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Over the years more and more of the castle had been locked up and left, as it was too expensive to maintain. Young Master Rourke kept moving from larger rooms to smaller ones as his needs shrank. A few months before, he had finally left the main castle entirely and moved to the old porter’s lodge near the front gates, past the lake that had once boasted real icebergs and penguins, even in summer. Now the giant freezing machine was broken and the penguins had been sent to a proper zoo. The lake was just a dark expanse of water, choked by rotten lilies.
The lodge and the land around it were half a mile outside the boundary of Portland town. Rourke had not thought this important when he moved. He had forgotten that someone had once told him that he should take care to stay on the town side of the boundary, at all times.
The sound that had woken him came again. Young Master Rourke tilted his head back as he tried to work out what it was. The grandfather clock in the corner of the room ticked slowly and melancholically, but that wasn’t it. The time was five minutes short of midnight and the clock far from striking.
The night was quiet for a few seconds. Then the noise came a third time – a quick rush as though of tiny feet across the roof, a drum-roll that swept over the tiles and was gone.
‘Is that . . . rain?’ muttered Young Master Rourke, blinking the sleep from his eyes.
He took off his half-moon reading glasses and consulted the ornate, gilded barometer that stood next to the grandfather clock. Like most of the furniture in the room it had come from the main castle rooms, and was a priceless antique like all the rest of his father’s furnishings.
The barometer’s needle was sitting at ‘Fair’.
‘Stupid thing.’
Rourke struggled out of his deep leather armchair, dislodging the paperback book that had been lying on his stomach. It fell on the floor, showing the cover, which had a trench-coated detective punching a gorilla that was being whipped into action by a circus ringmaster, his face twisted into an evil leer.
Rourke crossed the room to tap the face of the barometer firmly. The needle quivered, then moved, but not towards ‘Stormy’. It kept insisting the weather should be fine.
Another round of heavy raindrops crossed the roof. Rourke went to the window and looked out. There were still a few lamp-posts working on the broad avenue that went up toward the castle, alongside the lake. Above, the sky was cloudy and the sky utterly empty of stars, but Rourke couldn’t see any actual rain.
‘Just a shower, you daft old fool,’ he told himself. ‘Forget about it and go to bed.’
He bent down and picked up the book, his mood improving instantly as he read the title. Rourke had read Gorillas vs The Fist before, but it was one of many favorites that he often revisited. Reading pulpy old detective stories was one of his two main activities. The other one was looking after the only legacy of his father’s that he actually treasured: the animals of the old Rourke Menagerie.
In his father’s time, the menagerie had contained elephants and lions and tigers and all kinds of exotic animals. Now there were only two monkeys, a warthog, three lemurs, a zebra, a jackal and two wolves. Plus a macaw called Cornelia, who was at least a hundred years old, and who Rourke as a child had once believed had been stolen from a pirate.
In old Mister Rourke’s day all the animals had been housed in a complete zoo, up past the eastern wing of the castle. But that was a weed-choked wasteland now. Now they lived in a much smaller collection of cages and enclosures built on the old polo field right next to the lodge. It was nowhere near as impressive as the grand old Menagerie had been, but it was closer and much easier to deal with. The new cages were also outside the boundary of Portland town.
Rattling rain fell on the roof again as Rourke shuffled out of his study into the lodge’s main corridor. This time, when the heavy beat of the drops ceased, a sudden loud bang immediately followed, and then much heavier thudding along the roof.
‘That’s not rain . . .’ whispered Rourke, looking up to follow the sound as it travelled toward the back of the lodge. His heart was suddenly thumping in his chest, faster than was good for him. ‘That’s footsteps.’
The sound stopped. A second later there was another thud, this time on the ground outside the lodge. Rourke’s head snapped back down as a man-shaped shadow passed across the narrow stained glass window to the left of the back door.
There was someone out there – someone who had apparently come down with the rain.
It was only then that Rourke remembered the warning about staying inside the Portland town limits, and what might happen if he didn’t . . .
The book was still in his hand. He raised it, gnarled old fingers moving faster than anyone might expect, and flipped it open to the back page, where there was a simple white sticker that said ‘The Book Herd’, with a phone number, and below that a website address printed in neat, blocky handwriting.
Rourke stumbled to the ancient phone that sat on a seventeenth century chestnut table in the corridor and put one shaking finger into the rotary dial.
At that moment he heard Cornelia the macaw, who had a free run of the new menagerie but most often slept in a custom-made box under the eaves at the back door of the lodge. Cornelia normally never said anything but ‘Who’s a pretty girl?’ and ‘Nellie wants a nut’. Now she started shrieking.
‘To the boats! Abandon ship!’
Then all the animals were braying and screaming and kicking, making noises that Rourke had never heard, not in all his long lifetime spent hunting for animals with his father and looking after them in his private zoo. Hooting and howling, barking and biting, shaking their cages and filling the night with their unnatural terror.
Frantically, Rourke dialed the number.
As the dial whirred in its final rotation, the noise of the animals suddenly stopped, as if a conductor had snapped down his arms for a sudden finish.
Rourke held the phone to his ear, hardly hearing the sound of ringing at the other end. All his senses were focused towards the back door, to the menagerie beyond.
The animals were quiet now, but there were other noises. Cages were swinging open, one by one. These sounds were familiar to Rourke, who opened them every day. There was the screech of the chimp’s door, the one he had been meaning to oil for weeks. There was the scrape of steel on concrete, the bent door in the fence that surrounded the wolves’ enclosure . . .
The phone kept ringing, and now Rourke could hear animals moving. Much more quietly than normal, though he still heard the soft pads of the jackal, the hooves of Patrick the warthog, and he shuffling gait of the warthog. The stealthy absence of any sound at all that was the wolves.
‘What?’ asked a tired voice on the phone. A man, grumpy at being woken up so late.
Rourke’s mouth opened and closed. He struggled to speak but couldn’t get any air into his lungs. The animals were at the back door now – he could see their shadows against the stained glass.
‘No!’ he tried to say, the word emerging as little more than a croak. ‘No!’
The handle of the back door slowly turned. The door edged open.
‘Who is this?’ asked the voice on the phone. ‘Is that you, Rourke?’
‘D-David!’ whispered the old man, finding his voice at the mention of his name. ‘You said to call . . . if . . .’
‘Rourke! What’s happening?’
The back door swung open. A man stood there, a man wearing a hat and a trench-coat just like the one on the cover of Rourke’s book, except both were thoroughly wet. Water dripped from the brim of the hat that shadowed this man’s face and puddled under his trench-coat.
The animals were gathered around the stranger, silent companions pressing in as close as they could as he eased through the doorway.
There was something very odd about the animals. It took Rourke a second to process exactly what it was.
