focus on was the movement inside her body, and she was unable to think of it in any terms other than the contents of an egg. A huge egg, its shell pure and white, and with the suggestion of something moving inside.
“I’m an egg,” she said, talking to the empty room, the white walls, the cheap-papered ceiling. “I am an egg, and this thing is growing inside me.”
She listened to her voice but the words didn’t seem like they belonged to her. Not for the first time, she felt like someone else was speaking for her, shaping her lips.
She pressed her hands against her belly once again. This time the movements inside became more frantic, responding to the heat transmitted through her palms.
“It’s coming,” she said, and this time the voice
She wanted this. She really did. She desired it more than anything — apart from having her dad back, her old life returned to her. But this was the next best thing. It was the best that she could hope for.
New life. Of a sort. Hunger. Need. Maybe even a saviour.
Perhaps what happened here tonight would save her and her mum.
The movement inside her stopped. Silence filled the room. Then she heard a low humming sound. But the room was empty, she was all alone. None of the electrical appliances were on in the other room — the vacuum cleaner had been taken by those men, the washing machine too. Nothing was switched on that would make a noise even remotely like this one.
Even the radio had gone silent. Not even static came from its little mono speaker.
But the humming… it remained, filling her ears. Its volume was constant. Low, regular, and constant.
Hailey sat up on the bed and turned to face the window. The weight of her stomach was a pleasant ache. The curtains were open and the sky outside was dark. She often liked to look at the moon, the stars, and imagine that she was up there, high up in the night sky and flying. Drifting away from all this fuss and bullshit.
There was a large flock of tiny birds hovering outside her window. She could see them outlined against the deep black sky, their wings blurring, sharp beaks glinting in the bleed-off from sodium street lights. Hummingbirds, hundreds of them, perhaps even thousands. The same kind she’d seen in the Needle a few days ago. They hung there, on the other side of the glass, watching her.
Hailey swung her legs off the side of the bed and got shakily to her feet. Her legs ached, but again there was no real pain, just the vague sensation of aching, like muscle memory. She padded across the carpet and went to the window. The birds didn’t move. A dense cloud of freeze-frame motion, an unmoving flurry of beating wings. She wondered if anyone else could see them, or if this was some kind of vision meant only for her. Hailey’s perception of the world was changing by the minute, and where, before, such a thought would have struck her as crazy, it now seemed perfectly reasonable.
She was carrying a wonder inside her, so why shouldn’t there be more wonders on show just outside her window?
“Hello there…” She raised her hand and placed her fingertips against the window. The hummingbirds remained as they were, suspended in the air with their wings blurring, as if locked in place like tiny working machine parts in the mechanism of eternity.
“Yes,” she said, struck by the sudden insight. “That’s what you are: cogs in the machine. Just like me. Like all of us.”
Then understanding slipped away and once again her mind was empty, a container for whatever sights the night might throw at her.
She dragged her fingers soundlessly down the pane of glass, leaving faint marks to chart their progress. The marks faded quickly; the attendant hummingbirds began to float slowly backwards, moving away.
“Come back,” she whispered, tears falling down her face. “Don’t leave me.”
But the birds didn’t respond. They drew back, and then shot up into the darkness as one, a blurred arrow ascending to the heavens. Then, in seconds, they were lost to her, gone into the blackness beyond the thin veil of clouds.
Hailey had never felt so alone, even when her dad had died.
She dragged her gaze from the sky and looked across the Grove, feeling abandoned, melancholy.
The top floors of the Needle poked up above the uneven line formed by the rooftops, its peak piercing the thin, low clouds. To Hailey it now resembled the huge fossilised trunk of an ancient tree, its branches grey and withered and its leaves having fallen to earth long ago, before she was even born: a petrified tree, with its topmost branches scraping the sky. A weird organic structure that had its roots buried in that other place.
For the first time in her life she realised how shallow her understanding of things had always been, and that everything has an inner life, an alternative identity. All she had been aware of until now was the surface, but recent events had shown her that the most important things are those which lie beneath.
Her legs felt cold.
She glanced down, at her naked body, and saw that her inner thighs were glistening. A reservoir of cool liquid had burst from inside her, washing her clean, preparing her for the act of passage yet to come.
Hailey knew exactly what was required of her, as if some trace memory, a stored neurological imprint, had suddenly revealed itself. She squatted down on her haunches, knees forced apart with her bent elbows, hands clasped tightly together as if she were deep in prayer. Then she waited to deliver something strange into the world.
…AND THIS TIME, in the dream, she is standing inside a ring of tall oak trees, looking up to watch the sunlight as it filters through the brown-tinged leaves. She squints, momentarily blinded by the light, and then clouds pass overhead and she can open her eyes again.
The creature she saw last time, near the swinging corpse of her mother, has moved on. The corpse has been taken down. She is alone. Her skin is warm, and when she looks down she sees blood smeared on the inside of her naked thighs. Deep red clots cling to the sides of her knees; red patterns decorate her shins and feet.
The sun moves west to east, travelling too-fast across the flat sky, and she is momentarily plunged into shadow. The trees creak, their ancient trunks shifting to accommodate the new position of the light source. Their branches are striving to be touched by the sun’s bright fingers.
She feels empty. She is bereft. Something has gone away, leaving her behind. Whatever she was carrying inside her has moved on. She takes a tentative step forward, and then another, gradually moving from the centre of the small grove of oak trees to its outskirts. She reaches out a hand and caresses the old, wrinkled bark as she passes one of the trees, and it moves beneath her hand, twisting like a living body. Her fingertips find a crack in the bark and slip inside, feeling the warm sap beneath. Under the toughened hide of the tree she touches something smooth and unmarred, not unlike newly formed human skin.
She stops and stares at her fingers. They are sunk up to the first joint into the tree trunk. She gently peels away a piece of bark, being careful not to cause too much damage to the delicate structure. The tree moves again, but this time as if it is responding to her touch. There is something almost erotic about the way the trunk slowly spins, turning eagerly to meet her wanton attention.
The underside of the bark is tacky; it sticks to her fingers as she fondles the material. She pulls the chunk of bark away and lets it drop to the ground, where it comes softly to rest on the grass and the fallen leaves next to her bloody feet. Leaning in close, she examines the patch that she has uncovered. It
As she watches, the skin begins to rise and fall. She rests her fingers on the area and can feel a pulse, which beats much slower than her own.
“Alive?” The question is one that barely needs voicing. It is obvious to her now that the tree — or the thing she has found beneath the layer of bark, whatever it is — lives. It is breathing; it has a pulse and probably a heartbeat; there is blood, not sap, running through its mysterious system.
She presses against the patch of skin with her fingertips and watches as it pushes inward, making a slight indentation. The tree shifts; a small twitching motion. The leaves above her shudder. The sound they make is like tracing paper being crumpled up in a fist.
“Where is it?” The bark surrounding the area she has uncovered starts to peel away. The trunk begins to
