The Book of Beasts

by John Barrowman

  ‘I knew you hadn’t abandoned me all those years ago, Malcolm my love, my dear boy.’ Her voice was spiked with adoration, adrenaline and years of repressed ambition. ‘You have achieved the unimaginable. Done the impossible. Now let me help you.’

  She could not leave the tapestry here. She could not let anyone else see how it had changed until she was ready.

  Dragging a chair over, she climbed up, unhooking the cloth from its iron rod. It was heavy, and required all her strength. Hastily, she rolled it like a carpet, using the belt from her coat to keep it secure. She ran to the windows on the other side of the room and threw them open. Dragging and pulling the tapestry, she heaved it over the windowsill into a private courtyard below, where it fell to the ground with a weighty thud.

  The door handles rattled.

  ‘Henrietta!’ called Sir Charles through the wood. ‘Why is this door locked? Are you ill? Open these doors immediately.’

  A euphoric Henrietta replaced her hat, grabbed her cane, and followed her prize out of the window.

  TWELVE

  Auchinmurn Isle

  The Middle Ages

  Malcolm’s cruel intentions were suffocating Matt, slowing him down. Beneath the bile, beneath the cold unyielding rage, Matt had sensed his father’s true focus.

  Malcolm tugged on the black peryton’s antlers. The beast reared, racing through the clouds towards the blackened hillside and the feebly stirring form of the Abbey’s housekeeper.

  ‘He’s coming for you!’ yelled Solon behind Matt. ‘Take cover!’

  ‘No, he wants Jeannie!’ yelled Matt. He had left the soft sand now, and was scrambling to pull himself up and over the lip of the hill. ‘He needs her. I can feel it. Jeannie!’ he screamed, clawing his way up the impossible slope. ‘Wake up! You have to move!’

  Malcolm and the black peryton were flying fast and low across the surf now, the beast’s hooves sparking against the outcropping rocks, the tips of its wings whipping the crests of the waves. Matt lunged at a tree root to heave himself further up the treacherous slope, but it popped like a loose tooth in his hands, tossing him desperately, maddeningly, on to the sand again.

  Carik shot three arrows in quick succession at Malcolm and the demonic spectre. The wind and her terror distorted her aim, and her arrows veered harmlessly into the water. The beast was almost upon them, its ghostly form gleaming, its wide snorting nostrils and blazing eyes terrifying to behold.

  Matt got to his feet, shaking and battered, searching hopelessly for some means of scaling the smooth, unforgivingly muddy slope that lay between him and Jeannie.

  ‘I’ll hoist you up!’ Solon shouted, cupping his hands.

  With Solon’s assistance, Matt finally made it over the lip of the muddy hillside. He scrambled to get a hold, shoving his hands deeper and deeper into the swampy ground, cold mud up to his elbows as he clawed his way forward. He couldn’t slip again.

  Up ahead, Jeannie fumbled to free herself from the tree. She wasn’t making progress. Her hands were swollen and red and the knots in her apron had tightened with the water.

  ‘Son,’ she called out groggily, seeing Matt pounding and slipping towards her. ‘This isn’t yer fight. Find yer way home.’

  A dark shadow swept over them.

  ‘Dad!’ Matt was struggling to stand in the streaming mud. ‘Don’t hurt her! Don’t hurt Jeannie!’

  Malcolm and the beast hovered above them, the wind from the peryton’s wings forcing Jeannie back against the tree. He grinned, the stretch of his lips tearing into the powdery pink flesh, exposing the black roots of his missing teeth and dripping clots of ink from his chin on to the winged collar of his chain mail.

  ‘Don’t hurt her, Dad,’ Matt screamed.

  Jeannie blinked up at Malcolm. ‘You hurt the wean, Malcolm Calder,’ she hissed, ‘and it’ll be your death too.’

  Down below, Carik and Solon had waded out into the water for the motionless body of the Abbot as he drifted into the shore. Now they were lifting him from the waves.

  ‘I’ll do anything you want, Dad!’ Matt yelled, shoving his arms and legs deep into the mud to anchor himself.

