We found the first body two days before Christmas.
Charley had been out gathering sticks to dry for tinder. She had worked her way through the wild garden and down toward the cliffs, scooping snow from beneath and around bushes and bagging whatever dead twigs she found there. There were no signs, she said. No disturbances in the virgin surface of the snow; no tracks; no warning. Nothing to prepare her for the scene of bloody devastation she stumbled across.
She had rounded a big boulder and seen the red splash in the snow which was all that remained of a human being. The shock froze her comprehension. The reality of the scene struggled to imprint itself on her mind. Then, slowly, what she was looking at finally registered.
She ran back screaming. She’d only recognised her boyfriend by what was left of his shoes.
We were in the dining room trying to make sense of the last few weeks when Charley came bursting in. We spent a lot of time doing that: talking together in the big living rooms of the manor; in pairs, crying and sharing warmth; or alone, staring into darkening skies and struggling to discern a meaning in the infinite. I was one of those more usually alone. I’d been an only child and contrary to popular belief, my upbringing had been a nightmare. I always thought my parents blamed me for the fact that they could not have any more children, and instead of enjoying and reveling in my own childhood, I spent those years watching my mother and father mourn the ghosts of unborn offspring. It would have been funny if it were not so sad.
Charley opened the door by falling into it. She slumped to the floor, hair plastered across her forehead, her eyes two bright sparks peering between the knotted strands. Caked snow fell from her boots and speckled the timber floor, dirtied into slush. The first thing I noticed was its pinkish tinge.
The second thing I saw was the blood covering Charley’s hands.
“Charley!” Hayden jumped to his feet and almost caught the frantic woman before she hit the deck. He went down with her, sprawling in a sudden puddle of dirt and tears. He saw the blood then and backed away automatically. “Charley?”
“Get some towels,” Ellie said, always the pragmatist, “and a fucking gun.”
I’d seen people screaming — all my life I’d never forgotten Jayne’s final hours — but I had never seen someone actually beyond the point of screaming. Charley gasped and clawed at her throat, trying to open it up and let out the pain and the shock trapped within. It was not exertion that had stolen her breath; it was whatever she had seen.
She told us what that was.
I went with Ellie and Brand. Ellie had a shotgun cradled in the crook of her arm, a bobble hat hiding her severely short hair, her face all hard. There was no room in her life for compliments, but right now she was the one person in the manor I’d choose to be with. She’d been all for trying to make it out alone on foot; I was so glad that she eventually decided to stay.
Brand muttered all the way. “Oh fuck, oh shit, what are we doing coming out here? Like those crazy girls in slasher movies, you know? Always chasing the bad guys instead of running from them? Asking to get their throats cut? Oh man …”
In many ways I agreed with him. According to Charley there was little left of Boris to recover, but she could have been wrong. We owed it to him to find out. However harsh the conditions, whatever the likelihood of his murderer — animal or human — still being out here, we could not leave Boris lying dead in the snow. Apply whatever levels of civilisation, foolish custom or superiority complex you like, it just wasn’t done.
Ellie led the way across the manor’s front garden and out onto the coastal road. The whole landscape was hidden beneath snow, like old sheet-covered furniture awaiting the homecoming of long-gone owners. I wondered who would ever make use of this land again — who would be left to bother when the snow did finally melt — but that train of thought led only to depression.
We crossed the flat area of the road, following Charley’s earlier footprints in the deep snow; even and distinct on the way out, chaotic on the return journey. As if she’d had something following her.
She had. We all saw what had been chasing her when we slid and clambered down toward the cliffs, veering behind the big rock that signified the beginning of the coastal path. The sight of Boris opened up and spread across the snow had pursued her all the way, and was probably still snapping at her heels now. The smell of his insides slowly cooling under an indifferent sky. The sound of his frozen blood crackling under foot.
Ellie hefted the gun, holding it waist-high, ready to fire in an instant. Her breath condensed in the air before her, coming slightly faster than moments before. She glanced at the torn-up Boris, then surveyed our surroundings, looking for whoever had done this. East and west along the coast, down toward the cliff edge, up to the lip of rock above us, east and west again; Ellie never looked back down at Boris.
I did. I couldn’t keep my eyes off what was left of him. It looked as though something big and powerful had held him up to the rock, scraped and twisted him there for a while, and then calmly taken him apart across the snow-covered path. Spray patterns of blood stood out brighter than their surroundings. Every speck was visible and there were many specks, thousands of them spread across a ten metre area. I tried to find a recognisable part of him, but all that was even vaguely identifiable as human was a hand, stuck to the rock in a mess of frosty blood, fingers curled in like the legs of a dead spider. The wrist was tattered, the bone splintered. It had been snapped, not cut.
Brand pointed out a shoe on its side in the snow. “Fuck, Charley was right. Just his shoes left. Miserable bastard always wore the same shoes.”
I’d already seen the shoe. It was still mostly full. Boris had not been a miserable bastard. He was introspective, thoughtful, sensitive, sincere, qualities which Brand would never recognise as anything other than sourness. Brand was as thick as shit and twice as unpleasant.
The silence seemed to press in around me. Silence, and cold, and a raw smell of meat, and the sea chanting from below. I was surrounded by everything.
“Let’s get back,” I said. Ellie glanced at me and nodded.
“But what about — ” Brand started, but Ellie cut in without even looking at him.
“You want to make bloody snowballs, go ahead. There’s not much to take back. We’ll maybe come again later. Maybe.”
“What did this?” I said, feeling reality start to shimmy past the shock I’d been gripped by for the last couple of minutes. “Just what the hell?”
Ellie backed up to me and glanced at the rock, then both ways along the path. “I don’t want to find out just yet,” she said.
Later, alone in my room, I would think about exactly what Ellie had meant. I don’t want to find out just yet, she had said, implying that the perpetrator of Boris’s demise would be revealed to us soon. I’d hardly known Boris, quiet guy that he was, and his fate was just another line in the strange composition of death that had overcome the whole country during the last few weeks.
