Back | Next
Contents

Eight: Summer Lightning

It took me a long time to find the house I really wanted. Six months to sell my London flat, another three months living in rented accommodation in Cardiff, but then I travelled to West Wales for a weekend and I found this house, and we fell in love with each other.

Sounds strange, a house falling in love with a person. But that's what happened. When I arrived to view, the front door was unlocked, even though the estate agent said no one had been inside for almost six weeks. I opened the door and entered, and I knew where everything was. I had never been here before—never even been to West Wales—but to the left was the kitchen, down the hallway and under the stairs was the door to the study, to the right was the living room, and if I walked through there and opened the double doors I'd see the dining room, painted white and dominated by an old oak dining suite rescued from a dilapidated manor house years earlier.

I knew. But I went through the motions anyway, mainly because I was scared that I knew. Perhaps I wanted to find something I did not recognise, a room I had never imagined which would make my recollection of somewhere I had never been imperfect. And that imperfection would bring comfort. So I looked downstairs and up, and found nothing out of place.

By the time I opened the back door and went into the garden, I knew that I loved the house. There was no fear or confusion, just a certainty that I should be here, and I sat on a flaking metal chair on the timber decking and rang the estate agent. He called back five minutes later to accept my offer. Four weeks later, I was in.

The sun was kissing the horizon. The wine sat in a cooler before me, resting on the metal table I had bought to match the garden furniture already there. I sat on the same metal chair; repainted now, and softened by a thick cushion. I closed my eyes and sighed.

"It's a beautiful night," I said.

I opened my eyes when somebody screamed.

The voice had come from the other side of the house. I dropped my wine glass, jumped aside as it shattered on the decking and ran indoors. Cool shadows welcomed me in and eased me back out, and I ran down the short gravelled driveway to the quiet country road beyond.

There was another scream just before I reached the front gates, coming from behind the screen of leylandii bordering my property. This scream was more controlled and considered, and more filled with panic.

I opened the smaller of the two gates, stepped out into the road and saw the girl in white. She must have been sixteen or seventeen, certainly no older, and her dazzling trousers and blouse were spattered with blood. She had fallen from her bike. She held her hand up in front of her, staring at the intermittent spray of blood showering from her wrist.

"Oh, Jesus Christ!" I said.

The girl looked at me, wide white eyes in a blood-mask.

As I ran to her I slipped the belt from my jeans and the phone from my pocket. I dialled emergency, knelt beside the girl and smiled as I waited for the connection. I switched the phone to loudspeaker and sat it beside me on the road.

As I spoke to the dispatcher, told her where we were and what had happened, I tied the belt around the girl's arm. Pulled tight. Slipped the clasp together and raised her hand higher.

I had no idea what I was doing.

The dispatcher insisted on remaining on the line, but it was the girl I spoke to.

"What's your name?"

"Jemma."

"What happened?"

"I fell off my bike."

I almost laughed. Stupid question, obvious answer.

Jemma's panic had lessened now that I had taken control. Blood still ran from the gash on her wrist and palm, but it no longer sprayed, so I hoped that was good.

"Is she woozy?" the telephone said.

Jemma shook her head and I said no.

"You live there?" she said, nodding back at the house.

"Yes. Not long."

"It's a lovely place," she said. "I was in there once, when the last owners were there. Couple of years ago. It felt like home." She looked away, embarrassed, but I nodded and told her I knew what she meant.

I asked Jemma if she wanted to come inside but the dispatcher told us to wait by the roadside, because the ambulance was on its way. So we sat in the sun, and I loosened the belt every few minutes to allow some blood through, and it was as though we'd known each other for ages. Jemma was no longer scared, and adrenaline kept me going.

It was later, when they'd taken her away and said she'd be fine, and the house had welcomed me back inside—my new house, my home—that I started to shake, spilling tears and gasping for air as massive sobs shook me to the floor.

