On the Third Day

by Rhys Thomas

  She lowered her head and felt her palms press together.

  ‘Please help us,’ she said.

  When she looked up again an invisible force streaked through her. A second, unnatural wind caught her hair; the wind from the machine. The two white lights were separated by a wider distance than she realized. The thing was huge. It would obliterate her. Its dissonance thumped into her as waves. The fog from the canal was being drawn unnaturally into the sky in vast, curling torrents.

  Black forms appeared in the fog and Miriam felt a rush of adrenalin fire along her veins. Two enormous military helicopters tore out of the night. She covered her eyes and turned away as the white searchlights picked her out on the balcony. Her pupils readjusted and she stared directly up as the two machines thundered over the building, their massive underbellies so close she thought she would be able to reach up and touch them. And then they were gone and the sound retreated with them.

  She remained on the balcony. Her head was clear. The chemicals in her blood equalized her senses and brought them to peaks of hyper-awareness. She could smell the canal below. She could feel the vapour of the fog on her face. She could hear the distant chopping of the helicopters.

  The waves were gentle against the man’s legs. The tide marched to the beach in foamy white scimitars. The man moved strongly through the water, pulling his rowing boat over his shoulder, clutching the tethered rope, taking one step at a time, like a robot.

  The dawn was beautiful. A low bank of cloud sat aloft the horizon, far in the distance, its underbelly glowing pink from the rising sun. At the top of the sky, high up in the atmosphere, the furrowed lines of stratus roofed the dome of the world. The sunrise was different. At last there was spring in it.

  Deep enough now, the man pulled his rowing boat to him and released the rope. He climbed smoothly into it and sat on the low bench at its centre. He took the oars in his hands and struck out for the horizon. Gulls flew all around him. A shoal of fish must have come inshore, guided by the currents, and the birds circled around and dived for their food. The man did not stop to watch them. He simply kept rowing, his arms beating a circular action, his muscles adjusting and settling into the repetitive motion.

  James watched from his open bedroom window. He considered going down to the beach to call the man in, but he also saw freedom in the little rowing boat. If you could choose somewhere to die, there were far worse places than out at sea.

  The boat grew smaller. It lurched endearingly over each cylinder of tide that rolled so massively underneath it. Up and down, further and further.

  The old man could smell the salt on the air. He loved it when that happened. Years of living in the house had accustomed his ears to the sound of the ocean but today he made a point of appreciating it. He looked down at his hands, at the knuckles that stood out sharper than they had when he was a young man, and pulled the window to.

  He could hear the murmur of the television set downstairs. His grandchildren were watching their cartoons. He would have to ready them soon. They needed to go to the village and pick up a few things. Joseph had called and asked him to buy seeds at the garden centre, but that could wait. He looked out of the window again to see if the man in the rowing boat had turned back and was heading into shore. But there was nothing there. The sea was just its plain old self.

  He crossed the room and sat at his wife’s dressing table, which he used as a writing desk. He still kept a picture of her in a silver frame. For the first time in eleven years he was glad she was dead. He would not have wanted her to experience this, the death of a child. He knew things were going to become bad. He had never before sensed the lingering panic that hung in the air now. It was everywhere. He was scared for the future.

  His stationery was in one of the drawers underneath the tabletop. He pulled it open and gathered up his pen and a sheaf of papers. Placing the pen to his lips he wondered what he should write.

  The room came into slow focus. She was cold and the place was silent. Slowly, she rose from the bed. Her knees stung as they stretched and a sudden fear opened inside her. She went into the living room but it was empty.

  ‘Joseph?’

  There was no answer. He wasn’t in the bathroom and he wasn’t in the hallway. Pele was in his basket, looking out at her through solemn eyes. There was a note taped to the fridge door and as she read it needles of anger pricked in her throat.

  He had left her. The note said he had gone to the university to pick up some things, and that he had found her some running shoes she should use. She could hear herself breathing. It was so like him. He knew she needed to see her mother but he didn’t care. He just did whatever he wanted. He didn’t care about her, or the kids. She was nothing more than a tendril between Joseph and his brother, a rope for him to hold on to.

