Sirens whooped and howled like beasts in the gathering night and the wind howled along with them, singing in the wires that stretched from pole to pole along Jack Park’s home straight track. It caught under the eaves of the barn and rattled at the slates of the farmhouse roof, whipping off a spindrift of snow and leaving miniature cornices along the ridging. The dogs howled in sympathy, snapping and snarling at each other from the backs of the vans.
“Useless bastards,” the chief inspector rasped, drawing hard on his thin cheroot and blowing smoke down his nose, trying to cauterise his nostrils to burn away the stench. Even though it was midwinter, the mess Jack Park had left of himself on the walls was still putrid. The first wagon with his remains wrapped now in plastic was on its way, lights whirling as it jounced along the track. Inside the farm, men were measuring, dusting, sampling.
“So who the hell is that?” he demanded, jerking his thumb towards the barn.
“It’s the girl we’ve been looking for,” David told him. “At least as far as I can tell. The coat matches, plus the shoe and the ring on her finger.”
Little else matched. The girl’s emaciated body had been found sprawled on the tight-packed bales, and if Helen Lamont had been the first to see it she would have recognised the ghastly twitching in the belly. Sergeant Holleran, who first discovered the corpse swore without repetition for almost a minute as he beat with frantic flails of his night stick at the scurrying bodies which emerged in panic from the hole in the chest cavity. He missed them all in the attempt.
The big, grizzled policeman had swung the flashlight beam round and saw her face, mouth wide open and thick with congealed blood. There was a gap in the teeth where several were missing and for an instant he thought he’d found an old skeleton. He leaned forward and saw the crumpled, drying eyes and realised that what he’d taken for bone was actually tightly-drawn skin over an emaciated skull. The girl’s hair, rat-tailed and filthy, was spread out to one side, its golden waves now a bedraggled grey. After his quite instinctive and frenzied attack on the scurrying rodents, he had taken a good look at the corpse. The woman was lying in an old coat, a skirt and a blouse which was rucked up and unbuttoned far enough to show a wizened, wrinkled breast. He assumed he was looking at the corpse of some old woman who had crawled in here to die.
He clambered down the bales and crossed to the door where he shouted to one of his men to fetch the boss. Some time after that, David took a look at the body and in that first glance, his impression was the same as that of the big jug-eared sergeant. This looked like an old crone.
But she was wearing the same coat that Ginny Marsden had worn. One of the shoes were off, leaving a bare foot with toes that had been nibbled by the hungry rats. The other was a fashionable winter walking shoe with a gold chain on the side. It was the same kind of footwear the missing girl had been wearing as she strode into the shopping mall. He remembered what other people had said. She’d grown older. In ten days, since John Barclay’s camera had picked up her lithe walk in the mall, she’d turned into a hag. Now she was aa corpse.
“So she’s not from around here?”
David shook his head, eyes fixed on the girl. He shivered, but not from the cold. Whatever it was that could cause such a drastic metamorphosis in such a short time, it was frightening. He remembered Hardingwell’s description of the long-chain molecular cells in the dead woman’s blood. Could it have been this? Had she been carrying a dreadful, wasting disease that she’d passed on to the girl?
Was the baby the vector?
David shook his head, he’s seen Helen’s face in the barn. The blod had drained out of it and she had been shivering in shock. She had seen the baby, and that had almost driven her crazy.
What were they now hunting? All he had were questions. He had to find the answers.
Helen came towards them, sipping hot coffee from a polystyrene cup. The senior man beckoned them both aside, to the far end of the barn. “Right. I think I should know what the fuck’s going on here. I want to know what you two are doing on my patch, and how the hell you turn up here at this slaughterhouse.”
David told him, speaking quickly. He left out much of it, sticking only to the bare bones of the story and omitting all of the history. They had been on the trail of a girl who had gone missing, and they believed she had stolen a baby. They had traced her to Barloan Harbour, to the bed and breakfast run by old Mrs Cosgrove. They had followed the constable up the hill on a hunch.
“Some hunch,” Bert Millar said, swinging his eyes between them. “And if this is her, where in the name of Christ is the baby? Huh?”
