Beast

by Paul Kingsnorth

  I felt like I had fallen down a hole into a thousand years ago. I looked around me and everything was much older than I was. I didn’t see anything so much as feel it. I felt I was in a wood and I could smell smoke and there were people around and maybe dancing. Carts were moving. Wooden carts. There was talk and I didn’t understand it though the words were familiar. There were buildings made of wood and straw. There was a wooden pole and a group of men sitting around a fire and one man standing before them raising his arms. It felt like a ceremony but everything was happening on the other side of a fine sheet of gauze or through a two-way mirror and here I was just standing as if I were apart from it and yet I could see it. I was there and I was here I was just passing through and I seemed so small in it that almost I could not bear it. I felt like I was fighting off some huge emptiness just beneath the surface of everything I had ever pretended was real. I felt like I was breaking apart and I wanted so much to break apart and yet I resisted it. I so wanted to be broken into pieces but a fear was rising within me.

  Then suddenly the fear gave way to a great calmness which flattened out all of the emotions within me made them white like the white sky. A great indifference came over me. I thought: I don’t care about anything. I don’t care about anyone. I’m sure there are people I am supposed to care about but I do not. I don’t care about myself because I don’t believe in myself. I don’t care if I’m alive or dead or what happens in the world or what the world is or what comes next. None of it interests me. I don’t care about this lack of interest. I’m not happy or sad. I don’t despair I don’t feel joy. I just am. I don’t care about anything and because I don’t care I have become free.

  I came back into myself then. I came back into my body and onto the moor and I kept walking along the track. Here I was again out on my search with my pack on my back and my map with the gridlines on it. Here I was with my plan. And yet everything had changed. All that day as I walked the lines the calmness stayed in me the great whiteness and everything I had seen. What I now knew about myself it stayed there and it would never leave me again. I walked the gridlines dutifully and saw nothing. No scat no hairs no marks no prints. I sat by the hut circles by the faint raised mounds of grass that marked where people had lived when this had been a town five thousand years ago. I heard nothing and saw nothing. I drank water. I walked my ten miles and then I headed home.

  It came just when I had stopped looking. I was loping awkwardly along the thin black peaty path that wound its way through the heather. I was tired and I was thinking of my sleeping bag. On the way down back towards the track that led home I had to pass a wood high up on the shoulder of the moor. The wood had a wire fence around it. The edge of the wood with the fence was perhaps half a mile from me as I moved down off the moor towards home.

  As I walked I caught a movement from the corner of my eye and I turned towards the wood and there it was. The thing that walks. It was long and low and dark and black and it was moving along the fence line. I couldn’t see it distinctly through the drizzle. Almost as soon as I saw it it disappeared from my sight. But I got a better view than before and I had been right I had been right all along. It was not a dog or a deer or a fox or a badger. It was a long low dark animal with a thin curling tail that it held above the ground as it walked. Its motion was smooth and cool. I didn’t see where it went. Into the woods I supposed. But it was real. I had been right. It was real. It was real and it walked and I had seen it again.

  I was sure there would be no point in following it but I went anyway across to the edge of the wood where I had seen it. There was a scent in the air I was sure of it a sharp hard musky smell. I wasn’t frightened this time there was nothing to be frightened of. I walked all along the fence line peering through the trees looking for movement between the trunks. Every time I fancied I saw something it turned out to be nothing. I looked for footprints but there were no footprints. I was so tired and yet I was floating with this now flying with it. I had been right. It was here. Again I had seen it again it had come. I was closing in.

  When I woke the next morning a white horse was staring at me through the window. It was all white with a white mane. The end of its nose was grey and pink. It was just standing there staring at me curious. The muscles in its flanks and legs twitched occasionally. I could see its veins and sinews under the skin. It just stood there and looked at me with its dark eyes. Of course it was beautiful. I jumped on the horse’s back and held tight to its mane and it ran it ran down the field it leapt over clover and buttercups. We jumped a hedge and then another we crossed more fields we saw no people there was nothing we just kept going until we entered a forest.

  It was a deep dark tangled forest and we rode for days and days. We never stopped he kept running he was not tired and I held on and I shrieked for joy and the air ran across my ears and my hair. We ran and ran for days and weeks without stopping until we came to a great clearing of grass and bluebells and there I slid down off the horse’s back and I lay on the ground and I looked up at the sky and breathed. The horse came over and looked down at me as I lay and I saw that he was not a horse he was a deer a white stag a white stag with golden antlers. And then I remembered that there were no forests anymore that you could not ride for days anywhere that you would be stopped by fences roads shops cars people that no horse could take you to this clearing now that there were no horses anyway. I sank into the ground then and outside the window the only whiteness was the sky and there was no whiteness in me and I was heavy.

  I wonder if every animal is a spirit. That rabbit you saw on the road the dog you live with the birds on the feeder in your garden the spider that hangs in the corner of your bathroom. What if they are all spirits sent to you and how you treat them is what you are. A thousand ant spirits in a nest and you pour boiling water onto them and what does that make you? Do you kick your dog or stroke him and give him a biscuit? Maybe your choice shapes the world and everything in it. Maybe that’s the secret. There has to be a secret.

