“Sure I saw her,” the woman said, holding the picture tilted to catch the light from the faintly flickering fluorescent bar overhead. Her eyebrows, carefully pencilled, arched in twin, proud curves, matching her jet-black hair. Her eyes narrowed as she remembered, accentuating the wrinkles around them. She had a kindly, lived-in sort of face.
She turned round to call to the other woman in the steamy space behind the laminated counter where the sausages were sizzling on the flat skillet. “You remember the girl with the baby, Maisie?”
“The one who sat all morning, yesterday, Margaret?”
“Yes. That’s her. This is her picture, isn’t it?”
The other woman came across, her hair that faded dyed red of an old women who remembers her bright young days. She walked with a waddling gait, centre of gravity dropped and getting lower all the time.
“Aye, that’s the one. Poor soul looked half starved and half frozen. And scared half to death. I thought maybe there was somebody looking for her, or she was hiding from somebody. She never said, though.”
David had gone east, following up some other lead and had left Helen to carry on her own search. It her two hours to find which bus Ginny Marsden had taken the day before. Two patrolmen thought they had seen a girl with a baby heading for the bus station close to St Enoch’s, not far from the Waterside mall. That had been in the early hours of the morning. Acting on the hunch, working patiently and taking the time to ask questions, she found a bus driver who said he thought he’d seen her sitting in the waiting room of the terminus. She pushed him a little harder, trying to find out which side of the room. It was a long, narrow corridor of a place, with several doors. The position somebody sat might give a clue as to the direction a person might travel. The four doors, north south east and west, in actuality corresponded with the directions the main-route buses would take from the centre of the city. Ginny Marsden had been sitting close to the west bound door, if indeed it had been Ginny Marsden. It was still all surmise, possibility rather than probability.
Another stroke of luck found her the bus crew, now just going of shift. John Skelly the driver, a beefy man with mutton-chop sideburns, recalled the girl.
“Just about fell upstairs. I thought she was drunk at first, but she was all right. Maybe just stiff with the cold. She gave me a tenner, which I wasn’t going to take - you’re supposed to give the right money, know what I mean? But what the hell, she was just a young lassie, far as I remember. I’ve a daughter who’s older than her and I wouldn’t like to see her out on the streets in the middle of winter, not with a baby. I’d smack her ear if she ever came home with one right enough, but I wouldn’t like to see her out in the dark at this time of the year.”
Helen led him back onto the track, thinking for an instant, that he’d sidetracked himself the way David Harper was prone to do. She suppressed a smile. She couldn’t see David Harper driving a bus.
“Anyway, she went up the back. There were two workmen, regulars, who were already there. They get the bus every morning, but you’ll have to get up early if you want to speak to them. I wouldn’t bother, for they sleep from here to Kirkland and only wake when I’m turning the bus outside the hospital. Ss she was up the back. Skinny thing. Looked as if she needed a good feed, big bags under her eyes. I thought she was older at first, but maybe she just had the flu. Oh, and what’s more, she could have done with a good wash an’ all. You don’t often get a girl smelling like that, but she was pretty ripe, I can tell you.”
Helen’s ears metaphorically cocked up. “She smelled?”
“Like a house full of cats. I should know. My auntie, she’s a bit wandered, she takes in every stray. The smell up in her place would choke a horse, swear to god. Well, this lassie, she was pretty powerful. I thought maybe it was the baby, maybe she hadn’t changed it for a while, for it was rank. Like shite and vomit and cat’s piss all mixed in, pardon the lingo. Maybe she had some sort of disease. Maybe it wasn’t the flu after all.”
Helen thought that Ginny Marsden, if it really had been her, might have some sort of disease, but not a physical one. Anybody who stole a baby had to be sick in the head.
“No. Tell you what. My uncle Jim, he had emphysema and his leg got gangrene. At the end of the day they had to cut it off at the knee, but it just got worse. The smell of that would have knocked you down for a mandatory eight count. That’s what she smelled like.”
“And where did she get off?” Helen wanted to know.
“Levenford. Just at the junction of River Street and Kirk Street. It was still dark and pretty damned cold. Soon as the door opened, there was snow blowing in. I wouldn’t like my girl to be out on her own in that, baby or no baby. It was a damned shame. She just looked like a poor soul. I nearly never bothered taking her money, but if the inspector catches you doing that, then you get your jotters, the sack, the old tin tack and no appeal. They’ve got hearts of pure stone, so they have.”
Helen Lamont knew inspectors just like that, though not on the buses. She thanked John Skelly, appreciating his honesty and his ineffable cheeriness, and went out of the station. She called David Harper on the mobile, got a busy signal, and decided to head down on her own. She wanted to have something more positive to tell him.
