White and Other Tales of Ruin

“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.