Louise was woken at 2:10 a.m. by a churning sensation inside her womb, as if the blades of a kitchen blender were slowly turning over.
She reached over to switch on her bedside lamp, and then sat up. When she pulled up her nightgown, she could actually see her stomach lumping up. She gagged, and her mouth filled with bile, although she couldn’t vomit. Since Dr Gupta had shown her the scans of the two foetuses that were growing inside her, she hadn’t been able to eat.
She felt desperate, but she had nobody to confide in. Her sister, Suzanne, hadn’t spoken to her for more than five years. Her mother would only react with disgust that she was pregnant, even if she protested that she hadn’t slept with anybody. Two or three of the elderly residents of the Whittington were kind and sympathetic, and treated her like a granddaughter, but they were suffering from varying degrees of dementia or memory loss, and they wouldn’t have understood what she meant if she told them that she was expecting two distorted babies.
There had been several times in her life when she had wondered if she would be better off committing suicide. When she was thirteen, she had been so badly bullied at school she had taken to cutting her arms with a broken test tube from the science lab. When Alan had left her, she had even gone to the hardware shop and bought a washing line to hang herself. Each time though, she had sat on her bed and decided that tomorrow might be better. Tomorrow she might have lost at least another two pounds. The day after tomorrow, when she had lost even more weight, she might meet another man. His name would be Roger, and he would have dark hair and an infectious grin.
So far, she had lost no weight and met no men called Roger, and now her womb had been invaded by these two hideous foetuses. Not only her womb, but her nervous system and her whole personality. If it would kill her to get rid of them, she might as well die anyway. She had the key to the rest home pharmacy cupboard, where there was enough Quetiapine to treat eleven residents with Alzheimer’s, and that would certainly be enough to stop her heart.
Her womb contracted with another agonising pang, and she felt an abrasive sensation all the way up her back, as if her spinal cord had been rubbed with glasspaper. She bent forward, her eyes squeezed tight shut, until the spasm had passed. Then she thought, That’s it. I can’t bear this. I just want it to be over. Dying can’t be any worse than going to sleep. The only difference is you don’t wake up. And why should I want to wake up, with these monsters inside me?
She opened her eyes and sat up. Suddenly she felt peaceful. All her life she had done what other people had told her to do, and tried to please them even when they had mocked her and criticised her. Now these hideous scratchy foetuses were trying to take possession not only of her body but her soul as well. Enough was enough. From this moment, only one person was going to control her destiny, and that was her.
She stood up, but as she stood up, she became aware of that smoky smell again. Surely the groundsman hadn’t lit another bonfire – not now, in the middle of the night? Her window was shut, so how had it penetrated into her bedroom?
The smell had a sharp acidic overtone too. She didn’t know why, but she imagined this was what you smelled like after you had died, and you were lying in the suffocating darkness of your own coffin. A smell both pungent and sour. Although how could you smell anything, when your lungs were deflated, and you couldn’t breathe, and your heart was empty, and your liquefying brain was trickling out of your ears?
‘Louise,’ she said, in a thick, clogged-up voice.
She looked around, shocked. She had said ‘Louise’, but she hadn’t spoken. The voice had come out of her throat, but she had felt that somebody was squeezing her larynx in their hand, and that was where her name had come from. It was a horrible, choking sensation.
‘Louise, look at me.’
She turned, and it was then that she saw the dark smoky figure standing by the door. It wasn’t completely opaque – she could make out the panels of the door through it, and the notice pinned up with her daily rosters on it. Yet she could clearly see its pointed hood, and its long dangling sleeves, and she thought she could see its eyes too, reflecting the light from her bedside lamp.
‘I sense that you wish yourself harm,’ she said.
She wanted to scream at this figure that it couldn’t be real, and to go, because she must be dreaming about it. But her lips and her tongue felt numb, like they did when she went to the dentist, and her lungs refused to fill with air, and it seemed as if she could only say the words that the hooded figure wanted her to say.
‘You must take care of yourself, Louise, because you are carrying my nestlings inside you. If you harm yourself, my nestlings will come to harm, and their lives are sacred. Your life is sacred too. Always remember that.’
Louise took a step toward the hooded figure. She wanted to flap her hands so that the smoke was dispersed, or at least to pull back its hood to see what it looked like. But her legs felt as numb as her lips, and when she tried to take another step, her brain couldn’t work out how to make her legs work. The foetuses inside her had entangled themselves into her spinal cord, and taken over her speech and her movement and even the beating of her heart.
‘You have thought of yourself as ugly,’ she said. ‘The cruel words of others have made you believe that your life has no value. But I tell you this: every single life has value. Every single life is sacred. Those children inside you were aborted and flushed away, but I was able to save them. Now you are bearing them for me, my nestlings, in a womb, which I no longer possess.’
Louise felt another sharp pain and took a step back, and then sat down heavily on her bed. Her eyes were so blurred with tears that she could hardly see the hooded figure as it drifted closer, but she could smell it even more strongly. Woodsmoke, and lemons.
‘You will not have to carry my nestlings for long. I am invested with the power to turn their bodily clocks much faster than those of other children. You feel pain inside you mostly because they are growing so quickly, and within a week, they will be ready to emerge. You will be a mother, Louise. The proud mother of different but sacred lives.’
Louise could do nothing but sit on her bed, rocking backward and forward because she was hurting so much.
‘You will not harm yourself,’ she said, and now her voice sounded even harsher, and more threatening. ‘I forbid you to harm yourself, under any circumstances. If you try to, you will know pain that makes this pain feel like nothing at all. Every nerve in your body will be ripped out, one by one, and you will have to eat your own eyes.’
With that, the hooded figure began to collapse. It swirled around and was sucked under the door, and disappeared, although it left behind that distinctive sickening smell of smoke and lemons.
Louise lay back on her bed, trembling uncontrollably, as if she had a fever. She could feel those foetuses turning around inside her and scraping at the lining of her womb, and her despair was total. How much worse could her life become, if she wasn’t even allowed to die?