The Fall Read online

  Gingerly, I went deeper into the darkness and found a large low box. It had a lid, and I worked hard to get my fingers to the right place to lever it upwards. In the end, I did. In the nearer section, there was nothing, just a damp pool that might have been oil or water. My fingers crept along, and at last, they touched what I knew at once was coal. There was almost nothing left—it was more dross than anything else—but I scraped up every last crumb all the same and put the coal into a bag I dug out of my inner pocket.

  I was going back in triumph when I tripped over some unseen tool and was thrown forward onto the stone floor. I was more shocked than hurt. The base of my left hand seemed sticky with blood, and I had done my elbow no good, but it could have been worse. I went the last yards more carefully, shut the door behind me, and went back inside.

  “Isle of Jura!” Trevor said blissfully as I came into the room. “A half bottle of Isle of Jura—my very favorite malt. The guy might almost have ordered it for me!”

  “That’s a bit sick,” I said. “Your gain is his loss. I don’t think he chose to be out there lying dead in thirty degrees of frost.”

  Trevor muttered something incomprehensible and occupied himself with pouring a stiff dram. I got rid of the blood from my hand as best I could and didn’t want to say anything. It was just like him to come out with something callous like that without thinking.

  “Oh, you got coal!” he said loudly when he saw the bag. “Good man. We should have enough now for the night.”

  “Let’s not forget torches tomorrow,” I said. “You take light so much for granted, and when it’s not there…. You know, I looked down into the valley and couldn’t see a sign of life, nothing. It was eerie, I tell you.”

  “Not another word. Come and have a malt. I refuse to be bleak with a bottle of Jura in front of me and a blazing fire at my back. There you go. A toast, Gavin, to ourselves and to all the others who’re battling the cold tonight.”

  We drank, and I thought of them, wondering how many they might be. I thought of what I had seen, the empty dark valleys across the southwest tip of England and the empty dark roads. How many were battling for life through another freezing night?

  “Blessed are those with open fires,” I said, and meant it. “You know, we thought we were so damned clever, ripping out all our hearths fifty years ago, putting in hideous electric fires instead. I wonder how many people are cursing the day they ever did that.”

  “If you don’t promise to lighten up, I’m going to take that glass from you, I swear. No more morbidity. You know how I came across Isle of Jura whisky? I was once in Scotland…oh, it must have been ten or even twelve years ago. I went with Sarah. It was August, and we’d taken light gym shoes, sweatshirts, and buckets and spades, absolutely positive it was going to be gorgeous for a fortnight. I tell you, Gavin, I don’t know how so much of Scotland is left above sea level, it rains so much. It rained for thirteen-and-a-half days without a break—the half day was the travel between King’s Cross and Glasgow. We ended up on this godforsaken island, Jura, where George Orwell wrote 1984, and I can understand why he wrote 1984 there. It has to be one of the most depressing places on earth—bracken and adders and rain. There’s one hotel, a few sad houses, and bugger all else. Except whisky, this whisky. A gift from heaven to the loneliest and saddest Hebridean isle. Sarah and I sat in the hotel and drank. We did nothing else but drink and sit beside the fire in the bar listening to the rain hammering down outside. I think I would have committed suicide if I hadn’t found that whisky.”

  He picked up the bottle and kissed it with deep reverence before pouring himself another generous measure.

  “What happened to Sarah in the end?” I said suddenly.

  “I warned you not to depress me,” he said darkly. “She went off with some idiot from the military—bigger car, bigger house, bigger everything. But I don’t miss her. I’d rather have found Isle of Jura than Sarah.”

