It seemed to me that there was something to which the dog was trying to attract my attention. In the gloom, I couldn’t make out what it was. I went to the heavy curtains and pulled them back. Light flooded through the frost-covered windows. That’s when I noticed just how bitterly cold it was in the house. My breath made plumes of vapour in the air.
Then I saw the body.
3
It was an old man, slumped in an armchair in front of the open fire grate. The fire had dwindled away, leaving nothing in the grate but a few smouldering sticks surrounded by mounds of black ash. The man’s face was pallid, his eyes closed, the wrinkled skin drawn tight over his skull. I assumed he must have died after the snow came; with no effective source of warmth he had succumbed to hypothermia. My first thought was to phone the emergency services. Call an ambulance to deal with him. There was a cordless house phone sitting on a sideboard. I picked it up but there was no sound. How helpless we are without electricity! With power, we can video-chat to someone on the other side of the world. Without power, we can’t even make contact with someone half a mile away.
I was debating what to do – whether I should try to walk on to the village in the hope that they still had power there or that someone might have a fully-charged mobile phone – when I heard a low, rasping sound of breathing.
The man opened his eyes, turned to look at me, said, “What the bloody hell!” and jumped out of the chair faster than any corpse had a right to. I was forced to conclude that my initial diagnosis had been in error. The man wasn’t dead after all.
“What the hell you doing in my house?” he snapped.
He was holding a knife in his hand. A big, sharp knife. The sort of knife a butcher uses to cut the bone out of a leg of lamb. The knife was pointing in my direction. I smiled. I tried to look friendly, which, when someone is pointing a knife at you, is a hard thing to do.
I babbled a bit and mentioned the dog. The dog, for his part, did his best to corroborate my story by licking my hand and staring up at the knife-wielding man with big, brown soulful eyes. Between the two of us, we finally managed to convince the man that my intentions were benign.
“You’ll be wanting a cup of tea, I suppose?” he said at last.
“That’s very kind of you.”
“So it may be but you can’t have any because I haven’t got any. And even if I had, how the hell would I boil any water?”
“How long has the power been off?” I said.
“What business is that of yours?”
“None. I was just wondering…”
“I tell you one thing, I shall refuse to pay. The electric bill. Not a penny will they get out of me. I shall demand a rebate.”
“Good idea,” I said, “In the meantime, if there’s anything I can do…”
The man sat back in the chair with a sigh – “The thing is, I’m so damn’ tired all the time. Light-headed, you might say. I had a touch of flu.”
“So did I,” I said, “Must be going around.”
“It’s the sheep I blame,” he said.
“The sheep?”
“Dirty animals. Any disease that’s going around, the sheep will be sure to have it.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Are you doubting my word, boy?” His eyebrows quivered accusingly.
“No, no. It’s just, well, I don’t know much about sheep.”
“Not much to know. They are stupid, dirty, nasty animals. Full of parasites. And you can’t trust the buggers. A sheep will stab you in the back as soon as look at you.” He waved the knife menacingly.
“I had no idea.”
“How old are you?” he snapped suddenly. The knife was pointing straight at me.
“Twenty-seven, I answered. Twenty-eight in February.”
“Young,” he said and gave me a suspicious look from under his bushy, grey eyebrows.
I laughed. “That’s the first time anyone’s said that to me in a while.”
“Aye,” he said, “Young. But not so young.”
I wasn’t sure what he was getting at, so I let it pass without commenting.
“You heard the wireless, at all?”
I shook my head. “Like I said, the power went off.”
He smiled. “Modern technology! Absolutely bloody useless just when you need it. I always keep a good stock of batteries. Aye, batteries. You can’t beat batteries. I heard all kinds of stuff on the wireless. I don’t mean the BBC. They tell you nothing. The shortwave is what you want. I heard stuff from all over. America. Canada. Somaliland… You listen to the shortwave, boy?”
“Well, not often,” – I smiled inanely because I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. As far as I knew, I’d never listened to a shortwave radio in my life. But he was getting so worked up on the subject that I didn’t think it would be diplomatic to tell him that. You couldn’t be sure how he’d react. He might turn violent. It crossed my mind that he might, in fact, be a bit strange in the head. Simple. Or drunk. At any rate, with that knife in his hand, I saw no reason to risk provoking him.
“It’s young people you got to watch out for,” he said, “They are the worst.”
“Yes,” I said. By now, I was desperate to get away. Get back home. “Well, I brought your dog back, so if it’s all right with you…”
But he wasn’t listening. He had slumped back into the chair and was sitting there as still and cadaverous as when I had first entered. I thought – Oh, God, no! He’s had a heart attack! He really is dead now.
But then I heard the wheezing. He had dozed off. Which didn’t seem entirely natural. I mean, one moment he was ranting and raving about sheep and shortwave radio. And the next moment, he was fast asleep. The dog started whining and licking the old man’s hand. It occurred to me that if he was left there, that old man, all alone in that bitterly cold house with no warmth and no food, then he would certainly die. The dog knew that too.
