The Silence

by Tim Lebbon

  “Got a bike?” the older guy asked.

  Huw laughed softly, took another sip of coffee. “I wish.”

  “Got some first-world problems, mate?” the young man said through a mouth of food. Huw decided he didn’t like him very much. He carried a cockiness that his older companion did not.

  “Something like that.”

  “Breakfast,” the owner said, crossing the room and placing the plate before him. “I gave you an extra sausage.”

  Huw laughed aloud, and then from across the room the businesswoman said, “Oh my God!”

  The dining room fell silent. A knife clanged against a plate as it was put down. The Indian woman paused with a napkin to her mouth; her daughter rocked back on her chair.

  The woman was looking at her tablet computer, from which tinny, unidentifiable sounds played. For a moment she seemed unaware of the sudden stillness around her, then she looked up. But her expression did not change—no embarrassment, no shy smile as she waved away her outburst. “Have you seen this?” she asked.

  Huw rose and crossed to her table instantly. She flinched back a little as he stood close beside her, shocked by his sudden proximity, but he didn’t care.

  Some celebrity split from her husband after nine days and a thirty-million dollar wedding, he thought. Or the Prime Minister being arrested for squeezing an assistant’s arse. He really hoped it was something inconsequential. But then he saw the screen, and the first thing he did was reach out to tap up the volume.

  “…isolated incidents in Ukraine and Russia, and unconfirmed reports of similar events in Romania. This footage was captured on a mobile phone east of Donetsk.” The footage played. It was silent, and showed the view from a second- or third-floor window looking down onto a street. People were running. Several cars had crashed, and further along the street a fire raged, consuming several smaller vehicles and a bus. Some people had already fallen, and others soon followed. It was a depressing echo of recent images from the troubled Moldova. But then there were the things.

  “We’re not quite sure what we’re seeing here…” the newscaster said.

  They flew through the air, landing on people, bringing them down.

  “They seem to be… bats? Birds of some kind? Attracted by the violence, the rioting and unrest, perhaps, but they seem to be…”

  “They’re the cause of the violence!” Huw said. Hadn’t anyone seen that thing at the cave last night?

  The camera moved violently left and right, blurring the picture. Then it steadied again, zooming in on a shape crawling along the road below. It was a woman in a short white and red dress. Several of the winged creatures—they were about the size of a small cat, Huw reckoned—were clasped to her back, and two more flapped their wings to reach under her. Clawing at her face. Biting.

  “These images are distressing, but as yet they haven’t been independently verified.”

  The woman rolled onto her back and slapped at the creatures attacking her face. One of them came away, and it seemed to take some of her with it. She opened her mouth to scream, and in the silence the action seemed even more terrible.

  She bled.

  The image flickered and then cut out, replaced by the two newscasters back in the studio. The man seemed shocked, but the woman was as professional as ever.

  “More on that breaking news as and when—”

  The businesswoman cut out the volume and sat back in her chair. “Horror movie,” she said. “Viral marketing. Very clever, and to have it on national news is genius.”

  “No,” Huw said. “It’s not that.” He and the woman swapped glances, and he knew that she knew the truth as well. She was simply in denial.

  “I saw something last night,” the Indian man said, standing beside his wife and daughter. “I turned it off. It was horrifying.” The two men gathered around to see the tablet screen. The younger man still chewed his breakfast, and he seemed more interested than concerned.

  “Thought it was something on the movie channel, or something,” his older friend said. “We switched to the match. United got their arse handed to them.”

  Huw continued watching the tablet. The sound was muted now but the newscasters were still there. The woman was talking, but the man next to her seemed to be listening to his earpiece, fingers tapping across his laptop. His eyes went wide. He looked around, first at his companion and then off-screen. Very unprofessional.

  “Look,” Huw said, and the woman turned up the volume again.

