booksnew/source/incubus-source/CB22.txt

<h2>22</h2>
<p>Jack Park came trundling up the road in his Range Rover, feeling the car bounce and sway as he took the corner, avoiding the ice patch picked out by the beams, where the ditch had spilled over from the field drain. He’d had a long drive up from Leyburn in Yorkshire, pushing the limits, desperate to get home for Christmas Eve. He’d checked out a couple of yearlings that might make an addition to his stable. Already he was planning for an end to recession and brighter times ahead when people had more money to spend. He was ready to open his paddocks as a riding school and get rid of the cattle altogether. At the height Middle Loan farm stood, high on the hill overlooking the estuary, with a commanding view up and downriver and with the orange lights of the sweeping bridge a magnificent string of jewels in the winter mist, the farming was a marginal business. Weekend riders and summer trekkers, would be money spinners when the time was right. It had been Kate’s idea, one he’d initially looked at with some reluctance, farming being well grained into his tough hide. His family had farmed Middle Loan since the middle of the last century.</p>

<p>He eased the car round the last bend and onto the narrow straight that led up to the farm, noting with no surprise, the mounds of horse droppings, pleased at the evidence that Kate had got back in the saddle again so soon after her legs were in the stirrups. He smiled at his own joke and looked forward to a good malt whisky, and after that, a great grilled steak festooned with mushrooms and tomatoes. More than that, he was glad to have made it home despite the delays on the motorways. He wanted to help wrap little Kirsty’s Christmas presents for the morrow. He’d phoned from the pit stop down the motorway and Kate had held the baby close, letting her snuffle into the receiver and instantly Jack had felt that warm, urgent twist in his belly.</p>
<p>That was something completely new. He was in love. For the first time in his life, he was completely, irrevocably, absolutely in love. It was different from the love for Kate, vast orders of magnitude stronger, though what he felt for his wife was a powerful emotion in itself. He loved Kate truly and deeply. They were friends and lovers and partners. He had hungered for her since the first time they’d met at a young farmer’s barn dance. Her auburn hair had been longer then, glinting chestnut under the lights and she’d been a pound or two lighter, no featherweight, but her sturdy curves had been well within his own ideal, and her thick red hair which faded to a fair matt beside her ears had hinted at a hirsute secrecy which he had discovered and revelled in. He had lusted after her and he had liked her, </p>
<p>
and had great appetites for everything in life and for life itself. She could milk a cow and cook a steak and wrestle a ram to the ground and at night, when he cuddled up against her firmness, she would go the distance with joyful and noisy passion and then go some more. He loved her, he imagined, as much as any man loved a woman.</p>

<p>But when he saw Lucy the hammerblow had hit him so hard, he was still, more than a month later, reeling from it. It hit him in his heart and in his soul. He had seen her head push out from between Kate’s quivering, straining thighs and seen the ugly little twisted face and then they’d handed the slippery bundle to him and to her and he had almost died of it.</p>

<p>Parental love kicked him down, lifted him up, made him fly. It had been the greatest, most momentous occasion of his entire life. Up in the high field, bringing the highland cattle down to the low pasture, he would savour the moment over and over again. Coming up the motorway, he would relive it time and again so that the distance passed without him being able to recall any of the road. Lucy, she had transformed from a lump, to a squirming thing and then to a complete human person as soon as he held her in his big, strong hands, and she had transformed him. He’d been a man who was comfortable, but distantly vague, with the idea of impending parenthood. Then Lucy had arrived and he was a father and what he had considered before as sunshine paled to twilight beside the radiance she put in his heart.</p>

<p>He thought of a malt whisky, he looked forward to a good sirloin steak dripping in its own fat. He felt a buzz of pleasure and pressure at his groin in anticipation of getting his wife under the sheets and running his hand down the taught curves of her breasts and her hips into that hirsute secret.</p>

<p>But more than anything he wanted to hold his baby again.</p>

<p>He gunned the engine, feeling the back fishtail on the black ice now forming on the road and got to the gate. The light was on at the corner of the byre, the warm and welcoming glow reflecting off the whitewashed corner, illuminating the side of the barn and the smooth cobbles of the entrance to the courtyard. He got out of the car, arching his back to take the stiffness of the road out of his muscles, glad he was driving a high-topped four by four and not some low slung saloon which would leave him creaking for weeks. He walked to the gate imagining he could feel the heat of the halogen lights on the back of his neck and as he pulled back the bolt, something flickered above him.</p>

