Thyla - Kate Gordon [46]
Her escape followed a week of bizarre and disturbing behaviour, during which one staff member and several other inmates – including members of the Flash Mob – were physically assaulted, and during which Miss Geeves has been apprehended on several occasions leaving her dormitory after curfew.
It was during a reprimand for this last indiscretion that Miss Geeves escaped.
I was not at my post the night that Miss Geeves disappeared, and the account given to me by the duty guard – Thomas Walter – is dubious at best. Walter reported that he happened upon Miss Geeves in the exercise yard, in a state of agitation. It was well after her curfew, so it was incumbent upon him to reprimand Miss Geeves. As he did so – and hereafter his account enters the realms of fantasy and farce – Walter reports that he noticed a curious and quite startling transformation in Miss Geeves’ physical appearance.
Walter is quite specific in his imaginings. He tells us that her eyes seemed to have changed from human eyes into what he could only describe as eyes of a more marsupial nature. Her teeth became elongated and ‘sharp as daggers’, and – most fantastical of all – he says her legs began to buckle and bend backwards. I know it sounds quite unbelievable and, in fact, it is. I have suspicions as to the sobriety of the young guard. The transformation was, quite obviously, simply a figment of his intoxicated imagination, but I will report it here as he told it, for I hope it will serve as some excuse for his lax response to Miss Geeves’ escape.
What happened next, the guard says, was this: Miss Geeves (or the creature he was hallucinating Miss Geeves into), opened her mouth and let out a sound something like a scream. It was a wild sound, he says; a bestial sound. It was not the kind of sound a human being should ever make.
After Miss Geeves ceased her ‘demonic howling’, she turned and, on her new, back-turning legs, she galloped towards the walls and leapt right over their top.
By the time I returned to the factory, Walter had already told Mr Hopkins of his ‘observations’. Though I advised Mr Hopkins that it was quite obvious the guard had turned temporarily mad, Mr Hopkins believed the best course of action was to inform Lord Chassebury of the guard’s observations, and to take action to recover ‘the beast’ from the woodland to which she had fled.
It has now been three days since Miss Geeves’ escape and, though Mr Hopkins and Lord Chassebury have both deployed many men to scour the forests that surround our Factory, she has not been recovered.
There have been reports of strange creatures sighted in the woods – mammals much larger than any we have seen already on this island. The creatures are said to walk upright instead of on all fours, and to display bizarrely human features. Those reporting these sightings claim the beasts have only been seen in glimpses caught as they race through the trees, and yet they imagine these are creatures to be feared. They describe them to be strong, fast and wild.
Chassebury’s men have informed him of the discovery of these ‘new mammals’, and a directive has been issued that any beast captured should be culled. Chassebury has visited Mr Hopkins’ office, and Mr Hopkins informed me that a bounty much higher than that paid for the thylacines will be available to anyone who can produce a skin from one of these new mammals. He said to me that these beasts represent all that England must eradicate in this new land, if it is to be transformed from a wild and corrupted place to a proper English colony. I have, of course, told officials at Van Diemen’s that it is obvious that the men are suffering a sort of mass hysteria.
There are no strange beasts.
Miss Geeves is not, herself, a monster.
It is all a creation of their minds. This new, strange land we find ourselves in is playing tricks upon their sanity.
I hope, in time, the men will forget they ever imagined the forest to be full of monsters. I hope that they will soon