Charley and I were here in the employment of the Department of the Environment. Our brief was to keep a check on the radiation levels in the Atlantic Drift, since things had gone to shit in South America and the dirty reactors began to melt down in Brazil. It was a bad job with hardly any pay, but it gave us somewhere to live. The others had tagged along for differing reasons; friends and lovers of friends, all taking the opportunity to get away from things for a while and chill out in the wilds of Cornwall.
But then things went to shit here as well. On TV, minutes before it had ceased broadcasting for good, someone called it the ruin.
Then it had started to snow.
Hayden had taken Charley upstairs, still trying to quell her hysteria. We had no medicines other than aspirin and cough mixtures, but there were a hundred bottles of wine in the cellar. It seemed that Hayden had already poured most of a bottle down Charley’s throat by the time the three of us arrived back at the manor. Not a good idea, I thought — I could hardly imagine what ghosts a drunken Charley would see, what terrors her alcohol-induced dreams held in store for her once she was finally left on her own- but it was not my place to say.
Brand stormed in and with his usual subtlety painted a picture of what we’d seen. “Boris’s guts were just everywhere, hanging on the rock, spread over the snow. Melted in, like they were still hot when he was being cut up. What the fuck would do that? Eh? Just what the fuck?”
“Who did it?” Rosalie, our resident paranoid, asked.
I shrugged. “Can’t say.”
“Why not?”
“Not won’t,” I said, “can’t. Can’t tell. There’s not too much left to tell by, as Brand has so eloquently revealed.”
Ellie stood before the open fire and held out her hands, palms up, as if asking for something. A touch of emotion, I mused, but then my thoughts were often cruel.
“Ellie?” Rosalie demanded an answer.
Ellie shrugged. “We can rule out suicide.” Nobody responded.
I went through to the kitchen and opened the back door. We were keeping our beers on a shelf in the rear conservatory now that the electricity had gone off. There was a generator, but not enough fuel to run it for more than an hour every day. We agreed that hot water was a priority for that meagre time, so the fridge was now extinct.
I surveyed my choice: Stella; a few final cans of Caffreys; Boddingtons. That had been Jayne’s favourite. She’d drunk it in pints, inevitably doing a bad impression of some moustachioed actor after the first creamy sip. I could still see her sparkling eyes as she tried to think of someone new… I grabbed a Caffreys and shut the back door, and it was as the latch clicked home that I started to shake.
I’d seen a dead man five minutes ago, a man I’d been talking to the previous evening, drinking with, chatting about what the hell had happened to the world, making inebriated plans of escape, knowing all the time that the snow had us trapped here like chickens surrounded by a fiery moat. Boris had been quiet but thoughtful, the most intelligent person here at the manor. It had been his idea to lock the doors to many of the rooms because we never used them, and any heat we managed to generate should be kept in the rooms we did use. He had suggested a long walk as the snow had begun in earnest and it had been our prevarication and, I admit, our arguing that had kept us here long enough for it to matter. By the time Boris had persuaded us to make a go of it, the snow was three feet deep. Five miles and we’d be dead. Maximum. The nearest village was ten miles away.
He was dead. Something had taken him apart, torn him up, ripped him to pieces. I was certain that there had been no cutting involved as Brand had suggested. And yes, his bits did look melted into the snow. Still hot when they struck the surface, blooding it in death. Still alive and beating as they were taken out.
I sat at the kitchen table and held my head in my hands. Jayne had said that this would hold all the good thoughts in and let the bad ones seep through your fingers, and sometimes it seemed to work. Now it was just a comfort, like the hands of a lover kneading hope into flaccid muscles, or fear from tense ones.
It could not work this time. I had seen a dead man. And there was nothing we could do about it. We should be telling someone, but over the past few months any sense of ‘relevant authorities’ had fast faded away, just as Jayne had two years before; faded away to agony, then confusion, and then to nothing. Nobody knew what had killed her. Growths on her chest and stomach. Bad blood. Life.
I tried to open the can but my fingers were too cold to slip under the ring-pull. I became frustrated, then angry, and eventually my temper threw the can to the floor. It struck the flagstones and one edge split, sending a fine yellowish spray of beer across the old kitchen cupboards. I cried out at the waste. It was a feeling I was becoming more than used to.
“Hey,” Ellie said. She put one hand on my shoulder and removed it before I could shrug her away. “They’re saying we should tell someone.”
“Who?” I turned to look at her, unashamed of my tears. Ellie was a hard bitch. Maybe they made me more of a person than she.
She raised one eyebrow and pursed her lips. “Brand thinks the army. Rosalie thinks the Fairy Underground.”
I scoffed. “Fairy-fucking-Underground. Stupid cow.”
“She can’t help being like that. You ask me, it makes her more suited to how it’s all turning out.”
“And how’s that, exactly?” I hated Ellie sometimes, all her stronger-than-thou talk and steely eyes. But she was also the person I respected the most in out pathetic little group. Now that Boris had gone.
“Well,” she said, “for a start, take a look at how we’re all reacting to this. Shocked, maybe. Horrified. But it’s almost like it was expected.”
“It’s all been going to shit …” I said, but I did not need to continue. We had all known that we were not immune to the rot settling across society, nature, the world. Eventually it would find us. We just had not known when.
“There is the question of who did it,” she said quietly.
“Or what.”
She nodded. “Or what.”
For now, we left it at that.
“How’s Charley?”
“I was just going to see,” Ellie said. “Coming?”
I nodded and followed her from the room. The beer had stopped spraying and now fizzled into sticky rivulets where the flags joined. I was still thirsty.
Charley looked bad. She was drunk, that was obvious, and she had been sick down herself, and she had wet herself. Hayden was in the process of trying to mop up the mess when we knocked and entered.
“How is she?” Ellie asked pointlessly.
