There was no sign of Ginny Marsden on Christmas Eve. Both David and Helen had visited her parents again and he was struck by the resemblance in posture, in expression, between Winnie Marsden and old Catriona McDougall. At least Winnie knew her daughter was still alive.
“But why is she doing this?” she wanted to know. Ginny’s boyfriend Tony hung about at the back of the room, looking uncomfortable and out of place. The western division which covered Levenford had assigned two patrols to make inquiries and both David and Helen had spent a cold day collating the information they had. It wasn’t until late on the night before Christmas that word came back that she might have boarded a train again, heading for the city. That would complicate the search.
David took Helen to her mother’s house and found the place filled with sisters and brothers in law and a confusing array of children. Almost everybody, it seemed, was wrapping presents, hanging Christmas cards, or crowding into the kitchen to cook, or to eat. It was a benign bedlam. David was introduced all round and promptly forgot most of the names. Helen told her mother they had to go back to the office just to sort out some paper work. Mrs Lamont, whose hair was still dark and thick and whose smile showed how well Helen would weather the years, expressed harassed sympathy and told David not to keep her daughter out too late at this time of the year. He promised, not sure of whether he had any control at all.
Outside he asked: “What paperwork?”
“It’s a madhouse in there. I need some quiet. Let’s go back to yours. My own place will be just the same. Families, at Christmas? Who’d have them?” David had to stop at a corner store for another bottle of Jack Daniels and added a bottle of gin to the list. He bought two six-packs, selecting cold ones from the fridge, threw in crisps of all flavours and a variety of peanuts
He hung her heavy jacket on the hook beside his dragonfly picture which had escaped June’s wrath. He hadn’t had much time to reflect seriously on her dramatic exit, because he’d been busy since the morning, but he’d been surprised when he’d woken that the swelling in his nose had gone down without leaving a tell-tale bruise which would have caused comment at the station. There was hardly a twinge of pain.
He poured a drink for each of them and, without ceremony, Helen pushed some cushions off the sofa, bundled them into a little nest and made herself comfortable on the carpet in front of the fire. Outside, the sky still clear and the forecast promised a sharp frost. The moon was still haloed in crystals of ice. Helen sipped her drink while he talked about the difficulty of finding anybody in the city, especially someone who did not want to be found until finally she stopped him and asked him about the previous night’s phone call.
“Oh, that was just the drink talking,” he said, not meeting her eye. He’d been hoping to avoid this and during the day, because she hadn’t mentioned it, he thought she might have forgotten. In the heat of the night, the thought had been so positive, so clear. In the cold of the morning, however, it was such a colossal concept that he had to get some distance on it. It had been a mistake, he knew, to dump it on her. “I’d had a blow to the head.”
“Don’t bullshit David.” The words came out sharply, not angrily. “There’s something happening here that I don’t understand. You were trying to tell me something.”
“Look, I was just trying to rationalise all of this,” he admitted. “I told you I spoke to the old woman, Greta Simon. Her story is just a reprise of the Heather McDougall story. Simon said she lost a baby. It happened on the same day McDougall went missing back in the sixties. We have incontrovertible proof that Ginny Marsden took the baby from the mall, and it was the same one McDougall had wheeled in a few minutes earlier before she threw a thrombo on the floor.”
“Nice turn of phrase,” Helen said. “Very sympathetic.” David ignored her and went on.
“So I’m just tying to establish connections. We already have links I suppose, but nothing that makes sense. Nothing I’m ready to put in any report to the boss or to Scott Cruden.”
“But you said something about babies stealing mothers.”
“It’s true. I did. I’m sorry, but my imagination was running away from me and I apologise for waking you.”
“No, it’s more than that,” Helen said. “I can tell. You’re backtracking right now. I wondered why you never mentioned anything about this today. I kept waiting for you to bring it up. And that’s the real reason I dragged you out of my mother’s. Well, part of it. Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know I lay awake all night after you called because I realise there’s something not quite right here. You know more than you’re telling. Don’t ask me how I know that, for I don’t know myself. But call me a liar if you dare.”
