THE clatter of fast footsteps slapped on the walls and came echoing back, hollow as drumbeats, urgent and with a flight rhythm all of their own.
Somebody was running.
It was a girl. She was hurrying along the alley, held in tight, breath puffed out in plumes as she passed the cascade of waste-bins at the back of the Loo Fung Chinese restaurant. Andy Skinner, who used to be something big in double glazing but had hit the skids after he’d hit the bottle and had now come to rock bottom, was rummaging around in the trash for chicken wings and cold leftovers. He saw the girl come flitting by, though flit wasn’t how he’d have described it.
Only the face was ghostly, a pale oval shape in the shadows. A pale oval shape with dark ovals for eyes and a wide oval for a mouth. She was hunched over, carrying something in her arms. Andy looked up and the girl looked up at the same time and her eyes opened wide, so wide they looked as if they could have popped out. Her mouth opened even wider.
It was then that he saw she was carrying a bundle close to her body, but she was moving too fast and it was too dark to make it out. For a minute he thought she was carrying a baby, and that was a surprise. Down in the alley in the back of the Loo Fung, you saw plenty of winos and every now and again you’d get somebody sticking a needle in a vein in their arm by the light of the back kitchen window. You never got girls with babies in their arms.
It must have been something else, he thought, turning away, minding his own business. He paused and turned back, slowly, the kind of way you see drunks do that shows their springs and shock absorbers are well and truly shot, along with their reflexes.
For a moment he thought he heard a cry, high and keening, and it could have been the girl. If she was running down here, it was a fair bet somebody would be after her. She might be one of the girls from Ramage Street who hung around waiting for the bars to empty out so they could clock on for the nightshift. Maybe it was the police chasing her and maybe it was her stickman, or maybe it was an angry john she’d stiffed for his twenty. Whatever it was Andy didn’t need the worry. Something to eat, some chow mein would be nice. Something to eat and a warm place over by the back vent where he could sleep. That was all he wanted. No trouble. He eased himself back into the shadows while the girl stumbled on, heels cracking hard on the old cobbles. She got past the black bags and the old galvanised containers that smelt sour and fatty, breath still feathering out in front off her face. She got to the light at the near end and he heard the cry again.
This time she turned again to look at him and in the yellow light he saw her mouth open in a gape that told him she was about to scream. There was fear written all over her face and Andy knew a thing or two about fear.
Whatever was scaring her, whoever was scaring her, it wasn’t Andy’s problem. He started to turn away from that look and the scream stayed stuck where it was, silent and pinioned inside the girl’s throat.
Her mouth clamped shut and the dark hollows of her eyes held him and made him stop in mid turn. The tendons of her neck were stuck out in vertical ridges, making her head shake. He could see that quite clearly even in the pale and watery light reflecting from a storeroom window. She was only a few feet away and he could sense the tension and the tremble in her body, like she was wound tighter than a top C string on a guitar. For that small space of time she slowed. Her feet stopped their clatter on the hardcobble and they stood, the tramp and the girl. A slick of hair had curled down onto her brow and stuck there just above her eye. There was a glisten of sweat there, as if she maybe had the flu or a fever, and at this time of the year that wasn’t beyond the bounds of probability.
The eyes held him. Down in their depths there was a glint of light, a powerful glare of life. She opened her mouth again, as if fighting pain, but her jaws clamped together again and across the space between them, Andy heard her teeth grind together, like small stones underfoot. Any harder and they’re gonna break, he thought. There had been a time when all he’d have thought about was the orthodontist’s bill, but on this night, looking at the stricken look and listening to that strange creaking sound coming from inside her, he thought about the pain it must have been causing the poor cow.
The whimpering noise came again. It was high and somehow hoarse. For an instant it could have been the cry of a baby, but he discounted it. The sound was too abrasive, too jagged. It was too animal.
The girl’s eyes opened wider. The light flashed in them and he saw pain there in the rictus of the grimace stretched across her face. She was a good looking thing, tall enough and not wasted like some of the hookers and her teeth were straight and even and despite the dim light, they looked white, which you never saw on any of the junkies
except that the grinding went on and they’d crack and shatter and then she could work here anytime
who did tricks for enough to buy the next fix.
The sound bleated, this time more of a growl. Like a ferret maybe, even one of the city foxes that came prowling around to compete with Andy for the Loo Fung scraps.
