His dreams were beset by visions.
In the deep dark the images came looming up close and he saw again the baby cuckoo hunched within the nest. Behind the translucent lids he could make out the red of the eyeball twisting and turning, trying to see. It struggled with the egg, getting underneath it, bracing its legs against the sides and the egg cracked open and a thin, warted thing came uncoiling to get its sucker mouth onto the bird. Even in the dream he knew this was wrong and he tried to turn away from it, but the creature held him as it held the fledgling and he saw it was no longer a cuckoo, but a child in a cot and the warted thing was hunched over it, its circular lamprey mouth straining to suck at its helpless eyes.
He reeled back in disgust and horror, knowing he had seen this before, twisting away and he fell into the water, sinking down and down into the thick mud. Under his feet something stirred and he knew it was a sucker-fish, a lamprey with its great flat mouth and its circle of teeth and he tried to swim away, but it twisted and changed and he saw it was no fish. The black bulk of a dragonfly larva scuttled up, its hinged and alien jaw snapping at him, armoured with deadly spines. He climbed, in desperate fear, climbing for his life and it scuttled after him while above him the crows were falling from the tees, cawing madly. Below, the black nightmare scuttled after him and he climbed further, trying to get away. He risked a look back and saw it stop.
It arched outwards and the skin of its back split down the middle. Two red eyes came poking through, forcing the torn edges of the skin apart. Out of the shell, metamorphosing in the dying light of day, Helen Lamont clambered, but her eyes were now wide and red and her skin was sagging and her breasts were huge. Dark clotted blood dripped between her legs.
“It got me,” she mouthed at him, “It gave me the sickness and now it’s inside me.”
He reeled back, lost his grip and fell away while she looked down on him and he knew he had failed. A heavy weight of loss and regret came rolling over him and he fell and fell and fell and...
He woke.
His hollow cry of panic and despair echoed round the room. Bright lights stabbed his eyes and he flinched from the glare. Pain drilled into his side and thudded in the back of his head and he felt reality slip away from him again.
A cool, soft hand slid over his forehead.
“You’ve come back to us then?” He risked opening his eyes again and the light was less painful. A pretty nurse was smiling at him in welcome and for a moment he was completely bewildered. He almost asked where he was, then realised he must be in a hospital. He drew in a breath, felt it rasp in his throat and he coughed reflexively. Immediately he regretted that. His throat burned like acid.
“Drink,” he managed to rasp.
“Yes, you’ll be a bit sore for the while,” she said in a lilting Dublin accent and she sounded like an angel from heaven to David Harper. “There was a lot of dirt in your lungs and you’ve had enough antibiotics to stop a horse.”
“How long?” he tried, and it came out a whisper.
“Only a day and a half,” she told him. “Doctor thinks the cold water saved you. It slows the metabolism, you see.” She took his temperature, gentle with the thermometer. “You’ve two broken ribs and a nasty cut on your arm.”
He didn’t remember the cut. The nurse checked the thermometer, failed to react and he knew he would live to fight another day. His head pounded, deep dull thuds in time to the beat of his heart and every breath brought a stab of discomfort. He managed to convey his pain to the nurse and she gave him a tablet. Swallowing was an ordeal, but finally it got past the rasped rawness of his throat. A few minutes later it started to work and the hurt fuzzed at the edges then started to dissipate.
Two hours after that, he woke up again, not realising he had slept. The nurse brought him a drink, eased him up on the pillow, told him he had visitors and opened the door. He expected Helen Lamont, but, disappointingly it was his boss, Donal Bulloch along with Bert Millar from the Western Division. Their bulk and height cut out a lot of the light which was a blessing. His head still ached.
The two senior men sat down and looked him over.
“You’ll live then,” the Chief Superintendent half-asked. “Bad time of the year to be swimming.”
“Is she all right?” he asked.
“Which one of many?” Bulloch asked. “I suppose you mean WPC Lamont. She’ll live as well. A bit of hysterics and a bit of a chill, nothing much. She’s tough. The farmer’s wife, she’s still alive, but for how long, nobody knows. Another tough one. She’s beat all the odds so far.”
“Did you find it?”
Both men looked at each other, then back at him.
“When you say “it”, what are we talking about?” The chief asked.
“The thing. The baby.”
“We’ve had two teams of divers down the whole stretch,” Bert Millar said, “and the place has been dragged. We got four dead dogs and two large pike and an expensive artificial leg that hasn’t been explained. Nothing else.” He leaned closer to the bed. “Did you get a look at this baby?”
David shook his head. “Just a glimpse. It was no baby. I couldn’t say what the hell it was.”
“That’s our problem,” Donal Bulloch interjected. “There’s a lot of media interest in this. I’ve spoken to Phil Cutcheon, after Mr Millar here briefed me on what you told him. Now, I have to tell you that I have no interest in any of old Cutcheon’s theories, not officially and not personally. We’re all policemen here and we all want to stay policemen and enjoy our pensions. Wild speculation does nobody any good. Officially, for the record, we were acting on information on a missing girl and happened to be in the vicinity when a child fell into the canal and was rescued by a passing policeman. All true. We might even find a medal for the gallant lad. As far as the Park killings are concerned, we are looking for a shotgun raider, and we will go on looking for one. As far as you are concerned, you were never at Middle Loan farm and there was never any baby there.”