<p>Startled, he turned. The flock of pigeons, racers and fantails, the doves white as snow in the beams, went fluttering with a whistle of wings, wheeling all together across the road, circling the dovecote.</p>

<p>Jack pulled the bolt against the spring and swung the gate forward, once again reminding himself that one day he’d get a remote control to open the gate and save him the start-stop every time he arrived home. The pigeons wheeled round again, flying in tight formation, turning all at once. They looked panicked and he wondered if a stoat had got into the dovecote. A stoat or a ferret, or one of those wild mink from the old farm on Langside, any of them could do a lot of damage in a henhouse or a pigeon loft. The birds hardly ever flew at night and when they did, they sought a place to roost as quickly as possible. Something must have spooked them to keep them on the wing. He thought he’d get the gun out and check out the roost after he’d something to eat.</p>

<p>He drove the car through, got back out again, closed the gate. For a third time the birds circled, trying to keep within the circle of light the lamp afforded, certainly unwilling to settle. Ahead, one of the horses was whinnying. It kicked the door and he thought maybe it was a fox, though the horses rarely bothered about vermin. The car door closed again and the heat inside, after the cold of the night, was suddenly quite oppressive. A bead of sweat trickled down the back of his neck, making the skin pucker. He was half way along the track, along the home straight as he and Kate called it when he realised it was not a hot sweat at all.</p>

<p>The hairs on his forearms rippled.</p>

<p><em>Something wrong?</em></p>

<p>He shook his head. He was just tired. On the way up, apart from thoughts of his beautiful daughter, he’d decided the price was right for two fillies. He’d phone later and make the deal. All work and no play made Jack a tired boy. That’s what he told himself as he slowed down at the end of the drive where the close cropped hawthorn hedge glistened with frost. The lights bounced off the whitewash of the wall, illuminating the night and making the mist sparkle. With the ease of long practice he swung the wheel, feeling another little slip as the tyres spun on hoar ice on the cobbles, then he was past the gaping door of the barn.</p>

<p>He eased the car into the yard, hauled hard to the left and drove straight into the garage. </p>

<p><em>Something wrong?</em></p>

<p>A twist of odd sensation gripped the muscles of his belly and gave a squeeze. He was out of the car, still in the dark of the garage. For some reason, his senses seemed abnormally acute. He stopped for a moment, put his hands on the roof, leaning. His breath made pale clouds in the dark and he tried to slow it down.</p>

<p>Why was he breathing fast?</p>

<p>“Must be coming down with something,” Jack muttered. He hoped not. Not now when they were getting ready to celebrate their first Christmas as a threesome. He’d told his parents and Kate’s family too, that they would see them all the day after Christmas at the earliest. The big day, he swore, was going to be at home, all of it. The tree, the presents, the dinner, it was to be their special time and he wasn’t going to drag his baby daughter round from one side of the country to another on a cold winter day to visit grandparents.</p>

<p>“Maybe it’s the flu,” he wondered aloud. He really hoped not. He didn’t want the baby catching something. If she got sick he’d shit himself, he knew that. He’d be unable to move for the fear of it. The hairs on his forearms were all marching together, standing proud like proper little soldiers. The skin puckered and tensed and he thought that was very odd indeed.</p>

<p>“Maybe it’s just the cold.” The cold. A cold. Maybe even just the tiring journey. He pushed himself away from the car.</p>

<p><em>Something wrong?</em></p>

<p>He walked out of the dark, into the yard and stopped. The moon was high and dented, a slumped face in the velvet sky. Over beyond the byre, the birds were still flying. What was different? He knew what was different, his instinct knew and his years on the farm told him. Something was wrong. Something was out of place.</p>

<p>There was noise where there should be silence. There was silence where there should be noise. It was inside out or back to front.</p>

<p>Out behind the cowshed, where the sturdy stables gave on to the paddock where the old dovecote stood in the centre of the field, the horses were whining and snorting. One of them kicked out every now and again, rattling the door, sending a hammershot into the night air.</p>

<p>Inside the byre, the cows were all howling. They were not lowing, the way they would in the spring as they headed along to the pasture, or the way they would when it was time for the afternoon milking. They were howling the way cattle did when their calf is straining to get out, head turned back the wrong way, stuck in the passage. The hoarse, high grunts made the building shiver.</p>

<p>“What the hell...?” he began to say. Where was Kate? Had she gone for the vet? Were they sick?</p>