  “…some breaking news coming in right now,” the male newscaster said. “This time from Buzau, seventy miles north-east of Bucharest in Romania. We’ve no footage, but there are reports of a massacre at a nursery, and further deaths at a restaurant, electrical component factory, and several other places. Erm… there’s no indication of who is responsible for these attacks. Or how.” The newscasters were becoming more fidgety, and the man pressed his earpiece in again, head tilted to one side.

  “And another report from closer to Bucharest,” the woman said. “A train has been attacked by what’s described as a ‘swarm of flying rats’.” She frowned, staring down at her laptop screen. It was one of the first times Huw had seen a newscaster showing anything approaching emotion. Usually they were cool, calm, almost inhuman. “Oh, my God,” the woman breathed.

  Huw backed away, feeling suddenly crowded by the others. He caught the young girl’s eyes and saw that she was scared, huddled into her mother, chairs now side by side.

  “It’s spreading,” he said.

  “What is?” the businesswoman asked.

  “Last night, the thing on the Discovery Channel. It was at a place in northern Moldova, now there are attacks in Ukraine and Romania. That’s hundreds of miles. And they said Russia too?”

  “So what is it, terrorists?” the younger man said through a mouthful of sausage sandwich. “At least it’s a long way away.”

  Huw just looked at him, searching for an answer but finding none that made sense. “Excuse me,” he said. He left the dining room, dashed into the hotel’s large hallway and ran up the wide staircase. He caught a whiff of something—it smelled like stale piss—and realised that the whole hotel smelled of it. Perhaps it was the carpet cleaner they used, or the little dishes of potpourri scattered around.

  He fumbled with his room key and slammed the door behind him, but he felt no more protected. Of course not. He was on his own and his family were at home, without him. Four hours away in the car, and that’s if he did the journey in one go and there were no hold-ups.

  He was breathing too fast, and not just from running up the stairs. Doomsdaying, he thought, that’s all I’m doing. Whatever had happened—was still happening—was more than a thousand miles away, in towns and cities whose names he’d never heard before, and countries that he rarely even considered. He was safe. His family was safe.

  But it spread hundreds of miles overnight!

  He stood there for some time with his back against the door, but in reality he’d already made his decision. It was unreasonable, irrational. He hadn’t rushed home to Kelly on 9/11. He’d been overseas when the Japanese earthquake and tsunami hit, visiting a building firm in Brittany and circling the idea of going into partnership. He’d watched in his gîte’s bedroom as Fukushima exploded, wondering whether the hazy image would change the world. That business association had never solidified, but he’d not felt the need to jump on a plane and fly back to his family.

  So why now?

  He didn’t know. What he did know was that it felt right, it felt good, and he was not going to fight his feelings on this one.

  Before pulling his bag from the wardrobe and starting to pack, Huw held his breath and turned on the TV once more.

  The weather forecast was on. It was going to rain.

  3

  Been coming for years. Mother Earth gonna eat us all back up. Nom-nom.

  @GaiaZombie, Twitter, Friday, 18 November 2016

  I felt much better after leaving the house
and walking through the village to the bus stop. I met Lucy in the usual place, and we exchanged hellos. Lucy didn’t mention anything about the news. By the time the bus came, I’d tried to forget about it too.

  But those images stuck with me.

  “TFIF,” Rob signed as I jumped off the bus in the school grounds. Thank fuck it’s Friday.

  “You doing anything this weekend?” I asked.

  “We’re going to north Wales to visit my uncle.”

  “Nice,” I said. “Mountains. Lakes. Cold. Grey.”

  “My uncle’s cool, he takes me mountain biking and hiking.” Rob was cool, too, and his coolness wasn’t a pretence or a mask. Good-looking and smart, he had a manner about him that compelled me to watch the way he moved, the way he was. I knew I wasn’t the only girl who felt that way. In fact, I was pretty sure plenty of boys felt that way too. Girls wanted to go out with Rob, boys wanted to be him, and the fact that his charisma was unforced and unconscious made him even more attractive. There were the Beautiful People in school, so taken with their own appearance that the outside world existed purely as a mirror for that vanity. Rob was beautiful without being a Beautiful Person.