The sound of it made the hairs on the back of his head stand right up on their ends and quiver. He could feel them rise and tense up as if a cold hand had grabbed the skin between his shoulder blades. Right away his belly clenched tight, another cold hand gripping hard and he could feel the muscles of his sphincter open and close. His breath stopped and backed up, clogging his windpipe.
The fear came almost hard enough to knock him down.
It shuddered through him, a shunt of absolute, inexplicable dread. Andy knew a thing or two about fear. He’d been mugged many a time and got scared, but that was the day to day fear of life on cobbles. Worse than that, no matter what anybody said, once he’d got down and got dirty and looked at the world through the bottom of a bottle of Buckfast fortified rocket fuel, was the mad fear of the heebie-jeebies when his dead wife and dead kids would come stalking him through the shadows dripping flesh and rippling with the fire that had blackened their bones.
The fear that riddled through him was like that, except it was worse, much worse. It hit him almost hard enough to make him stumble and fall. It was every primitive fear that had ever been spawned. It was the fear of the inhuman.
And it was all sparked off by that little whimpering growl. The sound of a baby crying, yet somehow, not that. It was a sound that had no place. It was simply wrong.
Andy did stumble back. The girl began to turn. The fear and dread was swelling inside him like a live thing. Her eyes were held tight by the girl’s own gaze.
“Holy fu...”he started to mouth.
The girl turned and as she did, her coat opened, jut an inch or two. Andy got a glimpse of something small and crumpled in the shadow. A flash of something that could have been a reflection, could have been an eye.
The terror soared. The skin of his scrotum withered and wrinkled as his whole body squirmed to get away.
The girl turned, moved away. Her eyes swept past him, a terror as black and as poisonous as the fear inside Andy Skinner twisted her features into something hag-like and ugly. Then she was gone and the blanket of dread that smothered Andy was dragged away. He stood there, shaking with the force of it, his own eyes wide and staring and threatening to pop out and swing on his own gaunt cheekbones. The nerves at the back of his knees twitched and jittered and almost turned traitor toed to spill him to the pile of trash-bags. His scalp was still crawling and the slithery fingers were still gouged into the skin of his back but the fear was ebbing away.
He let out his breath. The girl moved on and the echoes of her footsteps rang out, fading as she moved out of sight.
The fear diminished with the distance. He stood there, listening for that sound again, but apart from her receding footsteps, there was no sound, except for the murmur of traffic along the main street. Andy stood still, pressed against the shadowed wall, waiting for the pursuit to clamour along, and he kept back in the shadows just in case somebody mistook him for something more than a tramp.
Nobody came.
He waited a while, among the slimy smells and scents of the Chinese garbage, feeling the sudden craving for a drink to stop the shakes. Nobody came along and the girl’s footsteps faded to whispers and then died.
Andy turned away from the garbage and headed for the light down on the street. Whatever had reached and touched his nerves, whatever it was had sobered him up. His hands might have been shaking and his heart pounding, but he was more sober, more lucid than at any time in the past five years.
He reached the wine shop on the corner where he could get a plastic bottle of high-octane brain rot, but he stopped before he went inside.
For the first time in a long time, he didn’t want a drink. He stood there, trying not to think about the awful fear that had taken him over, unable not to think about it. He was confused and bewildered as any man can be. For those few moments, he did not know what to do.
Down the street and over the backs of the houses, the bells of St Stephen’s punctuated the hour, a clear and smooth sound that cut through the cold air and reached Andy as he swithered on the wine shop doorstep. Father O’Toole would know what to do. It wasn’t too late, was it? Not too late in the day, and maybe not too late in the game.
Andy Skinner went down the main street and turned at the lights, weaving through the unseen traffic, heading for the dark spire of the church. A half an hour later, despite the bitter smell of new sweat on old, Father O’Toole heard him confess to the drunken and reckless killing of his wife and family in the car accident he’d escaped nearly seven years before.
Andy Skinner did not want a drink that night. He wanted more than anything to feel the nearness of God and the touch of his grace, though he hadn’t contemplated his creator in all of those years. He did now, because down in the shadow of the alley where the Loo Fung threw its garbage, he had felt the touch of something bad.
