by Tim Lebbon
Brand shook his head.
“We’ve got to do something,” Rosalie said. “We can’t just sit here while Boris is lying dead out there.”
Ellie said nothing. The telephone hissed its amusement. Rosalie looked to me. “There’s nothing we can do,” I said. “Really, there’s not much to collect. If we did bring his… bits… back here, what would we do?”
“Bury…” Rosalie began.
“Three feet of snow? Frozen ground?”
“And the things,” Brand said. The phone crackled again and he turned it off.
“What things?”
Brand looked around our small group. “The things Boris said he’d seen.”
Boris had mentioned nothing to me. In our long, drunken talks, he had never talked of any angels in the snow. Upstairs, I’d thought that it was simply Charley drunk and mad with grief, but now that Brand had said it too I had the distinct feeling I was missing out on something. I was irked, and upset at feeling irked.
“Things?” Rosalie said, and I closed my eyes. Oh fuck, don’t tell her, I willed at Brand. She’d regale us with stories of secret societies and messages in the clouds, disease-makers who were wiping out the inept and the crippled, the barren and the intellectually inadequate. Jayne had been sterile, so we’d never had kids. The last thing I needed was another one of Rosalie’s mad ravings about how my wife had died, why she’d died, who had killed her.
Luckily, Brand seemed of like mind. Maybe the joint he’d lit had stewed him into silence at last. He turned to the fire and stared into its dying depths, sitting on the edge of the seat as if wondering whether to feed it some more. The stack of logs was running low.
“Things?” Rosalie said again, nothing if not persistent.
“No things,” I said. “Nothing.” I left the room before it all flared up.
In the kitchen I opened another can, carefully this time, and poured it into a tall glass. I stared into creamy depths as bubbles passed up and down. It took a couple of minutes for the drink to settle, and in that time I had recalled Jayne’s face, her body, the best times we’d had together. At my first sip, a tear replenished the glass.
That night I heard doors opening and closing as someone wandered between beds. I was too tired to care who.
The next morning I half expected it to be all better. I had the bitter taste of dread in my mouth when I woke up, but also a vague idea that all the bad stuff could only have happened in nightmares. As I dressed—two shirts, a heavy pullover, a jacket—I wondered what awaited me beyond my bedroom door.
In the kitchen Charley was swigging from a fat mug of tea. It steamed so much, it seemed liable to burn whatever it touched. Her lips were red-raw, as were her eyes. She clutched the cup tightly, knuckles white, thumbs twisted into the handle. She looked as though she wanted to never let it go.
I had a sinking feeling in my stomach when I saw her. I glanced out the window and saw the landscape of snow, added to yet again the previous night, bloated flakes still fluttering down to reinforce the barricade against our escape. Somewhere out there, Boris’s parts were frozen memories hidden under a new layer.
“Okay?” I said quietly.
Charley looked up at me as if I’d farted at her mother’s funeral. “Of course I’m not okay,” she said, enunciating each word carefully. “And what do you care?”
I sat at the table opposite her, yawning, rubbing hands through my greasy hair, generally trying to disperse the remnants of sleep. There was a pot of tea on the table, and I took a spare mug and poured a steaming brew. Charley watched my every move. I was aware of her eyes upon me, but I tried not to let it show. The cup shook, and I could barely grab a spoon. I’d seen her boyfriend splashed across the snow. I felt terrible about it, but then I realized that she’d seen the same scene. How bad must she be feeling?
“We have to do something,” she said.
“Charley—”
“We can’t just sit here. We have to go. Boris needs a funeral. We have to go and find someone, get out of this godforsaken place. There must be someone near, able to help, someone to look after us? I need some one to look after me.”
The statement was phrased as a question, but I ventured no answer.
“Look,” she said, “we have to get out. Don’t you see?” She let go of her mug and clasped my hands; hers were hot and sweaty. “The village, we can get there. I know we can.”
“No, Charley,” I said, but I did not have a chance to finish my sentence (there’s no way out, we tried, and didn’t you see the television reports weeks ago?) before Ellie marched into the room. She paused when she saw Charley, then went to the cupboard and poured herself a bowl of cereal. She used water. We’d run out of milk a week ago.
“There’s no telephone,” she said, spooning some soggy com flakes into her mouth. “No television, save some flickering pictures most of us don’t want to see. Or believe. There’s no radio, other than the occasional foreign channel. Rosie says she speaks French. She’s heard them talking of ‘the doom.’ That’s how she translates it, though I think it sounds more like ‘the ruin.’ The nearest village is ten miles away. We have no motorized transport that will even get out of the garage. To walk it would be suicide.” She crunched her limp breakfast, mixing in more sugar to give it some taste.
Charley did not reply. She knew what Ellie was saying, but tears were her only answer.
“So we’re here until the snow melts,” I said. Ellie really was a straight bitch. Not a glimmer of concern for Charley, not a word of comfort.
Ellie looked at me and stopped chewing for a moment. “I think until it does melt, we’re protected.” She had a way of coming out with ideas that both enraged me, and scared the living shit out of me at the same time.
Charley could only cry.
Later, three of us decided to try to get out. In moments of stress, panic and mourning, logic holds no sway.
