But then things went to shit here as well. On TV, minutes before it had ceased broadcasting for good, someone called it the ruin.
Then it had started to snow.
Hayden had taken Charley upstairs, still trying to quell her hysteria. We had no medicines other than aspirin and cough mixtures, but there were a hundred bottles of wine in the cellar. It seemed that Hayden had already poured most of a bottle down Charley’s throat by the time the three of us arrived back at the manor. Not a good idea, I thought — I could hardly imagine what ghosts a drunken Charley would see, what terrors her alcohol-induced dreams held in store for her once she was finally left on her own- but it was not my place to say.
Brand stormed in and with his usual subtlety painted a picture of what we’d seen. “Boris’s guts were just everywhere, hanging on the rock, spread over the snow. Melted in, like they were still hot when he was being cut up. What the fuck would do that? Eh? Just what the fuck?”
“Who did it?” Rosalie, our resident paranoid, asked.
I shrugged. “Can’t say.”
“Why not?”
“Not won’t,” I said, “can’t. Can’t tell. There’s not too much left to tell by, as Brand has so eloquently revealed.”
Ellie stood before the open fire and held out her hands, palms up, as if asking for something. A touch of emotion, I mused, but then my thoughts were often cruel.
“Ellie?” Rosalie demanded an answer.
Ellie shrugged. “We can rule out suicide.” Nobody responded.
I went through to the kitchen and opened the back door. We were keeping our beers on a shelf in the rear conservatory now that the electricity had gone off. There was a generator, but not enough fuel to run it for more than an hour every day. We agreed that hot water was a priority for that meagre time, so the fridge was now extinct.
I surveyed my choice: Stella; a few final cans of Caffreys; Boddingtons. That had been Jayne’s favourite. She’d drunk it in pints, inevitably doing a bad impression of some moustachioed actor after the first creamy sip. I could still see her sparkling eyes as she tried to think of someone new… I grabbed a Caffreys and shut the back door, and it was as the latch clicked home that I started to shake.
I’d seen a dead man five minutes ago, a man I’d been talking to the previous evening, drinking with, chatting about what the hell had happened to the world, making inebriated plans of escape, knowing all the time that the snow had us trapped here like chickens surrounded by a fiery moat. Boris had been quiet but thoughtful, the most intelligent person here at the manor. It had been his idea to lock the doors to many of the rooms because we never used them, and any heat we managed to generate should be kept in the rooms we did use. He had suggested a long walk as the snow had begun in earnest and it had been our prevarication and, I admit, our arguing that had kept us here long enough for it to matter. By the time Boris had persuaded us to make a go of it, the snow was three feet deep. Five miles and we’d be dead. Maximum. The nearest village was ten miles away.
He was dead. Something had taken him apart, torn him up, ripped him to pieces. I was certain that there had been no cutting involved as Brand had suggested. And yes, his bits did look melted into the snow. Still hot when they struck the surface, blooding it in death. Still alive and beating as they were taken out.
I sat at the kitchen table and held my head in my hands. Jayne had said that this would hold all the good thoughts in and let the bad ones seep through your fingers, and sometimes it seemed to work. Now it was just a comfort, like the hands of a lover kneading hope into flaccid muscles, or fear from tense ones.
It could not work this time. I had seen a dead man. And there was nothing we could do about it. We should be telling someone, but over the past few months any sense of ‘relevant authorities’ had fast faded away, just as Jayne had two years before; faded away to agony, then confusion, and then to nothing. Nobody knew what had killed her. Growths on her chest and stomach. Bad blood. Life.
I tried to open the can but my fingers were too cold to slip under the ring-pull. I became frustrated, then angry, and eventually my temper threw the can to the floor. It struck the flagstones and one edge split, sending a fine yellowish spray of beer across the old kitchen cupboards. I cried out at the waste. It was a feeling I was becoming more than used to.
“Hey,” Ellie said. She put one hand on my shoulder and removed it before I could shrug her away. “They’re saying we should tell someone.”
“Who?” I turned to look at her, unashamed of my tears. Ellie was a hard bitch. Maybe they made me more of a person than she.
She raised one eyebrow and pursed her lips. “Brand thinks the army. Rosalie thinks the Fairy Underground.”
I scoffed. “Fairy-fucking-Underground. Stupid cow.”
“She can’t help being like that. You ask me, it makes her more suited to how it’s all turning out.”
“And how’s that, exactly?” I hated Ellie sometimes, all her stronger-than-thou talk and steely eyes. But she was also the person I respected the most in out pathetic little group. Now that Boris had gone.
“Well,” she said, “for a start, take a look at how we’re all reacting to this. Shocked, maybe. Horrified. But it’s almost like it was expected.”
“It’s all been going to shit…” I said, but I did not need to continue. We had all known that we were not immune to the rot settling across society, nature, the world. Eventually it would find us. We just had not known when.
“There is the question of who did it,” she said quietly.
“Or what.”
She nodded. “Or what.”
For now, we left it at that.
“How’s Charley?”
“I was just going to see,” Ellie said. “Coming?”
I nodded and followed her from the room. The beer had stopped spraying and now fizzled into sticky rivulets where the flags joined. I was still thirsty.
Charley looked bad. She was drunk, that was obvious, and she had been sick down herself, and she had wet herself. Hayden was in the process of trying to mop up the mess when we knocked and entered.
“How is she?” Ellie asked pointlessly.
“How do you think?” He did not even glance at us as he tried to hold onto the babbling, crying, laughing and puking Charley.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have given her so much to drink,” Ellie said. Hayden sent her daggers but did not reply.
Charley struggled suddenly in his arms, ranting and shouting at the shaded candles in the corners of the room.
“What’s that?” I said. “What’s she saying?” For some reason it sounded important, like a solution to a problem encoded by grief.
“She’s been saying some stuff,” Hayden said loudly, so we could hear above Charley’s slurred cries. “Stuff about Boris. Seeing angels in the snow. She says his angels came to get him.”
“Some angels,” Ellie muttered.
“You go down,” Hayden said, “I’ll stay here with her.” He wanted us gone, that much was obvious, so we did not disappoint him.
Downstairs, Brand and Rosalie were hanging around the mobile phone. It had sat on the mantelpiece for the last three weeks like a gun without bullets, ugly and useless. Every now and then someone would try it, receiving only a crackling nothing in response. Random numbers, recalled numbers, numbers held in the ‘phone’s memory, all came to naught. Gradually it was tried less — every unsuccessful attempt had been more depressing.
“What?” I said.
“Trying to call someone,” Brand said. “Police. Someone.”
“So they can come to take fingerprints?” Ellie flopped into one of the old armchairs and began picking at its upholstery, widening a hole she’d been plucking at for days. “Any replies?”
