I had not made love to anyone since Jayne’s death. It was months before she died that we last indulged, a bitter, tearful experience when she held a sheet of polythene between our chests and stomachs to prevent her diseased skin touching my own. It did not make for the most romantic of occasions, and afterward she cried herself to sleep as I sat holding her hand and staring into the dark.
After her death I came to the manor, the others came along to find something or escape from something else, and there were secretive noises in the night. The manor was large enough for us to have a room each, but in the darkness doors would open and close again, and every morning the atmosphere at breakfast was different.
My door had never opened and I had opened no doors. There was a lingering guilt over Jayne’s death, a sense that I would be betraying her love if I went with someone else. A greater cause of my loneliness was my inherent lack of confidence, a certainty that no one here would be interested in me: I was quiet, introspective, and uninteresting, a fledgling bird devoid of any hope of taking wing with any particular talent. No one would want me.
But none of this could prevent the sense of isolation, subtle jealousy and yearning I felt each time I heard footsteps in the dark. I never heard anything else — the walls were too thick for that, the building too solid — but my imagination filled in the missing parts. Usually, Ellie was the star. And there lay another problem — lusting after a woman I did not even like very much.
The night it all changed for us was the first time I heard someone making love in the manor. The voice was androgynous in its ecstasy, a high keening, dropping off into a prolonged sigh before rising again. I sat up in bed, trying to shake off the remnants of dreams that clung like seaweed to a drowned corpse. Jayne had been there, of course, and something in the snow, and another something which was Jayne and the snow combined. I recalled wallowing in the sharp whiteness and feeling my skin sliced by ice edges, watching the snow grow pink around me, then white again as Jayne came and spread her cleansing touch across the devastation.
The cry came once more, wanton and unhindered by any sense of decorum.
Who? I thought. Obviously Hayden,but who was he with? Rosalie? Cynical, paranoid, terrified Rosalie?
Or Ellie?
I hoped Rosalie.
I sat back against the headboard, unable to lie down and ignore the sound. The curtains hung open — I had no reason to close them — and the moonlight revealed that it was snowing once again. I wondered what was out there watching the sleeping manor, listening to the crazy sounds of lust emanating from a building still spattered with the blood and memory of those who had died so recently. I wondered whether the things out there had any understanding of human emotion — the highs, the lows, the tenacious spirit that could sometimes survive even the most downheartening, devastating events — and what they made of the sound they could hear now. Perhaps they thought they were screams of pain. Ecstasy and thoughtless agony often sounded the same.
The sound continued, rising and falling. Added to it now the noise of something thumping rhythmically against a wall.
I thought of the times before Jayne had been ill, before the great decline had really begun, when most of the population still thought humankind could clean up what it had dirtied and repair what it had torn asunder. We’d been married for several years, our love as deep as ever, our lust still refreshing and invigorating. Car seats, cinemas, woodland, even a telephone box, all had been visited by us at some stage, laughing like adolescents, moaning and sighing together, content in familiarity.
And as I sat there remembering my dead wife, something strange happened. I could not identify exactly when the realisation hit me, but I was suddenly sure of one thing: the voice I was listening to was Jayne’s. She was moaning as someone else in the house made love to her. She had come in from outside, that cold unreal Jayne I had seen so recently, and she had gone to Hayden’s room, and now I was being betrayed by someone I had never betrayed, ever.
I shook my head, knowing it was nonsense but certain also that the voice was hers. I was so sure that I stood, dressed and opened my bedroom door without considering the impossibility of what was happening. Reality was controlled by the darkness, not by whatever light I could attempt to throw upon it. I may as well have had my eyes closed.
The landing was lit by several shaded candles in wall brackets, their soft light barely reaching the floor, flickering as breezes came from nowhere. Where the light did touch it showed old carpet, worn by time and faded by countless unknown footfalls. The walls hung with shredded paper, damp and torn like dead skin, the lath and plaster beneath pitted and crumbled. The air was thick with age, heavy with must, redolent with faint hints of hauntings. Where my feet fell I could sense the floor dipping slightly beneath me, though whether this was actuality or a runover from my dream I was unsure.
I could have been walking on snow.
I moved toward Hayden’s room and the volume of the sighing and crying increased. I paused one door away, my heart thumping not with exertion but with the thought that Jayne was a dozen steps from me, making love with Hayden, a man I hardly really knew.
