The screams echoed round the room, desperate and shrill and conveying so powerful a fear that everybody visibly flinched. The sound cut off abruptly and they could hear the crashing sound of twigs being broken, of bracken crackling underfoot. There was a thump and an animal grunt which could have been human, could have been the sound a desperate woman might make when she fell heavily to the ground. A cracking sound of branches breaking. Another thud, like a sharp blow.
A snuffling noise, like a dog in the dark, like a pig rooting in the undergrowth followed. It was a somehow unnatural whistle of panted breathing. Something, or someone gulped. A thudding sound came loud and clear, another hard blow landed against a rough surface.
“No,” Helen’s panic bleated. “Oh God no....”
“Jesus, turn it off.” David bent and put his head in his hands. His shoulders were twitching as if he was holding tight to prevent himself exploding into violence
“David,” Helen screamed and he jerked back as if garrotted. “Help me. Please. Oh. Help me!” Her rending cry reverberated staccato as it bounced from one tree-trunk to another, fading all the time before dying completely. They heard her try to say something, heard the words choke in her throat. Something else snuffled once more like a hungry beast scenting prey. There was a harsh cry of pain that ululated high and soared to a crescendo, a pure and crystalline shriek of utter agony. It climbed to an unbelievable height, sounding more animal now than human. It continued for a stretched out minute and then it was cut off.
They could hear frantic breathing and more grunting and that could have been anything at all. After a while the sound stopped altogether. There was a hard crack, presumably when the handset fell, and then a silence that fell like a physical weight. Somebody reached to put the recording off. David felt the violent shudder inside, a combination of anger and rage and impotent distress. At that moment every eye in the room was on him, all of them aware of his agony, all unable to reach and touch him at that moment. It was something he had to hear.
“That tells us nothing,” Donal Bulloch said. “Nothing of any great help.” He looked at David and managed to convey his sympathy and understanding in the same glance.
“Except that she was hunted down and raped.”
“Oh, it tells us that all right,” Bulloch said. “Doctor Robinson tells us the same thing, more or less. The tape only lets us know when it happened. If her attacker had spoken, we might have got a voice-print. If there had been any background noise, we could have got a pattern, maybe even got a computer analysis. But there was nothing at all. He never said a word. The dogs found nothing at all. There’s no shoeprints, scraps of clothing, nothing under her nails. Some blood.”
David winced, tried not to show it. Everybody in the room saw it.
“It’s hunting me it’s going to get me its.....” Her voice continued in his mind. She had begged for help and no-one had known where she was.
“Get away. Get away from me. Oh Jees...” Her desperate plea drilled into his head. He wanted to be sick. He cold feel the waves of nausea build up and subside again, like squeezes of pressure. His head was pounding in a dull, ceaseless ache.
“Bruising and lacerations,” Bulloch continued. “No sign semen at all. There’s a possibility there were two of them, because she’s been held in a tight grip, hands and feet. More than a possibility. There probably were two, or more. It’s possible they were disturbed before they finished.”
David kept hearing the dreadful screams. They overlaid everything else. Every time Bulloch paused, David could hear the frantic, demented shriek. Worse, he could hear the snuffling sound as Helen’s legs were forced apart and something sharp and spiked had been rammed inside her so hard it had ruptured the neck of her uterus and punctured her bowel.
“I know it’s a tall order, but I’m sure you’ll agree that we have to get a description,” The Chief told David, keeping his voice even. “She hasn’t spoken to anybody at all, and we have to get some response if we’re going to find them. It’s possible you might get some reaction.”
David looked at him blankly, trying to get his mind to switch off the interminable screaming. He cursed himself for being late, condemned himself for not picking up the signs quickly enough. He had arrived home, tired from a long day, looking forward to a good whisky and the chance to get the chill out of his bones. He parked the car, began to wall round the side of the house and stopped. For some reason, he turned. Had there been a smell on the air? He sniffed. There was a scent of spring growth, perhaps a hint of perfume from daffodils and primulas in the next door garden. Maybe something else, faint and almost gone.
The hairs on his arms were crawling again. He could feel them brush the fabric of his shirt sleeves. A trickle of sweat ran down the sides of his ribs. It felt cold. His heart speeded up and a flush of odd, anxious emotion, like a quick anger, twisted inside him. He turned, sniffing the air again, recognising this odour yet scenting a different smell inside it.
He was not alarmed, not yet, but the anxious sensation, and a new, odd and inexplicable feeling of foreboding, made him walk back through the gate. All of his senses, flagging and dragging only a moment before, were now wound up instantly to sharp alertness. He scanned the little yard, saw Helen’s car parked in the corner. There were no lights on in the house.