The drive to Levenford - fifteen miles, maybe a little more, west of the city - took nearly half an hour. It was mid afternoon when she turned at Roundriding Road, vaguely aware of having heard the quaint name before, wondering if someone she knew lived here. She drove down towards the centre of the town past the old Burgh hall that stood bare and weathered in the shadow of the great square red-brick bulk of Castlebank Distillery. A memory tugged at Helen as she went past the squat building. There had been something here, an incident a year or two past. She screwed her eyes up in concentration as she drove past the edge of the building, and saw the looming double hump of the old castle rock down on the mouth of the river.
Levenford. Things had happened here a year or two back, she recalled. Some crazy killer had stalked the streets in a winter as bitter as this, picking off kids at first. She remembered the stories in the papers at the time, the bulletins on the six-o’clock news. The madman had left a girl hanging from the tall, slender steeple Helen was driving past. She shuddered at the thought of the brazen arrogance, the madness that would lead someone to snatch and kill a young girl and leave her dangling from the weathervane like a trophy.
The distillery building drew her eyes. There had been something there too, had there not? She couldn’t remember, but she was glad she was not hunting a madman today. Maybe a crazy girl on a hormonal helter-skelter, but not a killer.
Ginny Marsden was somewhere here, Helen told herself. She had a hunch that she had come here and stopped a while. This old, narrow-streeted town was the place where you could come and find some peace to sit while the chase went rumbling past. Helen parked her car down by the river and walked up an alley of foot-smoothed cobblestones, under the arch of a tunnel-pend that led beneath an old and crumbling building. As she walked underneath, into the darkness away from the weak light of a winter-morning sun, she shivered again, and not with cold. Something had happened here. Helen did not know how she knew, or why. All she got was a a tickle that itched at the back of her head, and she wanted to be away from that place. She walked quickly to get to the daylight at the far side out on River Street where the feeling of sudden oppression faded. She told herself not to be a fool. Yet the feeling had been real.
The café next to the bus stop on the end of Kirk Street was quiet when she got there. Margaret and Maisie were grateful for something interesting to happen. They brought Helen a steaming mug of tea, big enough to take almost a pint of strong brew, and a fried egg sandwich, done just enough to let the yolk burst thick and wet. Both went down just a treat. Helen Lamont knew nothing about Ginny Marsden’s meal.
“You look as if you could use another one, love,” Margaret said kindly. She pulled a chair and sat down. “This girl, what’s she done?”
“She’s gone missing,” Helen said, giving nothing away. “Her parents are very worried.” She was really amazed that she had actually traced Ginny Marsden’s movements so easily. If it hadn’t been for the sheer luck of the two patrolmen remembering her, she could still be knocking doors round the city.
“So they should be worried,” Maisie said. “There wasn’t a pick of meat on the girl’s bones. Margaret tried to get her to eat something, but all she would take was a coffee and even then it was hard enough for her to drink that. You’d have thought it was poisoned. She was just a poor soul. Is her boyfriend after her, or did her family throw her out?”
“Nothing like that. I have to find her though.”
“Well, you should try the hostel opposite Ship Institute Hostel,” Margaret chipped in. “She was asking for someplace to stay and that’s the only place I could think of. They take in the homeless there. Big Nina Galt, she helps run the place for the institute. She’s a cousin of mine on my mother’s side. Anyway, the girl was looking for a room for the night, maybe longer, I don’t know. I told her to go round to see Nina. I think she must have, because we got busy with a crowd of folk off the bus and heading for Creggan. By the time I served them their food and looked back, she and the baby were gone.”
“Did you see the baby?”
“Just a snatch. You know what it’s like. You can’t resist having a look. She was holding it tight, and I remember thinking the wee one should have a hat at this time of the year. Any time of the year come to that. But she was hugging it in under her coat. I pulled it back to have a look and the girl, kind of, what’s the word, jerked back. Like flinched? I just got a peek at the baby and for a minute I thought it was deformed, honest to god. I felt my coffee and bacon coming right back up again it was that bad.”
“What do you mean?”
“Och, the old biddy, she needs glasses,” Maisie interjected. “She wouldn’t recognise her sister from across the street.”
“Nothing wrong with my eyes,” Margaret countered. The black eyebrows rose up in tandem arches. “No, when I looked at the baby, its head looked all wrong. I thought it was a doll at first and that maybe somebody had squashed its head. But it moved and I knew it wasn’t a doll. For a minute it was like, like....” Margaret searched for the words. “Like all out of shape, and a funny colour. But it must have been a trick of the light, because I coughed or something and my eyes watered and when I blinked them clear, it was fine, a lovely wee thing. I could have cuddled it to death.”
Helen felt a strange, unexpected shiver run through her. She’d heard those words before.
“It really was a bonny wee thing. I only got a glimpse, but I could see it was lovely. It was looking at me with a big blue eye, blue as the sea. Goodness, that’s like a poem, isn’t it?” She smiled widely, showing her impressive array of false teeth.
