booksnew/source/incubus-source/CB27.txt

<h2>27</h2>
<p>She was lurching along the track, unable to stop while the baby’s mind jittered inside of her own, forcing her on. Her body was a pulse of pain. She could even hear the sound of her bones grinding against each other where they met. Behind them men were coming through the trees. The sound of their voices was muffled, but getting louder out there among the trees.</p>

<p><em>Help me please help me...someone help me</em></p>

<p>The mantra sang out in the deep and barricaded part of herself that was her own, but she could not make the words come out, could not make herself stop. All she wanted to do now was die, but the thing at her breast tugged her on, its own panic conveying itself to her in sharp drilling spasms of energy. Off to the right, a clump of snow fell off a spruce tree with a quiet flop of sound and she felt it jerk in alarm. In her ears the chittering sound waxed, a fuzzy little crackle that made her ears feel as if they were bleeding. It vibrated in the bones of her jaw and made her teeth chatter together.</p>

<p><em>Go go go. GO!</em></p>

<p>No words but a mental goading, whip and sharp spurs, that could not be denied. She had to run and hide. She had to get the baby away from here. That was the only thing on the surface of her mind, the overwhelming, overpowering compulsion to get it to safety. It was crying at her, whimpering its alarm and its terror. She could do nothing but respond.</p>

<p>The dogs were coming. Two of them, howling behind, somewhere in the distance. They sounded like wolves in the early dawn. Over to the east the sky was pinking, slashed in layers of colours under the snow cloud, tinged with the rising sun and with the orange of the street lamps on the main route to the city. Over to the right, the wide black ribbon of the bridge spanning the estuary was lined with a coruscation of lights. Under any other circumstances it would have been a winter scene that would have made her stop to admire. She did not even see it, not with her own consciousness. Her whole attention had been focused on the need to run.</p>

<p>She ran, while rivers of white-hot pain surged in her feet and in her hips. Blood trickled form her mouth and from the ragged wound in her sole.</p>

<p>The baby whimpered constantly, huddled against her. She could feel its arms and legs twitch and its alarm was a sharp and twisting augur of cerebral hurt.</p>

<p>The dogs howled and snarled. Somewhere in the distance a siren wailed. Down in the estuary the foghorn bawled hollow in the lessening wind. Snow flurries still blew in, but less than there had been before. Kate Park’s feet made deep holes in the virgin snow and they made hardly a sound. Her joints squeaked like rusted hinges and it was a miracle that she did not collapse to the ground and lie down and die if such a word as miracle could describe her awful plight.</p>

<p>She stumbled on.</p>
<hr />

<p>Behind her, the dog handlers were urging their animals onward, with some difficulty. When they had arrived at the old station, the dogs, at first fired with their normal energy had taken one sniff inside the ticket office and then they’d gone into fits of frenzied barking. Both of them, powerful German Shepherd dogs, had cringed back, haunches low, tails tucked tight. Their eyes had been rolling wildly and they looked absolutely terrified. The handlers dragged them back, wondering what was wrong with them. Already the first team had been forced to pull back up at the farm when the other two dogs had started snapping and snarling each other, and one of them had tried to mount the other, thrusting way with powerful jerks of its rump, while foaming saliva flicked from its gaping jaws.</p>

<p>This time, just after dawn, the dogs looked plain scared. One of the other policemen went inside the office and came out holding his nose.</p>

<p>“Smells like a slaughterhouse dump,” he said.</p>

<p>There were footprints in the snow on the far side of the old building, leading down across the flat where the track had once been. They angled into the trees where the thick bushes had formed a snow break. The footprints stopped only a few yards into the spruce trees where the snow couldn’t reach. The handlers pulled the dogs away from the station. The animals howled and barked excitedly, almost like a gathering of wolves, but the trained men could hear the panic in their yelping.</p>

<p>“Something wrong here, Sarge,” one of the men said. “They don’t want to go on”</p>

<p>“They’ll go on with my toe up their backsides,” Sergeant Holleran warned him. “I don’t care if they’ve got broken legs. Get them out and get them sniffing.” The dog men dragged their charges onto the disused track. The beasts sniffed and yelped, in obvious distress. This pair, however, had taken their training better than the previous two at the farm. After a few moment’s hesitation, they got their heads down, started to snuffle for scent and then, very slowly, very nervously, they began to follow a trail. Every now one of them would back off, yipping in alarm and consternation. Slowly and hesitantly however, they made progress through the damp forest.</p>
<hr />
<p><em>He had perceived the pursuit and had woken her</em>. </p>

