Refuge

by Richard Herley

  ‘I hear you.’

  ‘We demand free passage. What you —’

  Bex became aware that the nature of the illumination in the room was changing. New shadows were appearing, new areas of light. The oil lamp on the dresser had been raised into the air. Helen, standing naked, had lifted it up. He turned to see her arm being drawn back, emphasising her breasts, momentarily reminding him of some image, a frieze, a statue, of the formidable goddess herself. He saw the motion of her throw, the calm, measured trajectory of the lamp as it came across the room towards him. Full of paraffin, made of glass and china and bits of flimsy brass, its wick alight, the object arrived and struck the wall next to his head. It smashed. He was hit with fragments and drenched in tepid fuel, soaking his shoulder and neck, his scalp and beard, spreading down his shirt to his trousers. To his astonishment, and before he could swing the gun round to shoot her, he burst into flames.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  In a few moments he was engulfed. Helen watched him drop his machine gun. He was squirming, bending, straightening up, beating at his blazing face with his two blazing hands. And he was screaming. She could smell the paraffin and, growing stronger, the pork-like odour of his burning flesh. The wallpaper was already on fire. He lurched against the royal tapestry with its heraldic beasts, its Tudor designs of warriors, shields and swords. The tapestry shared his flames and in seconds it was burning independently, fire wreathing the ceiling and its oaken beams, black against the lurid orange of the plaster. She looked again at Bex. He was upright, staggering towards the door.

  Dark with paraffin, the carpet had begun to burn. Flame was creeping towards the bed and its combustible hangings. Unaware of any danger, Helen shrank back, fascinated by the growing warmth and brilliance of the room.

  She did not yet understand what she had done to him. She knew only that she could not take any more. When he had said ‘I’ll be coming out’ she had seen herself being dragged somewhere again by the wrist. If anything, she had meant to hit him directly. Providence had deflected her aim and made the missile vastly more effective.

  A long time seemed to pass. The fire grew stronger. She heard the thump of the sledgehammer as at a vast distance. The lock and door burst open under the weight of its single blow. Air rushed in with a roar of heat. At its centre, brighter even than the rest, stood an effigy of flame, bifurcate, unquenchable. With its last reserve it tottered forward and out, beyond the threshold, out towards the blackness beyond. Men were there, men with illuminated faces. They stood aside, moving back as the figure opened a way among them. Its travel was checked for a moment by the balustrade, and then Bex toppled forward and fell, unimpeded, out of her sight at last, down and down into the unseen darkness of the pit.

  One of those in the gallery now started through the inferno, his face protected by his sleeve. Another, carrying something over his free arm, entered just behind.

  ‘Helen! Helen!’

  She thought she recognised the voice.

  The man reached her. He took his sleeve away. She saw his brown face and bald head, the gold-rimmed lenses of his spectacles. Now the second man arrived. Leigh. Leigh Fernihough. He had been carrying a heavy coat over his arm, glistening with rain: she felt her shoulders being grasped and the coat was placed around her.

  Paul spoke to Leigh and without ado took off his own coat, exposing himself to the heat.

  Leigh was shouting instructions.

  She tried to take them in.

  ‘Helen, just let us guide you! Do you understand?’

  Everything went dark. Paul had put the weight of his coat over her head. An arm encircled her waist. She was moving forward, running through fire, her bare feet visible, treading the flames. Two, three, four steps more and they were outside, standing on cool, seemingly damp carpet. The coat was taken from her head. As she was being led away she looked behind. The state bedroom was becoming a furnace fuelled by wood and paper and antique fabrics. Tongues of flame explored the edges of the doorway, seeking to extend their domain. The gallery was deserted. The other men were with her, with her and Paul, hurrying down the main staircase.

  The hall below and to the right was being lit by something like a heap of coal, spreadeagled on the solid slabs of the flagstone floor. He was burning, melting, a fat-fire consuming in its fury muscle and bone and brain. As if eager to get back upstairs, his smoke and stench were rising to the balustrade and beyond.