“It made that sound new babies make, kind of shivery, just a wee whimper, and it brought it all back to me what mine were like when they were just born.”
“And that wasn’t yesterday,” Maisie interrupted. “Her eldest’s thirty-eight and the way her daughter’s going, Margaret here’s going to be a great-granny any year now.”
“Och, hold your wheesht,” Margaret scolded, but gently. “Anyway, it smelled just like a new baby, you know that hot milk smell?”
“Did you notice any other smell?” Helen asked.
“Oh, at first I thought the girl needed a good bath,” Margaret said, wrinkling her nose. “When I came across to her at first, it was like those tinkers down on the West Mains by the shoreline, dirty beggars. Some of them stink to the high heavens, so they do. Well, at first, I thought she smelled like that, but I must have been wrong.All I could smell was the baby, and you know, I just wanted to pick him up and cuddle him. I really took a notion then. Imagine it, me at my age, thinking about having a baby.”
“It would be a bloody miracle, wouldn’t it?” Maisie snorted, and both women burst into laughter.
“And not just for me,” Margaret said. “I think my Billy’s forgotten how it’s done.”
He screamed.
She had abandoned him. The realisation triggered an uncontrollable fury and panic. He had fed, guzzling on the milk and the thick proteins the mother’s changing body had manufactured for him, feeling his new strength swell. Already the skin on his back was tight, shiny with pressure, aching with the need to slough. He was changing again and this was different from those other times. The change was imminent and it was immense. He could sense it with every cell of his body.
He was becoming something other. He had not the words or the capacity to understand what.
The past few sleeps had not been easy. He had dreamed again, dreamed of dark and shadowed places, of the long and arduous pain of birth, recalled and echoed in a strange and fearful replay, as if all of his being was resonating with his own long history. He dreamed of hunger and thirst and the overwhelming need now building up inside him, a bewildering, confusing want that felt like another hunger but was something more powerful.
It was the change he could recognise, rushing in on him.
And now she had abandoned him. She had waited until he had slept, stupefied by the feast and the lethargic torpor the changes wrought. She had bound him in the swaddling. He wriggled and fought against the sheets, feeling the fabric rasp against his drying, peeling skin. He kicked and pushed, rolling this way and that. He screamed all the while, sending his mental blast out so loud it rattled the windows and shivered on the floorboards.
He knew she could hear him because the reaction inside her flared in his senses, like a beacon of pulsing light throbbing hard on the forefront of his mind. He located her and demanded that she return. She shivered and her own mind shrieked in awful sympathy with her fear, deliberately defying him as she had resisted him before.
This one was different. The others had been cattle; complacent, contented; bovine. They had taken him and given themselves to him even as he drained them of their substance.
But this one was different. He had chosen too quickly, seizing the opportunity in the midst of his own panicked vulnerability, and he had chosen wrongly. He could not completely dominate her. She would not subjugate to him.
She was not a proper mother.
Even then he could sense her disintegration. He was draining her quickly, leeching her away, sucking her dry, and that too was new. A mother lasted longer than this, so long that time meant nothing at all. He would feed and sleep, feed and sleep and finally when a mother wore dry, he would chose another. This was different, because his needs were different, hotter and more urgent. He could feel the change in his own needs and in the feeding. He was taking not just what she could produce for him, what his own cells, speeding round in her bloodstream, commanded her body to manufacture. His feeding had altered. The new growth was able to probe into the veins inside her and drain directly, absorbing the elements, the nutrients, the building blocks his rapidly altering state demanded.
Yet she was not a proper mother. She fought and struggled and that was new. She tried to defy him, tried to deny him, and now she had bound him in the cocoon of fabric. She had ticked him and now she had marooned him while she escaped.
Awesome anger bubbled up inside him. This had never happened before. For a second, the dreadful panic threatened to swamp him and his mind shrieked in fear and hate. He sensed her falter, touched her pain. He probed instinctively at the fractures and crevices within her mind where he could manipulate and trigger the responses.
She fought desperately against his touch and he snarled, still wriggling frantically to free himself from the sheet. His head worked free and he rolled to the left, swivelling like a caterpillar weaving its own cocoon, rolled too far and fell off the edge of the bed. He hit the floor with a solid thump. A sensation akin to pain lanced across his back where the skin was thin and tender. Something tore and the urgency welled up from deep inside him, hot and corrosive as acid.
Down below, beyond the door and down the stairs, he heard the caterwauling of another female, cacophonous in his consciousness. For an instant he debated sending a call in that direction, then he realised, again instinctively that she was old, too old to be of any but momentary use. The older ones were harder to control because of their own changes. He screeched again, drilling the mother with the awl of his imperative need. She paused on the steps, almost drew back, then moved further away. He commanded desperately, felt another hesitation, another refusal, a mental protest made in abject fear. She took another step, another. He could feel the vibrations through the floor, seismic ripples picked up by the supersense he possessed. She was getting further away and he knew his influence was waning with the distance. He put out feelers, conscious tendrils of thought, to the rooms above and below, seeking contact, trying to find another human it could latch onto.
