Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed (12 page)

We ate our stale breakfast, drank tea clotted with powdered milk, listened to the silence outside. It had snowed again in the night and our tracks from the day before had been obliterated. Standing at the sink to wash up I stared through the window, and it was like looking upon the same day as yesterday, the day before and the day before that; no signs of our presence existed. All footprints had vanished, all echoes of voices swallowed by the snow, shadows covered with another six inches and frozen like corpses in a glacier. I wondered what patterns and traces the snow would hold this evening, when darkness closed in to wipe us away once more.

“We have to tell someone,” Charley said. “Something’s happening. We should tell someone. We have to do something. We can’t just…” She trailed off, staring into a cooling cup of tea, perhaps remembering a time before all this had begun, or imagining she could remember. “This is crazy.”

“It’s God,” Rosalie said.

“Huh?” Hayden, already peeling wrinkled old vegetables, was ready for lunch, constantly busy, always doing something to keep his mind off everything else. I wondered how much really went on behind his fringed brow, how much theorizing he did while he was boiling, how much nostalgia he wallowed in as familiar cooking smells settled into his clothes.

“It’s God, fucking us over one more time. Crazy, as Charley says. God and crazy are synonymous.”

“Rosie,” I said, knowing she hated the shortened name, “if it’s not constructive, don’t bother. None of this will bring—”

“Anything is more constructive than sod-all, which is what you lot have got to say this morning. We wake up one morning without one of us dead, and you’re all tongue-tied. Bored? Is that it?”

“Rosalie, why—”

“Shut it, Charley. You more than anyone should be thinking about all this. Wondering why the hell we came here a few weeks ago to escape all the shit, and now we’ve landed right in the middle of it. Right up to our armpits. Drowning in it. Maybe one of us is a Jonah and it’s followed—”

“And you think it’s God?” I said. I knew that asking the question would give her open opportunity to rant, but in a way I felt she was right—we did need to talk. Sitting here stewing in our own thoughts could not help anyone.

“Oh yes, it’s His Holiness,” she nodded, “sitting on his pedestal of lost souls, playing around one day and deciding, hmm, maybe I’ll have some fun today, been a year since a decent earthquake, a few months since the last big volcano eruption. Soooo, what can I do?”

Ellie appeared then, sat at the table and poured a cup of cold tea that looked like sewer water. Her appearance did nothing to interrupt Rosalie’s flow.

“I know, he says, I’ll nudge things to one side, turn them slightly askew, give the world a gasp before I’ve cleaned my teeth. Just a little, not so that anyone will notice for a while. Get them paranoid. Get them looking over their shoulders at each other. See how the wrinkly pink bastards deal with that one!”

“Why would He do that?” Hayden said.

Rosalie stood and put on a deep voice. “Forget me, will they? I’ll show them. Turn over and open your legs, humanity, for I shall root you up the arse.”

“Just shut up!” Charley screeched. The kitchen went ringingly quiet, even as Rosalie slowly sat down. “You’re full of this sort of shit, Rosie. Always telling us how we’re being controlled, manipulated. Who by? Ever seen anyone? There’s a hidden agenda behind everything for you, isn’t there? If there’s no toilet paper after you’ve had a crap you’d blame it on the global dirty-arse conspiracy!”

Hysteria hung silently in the room. The urge to cry grabbed me, but also a yearning to laugh out loud. The air was heavy with held breaths and barely restrained comments, thick with the potential for violence.

“So,” Ellie said at last, her voice little more than a whisper, “let’s hear some truths.”

“What?” Rosalie obviously expected an extension of her foolish monologue. Ellie, however, cut her down.

“Well, for starters has anyone else seen things in the snow?” Heads shook. My own shook as well. I wondered who else was lying with me. “Anyone seen anything strange out there at all?” she continued. “Maybe not the things Brand and Boris saw, but something else?” Again, shaken heads. An uncomfortable shuffling from Hayden as he stirred something on the gas cooker.

“I saw God looking down on us,” Rosalie said quietly, “with blood in his eyes.” She did not continue or elaborate, did not go off on one of her rants. I think that’s why her strange comment stayed with me.

“Right,” said Ellie, “then may I make a suggestion? Firstly, there’s no point trying to get to the village. The snow’s even deeper than it was yesterday, it’s colder and freezing to death for the sake of it will achieve nothing. If we did manage to find help, Boris and Brand are long past it.” She paused, waiting for assent.

“Fair enough,” Charley said quietly. “Yeah, you’re right.”

“Secondly, we need to make sure the manor is secure. We need to protect ourselves from whatever got at Brand and Boris. There are a dozen rooms on the ground floor, we only use two or three of them. Check the others. Make sure windows are locked and storm shutters are bolted. Make sure French doors aren’t loose or liable to break open at the slightest… breeze, or whatever.”

“What do you think the things out there are?” Hayden asked. “Lock pickers?”

Ellie glanced at his back, looked at me, shrugged. “No,” she said, “I don’t think so. But there’s no use being complacent. We can’t try to make it out, so we should do the most we can here. The snow can’t last forever, and when it finally melts we’ll go to the village then. Agreed?”

Heads nodded.

“If the village is still there,” Rosalie cut in. “If everyone isn’t dead. If the disease hasn’t wiped out most of the country. If a war doesn’t start somewhere in the meantime.”

“Yes,” Ellie sighed impatiently, “if all those things don’t happen.” She nodded at me. “We’ll do the two rooms at the back. The rest of you check the others. There are some tools in the big cupboard under the stairs, some nails and hammers if you need them, a crowbar too. And if you think you need timber to nail across windows… if it’ll make you feel any better… tear up some floorboards in the dining room. They’re hardwood, so they’re strong.”

“Oh, let the battle commence!” Rosalie cried. She stood quickly, her chair falling onto its back, and stalked from the room with a swish of her long skirts. Charley followed.

Ellie and I went to the rear of the manor. In the first of the large rooms the snow had drifted up against the windows to cut out any view or light from outside. For an instant it seemed as if nothing existed beyond the glass and I wondered if that was the case, then why were we trying to protect ourselves?

Against nothing.

“What do you think is out there?” I asked.

“Have you seen anything?”

I paused. There was something, but nothing I could easily identify or put a name to. What I had seen had been way beyond my ken, white shadows apparent against whiteness. “No,” I said, “nothing.”

Ellie turned from the window and looked at me in the half light, and it was obvious that she knew I was lying. “Well, if you do see something, don’t tell.”

“Why?”

“Boris and Brand told,” she said. She did not say any more. They’d seen angels and stags in the snow and they’d talked about it, and now they were dead.

She pushed at one of the window frames. Although the damp timber fragmented at her touch, the snow drift behind it was as effective as a vault door. We moved on to the next window. The room was noisy with unspoken thoughts, and it was only a matter of time before they made themselves heard.

“You think someone in here has something to do with Brand and Boris,” I said.

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!”