The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

Manners took a deep breath. There wasn’t really anything wrong. It was just operation nerves. People didn’t realize that even the most famous surgeons felt anxious before an important operation. He was seeing things.

Fangster had pulled the narwhal horn out of its jar and was holding it. And then suddenly he wasn’t holding it any more. The horn was floating quite by itself up into the air ... high it floated and higher, before it did a somersault and came down again behind him.

‘Ow, ow – what are you doing?’ yelled Fangster at the assistant. ‘Stop it, that hurts!’

‘I’m not doing anything,’ said the assistant. ‘It’s the horn – it’s digging itself into your backside.’

Madlyn managed to turn her head and look at Rollo. They had felt alone and friendless and they had been wrong.

Manners had pulled himself together. If he couldn’t make the syringe work, he’d have to stun the creature instead.

‘Get me a hammer,’ he shouted.

But before the assistant could obey him, a coil of rubber tubing had unwound itself slowly ... very slowly, like a snake uncoiling from a long sleep, and then – still slowly – it rose, floated dreamily across to Manners and began to wind itself around the doctor’s neck.

‘Ugh! Glup! Let go,’ spluttered the doctor.

‘Brenda,’ whispered Madlyn. ‘She does so love strangling.’

Fangster was going wild. He went to pull a scalpel out of the rack, determined to make an incision and implant the horn somehow – but before he could reach for the scalpel, the scalpel reached for him. It moved by itself out of the rack and came towards him, and he just had time to duck as it flew past him and embedded itself in the wall.

An arc lamp on the ceiling swayed, then crashed to the ground. Sunita always did her best work on ceilings. A second lamp followed it – and a splinter of glass hit the assistant on the shoulder.

‘I’m off,’ he cried, and disappeared through the door at the back.

A cylinder of blood fell on its side. The sticky liquid oozed out on to the floor and Fangster slipped and lay on his back.

‘Stop it,’ he screamed to the empty air. ‘Get off me. I know you’re there, I can feel you. Stop tramping on my chest.’

The children turned to each other. So The Feet too had put aside their own troubles and come to help.

Manners had managed to tear himself free from the rubber tubing. But now he went berserk. He seized the drill with its lethally sharp point and rushed at the children. It was their fault. This madness had started when they got in. Crunching through broken glass, slithering, cursing, Manners lifted his arm, ready to bring the point down on Rollo’s head.

What happened next was so ghastly that Manners thought he would die of it. His head was thrust back by an invisible hand. He was seized and shaken, and beaten and punched ... but that was not the worst of it. As he fell back against the wall there was a kind of flurry as though something was being dislodged.

And then he felt claws scrabbling across his face. He could not see them but he knew that they were there – grey and vile and utterly obscene. And after the claws, trailing across his cheek, came something long and cold and scaly. A tail ...

Then, from the dark nothingness that was attacking him, there came a scream.

Ned had wasted no time after the doors clanged shut and left him outside.

Somehow he had to get a message through to Sir George and the police – but how? And then he remembered the whaler tied up to the jetty. All seagoing ships had a short-wave radio. If only he wasn’t too late.

The boat was still there – but there were signs of activity; ropes being coiled, the sound of an engine starting, and men moving purposefully on the deck. It was only now that he was afraid that they wouldn’t let him use the radio. Men who poached the rarest and loveliest of whales would not be the kind that helped people in need.

Then, as he ran along the jetty, he noticed something strange. The Norwegian flag had gone and a new flag had been hoisted in its place.

It was a most unusual flag, made up of a pair of long red underpants, a green scarf and a purple cap.

Where had he seen those colours before? Of course! On the walls of the Mundanians’ hut. They were the national colours of Mundania! And now the man who had been coiling the rope turned.

‘So! What you do here?’ said Slavek. ‘You must go to tell—’

Ned in a rush of words explained. ‘I need to use the radio. I need someone to send a message, please, please. They’re in such danger!’

Slavek nodded. ‘Come with me.’

He led him into a cubicle where a man in oilskins was sitting, guarded by one of Slavek’s cousins with a gun.

‘We have taken over boat,’ said Slavek cheerfully. ‘Now we go home.’ He prodded the radio operator. ‘When he has sent your message we throw him in sea with the others.’

‘Really?’

‘Of course. We need boat.’

‘But what will happen to them?’

Slavek shrugged.

‘They can swim, perhaps. Is pity, because they are bad men.’