In behind the wall, a hibernating mouse woke up, screeched and died. The dendrites of its brain sparked and jittered, shattering themselves in the sudden blast of energy. Under the eaves, two roosting starlings fell from their perch and hit the frosted flagstones with muffled thumps. Their eyes leaked out onto the ice. A cat prowling at the kitchen door, looking for scraps, turned tail, yowled a strange sound that was like fingernails scraping down a blackboard, ran out of the narrow alley and under the wheels of the very bus that Ginny Marsden had taken from the city down to Levenford. It made a greasy smear two yards long on the road.
Out in the back yard, a pit bull terrier, the property of Nina Galt’s ne’er-do-well brother in law Campbell, (whose son had once faced something even more preposterous and terrifying than the thing which shrieked after Ginny Marsden, and survived that dreadful contact) suddenly went berserk and attacked the stout wooden door of the old brick outhouse where Campbell Galt kept it out of sight of prying eyes. He had trained it for a major fight set for after the New Year, forcing the wide-jawed and somehow manic beast to bite on an old bath towel and then dangling it from a third floor window for hours at a time until its facial muscles were so strong and distorted that the dog looked like a grotesque gargoyle. Now those jaws attacked the wooden door, twenty five yards from the hostel, down an alley which could only be approached from River Street. Nobody noticed until it had gnawed its way halfway through the door, its face a bloodied mess, spiked with wooden skelfs and splinters, its mind completely gone. Campbell Galt killed it with a single, catastrophic blow of a garden spade the following night.
The mother hesitated no more, despite the fearsome command the thing radiated as it writhed on the floor. She took another step, another, got further away. He was getting beyond his range. He panicked, rolling this way and that, the strange circular mouth rolling back from the almost perfect sphere of tiny, glass-shard teeth. Its mottled face twisted and torqued. Under the wrinkled lid of a protuberant eye, the skin tore in a series of jittering rips, exposing a purplish underskin that looked as if it was filled with exotic poison. Every gland under his upper limbs opened and pulsed, but he was still wrapped up. The chemical messengers, the powerful pheromones that he had used to manipulate the mothers and other humans before his mind had grown strong enough to command, sprayed directly into the fabric, almost dissolving the cotton, but it absorbed them so efficiently that the smell could not escape.
For an instant he was completely powerless. She was escaping, leaving him on his own. If he remained here, he could be discovered. He might be found another human who could not be influenced, a male. The chemical messengers in his glands could take a mother, make her love him, but on a male they would only drive him made with rage. He knew from somewhere in the past that a male could not tolerate him. Instinctively he knew he could be destroyed.
Fresh fear erupted. He was not strong enough yet to survive alone. The change was imminent and disabling. He could not travel on its own. He would be trapped here, trapped without a mother, and in an hour, maybe less, he would have to feed again. The urgency and panic swelled again.
Then the mother stopped on the stairs. The vibration in the floor faded and died. She had stopped on the landing, no more than thirty feet away.
Everything went silent. He stopped breathing, sensing out. Very slowly, finally figuring it out, he rolled to the left again. Almost miraculously the sheet began to unravel. His brain, or what passed for a brain, an organ that worked more on instinct than true, coherent thought, recognised the possibility of release. He rolled further until he fetched up against the base the bed, then astutely, he wriggled back to where he had started and rolled some more. The pressure of the sheets lessened. He twisted and managed to get his shoulders out.
She was still stopped on the stairs. Even as he moved, he could sense her turn. She radiated fear and dilemma. Her hesitancy was a vibration on the air, her awful apprehension a tremble resonating across the distance. The mother turned completely. She took one step upwards. The board creaked under her foot, a protest that sounded like a small animal’s alarm. Now he had his shoulders free, his arm reached out and clawed on the carpet, dragging it towards him. The carpet’s far corner was snagged under the leg of the bed. The slither across the floorboards stopped. He got his other arm out, clawed his elongated fingers on the rough, matted pile. The motion drew him out of the wrap of the sheet, like a caddis fly emerging from its protective case. His breath whistled as he hauled strongly, and a small grunt that was both satisfaction and exertion mirrored the groan of the stair tread under the mother’s weight.
Enormous excitement washed through him. She was coming back. He pulled again and rolled free of the wrapping, tumbling right across the rumpled carpet to the bare floorboards. His skin slithered and scrabbled on the polished surface. His nails got a purchase between two boards and he got himself to all fours. His lower limbs, scrawny and stick-like and oddly jointed, took his weight and he swivelled fast in a jittery, spidery motion. She came up the stairs, moving as fast as she could, the exhaustion evident in the heavy drag of her feet on the boards. He could make out her laboured breathing and the rasp of grinding pain in her joints. Still she came.