  Isolated and angry she crossed to the French windows. Pele stirred in his basket. A thick plume of black smoke rose on the horizon. It crept slowly upwards, perfectly defined, its edges crisp against the pearlescent vista of the late winter morning.

  She had to get to her mother. It didn’t matter how she got there, she had to see her. She scribbled a note, and went to the door.

  A picture frame stood on a shelf in the porch, of Joseph and Henry standing on a pier, holding fishing rods. There was a wide smile on Joseph’s face and he was lifting his thumb to the sky. Miriam found it difficult picturing Joseph as the carefree person she was looking at. That part of him was so far gone that it was difficult to believe it could ever have been there at all. Life had chewed him up and spat him out.

  The air was freezing outside. It blasted her face and hair and she pulled the collar up around her neck. Old deserted shops were separated by modern, ugly, red-brick structures like Joseph’s apartment building. She hurried to the busier road around the corner.

  As she turned on to it she was struck by the sense of normality. She didn’t know exactly what she had been expecting, but this was not it. After the horrors she had seen she assumed London would have fallen apart, but that was not the case. People were walking up and down the road, clutching shopping bags, holding cardboard cups filled with coffee. None of them seemed panicked. The world just kept going.

  The bus she needed was a quarter of a mile away. She walked quickly up the street and tried to empty her mind. Further up the road a man was standing on a wooden crate. He was holding a banner and shouting. As she approached his words started to clear in her head. His banner was daubed in black paint. It read ‘333’. It was mounted on two wooden poles that he held above his head.

  ‘It will come for three hundred and thirty-three days,’ he called.

  Miriam kept walking. She wanted to keep her head down but it was difficult to ignore him. His voice was so clear. She looked over to him and their eyes locked. He lifted the banner even higher.

  ‘I have seen it,’ he shouted, directly to her. ‘I walked the desert and I saw the number. The earth will swell for three hundred and thirty-three days. You are not safe. Are you listening? You, the woman across the road.’

  Miriam’s heart quickened with her pace.

  ‘You should listen to me,’ he called after her. ‘I came to an oasis and I saw a pool of water in the sand. It was as blue and clear as sapphires and the sand underneath rippled like lines of ribs. Fourteen fish swam in the waters, two for each colour of the rainbow.’

  Miriam slowed.

  ‘I watched the fish swim in silence for three days. And then I turned and saw a woman on her knees beside a bright green stem that was topped with two leaves. One pointed at the North Star, the other at the Lion.’

  His voice echoed off the buildings so that it was coming at her from all directions. Two men were standing at the corner of a junction, watching and listening. The younger man was holding a baby wrapped in a blanket. There was no traffic on the road now and the ambient sound of the city had diminished to little more than a few dead leaves bristling in the gutter. A young woman had stopped directly opposite the prophet. She
sat down against the front wall of a building and pulled a packet of cigarettes from her jacket.

  The man on the wooden crate looked like any other man. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a red T-shirt, despite the freezing weather, like the man she had seen on the bench.

  ‘The woman was weeping,’ he called. ‘I went to her and looked into her eyes. Past the tears I could see colours swimming inside her. The fish. She had taken them for herself and put them in her eyes. And so the Earth had taken her. Do you not see this? Do you not understand the theft of the fourteen fish? There are ancient rivers in us, between us, and now they run again. I sat with her for seven days and on the morning of the eighth day three sand dunes grew out of the desert and I felt them saying to me that this was the duration for which they would come. The Earth will swell around us and take our souls for three hundred and thirty-three days.’

  Miriam moved along. She crossed the road and turned right at the junction that would take her to the bus. A pub was on the corner and several people were sitting on the benches outside, smoking, happily enjoying their drinks.