David Harper had his collar rucked up against the chill of the winter air. The breeze was only an eddy of air, swirling round the blackened and crumbling corner of the old warehouse down close to the harbour. It was hardly more than a breath, but it sucked the heat from his cheek and the cold of it seared the inside of his nose. He dug his hands in his pockets and waited, trying not to stamp his feet in the time honoured tradition of policemen in cold climates. From somewhere beyond the corner of the lane, the faint and high-pitched tunes of Christmas carols came filtering through the mist, a monotonous and somehow melancholy sound of winter city streets. The shops were only a hundred yards away, maybe even less, as the crow flies, but David Harper and Helen Lamont were not crows. A hundred yards, maybe less, that made the difference between the bustle of the city with its fast and frenetic hordes of gatherers doing their festive shopping after work. Here, behind the facade of the mall and the main streets, were the dark alleys and service ways heading down towards the river. Here, the old warehouses, by-way shabby because they were not built to please the eye, huddled against the mass of railway arches and old shipping offices. In a year or so, they would all come down and make way for new works of architecture. For the moment they were solid and shadowed, roll-up doors battened against the night, windows bricked or shuttered against the intruder.
Somewhere down the river, a foghorn bellowed, far and mournful, and the sound made David think of dinosaurs. The gaunt shipyard cranes looming out of the fog on the other side of the river, lit by the flashing beams of the steady traffic passing over the curve of the bridge, looked like swamp monsters of pre-history. The shadows on the girders them made them seem to move. David wanted to move. Standing in the cold, hidden in the dark of a doorway where hookers performed al-fresco, and where drunks pissed and vomited every Saturday night in this no mean city, it was not his idea of a good time. It was work. It was job, but it was not fun.
Further along the road, where it joined with Riverside Lane, behind the shopping mall, Helen Lamont was almost completely hidden from view. She had the vantage of the north side of the street. David could just make out the pale blur at face height. She must be keeping very still. She must even be keeping a hand in front of her mouth to prevent the tell-tale plume of breath from billowing out. There was back-up down at the corner where two uniforms were sitting in the relative comfort of a van. David’s doorway and the niche of an old entrance where Helen Lamont merged with the shadows were the only cover on this part of the street. A parked car would have been spotted from two hundred yards away, and anyone approaching on wheels would have neither slowed nor stopped.
A slight cough on the radio jerked him out of his thoughts of dinosaurs and river beasts in the night. He thumbed the receive on his radio, pressing it close to his ear with the volume turned down so low the voice on the other end was almost drowned in the hiss of static.
“Company.” Helen Lamont’s voice, even in the tinny overlay, was abrupt and clear.
“Check.” He keyed the radio off again, feeling his heart speed up just that little bit as he went on the alert. Five seconds later, the twin lights of a van, just the side lights, no main beam, cut through the swirl of mist, expanding as they approached. The rumble of the engine caught up, an old, tired diesel with a pineal in the manifold that made it sound even older. The van came closer, juddering on cobbles that had been laid a century before, maintaining its speed as it approached. For a moment, David thought it might pass on by. He tried not to look at the lights, to maintain his night vision, wondering if he’d been given clean information.
The van slowed beside the metal gate on the far side. A blur up on the driver’s side showed pale face behind glass that was dirty and hoared with frost on its edges. Brakes squealed tinnily and the van stopped, an old, decrepit and nondescript pantechnicon, the kind that are always seen blocking alleyways or unloading from dingy storehouses at odd times of day. It lurched on springs until it settled. The door opened immediately. Somebody got out this side. Two others stepped down quickly from the blind side. There was no rush, but David Harper’s heartbeat moved up a notch. He glanced at the niche where Helen Lamont was still all but invisible. That was good. She hadn’t moved, waiting for his signal. She was keen and but she was pretty good. They’d worked together for six months and he knew he could rely on her to keep her head.
Tonight was no big deal. The Christmas rush was big business for everybody, and there were shares on all levels of the economy. Tonight, according to the wire, it was a simple pick-up of compact discs and assorted electronic hardware from a warehouse that had been turned over a week before. David had got the word from a good source. It wasn’t a big job, and there were no heavy people, which was why it was a two-man hit plus back up.
The roll door on the far side screeched upwards with a sound of tearing metal, high enough to send a shiver down the back of his neck. He waited some more while they all went in. A light came on, not bright, but enough to see by in the storehouse. He made out figures moving with deliberate speed. It took them five minutes to get the van half-loaded. They’d been stupid enough for the three of them to pile into the store without leaving a lookout, which told them they were far from organised. He allowed them another two minutes, thumbed the button on the radio, giving Helen the two words and then waited. She came out of the shadow, a slight figure in a heavy flying jacket, more a waif in the dark than a policewoman. Without any delay, he crossed the road, walked straight to the doorway as two of the men were coming out, arms laden with boxes of interactive CD machines.
