Childes leaned more heavily into the parapet. Oh dear God, its mind is in mine, stronger than ever before!
Soon he was able to perceive moon-cast outlines in its form, reflecting off immense sloping shoulders, jumbled in the texture of curled and matted hair. The shape of a nose, a chin. The planes of forehead and cheeks. The dark slash that was a wide, grinning mouth.
It drew nearer, passing the water tower, much of its ungainly body becoming lost from view behind the steps of the raised section on which Childes stood. For a moment, only the head and shoulders could be seen.
Its eyes were still shadowed, black pits that were as deep and as full of foreboding as the lake below.
It mounted the steps, its body rising as if from a tomb, broad, wild-haired head grinning, eyes unseen, coming closer, moving nearer, its thoughts stretching forward, reaching for him. And there was something else that was disturbing about this almost shapeless mass which seemed to shuffle rather than walk, something that was slowly - ever so slowly - becoming evident as it advanced, drew closer and closer, to stop when it was no more than three yards away.
It was only then, when he was able to look into that broad, moonlit face and see the gimlet eyes, small and black, that realisation pounced, for when she spoke her voice betrayed nothing of her gender, the sound so low, so rasping.
'I've… enjoyed… the… game,' she said, each word slow and singular.
Her low chuckling laughter was as unpleasant as her voice and punched into him like physical blows. He clutched at the parapet more tightly.
The woman shuffled a yard closer and he noticed that her ankles, revealed beneath a long, voluminous skirt, were swollen, flowing over the laced shoes she wore as though her flesh were melting. An outsized anorak was spread over her upper body in untidy folds.
Childes forced himself to stand erect. His head was buzzing with confused thoughts, nausea clogging his throat. He could smell this woman. He could scent her madness! He swallowed hard, desperate to regather his failing strength.
All he could think of to say was: 'Why?'
The word was nothing more than a croaking sound, but she understood. He sensed, he felt, her shift of emotions: amusement had scuttled away.
'For her,' she said in that low, ungendered rasp, arching her neck so that her face was lifted towards the moon. 'My Lady.'
She gaped her mouth and he saw crooked, disfigured teeth. She drew in a deep scratchy breath as though inhaling the moonlight itself and when her head lowered, for one fleeting, unnerving moment, the moon reflected in those dark, cruel eyes, and it seemed as if the shine came from within, that the moon was inside filling her body, the eyes merely windows. The illusion was transient, but the vision lingered.
'Tell me… tell me who you are,' Childes uttered, uncertain of his own sanity.
The grossly-shaped woman regarded him for some time before speaking again, the brightness gone from her eyes, but replaced with a different kind of gleaming. 'Don't you know?' she asked, her words slow, but less so than before. 'Didn't you learn anything from me? There was so much I got from you, my lovely.'
He no longer leaned so dependently against the ledge. 'I don't understand,' he managed to say, striving to keep a steady tone, willing his legs to stop their incessant trembling. She's only a woman, he told himself, not an 'It'. Just a woman! But a madwoman, a small, chuckling voice in his head whispered. An incredibly strong madwoman, it taunted. And she knows you're terribly afraid, my lovely.
'I stole the girl from you.' The woman sniggered. Her mood had changed yet again, that shift sweeping through Childes himself, as though his senses were an integral part of hers.
'Not your girl…' she said slyly, '… unfortunately. The other little girl. How the little dear wriggled, how she squirmed.'
The beginnings of anger flared inside him, a tiny flame struck in the darkness of his fear. The flame expanded, forcing back some of that darkness.
'You… killed… Annabel,' he said flatly.
'And those others.' Her voice was a low growl - a good-humoured growl. 'Don't forget all those others. Those girls were for my Lady too.'
The breeze sweeping over the dam was stronger, colder, flicking at his upturned lapels. It carried the salt smell of the sea. 'You murdered them,' he said.
