The bell tinkled overhead as Grundig Fletcher pushed open the door to his butcher’s shop. The wind tugged at his tweed sports jacket and batted sand into his shop. With a smirk putting a dent in his chubby face, he eyed the road through the glass and locked the snib.

  That little show in the beer garden had been priceless. Not the cap doffing, yes m’ Lord. No m’ Lord. Can I wipe your skinny arse m’ Lord? Oh, don’t your shit smell like roses, m’ Lord? You’re so lucky, my crap only smells of regular shit. Stinks up the whole downstairs if I don’t light a match, m’ Lord, and every time I’m thankful half the street don’t ignite. No, not just that, but it all showed most of the townsfolk were little more than cattle on two legs. And thanks to good old Fletcher a select few of them had grown into that role, chewed their way through the tainted meat until they were as much wyrm as people. What else was Sandford Row for? Hadn’t it always been the way? As ancient a tradition as any. Each side of this little game had its players, its heroes and its underdogs. But he was done playing by the rules. Grundig Fletcher was no one’s dupe, and no one’s serf.

  He stripped off his jacket and rounded the display cooler filled with prime cuts of meat, little sanitised portions of death all neatly presented so as not to offend anyone’s sensibilities. One day they were chewing the cud in a field, the next, as if by magic, they were unrecognisable and in a hundred little chilled pieces here in Fletcher’s shop. No one liked to think about that magic, because like all magic it was born out of sacrifice.

  A hook resided at head height on the other side of the wall. It rattled when he reached through the beaded curtain and hung up the jacket. At this point, normally, Fletcher would roll up his sleeves, wash his hands, and don a fresh white coat and matching trilby, fixing an obsequious grin on his face. But not this afternoon. A bright flash of lightning briefly outshone the fluorescent strip lights in the shop. The glare cut deep shadows into the grooves of Fletcher’s face and made his childlike teeth into glistening yellow nubs as he began to unbutton his shirt from the collar down.

  No need to rush. Fletcher was a man not so much in control as a one who was truly free for the first time. The law and social mores no longer applied to him. Not now the storm had arrived. A pinch of his fat thumb and index finger released the first button. He moved on to the next at an almost coquettish pace, each twist of his digits exposing a little more of the thick hair on his clammy chest and then the taut barrel he carried around as a belly. This was a touch more sparsely haired. His shirt fell open revealing a clump of bluish-black fluff lurking in the snug of his bellybutton and a pair of sagging moobs, with dark brown areola peering over his distended stomach. Peeling off the shirt, he hung it up with his jacket. Half in and half out of the beaded curtain, he halted at the bagging on the shop door.

  The sky blazed white, burning black caverns into the gaunt face of Constable Cribb.

  The bell jingled and Fletcher stepped aside to let the young policeman inside. Cribb regarded Fletcher uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Can I help you, Constable?’ the fat man said, locking the door.

  ‘It’s here. It’s actually here. The way you said it would be. And the sand and the wrymals, they’re coming. I saw them staggering up King Street, and...’ Constable Cribb ran his words together until they tripped over each other.

  He was young and stupid, two qualities which in Fletcher’s experience, like mint sauce and lamb cutlets, often went together.

  ‘And?’ Fletcher prompted.

  ‘I don’t... I mean, what do—’

  ‘What do we do next?’

  ‘Aye, what’s next? Do we wait it out? I know what the old stories say. I was only young the last time, but I remember the funeral of Lord Lorimer and all that. A close one it was. Dad wasn’t happy, I remember. It was hard to forget. He gave me a proper slap at home after the funeral because I cried.’

  Fletcher nodded solemnly. ‘Your dad was a good man. A good friend. I doubt we’ve ever had a better copper, and I remember your grandfather catching me at mischief and tanning me so hard I couldn’t sit right for a month. As for what to do next, let’s not talk here.’ He indicated for Cribb to head into the back of the shop.