<p>He made her move with a brutal, panicked wrench of his thought The dogs yipped and yelped and in his strange acoustics, he heard the sound like the cracking of ice, but he still recognised it as <em>threat</em>. Alarm jangled through him as she gathered him up and hobbled out into the cold, clutching him against her failing heat. He touched her mind once, twice, little shoves. Inside she was shrieking, like the other one had, like no other mothers before. They had all accepted him, they had loved him.</p>

<p>But now he was changing, and while he could control the mothers, he had to push them hard.</p>

<p>He shoved, twisted violently and she lurched outward over the snow flat and down to the runnel and into the trees. Her breath was ragged and her heart was beating too fast. He could sense the weakness there and the heat of slowly tearing muscle. She would not last. Her pain screamed within her, competing with the constant shriek of her trapped mind. Still she stumbled on, barging through the thickets of birch and bramble, charging through clumps of alder and hazel. He needed a place to hide. The threat came from behind them, in the howl of the beasts and the hoarse rumbling vibrations that were the shouts of pursuing men. If they caught him they would destroy him. That instinctive knowledge burned brightly, not in words but in a complete concept, on the forefront of his mind. A sudden dread washed over him. He had never been hunted, not in his memory. He had always driven the mothers, made them move on, whenever he sensed any threat. He had never been chased and now he was out in the cold, exposed and desperately vulnerable and they were after him.</p>

<p>In his panic he reached out a long way, casting ahead and behind, to sense for spaces where the danger was less, to identify the points of greatest peril.</p>

<p>He brushed the other one’s mind and recognised her.</p>

<p>Hope flared. A chance. Hunger swelled with it despite his panic. She was coming. She would follow him. If he could find a place, she would come to him, dragged along the invisible lines that bound them. He needed her now.</p>

<p>The mother stumbled on, broke free of the bushes and was down on the track again. Here, for a long straight distance, the rail-route was a broad avenue of pristine snow. He shoved and she went along it, breath crackling like ground glass, heart thudding so hard he could hear it through the shawl and the coat.</p>

<p>The dogs howled. Men shouted. They were getting closer. Ahead of them, the old iron bridge over the canal loomed, grey and stark. She stumbled towards it, now reeling from side to side, powered only by the force of his will. She could do nothing but move and the rivers of pain sizzled inside her. </p>
<hr />

<p>“It’s ahead of us,” Helen Lamont panted. She and David had been pushing their way through the bushes. Both of them had listened to what Snib McPhee had said and they were the only ones who took his description literally. Helen’s mind wandered back in the direction of the barn and then shied away from the recollection. She had seen something and her eyes had swung round, denying what she might have seen in the shadows. It had been a flash, a glimpse, nothing more, and it could have been anything at all, except for the fact that her subconscious mind had flared and snatched the image and burned it deep into her brain.</p>

<p><em>Monster.</em></p>

<p>She knew it had been and it had almost had her. It had reached with its foul touch and had drawn her in and somewhere in the dark of the barn it had opened her eyes and she had felt its hunger and it had been like the touch of corruption. It had wanted her, and God help her, in that instant, she had wanted it.</p>

<p><em>Monster.</em></p>

<p><em>“It’s a fuckin’ monster,” </em>Snib McPhee had said, unashamedly massaging his balls where, according to the two policemen, he had taken a bit of a knock when he’d fallen on the slippery snow against a tree-stump. Snib knew there was little point in protesting about brutality, and anyway his mind was on other things.</p>

<p>“Swear to Christ,” he swore to Christ. “I saw it with my own eyes. It’s a fuckin’ monster.” The small man crossed himself several times in quick succession, driving out devils. His hand slid back down onto his throbbing crotch.</p>

<p>“I saw a woman. She was just sitting there with her eyes open and I thought she was dead for Christ’s sake and then she moved. I heard her first. Crying like, sort of moaning. Or maybe like a grunt. I thought it was a dog or something, stuck behind the door, but I got a look at her in the torchlight and she saw me. She tried to talk, I think, but I never heard anything and then this baby she was holding, it turned round, and it wasn’t a baby at all.”</p>

