It was on her.
It had her in an embrace so foul that the very contact was enough to drain the life from her. It was eating her, sucking her dry, filling her with its poison and she could feel herself rot from within, bones and flesh melting and dissolving as her blood mingled with whatever foul stuff was running through its veins. It held her tight and she held it tight, both of them locked together in a deadly, dreadful enfolding.
A dream, only a dream...she tried to tell herself, even in sleep...wake up wake up wake up
It tightened against her, clammy and amphibious, cold as ice and hideous to the touch. It was feeding on her, gobbling her up, sucking and slurping and she could sense her own self diminish and shrink as it gathered energy and waxed strong.
It was a dream. A part of her mind, the internal sentry that kept watch in the dark, listening for danger, told her it was a dream, a nightmare, but she could not free herself from it. She could not waken.
It had changed, in the way that dreams do when they alter from the acceptable and familiar into the surreal, when they crest on the brow of night and go swooping down the black backslope into the chaos of tormented vision.
She had been coming home. An early finish, stepping light despite the drizzle and the early darkness of midwinter. A few days before Christmas with most of her presents bought, and all of her cards written up and posted for a change. She was heading past the shopping centre, listening to the little choirboys singing her favourite carols. There was a sparkle of tinsel and a twinkle of lights on the Christmas tree and she was looking forward to the holiday, her mother’s good cooking and dad snoring in his chair by the fire, still wearing his paper hat and giving off the faint aroma of his annual cigar. She walked briskly, planning to pick up a couple of small gifts in the shops, just stocking-fillers, before going round to Celia’s to feed the cat.
They’d asked her to go with them, and she’d been tempted. Two weeks in the sun of a Greek island, away from the cold and clammy winter would have been wonderful. She’d been tempted and had almost agreed, but at the last moment she’d thought of her father’s angina and the way her mother would look if she told her she wouldn’t be home for Christmas. And there was Tony too. They hadn’t been going out so very long but already they were close and she wanted to spend part of this time of the year with him.
There would be other Christmastimes, other winters when the lure of the sun might drag her away, but she’d plenty of time. The weathermen said there was a possibility of snow as a high pressure area brought cold down from Greenland and there was a chance the pond would freeze over and they could go skating.
All of this, the recollection of thoughts and fragments of emotions whirred past in her dream as she saw herself come into the mall. The doors whisked open silently and a warm blast of air from the overhead draughtbusters came billowing down in a welcome breath. The choirboys sang out louder now she was inside, clear recorded voices piercing through the hubbub of the crowd and the clack and clatter of heels on the tiles. She stopped at the leather shop and picked up a pair of chunky earrings, moved on to the Tie Rack for a pair of neat leather gloves for her grandmother. She was just putting them in her handbag as she was leaving the shop when she became aware of the commotion on the central walkway.
Somebody had been screaming. She wasn’t sure whether she had heard it or whether one of the shop alarms had gone off further along the mall. She turned towards where the crowd was gathering. A woman was hurrying from another shop, her overall flapping. The woman was running, but of a sudden, she was moving in slow motion. Everything started to lose speed. The world took on a viscid syrupy texture.
The sound of the choir boys faltered, as if drained of power. The low hum of the escalator became a deeper, growling sound, hollow and mechanical and strangely animal.
Over at the middle, the crowd were bending down to the flapping thing on the floor and she could hear their hushed, startled sounds, like distant, muted echoes.
She was moving away. Someone was hurt and she didn’t want to see it. Someone was on the ground and of a sudden she was scared. She turned involuntarily, almost reflexively, and moved to the right, feet silent now on the hard tiles, as if she was gliding along, not quite making contact with the ground. She could have been a feather drifting in the wind, so powerless was the control she had over direction.
A woman was coming round the side of the pillar. A small black shape was crumpled up against the wheels of a trolley.
