That woman, dressed in her oversized anorak, put up a fat, ugly hand to ward them off.
But an old man had slipped between the grotesquely painted prostitute and the shivering boy, a lewd, ridiculous grin on his wizened face. Pyjamas hung loosely over his emaciated frame and the moon struck his eyes to give them vitality, a reflected gleam that was full of lunacy. Dried, caked blood darkened his pallid features in parts, and his head ended an inch or so above his eyebrows, sheered flat, more squirming things sucking at the protruding mushy pulp. He gibbered uncontrollably (again the sound only in their minds) as if cold air and gorging parasites were doing funny things to his exposed brain.
The woman shrieked, the cry as manic as the old man's gibbering, and Childes cringed back, refusing to believe but knowing it was happening.
Now it was the woman's turn to cry:
'It's not real!'
The shifting figures crowded around her, pulling and snatching at her clothes, raking her face with their hands. The boy stood on tiptoe to reach into one black pit hoping to pluck out an eye.
She pushed him away, but he came back, and he was laughing at the game. She was dragged to her knees - or perhaps she fell in terror - and she thrashed her arms, all the while shouting,
'Not real, you're not real!'
They became still and looked down at her gross, huddled bulk, the old man sniggering, the prostitute holding her stomach with cupped hands, the boy pleading for the return of his heart.
'Illusion,' Childes whispered and the woman, the she-thing -
It
- screamed at him.
'Make them go away, make them go away!’
And for a moment, as his thoughts wavered between reality and illusion, it seemed their forms did partially fade, did become insubstantial mists again. Did become nothing more than thought projections.
Until a diminutive figure pushed her way through the fluctuating images to confront the obesity huddled on hands and knees.
The little girl wore a thin green cotton dress and there were no shoes or socks on her feet, no jumper or cardigan to keep off the chill night air. One side of her hair was braided into a plait and tied with a ribbon; the other side was loose and straggly, the ribbon gone. Her cheeks glistened like damp marble and a tiny hand sought to rub away the tears. But the hand had no fingers; it ended in five blood-clotted stumps.
'Annabel,' said Childes in an awed breath.
'I want to go home now,' she said to the quivering woman, her voice small and squeaky, reminding Childes of Gabby's.
The woman raised her head and howled, a long wailing cry of anguish that was amplified over the reservoir's watery acres, swelling to become hollow and plaintive.
The boy plunged in his hand, sinking it into the woman's eye socket almost up to the thin wrist - at least it looked as if it were so to Childes.
Impossible,
Childes insisted to himself,
a nightmare only!
But when the skeletal fingers were suckingly withdrawn, dark fluid gushing in their wake, they held something round and glistening, something that was restrained by a thin stretching tendril which eventually snapped, a thread left dangling in the oozing liquid.
The woman rose, clutching the gushing hole in her face to stem the blood flow. She shrieked and wailed and screamed and begged to be left alone.
But they would
not
leave her alone: instead they pushed forward and reached for her.
She tore herself free, striking out, unbalancing the old man so that the pulpy substance and its feeding parasites inside the open container of his skull spilled out like contents from a weird Toby jug. He bent over, still grinning, still inanely sniggering, and picked up the liquefying brain from the concrete, replacing it inside the jug of his skull as easily as someone donning a hat; in truth, the gesture had all the ludicrousness of a geriatric replacing a wind-blown hairpiece.
Childes wondered if it was he, himself, who had finally gone mad.
The woman was backing away, tripping over Childes' sprawled legs as she retreated and grabbing at the parapet ledge to maintain her balance, moving towards the other end of the dam, towards the water tower, towards an escape into the trees and undergrowth where she had skulked earlier. The moonlit shapes drifted after her, arms still reaching, lustreless eyes intent on her. They followed, wandering past Childes as though
he
were the ghost, unnoticed, unperceived.
Only the small figure who had been Annabel stopped to linger by him.