He paused for a moment, then turned quickly and ran up to the front door. It was locked, and that would be usual if Helen had arrived home first. His heart gave a double beat, felt as if it turned over inside him. The key rattled on the outside of the lock and he cursed at the delay. Finally it slid home, clicked and the bolt slid back. He pushed the door open and got inside. It was cold. The heating had not been switched on. He called her name and the feeling of foreboding swelled blackly within him. She was not here.
David did not hesitate. He went straight back outside, forgetting to close the door behind him. He ran to her car, found it locked. A breeze shivered the topmost branches of the trees in a whisper of sound. He turned, and the street lamp on the corner glinted on something on the ground. He bent, found the car keys only feet away from the door.
His heart stopped.
Two yards away, Helen’s bag was lying close to the hedge. It was wide open and the contents had spilled out.
A dreadful premonition shivered through him. Without hesitation he reached for his own handset and called the office. In ten minutes four patrols were in the little yard, lights flashing on the walls of the surrounding houses.
The tracker dogs were howling in the trees. One of the searchers fond the telephone. It was another six hours before they found Helen Lamont, bloody and bruised, huddling at the side of a disused boatshed close to the waterway. She had been unable to speak.
The memory of her bruised and torn body hung with him, hooked into his heart, the way the terrible screams on the operator’s tape lanced through him. He told Bulloch, in a slow, mumbling voice, that he would do what he could. He got up from the room and left them, feeling their eyes on him, not caring at all.
Helen was huddled on the bed. The clean white sheets showed up the scratches on her face and the bruises under her eyes. Her hair was jet-black against the pillow. Her eyes were open, staring at the wall. David sat down at the side of the bed.
“We’ve managed to repair the damage,” Dr Robinson had told him. David wanted to kill. Her dark eyes were unfocussed, hollow smudges, bereft of their life and fire. Helen’s breathing was slow and measured, but every now and again, her chest would hitch as if she was about to burst into tears.
The tears did not come. She said nothing.
He held her listless hand, finding it difficult to comprehend the turmoil inside himself. She did not respond to his touch or to his presence and that too upset him. Bandages swaddled her wrists and her hands, badly scratched and abraded, stayed flaccid and flopped, not returning his grip the way they had before. She had always been a tactile woman, eager to touch, eager to hold and caress. Her hand was cool and the skin dry. Her eyes did not so much as flicker.
He spoke to her, speaking low, leaning close so his words were private, just for the two of them. Her pupils remained fixed on some point far beyond the wall. He told her he loved her, promised her that everything would be fine, that they would be happy together. She did not react.
Helen made no sound at all, except that when David was about to leave, she began to hum, very faintly, almost inaudible. A trickle of saliva drooled down from her slack lips and he thought she had groaned. He turned round, leaned close again, willing her to respond.
She was humming tunelessly. He did not recognise the notes.
For an instant though, her eyes flickered. She blinked slowly and she looked at him. For that instant he thought she was trying to reach out to him, to make some sort of contact and he took her hand again. Then the expression changed. The eyes slid away. A muscle twitched on her cheek, drawing her mouth into a small smile. For another instant, for a brief flash of time, David thought he had seen that look on someone else.
It was only when he was leaving the hospital that he recalled the last time he had seen the same, almost sly expression on another face. It had been when mad old Greta Simon had spoken to him in Blane Hospital, when she had begun to hum the old Gaelic tune.
Helen sat in a world of strange and numbing sensations. She was Helen Lamont, a part of her understood, but she was more than that. It had looked into her eyes and it had connected with her depths and in that sharing she had touched them all, all of the past ones.
Her mind had fragmented and shattered and at once she was among them, sharing with them all, down through the years, feeling their powerful need, needing their powerful presence. They were one. They had all had one purpose, driven to it, unable to escape it, but there had been a purpose and now it was different.
Helen had reached into her new memory and had plucked out a song that she would sing to herself, and there were other songs, in words that she now understood, from far, far back. She hum these softly while these others clucked and fussed around her, seen as if through gauze curtains, heard as if through fog, part of a different world now. She had broken and shattered and fragmented and then all the scattered parts had coalesced once more and she was alive again.
He had come to speak to her, murmuring words that she could not understand, trying to touch an emotion that she could no longer posses, because there was only one emotion. He had touched her hand and she could feel her skin crawl. He did not realise how she could not bear to be touched any more.
