Free Bull Running For Girlsl by Allyson Bird Page A

within her soul. He had not done anything too foul to her, yet, but the evil started to grow, nurtured by lust and need.
    Alice knew that she had to stop. Maitland was beginning to scare her. Each rendezvous, outside the house, was arranged in the remotest of places; occasionally on the cold damp ground in the darkest part of the woods. They lay beside fires in blue-brown clearings that smelt of sacrifice, of animal blood and bone, where no one would hear her scream. In her ecstasy she hardly felt his hands upon her throat.
    That night her sons looked askance at her with troubled eyes and she knew she had gone too far. She had been afraid for some time about ending the affair with Maitland. Alice suspected that nothing was ever that simple but she had to end it.
     
    The next morning Alice did not go to work but chose to go to the library; not the one in the Old Town Hall but the one on Raglan Street. It had always been a place of comfort and peace for her. The library was quiet for midmorning—even on a market day—and each of the two rooms close to the main counter were empty. Alice chose to go into the room where three schoolgirls were sitting, legs crossed, on the large table under the window. Each girl was about ten years of age and wore a school uniform, none of which matched the colours of the local school. Alice remembered that Maitland had chosen her because, “…she had something about her that was childlike.”
    If the librarian caught the girls sitting on the tables they’d be in for it , she thought. The girls suddenly started laughing and making faces. They poked one another and pulled one another’s hair. The noise was overwhelming, and Alice watched in surprise as they began screaming even louder, jumping off the table and overturning the chairs.
    The librarian came in to put a few books away and the girls jumped out at her, waving their arms in front of her face, trying to attract her attention—but to no avail. She did not see them. They laughed at Alice and pinched one another, generating more screams that would wake the dead.
    Perhaps they are the dead , Alice thought.
    The librarian did not see them but Alice did. Was she going mad? She hadn’t slept for two nights, but, surely sleep deprivation couldn’t produce this.
    “You see them too, don’t you?” A man had entered the room and stood by her side. He was around fifty, with a beard and moustache, looking like some English professor with his notebook and pen. Next to him was a man wearing a baseball cap, who peered over the older man’s shoulder trying to see what he was writing.
    The man in the cap became irritated and distracted. “I said my name was David Dobson not Hodgson.”
    “Quite,” said the professor, crossing out Hodgson and writing Dobson. He then wrote young woman and fledgling eye , on his pad.
    Alice was speechless. There was a sickly-sweet smell of burnt brown sugar in the air. The girls were pulling out books and stacking them behind the librarian, giggling and waiting for her to turn around and fall over them. The professor continued to write in his notebook and then paused—
    “You will soon get used to it. I see them all the time.”
    “So do I,” said David Dobson.
    The librarian turned around, but by this time the books were back on the shelves and the girls were seated again on the table, swinging their legs and singing a song that Alice faintly recognised as a childhood nursery rhyme.
    Alice fled from the building and into what she thought was the comparative safety of the shopping mall. She had the sudden desire to buy something in green, but had no idea why or what? She made for the first shop selling women’s clothes and wandered along the rows, pausing to choose a green skirt and a pair of bottle-green army trousers. Then, she paid for both and left the shop to go…but where? She didn’t know.
    It was then that she saw them
     At every one of the half-dozen shops along each side of the mall she