  “He does sound cool,” I said, smiling. My dad would be home late that evening, Mum had said, and I was glad. I always missed him. I knew that he worried about me, but in truth I worried about him more. I hated him being away working. I’d lost my hearing, but he’d lost his parents in the crash. Sometimes he had a look of restrained panic about him, as if he was always waiting for something worse to happen. I wanted to tell him it was all right, I was fine, I was there. But I suspected that nothing would be all right for Dad ever again. The world had shrugged at him and revealed its indifference.

  “What do you think about the news?” I asked.

  Rob frowned briefly, then realised what I was talking about. “Oh, that! Weird, pretty sick. Bet the movie rights are sold already.”

  “Aren’t you worried?”

  “Nah. It’s a long way away.” He gave me a friendly punch on the arm and left for his form class.

  I walked through the crowded, raucous school, surrounded by silence. I’d managed my deafness amazingly well, not letting it hinder me any more than it had to. I’d been brave and clever, determined and unrelenting in my attempts to live a normal life.

  That’s what I was told, anyway.

  In reality, I felt just like a normal girl, and all I’d done was survive. So many people had helped, and were still helping, that I actually found the word “brave” a little offensive, as it threw a shroud over everyone else in my life. My parents, teachers, the guys at the school for the deaf where I went once a month, my friends, Lynne. Even Jude, the little shit. They were brave for adapting to accommodate the awkwardness some of them must have felt, or perhaps still felt now. As for me, I’d just got on with things. I had been the lucky one in that car crash, and living in silence was just another aspect to my new life post-accident.

  Sometimes, however, I felt smothered. Walking through the corridors and hallways towards my form room I could see and sense so much laughing and banter, so much noise—I could even feel it as vibrations against the fine hairs on my skin and transmitted through my feet—that the silence was like a weight crushing me down. I felt one step removed from the world I did my best to be a part of. That’s why I loved Lucy so much. My friend always stayed with me during the more chaotic school moments, and although I’d never spoken to her about it, I knew that she sensed my occasional unease.

  My form tutor, Miss Hughes, was already at her desk, sitting back casually as she chatted with the pupils already there. She waved and smiled at me, then stood and told the class to calm down. Chairs scraped, desks were bumped, everyone sat.

  This was the time when I settled in for the day. We read for ten minutes each morning while Miss Hughes took register, and that quiet time was comforting. I sat next to Lucy and we took out our books. Lucy was reading a Twilight novel; I read one of Ranulph Fiennes’s memoirs. For girls so similar, the gulf in our reading tastes was huge.

  My first lesson was geography. I always enjoyed the lesson, and liked even more that I got to sit next to Rob. But as soon as I saw him I knew that something was wrong.

  “What is it?” I signed. Sometimes I liked the fact that Rob and I could have secret conversations in the midst of a crowd.

  “That news,” he replied. “The cave. Those weird things that came out of it. They’ve spread. It’s all over the TV. And my cousin is in the army, based in Malta. He sent a text to his mum, she sent it to Dad, and he just forwarded it to me.” He took out his phone and held it out to me. We weren’t supposed to bring phones into the classrooms, but everyone did.

  I read the text on the screen:

  Been mobilised. Thing in Moldova bigger than they’re saying.

  “Bloody hell,” I said.

  Rob nodded. He was not his usual casual self. The frown did not suit him.

  “Sir?” I asked, hand raised.

  Mr Bellamy pointed to me and nodded. He was one of those who found it awkward, even uncomfortable, communicating with me. He was also a mumbler. I could barely see his lips moving, let alone read them, and he could not sign.

  “Can we talk about that thing in Moldova today?”

  Mr Bellamy smiled and spread his arms wide, said something, and most of the class turned to look at me. I glanced sidelong at Rob.

  “He said that’s exactly what he was going to do anyway.”

  I smiled at the teacher. He clapped his hands once and the class faced front again. He spoke to some of them, blinds were drawn, and one of the girls went to sit at the front of the class to work the computer. Mr Bellamy fussed with the remote control for the ceiling projector, then a square of flickering light appeared on the whiteboard.

