“We should take a look,” Helen had protested and David had reluctantly agreed, over his better judgement. Both of them were subliminally and consciously aware of the presence of threat, the imminence of danger, yet each of them were now driven to put an end to this, to find Ginny Marsden and the mysterious baby. The young policeman was whey-faced and every now and again his stomach muscles would spasm and he’d double over, dry-retching. He had not been sick yet. Helen had felt the bolt and roil of nausea and swallowed it back. The dead man’s awful injuries had not been the worst, though they had been devastating. The shotgun wounds were black and still liquid, while the blood on the walls was black and dry, soaked into the paper. Other things, dotted like flies still stuck there, shrivelling as they too dried. The dead man had not been the worst of it, though his frozen grimace, lips stretched back from bloodstained teeth, making him look like a savage snarling in death had been a sickening sight. So too had been his empty, bloodied eye sockets blindly staring at the ceiling, mutely appealing for help.
The baby’s thin and waxen little body had been the worst. David had tried to push her back from it, sparing her the horror, but she had squirmed past him and now she wished she hadn’t done that. The other policeman had not seen the baby. If he had, he might have been a stretcher case by now.
She was shaking inside, shaking in fear and in anger and in a sudden pathological loathing for the thing that had done this.
Not human. The words repeated themselves in her mind. Thing. She tried to shuck that thought away, but it came back insistently, reinforcing the crazy theory that David had raised.
What sort of woman steals a baby? What sort of baby steals a mother?
And what sort of devil could do this to a helpless infant?
She had bit down on the nausea and backed away from the cot where a thin trail of congealed blood hung down in an elongated drip, like old black toffee. The baby’s little mouth had been open
in a perfect circle, its tiny tongue, soft and delicate as a rabbit’s tongue, protruding over the toothless gums. Splashes of black, fathomless and alien, sank where the eyes had been. The tiny chin was angled to the left and below it was a hole in the flesh that reminded her of something. It was not until she got outside that she remembered what it had been. She had once seen the body of a tramp who had died of exposure in an old derelict warehouse. He had not been found for some time, not by humans. The rats had discovered him and had gnawed their way under his rib-cage and were eating him from within. The body had twitched in a ghastly, possessed way and the rats had come scurrying out of their fleshy tunnel, glutted and fat. The baby did not twitch or tremble. The tunnel in her little neck showed ragged and abraded ends of tendons and blood-vessels. It looked as if something had drilled its way through her skin and flesh. The small arms and legs were thin and wasted, as if all the goodness had been sucked out of her, and though Helen did not know it, that is exactly what the pathologist would discover.
Outside in the yard, where the snow had begun to fall, swirled round by the wind boiling up from the estuary, she had leaned against David, while he had used Jimmy Mulgrew’s radio to call in. He had kept it very brief. She held on to him, more for the warmth of another human being, than for anything else, while the initial ripple of shock and abhorrence faded to a level where she could grasp it and wrestle it down. He put the radio back in its socket in the front of the patrol car and then moved towards their own car.
It was then that Helen had sensed something, and later on she would say it was just like the scrape of awareness that had made her flesh creep down in Levenford as she was leaving the old women in the cafe, footsteps on her grave. Something touched her and she stopped dead.
“What is it?” David asked. His face was pale and pinched, showing he was not immune to what they had found in the farmhouse.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I got a feeling.”
“What kind of feeling?”
“We should look here.”
“We should wait for reinforcements,” David said. “I think we should get out of this yard, just in case.”
“There could be something here,” she said. “The guns are inside, and the used one is on the floor. Whoever did this has cut and run.”
The contact touched her again, a feather stroke on the edge of her thoughts, slightly greasy, ominous as a distant thundercloud. She sensed it and something deep within her responded.
“I want to look around,” she said, suddenly afraid, but needing to move. “It can’t do any harm.”
