booksnew/build/incubus/OEBPS/incubus10.xhtml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
  "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<meta name="generator" content=
"HTML Tidy for Windows (vers 14 February 2006), see www.w3.org" />
<title>1</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="imperaWeb.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type=
"application/vnd.adobe-page-template+xml" href=
"page-template.xpgt" />
</head>
<body>
<div id="text">
<div class="section" id="xhtmldocuments">
<h2>10</h2>
<p>"She always came home, or if she was staying out she'd always
call. But she never came home again and her dinner got burned in
the oven."</p>
<p>Neither of them knew it, but the old woman was repeating almost
word for word what Virginia Marsden's mother had told Helen Lamont.
Her name was Catriona McDougall. She had just been told that her
daughter had died in a shopping mall in a city the old woman had
never visited. The voice was tremulous and quavery and every now
and again, it would break off into a sudden silence as if the air
had been cut off. The pain was thirty years old but it had not
diminished in any way. Any comparison between the old woman's grief
and what Winnie Marsden was suffering would show not a whit of
difference.</p>
<p>David had driven across rolling country to get to this village,
an old place where the buildings had crow-stepped gables and the
streets were narrow and rutted from past decades of trundling
cartwheels and iron-shod hooves. The village was a huddle of houses
in the lee of a hill that might have been the spoil heap of an old
mine. The people were squat, broad shouldered, like mining people,
and their accents flat and dour. A small church had a graveyard in
the lee, sheltered from the wind, where old headstones canted and
slumped, and David knew that if he scraped the moss from them he
would read names that would be the same as the ones on the doors of
the low houses.The town was clean, scoured by cold blasts from the
sea a few miles distant, but country-clean, as if it had some pride
left, unlike the rest of the mining villages that had been left
forlorn and dying in the past years.</p>
<p>The old couple lived in a small cottage tacked on to a row of
houses off what could have been the main street. The house backed
on to sloping fields where the grass was weighed down by hard
frost. There was no sign of life in the fields, and few passers by
in the streets. David got the impression that this was a self
contained place, where people huddled together, like the houses
they lived in, and kept their own council. An outsider would stick
out in a village like this.</p>
<p>Despite that, the old woman, old Catriona McDougall had invited
him in, pressing herself against the wall to let his bulk pass her
tiny frame in the narrow hallway and had made him a cup of tea and
offered thick scones. Her mantelpiece bore a picture of a
shy-looking girl with three tiny moles in a line on her cheek.
David knew he would have to tell an old woman that her daughter was
dead.</p>
<p>"Never came home," the old man, said, parroting his wife. He was
sitting hunched in his seat, a rickle of big bones in a hollow
skin, pale blue rheumy eyes fixed on his massive, faltering hands
lying like dead roots on his knees. "Not never." His face was
quivering very slightly, as if there was an awesome tension within,
but David knew it was the palsied tremble of senility.</p>
<p>"It was in all the papers," the old woman said, "and we had the
police here day in, day out, always coming to ask another question,
or show us a picture of this man or that one to see if we could
spot somebody that might have done it, but it never made a bit of
difference. She never came home again. She just vanished. It was
about the same time as the baby was killed up there at Duncryne
Bridge.</p>
<p>"Not never," the gaunt man repeated, though his expression
didn't change.</p>
<p>"It broke him in half," Catriona McDougall went on, nodding in
her husband's direction. Her shaky voice still held the trace of
the highland accent she'd grown up with, the soft lilt of the west
coast. "Broke us all in two and that's the truth. She was our only
one, you see. It was a great shame that we could never have another
one, but Callum said it was fine, as long as she was healthy and
whole. He said no matter what we'd love her just like a whole tribe
of them. She was our only one and she never came home."</p>
<p>The old woman was about ninety. She was tiny in comparison with
the huge scarecrow of a man who sat motionless but quivering on the
seat by the small coal fire. Outside, a smatter of hailstones
rapped against the window, driven in the east wind that came
