by Gary Fry
Despite the darkening season and the gathering cold, she dressed that day in her thickest clothing and then exited her flat. Although the process was difficult now that she was so much bigger, she decided to drive to the hospital rather than take the bus. This would necessitate more expenses—to cover petrol and parking—but she needed to know what the sonographer had seen as soon as possible. Jane recalled that, unlike her colleague, Jackie Meadows worked Tuesday to Thursday, and today was Wednesday. The urgency of her inquiry was certain to ensure an emergency consultation. While crossing the London borough, Jane sensed her emotional condition elevate from unsettled to frightened. It was as much as she could do to outpace these feelings while entering the enormous NHS building. The maternity ward was quiet today, a merciful observation that ran in her favor. Then, without consulting staff at the reception desk, Jane advanced directly into the sonographer’s room, the same one she’d visited for her first troubled scan.
“I’m afraid I’m not ready for you yet, ma—” the older woman began from behind her vast machine, presumably expecting the next patient from the waiting room Jane had spotted on her way in. Luckily Jane had caught the professional between appointments, and there’d surely be time to make her pressing inquiry.
“I’m really sorry about this,” Jane replied, cutting the woman short and then causing her to rise from behind her machine’s screen. “You probably don’t remember me. I came for an appointment about six months ago and you conducted the scan. But…something odd happened that day. I saw it in your face. You said it was faulty wiring in your equipment, but I didn’t believe that for a moment. Afterwards, I told myself that was all it was, but I’d already seen something different in your behavior, in the way you responded to what you’d seen. Do you remember? And can you tell me what you saw?”
By now, the older woman was crossing the room, raising her arms to either support or restrain Jane, who must appear unstable or perhaps even worse than that. “You’re obviously very distressed, madam. I’m sorry to observe that. But you must understand that pregnancy is a time when—”
“Don’t tell me all that nonsense. Don’t say my emotions are affecting my perception. Ah’m more practical than that. Ah’m darn to earth. Now,” Jane finished with a resolute glint in her twitching right eye, “tha’s going to tell me what ah need to know.”
It was clear that the sonographer remembered Jane; this was evident in her defensive posture, her unnatural eagerness to escape from her equipment and accompany her former patient back outside the room. But when Jane stood her ground and spoke in that same flinty, uncompromising accent, the woman grew visibly confused and even a little fearful. She halted on the spot, dropped her head slightly, and finally began to speak.
“Okay, I do remember. But really, it was nothing to worry about.” She retreated to her screen, allowing Jane to follow and sit on one edge of the consultation bed, her extra body mass pushed out in front of her, like an inexorable reminder of her present problem. Then the professional, realizing the gravity of the situation, went on. “It was just confused images, that was all.”
“Images of…what?”
“They vanished when the next person came in, later that day. Even though the technician said the machine had no fault.”
“But what had you seen?”
“I’m getting to that. Please. It was distressing for me at the time, too, you know.”
“I’m sorry.” Jane’s heart was racing, but even so, she was able to maintain her characteristic kindheartedness. She gripped the cross on its chain around her neck, and then, sensing her eye twitching even more rapidly, said in an irrepressibly rough voice, “Ah’s losing me patience, girl. Tha’s better be quick.”
The sonographer glanced warily at Jane, as if suspecting her of acting. This was London, after all, and the older woman’s accent was faithful to the region. But Jane was no performer, not like her former lover Neil Lindsey, someone else the NHS had failed. Neil Lindsey, who’d been working in nearby Southend and had been possessed while filming in a graveyard. Neil Lindsey, one of seven brothers, one more than the number of children in the Catcher family…
What did it all mean? And why was Jane now convinced her child would be male?
“It was just distorted graphics,” the older woman was saying, even though Jane’s mind had drifted into wild speculation. “Just vague shapes around your baby. Two smaller ones to each side and a large one above, as if…as if it was trying to surround the child.”
Jane recalled that isolated property out on the northeast coast, and a feeling of being violated as she’d dressed inside it. Then she’d gone outside to play the Catcher mother well, standing where a group of children had later been grafted onto the photographic image. For one significant moment, Jane had been Mrs. Catcher, the mother of six, who’d died a horrible death before she and her sick husband had managed to produce their vital seventh son…
“It looked like a face and two hands,” the sonographer continued, her voice reduced to a palsied tremble. “It looked as if someone was inside you and trying to…take hold of your developing child.”
14
Luke Catcher’s memoir—The First of Failed Magic—was released only weeks before Jane was due to give birth, and true to his word, the author sent her a copy by post. Jane, who’d spent the last month alone in her flat, fell upon the book in frenzied haste, her eye rarely ceasing to twitch, that streak of grey thick across her scalp, her ungovernable voice coming in fits and starts, sometimes native Londoner, other times something closer to a northern rasp. She hadn’t eaten meat for months, but felt no better for it. Until recently, she’d adopted the sonographer’s trick of blaming her ongoing pregnancy for compromised health, but deep down knew that was all nonsense. She was being haunted—that was impossible to deny now. The spirit of Luke’s mother had somehow got inside her, had taken grip of her growing child, and was seeking to…what? That was the one thing she’d yet to figure out. And she hoped the newly arrived tome would help her understand.
