Make it stop. For God’s sake, make it stop.
God isn’t listening. Nor has he ever, I can’t help but reflect. And why would he? To me, of all people?
As if in answer my left leg begins to spasm.
No, no, no.
I can’t help it this time. I kick out both my legs in the hope that it will oppose the contraction. It doesn’t. It makes it worse. I imagine that having a knitting needle forced deep along the inside of my muscles would be less painful than this. I hear a yowl and I know it’s me but I can’t make myself stop.
Bruised, bilious flashbulbs from far above. The tendrils around me begin to pulsate and contract. Peristaltic ripples pass though their surface and I am drawn upward – slowly but with irresistible efficiency.
I mustn’t move. I mustn’t make a sound. I cannot, must not, die yet.
I think of Tara. I think of Jake.
***
We passed between deserted outbuildings and the farm, already abandoned. Farther up the track there was a ruin built on the edge of a stream. With Jake so unruly, I gave Tara his pack and carried him for a while, hoping it would calm him down. He wasn’t frightened by our circumstances; he was unsettled by the way his mother and I had spoken. It was easy enough to understand – even Jake realised on some level that we all had to think the same way, believe the same things, if we were going to have any success at surviving together. Together was the watchword. Even in a perfect world, what seven year-old child wants to see his family fracture? Carrying him made Jake worse because he knew I knew what was on his mind. He wriggled and pushed away and in the end I let him go. We were only a few hundred yards from Compton House by then.
“Okay, run on then, Jake. But just don’t go in the woods, okay? Stay on the path and wait for us when you get to the house.”
He didn’t respond. Just sprinted off again. Except he knew as well as we did that there was nowhere he could go to get away. Not really. I hoped a few minutes alone would be enough for him.
***
Over the coming days and weeks, we all needed time out. Outside. Away from each other. Away from the house. During the daylight hours you could walk the fields all around and not see a single soul. I was glad of that at first. It proved that my idea of staying away from populations was sensible. To begin with, we each took opportunities to leave our new home. There was no one near us – neither Stricken nor healthy. I explored the pine woods before I allowed Jake to go in there but they were deserted too. We’d found a haven in the miniature hills of the Cotswolds and it was because of me. I probably shouldn’t have been so smug.
We had enough food with us to last a few days. The cooker was supplied by two large orange gas canisters, so even though we didn’t have electricity we could eat hot meals. A fifty gallon cask collected rain from the roof and we warmed the water for washing, boiled it for drinking. We could even flush the toilet with a bucket. Logistically, we were made. Set up indefinitely. The only requirement was that one of us – usually me – hiked back into Norton or raided the nearest farmhouses for food.
I looked forward to the trips. Sometimes Jake came with me. As the days passed though, Tara seemed happier to stay indoors. She began to look a little pale.
“You should get some fresh air and some light on your face,” I said to her after we’d been there a week or so. “You used to love being outside.”
“It’s not the same now.”
“Course it is. Same sun. Same sky. Same world.”
“No, it isn’t. Can’t you tell?”
“Fine. At night it’s different, but in the daytime it’s like it always was.”
“If you really believe that, you’re lying to yourself.” Did I believe it? I suppose not. Not completely.
“There’s nothing wrong with getting out for a bit. You could do with the exercise, if nothing else. You’ll stiffen up otherwise. Get old before your time.”
She didn’t respond to that. Now that I think about it, it was a stupid thing to say. The ends of our lives had come suddenly much closer. We didn’t know how close but neither of us really believed in our dotage anymore. Isolated up there in the hills… how long before we went insane with loneliness?
We had each other but how long would that be a comfort?
“Tara?”
She didn’t answer.
“I don’t want you to waste away. It just looks like you’re giving up. We need you. We need your vitality. You have to set an example for Jake.”
“I don’t have to do anything. I do enough.”