“How do you think?” He did not even glance at us as he tried to hold onto the babbling, crying, laughing and puking Charley.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have given her so much to drink,” Ellie said. Hayden sent her daggers but did not reply.
Charley struggled suddenly in his arms, ranting and shouting at the shaded candles in the corners of the room.
“What’s that?” I said. “What’s she saying?” For some reason it sounded important, like a solution to a problem encoded by grief.
“She’s been saying some stuff,” Hayden said loudly, so we could hear above Charley’s slurred cries. “Stuff about Boris. Seeing angels in the snow. She says his angels came to get him.”
“Some angels,” Ellie muttered.
“You go down,” Hayden said, “I’ll stay here with her.” He wanted us gone, that much was obvious, so we did not disappoint him.
Downstairs, Brand and Rosalie were hanging around the mobile phone. It had sat on the mantelpiece for the last three weeks like a gun without bullets, ugly and useless. Every now and then someone would try it, receiving only a crackling nothing in response. Random numbers, recalled numbers, numbers held in the ‘phone’s memory, all came to naught. Gradually it was tried less — every unsuccessful attempt had been more depressing.
“What?” I said.
“Trying to call someone,” Brand said. “Police. Someone.”
“So they can come to take fingerprints?” Ellie flopped into one of the old armchairs and began picking at its upholstery, widening a hole she’d been plucking at for days. “Any replies?”
Brand shook his head.
“We’ve got to do something,” Rosalie said, “we can’t just sit here while Boris is lying dead out there.”
Ellie said nothing. The telephone hissed its amusement. Rosalie looked to me. “There’s nothing we can do,” I said. “Really, there’s not much to collect up. If we did bring his … bits … back here, what would we do?”
“Bury…” Rosalie began.
“Three feet of snow? Frozen ground?”
“And the things,” Brand said. The phone cackled again and he turned it off.
“What things?”
Brand looked around our small group. “The things Boris said he’d seen.”
Boris had mentioned nothing to me. In our long, drunken talks, he had never talked of any angels in the snow. Upstairs, I’d thought that it was simply Charley drunk and mad with grief, but now Brand had said it too I had the distinct feeling I was missing out on something. I was irked, and upset at feeling irked.
“Things?” Rosalie said, and I closed my eyes. Oh fuck, don’t tell her, I willed at Brand. She’d regale us with stories of secret societies and messages in the clouds, disease-makers who were wiping out the inept and the crippled, the barren and the intellectually inadequate. Jayne had been sterile, so we’d never had kids. The last thing I needed was another one of Rosalie’s mad ravings about how my wife had died, why she’d died, who had killed her.
Luckily, Brand seemed of like mind. Maybe the joint he’d lit up had stewed him into silence at last. He turned to the fire and stared into its dying depths, sitting on the edge of the seat as if wondering whether or not to feed it some more. The stack of logs was running low.
“Things?” Rosalie said again, nothing if not persistent.
“No things,” I said. “Nothing.” I left the room before it all flared up.
In the kitchen I opened another can, carefully this time, and poured it into a tall glass. I stared into creamy depths as bubbles passed up and down. It took a couple of minutes for the drink to settle, and in that time I had recalled Jayne’s face, her body, the best times we’d had together. At my first sip, a tear replenished the glass.
That night I heard doors opening and closing as someone wandered between beds. I was too tired to care who.
The next morning I half expected it to be all better. I had the bitter taste of dread in my mouth when I woke up, but also a vague idea that all the bad stuff could only have happened in nightmares. As I dressed — two shirts, a heavy pullover, a jacket — I wondered what awaited me beyond my bedroom door.
In the kitchen Charley was swigging from a fat mug of tea. It steamed so much, it seemed liable to burn whatever it touched. Her lips were red-raw, as were her eyes. She clutched the cup tightly, knuckles white, thumbs twisted into the handle. She looked as though she wanted to never let it go.
I had a sinking feeling in my stomach when I saw her. I glanced out of the window and saw the landscape of snow, added to yet again the previous night, bloated flakes still fluttering down to reinforce the barricade against our escape. Somewhere out there, Boris’s parts were frozen memories hidden under a new layer.
“Okay?” I said quietly.
Charley looked up at me as if I’d farted at her mother’s funeral. “Of course I’m not okay,” she said, enunciating each word carefully. “And what do you care?”
I sat at the table opposite her, yawning, rubbing hands through my greasy hair, generally trying to disperse the remnants of sleep. There was a pot of tea on the table and I took a spare mug and poured a steaming brew. Charley watched my every move. I was aware of her eyes upon me, but I tried not to let it show. The cup shook, I could barely grab a spoon. I’d seen her boyfriend splashed across the snow, I felt terrible about it, but then I realised that she’d seen the same scene. How bad must she be feeling?
“We have to do something,” she said.
“Charley — ”
“We can’t just sit here. We have to go. Boris needs a funeral. We have to go and find someone, get out of this God-forsaken place. There must be someone near, able to help, someone to look after us? I need someone to look after me.”
The statement was phrased as a question, but I ventured no answer.
“Look,” she said, “we have to get out. Don’t you see?” She let go of her mug and clasped my hands; hers were hot and sweaty. “The village, we can get there, I know we can.”
“No, Charley,” I said, but I did not have a chance to finish my sentence (there’s no way out, we tried, and didn’t you see the television reports weeks ago?) before Ellie marched into the room. She paused when she saw Charley, then went to the cupboard and poured herself a bowl of cereal. She used water. We’d run out of milk a week ago.
“There’s no telephone,” she said, spooning some soggy corn flakes into her mouth. “No television, save some flickering pictures most of us don’t want to see. Or believe. There’s no radio, other than the occasional foreign channel. Rosie says she speaks French. She’s heard them talking of ‘the doom’. That’s how she translates it, though I think it sounds more like ‘the ruin’. The nearest village is ten miles away. We have no motorised transport that will even get out of the garage. To walk it would be suicide.” She crunched her limp breakfast, mixing in more sugar to give some taste.