“No,” David conceded. “I know as much, or as little as you. But as old Sherlock said, whatever that’s left, however improbable, is the truth. Has to be. So I have to think on even improbable things. There’s a similarity all down the line, and I mean going back to the forties when old Greta said she had found a baby. Mike Fitzgibbon says she’s incapable of lying, so I have to take that as the truth. She had a baby in her care in the forties and then again in the sixties. McDougall had one in the sixties and another one this week. Where did the babies come from? Why were both of these women lactating? Old Hardingwell told me our Jane Doe was carrying something in her blood, major league molecules, long peptide chains, something that was very like the structure of a virus, so Hardingwell says, and I’m thinking maybe that’s another connection. Greta had something in her blood that they couldn’t identify, not then. It was probably the same thing. Maybe this baby’s some kind of carrier. Maybe it’s got a virus or some kind of bug that alters hormones for instance.”
“You think they’re sick?” Helen asked and when she did she felt a tremor again. Someone’s walked over my grave again. She remembered the odd moment on the stairs when both she and Nina Galt were adjusting the pressure of their brassieres. She’d smelt the bitter stench in the room and her nipples had stood out, tender and throbbing, pushing against her sweater. She tried to think back, picturing the big woman jostling her substantial breasts, trying to recall whether she too was in the same turgid state. The memory wouldn’t come. She’d been too concerned about covering her own fear and her own embarrassment.
“I don’t know,” David answered her question. “There’s just a strange chain of events. It could be something like rabies.”
The shiver ran through Helen again. Had she herself picked up some contamination? “What do you mean?”
“Rabies is a very smart virus. It programmes its hosts. First it infects the bloodstream then gets to the saliva glands. After that it spreads to the central nervous system, drives the host mad, and then makes it bite others. The saliva in the bite carries the virus on again, right down the line. Smart virus.”
“And you think that’s what we’re dealing with? Something that could infect us?”
“No. I don’t think there’s any danger. I’m just thinking aloud. Maybe there’s a virus that alters a woman’s drive. Maybe. I don’t know. But Ginny Marsden stole a baby. So did Heather McDougall, at least so we have to surmise, because she never gave birth and nobody has reported the kid missing. As far as I know she stole one from Greta Simon, way back when I was in shorts. Greta herself says somebody took it, and Phil Cutcheon now believes the baby never died.”
“So what happened to the babies?”
“That’s the million dollar question. We know, or have to assume, that the Marsden girl still has this one, but we don’t know where it came from. Nor do we know what happened to the one I believe Heather McDougall might have picked up at Duncryne Bridge. Did it die? Did she give it away to somebody else? And where did that one come from, because old Greta never gave birth, and as far as I know, nobody ever reported that baby missing. As you say, it gets pretty weird.”
“So there could be some disease that makes women steal babies?”
David laughed. “There would have to be one that made mothers fail to report the loss too.”
“So far we’re talking of at least five, because McDougall has been seen with kids for the past five years, off and on.”
“Unless it’s the same baby,” Helen said, trying to make it sound light, but the shiver stole through her again.
“It would have to be a pretty old baby,” David said, but he gave Helen an odd, almost surprised glance. “Old Greta, she had a baby back in the forties, during the war. That would make it close to sixty by now.”
“Older than my mother,” Helen said, wishing the strange feeling of uneasy prescience would leave her.
“Anyway, that was just one of the things I was considering last night, and I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I’d been looking at some of my natural history tapes and I started seeing similarities. Now it sounds a bit crazy. I’ll have to think on it some more.” Even as he said it, he knew he was not telling the entire truth. What had started out as a simple sudden death in plain sight had turned into something completely different. David was experiencing the same thrill of forewarning that was making Helen’s skin stick out in goosebumps. Unless it’s the same baby, she had said. That had brought out his gooseflesh.
Just as he mentioned his tapes, he recalled the dream again, the dream he’d remembered as soon as he’d woken up and instantly he felt his ears redden in the way that they did when he was angry, but this time the flush was embarrassment. In a flash of recollection he smelled the scent of her body and felt the shudder and gasp as she forced against him. He felt her eyes on him and tried to look away casually.
“It might sound just as crazy, but I think there is something wrong in this whole thing. I don’t like it.” Helen said. “To tell you the truth, it gives me the creeps. I can’t say why, but I’m getting a bad feeling out of this.” She was turned towards him, looking up, her face raised, almost aggressively. As she moved, his memory superimposed the dream Helen who had turned and trailed soft fingers on the length of his thigh. Another flush of embarrassment, and of something entirely different, crept up from his open collar and he rubbed his fingers on his jawline, as if to check his day’s growth.
She said something again, which he missed.
“Are you listening?” She was looking right at him and the gleam of the side-light was in her eyes, the way the sun had been.