'Fire murdered them, my lovely. And the woman who tried to stop me. Fire murdered the retards in the home, too. Oh how I enjoyed that place.' Her massive bulk edged closer and she leaned her head forward in a conspiratorial manner, silvery light haloing the matted curls of her hair. Once more her eyes lay hidden in black pits. 'Oh how I enjoyed that place,' she repeated in a whisper. 'My asylum. Nobody believed those lunatics, not their snivelling tittle-tattle. Who in their right mind would believe what I did to them when I got them alone? Who would credit the insane? Such fun it was, so very enjoyable. Such a pity it had to end, but you were coming closer, weren't you, my lovely? And you would have given me away. That made my Lady very cross.'
Now only one of Childes' hands rested against the concrete ledge. 'I still don't understand. What lady?'
She leered at him - at least he imagined it was some form of grotesque leer. 'Don't you know? Haven't you felt her divine force inside you? The power of the moon goddess that waxes and wanes with the moon's cycle. Can't you feel her strength in our minds? You have the gift too, my lovely, don't you see?'
'The sightings…?'
She became impatient, her irritation rumbling through his own senses. 'Whatever you care to call it - none of that matters. When we share that gift, when our minds are together - like now! - its strength is so powerful… so beautifully… powerful.' The thought had made her breathless. Her body swayed from side to side, her face upwards again.
Her smell of insanity was rancid.
She became motionless and her head lowered. 'Don't you remember what we did with your machines? Our little game?'
'The computers?' He shook his head in bewilderment. 'You made the word "MOON" appear on the screens.'
She laughed, and the sound was threatening. 'You made the word appear in their mindsl Not on the machines, my lovely fool! We did it together, you and me, we made your precious girls see what we wanted them to see! And you saw what I wanted you to!'
Illusion. Everything was illusion; and perhaps it made more sense that way, knowing none of it was real.
'But why,' he pleaded, 'for God's sake why did they have to die?'
'Not for God's, but for our goddess's. Sacrificial lambs, lovely. And for their spiritual energy, feeble though it was in most. Interestingly strong in the woman, though, the one whose neck I broke inside the school.'
'Miss Piprelly?'
A shrug of those immense sloping shoulders. 'If that's who she was. You understand the energy I mean, don't you? I think you'd call it psychic force or some such fancy name. That energy tucked up inside here.'
A stubby finger tapped her temple and Childes shuddered inwardly when he saw how large her hands were. Powerful hands, swollen, like her body.
'But the woman's was nothing like yours, my lovely. Oh no, yours is special. I've searched inside you, I've touched your spirit. Such force, and held back for so long! It belongs to me now, though.' She grinned and shuffled closer.
'All those others,' Childes said quickly, needing time for his anger to surge through him, to lend its vigour. 'Why did you mutilate them?'
'I tasted their souls through their inner flesh. That was the way, d'you see, my lovely? I emptied them and filled them again, but not with their own organs - oh no, their organs couldn't be returned, or they would have tried to reclaim their souls. And their souls belonged to our goddess. But I left them the stone, her physical presence here on earth. You've witnessed her earthly spirit inside the moonstone, haven't you, that tiny blue-glowing spark that's her essence? My gift to those unfortunates who had to die for her.'
Mad. She was totally mad. And she had moved very close now.
Dread, icy and clutching, held him there as
she stretched one of those big hands towards him. The fingers slowly uncurled, the palm upwards, so that moonlight struck the fleshy surface.
'I've got one for you,' she whispered, smiling at all that her offer implied.
A tiny round stone lay in the outstretched palm and it might only have been the madwoman's disrupted and disruptive mind working on his, implanting the thought, the illusion - for she did have the ability; despite her madness, she did possess unbelievable psychic power - but there was an effulgence inside the gem, a bluish phosphorescence heightened by moonshine. In that glimmer he saw all the deaths.
With a gasping cry of both fear and rage, Childes slapped at the hand so that the moonstone flew into the air, a minute shooting star snuffed out almost immediately as it arced down into the void that was the dam's valley.
