by Tim Lebbon
Ellie sat on one of the wide window sills and sighed deeply. She ran a hand through her spiky hair and rubbed at her neck. I wondered whether she’d had any sleep at all last night. I wondered whose door had been opening and closing; the prickle of jealousy was crazy under the circumstances. I realized all of a sudden how much Ellie reminded me of Jayne, and I swayed under the sudden barrage of memory.
“Who?” she said. “Rosie? Hayden? Don’t be soft.”
“But you do, don’t you?” I said again.
She nodded. Then shook her head. Shrugged. “I don’t bloody know. I’m not Sherlock Holmes. It’s just strange that Brand and Boris…” She trailed off, avoiding my eyes.
“I have seen something out there,” I said to break the awkward silence. “Something in the snow. Can’t say what. Shadows. Fleeting glimpses. Like everything I see is from the corner of my eye.”
Ellie stared at me for so long that I thought she’d died there on the window sill, a victim of my admission, another dead person to throw outside and let freeze until the thaw came and we could do our burying.
“You’ve seen what I’ve seen,” she said eventually, verbalizing the trust between us. It felt good, but it also felt a little dangerous. A trust like that could alienate the others, not consciously but in our mind’s eye. By working and thinking closer together, perhaps we would drive them further away.
We moved to the next window.
“I’ve known there was something since you found Jack in his car,” Ellie said. “He’d never have just sat there and waited to die. He’d have tried to get out, to get here, no matter how dangerous. He wouldn’t have sat watching the candle burn down, listening to the wind, feeling his eyes freeze over. It’s just not like him to give in.”
“So why did he? Why didn’t he get out?”
“There was something waiting for him outside the car. Something he was trying to keep away from.” She rattled a window, stared at the snow pressed up against the glass. “Something that would make him rather freeze to death than face it.”
We moved on to the last window. Ellie reached out to touch the rusted clasp and there was a loud crash. Glass broke, wood struck wood, someone screamed, all from a distance.
We spun around and ran from the room, listening to the shrieks. Two voices now, a man and a woman, the woman’s muffled. Somewhere in the manor, someone else was dying
.
The reaction to death is sometimes as violent as death itself. Shock throws a cautious coolness over the senses, but your stomach still knots, your skin stings as if the Reaper is glaring at you as well. For a second you live that death, and then shameful relief floods in when you see it’s someone else.
Such were my thoughts as we turned a corner into the main hallway of the manor. Hayden was hammering at the library door, crashing his fists into the wood hard enough to draw blood. “Charley!” he shouted, again and again. “Charley!” The door shook under his assault but it did not budge. Tears streaked his face, dribble strung from chin to chest. The dark old wood of the door sucked up the blood from his split knuckles. “Charley!”
Ellie and I arrived just ahead of Rosalie.
“Hayden!” Rosalie shouted.
“Charley! In there! She went in and locked the door, and there was a crash and she was screaming!”
“Why did she—” Rosalie began, but Ellie shushed us all with one wave of her hand.
Silence. “No screaming now,” she said.
Then we heard other noises through the door, faint and tremulous as if picked up from a distance along a bad telephone line. They sounded like chewing; bone snapping; flesh ripping. I could not believe what I was hearing, but at the same time I remembered the bodies of Boris and Brand. Suddenly I did not want to open the door. I wanted to defy whatever it was laying siege to us here by ignoring the results of its actions. Forget Charley, continue checking the windows and doors, deny whomever or whatever it was the satisfaction—
“Charley,” I said quietly. She was a small woman, fragile, strong but sensitive. She’d told me once, sitting at the base of the cliffs before it had begun to snow, how she loved to sit and watch the sea. It made her feel safe. It made her feel a part of nature. She’d never hurt anyone. “Charley.”
Hayden kicked at the door again and I added my weight, shouldering into the tough old wood, jarring my body painfully with each impact. Ellie did the same and soon we were taking it in turns. The noises continued between each impact—increased in volume if anything—and our assault became more frantic to cover them up.