<p>“What was it?” Bert Millar wanted to know.</p>

<p>“I told you. It was a fuckin’ monster. My torch went out and next thing it’s up at the window. It had eyes like nothing I ever saw in my life and a mouthful of teeth. A big circle of them, all pointing in towards each other. You put a finger in there and it’s never coming out. I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like them lampreys you get on salmon. You know those things that eat their way inside?”</p>

<p>David recalled the words of dead Ron McBean in his strange and obsessive report. The Lassiter woman, way back before the turn of the century, had leapt off a bridge and killed herself</p>

<p><em>When recovered, her whole body covered in bleeding lacerations and bruises which a doctor described as very similar to the sucking circlets caused by lampreys on salmon from the nearby River Nith</em>.</p>

<p>McBean had noted the similarity in the odd circular lesions uncovered in the autopsy on Harriet Dailly.</p>

<p>Another coincidence, David thought. Whatever this thing was, if McBean was right all along, it was older than fifty, older than a century. How long had it been around, picking women, stealing mothers? And what sort of creature, what sort of beast, looked like a sucking lamprey that fed on living salmon?</p>

<p>“You’d know all about salmon, Snib,” Sergeant Holleran had volunteered, but the CID boss held up his hand for silence.</p>

<p>“What do you think?” he asked David. “Is he taking the piss or what?”</p>

<p>“No,” Helen said. “It’s probably the farmer’s wife. She’ll have the baby.”</p>

<p>“Killed her own and then run off with another?”</p>

<p>“I couldn’t say, sir,” Helen said, falling back into police-speak. “But the woman is missing and I can’t think of anybody else who’d be out alone with a baby on a night like this. And it also wouldn’t be the first time, if we’re right.”</p>

<p>Millar drew them outside. “At least we’ve got a direction. We’ll take his word for it, but as far as the rest are concerned, it’s a woman and a baby.”</p>

<p>A half an hour later, Helen stopped, panting for breath. “It’s ahead of us,” she said. They were almost at the edge of the trees now, coming down to the straight. She had been pushing through the bushes, well to the left of the other policemen, maybe ten feet from David when she felt its touch, the cold slither of hunger and black need. It sent a shiver right into her, because she recognised her own response.</p>

<p>“Which way?” David asked. He recognised the look on her face and simply believed her. In the cold of the morning, in the weak winter light, her face was pinched and pale, and her dark eyes were like black stones in snow. The wind ruffled her hair and made her seem slender and vulnerable.</p>

<p>“There,” she said, pointing ahead, further to the left. She turned and he followed, up a tree-covered rise and down the slope. The dogs were behind them now. They reached a stand of thin, rotting willowherb, ploughed through and found themselves on the straight.</p>

<p>A pair of footsteps, deep and unclear, angled away from them towards the bridge in the distance. From where they stood, they could see the shambling progress, as if both feet had been dragging, throwing up spill-piles of snow into hummocks. The tracks wove left to right, from one side of the line to the other.</p>

<p>David turned and bawled, attracting the attention of the dog teams who came bursting out onto the line some fifty yards behind. He pointed to the tracks and then turned to follow them. The dogs barked frantically, high, fretful yipping sounds that made them, sound plaintive and timid, but the handlers urged them on. David and Helen ran ahead, following the footsteps and all the time, Helen could feel the oily, sinful touch of the thing she had pursued now for eleven days.</p>
<p>_______</p>

<p>Kate Park lurched out of its grasp on the steep embankment about three hundred yards past the bridge. She had stumbled off the old track and down the slope, driven by the thing she carried. Behind them the dogs howled and scrabbled. Footsteps thudded on the far side of the bridge and men’s voices carried on the cold air.</p>

<p><em>Go go go go GET GONE</em></p>

<p>There was desperation in its urging and she obeyed it. She slipped, fell, arched her racked body to protect her burden, and got to her feet again. Every nerve ending jittered with pain. Burning crushing sensations ground from bone to bone down the length of her back. Her heart was a lump of fire in the centre of her chest and the pain in her legs and hips had soared to such a crescendo that the nerves there had simply given out. A dreadful numbness oozed up her limbs making it even more difficult to carry on. Yet she moved, stumbled, staggered, reeled down the slope, snagged by thorns and bramble runners, down to the low wall that came to waist height, in the brown sandstone of railway embankments the world over. An angle-iron fence sat atop the wall, its top spikes rusted and paint peeled. She started to climb when one of the upright spars clanged outwards, making a gap. A bolt had rusted. She slipped through, pushing the baby ahead, then drawing herself between the spars until she was on the wall itself, maybe ten feet above a narrow street.</p>

