Chapter Four

The creature closed all three of its mouths, and chewed. Blood trickled slowly from the corner of its central maw, like Ribena leaking through the decayed teeth of a spoilt toddler. The sound of gently cracking bones accompanied the stretching and tearing of sinew, gristle and, most notably, lycra, as the creature feasted. A flash of white appeared briefly between leathery lips – lips which smacked with satisfaction after every bite. Was it a tooth? A shard of bone? No. It was a size five stiletto.

A radio played nearby. The voice of Ken Bruce could be heard reacting with both surprise and delight as the current Secretary of State for Health chose the tracks of her years, and expressed a lifelong, and hitherto undeclared, desire to play PopMaster. The creature exhaled in a dismissive manner, and looked at the clock on the wall. It wouldn’t be long now until Jeremy Vine.

Heaving its weighty body onto all five of its legs, the creature stood up and plodded across the room, inadvertently kicking a roughly spherical object which lay on the floor nearby. The object rolled across the room, its matted hair leaving a trail of liquid red behind it. The object came to rest against the step of a low stage, nose in the air, eyes wide with vacant terror, black roots belying the owner’s true hair colour. The brain inside that severed head may have been used infrequently during life, but would be put to good use now.

Reaching down, the creature picked up the lifeless noggin and cracked it against the corner of a nearby bar, like a bleached blonde egg on the edge of a mixing bowl. Probing the resulting fissure with one tentacled digit, it extracted the contents and stuffed them into the third of its mouths. A mere snack, but a fine delicacy nonetheless.

Grasping the head by its hair and dangling the object like a well worn supermarket bag-for-life, the creature paused to survey the scene. It was morning, but the room was dimly-lit. Windows were set in the wall opposite, but blacked out with three layers of dark paint, light entering only through thinly scratched out letters bearing the initials of their author, and his love for an equally unidentified woman. ‘P.G 4 L.K.’ read one. Another testified that its author had a large private part and was not afraid to use it.

The bar which had served as a convenient nutcracker was cluttered with empty glasses and bottles which sat amongst small puddles of foul-smelling liquid and cigarette ash. Across from the bar stood a sound system and mixing desk. Between them a dance floor. Above, the ceiling was lined with coloured spotlights and silver mirrorballs. An electrically illuminated glass sign, now sadly in darkness, was mounted on the wall to one side. In a faux handwriting style designed to convey both casual elegance and simple class (neither of which it achieved), it read quite simply “Raquel’s”.

The creature took a step towards the blackened windows, possibly to examine the phone number of the prodigiously endowed visitor who had made his mark earlier. As it did so, a bent sheet of metal fell from its largest mouth, as though involuntarily spat out by a digestive system which had chosen to reject it as inedible. The creature looked down as the heavy metal hit the dance floor. It remembered devouring the object, but not why, or how. On some primitive level, however, its reappearance seemed to be a sign. An indication of the journey the creature had undertaken. How far it had come. And, perhaps, where it was going. The sheet of metal bore three words: ‘Welcome to Essex’.

Pausing no longer, the creature raised its leftmost hand and held the disembodied head aloft, its owner’s ashen face bleached of colour like the peroxide highlights with which it was grasped. Facing the lifeless expression of horror that visage bore, the creature looked directly into the head’s vacant eyes, and a smile spread slowly across its leathery lips. The lips parted, and with a tone that lay somewhere between condescension, pity and sheer unadulterated pleasure, the creature spoke:

“IRMA...”