  The road led round a bend and when it straightened Miriam stopped. There was a church up ahead. A large crowd of people had gathered outside and were spilling out into the road. Even from her distance she could hear the sounds of people crying. She regarded the scene for a moment. The road was quiet and there was a gentle melancholy hanging over the people outside the church. She went slowly forwards.

  There was a patch of wasteland on her left. Thick grass shot up in clumps between the hard, ice-bound mud. Discarded lengths of rusting metal sat at awkward angles on the ground. Large laurel bushes grew between the piles of rubble and there, amongst it all, a man was standing upright, arms limp at his side, very still. And he was staring at her.

  Tears formed in her eyes when she saw him and an upwelling of grief curdled inside. Whatever it was that had taken her husband had taken that man out there in the dry, ochre wastes. Something vital had gone from him and she could sense its absence keenly. She wondered if the man was going to die; whether there was any coming back from it.

  She was running now. Her hair caught in the wind and her face pricked with cold. Her vision blurred. Something very dangerous and very evil was in the world and it had not been there before. It had descended into the places between places, the forgotten edges of the world that only come back to us when they are disturbed; those cracks and alcoves that invisibly order themselves into a construct over which reality drapes itself and becomes solid.

  The people gathered round the church looked up when they saw her running towards them. Most of them were black. The tears wobbled on the surface of Miriam’s eyes and fell away.

  The priest, who was female, saw her and stepped to the front of the crowd.

  ‘Please,’ said Miriam, no longer aware of why she was crying, for whom she was crying. ‘Please help.’

  She stopped and the priest smiled at her. Miriam took a deep breath and wiped her eyes.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said the woman, with a rich Caribbean accent.

  ‘There’s a man,’ said Miriam, out of breath.

  Her lungs were stinging. Her mind was reeling, falling over itself, tripping on outcrops of sharp images. She just wanted to see her mother, to get her kids back, for things to be the opposite of what they were. Her chest heaved. ‘Back there. He needs help.’

  The priest tried to calm her.

  ‘OK, OK, honey. It’s going to be fine.’ She turned to the crowd.

  ‘Anton,’ she called, and gestured for one of the men to come over.

  Miriam’s eyes went past the priest and fell on the scene outside the church. There were so many of them. The pores of her skin clammed shut and she felt blue ice in her flesh. They were just lying there, those stricken down by it. Twenty or thirty of them. Miriam tried to breathe too fast and coughed. Her eyes swept over the faces, all of them expressionless, looking at nothing. Families sat around the victims, crying in disbelief. Bunches of bright flowers were lined up against the wall of the red-brick church.

  One of the victims was a little boy. He was dressed in a grey school uniform and he lay on his side, half on the pavement, half off. His mother and grandmother were huddled over him, each holding one of his hands. The boy stared out across the road, his lips slightly parted, his eyelids a quarter down. Miriam took a step backwards.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said the priest. She lowered her head and looked up into Miriam’s eyes. ‘What’s your name?’

  Miriam steadied herself. She thought she might be about to throw up.

  ‘Miri. Miriam.’

  ‘My name is Grace.’ The priest turned back to the crowd. She was tall and slim, with a long neck and short-cropped hair. ‘Anton, I said come over here, please.’ The priest turned back to Miriam and smiled.

  A large black man who had been leaning against the closed and heavy-looking wooden doors of the church stood up.

  ‘What about the doors?’

  A large, metal padlock held them shut. Several thick metal pipes were leaning against them and a group of big men were standing in front.

  ‘Just come over here, OK?’

  Anton picked up one of the metal pipes and approached them.

  ‘What’s locked in the church?’ said Miriam, quietly.

  Grace hooked her arm under Miriam’s and turned her round. As she did so there was a loud bang from inside the church, of something heavy being slammed into the door. Miriam jumped and went to turn but Grace pulled her back.

  ‘Don’t you worry yourself about that,’ she said, patting Miriam’s arm. ‘Come on, let’s go and find your man. Just keep walking.’

  ‘They’re calling it the Sadness,’ said Grace. They walked down the road towards the wasteland. ‘Nobody knows what it is, or where it’s come from.’

