Empty World

by John Christopher

  “You will come back, Neil, won’t you?”

  Neil had scrutinized his morning face. He said with confidence:

  “Don’t worry. I’ll come back.”

  He had worked out the requirements with some care. An adequate water supply and reasonable proximity to supplies of tinned food were the basic needs; beyond that it was a question of settling for the best that was offered, bearing in mind that he could not afford to spend too much time on the quest. The countryside just outside Rye offered the most promising scope, and he got on his bicycle and pedalled down the hill in that direction.

  He searched throughout the morning with no success. Once his hopes were raised by finding a farmhouse with a pump-handle in the kitchen, but closer inspection showed it had been kept for ornamental purposes only: the handle yielded to the pressure of his arm but nothing happened. Apart from mains supplies the nearest water was several hundred yards away, in the form of a stagnant pool.

  That was around noon. He was hot and tired and hungry. He found a ham in the larder—the larder was north-facing, cool, and the ham smelt all right—and cut thick slices which he ate ravenously. He had not gone upstairs but took it for granted now that there would be no-one left alive. He had seen plenty of animals: sheep, stray dogs and cats, and a horse, saddled and bridled, that snorted at him before trotting away; but nothing human.

  Some sense of discouragement was inevitable, but he refused to give way to it. He washed down the ham with a bottle of cider, and set off again. This felt like the hottest day so far, and his bicycle wheels ploughed through patches of melting tar. He had stripped off his shirt and tied it around his waist, but after a time resumed wearing it. He could not risk sunburn, with all that had to be done.

  In mid-afternoon he found it, and could not believe his luck. It was a sprawling timbered farmhouse, parts of it probably Elizabethan, and a stream ran alongside. The stream was narrow but fiercely flowing, and sheltered by the house’s southern wall. It would run even in a deep frost.

  The sitting room had an open fireplace, and logs were stacked in the yard outside—a huge pile reaching up to the eaves. They were of a size a child could handle, and he could break down the pile to enable Tommy to get at them more easily. With matches and a supply of firelighters, they should be able to keep warm. Plus a stern lesson in fire precautions. There was a risk, but it was better than leaving them at the mercy of the winter.

  It was situated less than a mile from Rye: the sitting room window framed a view of red roofs and the church with its weathercock glinting in the sunlight. Tomorrow he could bring them over, and start moving in supplies. But to save precious time he could make a beginning of that part of the operation right away.

  In Rye the smell was worse than ever, and he had to force himself through a miasma that almost seemed to drag physically at his limbs. The heat was making things worse, but he took consolation from the fact that it was accelerating the inevitable process of decay. It would not be long before it was over: there would be only clean bones in the world Tommy and Susie went out to explore.

  The town was quite deserted. Neil wondered about small children: if Tommy and Susie had survived there ought to be many others in a place as big as this. But those big enough to do so would have fled, he guessed, from this charnel-house, and the rest would not have survived. He did stop to listen once or twice for crying, but was guiltily relieved when he heard nothing. He had a commitment already, and Tommy would have enough to do in caring for his sister.

  In an ironmonger’s shop he found a galvanized iron wheelbarrow with pneumatic tyres. He went into a chain grocers, broke into a store room at the rear, and was surrounded by aisles of plenty. He filled the wheelbarrow too full at first, and had to shed part of the load to make it manageable. It was an advantage that Rye, like Winchelsea, stood on a hill, making the descent to the farmhouse relatively easy.

  He made four trips before he decided to call it a day. He had the beginnings of a stockpile, and even if he woke up changed in the morning and was too feeble to do much more in the way of fetching, he could show Tommy where to go. He was very tired, but contented.

  There was one more thing needed doing in the house. He went upstairs for the first time and looked at what was there: three bodies in all, two in one room and the third in another. He steeled himself to pull that one off the bed and drag it in its sheet along the landing and into the room with the others. Even had he been able to bear it, he could not spare the time burial would have required. The bedroom had a key: he turned it behind him and went downstairs. Before mounting his bicycle, he threw the key far off into a shrubbery.

  • • •

  Neil had a moment’s apprehension as he pushed the bicycle up the last bit of the hill, under the stone gateway, that he might not find them there—that they might have wandered away during his absence. But Susie appeared in the hallway, answering his call and stumbling towards him with her rolling infant’s gait. He picked her up and carried her through, calling Tommy, who answered from the garden.

  There was something odd in his voice and Neil wondered if he might be getting a summer cold. He would need to add a few basic medicaments to the farmhouse store, and advice on using them. Tommy came in, walking slowly as though he were tired, but he reminded himself it had been a long day, involving some strenuous playing probably. He put Susie down, despite her protests, and went to greet the boy.

  He stopped some feet away, struggling not to show his incredulity and horror. A little old man stared at him from the face of a child.

