The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

He would have set off then and there but Madlyn made them all eat some bread and butter and wash as best they could under the tap they found in the vestry. They had parked the car behind the church; with luck no one had seen it from the island, and they could make their way across on foot without being noticed.

‘We’ve got to hurry,’ Rollo kept saying, ‘before everybody wakes up.’

The ghosts meant to come with them but they were having trouble with The Feet. The Feet had spent the night on a moss-covered tombstone at the edge of the churchyard. It didn’t seem to be so different from any of the other tombstones – slightly crooked, with crumbling stonework and a name carved into it which was difficult to read. The name on this particular tombstone was ISH, which was unusual, but this was the place where The Feet wanted to be, and when it was time to set off for the island they refused to move.

Even Sunita couldn’t make them come away. When she called them, The Feet would take a few steps towards her and then they would sort of fall in on themselves, the toes curled under, and, even in the cold of early morning, a sweat broke out on their skin.

‘We’ll catch you up,’ said Ranulf, and the children scrambled down on to the sands and set off along the causeway.

It was easy to believe that only an hour earlier the road that they walked on had been under water; there were still puddles between the uneven stones. On either side of them, on the sands, waders and oystercatchers were looking for shellfish left in the shallow pools. The receding water sucked and eddied round the wooden piles.

Halfway across, they passed the ladder leading to the Blackscar Box; but they kept steadily on. They could only hope that the mist was hiding them from the windows of the hotel. Fortunately the hotel had been built so as to face away from the mainland, with most of the windows looking out on the open sea.

When they reached the island itself they left the causeway and dropped down on to the foreshore, seeking the shelter of the dunes, crawling through the marram-grass and between hummocks of sand.

So far they had met nobody.

Every so often they made their way to the top of a dune and looked out on the interior of the island. They could make out the ornate building of the hotel, a row of wooden huts and a big windowless building almost the size of an aircraft hangar.

They had come to a small bay with a wooden jetty. The water here was deep and would provide good anchorage for seagoing boats, but there were no boats to be seen. Running across the gravelly sand, they found that the foreshore on the far side of the bay had levelled out; the dunes were less steep. An upturned rowing boat gave them a hiding place from which to watch.

Smoke was coming out of the chimney of one of the huts, but still nobody seemed to be about.

And then they heard a sound that stopped them dead in their tracks. A low mooing, followed by silence. Then the same sound, repeated.

There was no holding Rollo back now; the others did not even try. He broke cover and raced across the turf towards the noise they had heard, and they went with him.

They came to a high wooden fence, topped by an electric wire. Running round the fence, they reached a gate through which they could see into the paddock.

And in the paddock was a herd of cattle.

The three children stood absolutely still. Oddly, it was Madlyn, not Rollo, who had to blink back tears. Rollo’s disappointment was so great that he could only stare in silence, holding on to the wooden bars of the gate.

For while it was true that the field was full of cattle – cows and bulls and calves – these were not the Wild White Cattle of Clawstone that they had come so far to seek. The pelts of these beasts did not take the light; their hides were dull and lifeless. There was hay in the paddock, and troughs of water, but the animals were not feeding. They lay listlessly, like dark hummocks, on the trampled grass.

And they were brown. Every single animal was a dark and uniform brown.

The children stood there, completely winded. They had come all this way for nothing. Ned was the first to pull himself together.

‘Well, that’s it then,’ he said. ‘We’d better get out before we’re caught.’

But Rollo did not move. He was staring at the beasts and breathing hard.

No,’ he said. ‘Wait.’ And then: ‘Look – look at that calf over by the trough.’

‘What about it ?’ said Madlyn.

‘Look at the way it’s butting its head. And over there – the old cow up against the fence. Look at her horn.’

The others looked, but at first they did not understand.

‘Look at her horn,’ repeated Rollo.

‘It’s crumpled,’ said Madlyn under her breath.

Then the great bull, who had been lying down, half hidden by the other beasts, got suddenly to his feet and now they all saw what Rollo saw. For, brown or not, this was the great king bull of Clawstone.

The ghosts had caught up now, and above them they heard Sunita’s voice.

‘What have they done?’ she breathed in horror.