Cutty Grimes

--This is a short story that goes along with the "How to Kill" series of stories, featured on this site--

After my service during World War Two (I'm afraid my service record is sealed until 1992) I was offered two positions. If ever there was a point of divergence in my life, this was it. Trevor Bruttenholm, busy in Berlin, telegrammed me asking to help him form what would later become the B.P.R.D. At the same time I received a letter from a Lieutenant-Colonel Carne, who was assembling his own detective agency, asking me if I would like to head his newly-designated Occult Bureau. I was torn between my loyalty to a friend and my relative poverty as a professor and researcher. Carne's second letter persuaded me: he offered a substantial contribution to the Institute of Archaic Studies if I was to come aboard with him. I met with Trevor in the British sector of Berlin and explained to him my reasons. His response was unexpectedly bitter and vehement. He decried what he thought of as my "greed and arrogance", encouraging me to enjoy my thirty pieces of silver, and so on.

Nonetheless, in the spring of 1946 I began as Bureau Chief of the Occult within the Carne Organization, stationed in London, England. I sometimes regret my decision, especially in light of Trevor's later work, but regrets aside, my work within the Carne Organization was terribly fruitful.

It took time to become used to the resources of the Organization. Unlike the Institute, the Carne Requistionary didn't ask for forms, authorization, or even a reason for drawing out weapons, borrowing a car from the motor pool, even tapping out vast sums of cash for emergencies. I was glad to have such resources when the first assignment of the post-war era came to my desk.

A mining consortium outside of Manchester had hired us to look into a series of disappearances and cave-ins in their nearby coal mine. Survivors reported seeing a bright white human-like creature who ran on all fours and emitted a faint glow when stationary. One photograph came to me showing a series of what appeared to be bites along the calf of a mine foreman, who called the creature "Cutty Grimes".

After two ex-SAS men didn't return from an investigation of the mine I resolved to move in force and kill or capture the beast who haunted the mines. Recalling Cohen's three Aphorisms on the Occult I tasked several of my employees to look into anything dealing with this area going back to pre-Roman era. It was a bright woman named Georgia Lennox who turned up a reference to our "Grimes" in a diary of John Dee's: "Moste unusual are the Sightings of Cuttie Grymes”, a beast most Foul who stalks the Danforth Region and the caves thereof." From my own memory Dee never mentioned Grimes anywhere else in his library, but the research proved to me the serious nature of this threat.

Three former Commandos volunteered to assist me in the investigation, knowing the dangers involved I didn't order any one of my employees to move with me into the mine. They each outfitted themselves as they saw fit, being military personnel I assumed their opinion superior to mine. I requisitioned for myself a Sten gun and a Browning Hi-Power pistol, and prepared the clips of each to be loaded with cartridges with silver points. The ride to the mine took just over five hours and we spent the night at a local inn, going over the schematics of the shafts and checking our weapons. The next morning, equipped with electric torches, gas masks, and of course our weapons, we entered through the service shaft.

I was unprepared for what we saw after the short trip down the still-functioning elevator. The two operatives we had sent in were hanging upside-down from a wooden beam along the ceiling of the mine, naked from the waist down. On their chests were carved various Kabbalistic symbols. I recognized them from Agrippa's treatise on natural magic immediately- they were invocations of the tetragrammaton. The three men who accompanied me didn't bat an eye at this gruesome scene; in some ways it was less of a relief than I should've felt.

Because there was no functioning light system below, and because attempting to ignite the wicks of the dusty gas lamps could spark a potentially fatal blaze, we were confined to moving slowly through the tunnels, clinging to the light accorded to us by our electric lamps.

At times we grew disoriented and would pause to reexamine the map, it was in one of these attempts to regain our bearings that I heard first the awful whistling of Cutty Grimes.

I quickly shushed the furtive discussion between my men and cupped my ear to listen better. It was a tune I couldn't recognize- making the sound that much more eerie- and it was close. Very close.

After a time the whistling stopped, and one of us (I don't recall who) said, "That isn't a normal whistling."

"He's whistling through his teeth," said another. "My mum could do it."

We laughed at this for a short time but a sense of unease still filled me. We determined where we were in the mine and continued. We came across another awful sight: the corpses of six miners, still wearing their gear, scattered along the floor of an alcove containing benches and tables. Lifting up their shirts revealed the same Kabbalistic symbols I had seen upon our entrance, nevertheless the combinations of these Hebrew letters were unpronounceable, and I wondered on this as we ruefully abandoned the scene to continue our search.