  • • •

  Neil had a feeling of revulsion which it was not easy to master, but he managed—holding the ageing boy in his arms, kissing him at bedtime. Tommy had no idea of what was happening, and there was a chance, Neil thought, that he need not do so during the time remaining. He made an excuse to put them in separate rooms, in case Susie revealed something in her baby-talk, and went round the house hiding mirrors. The ones above the dressing tables he dismantled, and he locked the room which had the wardrobe with a full-length mirror in the door.

  The precautions were unnecessary. In the morning Tommy said he was tired, and it was no problem to persuade him to stay in bed. Susie, on the other hand, was full of energy, and he took her downstairs to give her breakfast. He had no appetite himself, and sat watching her and trying to behave normally as she chattered away.

  “Where Tommy?” she demanded at one point.

  Neil said: “Tommy’s not very well. He’s staying in bed this morning.”

  She nodded, accepting it as natural, and reached for another biscuit. Her face glowed with health and her thick blonde hair was tangled, despite his having brushed and combed it less than half an hour before. Although he had reconciled himself to what had happened to Tommy, he could not believe she would suffer the same fate. But if not, what difference did it make? Tommy might have had a chance of surviving in a world empty of people. For Susie there was none: she would perish within days of his protection being removed.

  It was almost with relief that he heard her complain, in mid-afternoon, of being tired, and subsequently saw the chubby face starting to lose its pinkness, drying and wrinkling. He put her to bed early, and she did not object. In the other bedroom he found Tommy awake, but very feeble. He asked in a cracked whisper for a drink of water, and Neil brought him a glass and held it to his lips: his arms were too weak to support it.

  Tommy whispered again: “You won’t go away, Neil?”

  He shook his head. “I won’t go away.”

  Neil slept that night on a mattress which he dragged through to the landing and positioned between the opened doors of their two bedrooms. He was awake a good deal during the night and a couple of times looked in on them. The second time Tommy was lying still; he touched his face and found it cold.

  Susie slept through most of the day, and went peacefully towards evening. Neil had spe
nt part of the afternoon digging a trench close to the grave of his grandparents. It was an easier task than the other, being so much shorter.

  It was easy, too, with dusk coming on, to carry out the two small bodies, wrapped in sheets, and lay them side by side in the grave. He felt very tired as he pushed earth over them with the spade. He thought it was probably happening to him as well, and was numbly contented. He went in, washed, ate sparingly, and lay down on his bed. The house was empty, but so was the town, the world. It might be he was the last person alive on earth. He was glad, as sleep took him, that it would not be for long.

  • • •

  For a week after that he lived like an automaton: eating, drinking, sleeping, trying not to think and for the most part succeeding. He did not bother to look at himself, and since he had put away the mirrors did not happen on his reflection accidentally. He had a dim feeling that it was taking too long, but all his thoughts were slack and dull and he did not pursue it.

  The weather had finally broken and the days were dark and stormy, with wind and rain howling and hammering along the street outside. The wind was violent at times, and once he heard a pane of glass break somewhere at the back of the house, but did not bother to go and look. It did not matter. Nothing mattered.

  One morning, though, the sun came out again, and he saw his shadowy image on the white side of the refrigerator. He put a hand to his face and felt his cheeks, full and unlined. It was a fortnight since he had had the fever.

  It took several more days for him to be sure he had somehow escaped the fate that had overtaken everyone else. That was when he left the house for the first time since the children died. He thought, with a new sense of misery, of his grandfather’s remarks about his will, and the inheritance that was to come to him. A good education, a decent ­profession. . . . He had a bigger inheritance than that: a vacated planet.

  His steps took him, without particular intent, to the church. He stood inside it and looked round at the old stone walls, the effigies of knights in their niches. What was the name for the celebration of thanksgiving—the Te Deum? The walls must have echoed to scores, hundreds of those, over the centuries.

  He thought of the tearaways on their motorbikes, trying to break the windows with their bottles. All dead now. He found a silver candlestick, hefted it, swung his arm and threw. The first two shots were ineffective, the candlestick crashing against stone and falling. But the third went home and he heard the crash of glass. The candlestick did not fall that time, but remained wedged in the leads. It stuck close by an apostle’s hand; as though he were carrying it to bed, but upside down.

  He stayed there a long time before going out from the quiet of the church to the world’s quiet.

  5

  THE RATS DROVE NEIL OUT of Winchelsea.

  He had no idea how long he stayed on after the children died: time meant nothing, and day followed day on a treadmill of sunrise and sunset, light and darkness, rain and shine.

  He stayed in his grandparents’ house, but developed a habit of going into other houses in the town. He preferred those that had family pictures on show, because they helped to people the emptiness. One day he found himself talking to a photograph of a motherly-­looking woman, as though it were a real person. He broke off on the realization, and did not go back there.

  The animals became wilder. He saw the glossy tabby that had followed him from the shop; it was leaner now, watched him suspiciously from the top of a wall, and leapt away on the other side when he called to it. The dogs for the most part had collected in packs. They gave Neil a wide berth. He was not sorry about this because they had a formidable look, and a fight between two of the packs kept him awake one night and left blood stains and patches of hair in the street next morning.

