by Guy N Smith
As he stepped back out on to the landing he heard noises coming up the stairs: running, leaping, scratching sounds on the bare boards. Puzzlement, then terror as he saw it emerge at the top of the stairs with pointed ears twitching, sleek and powerful in spite of the wound in its side, scenting him, seeing him in the doorway of the loo.
The caracal!
‘Oh, God, no!’
He backed into the cramped enclosure, dragging the door shut as he did so. Terror gripped him as he recalled that the warped wood did not close properly and the bolt had been missing for months.
‘He's in there all right,’ the sallow-faced sergeant at the wheel of the patrol car blocking the road nodded towards the house standing amidst the trees below. ‘Saw him go up the drive myself.’
The Chief Constable stroked his moustache. The strain of the past few weeks had left its mark on him. ‘That's fine … provided nobody else is in there!’
‘Couldn't say, sir.’
‘Well, we'll soon find out.’
Some twenty or thirty men were gathered around a line of parked vehicles, mostly Land-Rovers and vans. Uniformed police were already driving back the curious. Suddenly Pentre had emerged from obscurity to become the focal point of Radnor.
‘Right, men,’ the Chief Constable turned to address his force: police marksmen, Forestry Commission Rangers and those landowners who had a vested interest in the destruction of the caracal. ‘This time we have it trapped, and on no account must it be allowed to escape. A tight cordon must be thrown around the house and the grounds. The moment the animal shows itself - shoot to kill! Meantime we shall endeavour to find out whether or not the house is occupied. If it is, the occupants are in grave danger! Now, take up your positions as quickly and as quietly as you can. We must account for that beast before darkness falls.’
Lester Hoyle could hear the caracal breathing on the other side of the door as he attempted to close it by exerting his full two-hundred-pounds weight against it. Sweat trickled down his face and his shirt and jeans clung damply to him. The woodwork was too warped - no way was he going to be able to shut the animal out.
A claw raked the scratched and peeling paintwork as the caracal snarled a throaty rasp, spitting its frustration. It smelled the man's fear, and nothing else mattered except revenge.
The throbbing in its side was turning to agony once more, and the animal's fury bubbled up to boiling point. Again it sensed that time was running out and its enemy must be eliminated quickly. For half a minute it paused, renewing its strength.
Then it launched itself at the door with all its force, felt the impact as the wood moved, heard the man on the other side curse. The caracal fell back and the door was pushed to again. This wasn't the way.
The animal moved close to the door, wedged itself against the lintel and pushed hard, taking its time, the door post a lever for its muscular body. The door moved inwards an inch or so, the odour of sweaty terror became greater,
Hoyle had one foot against the pan, the other braced on the door. His eyes bulged, staring at the dark fur which was visible in the slowly widening gap.
‘Get out!’ desperation and futility in his shout ‘Go away, you bastard, or I'll kill you!’
The door gave another inch, now he could see an eye that burned like a live ember, red hot with hate and madness. Lester was only too well aware that he was losing this trial of strength, and had no chance of keeping the creature at bay.
Desperately he looked about him for a weapon of some kind, but there was nothing except an almost bald lavatory brush. Then he noticed the window, a two-foot-square opening - the woodwork rotted, the sash loose. As he pushed at it there was a cracking sound and the screws came away. It yawned open, hanging by a single hinge.
Oh, God! He didn't need to look, knew what lay below: a drop of twenty feet, possibly more. With luck he would land on the outhouse roof, which was probably rotten but at least would break his fall. Otherwise he would hit the rocky ground. But any injuries were preferable to being mauled to death!
He closed his eyes. This couldn't be happening, but a throaty snarl told him it was real enough. The door was slowly being forced back. Outside someone was talking loudly - a megaphone or loudhailer, distorted words. They couldn't help him,
‘THIS IS … POLICE … IS ANYBODY … REPEAT, ANYBODY … A DANGEROUS ANIMAL IS …’
Oh, shut your fucking mouth! The caracal's here …
‘Help … help me!’