I said I’d go with Brand and Charley. It was one of the most foolish decisions I’ve ever made, but seeing Charley’s eyes as she sat in the kitchen on her own, thinking about her slaughtered boyfriend, listening to Ellie go on about how hopeless it all was… I could not say no. And in truth, I was as desperate to leave as anyone.
It was almost ten in the morning when we set out.
Ellie was right, I knew that even then. Her face as she watched us struggle across the garden should have brought me back straightaway: She thought I was a fool. She was the last person in the world I wanted to appear foolish in front of, but still there was that nagging feeling in my heart that pushed me on—a mixture of desire to help Charley and a hopeless feeling that by staying here, we were simply waiting for death to catch us.
It seemed to have laid its shroud over the rest of the world already. Weeks ago the television had shown some dreadful sights: people falling ill and dying in the thousands, food riots in London, a nuclear exchange between Greece and Turkey. More, lots more, all of it bad. We’d known something was coming—things had been falling apart for years—but once it began it was a cumulative effect, speeding from a steady trickle toward decline to a raging torrent. We’re better off where we are, Boris had said to me. It was ironic that because of him, we were leaving.
I carried the shotgun. Brand had an air pistol, though I’d barely trust him with a sharpened stick. As well as being loud and brash, he spent most of his time doped to the eyeballs. If there was any trouble, I’d be watching out for him as much as anything else.
Something had killed Boris and whatever it was, animal or human, it was still out there in the snow. Moved on, hopefully, now it had fed. But then again, perhaps not. It did not dissuade us from trying.
The snow in the manor garden was almost a meter deep. The three of us had botched together snow shoes of varying effectiveness. Brand wore two snapped-off lengths of picture frames on each foot, which seemed to act more as knives to slice down through the snow than anything else. He was tenaciously pompous; he struggled with his mistake rather than adm
itting it. Charley had used two frying pans with their handles snapped off, and she seemed to be making good headway. My own creations consisted of circles of mounted canvas cut from the redundant artwork in the manor. Old owners of the estate stared up at me through the snow as I repeatedly stepped on their faces.
By the time we reached the end of the driveway and turned to see Ellie and Hayden watching us, I was sweating and exhausted. We had traveled about fifty meters.
Across the road lay the cliff path leading to Boris’s dismembered corpse. Charley glanced that way, perhaps wishing to look down upon her boyfriend one more time.
“Come on,” I said, clasping her elbow and heading away. She offered no resistance.
The road was apparent as a slightly lower, smoother plain of snow between the two hedged banks on each side. Everything was glaring white, and we were all wearing sunglasses to prevent snow-blindness. We could see far along the coast from here as the bay swept around toward the east, the craggy cliffs were spotted white where snow had drifted onto ledges, an occasional lonely seabird diving to the sea and returning empty-beaked to sing a mournful song for company. In places the snow was cantilevered out over the edge of the cliff, a deadly trap should any of us stray that way. The sea itself surged against the rocks below, but it broke no spray. The usual roar of the waters crashing into the earth, slowly eroding it away and reclaiming it, had changed. It was now more of a grind as tonnes of slushy ice replaced the usual white horses, not yet forming a solid barrier over the water but still thick enough to temper the waves. In a way it was sad; a huge beast winding down in old age.
I watched as a cormorant plunged down through the chunky ice and failed to break surface again. It was as if it were committing suicide. Who was I to say it was not?
“How far?” Brand asked yet again.
“Ten kilometers,” I said.
“I’m knackered.” He had already lit a joint and he took long, hard pulls on it. I could hear its tip sizzling in the crisp morning air.
“We’ve come about three hundred meters,” I said, and Brand shut up.
It was difficult to talk; we needed all our breath for the effort of walking. Sometimes the snowshoes worked, especially where the surface of the snow had frozen the previous night. Other times we plunged straight in up to our thighs and we had to hold our arms out for balance as we hauled a leg out, just to let it sink in again a step along. The rucksacks did not help. We each carried food, water and dry clothing, and Brand especially seemed to be having trouble with his.
The sky was a clear blue. The sun rose ahead of us as if mocking the frozen landscape. Some days it started like this, but the snow never seemed to melt. I had almost forgotten what the ground below it looked like; it seemed that the snow had been here forever. When it began our spirits had soared, like a bunch of school kids waking to find the landscape had changed overnight. Charley and I had still gone down to the sea to take our readings, and when we returned there was a snowman in the garden wearing one of her bras and a pair of my briefs. A snowball fight had ensued, during which Brand became a little too aggressive for his own good. We’d ganged up on him and pelted him with snow compacted to ice until he shouted and yelped. We were cold and wet and bruised, but we did not stop laughing for hours.
We’d all dried out in front of the open fire in the huge living room. Rosalie had stripped to her underwear and danced to music on the radio. She was a bit of a sixties throwback, Rosalie, and she didn’t seem to realize what her little display did to cosseted people like me. I watched happily enough.
