The Sixth Soul Read Online Free Page A

garden.’
    Silence.
    ‘Sure.’
    Harrison walked away. ‘I love you, too,’ he muttered.
    ‘What was that?’ asked Rosen.
    ‘Just thinking out loud, sir.’

6
    J ulia Caton was woken by the kicking of her baby inside her womb.
    For a few clouded moments, she thought she was dreaming. And in those seconds, as the baby moved, she felt his shifts, rolling and turning, the pressure of his hands and feet pressing the sides
of the amniotic sac. It was these gathering sensations that made her realize that, even though she didn’t know where she was in that bizarre dream, she and her baby were alive.
    Julia opened her eyes to pitch darkness. She ached all the way down her left side, from her shoulder to her ankle. She blinked a few times and strained to see but there was no relief from the
dense blackness. She wondered if she’d gone blind.
    She was floating on the surface of lukewarm liquid and her baby was moving with the growing impatience of a life waiting to be born. How could her bed be so liquid?
Because it was a dream,
that’s how, like a dream after too much wine.
    As she grew more wakeful, she became aware, without checking, that she was naked.
    She raised a hand close to her face, disturbing the surface of the liquid as she did so, but she couldn’t see her fingers even as they brushed the tips of her eyelashes.
    The back of her hand came into contact with a smooth surface that felt curved and plastic. The word
lid
slipped into the front of her mind. Lids may lift.
    She raised her other hand, palm up, and pushed with both against the cool plastic. The lid didn’t budge. Julia knew that they were locked in a container of some kind, floating,
floating.
    She closed her eyes and took a deep breath to fight down the rising panic, the unwanted gift of delayed shock. She listened to the air rushing into her nostrils, felt her ribcage rising with the
intake, and this was all she could hear.
    The baby – she had learned it was a boy on the second scan – stilled inside her. It was as if he was obeying some secret command telepathically delivered from mother to son.
    ‘Good boy,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t move.’ Her voice was ethereal in the liquid silence. Talking was a mistake. The physical action of speech set off a taste in her
mouth and she felt the urge to be sick.
    As the sound of her voice sank into the darkness, and smell and taste overtook her senses, memory erupted in nuclear flashes in her mind’s eye.
    In the bathroom, she had felt a sudden sharpness in her forearm and a hand in her face. The sense that she was dreaming evaporated as the stone-cold wind of reality thrust her into
wakefulness.
    He didn’t come out of darkness, he was darkness itself.
The thought assailed her, and the thread of then and now connected.
    ‘Jesus!’
    She dipped her fingers into the solution on which she floated and sniffed them.
    There was no perceptible scent. Slowly, she opened her lips and allowed her fingers to touch her tongue. Salt. Salt water. They were floating on a solution of salt water, locked in the dark with
no sound coming in.
    She recalled a name: Alison Todd, the second mother to go missing just over seven months ago, the discovery of her body filling the news headlines on the day Julia had learned that she was
pregnant.
    Of the four murdered mothers, Alison’s case had affected Julia most deeply, the thought of her mutilated body casting a long shadow over their celebratory supper.
    Phillip had tried to dismiss Julia’s fears, but they had remained all through her pregnancy, sometimes singing loudly, sometimes muttering darkly, but always there.
    There were sides to the thing that they were locked inside. Her fears took a collective breath and started screaming inside her head.
    ‘Oh my Jesus!’
    Julia could feel the blood draining from her limbs, the lightness in her brain.
    A stressed mother stresses an unborn baby!
    A received wisdom from the antenatal clinic she’d attended came back