<p>The metal clanged back into place just as the dogs came pounding over the edge of the embankment, whining as they came. The handlers urged them on. They all came thundering towards the shape on the other side of the fence, half-hidden by the upright spars. The baby squirmed until it could see over her shoulder, risked opening its eyes despite the ferocious burn even in the half light of the early winter’s morning. Its attention was half snagged by the other female who was behind the dogs, but it had no time to waste. It concentrated at the beasts, reached out, stabbed into their minds.</p>

<p>The dogs went berserk.</p>

<p>They were halfway down the steep slope when the whining yelps turned into savage growls. The lead dog turned round, bolted between its handler’s legs, knocking him of balance. It pulled the leash from his hand and went streaking for its partner, jaws agape. The second dog reared up, met it half way, fangs exposed in a ferocious snarl. The two animals hit, growling like tigers. Their teeth closed on each other’s necks and they worried and tore frantically. Blood and fur flew. The two men tried to separate them, but the dogs seemed to have gone mad. Their eyes were rolling wildly and their strangled grunts soared higher and higher as they savaged one another. One of the men got his night-stick between one dog’s jaws, levered hard and succeeded only in snapping two teeth. The dogs ignored them.</p>

<p>Helen and David came running fast over the rise and down the slope. They took in the snarling animals and then saw the shape at the far side of the fence.</p>

<p>Helen felt the touch of the thing, not aimed directly at her, because it was focused on the dog threat, but it still sent a spasm of horror (<em>and feral hunger too, she knew</em>) right through her.</p>

<p>“There,” David said, pointing. A pale face could be seen on the other side of the fence. Someone was sitting on the wall. “Stop,” David yelled, and the face disappeared from view. The dogs screamed in fear and fury. Blood bubbled form their nostrils, from their throats. One of the policemen was shouting at the top of his lungs. David started toward the wall and Helen followed, her whole mind cringing from the leprous touch.</p>
<hr />
<p>It turned its mind away from the mother.</p>

<p>The woods were full of noise and motion. She had got through the fence and was over the road when the dogs came rushing down, howling and whining and the thing had turned its attention on them. She felt the buzz of mental energy as it concentrated, and threw its command at them. It was like he searing heat of lightning in the air, an arc of pure power. Her own mind had reeled out of the control and then lurched away from that mental blast.</p>

<p>And she was herself again.</p>

<p>Kate Park blinked, coughed, and a trickle of pink foam spun away from her. She felt a scream build up in her shredding lungs, an enormous primal blast from the depths of her fragmented soul and she clamped it to silence. All of her was in pain, her mind, her heart, and her body. The image of Jack’s twitching body came back again, overlaid by the sound of sucking from the baby’s crib and the awful dribbles of blood that had come soaking through the basket weave.</p>

<p>She was out of it, out of one nightmare and into another. She turned her eyes to the thing and saw its flat, mindless eyes. It was bigger now, more angular, almost insectile. She looked at it and her hate welled up and in that moment she knew what she had to do.</p>

<p>Behind her, the dogs howled and shrieked, tearing at each other, men were bawling. The beast was concentrating on the animals, trying to combat one threat. It would come back to her, or it might turn on the others.</p>

<p>She was done and she knew it. There was nothing now. Jack was dead. Lucy was dead, her own baby gone. There was nothing to live for and the pain was so much, so overwhelming that she knew she would not last much longer.</p>

<p>It was turning to the others. She turned too, unable to prevent herself. Through the bars of the fence she saw the young man coming towards her, his mouth open to say something, one hand raised as if reaching to grab her across the distance between them..</p>

<p>Beside him was the girl she had seen below the hayloft. She recognised her instantly, although their previous encounter had only been a dreadful scrape of contact. She recognised her and her open mind touched the girl’s, in a flash of empathy. She knew in that instant it had wanted her and she knew why. The girl’s mind touched hers and sent a shudder of sorrow and pity and fear.</p>