He held up his black flashlight, butt first.
“Put those hands up,” he barked, glad to be moving and suddenly unable to resist . The first man, maybe the same height as himself and several pounds heavier, squawked in alarm. He only saw the figure with a hand stretched out, took in the black barrel, and did exactly as he was told. Three boxes went spilling to the ground in a clatter and thump of cardboard.
“What in the name of...”
“You’re under arrest,” David said. “Put the boxes down and line up against the wall.”
A smaller man close by the door put his stack down. Over by the wall, a younger man, stick thin and angular had stopped in the act of bending. He straightened up, spun, leapt for the space between David and the doorway. Just as he did so, the smaller man dropped his load and scuttled straight out into the street. David grabbed at the thin one, got a hand to an anorak hood. He snatched it, jerked back and down with a hard twist, trying to spin the other man, and the whole hood came ripping of with a pluck of torn buttons. The thin man did spin, but more my luck than anything else, regained his balance and came out of it facing the right way for flight. He was off and running, hard on the heels of the smaller man who had gone out first.
David cursed and for a split second he couldn’t decide whether to stay and capture the third man, but the decision was made for him instantly when he heard Helen shout from outside.
“Stop right there.” She was trying to take two of them. David launched himself out of the storeroom, knowing he’d recognise the third man again no matter what, and ran after the feeling figures. Helen was running in the opposite direction, aiming to cut the fleeing men off. The small man went straight for her. She didn’t stop, but instead brought her own flashlight up. From only a few feet away she flicked it on, sending the beam right into the man’s eyes. He made a guttural sound, put his hands up to his face. Helen side-stepped, bent, and at the same time put her foot out, swinging forward to sweep the man’s legs from under him. He cried out again, went into a half somersault and came down with a sickening thud. Immediately Helen was on him, twisting his arm up his back, telling him in a yell that he was under arrest.
The thin man hit her hard enough to send her sprawling.
The toe of his boot caught her right under the ribs and knocked her straight back. From twenty yards away David head the crack of the connection and the small grunt of pain. Helen hit against the wall, slamming hard with her shoulder, letting out another incoherent yet eloquent sound.
“Fuckin’ bitch,” the thin man screeched. He had stopped, possibly unaware that David was right behind him, or perhaps because the fright of the sudden surprise had put him right over the edge. Despite the violence of the kick and the slam against the wall, Helen got to one knee, grabbed his leg. He tried to kick her again. But this time the small man had rolled, groaning, made it to his feet. The thin one aimed a punch directly at Helen’s head and she warded it off with her forearm. He managed to get another kick at her, catching her in the pit of her belly, while she still hung on to his leg.
David hit him so hard the blow almost dislocated Helen’s shoulder.
The skinny man went staggering off and David followed, slamming him again, right up against the wall which he hit with a surprisingly meaty thud. Without hesitation, David smacked him on the back of his head, driving his face forward into the crumbling sandstone. He heard the crack as the man’s nose broke. The thin man squealed. David grabbed him by the collar where the hood had come away, dragged him back. The small man was on his feet, getting ready to hare off down the road. Helen’s hand flicked out in a cat-swipe, snatched his hair and spun him round, bringing him close to where David was standing.
In the dim light of the back street she pivoted on one foot, still grasping the small man’s hair while he mewled in pain and fright, snapped her leg up and drove her knee hard and fast into the thin man’s groin. He jack-knifed instantly and David let him drop.
“Thanks,” she told him.
“Any time,” he said, grinning, though he would have felt happier if the collar had been easier. There should have been no trouble in making the arrest and he should not have let any of them out of the door. He bent down, took a hold of the collar again, hauling the thin man upright, and began reading him his rights. The prisoner was blubbering now, his face a mask of blood and snot, both hands sunk in against his crotch, while his body tried to stay bent double.
Right at that moment, the van’s engine coughed into life. It revved hard and without hesitation, it came rumbling along the narrow road towards them.
“What the hell?” Helen snapped. The thin man tried to pull away and she clamped his wrist, driving it up his back. The van came roaring down, just a black shape, with no lights on. For an instant it looked as if there was no driver. The nearside wheel hit the kerb, mounted the pavement and the van came swerving right for Helen.
