White and Other Tales of Ruin by Tim Lebbon Read Free Book Online Page B

occasional shadow passed across the snow, though it could have been from a bird flying in front of the sun. But if I relaxed my gaze, tried not to concentrate too hard, lowered my eyelids, then I could see them. Sometimes they skimmed low and fast over the snow, twisting like sea-serpents or Chinese dragons and throwing up a fine mist of flakes behind them. At other times they lay still and watchful, fading into the background if I looked directly at them until one shadow looked much like the next, but could be so different.
    I wanted to talk about them. I wanted to ask Ellie just what the hell they were, because I knew that she had seen them too. I wanted to know what was happening and why it was happening to us. But I had some mad idea that to mention them would make them real, like ghosts in the cupboard and slithering wet things beneath
    the bed. Best ignore them and they would go away.
    I counted a dozen white shapes that morning.
     
    “ Anyone dead today?” Rosalie asked.
    The statement shocked me, made me wonder just what sort of relationship she and Brand had had, but we all ignored her. No need to aggravate an argument.
    Charley sat close to Rosalie, as if a sharing of grief would halve it. Hayden was cooking up bacon and bagels long past their sell-by date. Ellie had not yet come downstairs. She’d been stalking the manor all night, and now we were up she was washing and changing.
    “ What do we do today?” Charley asked. “Are we going to try to get away again? Get to the village for help?”
    I sighed and went to say something, but the thought of those things out in the snow kept me quiet. Nobody else spoke, and the silence was the only answer required.
    We ate our stale breakfast, drank tea clotted with powdered milk, listened to the silence outside. It had snowed again in the night and our tracks from the day before had been obliterated. Standing at the sink to wash up I stared through the window, and it was like looking upon the same day as yesterday, the day before, and the day before that; no signs of our presence existed. All footprints had vanished, all echoes of voices swallowed by the snow, shadows covered with another six inches and frozen like corpses in a glacier. I wondered what patterns and traces the snow would hold this evening, when darkness closed in to wipe us away once more.
    “ We have to tell someone,” Charley said. “Something’s happening, we should tell someone. We have to do something, we can’t just…” She trailed off, staring into a cooling cup of tea, perhaps remembering a time before all this had begun, or imagining she could remember. “This is crazy.”
    “ It’s God,” Rosalie said.
    “ Huh?” Hayden was already peeling wrinkled old vegetables ready for lunch, constantly busy, always doing something to keep his mind off everything else. I wondered how much really went on behind his fringed brow, how much theorising he did while he was boiling, how much nostalgia he wallowed in as familiar cooking smells settled into his clothes.
    “ It’s God, fucking us over one more time. Crazy, as Charley says. God and crazy are synonymous.”
    “ Rosie,” I said, knowing she hated the shortened name, “if it’s not constructive, don’t bother. None of this will bring —”
    “ Anything is more constructive than sod-all, which is what you lot have got to say this morning. We wake up one morning without one of us dead, and you’re all tongue-tied. Bored? Is that it?”
    “ Rosalie, why —”
    “ Shut it, Charley. You more than anyone should be thinking about all this. Wondering why the hell we came here a few weeks ago to escape all the shit, and now we’ve landed right in the middle of it. Right up to our armpits. Drowning in it. Maybe one of us is a Jonah and it’s followed —”
    “ And you think it’s God?” I said. I knew that asking the question would give her open opportunity to rant, but in a way I felt she was right, we did need to talk. Sitting