<p>Kate Park turned away. Down below the flagstones of the sidewalk came hard up against the wall of the embankment. The thing’s attention was still on the dogs, just beginning to swivel to the men, when she launched herself into the air. She clutched her burden tight, turning as toppled, ensuring that they would both land together, head first on the hard concrete.</p>

<p><em>Kill you! </em> Her mind snarled. She spun away. Oblivion rushed at her.</p>

<p>David Harper saw the twisting lurch and bawled at the top of his voice, jumping past the slavering, snarling animals. Helen screeched an incoherent warning. The woman disappeared from the other side of the fence.</p>

<p>Kate was falling. But a long runner of bramblethorn snagged her foot as she tumbled, spinning her in mid air. The world whirled. The thing in her arms shrieked a glassy mental scream, more powerful now in its desperation, stronger now since its change and the spurt of growth. It screeched and she felt the mind-blast like a sizzle in the air, like a physical vibration. A pure distilled pain shuddered into her head and completely shattered the cochlea in her inner ear. Above the embankment, the mind-shriek lashed outwards and a policeman’s retinas detached themselves and he went instantly blind. In the trees overhead, the flock of crows that had mobbed Kate on her run down by the hedge, dropped like fluttering weights, hitting against branches before they flopped to the ground quivering but not dead, all of them hissing like snakes. Fifty yards away a cat howled, ran across the broad, and was flattened under the wheels of an early morning commuter’s car. Beyond the bridge, a small child in a high-chair vomited and fell face first into a plate of cereal.</p>

<p>Kate Park landed on her hip and her pelvis shattered into fragments. The appalling jolt smashed her teeth together so hard that they bit right through the tip of her tongue. A new lava-burst of pain slammed her breath away and she bounced, flopping on the pavement, dazed, but amazingly still conscious. Unbearable despair overshadowed the inconceivable pain in her damaged body. She had tried to kill them both and she had failed.</p>

<p>“Are you all right dear?” A voice came from nowhere, thin and wavering. Her head turned as she lay, not voluntarily, but simply with its own weight. An old and weathered face was looming down at her.</p>

<p>“Go,” she tried to say.</p>

<p>“What’s that love? Are you hurt?” The old woman peered down, her head tightly wrapped in a thick scarf knotted under her chin. “You took a nasty fall there. Did you slip on the ice?”</p>

<p>“Please,” Kate tried to tell her, but the word only came out in a wheeze. Her vision was looping in and out of focus and she felt her consciousness only now begin to slip away. In her arms, a shape stirred, wriggling powerfully and it was only then that she realised it was still wrapped in the shawl. It kicked against her. She could feel its mindblast of panic as it shoved and twisted, like a trapped stoat.</p>

<p>“Oh dear,” the old woman said. “The poor wee thing. Is the baby hurt?”</p>

<p>She tried to scream again, to tell the old woman to get away. Beside her, she saw with unexpected clarity, a shopping bag on wheels and just then she got a whiff of freshly baked morning rolls, the first normal scent she had been aware of since the thing had come scuttling in through the cat flap and stolen her mind. It’s thoughts were focused outwards, not aimed into her brain. It knew she was useless. Up above, beyond the wall, the shouts of men echoed down and she could not move, could not even speak. Blood gushed from the rip on her tongue, dribbled down her throat, made her cough in a red spray.</p>

<p>It pushed and kicked, panicked now and desperate. The old woman with the trolley was leaning closer, using her solid walking stick to brace her weight. She was wearing a long dark coat and had a red scarf double-looped around her neck.</p>

<p>“Can you get up?” she asked.</p>

<p>The thing swivelled, managed to get its head and shoulders out of the confines of the swaddle of the shawl. The old woman blinked, wrinkled her nose.</p>

<p><em>Take me take me take me. HELP ME!</em></p>

<p>The wordless command blared out. Kate Park recognised it. Her whole body was trembling in the shock of her fall, making the twitching motions Jack had made as he death-danced to the floor, but even then, in her extremity, she tried to move, to roll over, crush the life out of it. Much of her weight had wasted away, but there was enough there, surely, to suffocate the monster. She tried to move, rolled and just then the old woman bent and lifted it, grunting with the effort.</p>