Charley did not reply. She knew what Ellie was saying, but tears were her only answer.
“So we’re here until the snow melts,” I said. Ellie really was a straight bitch. Not a glimmer of concern for Charley, not a word of comfort.
Ellie looked at me and stopped chewing for a moment. “I think until it does melt, we’re protected.” She had a way of coming out with ideas that both enraged me, and scared the living shit out of me at the same time.
Charley could only cry.
Later, three of us decided to try to get out. In moments of stress, panic and mourning, logic holds no sway.
I said I’d go with Brand and Charley. It was one of the most foolish decisions I’ve ever made, but seeing Charley’s eyes as she sat in the kitchen on her own, thinking about her slaughtered boyfriend, listening to Ellie go on about how hopeless it all was … I could not say no. And in truth, I was as desperate to leave as anyone.
It was almost ten in the morning when we set out.
Ellie was right, I knew that even then. Her face as she watched us struggle across the garden should have brought me back straight away: she thought I was a fool. She was the last person in the world I wanted to appear foolish in front of, but still there was that nagging feeling in my heart that pushed me on — a mixture of desire to help Charley and a hopeless feeling that by staying here, we were simply waiting for death to catch us up.
It seemed to have laid its shroud over the rest of the world already. Weeks ago the television had shown some dreadful sights: people falling ill and dying in their thousands; food riots in London; a nuclear exchange between Greece and Turkey. More, lots more, all of it bad. We’d known something was coming — things had been falling apart for years — but once it began it was a cumulative effect, speeding from a steady trickle toward decline, to a raging torrent. We’re better off where we are, Boris had said to me. It was ironic that because of him, we were leaving.
I carried the shotgun. Brand had an air pistol, though I’d barely trust him with a sharpened stick. As well as being loud and brash, he spent most of his time doped to the eyeballs. If there was any trouble, I’d be watching out for him as much as anything else.
Something had killed Boris and whatever it was, animal or human, it was still out there in the snow. Moved on, hopefully, now it had fed. But then again perhaps not. It did not dissuade us from trying.
The snow in the manor garden was almost a metre deep. The three of us had botched together snow shoes of varying effectiveness. Brand wore two snapped-off lengths of picture frame on each foot, which seemed to act more as knives to slice down through the snow than anything else. He was tenaciously pompous; he struggled with his mistake rather than admitting it. Charley had used two frying pans with their handles snapped off, and she seemed to be making good headway. My own creations consisted of circles of mounted canvas cut from the redundant artwork in the manor. Old owners of the estate stared up at me through the snow as I repeatedly stepped on their faces.
By the time we reached the end of the driveway and turned to see Ellie and Hayden watching us, I was sweating and exhausted. We had travelled about fifty metres.
Across the road lay the cliff path leading to Boris’s dismembered corpse. Charley glanced that way, perhaps wishing to look down upon her boyfriend one more time.
“Come on,” I said, clasping her elbow and heading away. She offered no resistance.
The road was apparent as a slightly lower, smoother plain of snow between the two hedged banks on either side. Everything was glaring white, and we were all wearing sunglasses to prevent snow-blindness. We could see far along the coast from here as the bay swept around toward the east, the craggy cliffs spotted white where snow had drifted onto ledges, an occasional lonely seabird diving to the sea and returning empty-beaked to sing a mournful song for company. In places the snow was cantilevered out over the edge of the cliff, a deadly trap should any of us stray that way. The sea itself surged against the rocks below, but it broke no spray. The usual roar of the waters crashing into the earth, slowly eroding it away and reclaiming it, had changed. It was now more of a grind as tonnes of slushy ice replaced the usual white horses, not yet forming a solid barrier over the water but still thick enough to temper the waves. In a way it was sad; a huge beast winding down in old age.
I watched as a cormorant plunged down through the chunky ice and failed to break surface again. It was as if it were committing suicide. Who was I to say it was not?
“How far?” Brand asked yet again.
“Ten miles,” I said.
“I’m knackered.” He had already lit up a joint and he took long, hard pulls on it. I could hear its tip sizzling in the crisp morning air.
“We’ve come about three hundred metres,” I said, and Brand shut up.
It was difficult to talk; we needed all our breath for the effort of walking. Sometimes the snow shoes worked, especially where the surface of the snow had frozen the previous night. Other times we plunged straight in up to our thighs and we had to hold our arms out for balance as we hauled our leg out, just to let it sink in again a step along. The rucksacks did not help. We each carried food, water and dry clothing, and Brand especially seemed to be having trouble with his.
The sky was a clear blue. The sun rose ahead of us as if mocking the frozen landscape. Some days it started like this, but the snow never seemed to melt. I had almost forgotten what the ground below it looked like; it seemed that the snow had been here forever. When it began our spirits had soared, like a bunch of school-kids waking to find the landscape had changed overnight. Charley and I had still gone down to the sea to take our readings, and when we returned there was a snowman in the garden wearing one of her bras and a pair of my briefs. A snowball fight had ensued, during which Brand became a little too aggressive for his own good. We’d ganged up on him and pelted him with snow compacted to ice until he shouted and yelped. We were cold and wet and bruised, but we did not stop laughing for hours.
We’d all dried out in front of the open fire in the huge living room. Rosalie had stripped to her knickers and danced to music on the radio. She was a bit of a sixties throwback, Rosalie, and she didn’t seem to realise what her little display did to cosseted people like me. I watched happily enough.
Later, we sat around the fire and told ghost stories. Boris was still with us then, of course, and he came up with the best one which had us all cowering behind casual expressions. He told us of a man who could not see, hear or speak, but who knew of the ghosts around him. His life was silent and senseless save for the day his mother died. Then he cried and shouted and raged at the darkness, before curling up and dying himself. His world opened up then, and he no longer felt alone, but whoever he tried to speak to could only fear or loath him. The living could never make friends with the dead. And death had made him more silent than ever.
