'Shadows from the past?' I said, surprised. This whole story had sounded like the last word in horror: could there be worse to come?
'That's what you could call them,' Saffron growled, taking up the tale. The column of greyish backs and expectantly raised tails winding on ahead of us curved round to the right.
'There was only one shadow really. But of course the past is interesting mainly as it affects the present. I believe you encountered something strange soon after entering our territory, Francis.'
'One corpse, drowned. Probably European Shorthair. Head severed from neck and no longer present. Numerous very large bite-marks on the body. Had probably been in the water for several days, hence the extremely bloated appearance of the body. Is to be assumed that the killing was not preceded by a fight of the sort usual among us with its rituals of challenge and defence; killer did not employ the customary neck-bite. Conclusion: victim must have been in a state of shock at the time, rendering him unable to defend himself and making things easy for the murderer. The extent of the brutality can hardly be explained any other way.'
I thought, with some pride, that no expert in forensic medicine could have put the salient points better. Saffron and Niger seemed impressed by my lightning analysis too, and momentarily slowed down. However, the big boss wasn't going to show his respect for my little grey cells openly. He wouldn't want anyone encroaching on his own authority. So he just looked impassive.
'We guessed it was something like that,' he said gruffly, following up his remark with a mock yawn. 'However, you weren't to know that this was the fifteenth or twentieth corpse to have paid us a visit to date.'
Dread descended on me like black folds of mourning tulle. I thought I was going to stumble, because the horror of it temporarily made me lose my balance. Good God, what monster was working at this frenzied rate to prove his skill in butchery? What could the motive be? Sheer love of violence? Hunger? Madness?
'The twentieth corpse?' I murmured incredulously. Something inside me refused to believe the inconceivable.
'Or maybe the thirtieth. We stopped counting the mutilated bodies after a while.' Saffron was gradually forgetting to play the authority game; he sounded genuinely upset. His expression and the thoughtful way he walked showed that these incidents got right under his fur. In fact he was very worried indeed.
'Because of our living conditions here, we can't help swimming in the sewers now and then. I know humans think we avoid ordinary water the way the devil avoids the holy variety, but that's not true of all of us - much of it's based on superstition, and practice can make anyone a good swimmer. Anyway, recently we've found that when we go into the water we're more and more likely to find one of these mutilated corpses floating into our paws. We believe the murders are committed somewhere in the forest outside the city, because we quite often find pine needles stuck in the victims' wounds. There are some streams and ditches there which run straight into the sewage system. And the nearby farms have drainage feeding into the system too. So it's possible the murder victims were brothers and sisters of ours living with farmers in the country.'
'And you want me to go out into the world and discover who dunnit?' I said, without much enthusiasm.
'Oh no, you don't need to do anything like that, my dear Francis. We know who dunnit.'
'You know who ... but then for heaven's sake why don't you get your skates on and pick him up?'
I stopped abruptly. I wished I hadn't made that last remark. Sometimes, I realised, I had all the sensitivity of a slogger in a baseball game.
'Your eyes,' I said, awkwardly. 'I suppose they make things difficult for you outside.'
'Yes, there's a bit of a problem there,' said Saffron, to my relief ignoring the brick I'd dropped. 'But the complicated part is finding him, because he's everywhere and nowhere. In fact strictly speaking he doesn't exist: he's a legend, a shadow from the past ...'
Saffron suddenly stopped and sat there, concentrating hard. The sparkling gold rings swung gently from his pointed ears, pricked in their most receptive position; his head swayed back and forth like a tank turret seeking its target, and his whiskers quivered busily, as if they were insect antennae processing information. Then his blind, flickering gaze came to rest on a certain point in the waters of the sewer.
'Niger, you tell him about the Black Knight,' whispered the Chartreux, barely audibly, and with a mighty leap he plunged head first into the water. While I was still trying to recover from my surprise, he came to the surface again with something struggling frantically between his teeth. He had obviously caught a rat and was taming it for breakfast. I'd already heard amazing tales of the acoustic sensitivity of the blind, but this episode surely took the biscuit.
Paying no further attention to the incident, Niger walked on. I took this as an invitation to follow her. Leaving the angler to his hobby, I followed close on my companion's heels. Naturally I couldn't resist the temptation to cast several glances back over my shoulder for a better view of Saffron's extraordinary activities, but I couldn't really see much except a frantic splashing as either the hunter tried to drag his prey under water or vice versa.
'Once upon a time, Francis, something evil ruled the underworld.' Niger closed her eyes and stretched her neck telescopically forward, as if passing through an imaginary wall into the realm of the past. Inexpressible horrors seemed to be resurrected before her mind's eye.