I wake, sit up, crying. The Irishman is sitting with his back to me, and he doesn't turn around. I silently curse his politeness.

"Holy shit," I say.

"What?" Cordell is behind me, and I stand and turn around.

The house . . . that voice . . . my home?

I shake my head. "Bad dream." I look around, searching for a sign that there were reasons for that memory, but I find none.

"We should go," Jessica says. "You okay?"

I nod, run my hands across my scalp. Damn! That was weird. That was . . .

I mount the bike, kick it to life and fill my head with noise before I allow myself to admit what has happened.

That was Jacqueline. I had one of her memories.

 

A dozen miles later, travelling toward the falling sun, we see something that stops us in our tracks: a forest, starting immediately beside the motorway and spread up and across the low hills of Somerset. It sweeps away from the road, climbing slopes, spiking hilltops, and looking along the road's route I cannot see where the trees end. They look young and fresh—their leaves sporting vivid shades of green, visible trunks quite smooth and unworn by time—and I wonder how long they have taken to grow.

The others climb from the Range Rovers, I dismount, and we stand together beside the road.

"That doesn't look quite right," Cordell says.

I laugh, but it's a desperate sound. "I drove this way several times each year," I say. "This shouldn't be here. There should be farms out there, and a hotel up on that hill with panoramic glass windows, and barns and a field full of junked cars half a mile that way." I point at the trees, the trees. There's no sign of any buildings, anywhere. No power pylons, no flashes of tumbled masonry, and no fields outlined by wild hedges or old stone walls. Only trees, with dozens of birds spotting the sky above. We can see quite a long way into the forest, because the leaves seem not to have grown into a full canopy yet. But that's the only real sign that these trees have not been here for very long.

How long ago? I think. How long since Ashley and I came down here? I'm not sure what to feel. I suppose I should be scared. We're standing before something supernatural, after all: a forest that was not here a year before. Yet so much has happened that the term natural has taken on new meaning, and continues to change.

"We'll go in," the Irishman says. His voice is lacking in his usual lightness. "There'll be plenty to see in there." He starts across the hard shoulder toward the overgrown hedge that marks the edge of relative normality.

"Hey," I say. "It may not be safe."

The Irishman turns and shrugs. "What is?"

The trees whisper.

I take a step back and almost trip. Jessica gasps and reaches for the shotgun. There was not even a breeze, and only a few leaves seem to flicker and shift.

The Irishman pauses before the hedge and stands on tiptoes to see over. He looks left and right, stumbling a couple of times as he tries to stretch higher. When he drops down onto flat feet he seems smaller than before. Shrunken.

"What is it?" I say.

"Dangerous in there," he says. He joins us back on the road and looks left and right, examining the motionless queue of vehicles. "Notice anything?"

We look, and yes, I have already noticed. Perhaps it just didn't register before.

"Doors are open," Jessica says. "We've seen a few before, but there are lots more here. As if there was something to stop and get out for."

"They're in there." The Irishman nods at the forest, then turns and climbs back into his Range Rover. He shuts the door, and the sun glares from glass so that I only see him in silhouette. Even then I know that he is shaking.

"Do you really want to see?" Jessica says. Cordell has started for the hedge, and even though I can answer Jessica's question I follow him. Some things need to be seen. The bodies in the cars can stay where they are, because they have chosen a very private death. The old cities clotted with dead and scattered with damaged survivors will never be somewhere for us, because they are so far in the past, awash with the stink of yesterday's rot and madness. But here, the supernatural gives us some way to glimpse something else. Something changed, perhaps, or of the future.

We reach the hedge together. I'm taller than the Irishman, and I can see more. Cordell finds a rusted paint pot hidden in the grass and stands on it. To begin with, we say nothing.

In this new forest, the trees are spaced far apart. The ground between them is rich with low plant life, some of it root crops gone wild, some wilder plants spread from the hedges or seeded by birds. There are none of the usual signs of an old, established wood: no fallen trunks, jagged stumps or banks of old shrubs. But there are people. I can see a dozen from where I stand, all of them involved somehow with the trunk of a tree. I can think of no other word that suits: they're involved.

