Louise was woken up by a deeply disturbing dream.
She dreamed that she was lost in a forest of tall dark trees and that it was raining, hard. In between the trees the forest floor was overgrown with ferns, and they nodded in sequence as the raindrops pattered down on them. She had the feeling that creatures of some kind were scuttling around, hidden beneath the ferns, rats or giant cockroaches. She could hear them, but she couldn’t see them.
She knew there was a reason why she had entered the forest, but she couldn’t remember what it was. All she wanted to do now was find her way out.
She forced her way through some bramble bushes, scratching her arms and her legs. On the other side of the brambles she came across a limpid pool, its surface dimpled by the raindrops. As she approached the edge of the pool, she heard crying from the opposite side. A child crying. In fact, as she listened, she realised it was two children crying, in melancholy harmony.
It was then that she remembered why she was here. She was looking for her children. She had gone into their bedroom this morning to wake them up, but their cots were both empty, with rumpled sheets, and she had known instinctively that they had gone to the forest.
She started to make her way around the pool. Progress was difficult, because it was boggy in places, and her slippered feet sank into the mud. She was only halfway round when she saw two pale figures emerge from the overgrown reeds. They were both dressed in white nightgowns, although the hems had trailed in the dirt. Their cheeks were streaked with tears and their mouths were turned down in misery, but even though they looked so sad, they were strangely beautiful, like angels in a medieval painting.
‘What are you doing here?’ Louise called out, although her voice sounded oddly muffled, as if she were shouting into a pillow. ‘You need to come home!’
The two children began to struggle their way toward her through the reeds and the nettles, but as they came closer Louise saw that one of them appeared to have thin jointed arms and legs like a spider, while the other was waving hands that were curved into claws.
She felt icy cold. She knew that these were her children, and that she was supposed to take care of them, but they were both monstrosities. As they came nearer and nearer, she suddenly lost her nerve. She turned around and battled her way back through the bramble bushes, flailing at them wildly with both arms, even though they were lacerating her.
She heard the two children scream in fear and bewilderment, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Where are you going?’ but she kept on stumbling through the forest until she burst out into the open, into the rain, and woke up.
*
She opened her eyes, and the first thing she did was lift up her arms, to see if they were scratched. Around her wrist was the fine silver bracelet her grandmother had given her, but except for some almost invisible scars from her schooldays, her skin was unmarked. She sniffed. There was an unfamiliar smell in the room, like smoke, but she supposed that the rest home’s gardener must have lit a bonfire.
She sat up. The orange hessian curtains were drawn, but it was daylight outside. Last night she had worked the early-morning shift at The Whittington Rest Home, starting at midnight and finishing at eight, and after breakfast, she had gone straight to bed.
She was a large young woman, over 12 stone, and 5 foot 9. Last month, she had celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday and her fifth anniversary of nursing at the Whittington. The old people in the home adored her, because she was endlessly patient with them, even those residents who were suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s, or who were doubly incontinent. Despite her warmth though, she had only ever had one boyfriend – a shy ginger-haired accountant called Alan, who had eventually left her for another young man, called Grzegorz.
She stood up and went into her bathroom. Her stomach felt full and uncomfortable, as if she had eaten far too much, but she sat on the toilet for almost five minutes and all she could manage was a few squirts of urine. Eventually she gave up, washed her hands and brushed her choppy brunette bob in the mirror.
Her mother had always complimented her for having beautiful green eyes, but she had long ago given up believing that beautiful green eyes were enough to attract a man – not if you had a double chin and enormous breasts and a belly that flopped over the top of your tights. She had dieted, endlessly. This morning’s breakfast had been nothing more than two slices of Ryvita with low-fat cream cheese and a cup of lemon tea. But dieting made no difference. It only prevented her from growing even fatter.
She sat back down on her bed and picked up her watch. It was 3:17 in the afternoon, so at least she had managed to have five and a half hours’ sleep. She had nearly run out of toothpaste and shower gel so she decided she might as well get dressed and go out to the chemist. She just wished that her insides didn’t feel so bloated. She lay back on her pillows, frowning and cradling her stomach.