  ‘Come on, Helen.’

  The ceiling far above was burning too, and a section of the balustrade. The bedroom windows had just blown. Oxygen was pouring into the house, driving night air, rain and steam into the heart of the conflagration. As Paul hustled her away from it, Helen heard a bang, then another, then more, many more. The ammunition in the machine gun was being set off, spinning it round, exploding in all directions in the horizontal plane. Even as the humans retreated, the first floor was becoming uninhabitable, a terrifying arena of the gods: flame versus smoke, heat against cold, light against darkness.

  Paul was a comfortable, familiar presence beside her. He and Martin had been friends. He led her into the vestibule. A crowd was there. She saw Sidney Pellew, Mike Wallace, Alan Fenwick and others, apparently clustered round someone lying on the floor. Paul drew her past.

  ‘Who was that?’ she said, uselessly looking back, as they emerged from the vestibule and descended the steps into the rain.

  ‘The man who saved us.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later.’ He stopped and fastened the buttons on her new coat. ‘I’m going to carry you. Hang on to my neck.’

  He lifted her up.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To the Fenwicks’.’

  ‘No. I want to stay here. I’ve got to see.’

  He ignored all her objections. This had been her father’s house, her home since the plague. She had been married from there; she and Martin had occupied their own suite. She couldn’t just turn her back on it now. But Paul was stronger. Bearing her weight with some difficulty, he crunched his way across the shingle of the drive. More people were arriving. Some briefly gathered, brought their faces close, called her name. Paul kept going.

  Over his shoulder she saw that the fire had already spread to the uppermost storey. Underlit smoke was escaping from the tiles of the roof. Even as she watched, three more windows on the first floor blew out, followed immediately by billows of leaping flame.

  Paul passed through the wrought-iron gates.

  ‘No, wait!’

  Somewhere high up, deep inside the central section, she could hear explosions. Their bullets and grenades were being made safe.

  The fire was working its way through the house and doing battle with their presence, cleansing everything they had touched, incinerating the air, cremating their very bodies. The rooms where they lay would be by now white with heat, its light too dazzling for mortal eyes to behold. The only shadow there would be the charcoal of their skulls and skeletons, slowly distorting, a single dwindling arm perhaps being caused to rise in inadvertent protest or farewell.

  Helen shut her eyes. She had reached the limit. She could bear no more. She clung ever more tightly to the neck of the man carrying her. She had forgotten who he was and where they were going. When she found herself seated in a calm, lamplit room, she watched without undue concern as Josephine Fenwick slid a hypodermic needle into her upper arm. A friendly embrace laid her sideways and covered her with clean sheets.

  Her head sank into the pillows and she tried to look up reassuringly at Josephine’s anxious face, but already she was swooning, falling inward, being overtaken and borne away in a phosphorescent avalanche of bliss.

  9

  Suter remembered hearing church bells clanging interminably not far away, the sound diffused and made duller by intervening masonry and the closed windows of his room. At first he had not connected the bells with anything, not even the church, and certainly not celebration. They had rung all through one cloudy
morning, when he had been comparatively lucid. Perhaps yesterday. On that day, or another much like it, he had passed his hand across his face and found it smooth. The women nursing him had shaved off his beard while he had been asleep, or unconscious.

  He knew he had been anaesthetised early on, at the beginning of his time in this house. He distinctly recalled the moment when he had been given release, and he recalled afterwards feeling sick, and retching in the darkness. Or that might have been on the tower, long before he had been shot.

  They had opened him up and removed the bullet. The pain in his side had yielded to something less grinding and variable. He could feel bandages, tightly wound. He could smell disinfectant. And he knew his jaw had, for several days now, no longer bothered him. They had reset it. He probed once more with his tongue and found the healing gap where his molar, the first on the upper left, had been.

  He smiled inanely.