He moved in a scuttle across the floor to the edge of the bed, half covered by the trailing sheet, small and scrawny and slat-ridged, a grey, blurring thing. She got to the door, an unseen presence beyond the doorpost. A pale and fluttering hand reached in, fumbling in the air, as if the mother was too afraid to look inside herself, which was utterly true. The fear radiated from her in pulses. The door had hit against the wall and rebounded slowly. The blue plastic tab dangled from the key in the lock. Her arm reached out for it. He could see her shoulder, then the side of her face. Inside he felt the irresistible pressure building up, the unendurable strain of his glands as they powered and clenched. He held it, held his own thoughts, instinctively waiting for the moment.
She half turned, her eyes catching the scuttling motion on the floor. They flared wide. Her fingers touched the key. Her mouth began to open as she saw him.
He screeched his command and his glands blew, sending an almost visible spray into the air. She froze, eyes so wide they looked as if they would blurt blindly from the sockets.
Then he moved.
Helen finished a second cup of tea, a decision she knew she would regret later. Mentally she made a note to find a toilet before she started the drive back up to the city. A group of grey-suited clerks from Castlebank distillery had come in, all looking like accountants or lawyers. They ordered burgers and sausage rolls, quick food for the office class, and both Margaret and Maisie had to reluctantly give up their gossiping to serve the food. Helen put a few coins under the outsize saucer and made her way out into the cold air. The sky was clear, the glassy blue of a cloudless midwinter, and the haze of river mist was curling round the corners of the alleys which led down past the old bakery on the other side of the road towards the quay. The air was still and cold and the tendrils of river mist haar were like translucent tentacles probing the day. Even in the watery brightness they crept eerily. Helen shivered with more than just cold. She turned, took a step along River Street and she shivered again, this time more violently.
“Somebody must have walked on my grave,” she muttered to herself, feeling the shudder still ripple insistently down her back.
It was as eerie as the probing fingers, an odd and inexplicable sensation of wrongness.
She took another step forward, two, then she stopped. It came to her with sudden clarity. She’d felt it before, the feeling of being watched, of eyes upon her. She was young enough, certainly attractive enough to be aware of the glances she would draw from scaffolders or road workers, the traditional public oglers. She was aware of it from men in cars, catching their pale faces turn away as she glanced to challenge their stares. She was also aware of it, more strongly, at other times, when she walked into a crowded bar and she would feel eyes peeling her, picking her clean, some hostile, some hungry. It was a kind of sixth sense which was valuable when it alerted the other senses to the possibility of danger.
Now she felt it again, though more strongly, inexplicably so. It was somehow different, this sensation of surveillance.
She stopped and turned, drawing her eyes quickly back along the walkway to where Kirk Street connected at right angles with the main road through the town. Two men, burly in thick overcoats, were walking quickly together, a matching pair of lawyers coming round from the sheriff court sitting. By the bus stop, a couple of teenagers with shaven heads which looked vulnerable and cold, were hunched, sharing a cigarette. For a second Helen did not recognise them as girls until one turned round and blew a plume of smoke into the air through pouting rosebud lips.
The sense of being observed died abruptly. The inspection, if it had been that, was over. For a brief moment, Helen felt disoriented, as if she had imagined it, but she was left with a strange and uneasy sense of contagion. It was as if something had touched her and left a stain. She shivered again, an invisible vibration, told herself to get a grip. There was no-one else around, apart from the portly fat cats and the skinny idlers and, further along the street, several stout old ladies weighed down by age and large bags of groceries. She moved on away from the cafe and the trickling sensation under her skin, the resonance in the long nerves down the length of her spine, died away. If somebody had stood on her grave, they had moved off again.
The Ship institute was on the other side of River Street, up a narrow lane. The Victorian building had been imposing in its day, when the town was rich from shipbuilding and shipping, when the tobacco barons and tea-lords reigned supreme. Now it was a mouldering monument to days gone by, the carved stone cargo ship above its wide doorway, an anachronism. The town built no more ships. It built nothing at all these days.
The hostel, which once housed sailors home from a windjamming run from Cathay, was incorporated into the building, sheltered from the prevailing west wind, and therefore better preserved than the once imposing institute proper.
Nina Galt took a wary look at Helen’s warrant card. “We’re not really supposed to talk about our guests,” she said.
Helen couldn’t be bothered going through the rigmarole of worming her way in. “I could come back,” she said flatly. “I don’t want to fall out with anybody or have a dispute on the doorstep. But I could go and get some paperwork and come back. But that’s going to mean an awful lot of trouble for me, and naturally, that’s going to spoil everybody’s day.”
