The Devil's Whelp. Vin Hammond Jackson
her son's image. She stopped screaming. She had to, in order to see. Terrible though it was, she had to look!!
Eddie was screaming, too. His mouth was open wide, his throat a raw, yawning cavern. Folds of skin on his face became ropes straining to the limit. They would never hold. They wept for release as she did, as Eddie would be weeping, if he didn't have the need to scream in terror-filled silence.
Then luminous, violet milk was pouring into his mouth. That was what it looked like, a trailing, twisting, viscous stream that flowed around his body then curled up to his neck and under the seal of his breathing helmet. Once inside, it just went into Eddie, through his mouth and his nostrils, right inside.
She pitched and pulled, dragging at the water with clawing fingers, coming no closer, destined to witness the invasion of her bairn by this affront to both nature and God.
It continued to flow relentlessly in a never-ending stream, saturating her precious Eddie, bloating him until there was no more space left in either his body or the suit and hat which were supposed to have kept him safe.
The suit began to tear. Eddie's nose and lips pressed flat against the view-plate. His teeth gnawed involuntarily on the clear, plexiglass panel. Then it started to crack.
Her world began to come apart, everything did - the suit, the rat-hat, and finally Eddie. The sea before her exploded. Pieces flew, spiralling through the water, trailing millions of bubbles captured in spearing, violet jet-streams. Eddie was everywhere, and yet he had gone completely and forever.
Her anguish and fear had reached a climax. She was impotent. She had let her son die. She wasn't a mother. She was a weak, useless woman!
Wailing bubbles, she tore at herself, raking her nails down her cheeks, forcing them to pierce right through and into her mouth, clutching the flesh in greedy palms and ripping it from her face. Then she turned her rabid attention to her body. Her hands fought through the material of her clothes until the fingers were able to hook and drag great pieces of gory meat from the bones and thrust them in despair at the unnatural power which held her, making her final gesture of contemptuous defiance.
But the force which had been rushing like a stream seemed to have disappeared. The water was still, and so the chunks of flesh which she had torn from herself just floated away a short distance then hung suspended, seeping wispy trails of blood.
She had stopped, mesmerised by the phenomenon, a flap of torn stomach wall in one hand and a kidney oozing between the clutching fingers of the other. Blood trailed from both hands. It rose. Then there was more, and more, until it was billowing from the huge, jagged rents in her abdomen.
Just when the opaque cloud of red began to mask her view, she saw something, a dark shape at the periphery of her vision. The crimson screen became denser, and the shape moved closer, coasting gracefully. She recognised it by the way it moved. The name was on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn't quite recall it. Then the spectre changed direction suddenly as such creatures do and she was able to watch it circling, alert, deadly, the first of many sharks.
After all she'd seen, all the torture she had been forced to endure and had finally put herself through, it should have been over. No one person ought to be allowed to suffer more. Now this!! Couldn't she just have grieved in peace? She had loved Eddie and always would, but she had to be alive to mourn his passing.
They were circling closer, four, five, and more coming. The front runners were growing agitated, snapping and warning off those nearest to them, marking their ground, establishing a pecking order.
She turned and began swimming. The water was placid, no rushing tide, not even a gentle current, nothing to aid or abet her. No one thing that she could blame, or curse, or sacrifice her fate to. All that lay between life and death was her ability and determination.
And she did want to live. Now that Eddie had gone and there was nothing she could do to bring him back, she wanted time to grieve. She didn't want to die, not like this, not mashed and torn apart by....
One swam so close to her that she could have touched it. It seemed to be taking not the slightest notice of her and had almost passed. Then, with a surge, it jack-knifed and rushed at her. She churned water in a frantic dog-paddle, going nowhere fast.
She'd heard that you felt no pain when a shark attacked, just the impact - it happened so quickly. So why could she feel the teeth spearing into the flesh of her thigh? How was it possible that a person totally submerged in water could hear her bones snapping and splintering? And if she could feel and hear this, what would it be like when it started to eat its way up her body? God in heaven, why was this happening at all?
A terrible darkness engulfed her that was not merely visual. A dense, perceptual screen surrounded her, masking reason, defying logic. Agnes MacFarlane was alone within it. There was no more pain, not of the physical kind. But it hurt to be there, probably more so because nothing made sense any more. She had been swimming, yet she had never learned how. She was floating, but at the same time was sitting bolt upright. She had been drowning and thought that she still was; only the water was perspiration that streamed down her face like a river over the rocks of a waterfall. And the wet suit which she had never in her life possessed she now recognised as a flimsy nightdress which clung to her saturated body. And the sharks....?
She paused, frowning. Where were they? Fear caused a fresh outbreak of perspiration to well from her pores. They must be there still, lurking beyond the darkness, waiting to move in for the kill. She strained her eyes to look for them. The closest shape she could find was the silhouette of her arch-topped wardrobe canting harmlessly against the wall next to the window.
Her attention became fixed on the curtains. Light shone through them, accentuating the folds and threadbare patches. She wanted to get up, walk over to them and peer out, but she was afraid that the dingy Glasgow back-street which ought to be there might not; and anyway, she couldn't walk - the shark had been feeding on her. It had taken her legs.
Oh, God, my legs!!! Panic snatched at her. She felt for them and they were there! The sharks were just imagination. Everything must have been. Then she remembered savaging her own body and thought that she might have done just that while in the grip of her terrible dream. Her hands frantically traced the contours, finding no rents or gaping holes, none at all. She was complete again, almost.
Only one thing was missing - her son, Eddie. He wasn't there. He was on the other side of the World - Australia. He was out on an oil rig, with his rat-hat, and his air lines, and his blue body-suit. He had all he ever wanted, all he needed, except for his loving mother. She was still here in Scotland, having nightmares about him, so afraid that he might never return.
In his absence, she did the only thing a mother in her situation could do for her son - she cried.
2
There were no distinguishing features. There was nothing out there but sea, mile upon mile of it. Except for the sun and stars which might be just another illusion, there was nothing to indicate that a certain point had been encountered before. It was an ocean that appeared to span the entire earth. Only circumnavigation could confirm or refute the hypothesis, and who would dare attempt a voyage of such magnitude? Who would risk years, maybe decades, of loneliness in search of that which might not exist?
Some might, if they were desperate enough. Men sufficiently greedy, or reckless, perhaps. Proud men. In fact, they were already there, in the midst of desolation, not sailing on it in search of home, but fossicking beneath for a jewel far more precious than mere land.
They already had a country, and a home. They couldn't see either, not from the middle of that vast emptiness, but they knew all those comforts were there, just a chopper ride away, so they didn't worry about it. Worrying was for wimps, and oil men were hardly that.
They were smart enough to know that it wasn't all the same out there. It might look it - to a wimp - but they weren't just there by chance, and it wasn't just any old spot of ocean where they'd set up camp. It was a particular one.
So that they could recognise it and return