Triceratops skull on the thigh

Reverend Father, the men of Thorncombe struck something in the clay pit below the mill this week, and I have not been able to stop thinking of it. It is no ox, nor any beast I know from Genesis or the bestiary in our library. It lay in the grey clay like a helm left after a battle, and when Hob the carter brushed the mud from it, two horns longer than my forearm curved forward over the eye sockets, like a ram's but cut from stone.

I have spent three nights drawing it by the light of one candle, borrowed from Sacristan Pell, setting each ridge of the bone with fine strokes and filling the shadows with dots, one at a time, until my wrist ached. The frill spreads from the back of the skull in pleats like the folds of a choir cope. The jaw ends in a beak as hooked as a tortoise's. The villagers want it broken for lime. Brother Simeon calls it the devil's hound. I told them the Psalmist wrote that the earth is full of creatures we have not yet been shown, and they looked at me as though I had said the bones were our own.

I will confess the thing that troubles me. When I hold the lamp low and to the left, the eye sockets go so dark that my drawing seems to look back at me, and I find I cannot leave the room without glancing over my shoulder.

I enclose the sketch and ask that you keep the original in the chapter house, where no hammer can reach it. If the bone is lost, let at least these lines survive.

Your servant in Christ, Anselm.