If the manor had not been so old and decrepit we would never have broken in. The door was probably as old as all of us put together, but its frame had been replaced some time in the past. Softwood painted as hardwood had slowly crumbled in the damp atmosphere and after a minute the door burst in, frame splintering into the coldness of the library.
One of the three big windows had been smashed. Shattered glass and snapped mullions hung crazily from the frame. The cold had already made the room its home, laying a fine sheen of frost across the thousands of books, hiding some of their titles from view as if to conceal whatever tumultuous history they contained. Snow flurried in, hung around for a while, then chose somewhere to settle. It did not melt. Once on the inside, this room was now a part of the outside.
As was Charley.
The area around the broken window was red and Charley had spread. Bits of her hung on the glass like hellish party streamers. Other parts had melted into the snow outside and turned it pink. Some of her was recognizable—her hair splayed out across the soft whiteness, a hand fisted around a melting clump of ice— other parts had never been seen before because they’d always been inside.
I leaned over and puked. My vomit cleared a space of frost on the floor so I did it again, moving into the room. My stomach was in agonized spasms, but I enjoyed seeing the white sheen vanish, as if I were claiming the room back for a time. Then I went to my knees and tried to forget what I’d seen, shake it from my head, pound it from my temples. I felt hands close around my wrists to stop me from punching myself, but I fell forward and struck my forehead on the cold timber floor. If I could forget, if I could drive the image away, perhaps it would no longer be true.
But there was the smell. And the steam, rising from the open body and misting what glass remained. Charley’s last breath.
“Shut the door!” I shouted. “Nail it shut! Quickly!”
Ellie had helped me from the room, and now Hayden was pulling on the broken-in door to try to close it again. Rosalie came back from the dining room with a few splintered floorboards, her face pale, eyes staring somewhere no one else could see.
“Hurry!” I shouted. I felt a distance pressing in around me, the walls receding, the ceiling rising. Voices turned slow and deep, movement became stilted. My stomach heaved again, but there was nothing left to bring up. I was the center of everything, but it was all leaving me; all sight and sound and scent fleeing my faint. And then, clear and bright, Jayne’s laugh broke through. Only once, but I knew it was her.
Something brushed my cheek and gave warmth to my face. My jaw clicked and my head turned to one side, slowly but inexorably. Something white blurred across my vision and my other cheek burst into warmth, and I was glad. The cold was the enemy; the cold brought the snow, which brought the fleeting things I had seen outside, things without a name or, perhaps, things with a million names. Or things with a name I already knew.
The warmth was good.
Ellie’s mouth moved slowly and watery rumbles tumbled forth. Her words took shape in my mind, hauling themselves together just as events took on their own speed once more.
“Snap out of it,” Ellie said, and slapped me across the face again.
Another sound dragged itself together. I could not identify it, but I knew where it was coming from. The others were staring fearfully at the door, Hayden was still leaning back with both hands around the handle, straining to get as far away as possible wit
hout letting go. Scratching. Sniffing. Something rifling through books, snuffling in long-forgotten corners at dust from long-dead people. A slow regular beat, which could have been footfalls or a heartbeat. I realized it was my own and another sound took its place.
“What…?”
Ellie grabbed the tops of my arms and shook me harshly. “You with us? You back with us now?”
I nodded, closing my eyes at the swimming sensation in my head. Vertical fought with horizontal and won out this time. “Yeah.”
“Rosalie,” Ellie whispered. “Get more boards. Hayden, keep hold of that handle. Just keep hold.” She looked at me. “Hand me the nails as I hold my hand out. Now listen. Once I start banging, it may attract—”
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Nailing the bastards in.”
I thought of the shapes I had watched from my bedroom window, the shadows flowing through other shadows, the ease with which they moved, the strength and beauty they exuded as they passed from drift to drift without leaving any trace behind. I laughed. “You think you can keep them in?”