None of us would admit it, but we were all scared shitless as we went to bed that night. As usual, doors opened and footsteps padded along corridors. And, as usual, my door remained shut and I slept alone.
Days later the snow was too thick to be enjoyable. It became risky to go outside, and as the woodpile started to dwindle and the radio and television broadcasts turned more grim, we realised that we were becoming trapped. A few of us had tried to get to the village, but it was a half-hearted attempt and we’d returned once we were tired. We figured we’d travelled about two miles along the coast. We had seen no one.
As the days passed and the snow thickened, the atmosphere did likewise with a palpable sense of panic. A week ago, Boris had pointed out that there were no ‘plane trails anymore.
This, our second attempt to reach the village, felt more like life and death. Before Boris had been killed we’d felt confined, but it also gave a sense of protection from the things going on in the world. Now there was a feeling that if we could not get out, worse things would happen to us where we were.
I remembered Jayne as she lay dying from the unknown disease. I had been useless, helpless, hopeless, praying to a God I had long ignored to grant us a kind fate. I refused to sit back and go the same way. I would not go gentle. Fuck fate.
“What was that?”
Brand stopped and tugged the little pistol from his belt. It was stark black against the pure white snow.
“What?”
He nodded. “Over there.” I followed his gaze and looked up the sloping hillside. To our right the sea sighed against the base of the cliffs. To our left — the direction Brand was now facing — snowfields led up a gentle slope towards the moors several miles inland. It was a rocky, craggy landscape, and some rocks had managed to hold off the drifts. They peered out darkly here and there, like the faces of drowning men going under for the final time.
“What?” I said again, exasperated. I’d slipped the shotgun off my shoulder and held it waist-high. My finger twitched on the trigger guard. Images of Boris’s remains sharpened my senses. I did not want to end up like that.
“I saw something moving. Something white.”
“Some snow, perhaps?” Charley said bitterly.
“Something running across the snow,” he said, frowning as he concentrated on the middle-distance. The smoke from his joint mingled with his condensing breath.
We stood that way for a minute or two, steaming sweat like smoke signals of exhaustion. I tried taking off my glasses to look, but the glare was too much. I glanced sideways at Charley. She’d pulled a big old revolver from her rucksack and held it with both hands. Her lips were pulled back from her teeth in a feral grimace. She really wanted to use that gun.
I saw nothing. “Could have been a cat. Or a seagull flying low.”
“Could have been.” Brand shoved the pistol back into his belt and reached around for his water canteen. He tipped it to his lips and cursed. “Frozen!”
“Give it a shake,” I said. I knew it would do no good but it may shut him up for a while. “Charley, what’s the time?” I had a watch but I wanted to talk to Charley, keep her involved with the present, keep her here. I had started to realise not only what a stupid idea this was, but what an even more idiotic step it had been letting Charley come along. If she wasn’t here for revenge, she was blind with grief. I could not see her eyes behind her sunglasses.
“Nearly midday.” She was hoisting her rucksack back onto her shoulders, never taking her eyes from the snowscape sloping slowly up and away from us. “What do you think it was?”
I shrugged. “Brand seeing things. Too much wacky baccy.”
We set off again. Charley was in the lead, I followed close behind and Brand stumbled along at the rear. It was eerily silent around us, the snow muffling our gasps and puffs, the constant grumble of the sea soon blending into the background as much as it ever did. There was a sort of white noise in my ears: blood pumping; breath ebbing and flowing; snow crunching underfoot. They merged into one whisper, eschewing all outside noise, almost soporific in rhythm. I coughed to break the spell.
“What the hell do we do when we get to the village?” Brand said.
“Send back help,” Charley stated slowly, enunciating each word as if to a naive young child.
“But what if the village is like everywhere else we’ve seen or heard about on TV?”
Charley was silent for a while. So was I. A collage of images tumbled through my mind, hateful and hurtful and sharper because of that. Hazy scenes from the last day of television broadcasts we had watched: loaded ships leaving docks and sailing off to some nebulous sanctuary abroad; shootings in the streets, bodies in the gutters, dogs sniffing at open wounds; an airship, drifting over the hills in some vague attempt to offer hope.
“Don’t be stupid,” I said.
“Even if it is, there will be help there,” Charley said quietly.
“Like hell.” Brand lit up another joint. It was cold, we were risking our lives, there may very well be something in the snow itching to attack us … but at that moment I wanted nothing more than to take a long haul on Brand’s pot, and let casual oblivion anaesthetise my fears.
An hour later we found the car.
By my figuring we had come about three miles. We were all but exhausted. My legs ached, knee joints stiff and hot as if on fire.
The road had started a slow curve to the left, heading inland from the coast toward the distant village. Its path had become less distinct, the hedges having sunk slowly into the ground until there was really nothing to distinguish it from the fields of snow on either side. We had been walking the last half-hour on memory alone.
The car was almost completely buried by snow, only one side of the windscreen and the iced-up aerial still visible. There was no sign of the route it had taken; whatever tracks it had made were long-since obliterated by the blizzards. As we approached the snow started again, fat flakes drifting lazily down and landing on the icy surface of last night’s fall.
“Do not drive unless absolutely necessary,” Brand said. Charley and I ignored him. We unslung our rucksacks and approached the buried shape, all of us keeping hold of our weapons. I meant to ask Charley where she’d got hold of the revolver — whether she’d had it with her when we both came here to test the sea and write environmental reports which would never be read — but now did not seem the time. I had no wish to seem judgmental or patronising.
As I reached out to knock some of the frozen snow from the windscreen a flight of seagulls cawed and took off from nearby. They had been all but invisible against the snow, but there were at least thirty of them lifting as one, calling loudly as they twirled over our heads and then headed out to sea.
We all shouted out in shock. Charley stumbled sideways as she tried to bring her gun to bear and fell on her back. Brand screeched like a kid, then let off a pop with his air pistol to hide his embarrassment. The pellet found no target. The birds ignored us after the initial fly-past, and they slowly merged with the hazy distance. The new snow shower brought the horizon in close.