David looked at Helen, she looked back. The Chief Inspector looked at both of them. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” he said. “I don’t want to be a pain in the arse, but I’ve just walked into a madhouse here. You know I’ve got three bodies, two of them mutilated and a farm full of dead beasts including two wee Scottie terriers who look as if they’ve screwed each other to death. Santa Claus did not stop here at Christmas with peace and goodwill to all men.”
He paused and smiled without any trace of humour. “Now you might think my head zips up at the back, but I’ve been running murder hunts since you were on the potty. I can spot a lie a mile away and I’m spotting one now. So what you two are going to do, is to come with me, sit down, and tell me everything I want to know. From start to finish. Because what you’ve said so far doesn’t add up to a spoonful of shit as far as I’m concerned. You know it and I know it.”
“It’s difficult,” David started to say, but Helen forestalled him.
“We can tell you,” she said quietly. The scrape on her temple looked like a dark wedge close to her hairline. “But you won’t believe it.”
“Well girl,” Bert Millar said. “We’re just going to have to see.”
It was another twenty minutes and two cups of coffee from the dispenser in the mobile unit before David finished talking. He took the senior officer through the story from day one, from the death of he woman they’d assumed to be Thelma Quigley and the later discovery of the video shots showing Ginny Marsden who had by this time become the subject of Helen’s search. He spoke of the puzzling pathology in the autopsy and the inexplicable and confusing series of coincidences.
At the end of it, the Chief Inspector drained his cup and lifted his head. “And you believe this? It’s some kind of mutant?”
“It’s getting hard not to,” David finally conceded. “We’ve been on her tail for ten days. Heather McDougall had a baby and nobody knows where it came from. Ginny Marsden took her baby and now she’s dead. Nobody has ever really clapped eyes on this baby.”
“Just the one?”
“Who knows? There could be several,” David said, still instinctively prevaricating. No matter what he believed, he was aware of how it would appear. “If there’s just one, then it’s some kind of mutant, and it’s damned dangerous.”
“I think it is, Chief,” Helen interjected. “We wanted to find her first, to make sure. But I can’t think of any other explanation. She’s been here, and now the baby, whatever it is, it’s gone.” The only thing she’d omitted was the confrontation in the hayloft, and that was only because she refused to even let her mind approach that. Every time her memory veered I that direction, a wave of panic began to swell inside her, threatening to engulf her completely and reduce her to a quivering, weeping child.
“She’s been here,” David backed her up. He knew she’d seen another woman with another baby, some other thing in her arms, but he sensed, quite rightly that she was not willing to share that information with anyone else. “And earlier on, I thought I heard something over by that loft. There was nothing there by the time I got the door open,” he felt Helen tense against him, knowing he was lying, “but I’m sure there was. There was movement down by the hedge along the edge of the field. I couldn’t make it out, for it was snowing by then, and I thought it was best not to give chase on my own.”
“So who could it have been?”
“I think it could be another woman, maybe even the farmer’s wife. There’s no sign of the baby, is there? Nobody’s found her yet.?”
Bert Millar thought about this. He had a long face and beetling black eyebrows which every now and again drew down so that his eyes were hidden. He looked as if he’d stood out on a lot of crime scenes on a lot of cold winters.
“You say Phil Cutcheon goes along with this?”
“He gave me the old man’s files,” David said. “He says he thinks there’s something wrong. I know there’s something wrong. I don’t know the answer, but I think we came close to it.”
“I worked for Phil,” the DCI finally said. “He was a straight arrow. Still is, I suppose, and he was never given to flights of fancy. But all this gives me a problem. I don’t believe in aliens and mutants and I don’t even waste my time watching them on television. I’ve never seen a UFO and I think Uri Geller’s a crank. That’s just to state my position so you know the kind of reports I submit. As far as I’m concerned you’ve got a missing baby. I’ve got a father and a child killed by some maniac and I’ve got the corpse of your runaway girl. I’m going to assume this baby of yours has been abducted yet again, because there’s no trace of it and there’s no trace of whoever left this place in a shambles. Now, until I know better, I’m going on the assumption that there’s been some leak, some contamination into the water supply. Maybe some old chemicals lying around that have killed the livestock, made it abort, and maybe caused some aberrant behaviour. That’s my official line and that is how this inquiry is going to proceed.”