<p><em>Something wrong.</em></p>

<p>The chickens were silent. There was always, even in the dark, a squawk as the pecking order was maintained. He turned and walked past the coop. A black shape came scooting from the side of the shed, startling him of balance, just a dark blur. The cat, the best ratter they’d had in years, went screeching past him, ran towards the door of the tack room, missed and hit the wall with such a thud that it somersaulted backwards, landed on its back, got to its feet still screeching and then shot right out of the yard.</p>

<p>Where were the dogs? They always yapped him a frenzied welcome. Always.</p>

<p>“What the fuck is going on here?” he demanded to know, speaking aloud.</p>

<p>He almost went straight to the house, but something held him back. He could not explain it, but suddenly he felt a shudder of real apprehension. Instead, he crossed to the byre, got his weight against the door and slid it open on its rollers.</p>

<p>The cows were crying. They howled and screeched, each one in its stall, crying in the darkness. He reached a hand and hit the light. The fluorescent bars flicked on one after another, drenching the place in their pale glare. He walked into the centre into the warm, steaming air, breathing in that familiar scent of hot milk and warm cattle. He turned round by the stalls and his jaw dropped so wide his chin hit his chest.</p>

<p>He was standing in a pool of milk. Six of the seven cattle were standing, legs spread, sides convulsing while all of their milk poured steadily in pulsing spurts from their grotesquely swollen udders. One of them managed to turn round, a gentle jersey the colour of old honey. Its great black eye rolled, showing white all round, pinning him with the desperation of its pain.</p>

<p>“Jesus God,” Jack said finally.</p>

<p>The six cattle were standing leg-spread and each of them was covered in blood. Behind them all, in the drainage gully, their part-formed calves, calves that would have been born in the late spring, lay in greasy heaps of placenta and blood. They had all aborted, every one of them.</p>

<p>A chill stole right inside Jack Park. Were they sick? Had they caught a disease?</p>

<p>He saw his milk profits and his calf profits gone for the year. A sick feeling of apprehension lurched inside him and he staggered backwards with the force of it, feeling his own gorge rise at the grotesque sight of all those slimy packages that would have been calves. The seventh jersey, his best milker and mother of three others standing in the stalls, was lying on the ground, her head at a strange angle. She must have slipped and the collar had choked her, retaining all the blood in her head so that her face was swollen and black and her tongue protruded grotesquely. Her legs were splayed and from just under her tail, her calf’s hind legs protruded like a growth.</p>

<p>Jack moved back. His good-to-be-home feeling had evaporated instantly.</p>

<p>“What the fuck? What the bloody fuck?” he demanded to know, almost incoherent. He bulled his way out of the barn, leaving the cattle to bellow their pain. He crossed the yard at a trot and almost stumbled over the terriers, still locked in a dead embrace.</p>

<p>Dread clamped on Jack Park’s heart.</p>

<p>Poison, he thought. Had there been a leak of something? Had there been a chemical emission from the big incinerator over the hill towards Drumadder? His heart was beating so hard it made him dizzy. Nausea and vertigo came on in waves. The front porch loomed and the fear gripped him in a cold and merciless hand.</p>

<p>“No,” he said aloud, a panicked blurt of sound.</p>

<p>This was all madness. His dogs were dead. His cattle were dying. What was happening? The pigeons flew round again in their sweep and he wanted to shoot them down, make them stop. He wanted the cattle to stop their wailing, the horse to quit kicking. He wanted the pressure inside his head to slacken because suddenly he was very afraid to open his own front door.</p>

<p>Had somebody done this? Had somebody killed his dogs and poisoned his cattle? The irrational thought did not seem irrational to him, not at that moment. His wife and child, his wife and his baby girl, they were inside the house</p>

<p><em>Were they?</em></p>

<p>waiting for him to come home to them.</p>

<p>“Oh please,” he whimpered, his voice breaking, gaining two octaves in height, making him feel like a helpless boy again. He moved towards the door then stopped. Maybe there was somebody here. Maybe strangers had come and were inside there now.</p>

<p>Anger suddenly flared up under the fear, twisting him this way and that. He stopped once more, trying to think. They would expect him to come in the front. They could be waiting for him. <em>They</em>. He turned and moving as quickly as his quivering muscles would let him, went to the path at the side of the house up beside the vegetable garden, unwittingly following the trail of something else.</p>
<hr />