She glided on past the line up of buggies and prams, suddenly aware that something was wrong. Everything was wrong. The choirboys were tolling out a slow, tuneless dirge. Their clean little plastic faces seemed to run and melt. The escalator wheels were shifting and grinding. The tinsel sparked and spangled with a strange, electrical illumination. It writhed in the curved bows suspended above her.
She stopped.
The smell engulfed her and she stopped dead in her tracks. In an instant her stomach clenched in a reflex, gripped in a spasm so tight it sent a bolt of pain through her, worse than cramp. She grunted and the sound came out long and slow, thrumming in a way her voice never did.
Take me!
The command bloomed inside her.
The smell billowed into her nostrils, rank and somehow musky, thick and cloying in the back of her throat. It scraped against the receptors of her membranes and for an instant she almost fainted.
She was standing stock still, a hand clamped against her belly. The pain faded just a little, but it spread upwards, forked left and right, flowed into her breasts in twin warm and tingling streams. Without warning, the pain flared there too.
Oh...oh!
Her voice seemed to have the cracked tones of an old bell.
Take me take me. LOVE ME!
A dreadful imperative shuddered into her mind, more painful than the twist in her breasts or the augur in her belly. It was a mental blast. A wave of heat ran through her veins, fast and jittery. Beads of sweat sprung out on her forehead and made it clammy. Her breath came short and shallow. All the twinkling colours reflected from the window faded out for a moment.
Take me NOW!
She felt herself turning. An old grey pram, one of the coach-built ones, maybe an old Silver Cross walker that had seen better days, stood alone at the end of the rank, just beside her. The courtesy chain that would have secured it to the bar on the wall dangled free. The folding hood was up, shading the inside, and the weather guard was firmly clipped in place. From where she stood, she could see nothing.
But the smell billowed out, strong and volatile and making her emotions spin. She tried to walk on but her feet refused to obey her. She moved towards the old Silver Cross pram, shoes dragging on the tiles. Something inside it moved, just enough to make it shudder and rock on its old fashioned curved springs.
A small sound, something like a grunt, something like a cry came out from the shadow. It riveted right into her.
The noise of the commotion faded away and the choir boys bass atonal singing rumbled to silence. In that instant there was just she and the battered pram, enveloped in a musky, invisible cloud. Her heart was tripping erratically, thudding inside her and her skin seemed to crawl with a life of its own. Her feet moved her forward.
She reached out and unclipped the snapper on the weather shield. She lowered it slowly. Down in the shadow, something moved.
Without any volition, she unsnapped the second catch and leaned forward.
For a fraction of a second, for the briefest instant eyes fixed on her, pinning her with a sharp and hot connection of will. She saw a face that at first had no real shape, just a rippling blur of flesh. A scream started to wind up down inside the hot clenching in her belly. She stumbled back, but the mental imperative stopped her. In that brief space of time she was held, shuddering with fear and alarm while another, stranger, and much more powerful emotion was building up inside her.
It drew her back again and she looked under the hood. Her eyes blurred, focused again and impossible rippling sensation faded and stopped. She saw the baby.
The big eyes looked up at her, glistening with baby tears. Its round face and little smooth red cheeks were streaked with them. It’s soft lips were trembling, as if it was about to burst into a spasm of sobs.
Her heart swelled. The urgent thumping faded instantly. The pain down in her core shrank away, though the pulsing pressure in her breasts did not diminish, but swelled fiercer, but now it was no longer real pain. It was the pressure of need.
She leaned towards the child.
“Poor little thing,” she heard herself say, voice automatically talking on the sing-song cadence of an adult comforting a baby. Inside her, a part of her consciousness screamed at her to run away, to flee.
It smiled up at her suddenly. It’s eyes were huge with appeal. The wide brow showed a twist of dark curls poking down from under a knitted hat. The baby smell infused her.
Take me take me take me..
The demand was urgent now, irresistible, inescapable. The fear was strangled back to whimper deep in her consciousness.
Mother me!
