Wake Wood

by K. A. John

  Patrick stepped back from her and leaned against the wall. ‘This isn’t easy for me to say or admit, Louise. But things aren’t right with Alice. You do know that, don’t you?’

  She gazed at him wordlessly.

  ‘You do know that, don’t you?’ he repeated.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she conceded miserably.

  Patrick’s phone rang.

  He ignored it. It eventually stopped ringing, only to start again almost immediately.

  ‘You know better than me what people are like when their animals are sick. It won’t stop ringing until you switch it off or answer it,’ Louise advised.

  Patrick wrapped his arm around her shoulders, took the call and listened for a moment, then said, ‘I can come tomorrow … No, I can’t … How high did you say his temperature is? … OK … OK … All right, twenty minutes. I’ll be there.’

  Louise broke free. ‘No! Please, Patrick, not today. You can’t leave Alice and me, not today of all days.’

  ‘I have to go,’ he declared reluctantly.

  ‘Please …’

  ‘I have to,’ he insisted. ‘If I don’t, they’ll be back here again with their black feathers and demands that we return Alice instantly to the woods and the earth, just like last night. Do you want that?’

  Too overwrought to speak, she shook her head. Her tears fell to the floor.

  ‘Louise?’

  She turned her back on him and opened the door to the dining room.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ he called after her.

  ‘You’ll be as long as it takes.’ She took a moment to wipe her eyes and pull herself together before returning to Mary.

  Mary noticed Louise’s tears. ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked sympathetically.

  ‘Patrick’s been called out,’ Louise informed her briefly.

  ‘I see. I’m sorry. Hopefully he won’t be too long.’ Mary rose from her chair. ‘It’s time I was going, but I’ll be back for you before midnight and we’ll all join the procession to the woods. The whole town will be there for you, Alice and Patrick.’

  Louise didn’t trust herself to comment. ‘I’ll see you out.’

  ‘How are you really, Louise?’ Mary enquired earnestly. ‘Are you in good heart?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Louise lied.

  Mary hugged her and left. Louise watched her pick up her bicycle and wheel it down the drive.

  Louise returned to the house and closed the door. When she looked up she saw Alice watching her from the top of the stairs. She forced a smile. ‘Want to play a game, Alice? Any game, your choice.’

  Alice glared back at her. ‘When’s the baby coming?’

  Eighteen

  THE O’SHEAS’ FARMYARD was dark and deserted. Black clouds had blown in suddenly and heavily, transforming midday to twilight. The shadowy outlines of farm machinery parked on the fringes of the yard had adopted strangely prehistoric dinosaur-like silhouettes. The chickens, ducks and geese were silent, safely locked away in the poultry houses secure from marauding foxes. Even the dogs were quiet and sleeping in the barn after a morning spent out in the fields with the sheep and the cattle.

  A solitary light burned at the entrance to the cow house. Inside, the animals were restless, lowing noisily, flicking their tails and shuffling and stamping their hooves. Martin O’Shea leaned against a pillar at the entrance. Conscious of his animals’ disquiet, he was alert, watchful, eyeing the cows in between glancing apprehensively towards the gate of the bull pen.

  Patrick was taking his time over examining the prize bull and Martin wasn’t sure whether that was a good or a bad thing. The beast had looked in bad shape to him but a good vet could work miracles, or so Arthur always said. And he and his late father had always believed everything Arthur said, with good cause. The vet had looked after all their animals and well, since Martin had been a small boy.

  And Arthur had brought Patrick into Wake Wood and trusted him to carry on his good work.

  When the gate swung open, Martin stepped forward, immediately preparing himself for what he suspected was going to be expensive news. A vet’s services didn’t come cheap, especially when an animal was in as bad a way as the bull appeared to be.

  Patrick stood framed in the doorway, his gloved hands and overalls saturated with bright red blood.

  ‘He’s a mess, Martin,’ Patrick declared flatly. ‘I’ve never seen an animal as bad that’s still breathing. When and how did this happen to him?’

