The Empty Room

Cole Vandermeer consented, and I have never been prouder of a patient, and I have never been sorrier for one.

Willa Cray came up from Quillon at five on Saturday afternoon with her old leather bag and a cardboard box of equipment, and the two of us sat down with Cole in the front room and did the honest thing, which is what Varley had asked for: I explained to him, as a physician, exactly what his heart would do, and had been observed to do in every documented death in his family, if a thing the size of a horse came out of the dark at him and roared. She applied a small adhesive monitor to his chest that would record the rhythm; she measured him; she gave him his evening dose early; and she said the thing that I would have said, which was that medical science had nothing that would keep a man upright under that fright, and that the only drug that would help was distance, and that once the animal was within thirty feet of him he would be in the hands of his own conduction system, and that she would be standing thirty feet behind him with a bag in her hand and a plan that consisted entirely of prayer.

"You're telling me I might die tonight."

"I am telling you that the risk is real and small and that the reason it is small is that there will be four people in the dark around you." Dr. Cray put her stethoscope away. "Mr. Vandermeer, if you would rather not, say so now, and I will tell Mr. Varley myself, and I am not a woman who embarrasses easily."

"I'll do it." He was sitting forward with his hands on his knees. "It's not courage. Everybody keeps assuming it's courage. I've got a survey licence application in the county file with my name on it, and a drainage plan I mean to build, and if I run off this coast tonight then I'm the nephew who came for the money and ran at the first dog, and that goes on the record along with everything else this family has done on this land. I'd rather be dead than be the third generation that got run off." He stood up and looked at the two of us. "Also I've been thinking about it all day and I'm fairly sure nobody's actually trying to kill me."

"What?"

"Ask yourself what happened on Friday night," said Cole. "The dog came for a man in my coat, at a quarter past ten, on a path I should have been on, and it killed him and it didn't eat him. Nobody moved the body. Nobody took the body away. If it had been meant for me, then the man who set it has a problem, because a killing in the open is the one thing he cannot use. A body on a path brings a coroner, and a coroner brings a laboratory, and a laboratory takes the paint off a dog. Whatever he has been building out there, it needs a man to vanish quietly, and vanishing is not done with an animal. It is done with water." He pulled on his coat. "Whatever he's been planning, it isn't a murder. It's a funeral."

We know now that he was right, and we know now that he had arrived at it by the time the man who wanted him dead was already committed to the only way a funeral can be arranged on the Drumble, which is to have nothing left to bury. But at nine o'clock that night, when we took up our positions, that was still speculation and the animal was still fact, and I would like to record the disposition of four people who were standing in the reed at the edge of the Drumble in the dark of a foggy night, waiting to shoot a dog.

Varley was on the shore-road side of the lower path, in the lee of the orchard wall, with a shotgun. Deputy Marshal Ozer was on the ridge side, forty yards up, with her service rifle. Dr. Cray was behind Cole at thirty feet with her bag, and I was with her, because whatever else I had been brought for, my function that night was to know, in the dark, what was happening inside the chest of the man in front of us. Cole himself was on the path, walking slowly east with a lamp in his hand, deliberately, because that was the entire point of the exercise: to be exactly the man in the wrong place that the animal had been trained to come to.

And at a quarter past ten the animal came, and the man did not.

What came was a light. That is what I saw first, and it is what every witness in that county has described for a hundred and forty years, and I understood in that moment why no two of them ever agreed about it: because it is not a lantern and it is not a reflection; it is a soft, low, greenish-white luminescence spread over the whole front of a moving mass, weak in the middle and brighter along the ridge of the back and the line of the jaw, so that what you see coming out of a fog at night is the outline of an enormous animal and not its body, as though the fog itself had taken the shape of a thing and begun to run.

It came off the Drumble on the eastern path at a speed I could not follow with my eyes, and it made no sound at all, and it was running straight at Cole Vandermeer, and it was, I am told by men who have weighed it since, a hundred and six kilos, and stood ninety-two centimetres at the withers, and was a cross of Anatolian shepherd on a breed that nobody has ever established.

I have played the next eleven seconds over in my mind more than any other eleven seconds of my life. Cole stood still, which is what we had told him to do, and which I now believe saved him, because an animal trained to come on a running man may very well have gone past a standing one. He raised the lamp. He did not run and he did not scream. He said, very loudly and quite distinctly, the words "Now, then," and then the shot came from the orchard wall and the animal went down on its front legs on the path twenty feet from him and rolled and came up again, and Ozer's rifle took it in the shoulder at a range of twenty yards, and it turned in a half-circle in the middle of the path with its mouth open and went down and did not get up.

Then, and for perhaps forty seconds, there was the most appalling sound I have ever heard a living thing make, and then there was nothing but the fog, and four people breathing, and a dog the size of a pony lying dead on the path at Harrow Reach with a smear of luminous paste still faintly glowing along its ribs.

Cole Vandermeer sat down on the ground where he stood, carefully, like a man who had decided to sit, and put both hands flat on the path, and Dr. Cray went past me with her bag open in her hand, and I heard her say, in the tone of a woman who has just read a good blood pressure, "Sinus. Fast, and regular. He's all right. He's all right."