He leaned over and looked David straight in the eye. “You’ll understand what I’m saying?”
David nodded. He was tired and his head and ribs ached. He caught the drift. Donal Bulloch and Bert Millar had talked it over and they had done a deal. That was fair enough with him. It was dead and that’s all that mattered. It was down there, below the mud and it would rot there. Bulloch his boss had obviously spoken to everyone concerned and all of their stories would be matching by now. The boss did not want to see what was down there. He was a policeman. He upheld the law. He saw no devils except in the hearts of men. He was lucky.
“Suits me,” he said, and worked up a smile. “That’s exactly how I remember it.”
Bulloch nodded and left the room. Millar stayed for a moment. “I spoke to old Phil. Whatever the hell’s going on, you’ve got balls. You and the girl did a good job. You want to work for me anytime, you just ask.” He stood up, put on his straight look which drew his brown down so that his eyes were almost hidden. “But no more ghosts and ghoulies, okay? That’s enough for one career. Remember what your Chief says. You know it makes sense.”
It was the following morning when Helen finally came in, bearing a huge basket of fruit. She leaned over and kissed him hard, accidentally pressed down on his cracked rib and then jerked back when he groaned in dismay. The nurse looked in, smiled, went back out again.
“Is it dead?” she asked as soon as they were alone.
“Last thing I felt it was at least a yard under the mud. Must be pretty deep if the divers haven’t found it, though I don’t know how hard they were told to look. It stooped struggling before I did, and I was down there for a long time.”
“I know that. Everybody stood around and that stupid constable just sat on her backside crying. The poor little girl was in better shape than her.”
Helen told him that it had been Jimmy Mulgrew, the young policeman who’d been sick up at the farm who had jumped in to the canal, diving down fully clothed and had finally, after two unsuccessful attempts, found David’s foot and dragged him up to the surface.
“He got you out and got most of the crap out of your lungs, so you owe him,” she said. “And I owe you too. I can’t remember anything of what happened after we got to the canal. It’s all a blank.”
“You broke my ribs, you silly cow,” he said. She sat back, taken by surprise, but then he laughed, though the laughter cost him plenty. “But I’ll heal.”
Kate Park was alive. She was in intensive care in St Enoch’s Hospital where a succession of specialists queued up for the chance to examine her. She was alive, but in the depths of her coma, barely just. Her hold on life was so tenuous it barely existed. It was a miracle that she had any hold on life at all. According to the x-rays and the cat-scans, the damage to her system was phenomenal. It was indeed a wonder that she was still breathing, that her heart could still beat. Apart from the multiple fractures of her hips and chin, the deterioration in her skeletal structure and musculature showed she lad lost almost thirty percent of her bone calcium and all of her body fats. Dr Hardingwell and senior bacteriologists and virologists speculated on a new super organism which could cause such catastrophic damage. Kate Park’s body contained more samples of the large, proto-genetic compounds that had been discovered in Heather McDougall and in Ginny Marsden. It was studied at length by many eminent men, but no two of them drew the same conclusion. Some said it resembled a kind of virus. Others claimed it was a complex protein complex that could trigger responses on the cellular level. Most agreed that its components were amino acids, the very basic building blocks of life. That was where agreement ended. It remained and still remains a mystery.
Teams of people worked round the clock trying to keep Kate Park alive and to rebuild the lost elements of her wizened body. Occasionally she would twitch, as if coming awake, but then she would go still. Nobody knew what monsters scuttled in her dreams. Her husband and her baby girl were buried in the same grave in the family plot in the churchyard at Bowling Harbour. Most of the town turned out for the funeral on a cold winter’s morning. The priest at St Fillans prayed for the repose of their immortal souls. For Kate Park’s soul, as yet, there was no repose.
Little Kirsty Cameron spent a week in hospital and was then transferred to a psychiatric ward where she underwent intensive therapy for a hysterical fugue state. The girl’s little breasts were black with bruises and medical examination showed severe damage to the subcutaneous tissue caused by sudden violent expansion and stretching. Blood tests showed that she had gone into a rare, instant puberty. Her ovaries were fully developed and were now producing vast quantities of adult female hormones. She was also almost catatonic, staring into space, mouth slack, and shivering just a little.
She responded to no stimuli, or hardly any. It was only whenever she heard a baby cry that she would react, going into such fits of hysteria that she had to be subdued with thorazine. She would remain in the psychiatric ward for some time.
David Harper got out of hospital in three more days, during which time Helen visited him every day, and, awkwardly for them both, so did June, fussing at his bedsheets and plying him with outspoken concern at his treatment and fruit for his speedy recovery. Eventually both of them accepted her attentions, though she was brusquely and sullenly hostile towards Helen. He drew the line when she turned up on his doorstep, and she stormed off in an angry flood of tears. It was to be a further four weeks before he was allowed back to active duty. Donal Bulloch welcomed him back to the squad, shaking his hand gravely and thanking him for his efforts in tracing the dead woman.
Between them, David and Helen completed the report that an old policeman had started before they were born, but they never showed it to anyone else.
They closed the chapter.