The demented woman, who held within her an uncanny force, stood silently before him, her hand still outstretched, her face, with its shadowed eyes, inscrutable. Childes, too, was transfixed, the air between them somehow dangerously charged, an insidiously creeping current thrumming around his body so that each hair stiffened on its own little island.
A thought burst into his mind, causing him to stagger.
Amy, sprawled writhing beyond the low wall by the roadside, her face a pincushion of glass shards, her neck unnaturally twisted against the base of a tree trunk, her mouth open with blood dribbling out.
'No!' he shouted.
The thought was gone.
And the shadowed gash on the woman's face was a grin.
He ducked his head into a hand as another image struck.
Jeanette, dangling over the stairway, her neck squeezed tight by the noose that was a tie, flesh puckered and swollen over its edges. Her bloated tongue slowly oozing between her lips, growing in length like some emerging purple worm, crawling down her chin to quiver over the throat that was drawn so tight. Her eyes bulging against their sockets, first one then the other plopping loose to swing against her cheeks. A trickling of clear yellowish liquid from between her legs, soaking into the white sock on one leg, falling in a broken stream into the well of the stairway.
'It isn't real!’ he cried.
Gabby in repose, little white body unclothed and unmoving, as still and quiet as death. Her stomach cut open, sticky sweating organs breaking free, throbbing as they wriggled forth like slimy parasites. Her mouth beginning to open while these slithering things that were her existence escaped. Her fingers missing. Her feet blunted, each toe gone. She was calling for him, calling for Daddee… Daddee… DaddeeEEE!
'Illusion!' he screamed.
But the thing facing him on the dam only laughed, a deep, guttural noise that was as evil as her deranged mind.
His head shot sideways as an invisible force swiped at him. He touched his stinging cheek, feeling the hotness there. Yet she had not moved. Her snickering taunted him as cold, iron fingers jabbed at his lower body, clamping his testicles, excruciating pain doubling him over.
'Illusion, my lovely?' came her voice.
He shrieked and fell to his knees as the unseen hand turned to fire and thrust up inside his anus, piercing through, singeing the passage, reaching for his innards to melt and pulp them in its flaming grip.
'ILLUSION?' she demanded.
And although the agony was beyond belief, a white searing brand risen high inside him, an intense hurting that clawed his fingers and bowed his head against the concrete, Childes understood it was not real, the appalling severity driving off fear itself, and with the fear her intimidating control of his thoughts.
The pain ceased immediately with the realisation. But he was left weakened and slumped against the parapet wall. He stared up at the black looming shape that had not moved.
'Illusion,' he affirmed breathlessly.
Her anger rushed out at him like a wind squall, pressing him to the stone. A sharp scratching against his pupils blurred his sight and his fingers reached for the shrivelled contact lenses, tearing them from his eyes. He dropped the crinkled plastic onto the walkway and struggled to regain his feet, blinking away tears.
An unknown pressure tried to force him down, but Childes resisted, his hand reaching for the ledge above to pull himself up. Not real, he kept telling himself, not real, not real! Tentatively he struck out at the monstrosity in front of him. Not with his body. Not with his fists. With his mind. He aimed a blow at her with his mind.
He was surprised to see her shudder.
She came back at him and Childes reeled, his lower spine jarring against the top of the parapet. But this time the mental strike was softer, had less effect.
He heard voices, distant and somehow hollow, non-existent. They were inside his head and as unreal as the brutal thoughts she sent him. Childes pushed at her mind again and felt her flinch. It was impossible - he knew it was impossible - but he was hurting her.
The voices grew louder, but still they were from within and had nothing to do with the night.
It seemed as though she were listening too, but again she endeavoured to wound him with her own secret torture. Cruel clawing fingers that weren't really there dug into his face, drawing down, jagged nails raking his skin. He felt their pressure, but not the pain. A curious vibration had began to hum through his body as though flowing through arteries and nerves, and the voices dipped and dived inside his head.
'No more,' came her rasping growl. 'Game's over for you, my lovely!'
