You can hear it lowing out there, past the drooping tendrils of willow. Its song is deep and mournful, and there is a small snag in its calls that telegraphs a pain, eroding away whatever mechanism expels the hollowing clamour. Its pitch dies and rises as the hours of the night wallow. What’s worse is that by day, the call persists.
And it is a call. What else would you name it? When something so utterly opposite to human comfort can draw you into a place so saturated with disease and danger, what else can it be, other than a call?
We know it is a stag, though no one has ever seen it. However mutated, the moaning has a core that is unique and distinctive to the breed. We have seen the dripping layers of stripped, red velvet hanging from the bark around the mire. And sometimes on the periphery of the city, out in the rural tracks by the farms and industrial compounds, we find over-large hoof prints pressed into the mud.
What we don’t know is what it is, beyond a stag. Or if it has chosen the form, or been bound to it. We don’t know how long it has been here, or why, or if, it chose this place. We don’t know what it needs, or what pains it.
But we do know what it wants; its call is attuned for drawing the human mind towards its vast, watery empire. What it does there with those people, we don’t know, because they never come back.
Bolt that door and get yourself to bed.
Paddy Dobson
25th July 2020