Ghertrude crept forward and opened the second door that only she had entered before.
She slipped along the wall towards the old kitchen, the crowbar sweating in her determined hand. As she got closer she could hear voices. She recognized them. It was the Kin and they were talking to somebody. She slowed and strained her ears.
“Sit still, little one, the blood is still flowing freely,” said Luluwa.
“Little one.” The words barked in Ghertrude’s head. It must be Rowena! Her stolen child. They’d had her all along! She was back! They had her! Ghertrude’s heart missed three beats and punched her ribs with the fourth.
“Blood,” she heard next, as if from a separate sentence from a separate universe. Her heart swallowed her brain and adrenaline roared through her body. She charged into the kitchen. Seth stepped in front of her to slow her stampede, embracing her and turning her on her own axis like a dramatic and passionate dancing master. Nobody else moved. She regained her stance and saw Luluwa daubing the face of the seated figure that she held lovingly in her stiff brown arms. It was not Rowena. As the bloody cloth was taken away, the figure turned towards her and spoke.
“Hello, Ghertrude. You missed my execution, so I decided to come to yours.” Ishmael gave her a sickly grin and she jolted into shock when she saw him alive and again with only one eye. The other had been gouged out, the scarred socket empty and streaming with thin tearful blood. His words eventually bypassed his appearance and she saw the sleek black pistol dangling at the end of his arm.
In the grief of her disappointment, she did not hear herself say, “Ishmael…how…”
“With the help of an old friend, a real friend.”
Luluwa still had her hand on his shoulder. She was watching Ghertrude with an expression that for the first time seemed baleful and accusing, even though Ghertrude knew that the Bakelites had only one fixed set of facial movements. Luluwa removed her gaze and continued to daub at the rend in her patient’s face, speaking as if addressing the wound itself.
“Ishmael has come home.”
“This is not his home, he no longer belongs here.”
“And you do?” said Ishmael, lifting his arm and levelling the slender wagging gun at Ghertrude’s heart.
“Ishmael will stay with us until the humans stop looking for him,” said Seth from behind her. And there it was, for the first time. Her inclusion with them and her spoken separation from the rest of mankind. She felt cold and horrified; a clammy distance enveloped her life.
“I’m not one of you,” she barely murmured.
“That’s not what they have been saying,” said Ishmael, quivering exhortation in his voice. “They say we are brother and sister, you and I. Both made with their help in this very house.”
Ghertrude clamped her hands over her ears, but his voice still got through.
“Brother and sister, different mothers maybe. But the same unknown father. Brother and sister who fucked like rabbits. That kind of makes our offspring very special, don’t you think?”
She ignored the gun and rushed at him, crashing him out of the chair and Luluwa’s arms.
“You monster,” she screamed, “you foul monster! Don’t you talk of Rowena that way. She was never yours!”
She was going for his eye. The gun skidded across the floor, hit the skirting board, and fired, the bullet going through the wall. They both rolled in a tangled fury, punching and screeching, crashing into Luluwa’s ankles and bringing her down, whistling shrilly, on top of them. They slithered on the floor, Ishmael shielding his eye and trying to kick out at Ghertrude. Luluwa’s flailing limbs were getting in the way. Seth rushed at them and with his fearsome strength tried to yank Ghertrude away. There was a sickly muffled sound and she bellowed in pain as he dislocated her left leg. Aklia also tried to grab part of the writhing mass. Suddenly all the Kin stopped moving, their heads swivelling towards the door in unison. Luluwa was instantly upright and shrinking back with the others. The fight on the floor continued unaware: Ishmael had Ghertrude’s hair wrapped around his fist and was pulling her head backwards. She had sunk her nails into his face. Their feet kicked in all directions.
It was only when the gun went off and they were splashed with the sticky, hot, creamy fluid that they stopped and came apart. Ghertrude saw the pistol floating in space, smoking and moving slightly towards them. Then she saw Luluwa, who was shaking her head from side to side like a dog worrying a bone. A stream of white fluid pumped from her abdomen in a constant rapid flow. It had splashed all over them. Everybody was frozen; the white torrent and the automatic head were now the only movement.