None of them realised anything at all.
She blinked slowly, turning away from the light, and turned in to herself, listening to the slow beat of her own heart and the rhythm of her own cycle.
June’s parents both came round to David’s house the evening after he had been to the hospital and surprised him when they asked after their daughter. They had been surprised to learn that she and David had split up, for she had not mentioned the parting at all. In fact she had continued as if nothing had changed. They had wanted to know if she was staying with him, for they hadn’t heard from her in a few days. David was irritated by their presence, because it reminded him of a dead relationship while his own relationship had been shattered by Helen’s rape. He held himself in check, because they were a nice couple and he’d always liked them. The three of them went round to June’s flat, found the place cold and empty, with two day’s milk outside the door and two days mail behind it. He took them down to the station and helped them fill out a missing person report.
Within himself, however, he harboured dark and irrational suspicions. Had June taken a revenge? Had she set Helen up in the hope that she could win David back? A miserable, smouldering anger started to twist inside him again and he could not quench it.
The rapists were never found. Neither was June Whalen.
David spent a couple of hours with Dr Mike Fitzgibbon, the psychiatrist who had taken him down to see Greta Simon, what seemed like years ago. David was hoping to get some answers.
“She wants to forget what happened,” Mike told him. “It’s the brain’s way of coping with an overload of trauma. It is not catatonia, more a withdrawal. I’m sure she will pull out of it, with help and therapy and counselling. Your division’s got some good rape crisis people.”
Mike explained David’s own feelings of panic and anger, of complete helplessness.
“It’s another side effect of your own drive. You feel the need to protect your mate, and you consider that you have failed in that . If there was a visible threat, another human, you would fight him, but you cannot see it, only imagine it. Your brain is doing the fighting for you because you feel the overwhelming need to protect what is yours.
“You asked me some time ago what sort of woman steals a baby and I explained about the mothering need. It is a primitive drive, a built-in instinct. Men sometimes have a corresponding drive which generally manifests itself after the birth of a child. All of these drives are linked to the great fundamental, which is more powerful and basic than the day-to-day survival instinct. Our whole lives, our very existence, revolves around the compulsion to reproduce. Everything is secondary to that, yet everything is linked to it. The reproductive urge is the most powerful force on the planet. Yours had been threatened, in a very literal sense. Humans suffer stress because of that. Helen is suffering enormous stress and so are you. The problem with humans is that we can think. We are not mindless animals. If we were, it might be easier.”
David still wanted to lash out. He needed a target to hit. Something to kill.
Helen Lamont came out of her fugue state after two days, but while she seemed more aware of her surroundings, she remained silent and unresponsive. She walked stiffly and painfully, wan and bloodless, her eyes huge in her pale face, still focused on the far distance. A battle weary soldier would have recognised that hopeless look into infinity. She looked more slight, more vulnerable than ever. A woman colleague of Mike Fitzgibbon, along with two rape specialists, tried to coax the story out of her, but Helen, when she spoke at all, haltingly, mumblingly, managed to convey to them that she remembered nothing at all. After another day, despite David’s panicked protests she signed herself out of the hospital. Failing to persuade her, he told her he would take her back to his place, which in recent times had become their place. She shook her head dumbly Helen refused to go to her mother’s house, or her sister’s place where he knew she would get love and care. She went back to her own apartment, sitting silent in the car as he drove her there, ignoring everything on the way, eyes fixed ahead of her. She let herself in with her key, easing the door closed on his hurt expression.
At the beginning of May, two small boys found something in a dense coppice four miles along the waterway parkland. They were not sure what it was, but they said it had skeleton hands and it might be a body.
David was merely going through the motions, unable to cope with what had happened to Helen. She was still unable to return to work and she still refused to communicate with him, or, it seemed, anyone else. Her mother had called on him, hoping for some help in getting through to her daughter, but he was as powerless as she was. Helen had simply withdrawn into a shell of her own world, into a cocoon of solitude. On the two occasions when she let him into her apartment, he picked up a sense of anxiety and more than a sense of dumb hostility towards him which he found as painful as a physical blow. Her eyes were dull and lustreless and she cocked her head to the side, absently listening to some imagined sound. He got the impression that she could hardly bear his closeness and only wanted him to leave. He wanted her to get medical help, but she told him in a flat, listless voice, that she neither wanted it or needed it. She only wanted to be alone.
