Nairn raised a hairy grey eyebrow. ‘Oh aye?’
‘Any chance we can come in out of the pishing rain? Only I left my gills at home.’
He narrowed his eyes, mouth pinched like he was trying to suck something out of his dentures. Then he harrumphed, turned, and headed back inside, leaving the door open behind him.
Moore turned the right way around again. ‘Bet he’s got a banjo in there.’
‘At least he didn’t tell you you’ve got a pretty mouth.’ She climbed up onto the porch and stepped inside.
OK, that was... different.
The cottage was all one room, with a bed in the corner, a rocking chair by the fireplace, and a kitchen table with three wooden seats. No TV, no radio. A trio of storm lanterns hung from hooks in the ceiling, lending the place a septic-yellow glow that wasn’t anywhere near bright enough to banish the gloom. But more than enough to really add to the horror-show vibe Albert Nairn was clearly going for.
There were probably more dead things in this one room than there were in the whole of Skirivour Castle Hotel. Onlywhere the hotel’s collection of taxidermy was fairly standard, the stuffed menagerie in here was a lot more...creative. And less bound by anatomical and evolutionary constraints.
Every wall was lined with shelves, and shelves, and shelves, all groaning under the weight of dead things in various stages of finish. More hung from the ceiling, between the lanterns.
Albert Nairn had let his imagination run rampant. One ceiling-dangling monstrosity was part fox, part hare, and part badger. A salmon-squirrel hybrid stared at Roberta from its shelf, with glittering black-glass eyes. Whatprobablyused to be a border collie had been merged with a goat and an eagle... And there were dozens and dozens of other pick-’n’-mix monsters: all different, all weird.
He’d arranged some in semi-natural poses – or whatever passed for semi-natural when you had the back end of a wildcat, the front end of a fawn, and the head of a duck – but thereallyfreaky chimeras were the ones doing people things. Strange day-to-day tableaus, like the half-raven-half-stoat, wearing a tartan miniskirt and loading a miniature tumble drier.
Roberta blinked at it for a bit. But it reallywasthere, stuffing teeny red socks into the machine. ‘OK...’
Nairn gave her another harrumph, propped his shotgun against the wall, and sat at the rickety table with his back to her. Fiddling away at something.
Sergeant Moore slipped in from outside and closed the door. Then stood there, gawping at Dr Moreau’s petting zoo. ‘Well, this is...homely.’
‘Hmph.’
‘We need to have a word.’ Roberta ducked under a twelve-legged foxipede, on her way to the table.
Soon as she drew level with it, Nairn slid an empty chair out for her with his foot – the wooden legs screeching across the bare floorboards.
She settled into it. ‘So, Albert. Bert. Bertie?’
He fixed her with his yellowy eyes. ‘“Nairn” is fine.’
‘Right,Nairn, we need to talk to you about...’ And that’s when it finally registered what the old man was actually working on. ‘Oh.’
It was a tableau of the morning’s jolly discovery, rendered in weird-as-hell taxidermy. He’d replaced the stag statue with a stuffed squirrel. Only the squirrel had little antlers and hooves on its back legs. The part of Sir Reginald Bradbury-Scott was played by a mouse, impaled on the squirrel’s ‘antlers’, just like the real-life version. The mouse was even wearing a teeny pair of tartan pyjamas – the bottoms down around its ankles.
Nairn turned his creation, so she could get a good long look at it. ‘Lot of people’ll tell you about the Jackalope, but that’s a Yank creature.’ He pointed at the squirrel-thing with a strange mixture of pride and awe in his voice. ‘Feòrag a ’Bhàisstalks the glens and moors of Scotland, and if he catches your soul when you die, before you can flee this filthy world, he buries it beneath an ancient oak tree, where the twisted roots will feast on it and claim you as their own.’
‘Right.’ Mad as a sack of hedgehogs. She shared a quick look with Sergeant Moore, trying not to make it too obvious. ‘And did you make this today? Because it’s a lot of work since this morning.’
A smile blossomed on that wrinkly face, followed a moment later by a high ringing laugh as Nairn swung a finger up, pointing at a shelf behind her.
And when she turned, there they were: a whole chorus line of antlered squirrels, all just waiting their turn to shine in some exciting frieze.
He lowered the finger. ‘Nowthiswas more challenging.’ Bending over, he guddled about under the table, emerging with a small wooden box about the size of a cigarette packet.He lifted the lid and pulled out another mouse. This one was white, wearing blue trousers and teeny stripy red-and-black socks. And a grey bra that was a pretty accurate representation of Old Faithful. The mouse even had a miniature chamber pot in one hand.
He’d made a little her. A dead mouse mini-me.
‘Eeek...’
‘Had to glue three kinds of badger fur to its head to get the hair right.’ Nairn stroked the shock of greys up into random spikes, then placed Rodent Roberta on the table in front of her. It stood there – or at least balanced on its own two... paws – looking up at her with shiny glass eyes.
‘Well, that’s just... It’s... I...’
