5. Basil the Big Hound

THE HIDDEN FOREST -5

Eight o’clock in the morning was a mystery to Paul Fairweather, who barely managed the mornings even when his unemployment giro was due and he was hungry. It wasn’t that he was just lazy but that he was extremely lazy and found that the horizontal position in bed was the perfect accompaniment to breathing. But now that he had something on his mind and the fact that his door was being virtually hammered in, he found his way out of bed and went to greet the dawn. He was too late for that, but he felt it might be lurking just round the corner anyway.

“Come on, lazy bones,” crackled Davey Frost when the door was open, “and get some clothes on you post-haste. We’ve adventuring to do and not much time to do it in! I’ve got work later!”

“Oh,” muttered Paul, having forgotten he normally slept as naked as the day he’d been born, and he backed into his hallway covering his genitals with one hand, though that wasn’t strictly necessary because a sagging extrusion of his stomach served perfectly well to cover any embarrassment he might experience.

“What time is it?” he stammered.

“It’s gone eight,” replied Davey, his morning voice being more prone to creaking than his evening one “and as bright a day as you’d expect at this time of year,” he added, “now get a move on and we’ll see what we will see. After all, it’s your inheritance, not mine.”

It was agonizing for Paul to go without breakfast but the ferocious cadaverous expression on Davey Frost’s skeletal face suggested that for once it might be a wise decision, so he grabbed a large can of cheap lager from his fridge, grunted about nights being shorter than they ought to be, and accompanied his neighbour to his taxi.

“I found myself out this way yesterday,” murmured Davey, “we taxi drivers find ourselves on all sorts of unlikely roads, you know, and can’t predict where, and I couldn’t help keeping my eyes open just in case I spotted a clue that might be useful.”

“A clue?” queried the fat man, adjusting himself in his seat so that the car’s suspension protested. “I didn’t think we needed any clues! Surely there’s a sign, maybe an illuminated one in gold with emeralds underlining the word MANOR so that we know exactly where we are?”

Davey shook his head and wondered what kind of moron his companion might turn out to be. “No such thing as you might expect when you realise it’s two hundred or more years since it was last inhabited,” he said in the kind of voice that indicated that Paul might be the owner of considerably less than one cell short of a brain as well as a pile of rubble that may once have been a fine house and grounds.

He pulled up where he had the previous evening, exactly level with where at the time he believed he had seen a witch but reasoned during the time since then that, there being no such thing under the known sky as witches, he must have been confused by something more natural, like leaves blowing from trees that weren’t there and creating as they did so a purely expected optical illusion from debris on the wind.

“Here,” he said, pointing, “is the grand driveway to Blondeau Manor. I’ve checked it on a really old map I found at the bottom of a pile of really old maps my grandad used to make paper planes out of. Clever bloke, was my grandad, using a scientific formula all of his own he worked out that if you threw a paper plane made out of a map hard enough it might actually end up going to the place on the map.”

“And did it?” asked Paul, a trifle confused by the words scientific formula.

Davey shook his head sadly. “He must have made an error and got a wrong algorithm, or maybe he just couldn’t throw one hard enough,” he murmured. “Now get out and come across the road. It’s never busy down this way.”

Dodging a train of hooting cars that were stuck behind a tractor towing a huge trailer overflowing with potatoes in and out of sacks, he made it to the other side of the road. Paul, however, having considerably more weight to transport, took longer.

“You’re a slow coach,” rattled the cut glass voice of the taxi driver, “we haven’t got all day, you know.”

In the light of day he could see better than he had the previous night by torchlight, and it was quite clear to him that the width of what looked to be little more than a dent in the wild hedgerow was marked by the truly rotten and mildewed remnants of two gateposts, now sadly reduced to little more than a foot or so of soggy splinters barely visible above the weeds.

“See,” he said, “there must have been gates here once upon a time. Come on: let’s see how far we can get before we can’t go any further on account of...”

“On account of what?” asked Paul, irritably.

“On account of that hound,” grated Davey, his voice threatening to shake as he pointed at a gigantic hound, grey as a grey night yet with flaming red eyes and a salivating tongue that hung from its mouth like a bleeding dishcloth, as it emerged, it seemed, from nowhere, and blocked their way.

“Crikey, what a beauty!” whispered Paul in an exclaiming sort of way.

“It’s threatening to eat us,” stammered Davey, “I’d guess that it’s hungry, that’s what it is, starving and looking for a snack, and you’re the one with all the best meat on him!”

The hound, a great deal more threatening than the wimpy one of Baskervilles fame, took a step towards them and at least a pint of rancid saliva dripped from his open mouth and over its yellow teeth, landing with a steaming splash into the undergrowth, which shrivelled as it did so.

“Good Fido,” burbled the fat man, not having the least idea that when the hound looked his way its eyes were totally focussed on his tsunami of his own gross belly.

“Back to the cab!” hissed Davey, “I’m not planning to be hors d’ oeuvres for a beast like that!”

It was clear that the huge beast was about to leap when a small voice from, it seemed, nowhere, interrupted it.

“Now than, Basil,” it said, squeaking like a rusty hinge, “don’t you get any naughty ideas in your silly head or I’ll have to smack you!”

And the sweetest looking old granny sort of materialised in front of them, and the hound gave a scared yelp and slunk backwards, disappearing, it seemed, into a mountain of dead leaves that hadn’t been there last night.

“That’s better,” smiled the sweet old granny, “now I’ve got the two of you all to myself, and I am feeling a tad romantic myself. Who wants to be my starter, and who my main course?” and then she cackled as if she was rehearsing for an early sixties horror film, and winked at them.

“Who?” gulped Paul, “and what are you doing here?”

“Me, dearier? I live here, that’s what I’m doing here, with my lovely family of honest decent folk, like Fangor here, say hello to Fangor...”

And standing behind her as if he’d been there all the time was a seven foot tall giant with the most gormless expression Davey had ever seen, and he’d see some.

© Peter Rogerson, 06.11.20