booksnew/source/incubus-source/CC31.txt

<h2>31</h2>
<p>“That’s the fourth time this week,” Helen said as David rewound the tape on the answering machine. “I never thought she was God’s gift to intellectuals, but I thought at least she’d have got the message by now.”</p>

<p>The tape clicked to a halt. Helen’s eyes held a mixture of pity, contempt, and a flash of anger too. “You’ll have to tell her.”</p>

<p>“I did tell her,” David said. “I can’t seem to get through to her at all. She’s got herself convinced that everything’s going to be sweetness and light again.”</p>

<p>“She’s got a problem, David. She really needs help if she can’t get it into her head that it’s over between you.”</p>

<p>“And I could surely do with the break.”</p>

<p>“Me too. She’ll have to understand that it’s you and me from here on. It’s not easy maybe, but it’s a tough old world. To the victor, the spoils.” She gave him a look that measured him up and down, managed a half smile.</p>

<p>“Even if the spoils are spoiled and don’t amount to much.”</p>

<p>She ruffled his hair with a fast hand. “Tell her. After what we’ve been through, we’re sticking together. You won’t get rid of me easily.”</p>

<p>“Or at all,” David said, “That’s a promise.”</p>

<p>June’s ever more demanding messages were becoming more than an irritation. She’d sent him a mass of flowers while he was in hospital and then arrived in person, elbowing brusquely, and with obvious hostility past Helen. David had been mildly embarrassed then, but now he was becoming concerned, not for himself, though he wished she would take no for an answer in the hope that they could all get back to some semblance of normality, if anything ever could be normal since the frantic conclusion in the freezing, murky water of the canal. David had dreamed of the thing for nights after that, still did, though he never told Helen. He didn’t know that she was keeping the same secret from him. The thing still preyed on their minds all through the spring months. </p>

<p>Neither would June let him go. He’d had the Christmas cards, and an expensive Gucci watch which he’d almost been tempted to send back by return of post, but that would only have been an insult. He still felt pangs of guilt that he hadn’t been able to give June what she wanted and never would. She’d sent him the valentine cards. She’d sent him letters. She called him at the office and she left messages on the tape at home. She contrived to bump into him in the street and every time he met her she had that desperate, hopeful, needful look on her face that made him feel at once guilty and repulsed.</p>

<p>“She’s one creepy lady,” Helen finally said. “She can’t control her emotions, and if she thinks she’s going to have your kids, then she’s got another think coming. You’d better watch or you’ll end up in a fatal attraction scenario. You don’t keep a rabbit she might be tempted to cook?”</p>

<p>“I’ll tell her,” David said. “I will. Honestly.”</p>

<p>“Good man,” Helen told him, favouring him with a quick smile. “If anybody’s going to have your kids, I want first crack at it.”</p>

<p>He spun round so fast he felt a harsh crick in his neck.</p>

<p>“Kidding,” she said. “At least for a year or so. I want to make Chief Inspector before you do.”</p>

<p>“No chance.”</p>

<p>“Maybe, but I’m serious about the other thing. I’m sorry for June, but it’s us against the world now. I’m not a grasping person and I don’t plan to be a weight around your neck, but I don’t believe I’m going to let you go, not after what we’ve been through.”</p>

<p>David eased towards her and drew her close. He remembered the regret down in the mud before everything had faded, the infinite sadness that he would lose her. She had been worth dying for.</p>

<p>“Thank heavens for small mercies,” he said, and she leaned into his warmth.</p>

<p>Helen had transferred to Western Division to work with Bert Millar not long after David had come back to duty. It had been a good move for her, and the right move for both of them. Working in the same office and living together would have done neither career any good and would have put too much pressure on them off duty. David was rewarded with what he wanted, a transfer to the murder squad. The drugs wars were heating up in the east and south of the city and the subsequent rash of street killings kept him busy as winter turned to spring and edged towards summer.</p>

<p>Apart from June’s pestering, life almost got back to normal. Then, in late spring, two bodies were found on a narrowboat in the canal.</p>

<p>It may have been coincidence (though both of them had long since stopped accepting coincidence so lightly) that David and Helen found themselves, that spring morning, on the banks of the canal. The sun was already high and the morning mist was burning off in the heat of the day.</p>

<p>When she had arrived here, the memory of the frantic battle for mind and body had come rushing back to her, and she shivered silently, getting the same feeling she’d had in Levenford when she’d imagined that someone had walked over her grave. <em>Something was wrong</em>. A sense of threat scraped on her mind and she tried to tell herself it was only the association with this place and the memories it brought. The water here was deep and turbid, and in the early hours, the air was still except for the occasional twist of wind coming of the estuary where the wading birds piped and whined. The ice was gone, but there was a sense of life under the still waters of the canal. A dragonfly whirred by, metallic green on helicopter wings, and Helen recalled the scene in David’s photograph where he’d caught the insect emerging in transformation from the ugly skin of the larva. She shivered again, wishing she were elsewhere. This palace gave her the creeps, she told herself, and always would.</p>