  ‘I have no idea. His fever was up when I last checked him, that’s when I went into the house to phone you. When I came back here I found him like he is now. And that’s all I know,’ Martin replied defensively. ‘What’s he got?’

  Patrick met Martin’s eye. ‘It’s not an illness, Martin. Someone or something did this to him.’

  ‘Someone … you mean deliberately attacked and hurt him!’

  ‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ Patrick confirmed.

  ‘Well, don’t look at me,’ Martin countered pre-emptively. ‘I think the world of that bull, even after what he did to my dad. He’s an animal and animals can’t think. Not like us. They don’t know what they’re doing and can’t be held responsible when they hurt people. Can they?’

  ‘No, they can’t.’ Patrick left the gate open, returned to the bull pen and gazed down at the bull. The creature lay on his side, gasping for breath. The pool of blood beneath and around the beast was inches deep and more was pumping from his wounds every second. Wide gashes on his head and neck exposed the white of the skull and spinal bones in places. But even worse than the head and neck injuries was the sight of one of the animal’s eyes lying on the floor beside his empty eye socket. It had been viciously and inexpertly gouged out.

  Martin moved reluctantly into the doorway of the pen, nauseated by the sight that greeted him. He could barely bring himself to look at the wreckage of what had been his father’s prize animal.

  Patrick crouched down beside the bull. He’d spotted something glittering on the ground, floating in the blood. He picked it out with his gloved fingers and held it up. It was a silver chain. He recognised it as Alice’s. The one Louise had given her on her birthday. The same one he’d taken from Alice’s grave, washed, disinfected and cleaned and hidden in Alice’s coat pocket, for her to find later, when they’d played football in the garden on the first day after her return to them.

  Patrick studied it for a moment, then blanched as his suspicions hardened. He looked back at the bull, evaluating its injuries and considering how they might have been made. Surely not …

  ‘Did you drop something?’

  Patrick started. ‘Sorry, Martin, I heard you speak but I was miles away. What did you say?’ He pocketed the bloodstained chain.

  ‘I asked if you’d dropped something,’ Martin repeated.

  ‘I was minding my daughter’s neck chain for her. It fell out of my pocket,’ Patrick lied.

  Martin looked at the bull. ‘You’ll be wanting some hot water, Patrick, so you can tend to him. I’ll get a couple of buckets from the kitchen.’

  The bull heard Martin’s voice, recognised it and moved his head so he could look up at him with his one remaining eye. Martin saw the beast move and fought back tears.

  Patrick knew that Martin would be embarrassed by sympathy so he pretended not to notice his distress, although he was in danger of being overcome by emotion himself. He patted and smoothed the bull’s flanks before glancing back at Martin and shaking his head. ‘I won’t need any hot water, Martin.’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do for him?’ Martin didn’t want to believe it.

  ‘All I can do for him now is put him out of his misery,’ Patrick said quietly.

  Martin squared his shoulders, stared at the ailing bull for a moment, then looked away. ‘Fair enough, Patrick. At least you came out to see to him, so you gave him every chance. Injection, is it?’

  Patrick opened his bag and prepped a hypodermic. He hesitated after he’d drawn the contents o
f a phial into the syringe, then checked the notes on the back of the bottle of solution he’d used to fill the needle.

  ‘He’s too big for this. It won’t have any effect on a beast his weight.’ Patrick capped the hypodermic. He returned to his bag and removed a small bolt-type gun. ‘They call this a humane killer. It will be quick,’ he explained.

  ‘And painless?’ Martin asked hopefully.

  ‘After what he’s already been through, as painless as I can make it,’ Patrick promised. He looked around the shed at the rest of the cattle, aware that they were all watching his every move. He primed the gun, rose to his feet and walked deliberately to the bull’s head. He pressed the device to the animal’s forehead and fired.

  The noise of the shot ricocheted around the shed, driving the cattle further back into their pens in fright. They moved even more restlessly, mooing and lowing noisily. The bull went into a seizure. Its legs thrashed wildly in its death throes, drumming the concrete floor and splashing the walls and gate of the pen with blood.