Jayne’s dead, I told myself, and she cried out once, loud, as she came. Another voice then, sighing and straining, and this one was Jayne as well.
Someone touched my elbow. I gasped and spun around, too shocked to scream. Ellie was there in her night-shirt, bare legs hidden in shadow. She had a strange look in her eye. It may have been the subdued lighting. I went to ask her what she was doing here, but then I realised it was probably the same as me. She’d stayed downstairs last night, unwilling to share a watch duty, insistent that we should all sleep.
I went to tell her that Jayne was in there with Hayden, then I realised how stupid this would sound, how foolish it actually was.
At least, I thought, it’s not Ellie in there. Rosalie it must be. At least not Ellie. Certainly not Jayne.
And Jayne cried out again.
Goosebumps speckled my skin and brought it to life. The hairs on my neck stood to attention, my spine tingled.
“Hayden having a nice time?” someone whispered, and Rosalie stepped up behind Ellie.
I closed my eyes, listening to Jayne’s cries. She had once screamed like that in a park, and the keeper had chased us out with his waving torch and throaty shout, the light splaying across our nakedness as we laughed and struggled to gather our clothes around us as we ran.
“Doesn’t sound like Hayden to me,” Ellie said.
The three of us stood outside Hayden’s door for a while, listening to the sounds of lovemaking from within — the cries, the moving bed, the thud of wood against the wall. I felt like an intruder, however much I realised something was very wrong with all of this. Hayden was on his own in there. As we each tried to figure out what we were really hearing, the sounds from within changed. There was not one cry, not two, but many, overlying each other, increasing and expanding until the voice became that of a crowd. The light in the corridor seemed to dim as the crying increased, though it may have been my imagination.
I struggled to make out Jayne’s voice and there was a hint of something familiar, a whisper in the cacophony that was so slight as to be little more than an echo of a memory. But still, to me, it was real.
Ellie knelt and peered through the keyhole, and I noticed for the first time that she was carrying her shotgun. She stood quickly and backed away from the door, her mouth opening, eyes widening. “It’s Hayden,” she said aghast, and then she fired at the door handle and lock.
The explosion tore through the sounds of ecstasy and left them in shreds. They echoed away like streamers in the wind, to be replaced by the lonely moan of a man’s voice, pleading not to stop, it was so wonderful so pure so alive …
The door swung open. None of us entered the room. We could not move.
Hayden was on his back on the bed, surrounded by the whites from outside. I had seen them as shadows against the snow, little more than pale phantoms, but here in the room they stood out bright and definite. There were several of them; I could not make out an exact number because they squirmed and twisted against each other, and against Hayden. Diaphanous limbs stretched out and wavered in the air, arms or wings or tentacles, tapping at the bed and the wall and the ceiling, leaving spots of ice like ink on blotting paper wherever they touched.
I could see no real faces but I knew that the things were looking at me.
Their crying and sighing had ceased, but Hayden’s continued. He moved quickly and violently, thrusting into the malleable shape that still straddled him, not yet noticing our intrusion even though the shotgun blast still rang in my ears. He continued his penetration, but slowly the white lifted itself away until Hayden’s cock flopped back wetly onto his stomach.
He raised his head and looked straight at us between his knees, looked through one of the things where it flipped itself easily across the bed. The air stank of sex and something else, something cold and old and rotten, frozen forever and only now experiencing a hint of thaw.
“Oh please …” he said, though whether he spoke to us or the constantly shifting shapes I could not tell.
I tried to focus but the whites were minutely out of phase with my vision, shifting to and fro too quickly for me to concentrate. I thought I saw a face, but it may have been a false splay of shadows thrown as a shape turned and sprang to the floor. I searched for something I knew — an arm kinked slightly from an old break; a breast with a mole near the nipple; a smile turned wryly down at the edges — and I realised I was looking for Jayne. Even in all this mess, I thought she may be here. I’ll be with you again, she had said.
I almost called her name, but Ellie lifted the shotgun and shattered the moment once more. It barked out once, loud, and everything happened so quickly. One instant the white things were there, smothering Hayden and touching him with their fluid limbs. The next, the room was empty of all but us humans, moth-eaten curtains fluttering slightly, window invitingly open. And Hayden’s face had disappeared into a red mist.