“Jesus Christ,” the small man bleated in a high-pitched, panicked voice. Helen turned, saw the black shape bearing down on them. Her mouth opened in a perfect circle.
David ran forward, dragging the thin man with him. He twisted, swinging the other man out in front of him, placing him directly between the van and Helen. Lights or no, he knew the driver could see enough.
The engine growled. Up on the cabin the pale blur of the driver’s face pulled back. For a second it looked as if it would crump both David and the thin man against the wall. Then at the last possible moment, the wheels spun. Bight sparks fountained from the wall where the wheel arch scraped and then the van went hurtling away from them. It missed David and the thin man by inches. Unable to stop it careened across the road and slammed into the opposite wall with a deafening crash.
David dragged his captive with him as he strode towards the van. With one easy movement he brought out his cuffs, slapped them on the thin man’s wrist, jamming them as tightly as he could to cause the maximum pain. He snicked the free end onto the lug at the back of the van. A smell of spilled diesel spread out from under the chasis. David sniffed.
“If this blows, you’ll blow with it,” he told the thin man whose mouth dropped wide in fright, showing a snaggle of stained teeth.
David got to the door, jerked it open, reached in and hauled the third man from the cabin. The driver was moaning in pain and panic, both hands up against his head where he had driven forward and hit the windscreen. David got him outside, turned him round, and with surprising gentleness, he pulled the man’s hands down from is face.
“Kenny Lang,” he said. “I thought it was you. Are you all right?”
He leaned forward, in evident concern for the other man’s well being. Kenny Lang lifted his face, spread his arms just enough to show that he thought he might live. David looked him straight in the eye and in that moment the anger flared in sudden heat. This cretin had tried to kill his partner. He had deliberately run the van straight at her to smear her against the wall. Another second and Helen Lamont would have been lying there in a crumpled heap.
David Harper drew his head back, drove it forward with all his weight and smashed his forehead onto the other man’s nose. Kenny Lang dropped like a sack, making no sound but the noise of his weight hitting the ground. His face was opened like a ripe tomato.
David crossed the road. Helen had the other man cuffed and face down on the pavement. He got his hands to her elbows and raised her up, There was a dirty smudge on her cheek where he had made contact with the wall. In this light it looked like a bruise on her pale skin. The orange street lights at the far end caught her eyes and made them glitter. David got an arm around her, feeling the slight of her body against his, and the shiver of the adrenaline rush that just about matched his own.
“You okay?”
“I’ll live,” she said, breathing heavily. He could hear the anger in her own voice, along with the pain. She was bent slightly to the left, favouring her injured side. “And thanks again. You’re making a habit of this.”
“What’s a boy to do?” he said, managing to get a smile from her.
The patrol arrived from the end of the lane and David relinquished his hold on her, though not before the uniforms exchanged knowing looks.
“Call for the wagon,” David told them curtly. “Constable Lamont may need medical treatment. Book all three of these.”
“What’s the charge?”
David looked at the bulky man who still lay on the street, conscious but hardly aware. “Littering the road for a start. Then we’ll work it up from there when I get back from casualty.”
He walked Helen the two hundred yards to the car, past Carrick Street which led right down to the river’s edge. Just at the corner, somebody passed them, heading west on the old cobbles. Neither of them looked, but both of them got the impression of a young woman walking quickly. In the distance, the choirboys in the shopping mall were still singing their non-stop dirge and here, closer to the shopping centre, the bustle of the city was louder and more urgent.
The fast footsteps clacked on the cobbles and the figure hurried away. A breeze stirred and brought up a smell from the dirty waters of the river, an acrid, rancid scent that was sharp as the winter air. David wrinkled his nose, wondering what toxins had been flushed into the water. He blinked quickly, feeling the anger inexplicably swell inside him again. He took a deep breath to force it away. By the time he eased Helen into the car, the street was empty.
She was running.
She scurried down in the dark and shadow of the alleyway, staying clear of the lights and the bustle of the main street. Her heartbeat was a pounding in her ears and the pulse a thudding in her head, hard and persistent, like a migraine without the blindness.
There was a red tinge to everything, as though she was seeing the world, dark and shade, through coloured glass. It was like looking through a film of blood and she wondered, dimly, what was wrong with her eyes. Something had burst. She had felt it when she was running, a sharp shock of pain on the crescendo of the thudding pulse and then a draining sensation as it faded under the grinding throb.