  Later he was awake again. The day had noticeably faded. Lying on his right side, in his cocoon of foetal warmth, he tried to make sense of what he could see. The furnishings he mostly recognised. A bedside cabinet or locker. Beyond it a lightweight armchair upholstered in some old-fashioned union cloth. Two tall sash windows, each with floral curtains hanging from polished poles terminated by oversized acorns. Wallpaper patterned with bamboo and oriental birds. Between the two windows, a polished semi-circular table with three legs, solid fruitwood or veneered, bearing an ironstone vase with an arrangement of flowers: chrysanthemums, mainly, in white and cream and yellow. Through the right-hand window he could make out a distant shrubbery, perhaps limiting a lawn that sloped downhill to the river. Beyond that, its bronze crown lit up by the setting sun, rose the aristocratic mass of a copper beech.

  Behind him he heard the door opening. The eldest of the three women circled the end of his bed and shut out the tree. She was bending towards him, wearing a blue overall.

  ‘Did you have a nice nap, John?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  She was about sixty, thickset, maternal, with a kindly voice.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Suter said. ‘I’ve forgotten your name again.’

  ‘Josephine.’

  One of the others, the middle one, was called Sally. He remembered then the man who had operated on him. Alan. And what he had said. ‘You’re lucky.’

  Josephine waited, eyes averted towards the garden, while he filled his bottle.

  The effort of sitting up somewhat had cost him all his strength. When he tried to settle back as he had been before, the sword-thrust of pain almost made him cry out.

  He felt her soothing hand on his brow. His eyes closed; his mouth involuntarily opened. Presently the hand went away.

  The next time he awoke he was again lying on his right side. He thought his pyjamas had been changed. The curtains had been drawn and the bowl of flowers removed. It was night, or anyway after dark. He knew this because a small electric lamp was burning, out of his direct sight, perhaps on the table by the door.

  Someone was sitting in the armchair. A woman. Too youthful to be Josephine. Neither was she Sally, nor yet the youngest of the three, whose name he had again forgotten.

  He narrowed his eyes and watched her through his lashes. She had just looked beyond the bed and towards the mantelpiece with its noiseless clock. The erect, dignified way she held herself was unmistakable. Her eyes, her nose, her soft lips, the perfectly defined shape of her eyebrows, had changed not at all. Only her hair was different: short, much too short, as if it had been cut as a form of punishment.

  Helen.

  In his consternation, and before she could look back from the clock, he shut his eyes and tried to pretend that he was still asleep.

  It was not possible. She could not be alive. For if she were alive she could not have died. If she had not died, then there had been no plague and the past twelve years could not have happened. The first two years of madness, his April testament, the succeeding years of erratic solitude, chaining the locks, the valley, the river, finding the body of that young man and hauling it to the bank: none of this could have happened.

  He had last seen her, spoken to her, kissed her, on 27 May, 2016. They had sat in his car. It was over, she had told him. She no longer felt the same. Why couldn’t he understand that people changed? Why did he have to be so logical about everything? People weren’t like that. She wept. She gave him back the ring. A diamond set in white gold, among sapphires. It had cost him three months’ pay. He asked if there was someone else. No, she said. But there was. He found out by chance. A few weeks later, at the mall, he saw them together. The boyfriend was saying something she found amusing. They entered the main department store. Suter followed, hiding behind pillars as they wandered among the dressing tables and wardrobes. They stopped in the bedding section. Showed interest; were approached by a salesman. Suter fled.

  He never knew what happened to the boyfriend. Helen died two hundred and twenty-seven days later, at the height of the plague. Suter heard the news from her sister, who herself lasted only another six weeks.

  But he survived. Got himself left behind. Some intolerable quirk of genetics, some molecular oddity in the structure of his microsomes, had spared him while the rest of humanity perished. He came through, and for over twelve years, till that morning on the riverbank, was left alone to wonder why.