After the shotgun blast there was only the wet sound of Hayden’s brains and skull fragments pattering down onto the bedding. His hard-on still glinted in the weak candlelight. His hands each clasped a fistful of blanket. One leg tipped and rested on the sheets clumped around him. His skin was pale, almost white.
Almost.
Rosalie leaned against the wall, dry heaving. Her dress was wet and heavy with puke and the stink of it had found a home in my nostrils. Ellie was busy reloading the shotgun, mumbling and cursing, trying to look anywhere but at the carnage of Hayden’s body.
I could not tear my eyes away. I’d never seen anything like this. Brand and Boris and Charley, yes, their torn and tattered corpses had been terrible to behold, but here … I had seen the instant a rounded, functional person had turned into a shattered lump of meat. I’d seen the red splash of Hayden’s head as it came apart and hit the wall, big bits ricocheting, the smaller, wetter pieces sticking to the old wallpaper and drawing their dreadful art for all to see. Every detail stood out and demanded my attention, as if the shot had cleared the air and brought light. It seemed red-tinged, the atmosphere itself stained with violence.
Hayden’s right hand clasped onto the blanket, opening and closing very slightly, very slowly.
Doesn’t feel so cold. Maybe there’s a thaw on the way, I thought distractedly, trying perhaps to withdraw somewhere banal and comfortable and familiar…
There was a splash of sperm across his stomach. Blood from his ruined head was running down his neck and chest and mixing with it, dribbling soft and pink onto the bed.
Ten seconds ago he was alive. Now he was dead. Extinguished, just like that.
Where is he? I thought. Where has he gone?
“Hayden?” I said.
“He’s dead!” Ellie hissed, a little too harshly.
“I can see that.” But his hand still moved. Slowly. Slightly.
Something was happening at the window. The curtains were still now, but there was a definite sense of movement in the darkness beyond. I caught it from the corner of my eye as I stared at Hayden.
“Rosalie, go get some boards,” Ellie whispered.
“You killed Hayden!” Rosalie spat. She coughed up the remnants of her last meal, and they hung on her chin like wet boils. “You blew his head off! You shot him! What the hell, what’s going on, what’s happening here. I don’t know, I don’t know …”
“The things are coming back in,” Ellie said. She shouldered the gun, leaned through the door and fired at the window. Stray shot plucked at the curtains. There was a cessation of noise from outside, then a rustling, slipping, sliding. It sounded like something flopping around in snow. “Go and get the boards, you two.”
Rosalie stumbled noisily along the corridor toward the staircase.
“You killed him,” I said lamely.
“He was fucking them,” Ellie shouted. Then, quieter: “I didn’t mean to …” She looked at the body on the bed, only briefly but long enough for me to see her eyes narrow and her lips squeeze tight. “He was fucking them. His fault.”
“What were they? What the hell, I’ve never seen any animals like them.”
Ellie grabbed my bicep and squeezed hard, eliciting an unconscious yelp. She had fingers like steel nails. “They aren’t animals,” she said. “They aren’t people. Help me with the door.”
Her tone invited no response. She aimed the gun at the open window for as long as she could while I pulled the door shut. The shotgun blast had blown the handle away, and I could not see how we would be able to keep it shut should the whites return. We stood that way for a while, me hunkered down with two fingers through a jagged hole in the door to try to keep it closed, Ellie standing slightly back, aiming the gun at the pocked wood. I wondered whether I’d end up getting shot if the whites chose this moment to climb back into the room and launch themselves at the door …
Banging and cursing marked Rosalie’s return. She carried several snapped floor boards, the hammer and nails. I held the boards up, Rosalie nailed, both of us now in Ellie’s line of fire. Again I wondered about Ellie and guns, about her history. I was glad when the job was done.
We stepped back from the door and stood there silently, three relative strangers trying to understand and come to terms with what we had seen. But without understanding, coming to terms was impossible. I felt a tear run down my cheek, then another. A sense of breathless panic settled around me, clasping me in cool hands and sending my heart racing.
“What do we do?” I said. “How do we keep those things out?”
“They won’t get through the boarded windows,” Rosalie said confidently, doubt so evident in her voice.
I remembered how quickly they had moved, how lithe and alert they had been to virtually dodge the blast from Ellie’s shotgun.
I held my breath; the others were doing the same.
Noises. Clambering and a soft whistling at first, then light thuds as something ran around the walls of the room, across the ceiling, bounding from the floor and the furniture. Then tearing, slurping, cracking, as the whites fed on what was left of Hayden.