  Martin O’Shea had closed his eyes. He didn’t see Patrick slip the hypodermic syringe into his pocket.

  The world whirled crazily around Louise. She felt as though she were standing in the centre of a roundabout that was rotating wildly out of control. The only constant was Alice, standing stock still on the landing.

  Louise lost all sense of time and self as she continued to stare up at her daughter. The searing, contemptuous glare in Alice’s eyes went beyond anger. It was disdainful, dismissive, and ferocious in its intensity. Louise burned under that steady gaze until Alice broke the spell by turning her back, flouncing to her room and shutting herself in with a loud bang of the door.

  Only then did Louise take a deep breath. She felt giddy, nauseous, as if she’d run a marathon. Could it be … was it possible that she was really pregnant? After all that the doctors had said?

  She hurried through to the kitchen, picked up her keys and went outside to the old dairy that Patrick had paid a builder to convert into a stockroom for her pharmacy.

  Hands trembling, she unlocked the door, burst inside and switched on the light. She searched frantically along the steel shelving units until she found the box she was looking for. She lifted it down to the floor and, taking one of the metal box-rippers she kept on the end of every shelf, tore it open.

  Her fingers reacted clumsily. They felt as though they’d swollen to double their normal size but somehow she managed to tear open the flaps on the box. She removed one of the pregnancy testing kits it contained. Taking it, she left, locked the stockroom door, charged across the garden back to the house and upstairs to the bathroom. She closed the door, fumbled with her zip, pulled down her jeans and panties and dived on to the toilet.

  Her hands were still shaking when she fought to tear apart the cellophane that sealed the box. She extracted the litmus stick, thrust it beneath her, urinated on it, leaned forward and closed her eyes, counting off the seconds twice over until she was absolutely certain she’d passed the three-minute mark.

  She opened her eyes, lifted the stick out from under her and stared at it. The result was unmistakeable. A definite pregnant ‘3+ weeks’. She placed the stick carefully on the shelf beside her as if it was her most precious possession, rose from the toilet, pulled up her panties and jeans, fastened the zip and flushed the cistern.

  Her gynaecologist had been so definite when she’d examined her after Alice’s birth. The diagnosis brutal. Her uterus had been so badly damaged when Alice had been born that there wouldn’t be any more children. Not for her and Patrick. There couldn’t be. When she’d broached the subject of IVF the consultant had discounted it, insisting she’d never conceive another child.

  The doctor had tried to be kind, telling her, as gently as she knew how, the only chance she and Patrick had of increasing the size of their family lay in adoption or surrogacy.

  The diagnosis had been a difficult one for both her and Patrick to come to terms with because from the time they’d first discussed marriage they’d planned to have a large family. Yet, somehow, a miracle had happened and now she was carrying another child.

  She ran a sink full of water, plunged in her hands, soaped them and rinsed them off. Another baby to love, another child for their family. Her and Patrick’s baby! She could actually think of babies again. Tiny, soft, warm, pink bodies smelling of baby lotion and talcum powder. Minute clothes, bassinets, toys, baby smiles and giggles.

  She picked up the pregnancy test again between her thumb and forefinger, read and reread it. All her training as a pharmacist told her the results were definite and positive, yet she still had difficulty believing it.

  She closed her eyes. It was all she and Patrick had hoped for and more. She couldn’t wait to tell him, to see the expression on his face. She unlocked the door and left the bathroom, her mind still reeling from the thought. A baby! Another baby! Hers and Patrick’s!

  Then she remembered Alice. This was their last day on this earth with her. She hated herself even as the thought formulated in her mind, but she knew that this news would make her and Patrick’s parting from their daughter a little easier to bear. No baby could ever replace Alice. Nothing and no one could, but it was another life … it would add another dimension to their family.

