The Midwives

Duncan Ralston

Contents (32)

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 978-1988819204

Cover art by François Vaillancourt

Needleteeth font courtesy of

SinisterFonts.com

PR Celtic font courtesy of PR Fonts

Also by Duncan Ralston

Gristle & Bone (collection)

Salvage (novel)

Wildfire (novella)

Woom (novella)

Where the Monsters Live (novella)

The Method (novel)

Video Nasties (collection)

Ebenezer (novella)

Ghostland (novel)

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A killer on the loose.

A writer on the run.

A town plagued by an ancient evil.

On tour with his latest book, true crime writer Martin Savage discovers one of his most-dangerous subjects has escaped. The so-called "Witch Hunter," a delusional murderer of women and their unborn children, holds a deadly grudge. He'll stop at nothing to get his revenge, and destroy everything Martin cares about.

With nowhere to run, Martin and forensic psychologist Sheila Tanner flee to the town he left when he was a boy, after his mother was locked away in a psychiatric facility. A town hidden deep in his past, where no one would think to look for them.

But things are not what they seem in Barrows Bay. The idyllic island holds terrible secrets. An ancient evil lived here long before the first Irish settlers crashed upon its shores in a coffin ship. An evil wearing the innocent faces of elderly midwives who've delivered every child in the Bay for over two hundred and fifty years.

Martin and Sheila think they're safe in his childhood home. But his mother has plans for them. Plans that require sacrifice.

And sacrifice requires blood.

"You can't go home again."

—Thomas Wolfe

"Better the devil you know than the devil you don't."

— Richard Taverner

"There is no truth beyond magic."

— John Fowles, The Magus

Prologue

Mother

Barrows Bay, 1978

THE GIRL LEFT a trail of blood behind her, glistening as she passed under streetlamps lighting her apparently aimless trek. Blood flattened the blonde hairs on her slender legs and pooled in between her toes. Her bare right foot tattooed red on the ragged pavement over and over, like a stamped signature falling back into dark oblivion.

Sunken within bruised pits of flesh, her green eyes stared frantically ahead through tangles of wet and straggly hair. Fresh blood dribbled from a rope of purplish flesh dangling below her pink nightgown, soaked through the crotch with a dark, wet stain.

In the distance, the ocean sound beat against the shore. Here, on this lonely stretch of island road closed in by skeletal black pines, a baby cried joylessly.