straight over from Siberia and down across the North Sea to chill
the whole of the shoreline on the Firth of Forth. The wind moaned
down the chimney and the old woman reached over to pull the heavy
blanket around her helpless husband's shoulders, gently smoothing
down the old woollen fabric with a stroke of her hand which
conveyed, in that one soft movement, the enormous love and loyalty
they'd shared during the good times and the barren days and still
burned strong in her heart. The capacity for human love, David
thought right then, must be unfathomable.</p>
<p>He was reminded of old Mrs Whalen, a few doors down from where
the dead woman, this woman's daughter, had lived. There was the
same compassion and concern, the same old, warm love that bound two
people together. David Harper could only marvel at the strange and
powerful drives that kept two people linked so unbreakably long
after the flush and the heat were gone. He wondered it such a thing
could happen to him. There was a difference though, between the two
old women who looked after their ruined old men. Mrs Whalen had
brought eight children into the world and raised them through the
good and bad times and seen them off into their own lives, reaping
the harvest of grandchildren.</p>
<p>Old Catriona McDougall had given birth to the one, a difficult
and harrowing birth that had almost killed her and the baby both
and she'd never been able to have any more.</p>
<p>And then that one, whom she'd cared for beyond the normal span
of years of motherly care, had been taken from her and her
mother-love still burned within her, a torch of sadness and hope
and prayer and need that would never be extinguished.</p>
<p>"After Thelma went, Heather was never the same again. They'd got
so close, and it was Thelma who got her out of herself. You know
what I mean. Heather was always the shy one." Catriona McDougall
pointed to the picture of her daughter on the mantelpiece, right in
the centre, in contrast to Mrs Whalen's array of descendants. The
three little birthmarks, set in a slant like the stars in Orion's
belt, and equally spaced apart, were exactly like the ones in the
other photograph which he'd seen of the dead woman, eyes half-open
and blind in death, on the slab. The moles provided the only visual
similarity, though there had been other identifying marks. Like the
picture in the old newspaper cutting, the young woman in the
picture looked nothing like the raddled, oddly proportioned corpse
in the mortuary.</p>
<p>"Oh, don't get us wrong. Thelma was wild in her way and
sometimes we'd worry that she'd lead our girl astray, but Heather
told us she was old enough to make up her own mind, and it was
true. We just never wanted to see her getting hurt, or into
trouble, you know?"</p>
<p>David agreed that he understood.</p>
<p>"Never came back," the old man chimed in a voice that was as
hollow as his skin.</p>
<p>"But after what happened, she just seemed to crumble. It was
like the light went out of her life, and that's what happened to
Callum here. The light went out of his, so I lost the both of them
really, more or less. They never ever found her, so they could
never say for certain what happened. Oh, sure, everybody said it
was the same beast that killed Thelma must have done away with
her."</p>
<p>The old woman's eyes filled suddenly with tears and she broke
off, turning to dab a small embroidered handkerchief there.</p>
<p>"I couldn't bear to think about it. We knew what had happened to
the poor girl. Stabbed and mutilated that was, it was dreadful,
just animal, and if they'd caught the man who did it, he'd have
been torn limb from limb by the folk around here. But they never
found him and they never found Heather. The police asked if maybe
she would have run off with the man and I remember I got angry and
nearly threw them out of the house for ever suggesting such a
terrible thing. Thelma was younger than our Heather, but she was
good for her, we realised later, because we'd brought her up close,
you know. Sheltered. Because she was the only one we had and we
were always scared of her getting hurt. But Thelma really was good
for her and she'd never have had anything to do with anybody who
hurt her friend.</p>
<p>"It was after that the police, yon big man that Callum knew from
the bowling club, Superintendent Cutcheon, told us that it was
likely she'd been killed and we shouldn't expect to see her
again."</p>
<p>The old woman looked over at David who sat patiently, holding a
saucer in one hand and a half-empty cup in the other. "But I never
gave up hope, for there was something inside of me that could still
feel her. Oh, I could never explain it to anybody and I can't
