And yet… was it her usual nightmare? Glimpsing its after-image as it faded from her mind, she realized there was something different about it. The way it had made her feel was the same as always, but for the first time, the creature at the centre of the drama seemed to be someone other than herself. Not at the beginning, no: at the beginning it was unmistakably Isserley, being led down into the bowels of the earth. But by the end she seemed to have changed shape, size and species. And in those last anxious seconds before waking, the dream hadn’t been about a human being anymore, but a dog, trapped inside a vehicle in the middle of nowhere. Her master wasn’t coming back, and she was going to die.
As soon as she was fully awake, Isserley disentangled herself from the bedclothes, hugged her cold legs in her warm arms, and began to argue herself back from the brink of panic.
Of course the dog she’d dreamed of was yesterday’s vodsel’s dog, but there was no need to be having nightmares about it. The animal would be just fine. Its master would have left the windows of his van open a fraction, surely. And even if he hadn’t, vehicles weren’t exactly vacuum-sealed, and the weather was cool. As for imagining the dog was going to starve to death, well, that was stupid. When the dog got hungry, it would start barking, and eventually people would get irritated by the noise and search out where it was coming from. In any case, what was so important about the fate of a dog? Dogs died every day. She’d seen the flattened carcasses of lots of them on the A9, had driven over the remains herself, rather than swerve dangerously. They made a barely perceptible bump under the tyres. Their consciousness was rudimentary.
Isserley rubbed her eyes and looked up. She’d put fresh batteries in the clock yesterday, as part of reclaiming a grip on her life: it now glowed 4:09. Maybe it would have been better not to know how many hours she still had to wait for sunrise. Maybe it would have been better not to wake up at all.
She crawled out of bed, crippled as usual. What heaven it would be to get revenge on the surgeons who’d done this to her! She’d never even seen their faces: she’d been drugged into oblivion by the time they’d stuck their knives in. And now they were probably boasting to Vess Incorporated how much they’d learned from their mistakes, how there was no comparison between the miracles they could perform now and the crude experiments that had been Esswis and Isserley. In a fair world, she would be given the opportunity, before she died, to tie those surgeons to a slab and do a bit of experimenting of her own. They could watch, tongueless, as she carved their genitals away. To keep their noise down, she’d give them big chunks of their own severed tails to chew on. Their anuses would clench as she penetrated their spines with iron skewers. Their eyes would blink blood as she sculpted brave new faces for them.
Isserley switched on the television and began her exercises.
‘I can’t endure a lifetime without love,’ a voice whispered into her dark bedroom. The image materialized, a black-and-white little female clinging onto a broad-shouldered male looking away from her, towards the sky.
‘Don’t be silly,’ he chided her gently. ‘You won’t have to.’
Isserley reached out her foot to change the channel just as a sleek aeroplane flew off into dramatic gloom, propellers twirling.
Warm colours suffused the screen, abstract and mutable. The camera image pulled back, sharpening into an iridescent circle of wet glass held between a giant thumb and forefinger, like a single spectacle lens smeared with soup.
‘Cultures such as this one,’ said an authoritative voice, ‘may literally be growing a cure for cancer.’
Isserley stood staring into the fire she had made, almost mesmerized. She’d built a much larger pyre of twigs and branches than usual, and the flames blazed gold and apricot in the dawn. With effort she roused herself and walked past her car, which was already clear of the shed and facing out of the farm, engine running. Isserley limped across to the steading, her shoes scuffing awkwardly along the stony ground. There was something wrong at the base of her spine which exercise hadn’t yet managed to fix.
‘Isserley,’ she spoke into the intercom.
No-one answered, but the great metal door rolled open. Just inside, as expected, sat the black plastic bag filled with the personal effects of the last vodsel. She grabbed it and left the steading immediately, just in case whoever was on duty was coming up from the earth’s depths for a chat.
Back at the fireside, she pulled the vodsel’s shoes, pullover and dog-haired suit out of the bag, and examined the rest. There wasn’t much there: he’d evidently worn nothing but a stained T-shirt under his pullover, and no underpants. His jacket was empty, and in the pockets of his trousers, apart from car keys and a wallet, there was nothing.
Laying the pullover on the bonnet of her car to keep it off the dewy grass, she sprinkled the jacket, T-shirt, trousers and shoes with a christening of petrol, then tossed them onto the fire. There was a surprising amount of dog-hair on her hands, which she didn’t want to wipe on her own clothing. With any luck, it would wear off naturally.
Grunting in discomfort, she knelt to look through the wallet. It was a fat one compared to other wallets she’d seen, but there was little variety inside. Instead of the usual assortment of laminated plastic cards, official concessions and licences, addresses, tickets and sales dockets, there was only money and one sheet of card folded small like a miniature map. The fatness was caused by the sheer bulk of the cash. As well as a few coins, there was a wad of banknotes, mostly twenties with a few tens and fives, adding up to £375. Isserley had never seen so much money before. It was enough to buy five hundred and thirty-five litres of petrol, or a hundred and ninety-two bottles of the blue shampoo, or more than a thousand razor-blades… or… fifty-seven bottles of the fermented potato juice the vodsel had mentioned. She transferred the banknotes to her trousers, distributing them between both pockets to minimize the bulge.
The sheet of card was a large colour photograph, folded many times. When opened and smoothed out, it showed the vodsel, much younger, embracing a female in a gauzy white dress. Both of them had glossy black hair, rosy cheeks and big crescent smiles. Isserley’s vodsel was clean-shaven, unwrinkled, grime-free. There was no old food on his teeth, and his lips were wet and pink. No doubt she was extrapolating, but she fancied she could tell just from his expression that his happiness was genuine. She wondered what his name had been. There was an ornate signature, Pennington Studio, inscribed on the bottom right-hand margin, which struck Isserley as a foreign name, though the vodsel hadn’t sounded foreign to her.
Even as Pennington’s clothes burned, Isserley was toying with the idea of rescuing him. Amlis had had no trouble setting a few vodsels free; she could surely do it with just as little bother. The men down there were imbeciles, and most of them would still be asleep.
But of course it was too late. Pennington would have had his tongue and his balls removed last night. He hadn’t much wanted to live anyway, and he was, hardly likely to have changed his mind by now. He was better left alone.
Isserley stirred the bonfire with a stick, wondering why she was bothering to be so thorough. Force of habit. She tossed the stick onto the flames, and walked to her car.
As Isserley drove along the A9, the sun was rising higher above the horizon, recovering from whatever it had suffered behind the snow-capped mountains during the night. Unclouded and at large, it shone with abrupt intensity, casting a generous golden light over all of Ross-shire. Just by being in the right place at the right time, Isserley was part of that landscape too; her hands turned gold on the steering wheel.