  I felt tired the next morning tired and dirty and old. I sat at the table drinking my morning mug of water and thinking about the creature and suddenly I felt an overwhelming need to be clean. How long had it been since I had washed? I couldn’t remember. Perhaps I had never washed. I needed to clean my body. I couldn’t let the creature see me like this. There had to be some dignity. If I was not clean it would never come. There was a yellow plastic tub in the corner of the room which had probably been used once for collecting something from somewhere. Now I took it outside into the yard. The drizzle was still coming down. I went back into the house and brought out the jerry can which was two thirds full of water and I poured all of the water into the plastic tub. I put the lid back on the jerry can and took it back inside. Then I stood by my bed and took off all of my clothes. I left them in a pile on the floor and walked outside and stood in the bucket.

  The water was cold and astringent it bit into my toes and ankles and widened my eyes. I squatted down and began to scoop armfuls of water up and scrub them into me. I scrubbed my hair my face the back of my neck my chest. I scrubbed every inch of myself all of the parts of me that had not been touched for so long that smelt acidic and old I scrubbed them I poured water over them until the water in the bucket was brown and greasy and I was washed clean. Then I stepped out of the bucket and poured the dirty water on the stones of the yard and watched it pool and puddle and snake away. I left the bucket there upside down and went back in to the house and sat naked and wet at the table and drank one more glass of water and watched the fine drizzle drifting slowly down onto the stone floor and the stove.

  I looked down at my body. It was pale and knobbly and cream-coloured. The five long scratches that ran down across my torso were still clearly visible though they had scabbed over long ago and were now more like brown pencil lines. The left side of my chest was no longer red and swollen but it did seem to be a different shape to the right side. My left knee and lower leg seemed permanently bent at a differe
nt angle from my right. But here I was. This was me. I wanted to run up onto the moor like this naked and wet and greet the thing. I could run forever this way with nothing to encumber me. The thing would understand me like this it would know me this way. I was an animal wet from the watering hole clean now and ready.

  I sat there dripping onto the floor and sipping slowly at my water until I was nearly dry and then I put my clothes back on. I only had one set of clothes and it had not occurred to me until today how much they stank. The thing would smell me a mile away when I went looking for it. I would have to wash them. But not now. This morning I was going out again.

  I was going to abandon my plan. I had known the moment I saw it again outside the wood that things must change now that I must be flexible that I had been gifted another offering and that I had to respond. So today I was going to go back to the wood. It must be living in the wood or maybe hunting in it. I was getting close now I was zeroing in and I wasn’t going to let it escape just for the sake of following some preconceived pattern. I was going to be thorough in my search and I was going to find it I was going to see it I was going to know. I had a feeling about this wood. A creature like that this was the kind of place it would live it was the kind of place it would hide.

  It wasn’t far from the house to the wood. I made my way steadily and quietly up the shoulder of the moor with the familiar tor to my right over on the horizon. The wood was shut in by a wire fence with barbed wire along the top. There was a padlocked iron gate. There were ash trees and poplars and birches all around the edges and further in it was mostly yew and larch and spruce with a few oaks and ashes that looked older than the rest.

  The first thing I did was to walk the boundary line of the wood outside the fence starting at the point where I thought I had seen it. Nothing. No prints this time even along the part of the fence where I was sure I had seen it walking. I kept examining the twists of barbed wire in case any hairs had been caught but there were none. Of course I heard no sound and I saw no creature. It wasn’t there not now. Why would it be? Why would it stay? Why would it wait for me?

  I climbed the fence carefully and stood inside the wood and listened. Silence the same silence that had held me for so many weeks. No birdsong no rustling in the undergrowth no distant cars no voices animal or human. Just my breathing and my footfall and the settling of tiny raindrops on leaves and on the woodland floor. I decided to walk the wood as if it were one of my grids on the map. I would walk in a series of straight lines from north to south and then from east to west and that way I would cover all the ground. Nothing would get past me. I was good at this now.

  I began. I walked slowly from one side of the wood to the other and then I walked perhaps fifty yards to the side and began down again in the opposite direction. At one point I saw what I thought might have been a footprint of the kind I’d seen in the lane but the leaf litter on the floor was so thick and damp that I couldn’t be sure really what I was seeing. Apart from that there was nothing. I walked this way north and south north and south for perhaps an hour and then I came to the edge of a deep pool of water. The pool felt old. It was long and narrow and it looked deep. Its surface was still and black. Long thin reeds and yellow irises grew around the edges. It reminded me of somewhere but I didn’t know where.