  She looked out of the landing window at the trees waving their skeletal winter branches. Spring would soon come, bursting with new life. Head swimming giddily, needing air, she walked downstairs, opened the front door and went outside to the flower beds. The reassuring signs she’d craved to see were all there. The tips of spring bulbs, daffodils, crocuses and tulips pushing up through the soil; the camellia and azalea bushes heavy with buds, the small green shoots that would soon grow into clumps of perennial geraniums.

  She moved her hands protectively over her abdomen and turned to the house. The smile died on her lips when she saw Alice standing in her bedroom window, staring down at Louise through cold, dead eyes.

  Beset by remorse and regret, her heart went out to her daughter. Alice had been her and Patrick’s entire world. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how much pain Alice was feeling at this moment at the prospect of another child entering their lives. A child who’d arrive long after Alice had left them – for ever.

  For ever – and go where? She froze in terror at the immense finality of the black unknown that was death.

  She had to talk to Alice, convince her that she and Patrick hadn’t set out to deliberately conceive a baby. That, no matter what, the new arrival would never replace her or take the love they had reserved solely for her. Alice had to know that she would always be their first, their darling; nothing and no one could take the space she had occupied in their lives and their hearts.

  Louise returned to the house and entered through the kitchen. She heard it as soon as she closed the door. The sound of discordant music; childish voices rasping horribly out of tune, accompanied by monotone instruments; it seemed to be emanating from upstairs.

  The noise was terrifying, yet somehow she was drawn to it. Unable to leave because the love she bore for her daughter was greater than her fear. Shaking, shivering, ice cold, she followed the sound. It grew louder and louder, increasing in volume until it deafened her when she reached the top of the stairs.

  A wave of nausea washed over her. Faint, she reached out to the door handle of Alice’s bedroom.

  The instant she touched it, the singing stopped momentarily, only to be replaced by a myriad of noisy, jabbering voices. Summoning her courage, she pressed down on the handle and pushed the door open.

  The voices quietened to the sound of just one little girl crying out, whining pitifully. Then it stopped.

  ‘Alice?’ she ventured tentatively. She looked into the room. Seeing no one, she peered behind the door. The room was empty. She stepped inside, looked beneath the bed, behind the curtains and opened the wardrobe door to reassure herself that no one was hiding in there.

  Wondering if she were locked in an all-t
oo-realistic nightmare, she turned around. Alice was standing on the landing behind her, swinging one of her old dolls from her right hand.

  ‘Mum?’ Her voice was soft, whingeing, insincere.

  Louise retreated, hitting a wall and painfully bruising her spine. ‘Alice,’ she murmured. She needed to get a grip on her emotions. It was ridiculous to be afraid of her own daughter. She forced a smile. ‘What is it, sweetie?’

  ‘When’s the baby coming?’

  ‘Not for months,’ Louise answered. ‘I didn’t even realise I was pregnant until you told me.’

  ‘You didn’t?’ There was disbelief as well as reproach in Alice’s question.

  ‘I really didn’t, sweetie.’

  ‘But it’s true.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’ Louise tried not to sound too glad. It wasn’t difficult. Despite her best efforts to remain calm, Alice was frightening her.

  Alice moved closer towards Louise but she didn’t seem to take a step. It was almost as though she were gliding across the floor of the landing.

  Terrified, unable to move back any further, Louise slipped sideways, slithering along the wall.

  ‘You and Dad don’t want me any more,’ Alice pronounced bitterly.

  ‘That’s not true, Alice. Dad and I love you very much. You’re everything to us. Our entire world, sweetie,’ Louise protested.

  ‘No, you’re lying. You don’t love me or want me. Not any more.’ Alice threw the doll at Louise. It hit her cheekbone. Hard!

  Louise reeled more from the shock of Alice’s anger directed at her than the force of the impact. ‘Alice …’

  Alice moved closer and Louise continued to slide away from her until Alice began to convulse.

  Seeing her daughter in pain, Louise’s maternal instincts held sway, quelling both her misgivings and her terror. She went to Alice and wrapped her arms around her, holding her tight as if she could will her daughter to stop shaking and her teeth to stop chattering.