by Bark, Jasper
VII
Rose was in the garden when the phone went. She was trying to get rid of a particularly stubborn outbreak of bind weed before she got too big to do any more gardening.
She was growing at an alarming rate and had given up any hope of seeing her feet in the near future. This made clambering up off her knees, and shuffling into the house, very uncomfortable.
The answer machine took the call before Rose could get to the phone. She picked up the receiver but the blessed thing kept recording. Like a lot of modern technology, the intricacies of operating it completely defied Rose. She’d bought the thing under protest because her old machine, that she’d had for nearly fifteen years, kept cutting off callers and mangling the tapes she put in it.
“Hello, hello,” said Rose, randomly pushing buttons on the machine.
“Oh… hello, is that Mrs Shotton?” said the young man who’d been leaving the message.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“Hello there, my name’s Keith, I’m calling from the Bridge Hotel. Do you know a Mr Peter Hince?”
“Yes, he’s my neighbour, why?”
“He’s been staying with us recently, but we haven’t been able to locate him for the past couple of days. There was some post in his possession that’s addressed to you. You haven’t seen or heard from him recently have you?”
“No, not for the last couple of weeks. Is anything wrong?’
“Well it’s rather hard to explain Mrs Shotton. Would you be prepared to come and collect some of his things? We’re not too far from you.”
“Erm, I’m not too sure, when would you need me?”
“Whenever you’re available Mrs Shotton, but we’d appreciate it if you could come in sometime today or tomorrow.”
“And what would you like me to pick up?”
“Again, that’s rather hard to explain over the phone, you’d really have to see it for yourself. Shall I expect you later today?”
“Well, okay, I think, but I’ll have to check.”
“Splendid Mrs Shotton. Would you like me to e-mail you directions?”
“No, that’s alright, I’ll find you on the map.”
“Okay Mrs Shotton, I’ll hopefully see you later today, just ask for Keith at reception.”
“Okay bye,” Rose said and hung up. She felt more than a little coerced into visiting the hotel, but she was curious about Peter. He must have accidentally taken the letters he was going to drop round with him
Two days after Rose last saw him, an estate agent’s sign had appeared in Peter’s front garden. Rose hadn’t seen anyone come to view the house, but a team of cleaners had called round to spruce the place up. Rose hadn’t expected to hear from Peter after that, so she was more than a little intrigued by the call from the hotel.
The Bridge Hotel was a shabby, modern building, just off a busy A road. It was a bland, featureless building with a large gravel forecourt. It looked like a Travelodge or Holiday Inn that had seen better days.
The reception area smelled strongly of air freshener and needed a lick of paint. Rose asked to see Keith and was introduced to a tall, thin man with spiky blond hair and bad skin.
“Mrs Shotton,” Keith said. “Thank you so much for coming in.” Keith was having great difficulty taking his eyes off Rose’s stomach. She supposed it didn’t quite gel with her grey hair and crow’s feet. It was actually the first time in about three decades that a man hadn’t been able to make eye contact with her. Sadly it wasn’t her chest that was drawing his gaze, but she thought he could be forgiven, under the circumstances.
“I wonder if you could just sign a few forms for us and then you can pick up Mr Hince’s things. Oh, here’s your post by the way.” Keith held up a few official looking letters in brown envelopes as Rose waddled over to the reception desk.
“What sort of forms?” she said with a little suspicion.
“Oh nothing too important, just some silly legal stuff.”
“What kind of legal stuff? I thought I was just doing you a favour by popping by to pick up Peter’s things.”
“It’s nothing major, don’t worry. It’s just something our legal department said you had to sign.”
“Why?”
Rose shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. Her arches hurt from standing.
“Just so that the hotel is covered legally, when it comes to damages and transportation.”
“Well, I brought my car, that’s all the transportation we’ll need isn’t it?”
“Not for everything I’m afraid.”
“But surely he just brought a few suitcases.”
“Yes, but there is one item that’s… shall we say - rather cumbersome…”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Look, it’s a bit hard for me to describe. I think I better show you Mr Hince’s room.”
Keith took Rose down a series of ground floor corridors towards the rear of the building. The walls were hung with bad watercolours of old cathedrals. The paper was coming away in places and the carpet was well worn.
Keith stopped beside a wood paneled door with chipped white paint. “The thing is,” he said, slipping the electric key in the lock, “We have no idea how Mr Hince got this in the room. It wasn’t there when he booked in. We only discovered it after he disappeared. As far as we can tell, he left everything he had in the room, car keys, phone, you name it. We tried everything we could to get hold of him, but he’s nowhere to be found. You were our best lead.”
Keith opened the door and stepped inside. “You see what I mean. He couldn’t have gotten this through the window or down the corridor. No one saw him carry it in the entrance. It’s not on the CCTV footage. Where did it come from?”
Keith was standing in the doorway with his back to Rose, so she couldn’t see into the room. Nevertheless she knew exactly what he was going to show her before he ushered her inside. The poky little room, scattered with Peter’s clothes, was utterly dominated by a four poster bed. Rose felt her stomach lurch as she recognised the carved posts, the bed spread and the obscene tapestry on the underside of the canopy.