“Shit,” Charley muttered.
“Yeah.” Brand reloaded his pistol without looking at either of us, then rooted around for the joint he’d dropped when he screamed.
Charley and I went back to knocking the snow away, using our gloved hands to make tracks down the windscreen and across the bonnet. “I think it’s a Ford,” I said uselessly. “Maybe an old Mondeo.” Jayne and I had owned a Mondeo when we’d been courting. Many was the time we had parked in some shaded woodland or beside units on the local industrial estate, wound down the windows and made love as the cool night air looked on. We’d broken down once while I was driving her home; it had made us two hours late and her father had come close to beating me senseless. It was only the oil on my hands that had convinced him of our story.
I closed my eyes.
“Can’t see anything,” Charley said, jerking me back to cold reality. “Windscreen’s frozen up on the inside.”
“Take us ages to clear the doors.”
“What do you want to do that for?” Brand said. “Dead car, probably full of dead people.”
“Dead people may have guns and food and fuel,” I said. “Going to give us a hand?”
Brand glanced at the dark windshield, the contents of the car hidden by ice and shadowed by the weight of snow surrounding it. He sat gently on his rucksack, and when he saw it would take his weight without sinking in the snow, he re-lit his joint and stared out to sea. I wondered whether he’d even notice if we left him there.
“We could uncover the passenger door,” Charley said. “Driver’s side is stuck fast in the drift, take us hours.”
We both set about trying to shift snow away from the car. “Keep your eyes open,” I said to Brand. He just nodded and watched the sea lift and drop its thickening ice-floes. I used the shotgun as a crutch to lift myself onto the bonnet, and from there to the covered roof.
“What?” Charley said. I ignored her, turning a slow circle, trying to pick out any movement against the fields of white. To the west lay the manor, a couple of miles away and long since hidden by creases in the landscape. To the north the ground still rose steadily away from the sea, rocks protruding here and there along with an occasional clump of trees hardy enough to survive Atlantic storms. Nothing moved. The shower was turning quickly into a storm and I felt suddenly afraid. The manor was at least three miles behind us; the village seven miles ahead. We were in the middle, three weak humans slowly freezing as nature freaked out and threw weeks of snow and ice at us. And here we were, convinced we could defeat it, certain in our own puny minds that we were the rulers here, we called the shots. However much we polluted and contaminated, I knew, we would never call the shots. Nature may let us live within it, but in the end it would purge and clean itself. And whether there would be room for us in the new world …
Perhaps this was the first stage of that cleansing. While civilisation slaughtered itself, disease and extremes of weather took advantage of our distraction to pick off the weak.
“We should get back,” I said.
“But the village — ”
“Charley, it’s almost two. It’ll start getting dark in two hours, maximum. We can’t travel in the dark; we might walk right by the village, or stumble onto one of those ice overhangs at the cliff edge. Brand here may get so doped he thinks we’re ghosts and shoot us with his pop-gun.”
“Hey!”
“But Boris …” Charley said. “He’s … we need help. To bury him. We need to tell someone.”
I climbed carefully down from the car roof and landed in the snow beside her. “We’ll take a look in the car. Then we should get back. It’ll help no one if we freeze to death out here.”
“I’m not cold,” she said defiantly.
“That’s because you’re moving, you’re working. When you walk you sweat and you’ll stay warm. When we have to stop — and eventually we will — you’ll stop moving. Your sweat will freeze, and so will you. We’ll all freeze. They’ll find us in the thaw, you and me huddled up for warmth, Brand with a frozen reefer still in his gob.”
Charley smiled, Brand scowled. Both expressions pleased me.
“The door’s frozen shut,” she said.
“I’ll use my key.” I punched at the glass with the butt of the shotgun. After three attempts the glass shattered and I used my gloved hands to clear it all away. I caught a waft of something foul and stale. Charley stepped back with a slight groan. Brand was oblivious.
We peered inside the car, leaning forward so that the weak light could filter in around us.
There was a dead man in the driver’s seat. He was frozen solid, hunched up under several blankets, only his eyes and nose visible. Icicles hung from both. His eyelids were still open. On the dashboard a candle had burnt down to nothing more than a puddle of wax, imitating the ice as it dripped forever toward the floor. The scene was so still it was eerie, like a painting so life-like that textures and shapes could be felt. I noticed the driver’s door handle was jammed open, though the door had not budged against the snowdrift burying that side of the car. At the end he had obviously attempted to get out. I shuddered as I tried to imagine this man’s lonely death. It was the second body I’d seen in two days.
“Well?” Brand called from behind us.
“Your drug supplier,” Charley said. “Car’s full of snow.”
I snorted, pleased to hear the humour, but when I looked at her she seemed as sad and forlorn as ever. “Maybe we should see if he brought us anything useful,” she said, and I nodded.
Charley was smaller than me so she said she’d go. I went to protest but she was already wriggling through the shattered window, and a minute later she’d thrown out everything loose she could find. She came back out without looking at me.
There was a rucksack half full of canned foods; a petrol can with a swill of fuel in the bottom; a novel frozen at page ninety; some plastic bottles filled with piss and split by the ice; a rifle, but no ammunition; a smaller rucksack with wallet, some papers, an electronic credit card; a photo wallet frozen shut; a plastic bag full of shit; a screwed-up newspaper as hard as wood.
Everything was frozen.
“Let’s go,” I said. Brand and Charley took a couple of items each and shouldered their rucksacks. I picked up the rifle. We took everything except the shit and piss.
It took us four hours to get back to the manor. Three times on the way Brand said he’d seen something bounding through the snow — a stag, he said, big and white with sparkling antlers — and we dropped everything and went into a defensive huddle. But nothing ever materialised from the worsening storm, even though our imaginations painted all sorts of horrors behind and beyond the snowflakes. If there were anything out there, it kept itself well hidden.