After returning to her lounge and sitting in front of her roaring gas fire (she’d tried remaining frugal, including keeping down her utility bills, but was feeling the cold today and for good reason), she tore open the padded wrapping around Luke Catcher’s book and began to scour the volume.
The paperback cover was a perfect facsimile of the picture she’d already seen, the one that shady photographer had modified with Photoshop and then sent to her without any publication paraphernalia. But now, respectively above and below the image of Jane in front of six young boys, were the words THE FIRST OF FAILED MAGIC and A MEMOIR BY LUKE CATCHER. Jane shuddered, despite the heat in the room, and then snapped open the book.
The author had signed this copy to her in large, scrawling handwriting: FOR JANE, A PERFECT REPLACEMENT—LUKE. Presumably he was referring to the way she’d stood in for his mother on the cover, but as Jane felt her baby shift inside her, she sensed a chill scurry down her back while imagining plausible alternatives. She countered this by turning the first page.
The opening sections included a dedication to the memory of Luke’s parents and a contents page that demarcated certain stages of his youth: BIRTH…BEING A TODDLER…MY FIRST MEMORIES, and more. These headings had the appealing clarity of his popular fiction, but soon darkened: WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT MUM AND DAD…THE DARKNESS BEGINS…HOW IT NEVER HAPPENED…
How what never happened? Jane wondered, eager to turn directly to that section, but then she restrained herself. If she wanted to know the whole story—the events to which the author had only hinted during their restaurant meal together—she’d have to read the story from the beginning.
Huddling herself warmer in her dressing gown, Jane made a start.
The opening chapters offered much background information about Luke’s family’s heritage. His mother, Freda, had been born in North Yorkshire, in the small town of Filey. Her father had been a fisherman and her mother a housewife. Freda had been an only child. Later,
after the family had saved with a frugality worthy of the regional stereotype, they’d moved into that big old house on the northeast coastline, just below Whitby. This was where Luke’s mother had stayed until her parents had died in an accident when she was still a teenager. The event had hit her hard, and she’d spent some time recovering from a nervous breakdown, an episode that had apparently left her with an involuntary twitch in one eye. But despite this emotional trauma, she’d been bequeathed enough money to fund a modest lifestyle, and had become a “lady of leisure” (one of the author’s less original descriptive phrases amid a familiarly cool prose style) until, in the mid 1940s, she’d met her future husband at a meeting of amateur mystics in York.
Luke’s father, William Catcher, had been a soldier excused from war duties on account of an injury developed during childhood: a persistent and incurable back problem. He came from the south—more particularly, from the coastal town of Southend-on-Sea. He was one of seven children, all of them boys.
Back injury…Southend…seven brothers…
Shoving aside a mental image of her sick former lover Neil Lindsey, Jane turned quickly to the center of the book, where earlier she’d noticed a small section of photographs, as many nonfiction books possessed. Among many pictures of people to whom she’d yet to be introduced in the text, she found one that made her shiver in her cloyingly warm room. It was of the author’s parents on their wedding day, circa 1947. The man looked nothing much like the actor, the guy who’d fathered Jane’s imminent child; but the woman…the woman was like looking at a picture of herself, ten years hence. Mrs. Catcher even possessed a streak of grey hair exactly where her own had grown.
Suppressing too much claustrophobic speculation, Jane realized that this photo was of the happy couple before they’d had any children, a few years before their first son Luke had been born. They appeared happy together, and if William looked a little crooked in posture—his back problem clearly reducing his height—there was no sign of the cancer that would cut down Freda as few as ten years later. She was youthful, sprightly, almost deliriously happy… Jane, looking on with transfixion, felt something lurch deep inside her.
But she must get back to the unfolding story. She knew that more dark material was about to be alluded to, perhaps even worse than the knowledge that, in addition to feeling violated since visiting the Catchers’ house in North Yorkshire, Jane’s previous lover, an actor who’d visited Southend during a recent filming project, had felt similarly troubled after entering a graveyard there…
It was all too absurd to be true, but Jane realized that life was often like that, full of beguiling connections and unlikely happenstance. Then she turned back to the page she’d been browsing and recommenced reading. Magic must be involved in the tale, the magic of the book’s title…and it wasn’t long before she found it.
In the 1950s, just after Luke was born, the couple started dabbling in ancient rituals. It was Freda who introduced her husband to these primitive methods, mainly because (the author speculated) his physical indisposition was now getting a crippling hold on him. Freda had learned about black magic and other arcane practices as a girl growing up in a traditional Yorkshire community. Before she’d married, there’d been strange rumors in Whitby about her true nature: a young woman living alone in such a house, away from the crowds and ostensibly independent of means… Gossip had grown rife, and it hadn’t been long before local people had started shunning her, and then William when he’d come to live there, and finally their children as each was born.
Young Luke must have experienced some of this ostracism, and his lyrical account of those half-remembered days was moving and—it couldn’t be denied—decidedly disturbing. At one stage, Jane put aside the book and rose to fetch a mug of reassuring tea. She’d sensed her insides churning again, and such herb-infused remedies helped with that. Then, ruling out any connection between her impromptu diet and the Catchers’ activities so many years ago, she returned to their creeping history.