  Mesmerized, he watched his father tug the peryton higher, swinging some kind of lasso in tight circles above his head. A black orb the size of a football was attached to the end of the rope. It flew towards Jeannie’s head where it whirred and clicked and popped open, dropping a mechanical net over her. The sides snapped against each other like teeth, locking Jeannie inside.

  How is he doing this? Matt wondered, lunging towards the swinging net.

  But he wasn’t fast enough. Malcolm and the beast galloped away through the air, dragging Jeannie behind them, vanishing into the clouds and leaving a ragged line of light like a scar in the sky.

  THIRTEEN

  Matt’s body was caked in filth, his hair stuck to his scalp in thick clumps. A cut on his cheek was bleeding. But it was the pain inside his head that was making his teeth ache. He had failed.

  He walked in defeat across the beach to where Solon was kneeling next to the Abbot.

  Matt had never seen a dead body before. He slowed, unsure of what to expect.

  Solon had pulled the Abbot’s hood respectfully over his face, leaving only the old man’s pale chin and wiry grey whiskers visible beneath the folds of cloth. His hands were tucked inside the sleeves of his robes and his arms folded in front of him. The wet material clung to his body like a heavy skin. It was clear that the fall into the sea from such a great height had broken him.

  ‘We must get his body somewhere dry and safe.’ Solon’s voice was thick with anguish.

  ‘After we find Brother Renard, we will lay the Abbot to rest. Then we deal with your father.’

  Matt kneeled next to Solon, feeling more desperate than ever. ‘That man, that monster, is not my father. Whatever happened when I… I brought him here destroyed his mind… or whatever was left of it.’

  ‘No matter. He will pay.’ Solon stood. ‘Help me carry the Abbot to higher ground. We must lay him somewhere safe, where animals can’t reach him.’

  Matt didn’t reply but instead reached for a stick and sketched in the dry, hard-packed sand above the tideline. Within seconds, a simple plank coffin appeared.

  ‘You have broken the Rules again,’ said Solon after a moment.

  ‘This is no time for the Rules,’ said Matt.

  Together they lifted the Abbot inside the coffin. Solon dug around in the rocks until he found two flat stones, placing them gently and reverently on the Abbot’s eyes. Matt dropped the heavy lid.

  ‘It should keep out any animals until we can bury him properly,’ said Matt.

  Carik suddenly came sprinting round the rocky point.

  ‘RUN!’ she screamed.

  A line of knights in matching black armour, wings forged on their shoulders and silver spirals on their breastplates, was marching swiftly towards them behind Carik, their heads cowled in chain mail, each figure outlined in an eerie yellow light.

  ‘Animations!’ said Matt in astonishment, scrambling to his feet. His father couldn’t have imagined this army – he was a Guardian – so who had created them?

  There were six knights, each one at least two metres tall, and marching with unnatural speed and an extraordinary choreographed precision, their bony joints visible through the chain mail. But it was their heads that horrified Matt.

  Each had only half a face.

  Matt’s first idea was to imagine a machine gun, but he knew he couldn’t. Gunpowder wouldn’t make its way to the far corners of Scotland for another century at least, never mind rapid-firing guns. He’d already violated history enough. What could he do to fight these creatures?

  Carik leaped up on to a ridge of rocks and released a flurry of arrows, hitting one or two of the knights in the back and puncturing their armour. The resulting wounds oozed a thick bubbling black liquid on to the sand, melting everything it touched as the knight dissolved to a hissing puddle.

  ‘Do
n’t let that stuff touch you!’ Matt yelled at Carik in warning.

  It was too late. Carik screamed in pain when one of the creatures turned towards her, splashing the oozing tar on her hand and blistering the skin on contact.

  ‘It’s some kind of incendiary ink, like sulphur and coal tar,’ Matt began to explain to Solon. ‘It’s burned her, though she’ll be—’

  But with a howl Solon had already charged among the five remaining skeletal soldiers, swinging and thrusting his broadsword, reducing one to fizzling liquid with a lucky stab to the image on its breastplate.

  ‘Aim for the breastplate!’ Solon shouted, wiping the ink on his clothing.

  Instantly the liquid ate through the wool of Solon’s tunic. Matt could smell burning flesh as Solon screamed. Frantically the young monk ripped the cloth from his body and grabbed a handful of wet seaweed, pressing it hard against the smouldering wound.