“What about us?” he asked, clumsily. She looked at him as if she did not quite understand. He got no reply to his question. In the breaks of conversation, breaks that could stretch out into dismal, uncomfortable minutes, she would hum to herself as if her mind was roaming elsewhere. Her hair was getting longer, but it was losing its shine. She was developing lines at the side of her mouth. The bags were still heavy dark curves under her eyes. Occasionally she would smile to herself, as if harbouring a secret. David wondered if she had simply gone insane. He felt impotent and angry and bewildered all at the same time, and added to that was the guilt he felt for harbouring such a selfish attitude.
He tried to throw himself into his work and when the call came in that a body had been found in the woods on the parkland, he welcomed the chance to get on a case.
“Over there,” the local policeman said when he arrived on the cycle track that shadowed the waterway. “Don’t know what the hell it is.” Two small boys, both red haired and freckled, obviously brothers, were sitting in a police car, looking scared yet puffed up with importance all at the same time. David spoke to them first then went into the coppice, pushing his way through the bramble runners and dog rose stems which clawed and tugged at his coat. Finally he reached the shape in the centre of the thicket.
It looked at first like the decomposed body of a man.
There was no wind here in the coppice, but the day was warm and the smell was overpowering. No direction was upwind. A horde of black buzzing flies crawled over the body. A long, thin hand reached out to grasp a sapling. The other one was stretched overhead, hooked onto a branch. The skin was purple and fluid, as if it had been burned or melted. Bones, long and slender, strangely gracile and oddly jointed showed through in places.
“What in the name of Christ is that?” a uniformed sergeant who had followed him through the undergrowth wanted to know. David heard the man’s harsh gagging as he tried to cope with the smell of rot.
He stepped closer and saw that whatever it was, it was not a man. It was more like a spider monkey, in a way, with those elongated arms and grasping fingers. The lower limbs were almost identical, slender and jointed, almost insectile. For a moment, the image of a mantis came to him. The feet were prehensile, each of them holding onto an upright stem. It hung there, head down on its narrow, ridged chest, an obscene Christ from a Dali nightmare. Flies crawled all over its flat face. David risked getting closer, shooed them away and they buzzed up in an angry cloud. Two wide sockets, each big as a fist, gaped in a flat face.
There was no mouth at all.
David stood a step back, suddenly nauseated, not so much by the smell, but by the dead thing’s hideous appearance. It defied the senses in a monstrous assault. It was an obscenity, an offence against the natural order of things.
To David, the rotting carcass was a crime against nature, though its shape, thin and angular, was somehow familiar. But for the lack of mouth, it was just a larger, more elongated version of the thing that he had shoved down into the mud of the canal. Such a thing could never exist, not in this world, but it was there, decomposing in the shadow of the copse, suspended from the branches, a slender, slatted horror with purpling, viscous skin which dripped onto the brambles below it. Its proportions were all wrong, yet it looked somehow deadly, somehow predatory. He could imagine it stalking, like a mantis, like all other mindless creatures.
Between its legs curved a spike which looked like bone. It pointed outwards and upwards, a vicious stabbing thing.
Donal Bulloch’s words came back to him. “Something sharp and spiked has damaged the walls of her uterus and punctured her bowel,” Bulloch had said after the tape had stopped playing and the silence had echoed with screams.
As soon as her recalled that, the image of the mantis faded. The deadly insects killed only to eat, even to the extent of snatching a potential suitor and tearing it to shreds. This thing without a mouth was different. As he stared at it, his encyclopaedic knowledge of the natural world dredged up for him a picture of a male octopus, in a scene captured underwater by the camera of the now dead Flora Spiers. It had copulated with the female and after the successful fertilisation, its role in life done, it had ceased to live. It had completed its purpose and it simply disintegrated and died.
He remembered another picture, taken by himself when he was only ten years old, of spent mayfly bodies on the still water of a river pool. They had metamorphosed from larvae to emerge as adults for their final flight, the incandescence of the breeding dance on the summer air. They had fed all their lives and now the feeding was over. They had emerged with only one drive, to find a mate. To breed. They had no need of mouths, not any more.
“Oh sweet Jesus,” David muttered. He stumbled backwards, his mouth open, eyes fixed on the dripping shape.
The clawed hands gripped the branches in a death lock. The feet were hooked round the slender saplings. David now recognised the bruising on Helen’s wrists and ankles.
And death it showed its living purpose, the stabbing spike between its scrawny limbs curved up like a horn. It was only then that he realised the cause of the dreadful rending wounds inside of her. He stood back, groaning, eyes suddenly blinded by the violent, uncontrollable pounding of his heart.
Helen Lamont disappeared that day from her flat. She was never seen again.