  It was impossible that Helen, his Helen, was still alive. She whom he had grieved, whom he had adored, she who had grown away from him in the realisation that he was not for her, who had wished to postpone the wedding and then finally, cruelly, decisively, had rejected him in favour of another; she could not be alive.

  His febrile sanity hinged on this fact.

  He forced open his eyes.

  The chair was empty. Just as before, just as it always was, the chair was empty.

  He had imagined her. Maybe they were feeding him drugs for the pain. Drugs to affect the mind. This room, for example. It seemed too familiar. From what he had been told, he believed he was still at Shanley, in the Rectory, where others of the village wounded were being treated. Yet hadn’t there been, wasn’t there now, a room exactly like this in his house by the river?

  He didn’t know. Couldn’t remember. He fell asleep, trying. Later he woke again and the lamp had been switched off. Moonlight framed the curtains. Deep, supple silence reigned.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  In the morning Suter felt better. Josephine brought his breakfast. She was married to Alan, who acted as the village doctor. They lived in the Rectory; this was their home. One of the reception rooms had been fitted out as an operating theatre equipped with everything they needed.

  With the barest hesitation, Suter said, ‘Did I have a visitor last night? A young woman, sitting in that chair.’

  There had already been other visitors: Fernihough, for one, and Aziz, and a man called Goddard who had made what had amounted to a pompous speech.

  ‘A visitor?’ Josephine said, placing the tube in his mouth so that he wouldn’t spill his milk. ‘Not that I know of.’

  Suter’s abdomen seemed less swollen. The pain was definitely less.

  ‘You’re healing up,’ she said, as she bustled around him. ‘My husband looked at you first thing. He says you’re remarkably fit. Because of that, he says, you’re going to be all right. He’s already scaling down the morphine.’

  Morphine. That would account for it.

  After breakfast she helped him to wash. His face rasped: the beard was quickly growing back. He decided to begin shaving again. But not today.

  After these exertions Josephine left him alone and he rested, lying on his right side in the attitude that seemed to offer most relief from pain. Lying there, he saw for the first time that nothing but his infirmity remained to prevent his returning home. He had achieved his goal. He had removed the obstacle of Bex.

  That stretch of the river below his house, the precise place where he had waited in the moonlight, was colouring and influencing his mind. It lay behi
nd it like a background projection, sometimes obtruding into his thoughts. The lake was calling out to him. His simple, uncluttered existence there had suited his temperament. He might have been made for such a life. If the plague hadn’t happened he might even have wished it into existence merely to conjure everybody else away.

  Bex had confirmed the wisdom of minding one’s own business. Nor had Suter been much impressed by the collective behaviour of the village, neither by its criminal folly in allowing Bex to take over in the first place, nor by the craven submission of most of its menfolk. Seven villagers had died in consequence. Eight more had been wounded, three so badly that they might not live. The whole population had been traumatised. Even the Manor House had been allowed to burn to the ground. One of the supposed objects of any community was to present a united front. As soon as Bex had arrived, as soon as an external threat had materialised, that front had collapsed. Every man had then had to look out for himself. No one had stood up for the head man, for Helen, for Muriel. In that respect Shanley was like every other community Suter had known or heard about.

  But he was troubled. He liked a number of those he had met: Aziz, Fernihough, Josephine, old Sidney. There might be others he could take to, for all he knew. Goddard had said something or other about wanting him here. If he stayed, that would mean losing his independence.

  People meant trouble. It had always been easier and safer to remain on his own. He had more to contribute than society could ever offer him: he would always be out of pocket, as he had been before the plague. The price they had demanded of him, both in time and taxes, had been far too high. If he remained in Shanley the same thing would happen again. And he would have to conform, to share an arbitrary set of values and beliefs. They might even expect him to go to church. Fools like Goddard, who seemed to be some sort of politician, would for ever be telling him what to do.

  This was the crucial dilemma. It underpinned the insoluble equation in his life. People were trouble, yet he was not meant to live alone.