  I prepared myself for another incomplete lesson. The teachers were great, and if they knew I wouldn’t be able to follow a lesson completely—if, for instance, they were talking about a lot of stuff instead of displaying it all on whiteboards—they’d have a printout ready at the end of the period. I’d come to terms with the fact that my schooling took up about twenty per cent more time than my fellow pupils’, because I spent an hour or two after coming home every evening reading printouts. If there was anything I didn’t understand, the teachers were usually available during free lessons to help. Some were better than others, and Mr Bellamy was one of the few who found dealing with me problematic.

  The first image appeared on the whiteboard. It showed a cutaway section through a cave system, and I wondered if I was the first to notice what made it unique—there seemed to be no entrance.

  I could see Mr Bellamy starting to talk, and Rob tapped my arm. He started signing for me.

  “Let’s start with a different cave to the one we saw on the news yesterday. Movile Cave in Romania was discovered by construction workers in 1986. They were drilling to assess whether the remote area was suitable for a new power station, broke through into an underground passage, and immediately sealed it up again. What scientists discovered when they ventured down was a cave system that had been cut off from the outside world for millions of years. What surprised them more was the unique ecosystem that existed down there. Apparently, it’s an arachnophobe’s worst nightmare.” The class laughed. I focused on Rob’s hands, his mouth, his facial expressions. I liked it when he signed for me; he became mine.

  “There are no stalactites in the cave, so no evidence of water ingress. The atmosphere is only ten per cent oxygen. And there’s no evidence of radioactive isotopes from the Chernobyl disaster. That convinced scientists that what they’d found was a genuinely isolated ecosystem, completely enclosed from the outside world. Some of what they found down there… remarkable.” Rob nodded forward and I looked.

  The projections changed every few seconds. Images of strange spiders, scorpion-like creatures, snails, spring-tailed insects, millipedes and worms, all of them ghostly white and eyeless. Some of them seemed almost trans
parent, their insides visible.

  Rob touched my hand as Mr Bellamy continued.

  “Only a handful of scientists have been down into the cave. It’s such a difficult environment to work in, with oxygen levels so low your kidneys will fail within a couple of hours, and the heat is almost unbearable. Quite an amazing place.”

  A cross-section of the cave appeared on the screen and he used a light pen to point at particular features.

  “It’s estimated that the caverns had been cut off from the outside world for over five million years. In that time the species within have evolved and become quite unique. It’s a perfect example of Darwinian evolution, actually. There were plants and creatures that were found nowhere else on the planet. Many were familiar, but some necessitated whole new classifications.”

  The picture showed a milky-white spider, bloated and moist, mandibles dark-tipped and seemingly ready to snap from the screen.

  “Eww,” I said, and I saw other pupils laughing in equal disgust.

  Mr Bellamy fell silent as the slideshow of images continued, one picture fading out as the next faded in.

  A fern-like plant, the edges of its pale leaves glimmering with moisture or mineral deposits. A small beetle, its shell a soft-looking pale yellow. Several types of fungi.

  “It’s just one of several such sites around the world,” Mr Bellamy said. “That we’ve discovered, at least. And the system in Moldova is the latest.” He fell silent again as the screen turned to white. He seemed to be staring at the wall, lost for words. The pupils glanced around at each other, a few of them smiling, most a little worried.

  “Sir?” I saw one of them say.

  Mr Bellamy used the remote to turn off the projector. He turned to face us, and I’d never seen him looking so old. His face was grey, eyes dark. It was as if he’d returned from seeing something terrible without ever having left the classroom.

  “I’ve always worried about things like this,” he said. “When I was your age it was the idea of space exploration that troubled me. But as I learned more, it became obvious that there were countless places still on Earth that were yet to be discovered. Ecosystems are just that—systems. Whole, complete, sometimes in turmoil, yet usually, eventually, balanced. Introduce one unique ecosystem to another and the result is unknown. And as the world becomes smaller with advances in communication and travel, so remote dangers come closer.”