Nina Galt started to speak, but Helen held up her hand: “Here’s the base line. I’ve got a missing girl whose parents are worried to death, and my boss has asked me to find her. She’s been reported missing and it’s now my job. This is the law. She might be here, and she might not be. What I want you to do is have a look at a picture and tell me. On and after that, we’ll talk, but in the meantime, just have a look for me, okay? We both want to have a nice day.”
Nina Galt looked Helen in the eye, weighing her up. She’d had a hard life of her own, growing up with a family of boys who were never out of trouble with the police, and then marrying a husband who had spent many a Friday night in the slammer of the police station down by College way. She had no love of the police, but she was herself a law abiding person. She did, however, have a loyalty to the people who passed through the hostel, some of them on the run from trouble of one sort or another, some of them not wishing to be found.
“She’s really missing?”
“Yes. And she’d not in any trouble, not official trouble.”
“Show me the picture.”
Helen took it out from her inside pocket. Nina Galt held it up, drawing her eyebrows into a frown. “Yes. She came here yesterday. She’s got a room upstairs. There’s always a couple just before Christmas. We just give them a room until social services find them a place.”
“I told you, there’s no trouble for her, not from us, nor her parents,” Helen said. She wasn’t telling the entire truth. There could really be trouble for Ginny Marsden. She’d taken the baby. Yet something inside Helen, a mere hunch, an intuition, told her that the missing girl was in a different kind of trouble altogether.
“Is she in now?”
“I reckon so. We don’t keep much of a check on the clients. We give them bed and board and make sure they’re not taking anything illegal. They’re free to come and go as they please.”
“Did she give you a name? Show you any identification?””
“Celia,” Nina said after a moment of concentration. “Celia Barker. It was on her bank card.”
Out in the back of the hostel, a dog was barking furiously, the sounds hardly muffled by the distance or the thickness of the walls. Nina Galt got a master key from a hook underneath the front counter and led the way towards the stairs. Just at the foot of the steps, where the ornate banister curled round in a smooth, polished sweep, she stopped and looked along the narrow corridor behind the stairway where a line of coat hooks, old brass, stood out from the wall at eye level.
“She’s moved her pram,” Nina said. “It was there this morning.”
Helen’s heart sank. She wanted to get this over with and get back to what she considered real police work, catching criminals.
“Maybe somebody shifted it,” Nina went on. “We don’t like to have the hallway cluttered up. The fire safety inspectors don’t like it, but we can’t expect the girls to haul their prams upstairs. It could be out in the back yard.”
“Let’s check the room first,” Helen suggested. Nina shrugged and led the way upstairs. She was about to slide the master key into the hole when she stopped abruptly. An oblong of blue plastic was lying on the floor, partially hidden under the door itself. She stooped, picked it up, drawing the key through the narrow gap as she did so. She straightened and without hesitation, she opened the unlocked door.
“Jesus God,” Nina said, turning back, nose wrinkled in a sudden grimace which sent frown ridges gathering on her forehead. “Something’s gone and died in here.”
Helen moved past her. The smell was thick and stale, and she recognised it from the previous times. It was weaker than before, as if it had faded from the air, but it was still discernible, still rank and foetid. She felt her eyes sting and her heartbeat cranked up to a faster level. Her pulse beat behind her ears and for an instant the bright outline of the unshaded window wavered in her vision. She shook her head and backed away from the door.
The entire room was visible from outside in the hallway at the top of the stairs. The blankets were swirled on the bed, the way they had been in Heather McDougall’s home, the way they had been on Celia Barker’s neat little divan.
On the floor a sheet was stretched out, crumpled but unravelled. A dried bloodstain , the colour of old rust, smeared down the middle of it. The carpet was twisted and rumpled.
“What the hell’s been going on here?” Nina asked.
Helen stood stock still. Her eyes scanned the room quickly, taking in the open door of the tiny bathroom, and the wall cupboard on the far side. The room was empty.
Something wrong her instinct told her. A shivery sensation scuttered over the skin of her back, prickling the follicles on the back of her neck. It felt like a rash of goose-bumps.
Nina Galt turned to look at her. The young policewoman’s face had gone pale, chalk white in contrast to the black sheen of her short-cropped hair. Helen Lamont stood, breathing hard, wondering what to do next. The memory of what had happened in Celia Barker’s kitchen, when the dead cat had got up and danced and when the walls had begun to pulse and breathe and when the two headed monster had come rushing out, twisting and distorted in her vision, it all came back in a rush.
She did not want to go into the room. All of a sudden she knew she should call in, get David Harper here. She did not want to do this alone any more. The voice of instinct was so powerful that she could almost hear it clamouring in words, but there were no words, just an uncanny certainty that this whole thing was out of hand, suddenly and incomprehensibly out of control.