He dropped his voice. “But you two crazies had better keep on working on your own thing. You’re looking for a missing child and at the same time helping me with my investigation because the two are linked. I’ll speak to Donal Bulloch and get him to spare you for the duration. He’ll go along with that. Now believe me, we never had this conversation. I never heard a word about sixty year old babies, not a whisper about aliens and monsters. Okay?”
He stood up. “When you heard something, out at the back of the hayloft, which direction would you have said it went?”
“Down towards the trees,” David said. “Why?”
“That’s where the dogs went berserk. The handlers couldn’t get them past the hedge. They sounded as if they were scared shitless.” His brows drew down again, hiding his eyes from them. “I think you two should think about where this baby might have gone, and who it might have gone with. Your right when you say we haven’t found the farmer’s wife. If she’s killed her own child and run off with another, there’s more of a chance that this really is down to some toxic leak. I’d honsestly prefer to believe that.”
He turned to Helen. “Do you think she did this? Or was it the siege of Sunnybrooke Farm? I really want to know, and God help me, I’m beginning to think you two might be able to help me.”
He heard the dog in the distance.
He knew the frenzied sound from back in his past, so long ago that it was lost in the haze of all memories. The animals were too far away to pose a threat. The snow was thicker now and he burrowed under the mother’s coat, in against her flopping breasts, feeling the beat of her heart. It stuttered and staggered along with her and he knew she was flagging. He concentrated and goaded her onwards. They had reached the old railway, the one which used to carry the grain to the Littlebank distillery further beyond Bowling Harbour. The spur line had not been used for years, though in times past, he had travelled it, huddled against another mother. He had no way of recognising it or recalling the mother. It was too far away, too far in the past and all their scents and flavours merged.
Some of the sleepers were still on the flat, but most were gone, leaving the hardpack grit which was overgrown and matted with moss. Most of the line was a pathway, used by small boys on bikes as a shortcut along behind the village in the summer. Now it was quiet, the sounds muffled by the falling snow. They had been moving for half an hour, she pushing along, moving in a swirl of pain and exhaustion, through brambles and rose thickets. Her legs were a mass of scratches and her twisted ankle kept giving way, but there was nothing for it. He had to get to shelter and he had to get to other people before she emptied and stopped.
Almost as soon as he had broken through the ragged confines of the old skin, feeling the new surface shiny and slick and rippling with the strength of growing muscle, he had felt the start of yet another change. It was happening so quickly he had hardly time to act. Now he had to be away, away from the howling beasts and away from the others who had followed him.
He recalled the shock that had come out from the female, the sudden burst of awareness when he had reached and touched. He had stretched out, stroked and felt the rightness of her, the ripeness of her, and the new hunger had raged within him. His glands had puffed up, filling themselves and the new-grown paart of him had swelled in readiness. Blinding sparks had fizzled inside of his head and the heat of contact had made all of his muscles quiver and vibrate in monstrous anticipation.
And then he had missed her.
It had been so close he could have had her, taken her right there and then. He could have snatched her and drooped this one to the ground with a twitch of his mind, and unbelievably, he had been thwarted. His anger swelled and he doused it instantly. She would come again and he would be prepared.
They had come too far for him to be able to sense her now. But she had followed him down the days. From one den to another, from one hiding place to the next. She had followed him and he knew she was important.
Darkness was beginning to fall now. His own eyes were closed, but he could sense it through the mother’s dulled reactions. She pushed through a barrage of broom stems, scraping her ankle on a gnarled root, ignoring this little pain among so much of it. Ahead, over the iron bridge which spanned the canal, barely visible in the deepening shadows, was the old station. A dim and distant part of Kate Park recognised it. She had played here as a girl, climbing the trees with her brothers, and trying to catch fish in the small stream which ran parallel to the high track and emptied itself into Barloan Canal. That had been a lifetime ago.