A naked man is pressed against one trunk, the wood holding him tight where it has grown to encompass his abdomen and stomach, and even the tip of his nose and lips seem to be held still. He seems to be dead, though his pale skin is unmarked by decay. His hair is long and tangled, and I can see insects crawling in and out of its mess. There's a woman to my left, legs and arms protruding from either side of an oak tree's trunk. Her face is almost entirely out of sight, only a cheek, ear and length of golden hair still revealed. I can tell it's a woman because one breast is also loose, hanging as though heavy and full. There's an old man high in one tree's branches, pierced in several places and held aloft while leaves cloak him green. A child—I think it's a boy, though I cannot be sure—is buried to the chest in the junction at the top of an elm. The child's head hangs to the left, neck apparently broken. Still, no rot.

"They're alive," Cordell breathes.

"No. I don't think so."

"But their skin, their faces. They're still whole, and if they came from those cars . . ." He points back over one shoulder with his thumb, never taking his eyes from the trees.

"I think they're being kept," I say.

"Kept?" He glances at me then back at the trees, and I see realisation settling.

"What do you see?" Jessica calls.

"Dead people," I say.

Cordell shakes his head. "Kept for what?"

I have no idea, but he looks at me, demanding an answer. I shrug. "Food?"

"Food. But it's not all of them. Not every tree has someone."

"No. Maybe just the lucky ones."

There's another whisper from the trees, and I instinctively look up to see the patterns of leaves waving at the sky. But there is almost no movement. No breeze. The whisper goes on, and I know it has come from deep within this new forest.

I expect a head to turn then, a fist to clench, an exposed eye to blink slowly, a mouth to stretch into a smile, but none of that happens. The bodies remain still but whole, kept and protected from the ravages of decay by their new tree homes. I wonder whether they share more with the trees than just space.

"We need to go," Cordell says. He steps down from the paint pot and walks back to the road, and I can hear him mumble something to Jessica.

I take one last look, because it suddenly seems important to see. Nothing changes; there is no revelation. The trees whisper again as I turn to leave, but there is no calling in that sound, no lure. Perhaps it's a language we were never meant to know.

 

As I ride alone, I dwell upon the memory I had from Jacqueline's life. She must have told me about it during one of those long, sleepless nights when we lay together, for comfort and company rather than anything else. We had talked a lot then, drifting in and out of sleep, to and from dreams, and I revealed much more about myself in that bed than at any time since Ashley. Jacqueline did as well. I cannot recall the actual conversation when she talked about her new home in West Wales and the bloodied girl out on the road, but it must have happened. Must have.

But that felt like a memory of my own!

I ignore the voice of reason in my mind, because it's surely mad.

That evening, as the sun finally sinks away, we park on the road and sit together in one vehicle. The sunset is giving us a wonderful display of colours as it settles low over the Devonshire hills. Cordell once said that the fine sunsets were caused by dust in the sky from a distant war. But he hadn't repeated that assumption for a while, and I was trying to forget.

"That's beautiful," the Irishman says.

"It is." I'm sitting behind him and I see the sunset through the frazzled ends of his long hair.

"We should be there tomorrow," Cordell says.

"You think so?" Jessica is in the driving seat. She's nursing the shotgun like a teddy bear.

"So long as the roads stay as clear as they have been, yes."

"What's happening?" she says. "What were those trees? Why were they holding dead people, like you said? What's happening?"

None of us answer for a while, and I feel the need to break the silence. "Michael told us things are moving on," I say.

"Great," the Irishman says. "Moving on to carnivorous fuckin' trees."

"They weren't eating them," Cordell says. "Not really."

"We stay to the road," I say. "We stick to the plan, get to Bar None as soon as we can."