  Miriam stared straight ahead. She remembered that she was supposed to be going to her mother, that she was losing time, but the thought was indistinct, nebulous.

  ‘Has anybody you know been affected?’

  ‘My husband,’ Miriam answered quickly, surprised by the speed of her response. There was adrenalin in her blood and her body felt light.

  Anton walked a few feet before them, clutching his metal pipe. He was taller than six foot, with broad shoulders and a long straight back.

  ‘Why has he got that pipe?’

  She noticed the tiny hesitation in Grace before she answered.

  ‘Not everyone reacts to it in the same way,’ she said, unwilling to add anything more than that.

  The sound of people crying outside the church receded. A gentle but cold breeze drifted over their faces as they reached the wasteland. The metal fence that had once separated the land from the pavement lay flat on the rocky soil. Anton lifted his pipe over his shoulder and stepped over it.

  ‘Watch your footing, ladies,’ he said, in a voice rich and deep. He climbed on to a block of concrete and looked around, his metal pipe swinging lazily at his side. ‘I can’t see anybody.’

  Then there was the clashing of metal against rock as Anton dropped his pipe and stumbled backwards. Something had struck him. Blood was coming from the side of his head.

  A scream broke out from the direction of the church and Miriam swung her head round. There was too much happening, too many stimuli. Anton fell from the concrete altar and when his feet hit the ground his legs buckled beneath him. Dark red blood flowed freely down the side of his face, visible as a glistening stream against his skin.

  There was movement from the wasteland. A man scorched out of one of the low laurel bushes, dust spitting up around his feet as his shoes pounded into the dirt. It was the same man Miriam had seen, but now he was wholly changed. He was running in a straight line towards Anton. It did not seem real. He was moving too fast, as if it was some trick of the light, an illusion.

  ‘Anton!’ called Grace, dashing out across the open space.

  Miriam felt helpless. She couldn’t move. She just watched as Anton tried
to lift his bleeding head. She willed her brain to get into gear and then, quickly, she ran after Grace.

  The man sprinting across the wasteland did not stop. He hurdled the larger rocks, his ankles buckling on the rough terrain, but he kept coming.

  ‘Get away from me,’ he screamed. His voice tore viscerally across the air. His words were contradictory to his actions, as if his body was ruling his mind. ‘Get away – I don’t want to do this.’

  The man was going to reach Anton before Grace. He was running so fast. His legs seemed to take strength from the ground itself. When his feet hit the dirt it was as if the earth fired them back up. He was not running across the ground, he was skimming along it like a cat. He reached the concrete block, lifted Anton’s metal pipe off the ground and stood over the limp mass of human at his feet, ready to strike.

  ‘No,’ screamed Grace. ‘Get away from him. Get away from my brother.’

  Miriam saw the man’s face saturate with pity.

  ‘I can’t,’ he cried. His chest heaved with exertion. ‘It won’t let me.’

  He lifted the pipe above his head and pushed his shoulders down to swing but Anton threw dirt up into his face. The man jerked his head sideways. He coughed, stopped and then went to swing again. The brief pause was enough to allow Anton to lift his forearm. The force with which the metal pipe swung through the air was shocking and violent. It whirred, made a low whistling sound and crashed into the bone of Anton’s arm with a deep, metallic clang. Anton grunted, his face contorted in pain as his arm depressed in on itself.

  Grace threw herself bodily at the infected man. He stumbled sideways under her weight but realigned his balance almost immediately. He prised Grace from his back and pushed her down. She went sprawling across the rocks, too far for a normal human, as if being dragged backwards across the ground.

  Ignoring her, the man swung at Anton. He seemed able to draw every ounce of energy from his body, to tap into some ancient reservoir that had been long since forgotten in humans. He moved like an animal. The pipe came down into the side of Anton’s head with an unnatural power and his body went instantly loose. Miriam stopped. Anton fell between her and the infected man and when his body hit the floor, the man was looking at her, his mouth open, baring his teeth.