It had been her baby’s brief and incandescent lifetime ago. It had been Jack’s lifetime, ended as he spun, twitching to the floor. Now she was groping her way along this track with the beast that had made her kill him, with the beast that had clambered onto the baby’s crib. She was stumbling along and while this small, helpless part of herself knew it for what it was, its control was such that she clutched its weight against her and felt the smooth skin of a new-born baby. The compulsion was so powerful that she kept going, despite the rot of her flesh and the disintegration of her bones as it took all the succulence from her body and used it for itself.
She reached the old ticket office, almost an exact duplicate of the still-used room down in the village where Ginny Marsden had sat by the cooling fire, resting for her next move. Here it was cold and damp, hidden by tall trees which kept out most of the wind, but let the snow billow round the trunks and build up on the west facing sides. As soon as she arrived, a family of magpies which had been sheltering under the canopy took off into the gloom with loud, racketing cries of alarm. Out beyond the track, a stoat sat up on its hind legs and sniffed at the air, sensing something more mindlessly hungry than its own self. Very quickly and silently, it turned and sinuously disappeared into a hole between the roots of a thick beech tree.
The station door was closed, but the lock had long since fallen out of the rotted wood and Kate Park’s weight pushed it open. Inside, the air smelled of old fires and piss. An ancient mattress, helixed with rusted springs, jutted out from the corner near the fireplace. It smelled of worse, though Kate was unaware of it. She squeezed inside, out of the turbulent wind. Beyond the ticket office, through a wide open door, was another small room with a bench. The windows here were still intact. Kate stumbled to the seat and lowered herself down, eyes wide in the deepening darkness. She cuddled the thing in against her and it lowered its mouth onto her, taking another feed. She felt herself drain into it, every pulsing suck taking more of her, but she was helpless to resist.
After a while her eyes closed and she gave herself to the unremitting waves of pain, holding onto them because that was the only part of her that was truly her own.
As the night deepened she sat still, one foot bloated with infection and the other twisted to the side where the muscle had been wrenched. The layer of fat that had given her the substantial round sleekness had gone, sucked out of her and burned by the creature’s flaring metabolism. It left her angular and sharp, her cheek bones beginning to stand out the way Ginny Marsden’s had done. In less than three days, it had robbed her not only of her baby and her husband, but her very substance.
And still she could do nothing. It held her tight and drained her dry.
By a miracle, she survived the night, the deeply buried part of her re-reeling those deaths on a constant loop.
In the morning, when the sun came up, she came awake from a kind of torpor, slowly aware of the sound of howling dogs. It too was awake and aware. It heard the dogs and knew that the danger was coming. It reached for her and made her move.
Kate Park tottered to her feet and held the thing tight.
The autopsies of Jack Park and his daughter Lucy were carried out simultaneously with the post mortem on the body in the barn. Professor Hartley was called down from St Enoch’s and Simpson Hardingwell arrived within the hour. By this time, the whole of Barloan Harbour had been blocked off and Bert Millar’s squads were methodically making door to door inquiries.
Hartley got a positive identification on Ginny Marsden less than an hour after she’d been carried out of the barn, her limbs jutting like stiffened sticks. The identification needed dental records which were already on hand. Helen Lamont had got them on the third day of her search for the missing girl, just in case they were needed. She hadn’t told the girl’s parents that, to spare their feelings. Now they would hear the worst. John Marsden would face the nightmare of identifying his ruined daughteris corpse.
Had it not been for the x-ray’s of her upper molars, even this first identification would have been difficult, because Hartley discovered the girl had lost eight teeth in her last few days. The gaps in the gums were frayed and swollen with infection. His notes said that the woman appeared to be middle aged and extremely emaciated. Apart from the gaping wound in her belly where the rats had gnawed a tunnel into her liver, he found she had been suffering from acute calcium and collagen deficiency in her skeletal structure. Her skin was wrinkled and her hair thinning, much of it turned grey. He remembered the woman who had died in the mall and reflected on the similarity in their pathology.