  The minions honed in on Matt, who had scrambled on to the jagged rocks that lined the shore. With no time to think, Matt used the tip of Solon’s sword to scratch a weapon on the face of the rock.

  This had better work.

  FOURTEEN

  A motorized hum electrified the air seconds before a double-ended light-sabre materialized in Matt’s hand. He stumbled a little at first, not realizing how heavy his creation would be, but quickly adjusted, checking his stance and tightening his grip on the central handle. Dropping one shoulder, he swooped at the faceless knight on his left, plunging the end of the laser into his breastplate, then pivoted and drove the other side into a second creature approaching from the right. Each dissolved into pools of thick black ink.

  Two more flew at him. Matt sidestepped the first, slipped on a slick rock, but righted himself in time to push his laser into its chest. The other end of the light-sabre missed the second completely, and Matt landed in a spreading puddle of burning ink.

  ‘Ow!’

  The toxic mixture singed through Matt’s jeans. He rolled away, his whole body shrieking with pain. The last knight’s rotting face was almost upon him. Matt got to his knees, twisted round and swung his laser at its head. He missed.

  It was Solon who jumped up on to the rocks to stab his sword into the last faceless knight’s back and out through his chest.

  The two boys leaned against each other next to the Abbot’s coffin, catching their breath, watching the ink simmer and seep into the sand.

  Solon stared at Matt’s light-sabre in awe. ‘Is this a weapon from your time?’

  ‘It’s from a galaxy far, far away,’ said Matt, grinning.

  ‘Where did you learn to fight like that?’ asked Carik, letting Solon plaster seaweed on to her blistering hand. It was clear that she was trying not to appear impressed.

  Matt pressed the button in the centre, and the light-sabres withdrew into their respective sides of the handle. ‘Video games,’ he said, scraping his drawing off the rock. With a soft hum, the weapon vanished, leaving a faint green glow floating above his hands that faded into nothing. ‘You play with an avatar on a… a special screen against other gamers. This weapon is from a game with Jedi knights.’

  ‘You still have knights in your time?’

  Matt caught Carik and Solon exchanging glances, and sensed that they were communicating telepathically. It reminded Matt of how alone he was. He missed having Em in his head, even when she wasn’t speaking to him. Her presence had been comforting.

  Matt swallowed a sob. He didn’t know if he could stand not having Em in his head for the rest of his life. He hoped, despite what Solon and Carik said they had seen, that somehow Em had survived. Surely if she was really dead, he would have felt something.

  One thing Matt did know for sure. His mum and Em weren’t in the Middle Ages any more.

  ‘What is an avatar?’ asked Solon.

  Matt forced his mind back to the present. ‘It’s a thing that you create to fight for you in games.’

  Solon’s face cleared. ’Like a squire taking a knight’s place at a joust?’

  ‘Sort of,’ said Matt, deciding that to explain online gaming and the internet to two medieval teenagers centuries before the printing press and movable type would take too much energy.

  The tide had come in, leaving only a narrow strip of jagged rocks, like uneven teeth, exposed beneath the hillside. The Abbot’s coffin lay perilously close to the edge of the water.

  ‘We can’t leave the coffin here,’ said Solon. ‘The Abbot could be washed out to sea with the tide.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be honourable?’ asked Carik. ‘All my people are returned to the sea in flames. It’s how they journey to Valhalla.’

  Solon shook his head. ‘The Abbot has a place in the crypt with the other great monks of Era Mina. He has earned that honour. We must put him somewhere safe before we seek shelter ourselves.’

  Struggling against the rising wind and the dropping temperatures, the boys managed to grip each end of the coffin without either one of them falling into the bay. Stepping with great care from rock to rock, they followed Carik to the end of the cove where there was a rocky ledge high and wide enough for them to hoist the coffin to safety.

  Free of their burden, the three of them picked up their pace, hugging the rock face for cover as they hurried along the narrow exposed strip of beach, heading to the other side of the island to take shelter in the old smugglers’ caves.