  He fell silent and buried his gaze in the orange ball of the fire. I thought of Allison, the girl I had gone out with when I first settled in Tavisdale, and I wondered what might have happened to her. I had seen her now and again in town, but we always avoided one another since things had ended rather jaggedly. For the first time in ages, I really missed her and wished she were with me. Maybe it was partly the whisky, for I’d hardly eaten that day, and my head was already light. I remembered what it had been like to hold her, and I imagined talking to her now and touching her. I was glad we were where we were, but I felt suddenly the oppressive hugeness of the cold beyond. It was as if we were buried beneath some huge white mountain, the only thing alive there, not knowing what had happened or what might lie ahead. Tomorrow we would have to leave and face ten miles of this before we reached Tavisdale, and heaven only knew what we might find there.

  We finished the whisky and stoked up the fire as best we could. One of the candles had already guttered, hissed, and gone out—the other we kept burning until we had arranged our makeshift beds on the floor. Then Trevor blew it out, and there was nothing—nothing except the slowly sinking heart of the fire. I was tired, but I took a long time to sleep all the same, and even when I did, I did not seem to sleep deeply. I kept thinking I heard noises, and once more, I was aware of the smell of death that seemed to permeate every room and corridor.

  When I did drift into sleep, it seemed as though I were still awake. I fancied the outer door was not quite shut, that it was moving about in the night wind, and I wanted to get up and shut it, but my arms and legs wouldn’t work—they were like jelly.

  At last, it was as if I were standing beside the front door, watching as some large animal pawed and pawed to get in. In the dark, it was no more than a huge shadow, but when it pushed inside, I saw that it was a wolf. It did not pay any attention to me whatsoever. It did not even seem to notice I was there, but instead, it started up the staircase on soft feet. I seemed to move with it, though I had no notion of walking at all, and I found myself in the bedroom of the old woman. The wolf began to eat her body, every last bit of her, until it came to her face. Then it finished, turned away, and disappeared from the room. I remained, my eyes fixed on her gaze, the only thing left of her. The open, wide green eyes and those sticking out, bent teeth. All of her eaten but for her gaze.

  I woke up abruptly and listened to the silence, listened like one does as a child when lying alone in the darkness, fearing the shadows and the nothingness.

  I lifted my head and looked at the fire. It was more or less out, and already the room had grown fiendishly cold, the huge outer world of winter marching in like an occupying army, inch after steady inch.

  “Gavin, are you awake?”

  “Yes,” I answered him quickly, startled by the noise.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. It was nothing at all. Nothing.”

  I wanted to say things then, express my fear and emptiness, but I did not know how. I knew he was awake in the darkness. The words came to the edge of my lips and dried up, blew away broken, and turned to dust. I did not know him except as a man to laugh with over beer in the Clare Arms or to argue with about rock samples and deposits. But I was glad he was there all the same. It would have been too huge and terrible to face this unknown alone. I could not have done it. I was somehow glad my parents were gone and that they had not had to face this terrible happening, whatever it was. Then I wondered if that was unbelievably selfish or truly altruistic, and I argued with myself in my head over and over again until, at last, I got back to sleep.

  Chapter Three

  I woke early in the morning. I knew it was early without any physical evidence. I have always been like that since childhood. The room was still grey with shadows, and it took me a moment to remember where I was. Then I saw Trevor, the fireplace, the candles.... I turned around towards the windows and listened. Almost at once, I knew I was hearing the silence of snow, that uncannily deep quiet that comes when real snow is falling, great magnificent flakes of it.

  As soon as I moved to get up, I felt the cold. It was deadly, a raw grey pain of cold that tired one’s spirit cruelly. I got to the window and caught a glimpse of the world beyond flurried with white flakes, its skies the color of slate. Then I escaped back to the warmth of my nest on the floor, dreading everything that lay ahead of getting up.

  I reckoned all the same that the temperature must have risen somewhat if snow was falling. In one sense, it gave me a feeling of hope, though I did not relish a walk of ten miles or more to Tavisdale through a blinding blizzard.

