sculpture — jumpers, paintings, a My Little Pony duvet cover — and parts of a body were visible beneath. The sapling child was quickly transforming into flesh and blood, as if the process were speeding up because he was watching it happen. Like a low-rent Pinocchio, the lifeless simulacrum was gaining sentience.
His finger twitched on the trigger — a reaction that he was unable to control — and the gun went off. He managed to twist his wrist so the shot went wide, punching a hole in the wall near the window.
“Tessa?”
Her face formed quickly, like reversed footage of plastic melting, and he began to make out her lovely features beneath the mess of creation. What at first looked like a long, beaklike snout shortened to form her delicate little nose. The eyes opened, trailing strings like pizza cheese between the upper and lower lids. The eyeballs pushed outwards, and then settled back into the sockets. The eyelids blinked.
Erik dropped the gun. He fell to his knees and clasped his hands together as if in prayer.
The Tessa-thing stepped from out of the hollow cone, parts of her makeshift sarcophagus breaking away, the whole structure tumbling and falling to the floor. She walked towards her father and embraced him, enveloping him in her warm, damp flesh.
“Baby… my baby…” He was weeping now. He could hold back the tears no longer.
Abby had crawled across the floor and now lay at his side, reaching out towards them both. He felt her hands grabbing at his legs, and angled his body so that she could be included in the embrace.
The three of them, together again, reunited at last, right at the centre of the black hole.
The family unit was coming back together, reforming. The damage had been repaired. He had no idea what kind of magic this was, but he didn’t want to question it too deeply. In his experience, those kinds of questions usually led to trouble, and he didn’t want to wreck what had been made here, in a dim bedroom in a council house at the back end of nowhere.
This was not the kind of place where wonders were meant to happen. But here it was: here was wonder. Here was awe.
Then, weary and aching, he became slowly aware of a faint clicking sound.
He moved back, pushing Tessa away to create a gap between them, and what he saw made him question everything else he’d been thinking. The thing that resembled his daughter stood there, naked and genderless — with just a bare patch of skin between her legs and no navel or nipples –wearing a strange white mask in place of her pretty face. The front of the mask jutted out to form a hideous beak, and its eyes were hidden behind small black shades.
She raised her arms to the ceiling, spreading her legs and bending her knees to brace herself against the floorboards. Black leaves that fused together to become a long black cape or overcoat cascaded downwards, seeming to flow from her open hands, to cover her body, flapping at first like wings before moulding itself to her shape.
In one hand she was holding a short pointed cane.
It was only when she looked back down, staring directly into his eyes, that he realised the clicking sound was coming from Tessa. And then it occurred to him that this half-formed creature was not Tessa at all, but something that was using her image in an attempt to gain entry into this world.
He turned away from the image, unable to fully comprehend what he was seeing.
“Put on some clothes,” he said to Abby, trying to cling to anything that might represent normality.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ROYLE RUSHED ACROSS the hospital car park, thinking the worst.
He’d received the call twenty minutes ago and had wasted no time in getting here. His car was parked at an angle, taking up two spaces, but he didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, he was lucky to have made it here without running someone down. He could remember none of the journey; he’d completed it on auto-pilot.
He barged through the main doors and headed towards the maternity wing. The hospital was quiet; people were pushing trolleys laden with breakfast into side rooms, a few patients wandered the halls in their dressing gowns, doctors and nurses with weary eyes and soft morning faces talking in low voices.
At the reception desk, Royle told a small, frail woman with thick spectacles who he was and why he was here.
“And we called you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I got a call not long ago to tell me that she was here.”
The woman checked her computer for the second time, the light from the screen reflecting in the lenses of her glasses. “What was the name again?”
“Mine?”
“No, the patient’s.”
“Vanessa Royle.”
Her eyes darted across the screen. “I’m sorry, but she isn’t on here… when exactly was she brought in?”
“She came in last night, with pregnancy complications, or so I was told. Listen…” He paused, trying to rein in his temper, and something occurred to him. “Oh, hang on. She might be down under her maiden name.” He shrugged when the woman glanced up at him, her face filled with tired pity. “Vanessa Mantel.”
“Mantel… ah, yes. Here she is. Ward Ten. Just go down the corridor there and turn right at the end.” A smile crossed her face, briefly but brightly, and then she dismissed him by peering over his shoulder at the other people milling about near her desk.
He walked through the doorway the woman had indicated and passed a couple of empty rooms, several closed doors, and a ward containing a group of pregnant women. When he finally reached the ward where Vanessa was staying, he paused and tried to gather his thoughts.
They hadn’t told him much over the phone, just that he needed to get down here because his wife had been brought in with complications. They told him not to worry, but to get here as quickly as he could. Not to worry… such stupid advice, especially when it came from someone at the hospital where your pregnant wife had been rushed in the early hours of the morning.
He remembered the sound he’d heard — or thought he’d heard — coming from her belly the last time he’d seen her. Hadn’t she also said that the baby had been kicking hard? Surely that was a sign that the baby was okay, that it was developing well. A dead baby couldn’t kick.
He closed his eyes, trying to banish such thoughts. But it was no good. This was his biggest fear, the terror that gripped him every night, part of the reason he reached for the bottle: that the baby would die, and it would kill his marriage when it did so. All he wanted, everything he needed, was in this building. He couldn’t face the idea of leaving it here, in a medical waste bag headed for the incinerator.
Fuck, why did he always have to think such negative thoughts… why was he so damned dark? Sometimes he blamed the job, but then he thought that he was probably drawn to become a police officer in the first place because of that darkness, which had always been at his centre: a hard little kernel of night. And wasn’t the alcohol just another way of trying to drown that seed, to render it powerless? Or was it just a way of watering it and helping it to grow?
He ran a hand through his hair, straightened his shirt collar, and pushed open the door.
He saw Vanessa immediately. She was in the bed nearest the door. Her face was so pale that she looked like a ghost of herself. She didn’t see him at first, so when he approached the bed she twitched in shock when he spoke.
“How are you?”
She smiled. “Okay. It’s good to see you.”
He felt like crying. He wanted to start punching and kicking the walls, tearing apart the place. “What happened?”
“Have you spoken to the doctor?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. I came straight up here, to the ward.”
A nurse walked over from her station. “Mr Royle?”