<p>At night, in the dark she could still see the thing glaring at her, reaching into her mind, while it stole her soul away. In the daytime, the image came unbidden. She blinked the memory away, tried to tell herself it was over. A group of people were coming along the track and that distracted her enough. She turned, drawing her eyes away from the dark water and saw the murder team arrive. Helen have David a small, not quite surreptitious wave when he got to the side of the canal with two young men and a tall, bulky man she knew was a chief inspector on the squad. David had told her he was very hard, but also very good. The narrowboat had been barricaded with police yellow tape. But for the numbers of police in uniform and the curious crowd of onlookers, nothing looked out of the ordinary. The surface of the canal was almost glassily placid, except for that part just beside the barge where the added weight made it dip slowly and send out a barely perceptible ripple. An early kingfisher flashed past, an emerald glitter close to the surface, a little visual bonus that heralded the summer to come.  David recognised it immediately and almost automatically he noted it for future reference. He could come back here in the late spring and get some shots of the bird on fast film.</p>

<p>Bert Millar came striding up the path, ducking under the tape, shook the senior man’s hand, then turned to David and did the same, favouring him with a nod of familiarity.</p>

<p>“Two women,” he said. “Doctor Robinson estimates they’ve been here close to a month. We’ve got one of the McPhee boys banged up as we speak. He’s talking his head off. Crying his head off more like. That’s one light fingered wee bugger who wishes he’d never broken into a boat.”</p>

<p>“Bad?”</p>

<p>“Nothing much left of them. You’ll have a problem getting anything here. And another problem.” Bert Millar stopped and drew them towards the narrowboat and away from other ears. “I had a look at them. No matter what Robinson comes up with as the cause, I’ll give you any odds you name that it’s the same as that Park baby up in Middle Loan farm.”</p>

<p>A cold touch trailed down David’s skin. The Chief Inspector raised his eyebrows. “David here knows what I mean,” Bert Millar said. “He was there.”</p>

<p>“I heard,” the murder hunt leader said. “You’d better come with me then.”</p>

<p>Helen watched as both of them stepped onto the barge. David didn’t look up, so she couldn’t wave, even surreptitiously. A light breeze riffled through the green reeds at the edge of the canal, making them rasp together in a conspiratorial whisper. The still water shimmered in the eddy of wind, bearing the scent of early hawthorn flourish and willow pollen. Overlaid on that, there was another, much fainter scent, barely discernible on the air. </p>

<p>Helen breathe for an instant. The fine hairs on her arms were standing out against the cotton of her blouse. She sniffed, twice, caught the hint of it again. An itch crawled across the skin of her breasts.</p>

<p>“No,” she breathed. Beside her, one of the other policeman turned, thinking she had spoken to him. The eddy passed by and took the trace of scent away. Helen shook her head, wondering. The sense of sudden threat had swamped her so quickly that she could feel her heart pound at double speed. Her eyes scanned the slow water where a bloom of algae was already spreading over the surface. If there had been a movement there, if some rounded head had poked out from the weeds, and if a glassy red eye had fixed upon her, she might just have run along the towpath and run and run until she had dropped. The deep and dark corner of her mind that could reach forward and sense the danger in the future, touched against something and she recoiled from it. David was at the edge of the barge, walking towards the cabin. The prescience suddenly swelled inside her, a black tide of foreboding. She wanted to call out to him, to tell him to stop and turn and get of that damned boat, but she knew she could not.</p>

<p>“I know her,” David said, once he got his breath back. Despite the open door of the hatchway in the cabin, the air was thick with that clogging, musty scent of old death. Bert Millar’s men had searched the boat and despite the obvious difficulty the forensics boys would have in getting an identity on the two women, there had been enough personal effects to be fairly sure.</p>

<p>“She’s one of the best wildlife photographers in the country.” He said. “A world expert.”</p>

<p>Flora Spiers’ battered old camera bag was stacked on a ledge at the foot of the bed. On the wall, a world-famous shot of a wedge of geese crossing the face of the full moon dominated the other photographs, the same picture David had on his own wall. David had long admired the woman’s technique and style. If he hadn’t become a policeman, he would probably have tried to make a career of his hobby.</p>

<p>“I never knew she lived here.”</p>

<p>“According to the harbour keeper, they spent weeks here at a time. They’re both from London,” the other policeman said.”</p>