“Let’s go down,” Ellie suggested. We were already backing away.
Jayne may be in danger, I thought, recalling her waving to me as she walked naked through the snow. If she was out there, and these things were out there as well, she would be at risk. She may not know, she may be too trusting, she may let them take advantage of her, abuse and molest her -
Hayden had been enjoying it. He was not being raped; if anything, he was doing the raping. Even as he died he’d been spurting ignorant bliss across his stomach.
And Jayne was dead. I repeated this over and over, whispering it, not caring if the others heard, certain that they would take no notice. Jayne was dead. Jayne was dead.
I suddenly knew for certain that the whites could smash in at any time, dodge Ellie’s clumsy shooting and tear us to shreds in seconds. They could do it, but they did not. They scratched and tapped at windows, clambered around the house, but they did not break in. Not yet.
They were playing with us. Whether they needed us for food, fun, or revenge, it was nothing but a game.
Ellie was smashing up the kitchen.
She kicked open cupboard doors, swept the contents of shelves onto the floor with the barrel of the shotgun, sifted through them with her feet, then did the same to the next cupboard. At first I thought it was blind rage, fear, dread; then I saw that she was searching for something.
“What?” I asked. “What are you doing?”
“Just a hunch.”
“What sort of hunch? Ellie, we should be watching out — ”
“There’s something moving out there,” Rosalie said. She was looking through the slit in the boarded window. There was a band of moonlight across her eyes.
“Here!” Ellie said triumphantly. She knelt and rooted around in the mess on the floor, shoving jars and cans aside, delving into a splash of spilled rice to find a small bottle. “Bastard. The bastard. Oh God, the bastard’s been doing it all along.”
“There’s something out there in the snow,” Rosalie said again, louder this time. “It’s coming to the manor. It’s …” Her voice trailed off and I saw her stiffen, her mouth slightly open.
“Rosalie?” I moved towards her, but she glanced at me and waved me away.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s nothing.”
“Look.” Ellie slammed a bottle down on the table and stood back for us to see.
“A bottle.”
Ellie nodded. She looked at me and tilted her head. Waiting for me to see, expecting me to realise what she was trying to say.
“A bottle from Hayden’s food cupboard,” I said.
She nodded again.
I looked at Rosalie. She was still frozen at the window, hands pressed flat to her thighs, eyes wide and full of the moon. “Rosie?” She only shook her head. Nothing wrong, the gesture said, but it did not look like that. It looked like everything was wrong but she was too afraid to tell us. I went to move her out of the way, look for myself, see what had stolen her tongue.
“Poison,” Ellie revealed. I paused, glanced at the bottle on the table. Ellie picked it up and held it in front of a candle, shook it, turned it this way and that. “Poison. Hayden’s been cooking for us ever since we’ve been here. And he’s always had this bottle. And a couple of times lately, he’s added a little extra to certain meals.”
“Brand,” I nodded, aghast. “And Boris. But why? They were outside, they were killed by those things — ”
“Torn up by those things,” Ellie corrected. “Killed in here. Then dragged out.”
“By Hayden?”
She shrugged. “Why not? He was fucking the whites.”
“But why would he want to … Why did he have something against Boris and Brand? And Charley? An accident, like he said?”
“I guess he gave her a helping hand,” Ellie mused, sitting at the table and rubbing her temples. “They both saw something outside. Boris and Brand, they’d both seen things in the snow. They made it known, they told us all about it, and Hayden heard as well. Maybe he felt threatened. Maybe he thought we’d steal his little sex mates.” She stared down at the table, at the rings burnt there over the years by hot mugs, the scratches made by endless cutlery. “Maybe they told him to do it.”
“Oh, come on!” I felt my eyes go wide like those of a rabbit caught in car headlights.
Ellie shrugged, stood and rested the gun on her shoulder. “Whatever, we’ve got to protect ourselves. They may be in soon, you saw them up there. They’re intelligent. They’re — ”
“Animals!” I shouted. “They’re animals! How could they tell Hayden anything? How could they get in?”
Ellie looked at me, weighing her reply.
“They’re white animals, like you said!”
Ellie shook her head. “They’re new. They’re unique. They’re a part of the change.”
New. Unique. The words instilled very little hope in me, and Ellie’s next comment did more to scare me than anything that had happened up to now.