Panic flared high and hysterical and was instantly swamped down to a low guttering flame.
Oh Jesus don’t let this be happening to me
She turned the corner, holding herself tight, clutching the bundle in clawed hands, clamped against herself under her coat. She could feel it press up against her breast and the panic soared again. The mewling sound came, soft and close, but it went through her like the screech of a stone-saw in the masonry yard where her uncle worked and she felt it like a physical sear.
He alley was long and narrow, jinking in a dog-leg at the far end where the shadows crouched and huddled away from the light. She clattered down on the cobbles, feet pattering and echoing back from the high walls. Round the corner she came, slipping on something slimy and slick, regaining her balance before she slammed against the roughcast on the corner of the back-alley storehouse and came along the straight serviceway behind the main street stores. Here and there, fruit-boxes and plastic bread-boards were stacked or heaped, there was a smell of old mould, and it would have been strong on the cold air but for the all pervading flat and sour scent that clogged her nose and somehow conjured up images of weasels and reptiles. The reek hung about her like a cloud and made her heart beat fast, too fast, in her chest, but she could do nothing about that now. All she could do was run down the alley, holding on, holding tight.
She went scuttering past the piled black bags beside the dumper skip at the back of the Chinese restaurant when something caught her eye, a grey motion in peripheral vision, and she turned her head.
The thing came lumbering out from the shadows, not close but not far away and she slowed, quite reflexively, the way she would have done on any street, in any alley - though there were few alleys she’d gone tripping down in recent years - but it was only instinct, not fear. There was no room inside her for any more fear. She turned and saw the man, gaunt and grizzled, his grey hair wild and awry, almost a caricature of someone who has stuck a finger in an electrical socket. His face was grey but his eyes were wide and his mouth even wider. She did not know that unconsciously the man was parodying her own expression.
Something, some cry, some word came blurting to her lips and almost made it out into the cold air but then her jaw snapped shut was made to shut and the word was strangled to silence. She could hear her own teeth grinding there as her muscles clamped and clenched and creaking noises of hard surface against hard surface vibrated through her head.
Go on go on go on don’t stop
Not quite words. Just an urgency. A motive force. It twisted within her and willed her feet onward, making the nerves jump and the muscles twitch. The man started at her, eyes owlish and suddenly fear-filled. She could see it there, mirroring her own terror, as if he was looking at a devil. She tried to speak again but nothing happened. Her teeth clenched and the tendons in her neck felt as if they would break with the strain of it.
Go go go go get gone. Go now.
She could feel herself turn and pull away, to stop still. Her mind tried to fight the dreadful imperative, but a sharp pain, keen as glass, razored in behind her eyes, crystal clear and so powerful it blinded her momentarily. She shook herself, more in reaction to the hurt, to shuck it away, and when her vision came back all the dark images were tinged I n a deeper red and they were doubled up, wavering apart in dizzying duplication before they jostled back into conjunction.
Oh please. Mother. Oh no. Her mind, the part of it that she could still use, was babbling in baby talk.
The man with the grizzled fright-hair and the terrified look on his face backed off. She turned and went running down the alley, leaving him in the shadows. She struck to her own, clinging close to the wall where it was dark. The alley forked here. The left track doubled back down to the main street where the library stood blocky and solid on the corner opposite the double hump of McDonalds. Down there, people were parking their cars and eating out of polyfoam platters. Families would be huddled round tables, groups of boys would be exchanging bashful insults with groups of girls, the way she had done only a few years past.
A million years, it felt like
Down there were people, ordinary folk, going about their business and their lives and she wanted to call out to them but she couldn’t made a sound. Her breath rasped at the pack of her throat and whistled out through clenched teeth and she grasped her arms tight around it and went staggering up the other fork in the alley to the end, at the back of the Pizza place where she used to work Friday nights when she was still at school. The smell of onion and mozzarella and pepperoni came thick in the steam from the vents, billowing out on ghostly hauntings of scent, but it smelled bad here, foul and sickening, alien.