In his notes he wrote: “The inflammation in the joints, caused by the abrasion and pitting of the calceous surfaces due to bone degeneration, would have caused acute pain. It is unlikely that this person was able to walk, at least for any distance. Similar deterioration can be seen in the ligaments and joints of hands and feet and out seems to have been spreading to her skull and pelvis where a marked thinning of the skeletal structure is apparent.”
Hartley noted the bite-marks all over the body’s upper torso and the scarring of the skin on and around the breasts and nipples. There was evidence of lactation, although each breast was now wrinkled and empty. Ginny Marsden’s blood was devoid of iron and magnesium, zinc and a host of vitamins. Her white cell count was huge while the number of red cells was vastly below normal. She was seriously anaemic. The muscle of her heart was thin and the aorta had already become porous, leaking her dilute blood slowly into her chest cavity. The mucosal membrane of her trachea and throat had been stripped clean. Some of the bloody lining had already been found on the hay of the barn. Simpson Hardingwell, the microbiologist confirmed the presence of large polypeptide molecules and clusters of unfamiliar cells which later proved to contain unidentifiable chains of genetic DNA cells. Hartley concluded that Ginny Marsden had died from blood loss and oxygen starvation possibly caused by an unknown viral infection.
Simpson Hardingwell took samples of the cell material for later study. Despite being kept frozen in liquid nitrogen, the clusters of cells fragmented, spilling their genetic sugar-chains into a soup of amino acids as soon as the samples were unfrozen. Subsequent attempts to identify the cells proved fruitless.
The autopsy on Jack Park was easier. He died from shock and haemorrhaging caused by the two gunshot wounds, first to his hands and arms and then to his side which took away one kidney, some of his liver and half of a lung.
The baby, little Lucy Park, only five weeks old, had died from blood loss. The cause of that was more difficult to determine. The pathologist found a small and roughly circular gash in her neck where the flesh had been cut away. The striations on the skin and muscle showed a scouring pattern unlike an animal bite. In fact it was unlike anything in the experience of the young pathologist who was working in the room next to Hartley. He wondered if there might be some kind of farm implement which could have drilled such a hole. Tests on the few centilitres of blood left in the tiny body showed a type of anti-coagulant similar in chemical structure to the kind produced by leeches to prevent clotting. He could give no opinion as to how the substance was introduced to the body, other than in a kind of bite. He was unable to offer an opinion as to what kind of creature would bite in such a fashion or be the vector of the blood-thinning compound.
While the autopsies were being carried out in the basement of Lochend Hospital, Bert Millar had set up his incident caravan down in the centre of Barloan Harbour, close to the railway station and his teams were out knocking on doors. Jack and Helen had been seconded, with the agreement of Donal Bulloch. The dog teams had tried again up at the farm but the animals were unable to function properly. They were confused and agitated, and none of them, it seemed, could be persuaded to go down to the woods at the bottom of the slope.
Two teams of searchers combed the thick belt of trees until darkness fell and found nothing on the stretch between Middle Loan farm and the railway line. The Chief Inspector posted guards on the upper perimeter on the assumption that anybody leaving the town, east or west, by road or rail, would be picked up. The road blocks stayed on until the following afternoon.
Nothing turned up, except a poacher called Snib McFee, who was ambushed by two big policemen as he came scuttling quickly down through the trees beside the canal just before sunrise. The unfortunate Snib was running at full tilt along the path and had not expected a welcoming party, as was clear from the look on his face as soon as the hand clamped upon his shoulder. The flashlight beam caught his look of utter terror. His hand went to his chest, and if the light had been better, his face would have been seen to go a sickly bluish colour as he gasped for breath. The sack with four hen peasants, all of them winter-plump fell to the ground with a thump and Snib almost did the same.
“Holy mother of...” he gasped, hauling for breath. “I’m having a fuckin’ heart attack.”
The burly policeman didn’t even hear the protest. All he knew was that a killer was on the loose, a maniac who had shot a man and killed his baby and he was taking no chances. Heart attack or not, he was in no mood to take any chances. He swung his boot, caught Snib in the crotch with such force that the small man, one of a large family of poachers who plagued the landowners for a radius of twenty miles, was lifted three inches above the path. He doubled over, fell to the ground with both hands between his legs. He was suddenly, violently sick. The policeman grabbed him by the collar, dragged his hands away and cuffed them.