  One dog, a Labrador cross, approached him, and seemed half-inclined to allow itself to be adopted. He gave it food and water but it did not stay, and a couple of days later he saw it running with one of the packs. His encouragement of it, he thought, had probably been half-hearted. He had liked the dog and would not have minded keeping it, but it did not offer him anything he much wanted. The empty rooms with the family photographs were better in that respect.

  Flies became a nuisance. Whenever it was at all warm they swarmed, bloated and buzzing, impudent beyond belief in their attacks on anything that moved. He knew what had brought about this population explosion, but shut his mind to it as far as possible. In one of the shops he found a stack of aerosol sprays, and was able to keep the rooms he used free of their pestering. Outside it was different. A cow wandered into the town one day, its face black with them, the eyes in particular. It went off at quite a gallop when Neil approached it. The udders swung slack and empty, showing she had gone out of milk.

  The rats followed the flies, and were worse. He only had glimpses of them at first—a brown body slinking along a gutter or running across the street with its hideous humpbacked scuttering motion. But they rapidly multiplied and grew more daring. He understood the reason for their multiplication, too, and this time could not blank it out.

  That by itself would not have been enough to impel him to move: the sense of revulsion was less strong than the feeling of inertia, of reluctance to do anything beyond the routine, which had held him since he found himself alone. But the rats went on increasing and began to appear in packs like the dogs, and by day, indifferent to other living things. Or at first indifferent. One day he saw one of the dogs, a small ill-looking brown mongrel, limping in the rear after its companions had run down the High Street. The rats seemed to come from nowhere, a darker brown stream made up of hundreds of living hungry bodies, and the dog went down, yelping in agony. Neil was some fifty yards from the scene. There was nothing to be done, and he turned away back to the house. The yelping did not last long.

  He thought about it in the sitting room, in front of the blank screen of the television set. His supply of biscuits had run out some days before, and when he had gone to the shop he had found only gnawed scraps of paper where there had been a shelf of wrapped packets. The rats were running out of food, too. Eventually cannibalism would restore a balance, but until that time they would be an increasing menace. They would pull down more than a puny terrier before they turned on one another.

  He left early the following morning, taking only a change of clothes in a haversack. He cycled in the direction of Rye, but did not enter the town: the rat situation there was likely to be worse than in Winchelsea. He went instead to the farmhouse he had intended as a refuge for Tommy and Susie.

  It was a day of cloud and sunshine, warm after rain. Neil propped his bicycle against a wall and went into the kitchen. It was just the same, with the supplies of food piled in the cupboards as he had left them. There was enough to last him a long time—a month at least. Looking at them he had a piercing recollection of the way he had felt that afternoon: the sense of achievement, the hope for a future which, even though he would not share it, was worth planning and labouring for.

  He thought of Tommy and Susie and began to cry; sniffling at first, then miserably and helplessly. It was the first time he had wept since the car smash.

  • • •

  Gradually during the weeks that followed he started to come alive again. It was a slow process, broken by relapses into numbness and lethargy. Once he stayed in bed for two days, only moving to get a snack or go to the bathroom. But a change was taking place. He felt his mind moving out of the fog in which for so long it had been lost.

  One day, in the course of another heatwave, Rye caught fire. A pall of black smoke hung over it by day and flames lit the night sky. It was inevitable, he realized, as small fires, accidentally started by something like the sun’s rays beaming through glass, spread for want of human control. In a place like Rye, close-packed with mainly wooden houses, a conflagration was certain; it was only surprising it hadn’t happened sooner. It offered an interesting spectacle, but no m
ore than that. You could not even think of it as a town burning: a town, by definition, had inhabitants.

  Watching it he found himself speculating on human existence—its purpose, if it had a purpose. He thought about God, at first with a kind of contemptuous anger at someone who, if not the actual author of what had happened, had permitted it at least, observing with a cold eternal eye as his creatures, good and bad together, perished and rotted.

  From this he passed to the contemplation of his own survival. What was he that he should have been spared, to live in a desert world? He searched his self for anything which might merit so terrible a favour, and could discover nothing.

  But what if it were no favour, but a punishment? Perhaps it was wickedness which had caused him to be singled out. Perhaps even—the thought struck him with a savagery that made his head reel—none of this had really happened; he had been killed with the others in the car smash and this was a nightmare, some kind of purgatory. . . .

  The notion tormented him for a time until other considerations replaced it. He felt the pangs of hunger and realized that in watching the fire he had forgotten his evening meal. Appetite, the awareness of a body requiring nourishment, demonstrated the absurdity of the fancy, and he went to the kitchen to get a tin of stew.

  He kept the fire in the sitting room going most of the time; he had found a trivet and rigged up an arrangement for cooking over it. As he sat in front of the saucepan where the stew was heating, the whole line of speculation which had engaged him seemed to lose its substance. Before any of this happened he had regarded himself as an agnostic. What had occurred since, however terrible, was not a reason for inventing either a punishing or a rewarding God.

  It had happened, and that was that. He was alone in the world and must make the best of it.