<p>The mother’s breath came harsh and shallow, panting for air. She was fighting him, even in her shallow slumber the way the other one had fought him, but he had been prepared and he had battened her down, using the last of his resources to subdue her. Now she lay slumped in the darkness, dazed and numb, her body shaking all over, vibrating with a delicious frequency that set up a sympathetic resonance within himself.</p>

<p>His glands had squeezed him almost dry, filling her with his essence and she had succumbed. Her massive teats were filling now. He could feel the swell of them and smell the nourishment surge inside. He had clamped his sucker mouth on one of them, letting his tiny teeth dig just enough into the surface of the skin so that the trickle of blood and new milk mingled. Strength began to flow back into him in a hot stream.</p>

<p>After a while he was aware of the rumble of the engine as the car trundled along the road he’d been carried along when the day was fading.</p>

<p>Immediately, all of his gathering senses went on the alert.</p>
<hr />

<p>Ginny Marsden coughed the last of her blood onto the hay and she died at the same time as little Lucy Park.</p>

<p>The baby’s mother had been powerless, bound in mental webs, chemical manacles that prevented her from moving. She remained slumped against the wall with the image of the thing’s eyes burned into her brain, hovering in front of her. The whole world had taken on a red tinge, turning the light of the room into a strange purple. She was gasping for breath trying to clear her lungs of the thick and acrid miasma that had sprayed out from it. Behind her the baby whimpered and the thing, the other baby turned its head, quite unnaturally, almost completely around on its narrow shoulders, like an owl responding hungrily to a squeak in the dark. She needed to mother it, was compelled to feed it, yet at the same time she wanted to kill it. She had tried to reach and clasp it by the throat, but her hands were only capable of stroking its smooth, unblemished skin and pull it even closer to her own body. She could not make them grasp and strangle.</p>

<p>Behind her Lucy cried again, and the baby moved quickly.</p>

<p>“You can’t walk,” she tried to reason, mouthing the words while dribbling saliva onto her bare chest. “Just a baby.”</p>

<p>It clambered off her, crawling quickly and moved to the little wicker Moses basket Jack had brought back from a trip down south. She heard the scrabble as it climbed up and she tried to scream a warming. The baby was climbing up to her child.</p>

<p><em>Not a baby</em> she tried to think, but the thought couldn’t break through the membrane that encapsulated her own mind.</p>

<p>Out of sight, she heard a sucking, wet sound and her heart slumped, giving a slow double beat that was shock and loss and dreadful despair. She tried to move once more, but her limbs were incapable of anything more than a slow-motion, directionlesss flop. The baby cried out, thin and fearful and then the sound faded out. Kate’s mouth stretched wide in a silent scream and all that came out from between her quivering lips was a thick and ropy saliva.</p>

<p>The baby, her own baby, gurgled again, a sound that was liquid and high. The cot rattled violently and she could not turn to stop it, could not turn to protect her own. After a while, the sound stopped and her baby was silent and the other one came crawling back to her, climbing up between her breasts again. She felt the terrible touch inside her head and the need to mother this thing came rushing back into her. Down in the depths of her belly, blood trickled and the baby on her breast lifted its head. His eyes bored into hers and forced once again and she drew her arms around it, compelled to protect this one, driven to feed it. She drew it back down to let it suckle and after a while the appalling pain in her heart was crushed away by the scraping touch in her mind and she fell into a numbed daze. </p>

<p>It was some time later when she awoke, fuzzy and drugged, rising up from a black pool of sleep where terrible things happened in nightmare visions of death and destruction. She slowly got to her knees, clasping her baby tight, pressing its tiny frame against her. There was somebody outside and he was coming for the baby. She knew that without doubt, not aware of any true reality.</p>

<p>She quickly moved to the front room, robe flapping, protecting the child. Someone was outside. She heard the engine, over and above the howling of the cattle. Someone was coming and the baby was in danger. She could feel its urgency, feel its demands for protection</p>

<p><em>Mother me  mother me  mother me.... A</em> mantra of wordless demand. She could do nothing except obey.</p>

<p>It was dark in the room where she sat in the corner, prepared now.</p>

<p>And all the time, her very soul was riven and rent by the unspeakable knowledge that her own baby, her Lucy, was gone.</p>
<hr />

<p>His guns were in the cabinet in the front of the house. There was a spare key in the roll-top desk in the same room, but it was still at the front of the house. He was sure nobody could break into the gun case where the two twelve bores stood side by side, but whoever was in the farmhouse, they could still be armed. He had convinced himself that the threat was human.</p>