“I was thinking back,” he said truthfully, wondering if she could see the flush of colour. To cover it, he poured her another drink, while she held the glass up to him, her arm outstretched. The glass trembled slightly, breaking up the light from the fire into diamond sparkles. She raised herself up and sat beside him.
“What do you really think?” she demanded. “And no bullshit this time.”
“As long as this is between the two of us?”
She nodded, staring earnestly into his eyes.
“Of course it is. I’m one of the good guys too.” She smiled, but there was something else in the smile. He couldn’t identify it.
“You know anything about the natural world?”
“I know a brachiosaur from a brontosaurus,” she said. “Which is more than you do. Yes. I grew up in the country. My uncle’s a gamekeeper. His brother’s the best poacher you ever saw, and they still drink together. I know where the dipper nests and where the big trout lie in a stream. It’s not all dolls and prams with us girls, you know.”
“I was thinking about cuckoos last night.”
“Brood parasites.”
“Exactly. I was putting two and two together and coming up with a lot more than four.”
She pulled back and looked him straight again. “You think we’re dealing with some kind of parasite? Like a vampire?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Possibly. There’s a connection running all through this that’s just not right. As I said, when everything else is exhausted....anyway I think I’d like a day off, and get my head clear of all of this. There’s more permutations in all of this than you get on a football coupon. Too many names and too many babies. Maybe I need a week off.”
“That’s a good idea,” Helen said. “I wish I hadn’t brought the subject up. I think we should declare an amnesty from work, at least for the now.”
“Suits me,” he said, wondering how crazy she thought he was. He leaned back. This time she took his glass, poured another measure and handed it back to him. She drew her feet up, tucked them underneath her, took a sip of wine.
“So what are we going to do?” she asked.
“Christ alone knows.” He looked at her and she looked back at him, dark eyes still catching the light. That expression was back again and it looked like hunger.
“I don’t mean what will we do about work,” she said. “That can wait. It’s Christmas, isn’t it?”
He turned to her askance and without any hesitation she leaned forward and kissed him. He was too taken aback that he did nothing for all of five seconds. She pulled back eyes scanning his, left to right and back again, her own eyes wounded and moist.
“Do I need some mistletoe?” She asked, soft, now uncertain. “Or have I grown two heads?” He tried to shake his head, opened his mouth just a little. She tried again and this time, more prepared, he responded to the press of her mouth and the heat of her skin. Her tongue slid out, very slowly and licked the inside of his own lips, a slide of sensuous contact. He met it with his own. She made a very small noise that could have been a whimper or a sigh. There were two simultaneous, almost identical sounds as they reached blindly to put their glasses down on the table and then slowly leaned against the back of the sofa.
Some time later, he took her into his bedroom.
The moonlight sliced its slash on the wall, catching the bright and beady red eye of a fighting black grouse cock framed on the wall, though neither of them saw that.
Some time later, deeper in the night, he’d lain there, listening to her breathing in the dark, watching the moonlight on the curve of her neck, feeling guilt about June and uncertainty about getting involved with somebody he liked and somebody he worked with and wondered how he’d got himself into this mess. He also recalled the shiver and sigh that he’d seen in the dream and then felt against him in their deep contact, and marvelled at her responses. Sometime in the night she woke up and heard him snoring softly and cuddled into him, grateful for his presence on a cold night, delighting in the press of his tough body. She knew, she told herself, that she hadn’t exactly planned this, but she was glad it had happened. Some things really were simply unpreventable.
There were some drives that had a control all of their own. In the dark, she remembered his touch and the sudden ripple that had started deep within her and become a shudder and she remembered crying out, almost laughing with the force of it. She remembered the urgent demand that overwhelmed her and the spark of warm tears as it began to ebb. She remembered shaking her head when he had looked at her to see if there was anything wrong.
Some time, even later, she roused him with more kisses and told him she had to go home before midnight. When he sleepily asked why, his face a picture of confusion and then drowsy comprehension, she told him.
“It’s Christmas. They’ll expect me. It’s a family thing and I can’t break the tradition.”
Ten minutes later, wrapped in his dressing gown and looking even more slender than slight and defenceless, she dried the short-cropped hair that gave her a pixielike, innocent look that belied her toughness and strength of her slim body. She came out of the bathroom and gave him a smile that dimmed the light.