He had looked at her, weighing it up. She was probably right, he finally conceded. This had not happened today, or yesterday. The damage was a couple of days old and the killer had gone. He thought that, yet the other part of him, the part that had read old Ron McBean’s account and had dreamed of parasites, told him to get the hell out of there. Ginny Marsden had come to Barloan Harbour with her creepy little baby. Down the years, there had been a trail of death and madness, suicide and lost, abandoned lives, and they were all linked. Ginny Marsden had come here with her creepy little baby and they had followed her trail and they had found a tiny infant with a black, gaping hole in its neck and not a drop of blood left in its body. He lifted up a hand to call her back, but she was angling away towards the corner of the garage. Behind him, Jimmy Mulgrew gurgled like a drain and then heaved his substantial lunch onto a pile of potato sacks.
David shrugged. She was probably right. The inner voice nudged and tweaked at him, but he ignored it. They were the police, his rational voice said, stolid and definite. This is a murder.
Helen was across by the wall. The touch came again, gentle as fog. She thought she heard the squeak of tiny bats, whispery as insect legs on dry sand. It drew her onward and she did not even know she was being pulled.
Go back. The logical segment of her brain, the one corresponding to David’s rational part, urged powerfully. Get out of here NOW, pleaded the deep, subconscious core that sensed a deep and alien danger and an awesome threat in the shadows. Yet beneath that, something darker egged her on. Her nipples tingled. At first she had been unaware of it as she crossed the yard, feet muffled by the thickening snow. It came as a pressure in her breasts and then a warmth that spread to the tips and suffused them with a fierce, prickling heat. Down in her belly, another warm, sensation spread, edged down between her legs, pulsed twice, unexpected and powerful. For an instant her vision swam and she thought she was slipping on ice. She reached a hand out to the wall, found its cold surface, steadied herself. The brief flare was gone, leaving her with only an itch and a sudden sense of need that she could not identify.
Go back! Get out of here!
It came loud, like a physical blow, just as she pushed forward. Her hand shoved the faded red door. It creaked open in a shudder. She was in before she knew it. The bat-squeak subaudial sound in her ears swelled stronger. It felt like a resonance in the bones of her skull. The fillings in her teeth sang in sympathy, sending a ripple of galvanic shock down her jawbone. Behind her she heard the clatter of the byre door as it swung along on its rollers, but it sounded far away. She was here and she was now and her whole world was suddenly shrunk right down to this singularity.
Above her, a slow, flopping sound rolled down from on high. The air was cool and dry, filled with dust and another, more familiar smell. She walked inside, across the dry straw-covered floor, between two stalls festooned with ancient harnesses and bridles, to the other side. Very slowly, and with hardly a sound this time, the door swung shut. The darkness here was not absolute.
Another smell. She breathed in and the flush fluttered over her skin in a hot tide. She turned, feeling the touch stronger now, feeling it close. Deep within her, in her mind and in the cells of her body, urgent messages were pulsing, exchanging, jumping from axon to dendrite, from cell wall to cell. They shunted through her nerves. For an instant, everything else was forgotten and a tide of hungry need rolled up to swamp her.
Up there, the sound came rumbling, as if heard through several layers of canvas, while the whispery call that snagged her went on and on and on, insistently tugging at her. She was halfway up the short flight of wooden steps when a shape launched itself from the doorway ahead. Helen saw a pale face and a flapping coat, white skin. It came rushing at her.
The singing in her ears soared to a glassy, brittle pitch, and pain drilled into her skull, but over them, the appalling need swamped everything. It took hold of her and drove her on. She wanted it. It wanted her. She had to have it, Protect it, mother it.
Uncontrollable ripples of emotion pulsed into her, pulsed out from her. The shape came lumbering down, pale in the gloaming light, the edges of a coat flapping, while legs, moving slow, as if through glue, thudding with soft, muffled crumps on the treads. She saw a dark triangle of hair, realised this was a woman. She tried to raise her head. There was something dark clutched tight in the other woman’s arms.
The baby.
A surge of need was like a bolt of electricity, shivering her from foot to head. She had to look after it, had to protect it. She felt its touch and heard its cry and smelled its smell and for an instant she was completely and utterly ensnared. She reached to take it. It reached towards her, focusing its thoughts. She heard its hunger.