She was not dealing with anything natural. The realisation abruptly crystallised within her.
Outside, beyond the window, the dog howled and grunted and slavered quite madly, adding to the insanity of the scene. Beyond the window, beyond the wood of the brick outhouse door, she could hear it growl and froth, throwing itself against the door which slammed against the upright. Below, on the ground, two dead birds were being slowly covered up by tiny snow crystals blowing off the roof. In a cavity in the wall, the soft and jellied brain of a mouse was leaking from its southernmost ear.
Helen’s nerves felt as if they were all on the outside of her skin. She was aware of Nina Galt looking at her askance, even though the other woman’s throat seemed to be involved in its own contraction, trying to choke down a rush of bile. She was conscious of the other woman’s presence on one level, but deep in her primitive core she was only aware of a dreadful feeling of supernatural fear.
On the video, she had seen Ginny Marsden stop dead in her tracks as if she’d been garrotted. It had happened when Heather McDougall was writhing in her death throes on the floor of the mall and the girl had turned and lifted the baby, the infant the woman had brought, from the pram. Now, here, the air was still thick with the scent that had sickened her in McDougall’s house, the scent that had twisted her emotions like some sort of hallucinogenic drug. It was the same smell as at Celia Barker’s apartment, the girl whose name Ginny Marsden had adopted.
It was all connected, she understood now. The strangeness of it all twisted once more at Helen Lamont, contaminating her with the unfathomable sensation of threat.
“Close the door,” she said. “And lock it.” She backed away while Nina Galt swung the door closed, her throat still working against the reaction caused by the cloying, rancid smell. The key went into the lock, turned and clicked. The smell faded almost instantly. Beyond the door, the noise of the madly barking dog was muffled down to a series of distant howls.
“What on earth was that?” the other woman finally said. She could see the policewoman’s hands were trembling slightly, as were her own, for no reason. She felt dizzy and nauseous and disorientated. The policewoman looked scared to death. “What in the name of God is that smell?”
“I don’t know,” Helen finally said, “but I’ll find out. Don’t let anybody in there yet. I’ll have to have it checked out.”
“I’ll have to have the place fumigated,” Nina Galt added. “That would make you sick, so it would.” She pulled back from the door, shoulders working in a swivelling motion as if she itched. She lifted a thumb and dug it in under her own armpit and twisted, pulling the fabric away from herself. Helen recognised the motion. She was adjusting a brassiere that had suddenly become uncomfortable. She froze, realising that she herself was doing exactly the same thing.
She looked down at herself while the other woman was turning away to walk to the head of the stairs. Her nipples were throbbing, pulsing with every beat of her heart, and the pressure of the cotton weave was suddenly uncomfortable and rasping. The nipples were straining against the thin sweater she wore under the flying jacket, standing proud. She pulled her jacket closed, hiding the tell-tale swellings, while the sensation of pressure continued as she walked down the stairs. The motion rubbed her turgid flesh against the cup and made it rasp sensitively.
Helen thought the thick, cloying smell would make someone more than just sick. The sensation that somebody had walked over her grave came back to her, strong as the vibration of a bowstring
It had come at Ginny fast. It had come at her like a spider.
She was reaching for the key, while a fear so terrible it felt like it could shatter her into fragments was shuddering inside her, blacking out everything except the urgent need to close the door and lock the baby
monster it’s a fucking monster it is a devil.
inside the room and close it away. She had to trap inside. It was, despite the crippling terror, the bravest thing the girl had ever done in her life. It was the first time she had ever had any need to be brave. It was struggling up there, she could hear it thumping against the floor and she could imagine its twisting and desperate writhings to be free of the sheets.
She had almost got away. She had stopped on the landing and then trudged back up the impossibly steep cliff of staircase, battling the horror and the pain in her joints and the creeping exhaustion of her muscles. She reached the doorway. Inside the room it was panting and snuffling desperately, like a trapped and vicious animal and making that horrible screeching sound that was so high she couldn’t physically hear it, but her brain could somehow pick up the anger and supernatural fear it was broadcasting. She reached towards the door handle, knowing she had to expose part of herself to its gaze.
Ginny thought she could do it, imagined she could get the key, turn it in the lock. She held her breath tight against the demand for air caused by her painfully thumping heart. Her vision wavered, going dark then coming light again.
The key was stuck in the lock, but it was on the other side of the door. She had to reach further while all the time the white sizzle of its distress and anger flared and burned on the bones in the back of her skull. She forced herself forward.
It hissed. It called to her. It demanded. It commanded
She tried to force her fingers round the key, but they were white and numb. Pins and needles danced on the skin of her arms and throbbed in her hands along with the new and grinding pain. It commanded and she felt her head turn, entirely against her will. The blanket was unravelled, unravelling still on the carpet which was pulled into a crumpled roll, caught by the leg of the bed. A small, dark and angular shape moved and she tried not to look.
