‘No,’ said Isserley, striving to keep her voice level. ‘No, I don’t think so. You can say Isserley says hello and goodbye, how’s that? Now, I really must get to my bed.’
‘Of course,’ said Ensel, bowing out of the window-frame.
Bastard, thought Isserley as she drove off. Tired and vulnerable, she’d lost concentration and let slip that little detail about going to her bed. No doubt Ensel would relish that, share it with the other men, this titillating proof of her subhumanity. Had she shaken him off sooner, he would never have been any the wiser; he and the other men would have carried on assuming that when Isserley slept, in that secretive cottage of hers, she slept like a human being, on the ground.
Instead, in one humiliating instant, she’d thoughtlessly given him the gift of the tawdry truth, a vision of an ugly freak sleeping on a strange oblong structure of iron and cloth-wrapped kapok, her body wreathed in sheets of old linen, just like a vodsel.
5
ISSERLEY, HAVING VOWED to be uncaringly asleep when the ship came in, lay in bed, in the midnight dark, listening for its arrival.
She hadn’t changed her attitude; it was sheer anxiety keeping her awake, anxiety that she’d be roused out of her bed by the men, or, worse, by Amlis Vess.
More than anything she was afraid of not hearing them knocking at the front door, of sleeping right through the noise. They might just let themselves in then, come up to her bedroom, and have a good look at the denuded freak, the gargoyle girl, snoring on the pallet. Ensel was Estate trash, after all; his idea of privacy bore no relation to hers. He’d seemed to have trouble hearing her when she told him she didn’t want to be disturbed; it wouldn’t take much to make him forget. And wouldn’t he just love to see what the surgeons had done to her below the waist! Well, he could go fuck himself.
Hours eroded by. Isserley’s eyes swelled and itched with the imaginary grit of sleeplessness. She squirmed in slow motion on her stained and ancient mattress, listening.
The ship’s berthing, shortly after 2 a.m., was almost noiseless: she could barely distinguish it from the sound of the waves on the Moray Firth. But she knew it had come. It came every month at the same time, and she was intimately acquainted with its smell, its great, secretive groan of docking, and the metallic sigh of its insertion into the steading.
Isserley lay awake longer still, waiting for the clouds to uncover the moon, waiting for the men, for Amlis Vess, to just dare, to have the nerve. ‘Well then, let’s see this Isserley,’ she imagined Amlis Vess saying, and the men scurrying off to fetch her. ‘Fuck off,’ she would call out to them.
She lay for another hour or so, coiled ready with her ‘Fuck off’ sizzling on the tip of her tongue. Nervous moonlight hesitated into her bedroom, drawing a spectral line around the meagre contents, stopping well short of the bed. Outside, a screech owl began its performance of wails and shrieks, one calm and unruffled bird sounding deceptively like a horde of much larger creatures in terror and agony.
Serenaded thus, Isserley fell asleep.
It seemed she had only slept a few minutes when she was shocked awake by urgent hammering at the front door of her cottage.
Frantic, she reared up on her bed, clutching the rumpled sheet to her breasts, pressing her legs together. The knocking continued, echoing around the bare trees like phantom knocks on dozens of phantom houses.
Isserley’s bedroom was still shut tight and snug, but through the window she could see the darkness of the world starting to go a pre-dawn blue. She squinted at the clock on the mantelpiece: it was half past five.
Isserley wound the bedsheet around her body and hurried out to the landing, where there was a tiny four-paned casement. She unlatched it, poked her head out into the night and looked straight down.
Still hammering energetically at her front door was Esswis, all dressed up in his best farmer gear, complete with deerstalker and shotgun. He looked ridiculous and terrifying, lit up luridly by the headlights of his Land-rover parked nearby.
‘Stop banging, Esswis!’ Isserley warned, her voice half hysterical. ‘Can’t anyone understand I’m not interested in Amlis Vess!’
Esswis stepped back from the door and lifted his face to get her in his sights.
‘Fine with me,’ he said brusquely. ‘But you’d better get your clothes on and come out.’ He adjusted the shotgun on its strap, as if he was authorized to shoot her if she refused.
‘I told you—’ she began.
‘Forget Amlis Vess,’ barked Esswis. ‘He’ll keep. There are four vodsels loose.’
Sleep made Isserley stupid. ‘Loose?’ she repeated. ‘What do you mean, loose?’
Esswis waved his arms around irritably, indicating a random sweep of Ablach Farm and everything beyond.
‘What do you think I mean?’
Isserley jerked her head back inside the casement and stumbled back into her bedroom to dress. The full implications of Esswis’s announcement were well on the way to sinking in by the time she was struggling to get her feet into her shoes.
In less than a minute she was outside, accompanying Esswis across the frosty ground to his car. He swung into the driver’s seat; she bounced into the passenger side and slammed the door. The car was cold as a stone, its windscreen an opalescent swirl of mud and frost. Warm and sweaty from the metabolism of sleep, Isserley wound her window down and leaned one arm out onto the car’s freezing flank, ready to scan the dark.
‘How did they get out?’ she demanded as Esswis revved the engine.
‘Our distinguished visitor let them out,’ growled Esswis as the car pulled away with a crunch of ice and gravel.
For Isserley, it feld odd, even frightening, to be in the passenger seat. She was fumbling in the clefts of the upholstery, but if Esswis’s vehicle had seat-belts, they must be well hidden. She didn’t want to reach too far down; there was dirt and grease everywhere.
Esswis made no attempt to swerve when they reached the morass of pot-holes near the old stable. Isserley’s spine was jolted repeatedly, as if furious assailants were kicking her through the seat; she looked aside at Esswis, wondering how he could stand such punishment. Obviously, he hadn’t taught himself to drive the way she had, puttering round and round the farm at ten miles an hour. His teeth were bared as he leaned over the steering wheel, and despite the treacherous surface, the dark, and the semi-opaque windscreen, his speedometer needle reeled between thirty and forty. Twigs and leaves slapped Isserley’s left elbow, and she pulled it in.
‘But why didn’t anyone stop him?’ she called over the engine’s noise. All she could imagine was Amlis Vess ceremonially granting vodsels their freedom while the workers stood by, nervously applauding.
‘Vess got a guided tour of the factory,’ growled Esswis. ‘Seemed impressed. Then he said he was tired, he was going to have a sleep. Next thing anyone knew, the steading door was open and four vodsels were gone.’
The car slewed through the main entrance to the farm and sharp left onto the public road without even slowing down. Indicators and brakes were an alien concept to Esswis, it seemed, and gears were fortunately automatic.
‘Left side of the road, Esswis,’ Isserley reminded him as they hurtled into the darkness.
‘Just look out for the vodsels,’ he said.
Swallowing hard on retaliation, Isserley peered into the fields and scrub, straining for a glimpse of hairless pink animals.
‘What grade am I looking for?’ she asked.
‘Monthlings,’ Esswis replied. ‘Almost ready. Would have gone on this shipload for sure.’
‘Oh no,’ said Isserley. The thought of a shaved, castrated, fattened, intestinally modified, chemically purified vodsel turning up at a police station or a hospital was a nightmare made flesh.