<p>On the bed, two mounds which bore little resemblance to human beings lay parallel to each other. Any blood had long since dried and much of the flesh that had been left had been taken care of by the flies, even at this time of the year. The inside of the cabin was festooned with cobwebs as the spider population exploded to cope with the glut.</p>

<p>Jasmine Cook’s head was canted to the left and her jaw was open so wide it made her appear to be screaming silently and eternally. A thick spider scuttled across one sunken eye socket. Her perfect teeth showed brilliant white against the grey of the taut flesh. On the side of her neck, where the flesh had shrivelled and dried, a gaping hole showed ragged edges. The mattress was matted with a hoary white fungus that rippled in the stir of air when any of the men moved. It looked like a dreadful infection, but David had seen it before. It was feeding on the dried blood. Jasmine’s legs were spread apart in a dreadful invitation that made the obscenity somehow blasphemous. At the junction, the white fur had grown up the trail of blood to meet the dark triangle. On either side, both hips pushed like budding horns through drum-tight skin. The body looked hollow.</p>

<p>Flora was on her side, neck twisted back so that her blind sockets gazed up at the ceiling. Thin, empty and leathery breasts hung down on either side of her arched chest. David could count every rib which poked up through the surface. Both hands were curled into claws, longer now that the flesh had withered and shrunk. Her nails seemed like black talons ready to hook and gouge. The hole in her throat was even more ragged, as if whatever had killed her had used considerable force. As if it had been very desperate.</p>

<p>“It’s back,” David said aloud. He remembered Helen waking in the night, her body shivering like a tuning fork, unable to say what had woken her, what scared her. She hadn’t known, not in words, what was happening. But she had known.</p>

<p>“What’s that?” Bert Millar asked, turning back towards him. David only shook his head. The smell here was now quite cloying, rasping on the soft membranes in his nose and throat. He had tried to kill it, the thing that had sometimes looked like a baby and sometimes wavered into something else entirely, and he had failed. He had put it down under the mud and it had not died.</p>

<p>His mind flicked back to the cot up in Kate Park’s farm. He had crept into the bedroom, his nerves jumping, every one of them expecting attack. He had looked over the rim of the crib and he had seen the strange circular wound in the baby’s neck. He was looking at the same wound now, only this time, the ragged gape was bigger.</p>

<p>Both women had been raped too. He could see that from the trail of fungus up the trickle of blood. At least they’d been penetrated, damaged inside.</p>

<p>What in the name of God had it done? Mentally he rephrased the question. This had not been done in the name of any god.</p>

<p>His eyes scanned the cabin, looking for any trace of the thing, but he saw nothing and smelled nothing except the flat and somehow powdery odour of flesh that was bloodless and dry and the bitter, somehow alien scent of the hoar-fungus. The thing he’d shoved down into the mud was back. Of that he was suddenly and completely certain. It had somehow stayed alive after he’d been dragged unconscious from the mud at the bottom of the canal. The frogmen had searched and the stretch of waterway had been dragged with weighted hooks and nothing had been found except for a couple of pike and some drowned dogs. They had missed it. It had got away, and now it had come back to kill again.</p>

<p>The wizened corpses on the bed might tell the forensic team a few tales, might give them some pointers. David could tell, because he’d seen it before, that they would find veins collapsed from lack of blood. They would find torn ligaments and muscles, burst blood vessels. He knew that as a fact. The experts in minutia would come up with reams of documents to show what had caused the deaths of these two women.</p>

<p>But they would not show the killer. David knew it had a shape and a face, something that rippled and changed and hurt the eyes. It was a face from nightmare.</p>

<p>Some time later, Helen saw him come out from the cabin and step down onto the bank. Even at the distance separating them, she could see the blank, hollow look on his face and she knew something was badly wrong.</p>
<hr />

<p><em>He was moving.</em></p>

<p>With uncanny and utter silence he followed the line of the hedgerow, hungry now, ferociously hungry again. He had come out of the stand of spruce trees, a dark and shadowed place bounded by a high fence. He had left the last skin there, an opaque but translucent remnant caught on the sharp branches, a pale image of himself. After all the changes, after all the mothers, he had finally <em>become.</em></p>