Actually, it was even worse than that. At least, so it appeared. Not only didn’t he have any food, he didn’t have any water either. I turned the tap on and nothing came out. The water had frozen solid in the pipe. Or maybe the pipes had burst? That was one problem I hadn’t had in my house – yet. I guessed I was just lucky. Maybe the water pipes that led to my house were further underground so they hadn’t frozen. Or maybe my pipes were better lagged. I’d heard people talk about the importance of lagging your pipes even though I had no idea how to do it.
I patted the dog on the head. It was following me wherever I went. I told it that I’d be back soon and that this time I’d bring some food and water. How stupid is that! Explaining myself to a dog. But the dog made little huffing noises in reply which made me think that maybe it got the general idea of what I was saying.
I had a look around the house to see if there was anything I could use to heat the place – a paraffin heater maybe. Or some more wood for the fire. I couldn’t see a heater but I soon found plenty of wood, stacked in a shelter outside. The only trouble was that there was nothing to light the fire with: no newspapers or kindling. I couldn’t even find any matches. The embers in the grate were no longer glowing and even if they had been I wouldn’t have known how to work them up into a decent blaze. I decided the best course of action would be to trek back to my cottage. I had a few firelighters, so I could bring those, and also some food and water. Potty as the old man might be, I couldn’t just leave him there to freeze or starve.
The dog followed me all the way back home. Once there, I found an old rucksack and filled it with tins of soup and beans and fruit. I added a couple of firelighters and a box of matches. Then I had the problem of finding a container for the water. The only thing I could find was an empty screw-cap wine bottle. I didn’t think that would hold enough water to keep the man going for very long. Not if the freeze continued for more than a day or two. Then it occurred to me that taking water to him was a stupid idea. The one thing he wasn’t short of was water. It was everywhere. Piled up around his house in the form
of snow. Once I’d lit his fire, I could melt some snow in a saucepan. So I set back off in the direction of the man’s house. Snow was falling again. Little more than an hour had passed since I’d left the old man: it had taken me twenty-five minutes or so to walk from his house to mine, ten minutes to fill up my rucksack, and another twenty-five minutes to walk back.
The man was no longer there.
The blankets he’d had around him when last I’d seen him, asleep in the armchair, were heaped up on the floor. I walked through the house, shouting. I went upstairs. There were two rooms up there: one was full of junk, the other contained a rumpled double bed that smelled of rotting fish. There was no sign of the old man. I looked in the kitchen downstairs and in the small bathroom. Then I went to the back door to see if he might be outside, in one of the barns or outbuildings. He was nowhere to be seen. But I did see footprints. They led away from the house, up the side of a low hill. The snow was falling heavily by now, great goose-feather flakes, the kind of snow that quickly settles into deep drifts. If I didn’t hurry, I might not be able to make it back to my own house. The snow would be too deep. So I didn’t try to follow the old man. If he was well enough to go climbing up a hill in this weather, I reasoned, he was well enough to make his own way back without any help from me.
The dog seemed less convinced. It kept running up the hill, then back to me, letting out a whine or a bark every once in a while by way of emphasis. I got the strong impression that it wanted me to go looking for its master. Sorry, I told it, but that would be well above and beyond the call of duty, old chum.
I went back into the sitting room and put a few of the tins of food, plus the firelighters and some matches, onto the mantelpiece above the grate. When the man came back – if he came back – he would at least have something to eat and some way of getting warm. Then I left.
The damn’ dog followed me. I shooed it away. “Back!” I said, “Go on! Go back home!”
It was having none of it. Wherever I went the dog was determined to follow. I continued trudging through the snow in the direction of my house and the dog kept darting around me, leaping through the snow, from one side of me to the other. I hoped it would eventually tire of the game and trot off back where it had come from. But, no way. Once it had decided to stick with me, it was not to be deterred.
If it hadn’t been for the dog, I might not have found the boy in the woodshed.
4
The dog was scratching at the door of my woodshed and barking. I yelled “Shut up, you stupid mutt!” but that was either a command that he didn’t know or else one that he chose to ignore.
I went inside and took off my gloves, coat and scarf. The fire was still smouldering in the stove but the wood had mostly burned down to ashes. That meant I’d have to go out again to get some logs. I wrapped my scarf around my neck but didn’t bother with the coat and gloves because I didn’t intend to be outside for very long.
When I got outside, the blasted dog was still there, alternately scratching at the woodshed door and barking at me. I was going to the woodshed anyway so if there was anything in there both the dog and I would soon see what it was. I suspected it would be rats. Or maybe a cat. What I didn’t suspect was that it would be a seventeen year-old boy covered in blood. But that is exactly what it was. Slumped on the floor in front of the stack of wood was Geoff Parkham. Geoff is one of my guitar students. As a rule, he was a sensible lad – studious, polite, intelligent and level-headed. To say that I was shocked to see him sitting in my woodshed with blood soaking through his denim jacket would be an understatement.
You are probably thinking to yourself that I must have immediately realised this was a medical emergency, asked Geoff what had happened and then dealt with the problem swiftly and efficiently. Sadly, you would be wrong. The truth of the matter is that I couldn’t make any sense of what I was seeing and I couldn’t think of anything sensible to say. What I did say was, in fact, pretty damn’ stupid in the circumstances: “Hello, Geoff. What are you doing here?”