Childes watched the stumbling woman retreat, despising her for the atrocities her perverted yet extraordinary mind had allowed, but taking no pleasure from this macabre retribution. One of her hands pressed against her eye socket, the fingers inky with leaking substance, but she never ceased moving backwards, shuffling away from those stalking spectres. Finally she turned her back on them, her stumbling pace increasing, nightmarish terror forcing her thick legs with their overflowing ankles into a staggering lope.
She soon came to a halt. She began to back away from the steps that she herself had risen from earlier like a ghoul from a dank tomb.
She reversed into the eagerly awaiting arms of those who had followed.
Beyond her, Childes saw what had brought her to a stop, for more ethereal figures were mounting the steps, their heads coming into view first, then their shoulders, their chests, their waists, and they were not wearing the nightclothes in which they had burned to death, but their school uniforms, the La Roche colours mono-chromed in the moonlight, unsoiled and uncharred by flames, although their bodies were blackened and gristled, their hair gone, skulls darkened and mangled, with exposed lipless teeth set in hideous grins and flesh hanging in rotted slivers, and Kelly pointing with a burnt and withered arm at the lumbering hulk of a woman, while her companions giggled as if Kelly had whispered some risque joke…
… And Miss Piprelly leading them, her charcoaled head resting on one shoulder, perched uneasily there as if about to topple, her oddly tilted eyes blazing whitely from blackened bones and skin, yet full of infinite sadness, full of weeping…
… And Matron following up from behind, herding her girls, checking that none had strayed, none were lost, and all were sound and the scars and melted tissue did not hurt, that there was no longer any searing pain, not for the girls and not for her…
Everything was blurred to Childes now that he no longer had his contact lenses, yet somehow everything was crystal clear inside his head. Clear even when tears crept into his eyes as the crocodile file of girls, led by their principal and tailed by their ever-watchful matron, became momentarily whole again, their unmarked flesh glowing with life, Miss Piprelly's head erect and body ramrod proud, Kelly bubbling and impudent as ever, her pointing hand smooth and slender, with only their eyes still dead things. The change was fleeting. By the time they had all climbed the steps and were on a level with the transfixed woman, they were charred and disfigured corpses once more.
The woman's screams were piercingly shrill as the drifting figures converged on her, discarnate bodies hemming her in, clutching and tearing, beating her, raining blows that should have had no effect, yet which somehow drew blood, somehow caused the woman, the
beast,
to fall back. One thick arm was raised to protect her face while her other hand still covered her gouged eye. Childes became aware that in the background and more hazily vague, observing rather than participating, was the figure of a uniformed man, the blood-seeping slash at his throat matching the tight-lipped smile on his wan face. Childes thought of the policeman he had found slumped in his patrol car at La Roche. Other shapes moved in the background, but these had no definite form, could indeed have been nothing more than mist drifting in from the lake. But there was laughter and moaning and wailing among those vapours.
Still sprawled against the wall, Childes watched on, horrified and unable to move, unable even to call out. The silent figure of Annabel stood nearby.
The woman was leaning back against the parapet, her huge sloping shoulders stretching over the ledge in an effort to keep away from those grasping spectral hands. She twisted to protect her face and a stream of blood ran through her fingers to splatter against the dam's massive wall, where the flow continued to trickle down, a dark leak on a vast concrete expanse.
The next thing to happen was so fast that Childes was unsure of what he had seen - or what he had perceived, for his brain still insisted that none of this was true, that it wasn't taking place at all.
She might have attempted to climb onto the parapet to escape them.
In her wretched pain and craziness, she might even have decided to jump.
Or the figures that surrounded her might have really lifted those huge tree-trunk legs and pushed her over.
Whichever, Childes saw her huge bulk disappear and heard her scream rip through the night.
He closed his eyes, shutting out the madness, retreating into a blankness that unfortunately hid nothing. Everything was still there before him inside his besieged mind.
'Oh God…' he moaned. And opened his eyes.