<p>The feeding frenzy had glutted him as he drained the two mothers in his penultimate transformation. He belly had swelled and distended like an insect’s abdomen and as soon as he had fed he had felt the numbing drowsiness overtake him, but he had shaken it off because he knew he could not wait here in the narrow confines. He had to find somewhere dark and isolated for the next development that already was beginning to work inexorably on him and within him. Instinct drove him on in the darkness as he silently followed the strand of willow that bracketed the canal until he found the coppice of thick rhododendrons and brambles. He stalked through them, a bloated shape on thin, stick-like legs, moving with predatory quiet. In the sky a cloud moved slowly and let the light of the moon shine down through the thick branches, limning his body with its silver, making his skin gleam like exotic metal. Things scuttled and rustled down in the undergrowth, but he ignored them. Early bats whispered their subsonic chatter, chasing the few insects flying at this time of the year. They avoided him as instinctively as he headed for the centre of the coppice, through the impenetrable mounds of bramble and hawthorn. Over in a gnarled oak, a tawny owl opened an eye and saw hiss shape moving. It opened the other, let out a hoot of alarm and took off on whispering wings. He felt its fright radiate in the air, but ignored it, his concentration fixed on his own need.</p>

<p>In the centre, he found a hollow under a toppled elm that had fallen over an ancient stone hut that must have existed before the trees themselves had taken root. He forced his way into the hollow and found the shelter he needed beyond that. A family of rats bolted out into the night, shrieking their terror. He found a corner willed with leaves and bracken and swirled them around him until he was covered, the way a weasel nests in the heat of the day. The sleep was rushing on him and in the sleep he knew there would be change again and he sensed that this would be the last. The moonlight sent a shard of silver down through a hole in the dry stones and that was the last thing he saw. The pressure in his belly pulsed and his eyes closed and he sensed his organs already begin to disintegrate.</p>

<p>It seemed no time at all. It seemed forever.</p>

<p>He awoke again, so suddenly it was like a birth. He woke trapped in a hard case. He flexed and the case split with the sound of snapping branches. He opened an eye. His limbs creaked into motion and he uncurled his body. He opened the other eye, snuffled the air. He smelled the roots and the insects. He scented birds in the air, but they meant nothing to him at all. He snuffled and got a far-off scent, so faint it was no more than one or two atoms and a hunger wrenched inside him.</p>

<p>He was grown now. The last change was over, and the new hunger was a hot pain deep inside him. He could no more deny this than he could have refused to feed before, when he had needed the mothers.</p>

<p>Now his needs were different.</p>

<p>He stretched his limbs and got to a crouch, squeezed himself with some difficulty through the narrow entrance hole, which was much smaller to him now. He moved quickly and silently, strong now and powered by the new fierce imperative. His nerves sparked and jumped and behind his eyes, a pulse throbbed. Whatever passed for blood in his veins was now pumping fast within him, strong and vital and urgent. Overhead a cloud was pushed across the sky, just enough to let the moon shine through. It was full again, leprous pale in the black of the sky. It pulled at him, swelled the tide within him and it drove him on and on.</p>

<p>This emerging had not exhausted him, because his blood was singing with the energy the final mothers had provided. All of his senses were keyed to fever pitch and he moved silently and fast, a thin, gaunt thing of shadows and edges. Here and there, little points of lights would flicker on his consciousness, lives flaring briefly. He could extinguish them if he only looked, but he had no time. The new urgency spurred him on, dug into his being, dragged him along. Every now and again he stopped, sniffed the air, turning his small, domed head this way and that, before moving on.</p>

<p>The clouds swung closed and the world went dark. It was morning, but black as pitch here. He had followed the line of the canal, using its hedges and trees and reeds as cover as he moved east, ever east, following the pull of the wordless demand. His whole being was tuned to that and could not waver or deviate. Here and there, on the locks, as the canal approached the city, there would be lights, but he was able to cope with them now, even if the glare seared his skin. The orange glow of the road-lights would have melted his eyes if he stared into them, but now he had a nictitating membrane, a secondary pair of lids that came flicking down to dim the light. It allowed him to see as he moved.</p>

<p>The canal wended slow and sluggish towards the city, a snake of water that had been re-developed for the new millennium, an inland waterway that bisected the north side before it crossed over to Blane on the east coast. It may have been coincidence that all of the towns that had featured in his long and alien life, through all of the changes, they had all been connected by river, lake and waterway. It may have been coincidence.</p>

<p>The morning air was still and damp. Once or twice, it heard the incomprehensible sounds of human voices, low and muttered from inside an outhouse close to the canal, loud and fretful from a house some distance away. He heard the clump of a policeman’s feet and had to fight the instinct to strike. He heard the patter of a fox bitch as it crossed a pipe spanning the canal. He did not know that it had smelled him when it reached the far side and had instantly aborted, in dreadful agony, the seven cubs she would have laid the following week. They writhed weakly on the grass until the cold stopped them.</p>

<p>He drew nearer where he had to be. The drive, the force inside him, was now a singing screech of physical demand. He was complete now and this was his hour.</p>

