Hold on, please hold on, stay with me, please don’t go.
She uses the toilet and washes her hands. On the sink, she sees two toothbrushes in a holder, one of them clearly Elissa’s. Few other traces of the girl exist inside the bathroom – no spew of teenage beauty products, no cluster of budget perfumes. How light her touch on the world has been. How short-lived her legacy, if she’s really gone.
II
On the drive back to Dorset she phones her GP, who arranges a same-day referral to the Royal Bournemouth Hospital’s early-pregnancy assessment unit.
Mairéad sits in the waiting room, eyes closed, breathing deep. She decides against calling Scott. He’ll try to comfort her, wrap her in love, and she can’t risk that. Right now, she’s an empty vessel, devoid of all emotion. Exactly how she needs to be.
She forces her attention back to the investigation. Five days now, since Elissa disappeared. Mairéad feels her slipping inexorably further away. Already, she’s noticed a change in the nature of the news reporting, grim acceptance beginning to replace hope. Next week, by degrees, Elissa will fade from the front pages. In a month, her story will be relegated to occasional Sunday-paper spreads.
Mairéad, her eyes still closed, reaches out with her mind: Hold on, please hold on, stay with me, please don’t go. And with that she’s back in the waiting room, hands on her belly, waiting for the news she dreads to hear.
III
The sonographer, a loose-jowled woman with auburn hair, isn’t one she’s met before. Mairéad’s relieved about that. She knows most of the staff at the unit. Today, she’ll willingly trade their smiles and careful kindnesses for anonymity. The loose-jowled woman introduces herself, but Mairéad doesn’t hear her name. There’s white noise in her ears, now. It drowns everything out.
Lying on the examination table, she unbuttons her trousers and lifts her blouse. If the ultrasound gel is cold, she doesn’t feel it.
The sonographer is talking again, fuzzy words that bounce away without registering. In her right hand she holds the probe, which she presses to Mairéad’s belly. On the monitor appears a familiar fan-shaped swirl of grey. The image is grainy and distant, like footage received from deep space. It shifts, coalesces, and now, at the heart of it, a cavity appears, a black bolus of emptiness. The white noise in Mairéad’s head becomes a buzzing, all-consuming. Her fingers find her wedding ring, rotating it three times.
The sonographer’s chest rises and falls. Her eyes move from the monitor to Mairéad’s belly and back, jowls swinging like a mastiff’s. Fractionally, her eyebrows dip. The probe tilts, hunting for a better angle, but Mairéad knows the truth without being told. And she can cope with it; she can.
At last, the woman begins to speak. Her platitudes fall like rain. She gestures at the monitor and Mairéad nods along, carefully arranging her expression. She’ll wear this face back to the car, back to Bournemouth Central. She’ll wear it for Scott, and for the TV cameras, and for Elissa Mirzoyan’s mum.
‘—with our consultant obstetrician, but it’s up to you.’
Gradually, Mairéad tunes back in. She knows the script from this point on. The miscarriage will happen naturally or it won’t. Either way, she’ll be back here within a week, to check that no trace of the foetus remains.
‘The hardest part’s always the not-knowing,’ the sonographer says. ‘At least you can relax now.’
Through eight years of medical practitioners, Mairéad’s met almost universal kindness, courtesy, everyday humanity. And then, every now and then, there’ll be someone like this.
Her jaw hardens. The top of her scalp grows cold. ‘What did you just say?’
The woman smiles, as if she’s sharing a confidence. ‘I can’t blame you for zoning out. I said I can get one of the consultants to talk to you, if you like. Either way, you did the right thing by coming in.’
Mairéad’s hands sharpen into fists. Her breath is stuck in her throat. She glances back at the monitor, trying to displace her rage, and there, suddenly, she sees it, right at the bottom of the image: the shivery oscillation of a fast-beating heart.
Elissa
Day 7
I
There’s no stubble on his cheeks, no hint of a beard, not even the soft, wispy down she’s sometimes seen on the faces of adolescent boys. His skin is frog-pale, his features rounded by fat. Beneath them, the folds of his neck are like rings of molten wax around a guttering church candle. Within those folds, there’s no sign of the enlarged larynx that usually forms during puberty. A six-inch scar, which appears to have healed without stitches, runs from his left temple to his chin.
Elissa’s vision skips, the colours bleeding into themselves. For a moment she wonders if she’s hallucinating, if what she’s seeing is a composite monster dredged from the depths of her subconscious. But this is no illusion, no trick of the mind.
In the low light, the rest of him resists much examination, but she has the impression of a large body, more feminine than masculine in its curves. Elijah is obese, but not morbidly so. He looks clumsy, sluggish. His eyes, by contrast, have the deadpan intensity of a lizard’s.
As she stares at him, muscles locked solid, the terrible repercussions begin to sink in. Throughout her ordeal, Elijah and the ghoul have been easily distinguishable; the naive boy versus the depraved adult; the high-pitched voice of an innocent versus the whispered demands of a beast.
A whisper, Elissa now realizes, can conceal as much truth as the dark.
Since the beginning, she’s had her suspicions of something not-quite-right, of a game being played with rules she hasn’t grasped. Elijah might never have played chess, but he’s proved himself adept at deception. Perhaps he’s even deceived himself.
‘Is all this real? Sometimes … sometimes I think … it isn’t.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not Hansel.’
‘No. You’re not Hansel. You’re Elijah.’
‘Am I?’
Obvious, now, why his voice sometimes sounded so disembodied. Throughout, she’d put that down to her exhaustion or disorientation, or perhaps the ghoul’s filthy drugs. Belatedly, she realizes she experienced it only when Elijah was standing, magnifying the difference between the height she imagined him to be and the reality. Upright, he must be taller than six foot.
Despite her horror at what the candle flame has revealed, and the starkness of its implications, Elissa considers her earlier plan. Because of what she’s just learned, the consequences of a misstep are likely fatal: There’ll never be anything, ever in this life, that you can conceal from me. And yet inaction carries consequences just as bleak.
‘Elijah, I’m sorry,’ she says, trying to smooth the tremors in her voice. ‘But if we can’t get a signal, we can’t download the software. Underground, the phone just won’t work. No calls, no data, no nothing.’
The thick folds of his neck contract. She hears him swallow, a hard-sounding glop. When he blinks, the computer screens floating in his eyes wink out, then reboot.
This is it.