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 don’t know. I swear I don’t.’
The midwife had withdrawn. Shadwell, a sham of pity on his face, now did the same.
In the dirt a few yards from Cal the child was already standing up. It was the size of a chimpanzee, and shared with its siblings the appearance of something traumatically wounded. Portions of its inner workings were teased out through its skin, leaving its torso to collapse upon itself in places and in others sport ludicrous appendages of gut. Twin rows of dwarf limbs hung from its belly, and between its legs a sizeable scrotum depended, smoking like a censer, uncompanioned by any organ to discharge what boiled within.
The child knew its business from its first breath: to terrorize.
Though its face was still wreathed with afterbirth, its gummy eyes found Cal, and it began to shamble towards him.
‘Oh Jesus …’
Cal began looking for the Salesman, but the man had vanished.
‘I told you,’ he yelled into the darkness, ‘I don’t know where the fucking carpet is.’
Shadwell didn’t respond. Cal shouted again. Mama Pus’ bastard was almost upon him.
‘Jesus, Shadwell, listen to me, will you?’
Then, the by-blow spoke.
He stopped struggling against his restraints a moment, and looked at it in disbelief.
It spoke again. The same syllable.
Even as it pronounced his name its fingers pulled at the muck about its head. The face that appeared from beneath lacked a complete skull, but it was recognizably that of its father:
The only reply was his own voice, echoing back and forth until it died. The child’s arms jerked forward, and its long fingers latched onto Cal’s face. He tried to fight it off, but it drew closer to him, its sticky body embracing him. The more he struggled the more he was caught.
The rest of the by-blows loosed their hold on him now, leaving him to the new child. It was only minutes old, but its strength was phenomenal, the vestigial hands on its belly raking Cal’s skin, its grip so tight his lungs laboured for breath.
With its face inches from Cal’s, it spoke again, but the voice that came from the ruined mouth was not its father’s this time, but that of Immacolata.
‘I just saw a place –’ he said, trying to avoid the trail of spittle that was about to fall from the beast’s chin. He failed. It hit his cheek, and burned like hot fat.
‘Do you know
‘No …’ he said. ‘No, I don’t –’
‘But you’ve dreamt it, haven’t you?
Momentarily his thoughts leapt from present terror to past joy. To his floating over the Fugue. The sight of that Wonderland kindled a sudden will to resist in him. The glories he saw in his mind’s eye had to be preserved from the foulness that embraced him, from its makers and masters, and in such a struggle his life was not so hard to forfeit. Though he knew nothing about the carpet’s present whereabouts he was ready to perish rather than risk letting anything slip that Shadwell might profit by. And while he had breath, he’d do all in his power to confound them.
Elroy’s child seemed to read this new-found resolution. It drew its arms more tightly about him.
‘I’ll confess!’ he yelled in its face. ‘I’ll tell you everything you want to know.’
Immediately, he began to talk.
The substance of his confession was not, however, what they wanted to hear. Instead he began to recite the train timetable out of Lime Street, which he knew by heart. He’d first started learning it at the age of eleven, having seen a Memory Man on television who’d demonstrated his skills by recalling the details of randomly chosen football matches – teams, scores, scorers – back to the 1930s. It was a perfectly useless endeavour, but its heroic scale had impressed Cal mightily, and he’d spent the next few weeks committing to memory any and every piece of information he could find, until it struck him that his magnum opus was passing to and fro at the bottom of the garden: the trains. He’d begun that day, with the local lines, his ambition elevated each time he successfully remembered a day’s times faultlessly. He’d kept his information up to date for several years, as services were cancelled or stations closed. And his mind, which had difficulty putting names to faces, could still spew this perfectly redundant information out upon request.
That’s what he gave them now. The services to Manchester, Crewe, Stafford, Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Coventry, Cheltenham Spa, Reading, Bristol, Exeter, Salisbury, London, Colchester; all the times of arrival and departure, and footnotes as to which services only operated on Saturdays, and which never ran on Bank Holidays.
I’m Mad Mooney, he thought, as he delivered this filibuster, listing the services with a bright, clear voice, as if to an imbecile. The trick confounded the monster utterly. It stared at Cal while he talked, unable to understand why the prisoner had forsaken fear.