It shrieked inside her and she gasped with the ferocity of the hurt its sending caused deep in her centre. Ginny tried to turn away, hearing the small metallic tinkle as the tab twisted on its loop. Her fingers got to it, fumbled for the key. It rattled, pulled out a mere fraction.
Her head was jerked round, hauled by the irresistible force of its demand.
The thing rolled and squirmed beyond the edge of the bed. Her hand pulled at the key. It tumbled out of the lock, slowly twisting in the air in slow motion, whirring softly as it fell. Her senses were cranked up to supernatural perception. Every cell of her body was suddenly and completely aware.
The monster twisted round to face her. Flat red eyes glared in a small and flattened face. The round mouth opened and closed in a sucking motion, showing her the lamprey circlet of teeth slivers. Its limbs were scrawny and stick-like, its skin wrinkled and mottled and slatted grey, the way she had seen it in the mirror.
It came at her like a spider. It scuttled across the floor, small and spindly, a grey, blurring thing that moved so fast she could hardly make her eyes follow it. The key hit the floor with a low, metallic thrum and bounced out of sight. Down in the kitchen, a million miles away, the sound of the woman singing was now a monotone drone, drawn out and slowed to incomprehensibility. A steam kettle’s whistle sounded like a distant ship’s foghorn.
The thing came in a scuttling rush. Its outlines fuzzed and blurred as the swellings on its sides pulsed and clenched like small lungs, like poison sacs, sending a fine mist into the air around it. Ginny’s mouth instinctively shut like a trap. She tried to move, found her feet were glued to the floor. Her hand was still reaching for the key that had long gone and the thing on the floor launched itself at her.
The smell hit her at the same time as the monster scuttled and leapt, taking her at waist height and then climbing up with arachnid speed, its small, wizened hands reaching to grab the sides of her face just under the jawline. The fingers, elongated and warted digits, like the hands of some reptilian lemur, clenched on her skin, almost hard enough to break through into the underlying tissue. The eyes glared, great saucers of red, up so close against her that they lost definition like twin, flaring lava pools, like mad moons.
The stench enveloped her, infusing her pores and passages with its chemical power while the thing’s mental blast seared her own mind.
In that instant she was recaptured.
Its outline wavered and blurred in her vision, first grey and rough, then pink and smooth, then back again, as if the camouflage was no longer completely necessary. It fixed its eyes on her, drilling its singularity into hers. Her heart seemed to expand like a balloon under her ribs, swelling with sudden pain. She gasped and its essence went down her throat, swirled into her lungs. Every nerve bucked, every muscle twitched, every joint ground like stone. Fear and need fought with each other, desire battled with the incredible loathing. The compulsion to mother the thing vied with a powerful desire to kill it and be gone. She wanted to run and hide, to kick and scream, to twist free of its grasp and go somewhere to be sick while alongside that she was forced to obey its overriding domination. Over all of it lay an appalling weight of utter despair and loss.
It had her now and she would never be free.
Ginny Marsden backed against the wall, hit it with a thump, slowly slid down to her haunches, her coat stripping off a loose sliver of old flaking wallpaper. The thing in her arms continued to glare into her eyes, mesmerising her with a brutal mental blaze that sizzled into that part of her brain which gave her volition and seared it with its own baleful heat.
A rope of saliva drooled from the corner of her mouth. She moaned slightly while out beyond the window the mad dog went even crazier, attacking the wooden door with snout, teeth and skull.
After a while, after a long while, she began to stir. The thing that was still clenched onto her skin loosened its grip a little and after a while, the great red eyes, glassy as garnet, slowly closed. It lowered itself, moving like an emaciated and scaly monkey, down over her breasts and began to burrow in once more. After more of a while she felt it clamp on her skin and then she sensed the thin and slick probing between her legs.
But this time she was not aware on any conscious level.
What there was of Ginny Clark’s own self, her own comprehension of being, was clamped down and trapped in an impervious bubble within her, buried down there in the dark where its screaming, panicked cries could not be heard.
Ginny Marsden, the mother, let it suck on her, let it probe her until, once more, it was sated. The draining sensation deep inside her was like a cold and constant trickle. She ignored that. All she knew was the need to do its bidding and the creeping ache that had invaded her whole body.
After more of a while, the baby told her to move. Her eyes could make out its shape. Somewhere within, her thoughts translated the visual image into something resembling a baby, but by this time it did not matter. It had taken her now and she was no longer her own. She belonged to it.
Outside, as she pushed her pram down to River Street, it held her tight. Every now and again, she would bend down, leaning under the hood, the mothers do when they are pacifying a small child, comforting an infant, just letting it know she is there.
The pram’s left wheel squeaked its protest as she slowly went down the alley, moving like an old woman.