“I found the birthmark,” she said, laughing and he went along with it, trying to squash down the feelings of guilt and uneasy elation. June’s angry, pained face floated in his memory, scolding and accusing. He turned away from her, made her image fade away and he knew that he had turned a corner. Exactly where he was going, he had no idea.
Helen changed back onto her jeans and flying jacket while he got his winter jerkin out. She turned to him, easing his collar up to protect his neck, while he did exactly the same thing to her.
“Listen,” she said. “If you go all guilty on me, I’ll feel we did something wrong. But I know we didn’t. No pressure at all, but I’d like to do it again. You’re one of the good guys. I’ve known that for a while, even since before you saved me form getting my ribs stove in, and there’s hellish few of you around.”
He pulled her close and kissed her again, savouring the taste and the texture and suddenly he did not want her to leave. June still tried to intrude, but he mentally straight-armed her away with a determined thrust. When he and Helen broke apart, almost fighting for breath, he reluctantly walked her down to his car, enjoying the close clutch she had on his arm, then drove through the bitter cold night and waited outside her house until she went inside. It was just more than an hour short of midnight and the moon was riding high.
In the morning, when he awoke, for a confused few moments, he thought it all might have been a dream.
_______
On the day before Christmas Mrs Cosgrove woke early and prepared breakfast for the woman and her child. They had gone to bed early, the thin woman moving slowly as if she’d walked a thousand miles and had more to go before she reached her destination. The old woman remembered thinking it was a darned shame that anybody, any woman and child, should be away from home at this time of the year, staying in bed and breakfast with strangers.
She looked at the line of cards along her wall, pictures of angels and glittery Santa Clause figures. At the far end there was a big one from her youngest son in Canada. It was a picture of the virgin Mary and her child, in a wooden stable. Another young woman, thought old Mrs Cosgrove, a long way from home with her baby. She put the kettle on and decided to give the woman two eggs and another rasher of bacon.
As it happened, the stranger only ate the yolks and never touched the tea. She went out early and came back a while later with money which she handed over without a word. There was enough for a week’s lodgings, and that meant the poor dear meant to stay here right over the new year. Mrs Cosgrove wondered if maybe the girl was running away from something, if she was maybe in trouble with the police. She leaned back, taking the weight on her good leg and had a good look at her paying guest. The girl’s bones were pressed out against her cheeks, making the hollows under the ridges as dark as caves.
As she told David Harper some days later: “I thought then that she was really sick. You know, that new thing, the Aids plague. There wasn’t a pick of meat on her. Just a rickle of bones. She should never have been out with that baby. I took a peek inside his pram and he looked healthy enough to me. It had big blue eyes and a smile that would break your heart. I could have picked him up and cuddled him. But the mother, she looked as if her days were numbered, poor soul. You know what she looked like? She was like one of them Jews in Germany in the war. The ones in the camps.”
This was some time after what happened in Barloan Harbour came to light.
The mother was finished.
She would not last much longer and already he felt the panic of imminent vulnerability rise up like bile inside him. The old dry woman, who had a familiar scent, one he remembered from days long past, hovered around, desiccated and done, while the mother’s milk turned sour and thin. He was hungry now and there was little sustenance left.
He had to move, had to find another one quickly. His senses told him that he would be found here if he did not move on. The others, the man and the woman - the very thought of her made the new hunger swell under the old one - would follow and the mother was not quick enough, not strong enough to carry him much further.
It was time. He lifted this head up from the mother’s teat and forced his thought into her. She sagged back, twisting away from the hurt of it. Her eyes screwed themselves into slits. There was a dirty smell of old blood on her breath, partially from the pound of raw minced beef she’d got from the corner shop and also from the three gaping molar sockets where, during the night, the teeth had loosened and come out. He touched inside and she slowly sat forward and began to wrap him up.
She was almost finished. He had to act.
Ginny Marsden had no strength to resist when it made her rouse.
It made her take it out into the cold again when all she wanted to do was close her eyes and let it all drift away.
“Hail Mary full of grace please mother take this thing away from me.” The thoughts linked together in a profound litany. “Holy Mother please.” She had never been a religious person, not since the piety of early childhood and bedtime prayers, but the words all came back to her now in her extremity. Sometime that day she had turned to a mirror and the part of her own mind that was still hers had perceived the witch in the reflection and she had known it was herself. She had been to exhausted, too drained, to be shocked, or frightened. She sensed the imminence of the end rushing towards her. The witch in the mirror looked like death itself, (death warmed up, as her mother used to say a million years ago, and a tear sprung into the eyes of the decrepit, desiccated woman who used to be Ginny Marsden the girl) The glistening tear tumbled over the dark, blood-purple bags under her eye and trailed down the cavernous hollow of her cheek, getting lost in the fissure cracks around her lips.