"If it even exists." Cordell slips down in the seat beside me and looks at the Range Rover's ceiling. "Maybe Michael was a madman."

"You really believe that?" I ask. He closes his eyes.

"I have a plan," Jessica says. "If we don't find this place, I have a plan. There's a place on Bodmin, out on the moor, a hotel."

"Jamaica Inn," I say.

She smiles and nods. "We could go there. It's in the middle of nowhere, away from any towns or cities, and if there were people there at the end, I'll bet it wasn't many."

"Not many bodies to move, you mean," the Irishman says.

"Could be they're still alive."

"I'm not going out there," Cordell says. He nods at the windscreen but I know what he means, we all do. The wilds. "I'm staying on this road until we get to Bar None, then I'll go inside and see if what he said is true. And if it's all bollocks—if we don't even find the place—I'll turn around and drive all the way back home. I will. But there's no way you're dragging me onto the middle of Bodmin Moor. I've been there and it's wild. And that was before." He shakes his head. "No way."

"Well, it's just an idea."

"We've put so much trust in him," I say, and my words dwindle away into silence. We're all realising exactly what we've done: given up a safe place, come out into the changing world, opened ourselves up to danger, chasing the dream of a place that may or may not be, all on the strength of one man. Perhaps the end really has driven us mad.

 

We park the Range Rovers close together and sleep in them. The Irishman and I chat for a while, but there's a weight of knowledge between us that makes idle conversation seem almost disrespectful. We've seen and sensed individual things that are strange and almost incomprehensible. Considered together, they give evidence of a huge change. I'm scared, and nervous, and thrilled.

"You know what I heard?" he says, breaking a loaded silence.

"I'm sure you'll tell me."

"Theories," he says. "The internet was alight with them in the weeks before the end. They appeared on all the usual conspiracy theory websites to begin with. I used to love all that bullshit: who shot Kennedy, how the moon landings were faked, who paid for Princess Diana to be assassinated. But pretty soon after they appeared on these sites, the major news agencies started to repeat the same stories. Details were slightly different, dates and places altered just subtly. But close enough."

"Is this the thing about the plagues' origins?"

"Yep. To begin with everyone thought it was just one plague out of Africa, like Ebola. But then it became clear that there were different strains, and from then on new plagues were identified every few days, and new points of origin were found. A cave in Indonesia. An inaccessible valley in Brazil. India, the Australian Outback, an ice-cave in Alaska discovered by oil drillers. Other places, too."

"Lots of people said it was terrorism."

"What terrorists would plant germ warfare weapons in places so far out of the way? If it was terrorists, why not London, New York, Moscow, Paris?"

"Too heavily protected?"

The Irishman held up his hand, flexed his index finger and hissed. "Aerosol. Doesn't take much."

"So it's nature," I say. "That's what these stories were getting at. Nature did this."

"Humankind's expansion into nature. Almost as if these plagues have always been there, a guard against us going too far. And when we did go too far . . ."

In one way it's a momentous idea that I can barely absorb. In another, more immediate way, it really does not matter.

I drift off to sleep thinking about the bomb in the channel tunnel, and how nature was far more subtle.

 

Next morning we eat a brief meal of tinned fruit then set off early. We want to reach Bar None today, if we're ever going to reach it at all.

We travel well that day, pausing here and there for one of the Range Rovers to push tangled cars from the road, stopping around lunchtime to refuel from the jerry cans in the back of the Irishman's vehicle.

We see more strange things, but try to ignore them.

Late afternoon we leave the motorway and head off across the countryside, following A-roads that twist between hills and valleys. These roads are generally quite clear, but when we come across the first real barrier, it's a bad one. An oil tanker has jack-knifed and exploded, taking a dozen cars with it, and we have to leave the road and drive through overgrown fields, skirting a few copses of trees that have strange growths at their centres, ploughing through hedges that grapple at wheels and axles. I take the rear, driving the bike along the route the Range Rovers are carving across the fields. I feel very vulnerable.