With a storytelling skill honed during years of writing popular novels, the author went on to explain how his parents had tried manipulating the nature of their next five children. Certain spells were alluded to, without being outlined by the author in full detail. It was as if Luke actually believed these were real. Jane scoffed, feeling her right eye twitching again, as it always did when she grew anxious. But however crackpot their attempts had been, the potions produced by Freda and a now-ailing William seemed to have coincided with each new child being male. But why was that essential?
Despite recently deciding that her own child would be a boy, Jane was unable to figure out why she was so certain. She’d now reached the end of the latest chapter, and like the master tale-spinner who’d had so much success writing fiction with similar themes, Luke Catcher dragged the issue into the next.
Jane turned the page with savage impatience.
“Tha’s winding me up,” she said, her deeper voice resounding in her otherwise empty flat. She ran one hand through her streaky grey hair and took another slurp of her beverage. “Tha’s up to no good, lad. So let’s have ye.”
Then, in a chapter entitled FAILED MAGIC, she discovered all she needed to know. Rapidly devouring the words, she felt her whole body give a sickening lurch. She clung desperately to her dangling crucifix.
And just after reaching the end of this section (the next detailed Luke’s teenage years and his many adulthood successes), a cramp in her belly grew unbearable and a cold rush of water began running down her legs.
15
The next she knew she was in the hospital, lying alone in a bed. The moment she opened her eyes and reoriented her frantic mind, she glanced down at her waist…and found that her baby wasn’t there.
They’d snatched away her child. The Catchers had somehow conspired together and claimed the seventh boy as their own.
But seconds later, after summoning her rational self, Jane realized how foolish her fears were. She was clearly inside an NHS institution, and for all its common errors and shortcoming, no official representative would let an infant be taken without its (his) mother’s consent. That would be a national scandal, and couldn’t be allowed to occur. Procedures and regulations were more rigorous than that, they were, they were, they—
As Jane noticed that she was in a private room rather than a ward, she thrust back the bedsheets and swung her legs out onto the floor. At once a tremendous pain gripped her, running violently from gut to head and back again, weakening each of her limbs in the process. But then, slowly standing, she managed to get a hold of herself. She realized that her feet were naked, and except for a white gown, so was the rest of her (even her cross on its chain was missing from around her neck). Her stomach, a significant section of flesh running from left to right, continued to throb with pain, but she was afraid of letting her hand fall, to the place in which she’d experienced an intrusive bump for months… It was no longer there. Her baby was gone. But where, where, where?
As she started pacing, slowly and awkwardly, across the whitewashed room for the single exit, the door opened of its own accord and a lozenge of light from the hallway beyond fell into the dim chamber, whose only window was shielded by closed curtains.
A shadowy figure now stood in the entrance’s jaws: tall, burly, stooped. It was a middle-aged man for sure. He took a pace forwards and activated the room’s central light-fitting via a switch on the wall. Then Jane saw clearly who this was. And it wasn’t any surprise to her.
Luke Catcher, dressed in his customary suit and tie.
“You,” she said, in her own voice. Indeed, whatever possession had previously rendered her paranoiac and cantankerous seemed to have dissipated now, leaving her mind clear and coherent. She remembered the information she’d read in the book, about the particular characteristics of a seventh son of a seventh son. But what she still didn’t understand was how the author had brought all this about. It seemed too farfetched, too contingent on random events. But she realized sh
e mustn’t underestimate his treacherous powers. He’d written so many books about dark phenomena. And she knew, from only a peripheral involvement in the upper reaches of society, that many people in high places believed in such issues and would do all they could to bring them to fruition. He’d surely have contacts everywhere—in the media, the medical world, and many more places.
“I had you transferred here at my expense,” said the man, entering the room and closing the door. “You’ve been here several days, mostly under sedative. This is a private institution. You’re quite safe.”
“From who?” was Jane’s first response, and wondered what might have been done to her during days of unconsciousness. But most of all she wanted to ask what had become of her child, her baby, her innocent boy.
Luke seemed to read the inquiry deep in her eyes, because a moment later, he said, “Don’t worry. He’s just as safe as you are. We’re taking good care of him.” He paused a moment, smiled craggily, and then went on. “You needed a cesarean, Jane. Although you managed to make a call for assistance from your London flat, you lost consciousness soon after and there were complications during natural delivery processes. The doctor—a close associate of mine, as it happens—made an executive decision and you were moved here. It was enough to save your life.”
Something about this troubled Jane, and she relied on intuition to give voice to it. She still felt weak and woozy, from the operation and then whatever drugs this place had plied her with, possibly against her will. But now, despite her unrelenting pain, she was able to fight back.
“You clearly have what you wanted. You’ve obviously pulled strings and called in favors or whatever else A-list folk do, with all your Masonic agreements and vast influence.”
When the man’s pale face didn’t flicker in response, another layer of fog cleared from around Jane’s thoughts, and she frantically added more.