<p>His heart was beating somewhere in his throat, making it difficult to breathe quietly. Fear and anger were battling it out, each a powerful force, but utter desperation overshadowed them both. His hands were shaking as he grabbed the spade from the side of the greenhouse and hefted it in two hands. It had been well used in the summer and autumn and the moonlight reflected off the abraded blade.</p>

<p>“Let them be all right,” he whispered under his breath in a hoarse prayer. “Let them be all right. Please.” He appealed to any god, any force. What he was saying was <em>let them be alive.</em> Cold dread twisted inside him, and he could feel the loop of sudden nausea force upwards. He swallowed it back, telling himself he had to be clear, he had to be strong.</p>

<p>There was light inside the house, but no sound at all. He made his feet move silently on the flagstones, avoiding the small decorative chips that would crunch underfoot, and got to the back door. Very carefully, he turned the handle. The door opened a crack. </p>

<p><em>Something here.</em></p>

<p>The perturbing smell reached him and for an instant he thought again about poison, some sort of pollution. His heart leapt at the notion. Maybe they were safe. Maybe....</p>

<p>He opened the door further, pushing it quickly to prevent a squeal. He got inside. Slunk along the narrow little corridor to the corner where it turned beside the baby’s bedroom. Here the smell was thick and clogging and he felt his heart speed up with sudden vigour. Without warning, the desperation evaporated and the anger suddenly soared to ascendancy. The fear disappeared. An instant, burning rage bubbled inside his veins, making his temples pound. His vision wavered as the adrenaline punched into his bloodstream. He moved quickly, carried on the surge of anger, holding the spade right out in front of him, ready to decapitate the first bastard he saw. In his mind, pumped up in the flare of rage, he saw an ugly head topple from shoulders to land with a thud and the image gave him a savage sensation of gleeful anticipation.</p>

<p>“Fuckin bastards,” he growled, unaware that he spoke aloud. He barged, not quietly, into Lucy’s room. It was empty. The little Moses basket was askew on its stand, and he knew instantly that Kate had grabbed the baby to protect it. She must have. He turned, about to storm out, then halted, garrotted by some new information. He spun back, leaned over the cradle. A dark stain smudged the tight basket weave of the little cradle. A smudge of deep red.</p>

<p>His thudding heart hammered against his ribs with such violence it was like a small explosion. He leaned forward, face contorting in awful apprehension, fingers digging into the shaft of the spade.</p>

<p>A waxen doll lay on a red-stained pillow, a small and inhuman thing with plastic, stiff fingers, and half-closed dark eyes which glinted in the overhead light. A darker smudge indented under its chin, like a bruise. Twin trickles showed where tears had trailed from its glassy eyes.</p>

<p>The bolt of nausea made it into his throat, hard and bitter lumps hitting his palate only to be swallowed down in a little acrid stream. He turned away, stumbling, his brain in a state of complete rejection. He saw a doll, he told himself. It was just a doll that Kate must have bought for the baby.</p>

<p>The stiff little fingers reached up into the air. He could see them in his mind’s eye and he knew they had to be plastic because they were still and rigid, not like his baby girl’s soft and gentle, perfectly formed hands. He made himself walk out of the door, trying to call his wife’s name, but unable to get his mouth to form the words. The muscles in his belly were heaving and twitching and all across his back they were moving in conflict with each other as if all the nerves had been disconnected and rewired wrongly. A singing noise filled his ears in a juicy, high pitched monotone.</p>

<p>He staggered into the kitchen. On the stove a kettle was billowing steam. A pile of washing lay on the table. On the work surface by the sink, two substantial steaks were lying on a flat plate, each in a dark pool of blood.</p>

<p>“Must have been the steak,” he said. “Must have been. Sure.” He giggled and the sound had a taste of madness in it. “Should have washed her bloody hands first.” He laughed again, high and manic. “Bloody good pun.”</p>

<p>Inside him, his inner voice was trying to make him go back into the baby’s room, telling him to look again. His subconscious had taken in the shape in the cot and it had recognised it for what it was. Jack Park’s conscious mind would not let him accept it.</p>