explain it to you neither. You don't know what a mother has inside
of her. I knew from the moment..." She stopped and looked over at
the ruin of her husband, slack mouthed and empty eyed, and a look
of wonderful tenderness came over her face. The love conveyed in
that one look was so powerful that in that instant David could see
the young woman behind the wrinkles of the ancient face.</p>
<p>"....I knew from the moment she was conceived. That's hard to
believe, but I knew then that I was carrying her. She was a part of
me from that night, a living part of me. I felt her grow. What does
the bible say? I felt her <em>quicken</em> in me and I said a
prayer of thanks. Callum, he just laughed the next day, the big
lump and he was off to the war two days later before the sickness
started and he'd have laughed on the other side of his face if I'd
have got a hold of him then. But I'm telling you, Mr Harper, you
know when a part off you has died and I never felt that until,
now."</p>
<p>David raised his head as if startled. "Pardon?"</p>
<p>"I was making the dinner, just a piece of boiled fish, for
that's about all he can manage these days, and I was bending down
to take it off the stove when I fell down. I was there on the floor
and I thought this was it, that my maker was calling on me while I
was making the dinner and I thought it was not a good time and then
I got scared thinking of what Callum would do because he'd just be
sitting there and never know what happened."</p>
<p>Mrs McDougall dabbed her eyes again and sniffed. "But then,
right at that moment, I saw Heather standing in front of me, just
the way she was. She was waving to me like she did in the mornings
when she went off to work and then she was gone and she really was
gone. I couldn't feel her inside of me and I cried and cried, just
like I'm doing now, silly old woman. I don't know what happened,
but since that moment, not even a week ago, I've known she was
gone. Maybe I just couldn't admit it to myself all those years, but
I don't think so. The light just went out and the torch inside of
me that would have lit her steps back home went out along with
it."</p>
<p>She stopped sniffing and turned her eyes on David. They still
glistened, but they were still bright with intelligence.</p>
<p>"And then you turn up on my door asking questions," she
said.</p>
<p>"The bridge," he said. "That's what I wanted to ask about. It's
in the old files."</p>
<p>"Not so old, Mister Harper. It's as clear as yesterday to me.
And probably to him an' all," she said, nodding in her husband's
direction. "For he isn't in the here and the now."</p>
<p>She looked up, remembering. "That's where they found Thelma.
Hardly buried at all, just covered with leaves and all cut up by
that madman. He could still be living, but I'd sooner he was
burning in hell, may God forgive me. It was up by the bridge at
Duncryne. It's not far away, just a half a mile along the road and
then a sharp turn to the right that takes you up the valley. It was
Lord Duncryne built it in the old days, before my time even, and
that's a <em>wheen</em> of years ago, I can tell you."</p>
<p><em>I'm going to go up to the bridge tomorrow, because wherever
Thelma is, she'll be laughing and she'll make me laugh
again.</em></p>
<p>The lonely, rending words in the diary came back to him. Heather
McDougall had decided to go up the bridge and it was clear from the
diary that she'd intended to throw herself off and drown herself.
He hadn't been up there yet, though his curiosity would drag him in
that direction, nothing surer, but he knew beyond a shadow of a
doubt that there was deep water under that bridge and if she had
jumped off she would have drowned.</p>
<p>His thoughts flicked back to the rest of the story in the
newspaper, the tag-on filling around the tale of the missing girl.
There had been another death at the bridge, and something more
besides. Somebody had gone over the parapet and had almost drowned
in the pool there way back in the sixties, at the same time as
Heather McDougall had disappeared.</p>
<p>Now he knew that she had not been abducted. Not murdered.
Neither had she thrown herself from the bridge in a despairing
reaction to the brutal death of her friend.</p>
<p>She had simply disappeared and she had been gone for thirty
years, using her dead friend's name, living, for some of the time
in a damp and cramped little apartment in a city on the other side
of the country.</p>
<p>And this mystery planted its daughter mysteries, more conundrums
and riddles. Old Catriona McDougall, a highland woman who had the
lilt of Gaelic in her voice had obviously inherited a touch of the
second sight. She had never truly believed her daughter was dead.
