Topic warning - some gore and firearms

---

Fred Kendall was a determined man. For the past three mornings, he had gone to tend to his sheep, only to find he'd lost one the first night, two the next - and the previous morning, four. On investigating, he'd found them torn to pieces, the grass bloody and covered in wool and bones. Some of the sheep had been partially eaten by foxes, carrion, the like, but some of them seemed to be complete - although splattered.

The other week, neighbouring farmers, Richard and Peter Croxhall had lost two cows - skinned clean, but the second had been pulled apart by something that had to be strong.

They had compared notes last night in the pub. The others at the bar suggested a big cat, got loose from a zoo down in Paignton, or on the way there. They had some sumatran tiger or something down there. It wouldn't be the first time one of them had gotten out - there were plenty of big cat tales around the country where farmers were losing livestock.

"We'll have to try and trap it," Dick had suggested. He and Pete had been out to try and find it with no luck, taken the dogs out with them, but had no luck in finding the cause. However, it had decided it didn't like cattle, and had moved to Fred's sheep, where it had a healthy appetite for killing, but not actually eating.

"Sure its not those weirdos down at Hollow?" Offered Jim, their local postman, referring to the next village which was always slightly ridiculed for its strange goings on and belief in hauntings in the church. Pretty enough place, just some of the people weren't quite right. Inbreeding, some suggested.

Those within earshot began to recount some tale of a school child who had set light to school books after an argument. It wasn't every day a six year old did that, but it seemed far more likely down the road, anyhow. These strange tales aside, the people at Godric's Hollow had never bothered Fred much. They bought lamb like the others round here when he slaughtered it, and he thought the stories were all a bit of hype. Kids these days...

"Whatever it is," Fred assured the brothers before he had to sit through ten minutes of whittering about school children, "It'll take both barrels of my shotgun between the eyes."



He blinked the blood away from his eyes, having ruled out possibility number eight. Far too messy, but from what he could see from his wand light, this sheep was now reversed. There was only one way to check. The light went out on the end of his wand and he raised it above his head, sweeping down sharply. Beneath him the carcass thwacked and gurgled, bursting open into two halves and further sheep fluids splattered all over him. His robes were cold against his skin with the damp, the weather still not out of winter properly in the West Country.

His wand illuminated the carcass again and he crouched beside it, reaching his left hand inside to inspect the state of the work. The body was hot, not only from life but from the strong magic that had pulled it inside out. The smell was like the start of a Sunday roast, only with the tang of a butcher's shop still strong, not helped by the fact he had caught the taste of what had splattered his face from his lips.

This had been the closest yet, he would be able to tell Trevelyan and Radley[1], the cleanest and with the greatest speed. He reached inside his robes to the camera he had borrowed, which he was using to record the evidence each time. The bodies would soon start to rot, the dark magic wouldn't help the preservation, and the local wildlife were feasting on things as far as he could tell from what was left each time he came back to the herd. Two pops of the bulb and a cloud of smoke billowed upwards into the night sky, leaving the Professor temporarily blinking from the sudden flash. His eyes had become well adjusted to working in the dark the past hour.

All of a sudden there were two strong beams of light near to where he was crouched, and his head snapped up in surprise, wand in hand. The lights swung round, and Ignan quickly darted out of their path, not recognising them as a Land Rover's headlights, until more of them sprang on and he heard the roar of an engine heading in his direction.



Fred's son put his foot to the floor. His father only let him drive the Land Rover on the farm, too young to try for a license on the road, the spotty teenager was a dab hand at flinging the trusty machine around their land when required. A night out in his Easter holiday to try and find what was killing his father's sheep was a good enough reason if any, and his dad had offered to let him shoot if they had any luck. The flashes of light were either a torch or a gun, or both, which was odd as they'd been looking for an animal. Still, he was determined to find it, as he swung the four-by-four round and pushed on all the headlights, and the top lights that they'd installed for this sort of job. The field ahead was flooded in light. There was a sheep torn to bits on the grass, just as his dad had described, so they were definitely on to whatever it was.

