Part 8 (1/2)

”Okay, this is how I see things,” Ellie said. ”There's a wild animal, or wild animals, out there now.”

”What wild animals!” Rosalie scoffed. ”Mutant badgers come to eat us up? Hedgehogs gone bad?”

”I don't know, but pray it is animals. If people have done all this, then they'll be able to get in to us. However f.u.c.king 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 rea.s.sure herself of its presence.

”But what animals-”

”Do you know what's happening everywhere?” Ellie shouted, not just at doubting Rosie but at us all. ”Do you realize that the world's changing? Every day we wake up there's a new world facing us. And every day there're fewer of us left. I mean the big us, the worldwide us, us humans.” Her voice became quieter. ”How long before one morning, no one wakes up?”

”What has what's happening elsewhere got to do with all this?” I asked, although inside I already had an idea of what Ellie meant. 1 think maybe I'd known for a while, but now my mind was opening up, my beliefs stretching, levering fantastic truths into place. They fitted; that terrified me.

”I mean, it's all changing. A disease is wiping out millions and no one knows where it came from. Unrest everywhere, shootings, bombings. Nuclear bombs in the Med, for Christ's sake. You've heard what people have called it; it's the Ruin. Capital R, people. The world's gone bad. Maybe what's happening here is just not that unusual anymore.”

”That doesn't tell us what they are,” Rosalie said. ”Doesn't explain why they're here, or where they come from. Doesn't tell us why Charley did what she did.”

”Maybe she wanted to be with Boris again,” Hayden said.

1 simply stared at him. ”I've seen them,” I said, and Ellie sighed. ”I saw them outside last night.”

The others looked at me, Rosalie's eyes still full of the fear I had planted there and was even now propagating.

”So what were they?” Rosalie asked. ”Ninja sea-birds?”

”I don't know.” I ignored her sarcasm. ”They were white, but they hid in shadows. Animals, they must have been. There are no people like that. But they were canny. They moved only when 1 wasn't looking straight at them. Otherwise they stayed still and... blended in with the snow.” Rosalie, I could see, was terrified. The sarcasm was a front. Everything I said scared her more.

”Camouflaged,” Hayden said.

”No. They blended in. As if they melted in, but they didn't. I can't really...”

”In China,” Rosalie said, ”white is the color of death. It's the color of happiness and joy. They wear white at funerals.”

Ellie spoke quickly, trying to grab back the conversation. ”Right. Let's think of what we're going to do. First, no use trying to get out. Agreed? Good. Second, we limit ourselves to a couple of rooms downstairs, the hallway and staircase area and upstairs. Third, do what we can to block up, nail up, glue up the doors to the other rooms and corridors.”

”And then?” Rosalie asked quietly. ”Charades?” Ellie shrugged and smiled. ”Why not? It is Christmas time.”

I'd never dreamt of a white Christmas. I was cursing Bing f.u.c.king 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, 1 had seen contentment vanish forever under the gray cloud of humankind's fall from grace.

None of this seemed to matter now as we closed it all in. I thought I should feel sad, for the symbolism of what we were doing if not for the loss itself. Jayne had told me we would be together again, and then she had died and I had felt trapped ever since by her death and the promise of her final words. If nailing up doors would take me closer to her, then so be it.

In the next room I looked out the window and saw Jayne striding naked toward me through the snow. Fat flakes landed on her shoulders and did not melt, and by the time she was near enough for me to see the look in her eyes she had collapsed down into a drift, leaving a memory there in her place. Something flitted past the window, sending flakes flying against the wind, bristly fur spiking dead white leaves.

I blinked hard and the snow was just snow once more. I turned and looked at Ellie, but she was concentrating too hard to return my stare. For the first time I could see how scared she was-how her hand clasped so tightly around the shotgun barrel that her knuckles were pearly white, her nails a s.h.i.+ny pink- and I wondered exactly what she she was seeing out there in the white storm. 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. n.o.body denied anything.

”Badgers,” Rosalie said. ”Big, white, fast. Sliding over the snow like they were on skis. Demon badgers from h.e.l.l!” She joked, but it was obvious that she was terrified.

”Not badgers,” Ellie cut in. ”Deer. But wrong. Deer with scales. Or something. All wrong.”

”Hayden, what did you see?”

He remained hunched over the cooker, stirring a weak stew of old vegetables and stringy beef. ”I didn't see anything.”

I went to argue with him but realized he was probably telling the truth. We had all seen something different, why not see nothing at all? Just as unlikely.

”You know,” said Ellie, standing at a viewing slot with the snow reflecting sunlight in a band across her face, ”we're all seeing white animals. White animals in the snow. So maybe we're seeing nothing at all. Maybe it's our imaginations. Perhaps Hayden is nearer the truth than all of us.”

”Boris and the others had pretty strong imaginations, then,” said Rosalie, bitter tears animating her eyes.

We were silent once again, stirring our weak milk-less tea, all thinking our own thoughts about what was out in the snow. n.o.body 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 1 had known was not really there, even as I watched her coming at me through the snow. /'// be with you again be with you again.

”The color of death...” Ellie said. She spoke at the boarded window, never for an instant glancing away. Her hands held on to the shotgun as if it had become one with her body. I wondered what she had been in the past: I have a history I have a history, she'd said. ”White. Happiness and joy.”

”It was also the color of mourning for the Victorians,” I added.

”And we're in a Victorian manor.” Hay den 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 1 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 mold 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.

Three - The Color of Morning

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 polyethylene between our chests and stomachs to prevent her diseased skin from 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 1 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- l.u.s.ting after a woman I did not even like very much.