White and Other Tales of Ruin

by Tim Lebbon

  I followed, glancing at the others to indicate that they should stay where they were. None of them argued. Ellie was already half-way up the long staircase by the time I entered the hallway, but it was not until the final stair that she stopped, turned and answered my soft calling.

  “My husband,” she said, “Jack. I haven’t seen him for two years.” A tear ran icily down her cheek. “We never really made it, you know?” She looked at the wall beside her, as though she could stare straight through and discern logic and truth in the blanked-out landscape beyond. “He was coming here. For me. To find me.”

  There was nothing I could say. Ellie seemed to forget I was there and she mumbled the next few words to herself. Then she turned and disappeared from view along the upstairs corridor, shadow dancing in the light of disturbed candles.

  Back in the living room I told the others that Ellie was all right, she had gone to bed, she was tired and cold and as human as the rest of us. I did not let on about her dead husband, I figured it was really none of their business. Charley glared at me with bloodshot eyes, and I was sure she’d figured it out. Brand flicked bits of carrot from his soup into the fire and watched them sizzle to nothing.

  We went to bed soon after. Alone in my room I sat at the window for a long time, huddled in clothes and blankets, staring out at the moonlit brightness of the snow drifts and the fat flakes still falling. I tried to imagine Ellie’s estranged husband struggling to steer the car through deepening snow, the radiator clogging in the drift it had buried its nose in, splitting, gushing boiling water and steaming instantly into an ice-trap. Sitting there, perhaps not knowing just how near he was, thinking of his wife and how much he needed to see her. And I tried to imagine what desperate events must have driven him to do such a thing, though I did not think too hard.

  A door opened and closed quietly, footsteps, another door slipped open to allow a guest entry. I wondered who was sharing a bed tonight.

  I saw Jayne, naked and beautiful in the snow, bearing no sign of the illness that had killed her. She beckoned me, drawing me nearer, and at last a door was opening for me as well, a shape coming into the room, white material floating around its hips, or perhaps they were limbs, membranous and thin …

  My eyes snapped open and I sat up on the bed. I was still dressed from the night before. Dawn streamed in the window and my candle had burnt down to nothing.

  Ellie stood next to the bed. Her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. I tried to pretend I had not noticed.

  “Happy Christmas,” she said. “Come on. Brand’s dead.”

  Brand was lying just beyond the smashed conservatory doors behind the kitchen. There was a small courtyard area here, protected somewhat by an overhanging roof so that the snow was only about knee-deep. Most of it was red. A drift had already edged its way into the conservatory, and the beer cans on the shelf had frozen and split. No more beer.

  He had been punctured by countless holes, each the width of a thumb, all of them clogged with hardened blood. One eye stared hopefully out to the hidden horizon, the other was absent. His hair was also missing; it looked like he’d been scalped. There were bits of him all around — a finger here, a splash of brain there — but he was less mutilated than Boris had been. At least we could see that this smudge in the snow had once been Brand.

  Hayden was standing next to him, posing daintily in an effort to avoid stepping in the blood. It was a lost cause. “What the hell was he doing out here?” he asked in disgust.

  “I heard doors opening last night,” I said. “Maybe he came for a walk. Or a smoke.”

  “The door was mine,” Rosalie said softly. She had appeared behind us and nudged in between Ellie and me. She wore a long, creased shirt. Brand’s shirt, I noticed. “Brand was with me until three o’clock this morning. Then he left to go back to his own room, said he was feeling ill. We thought perhaps you shouldn’t know about us.” Her eyes were wide in an effort not to cry. “We thought everyone would laugh.

  Nobody answered. Nobody laughed. Rosalie looked at Brand with more shock than sadness, and I wondered just how often he’d opened her door in the night. The insane, unfair notion that she may even be relieved flashed across my mind, one of those awful thoughts you try to expunge but which hangs around like a guilty secret.

  “Maybe we should go inside,” I said to Rosalie, but she gave me such an icy glare that I turned away, looking at Brand’s shattered body rather than her piercing eyes.

  “I’m a big girl now,” she said. I could hear her rapid breathing as she tried to contain the disgust and shock at what she saw. I wondered if she’d ever seen a dead body. Most people had, nowadays.

  Charley was nowhere to be seen. “I didn’t wake her,” Ellie said when I queried. “She had enough to handle yesterday. I thought she shouldn’t really see this. No need.”

  And you? I thought, noticing Ellie’s puffy eyes, the gauntness of her face, her hands fisting open and closed at her sides. Are you all right? Did you have enough to handle yesterday?

  “What the hell do we do with him?” Hayden asked. He was still standing closer to Brand than the rest of us, hugging himself to try to preserve some of the warmth from sleep. “I mean, Boris was all over the place, from what I hear. But Brand … we have to do something. Bury him, or something. It’s Christmas, for God’s sake.”

  “The ground’s like iron,” I protested.

  “So we take it in turns digging,” Rosalie said quietly.

  “It’ll take us —”

  “Then I’ll do it myself.” She walked out into the blooded snow and shattered glass in bare feet, bent over Brand’s body and grabbed under each armpit as if to lift him. She was naked beneath the shirt. Hayden stared in frank fascination. I turned away, embarrassed for myself more than for Rosalie.

  “Wait,” Ellie sighed. “Rosalie, wait. Let’s all dress properly, then we’ll come and bury him. Rosalie.” The girl stood and smoothed Brand’s shirt down over her thighs, perhaps realising what she had put on display. She looked up at the sky and caught the morning’s first snowflake on her nose.

  “Snowing,” she said. “Just for a fucking change.”

  We went inside. Hayden remained in the kitchen with the outside door shut and bolted while the rest of us went upstairs to dress, wake Charley and tell her the grim Yule tidings. Once Rosalie’s door had closed I followed Ellie along to her room. She opened her door for me and invited me in, obviously knowing I needed to talk.

  Her place was a mess. Perhaps, I thought, she was so busy being strong and mysterious that she had no time for tidying up. Clothes were strewn across the floor, a false covering like the snow outside. Used plates were piled next to her bed, those at the bottom already blurred with mould, the uppermost still showing the remains of the meal we’d had before Boris had been killed. Spaghetti bolognaise, I recalled, to Hayden’s own recipe, rich and tangy with tinned tomatoes, strong with garlic, the helpings massive. Somewhere out there Boris’s last meal lay frozen in the snow, half digested, torn from his guts —

  I snorted and closed my eyes. Another terrible thought that wouldn’t go away.

  “Brand really saw things in the snow, didn’t he?” Ellie asked.

  “Yes, he was pretty sure. At least, a thing. He said it was like a stag, except white. It was bounding along next to us, he said. We stopped a few times but I’m certain I never saw anything. Don’t think Charley did, either.” I made space on Ellie’s bed and sat down. “Why?”

  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 humour there. There rarely was. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to know. But! We will have to be careful. Take the guns when we try to bury Brand. A couple of us keep a look-out 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 flowers beds. We stared 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 colour 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 humourous 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 grey 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. 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’s 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 realising 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 further 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 snow banks, 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. Som
etimes 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 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.