She felt her throat clench against it and the pounding came harder in her ears. For a moment she thought she might vomit in a bitter spray against the wall, but while her belly heaved, it all stayed inside her. Beyond the corner, on the far side, a corrugated shack stood adjacent to a fenced compound filled with bent and broken cars. She stumbled past and two big dogs came loping out of the shadows, startled by her passage, and launched themselves at the chain-link wire. Ordinarily the frantic and vicious snarling would have sent her screaming in fright, but she was beyond that now, carried along on a wave of utter horror of her own that transcended any simple alarm. The dogs slavered and growled, eyes reflecting the orange of the street light, noses wrinkled, lips pulled back from gnashing teeth.
A small whining sound responded, high and rasping, not loud, but cutting across the snarls from inside the compound. A different, corrosive smell sprayed out.
The effect was electric. The dogs leapt back from the fence as if they’d been kicked. The larger of the two, a big German Shepherd with a shaggy coat hackled into spikes twisted round so quickly it slipped and rolled on the wet ground. The other one yelped a whinny of protest and surprise. It spun round in a complete circle, clashed against the chain link and then leapt for the far shadows. The second dog screamed an oddly cat-like sound and tumbled after it, tail tucked right under its belly. Far back in the compound, among the hulks of broken cars, they could be heard howling in fright, a strange and shivery, quite unearthly sound in the dark.
She continued up the alley, ignoring the canine terror, went round the corner to the accessway behind the terrace of houses on Dunlop Street. She scrambled past the tight hedges careless of the scrape of sharp twigs against her good winter coat. Her breath plumed in front of here, picking up the light of the moon. Five or six houses along she came to the white barred gate, pressed against it and swung it wide with a faint creak of the hinges. Inside she scurried up the flagstone path and went round the side, up the short flight of stairs. Her fingers, still clawed and numb, managed to get a hold of the handle. With a wrench she got it open and pushed her way inside.
Her hand automatically reached for the light switch.
No...!
The wordless command froze her rigid, hand stretched out in the dark. The awesome fear burgeoned in a black tide and she sagged against the wall, limbs suddenly weak and shivery, as if she’d run a marathon, as if she was felled by fever.
Hot tears sprung to her eyes, wavering pink as they brimmed over and spilled down her cheeks.
She slowly lowered herself to the floor, slipping down against the wall until she was hunkered against the skirting board, breathing shallow and fast. The door snicked shut on the latch leaving her in darkness lightened only by the paler rectangle of the curtained window.
The small sound came again, cold and shuddery, quiet as a creaking hinge, rasping like gravel on a far shore, but loud in her consciousness, a demanding sound.
“What am I doing here,” she thought to herself. “What on earth...”
The baby in her arms whimpered its dry little rasp. The scent came wafting up from the folds of her winter coat and a hot shard of pain twisted against her breast. She turned, squirming against the sensation, letting her coat open wide. Her eyes were more accustomed to the dim light and she could clearly see the white of her blouse, coned out where her other breast pressed against the smooth fabric.
A dark, damp stain was spreading across the surface, turning the white to grey. She stared at it, puzzled. Behind her nipple, an odd, pulsing ache, not quite pain now, but a pressing sensation, swelled and waned. The stain spread and the odd scent came strong again, now tinged with a sweeter smell. It was then she realised that her breast was leaking milk.
Oh please no. Don’t let this be happening to me.
The panic welled up again and the scent came thick and choking in her gullet, enveloping the dread. The fear was smothered and squashed down inside her.
The baby’s head, a small smooth shape in the dim light moved quickly. She felt the cotton of her blouse tug away from her and the edge of her brassiere scraped against her skin. The baby’s head moved again, nuzzling down. She felt its touch and a shudder of appalling revulsion rippled through her, yet that too was sugared with a powerful, undeniable need within her.
The scent came again, strong and powerful and thick in her throat and the revulsion faded.
The baby clamped on her nipple, sucking hard, pulling furiously at the erect little nubbin. She could feel the liquid, her own milk, squirt out of her and even as she lost herself in the darkness, she knew that she could not possibly be nursing a baby. She couldn’t be breast feeding. She had no milk to give.
Yet the baby sucked and pulled. It made small, feral, gobbling noises down there in the dark of the coat folds and Ginny’s panicked breathing began to subside. The sobs that made her lungs hitch in sudden jerks faded away and an irresistible sensation of fulfilment enveloped her. It layered itself on the spark of her own self that was still aware and writhed and twisted inside her, clamouring to be away and home and safe.
Very slowly, as if all the strength had drained away from her she leaned back against the wall where her coat made a damp smear on the flock paper.
The baby did not stop feeding.