“Yes,” she said aloud, letting the word trail away in a long sigh. She bent right into the pram, pushing the hood back a little. The baby blinked its eyes tight against the light but she wrapped it in the old shawl and gently lifted it out. She opened the top buttons of her coat, overwhelmed by a sudden protective instinct, and clutched the baby in against herself. She turned around, looking up to the end of the concourse and down again to the near door where she had entered. For a moment of indecision she swithered, taking one step to the left, another to the right.
Over in the centre, the woman kneeling beside the dark, prostrate body was slamming her weight down hard on the chest, using the heels of her hands on the breastbone, trying to restart a still and lifeless heart, trying to resurrect the dead.
The need to get away came sweeping through her. She turned, keeping her head low, and pushed her way through the passing crowd of shoppers towards the nearest exit. As she passed, some of them, the women, turned suddenly, following her with their eyes. She could feel them on her but she tried to ignore them. She hurried forward. Down the centre, past the escalators she turned and her coat flapped open. Immediately the baby squirmed hard, and she felt a bolt of pain lance into the back of her head. Without thought she clasped her collar up to cover the small bundle. Moving fast now, as fast as she dared without breaking into a run, she got to the far doors which opened with a slow gush of sound like a harsh intake of breath.
Out in the air it was winter dark and a smirr of rain was misting the air, though it was cold enough to be sure to turn to ice in the night. She swerved to the left again, keeping her head low and hurried up the pedestrian walkway, swerving to avoid passers by.
The urgency was inside her. She had to keep moving, just get away. She had no direction yet, only the imperative to move, to flee. She walked up and over Hanover Street, down Wellington Street, past Victoria Square, all of them hung with fairy lights and each shop competing in the choral cacophony, but she heard none of it.
Her entire being was focused on the internal voice which urged her on and on into the night, and the powerful, urgent need that surged within her in a powerful tide of emotion.
In at her breast, the baby moved, shifted position, nuzzled further in against her warmth and the mother-love burgeoned like a flower. The scent of the baby was all through her now, a warm narcotic that nurtured her as she would nurture the baby.
But first the had to find shelter. She hurried out of the shopping precinct, heading parallel to the river. She reached the junction that was the unofficial boundary of the city centre and turned right on Levenford Road beyond the Chinese restaurant.
The alley yawned and she was scurrying up in the darkness. She was almost running now, heels slapping on the cobbles. A shape moved out of the shadows and she saw the grizzled old tramp. She looked at him and he stared back and the fear in her welled up in the depth where her own sense of self lived. It made her want to scream out loud and beg for help because over and above the powerful urge there was something wrong that she couldn’t fathom but deep inside of herself he was dreadfully afraid. She tried to stop and ask the man for help, not knowing why, only realising that something was happening to her, but the enormous gravity of the force inside her dragged her away and on and on and on. The dogs came and snarled but she hardly noticed them as she scurried along the path, pushed the gate open, found the door handle and let herself inside a house she had never seen before.
The fear was rising faster now, a black tide of it, threatening to swamp the other emotion, the awful need. She went into the lounge, still the dark and leaned against the wall, feeling the strength drain from her as her knees gave way. She slid down against the wall leaving a damp stain on the wallpaper.
Another damp stain was spreading across the surface of her blouse. In the dim light she watched it expand, grey against the white. A different scent came now, one that made her think of weasels and scaly things. It came strong now, tinged with that other, musky smell that seeped into her pores and into her blood and into her mind.
Her breast was leaking milk,
What’s happening to me?
The panic welled up again and the scent came thick and choking to mask it, smother it, clamp it down. In against her the baby moved and she felt it nuzzle down.
She woke with a start, hauling for breath, shaking with the force of the dream. The room was dark and the curtains drawn and right then she did not know where she was. She was cold and stiff and the images of the dream hovered at the front of her mind, dreadful pictures spangling and expanding in the dark, changing with the flicker-flick speed of film sequences.
