Even from some way off I saw the crack representing the mouth of the cave, which was dark and threatening as the gateway of Hades and exercised a hypnotic power of attraction on persons with a death-wish, like me. The entrance itself was an inconspicuous slit in the stone, but broad enough to admit even a human being. Although I was on speaking terms with death by now, I had no intention of making things easier for him. On the contrary, I wanted to make the Great Reaper work hard to get me. So I stalked close to the crack in the rock on quiet paws, and only when I was sure there were no suspicious noises coming from inside did I risk a glance. It was rather dark in there, but there seemed to be perforations in the rock some way up admitting daylight in the form of columns of bright light. I gulped, and looked anxiously up at the sky. Lightning was now streaking across it. Great dark grey clouds swollen to alarming size had clashed and seemed to be wrestling with each other. The air was sultry because this sinister, impenetrable brew of cloud weighed so heavy on the earth. A monumental thunderstorm was about to break any moment. Perhaps I would never be granted a sight of the sky again. Before I succumbed to the temptation of putting up a fervent prayer, I summoned up all my courage and went in.
Fortunately the lances of light penetrating the rocky ceiling of the cave helped me to orientate myself. As I went step by step further in, I realised that at least it wasn't too difficult to get an all-over view of this musty domain. It might be the size of a small public hall, but luckily it wasn't sneakily equipped with dark nooks and crannies. If Crazy Hugo and the mastiff were planning an attack, they wouldn't be able to contrive much of an ambush, for want of suitable hiding places. The only good cover, not to mention an oppressive sense of tension, was provided by some spurs of rock rising from the ground, some of them tall as a man, rather like the stalagmites you see in dripstone caves.
My anxiety did not vanish, but it was increasingly overlaid by the fascination of this hidden cave. The further in I went, the more closely I observed what I saw, the more I forgot the real purpose of my visit. Curiosity about the unexplored took possession of me. I was particularly pleased when, to my surprise, I made a spectacular discovery. The rock wall on my right was covered with any number of pictures of buffaloes, horses, ibexes, and human figures dancing about in a state of euphoria. Of course I was seeing these pictures in a dim light, and I could only guess at the original colours, but there was no doubt about it: I was looking at genuine cave paintings. I might not be the first to discover these precious things, but that didn't lessen the thrill at all. Looking at the pictures, which were executed with great care, I remembered the many books on this subject in Gustav's library, books I'd once read avidly. The human practice of worshipping certain animals goes back to prehistoric times. For years, people thought the idea behind these pictures was that the image of a buffalo on the cave wall would give humans power over it. But when you look at such cave paintings with a zoologist's eye, you suddenly see something else: they show dead animals, not live ones. For instance, it's obvious that the animals' weight is not resting on their hooves. The cave paintings show the feet of animals lying on their sides rather than standing upright. They are depictions of freshly slaughtered animals, intended to honour their memory, and bear witness to the great respect human beings then felt for the spirits of the creatures they had killed. The more faithfully the artists captured the figure of their prey on the rock wall, the sooner would its soul reconcile itself to its new home. Boy, oh boy, to think how things had gone wrong between us and mankind since those magical times!
The painting I liked best was one which basically looked like a kind of prehistoric strip cartoon. It showed a man with a spear hunting an animal with some similarity to a bear. In the next phase of the picture he'd killed and skinned his prey and was wearing its skin, so that he looked like a bear himself. I took a few steps back to get the general impression. As I did so my back paws knocked against something in their way. It clattered. Alarmed by the sudden breaking of the silence, I let out a shriek and swung round. What I saw on the cave floor was another sensation, but one of the more familiar sort. I'd finally come upon what I'd been looking for.