Later, we sat around the fire and told ghost stories. Boris was still with us then, of course, and he came up with the best one, which had us all cowering behind casual expressions. He told us of a man who could not see, hear or speak, but who knew of the ghosts around him. His life was silent and senseless save for the day his mother died. Then he cried and shouted and raged at the darkness, before curling up and dying himself. His world opened up then, and he no longer felt alone, but whomever he tried to speak to could only fear or loathe him. The living could never make friends with the dead. And death had made him more silent than ever.
None of us would admit it, but we were all scared shitless as we went to bed that night. As usual, doors opened and footsteps padded along corridors. And, as usual, my door remained shut and I slept alone.
Days later the snow was too thick to be enjoyable. It became risky to go outside, and as the woodpile started to dwindle and the radio and television broadcasts turned more grim, we realized that we were becoming trapped. A few of us had tried to get to the village, but it was a half-hearted attempt and we’d returned once we were tired. We figured we’d traveled about two miles along the coast. We had seen no one.
As the days passed and the snow thickened, the atmosphere did likewise with a palpable sense of panic. A week ago, Boris had pointed out that there were no plane trails anymore.
This, our second attempt to reach the village, felt more like life and death. Before Boris had been killed we’d felt confined, but it also gave a sense of protection from the things going on in the world. Now there was a feeling that if we could not get out, worse things would happen to us where we were.
I remembered Jayne as she lay dying from the unknown disease. I had been useless, helpless, hopeless, praying to a God I had long ignored to grant us a kind fate. I refused to sit back and go the same way. I would not go gently. Fuck fate.
“What was that?”
Brand stopped and tugged the little pistol from his belt. It was stark black against the pure white snow.
“What?”
He nodded. “Over there.” I followed his gaze and looked up the sloping hillside. To our right the sea sighed against the base of the cliffs. To our left—the direction Brand was now facing—snowfields led up a gentle slope toward the moors several miles inland. It was a rocky, craggy landscape, and some rocks had managed to hold off the drifts. They peered out darkly here and there, like the faces of drowning men going under for the final time.
“What?” I said again, exasperated. I’d slipped the shotgun off my shoulder and held it waist-high. My finger twitched on the trigger guard. Images of Boris’s remains sharpened my senses. I did not want to end up like that.
“I saw something moving. Something white.”
“Some snow, perhaps?” Charley said bitterly.
“Something running across the snow,” he said, frowning as he concentrated on the middle distance. The smoke from his joint mingled with his condensing breath.
We stood that way for a minute or two, steaming sweat like smoke signals of exhaustion. I tried taking off my glasses to look, but the glare was too much. I glanced sideways at Charley. She’d pulled a big old revolver from her rucksack and held it with both hands. Her lips were pulled back from her teeth in a feral grimace. She really wanted to use that gun.
I saw nothing. “Could have been a cat. Or a seagull flying low.”
“Could have been.” Brand shoved the pistol back into his belt and reached around for his water canteen. He tipped it to his lips and cursed. “Frozen!”
“Give it a shake,” I said. I knew it would do no good but maybe shut him up for a while. “Charley, what’s the time?” I had a watch, but I wanted to talk to Charley, keep her involved with the present, keep her here. I had started to realize not only what a stupid idea this was, but what an even more idiotic step it had been letting Charley come along. If she wasn’t here for revenge, she was blind with grief. I could not see her eyes behind her sunglasses.
“Nearly midday.” She was hoisting her rucksack back onto her shoulders, never taking her eyes from the snowscape sloping slowly up and away from us. “What do you think it was?”
I shrugged. “Brand seeing things. Too much wacky baccy.”
We set off again. Charley was in the lead, I followed close behind and Brand stumbled along at the rear. It was eerily silent around us, the snow muffling our gasps and puffs, the constant grumble of
the sea soon blending into the background as much as it ever did. There was a sort of white noise in my ears: blood pumping, breath ebbing and flowing, snow crunching underfoot. They merged into one whisper, eschewing all outside noise, almost soporific in rhythm. I coughed to break the spell.
“What the hell do we do when we get to the village?” Brand said.
“Send back help,” Charley stated slowly, enunciating each word as if to a naive young child.
“But what if the village is like everywhere else we’ve seen or heard about on TV?”
Charley was silent for a while. So was I. A collage of images tumbled through my mind, hateful and hurtful and sharper because of that. Hazy scenes from the last day of television broadcasts we had watched: loaded ships leaving docks and sailing off to some nebulous sanctuary abroad; shootings in the streets, bodies in the gutters, dogs sniffing at open wounds; an airship, drifting over the hills in some vague attempt to offer hope.
“Don’t be stupid,” I said.
“Even if it is, there will be help there,” Charley said quietly.
“Like hell.” Brand lit another joint. It was cold, we were risking our lives, there may very well have been something in the snow itching to attack us… but at that moment I wanted nothing more than to take a long haul on Brand’s pot, and let casual oblivion anesthetize my fears
.
An hour later we found the car.
By my figuring we had come about three miles. We were all but exhausted. My legs ached, knee joints stiff and hot as if on fire.
The road had started a slow curve to the left, heading inland from the coast toward the distant village. Its path had become less distinct, the hedges having sunk slowly into the ground until there was really nothing to distinguish it from the fields of snow on either side. We had been walking the last half hour on memory alone.