The approaching end was not rushing fast enough.
Her joints ground like sand in gearwheels, and the rasp of dreadful friction vibrated the deadly abrasion through her faltering frame. Her mouth hurt and her eyes hurt. She began to button her coat over her breasts, noting vaguely that they were not as swollen, not as turgid as they had been. The nipples were red and raw, and beside them, the scadded skin where it had sucked blood through the capillaries and the pores, was beginning to map itself in islands of scabs.
It made her move and everything inside her hurt and burned. If she had been able, she would have got on her knees and prayed, though the pain of that would have made her scream out or pass out, she was sure, before the thing woke her up to urge her on. It stared into her eyes and she stared back, unable to pull away while inside of her head, her mind was shrieking uncontrollably at the hurt and the fear and the knowledge that she was damned.
Devil. It’s possessed me.
And when she thought that, the corner of her mind that had a kind of rational capacity, suddenly recalled what she’d learned a learned time ago, of Christ in his passion in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he was so raddled by the fear of the manner of his death that the blood had come bursting through the pores of his body and he had appealed to his father to take this chalice away.
Ginny Marsden might have prayed, but the monster reached out its thought and turned her around with brutal force, and made her stand up. Her joints squealed, both in pain and in actuality, rusted door hinges protesting. She shuffled to the door. Somewhere at the front of the house the television was on and old Mrs Cosgrove was talking to someone, possibly on the telephone. It didn’t matter. Ginny was made to walk towards the back door, down the narrow little lobby that separated her bedroom from the kitchen. The door opened easily, though the motion of turning the handle sent needles of pain up to her elbow. She went out, almost tripping over the lip of the door edge and down the broad path where the skeletons of the summer’s sweet peas and nasturtiums waited to be cleared away in spring. The air was cold and rasped at the tenderness of her throat and froze her lungs, but she moved on, turning at the gate, not even looking back.
The thing in her arms pulled at her, making her move, right, left, pain, hurt, right, left,
please God take this chalice.
Agony. She staggered not down the hill as she had before, to get to the little branch bank and the corner shop in this winter-silent village. It forced her onwards, upwards, along the road, a pause while it let her gather failing strength.
Oh please make it stop.
It made her go on. Here the hedges were frosted in the cold, rimed with ice that blew in from the estuary on the misty sea-haar. Down in the distance a monster howled and she did not even realise it was a foghorn blaring from a blinded tanker slowly feeling its way upriver.
Behind her came a hollow clatter and she half turned, regretting the motion instantly as the shock-waves ran up the length of hr spine and seemed to explode in her head. For an instant the whole world went black and she felt herself stumble towards the ditch. The light came back on instantly and she managed to keep her feet. Two women on horseback passed by, eyed her curiously. The horses whickered and whinnied nervously.
“Watch out for the ice, Kate,” one of them said, “the ditch has overflowed close to the hedge. They’re worried they’ll slip.”
The one who spoke passed by. Ginny Marsden looked up and the woman at the rear, auburn haired, darker than Ginny had been and robustly healthy, looked down. Her eyes widened, not in shock, but in surprise, the way whole people do when they see the deformed and the grotesque. Ginny had no will, no strength to react to it. All she felt was the pain and the rasp of bone on bone. The horse skittered nervously, snorting through dilated nostrils and shaking its head, stamping hard on the road surface as it passed her and the woman had to pull tight on the reins. It got over the patch of ice, hooves sounding like mallets, danced on beyond, still nervous and spooked. The woman up ahead called back and the second woman caught up on her. The horse settled down again, slowing to a walk and moved on with its companion, both sashaying like proud women, backsides swaying from side to side. They quickly passed by, carried on along the road to where it turned uphill. At the turn, the one who had looked, turned back to look again.
“Come on Kate, I have to go fetch Jeremy from the airport,” her companion said. The horses moved away and the sound of their hooves faded. The cold was beginning to sink into Ginny’s bones and for a little while, she was grateful for the numbness that spread into her throbbing fingers. She kept moving, slow and faltering, forced onwards while the thing at her breast kept its eyes closed tight against the weak winter sunlight that came through the gap between the buttons of her coat and waited for dark.
