During the final few days of Jayne’s life I had felt completely hemmed in. Not only physically trapped within our home — and more often the bedroom where she lay — but also mentally hindered. It was a feeling I hated, felt guilty about and tried desperately to relieve, but it was always there.
I stayed, holding her hand for hour after terrible hour, our palms fused by sweat, her face pasty and contorted by agonies I could barely imagine. Sometimes she would be conscious and alert, sitting up in bed and listening as I read to her, smiling at the humourous parts, trying to ignore the sad ones. She would ask me questions about how things were in the outside world, and I would lie and tell her they were getting better. There was no need to add to her misery. Other times she would be a shadow of her old self, a grey stain on the bed with liquid limbs and weak bowels, a screaming thing with bloody growths sprouting across her skin and pumping their venom inward with uncontrollable, unstoppable tenacity. At these times I would talk truthfully and tell her the reality of things, that the world was going to shit and she would be much better off when she left it.
Even then I did not tell her the complete truth: that I wished I were going with her. Just in case she could still hear.
Wherever I went during those final few days I was under assault, besieged by images of Jayne, thoughts of her impending death, vague ideas of what would happen after she had gone. I tried to fill the landscape of time laid out before me, but Jayne never figured and so the landscape was bare. She was my whole world; without her I could picture nothing to live for. My mind was never free although sometimes, when a doctor found time to visit our house and tut and sigh over Jayne’s wasting body, I would go for a walk. Mostly she barely knew the doctor was there, for which I was grateful. There was nothing he could. I would not be able to bear even the faintest glimmer of hope in her eyes.
I strolled through the park opposite our house, staying to the paths so that I did not risk stepping on discarded needles or stumbling across suicides decaying slowly back to nature. The trees were as beautiful as ever, huge emeralds against the grimly polluted sky. Somehow they bled the taint of humanity from their systems. They adapted, changed, and our arrival had really done little to halt their progress. A few years of poisons and disease, perhaps. A shaping of the landscape upon which we projected an idea of control. But when we were all dead and gone our industrial disease on the planet would be little more than a few twisted, corrupted rings in the lifetime of the oldest trees. I wished we could adapt so well.
When Jayne died there was no sense of release. My grief was as great as if she’d been killed at the height of health, her slow decline doing nothing to prepare me for the dread that enveloped me at the moment of her last strangled sigh. Still I was under siege, this time by death. The certainty of its black fingers rested on my shoulders day and night, long past the hour of Jayne’s hurried burial in a local football ground alongside a thousand others. I would turn around sometimes and try to see past it, make out some ray of hope in a stranger’s gaze. But there was always the blackness bearing down on me, clouding my vision and the gaze of others, promising doom soon.
It’s ironic that it was not death that truly scared me, but living. Without Jayne the world was nothing but an empty, dying place.
Then I had come here, an old manor on the rugged South West coast. I’d thought that solitude — a distance between me and the terrible place the world was slowly becoming — would be a balm to my suffering. In reality it was little more than a placebo and realising that negated it. I felt more trapped than ever.
The morning after Brand’s death and botched burial — Boxing Day — I sat at my bedroom window and watched nature laying siege. The snow hugged the landscape like a funeral shroud in negative. The coast was hidden by the cliffs, but I could see the sea further out. There was something that I thought at first to be an iceberg and it took me a few minutes to figure out what it really was; the upturned hull of a big boat. A ferry, perhaps, or one of the huge cruise liners being used to ship people south, away from blighted Britain to the false promise of Australia. I was glad I could not see any more detail. I wondered what we would find washed up in the rock pools that morning, were Charley and I to venture down to the sea.
If I stared hard at the snow banks, the fields of virgin white, the humped shadows that were our ruined and hidden cars, I could see no sign of movement. An occasional shadow passed across the snow, though it could have been from a bird flying in front of the sun. But if I relaxed my gaze, tried not to concentrate too hard, lowered my eyelids, then I could see them. Sometimes they skimmed low and fast over the snow, twisting like sea-serpents or Chinese dragons and throwing up a fine mist of flakes behind them. At other times they lay still and watchful, fading into the background if I looked directly at them until one shadow looked much like the next, but could be so different.
I wanted to talk about them. I wanted to ask Ellie just what the hell they were, because I knew that she had seen them too. I wanted to know what was happening and why it was happening to us. But I had some mad idea that to mention them would make them real, like ghosts in the cupboard and slithering wet things beneath
the bed. Best ignore them and they would go away.
I counted a dozen white shapes that morning.
“Anyone dead today?” Rosalie asked.
The statement shocked me, made me wonder just what sort of relationship she and Brand had had, but we all ignored her. No need to aggravate an argument.
Charley sat close to Rosalie, as if a sharing of grief would halve it. Hayden was cooking up bacon and bagels long past their sell-by date. Ellie had not yet come downstairs. She’d been stalking the manor all night, and now we were up she was washing and changing.
“What do we do today?” Charley asked. “Are we going to try to get away again? Get to the village for help?”
I sighed and went to say something, but the thought of those things out in the snow kept me quiet. Nobody else spoke, and the silence was the only answer required.
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 was already peeling wrinkled old vegetables 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 theorising 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 mar 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 Rosalie sitting slowly 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 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, they’re strong.”
“Oh, let 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 realised 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, verbalising 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 whoever 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 surround 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 recognisable — 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 agonised 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!”
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 centre 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 realised 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 around 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 clicked 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 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 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 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.