by Tim Lebbon
Ellie walked to the window and opened the curtains. The snowstorm had started in earnest, and although her window faced the Atlantic, all we could see was a sea of white. She rested her forehead on the cold glass, her breath misting, fading, misting again. “I’ve seen something too,” she said.
Ellie. Seeing things in the snow. Ellie was the nearest we had to a leader, though none of us had ever wanted one. She was strong, if distant. Intelligent, if a little straight with it. She’d never been much of a laugh, even before things had turned to shit, and her dogged conservatism in someone so young annoyed me no end.
Ellie, seeing things in the snow.
I could not bring myself to believe it. I did not want to. If I did accept it then there really were things out there, because Ellie did not lie, and she was not prone to fanciful journeys of the imagination.
“What something?” I asked at last, fearing it a question I would never wish to be answered. But I could not simply ignore it. I could not sit here and listen to Ellie opening up, then stand and walk away. Not with Boris frozen out there, not with Brand still cooling into the landscape.
She rocked her head against the glass. “Don’t know. Something white. So how did I see it?” She turned from the window, stared at me, crossed her arms. “From this window,” she said. “Two days ago. Just before Charley found Boris. Something flitting across the snow like a bird, except it left faint tracks. As big as a fox, perhaps, but it had more legs. Certainly not a deer.”
“Or one of Boris’s angels?”
She shook her head and smiled, but there was no humor there. There rarely was. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to know. We’ll have to be careful. Take the guns when we try to bury Brand. A couple of us keep a lookout while the others dig. Though I doubt we’ll even get through the snow.”
“You and guns,” I said perplexed. I didn’t know how to word what I was trying to ask.
Ellie smiled wryly. “Me and guns. I hate guns.”
I stared at her, saying nothing, using silence to pose the next question.
“I have a history,” she said. And that was all.
Later, downstairs in the kitchen, Charley told us what she’d managed to read in the paper from the frozen car. In the week since we’d picked up the last TV signal and the paper was printed, things had gone from bad to worse. The illness that had killed my Jayne was claiming millions across the globe. The USA blamed Iraq. Russia blamed China. Blame continued to waste lives. There was civil unrest and shootings in the streets, mass burials at sea, martial law, air strikes, food shortages… the words melded into one another as Rosalie recited the reports.
Hayden was trying to cook mince pies without the mince. He was using stewed apples instead, and the kitchen stank sickeningly sweet. None of us felt particularly festive.
Outside, in the heavy snow that even now was attempting to drift in and cover Brand, we were all twitchy. Whoever or—now more likely—whatever had done this could still be around. Guns were held at the ready.
We wrapped him in an old sheet and enclosed this in torn black plastic bags until there was no white or red showing. Ellie and I dragged him around the corner of the house to where there were some old flower beds. We started to dig where we remembered them to be, but when we got through the snow the ground was too hard. In the end we left him on the surface of the frozen earth and covered the hole back in with snow, mumbling about burying him when the thaw came. The whole process had an unsettling sense of permanence.
As if the snow would never melt.
Later, staring from the dining room window as Hayden brought in a platter of old vegetables as our Christmas feast, I saw something big and white skimming across the surface of the snow. It moved too quickly for me to make it out properly, but I was certain I saw wings.
I turned away from the window, glanced at Ellie and said nothing.
two
the color of fear
DURING THE FINAL FEW days of Jayne’s life I had felt completely hemmed in. Not only physically trapped within our home—and more often the bedroom where she lay—but also mentally hindered. It was a feeling I hated, felt guilty about and tried desperately to relieve, but it was always there.
I stayed, holding her hand for hour after terrible hour, our palms fused by sweat, her face pasty and contorted by agonies I could barely imagine. Sometimes she would be conscious and alert, sitting up in bed and listening as I read to her, smiling at the humorous parts, trying to ignore the sad ones. She would ask me questions about how things were in the outside world, and I would lie and tell her they were getting better. There was no need to add to her misery. Other times she would be a shadow of her old self, a gray stain on the bed with liquid limbs and weak bowels, a screaming thing with bloody growths sprouting across her skin and pumping their venom inward with uncontrollable, unstoppable tenacity. At these times I would talk truthfully and tell her the reality of things, that the world was going to shit and she would be much better off when she left it.
Even then I did not tell her the complete truth: that I wished I were going with her. Just in case she could still hear.
Wherever I went during those final few days I was under assault, besieged by images of Jayne, thoughts of her impending death, vague ideas of what would happen after she had gone. I tried to fill the landscape of time laid out before me, but Jayne never figured and so the landscape was bare. She was my whole world; without her I could picture nothing to live for. My mind was never free, although sometimes, when a doctor found time to visit our house and tut and sigh over Jayne’s wasting body, I would go for a walk. Mostly she barely knew the doctor was there, for which I was grateful. There was nothing he could do. I would not be able to bear even the faintest glimmer of hope in her eyes.
I strolled through the park opposite our house, staying to the paths so that I did not risk stepping on discarded needles or stumbling across suicides decaying slowly back to nature. The trees were as beautiful as ever, huge emeralds against the grimly polluted sky. Somehow they bled the taint of humanity from their systems. They adapted, changed, and our arrival had really done little to halt their progress. A few years of poisons and disease, perhaps. A shaping of the landscape upon which we projected an idea of control.