  Trevor lay as if he were dead, kingdoms away. I thought of impressing him by going on a hunt for fresh wood for the fire, but I just couldn’t bear leaving that room for the still worse cold of the remainder of the house. I lay for a while thinking of everything and nothing, wondering more than anything what we might find when we left there and went to town, what we might learn of the true story of this winter. Then, in the end, I needed to get to the toilet too badly and had to stagger away grumpy and freezing to the other end of the house.

  “What’s for breakfast then?” Trevor yawned when I reappeared.

  I looked at him in irritated surprise. “Full English breakfast and a choice of teas,” I retorted. “What d’you expect?”

  “Poor Gavin. Mornings were never your thing, were they? All right, we’d better get sorted and then make a move. I don’t like the look of that snow. I reckon it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”

  “Is it worth starting a fire?” Now that I was up, I was more willing to embark on a hunt for wood. The great pile I’d collected for the previous evening had all but vanished now.

  He looked at the ashes in the grate and thought out loud. “Well, if you can get it going quickly, all right. Wouldn’t be a bad idea to warm up before we leave this place. I’ll see what I can find us to eat.”

  I didn’t discover a vast amount in the end, and what I did find wasn’t brilliant for burning. But I got a fire of sorts started and then found an ancient kettle under the sink that I took to the back door and dragged through the snow. Using various implements, I scraped together a second bucketful to add to the kettle once it had melted, for I’m always aware of how little water you actually get from snow. Already three or four inches of crystal-sharp white wool lay on the ground, and even in those few seconds I waited at the back door, I was covered in a mass of giant flakes. There was not the slightest movement of wind. It was uncannily still. I might almost have heard a pin drop in Moscow. But what frightened me was that it was a dead silence, utterly and completely empty.

  There was very little to eat. Some biscuits and a bit of fruit from the house. But I kept thinking of the dead couple, and the expression of the old frozen woman upstairs in particular, and the food tasted bad and hollow in my mouth. At least we made tea in plenty, generously stoked up with sugar to fortify us for the journey ahead.

  Then we tipped out the stone samples from our packs and thought how we might best use the space we now had.

  “There must be real winter gear in the house somewhere,” Trevor kept saying. He marched about the various rooms banging doors and whistling, though I reckoned most of it was bravado. He didn’t like the scent of death there any more than I did.

  The jackets we found were old, but they were waxed nonetheless, and Trevor said they’d do us better than the ones we had. There were several balaclavas, and we took them despite our shared dislike of thick wool against our skin. But boots were a problem. The pair that stood on the front porch had obviously been the woman’s and were far too small for either of us.

  “He must have been wearing his,” Trevor said. “I’ll make do with my own, though they’re not as watertight as they could be.”

  I didn’t argue with him. We had both seen in our minds the dead man lying frozen on the path. It would have demanded greater desperation than ours to take the boots from his feet.

  We found one or two extra sweaters and took a blanket each. The torch we discovered in a kitchen cupboard was powerful, and beside it were a couple of extra batteries. Apart from that, we stuffed into side pockets things we reckoned might come in useful if worst came to worst: cutlery, string, scissors, kindling, paper, and a hunting knife.

  “All right then,” Trevor said, heaving his pack onto his shoulders. “After you.”

  I could never have imagined how hard the going would be. The snow was soft as wool so that one’s feet went right through to the solid ice beneath. We had not reached the road yet, and the track was pitted and rough. I fell a dozen times before we reached the shell of Trevor’s car, and falling hurt badly. But it was the snow that really tired the nerves. Even with our balaclavas, the giant flakes hit our eyes and the upper parts of our cheekbones. The pain of that melting snow was agonizing. It seemed to burn right into the center of one’s face and go on and on hurting remorselessly.

  But the car was a milestone. From here on, at least we had a proper road. We stopped there, getting our breath back and looking at the surreal white hump that had been Trevor’s car.

  “I’ll miss her,” he said. “A lot of things happened in that car—a lot of my life is in there.” He brushed the snow away from his face in frustration. “Still, I suppose it would have ended up in the scrapyard in the end. It’s just sooner than I expected.”