Shouting wildly but his voice only came out as a croak, a rusty tremor in his wide throat.
He sized up his only escape route. He was bulky and would have a struggle to get out through the window. That meant relinquishing his hold on the door, and the caracal would be in at once, clawing at the lower half of his body. Another thing, he would have to dive out head-first; the thought brought on a sense of giddiness, vertigo. Suppose he landed on his head?
He was aware that his bowels had released their load but he didn't care. The caracal's head was visible now; two eyes glaring with a terrible malevolence. He got one foot on the split wooden seat, gripped the window frame and thrust upwards. Head and shoulders through - struggling, trying not to look down. Take your time, close your eyes. Shit, you couldn't help looking down. The shed roof below looked so tiny, the ground around it more rock than soil. No going back now, though. Lansdale ought to have been here. Instead he'd run out when the going got tough. Jesus, the bastard will probably write a book about it that nobody can understand, and somebody will pay a fortune for it. He should've been here seeing for himself instead of laughing his fucking eyes out …
Hoyle screamed as the claws slashed the backs of his legs, deep bloody gouges right to the tops of his plimsolls. Struggling, screaming with pain and fear, he was wedged in the small opening with no way forward or backward. He shrieked hysterically as fangs bit and tore, pulling the flesh from the lower part of his body in strips and lumps. The caracal swallowed some of the bloody human meat whole. Time was short, too short to get at its victim to kill, so it ate living flesh, a repast that tasted sweeter than any before.
The commune leader realised only too well that he would never make that death-defying dive. Death was claiming him in a far more terrible way. He heard the cracking of a bone, suffered the crazed agony of amputation, as blood poured and splashed on to the linoleum floor. The caracal tore at the jeans between his thighs, bared the flesh, and then bit savagely …
He jerked upright, almost made it out of the window, then sagged forward, his head hitting the outside wall with a dull thud. For Lester it was all over. He did not hear the running, pounding feet of armed men as they charged through the hall and up the stairs.
The caracal fell back from its bloody feast, fur crimson with blood, and turned snarling to the door. It slunk, half-dragging itself, out on to the landing, the shot wounds now beginning to sap its strength.
At the top of the stairs it halted, at bay. Men were coming up, stopping suddenly as they saw it, surprise and fear on their faces. It saw the guns, knew what they were, and shrank back.
‘There he is, Joe!’ someone yelled.
The police marksman steadied his aim, left fingers gripping the right wrist of his gun hand. The shot when it came was deafening, the vibration bringing down a shower of loose plaster from the ceiling above.
‘You got him, Joe! By God, you got him!’
Thick dust and gunsmoke obscured their vision, momentarily hiding the scene on the landing above.
And then the caracal sprang, coming at them like a black avenging angel.
Chapter 12
‘Well, it got away all right.’ Colin Rutter said, a note of resignation and despair in his voice.
The other two nodded without speaking. Daylight was barely an hour old and between them they had already searched the area within a hundred yards' radius of the clearing. There was no sign of the caracal except a few traces of blood. It had been wounded and, as the zoologist had said, was now infinitely more d
angerous.
They wandered about aimlessly, kicking the undergrowth. The morning was clear and bright, the sun starting to peep above the range of hills over Bucknell. They had not breakfasted - food was the last thing they wanted right now.
‘We're just wasting our time,’ Rutter said at length, leaning up against a tree. ‘It isn't here, and that's that. We aren't going to find it. We're kidding ourselves. Our expedition's been a failure and it's all my fault.’
‘Don't blame yourself,’ Wes felt both embarrassed and sorry for the older man. ‘Maybe we should give it another day or two?’
‘Let's stop kidding ourselves,’ there was bitterness in Colin Rutter's tone. ‘The caracal isn't going to venture near any more campfires. If he isn't fatally wounded - and it seems I just gave him a flesh wound - then he's going to change his tactics drastically. He'll strike just where he's least expected, and only a lucky shot will put paid to him.’
