The thin crescent of a waxing moon rises to watch the two women at their labours, and by the time they have buried Colin Neary piece by piece it is nearly six in the morning. Dennie calls in sick to work and stays with Sarah for the rest of the day, cleaning her wounds, watching over her as she sleeps and twitches in her dreams, and cat-napping herself when she can.
Six weeks later the police will find the decomposing remains of Colin Neary buried in his own allotment, and will arrest Sarah, who will steadfastly refuse to implicate Dennie in any of it. Sarah wants her to adopt the baby, but Dennie knows that isn’t how those things work. Nevertheless, she’s too afraid of what Sarah might do to herself and her unborn child if she refuses, so, to her undying shame, she lets Sarah take all the blame.
Right now, though, when Dennie finally returns to her own home, the first thing she does is go through her fridge and throw out anything that contains meat.
* * *
Dennie waited for the long shadows of the summer evening to stretch themselves over the allotments. Quite a few of her neighbours were taking advantage of the good weather to sit out on their plots in the lingering twilight, chatting quietly, having family barbecues, or just watching the day fade. According to her calendar the moon was waning, but she hadn’t been able to see it because it had set during the afternoon and wouldn’t be seen in the sky until the early hours of tomorrow morning. There was still a week before the newcomers did whatever it was they were going to do, which was also when she expected to have another visitation from Sarah and Sabrina – or at least the part of her mind that was using their shapes to try to communicate with her conscious brain. The strongest and most insistent of those times also occurred at the time of the waxing crescent, but that didn’t help her because by then the deed – whatever it was – had already been done. What Dennie needed was for Sabrina to come to her in advance. Since that seemed unlikely to happen, she had decided to try to force the issue. She had spent an afternoon going through all the boxes in the loft looking for the actual doll, but without success.
‘After all,’ she said to Viggo, ‘as the proverb says: if the bikkies won’t come to the hound, the hound must come to the bikkies.’
Viggo thumped his tail on the floor of the shed hopefully, but since no bikkies were actually forthcoming he sighed tragically and went outside to have a sniff around.
The last of the summer twilight dwindled, and the hangers-on packed up and went home, leaving Dennie alone with the pipistrelles that darted after insects in the sky like scraps of storm-torn handkerchief.
She had to admit to herself that she had no idea what she was doing. It had been well over fifty years since she’d had conversations with her old rag doll, and the fact that she now knew she’d really been having conversations with herself wasn’t helping. Maybe that was what ouija boards and crystal balls were actually doing – not contacting the spirits of the dead but opening lines of communication with parts of the human mind that knew things which were otherwise impossible to know. So, what was her ouija board? What was her crystal ball? What did she do to take her conscious mind off the hook and let in the echoes of the universe?
Well, digging in her allotment, obviously. It had always been the one thing she could rely on to calm her down when she was stressed. Whenever she’d had an argument with Brian, or the kids had been getting on her nerves, or the people at work had been feckless, she’d come down here and dig over a few feet of soil and somehow all the tension was grounded safely away like the atmospheric charge before lightning could strike.
Dennie took her favourite gardening fork and went outside into the gathering gloom.
She talked to Sabrina as she worked, in the hope that it might jog something. Nothing-words and nonsense-sentences like when she was little, a running commentary on what she was doing, ruminations on what tomorrow’s weather might hold, trying to focus on her and yet not focus, to find the middle ground between being aware and zoning out, between being asleep and awake. She pottered between her rows of tomatoes, breaking up clods of earth and flicking out weeds, hardly able to see what she was doing and peering so intently at the ground that she nearly ran into Sarah, who was standing barefoot in the soil.
Slowly, Dennie raised her eyes.
Sarah was wearing the same flannel pyjamas with the single bloodstain and clutching Sabrina tightly. She stared around with wide, frightened eyes. Plainly she didn’t know where she was or what she was doing here.
‘Sarah,’ Dennie said softly. Her head began to ache, as if she’d had too much coffee.
The dead woman’s eyes snapped onto her. ‘He’s coming!’ she whispered. ‘It’s not safe here! You have to go home!’
‘Who’s coming? Do you mean Colin? It’s okay, honey, he’s gone.’
Sarah’s eyes resumed their urgent scanning of the surroundings, and now it seemed to Dennie that she hadn’t been staring around in confusion but was looking for someone, or something. Something hiding amongst the bean poles and greenhouses. Something that terrified her. The headache was growing stronger, throbbing and pulsing in Dennie’s skull. ‘Please, Dennie!’ she begged. ‘It’s not safe! You have to go home! They’re bringing him back! He’s coming!’
‘Sarah, who’s coming?’
The reply did not come from Sarah’s mouth, though it was uttered in Sarah’s voice. It came from the doll clutched in her hands.
‘He Who Eats the Moon.’
Then something seemed to burst out