It took her more than an hour to make it to the barn. In that time a four wheel jeep almost knocked her into the ditch, just pulling up at the last moment as the woman, the one who had been on the leading horse, realised there was someone walking on the narrow farm road. The headlights, on full despite the hour, blared and seared her eyes, causing her to wince away from a fresh input of hurt. Her breath was coming hard and sore, like an asthmatic in the midst of a final, catastrophic attack. The pain in her feet had gone now, gone completely as if the nerves had been eaten away. She heard her shoes slap down on the hard road metal as she approached the gate. In the near distance, horses whinnied, their hollow voices magnified by the slope of the stable roof. Overhead, a chevron flight of honking geese passed across the now deepening sky and off in the distance, a magpie machine gunned its aggressive call from a stand of trees.
It impelled her to climb the gate. The metal rang and clanked as she hauled herself over it, not knowing where she was or where it was forcing her towards. In her head, her own befuddled mind was chanting the prayer over and over again, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, pray for me. Let this chalice pass. The prayers went unanswered. She got down on the other side of the gate, slipped on the slick ice and felt her thigh bone pull right out of the socket. A momentary shriek of anguish ripped in there, but still she was goaded onwards, the mad puppeteer that had control of her volition dragging and tugging on the strings. The next twenty yards, despite the rending hurt in her thigh, were easier, because the bone was now outside its own socket. A monstrous lump swelled on her hip, at the top end of the thigh, where the flesh was all bunched up, but the ends of the bone were now separated. Somehow, she was able to walk, in an odd, staggering and crablike motion, but the immense pain screamed only in the right thigh where the joints still grated and abraded. She had no willpower to be thankful for this tiniest of mercies as she stumbled on, only enough of herself to repeat the mantra over and over, though it did not help, except to focus what was left of her away from everything else.
She stumbled onwards. Out beyond the whitewashed walls, a dog barked, high and agitated. Closer in, from the roof of an ancient dovecote, a throng of pigeons clapped their panicked way into the air. The sky was getting darker now, noticeably so as the shadows lengthened. There was a light at the side of the farm’s small and horse-shit fouled courtyard which sent the shadows of the hawthorn hedge reaching towards her. The light hurt her eyes, but she still shambled towards it. The whinnying was closer now, though the barking had stopped. Out of sight a galvanised bucket was kicked over by a careless foot and she stopped, still muttering madly to herself. Her feet, now completely numb, were bleeding where the bones had pushed into decaying flesh, and it was hard for her to keep her balance. In at her breast, the thing nuzzled, sucking hard at her skin.
The barn door yawned and she went inside. It was musty here, musty and dusty, with harsh motes of hay dancing on the air in the light that speared through the holes in the wall in solid beams. The bales were piled high, great oblongs of fodder, stacked one upon the other. It made her climb up the giant steps of hay, higher and higher, her heart now pounding with the enormity of the effort, her feet unable to feel where they were stepping, her dislocated hip making it almost impossible for her to bend her leg properly, but still it drove her, onward and upward, now far above the village of Barloan Harbour. Finally she could go no further. Up at the back where the hay bales formed a natural hollow which had actually been carved out by a teenage boy from down in the basin who had found the ideal place out of the cold and away from prying eyes, to copulate at every opportunity with the red-haired and heavyset girl who occasionally helped out in the tackroom. The place, this close to Christmas, was empty except for the faint squeak of the colony of rats which burrowed far under the hay.
Ginny Marsden hated rats. She would have run a mile, under normal circumstances, had she realised what was making the sound, had she even heard what was making the feral twittering sounds under the bales. These were far from normal circumstances.
Ginny Marsden was dying.
She slumped down in the shadows, gasping for breath, lungs rasping air and hay dust, her sides heaving like an exhausted animal.
Holy Mary mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.
The dark crowded in on her and in the depth of it, despite the hurt and the catastrophic wasting of her body, she saw her mother’s face floating just in front of her, wavering as if seen through a film of liquid. Her mother was calling out to her, anguished at her loss and Ginny tried, desperately to call out to the woman who had gone through the pain of childbirth and had suckled her at her breast. The illusion wavered and danced, rippling in the forefront of her mind, and in that moment, Ginny knew that her mother was crying for her. She did not even know that this was Christmas Eve and that all of her presents were wrapped and neatly stacked under the tree.