It was a few seconds before he answered. He was looking at me in a very strange way. As though he was frightened of me. As though he didn’t trust me.
“Hello, Mr Richards,” he said, “I was taking shelter. From the snow.”
Suddenly the ludicrousness of this conversation stuck me.
“Your arm,” I said, “You’re hurt. What the bloody hell…”
He smiled feebly but it was obvious he was in considerable pain.
“Got shot, didn’t I.”
“What d’you mean, you got shot? Who shot you?”
“A farmer, I guess.”
“Who?”
“Not sure. I mean… it was snowing and… you know. I couldn’t see…”
“But why did he…? Oh, never mind that. You’re losing blood. We need to get you to hospital.”
He laughed, but without humour. “How you going to do that then, Mr Richards?”
“Jonathan,” I said, “Call me…”
“Whatever I call you, I don’t see how you’re gonna get me to no hospital. Not the state things is in.”
He had a point, of course. The roads were blocked with snow and the snow was continuing to fall. There was no power and the battery of my mobile phone was flat. An idea occurred to me – “You haven’t got a mobile phone on you, have you, Geoff?”
“Yeah.”
“Charged?”
“Don’t know. I think so. But that’s not gonna do you any good. Who d’you think you’re gonna call?”
I thought I was going to call the hospital, of course. They had a helicopter that they used in emergencies. It’s not that unusual in rural areas. But first things first. I had to get the boy out of the woodshed and into the house. Keep him warm. Get him somewhere comfortable to lie down. I wished I’d paid more attention to the First Aid lessons we’d had at school. I couldn’t think what you were supposed to do when someone was injured. I had a feeling a tourniquet was involved. Or was that only if an artery had been severed? I knew you were supposed to give them sweet tea. Or was it brandy? Oh well, those were minor details. The most important thing was to get him out of the shed and into the house.
I reached down and tried to grab Geoff around the chest with the intention of pulling him to a standing position but he immediately cried out in pain. I’d accidentally brushed against his wounded arm, I think. So I knelt next to him and he put his good right arm around my shoulders. Somehow or other, we managed to arrange it so that I was holding on to him and he was holding onto me without causing him too much pain and in that way I slowly hoisted him to his feet. He was trembling. I didn’t know if that was from the cold or the shock. Maybe from both?
“Hello Bobby,” he said, “What are you doing here?”
Bobby, it seemed, was the dog’s name and he and Geoff knew one another. The dog rubbed its head against Geoff’s jeans while Geoff tried to pat the dog’s head – not entirely successfully – with the injured arm which was hanging limply at his side. At least he still has the ability to move his fingers, I told myself. That’s got to be good.
Let me honest: I’ve never been any good around blood. I cringe at the sight of it. The stink of blood on Geoff almost made me gag. I got him into the house and told him to lie on the settee. He refused. He said the blood would make a mess. I told him not to be so damn’ stupid, a bit of blood on that old settee was neither here nor there. But he was adamant.
“How did this happen, Geoff? I mean, how the hell did you manage to get yourself shot?”
There were only two explanations I could think of. Either someone had been out hunting – shooting deer or foxes or pheasants – and they’d been careless, fired into some trees maybe or shot off into the distance and they’d hit Geoff by mistake. Or else Geoff had been doing something he shouldn’t have been doing, somewhere where he shouldn’t have been doing it, and a farmer had fired off a shot to deter him. But neither scenario seemed all that likely. What fool would be out hunting in this weat
her? And as for Geoff doing something bad, something criminal – well, that was impossible to imagine. He was always so well behaved, so damned polite. I wasn’t even sure if he used swear words, let alone anything worse.
“It’s just the way things is now, ain’t they, Mr… I mean, Jonathan?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, nobody trusts anybody now, do they? Especially not someone like me.”
“Like you?”
“Someone my age, I mean.”
I can’t remember what I replied. Jonathan wasn’t make much sense to me. I assumed it was the shock. Making him say irrational things. The important thing was to get some medical help. I asked him for his phone and he handed it over but told me I was wasting my time.
The phone was still charged. I had no idea what the hospital’s phone number was so I dialled 999 to get through to an Emergency hotline. With no success. The phone just said “No service”.
“I told you,” Geoff said, “You’re wasting your time.”
My house was at the bottom of a shallow valley and the phone reception there was intermittent at the best of times. What with the bad weather and the power cuts, I assumed the mobile network must be in an even worse state than usual.
“I’ll try again in a few minutes,” I said, “I can’t leave you like that. I have to get you to a doctor.”
He shook his head, “There isn’t anyone.”
“Of course there is. I just have to…”
“You really don’t know, then?”
“Don’t know what?”
“What I said. There isn’t anyone. Not any more. There’s nobody. No doctors. No hospital. Nobody.”
He’s in shock, I told myself. He’s talking nonsense. Just like the old man. The man the dog had taken me to. There’s nothing to worry about, I told myself. And I felt my blood run cold. Because I wasn’t sure that the things I was telling myself were true.
The Exodus Plague | Book 1 | The Snow Page 2