“Check the bag,” he rasped, hardly daring to take his eyes off the gasping man. “If there’s a body in it I’m going to cave this bastard’s head in.”
The pheasants rolled out heavily, their necks twisted at odd angles.
It was to be more than an hour before Snib McFee finally got someone to listen to him and by that time his testicles had swollen to such an extent that he thought they might burst. Sergeant Holleran wanted to lock him up, being the local cop and bearing the considered opinion that poaching was just one degree beneath treason in the eyes of the law. He and Jack Park had gone fishing together up in the tarns on the hillside in the summer months. He’d sat out on many a night trying to catch the McFee boys.
A valuable hour was wasted before anybody listened to what the little poacher had to say.
Snib had been after the pheasants at Wester Farrow estate where shooting parties gathered every autumn and winter for some of the best woodland pheasants and high-moor grouse. The land was fenced and well patrolled, but the quick and the brave could get in, snare a couple of pheasants as they roosted in the branches of a thicket, and be out again long before anybody noticed. It was simple enough. The pheasants never flew at night, and a noose of wire on the end of a pole would bring them down without a sound as they slept and the birds would buy drinking money for any long weekend.
He’d heard the barking of the dogs in the distance, a couple of miles west at Middle Loan, but he paid them no heed. Big Jack Park was probably out for the foxes, and maybe even he’d persuaded the gamekeeper at Wester Farrow to come along for the fun. Snib preferred to hunt what he could eat or sell.
In and out. He’d been quick and he’d been quiet. Just a flash of light from his maglight and another bird would come down. Four was enough for a night. It had been cold and the wind had shaken the trees in the early hours of the morning, dropping the canopy of snow down in flurries and cascades which sounded like footfalls in the dark. The dark did not bother Snib. It was his cover. In and out without a sound.
He came down through the pines, following the edges of the forest and the high fence until he came to the break he and his brother had cut weeks before, hidden by a clump of rhododendrons. Through that and into the beech forest, he had only a mile or so to home if he used the railway track. Down on the level, he followed the straight of the disused spur-line, his feet now silent on the thick snow that had managed to get down through the trees. The wind was still strong, rattling the bare twigs high overhead, but down on the track he was protected from the worst of it. The pheasants were still warm against his back.
He reached the old station, cupping a cigarette in his hand, and followed the slope up to the abandoned platform. Here, it was more exposed and he went round the side of the old ticket office and stood in the lee for a moment, drawing hard on the smoke and looking forward to the sharp burn of a dram of whisky when he got home. He finished his smoke, hefted the sack again and turned round the corner, into the wind, passing the shuttered window which rattled softly in the bluster. He was just beyond the window when he heard the noise.
He froze, one foot still suspended in the air, the way he would while poaching, if he suspected the keeper was close. One wrong foot in the forest could crack a twig and draw attention.
Snib froze, but at the same time, all the hairs on the back of his neck suddenly crawled and the skin down his back puckered in a cold twist.
The noise was just a groan, hardly heard above the whine of the wind through the branches, but it had stopped Snib in his tracks. Very slowly, he put his foot down onto the overlay of soft snow on the platform, making not a sound. His heart had speeded up, quite inexplicably, and something inside him wanted him be off and away along the track. Snib was a creature at home with the night, and at home with the trees in winter. Perhaps that gave him an added sense, an alertness to threat or danger. Whatever it was, it gave him a chill ripple of alarm.
Despite that, when the soft groan, a noise like a whimper, came again, he could not prevent his feet from taking him back two steps towards the window. He leaned towards the dusty glass which after all the years of abandonment was still intact. Inside, it was black as tar. He caught a flicker of his own reflection looming out at him and started back in alarm. The feeling of sudden menace inflated.
