White and Other Tales of Ruin

by Tim Lebbon

  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 death bed. 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 a person has 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 realise 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 world-wide 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 any more.”

  “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 seabirds?”

  “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 colour of death. It’s the colour 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 Hayden 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 grey 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 of the window and saw Jayne striding naked towards 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.

  By midday we had done what we could. The kitchen, one of the living rooms and the hall and staircase were left open; every other room downstairs was boarded up from the outside in. We’d also covered the windows in those rooms left open, but we left thin viewing po
rts like horizontal arrow slits in the walls of an old castle. And like the weary defenders of those ancient citadels, we were under siege.

  “So what did you all see?” I said as we sat in the kitchen. Nobody denied anything.

  “Badgers,” Rosalie said. “Big, white, fast. Sliding over the snow like they were on skis. Demon badgers from hell!” She joked, but it was obvious that she was terrified.

  “Not badgers,” Ellie cut in. “Deer. But wrong. Deer with scales. Or something. All wrong.”

  “Hayden, what did you see?”

  He remained hunched over the cooker, stirring a weak stew of old vegetable and stringy beef. “I didn’t see anything.”

  I went to argue with him but realised he was probably telling the truth. We had all seen something different, why not see nothing at all? Just as unlikely.

  “You know,” said Ellie, standing at a viewing slot with the snow reflecting sunlight in a band across her face, “we’re all seeing white animals. White animals in the snow. So maybe we’re seeing nothing at all. Maybe it’s our imaginations. Perhaps Hayden is nearer the truth than all of us.”

  “Boris and the others had pretty strong imaginations, then,” said Rosalie, bitter tears animating her eyes.

  We were silent once again, stirring our weak milk-less tea, all thinking our own thoughts about what was out in the snow. Nobody had asked me what I had seen and I was glad. Last night they were fleeting white shadows, but today I had seen Jayne as well. A Jayne I had known was not really there, even as I watched her coming at me through the snow. I’ll be with you again.

  “In China, white is the colour of death,” Ellie said. She spoke at the boarded window, never for an instant glancing away. Her hands held onto the shotgun as if it had become one with her body. I wondered what she had been in the past: I have a history, she’d said. “White. Happiness and joy.”

  “It was also the colour of mourning for the Victorians,” I added.

  “And we’re in a Victorian manor.” Hayden did not turn around as he spoke, but his words sent our imaginations scurrying.

  “We’re all seeing white animals,” Ellie said quietly. “Like white noise. All tones, all frequencies. We’re all seeing different things as one.”

  “Oh,” Rosalie whispered, “well that explains a lot.”

  I thought I could see where Ellie was coming from; at least, I was looking in the right direction. “White noise is used to mask other sounds,” I said.

  Ellie only nodded.

  “There’s something else going on here.” I sat back in my chair and stared up, trying to divine the truth in the patchwork mould on the kitchen ceiling. “We’re not seeing it all.”

  Ellie glanced away from the window, just for a second. “I don’t think we’re seeing anything.”

  Later we found out some more of what was happening. We went to bed, doors opened in the night, footsteps creaked old floorboards. And through the dark the sound of lovemaking drew us all to another, more terrible death.

  three: the colour of mourning

  I had not made love to anyone since Jayne’s death. It was months before she died that we last indulged, a bitter, tearful experience when she held a sheet of polythene between our chests and stomachs to prevent her diseased skin touching my own. It did not make for the most romantic of occasions, and afterward she cried herself to sleep as I sat holding her hand and staring into the dark.

  After her death I came to the manor, the others came along to find something or escape from something else, and there were secretive noises in the night. The manor was large enough for us to have a room each, but in the darkness doors would open and close again, and every morning the atmosphere at breakfast was different.

  My door had never opened and I had opened no doors. There was a lingering guilt over Jayne’s death, a sense that I would be betraying her love if I went with someone else. A greater cause of my loneliness was my inherent lack of confidence, a certainty that no one here would be interested in me: I was quiet, introspective, and uninteresting, a fledgling bird devoid of any hope of taking wing with any particular talent. No one would want me.

  But none of this could prevent the sense of isolation, subtle jealousy and yearning I felt each time I heard footsteps in the dark. I never heard anything else — the walls were too thick for that, the building too solid — but my imagination filled in the missing parts. Usually, Ellie was the star. And there lay another problem — lusting after a woman I did not even like very much.

  The night it all changed for us was the first time I heard someone making love in the manor. The voice was androgynous in its ecstasy, a high keening, dropping off into a prolonged sigh before rising again. I sat up in bed, trying to shake off the remnants of dreams that clung like seaweed to a drowned corpse. Jayne had been there, of course, and something in the snow, and another something which was Jayne and the snow combined. I recalled wallowing in the sharp whiteness and feeling my skin sliced by ice edges, watching the snow grow pink around me, then white again as Jayne came and spread her cleansing touch across the devastation.

