They were about to leave when Jenny heard a low growl.
It was the last thing she ever heard.
Keith got lucky. He got to hear his own screams before he died.
CHAPTER 11
After leaving Nobblethwaite, Owen Blackhead returned to his home town of Huddersfield.
He had a blog called ‘The Hiking Dad’, which was devoted to his experiences as a walker. As soon as he found the time, he put a lengthy post in it about the were-cat he’d seen in Nobblethwaite. The post had a very positive impact on visitors to his blog. The numbers leaped from three a month to over three thousand an hour. As an added bonus, most of the visitors passed comment on his post, something which had seldom happened before, certainly not in those sorts of numbers.
Owen was delighted.
Until he read the comments.
That was when he decided he had to get proof that were-cats actually existed.
CHAPTER 12
It was a hole, and not just any hole, it was a fucking massive hole.
But what really made this different from other holes was that it was full of shit.
Farmer Hodge was looking at it contemplatively while holding his nose
Perhaps it’s time to dig a new hole, he thought. The Hodge family has been using this one for generations, but now at last it’s full.
The thought never once occurred to Farmer Hodge to get a septic tank installed at his farm; he was a Yorkshireman, and he was far too careful with his money to ever squander it on a frivolity like that.
He scouted around the field looking for a suitable spot to dig a new hole, and when he found the ideal location for it, he got his tractor rigged up with his excavator tool, and dug the biggest hole he could. Then he climbed down from his tractor, and stared at his new hole with a look of satisfaction on his face.
Next I’ll have to re-route some of the soil pipes from the previous hole to this one, he thought. I wonder how long I’ve got before the old hole overflows.
He looked up to see a man in the distance dressed in hiking gear ambling along Stonker Lane. That bastard better not be thinking of walking across my land, he said to himself. He wandered over to the first of his family’s shit-holes and examined it carefully.
There was a slight breeze which was causing the surface of the shit to ripple, like the waves on a lake. Where they lapped against the edge of the hole, they were almost, but not quite, flooding the dry land surrounding it.
It’s probably good enough for another couple of hundred shits, he said to himself. By then it’ll be brim-full, so I better not leave it too long to re-route those soil pipes.
Then he had a pleasing thought:
Maybe I could run a footpath from the road right up to this shit-hole, he said to himself. Then when those annoying bastard walkers walk over my land in future, some of them might fall into that old shit-hole of mine. Hopefully one or two of them might even drown in it.
There was no danger of any hikers using the proper footpaths on Farmer Hodge’s land; he’d made sure they couldn’t use them. He’d blocked off the gap in the wall at the side of the road which gave access to the legal footpaths on his land, and he’d run barbed-wire fences across them for good measure.
When he’d finished smiling to himself at the thought of the new footpath. Farmer Hodge parked up his tractor next to his farmhouse and went inside for a cup of tea, and a rest. While he was drinking his tea in the kitchen, he resolved to build the new footpath leading to the shit-hole the very next day.
After a good night’s sleep, Hodge rose at 4.00 a.m., showered, dressed, and set to work on the new path. He ran it in a straight line from the old shit-hole to the wall that separated his land from Stonker Lane, and he created a new opening in the wall that positively beckoned walkers to enter through it onto his new path.
The lie of the land was such that the shit-hole couldn’t be seen until you were almost on it, and in calm conditions, when the wind wasn’t rippling its surface, the shit-hole looked like nothing more threatening than a huge area of bare earth in the middle of a field that for some unaccountable reason had a profoundly bad smell hanging in the air above it.
Those ignorant bastard walkers won’t be able to tell its shit, thought Hodge with satisfaction when he’d finished work on the path. They’ll just think it’s bare earth and just assume this is what a farm smells like.
Hodge had perhaps underestimated the intensity of the smell that came from his shit-hole.
He slept well that night, and got up in the morning feeling positive because it was the tenth anniversary of his divorce from his long-suffering ex-wife. He’d been so pleased to see the back of her that he had a little celebration all by himself on this date. They’d never had children; he was the last in the Hodge line. It didn’t bother him; he hated children.
He put on his green wellington boots and went out into the farmyard.
CHAPTER 13
After killing Charlie and Ben, the two unfortunate policemen who’d gone to rescue Bob Slawit and Henderson left Slawit Hall by the open front door and set off through the night. He instinctively headed back towards Huddersfield, perhaps because it had been his last real home.
At dawn he found a sheltered spot beneath a rock with an overhang. He curled up there and fell asleep, and dreamed of his old owner in Croydon, the kindly Mrs Thompson. She’d taken him in when he’d been a stray, and she’d looked after him until he’d been killed in a car accident and then turned into a zombie by Professor Ted Forsyth.
He woke up, and yawned and stretched. It was time to start walking across the bleak and wild terrain of Nobble Moor again.
As dawn broke on the fifth day of his journey, Henderson found himself crossing the outlying fields that belonged to Stonker Edge Farm. He made his way across the fields to a patch of long grass near the farmhouse; and there he stopped.
Directly ahead he could see farmer Hodge emerging from his front door wearing his green wellies.
Henderson couldn’t understand why, but he associated Hodge with bad things happening to him. This may have been because Hodge had discharged his shotgun close to Henderson’s ear, some months previously; or because some instinct told him that Hodge was a cat-hater.
He dropped into a low crouch; as low, that is, as he could manage with his disc-shaped midsection. Then he wiggled his backside. When he was certain that Hodge hadn’t seen him, he walked stealthily a few paces closer to his prey and stopped again.
Hodge, unaware of the danger he was in, walked in Henderson’s direction. The zomcat wiggled his backside one last time and set himself. Hodge started whistling a tune, as he cheerfully contemplated the many walkers who were going to come to grief in his shit-hole.
He got no further than the first few bars of his cheery tune when something came at him from the long grass a few yards ahead; something that resembled a ginger thunderbolt. It flew into the air and hit him in the face. For an instant he felt like he was being savaged by a bramble bush, and he fought hard to escape from its painful clutches. But the ginger brambles were sharp and dug into his flesh, and the branches of the ginger bush had a ferocious strength to them. He felt something sinking into the carotid artery in his neck.
The farmer whirled his arms in a panic, and cried out as his blood sprayed everywhere. He saw it — heard it — splashing on the side of his ancient Ferguson tractor. But he didn’t see it for long. First his left eye came out, and a nice juicy morsel that was, and then the right eye followed it.