<p>He only had one purpose. </p>
<hr />

<p>June Whalen had come by taxi, bearing David’s birthday cake. She had called him at the office and discovered he wouldn’t be home until later. She had arrived at ten and it was now close to midnight. It was dark, but not too cold, though there was a hint of rain in the air. She wondered if she should get a taxi and go back home again, but she wanted to see him on his own.</p>

<p>She had made a big mistake, she knew, and if she could only get the chance to make him see, everything would be back to normal again. When she had walked out, it had been in the heat of the moment. She had rushed him, tried to force him and that had been the wrong thing. She knew that deep in his heart, he loved her and she knew, with the same certainty, that they would be together again. He would come round. They would get married as she had always planned. They would start a family and he would see she had been right all along. It would just take time, and she had time. She was still young.</p>

<p>There was no question of her trying to find another man. She had been crazy about David since the day they had first gone out together, and she still was, no matter what arguments they had had. That was all in the past. She could make him see that, no matter what silly mistake he had made with that other <em>bitch.</em> There was no-one else for her.</p>

<p>She waited on the corner, knowing he would arrive any moment. He would drive round the side, to the off-street car park in the shadow of the trees that led onto the waterway park. She hummed to herself, as she strolled round the corner where the Virginia creeper was just bursting into a leafy tumble on the wall.</p>

<p>The air stirred. Something moved. She heard a high-pitched buzzing in her ears. She turned.</p>

<p>“Who’s there?” She was not alarmed. There would be no danger next to David’s house. Maybe, she thought, he had come from round the back. She took a step forward down the path, out of the light. A shadow moved and she stopped, saw it was only the shade of the juniper tree ruffled by a gentle breeze. Something moved again in the deeper shadow at the side of the house. She stopped once more and a figure came looming out. At first all she saw was a black silhouette, about the height of a man.</p>

<p>“David?” </p>

<p>It came towards her and as it did, she heard the fruity little hum get louder. The air thickened and a powerful, sickly scent enveloped her.</p>

<p>“What...?” she began. For an instant her vision wavered, watered. She blinked, turning to the side.</p>

<p>The shadow came forward, very quickly. It took hold of her shoulders. It turned her round to face it and two eyes flicked open with audible fleshy clicks. They glared into hers and she felt the power of its will force its way into her brain, and her mouth flew wide open. A scream formed in her throat but died there unblurted. The world went red and then it went dark.</p>
<hr />
<p> </p>
<p>Helen Lamont was on her way home after a long, footslogging day. She had walked most of the western end of the canal, as far as Barloan Harbour, asking questions of the few boatmen who were on the water at this time of the year. </p>

<p>Every step on the bridle path reminded her of the chase after the girl and the gargoyle thing clutched in her arms, every swirl in the water when a pike came rising to snatch a minnow, would cause her to start and turn, eyes wide, alert to the potential threat. Since she had breathed in the faint, cold trace of its passing, she had realised that this was not over. She could not share her fear with anyone else, here with her new team-mates. She told herself she should be thankful that this was not the high summertime when the waterway would be teeming with weekend navigators and the basin filled with yachtsmen and power-boaters. Yet it would have been better if there were more people on the stretch of canal. In the distance the arch of the bridge showed movement as cars and trucks passed over the wide span of the river, but here there were few people. She felt vulnerable and exposed. At night she would have felt in dreadful danger. </p>

<p>She also told herself that she was wasting time here. She had seen the photographs of the two women on the barge. She had read the report and she knew they were looking for no murderer. They were looking for something which killed and fed. Bert Millar knew it, but there was an unspoken agreement between them. He did not want to get involved in this one. Murder squad could handle it.</p>

<p>She and David had talked it over and they both knew the little beast was back again. If she hadn’t seen the evidence, she would have known anyway. Her prescient sense itched and nagged, telling her to beware. The thing would no doubt kill and feed again. They would have to wait until it did, and then they would have to kill it dead. They would make sure this time.</p>

<p>Helen steered the car round by the trees, to the little car park behind the house. The wind was picking up, rustling the branches that overhung the quadrangle. The light was off in the house, all the windows dark hollows on the wall. She knew David might not be home for some time. She was only on the periphery of the inquiry, but David was there, unable to say what he thought, what he knew. The night before he had woken, lacquered with sweat, gasping for breath, just as she had done. In his dream, he later told her, sides heaving in the aftermath, that he had been fighting with it again, down there in the mud.</p>

<p>“It’s been a month,” Helen said, tying to convince herself and failing. “And nothing’s happened.”</p>

<p>“It was three months before that, and it still came back.”</p>

<p>“You’re sure?” Stupid question. She was sure herself. There was no mistaking it. She had sensed its existence.</p>

