New Title 1

by Jeffrey, Shaun

  Chase followed her, absently noticing George scratching his bottom and then sniffing his fingers as he walked back behind the bar, oblivious to the small commotion.

  Outside, the girl threw up. As though it was catching, Chase followed suit.

  “It’s happening,” the girl said when she had recovered.

  “What? What’s going on?” Chase sat down next to her.

  “I don’t know. But everyone’s ... changing.”

  “Changing! How?”

  “I don’t know.” She started crying.

  Chase put her arm around the girl’s shoulder, causing her to flinch, but she didn’t shrug her away which Chase thought was a step in the right direction.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mandy ... yes, that’s it, Mandy ...”

  Chase remembered the diary and then thought of George. “And when did all this start? No, don’t tell me, after the fog descended.”

  Mandy nodded. “I think so. I don’t really remember.”

  Chase frowned. She still wasn’t sure what was going on, but she knew she was in serious trouble.

  “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting?” Adam said, walking down the lane, smiling. He was wearing black jeans and a grey shirt that was unbuttoned, revealing a white T-shirt underneath.

  Chase looked up but didn’t smile back. Above her head, the pub sign squealed as though in pain.

  “What’s wrong?” Adam asked.

  “Apart from George trying to feed Mandy excrement, what could be wrong?” The sarcasm was as thick as molasses.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Do I look as though I’m joking?”

  “You must have made a mistake. Come on, let’s go inside and sort it out.”

  Chase stood up. “Come on Mandy. I’m not going back in and leaving you out here.”

  Submissively, Mandy followed them back into the pub. Chase walked straight to the table they had been seated at.

  The plate was gone.

  Chase looked around, confused.

  “So where is it?” Adam shook his head, unable to disguise his grin. “I’m sorry, Chase, don’t you realise how stupid it sounds?”

  Chase clenched her fists, took a deep breath and walked to the bar. “George, where’s that plate gone?” She pointed at the table.

  George eyed her warily from his perch, like a vulture watching a prospective meal, waiting for it to succumb.

  “You don’t serve shit in here, do you George?” Adam said, laughing.

  George gave a toothy, humourless grin.

  “Although it sometimes tastes a bit like shit.” He held his hands up in a placating manner. “Only joking. The food in here is excellent.”

  Looking across at Mandy, Chase saw her shake her head and frown, as though warning Chase not to pursue the matter further.

  “You see. I don’t know what’s got into you, Chase. Let me buy you girls a drink and we’ll sit down. A pint of bitter, orange juice, and, Mandy, what would you like?”

  But Mandy had gone. The door swung shut in her wake. Chase made to go after her but Adam grabbed her shoulder.

  “Let her go,” he said quietly. “Her parents died recently. I don’t think she’s got over the shock yet. I think she just needs some time to grieve.”

  “Died. How?”

  “Oh, it was a car crash.”

  Chase frowned. A car crash. Since moving to Paradise, the only vehicles she had seen were rusting carapaces left unused in some of the drives. “Here? How long ago?”

  “No, they lived away from here, somewhere. I don’t know where. It happened a few months ago. Terrible business.”

  “So Mandy lives here on her own?”

  Adam nodded, but before she could question him further, George suddenly reappeared with the drinks and Adam busied himself paying.

  For whatever reason, she felt Adam was lying and she shivered.

  CHAPTER 18

  Conversation in the pub was stilted. Occasionally someone in the shadows would cough. A chair would scrape and someone would approach the bar before scurrying back to their dark retreat, drink in hand.

  Chase didn’t really know what to say. She had so many questions, but she didn’t know whether Adam would tell her the truth. And if he did, how would she know?

  “I’m still waiting for you to come and see me at the surgery,” he said, sipping on his bitter.

  “Yes, I know.” Didn’t he realise she had more important things on her mind, like leaving.

  Adam tutted. “You really have got to organize yourself. We need to check how the baby’s doing. Besides, it would also give me an excuse to see you again.”

  Chase nodded. She still couldn’t believe she was pregnant. It felt as if she was swimming through a murky pool – nothing was clear anymore. Where once there had been understanding and routine, now confusion and uncertainty reigned. Her world had flipped on its side, twisted, inverted, somersaulted, rolled over and played dead without her knowing it. Now she was in a world inhabited by strange people. Sanity replaced with insanity. Nothing was what it seemed.

  “Have you seen the vicar again?” Chase asked. “I called in at the church, but he wasn’t there.”

  Adam swirled the contents of the glass. “It’s funny you should ask that.”

  Chase found nothing remotely funny about it.

  “You see, he’s gone missing.”