  I made my way down to the edge of the water until the ground got too wet for me to continue. I love staring into water. I looked down into the black depths but I saw nothing not even any insects moving on the surface. The whole thing was like a great old scrying mirror. I looked into the water and I was in a flat wooden boat making my way across it and there was nothing around me but the sound of the water. But I was not in control of the boat something else was in control of the boat and in control of me and all of the people. I was making my way across water but I didn’t know where I was going and I didn’t need to because what I wanted was not important now. I was a tool I was an object a means to a creation. I lay down in the boat the back of my head rested on the hard flat wooden planking and I looked up at the sky and the sky moved slowly above me and where I was being taken was no longer my concern.

  There was nothing in the pool and there was nothing by the pool or around it. I walked the whole perimeter of the water I thought perhaps it might come here to drink but I saw nothing. So I continued with my plan. I walked the whole wood along my north south lines and then I turned and I did the same thing from east to west. Nothing. It was not here. Not only was it not here but there was no evidence that anything had ever been here even in the place I had clearly seen it the night before.

  I made my way back to the gate out of the wood and I clambered over the top of it. I stood looking up at the long shoulder of the moor against the white sky. It was becoming clear to me that when I looked for this thing I never found it. I only ever saw it in passing when my guard was down when I was tired and hungry and walking away. My system didn’t work. I dropped my rucksack to the ground took out my water bottle and drank half of it on the spot. Then I shouldered my pack again and I made my way up the moorland slope the way I had walked yesterday.

  Something dropped into me the minute I walked clear of the wood. Something changed. Now I knew that the search would always be fruitless now I realised that for days I had had this tightness in my belly this great knot like a fist clenched inside me and I felt it begin to loosen. My bowels uncoiled themselves my stomach turned to jelly and a strange calm spread from it through the rest of my body. I dropped my pack onto the heather and sat on the ground. I leaned back against a rocky protrusion and let my gaze wander across the woodland past the wire fence up to the tor across to the gully. I felt the fine drizzle on my face and hands. I saw how damp my boots were. I was not going to look for it anymore. Looking for it didn’t work. I was just going to sit and let my mind wander. There was nothing else.

  I suppose I was there for a long time and in all that time I barely moved my body. I was afraid that if I moved the fist would clench again and that I would be the solid old tree the metal pole the coils of wire wound tightly the solid thing that could not feel. As I lay against the stone with my pack next to me I felt like I was melting into the ground and this was good. I thought I would probably stay here forever. I had come here for this I was certain of it now.

  And then as my gaze wandered towards the wood I saw a movement. At one end of the wood was a line of thin birch trees twelve of them white and upright and still in the misty rain. I looked towards the trees and it stepped out and walked slowly along the front of them. Perhaps it was fifty yards from me. It walked slowly along the line of the trees and then it sat on its haunches. It looked around as if it were scanning the horizon but it did not look at me and I felt relieved about that. But I saw its eyes. It had yellow eyes. It was a huge black cat with yellow eyes. It was bigger than I was. Perhaps it sat there for a minute and then it raised itself and walked calmly back into the birches and was gone.

  After that everything was movement. I ran home or tried to. I stumbled hobbled tripped all the way home with an enormous joy welling up inside me from where the fist had unclenched. I had seen it! I had seen it I had seen it! It was a cat! A bloody big cat! It must have been the size of a tiger or a puma or a cheetah or something. What was it doing here? What would a big cat be doing here? How did it come out of the trees when I had walked through the whole wood and seen nothing? What was this? All of this what was this it was nothing. All of these were just words to me but this had not been words this had been so much more than words.

  I almost fell back into the yard I was breathing so heavily there was an intense pain and joy throughout my body. My left leg was swimming in its own world my ribs were heaving I was sweating. I sat heavily onto the upturned yellow tub I had washed in before I left. I had a terrible headache again my headache had returned but the joy was overwhelming even that. A big cat. A big black cat! Jesus.

  I was so tired. I am so tired. I want to sleep but what if I sleep and when I wake the joy is gone? W
hat if I sleep and when I wake the vision is gone? What if I forget it in the night? What if it turns into words again? I looked so long for it I worked so hard for it I had wanted to see it so that I would know and now I have seen it but I know nothing I know less than I have ever known in the world. All I have now is questions. Questions and this great joy that is singing that is howling and crashing in me. I cannot even go inside now all I have is what is living in me here in this thin rain.

  I wonder if I could explain this to anybody. I can see it now in my mind I can see it in my head the picture of it sitting there scanning the world looking around with its yellow eyes. And in my head too another picture a picture of a woman a woman and a child. A mother and child. A young girl a baby girl. I can see their faces. They are watching me they are scanning the world for me. I know them. Here it is now. Here it is. There we are now. There we a

  s no god and god is everywhere. everything is breathing so what is the complication here. all these questions there are no questions. here is an earthworm here is the yellow flower of the broom here are my feet on the ground sometimes i find it hard to see them. i move them but i do not know how. god is the sound of a cat in the cloud. the cat god. i have not seen a tree for days. i would like to lick the clear water droplets off the leaves of a rowan. i will walk i will walk on. the running is the pain the running from. i will walk on.