But when we were all dead and gone, our industrial disease on the planet would be little more than a few twisted, corrupted rings in the lifetime of the oldest trees. I wished we could adapt so well.
When Jayne died there was no sense of release. My grief was as great as if she’d been killed at the height of health, her slow decline doing nothing to prepare me for the dread that enveloped me at the moment of her last strangled sigh. Still I was under siege, this time by death. The certainty of its black fingers rested on my shoulders day and night, long past the hour of Jayne’s hurried burial in a local football ground alongside a thousand others. I would turn around sometimes and try to see past it, make out some ray of hope in a stranger’s gaze. But there was always the blackness bearing down on me, clouding my vision and the gaze of others, promising doom soon.
It was ironic that it was not death that truly scared me, but living. Without Jayne the world was nothing but an empty, dying place.
Then I had come here, an old manor on the rugged South West coast. I’d thought that solitude—a distance between me and the terrible place the world was slowly becoming—would be a balm to my suffering. In reality it was little more than a placebo and realizing that negated it. I felt more trapped than ever.
The morning after Brand’s death and botched burial—Boxing Day—I sat at my bedroom window and watched nature laying siege. The snow hugged the landscape like a funeral shroud in negative. The coast was hidden by the cliffs, but I could see the sea farther out. There was something that I thought at first to be an iceberg, and it took me a few minutes to figure out what it really was; the upturned hull of a big boat. A ferry, perhaps, or one of the huge cruise liners being used to ship people south, away
from blighted Britain to the false promise of Australia. I was glad I could not see any more detail. I wondered what we would find washed up in the rock pools that morning, were Charley and I to venture down to the sea.
If I stared hard at the snowbanks, the fields of virgin white, the humped shadows that were our ruined and hidden cars, I could see no sign of movement. An occasional shadow passed across the snow, though it could have been from a bird flying in front of the sun. But if I relaxed my gaze, tried not to concentrate too hard, lowered my eyelids, then I could see them. Sometimes they skimmed low and fast over the snow, twisting like sea serpents or Chinese dragons and throwing up a fine mist of flakes behind them. At other times they lay still and watchful, fading into the background if I looked directly at them until one shadow looked much like the next, but could be so different.
I wanted to talk about them. I wanted to ask Ellie just what the hell they were, because I knew that she had seen them too. I wanted to know what was happening and why it was happening to us. But I had some mad idea that to mention them would make them real, like ghosts in the cupboard and slithering wet things beneath the bed. Best ignore them and they would go away.
I counted a dozen white shapes that morning.
“Anyone dead today?” Rosalie asked.
The statement shocked me, made me wonder just what sort of relationship she and Brand had had, but we all ignored her. No need to aggravate an argument.
Charley sat close to Rosalie, as if a sharing of grief would halve it. Hayden was cooking up bacon and bagels long past their sell-by date. Ellie had not yet come downstairs. She’d been stalking the manor all night, and now that we were up she was washing and changing.
“What do we do today?” Charley asked. “Are we going to try to get away again? Get to the village for help?”
I sighed and went to say something, but the thought of those things out in the snow kept me quiet. Nobody else spoke, and the silence was the only answer required.
We ate our stale breakfast, drank tea clotted with powdered milk, listened to the silence outside. It had snowed again in the night and our tracks from the day before had been obliterated. Standing at the sink to wash up I stared through the window, and it was like looking upon the same day as yesterday, the day before and the day before that; no signs of our presence existed. All footprints had vanished, all echoes of voices swallowed by the snow, shadows covered with another six inches and frozen like corpses in a glacier. I wondered what patterns and traces the snow would hold this evening, when darkness closed in to wipe us away once more.
“We have to tell someone,” Charley said. “Something’s happening. We should tell someone. We have to do something. We can’t just…” She trailed off, staring into a cooling cup of tea, perhaps remembering a time before all this had begun, or imagining she could remember. “This is crazy.”
“It’s God,” Rosalie said.
“Huh?” Hayden, already peeling wrinkled old vegetables, was ready for lunch, constantly busy, always doing something to keep his mind off everything else. I wondered how much really went on behind his fringed brow, how much theorizing he did while he was boiling, how much nostalgia he wallowed in as familiar cooking smells settled into his clothes.
“It’s God, fucking us over one more time. Crazy, as Charley says. God and crazy are synonymous.”
“Rosie,” I said, knowing she hated the shortened name, “if it’s not constructive, don’t bother. None of this will bring—”
“Anything is more constructive than sod-all, which is what you lot have got to say this morning. We wake up one morning without one of us dead, and you’re all tongue-tied. Bored? Is that it?”
“Rosalie, why—”
“Shut it, Charley. You more than anyone should be thinking about all this. Wondering why the hell we came here a few weeks ago to escape all the shit, and now we’ve landed right in the middle of it. Right up to our armpits. Drowning in it. Maybe one of us is a Jonah and it’s followed—”
“And you think it’s God?” I said. I knew that asking the question would give her open opportunity to rant, but in a way I felt she was right—we did need to talk. Sitting here stewing in our own thoughts could not help anyone.