“Why would anyone do something like this?” said Keith. “Is it some kind of sick joke? I just don’t understand it.”
Rose couldn’t bring herself to answer Keith. She knew that their efforts to trace Peter’s whereabouts would come to nothing. Just as Peter’s attempts to find Bethany had been futile.
She felt the unborn creature inside her start to kick at the proximity of the bed. Rose winced and put a hand to her stomach.
“Are you alright?” said Keith.
“Yes, I just felt a kick, I’ll be alright in a moment.”
“So you are actually… I mean, at your age… is that possible?”
“It came as a great surprise to me.”
Rose staggered. At the back of her mind she felt the foetus’s brain come to life. Its thoughts seeping into hers like bile leaking from a ruptured spleen. They were half-formed and struggling for comprehension, a still growing consciousness trying to recall something from a former life.
Rose recognised what the unborn life was trying to grasp at though. It was a clause in a contract.Aeternae ultionis, meaning eternal, or unending, vengeance which, if invoked, would result in being punished over and over and over again.
Rose felt her legs go from under her and she sat down hard on the floor. “Is everything okay?” said Keith.
“No,” Rose replied. “I’ve got to go.”
“But what about your post, and Mr Hince’s things?”
“You can keep them.”
“And the bed?”
“Hack it to pieces and burn every single last bit of it.”
VIII
“Rose, love, you need medical attention.” Stanley was really worried now. He’d been trying to wheedle Rose into seeing a doctor for the past five days. Ever since she retired to her bed.
Her stomach had become so huge that she couldn’t carry the weight of it. She was at least tw
ice the size of any normal pregnant woman at the end of her third trimester. Her calf muscles and joints were inflamed, her ankles were swollen and her lower back was pure agony.
Stanley was being ever so sweet to her, for a change. He rearranged her pillows whenever she asked him, brought her soup, and any other food she demanded, and even gave her frequent sponge baths.
As a consequence Rose was being frightful to him. She bullied and berated him at every turn, until he was cowed into submission. And Stanley was so concerned that he took whatever abuse she hurled at him.
“It’s not natural love,” he said for the fortieth time that day.
“And just what am I going to tell the doctor, if you do call for him? That my husband and I had sex on a magical bed and now I’m pregnant, even though I’m in my sixties?”
“You’re not pregnant love, you can’t be.”
“And why not?”
“Because you’re too old and you’re too big. No one gets that big when they’re pregnant.”
“Then what have I got growing inside me?”
“I don’t know, a parasite or something, like a tapeworm perhaps. Maybe it’s just a bloody big tumour, but it’s not a baby. It can’t be, it’s not possible.”
“I can feel him moving inside me. I can hear his thoughts, I know he’s there.”
“No you can’t love, you only think you can. You’re not well and you’re imagining things.”
“I am not imagining things!”
“You are love, and it’s bloody well got to stop, right now!”
Stanley pulled his mobile out of his pocket, much to Rose’s amazement. It was an ancient, cheap thing she’d bought him from Argos. He drove her mad most of the time because he refused to carry it anywhere and even when he did, he left it turned off so she could never reach him. He must have thought the situation was grave to have actually charged it.
As Stanley began to dial the number, Rose felt a kick. Urgency and alarm emanated from her womb. A voiceless plea burst into her mind. He’s going to hurt me mummy. They’re going to take me away from you. Please don’t let them take me away from you!
Like a lioness whose cub is in danger, Rose felt a wave of murderous anger engulf her. She remembered there was a kitchen knife under her pillow. She’d put it there when she became bedridden, at the insistence of her unborn. She hadn’t given it much thought at the time, but now she realised why she’d been prompted to hide it there. Many things she did these days were done unconsciously for the good of her unborn child.
Stanley was still dialing when she rolled off the bed, reared up on her feet and lumbered towards him. The pain in her spine and the back of her legs was almost crippling. If she hadn’t been filled with adrenaline and spurred on by homicidal intent, Rose would have collapsed on the floor in agony.
She raised the knife over her head and lunged at Stanley with her other hand. She grabbed his shoulder and they toppled to the ground. Stanley gasped with pain as the air was knocked out of him and Rose’s immense weight pinned him to the ground.
The phone fell from his hand. Rose brought the knife down. Stanley yelped with fear. She smashed the point into the phone’s screen and shattered it.
Rose brought her face right up close to Stanley’s. “You are not doing anything to endanger the life of my baby,” she growled.
Stanley whimpered with pain as Rose shifted her weight, crushing his arm beneath her. She rolled off him onto her back and started to push herself back towards the bed with her legs.
Stanley got to his feet, wincing with pain. “Here, let me help you,” he said. Rose waved the knife at him.
“Don’t you come near me,” she shouted, in a deep, ragged voice that sounded nothing like her own and surprised her with its viciousness.
She caught Stanley’s eyes. He looked deeply wounded. Unable to believe that she could treat him this way after forty years of marriage.
