Beast

by Paul Kingsnorth

  it is a grey stone building it has an empty stretch of asphalt to its left with giant concrete cubes blocking the entranceway. there are grey metal shutters all over the windows with small round holes in them and the door is barred and padlocked i walk up to the door and rest my hand on the cold metal i make my way all around the building to the back following the walls with my hands in the cloud. there are some old sheds there and a barn with an arched doorway and a small garden with picnic tables. everything is weedy and overgrown. someone has forced the metal shutters off one of the ground floor windows here i’m able to push open the window and put my head inside. it smells of must and feathers shall i should i yes it is impossible not to accept this invitation.

  i squeeze my way through the half open window into the inside of the building. i drop to the floor in a pile of pigeon shit there are spiders in the corners it is a tiny dank room i have landed in but there is a door to a bigger one. i walk through the door there are tables and chairs and a bar with handpumps there are old barrels lying in the corners it is dark but hundreds of pinpricks of light are coming in through the grey metal shutters on the windows they are like eyes the pinpricks of light are like yellow eyes looking at me from the outside. i should not be in here i can’t look at the eyes i can’t look at the shafts of light coming through they are like lasers they come through the windows and they land on me and each one burns me like acid. no this is terrible it should not be like this nobody told me about this. i need to find a place where the eyes of light will not land on me i run and crouch down behind the bar where it is dark there are plastic ashtrays scattered around on the floor and transparent pipes that come down from the pumps on the bar and disappear into the floorboards there is a brown plastic crate of empty beer bottles beside me. the light can’t get me here the eyes cannot see me. but it is too much for me to be in here how will i get away from this place if i stand up the eyes will see me but then i wanted the eyes to see me that was what i wanted wasn’t it it is so confusing in the cloud. i decide to make a break for it i hold my breath and then i scuttle on my hands and knees like a giant cockroach from the bar into the back room where the shafts of light from the metal shutters cannot come i almost trip over my own hands i think i feel one of them touching my skin on the way but it’s fine. i am fine. i reach the small dank room and i run now to the window and i force myself back up and out through the crack into the curling cloud.

  outside everything is clearer even in the cloud. that was a strange thing for me to do climbing into old buildings like that i am hunting here i am on a hunt what would i be doing in a building like that i was asking for it it serves me right really. i go into the garden and sit down on one of the picnic benches which creaks beneath me it is covered in beige and green lichens there is a rectangular green plastic ashtray in the middle of the table in which wet cigarette butts float in a pool of dark brown water i pick one up and sniff it i inhale the smell of the tobacco it is delicious. i wish i had a lighter here i wish i had some matches i would love a cigarette i am rolling a cigarette at a bus stop golden virginia i only buy small packs because i’m not really a smoker i take out a green paper and a pinch of tobacco and i pull the tobacco apart and spread it out evenly and then i begin to roll the paper between my fingers and thumbs i never use filters. i lick the edges delicately and glue the cigarette down i love this ritual i take a yellow plastic lighter from my coat pocket and i spark up and the first breath is always the best is really the only one worth having it lifts me up and i fly.

  i see that there will be a time yes a time will come again not for lifetimes but it will come. the woods will be flooded as they were and hung with moss and we will take boats through them flat wooden boats and there will be no-one full enough to believe that any of the real things of the world could be counted or named. we will hear again the sound of the oars through the water and the sound that evil makes when it plays at being good and coming up from the ground we will be only what we were naked as in the old dance on the plains before we toppled the king and fell with him. down we fell down to where it first began but even here he can see us he can always see us there is no escape from him. hide in the mountain and he will find you hide in the forest and he will find you hide in the grave and he will find you. he will find you and pull you apart you will be torn into parts and those parts buried and a season will pass before a flower will grow from the soil you were sunk in. and that flower will become you born again complete but not the same and you will sit up on your bed in the tent on the fringe of the brown wood rubbing your crown three white hairs in your shock of black and a limp where there was none and you will ask of whoever is there or no-one at all you will ask lover what has happened to me?

  there. the noise again. the cat again. there.

  i think it is closer now perhaps it is coming from the same direction as before it is hard for me to tell now that the road and my expedition into this building have disorientated me but i stand up when i hear the noise and drop the cigarette butt and i turn around because it is coming from behind me. it is still there. yes it is closer it sounds throatier when it was circling me in the yard the noise was so loud i could hear its breath in my mind i could see its mouth open the pink wetness in there.