“They were using Hayden to get rid of us. Now he’s gone … well, they’ve no reason not to do it themselves.”
As if on cue, something started to brush up against the outside wall of the house.
“Rosalie!” I shouted. “Step back!”
“It’s alright,” she said dreamily, “it’s only the wind. Nothing there. Nothing to worry about.” The sound continued, like soap on sandpaper. It came from beyond the boarded windows but it also seemed to filter through from elsewhere, surrounding us like an audio enemy.
“Ellie,” I said, “what can we do?” She seemed to have taken charge so easily that I deferred to her without thinking, assuming she would have a plan with a certainty which was painfully cut down.
“I have no idea.” She nursed the shotgun in the crook of her elbow like a baby substitute, and I realised I didn’t know her half as well as I thought. Did she have children? I wondered. Where were her family? Where had this level of self-control come from?
“Rosalie,” I said carefully, “what are you looking at?” Rosalie was staring through the slit at a moonlit scene none of us could see. Her expression had dropped from scared to melancholy, and I saw a tear trickle down her cheek. She was no longer her old cynical, bitter self. It was as if all her fears had come true and she was content with the fact. “Rosie!” I called again, quietly but firmly.
Rosalie turned to look at us. Reality hit her, but it could not hide the tears. “But he’s dead,” she said, half question, half statement. Before I could ask whom she was talking about, something hit the house.
The sound of smashing glass came from everywhere: behind the boards across the kitchen windows; out in the corridor; muffled crashes from elsewhere in the dark manor. Rosalie stepped back from the slit just as a long, shimmering white limb came in, glassy nails scratching for her face but ripping the air instead.
Ellie stepped forward, thrust the shotgun through the slit and pulled the trigger. There was no cry of pain, no scream, but the limb withdrew.
Something began to batter against the ruined kitchen window, the vibration travelling through the hastily nailed boards, nail heads emerging slowly from the gouged wood after each impact. Ellie fired again, though I could not see what she was shooting at. As she turned to reload she avoided my questioning glance.
“They’re coming in!” I shouted.
“Can it!” Ellie said bitterly. She stepped back as a sliver of timber broke away from the edge of one of the boards, clattering to the floor stained with frost. She shouldered the gun and fired twice through the widening gap. White things began to worm their way between the boards, fingers perhaps, but long and thin and more flexible than any I had ever seen. They twisted and felt blindly across the wood … and then wrapped themselves around the exposed nails.
They began to pull.
The nails squealed as they were withdrawn from the wood, one by one.
I hefted the hammer and went at the nails, hitting each of them only once, aiming for those surrounded by cool white digits. As each nail went back in the things around them drew back and squirmed out of sight behind the boards, only to reappear elsewhere. I hammered until my arm ached, resting my left hand against the vibrating timber. Not once did I catch a white digit beneath the hammer, even when I aimed for them specifically. I began to giggle and the sound frightened me. It was the voice of a madman, the utterance of someone looking for his lost mind, and I found that funnier than ever. Every time I hit another nail it reminded me more and more of an old fairground game. Pop the gophers on the head. I wondered what the prize would be tonight.
“What the hell do we do?” I shouted.
Rosalie had stepped away from the windows and now leaned against the kitchen worktop, eyes wide, mouth working slowly in some unknown mantra. I glanced at her between hammer blows and saw her chest rising and falling at an almost impossible speed. She was slipping into shock.
“Where?” I shouted to Ellie over my shoulder.
“The hallway.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
I had no real answer, so I nodded and indicated with a jerk of my head that the other two should go first. Ellie shoved Rosalie ahead of her and stood waiting for me.
I continued bashing with the hammer, but now I had fresh targets. Not only were the slim white limbs nudging aside the boards and working at the nails, but they were also coming through the ventilation bricks at skirting level in the kitchen. They would gain no hold there, I knew; they could never pull their whole body through there. But still I found their presence abhorrent and terrifying, and every third hammer strike was directed at these white monstrosities trying to twist around my ankles.
And at the third missed strike, I knew what they were doing. It was then, also, that I had some true inkling of their intelligence and wiliness. Two digits trapped my leg between them — they were cold and hard, even through my jeans — and they jerked so hard that I felt my skin tearing in their grasp.