We make it back onto the road past the site of the accident, and head off once again in pursuit of a place that may not be.

But Bar None's existence is revealed to us long before we reach it.

 

I see her as we drive around a bend. She's standing in the middle of the road, away from any wrecked cars, wearing a white wedding dress over leather trousers and a leather jacket. The dress would probably fit her were it not for the clothes beneath, but it is bulged and stretched as though fit to burst. It's unnaturally clean. Her face is painted red.

I stop the bike and turn around. Jessica shrugs.

I look at the woman again and she's still standing there, smiling. She starts walking toward me. I rev the bike and drift forward another fifty metres, then kick down the stand and dismount.

I look around. To my left a steep hill rises away from the road, and to my right there are fields. There could be a hundred people hidden within a hundred steps of me, and I'd never see them. But I need to offer a peaceful sign to this woman, so I smile and walk to meet her. We both pause several steps from each other. There's something strange about her, way beyond the red-painted face and unusual attire, but I can't place it.

"We can't allow you to reach there," she says.

"Reach where?"

"Bar None."

We, she had said. Of course, I never believed she would have been on her own, but now I'm conscious of other eyes upon me. "Come with us," I say. That disarms her. She frowns, steps back, and that's when I realise what it is about her that's so strange. What I thought were loose threads from the hems of the wedding dress are in fact fine white roots, delving out from beneath the dress's sleeves, across the backs of her hands and around her fingers. There are some at her throat as well, fine white veins trailing upward for her face. The dress is unharmed. These are growing from beneath.

"You'd take me?" she whispers.

Now she's talking in the singular. If this is a game, I have to win. I can feel the others watching from inside the Range Rovers, and I step to one side to allow Jessica a clear shot.

"Have you not been there already?" I ask. The woman's face drops, all signs of hope slipping from the glazed paint. She spits, laughs, turns around to present her back to me.

"You think I'd have come out again if I had?"

"I don't know anything about Bar None," I say.

The woman spins around again, and spittle flies from her mouth. "Don't lie to me, fresh man. Don't fuck with the Wild Woman of Wongo. Last man who fucked with the Wild Woman left his dick inside. Shall I show you? Would you like to see?" She's lifting the wedding dress and hauling down the zipper on her trousers, and as she's distracted I take another look up at the hillside to my left. I can detect no movement there, but it's so overgrown that there could be anything hidden on its slopes.

"I don't need to see, I believe you," I say.

The woman lets her dress drop. "Oh, if you did see you'd never believe, fresh man. So innocent. So sheltered. Where have you been all my new life?"

I've no answer, and she spits again.

"Well, doesn't matter. You're not going there. We can't let you."

"Why not?"

"So you do know Bar None!"

I offer a rueful smile, as though she has won one over on me. "We just heard it's a nice place to stay."

"Nice?" She moves closer and now I can smell her, a mix of freshly cut grass, turned earth and raw meat. I glance down at her throat and see those roots stroking her chin, as though encouraging her to speak again. "Nice? It's nice if you like pain, and rot, and torture. Nice if you want your face flayed away and pebbles put in place of your eyes. Then it's nice, fresh man. Nice for you and all your fresh meat." She looks over my shoulder at the Range Rovers. She seems disappointed. "Fresh, but so sparse."

"We don't want trouble," I say. "We don't want anything from you, all we want to do is pass."

"Pass?"

"On the road. We just want to drive on."

She smiles, and her amazingly white teeth form a slash across her bloody red face. The laughter sounds real, and for a moment I think I can see the human being beneath this charade. I wonder what she was before the end, but realise that no longer matters. Might as well ask what she had been in a previous life. We are all reincarnated now, in this world that seems to carry so little of the past.

"I can't let you drive on," she says. "I'm hungry. My sweet pig-fucking God, I am so damn hungry."

Something happens to her teeth.

