of Macau. I recognised the hide by the unique markings, which revealed a close relationship with the two (now one) piece I already own. Chinese pirates obtained it for me while it was on its way across the mouth of the Pearl River to Hong Kong airport, destined for an exhibition in Paris. The second, a strip, was a large bookmark in a sacred volume owned by Buddhist priests in Burma. And finally, the best and largest, there was a Zulu war shield, said to belong to Shaka himself and used to decorate the gate to his kraal.

The extraordinary markings – their singularity, for in all my years of research in and around the museums of the world I have never come across such hide – lead me to believe that they belonged to a creature which has been lost to human knowledge. A marvellous beast of some kind, like the sabre-toothed tiger, or the mammoth, yet even more distinct, more rare than either of those prehistoric creatures. If I can obtain more pieces – and I certainly intend to try – I shall endeavour to recreate the original shape. I am helped in this by the ability of the material to join with itself at the appropriate positions.

~

Colonel Douglass is dead. In a way I am relieved. My research for him was getting in the way of my true work: to restore the beast. Since discovering the first two skins, which were luckily part of the same document, I have gradually been gathering more of the whole hide. Most of the sections – though certainly not all – have been used to record sacred works. (Not surprising considering the nature of the pelt and the creature from which it came.) Among those gathered, stolen, purchased and permanently borrowed, are:

~

An ancient and sacred Native American (Pawnee) drumskin.

~

A Tibetan religious banner, supposedly carried by those priests guarding the Dalai Lama, when he was taken to India after the Chinese invaded Tibet. It was stolen by badmashes on one of the mountain passes and sold on by them to a curio collector in New York.

~

Three
khana
or sections of a Mongol-Kalmuck ceremonial yurt.

~

A cloak used in the rituals of the two Afghanistan Pushtun tribal divisions – the Ghilzai and the Durrani. (These two groups were forever fighting over ownership of the garment.)

~

Book covers for a uniform edition of the works of Aleister Crowley, including his writings on Thelema and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. (It was in one of these books that I found my first insight as to the original owner of the whole hide. Crowley writes of a
unique
fabulous creature which roamed the earth in prehistoric times, from whose womb sprang other forms of life.)

~

Several of the pieces of the precious hide have come into my possession through diligent research. There are medieval stories of knights on quests: I have been on many quests in search of many grails. Fortunately I have no concerns about money. To put it bluntly, since Colonel Douglass died and made me his benefactor I am a rich man. Inherited wealth. I can think of no better purpose for my money than using it to restore a creature previously lost to natural history. In any case, it is an investment. The colonel stipulated in his will that his fortune should only go to me if I continued with his work: well, I believe I am continuing with his obsession. Oh, yes, it has also become an obsession with me now. When I have gone as far as I can go with it, I am sure the museums of the world will be bidding for possession of it. What dreams I have in that recreation! My head is spinning with the wonder of it all. I am so lucky. So very lucky. To have found – albeit by accident – a previously unknown extinct creature which will ensure my immortality in the world. I will be up there with the Leonardo de Vincis, the Isaac Newtons. I will be the man who found and recognised an unknown fabulous beast.

~

Despite its age the thatched cottage in Wiltshire is proving an ideal central location for the pursuit of fragments of the beast's skin and their painstaking and oddly dangerous re-assembly. Not far from the cottage itself is a huge barn, out of time with the dwelling, but standing on secluded land common to both. As tenant of the cottage I am entitled to use of the barn. It is a massive wooden structure, criss-crossed with beams, at one time used not only to store hay, but also to house cattle during the winter on two storeys. There is a kind of drawbridge arrangement which drops front the first floor of the building to the ground which once allowed the animals a sloping run up to the top stalls. When the beast is ready to enter the world, it will be by this ramp.

Colonel Douglass himself was too obsessed with his personal goal to bother with the barn, but it is the perfect place to store and examine fragments of the beast as I uncover them. when I first discovered the barn the structure was sound: the cross members, purlins and yoke braces are all of solid oak, as strong now as when they were in Elizabethan times. Some of the jack rafters needed attention and the planking on the walls has grown flimsy, but my handyman William Enifer is a fair carpenter and is up to renovating any rotten struts. The illumination is good, through the skylight windows which William fitted and is almost of an artist's studio quality: a soft, dusty light, falls obliquely on the subject from both sides. Like most of the older buildings which look out over the moors, there is a window in the shape of a crucifix under the gables at the east end. A lamp within this window, when lit, helps to comfort and guide lost souls on the wasteland at night.

Much to William’s chagrin I no longer light the lamp within the cross, since I want no strangers entering the barn, lost or otherwise.

~

Even as I acquire my pieces, my strips, my sheets of hide, the great three-dimensional jigsaw begins to take shape in the the barn. I ponder on Crowley’s sentence, especially on that word,
unique
. He surely could not have meant there was only
one
beast? A single creature with no means of reproducing its own kind? That would make it a direct creation of God or nature, depending on your beliefs. An Adam without an Eve. Or perhaps – since Crowley seems to believe the beast produces
other
creatures, an Eve without an Adam. Yet – and the thought makes my heart pound in my chest with excitement – perhaps it could be so? If it were true, what would be the creature’s lifespan? A hundred years? A thousand? Ten thousand? Or even – forever? The pieces join, as if life were still in them. Perhaps the creature has not died at all, its many parts merely scattered too widely for it to show signs of life?

~

This is unbelievably wonderful! I do not have to find
all
the pieces to the complete hide. Where there are gaps it grows between them. The area around these spaces has to be complete, but a hole the size of a broad-brimmed hat simply fills itself overnight. Even more astonishing it is becoming a solid entity, not an empty skin which I later have to stuff. The beast constructs its own shape not only from without but now also from within. It continues to grow like a fungus feeding on its own remains, filling the empty sac.