<p>“Oh, who’s a lovely baby then?” she crooned, sing-song.</p>

<p>“No,” Kate tried to say but all that came out was a bubble of red. She fell forward and hit the pavement with a solid thud. Her shoulder splintered where the weakened bone took the impact but even then, she still tried to grab the thing from the old woman. Already it had fixed its eyes on her. The trolley rolled away on its own, down the small slope, tumbled off the kerb onto the road, and a half-dozen morning rolls spilled out and wheeled around in decreasing circles under the span of the old railway bridge.</p>

<p>“Give me,” Kate grunted but the words were all bloodied and incoherent. She snatched at the old woman’s coat, ignoring the white rivets of pain caused by every motion. Her numb fingers grabbed the fabric and she hauled hard. The little lady was jerked forward, almost off balance. She turned to look down at the crawling, desperate woman on the ground.</p>

<p>The baby held her tight and glared into her mind. Its glands pulsed, sending a hiss of chemicals in an visible cloud around them both. An immediate rush of emotion swept through the old woman, an unexpected flare of heat and need. Her vision swam for an instant, steaming up her wire-framed glasses, then it cleared. She looked down and saw some dreadful woman trying to steal her baby. In that hellish moment, she felt a twist of pain in her ancient breasts, felt them swell. Another sensation rippled between her angular, shapeless hips. Sensations she had not experienced for near-on fifty years flooded her and in that instant she had to protect her baby. The dreadful woman on the ground was trying to take it from her. She wanted to kill it.</p>

<p>The old woman dragged herself back with a thin cry. Without hesitation, she raised her walking stick and brought it down with all her weight, her strength now augmented by the baby’s powerful demand. The end of the stick came down in an arc and caught Kate Park on the side of the face and her head whipped back in a violent jerk. Without hesitation the club was back in the air and coming down again. It cracked against her jaw and something in there broke like a twig.</p>

<p>“You can’t have it,” the old woman squawked. Her stick hit again, right on the bridge of Kate’s nose and this time it was enough to slam her to the ground. The world spun in wavering ellipses and then blacked out. The pain drained away.</p>

<p>The old woman did not pause. She turned and tottered away, off the pavement and past the overturned trolley. Her foot crushed one of the morning rolls under the bridge, but she saw nothing. Her whole being was overwhelmed by the need to get away, find a place to look after the baby. The bundle in her arms, a heavy, dragging weight, clung tight to her coat and she smothered it in her thin arms.</p>

<p><em>Move move move move. </em>She heard the commands as her own thoughts and she scurried under the bridge, turned at the corner beyond it, hastening in small, old-lady steps. Behind her, dogs were snarling and men were shouting or crying and she had to get away. At that moment, for the old woman, it was the whole purpose of her existence.</p>

<p>In her arms the thing shoved hard. A savage, mindless glee shuddered within it, the aftermath of extreme danger. He would escape. He would find shelter and find another mother. He had touched this one and knew it was empty. He instinctively sensed the twitches deep inside this one as its body tried to respond, as the old machinery tried to re-awaken, but it was dry and barren. There was no feeding here.</p>

<p>They turned the corner and the sounds of pursuit faded away. Here the road was narrow, flanked on one side by the blank wall of the railway where boys came to practise climbing in the summer. The line then turned to allow space for a terrace of sandstone houses. On the other side, a couple of old buildings, the bakery and a newsagents. They were almost at the far edge of Barloan Harbour. Beyond the cluster of buildings the canal snaked away up from the harbour itself. A strip of grass, covered now in snow and planted with cherry trees in regimented lines, gave on to the bridle path. A mist crept up from the still water where the outlines of the houseboats and converted barges loomed like ghosts.</p>

<p>The old woman scurried along, heading past the shops. In the distance, ahead of her, a bell jangled and a child came scooting down the slope on a bicycle. A couple came out of the newsagents and started walking towards the bridge.</p>

<p>Up on the embankment, a tragic comedy of confusion was unreeling. One of the policemen was crying real tears as he tried to open the jaws that were clamped and still chewing away it his own dog’s neck. He did not care that his own animals teeth were embedded in the flesh of its attacker. They were partners, he and the dog. He had trained it almost since it was a puppy and it was dying in front of his eyes. He jammed his night-stick in between the teeth and twisted savagely. The other policeman, a close friend, took exception to this and kicked him on the backside so hard his colleague fell over onto the writhing pair of animals. All around them, stunned crows were flapping in little circles, banging into trees and men alike, now cawing raucously in confusion and fright. Another policeman grabbed the first and dragged him back, while a fourth was holding on to the trunk of a tree and bawling for help. “I’m blind, for pity’s sake. I can’t fuckin’ <em>see</em>!”</p>