‘Marta, rambling rose of the wild wood…’ a thin voice sang outside her door. She knew who that was: Leonard Bassett, only six months shy of his hundredth birthday. He had once been given top billing at the Camberwell Palace Theatre, but the theatre had been demolished thirty years ago and Leonard couldn’t even remember his own name.
She wondered why he was wandering unaccompanied around the care home, and she was starting to get up when she was gripped by an agonising spasm in her stomach. She dropped back onto her bed, gasping with pain, clutching her stomach with one hand and the candlewick bedspread with the other. Something was moving inside her, something that was stretching and poking and scratching at her, and when she pulled up her nightdress, she could see that her stomach was bulging and undulating as if she were pregnant and a baby was kicking inside her.
She tried again to sit up, but she was wracked by another spasm, so painful that she hissed and doubled up. She had never known anything in the whole of her life to hurt so much as this. She rolled from side to side, digging her fingers deep into her stomach to try and stop the churning sensation, and when she did that she could actually feel a hard shape rising up and turning over inside her womb. It felt like a crab shell. Almost immediately after, she felt a second shape rise up, and the two shapes seemed to become locked and tangled up together, scratching the lining of her womb as fiercely as the brambles in her dream.
She stretched her mouth wide open, but her senses were blotted out with pain, and if she was screaming, she couldn’t hear it. After a few moments though, her door was cautiously opened and Leonard appeared, almost skeletally thin, with long white hair, wrapped in a white towelling dressing gown. He came up to her bedside and leaned over her, his straggly eyebrows knitted in concern, and she could see his lips moving.
Louise reached out toward him, trying to make him understand that she was in too much pain to speak, but silently begging him to go and fetch help, as quickly as he could. If he didn’t, she was sure that it would only be minutes before the pain totally overwhelmed her, and she died.
*
‘Ah, you’re awake,’ said a man’s voice.
Louise blinked. She looked around her and gradually realised that she was lying in a dimly lit hospital room, and that it was dark outside, except for street lights. Two doctors were standing beside her bed, one male and one female, one on either side, smiling at her. At the end of the bed, a nurse in a green uniform was writing on a clipboard.
‘Where am I?’ she asked. Her mouth was so dry that she found it difficult to speak, and her breath smelled like wood varnish.
‘You’re in KCH,’ said the doctor. ‘That’s King’s College Hospital. You’re in a room in Beverley Ward, where we treat patients who have birthing problems. My name is Doctor Sanjay Gupta. I am a consultant in emergency medicine. This is Doctor Clarissa Edwards, who is a consultant obstetrician. In fact, she’s our head of obstetrics.’
Louise’s head was throbbing, and she felt both bruised and nauseous, as if she had been punched very hard in the stomach, not just once, but again and again, so that she had been sick. Her hips were sore too.
‘Birthing problems?’ she said huskily. ‘What do you mean, birthing problems? I’m not pregnant.’
‘I hope it doesn’t come as too much of a shock to you, Louise,’ said Dr Edwards. ‘But you are pregnant, yes.’
‘I can’t be pregnant. I haven’t been with anybody. I haven’t even got a boyfriend.’
‘You’re sure you haven’t had any kind of sexual relations with anybody – not necessarily intercourse? Is it possible that somebody could have taken advantage of you while you were asleep, or after you’d had a little too much to drink?’
‘I don’t drink. And, no, I don’t see how anybody could have had sex with me while I was asleep. Nobody’s allowed into the care home without a pass, and all our male patients – well, they’re long past that kind of thing.’
‘However it happened, Louise, there’s no question that you are pregnant. We gave you a sonograph scan as soon as you were brought in here. As a matter of fact, I hate to spring this on you, but you’re carrying not only one foetus, but two.’
‘Twins? That isn’t possible. It simply isn’t possible.’ Louise pressed her hand against her stomach and winced because it was still very tender. ‘How long have I been here? What time is it?’
