The Fabulous Beast Read Online Free PDF

despising Simon, the count, and everyone in the room except the lovely Sofia, whom I loved as much as I hated.
    That night I lay in the blackness of my room, any light from outside the window completely obscured by huge, thick, dusty velvet curtains, forcing myself to think about the murders in the Weissgarten . There were three in the castle records, but there had probably been more over the centuries, which had been lost to memory and had never been recorded. The first in the Friedrich family memoirs had been a maidservant, hurrying home late at night after a liaison with a married innkeeper. Her skull had been crushed. This incident had occurred exactly 87 years before the second victim was found with his neck broken, lying appropriately amongst the lilies.
    Now, 134 years after that murder the castle had witnessed a third, this time a gardener in the early hours of the morning. His smoking pipe was still clenched between his teeth when they found him, his chest battered in by some heavy instrument. Evidenced by the garden flowers, he had died in terrible agony, thrashing around for a very long time, his breath and blood bubbling from the injury, for the single blow had not only smashed his rib cage into his lungs, it had left a ragged hole the size of a fist.
    All these killings – one assumes murders – occurred in the garden which was reserved exclusively for white flowers. White roses, lilies, ox-eye daisies, jasmine, white lupins, and so forth and so on. The surrounding gardens of the castle boasted amongst its other treasures two orangeries (upper and lower), a water park with channelled streams running from the hills behind down into pools within the gardens, a haha, woodland walks, a natural open-air theatre. There were deep-green hedges of myrtle and yew to scent the air.
    Apart from the natural wonders there was also an abundance of Greek statues in the baroque gardens: entwined lovers such as Orpheus and Eurydice, Narcissus and Echo, Bacchus and Ariadne and others already mentioned, along with single figures such as Zeus, Heracles and Artemis.
    Finally, in the sunken garden, there was the Silent Orchestra: a set of beautifully sculpted statues of cherubs ‘playing’ musical instruments. This last set piece, positioned down below the marble staircase alongside which the obsidian aqueducts ran, was famous throughout the empire and visiting kings and queens came just to look and ‘listen’ to the silent music of these works of art, carved by that wonderful sculptor Georg von Richtendorf.
    After receiving the invitation from the count to investigate the murder I left Dresden the following day, to find on my arrival that the scarlet stains on the white petals were still there.
    ‘We didn’t pick them,’ explained one of the undergardeners, ‘so you could see the exact spot where he died.’
    The exact spot was indeed visible. The shape of his dead form remained indented in the crushed foliage. The deep footprints of the monster who had caved his chest also remained. On either side however were solid paths which of course showed no such depressions. The prints went right across the White Garden, but vanished on the stone walkways. Searching the rest of the enormous gardens, I was surprised and frustrated to find that no further footprints could be found. It was as if the murderer remained, somewhere in the castle grounds: as if he had hidden under some slab or stone, waiting for an opportunity to escape the scene.
    Whoever had carried out this terrible deed, he was a big man – a very big man – no doubt with great strength and not even a kernel of a conscience. To strike someone dead with a blow to the head would seem to me to be more humane than crushing his chest and leaving him to die slowly in terrible pain.
    On questioning the gardeners I was told that they often found footmarks in the White Garden, the plants beaten down. It was now so common they simply accepted it and repaired the damage. Attempts