<p>Now she eased herself out of the car, pulled her bag out and slung it over her shoulder. She turned, stuck the key in the lock, crossed the little yard under the trees, walking towards the house.</p>

<p>Then she froze.</p>

<p>Every cell of her body lurched. She stood rigid, still as a statue, completely motionless, mouth agape, while inside, her heart fluttered like a trapped and desperate bird.</p>

<p>Something had touched her.</p>

<p><EM>IT</EM> had reached out. <EM>IT</EM> had stretched to touched her. She felt its caress, its damp, dank, slither and she recognised it from before, but now it was different. The tendrils of its foul touch slid over the surface of her mind and she recoiled in utter disgust. Right on the heels of the uncontrollable repugnance came the immediate fear, so powerful that it almost spilled her to the ground.</p>

<p>“Oh God,” she managed to blurt out.</p>

<p><em>Oh God it’s </em>here!</p>

<p>Her legs had simultaneously frozen solid and turned to jelly. She tried to back away, and her feet refused at first to move, her weight made them feel week and unable to support her. The breeze carried the smell towards her, not faint now, but a harsh reek, a foul taint, and her vision wavered. Her heart stopped fluttering and kicked madly, painfully in her chest.</p>

<p>Something moved in the shadows, deeper black on black and for some reason, the fright unlocked her. She turned, grabbing her bag as she did so. She snatched the mobile phone and was keying the number as she moved. The bag spun away and landed against the garden fence.</p>

<p>Behind her a snuffling sound seemed so close she could feel cold breath on her neck. She scuttered across the yard, head down, got to the car. She tried to open it, couldn’t get the key in the lock. Feet scrabbled behind her and she realised she’d never make it in time.</p>

<p>The scabrous touch reached out and into her and she reeled in horror from the appalling sense of filth in the alien contact. She turned from the car, unable to make herself look back, knowing that of the thing fastened its eyes on her it would sear her brain. She jinked to the side, trying not to whimper, trying to concentrate despite the huge eruption of fear. She got to the far side, along where the privet hedge bordered the thicket. She was running under the overhanging trees. The telephone beeped at her as her thumb pressed the numbers, pressing so hard that her nail bent back in a rip of pain which she never even felt. In her mind she could see the gaping wounds on the dried and shrivelled bodies of Jasmine Cook and Flora Spiers side by side on the narrowboat. She saw the white fungus growing up the scab of dried blood between their legs and the fear bucked madly inside her. She ran under the light, heart kicking, breath suddenly tight and constricted as if her lungs could not haul enough air to fuel her escape.</p>

<p>It scuttled behind her. She could hear the scrape of <em>nails? Claws? </em>feet on the road, a deadly, predatory sound of pursuit.</p>

<p>“Emergency, which service do you require?” The operator’s voice came loud and clear, with none of the tinny interference she would normally expect. The woman could have been standing next to her. The sound of another human voce was somehow miraculous.</p>

<p>“Help,” Helen managed to blurt. “Please.”</p>

<p>All her training, all of her toughness had gone, evaporated in the flick of an eye when she had smelled the sweet-rancid scent as she rounded the corner and saw the shadow move in the deep shade. It had reached and touched her, pushing into her mind and in that moment it had changed her into a primitive, fleeing organism, running for life, running in abject and indescribable terror.</p>

<p>“Which service please?” the woman asked again. “Hello?”</p>

<p>Helen’s feet pounded the road. Her eyes swung ahead, beyond the house to the left. She was in a cul-de-sac. The road dead-ended at a picket fence. Her heart almost stopped dead. The touch slithered on the surface of her mind, digging in at her, trying to force its way inside. She felt the feral, supernatural hunger, sensed the sizzling heat of its need; the mindless panic erupted.</p>

<p>“Please,” she whimpered again. Her fingers were dug into the plastic case, clenched so tight that the thin shell creaked. Even as she spoke she was swerving to the right, cutting across the road, pulling out of the dead-end. It had gained silently on her as she turned, she sensed with quivering nerves but she put on a mad spurt of speed, getting to the far corner under the spread of chestnut tree branches which overhung the pavement. </p>

<p>“Hello? Can you give me a number? Hello” The phone was still pressed to her ear and the woman’s voice, the wonderful, natural human voice was speaking directly to her, an illusion of contact, of succour, while the diseased touch of the shadow chasing her tried to clamp her down and burn her thoughts.</p>

<p>“Get away,” Helen screamed. “Get away from me. Oh Jees...”</p>

<p>Her foot caught the edge of the kerb, twisting her ankle violently and throwing her off balance. A crack of pain bolted up to her knee as she fought to compensate, still clenching the telephone. Her shoulder hit against the upright of a trellis fence with a crash and the thin partition vibrated with the impact. The force of it threw her round, wheeling for balance. Behind her the shadow snorted. She could feel its eyes on her, sense long arms and hooked talons reaching for her and she spun through the gap in the fence.</p>

