Many of ye be wondering, no doubt, why I am here in the place of the good Reverend. Tom the rat catcher, you say, ain’t been to church nigh these forty years, since his old mum was laid out like a plaid picnic blanket by a speeding lorry. But old Tom has a story to tell, and if you don’t listen to old Tom, you won’t find out what happened to Reverend Cavendish.

I was neither a fit night for a man nor a fit night for a beast, which in my book made it for fair fight between the two. I was hunting squirrel by the parsonage when I a-heared an agonized howl that stopped me cold in my tracks. It was not a human sound, more like a devil, yeah, a half devil half Fantana sort of sound. The same sound I would wager that Sir Charles heard, right before his lifeless body fell into the bracken.

Reverend Cavendish poked his head out of the window.

"I believe I heard someone calling me," he said.

"No Reverend. I know you be a lonely man, but believe you me that was no human voice."

"But it sounded like a woman. And I distinctly heard my name," he said as he came around to the front door.

"Reverend, the moor is very sparsely inhabited."

"I'll just pop out and have a look," he insisted, walking past me toward the path that opened into the moor behind the woodshed.

"Reverend, we must avoid the moor in those hours of darkness when the powers of evil are exalted!"

He turned back and called, "I'll just check, then, why don’t I? I'll take an axe."

Then he disappeared into the woodshed.

Again the agonized cry swept through the silent night, louder and much nearer than ever. And a new sound mingled with it, a deep, muttered rumble, musical and yet menacing, rising and falling like the low, constant murmur of the sea.

It flushed out a whole nest of squirrels!

Good eatin.

AMEN.

[Submitted by MarkC from behind the Now Iron Curtain (that bars thought-crimey internet content from being accessed in the PRC.)]