I went down and the hammer skittered across the kitchen floor. At the same instant a twisting forest of the things appeared between the boards above me, and in seconds the timber had started to snap and splinter as the onslaught intensified, the attackers now seemingly aware of my predicament. Shards of wood and glass and ice showered down on me, all of them sharp and cutting. And then, looking up, I saw one of the whites appear in the gap above me, framed by broken wood, its own limbs joined by others in their efforts to widen the gap and come in to tear me apart.
Jayne stared down at me. Her face was there but the thing was not her; it was as if her image were projected there, cast onto the pure whiteness of my attacker by memory or circumstance, put there because it knew what the sight would do to me.
I went weak, not because I thought Jayne was there — I knew that I was being fooled — but because her false visage inspired a flood of warm memories through my stunned bones, hitting cold muscles and sending me into a white-hot agony of paused circulation, blood pooling at my extremities, consciousness retreating into the warmer parts of my brain, all thought of escape and salvation and the other three survivors erased by the plain whiteness that invaded from outside, sweeping in through the rent in the wall and promising me a quick, painful death, but only if I no longer struggled, only if I submitted -
The explosion blew away everything but the pain. The thing above me had been so intent upon its imminent kill that it must have missed Ellie, leaning in the kitchen door and shouldering the shotgun.
The thing blew apart. I closed my eyes as I saw it fold up before me, and when I opened them again there was nothing there, not even a shower of dust in the air, no sprinkle of blood, no splash of insides. Whatever it had been it left nothing behind in death.
“Come on!” Ellie hissed, grabbing me under one arm and hauling me across the kitchen floor. I kicked with my feet to help her then finally managed to stand, albeit shakily.
There was now a gaping hole in the boards across the kitchen windows. Weak candlelight bled out and illuminated the falling snow and the shadows behind it. I expected the hole to be filled again in seconds and this time they would pour in, each of them a mimic of Jayne in some terrifying fashion.
“Shut the door,” Ellie said calmly. I did so and Rosalie was there with a hammer and nails. We’d run out of broken floor boards, so we simply nailed the door into the frame. It was clumsy and would no doubt prove ineffectual, but it may give us a few more seconds.
But for what? What good would time do us now, other than to extend our agony?
“Now where?” I asked hopelessly. “Now what?” There were sounds all around us; soft thuds from behind the kitchen door, and louder noises from further away. Breaking glass; cracking wood; a gentle rustling, more horrible because they could not be identified. As far as I could see, we really had nowhere to go.
“Upstairs,” Ellie said. “The attic. The hatch is outside my room, its got a loft ladder, as far as I know it’s the only way up. Maybe we could hold them off until…”
“Until they go home for tea,” Rosalie whispered. I said nothing. There was no use in verbalising the hopelessness we felt at the moment, because we could see it in each other’s eyes. The snow had been here for weeks and maybe now it would be here forever. Along with whatever strangeness it contained.
Ellie checked the bag of cartridges and handed them to me. “Hand these to me,” she said. “Six shots left. Then we have to beat them up.”
It was dark inside the manor, even though dawn must now be breaking outside. I thanked God that at least we had some candles left … but that got me thinking about God and how He would let this happen, launch these things against us, torture us with the promise of certain death and yet give us these false splashes of hope. I’d spent most of my life thinking that God was indifferent, a passive force holding the big picture together while we acted out our own foolish little plays within it. Now, if He did exist, He could only be a cruel God indeed. And I’d rather there be nothing than a God who found pleasure or entertainment in the discomfort of His creations.
Maybe Rosalie had been right. She had seen God staring down with blood in his eyes.
As we stumbled out into the main hallway I began to cry, gasping out my fears and my grief, and Ellie held me up and whispered into my ear. “Prove Him wrong if you have to. Prove Him wrong. Help me to survive, and prove Him wrong.”
I heard Jayne beyond the main front doors, calling my name into the snowbanks, her voice muffled and bland. I paused, confused, and then I even smelled her; apple-blossom shampoo; the sweet scent of her breath. For a few seconds Jayne was there with me and I could all but hold her hand. None of the last few weeks had happened. We were here on a holiday, but there was something wrong and she was in danger outside. I went to open the doors to her, ask her in and help her, assuage whatever fears she had.
I would have reached the doors and opened them if it were not for Ellie striking me on the shoulder with the stock of the shotgun.