<p>“Police,” she blurted again, almost incoherent. “It’s hunting me it’s going to get me its.....” her voice cut off.</p>

<p>“Hello, please, where are you?” The operator sounded suddenly very concerned indeed.</p>

<p>Helen had crashed through the gap which gave on to the little woodland bordering the waterway park. As soon as she was off the pavement, she realised she had made the wrong move. The cul-de-sac would have been better. There were houses there and lights. She could have run to one of them and demanded sanctuary. She could have done, but she had not thought. The primitive animal fear had swamped her and all she had known was the need to run, to cover distance, escape from this nightmare. Her other shoulder slammed into a birch sapling and spun her again. She almost fell, but still she held on to the telephone. Her feet crackled over twigs and through burgeoning brambles.</p>

<p>Behind her, the beast-nails scraped on the road mettle again, then went silent for an instant before it reached the grass under the trees. A twig cracked loudly, the sound of breaking bones and the enormity of her mistake sunk in to her. She should have kept on the street and not come into the trees. Even then she knew to have done so she would have had to turn and face the thing and that would have destroyed her. Yet here, in the dark, it had the advantage. It was a night thing, she now understood. It was a devil. She ran, blundering through the dark of the copse, the phone held up against her ear, one hand outstretched to push through the undergrowth while all the time she could hear the steady, fleet pursuit of the thing that snuffled ferociously behind her. </p>

<p>The beast reached out to her and she felt its hunger yawn. Hot and febrile thoughts scurried and scratched over her own. It was getting closer, she could feel that, and she could hear its progress, quieter than her own, swift and deadly, a rustle here, a scrape there, and all the time the fast and feral snort of its breathing. She got down to the pathway between the trees, reaching the flat ground, forcing her legs to move, though they threatened to stop working and simply spill her to the ground. Helen knew she had to put some speed on to get away from it. </p>

<p>All the while, throb the thicket and the bramblethorns the operator’s voice was scratching out from the receiver, but Helen had no breath to spare now no time to waste. Her breathing came in ragged, desperate gasps. The moon stuttered its light through trees, a pallid strobe that marked her frantic passage. Off at the edge of the forest, something small panicked and screeched. Close by, to her left, a shadow flickered in peripheral vision.</p>

<p>The touch squeezed at her and a bolt of shattering pain slammed into her head.</p>

<p>“Oh,” she said. Nausea looped. The pain flared, burned, faded a little. Sparks danced in her eyes. The moving shadow veered towards her, hurtling in from the side. It hit against her, surprisingly light, grabbed a hold of her neck. She felt a sharp abrasion, a touch like sandpaper. It hauled, letting its weight slow her.</p>

<p>She spun and hit at it, cracking the telephone against the side of its body. The blow jarred her right up to her shoulder. It was like hitting rough tree bark. Its skin was hard and leathery. It grunted and twisted to the side, its grip on her momentarily broken. It twisted, a mere blur in the dark. The eyes glared briefly but she was turning away and missed the force of it. The shape came at her again, reached in a flick of motion. She batted it away again, feeling the scrape of the skin, like sharkskin, like sandpaper and she knew this thing did not belong, should never have existed on this world. It grunted again, leapt to the side, came bulleting in again. A hand, a claw, whatever it was snatched for her, crabbed her shoulder. She screamed and hit out at it, but it gripped her hard enough to drive fingers or nails almost through her skin.  A grip like a thin, hard bird claw snagged her ankle, tripping her forward and her feet slipped on wet leaves from the winter’s decay.</p>

<p>A cry blurted from her. The beast snuffled, questing at her, the sound of a beast in the shadows, the sound of a hunting predator. The image of Jasmine Cook’s gaping bloodied neck came back to her again and she bucked in terror, trying to shuck it away.</p>

<p>She screamed again, stumbling to the side, trying to gain her balance, failing, tumbling. She hit the ground with a wordless grunt as the air whooshed out of her in a rush. Her head slammed against the soft springy loam and sparks whirled and spangled in the darkness. She hit out, a desperate flap of her hand which accomplished nothing. She tried to kick out and connected with air. The thing had downed her, leapt back quickly, spidery fast. It came rushing back in again and she got an image of a slender, disjointed shape that was all edges and angles, like a black mantis. Its arms moved with incredible speed and shot forward. Fingers clamped themselves to the side of her head. Two hands gripped her ankles.</p>

