Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens

Well, said the ghost of Mary Ann Nicholls to herself, that went well, didn’t it? Barely a couple of days into the job and she had managed to make a complete and utter mess of looking after Annie Chapman. In fact, barely half an hour had passed between her encounter with the Headless Whore and poor Annie being duped by that unpleasant Mr Collins into going into his Mission.

She’d tried everything. She’d kicked him, pinched her, shouted “HELLO?” as loud as she could right in her face, but neither of them took the blindest bit of notice. It clearly wasn’t anything like as simple as Headless had made out. Mind you, now she thought about it a bit more, taking advice from someone who didn’t have their head attached to their neck probably wasn’t one of the best ideas she’d ever had.

So she’d watched as Annie got taken in and subjected to the same peculiar probing that she’d been on the wrong end of. It wasn’t a pretty sight from any angle. Once again she’d tried her best to distract the nurse whilst she as carrying out the procedure, and once again she’d completely failed to make any impression on the land of the living.

Then she’d watched as Annie had been introduced to that cold, inhuman creature Mr Darcy, and heard that she’d been Chosen, just like she had been. Oddly, this time she seemed to understand what a capital letter was. Maybe that was something that happened when you were dead. Perhaps when you walked through a few educated people some of the learning rubbed off on you. She stopped and thought about this for a moment.

“A”, she said to herself.

“B”.

“C”.

Bloody hell. If only she’d known all her letters when she was still alive. She could have offered BDSM and charged extra for it.

She sighed. But all her new learning hadn’t helped poor Annie, had it? And there was the proof, lying on the bed asleep in front of her. Annie was having a disturbed night, thrashing from left to right, drooling and sweating feverishly. Occasionally she would call out something like “No!”, “Help!” or “Tentacles!” and flail her arms about wildly. I must have looked like this, thought Mary Ann, the night before it happened. And the same thing’s going to happen to her, isn’t it?

The worst thing was when Annie and Mr Darcy … she could hardly think of a word to describe what they did. It certainly wasn’t anything on her price list, that was for sure. And something very odd had happened to Mr Darcy whilst it was going on. He’d seemed to change. Things had grown out of him: tentacle-y things, un-human things, things from a different … species.

As soon as she’d realised what was going on, she’d tried to stop it of course. And at one point, she almost felt that Mr Darcy noticed her, because for one brief moment, his eyes caught hers. There was the faintest glint of a smile, and then he returned to his grotesque business with Annie.

And now Annie was lying there, wracked by nightmares, with a strange unnatural thing growing inside her. Mary Ann leant over her and tried to stroke her hair to calm her down. As she did so, Annie’s hand fell open and a piece of card tumbled out and landed on the floor. Mary Ann looked down at it and read the name Lieut. Geo. Wickham, Dept of Illegal Aliens, and an address where he could be contacted. Perhaps this was a man who might be able to help.