I turn, shout, run toward the motorbike, trip and fall to the ground. The shotgun breaks the air. Something strikes the road behind me. I scramble to my feet and run for the Range Rover, and it's as if the air is being torn around me, things whipping at my clothing, something cool and harsh slapping the back of my neck, and then the explosions come in and I realise someone is shooting at me. I hear thuds and other metallic sounds as I reach the lead Range Rover, then the shotgun sounds again, the air rifle snaps at the air, and I leap into the rear seat even as the vehicles start moving.

"Keep down!" Jessica shouts. I look up at the back of her head and see it haloed by a shower of shattered glass. I sit up anyway, because I can't bear not being able to see. Jessica curses and punches at the obscured windscreen without slowing. It falls in on her, a million diamonds that pile onto her and Cordell's laps and scatter around their feet, and I just see a flash of white and red before the Range Rover bumps over something lying in the road.

"Was that my bike?"

"Already passed that," Jessica says.

More gunshots. Cordell thrusts the shotgun from his side window and fires at the hillside, but I can't see what he's shooting at. The car shakes as bullets strike it, and the door lining to my left erupts in pieces. I glance back and see the Irishman following. As he passes over the shape in the road it's mostly red.

"Get down, damn it!" Jessica shouts again.

"What the hell was that?" I say. "What was the point?"

"I heard what she was saying," Cordell says. He breaks the shotgun, trying to hunker down low in the seat as he pops in two fresh cartridges. "About Bar None." He sits ups again, gun resting on the sill of the shattered windscreen.

I realise that the gunfire has stopped. Something is growling in the Range Rover's engine, but there are no more bullets trying to tear us apart. I look back again and the Irishman is on our tail. There are some holes in his windscreen but it has not shattered. He smiles and gives the thumbs up, and I wave back.

"There was something wrong with her," I say.

"You can fucking say that again!" Jessica says.

"No, I mean something that's not wrong with us."

"Yeah, well." Cordell leans forward and scans the road ahead, the hillside to our left, the tall, wide hedge that now borders the fields to our right. We round a bend and there's a bus parked beside the road, a car buried in its rear. Jessica presses down on the gas and we roar by, Cordell tracking the bus with the shotgun.

"So what was it?" Jessica says.

Cordell snorts. "Does it matter?"

"Weird," I say, "like she had something growing—"

The shotgun explodes and a spread of shrubs to our left coughs leaves. "Thought I saw something," Cordell says.

Jessica glances at me in the rear-view mirror.

"Maybe we can talk about this later," I say. It's noisy. Wind whistles through where the windscreen had been, and I can see that Jessica and Cordell both have dozens of tiny cuts on their faces. Some of them drip blood, and I'm reminded of the red-faced woman we just left behind.

Jessica ran her over. I wonder whether it was on purpose, or because the road was not wide enough to avoid her. I try to remember where we had been standing, but I can't. I mourn the loss of the motorbike, a link to Michael, but I'm also strangely thrilled at what the red-faced woman had been saying. She and her friends knew of Bar None, which could only mean that it was real.

"We must be close," Cordell says.

"Why?"

"If they didn't want us to get there, they wouldn't be guarding roads miles away."

I dig around in the back of the Range Rover and find an old road atlas.

"Don't think we'll need that," Jessica says. Her eyes are stark against her blood-smeared face, and I realise for the first time how piercingly blue they are. Almost beautiful. I'd never thought of her that way before, and it surprises me.

I look back again to make sure the Irishman is still following. He seems fine, but this time he does not acknowledge my wave. He seems lost, in a world of his own. Daydreaming.

I close my eyes and a flood of images hits me. I recognise them, but at the same time I do not. They're not from my life.

"Has anyone . . . ?" I begin, but trail off.

"What?" Jessica asks.

"Doesn't matter." I lie on the back seat and close my eyes, and this time I do not open them again. I don't sleep. But I do remember.

 

Back | Next
Framed