“There’s nothing out there but those things!” she shouted. I blinked rapidly as reality settled down around me but it was like wrapping paper, only disguising the truth I thought I knew, not dismissing it completely.
The onslaught increased.
Ellie ran up the stairs, shotgun held out before her. I glanced around once, listening to the sounds coming from near and far, all of them noises of siege, each of them promising pain at any second. Rosalie stood at the foot of the stairs doing likewise. Her face was pale and drawn and corpse-like.
“I can’t believe Hayden,” she said. “He was doing it with them. I can’t believe … does Ellie really think he …?”
“I can’t believe a second of any of this,” I said. “I hear my dead wife.” As if ashamed of the admission I lowered my eyes as I walked by Rosalie. “Come on,” I said. “We can hold out in the attic.”
“I don’t think so.” Her voice was so sure, so full of conviction, that I thought she was all right. Ironic that a statement of doom should inspire such a feeling, but it was as close to the truth as anything.
I thought Rosalie was all right.
It was only as I reached the top of the stairs that I realised she had not followed me.
I looked out over the ornate old banister, down into the hallway where shadows played and cast false impressions on eyes I could barely trust anyway. At first I thought I was seeing things because Rosalie was not stupid; Rosalie was cynical and bitter, but never stupid. She would not do such a thing.
She stood by the open front doors. How I had not heard her unbolting and opening them I do not know, but there she was, a stark shadow against white fluttering snow, dim daylight parting around her and pouring in. Other things came in too, the whites, slinking across the floor and leaving paw prints of frost wherever they came. Rosalie stood with arms held wide in a welcoming embrace.
She said something as the whites launched at her. I could not hear the individual words but I sensed the tone; she was happy. As if she were greeting someone she had not seen for a very long time.
And then they hit her and took her apart in seconds.
“Run!” I shouted, sprinting along the corridor, chasing Ellie’s shadow. In seconds I was right behind her, pushing at her shoulders as if this would make her move faster. “Run! Run! Run!”
She glanced back as she ran. “Where’s Rosalie?”
“She opened the door.” It was all I needed to say. Ellie turned away and concentrated on negotiating a corner in the corridor.
From behind me I heard the things bursting in all around. Those that had slunk past Rosalie must had broken into rooms from the inside even as others came in from outside, helping each other, crashing through our pathetic barricades by force of co-operation.
I noticed how cold it had become. Frost clung to the walls and the old carpet beneath our feet crunched with each footfall. Candles threw erratic shadows at icicle-encrusted ceilings. I felt ice under my fingernails.
Jayne’s voice called out behind me and I slowed, but then I ran on once more, desperate to fight what I so wanted to believe. She’d said we would be together again and now she was calling me … but she was dead, she was dead. Still she called. Still I ran. And then she started to cry because I was not going to her, and I imagined her naked out there in the snow with white things everywhere. I stopped and turned around.
Ellie grabbed my shoulder, spun me and slapped me across the face. It brought tears to my eyes, but it also brought me back to shady reality. “We’re here,” she said. “Stay with us.” Then she looked over my shoulder. Her eyes widened. She brought the gun up so quickly that it smacked into my ribs, and the explosion in the confined corridor felt like a hammer pummeling my ears.
I turned and saw what she had seen. It was like a drift of snow moving down the corridor toward us, rolling across the walls and ceiling, pouring along the floor. Ellie’s shot had blown a hole through it, but the whites quickly regrouped and moved forward once more. Long, fine tendrils felt out before them, freezing the corridor seconds before the things passed by. There were no faces or eyes or mouths, but if I looked long enough I could see Jayne rolling naked in there with them, her mouth wide, arms holding whites to her, into her. If I really listened I was sure I would hear her sighs as she fucked them. They had passed from luring to mocking now that we were trapped, but still…
They stopped. The silence was a withheld chuckle.
“Why don’t they rush us?” I whispered. Ellie had already pulled down the loft ladder and was waiting to climb up. She reached out and pulled me back, indicating with a nod of her head that I should go first. I reached out for the gun, wanting to give her a chance, but she elbowed me away without taking her eyes off the advancing white mass. “Why don’t they…?”
She fired again. The shot tore a hole, but another thing soon filled that hole and stretched out toward us. “I’ll shoot you if you stand in my way any more,” she said.
I believed her. I handed her two cartridges and scurried up the ladder, trying not to see Jayne where she rolled and writhed, trying not to hear her sighs of ecstasy as the whites did things to her that only I knew she liked.