  “Gone missing!” Her heart lurched and her breath hitched in her throat.

  “Yes. Now before you start, I don’t believe he’s dead, like you said. But I never actually saw him when I said I did. You see, I just didn’t want to upset you, not with the baby and all.”

  “So where is he then?”

  “That’s it. I just don’t know.” He shook his head.

  “Then why don’t you believe he’s dead?”

  “Because he’s not.”

  “So now you’re calling me a liar.”

  “No, not at all.”

  “But I saw the body.”

  “Then where was it?” He sipped his drink. “You saw for yourself, there was no evidence of anything like you said. We don’t breed killers around here.” He laughed without humour.

  Was he telling the truth? Chase didn’t know anymore. She wanted to believe him, if only to take away the festering memory of a man with a slit throat. Where were the police when you needed them?

  Madness or death? The question returned and the answer was as elusive as ever.

  She didn’t want to be mad. And she really didn’t think she was. She knew what she had seen ... didn’t she? Or had she stepped onto the roller coaster of delusion, where everything swept past in a swirling blur? Was her memory playing tricks? Was she going mad? She remembered reading somewhere that a mad man doesn’t know when he’s going mad, so because she thought she was, did that mean she wasn’t?

  She began to feel dizzy.

  “Chase, are you okay? You’ve gone very pale.”

  “I think I’m just a bit hot. Can we go outside?”

  “Sure.”

  She picked up the book that Mandy had forgotten to take and walked toward the door with George watching her. He licked his lips with a reptilian flick of his tongue and she shivered as she recalled the snake eating the frog.

  ***

  Mandy was scared. Very scared. Petrified even. She didn’t understand what was going on – why people were changing. Why she was changing? In her case, it wasn’t a physical change like some people had experienced when their ailments miraculously healed or went away. Those people had flocked to the church, offering praise and thanks to the Lord for the miracle. The vicar had been overwhelmed by the increased attendance, and the collecting bowl was handed out at every opportunity so people could show their thanks for the marvel.

  But as the congregation swelled, the vicar’s sermons had become darker in tone. She hadn’t attended herself, but her parents had, before they ...

  She shut the thought out. Put it in a box. Locked it.
Sealed it. Then threw it into an unused corner of her mind where she could forget about it.

  The village grapevine whispered that the vicar was drinking too excess, which was why his sermons had become dark and strange, but Mandy wasn’t so sure that was the reason. Although she never entered the church, she had, out of curiosity, once stood in the graveyard, underneath the stained glass window and listened as he preached from Revelation. He also liked to preach from the Old Testament, about the tree of knowledge and how thou shalt not eat from it. Although she was sure some of the things he preached about were not even in the bible: people who live in glass houses will invariably get cut; if you choose to sit on the fence, shit happens (she wasn’t actually sure he did say shit, but it sounded like he said shit); damnation sits on the shoulder of greed; Humpty Dumpty was pushed (people had actually laughed at that one); bad things happen.

  She knew that one was true, though.

  Although she hadn’t thought it at the time, she had later come to realise there was a sort of code among the sermons, a message, a warning ... and when she felt the change, she knew the warning had come too late.

  It had started with her memory. First she forgot where she put things. Then she forgot what the things were that she couldn’t find. Then it was names. People she had known all nineteen years of her life became strangers. Then came the absence of time when she couldn’t recall where she had been or what she had done. Then there was her cat, Candle Wax. She had called him that because as a kitten he’d always been dripping on the carpet. But he was gone now.

  She still saw him sometimes, padding across the carpet and purring as he rubbed against her leg, his tail erect and pointing up at her like an accusation. Other times she never saw him for days or weeks at a time, or if she did, she couldn’t remember. Was he really dead? And if he was, had she killed him?

  The reason she wasn’t so sure whether he was dead or not, was because sometimes she saw her parents too, in the lane, in a field, in a room, and yet they were dead, weren’t they? Hadn’t she watched them die? Hadn’t she been the cause of their death?

  No, that was wrong. She hadn’t been the cause, not directly anyway.

  It was about a month after the fog descended, perhaps longer, perhaps shorter; it was before the change; the time was irrelevant ...

  It was raining heavily. Mandy watched the water running down the lane, an impromptu river through Paradise. Her mother was in the kitchen, baking bread with the army rations that had been delivered to the village shop. Money no longer changed hands for food supplies – the government subsidised them, calling it emergency aid. Mandy thought aid only went to third world countries and areas damaged by natural disaster: earthquake, flood and the like. She never thought of Paradise as being a charity case, dependant on handouts.