Yes. Yes. Come now. Sizzling messages jangled between them and the darkness started to close in on her.
He saw her.
In that moment of recognition, his new hunger yawned, huge and empty, confusing his senses and for an instant stripping his instinct away.
The scent of blood was even now still in the air, the mother’s blood, and with his own essence in it, rich and powerful. She had come for him on the cusp of the change, when he was freeing himself from the tight and fraying shackles of the old skin, while he struggled to break out. She had almost succeeded this one, even more than the last. The anger had flared and he had almost put his head against her neck and sucked her dry, but he still needed her. Instead he put the hurt in her, pushing the pain deep inside, sensing the explosion within her and hearing that sudden mental shriek as it burned in her head.
The mother had stopped, snared by the hurt and then he had pulled the pain out and covered it with a different pressure, making her love him again. She had nursed him in the dark, and he had fed, stronger now and needing more. He had fed ravenously, glutting himself even as she felt her own strength diminish. Another change was already boiing inside him, making his blood sizzle and his muscles tremble. It was coming so swiftly, hard on the heels of the last one, that its speed confused him and he only knew he had to feed fast now. Soon he would have to make her move on, because he sensed this change would not last long. The growth inside him was phenomenal. There were changes within changes, new senses, new needs, waxing with every feeding. He could not resist those changes any more than he could turn away from the need to feed.
Still he had no conscious thought, though a kind of intelligence burned behind the thick lids that protected his eyes from the day. His instinct, however, was all. He fed and slumbered, holding the mother tight with his neural connections as he did, making sure she could not escape again.
The sensation of threat, his ever-alert sentry, woke him and he knew they were coming again. Unconsciously he had reached out and touched, feeling them approach and he recognised their glow, the way a dog sniffs a familiar scent. He pushed the mother, waking her brutally. She came awake, coughing harshly, choking in the dust until he suppressed it. Her lungs were filling up with fluid. He made her sit very still, despite the cold of the old loft. They both heard the trundling vibration of the cars as they came round into the courtyard and still he waited, despite the urgent instinctive need to move, to fly.
His new hunger confused his instinct and made him wait.
After a while, noises came outside. People talked, unintelligible grunts and creaks to him and he recognised her sounds again. He stretched out, sending a tendril curl down towards her and slid it over the top of her thoughts.
She sensed him and recoiled. A delicious heat spread inside him, and the new thing between his legs swelled, urgent and thrusting.
He waited a while, fighting the need to be away and in a safe place, unable to comprehend the speed of the next change. The mother breathed steadily, her eyes closed and mouth open, a trickle of saliva dangling from her cracked lips. He could feel her encapsulated horror tumbling inside her mind and ignored it. Outside, beyond the walls, danger walked. He stayed stock still, all his senses stretched to their ultimate, picking up sounds and vibrations and the heat of the moving shapes. In the dark, surrounded by the old hay, clutched in the mother’s arms, he was safe for the moment.
Out there, the noises faded for a while, leaving a silence broken only by the rising moan of the wind, until a cry came, low and inarticulate. Some more noises, a clang of metal. His nerves twitched and he waited, awake and aware. Something was about to happen. The imminence of danger pressed at him. He closed his eyes and reached out just as the door opened below and alarm suddenly flared.
The mother jerked, hauled out of her torpor.
“Wha...?” a sudden sound blurted. He punched a command at her and her mouth clamped shut. The door rattled, the old loose hinges protesting. A shape came inside, sensed, rather than seen, through the gaps of the floorboards of the hayloft. He reached again, and touched the other female. An explosion of emotions erupted within him. The mother jerked back, hitting her shoulder against the heavy oak beam. The thud boomed hollowly.
Some reflex, some intuitive force made him move. He shoved at the mother, giving her a savage mental wrench. Her eyes opened wide, mouth wider. She got to her feet and moved slowly to the top of the steps.