<p>He whirled round, shouted his wife’s name now. “Kate, I’m home.”</p>

<p>He still held the spade up like an axe as he walked into the front room.</p>

<p>His hand reached for the light, but even before he touched it, he saw her in the corner, slumped or crouched against the wall. Her robe was wide open and she held a small monkey in her arms. He blinked once, twice. The smell here was dreadful, nauseating. It stung his eyes and he felt the surge of emotions shudder through him again. He hit the switch and the thing on Kate’s chest - both of the breasts were bared, rounded and full - the wizened form blurred and wavered. For a second it was grey and emaciated, ridged and flat faced and then its outlines ran and expanded. It was Lucy. He shook his head, trying clear his vision. The baby screamed and changed again, wavering into some ridged and blotched little gargoyle. The scream sounded like grinding glass. It scraped inside his head like fingernails down a blackboard. Sudden pain twisted in both ears.</p>

<p>“What the fu...” The red eyes flicked open and glared at him.</p>

<p><em>A fucking alien Jesus it’s a</em></p>

<p>He didn’t even think. He reacted, taking two steps forward, raising the spade at the same time. He would smash it off her. The thing wavered again, twisted. It was Lucy again, small and fragile, bleating in fear. He was about to smash his daughter’s head with the garden spade.</p>

<p>The picture of the doll in the cot, the doll with his child’s face suddenly leapt into the forefront of his mind. Utter horror swamped him. His brain almost stopped functioning from overload under the overwhelming visual and mental and chemical assault. He managed one more step forward.</p>

<p>Thunder erupted from the corner and smashed him backwards into the wall. He spun, hit his knuckles against the cupboard door and saw a crimson slash appear on the paint.</p>

<p>“Wha...”</p>

<p>Thunder roared again and slammed him again, taking him in the side. His hip hit the wall and a strangely numb but somehow fizzling pain, expanded in his arms and in his side. The spade spun away and landed next to the desk, clanging like a cracked bell.</p>

<p>“Kate its...” he started to say when he saw his hands, torn and ragged where the shot had blasted them, trying to comprehend the enormity of the damage, the immensity of this. He twisted, tried to make his legs move, failed and toppled to the floor. His feet did a jittery little dance and then were still. Huge pain bloomed in his side and in his back and he knew the heavy goose shot had done more than ruin his hands.</p>

<p>A cool realisation soared above the pain. “She must be mad,” he thought. “She’s bloody well killed me.”</p>

<p>He lay on the carpet, feeling his very essence ooze away so quickly that the room darkened almost instantly. Over in the corner, he heard Kate moan and for some reason the sound was the distillation of all fear, even though she had used his own gun and had killed him.</p>

<p>A picture of the doll in the cot came back to him and he saw his daughter’s face lying face up, his brain now able to comprehend a greater enormity than the fact of his own death.</p>

<p>“Lucy darlin’...” he managed to blurt before his lungs emptied in a frothy gush. He fell forward and died.</p>

<p>The last thing he saw as his vision faded to black, was the grey and ragged thing that squatted over his wife’s trembling body, one great red eye fixed on him while it sucked at her flesh. In the last moment of his life, Jack Park thought he saw the face of the devil.</p>

<p>Much later, long after the bottom of the kettle had melted on the stove, while her baby’s body was stiffening with rigor mortis, while Ginny Marsden’s disintegrating corpse was turning rigid with the bitter cold out in the barn and while her husband’s mutilated, slumped shape had dripped his last through the devastating wound in his side, Kate park got to her feet and went through the chest in the baby’s room, cradling the thing close to herself. Almost instinctively, she turned to look in the cot, but another force made her turn away and pay attention to what she was doing.</p>

<p>Over there in the little moses basket, there was something she should know, something she had to see, but she had no volition, no wherewithal to make herself cross the short distance. Her mind was not her own. She bent and wrapped her new baby up in the wonderful Christening shawl her mother had passed down, a link from a generation gone, her grandmother’s to a new one just begun. She wrapped it tight against the cold while its huge blue-lagoon eyes held her attention and her mind.</p>

<p>She wrapped the new baby while in the core of her being she was screaming madly, as Ginny Marsden had done. Her breasts were full and swollen by now and there was a tingling in her veins as her temperature rose, her body fighting a futile war with the new chemicals, the long and complex molecules now riving through her bloodstream. The twist in her belly proclaimed the start of her period after ten months of freedom from cramp. Without pause, she stripped off her robe, not noticing the new bruises on the ballooning skin, or the scratch marks where small and thin fingers had clenched her tight. She dressed herself like an automaton, knowing she would have to move soon, while ignorant of where, or when, or why.</p>