<p>Both dogs were howling no longer. They grunted and snarled weakly, unable, it seemed, to open their jaws and let go, locked in a deadly embrace.</p>

<p>David and Helen were over at the fence on the wall. David was trying to climb the spiked spars which had been designed just to prevent such an occurrence to keep children off the line. Down below, through the close-set spars, he could see some movement, but it was hidden by the ridge of the wall.</p>

<p>“She must have got through,” Helen said shrewdly. She scampered along the side of the fence trailing her hands on the spars. One of them swung at her touch. “Over here,” she said. David gave up on his fifth attempt to clamber the fence and came quickly towards her. She pulled the metal back, leaving just enough of a gap for him to squeeze through. Ignoring the men and the dogs behind them they got onto the wall and looked down.</p>

<p>One woman was lying spread-eagled on the ground, her pale face up to the sky. A couple of snowflakes landed on her forehead. Her eyes were open, staring straight upwards and David assumed she was dead. Down under the arch of a bridge, an old woman was walking, head down. David ignored her.</p>

<p>“Where is it?” Helen said. “I can’t see it.” Both of them peered down. There was no sign of the baby.</p>

<p>“It can’t have got away, can it?” Without hesitation he turned and began to lower himself down. There was little purchase for his feet on the damp surface and he slipped downwards, only catching himself at the last moment. Green smears of moss painted the elbows of his coat. Helen turned and started to lower herself onto her belly at first and then down the wall. For a moment the pair of them hung like mountaineers and then both dropped together, fortunately landing lightly. David turned, slipped on the snow and went down on one knee which hit the ground with a sickening thud.</p>

<p>He limped across to the prostrate woman. Her eyes were still open and a trickle of blood was dribbling out of her left ear. Her face was pale and twisted out of shape, which skewed her mouth out of position. There was a jarring grotesqueness about the woman’s posture. She looked as if she had crumpled in on herself. David got a flashing image of vampires after sunrise, then dismissed it. This was an injured woman. Even in the first glance, he could see that she was dreadfully hurt.</p>

<p>Helen scrambled across and knelt beside the woman, ignoring the damp snow under her knees. She took a hold of the woman’s face, holding it gently as she could. Kate Park blinked once, twice, and she took a deep, shuddering breath as she swam up to consciousness. Her eyes rolled, focused and met Helen’s.</p>

<p>“Saw you,” she said, and though the damage to her jaw and the bloody wound on her tongue fuzzed the words, Helen understood. “Couldn’t let it take you.”</p>

<p>“I know,” Helen said. “We’ll get help. Just lie still.”</p>

<p>“Find it,” Kate Park. “It’s got away.” The pain was razoring and twisting through her and not one part of her body was free of it. She had welcomed the dark, welcomed the cessation of hurt, but she forced herself to open her eyes. She had to do it because the thing had taken everything from her and she had to destroy it. The pain was a price she was willing to pay.</p>

<p>“Where did it go;?”</p>

<p>“Old woman,” she said, gasping for a breath that seemed to take forever to come. “She hit me. It got her.”</p>

<p>“Jesus,” David said. He hadn’t been thinking. He had seen the old woman turn the corner just beyond the bridge. It hadn’t even struck him as incongruous that the woman was still walking past after another woman had come flying over the wall and landed on the concrete. He hadn’t even considered how unnatural that was. Without hesitation he turned to face up to the embankment. The dogs were still wheezing and the crows were only now beginning to get their flight capability back, lumbering unsteadily into the air. One policeman was coming through the gap in the fence.</p>

<p>“Get on to Mr Millar,” David told him. “Tell him where we are. Get an ambulance here pronto.” The man nodded. David turned back. “You look after her,” he told Helen.</p>

<p>On the ground Kate Park moaned. She shook her head and a stream of blood blurted from between her lips. “No,” she said, guttural and almost incoherent, but powerful enough to make sure they understood.</p>

<p>“Find it,” she said. “Find it and kill it.”</p>

<p>She lowered her dreadfully injured head to the ground and the red blood trickled down onto the white snow in a searing contrast. Her body shivered as if in a death spasm, but her eyes were still gleaming bright.</p>

<p>“Go,” she told them. </p>