A Terrible Beauty

'You haven't maybe thought about another child?'

'No, Dad. I haven't. I can't replace Seamus. Besides, even if I did have another child?well, to be quite frank, I'm not at all sure that I'd want Paul to be his father.'

Katie's father pulled a face. 'I don't know what to tell you, love. It's always seemed to me that you would make the very best of mothers.'

'How can you say that I'm the best of mothers when I practically murdered my own son? I kissed him on the lips before I put him down to sleep. The doctor said that you can kill your child by kissing it on the lips.'

Her father stood up, without a word, and put his arms around her, and squeezed her very tight. 'Katie,' he said. 'Katie.'

He kept hold of her until the onions started to burn.

12

Fiona was suddenly woken up by the most shattering pain that she had ever felt in her life. She felt as if her right thigh had been forced through the grating of a white-hot furnace. She opened her mouth and tried to scream, but the pain was so horrifying that she couldn't even draw breath, and she could utter only a choked-up, gargling sound.

Oh God, she couldn't bear it, she just couldn't bear it. She tried to move her leg but it wouldn't respond. She wrenched at the cords that fastened her wrists to the bed frame, and thrashed her head from side to side, but she couldn't get free, and nothing helped to lessen the blazing agony that engulfed her hip.

Again she tried to scream, and this time she managed a shrill, distorted whoop, and then another.

The bedroom door opened with a sharp click. He stood in the doorway for a moment, smiling at her, and then he walked up to the side of the bed.

'I told you that I was going to hurt you. Do you believe me now?'

She stared up at him, her chest heaving. She opened and closed her mouth but she was speechless with pain.

'It's amazing, isn't it, how much physical trauma we human beings can endure? You'd think that our brain would shut down once the pain reached a certain level, to prevent us from suffering any more. But it doesn't, does it-as you can testify. Our minds allow us to experience almost unimaginable agony.'

He paused, and licked his lips, as if he could actually taste what she was feeling. 'My father died of stomach cancer, you know, and he said that sometimes it hurt so much that the pain was almost beautiful. He said it was like a huge scarlet flower, opening up inside his very soul, one luxuriant petal after another.'

Fiona swallowed, and swallowed again. 'Please,' she panted.

'Please what? Please let you go? Please give you some more aspirin? Please kill you?'

'Please.'

'I'm sorry, I can't do anything for you. My hands are tied, so to speak, just as much as yours. I have to perform the ritual according to tradition. If I don't, God alone knows what could happen. It's all very wellsummoningsomething, you see, but you have to make sure that you can control it, once it appears.'

Fiona kept on staring at him, as if she could will him into releasing her, or at least give her something to relieve the pain. But all he did was reach out and lift one sweat-damp lock of hair away from her forehead, and smile.

'You've been wonderful,' he said. 'It's a good thing you're so physically fit. Physically fit, and beautiful, too. I couldn't have asked for anybody better.'

He walked around to the other side of the bed, and peered closely down at her right leg. 'Have you looked at it yet? It's amazing. Just like an anatomy lesson.'

'What?' she said, in a blurry voice. She felt that she was going to lapse back into unconsciousness at any moment. The pain was now so overwhelming that she couldn't believe that she was the one who was feeling it. There must be another Fiona, who was suffering so much.

'Here,' he said. He leaned over her and lifted her head so that she could look down and see her leg. Through all of the pain, she could smell his underarm deodorant, like lavender. 'There-what do you think? It's extraordinary, isn't it?'

At first she couldn't understand what she was seeing. Her left leg was normal, suntanned and muscular from jogging and swimming. But where her right leg was supposed to be, there was nothing but a long white thighbone, and a bare kneecap, and then two slender shinbones, and an anklebone, and a skeletal foot. All of these bones were scraped completely clean of flesh, except a few red shreds and thin white sinews which had been left to keep them loosely connected together. The newspapers underneath the bed were thickly splattered with blood.

Fiona stared up at him in panic. 'What have you done to me?' she panted.'What have you done?'

'I've started to prepare you for the feeding,' he told her, easing her head back down onto the bedsprings.

'What have you done to me, you bastard?'

'Sssh, quiet,' he said, lifting his hand. 'You're going to need all of your strength for this ordeal, believe me.'

'What, you're not going to-'

'It takes time, and care, and everything has to be performed exactly according to ritual.'

'Tell me what you're going to do.Tell me!'

'I'm going to prepare you as an offering to the greatest occult power that ever existed-ever.'