______
When Kate Park became aware, she was already moving. Her body was a mass of pain and her foot was shrieking loudest of all. The bones of her toes had been dislocated and distorted as the tine of the pitchfork ripped between them. The puncture holes, top and bottom, were now ragged and black. A gangrene was setting in there on top of the infection from the rats droppings. Her joints sung a protest song as they ground together. Her breasts, now thin and dangling, felt as if they had been torn in a clawed vice. She was moving down the stairs from the dark of a hayloft. A blink of darkness flooded her vision, as if an internal switch had been cut, then her sight came back and with it came her own conscious self.
She was moving and her body was screaming in pain but her mind was her own. It had turned away from her, swung its dreadful concentration from her own mind. She stumbled down the stairs, not even limping, though the agony was so immense it felt as if she was riding an impossible surf of hurt. It carried her along, carried her down.
A pale face floated in the gloom.
She saw the woman, seeing her eyes widen, all of it in slow motion. She was slim and dark haired and she was reaching outwards towards the baby as if her life depended on the contact.
In that instant of recognition, Kate Park became a martyr.
In that moment of time, all three of them were bonded. The other woman’s hunger came sizzling between them and her primitive need to protect the baby came rolling up from her depths. The baby was calling out to her, a feral, mindless demand. The girl was reaching for it, snared by the thing.
The image of her baby’s pallid face lying in the cot came suddenly back to her and Kate Park’s mind almost broke with the pain of it. She saw her dead husband twitching his last while his blood ran across the floor. She saw the thing sucking down there at his face.
“No,” she grunted, though the sound was hardly even audible. She perceived the young woman’s need, knew it would have her, would capture her mind and soul, and in that instant she reacted.
Helen Lamont reached to touch the thing that was still huddled between Kate Park’s breast, overwhelmed by the need to hold and protect it, and overcome by the strange, hot urgency in the pit of her belly that was something entirely different from mother-love.
She reached with both hands and Kate Park slammed her to the floor. There was no hesitation. The woman swung out a sturdy arm and hit her square on the side of the face. The slap sounded like leather on wood. Helen went spinning away. She hit an upright with a dull thud and fell to the floor.
The beast howled in fury.
Kate’s momentum carried her across the store-room, past the stalls and out the back door. The thing in her arms was shrieking madly, its mind still casting round to grab the other woman. But for seconds, for a few vital seconds, Kate Park’s mind was her own, and in that brief, somehow eternal, space of time, she refused to let the monster take another human.
She pushed the door hard. It swung back, hit the wall and she was out in the snow. Cold bit at her skin. The thing at her breast cowered from the sudden lack of warmth. It’s mind was singing in screeching anger and thwarted hunger. She ran along, loose shoes clacking on the hard-pack ground, coat flapping in her wake, right down the line of the hedge, taking advantage of its frustration and confusion, putting distance between her and the farm, knowing she was doomed anyway, but doomed to hell if she stayed to let it take another woman.
Down at the bottom end of the field, where the old fence gave on to woodland, it stopped her headlong, staggering rush with a savage twist of demand, but she was too far now. It turned its attention to her, seething with incoherent anger. It pulsed at her and an augur of pain drilled into the back of Kate Park’s head. The last thing she knew before she lost control of her own mind was the appalling satisfaction that she had fought it, and on one level, she had won.
Helen Lamont had hit against the post and she dropped like a sack. The darkness spun and fragmented into crazy whirling Christmas lights. The sound was shrieking in her ears and the smell filled her pores and then everything broke up into shards. She rolled, gagged, got to a knee, fell again and then she burst into tears of loss and anger and pain and relief.
She had almost seen it. As soon as it was gone and as soon as she had got to her knees she realised that it had almost had her and a dreadful horror surged inside her at how close it had been. Everything was blurred. She remembered walking away from the car and nothing else after that except the humming sound of music in her ears and an urgent sense of want. She had turned and something had...
She reached for the memory, not wishing to see that it might show her, shuddering all the while, trying to overcome the racking sobs that shook her and filled her with that deadly, hopeless sense of loss. She turned, got to a crouch, tried to stand.