The shapes were less defined, had become vaporous and uncertain once more. They grouped on the walkway, forms indiscernible and undulating as if disturbed by the breeze. He was dimly aware of other sounds and lights in the distance. Annabel had not moved, was near him, sad and small, her face a fading image of haunting loneliness.
Childes exhaled a sighing breath, air held so long that it had become stale in his lungs. He sagged, his head sinking onto raised knees, arms hanging limply by his sides, hands resting against the concrete like two dead animals who had rolled over and died, his clawed, upturned fingers tiny legs frozen in the air. It was over, and exhaustion claimed him as he wondered if he would ever comprehend the true and intrinsic nature of this woman who had been a devious tormenting abstraction - an - to him for so long: Maniacal, certainly, a monster, too; but possessing such a strange power, a psychic force that was nothing less than demonic. He prayed that the power had been forever laid to rest.
And felt the cold insidious prickling ruffle his skin again.
Childes raised his head and looked towards the weaving mists, to where the woman had fallen. His mouth slowly dropped open, his eyelids stretched wide, and a trembling shook him as it had before.
For, even though his vision was poor, he could make out the shape of the big hand whose stubby fingers curled over the ledge like a fleshy clamp. Holding her there.
'No,' he murmured, a mere whisper to himself. 'Oh no.'
Was there a flicker of pleading in Annabel's otherwise lustreless eyes?
Childes twisted onto his knees, groped a shaking hand towards the ledge above, and pulled himself up. It seemed at first that his legs would not bear his weight, but strength returned like blood flowing into a limb that had gone to sleep, the process almost as painful.
He leaned heavily against the ledge for a brief time, then stumbled towards the clutching hand. The mists appeared to reassemble as he approached, again taking on separate forms. His legs were unsteady and he had become curiously numbed by all that had happened. When he drew near, the wispy figures parted.
They watched him, remote and impassive. The grinning old man whose skull was open to the sky. The naked boy who held something white and bloody in his frail fist, something he tried to push into the deep wound in his body as if to replace his lost heart. The bizarrely painted woman whose breasts were missing and whose belly bulged with small lumps as she pulled the sliced skin together. The schoolgirls and the matron, grisly, charred figures whose bones shone dully through gaping and mangled flesh. The uniformed man with two tight smiles, one above his chin, the other below. Estelle Piprelly, for a moment whole, unmarked, and who looked deep into Childes' eyes, an emotion passing between them.
They watched Childes and they waited.
He reached the spot where the hand spread over the ledge to grip its inner side, the fingers seeming to oscillate with the tension of bearing the woman's full weight. He saw the fleshy wrist, the sleeve of the anorak stretched tight over the edge, disappearing at the elbow into the void. Childes leaned over the parapet.
Her round, moonlit face was just below him, slick dark liquid that reflected light shading her jaw and cheeks. One eye and a deep black leaking socket stared back at him, her other arm hanging loosely beside her as though useless.
'Help… me…' she said in her low rasping voice, and there was no entreaty in her tone.
As he looked down into her wide, upturned face, her silver hair sprayed out behind in wild tangles, he touched her madness once more, felt the crawling sickness that went beyond the iniquitous and corrupted mind which worshipped a mythical moon-goddess in insane justification for the evil she herself perpetrated; this sickness sprung from a cruel and degenerate soul, a spirit that was itself malign and rancorous. He felt and he
saw
her warped essence not in that one eye that stared up at him so balefully, but in the other deep black oozing pit that watched him with equal malevolence! And the words
help… me
… were full of taunting, alive with mocking. Childes felt and saw these things because she was in him and he was in her, and she filled him with images that were monstrous and abhorrent, repulsive and sickening, for still she enjoyed the game between them. Her game. Her torture.
But a new sensation passed through that depraved mind when his hands closed over the fat, stubby hand.
Fear stabbed those tormenting thoughts like a blade piercing a pus-filled wound when he lifted her first finger.