The light was fast fading as we arrived back. Our tracks had been all but covered, and it was only later that I realised how staggeringly lucky we’d been to even find our way home. Perhaps something was on our side, guiding us, steering us back to the manor. Perhaps it was the change in nature taking us home, preparing us for what was to come next.
It was the last favour we were granted.
Hayden cooked us some soup as the others huddled around the fire, listening to our story and trying so hard not to show their disappointment. Brand kept chiming in about the things he’d seen in the snow. Even Ellie’s face held the taint of fading hope.
“Boris’s angels?” Rosalie suggested. “He may have seen angels, you know. They’re not averse to steering things their way, when it suits them.” Nobody answered.
Charley was crying again, shivering by the fire. Rosalie had wrapped her in blankets and now hugged her close.
“The gun looks okay.” Ellie said. She’d sat at the table and stripped and oiled the rifle, listening to us all as we talked. She illustrated the fact by pointing it at the wall and squeezing the trigger a few times. Click click click. There was no ammunition for it.
“What about the body?” Rosalie asked. “Did you see who it was?”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Well, if it was someone coming along the road toward the manor, maybe one of us knew him.” We were all motionless save for Ellie, who still rooted through the contents of the car. She’d already put the newspaper on the floor so that it could dry out, in the hope of being able to read at least some of it. We’d made out the date: one week ago. The television had stopped showing pictures two weeks ago. There was a week of history in there, if only we could save it.
“He was frozen stiff,” I said. “We didn’t get a good look … and anyway, who’d be coming here? And why? Maybe it was a good job — ”
Ellie gasped. There was a tearing sound as she peeled apart more pages of the photo wallet and gasped again, this time struggling to draw in a breath afterwards.
“Ellie?”
She did not answer. The others had turned to her but she seemed not to notice. She saw nothing, other than the photographs in her hand. She stared at them for an endless few seconds, eyes moist yet unreadable in the glittering fire light. Then she scraped the chair back across the polished floor, crumpled the photo’s into her back pocket and walked quickly from the room.
I followed, glancing at the others to indicate that they should stay where they were. None of them argued. Ellie was already half-way up the long staircase by the time I entered the hallway, but it was not until the final stair that she stopped, turned and answered my soft calling.
“My husband,” she said, “Jack. I haven’t seen him for two years.” A tear ran icily down her cheek. “We never really made it, you know?” She looked at the wall beside her, as though she could stare straight through and discern logic and truth in the blanked-out landscape beyond. “He was coming here. For me. To find me.”
There was nothing I could say. Ellie seemed to forget I was there and she mumbled the next few words to herself. Then she turned and disappeared from view along the upstairs corridor, shadow dancing in the light of disturbed candles.
Back in the living room I told the others that Ellie was all right, she had gone to bed, she was tired and cold and as human as the rest of us. I did not let on about her dead husband, I figured it was really none of their business. Charley glared at me with bloodshot eyes, and I was sure she’d figured it out. Brand flicked bits of carrot from his soup into the fire and watched them sizzle to nothing.
We went to bed soon after. Alone in my room I sat at the window for a long time, huddled in clothes and blankets, staring out at the moonlit brightness of the snow drifts and the fat flakes still falling. I tried to imagine Ellie’s estranged husband struggling to steer the car through deepening snow, the radiator clogging in the drift it had buried its nose in, splitting, gushing boiling water and steaming instantly into an ice-trap. Sitting there, perhaps not knowing just how near he was, thinking of his wife and how much he needed to see her. And I tried to imagine what desperate events must have driven him to do such a thing, though I did not think too hard.
A door opened and closed quietly, footsteps, another door slipped open to allow a guest entry. I wondered who was sharing a bed tonight.
I saw Jayne, naked and beautiful in the snow, bearing no sign of the illness that had killed her. She beckoned me, drawing me nearer, and at last a door was opening for me as well, a shape coming into the room, white material floating around its hips, or perhaps they were limbs, membranous and thin …
My eyes snapped open and I sat up on the bed. I was still dressed from the night before. Dawn streamed in the window and my candle had burnt down to nothing.
Ellie stood next to the bed. Her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen. I tried to pretend I had not noticed.
“Happy Christmas,” she said. “Come on. Brand’s dead.”
Brand was lying just beyond the smashed conservatory doors behind the kitchen. There was a small courtyard area here, protected somewhat by an overhanging roof so that the snow was only about knee-deep. Most of it was red. A drift had already edged its way into the conservatory, and the beer cans on the shelf had frozen and split. No more beer.
He had been punctured by countless holes, each the width of a thumb, all of them clogged with hardened blood. One eye stared hopefully out to the hidden horizon, the other was absent. His hair was also missing; it looked like he’d been scalped. There were bits of him all around — a finger here, a splash of brain there — but he was less mutilated than Boris had been. At least we could see that this smudge in the snow had once been Brand.
Hayden was standing next to him, posing daintily in an effort to avoid stepping in the blood. It was a lost cause. “What the hell was he doing out here?” he asked in disgust.
“I heard doors opening last night,” I said. “Maybe he came for a walk. Or a smoke.”
“The door was mine,” Rosalie said softly. She had appeared behind us and nudged in between Ellie and me. She wore a long, creased shirt. Brand’s shirt, I noticed. “Brand was with me until three o’clock this morning. Then he left to go back to his own room, said he was feeling ill. We thought perhaps you shouldn’t know about us.” Her eyes were wide in an effort not to cry. “We thought everyone would laugh.
Nobody answered. Nobody laughed. Rosalie looked at Brand with more shock than sadness, and I wondered just how often he’d opened her door in the night. The insane, unfair notion that she may even be relieved flashed across my mind, one of those awful thoughts you try to expunge but which hangs around like a guilty secret.
“Maybe we should go inside,” I said to Rosalie, but she gave me such an icy glare that I turned away, looking at Brand’s shattered body rather than her piercing eyes.
“I’m a big girl now,” she said. I could hear her rapid breathing as she tried to contain the disgust and shock at what she saw. I wondered if she’d ever seen a dead body. Most people had, nowadays.