  Her father, unable to get to work in the city forty miles away was going stir-crazy. He sat around the house, trying to find something to do with his time. He tried gardening, but everything he touched wilted and died, so he abandoned that idea (much to his wife’s relief) and took to walking around the village. He was an intelligent man who worked in finance, and even though in the circumstances, he would have been able to work from home, all communication had ceased. First the phone lines went dead, and then there was never a signal available for the mobile phone. He had tried getting answers out of Nigel Moon, but he was as evasive and taciturn as an eel.

  And then there was the fog.

  Omnipresent.

  Cloying.

  Insidious.

  It blanketed the area around the village like a shield, a nebulous barrier. At first people had tried to get through, but the fog had proved too thick; its stranglehold too absolute. Those who did try found they were disallowed from further attempts by security guards posted in the fog – apparently for the villagers’ safety. Escape was futile. Mandy’s dad said how it reminded him of the old television series, The Prisoner with Patrick McGoohan.

  On that rainy day, he came home from one of his walks, drenched to the skin but wearing a determined expression. His usual affable demeanour was gone and he ran a hand through his dark hair, flicking water from his fingers.

  “Karen, Mandy, get your things,” he said, dripping water over the carpet.

  “What’s the matter, dear?” Karen asked. “Look at the state of you. You’ll catch your death. And look at the carpet.” She ran a hand across her forehead, leaving a slight dusting of flour on her face. Her hair was going grey, but she disguised it beneath auburn dye.

  “Look, forget the bloody carpet,” he said, walking into the kitchen and grabbing his wife by the arm. “We’re going.”

  “Going where?”

  “Anywhere away from here, that’s bloody where.” He hesitated. “We’ll find a hotel until this fog has gone.”

  “Richard, what’s got into you?”

  “I’m fed up with being fucked around, now come on, we’re getting out of the village. Mandy, get whatever you can carry and get in the car.”

  Mandy frowned. “But we were told we couldn’t leave.” It wasn’t like her father to lose his temper or swear.

  “Fuck what they said.”

  “Richard, do you have to use that language.” Karen frowned.

  “Sorry, but get a bloody move on. Come on, shake yourselves.”

  Mandy went upstairs and threw a few belongings in a holdall. When she came back downstairs, her dad was impatiently goading her mother into action.

  “I don’t see what the rush is.” Karen looked at Mandy as if for support.

  “No, I’m with dad.” Mandy grabbed her dad’s hand and squeezed.

  “Coming or staying,” Richard said.

  “Well, you’re not leaving me here on my own. Just let me get my make-up.”

  “Forget the make-up, let’s just go.”

  Karen sighed in acquiescence.

  Richard led them to the car. It hadn’t been driven for over a month, but it started first time. “German engineering,” Richard said, gunning the accelerator and speeding precariously out of the drive, almost running Ms Woods, the shopkeeper over.

  Looking through the rear window, Mandy was sure she saw old Ms Woods stick two fingers up at them, but as they sped around the corner, Mandy didn’t think anymore of it, putting it down to her imagination.

  Beyond the church, the fog lay before them, a sea of mist undulating like a phantom jellyfish. Licking his lips, Richard slowed the car down and edged into the fog.

  Mandy watched it envelop them like a shroud. Richard put the headlights on, but the light glared off the fog, cutting visibility even more, so he turned them back off. The car crawled along at a snails pace and Richard craned his head like a tortoise to navigate, turning the windscreen wipers on to clear the condensation. With visibility down to a few feet, the car momentarily left the road, juddering over ruts on the grass verge. Richard quickly turned the wheel, trying to bring the car back onto the tarmac. The wheels slipped, trying to get a purchase in the mud.

  “Shit,” Richard muttered.

  Mandy thought she saw movement in the fog, a ghostly apparition that hovered beside the window, peering in with bug-like eyes.

  And then it was gone.

  Cupping her hands against the window, she tried to penetrate the mist, but it was no good, she couldn’t see anything bar her own reflection.

  “Damn, it’s thick,” Richard muttered.

  “Perhaps we should turn round,” Karen said.

  “No,” Mandy hissed. Her dad smiled at her in the rear-view mirror.

  “That’s the spirit.” He nodded his head, lips pursed.

  Karen shook her head. “But it’s too ... we can’t see where we’re going.”

  “We’ll be all right. Trust me.”

  “Candle Wax,” Mandy screeched. “We’ve left Candle Wax behind.”

  “He’ll be all right,” Richard said.

  “No, you’ve got to go back. I can’t leave him.”

  “She’s right Richard. We
’ve got to go back.”

  “No, we’re going on.”

  “Dad, please, we’ve got to go back.”

  She saw her dad looking at her in the mirror. This time he wasn’t smiling.