<p>She was screaming now, screaming high and clear, an ululating blast of pure fear. The thing’s eyes opened and its glare burned into her soul. The eyes were huge and glassy, polished stone slabs that had no iris, no pupils, just a red surface that caught the moonlight and looked as if poisonous blood vessels pulsed just under the surface. Its appalling need shunted into her, a dreadful obscene hunger.</p>

<p>She screamed and the operator pleaded tinnily, a whisper of noise now from her outstretched hand.</p>

<p>The smell came again and invaded her. She saw the baby in the cot and the horrible apparition that Ginny Marsden had become. She saw the scuttering thing at the side of the canal, pulling on her emotions and dragging her with it. She saw Kate Park’s wizened, raddled body.</p>

<p>More than that, she saw herself in all of this, a prisoner of the thing.</p>

<p>The smell pulsed again and infused her head and in that instant she realised that this thing did not want to feed.</p>

<p>“No,” she bleated. “Oh God no....”</p>

<p>The eyes blared into her, connecting her with a consciousness that was old and evil and deadly and so apallingly different from any other that her mind twisted desperately in a futile bid to break that awesome link. The probe reached and touched in a deadly sharing and the hollow of other sense in her mind opened up and</p>

<p> <em>she saw....</em></p>

<p><em>She saw Kate Park</em>. Her face was angled up, as if seen from below, eyes wide and staring at something in the distance, a dribble of saliva running down her chin. Her cheeks were hollow and gaunt and she looked as if she was damned forever.</p>

<p>She saw...Ginny Marsden, hurrying through the dark, her face a pale oval. A grinding vibration creaked upwards and Helen felt it inside herself, as if she was two people at once. She felt Ginny Marsden’s pain of disintegration and dissolution, and the desperate, mute prayers for help.</p>

<p>Ginny’s doomed expression faded and flickered and Helen saw Heather Quigley, young and fresh, with the three moles in a constellation pattern on her cheek, gazing down, mindlessly obsessed. In her own breast she felt the sucking of its lips and the drain from within.</p>

<p>The images came in rapid fire succession while the thing reached into her own head and stole her mind.</p>

<p>Greta Simon crooning a lilting lullaby.....Harriet Dailly in her little shack ...another face with cheerful, healthy cheeks...a thin woman with mad eyes...they came flickering like an old film...faces, postures, sensations, all riffling on the front of her own mind...</p>

<p>She saw a hawk-nosed men in armour drag babies from their mothers arms in a night of fire and screaming and impale them on stakes and she knew she watched the hunt for vampires.</p>

<p>She saw different, darker men rampage through a dusty city dragging new-borns into the night while the narrow streets ran with blood and madness ran in the night.</p>

<p>She saw men in skins cast out a woman and her child into the dark away from the fire, back in a distant, awful past.</p>

<p>Her mind catapulted back from then and Helen Lamont saw something in the future and the force of it was so dreadful it almost killed her. The awful realisation slammed her into the present and she squirmed against the poison of its scan and the pestilent scent of its flaring body. All she could hear was the whistle of its breath and the crack and rustle of the leaves and twigs under her writhing body.</p>

<p>It had her by the wrists. Prehensile feet on the end of skinny shanks grasped just above her feet, clamped to tightly she felt the bones grind together. It flexed powerfully, suddenly enormously strong, irresistible, stretched her wide, forced her apart. It sniffed its strange and terrifying scenting breath, a mindless sound that was appallingly alien. She felt the pain in her joints and muscles and knew she could not compete with its supernatural strength. Helen tried to draw her hands back, tried to turn, but it was futile. Panic soared.</p>

<p>“David,” she screamed. “Help me. Please. Oh. <em>Help me!</em>”</p>

<p>Her desperate cry reverberated from the trunks of the trees and vanished in the depths of the thicket.</p>

<p>She felt its heat and its hunger and smelt its rot, now dreadfully aware from the picture that had flashed into her mind that the hunger was truly different from before. It did not want to feed. It had no need now. Its wants were deeper than hunger, more powerful still. It stretched her further, making her muscles and tendons stretch beyond their capacity. Something tore in at her pelvis, then another thing, a dreadful thing that was rigid and sharp and hard jabbed in at her. She felt a rip of fabric, felt a rip of skin, felt a burning pain that at first was outside of her and then, <em>oh then</em>, it was shrieking and rending inside of her, in the very depth of her being.</p>

<p>The nightmare bucked on her spread-eagled body and its cold was through her, the alien cold of pure badness. In the heat of her pain she felt the dreadful, unnatural cold spear inside as it bucked upon her, thrusting viciously again and again and again.</p>

<p>She soared on the crest of unbelievable pain.</p>

<p>Helen’s scream went on and on and on.</p>