  One of the things about Hernshore and its... peculiar situation was that fathers followed sons and daughters followed mothers into the same roles they’d all been playing for as long as they’d been telling stories of that old goat-fucker Herne and his usurping of the Great Wrym Sugnar. The Fletchers had been killing cattle and carving them up for about that long too. Sometimes things changed, moved by the tides of the outside world. They got the wireless and television and telephones, but the signals were always terrible, and much of it was out of date by the time it reached them—just like the light from the stars is supposed to be millions of years old. Generally, though, things stayed the same on their side of the looking glass. If your father was a farmer, you’d shovel shit and cull the corn too. If a butcher, well, you’d be elbow deep in blood and guts all your life. And if they were a copper, then regardless of whether you were a halfwit or not, you’d play that role. There was no choice in the matter. They were slaves to the past, trapped and sentenced to play the same lives repeatedly. Even in death the curse only passed on to the next generation.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Cribb didn’t seem to notice the slight. His mind was troubled by other things. He merely agreed and trotted ahead of Fletcher like any other sheep into the back room.

  Fletcher turned on the bulb, which was even more naked than he was, and waddled over to the woodblock. He’d cleared it of the tainted meat before his little lunchtime bevy at The Stag and Snake. Picking a sharpening steel from a wall hook, he also selected a ten-inch filleting knife and his heaviest meat clever. With his back to the policeman, he started to sharpen the knife with swift up and down strokes. Cribb’s feet shifted on the spot. He’d never been allowed back here before, not into this sacred place of slaughter.

  ‘What are the markings?’

  Fletcher heard him swallow; feet agitated as Cribb turned on the spot, trying to understand what he was seeing on the whitewashed wattle and daub walls that were as irregular as a cave. The shop wore a redbrick Victorian fa?ade, one of those slow changes built around a much older building, and even that was on top of something far, far older. Fletcher continued to swish-swish the knife across the steel, honing its edge.

  ‘They’re not markings. Look closer.’

  Fletcher put down the steel and wiped the knife with a kid-goat skin made baby soft by working the leather in the goat’s own brains.

  The wooden boards groused under Cribb’s boots when he stepped off them onto the flagstones near the wall. Listening is an important sense. To the trained ear, for example, a sharp blade makes a specific sound as is scythes back and forth across the steel. Like the cleaver Fletcher had turned his attention too, it wasn’t quite right yet, but very soon it would be. Currently, the cutting edge was a touch too dull and unsure, much like Cribb.

  ‘Pictures?’ the policeman asked, before adding with more confidence, ‘They are pictures. Why are they only in red and brown? And what do they mean? Are these from the old times?’

  There, the cleaver’s blade was singing true. Unlike the high pitch of the filleting knife, a precision instrument, the cleaver held a base tone for doing the heavier work. Fletcher followed the ritual of an artisan and stowed the steel back on its hook and began to clean the cleaver with the kid-goat shammy.

  ‘They are old, very old, and in another way, they are very new.’ It wasn’t worth explaining more to Cribb. If Sugnar had wanted him to understand, she would have whispered to him too, come to him in terrifying dreams of an endless, slow moving ocean of sand and magic. A place caught between, neither land nor sea, nor heaven nor earth, from where she hissed her spells as quietly as the hushed grains of the hourglass. But Fletcher had learnt to listen, with his keen ear that could hear when a blade was at its most deadly; and he had learnt to write the enchantments at the right time with the right medium. The medium off all true magic.

  Cribb leaned closer, nose almost touching the wall to see better and reeled way. ‘Bugger me, Fletch, it smells like shit.’

  Fletcher had finished cleaning, folded the cloth and picked up both knife and cleaver. ‘It doesn’t smell like shit,’ he said turning around.

  ‘It bloody well does.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t smell like shit, it is shit. Shit and blood.’

  ‘Wha—’ Cribb began to say, turning from the wall.

  The heavy weight and keen edge of the cleaver sliced down through the Constable’s shoulder and chest, smashing through his clavicle bone, cutting muscle and sinew until it buried in his rib cage inches above his heart. A geyser of blood jetted into the air, spattering the low roof and raining down hotly on Fletcher’s impassive face and bare torso. Misunderstanding and surprise rippled across Cribb’s face. He opened his mouth halfway as if to speak, but instead his chest made a small hitch, and he retched up a gout of blood. With the last of his life pumping out the obscene cleft in his shoulder, his eyes started to droop.