Rosalie turned a fearful face my way. Her eyes were wide, her mouth hanging open as if readying for a scream.
“You think a few nails will stop them—”
“Just shut up,” Ellie hissed, and she slapped me across the face once more. This time I was all there, and the slap was a burning sting rather than a warm caress. My head whipped around and by the time I looked up again, Ellie was heaving a board against the doors, steadying it with one elbow and weighing a hammer in the other hand.
Only Rosalie looked at me. What I’d said was still plain on her face—the chance that whatever had done these foul things would find their way in, take us apart as it had done to Boris, to Brand and now to Charley. And I could say nothing to comfort her. I shook my head, though I had no idea what message I was trying to convey.
Ellie held out her hand and snapped her fingers. Rosalie passed her a nail.
I stepped forward and pressed the board across the door. We had to tilt it so that each end rested across the frame. There were still secretive sounds from inside, like a fox rummaging through a bin late at night. I tried to imagine the scene in the room now, but I could not. My mind would not place what I had seen outside into the library, could not stretch to that feat of imagination. I was glad.
For one terrible second I wanted to see. It would only take a kick at the door, a single heave and the whole room would be open to view, and then I would know whatever was in there for the second before it hit me. Jayne perhaps, a white Jayne from elsewhere, holding out her hands so that I could join her once more, just as she had promised on her deathbed. I’ll be with you again, she had said, and the words had terrified me and comforted me and kept me going ever since. Sometimes I thought they were all that kept me alive. I’ll be with you again.
“Jayne…”
Ellie brought the hammer down. The sound was explosive and I felt the impact transmitted through the wood and into my arms. I expected another impact a second later from the opposite way, but instead we heard the sound of something scampering through the already shattered window.
Ellie kept hammering until the board held firm. Then she started another, and another. She did not stop until most of the door was covered, nails protruding at crazy angles, splinters under her fingernails, sweat running across her face and staining her armpits.
“Has it gone?” Rosalie asked. “Is it still in there?”
“Is what still in there, precisely?” I muttered.
We all stood that way for a while, panting with exertion, adrenaline priming us for the chase.
“I think,” Ellie said after a while, “we should make some plans.”
“What about Charley?” I asked. They all knew what I meant: We can’t just leave her there; we have to do something; she’d do the same for us.
“Charley’s dead,” Ellie said, without looking at anyone. “Come on.” She headed for the kitchen
.
“What happened?” Ellie asked.
Hayden was shaking. “I told you. We were checking the rooms, Charley ran in before me and locked the door, I heard glass breaking and…” He trailed off.
“And?”
“Screams. I heard her screaming. I heard her dying.”
The kitchen fell silent as we all recalled the cries, as if they were still echoing around the manor. They meant different things to each of us. For me death always meant Jayne.
“Okay, this is how I see things,” Ellie said. “There’s a wild animal, or wild animals, out there now.”
“What wild animals!” Rosalie scoffed. “Mutant badgers come to eat us up? Hedgehogs gone bad?”
“I don’t know, but pray it is animals. If people have done all this, then they’ll be able to get in to us. However fucking goofy crazy, they’ll have the intelligence to get in. No way to stop them. Nothing we could do.” She patted the shotgun resting across her thighs as if to reassure herself of its presence.
“But what animals—”
“Do you know what’s happening everywhere?” Ellie shouted, not just at doubting Rosie but at us all. “Do you realize that the world’s changing? Every day we wake up there’s a new world facing us. And every day there’re fewer of us left. I mean the big us, the worldwide us, us humans.” Her voice became quieter. “How long before one morning, no one wakes up?”
“What has what’s happening elsewhere got to do with all this?” I asked, although inside I already had an idea of what Ellie meant. I think maybe I’d known for a while, but now my mind was opening up, my beliefs stretching, levering fantastic truths into place. They fitted; that terrified me.