“Oh yes, it’s His Holiness,” she nodded, “sitting on his pedestal of lost souls, playing around one day and deciding, hmm, maybe I’ll have some fun today, been a year since a decent earthquake, a few months since the last big volcano eruption. Soooo, what can I do?”
Ellie appeared then, sat at the table and poured a cup of cold tea that looked like sewer water. Her appearance did nothing to interrupt Rosalie’s flow.
“I know, he says, I’ll nudge things to one side, turn them slightly askew, give the world a gasp before I’ve cleaned my teeth. Just a little, not so that anyone will notice for a while. Get them paranoid. Get them looking over their shoulders at each other. See how the wrinkly pink bastards deal with that one!”
“Why would He do that?” Hayden said.
Rosalie stood and put on a deep voice. “Forget me, will they? I’ll show them. Turn over and open your legs, humanity, for I shall root you up the arse.”
“Just shut up!” Charley screeched. The kitchen went ringingly quiet, even as Rosalie slowly sat down. “You’re full of this sort of shit, Rosie. Always telling us how we’re being controlled, manipulated. Who by? Ever seen anyone? There’s a hidden agenda behind everything for you, isn’t there? If there’s no toilet paper after you’ve had a crap you’d blame it on the global dirty-arse conspiracy!”
Hysteria hung silently in the room. The urge to cry grabbed me, but also a yearning to laugh out loud. The air was heavy with held breaths and barely restrained comments, thick with the potential for violence.
“So,” Ellie said at last, her voice little more than a whisper, “let’s hear some truths.”
“What?” Rosalie obviously expected an extension of her foolish monologue. Ellie, however, cut her down.
“Well, for starters has anyone else seen things in the snow?” Heads shook. My own shook as well. I wondered who else was lying with me. “Anyone seen anything strange out there at all?” she continued. “Maybe not the things Brand and Boris saw, but something else?” Again, shaken heads. An uncomfortable shuffling from Hayden as he stirred something on the gas cooker.
“I saw God looking down on us,” Rosalie said quietly, “with blood in his eyes.” She did not continue or elaborate, did not go off on one of her rants. I think that’s why her strange comment stayed with me.
“Right,” said Ellie, “then may I make a suggestion? Firstly, there’s no point trying to get to the village. The snow’s even deeper than it was yesterday, it’s colder and freezing to death for the sake of it will achieve nothing. If we did manage to find help, Boris and Brand are long past it.” She paused, waiting for assent.
“Fair enough,” Charley said quietly. “Yeah, you’re right.”
“Secondly, we need to make sure the manor is secure. We need to protect ourselves from whatever got at Brand and Boris. There are a dozen rooms on the ground floor, we only use two or three of them. Check the others. Make sure windows are locked and storm shutters are bolted. Make sure French doors aren’t loose or liable to break open at the slightest… breeze, or whatever.”
“What do you think the things out there are?” Hayden asked. “Lock pickers?”
Ellie glanced at his back, looked at me, shrugged. “No,” she said, “I don’t think so. But there’s no use being complacent. We can’t try to make it out, so we should do the most we can here. The snow can’t last forever, and when it finally melts we’ll go to the village then. Agreed?”
Heads nodded.
“If the village is still there,” Rosalie cut in. “If everyone isn’t dead. If the disease hasn’t wiped out most of the country. If a war doesn’t start somewhere in the meantime.”
“Yes,” Ellie sighed impatiently, “if all those things don’t happen.” She nodded at me. “We’ll do the two roo
ms at the back. The rest of you check the others. There are some tools in the big cupboard under the stairs, some nails and hammers if you need them, a crowbar too. And if you think you need timber to nail across windows… if it’ll make you feel any better… tear up some floorboards in the dining room. They’re hardwood, so they’re strong.”
“Oh, let the battle commence!” Rosalie cried. She stood quickly, her chair falling onto its back, and stalked from the room with a swish of her long skirts. Charley followed.
Ellie and I went to the rear of the manor. In the first of the large rooms the snow had drifted up against the windows to cut out any view or light from outside. For an instant it seemed as if nothing existed beyond the glass and I wondered if that was the case, then why were we trying to protect ourselves?
Against nothing.
“What do you think is out there?” I asked.
“Have you seen anything?”
I paused. There was something, but nothing I could easily identify or put a name to. What I had seen had been way beyond my ken, white shadows apparent against whiteness. “No,” I said, “nothing.”
Ellie turned from the window and looked at me in the half light, and it was obvious that she knew I was lying. “Well, if you do see something, don’t tell.”
“Why?”
“Boris and Brand told,” she said. She did not say any more. They’d seen angels and stags in the snow and they’d talked about it, and now they were dead.
She pushed at one of the window frames. Although the damp timber fragmented at her touch, the snow drift behind it was as effective as a vault door. We moved on to the next window. The room was noisy with unspoken thoughts, and it was only a matter of time before they made themselves heard.
“You think someone in here has something to do with Brand and Boris,” I said.