  Before the opportunity escaped, Fletcher lunged. With a butcher’s efficiency, he unzipped the policeman open from groin to sternum with a curving slice. Cribb’s lips murmured a single, inaudible word drowned in blood. As the light of life faded from his eyes, Fletcher made sure the last thing the policeman saw was his own offal slopping onto the flagstones with a wet, vomitus slap. The butcher removed the tools of his trade from the offering, and Cribb pitched forward into a pool of his own blood, excrement, and organs.

  The scarlet river of Cribb’s pitiful life ran downhill to the centre of the room where the trapdoor lay. There it filled the grooves in the wood, like oiling a machine, and trickled through the gaps into the oubliette below. Fletcher could feel the tide had shifted. Cribb’s turning up at exactly the right moment relieved him of the duty of travelling out to fetch another offering. He lay his blades aside and picked up a meat hook. Throwing open the trap door, he gazed down upon the ten or so pairs of milking eyes gazing up even more dumbly than Cribb. They swayed slack jawed. One opened its maw wider, and a dry hiss slithered out.

  ‘Hungry, aren’t you, my lovelies?’

  Another one of the wrymals he’d been cultivating for the last few weeks hissed.

  ‘I know, I know. You’re starving, but today you’ll get to eat your fill. The storm is here, at last. No more rotten pig meat for you, only prime cuts.’

  Fletcher grunted, slamming the meat hook into Cribb’s back. These wrymals were the ones the town—the sanctimonious gits—wouldn’t miss. The poor and unwashed. He’d run out of room and had to be careful with the others from down on Sandyford Row. But it was funny how when the cycle completed its long revolution, eyes couldn’t help but look the other way. The magic made sure of that, Fletcher was certain of it, and most people saw only what they wanted to see. Even so, it was important not to be too obvious and timing was everything. Fletcher’s Mistress helped in that regard. His family had been servants of the Great Wyrm all the way back to the times of Lord Guldar Hardrada, who once ruled from on top of Lorimer Hill before the Lorimer usurper took his title (as well the name of the hill) for their own, after they did that tree-molester Herne’s bidding. Sugnar was once free to come and go from the sea to the land and came to Hernshore, so the legend said, when Lord Hardrada and his mistress, Nwyn, made an even older pact than Alaric the woodcutter’s son.

  ‘Well,’ Fletcher said, straining a touch as he dragged the body to the edge of the pit, ‘won’t be long until the wrym turns again.’

  He freed the hook from Cribb’s cadaver and was about to hang it back in its proper place, when it took on new a significance for him. The knife and cleaver were going to be his instruments of choice, but the hook, with its crossbar-handle resting in his palm and the curve of his pointed barb growing from between his fat fingers, felt like the right partner for the cleaver. Fletcher was proud of his knife work. The things he could do with it were pure artisanship. Yet this day called for a blunter approach. He wasn’t going to be dressing a crown of lamb, was he? There was no need to work in the shadows any longer. No need for a white coat and a simpering smile.

  He leered and hefted Cribb’s leg over the side of the pit. Gravity did the rest. The body knocked down two of the wrymals. They laid still until, smelling the blood, their nostrils flared.

  ‘That’s it. Get a taste for it. Plenty more of where that came from.’

  One of the wrymals splayed under the body suddenly craned its emaciated neck up and took a bite out of Cribb’s cheek. There was a soft sibilant rasp, like sand falling, and the rest of the wrymals descended on the body. The sounds of scuffling and raw meat being ripped and chewed accompanied Fletcher’s bare-chested waddle to the storeroom; he returned with a wooden ladder. He lowered it into the hole until its top wrung was a foot below the lip of the pit.

  With a whistle on his lips and a meat hook and clever in his hands, Grundig Fletcher unbolted the back door to his shop and stepped into the cobblestone alley. Leaving the door opened wide behind him, he strode into the gathering storm.