  “You can come back for her,” I said. “When all this is over.”

  He looked at me strangely. “If, not when. This is real, Gavin, more real than anything I can ever remember. I’m not pinning my hopes on anything right now.”

  He went ahead of me now, into the road that was filling up with snow. It was deeper than my boots now and getting deeper every second. I looked back at the path of my footsteps, at the set Trevor had left too, and considered that nothing else had passed that way, no human, no animal, no bird. Normally, at that time of year, the lanes were filled with cars and people out exploring the country around the moor. Half of London came up for the weekend to escape the concrete miles and the morning traffic. Now there was nothing.

  After an hour or so of walking, when the pain of that snow against the eyes became almost unbearable, I thought I noticed something far ahead. I caught up with Trevor and pointed.

  “Looks like another car,” he said.

  My heart pounded with a strange excitement as we moved towards it. I’m not sure why—perhaps I hoped that somehow, we would find someone alive there, and maybe even an engine that still had life in it. You take the sophisticated world completely for granted, and when suddenly it isn’t there, you’re left vulnerable and afraid, naked. And it hadn’t taken much to whip that world away but one week of winter.

  Even though Trevor called me back, I began running. It was a stupid thing to do, for we still had miles to go, and I was throwing my strength away. But I hardly heard him as he shouted at my back. I wanted to know. I wanted to find hope and life. I felt like a man crossing the desert, thirsty beyond words, seeing a flickering in the distance that might just be water.

  I got there, and the car was no different from Trevor’s. I pushed the snow away from the window and hacked at the ice beneath, as thick as the palm of my hand. I took the pocket knife from my jacket and bashed at the glass feverishly. It did nothing but bang hollowly on the ice. Then I took my whole arm, padded in thick layers of sweater and shirt and jacket, and swung it against the window with all my might. There was a shattering of glass and ice as the whole thing imploded, and it was a moment or so before I felt the echo of pain reverberate in my arm.

  A woman sat behind the wheel. She was dead, quite dead, for there was frost glinting on her eyebrows and in a silver trail along her upper lip. She was hugging herself as if she had a terrible pain in her belly, and her long blonde hair hung down about her shoulders in bright waves. It was as if she were desperately praying. She was so beautiful, so young. She should have been full of the celebration of life. But the cold had killed her like the slow closing in of wolves.

  “D’you think she was trying to escape?” I asked.

  “I think she fell asleep,” Trevor said softly, and there was a brokenness in his voice, something I had not heard before.

  I remembered words my mother used to quote, “There but for the grace of God go I.” The words ran over and over in my mind, and I could not get rid of them. The snow flurried in through the cracked black hole in the whiteness. Snowflakes landed in the woman’s hair and shoulders, but she made no more effort to brush them away. And in the end, she too would be covered by the snow, and the snow would take her away.

  When I walked on again, I was doubly tired. Running to the car had sapped my strength even more, but my spirit had been drained by what I had seen there. Somehow, though the sight of the old woman in the cottage had been terrible, this was worse. Maybe I looked on this girl with my own young eyes. Somehow it seemed so much more unfair that all the rest of her life should be snatched from her in a twinkling. I saw myself in her and knew that if it had not been for the caves, it might have been me.

  After a long time, I caught up with Trevor, and as we blundered through the deepening snow, we looked at one another.

  “D’you have any food?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “We can try the Clare,” he said, “see if we find any life there.”

  “How far now?” I asked.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Five miles.”

  I didn’t say anything. My stomach was empty, my eyes were numb with pain, and the balaclava over my face was clogged with driven snow. I had cleared it off twenty, thirty, forty times. I didn’t bother anymore. The snow was up to our knees now, and every step a labor. After another half hour, Trevor was ahead of me, barely more than a dark shadow far away. I imagined how it would be to walk off the road, cross the dyke, and disappear into the whiteness. I felt sleepy already, desperately tired. I could not believe it would take long to fall asleep.