Not until only a few nights past, the very night when the woman
travelling under Thelma Quigley's name had fallen to the floor of
the mall.</p>
<p>The thoughts were tumbling and whirling now, too many questions
and no answers at all. A part of him considered it would be better
if he dropped the whole thing, went back to Donal Bulloch and
Professor Hardingwell with the information he had gathered and at
least allow the police in this side of the country to close an old
case that was still technically open.</p>
<p>Old Catriona might have had some of the second sight, but he too
had an extra sense. He called it a hunch, an intuition. Whatever it
was, it was sounding of an alarm bell inside his head and prickling
the hairs of his forearms. He had always had faith in his hunches
and he decided he had to trust the feeling now.</p>
<p>______</p>
<p>Helen Lamont knocked on the door and waited in the cold for a
reply. She could have sent a uniform patrol round to check up on
the address, but it was on her way back to the station and after
seeing the despair in Winnie Marsden's eyes, she had decided to
make a special effort. David had gone through to Edinburgh that
morning while she was getting the photograph copied for inclusion
in the bulletin for the beat men and the patrol squads to show
around the doors.</p>
<p>There would be a lot of footslogging on this one, she realised,
because Ginny Marsden had been popular and she'd been busy.
Everybody she knew, from colleagues to friends, to the girls at the
aerobics class and the night school would have to be interviewed.
The girls at Kellacher and Frick, the solicitor's office down on
the Riverside, had been little help, until the very end, but that
hadn't been their fault. They were just teenagers with their minds
on Christmas and boys and nail varnish and little else. None of
them were at night school for a business diploma.</p>
<p>"Oh, what about Celia?" one of them asked.</p>
<p>"Celia Barker?" Helen had taken a note of the name at the
Marsden house. "Isn't she on holiday?"</p>
<p>"Yes, she is. Greece I think. I'm sure it's Greece. Or maybe
Ibiza. Oh, it doesn't matter. But Ginny was thinking about going
with them and then she changed her mind."</p>
<p>"And?" Helen asked encouragingly, hurrying the girl along.</p>
<p>"And I think she asked Ginny to feed her pets. I'm sure she did.
They were good pals, and Celia always got somebody to look after
the animals. She's got a cat and a goldfish with funny names. Minky
and Dinky. No, Mork and Mindy, but I don't know which is
which."</p>
<p>Helen took a note of the address. She'd planned to ask about the
Barker girl, simply because she was Ginny Marsden's closest friend
and there had been a possibility, a long shot maybe, that she had
changed her mind at the last moment and was now too scared to phone
her parents to tell them she was on an island in the Mediterranean.
It was a long shot that had bottomed out anyway. The girls
confirmed that Celia had flown off the day before the Marsden's had
put their daughter's dinner in the oven to keep it warm. Ginny had
been at work all day and the other girls in the office reckoned she
had gone down to the mall for some last minute shopping. The one
who remembered the pets' names recalled walking down to the corner
with her. The description she gave of the missing girl matched the
one Ginny's mother had given.</p>
<p>Helen jotted the date and time down in her book. She looked at
the figures, drew her eyes away, looked again. Something tried to
snag her mind. She reached for the vague connection, failed to
grasp it. It would come back later, she told herself.</p>
<p>The line of low houses on Dunlop Street were shaded by pollarded
lime trees which protected them just a little from the swirling
frost. It was getting late by the time Helen got there and while
she would have killed for a hot cup of tea she was conscientious
enough to get out of the car and push open the wooden gate on the
garden of the house at the end of the row. There were no lights on
in this house, or the one next to it, and Helen knew it was
unlikely there would be anything here worth bothering about, but
she had already called in her intended movements and it was best to
do this step by step. Ginny had apparently intended to go to her
friend's house some time to feed the cat, so it was logical to
check it out. The possibility that she had a secret boyfriend her
parents and Tony didn't know about had occurred to her. This place
might have been the ideal place for a clandestine meeting.</p>
<p>"Rather catch you getting a leg-under than find you lying in the
bushes," Helen said almost aloud, speaking to the image of the
missing girl she had got from the photograph. She chuckled to
herself. Better that, better all round than put Tony through he
hours of questions he'd face if Ginny didn't turn up very soon. He
was next on her agenda, right at the top of the list. The poor sod
didn't know what was about to hit him.</p>
<p>She knocked on the door and waited in the cold for a reply,
feeling the rasp of the winter chill in her throat.</p>
<p>Something scuffled inside the house. It was just a small scrape
of noise, but it was unexpected and made Helen jump. She knocked