‘A quarter past eleven. You were brought in just after three.’
‘But before today I haven’t been feeling any pain or any movement inside me – none at all. And it was my period last week. How can I be pregnant if I had my period last week?’
Dr Edwards looked across at Dr Gupta, and her expression was serious now. ‘You have two living foetuses in your womb, Louise. But the problem is a little more complicated than that. There’s no point in my beating about the bush. I have to tell you that the sonograph showed both of them to be suffering from severe malformation.’
‘What does that mean? What’s wrong with them?’
‘It looks as if they’re well into the second trimester – perhaps eighteen weeks or more. But although they’re unusually active, they simply haven’t formed properly. They have brains and hearts and all the other internal organs, but their bodies and their limbs are extremely misshapen. Every foetus develops clawlike muscles in their hands in the early stages of their growth – muscles that disappear before they reach full term. But it looks as if these two foetuses have sprouted all manner of extraneous muscles and limbs, and show no sign of losing them.’
‘You’re telling me that I’ve had them inside me for eighteen weeks? I can’t have!’
‘I understand how confused you are, Louise,’ said Dr Gupta. ‘But the results of the ultrasound are irrefutable. I am going to suggest that we also give you a CVS test. This is when we take a sample of cells from your placenta so that we can examine them for genetic or chromosomal disorders. In normal circumstances, there is a small percentage risk of miscarriage when we do this, but in your case…’
‘Go on, tell me. What’s so different about my case?’
‘I’ll have to be frank with you. In your case it seems highly unlikely that you will lose either of these two foetuses because of the unusual way in which they have connected themselves to you. They are attached not only to the lining of your womb, but somehow, they have managed to intertwine their nervous systems with yours by burying nerve rootlets into your spinal cord, and combined their circulatory systems with your inferior mesenteric artery. We have never seen anything like it.’
Louise could feel the foetuses shifting inside her, and her womb went into a painful spasm, which made her clench her teeth and grunt. She looked up at Dr Edwards in desperation.
‘When you say I won’t lose them… you can get rid of them, can’t you?’
‘Before we can consider termination, Louise, I’m afraid we’ll have to carry out far more detailed scans. As Dr Gupta says, both foetuses have connected themselves to you in such a comprehensive and complex way that we can’t simply give you a dose of mifepristone or cut them out surgically. If we tried to do that, the risk to your own life would be unacceptably high.’
‘In other words, abortion would not only kill them, but you too,’ said Dr Gupta. ‘At least, that is how it looks at the moment. But we will try to find a way to do it.’
Louise started to cry. Her eyes welled up with tears, and she sobbed uncontrollably until she could scarcely breathe. Her womb went into another spasm, even more painful than the last, and she could feel a chilly fizzing sensation up her spine.
Dr Edwards tugged a tissue out of the box beside the bed and wiped her eyes for her. Then she held her hand and said, ‘Louise… we’re going to be doing everything we can to find out how we can terminate these two. In the meantime, we’ll be giving you regular analgesics to suppress the pain. I have to be totally honest with you though. It does appear at the moment that you might have to carry them to full term and let them be born naturally.’
‘But they’re not natural! They’re freaks! I saw them in a dream!’
‘Excuse me? You saw them in a dream?’
Louise nodded frantically. ‘I know it’s them. I just know. One of them was like a spider and the other one had claws like a lobster. But they both had beautiful faces.’
Dr Edwards looked across at Dr Gupta. She said nothing, but Dr Gupta picked up a folder from the side table and took out two 3D colour sonograph prints. He held them up so that Louise could see them, and there they were, clinging to each other, the same children that she had seen in her dream. In these pictures they were much smaller, and naked, and their eyes were closed, but she could clearly see the angelic face of the spidery foetus. Its arms and legs were folded protectively around the foetus with the claw-like hands.
‘Oh dear God,’ whispered Louise. ‘Oh dear God I can’t believe this. What are they going to look like when they’re born? And what are you going to do with them, once they are? Are you going to kill them?’