Ishmael saw the squat young woman whom he did not know standing with his gun in her hand. There was something familiar about her but he did not know what it was. She had closed the door behind her and moved into the room, grating her teeth as she approached. Her eyes were set and ferocious. He did not know what was driving her, but he knew better than to get in its way. So did the remaining Kin, who shrank back. Ghertrude was still on the floor fearing to move because the pain in her hip was agonising when she shifted her weight.
Meta liked the Steyr Mannlicher in her hand; it fit her newfound vengeance perfectly. For surely these disgusting creatures were of the same family as the shapeshifter that had so ill used her in the warehouse. The sleek metal had automatically cocked itself and was primed for action. Ishmael dithered in front of its awesome sniffing barrel.
“Who are you?” Ishmael spat.
“Get back,” said Meta. “Mistress, can you hear me?”
There was no response. Meta jabbed the gun harder at the space before her and they all slithered backwards away from Ghertrude. Meta grabbed Ghertrude’s hand and materialised before her.
“Oh, Meta, it’s you, oh thank God, it’s you.”
A sound from above, as if somebody on the upper floor had changed direction noisily, caused them to freeze. They gripped each other tightly.
“Are there any more of you here or upstairs?” Meta demanded.
No one replied. Meta remembered a Wild West film that she had been taken to one Christmas. She always remembered it because her parents could never forget. In one scene a band of desperadoes entered a saloon where a troupe of dancing girls had been high-kicking in fast, loud black-and-white. The ruffians took out their guns and fired endless smoking rounds above their heads. Outraged and confused, the young Meta had said, “Mama, those ladies were dancing, then the horrible men came and killed the ceiling.”
Her parents laughed about it for days. For years. At every Christmas.
“Are there any more here?” she demanded again.
When nobody reacted she lifted the pistol and fired for effect above her head. The crisp plaster of the ceiling cracked like old bone. It was a satisfying feeling until she heard another distinct response from above. She crossed the room, waving the gun and grinding her teeth at the cowering group. She still held on to Ghertrude and tried not to pull against her pain. She leaned down and said, “Hold still, mistress, I will save you from these.”
As she said it, Ishmael made a move towards the door that led down below, towards the well. Meta turned the gun on him as the other door behind her splinted and started to crash open from a great force that was pushing through it. She spun the impatient gun towards the sound. This was the creature from the warehouse, the one that had defiled her, she thought, come after her again. As the door shattered, she aimed and pulled the trigger again and again with the hissing brass cartridges flying over her head and merrily dancing around her feet, while the deafening reports closed down her senses. Fired until the gun steamed jarringly open, locked back and gutted into its empty position. Everything went quiet. And now she could see it was not the creature from the warehouse that lay groaning on the floor but Mutter, her father, torn apart and dying.
The gun fell from her hand as she slipped the other out of Ghertrude’s and walked towards the leaking bulk of Mutter. The Kin and Ishmael had bolted for the lower stairs. Ghertrude groaned at her pain and the shock of what had just happened. She looked up at Luluwa, whose head was now just gently flinching, the last spills of her cream oozing down her flat brown body, between her thighs, and pooling with the rest on the floor like a white atoll in which Ghertrude now sat like a besieged, hopeless sovereign. Her eyes glazed and locked on the atrophied statue that showed no sign of falling and had once been so full of life. Meta stood over her father. A faint gurgling sound could be heard somewhere deep inside him.
“Poppa,” she said with the last trace of hope left in her concaving body. “Poppa?”
She knelt into the pool of his blood, which surprisingly was much smaller than the white one that surrounded Luluwa. She touched his hand, but there was nothing, he was gone, just cold. Cold and gone.
After what felt like hours or even days, she returned to Ghertrude and knelt in her puddle, the red and the white making swirls and eddies of interlaced colour. She grasped the leg and with a power and a knowledge that was never there before rammed it back into place. Ghertrude passed out and Meta dragged her like a broken flag out of the room, leaving a smeared trail of red and white. Luluwa was empty and still, her dead body standing in locked amazement.