The sound came for a third time, a little louder and he could not resist peering back again. He drew out the little torch and twisted it until the bream shone, then raised it to the class. What he expected, he could not have said. Maybe a fox, bleeding from a gin-trap bite, possibly even a roe deer trapped inside. He swung the thin beam round, following its pallid disc on the far wall, a small moon arcing across the flat blank sky. It passed a dark shape, moved on. He snapped it back.
The noise came again, that eerie, low moan and this time the ripple down his back was a physical shudder of apprehension. A dread sense of inexplicable danger settled on his shoulders. Yet still he peered in. The torch beam flicked back onto the shapeless huddle.
The woman’s face stared blindly at him. The light reflected back from bloodshot eyes, making them look eerily pink and somehow blind. Her mouth was open, slack and imbecilic. For a moment he thought she was dead until she moved and the moan escaped her. Despite the alarm, Snib almost called out to her, for, poacher though he might be, he was not a bad fellow and would never leave anyone, human or animal, lying hurt.
He almost called out to her, until he saw something move just under her chin. He lowered the beam and saw she was holding a bundle of cloth up against herself. She blinked and in the dark the torchlight caught the glint when her eyes opened again.
It was a baby, Snib realised and he let out a long breath. Just a baby. She was holding the bundle against herself the way a mother does with a child, keeping it warm. He raised the light to her face again, wondering what the hell a woman was doing out in the abandoned spur line station in the dead of a winter’s mooring. The light caught her eyes and in that moment they stared right at him and the look they conveyed was one of absolute and utter loss. Instantly the sensation of menace fell on him again. He lowered the light once more and saw the baby’s head squirm round as if it was trying to free itself from the shawl. The cloth fell away.
A wrinkled forehead puckered and a thick lid opened. A large, flat, red eye stared into his and he felt a dreadful jolt of baneful contact through the glass. Snib’s heart somersaulted into his throat. He jerked back and the flashlight flicked out. The pane of glass went black.
Snib took one step backwards, breathing hard. His foot slipped on the snow and he went down on one knee. Just as quickly he was back up again. Inside the ticket office he could hear a muffled thumping sound and then a pattering scrape. It sounded like dog’s nails on a hard floor. He reached out a hand to steady himself, turning once again towards the window.
A nightmare face pressed up on the other side of the glass. Two great red eyes bored into his. He saw a wrinkled demon face and a round, puckered little mouth with thin, warted lips that pulled back over a circle of glassy shards. In that instant he believed he was looking at a devil from hell.
“Oh mammy,” he yelped, unaware that he had made a sound, and oblivious of the fact that at the age of thirty, he had reverted to the language of his childhood when he had called on his mother to protect him from any hurt.
On the other side of the thin glass, the little beast glared at him. A grey, thin hand came up and scratched at the pane and the lips wavered back from the circlet of teeth. Inside that circle the light flashed on another set of spines. For a second he thought he must be going mad.
Then, behind the glaring nightmare face, he heard a woman’s loud and hollow cry, a sound so pitiful and desperate that even on the crest of his sudden primitive fear it touched a chord within him and he knew he had heard the cry of the damned.
The thing turned, showing him a flat profile and a receding jaw topped by that alien, rounded mouth. As soon as its attention had swept away from him, he could move again. Without a thought and without a sound, Snib was off and running. He slipped on the snow on the far slope of the old platform, rolled, got to his feet, trying to keep the scream inside of him. He scurried along the track, as fast as his feet could take him and if he’d been thinking at all, he’d have dropped the sack, but his dread was so great, the fear of a gargoyle-faced devil coming after him through the dark of the trees, that the thought never crossed his mind. He went haring along the track until he reached the turn, threw himself to the left, feet thundering on the hard-pack under the beech trees and raced downhill, narrowly missing all of the tree-trunks on the slope. His breath panted, loud as the old steam trains that had once run on the old line and his heart was kicking like a horse inside his ribs. There was no sound behind him, but he dared not stop to look. All he wanted to do was get home and lock the door and get up to is bed and pull the blankets over his head and wait until light.
Then a hand came reaching out of the shadows to clamp upon his shoulder and Snib truly thought he was going to die on the spot. When the foot came up and smashed into his groin, the pain was so great that he hoped he would die.