My paws had touched some bones which fell apart with a rattle. The bones belonged to two skeletons lying together on their sides, like the slaughtered beasts in the cave paintings, or perhaps like a pair of star-crossed lovers years after carrying out a suicide pact. Two skeletons in beautiful condition, untouched, as if they'd been preserved for biology lessons - but of different build. One of the skeletons, the top one, was the skeleton of a dog, judging by its size a mastiff. The one underneath unmistakably belonged to a specimen of my own kind. So it looked as if Hugo the Black Knight and his murderous steed didn't spring from a collective desire for myth and legend on the part of the forest-dwellers. They really had once lived in this cave, and they'd died here too - years and years ago.
But didn't Aurelia know that? Why had she said I could still find the Black Knight in his cave? And how could this be reconciled with the claims of not only Aurelia but all the other animals to have seen him? Zack had even given a detailed, factual description of the couple, faithful in every respect. And Alcina had gone on as if you could see them as frequently as outdoor keep-fit tracks in the forest. All the forest dwellers had given me that impression.
However, if my strange find made the mystery even more mysterious, at least the score was two-nil to me in one respect. First: just as my infallible instinct had told me, Crazy Hugo and the mastiff were out of the running as murder suspects because they had died ages and ages ago. Second: someone had a lively interest in shoring up the legends of the Black Knight in every way possible and ensuring that they were passed on. Unfortunately, whether this mysterious Someone was the same as the impersonator of the roving Black Knight, or indeed the same as the murderer, was a question that must remain unanswered for now. Despite Aurelia's distrust of the whole tribe of mice, I thought of Zack, who said the Knight used to ride an animal of a kind he'd seen near a house in the forest ...
I made another discovery. This one, however, didn't set me off on another sequence of logical deductions, it gave me a nasty sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach instead. All the time I was trying to work out possible solutions, my absent-minded gaze had been fixed on one of the natural stone pillars rising from the uneven floor. The front of this spur of rock was touched by one of the columns of light, and the place where the light actually met it shone more brightly than anything else in the place. It looked as if the light were being reflected off something even brighter. I took a closer look - and the sinking feeling in my stomach turned to outright panic.
The monster's paw shone in the cone of light like a special priceless creation behind armoured glass in a jeweller's display window. When I looked up, I saw his eyes glowing in the dark like boiling gold. They kept on staring at me, utterly motionless, as if they were firmly installed diodes. The creature was sitting perfectly relaxed on his rocky pedestal, and the real shock, to me, was that he'd been patiently watching me all this time. Judging by his vague outline, he was about a metre and a half long. He was probably waiting for me to die of a heart attack brought on by fright, so that he could spare himself the trouble of killing me and start tucking in straight away. Suddenly I didn't find this such an unattractive idea myself. I mean, it would save me a good deal of unpleasantness. However, there was one very useful aspect to this ultimate encounter of mine with Monster Paw. It solved the whole case! Monster Paw had killed Crazy Hugo and the mastiff here, eons ago, and then extended his reign of terror to the farmyards. All those witnesses who saw or thought they saw the Black Knight had simply been suffering from an optical illusion. Now that I'd successfully done my detective duty, I could die in peace.
At the last moment, however, I thought of what seemed to me an amazingly cunning plan. I'd act as if I hadn't seen Monster Paw at all. Then I would allow my gaze to wander in another direction, I'd turn in the casual manner of a walker who'd lost his way and
fetched up in this cave by accident, and I would stroll slowly towards the entrance. If the monster made any move to spring, then I'd suddenly switch into cheetah gear, as we describe our most effective emergency sprint, after a very famous relation of ours. It really was a brilliant idea.
I turned my back on the monster.
'No false moves, my little friend!'
I might have known it. I had, really. Not such a brilliant idea after all. His deep bass sounded like the voice of a pitiless Greek god in the habit of annihilating whole kingdoms just for the hell of it. It seemed to brook no contradiction because no one had ever yet ventured to contradict it.
Boldly, I turned round again.
'I've left a letter with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals authorising an anti-terrorist commando unit to storm this cave if I'm not home by tea-time,' I said, in a voice that trembled.
'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.
Felidae on the Road - Special U.S. Edition Page 19