The instant I made it through the hatch the sounds changed. I heard Ellie squeal as the things rushed, the metallic clack as she slammed the gun shut again, two explosions in quick succession, a wet sound as whites ripped apart. Their charge sounded like a steam train: wood cracked and split; the floorboards were smashed up beneath icy feet; ceilings collapsed. I could not see, but I felt the corridor shattering as they came at Ellie, as if it were suddenly too small to house them all and they were ploughing their own way through the manor.
Ellie came up the ladder fast, throwing the shotgun through before hauling herself up after it. I saw a flash of white before she slammed the hatch down and locked it behind her.
“There’s no way they can’t get up here,” I said. “They’ll be here in seconds.”
Ellie struck a match and lit a pathetic stub of candle. “Last one.” She was panting. In the weak light she looked pale and worn out. “Let’s see what they decide,” she said.
We were in one of four attics in the manor roof. This one was boarded but bare, empty of everything except spiders and dust. Ellie shivered and cried, mumbling about her dead husband Jack frozen in the car. Maybe she heard him. Maybe she’d seen him down there. I found with a twinge of guilt that I could not care less.
“They herded us, didn’t they?” I said. I was breathless and aching, but it was similar to the feeling after a good workout; enervated, not exhausted.
Ellie shrugged, then nodded. She moved over to me and took the last couple of cartridges from the bag on my belt. As she broke the gun and removed the spent shells her shoulders hitched. She gasped and dropped the gun.
“What? Ellie?” But she was not hearing me. She stared into old shadows which had not been bathed in light for years, seeing some unknown truths there, her mouth falling open into an expression so unfamiliar on her face that it took me some seconds to place it — a smile. Whatever she saw, whatever she heard, it was something she was happy with.
I almost let her go. In the space of a second, all possibilities flashed across my mind. We were going to die, there was no escape, they would take us singly or all in one go, they would starve us out, the snow would never melt, the whites would change and grow and evolve beneath us, we could do nothing, whatever they were they had won already, they had won when Humankind brought the ruin down upon itself …
Then I leaned over and slapped Ellie across the face. Her head snapped around and she lost her balance, falling onto all fours over the gun.
I heard Jayne’s footsteps as she prowled the corridors searching for me, calling my name with increasing exasperation. Her voice was changing from sing-song, to monotone, to panicked. The whites were down there with her, the white animals, all animals, searching and stalking her tender naked body through the freezing manor. I had to help her. I knew what it would mean but at least then we would be together, at least then her last promise to me would have been fulfilled.
Ellie’s moan brought me back and for a second I hated her for that. I had been with Jayne and now I was here in some dark, filthy attic with a hundred creatures below trying to find a way to tear me apart. I hated her and I could not help it one little bit.
I moved to one of the sloping roof lights and stared out. I looked for Jayne across the snowscape, but the whites now had other things on their mind. Fooling me was not a priority.
“What do we do?” I asked Ellie, sure even now that she would have an idea, a plan. “How many shots have you got left?”
She looked at me. The candle was too weak to light up her eyes. “Enough.” Before I even realised what she was doing she had flipped the shotgun over, wrapped her mouth around the twin barrels, reached down, curved her thumb through the trigger guard and blasted her brains into the air.
It’s been over an hour since Ellie killed herself and left me on my own.
In that time snow has been blown into the attic to cover her body from view. Elsewhere it’s merely a sprinkling, but Ellie is little more than a white hump on the floor now, the mess of her head a pink splash across the ever-whitening boards.
At first the noise from downstairs was terrific. The whites raged and ran and screamed, and I curled into a ball and tried to prepare myself for them to smash through the hatch and take me apart. I even considered the shotgun … there’s one shot left … but Ellie was brave, Ellie was strong. I don’t have that strength.
Besides, there’s Jayne to think of. She’s down there now, I know, because I have not heard a sound for ten minutes. Outside it is snowing heavier than I’ve ever seen, it must be ten feet deep, and there is no movement whatsoever. Inside, below the hatch and throughout the manor, in rooms sealed and broken open, the whites must be waiting. Here and there, Jayne will be waiting with them. For me. So that I can be with her again.
Soon I will open the hatch, make my way downstairs and out through the front doors. I hope, Jayne, that you will meet me there.