Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed (13 page)

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 without 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 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 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.

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 ports 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 vegetables and stringy beef. “I didn’t see anything.”

I went to argue with him but realized 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
.

“The color of death…” Ellie said. She spoke at the boarded window, never for an instant glancing away. Her hands held on to 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 color 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.”