Still not convinced you? Here's an extract to whet your appetite...
***
IV
The barn was an old building, rickety and wind-blown and, at this time of year, ankle deep in cow shit. It had a thin scattering of straw on the ground as if in an attempt to disguise the dirt. It didn’t work. The beam from the nervous farmer’s torch bounced around the room as if it would rather be in a nightclub. The acrobatic lighting added to Alan’s feeling of discomfort and displacement. It should have been a relief to be out of the driving rain but at this moment Alan would have gladly stood out in it naked until sunrise if it meant he could avoid seeing what had turned Mike White, who had calmly held prolapsed uteruses up on his knees and sawn rotten heads off stinking lambs to get them out of the ewe, as pale as his cows’ milk.
‘What… er… what have you got for me, Mr White?’ Alan asked nervously.
Mike turned to Alan, his weathered face deeply troubled. He had been a farmer all his life. He had seen just about everything nature could throw at a person, most of it before he was twelve. Alan wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to know what it was that had shaken him, but thought he should at least have some warning about what he was approaching.
‘It’s the damnedest thing, Alan. Never seen anything like it in all me born days.’
‘What is it, exactly?’
‘I was ’opin you could tell me. Maiden heifer, just calved. See for yerself.’
Mike turned back again, and trudged forwards, his torchlight illuminating a cow-shaped form in the corner of the barn. Alan followed, squinting, trying to make it out. It was a Friesian-Holstein heifer, slightly on the thin side, and as Mike had pointed out, obviously just calved. She was standing and licking forlornly at a small pale object lying in the straw. Alan’s mouth formed the ‘w—’ of ‘what’ but whatever else he was planning to say was lost to posterity because at that moment Mike shone his torch directly onto the object. The word retreated from Alan’s mouth and hid, quivering, down by his diaphragm.
The thing the cow was licking was a calf - of sorts. Alan had seen foetal monsters before, bizarre furry blobs of flesh with incongruous feet, tails or even heads protruding. Accidents of nature, never meant to live. This was different - it appeared normal. Four legs, head, tail, everything in place. At least, Alan thought so. It was hard to make out, because the torchlight shone right through the calf, illuminating the bloodstained straw beneath, which reflected the light right through the calf again as if it wasn’t there.
The calf was transparent.
Alan’s brain didn’t quite grasp the concept as it zapped through his neurones the first time, so he tried thinking it again, more clearly this time.
The calf was transparent.
He could see its ribs, its beating heart, its lungs, which were twitching and contracting as the neonate fought for breath. Alan watched in astonishment as the calf gave a feeble cough and a blob of pleural fluid travelled out of the lungs, up the trachea, and into the mouth, where the calf swallowed it.
The mother briefly glanced at the two intruders and then turned back to licking her miraculous calf.
V
Alan’s heart skipped a beat. A moment later, it skipped another one. It was preparing to skip a third when it received an urgent communiqué from his brain, suggesting that if it did so, there would be trouble. Reluctantly, it started up again, and then made up for lost time by hammering away at double speed.
Alan took a cautious step towards the calf. Mike stayed where he was.
‘What d’you reckon, then?’ the farmer asked.
Alan couldn’t tear his eyes away from the creature in front of him. He wondered if he was still asleep. Half of his brain was gibbering with sheer incomprehension. The other half was running through his notes, searching for the section headed ‘photo-transparent idiopathies’. Either he had forgotten all about them, or no such section existed.
The heifer looked up at him again. Alan had never been very good at reading bovine expressions.
‘Did she calve all right?’ he asked automatically, buying time so that his brain could stop gibbering and start working.
‘Reckon so,’ said Mike. ‘We didn’t help her out or nothin’, anyway.’
Alan was at a loss for what to do. Surely he should be gathering evidence, taking photos, something. This was obviously a whole new disease. He switched himself onto autopilot, clinical exam mode while he wondered what the bloody hell he was going to do.
The heifer was fine; normal heart rate, normal temperature, mucous membranes salmon-pink. A little bruised, but nothing out of the ordinary. She had cleansed fine - the shrivelled mess of perfectly ordinary placenta lay on the floor next to the calf.
The transparent calf.
‘Er… aren’t you going to look at the...?’ Mike asked from his safe distance, his voice dying off as he indicated the newborn with his torch beam.
‘Oh… erm… sure,’ mumbled Alan. He moved back around to the front of the cow and looked down.
It didn’t make any sense. How could it be alive? Weren’t there… reactions and things that had to happen in the skin? Didn’t it need to absorb light or something? Alan wasn’t clear on the specifics. Biochemistry was not his favourite subject.
Slowly, he knelt down beside the creature. It turned its head to him, making a weak mewling sound. Alan could see its larynx vibrate as it did so. It was clearly dying. The calf’s heart had slowed its beat since he had first looked at it, and the wretched thing was almost too weak to hold its head up.
Alan was strangely reluctant to touch it; a quiet but insistent voice in the heart of his being suggested that it would be a really bad idea. The cow nuzzled her calf again. Slowly, desperately trying to shake the feeling that this was all a dream, Alan reached his hand out to it...
***
Convinced?
Get the rest here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Soul-Purpose-Nick-Marsh/dp/1904853315 (or here for you colonial types: http://www.amazon.com/Soul-Purpose-Conduit-Sequence-Book-ebook/dp/B00BVMGVA4/
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