again.</p>
<p>"Hello?" She bent down to peer through the letterbox. Inside
there was darkness and shadows.</p>
<p>A floorboard creaked.</p>
<p>Helen's heart rate edged up.</p>
<p>There had been a noise, a movement. She had heard it twice. She
stood up, wondering what to do. She started to bend to look through
the letterbox then changed her mind. The noise had been small, just
a scrape of sound, so it was probably the cat. But there was a
chance that there was someone behind the door. She straightened up,
thinking, then turned and went back to the car for a
flashlight.</p>
<p>"Call in," she told herself, but another voice said that would
be stupid and could make her look foolish. The torch was big and
heavy in her hand. The gate creaked when it opened again, the
hinges contracted with the cold. Instead of going to the door, she
walked along the flagstones towards the window. The curtains were
mostly drawn, but there was a space she could peer through. The
beam reflected from the glass, but she shaded her eyes with a hand
bridged from her brow to the pane. Inside a long couch and a small
coffee-table were visible, more. Back at the door she knocked again
and, standing back she pushed the letter-flap open with her
fingers, keeping at arms length just in case something sharp and
blinding came lunging through the gap. It had happened before,
everybody knew that, a stab through a letterbox that had punctured
eye and brain. Only nobody knew <em>who</em> it had happened
to.</p>
<p>"Ginny Marsden?" she asked. The words were swallowed up in the
darkness inside. She waited a moment or two, then repeated the
girl's name. There was no reply.</p>
<p>Helen was about to raise herself up from her crouch in front of
the slot in the door where the flashlight beam angled through and
found only a shadowed hallway with a tall coat stand on which a
coat and hat made an eerie representation of a hanged man.</p>
<p>Then the sound came again. A little creak as if a slow foot had
gone down on a board, putting just enough weight for the old wood
to protest.</p>
<p>A shiver went up Helen's back.</p>
<p><em>Call in!</em></p>
<p>She thought about it again. It could be a burglar, somebody
who'd seen the curtains drawn for a day or two, somebody local who
knew the girl was off on holiday. Possibly it could be Ginny
Marsden herself, caught with another boy perhaps?</p>
<p><em>Call in.</em> It was always safer. If necessary she could
have a squad around here. She could even get a warrant to have the
place searched. But she could see the look on the patrolmen's faces
when they turned up, the big boys, the macho cavalry, who weren't
afraid of noises in the dark. She cramped down on the mental
insistence. She could do this. It was only a house.</p>
<p>Slowly she let her fingers draw back from the hinged flap. The
force of the spring made it snap against the frame and she stood
up. Diamonds of frost were dancing in the torchlight and her breath
plumed out into the cold night air. She swung the beam to the left,
following the path around the side of the house and then she
followed the beam, keeping it low and covering most of it with her
hand to make it less obtrusive. A wicker gate at the side opened
without any problem and hardly a rustle from the scraggly
honeysuckle festooned around it. She reached the back of the small
house. Overhead, an overflow pipe grew a long and deadly spike of
ice suspended over her like a sword. She moved out from under just
in case, past a small window which was shuttered by venetian
blinds. Here at the back of the house, the ice crystallising in the
air became a thicker mist curling in around the eaves and the
downpipe. It softened all the outlines but it crowded in along with
the shadows, moving in thick translucent tendrils and slowly
billowing rolls of fog.</p>
<p><em>Get a hold of yourself Lamont,</em> she ordered herself. It
was only a small terrace house on the end of a row. There were no
suspicious circumstances other than the fact that a girl had gone
missing. A cat-flap was a pale white against the dark of the door
and she remembered now. <em>Mork or Mindy.</em> The other was a
goldfish, according to the girl in the lawyer's office. Helen tried
the handle, turning it very slowly, pleased and somehow relieved
that it made no sound at all. She knew she should knock, identify
herself, but she tried the handle anyway, assuming the faint scrape
of noise had probably been made by the cat.</p>
<p>The door opened with brushing rasp. She froze, taken by
surprise. Her breath plumed out again and she realised it had
backed up unconsciously. Helen thumbed the torch, keeping the beam
down on the ground and swung it slowly forwards, through the two
inch gasp. The floor was tiled. She waited for another five
breaths, ignoring the nagging mental command to call in and get a
uniformed patrol round to the door.</p>
<p>She swung the door open until she stood in the frame. The
kitchen was cold and empty. Beside the sink there was a bowl with a
name printed on the side. A collection of pots hung from hooks on
the wall. A dishtowel had slipped to the floor beside the sink,
black and white on the red tiles, just out of the direct beam of