Part of Rose wanted to reach out to him. To apologise for her manic behaviour, take him in her arms and soothe his hurt. But that part of her was not in charge.
She was not in charge. In that moment Rose realised that her mind was now the consciousness on the periphery, and the iron will of the being inside her womb was in full control of this situation.
“Get out,” she screamed. “Get away from me, damn you, go!”
Stanley slunk from the room. His face showed shock and disbelief. His hands were shaking and his shoulders were slumped with dejection.
Rose pulled herself up onto the bed and cried out with the torment from her back. She rolled onto her side to relieve the immense pressure from her swollen front. Her unborn was still agitated and she stroked her stomach to soothe the both of them.
She lay like this for several hours. Sometime in the early evening she heard Stanley let himself out of the front door. She didn’t know where he was going, but she was suddenly seized with the knowledge that it was the last time she would ever see or hear from him again.
Rose began to cry, her body wracked with deep heaving sobs. Her chest swam with regret for all the things she’d had to sacrifice, including her marriage, in order to finally be a mother. She’d had to rid her life of everything that filled it, in order to stop feeling so empty inside.
It’s time mummy, her unborn thought, and she knew he was right. She circled his mind like a satellite sentience, sensing his intent from afar, without fully comprehending it.
There was a faint hissing noise coming from far away, rising imperceptibly in volume. The louder it got the more it sounded like someone wheezing and struggling for breath. Rose knew what it was. It was the sound of her former existence, breathing its last.
The sheets beneath her began to change in consistency, coarsening from crumpled cotton to finely pressed linen. She was aware of four objects approaching the bed, as if from a great distance, each with a trajectory that ended on a different corner. As they got closer, Rose saw they were carved wooden posts. A canopy with a tapestry on its underside descended upon the bed as if from a steep height.
Rose was filled a sense of déjà vu, as if she had dreamed all this many times before. Only it wasn’t quite something she’d already seen, so much as something she’d already lost. As though her former life, and everything she’d been experiencing until now, was a distant memory that had returned briefly to taunt her with everything she’d forsaken.
Rose looked around her at the four poster bed and the oak paneled room filled with obscene art. She’d never seen its lewd furnishings, or the magical symbols daubed in blood on the walls and formed in ash on the floor. However, she knew exactly where she was.
It begins, thought the life within her womb. And though he had yet to leave her body, Rose had never felt more distant from him, nor more afraid.
IX
Rose had studied every stitch of the tapestry on the canopy. Sometimes, as she lay on her back and looked up at it, she liked to imagine how it was woven, reconstructing its composition. She would picture the weaver working the threads of the weft back and forth through the warp. Working their way up and along the tapestry until it was done. It was a good way to keep her mind off what was happening to her.
The obscenity and eroticism of the image were long since lost on her. She’d been staring up at it for such a length of time it had lost its power to shock. Even so, Rose had no idea how long she’d been on the bed, trapped by the horror in her womb. All she knew was the endless carnage she had to endure. She may have been there months, but if felt more like years.
She thought often of Stanley and how they’d parted. She wondered about the lengths to which he’d gone to find her. Had he been as out of his mind as Peter? Rose wondered if Peter would have been so desperate to find Bethany if he’d known where it would lead him?
She scratched at her leg. The blood coating her thighs was dried and flaking, making her raw skin itch. Pints and pints of it had poured out of her this time. The sheets and mattress had absorbed it all. Drank it down until ther
e was hardly a faded stain left. The bed always devoured it. Rose had come to believe that was how it fed.
There was often cartilage or shreds of torn flesh in the blood. One time Rose saw an eyeball, with the optic nerve still attached. She had screamed then, and beaten her fists against the distended skin of her huge stomach. But it did no good. It didn’t stop him. Nothing could stop him.
Once the blood had been fully absorbed by the bed, the whole process generally started again. Knowing what was going to happen next didn’t make it any easier on Rose. She gripped the bed sheets and ground her teeth. The muscles in her calves knotted as her toes curled into her feet. She’d come to hate the waiting worse than all the other indignities she had to suffer.
The child within her wanted to be fed and a true mother will do anything, go to any lengths, to take care of her child. Rose’s child did not draw sustenance from an umbilical cord, nor from her dry and sagging breasts. Her unborn wanted vengeance, to suckle at the teat of theaeternae ultionis.
Rose neither ate nor drank any more. Whatever was in her womb was doing that for both of them. Though her term was long overdue he refused to leave her. Her body was his to do with as he pleased now. His hideous appetites kept her alive, even though she did not share them.
The flesh along Rose’s stomach began to ripple, a violent tremor made its way across the whole of her midriff. This was how it usually started. Rose felt, once again, the immense internal pressure that came with the process.
The skin around her midsection began to stretch and grow out of all proportion, as something pushed its way up from inside her. Rose groaned and screamed. An outline of shoulders, and the back of an adult head, could be clearly seen beneath the skin. Where it came from, how it appeared and grew so quickly, Rose had no idea. All she knew was the sudden, unbearable pain as her womb expanded well past its breaking point.