They returned to the clearing and began packing everything into their haversacks. Lansdale took the gun; it seemed that the professor had suddenly lost all interest in it.
‘Let's head back,’ Rutter led the way down a narrow overgrown ride. ‘Now we'll go and confess what a group of failures we've been.’
‘We don't have to say anything,’ Wes said. ‘Nobody's to know we even set eyes on the caracal.’
‘They'll have the full story,’ Rutter's mouth was a tight bloodless line. ‘Every detail. I was prepared to take the credit if I got the caracal. Likewise I'm prepared to take the blame for what I've done. That's the way I want it.’ Wes nodded, understanding.
Slowly, the small procession followed the twisting downhill paths, the pine woods sweet and fresh at the start of a new day, wood pigeons clattering noisily out of the trees. A mile or so further on they began to hear the everyday sounds of civilization: cars; a siren, which could have been a police car, ambulance or fire engine. Eventually it died away.
It was shortly after ten o'clock when they heard the shot, a report that seemed strangely magnified like a November-the-fifth banger detonated in a biscuit tin. The echo hung in the still atmosphere as though unwilling to disperse.
‘A shot.’ However obvious, Lansdale had to say something; any excuse to break the uneasy silence which had lasted since they broke camp.
‘Yes.’ Rutter stopped and turned. ‘Small-bore, either rifle or pistol, and from the magnification of the report I'd say it was fired inside a building. I have a strange feeling that somebody has done our job for us, more efficiently than we could have done. I may be wrong, but I reckon that's the end of the caracal. Bang, all over! One shot. An anticlimax.’ Wes Lansdale did not reply. As they walked on he experienced a feeling of sadness - like the time he'd found a stray kitten, kept it for a week even though it scratched him every time he picked it up. Then one morning it had wandered outside and been hit by a passing car on the road. He'd sobbed uncontrollably as he'd picked up the squashed remains and laid them reverently on the grass verge. He felt the same now, and it was all he could do to hold back the tears that misted his eyes.
The caracal had learned a great deal about guns: sticks that exploded deafeningly and brought terrible pain. The creature's tortured body cried out for rest, but instincts and reflexes overruled the pleas of tired and injured muscles. It saw the gun as the policeman held it straight, picking his mark, and was taking off as he started to squeeze the trigger, jumping the only way left to go - down the stairs!
It heard the crashing report and felt the rush of the bullet clipping the hairs of its belly, narrowly missing a back leg. But for pain and fatigue, it would have landed in the hall below, but the injured leg and shotgun wounds hampered its take-off. It was going to land on the man who had fired the shot, and extended its claws in readiness.
Men were screaming, panicking, falling in an ungainly heap down the stairs. As the policeman saw the beast hurtling towards him he threw up an arm to defend himself, but was too late and staggered back under the impact of the spitting fury. His gun dropped from his fingers and clattered down the wooden stairs. One fleeting glimpse, then everything went … scarlet. The caracal was gone on its way, wreaking havoc as it tore through the hall towards the open door.
The marksman knelt on the stairs, clutching at the rail, screaming ‘My fucking eyes! The bastard's torn my eyes out!’
Others looked in his direction and turned their heads away as sickness rose in their throats. He spoke the truth, his eyes were dangling down on bloody sinewy threads as he babbled incoherently, trying to push them back. Oh, Jesus Christ!
The caracal bounded out into the bright morning sunlight, saw more people in the drive and turned back towards the rear of the house. The wilderness of dying weeds seemed to offer a refuge: more vague memories.
Run, and keep running - the law of the hunted. The cat had finally tired of killing and just wanted to find somewhere quiet to lie down and rest; or maybe to die.
The atmosphere was filled with the scent of enemies, all around, in the fields and the hills and mountains beyond. But that did not matter any more. The creature saw the old poultry house and jumbled memories churned in its confused brain - memories of a time when this had been home.