'We didn't know what the evil thing was, but we knew it was there. Anyway, it seemed to be a creature of darkness, like us, and it could come round the corner without warning any time it liked. When it did appear, sudden as a jack-in-the-box, it would grab one of us and make mincemeat of him in the fraction of a second. We usually panicked and ran for our lives. If some brave person did go to the victim's aid, he'd be mincemeat too in no time at all, leaving only a couple of extremities, torn off but despised by the phantom, to bear witness to his courage. Our enemy was bestiality incarnate and completely unpredictable, and as time went on it became a terrible scourge threatening to wipe us all out. We crept along, hugging the walls, our teeth chattering; we couldn't hunt properly because there was no way to turn the threat aside, and we saw a time coming when we'd be wiped out. Meanwhile, the phantom was pursuing its annihilation programme as relentlessly as a finely calibrated circular saw, always trusting to vicious surprise attacks. Sometimes it would lie in wait in a secret niche above the wall, leap down on any group of brothers and sisters who happened to be passing and wreak indescribable havoc among them. Or it would dart out of a branch drainpipe like a combine harvester run amok and dispose of one of us with only a couple of bites. Whenever these things happened we heard terrible screams which sounded like the dreadful howling of madmen unable to express the infinite horror of their dark, imaginary world in language. And we heard echoes of terrifying sounds: the hiss of fangs plunged into live flesh, the dry crack of bones, the smacking of lips - oh, that disgusting lip-smacking sound which conveyed supreme contempt!'
Niger stopped, and a surreptitious glance showed me that tears had gathered in her eyes which, though blind, were as lovely as fjords surrounded by the mist. The horror seemed to have etched itself permanently into her memory, and like most witnesses of violent events she kept going back over the hell she'd suffered. I wanted to say something comforting, but I felt next moment that would be a clumsy, useless thing to do. I couldn't comfort someone whose suffering I hadn't shared.
Unexpectedly, Saffron caught up with us. He was wet through, and in his mouth he carried the fattest, ugliest rat I had ever seen. To be honest, I hadn't got to know very many of these unattractive contemporaries of ours to date, certainly none who had swollen to twice their normal size by lurking in subterranean vaults. For the rat Saffron was carrying in his teeth like a retriever was more the size of a stout rabbit. The hunter himself bore his trophy as casually as if he'd just stopped off at the supermarket meat counter. It had several deep bites disfiguring the neck area.
'Hab you tol hib
bou Cazy Uo?' he mumbled, since the prey in his mouth made it impossible for him to articulate clearly. The rat's dead, open eyes stared sideways and accusingly at me, as if reproaching me for hanging about in such disreputable company.
'I was just coming to that part,' said Niger, suppressing a sob and shaking her head violently to get rid of the tears.
'Hugo grew up during this bad time. He was a Tiffany, a long-haired Burmese: silky, sable-brown fur, very long and hopelessly tangled; eyes which might have been cast in high-carat gold, bushy tail, muscular build, round head. He was in a pitiful state when he was washed down into the sewers. That soon changed, and we very quickly realised that not only was he the most handsome young male we'd ever reared, he was also, extraordinarily, the only one of us to retain his vision. But it soon turned out that he suffered from severe behavioural disorders. With Hugo, even childish games quickly became so rough that his surprised companions were left with nasty injuries. When he grew older he would pick on anyone, even his foster mother, and in fact he hurt her quite badly. And he spent less and less time with us; he became a recluse, turning up only to pick violent quarrels. One day he broke our taboo: he actually killed one of us in a fight. We expelled him from our community as punishment for the crime, and thereafter we knew him only as Crazy Hugo. Like the evil phantom, he assumed the aura of a ghost who seldom appeared, but whose watchful eyes were secretly observing us all the time. After a while, however, we began to forget Crazy Hugo, being too busy with our own troubles. In fact the one we had cast out actually became a legendary figure of whom we told the most amazing tales with paws before our mouths.
'One day - by this time our numbers were much reduced by the monster's terrorist attacks - we were out hunting and came to a part of the sewage system where we'd never been before. As we went further and further on we suddenly came up against a wall, and realised too late that it was a blind alley. But by then we were in the trap, for at that moment we heard the dreadful dragging noise the phantom made. It had obviously been following us the whole way there. Now it took up its position behind us, cutting off the only way of escape. We were at its mercy. It just stood there, patiently waiting to turn our flesh and bones to bloody mush with its murderous jaws. And the descriptions the young ones and children who could still see gave us at last revealed the secret of its identity.'
'Some crazy human being, right?' I guessed astutely.
Saffron dropped the stinking rat from his mouth and with a mighty blow of his paw kicked it to the right, into an alcove where a stone had fallen out of the wall.
'Wrong. It was a dog!' he said, immediately raising his head and sniffing hard, as if he'd picked up a new scent. I had been so spellbound by Niger's story that only now did I notice the glittering megabeam of light, suggesting the dazzling effect of a UFO landing, which penetrated a gap in the roof far ahead. Surprises were coming thick and fast. The pack in front of us sprinted forward towards the light which apparently represented salvation, while we three went on walking at a leisurely pace.