We came across him just outside of the alcove. He was sitting, knees up, arms sprawled out, like an ape, glowing a grim purple. His head was cocked like a dog's, and his eyes calmly took us in as we rounded the corner. His lips peeled back to show a smile of teeth filed to points. He ran his black tongue along their enamel and began to whistle again.

The first man to raise a gun (I remember it being a Webley Revolver) was suddenly felled by Grimes, who toppled the man by jumping like a frog onto him and casually biting open his throat. His mouth came up red and he smiled up at us again; it was almost a proud or defiant gesture, and in a strange way, I felt he sought our approval. Before I or my men could fire at him he had taken off, running with remarkable speed on all four elongated limbs, whistling.

We kept a short but dignified watch over our colleague as he speedily bled out, and, pilfering his ammunition and gear, left his body behind to follow the beast.

He crashed down from above us at some time later (I could not hazard a guess as to when.. ten minutes or two hours, it makes no real difference), claiming another of our men with his long, curling fingernails, ravaging his eyes and slicing open his stomach in a deft motion that took no less than a few seconds. Here I was able to tag him with the Hi-Power, the round went through his knee and exited out the other side. He made no sound but fell backwards, baring his teeth as he was want to.

My second round struck him in the other leg, here too he made no sound, but seemed suddenly sedate and unable to respond. I ordered the remaining operative to hold a gun on him with orders to shoot to kill if he made an attack motion and removed a bundle of high-test coil. I bound his legs and tied his hands behind his back, even while this close he did nothing but watch me with his black eyes and, occasionally, bare his fangs. I tore a section of cloth off of our dead fellow's uniform, forced some coil through it, and so fashioned a sort of gag for the monster's mouth.

That accomplished, I ordered the other operative to assist me in carrying him up to the surface.

He didn't struggle as we hefted him, one of us holding his legs, the other his shoulders, through the mine, but the work was exacting and we paused to rest several times. It was when we came to the alcove where the dead miners lay that Grimes started and began to whistle. The other man swore, and dropped his end, letting the beast fall hard on his head. His whistling only became more frantic and frenzied.

"What are you doing?" I hissed at the operative.

"Marking time, sieur.." Grimes hissed, and I could not conceal my surprise. I heard then another whistle, and another, and another- a sea of whistles, coming from all directions, echoing monstrously throughout the cave. And then another noise, at first, inscrutable, but gradually understood. It was the padding of the feet of a thousand wretches, identical to Grimes. They were a beehive, I thought, and Grimes was a catch-all name for a hundred thousand identical beasts, they had lived in this cave system for centuries and we had been fools to mine it, fools to disturb them, and we were fools to try and capture one without consequences.

"We need to leave here, now," I told the man, dropping the other end of Grimes I still held. I leveled my Hi-Power at his skull and fired, the gunshot was deafening but put an end to HIS whistling, at least. Then we turned to run.

We came to a fork in the mine I did not recognize, and, harried, I began to wrack my mind, seeking the proper way out. The operative meanwhile was silent beside me, I could not hear him panting or, in my case, wheezing from the exertion. At first I chalked it up to his professionalism but when he tapped me lightly in the arm I turned to find a veritable sea of Cutty Grimeses, all of them working their way along the walls of the mine shaft with their hands, whistling. They were blind, I realized. Blind, and using the whistles to determine position, just like the squeaks of bats. It was then that I was thankful for having brought a smoke grenade. Trying with desperate patience I searched awkwardly through my rucksack for the canister. They inched ever closer. My hand seized upon it, and I felt a triumphant surge of energy, carefully and soundlessly lifting it from my rucksack and holding it in front of me. I pulled the pin of the grenade, and the soft click it produced made all of the creatures black eyes peer directly at me. They began to whistle a sharper tune, and I threw the grenade over their short heads and behind them. It landed and began to hiss, they turned and charged in the opposite direction.

The frantic journey through the convoluted mine, pursued by a critically delayed but still present enemy, I barely remember. I cannot recall how we made it up the elevator but I do recall the whistling that echoed up the chamber from below. I remember starting the car in the setting sun of afternoon. I remember that infernal whistling still audible over the roar of the engine as I reversed the car and sped down the dirt road out of the mining complex.

Two weeks later the Carne Organization offered its condolences to the mining consortium and refunded them their money- I was subsequently asked to help demolish and seal the mine in permanently.

I did so gladly.