the light. Helen took a step forward, two. She was inside.</p>
<p>The mist followed her in, twisting creepily in the light, like
an uninvited, insinuating ghost.</p>
<p>A small noise came from beyond the door, which was not quite
closed. Just a slither of sound, fabric on fabric and it was
followed by the faintest mewling sound, hardly more than a
squeak.</p>
<p><em>Damned cat,</em> she breathed. It was the cat. Of course it
was the cat. A strange relief oozed inside of her, draining away
the tension. She turned, moving towards the door.</p>
<p>"Here puss," she called softly, in the tone that every human
being uses. "Puss puss puss." She pursed her lips and made little
kissing sounds. She reached a hand forward to push the door open,
expecting the cat to come squeezing through the gap. Just at that
moment, something registered in her brain. She froze again.</p>
<p>It was the dish towel on the floor beside the sink, a black and
white shape crumpled on the floor. She was in the act of turning
towards it when a sudden rap of noise came from down in the
darkness of the hallway beyond the door. In that instant the skin
puckered down the length of her back as if a cold finger had
trailed between her shoulderblades. The flashlight beam jerked. She
was still in the act of turning when the light caught the scrap of
cloth on the floor.</p>
<p>It was no dishcloth. The cat was lying sprawled against the
little hatch under the sink. A puddle of blood had pooled out
around its head, black against the light colour of the tiles,
glistening in the beam. It was lying on its side, half turned so
that one paw jutted up, tensed in the final spasm of death, every
sharp claw unretracted, forced out in vicious little curves. Its
lips were drawn back in a death-snarl, pulled so tightly that the
sharp teeth were clearly visible top and bottom as if the animal
was frozen in a screech of hate. It made the little cat fierce and
feral in death.</p>
<p>But there was more to it than that and despite the little rap of
sound that had impinged upon her senses, a somehow menacing knock
in the still darkness beyond the door, part of her mind was clearly
and completely focused on the dead animal. It was not the yawning
scream fixed in rigor mortis or the hooked claw that made it look
as if it was caught in the act of a final vicious swipe.</p>
<p>It was the dark and ragged pits where the pet's eyes had been.
The head was twisted right round on the neck so that it stared up
towards the ceiling, but its stare was blind and cavernous. There
were no eyes, nothing but deep holes on either side of what once
had been a cute button nose. The eyes were gone, and in the gaping
recesses there was nothing but the glint of congealed blood or some
other glutinous fluid that caught the light of the torch and threw
it back. A flap of skin had been peeled away from the cheek, skin,
fur and muscle, leaving a hole where the bone showed through.</p>
<p>"Oh my..." she muttered, trying to draw her eyes away from the
mutilated little animal.</p>
<p>Down in the hallway another board creaked and the sense of
danger simply exploded inside her. She turned away from the door,
heart suddenly pounding, one part of her mind fixed on the cat with
its eyes torn out of its black sockets and another focused on the
noises down the hallway and yet another, deeper part of her mind
was suddenly awash with the fear of the unknown and the uncanny and
the supernatural. The child-fear of creatures in the dark swelled
within her, threatening to blot out everything but the need to turn
and run.</p>
<p>"Get a grip," she hissed to herself, trying to make her suddenly
pounding heart go quiet. The rush of blood soughed in her ears and
her throat clicked dryly.</p>
<p>It couldn't be the cat. It could be a burglar, someone caught in
the wrong place at the wrong time, surprised in the act of
ransacking the empty house.</p>
<p><em>And if it's only a burglar why are you so damned
scared,</em> she demanded to know. A burglar she could handle. She
snicked the torch off, though it still shook in her hand, and
gripped the handle tight raising it protectively to shoulder
height.</p>
<p><em>Not a burglar.</em> Housebreakers didn't pluck the eyes from
pet cats. <em>Then what?</em> For some reason she could not have
explained, she did not think of <em>who.</em></p>
<p>Her heart wouldn't slow down despite her best efforts. The
powerful occult sense inflated and she tried to flatten it down,
but it was uncanny and unexpected and so primitive that her
conscious mind could not squash it. Her legs were quivering with
the tension of it, trembling with awful apprehension. It was
completely incomprehensible, inexplicable, but it was real.</p>
<p>"This is the police," she called out, forcing the words through
her teeth and they sounded very quaky there in the dark of the
kitchen.</p>
<p>"Do not move, do <em>not</em> try to run." Helen went into
professional mode and that made her voice a bit stronger. She held
the flashlight tight and put one finger on the button ready to make
it shine. She took a step forward, through the doors and into the
hall.</p>
<p>Something mewled. It was a faint sound from down in the dark.
