she was away around the corner. He followed. There were a number of lamps not working along the street, and the silhouette he dogged was fitful. But she trailed her laughter still, and he went after it.
‘Where are you going?’ he wanted to know.
She only laughed again.
Above their heads the clouds were moving quickly, stars glimmering between, their fires too feeble to illuminate much below. They caught Cal’s eye for an instant, and when he looked back at Geraldine she was turning to him, making a sound somewhere between a sigh and a word.
The shadows that embraced her were dense, but they unfolded even as he watched, and what they revealed made his gut somersault. Geraldine’s face had dislodged somehow, her features running like heated wax. And now, as the facade fell away, he saw the woman beneath. Saw, and knew: the browless face, the joyless mouth. Who else but Immacolata?
He would have run then, but that he felt the cold muzzle of a gun against his temple, and the Salesman’s voice said:
‘Make a sound and it’s going to hurt.’
He kept his silence.
Shadwell gestured towards the black Mercedes that was parked at the next intersection.
‘Move,’ he said.
Cal had no choice, scarcely believing, even as he walked, that this scene was taking place on a street whose paving cracks he’d counted since he was old enough to know one from two.
He was ushered into the back of the car, separated from his captors by a partition of heavy glass. The door was locked. He was powerless. All he could do was watch the Salesman slide into the driver’s seat, and the woman get in beside.
There was little chance he’d be missed from the party, he knew, and littler chance still that anyone would come looking for him. It would simply be assumed that he’d tired of the festivities and headed off home. He was in the hands of the enemy, and helpless to do anything about it.
What would Mad Mooney do now, he wondered.
The question vexed him only a moment, before the answer came. Taking out the celebratory cigar Norman had given him, he leaned back in the leather seat, and lit up.
Good, said the poet; take what pleasure you can, while there’s still pleasure to be had. And breath to take it with.
The Salesman ordered him from the car. He got out obediently – it was difficult not to be obedient with a gun in his face. Shadwell immediately snatched the cigar from Cal’s mouth, grinding it beneath his heel, then escorted him through a gate into a walled compound. Only now, as he laid eyes on the canyons of household refuse ahead did Cal realize where they’d brought him: the Municipal Rubbish Tip. In former years, acres of parkland had been built on the city’s detritus, but there was no longer the money to transform trash into lawns. Trash it remained. Its stench – the sweet and sour of rotting vegetable matter – even overpowered the smell of the river.
‘Stop,’ said Shadwell, when they reached a place that seemed in no way particular.
Cal looked round in the direction of the voice. He could see very little, but it seemed Shadwell had pocketed his gun. Seizing the instant, he began to run, not choosing any particular direction, merely seeking escape. He’d covered maybe four paces when something tangled with his legs, and he fell heavily, the breath knocked from him. Before he had a chance to get to his feet forms were converging on him from every side, an incoherent mass of limbs and snarls that could only be the wraith-sister’s children. He was glad of the darkness; at least he couldn’t see their deformities. But he felt their limbs upon him; heard their teeth snapping at his neck.
They didn’t intend to devour him, however. At some cue he neither saw nor heard, their violence dwindled to mere bondage. He was held fast, his body so knotted up his joints creaked, while a terrible spectacle unfolded a few yards in front of him.
It was one of Immacolata’s sisters, he had no doubt of that: a naked woman whose substance flickered and smoked as though her marrow was on fire, except that she could have no marrow, for surely she had no bones. Her body was a column of grey gas, laced with strands of bloody tissue, and from this flux fragments of finished anatomy emerged: a seeping breast, a belly swollen as if by a pregnancy months beyond its term, a smeared face in which the eyes were sewn-up slits. That explained, no doubt, her hesitant advance, and the way her smoky limbs extended from her body to test the ground ahead: the ghost was blind.
By the light this unholy mother gave off, Cal could see the children more clearly. No perversion of anatomy had been overlooked amongst them: bodies turned inside out to parade the bowel and stomach; organs whose function seemed simply to seep and wheeze lining the belly of one like teats, and mounted like a coxcomb on another’s head. Yet despite their corruptions, their heads were all turned adoringly upon Mama Pus, their eyes unblinking so as not to miss a moment of her presence. She was their mother; they her loving children.
Suddenly, she started to shriek. Cal turned to look at her again. She’d taken up a squatting posture, her legs splayed, her head thrown back as she voiced her agony.
Behind her there now stood a second ghost, as naked as the first. More so perhaps, for she could scarcely lay claim to flesh. She was obscenely withered, her dugs like empty purses, her face collapsed upon itself in a jumble of tooth-shard and hair. She’d taken hold of her squatting sister, whose scream had now reached a nerve-shredding height. As the swollen belly came close to bursting, there was an issue of smouldering matter from between the mother’s legs. The sight was greeted with a chorus of welcomes from the children. They were entranced. So, in his horrified way, was Cal.
Mama Pus was giving birth.
The scream became a series of smaller, rhythmic shouts as the child began its journey into the living world. It was less born than shat, dropping from between its parent’s legs like a vast mewling turd. No sooner had it hit the ground than the withered midwife was about her business, coming between mother and spectators to draw away veils of redundant matter from the child’s body. The mother, her labours over, stood up, the flame in her flesh dying, and left the child to her sister’s ministrations.
Now Shadwell came back into view. He looked down at Cal.
‘Do you see?’ he said, his voice all but a whisper, ‘what kind of horrors these are? I warned you. Tell me where the carpet is and I’ll try to make sure the child doesn’t touch you.’
‘I