'Yes, it was a bloody great dog, a huge black mastiff,' Niger went on. 'In normal circumstances - whatever normal circumstances may be - we'd have felt sorry for him, because like us he was obviously an outcast, only trying to satisfy his hunger. And like us, he clearly preferred this paw-to-mouth existence to the company of human beings. Humans regard dogs like him only as their servants. But in our present situation, as I was saying, we could hardly afford solidarity. This dog was our enemy, a monster, and within a few seconds he was going to tear us all to bits, as sure as the hypocritical Amen they say in human churches. He took a few steps towards us and we flinched back in alarm. But next moment we heard a miserable howling. It undoubtedly came from the mastiff; it was just too dog-like a noise for any of us to have made it. We quickly got the sighted children to tell us what was going on. Crazy Hugo had suddenly shot out of the darkness and gone for the dog's throat like a flying vampire. He must have been shadowing us the whole time, and when he guessed we were in real danger he attacked. Anyway, the dog had no chance at all to do anything about Hugo, who clung to his throat however much he twisted and turned in unbearable agony. Finally the crazy creature drove his incisors deep into the crazy dog's oesophagus until the latter fell down, unable to do anything but whine miserably. We were praying Hugo would keep going and slaughter him with the same barbaric tortures we'd suffered ourselves. Let him know fear, the real fear of death, before he finally received the coup de grâce! Instead, a very strange thing happened. It must have been something to do with kindred spirits being on the same wavelength. The dog was wheezing as if begging for mercy. He'd surrendered ages ago, because Hugo was clinging to his vital artery like a malevolent leech; the smallest movement of resistance would mean the mastiff's dispatch. At long last the dragon had found a knight who was a match for him. Then, we were told, their eyes met in an exchange of glances quite different from the usual hostile staring that goes on between victor and vanquished. It was a current of recognition, of understanding for the terrible things they had done, each of them seeing his own reflection in his enemy's face. It was the merging of two forms of madness into a single and even more monstrous derangement. For some inexplicable reason Crazy Hugo had saved us, delivering us from the curse that threatened to wipe us out. But with that act he'd finally sold the soul which had still been related to ours up till then. He'd entered into a kind of pact with the devil. He let go of the mastiff, who got to his feet despite his injuries and looked at his conqueror as if hypnotised. Then Hugo mounted his dragon and trotted away on him like a cowboy riding into the sunset. We've never met either of them since, but they still live on in our legends.'(7)
'No, we've never met the two of them again, but we've heard some strange stories about them on occasion.' Saffron stopped, licked his forepaw thoughtfully and then rubbed it over his head. He seemed to be remembering that period with horror too.
'You think they did the murders?' I asked, not that I really wanted to know the details. Well, why shouldn't the theory of a crazy dog and an even crazier Hugo committing serial murder be true? By now, after all the amazing things I'd learnt in the last few minutes, I was ready to believe in the existence of the Seven Dwarfs themselves.
'Not a lot of outside news makes its way down here.' Saffron set off again, and Niger and I followed him towards the place which was illuminated as if in a floodlight. The others were just beginning to reach it. 'But we've heard that Hugo and his murderous steed have left the sewage system for good and are now terrorising the forest near by. People there call him the Black Knight because on his infrequent but spectacular appearances he's always seen riding that crazy dog. They say he sits upright on the mastiff like a human horseman, and the sight of the couple always strikes mystical awe into observers. They're the ultimate outsiders, so it seems logical for them to persecute those who live comfortably in the safety of human homes. Solitude and the outlaw life have finally brutalised them, and now they kill just out of hatred and envy - let alone the fact that they're totally deranged, of course.'
'The monstrous extent of the violence certainly supports that theory,' I agreed. 'It more or less rules out a single perpetrator. But what makes you so sure this particular pair are the murderers?'
'Well, we can't imagine who else in the animal kingdom would be responsible for such horrors. Besides, the crimes bear the trademarks we know from the past.'
'Oh, great. So what am I supposed to do if I catch Hugo and his lovely companion in the act? Put the handcuffs on and cart them off to the police station?'
'Just come back here and tell us where they're hiding out. We'll do the rest. Our situation now is very different from what it was before. There are more of us than there used to be, and we have far more hunting experience. But first, some brave and enterprising character has to go out and get us precise information on their whereabouts. We made a big mistake when we let those two go. It was irresponsible of us. Now they're at large out there, like psychopath chain
saw killers in a movie, inflicting dreadful carnage on the rural population. You must find the Black Knight, Francis. He's a disgrace to our kind, a festering sore that must be burnt out as soon as possible.'
Well roared, lion! But how exactly did Saffron envisage all this? I'd be useless at reading tracks North American Indian fashion, and I wasn't linked up to any reconnaissance satellites either. To make matters even more dicey, all I knew of wildernesses, to be honest, came out of a TV series based on the Leatherstocking tales. I knew the difference between a bush and a tree all right, but the mere thought of a forest jam-packed with bushes and trees made me feel like Hansel and Gretel rolled into one. Anyway, how did we know the murders actually had been committed by these two double-dyed villains? OK, so the vicious mutilation of the corpses fitted certain aspects of the murderer's profile as described, but there were other mad folk around too. If you read the papers as regularly as I did, you might well think the whole world was one vast funny farm. In view of these and similar considerations, I finally came to what seemed to me a brilliant conclusion. I'd promise the blind folk the help of my detective abilities, but once I was out of here I'd run straight to the nearest emergency call-box and vandalise it until a police patrol came to my aid, identified me from the tattoo on my rump and carted me back to my beloved Gustav. I'm ashamed to say I was even quite looking forward to seeing Francesca.
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