I remember looking out of the window towards the never-bright pine woods and seeing Jake out there, playing along its borders. He’d built a den between two of the outermost trees using rope, branches and an old tarpaulin. Some intense fantasy now drove him as he defended his stronghold from unseen foes. Unseen to me, at least. He used a stick for a gun, holding it into his shoulder and recoiling with each round he fired. Attackers fell in droves. He reloaded and fell back as the hordes closed in. I wondered where the fantasy ended – did he play to survive or be overwhelmed? Was he trying on the future for size? Weren’t we all doing that?
I looked away before the game reached its conclusion. Tara busied herself with some pointless cleaning task – running a dry cloth along the bookshelves and mantelpiece – but I knew then that no amount of house-proud titivation was going to lift her morale. She was already seeing a different future to the one I hoped for. In Tara’s mind, none of this would pass. Nothing would ever get better. There would be no rebuilding of society. I think it was because she couldn’t imagine how such things might be achieved. Simply because of that, she no longer had the heart to keep trying. All it had taken was a few days in a house on a hillside. The armed forces might be wiping out the Stricken by the thousands and gaining back the country, one victory after another. Already there might be thriving enclaves in other parts of England. But because she couldn’t see it and hadn’t heard about it, she believed it was over already.
No more pizza.
In that moment I couldn’t decide if she was incredibly ignorant or incredibly smart.
“I’m going to get out for a while,” I said. “Might check on that dairy farm in the next valley.”
Tara didn’t answer.
I grabbed my gear and left. In the paved courtyard where the real owners of the house might have parked their vehicles, I stopped for a moment and walked quietly to the darkest side of the house. Peeping through a wrought iron gate, I could see Jake. It looked like he was out of ammo because he was using his stick-gun as a club now. One arm hung useless as he whirled his weapon. Each time the enemy closed in, he retreated further, limping weakly. I knew how his fantasy would end. I left him there to die – victim of his mother’s genetics that he was – and I marched away. If I’d taken him with me that day, I suppose things might have been different.
***
Different? Who am I trying to fool?
The way the tendrils pump and writhe against me, I estimate I’ve risen a hundred yards in the time it’s taken for the cramps to ease out of my legs. I’m left with a combination of exhaustion and a deep ache in the affected muscles. All I can do to oppose the ascent is relax. Completely relax. It’s one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. I never found it easy to relax at the best of times, so letting my muscles slacken whilst caught in the grip of these monstrous, tongue-like tendrils is close to impossible. But my life depends on it.
Doesn’t it?
Hell, wouldn’t it be better if all this just came to an end for me? Up into those lights and then into my own personal blackness forever? I could forget everything then. I’d like to forget the things that have happened, I really would. But I need to know how I got here. How it came to this. Then I can go up – if not peacefully, then at least somehow complete. I will have processed it all. Isn’t that what we should all do before we die?
Remembering helped me get over the cramps, and the movement of the tendrils has slowed as
though they’ve started to lose interest in me. Perhaps I can use memory to let my muscles go slack.
Where was I?
The possibility of things turning out differently. I think I believed that could happen; truly believed it for a few days after I stormed away from Compton House, despairing of Tara’s lethargy. If Jake had raided the dairy with me that day, I might have behaved other than I did. That’s what I told myself. But something made me change my mind. Something I discovered.
Something I learned.
I’m there. Back on that hillside.
I’m angry – furious, in fact – but I’m free.
***
By the time I reached the crest of the hill, I was breathing hard and my legs were heavy with exertion. I stopped at the top, so winded I had to rest my hands on my knees for a few moments. I breathed deeply of the cool, slightly dusty air. When I stood straight again and took in the landscape, I forgot about Tara and Jake. The world was still beautiful – at least this part of it was. From where I stood, I could see hills and valleys; rumpled and green nearby, violet in the distance. I could see the Norton church spire and a dotting of farms across the hills in every direction. The only things affecting the view were a slight haze in the air and how still it all was. Usually there’d be cattle and sheep on the hillsides, rooks and seagulls riding the updrafts from the valleys. Most likely you’d see tractors rolling in and out of the farms and there’d be traffic on the roads. There was none of that. No engine noise. No animal noise. All I could feel was the wind and it was all I could hear; lashing through the trees as it raced across the slopes and whirled into the valleys. Out there at the top of Compton Hill, I felt like the last man on earth. It sent a thrill through my guts and made my heart quicken. Risk, power, freedom; some combination of all three. If this was the end of the world, perhaps it suited me.