The thing on her breast snuffled and gobbled. Its mind was loosening its grip on her,. She was suddenly aware of that, that it was withdrawing. Tears welled up in her eyes as, suddenly, she was able to think of her warm house and her mother’s hugs and the safety she had once, so long ago, taken for granted.
Way in the distance, down in Barloan Harbour, a choir from St Fillan’s church sang carols through a public address system and the faint melody floated up hill, even as far as the farm, even as far as the barn, even as far as Ginny Marsden’s dissolving mind. The tears rolled down the hollows of her cheeks while the thing snuffled and sucked, almost desperately. Inside, she could feel the rot, the sense of dereliction, the breakdown of her organs and her body. It had made her come here, overcoming the defeat in her own body, showing the power of one kind of mind over her kind of matter, making her achieve what would have been impossible by the force of its desperation and its unnatural drive.
Monster.
In the distance the choir sang about three kings and a babe in a manger, huddled in a barn. Here, the thing that sometimes looked like a baby and sometimes looked like a beast from a black nightmare, lifted its flat head. In the dark, its great eyes flicked open. Ginny Marsden saw them, big as saucers and emitting a strange, feral light of their own, but they were not fixed on her. It moved on her, lizard like, spider like, clambered off her prostrate and almost paralysed body. It rustled in the hay. Down in the depths, a small thing squeaked and then went silent. She heard a snuffling sound, a kind of breathless snort and the monster moved away.
She tried to move but could not. The pain in her fingers was draining away, mercifully. The hurt in her spine was still a throbbing shudder, but she knew that too would fade in the end.
About the time David Harper and Helen Lamont found their way into his bed and into each other, something burst inside Ginny Marsden with an actual sound of tearing. She twisted, contorted to the side by the force of the rupture. Her bowels pulsed and her whole lower intestine began to protrude from her anus, while her womb, that part of her that had been destined to carry children of her own, turned itself inside out and prolapsed grotesquely down through her vagina into the cold air.
She rolled to the side, unable to prevent herself and she coughed hard. A gout of wet came unravelling up her windpipe and through her throat to burst in her mouth and then drip down to the hay. Liquid bubbled inside of her. The dark took on a strange lightness and a succession of faces paraded in front of her, Celia Barker smiling as she waved goodbye and told her to look after the cat and the fish, Mork and Mindy; her mother came again, an elegant, oddly young face leaning over a tiny Ginny with a soft sponge in her hand and a smile on her face; the dark-haired woman who had come stumbling into Celia’s kitchen; Old Maggie and Maisie in the bus-stop cafe; Mrs Cosgrove and her big breakfast; the woman on the horse. And glaring past them all, the red and ferocious eyes of the monster that had snared her and drained her of everything that she was.
Holy Mother of God, pray. Holy. Pray
prey
Something else burst inside of Ginny Marsden. Just before everything began to fade, she thought of her father and his big manly hands and his gentle eyes and then she thought of Tony and how she had never let him touch her, saving herself for a special day, saving herself for the first time. Saving herself for motherhood.
She coughed again while down in the hay, the thing snuffled, moving towards the door of the barn. The choirboys sang and in the distance the beast in the fog moaned again far down the firth.
In the Lamont household, there was laughter as sisters and cousins kissed and hugged Christmas in. David Harper kissed his mother and poured a good shot of whisky for himself and his father, thinking about Helen Lamont and wondering what to do with the present he’d already bought for June.
In the Marsden house, a man and women cried in each other’s arms and prayed to God for the safe return of their daughter.
On the other side of the country, in the tiny house where Heather McDougall had been brought up until the day the monster had snared her, Catriona McDougall wished her husband a happy Christmas and pecked him on the cheek, though he should have been in bed a long time ago. Something had made her stay up and she treated herself to a small, thick sherry. She watched her man stare drooling at the fire and then she lay back and inside her head, a small vessel burst and she died without even knowing it. Old Callum, too far gone to realise that his wife was never going to wake up, died in mid morning when the heat of the fire drained away and the house slowly froze.
Ginny Marsden coughed violently and some other bloodied part of herself gouted out. The darkness expanded in a blare of white light which quickly fizzled down to a point of intense luminescence. All pain fled from her and she let out a rattling sigh which went strangely silent as very quickly the pinpoint of light expanded again and she was swept through it on a wonderful wave of warmth.