“I mean, it’s all changing. A disease is wiping out millions and no one knows where it came from. Unrest everywhere, shootings, bombings. Nuclear bombs in the Med, for Christ’s sake. You’ve heard what people have called it; it’s the Ruin. Capital R, people. The world’s gone bad. Maybe what’s happening here is just not that unusual anymore.”
“That doesn’t tell us what they are,” Rosalie said. “Doesn’t explain why they’re here, or where they come from. Doesn’t tell us why Charley did what she did.”
“Maybe she wanted to be with Boris again,” Hayden said.
I simply stared at him. “I’ve seen them,” I said, and Ellie sighed. “I saw them outside last night.”
The others looked at me, Rosalie’s eyes still full of the fear I had planted there and was even now propagating.
“So what were they?” Rosalie asked. “Ninja sea-birds?”
“I don’t know.” I ignored her sarcasm. “They were white, but they hid in shadows. Animals, they must have been. There are no people like that. But they were canny. They moved only when I wasn’t looking straight at them. Otherwise they stayed still and… blended in with the snow.” Rosalie, I could see, was terrified. The sarcasm was a front. Everything I said scared her more.
“Camouflaged,” Hayden said.
“No. They blended in. As if they melted in, but they didn’t. I can’t really…”
“In China,” Rosalie said, “white is the color of death. It’s the color of happiness and joy. They wear white at funerals.”
Ellie spoke quickly, trying to grab back the conversation. “Right. Let’s think of what we’re going to do. First, no use trying to get out. Agreed? Good. Second, we limit ourselves to a couple of rooms downstairs, the hallway and staircase area and upstairs. Third, do what we can to block up, nail up, glue up the doors to the other rooms and corridors.”
“And then?” Rosalie asked quietly.
“Charades?” Ellie shrugged and smiled.
“Why not? It is Christmas time.”
I’d never dreamt of a white Christmas. I was cursing Bing fucking Crosby with every gasped breath I could spare.
The air sang with echoing hammer blows, dropped boards and groans as hammers crunched fingernails. I was working with Ellie to board up the rest of the downstairs rooms while H
ayden and Rosalie tried to lever up the remaining boards in the dining room. We did the windows first, Ellie standing to one side with the shotgun aiming out while I hammered. It was snowing again and I could see vague shapes hiding behind flakes, dipping in and out of the snow like larking dolphins. I think we all saw them, but none of us ventured to say for sure that they were there. Our imagination was pumped up on what had happened and it had started to paint its own pictures.
We finished one of the living rooms and locked the door behind us. There was an awful sense of finality in the heavy thunk of the tumblers clicking in, a feeling that perhaps we would never go into that room again. I’d lived the last few years telling myself that there was no such thing as never—Jayne was dead and I would certainly see her again, after all—but there was nothing in these rooms that I could ever imagine us needing again. They were mostly designed for luxury, and luxury was a conceit of the contented mind. Over the past few weeks, I had seen contentment vanish forever under the gray cloud of humankind’s fall from grace.
None of this seemed to matter now as we closed it all in. I thought I should feel sad, for the symbolism of what we were doing if not for the loss itself. Jayne had told me we would be together again, and then she had died and I had felt trapped ever since by her death and the promise of her final words. If nailing up doors would take me closer to her, then so be it.
In the next room I looked out the window and saw Jayne striding naked toward me through the snow. Fat flakes landed on her shoulders and did not melt, and by the time she was near enough for me to see the look in her eyes she had collapsed down into a drift, leaving a memory there in her place. Something flitted past the window, sending flakes flying against the wind, bristly fur spiking dead white leaves.
I blinked hard and the snow was just snow once more. I turned and looked at Ellie, but she was concentrating too hard to return my stare. For the first time I could see how scared she was—how her hand clasped so tightly around the shotgun barrel that her knuckles were pearly white, her nails a shiny pink— and I wondered exactly what she was seeing out there in the white storm.