  FIFTEEN

  Royal Academy

  London

  Present Day

  ‘Hunt her down, Vaughn,’ Sir Charles had instructed through tight lips, his hand already on the phone to convene an emergency meeting of the European Council of Guardians. ‘Whatever it takes, find Henrietta de Court and that tapestry.’

  Hunting rogue Guardians and Animare was familiar ground to Vaughn Grant. As an agent of Orion, the secret organization of Animare hunters scattered through the world, Vaughn spent much of his time on similar missions. It was how he had first met Sandie, when Sir Charles had charged him with tracking her and the twins when they had gone into hiding in the early days.

  He’d done his job too well back then. Rather than betray Sandie, he had helped her survive. It was at that time Vaughn had also agreed to help Renard, his friend and mentor, by spying on Sir Charles lest he and the Council make any rash decisions about binding the twins after Sandie had fled to Scotland with them.

  This mission, however, felt more serious than most. Henrietta de Court was a senior Guardian on the European Council, the remaining members of which would need at least a day to answer Sir Charles’s summons and gather at the Royal Academy. But Vaughn didn’t have to wait.

  Glancing at his watch for the tenth time in as many minutes, Vaughn wondered if he would make it to the National Gallery of Scotland before it closed for the night. It was already 4.40 p.m., and he was still in London. He had twenty minutes left in which to do it.

  It was dangerous, but not impossible.

  He stared irritably at a group of schoolgirls who’d broken away from the last public tour of the day to root themselves in front of the painting Vaughn needed. Samuel Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre was a huge canvas that stretched across most of the wall between the Royal Academy’s two primary staircases. Vaughn tried to will the girls away from the art, but he was not a Guardian. Inspiriting them to move from the painting wasn’t in his skill set.

  Adrenaline surged through Vaughn’s veins. He let it. He’d need every bit of energy for what he was about to do.

  ‘This is the one I wanted to tell you about,’ said a curly redhead to her classmates in a loud voice.

  A dark-haired girl jabbed in the direction of the painting with her pen. ‘Looks lame to me,’ she said.

  The redhead folded her arms. ‘You’re just annoyed because Mr James put me in charge of our group for a change.’

  Vaughn leaned forward, glancing down the hallway. Come on, girls, please move. Opening and closing his fists, he cracked his knuckles in anticipation. His stomach rumbled and a headache w
as starting to pound behind his temples. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. Tapas near the Prado in Madrid yesterday? Or was that the day before?

  ‘The artist painted a room at the Louvre and put all his favourite pictures on its walls,’ the redhead continued as the pen-wielding girl grumbled on. ‘See, there’s the Mona Lisa next to the door and the—’

  ‘That’s really not where the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre,’ snapped the pen girl. ‘I’ve seen it.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said the redhead stubbornly. ‘The point is… this painting is haunted. My sister’s friend knows one of the night guards. He’s seen things.’

  ‘Will all patrons begin to make their way to the exits,’ boomed the public address system as the girls exploded with laughter. ‘The Royal Academy of Arts will be closing promptly in fifteen minutes.’

  Vaughn knew he was cutting this far too close. He’d made the journey from London to Edinburgh in nine minutes once, but his mind had been sharper then, and his imagination singularly focused. Unlike this afternoon. He’d already been travelling for close to thirty-six hours, and a lack of sleep compounded with his worry – about the twins, about Sandie, about Henrietta de Court – meant he was exhausted. An exhausted Animare could screw up, and when travelling by these means could be dangerous. Even fatal.

  ‘My sister’s friend,’ continued the redhead, raising her voice over the disbelieving laughter, ‘said that sometimes the guard can hear laughing and giggling from the painting and—’

  ‘What utter rubbish,’ the other girl said scornfully, flouncing towards the stairs with the rest of the group.

  If Vaughn arrived after the National Gallery in Edinburgh had closed, he’d have to animate something to avoid triggering the alarms or disturbing their guards, and the more he had to animate when he was feeling this drained, the riskier it was. Vaughn glanced at his watch again.

  The redhead shoved her gallery map into her backpack and stomped after the others. ‘Yeah, well… the artist who painted this invented Morse Code. And that’s amazing,’ she shouted after them, grasping for one last tidbit before she lost her audience entirely. ‘And if it wasn’t for him, well… well, we wouldn’t have… have… smartphones.’