  it is important that i pull myself together. this is not a game i have work to do. now i face the source of the sound and i begin again to walk towards it. i decide i will not walk around any obstacle in my way instead i will walk over it i will not be distracted i climb over three picnic tables and then reach the back wall of the garden which is stone. i climb up the stone wall and vault over it onto heather moorland. the call comes again it is straight ahead now you see this is the way to do things a straight line to the goal i keep walking i plough through the heather though there is no path i clamber over small rocks and some large ones i am heading uphill. the call comes again still straight ahead i laugh and i begin running slowly i bounce through the heather i keep bouncing like this until my right foot lands in a trench i didn’t see and then i twist and fall heavily onto the ground. it’s fine i’m not hurt i lie on the ground with my face pressed up against the heather there is the sound again but now it seems further away. just inches away from my head is a rock as big as my fist i was lucky. she is standing looking over the garden in the sun i come up behind her with the rock in my hand and i hit the back of her skull hard with it twice her head cracks and she falls to the ground then i take the child and hold it under the water until it stops kicking. i love you she says i love you too i say because you have to say that. then she puts her arms around me and we go back inside the house for dinner.

  it was further away that time this is not good enough. i get up and i keep walking in the direction of the sound but i must have been walking for twenty minutes or so now and i have not heard it again. it seems to come in waves in clusters it rises and falls like the tides in the sea.

  then i see something i’m sure i see something i’m sure i see a movement to my right it is so hard to tell the cloud is so thick i hold out my hand and still i can only just see my fingers but i’m sure something passed me it moved past me in the opposite direction to the one i am walking in. it went behind me.

  i wonder if it would eat me. it must eat something up here where did it come from where would a creature like this come from you hear stories don’t you nobody really knows anything. perhaps it would eat me perhaps that is what i am walking towards it feels as if that would be a fine ending. it springs from behind in the cloud i barely hear a thing i have no chance to move their jaws are so strong they go for the neck one bite one snap and that’s it they are perfect creatures it would be a fine ending. all things become other things scales become tails feathers become hair legs become fins leaves become rocks why run from the change death brings. do i want the same thing forever my own cold soul clinging on in the cloud wrinkling drying up fearing the churning that wants me and will come. better to stand and wait as you should and welcome it. people are strange i don’t u
nderstand them.

  drop away drop away see how i run.

  well i may not have seen anything. the cloud still seems to move around me as if it is alive as i walk i feel again how hungry i am if you get this hungry you begin to see things i’m sure i wish i had something to eat perhaps there are bilberries here i have seen bilberries growing around the heather. yes. i drop to my hands and knees and i start looking for berries i can’t see any i crawl steadily all around me in all directions i don’t know where i just keep looking now this is why i was brought here you see there are bilberries here there are dozens of the tiny little round blue berries hiding under the heather. i pick them slowly and steadily with my right hand until my left palm is full of them and then i cram them into my mouth the taste is stunning it is bitter and stunning and free. i keep crawling and i keep picking perhaps six or eight handfuls of these things there is nothing else in my life right now but bilberries i could live forever on bilberries their beauty is so strong.

  after a while i begin to feel queasy. i have had enough but perhaps this has saved me i feel stronger i feel i could walk for days now i feel a new strength in me. it left me it came to me and left me but it still wants me because it’s calling me it fed me when i was hungry i have seen something that matters more than anybody could know and i must find it. i sit with my hands in my lap my hands stained purple the cloud embraces me. in all of the crawling i have lost my sense of direction i don’t know now which way to go still i know i was heading up the hill so i will just keep heading up the hill and there will be something there for me.

  when i was in the yard when the cat was circling me there was a smell it was a kind of waxy sharp smell and it moved with the sound and now i can smell it again. it is fainter but i smell it again here on the moor this is the smell of the cat it is as distinctive as the muscles around its shoulders there is such a power in this thing such silent power it is so pointed there is no waste about it. whatever it wants it gets this beast it is like a spear it goes right to the heart there is no turning away once you have seen this.

  i stand up i orientate myself and i begin to walk up the heather hill again heather and cloud heather and cloud and my boots moving through them. suddenly i realise that my right boot has swung out into open air and my left boot follows before i can stop myself and now i am tumbling down into an emptiness that is eternal. i have come to the top of a cliff and i have fallen off or thrown myself off or thrown someone else off any of these would be fascinating. i turn over and around as i fall i had always thought that if i were to jump off a cliff i would be able to fly to control myself with my arms somehow to crash elegantly onto the rocks but no nothing works i flail and flap like i am boneless down and down and i will be eaten and if you have never been eaten then what are you. i remember i thought about this a lot but all of the thinking was meaningless none of it meant anything you can think for three decades and your thoughts will be worse than useless because you have not touched this thing not really. you have to live in this dimension your hands must be calloused your heart scarred or what are you.

  honestly it is so difficult to concentrate out here the mind plays tricks in this cloud. i could have been here for days or years or minutes it all seems to just roll together i am floating across it all i am on a boat and now i see some distant coastline but there are no gapless lines of trees along the shore there are no clouds of birds bursting from the green and screeching into the sky there are no monkeys murmuring from bank to bank nothing flows that way now. someone found this place centuries ago and built a city here and now it’s all neon and glass and contrails and rainbow slicks of diesel i am alone circling the world through oceans of plastic there is nothing left to find nothing to discover it’s all gone i came too late.

