‘Dead?'

‘Oh yes. She killed them herself, while the three of them were still in the womb. Strangled them with their own cords.'

True or not, the image was sickening. And more sickening still, the thought of the sisters' touch. Cal tried to put both from his mind as he advanced, Shadwell still at his side. All pretence to negotiation had vanished; there were only threats now.

‘You're a dead man, Mooney, if you don't confess. I won't lift a finger to help you...'

Cal was within hailing distance of the men. He shouted across to them. They broke off their drinking and turned in his direction.

‘What's the problem?'

‘This man.' Cal began looking towards Shadwell.

But the Salesman had gone. In the space of seconds he'd left Cal's side and melted into the crowd, an exit as skilful as his entrance.

‘Got some trouble?' the bigger of the two men wanted to know.

Cal glanced back at the man, fumbling for woods. There was no use his trying to explain, he decided.

‘No ... ‘ he said. ‘... I'm ail right. I just need some air.'

Too much to drink?' said the other man, and stood aside to let Cal step out into the street.

It was chilly after the suffocation of the hall, but that was fine by Cal. Hr breathed deeply, trying to clear his head. Then, a familiar voice.

‘Do you want to go home?'

It was Geraldine. She was standing a short way from the door, a coat draped over her shoulders.

‘I'm all right: he told her. ‘Where's your father?'

‘I don't know. Why do you want him?'

There's somebody in there who shouldn't be; said Cal crossing to where she stood. To his drunken gaze she seemed more glamorous than he'd ever seen her; eyes shining like dark gems.

‘Why don't we walk together a little way?' she said.

‘I have to speak to your father,' he insisted, but she was already turning from him, laughing lightly. Before he could voice a protest she was away around the corner. He followed. There were a number of lamps not working along the street and the silhouette he dogged was fitful. But she trailed her laughter still, and he went after it.

‘Where are you going?' he wanted to know.

She only laughed again.

Above their heads the clouds were moving quickly, stars glimmering between, their fires too feeble to illuminate much below. They caught Cal's eye for an instant, and when he looked back at Geraldine she was turning to him, making a sound somewhere between a sigh and a word.

The shadows that embraced her were dense, but they unfolded even as he watched, and what they revealed made his gut somersault. Geraldine's fare had dislodged somehow, her features running like heated wax. And now, as the facade fell away, he saw the woman beneath. Saw, and knew: the browless fare, the joyless mouth. Who else but Immacolata? He would have run then, but that he felt the cold muzzle of a gun against his temple, and the Salesman's voice said: ‘Make a sound and it's going to hurt.'

He kept his silence.

Shadwell gestured towards the black Mercedes that was parked at the next intersection.

‘Move,' he said.

Cal had no choice, scarcely believing, even as he walked, that this scene was taking place on a street whose paving cracks he'd counted since he was old enough to know one from two.

He was ushered into the back of the car, separated from his captors by a partition of heavy glass. The door was locked. He was powerless. All he could do was watch the Salesman slide into the driver's seat, and the woman get in beside.

There was little chance he'd be missed from the party, he knew, and littler chance still that anyone would come looking for him. It would simply be assumed that he'd tired of the festivities and headed off home. He was in the hands of the enemy, and helpless to do anything about it.

What would Mad Mooney do now, he wondered.

The question vexed him only a moment, before the answer came. Taking out the celebratory cigar Norman had given him; he leaned back in the leather seat, and lit up.

Good, said the poet; take what pleasure you can, while there's still pleasure to be had. And breath to take it with.

V

IN THE ARMS OF MAMA PUS

In the haze of fear and cigar smoke he soon lost track of their route. His only clue to their whereabouts, when they finally came to a halt, was that the air smelt sharply of the river. Or rather, of the acreage of black mud that was exposed at low tide; expanses of muck which he'd had a terror of as a child. It wasn't until he'd reached double figures that he'd been able to walk along Otterspool Promenade without an adult between him and the railings.

The Salesman ordered him from the car. He got out obediently - it was difficult not to be obedient with a gun in his face. Shadwell immediately snatched the cigar from Cad's mouth, grinding it beneath his heel, then escorted him through a gate into a walled compound. Only now, as he laid ryes on the canyons of household refuse ahead did Cal realize where they'd brought him: the Municipal Rubbish tip. In former years, acres of parkland had been built on the city's detritus, but there was no longer the money to transform trash into lawns. Trash it remained. Its stench - the sweet and sour of rotting vegetable matter - even overpowered the smell of the river.

‘Stop,' said Shadwell, when they reached a place that seemed in no way particular.

Cal looked round in the direction of the voice. He could see very little, but it seemed Shadwell had pocketed his gun. Seizing the instant, he began to run, not choosing any particular direction, merely seeking escape. He'd counted maybe four paces when something tangled with his legs, and he fell heavily, the breath knocked from him. Before he had a chance to get to his feet forms were converging on him from every side, an incoherent mass of limbs and snarls that could only be the wraith-sister's children. He was glad of the darkness: at least he couldn't 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 hunt 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 fare in which the eyes were sewnup 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 end 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.