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