Charged by the wind and the unmoving land, I descended towards the dairy farm.
***
As I reached the deserted milking sheds and dung-strewn concrete runs, it occurred to me to wonder where the animals had gone. Perhaps they’d found gates left open and wandered into other valleys. Maybe they’d taken to the roads and clopped towards Norton. Even now, the centre of Norton-on-the-Marsh might be filled with Friesians searching for their owners or tearing up the lush grass of the village green. I doubted it, though. The way the Stricken behaved, the way they cried out in some kind of spiritual penury – it was too much like hunger, like a ravening that could never be satisfied. I suspected that, come nightfall, every living thing not sheltered behind walls and locked doors was prey to the roaming, wailing souls who wandered the luminous nights with loss in their eyes and avarice in their grasping fingers. Nothing was safe. It made sense that the animals had all gone.
My feet scraped over the crumbling surface of the concrete spaces between the outbuildings. The sound echoed. Once again my pulse accelerated. If anyone was hiding among these outbuildings, they’d have already known I was there. A shotgun might have been poking through a broken siding and I wouldn’t have known about it until I was on my back in the runnels of urine that twisted between canyons of cow shit. I walked on. This was how each raid always felt. In just a few days, I’d become a little addicted to the sense of danger, of being observed by unseen threats. At the same time, I’d come to believe less and less in the existence of healthy survivors. I need only fear the Stricken and I need fear them only in the dark.
I turned a corner and found myself looking at the farmhouse. It fronted a driveway of rammed stone – much like the track leading from the country road up to Compton House. The other side of the farmhouse opened directly onto the fields beyond. It was a functional, featureless pile of bricks, three storeys high. In one of the upper rooms I thought I saw a curtain ripple. For a full two minutes I watched that window, its curtains drawn but not quite touching. I saw no movement there. It could easily have been the reflection of the clouds – they fled across the sky that day as though pursued. And sure enough, the surface of the window reflected nothing but the agitated heavens.
My hands became fists as I stood there. I released them as I stepped quietly towards the gate. I remember thinking that perhaps we ought to have armed ourselves better. We had no firearms in Compton House. We each carried a small hunting knife for practical uses and protection, but that was all. Just for a moment, I wished I’d come to the dairy farm tooled up like the survivalist. I erased the thought with simple reason: if there was someone in this house, they were still healthy, still human. And that meant they were still civilised. I might not come away with anything to add to our supplies, but I might make an ally. I might reach out and make contact with someone like us; someone who’d decided isolation was the best way to stay safe.
I pushed the gate open and it groaned on an exhausted spring. Outside the front door there was a covered porch. It was scattered with wellingtons of all sizes. They lay in disarray but for one pair, arranged neatly right beside the door. I tried the handle and was rewarded. The door swung open without a sound. I stood in a hall leading to a kitchen. I could see an old Aga and feel the warmth pressing out from it. The smell of food – wholesome, home-cooked food – wafted towards me on the welcoming air.
***
I took a few quiet steps into the hallway, just far enough to see into the rooms on either side. A study was to my right – papers, letters and folders eclipsing a desk. A dated computer, its screen black, stared like a dead eye from behind the pile of admin. To my left was a kind of cloakroom, equally untidy. Coats and mud-spattered waterproofs hung from hooks on the wall. Shoes and boots, crusted with earth, lay around the dirty skirting board. Pairing them up would have been a challenge. A gardening fork and spade rested in the corner and the red-tiled floor was cracked and covered with dried muck. The hallway contained only a small table and chair, pressed against the right-hand wall. A phone with a long tangled cord hung above the table, presumably as defunct as everything else. Between the table and the open kitchen door was the bottom of a staircase, the patterned carpet worn to threads. If it hadn’t been for the layer of dust that covered everything and the wrongness of the quiet in the house, it would have seemed quite normal: the chaos of a family with so much work to do that keeping their house tidy was impossible. But the dust – could that much have fallen from the air since the Hush had begun?