She lumbered forward and her hands were like huge crane claws reaching for him.
Outrage helped. Childes aimed for that wide fleshy face, his fist balled into a weapon. It struck the blob of her nose, but she turned her head, lessening the damage. Blood smeared her upper lip.
One big hand swatted his away and then she was upon him, crushing his body against the low wall with her bulky weight. The breath rattled wheezingly in her throat. A rough hand went beneath his chin, lifting, pushing back his jaw so that he was sure the bones in his neck would snap. His fingers encircled that fat wrist and he tried to wrench it away, but she was too strong, too incredibly strong. He struck at her face and she merely shrugged off the blows. His back stretched over the ledge and Childes could sense the deep, empty space behind him.
His feet left the concrete floor and kicked uselessly at the obese body that held him there.
His mind went cold.
He was going to die.
Oddly, he was aware of the breeze brushing against his cheeks. And he was aware of the abyss behind. His blurred eyes were filled with the roundness of the full moon, its edges hazy to him now, as it watched impassively, lighting his upturned face with an unblemished radiance. He smelled her foul breath, harsh and heated with her exertions, as well as her body odour, stale with sweat and uncleanliness. So keenly acute were his senses that his thoughts mingled with hers, their separate psyches almost merging so that he knew her, touched the craziness that was inside, flinched back when it spasmed as if to seize. And as his mind retreated from hers, he was aware that she also heard the screeching voices, for they were within both their minds.
His balance had gone, his weight pivoted over the ledge; she held him there as though prolonging the moment.
But she was looking around, searching for the voices. She stopped. She looked towards the end of the dam, its granite structure softened by moonlight.
Childes managed to pull himself back a little while her attention was diverted. He swivelled his head, followed her gaze. Saw the misty shapes drifting towards them.
54
They came from the night like wisps of curling vapour, nebulous and vague, a gauzy shifting of air, thin ethereal shapes that had little form and no substance.
Yet theirs were the voices that wailed inside Childes' consciousness.
At first they had seemed almost as one, a delicate cloud bank slowly moving along the top of the dam, but they had soon begun to separate, unthread into individual plasmic patterns, becoming different entities. Evolving into definite forms.
&nb
sp; The woman's grip on him loosened as she straightened, an expression of bewilderment on her puffy, moonlit face. There was something more than simply uneasy surprise in her reaction, but this Childes sensed through her mind: it was an inner tremor, a flickering of fear. He eased himself from her grasp and slipped back onto the walkway, wrist muscles quivering with the effort of hauling his body over; he sank to the concrete floor, his shoulders resting against the parapet wall.
She had hardly noticed his movement, so intent were her shadowed eyes on the drifting spectres. Her brow was furrowed into deep shaded ruts and her big killer's hands were held clenched before her as though Childes were still in their grip. She took a step backwards, obese body at an angle to the approaching mists, only her head turned in their direction.
Closer they came.
Childes was weakened, as if these immaterial bodies were drawing off his strength, using his energy; but the madwoman's body sagged also, for they sucked at her spirit just as they fed off his.
He began to understand what she meant when she had spoken of the gift they shared and how strong and how beautifully powerful it was. But had she really known how powerful the gift could be? For it was gradually becoming evident what these slow-twisting apparitions were. Electric shivers ran through Childes and he cowered back against the wall.
The woman - It - the creature - the killer - was now standing in the centre of the walkway like some squat monolith as flat white light from above eerily revealed the advancing forms, their shapes becoming firm, less incorporeal, affording only occasional glimpses of the terrain beyond their discarnate bodies.
The first was small and no more than a boy. A very young boy. A very pale boy. A boy whose flesh held no blood, whose eyes held no life, and who shivered in his nakedness. A young boy whose stomach had been gouged out, shreds of skin flapping loosely over his emptiness. His mouth had opened and there were earth things inside, tiny crawling pallid grubs that always fed from graves. His decomposed lips moved and although he uttered no sounds, his words could be heard.
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