"Steady! Steady!" His dad had his shotgun in his hand and was leaning out of the window, keen to take a shot as soon as they saw the thing, the cat, the wolf or whatever it was. Then they saw it - a man, running - his father took aim, fired, and then all of a sudden the man disappeared.

"Dad you shot him!" There was a horrible crunch of gears as they sped forwards in the same direction, thinking they'd shot some sheep thief, but by the time they reached the spot seconds later and leapt out, there was no sign of anyone there at all.



Gerda had been fast asleep in the cupboard under the stairs, the place in the house she had elected to call her own when they had moved in not too many weeks ago. Her oversized ears had been quite content to hear young master Storm snoring on the settee in the living room, and she had turned in herself after a very productive day clearing the back garden of weeds. She'd not needed to turn the iron on her ears at all. There would be time to sleep before she expected master Storm home from whatever he'd been doing the past few nights in the holidays from Hogwarts. She was an elf, and these things didn't get asked.

The sound of someone apparating outside the back door did wake her from her slumber, and she came scurrying out from under the stairs just as the back door came open to reveal a familiar shape.
"Master!"

He pressed a finger to his lips, not wanting to alert Johann to his presence, not in the state he was in covered in blood. He'd not had a moment to scourgify himself what with apparating on the spot to stop an idiot Muggle trying to shoot him. That had been a most unexpected turn of events, to say the least, especially so close to the results too.

1.	Just a Couple of Questions

"And you say that it was definitely a man?" PC Andy Jackson asked, tugging his standard-issue reflective yellow jacket up at the neck against the breeze on the hillside. Fred Kendall had rung him as soon as he'd come on duty that morning. Made a bit of a change from lost walkers, misuse of red diesel and the odd boy racer taking a corner wrong and ending up in a field.

In his hand he clasped his official notebook, and was making notes on the scene and the Kendall's account of what had happened last night. Mr Kendall and his son had been out to try and find out what animal was killing the sheep, and had instead come across a man, they claimed, who vanished into midair. Certainly there were footprints in the mud around the sheep's body, they were not the same boots as either Kendall or his boy, and they could be traced running in the direction the farmer had suggested, but stopped about a dozen strides out - about ten feet from where the Land Rover had left skid marks in the grass as it had come to a stop. 

Constable Jackson measured one of his boots up beside a footprint in the mud, careful not to put his foot down properly as he did it. It was a size smaller than his own, and the sole had been pretty smooth, with a heel. Looked like the footprints in children's murder mystery books, how illustrators drew, not like the comfortable Hunter wellingtons, or the hiking boots folk round here wore. They reminded him of riding boots, if anything, but there were no hoof marks in the field nearby other than the imprint of sheep's tiny feet.

"Clear as day, Constable. Taller than me, all dressed in dark clothes. He had white hair. Don't suppose the old age pension's got that tight that they're slaughtering my sheep to make ends meet?" Kendall suggested, though the explanation was tenuous at best. His teenage son was chewing on his lip, something was not all explained.

"So you were driving, son?" Jackson asked, not that he could do much about a teenager being supervised in a vehicle on their own land, "You saw him too?" The boy nodded, though had begun to doubt his sanity overnight since the incident, wondering if he'd hallucinated in the thrill of the hunt. He was more concerned with whether his father had accidentally shot the man they'd seen, but there was no suggestion, no body. They'd sent the sheepdogs out into the woods beside, but they'd taken no interest in anything apart from rabbits. Neither of the Kendalls had mentioned firing at the man.

"He must have had a torch, we saw flashes which were what alerted us, like. The body was still warm when we found it, so he couldn't have done it long before we spotted him."

"The other night we found them over that way so we must have missed him." Fred suggested, gesturing down the field away from the scene and the woods. PC Jackson wet his thumb and turned another page in his notebook.



Down the valley in Godric's Hollow, an unwitting family member was put off the possibility of breakfast as he encountered a set of freshly developed photographs of dismembered animals set out for examination on the kitchen table.

"And he says I have disturbing hobbies." He told the house elf with a shake of his head.