Charley was nowhere to be seen. “I didn’t wake her,” Ellie said when I queried. “She had enough to handle yesterday. I thought she shouldn’t really see this. No need.”
And you? I thought, noticing Ellie’s puffy eyes, the gauntness of her face, her hands fisting open and closed at her sides. Are you all right? Did you have enough to handle yesterday?
“What the hell do we do with him?” Hayden asked. He was still standing closer to Brand than the rest of us, hugging himself to try to preserve some of the warmth from sleep. “I mean, Boris was all over the place, from what I hear. But Brand … we have to do something. Bury him, or something. It’s Christmas, for God’s sake.”
“The ground’s like iron,” I protested.
“So we take it in turns digging,” Rosalie said quietly.
“It’ll take us — ”
“Then I’ll do it myself.” She walked out into the blooded snow and shattered glass in bare feet, bent over Brand’s body and grabbed under each armpit as if to lift him. She was naked beneath the shirt. Hayden stared in frank fascination. I turned away, embarrassed for myself more than for Rosalie.
“Wait,” Ellie sighed. “Rosalie, wait. Let’s all dress properly, then we’ll come and bury him. Rosalie.” The girl stood and smoothed Brand’s shirt down over her thighs, perhaps realising what she had put on display. She looked up at the sky and caught the morning’s first snowflake on her nose.
“Snowing,” she said. “Just for a fucking change.”
We went inside. Hayden remained in the kitchen with the outside door shut and bolted while the rest of us went upstairs to dress, wake Charley and tell her the grim Yule tidings. Once Rosalie’s door had closed I followed Ellie along to her room. She opened her door for me and invited me in, obviously knowing I needed to talk.
Her place was a mess. Perhaps, I thought, she was so busy being strong and mysterious that she had no time for tidying up. Clothes were strewn across the floor, a false covering like the snow outside. Used plates were piled next to her bed, those at the bottom already blurred with mould, the uppermost still showing the remains of the meal we’d had before Boris had been killed. Spaghetti bolognaise, I recalled, to Hayden’s own recipe, rich and tangy with tinned tomatoes, strong with garlic, the helpings massive. Somewhere out there Boris’s last meal lay frozen in the snow, half digested, torn from his guts -
I snorted and closed my eyes. Another terrible thought that wouldn’t go away.
“Brand really saw things in the snow, didn’t he?” Ellie asked.
“Yes, he was pretty sure. At least, a thing. He said it was like a stag, except white. It was bounding along next to us, he said. We stopped a few times but I’m certain I never saw anything. Don’t think Charley did, either.” I made space on Ellie’s bed and sat down. “Why?”
Ellie walked to the window and opened the curtains. The snowstorm had started in earnest, and although her window faced the Atlantic all we could see was a sea of white. She rested her forehead on the cold glass, her breath misting, fading, misting again. “I’ve seen something too,” she said.
Ellie. Seeing things in the snow. Ellie was the nearest we had to a leader, though none of us had ever wanted one. She was strong, if distant. Intelligent, if a little straight with it. She’d never been much of a laugh, even before things had turned to shit, and her dogged conservatism in someone so young annoyed me no end.
Ellie, seeing things in the snow.
I could not bring myself to believe it. I did not want to. If I did accept it then there really were things out there, because Ellie did not lie, and she was not prone to fanciful journeys of the imagination.
“What something?” I asked at last, fearing it a question I would never wish to be answered. But I could not simply ignore it. I could not sit here and listen to Ellie opening up, then stand and walk away. Not with Boris frozen out there, not with Brand still cooling into the landscape.
She rocked her head against the glass. “Don’t know. Something white. So how did I see it?” She turned from the window, stared at me, crossed her arms. “From this window,” she said. “Two days ago. Just before Charley found Boris. Something flitting across the snow like a bird, except it left faint tracks. As big as a fox, perhaps, but it had more legs. Certainly not a deer.”
“Or one of Boris’s angels?”
She shook her head and smiled, but there was no humour there. There rarely was. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to know. But! We will have to be careful. Take the guns when we try to bury Brand. A couple of us keep a look-out while the others dig. Though I doubt we’ll even get through the snow.”
“You and guns,” I said perplexed. I didn’t know how to word what I was trying to ask.
Ellie smiled wryly. “Me and guns. I hate guns.”
I stared at her, saying nothing, using silence to pose the next question.
“I have a history,” she said. And that was all.
Later, downstairs in the kitchen, Charley told us what she’d managed to read in the paper from the frozen car. In the week since we’d picked up the last TV signal and the paper was printed, things had gone from bad to worse. The illness that had killed my Jayne was claiming millions across the globe. The USA blamed Iraq. Russia blamed China. Blame continued to waste lives. There was civil unrest and shootings in the streets, mass-burials at sea, martial law, air strikes, food shortages … the words melded into one another as Rosalie recited the reports.
Hayden was trying to cook mince pies without the mince. He was using stewed apples instead, and the kitchen stank sickeningly sweet. None of us felt particularly festive.
Outside, in the heavy snow that even now was attempting to drift in and cover Brand, we were all twitchy. Whoever or — now more likely — whatever had done this could still be around. Guns were held at the ready.
We wrapped him in an old sheet and enclosed this in torn black plastic bags until there was no white or red showing. Ellie and I dragged him around the corner of the house to where there were some old flowers beds. We stared to dig where we remembered them to be, but when we got through the snow the ground was too hard. In the end we left him on the surface of the frozen earth and covered the hole back in with snow, mumbling about burying him when the thaw came. The whole process had an unsettling sense of permanence.
As if the snow would never melt.
Later, staring from the dining room window as Hayden brought in a platter of old vegetables as our Christmas feast, I saw something big and white skimming across the surface of the snow. It moved too quickly for me to make it out properly, but I was certain I saw wings.
I turned away from the window, glanced at Ellie and said nothing.