A huge sigh escaped her. She was stiff and sore, as if she’d got cramp and as if she’d taken flu and that was surely why she’d had the appalling dream.
She closed her eyes and her head thumped against the wall as the tide of the nightmare washed over and through her.
“What a dream,” she thought, hearing the words coherent in the tumult of the aftermath. “I stole a baby.”
It was an appalling notion, and that showed she must be coming down with something. She was lacquered with sweat, but cold and stiff. Her hair smelled damp.
She had dreamed she’d looked in a pram and seen a beautiful baby and she had taken it and gone on a nightmare run through the rain and the dark and gone to a strange house in an unfamiliar part of the city. It had been awful, but now she was awake, shivering in the aftermath. Any moment her mother would come in with a cup of tea. Any minute now...
“Must be getting broody,” she told herself, mind still vague and numb.
A griping pain twisted down in the basin of her pelvis, sharp and cramp-like. The pain looped up like heartburn and spread across her ribs to pool in her breasts and she thought the flue was worse than she’d supposed and maybe it was something worse than that. She closed her eyes, twisting them shut against the sensation.
And something moved on her skin.
She woke completely then, every pore of her body tensed and galvanised, every downy hair on her neck and arms standing to attention.
“Oh...aah!” Whatever she tried to say, it only came out in a little double gasp. She twisted away from the motion. It was small and slender. She could feel roughness scrape against her smoothness.
“Oh please...” she bleated.
The dream came back, swooping into her mind with powerful mental force, overlaying the conscious sensations.
She pulled back, turning as she did so. She was slumped on the floor, not on the bed. Her arms were clamped around the thing inside her coat. She tried to unlock them but they were stiff from the force of her grip and they refused to move. In their embrace, the motion came stronger. She tried to look away, sudden appalling terror welling up inside her in a gusher of abhorrence. The thick smell came billowing up, rank and foetid and overlaid with that sickly sweetness. It suffused her again, this time not in a dream, this time all too real as the dream had been a recollection of something all too terrible.
She felt her head turn of its own volition and she looked down into the shade in the folds of her coat. The small smooth head moved against her. It turned slowly. An eye opened, gazed into hers, held her for an instant, connecting with her, before it slowly closed again.
“Oh mother oh Jesus oh.” The words tumbled and tripped over each other in a gush of incoherent fear. Tears sparked and filled her eyes,.
The small shape turned again, eyes closed against whatever light was coming through the curtain but the pervasive scent came stronger. Ginny’s tears blinked away and the baby was in her arms. Away from the light, its eyes opened and its innocent gaze fixed upon her as if she encompassed its whole world.
The rank odour faded to a sweet baby scent and she felt the sudden love and the fierce need swell inside her. The deep, primitive part of her consciousness protested and fought, yelling hysterically and incoherently, a blare of pure fear, but the need within her grappled it and she was paralysed, unable to move.
There was blood on her blouse now, a faded patch where it had mingled with the milk.
She knew she had no milk. She couldn’t have milk to feed a baby. Her breasts could not be bleeding.
But there was a bloodstain on her blouse and her breasts were swollen and aching, pressing painfully against the cotton. The fear rose and the need clamped it down and her emotions wrestled and rolled while the baby fixed her with its wide, mesmeric eyes before it turned and nuzzled in where the buttons had come free. It burrowed down on her and she felt the scrape of skin as it sought her nipple. Her skin puckered, as if it was trying to crawl away from the contact. A shudder ran through her yet her body responded to the need and she twisted to assist. The mouth found her nipple and clamped upon it. It started to suckle, tugging hard, hard enough to cause the burning pain to return, but she was paralysed, locked within the fear and the mother-love, thoughts turning and tumbling and whirling within her, utterly terrified, completely smothered in maternal instinct, clutching the small thing that she’d stolen from the mall.
After a while, she began to sob softly in the dark.