The image wavered in her memory, trying to get through. Something had come at her, big and white. A woman? Yes, it had been. And in her arms she had held something that had reached out to her and demanded her love. She had stretched and even in the act of reaching she had sensed the wrongness that jittered under the urgent compulsion. She had not been able to help herself at all, snared in the intensity of its command.
Alien. She had almost been there. It had almost had her. She had been smothered by the need to protect and nurture it. It was a parasite. The realisation swamped her in a tide of terror and relief. The false imperative was ebbing away fast and on its heels came the fear. It had been an alien thing. It had reached into her soul and touched her and for a moment she was not herself at all, just a thing to be commanded by the filthy mental touch of something that should never have existed.
Parasite, she thought, breath now hitching violently. It was a parasite and it had wanted to feed on her.
The woman had slapped her, hit her. Had it been Ginny Marsden? Had she inadvertently saved Helen from it? Or had she deliberately saved her?
The door opened and David came running in. He took one look at her, hauled her to her feet. “What happened? Did you see him?”
Helen coughed, felt a bubble swell out of one nostril. She wiped it away unselfconsciously, pointed at the door. “There.” She said. “She got away.”
“She? Was it Marsden?”
“I don’t know. She hit me.”
“Did she have the baby?” David wanted to know. Helen could not even respond for a moment. She felt a warm itch of blood trickle from a scrape on her temple. David was across at the back door, pushing it open. Here in the lea of the wind, the snow had not gathered. There was a space of about two yards clear behind the building that was bare of snow. He looked up and down, but there was no sign of movement. There were no footprints on the hard mud. Finally he came back to her.
“You sure you saw something?” he asked.
“Yes. I saw something and it hit me. Oh God. It was a woman and she was carrying a bundle. I think it was a baby. It almost had me, for god’s sake.”
“How do you mean?”
“It reached inside me and told me to become its mother.” She turned to David, blinking the tears back. “It felt like leprosy, David. It felt like it had been waiting just for me. And I couldn’t do a thing about it.”
She held on to the lapels of his coat until a fresh and violent shudder of sobbing passed. He knew he should be out there looking for the woman, yet all he could do was stand and hold on to her.
Kate Park made it to the bottom of the hill hobbling in little spastic jerks, her body bent against the pain of disintegration. Her eyes were wide and blinkless, despite the whipping snow. She was heading for shelter, driven on by the force of its will. She reached the fence and skirted along the tree-line, now out of the direct wind. Ahead, the land rose and she forced her way up, every breath a purgatory of rasping pain, every step a hell of hurt, but she could not pause, not flag. Her mind was no longer her own.
She stumbled on, as the light was beginning to fade in the sky and the clouds rolled overhead. At the crest of the low slope, a black cloud erupted from the field that had been ploughed the week before. A flock of rooks, great black birds, took to the air, startled by her sudden lurching presence. There were forty or more, wide and glossy, cawing angrily. They wheeled, took off for the trees, then turned towards her. She reached the corner where a stile gave on to a woodland path which would lead to the far side of Barloan Harbour, close to the soaring bridge over the estuary. As she levered herself to the top of the steps, the flock of rooks came winging in, beaks wide, wings whooping. They swooped down, beating at her with their wings, black beaks pecking at her head. In at her breast, the baby thing hissed and spat, sensing their own perception of something alien, but unable to turn his head and open his eyes to the daylight.
If Kate’s mind had been her own, she would have known the crows were mobbing her, driving her off as they would a stoat or an owl caught out in the daytime, vulnerable in the open. They sensed the predator and the parasite and instinctively drove it away. She stumbled over the stile, landed heavily and twisted her ankle. There was no stopping. The crows followed them a short distance into the tangle of the woods and then pulled off, still cawing deafeningly. She moved on, down towards the old railway, lugging the weight she was forced to carry.
It had all been his fault, David knew that.
The sirens howled like banshees and the ice-blue lights pulsed like electrical sparks on the home straight. Jimmy Mulgrew was shivering and not from the cold. His eyes rolled every now and again and he would grab something to stop him from falling. He had been sick so often and so violently he believed the next spasm would turn him completely inside out.