  The cry came once more, wanton and unhindered by any sense of decorum.

  Who? I thought. Obviously Hayden, but who was he with? Rosalie? Cynical, paranoid, terrified Rosalie?

  Or Ellie?

  I hoped Rosalie.

  I sat back against the headboard, unable to lie down and ignore the sound. The curtains hung open — I had no reason to close them — and the moonlight revealed that it was snowing once again. I wondered what was out there watching the sleeping manor, listening to the crazy sounds of lust emanating from a building still spattered with the blood and memory of those who had died so recently. I wondered whether the things out there had any understanding of human emotion — the highs, the lows, the tenacious spirit that could sometimes survive even the most downheartening, devastating events — and what they made of the sound they could hear now. Perhaps they thought they were screams of pain. Ecstasy and thoughtless agony often sounded the same.

  The sound continued, rising and falling. Added to it now the noise of something thumping rhythmically against a wall.

  I thought of the times before Jayne had been ill, before the great decline had really begun, when most of the population still thought humankind could clean up what it had dirtied and repair what it had torn asunder. We’d been married for several years, our love as deep as ever, our lust still refreshing and invigorating. Car seats, cinemas, woodland, even a telephone box, all had been visited by us at some stage, laughing like adolescents, moaning and sighing together, content in familiarity.

  And as I sat there remembering my dead wife, something strange happened. I could not identify exactly when the realisation hit me, but I was suddenly sure of one thing: the voice I was listening to was Jayne’s. She was moaning as someone else in the house made love to her. She had come in from outside, that cold unreal Jayne I had seen so recently, and she had gone to Hayden’s room, and now I was being betrayed by someone I had never betrayed, ever.

  I shook my head, knowing it was nonsense but certain also that the voice was hers. I was so sure that I stood, dressed and opened my bedroom door without considering the impossibility of what was happening. Reality was controlled by the darkness, not by whatever light I could attempt to throw upon it. I may as well have had my eyes closed.

  The landing was lit by several shaded candles in wall brackets, their soft light barely reaching the floor, flickering as breezes came from nowhere. Where the light did touch it showed old carpet, worn by time and faded by countless unknown footfalls. The walls hung with shredded paper, damp and torn like dead skin, the lath and plaster beneath pitted and crumbled. The air was thick with age, heavy with must, redolent with faint hints of hauntings. Where my feet fell I could sense the floor dipping slightly beneath me, though whether this was actuality or a runover from my dream I was unsure.

  I could have been walking on snow.

  I moved toward Hayden’s room and the volu
me of the sighing and crying increased. I paused one door away, my heart thumping not with exertion but with the thought that Jayne was a dozen steps from me, making love with Hayden, a man I hardly really knew.

  Jayne’s dead, I told myself, and she cried out once, loud, as she came. Another voice then, sighing and straining, and this one was Jayne as well.

  Someone touched my elbow. I gasped and spun around, too shocked to scream. Ellie was there in her night-shirt, bare legs hidden in shadow. She had a strange look in her eye. It may have been the subdued lighting. I went to ask her what she was doing here, but then I realised it was probably the same as me. She’d stayed downstairs last night, unwilling to share a watch duty, insistent that we should all sleep.

  I went to tell her that Jayne was in there with Hayden, then I realised how stupid this would sound, how foolish it actually was.

  At least, I thought, it’s not Ellie in there. Rosalie it must be. At least not Ellie. Certainly not Jayne.

  And Jayne cried out again.

  Goosebumps speckled my skin and brought it to life. The hairs on my neck stood to attention, my spine tingled.

  “Hayden having a nice time?” someone whispered, and Rosalie stepped up behind Ellie.

  I closed my eyes, listening to Jayne’s cries. She had once screamed like that in a park, and the keeper had chased us out with his waving torch and throaty shout, the light splaying across our nakedness as we laughed and struggled to gather our clothes around us as we ran.

  “Doesn’t sound like Hayden to me,” Ellie said.

  The three of us stood outside Hayden’s door for a while, listening to the sounds of lovemaking from within — the cries, the moving bed, the thud of wood against the wall. I felt like an intruder, however much I realised something was very wrong with all of this. Hayden was on his own in there. As we each tried to figure out what we were really hearing, the sounds from within changed. There was not one cry, not two, but many, overlying each other, increasing and expanding until the voice became that of a crowd. The light in the corridor seemed to dim as the crying increased, though it may have been my imagination.