  now i think the ground is beginning to level out i must be coming up to the shoulder of the moor i don’t know which part of the moor i am on i have no idea can i still detect the waxy smell somewhere in the cloud i think i can or perhaps i’m imagining it. maybe i am imagining all of it. maybe i can smell the cat but i can’t hear it so how do i follow it how do i find it can cats see in cloud or are they like dogs do they need their sense of smell to find their prey. why did i use that word i will not be prey. if the cat wanted me for prey the cat could have had me so there must be something else happening here perhaps there is no cat at all if i told this story to somebody would they believe a word of it. somebody is sitting in front of me we are both sitting around a table and i am trying to explain what i have seen here. maybe they are a journalist or a doctor or some kind of cat investigator anyway they have a notebook i think this person is young maybe in their thirties and they have short brown hair and glasses. i think it is a man no it is a woman a man would scoff at me but a woman would listen she would have sympathy her hair is not short it is tied in a ponytail she is quite attractive she is beautiful actually. no this is a distraction this doesn’t matter the point is that i am explaining to somebody i am explaining to this woman what i have seen here i saw a cat in the distance you see i saw it twice and then i went looking for it. can i prove it can i prove what can i prove it was here that i saw it do i have any photographs is there any evidence why would a cat be here. why would anybody listen to me has anybody ever listened to me i think she feels sorry for me she is making a big show of writing all this down but how do i know what she is writing i want to grab the notebook i want to rip it from her hands how do i know i can trust her how do i know what she thinks of me who is she going to give these notes to i haven’t seen her identification. just because she is beautiful doesn’t mean i can trust her.

  i walk and walk it is flat now i have found some sort of thin track across what must be the shoulder of the moor another narrow peat pathway through the bowing heather. i would say it must be an hour or so maybe since i heard any sounds the cloud is not changing it is not getting thicker or thinner i am used to it now i have acclimatised it’s fine but now something else is coming out of the cloud at me. ahead of me to my right a great tall shape and now another to my left there are two people walking towards me. they are heading right towards me walking straight at me one on my right and one on my left. now what are they doing here walking in this cloud walking straight at me through this cloud. they are coming for me they have found me. no they are not people no they are stones standing stones i walk towards them until i am standing between them two great standing stones perhaps eight feet high and behind them dimly at the edge of the cloud two more. i walk from the first pair of stones to the second when i reach the second i can see two more just where the cloud thickens a stone row this is a stone row. i put one foot gently in front of the other and i walk up the avenue of stones i count the pairs as i go six seven eight eleven twelve thirteen the stones seem to shrink in size as the row goes on at the eighteenth pair they are shorter than me they are just about up to my waist. after that the row stops.

  i keep walking there is nothing else but heather now the stone row just stopped it started and then it stopped why did it not lead anywhere why would you build something like that if it didn’t lead anywhere. the right thing to do would be to walk backwards at this point. i start to walk backwards i put one foot behind the other i do it very slowly because of the mist and the heather. it is an intriguing thing to do this first you feel your toes touch the ground then the balls of your feet at the front and finally your heels everything is the other way around you cannot see where you are headed though in the cloud you cannot see where you are headed when you walk forwards either so really it is no different. i keep walking backwards and from behind me on either side the smallest pair of stones moves into view and begins to fade away in front of me into the cloud. eighteen times this happens the stones grow larger each time the sentinels appear from behind me and disappear before my eyes.

  when i come to the last pair i keep walking i keep walking slowly backwards down the hill i come to a house and then a road i keep walking backwards i am in the lowlands now i walk through fields
and through hedges and gateways there are people but they do not see me i am glad about that i keep walking over motorways and through towns and cities. i come to a town i walk down a street which seems familiar i continue to walk backwards down the pavement i look up at a window above a shop and i see two faces looking down on me a woman and a young girl. now what is that expression on their faces their hands are moving behind the glass. well i don’t know anything about that. i keep walking i pass a school there is a playground full of children circling around and around something like wild dogs i hide in a corner until they have gone in i find myself lying on a bed with a girl she is a child i am a child we are wondering what to do next what happens if i touch you here well if you touch me i can touch you i suppose this is how it works that seems fair i think.

  there seem to be birds scrabbling on the roof. i don’t know what this woman is saying to me a minute ago she was shouting at me now she is putting her arms around me no it is not my fault we agree on that it’s all fine really. if you keep walking backwards it emerges from behind you and then falls away again before you into the cloud and it is all fine really it is just like the wind blowing through and over you there is really no time to feel anything about it. i seem to be lying on the ground outside i don’t think i wanted to be lying here the ground is hard beneath me. i keep walking.