There was a rough edge to it, like the cry of a small animal. It
repeated, a little louder. Helen's heart thudded again, making
itself flop inside her chest. She took a second step forward,
another.</p>
<p>The smell came then, a powerful wave of scent billowing in the
dark, thick as the mist that had followed her inside. She
recognised it instantly. It was the smell of the house where the
dead woman had lived in the clutter of ripped and torn blankets and
the mounds of toy animals with their beady little eyes all
reflecting the light.</p>
<p>Her eyes stung and her nose smarted and her throat tried to
close itself against the stench. She blinked hard, trying to clear
the sudden spark of tears that made the dark shadows waver.
Something scraped roughly down there and the sound registered in a
series off dwindling vibrations, as if every element of the noise
had been slowed down and separated into a rasping chain of
sound.</p>
<p>Helen pulled back and the smell was everywhere, so thick it
could almost be felt, much stronger than it had been in Thelma
Quigley's house. She turned, trying not to breath it in, but
sensing the musky particles settling on her skin and entering her
pores. She was in the act of turning when colours erupted in her
wavering vision. They simply exploded in a series of shimmering
pulses, as if all of the rods and cones in the receptors at the
back of her eyes had fired up simultaneously. The colours danced in
her vision, sparkling and luminous.</p>
<p><em>Poison!</em> The recognition hit her the way it had come to
David Harper in the other house when he had dragged her to the
window. It had to be some sort of nerve gas.</p>
<p>The colours expanded in putrid shades of orange and yellow,
lava-reds and pulsing purples. Shapes swelled and fragmented. A
green face went whirling past her eyes, dripping sparks of watery
silver.</p>
<p>A child screamed far off in the distance, a high and piercing
sound that went on and on and on, ululating madly before tailing of
in a series of heartrending sobs. Off to the right, the sound of a
blocked sink, the sound she had hated as a child, came gurgling up
through the floor, rekindling an old fear of swamps and wet
darkness. Her foot kicked against the door and the thud chimed in
her ears in a loop of sound that echoed from wall to wall. She
turned away, heart kicking madly against her ribs and her fingers
paralysed on the flashlight, unable to make it switch on. The sink
by the window twisted and warped out of shape and the taps turned
to powder and crumpled into the maw of the drain. The cat on the
floor rolled over and stood up on its hind legs and reached out
that one paw, each of the nails hooked to rend and slash, while in
the blank sockets of its eyes she could see a phosphorescent light
glaring balefully.</p>
<p>Helen tried to call out again but there were no words. Her
throat managed a dry croak before it closed over in a strangled
clench. In the dark she saw her grandmother turn towards her, face
cobwebbed and crawling with spiders from some long forgotten but
somehow living nightmare. she heard her name called over and over
again in the far distance by a boy she had seen killed by a truck
on South Street next to the river. The cat was dancing to fiddle
music and insects were crawling all over her skin. Maggots came
humping from the spikes swelling to ripeness on the shimmering door
while down in the dark of the hallway, where the colours faded to
deep black., something dreadful was coming.</p>
<p>Her stretched senses reached and touched something alien and
scabrous.</p>
<p>She was still turning, trying to flee from the dark when her
reeling mind brushed against another and even although her thoughts
were whirling in a dreadful turbulence as the axons and dendrites
in her brain were sparked off in uncontrolled and uncontrollable
shivery pulses in the middle of her nightmare hallucination, she
still felt the cold and repellent touch of another mind.</p>
<p>She tried to scream and nothing happened. Inside her chest her
lungs felt filled with fire and her teeth ground together causing
sparks to leap from one surface to another. Her hair whipped like
tentacles and she began to fall in the dark.</p>
<p>Then a dreadful <em>jittering</em> thing came rushing at
her.</p>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>