Quite suddenly, I felt like an intruder. A stalker. Whoever was in this house had every right to come down those stairs and give me both barrels of their 12 gauge. Where had my recklessness arisen from? My almost sociopathic boldness? I hadn’t even knocked, had I? I stood there terrified for a few moments, so scared of what I’d done I could neither walk deeper into the house nor retreat to the front door and let myself out.
I wanted to shout up the stairs and announce myself in a friendly way but my throat seemed plugged with phlegm and grit from the air. As I cleared it ready to speak, I heard footsteps on the floor above me. They moved towards the top of the stairs and stopped.
That would have been the time to leave or even speak but something held me rooted and mute.
“It’s all right.”
The voice caused me to recoil. I took a step backwards. The voice reached me again.
“I’m not one of them.”
It was a woman. Instead of descending, her footsteps retreated from the stairs, back the way she had come.
I thought I heard her say, “You’ll be safe here. Why don’t you come upstairs?”
I heard creaking as she ascended the next flight of stairs, softer footfalls moving away to silence. Questions, misgivings – I had them all. But something convinced me that, whoever the woman was, she was on her own here and meant me no malice. She had been the one whose observation had shivered the curtains as I’d stood outside. She knew what I looked like and was not frightened.
Still, the time I spent unmoving in the downstairs hall extended and the quiet of the farmhouse pressed in on me – hyper-real, hyper-charged. I knew all alo
ng that I would walk forwards and follow the woman’s voice into the upper floors of the house. I knew all along that I would not turn away and leave her to her solitude.
Yet, knowing this, I still did not move. Not for a long time.
As though waking suddenly, I found myself nearing the stairs. I stopped. Put my hand to the wall. I looked back at the place where I had first stood and saw the ghosts of my boot-soles impressed into the fine dust.
Another gap in my thinking.
The stairs complained as I mounted them. I wandered from room to room on the first floor in flashes, taking in scenes of domestic untidiness. The place looked as though it had been abandoned on a Friday evening, after the kids were home from school and Dad had finished with work for the night. Clothes and bags on bedroom floors, shoes relinquished at bedsides, half-drunk mugs of tea on desks.
Strobing.
I tried to remain conscious of every moment, of everything I saw, but somehow, each time I thought I’d managed the trick of it, seconds or a minute or more of time vanished and I’d find myself in a new room or returning to the stairs.
The flashes of consciousness shortened and I found myself on the top floor of the farmhouse. The sun had broken through the fleeing clouds and it blazed through the window at the far end of the upper passage. Dust swirled and twinkled in the broad shaft of light, betraying lithe, sinuous currents in the air. That was where the woman had gone; to the end of the highest hallway.
Without seeming to take a step, I was there, my fingers reaching for the handle of the closed door. The sun warmed me through the window and the particle-heavy air pressed against me.
I shut the door behind me and stood in a room of radiant gold, so bright I had to squint. Time slowed down again, stopped fragmenting.
All the curtains were open and the sun blasted in. The air was just as polluted here; I could feel the minute grains in my mouth and throat. Spirals and vortices of dust rotated, suspended in the glorious amber brightness. On the other side of this universe of particles, the woman stood, bathing in the sunshine, a silhouette against the glare. She wore some kind of filmy summer dress but the sun shone through it, making it clear she wore nothing underneath. The violin curve of her waist and hips. The heavy swell of her breasts. The light detailing the fleshy wrinkle at the confluence of her legs.
The Veil (Testaments I and II) Page 10