David sat with Helen, merely holding her hand. She was shivering like an aspen leaf. He could feel it vibrate into him. Her eyes were wide and dark and she looked into the distance as if she had gone blind. Two red grooves angled from her ear to the point of her jaw and the side of her face was swollen alarmingly. It reminded David of Greta Simon’s slumped leer and he winced at the comparison.
Helen had not been badly hurt, not physically. But the look in her face told it all. She looked as if she was in the middle of a nightmare she could not escape from.
He should have pulled out.
She wouldn’t have been hurt if he’d just got them out of there and waited for the cavalry. Yet both of them had been compelled to stay, compelled to look. Christ, they could have been killed, he thought, all of them. He put his arm around her, pulling her close. Nearby, beside the barn wall where he’d hauled them back, the young constable was bent over again, gagging ferociously. David and Helen were sitting on the upturned trough, out of the wind, out of the gathering blizzard which had started only a few minutes ago and was now already covering the dead, fluttering bodies of the pigeons.
Exactly what had happened here? He couldn’t begin to imagine, he tried to tell himself, but his imagination was all fired up and doing nicely on its own. She shivered beside him, breathing hard, as if she’d run a long way and had some distance yet to travel.
The sirens howled a cacophony, the blinking lights battling bravely through the snowstorm. Down on the lane the gate opened, slammed hard against its post with the sound of a heavy bell and the cars came rolling on, wheels crunching on the gravel that would be hidden when the wind came round to let the snow lie on the track. A big sergeant, grizzle haired and jug-eared, wide as an outhouse and towering over them all came striding forward, followed by four other men in uniform and a pair of ambulance men in medics greens. Another car let out two pairs of plain clothes men and David recognised one of them as a Chief Inspector from the west division. He bulled his way forward.
“Well, young David,” he said, recognising him by sight, or simply from what he’d heard. “What in the name of God’s going on?”
“Two dead,” David said, “In there.” He pointed towards the farmhouse. “Plus some dead animals.”
“Signs of violence?” The detective asked. His name, David remembered was Bert Millar
David nodded. Helen shivered. “One of them’s gunshot. Shotgun. Haven’t a clue about the baby.” She shivered against him again at the sound of the word.
“Jesus. A baby?” The detective turned to one of his men. “Tell the office we need a full forensic, if it’s not on its way. And dogs.”
He swung back to David. “This a today job?”
David shook his head this time. “Couple of days, I think. The blood’s dried and clotted, no sign of mould yet.”
The older man looked at Helen. “Does she live here?”
“No, she’s with me. D.C. Lamont. Waterside section. City division.”
It was almost like a code. Short, rattled sentences, the machine-gunning of professionals.
“What’s up with her?”
“Slipped on the ice, Sir,” Helen spoke up. She had gone very still and David could feel the vibration in her body, tense and trembling. “Hit against the wall.” David said nothing. He had only seen a shape, maybe, a kind of movement along by the far hedge leading along the side of the field towards the trees. He’d considered pursuit, but Helen had been on the ground, hands to her face, obviously in pain. She’d seen it, and she wasn’t ready to tell another soul. Not yet.
“There might have been somebody in the barn. I couldn’t be certain,” he said, knowing he had a duty to tell them at least that. The senior man nodded, jerked his head to one of the others who strode towards the gaping door.
“I’d get that seen to,” Bert Millar said. He beckoned to the big sergeant who came clumping forward, his collar up against the gathering wind. “David’s going to show us. There’s a man shot in there.”
“Is it Jack Park?” he wanted to know, but David hadn’t a clue, and the young policeman had been no help at all. He had been unable to speak from the violence of his vomiting and he now looked as if his mouth had forgotten how.
They all walked in through the gap towards the courtyard of the farm as the snow fell in a silent shroud, giving the day an eerie, slow-motion effect. The flashing lights added a winking Christmas-card image as the snow began to pile quickly on the roofs and chimneys and the curve of the nearby barn, while inside, they both knew, was like a scene from hell. He was reluctant to go back inside again. They passed the door that led to the old hay-loft. It was still swinging on its hinge. He felt Helen cringe as they walked by.