As it sniffed around, a rat scurried out and darted off into the depths of some blackberry bushes. The caracal stepped into the run through a hole in the rotted wire netting, poked its head inside the wooden compartment which smelled stale and unused. It hesitated, then squeezed inside. More noises were filling the air - wailing sounds, vehicles coming and going, voices. The caracal lay down in the musty darkness and began to clean its wounds, tongue working gently and expertly. Every nerve in its body throbbed, and the dull pain increased.
The Chief Constable was visibly shaken. His nausea had begun with the sight of a hysterical detective, eyes dangling loosely from their sockets, being loaded into the ambulance. The scene upstairs in the toilet had made him vomit, leaning across the bloody floor and holding on to the cistern, retching into the pan until his guts were empty and trembling.
He'd seen some sights in his time but nothing to match this: the victim had been mauled and eaten right up to his testicles.
Now, standing in the overgrown drive with the bright autumn sunlight filtering down through the tall trees, he took a deep breath and forced himself to light a cigarette, something he rarely did on duty. He glanced around at his men - badly unnerved, and nobody could blame them. But they had to be brought back into the action, which meant he had to take a grip on himself first. He drew heavily on the cigarette and let the smoke filter slowly out of his nostrils.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘we'd better get cracking. This place is surrounded and there's no way the cat could have left unobserved in broad daylight. It must be killed before dark. So we search systematically, keeping close together, shooting on sight. Let's start with the garden.’
They moved off, Melvyn Hughes walking alongside Joe Simmons, the Forestry Ranger. Both men had shotguns loaded with BB, the safety catches pushed forward.
The dozen or so hunters lined the garden, two or three yards apart, moving slowly and glancing apprehensively at every patch of thick cover. Nerves were stretched almost to breaking point. Terror and death still lurked somewhere close at hand - whose turn would it be next?
The gamekeeper followed a mossy path alongside the vegetable plot. He didn't like this business one little bit. Trapping stoats and weasels, even feral cats, was all part of his job, but now he was quite out of his element. The countryside was full of trigger-happy gunmen all wanting to claim the caracal and make the headlines of every national daily. He only wanted it dead for one reason - because it preyed on his game, his livelihood. It didn't matter who shot it or how it died.
He marvelled at the way it had eluded his network of snares and traps all these weeks. Even the illegal gin traps which had been baited. It was the most cunning enemy he had ever had on the estate, and even now, he felt its death would not be achieved easily.
H
e heard voices, the hunters calling to one another, detected an undercurrent of nervousness in their tones. Fully armed, and in numbers, they were still scared to hell that at any second the caracal might leap out on them, just as it had savaged the policeman on the stairs. Nausea returned as he tried to push that bloody scene from his memory, and knew that - sleeping or waking - he'd never forget it.
You had to hand it to the big cat, he decided. A terrible beast, a maneater, but removed from its natural environment it could not be expected to react in any other way. All the same, it had to be killed.
When he noticed the caracal it was strangely without a sense of shock, almost as though he had expected to find it sunning itself outside the old poultry house. Its posture was relaxed, just like any normal domestic cat, paws outstretched as it licked an ugly wound in its side. It looked up and saw him, eyes reflecting the sunlight and ears pricked, but it did not move.
Melvyn Hughes stared in surprise. At first he did not even raise his gun in case it sprang at him. It looked so docile, just mildly inquisitive. None of the others would be able to see it, for it was screened from them by some blackberry bushes. He could have shouted to attract their attention but he didn't. This was a private confrontation between the creature and himself.
His gun came up slowly, hesitating, the barrels wavering. Suddenly he recalled a fox he'd snared last spring, a fully-grown vixen, caught around the middle instead of the neck because he'd set the noose too big. She'd been pulling and threshing about, really made a mess of her belly and half-severed a teat. In spite of the fact that some poults had been killed by a fox earlier that week, he wanted to put her out of her misery. He'd used the .22 and fired at her head, but she'd moved at the last minute and the slug had gone through her nose and out under her lower jaw; pouring blood, coughing and choking, gurgling but not dying.