Authors: Gillian White
Damn damn damn. She will ring the weather forecast at once. Maybe it is clear elsewhere. Maybe it won’t last long and, as the snow-clearing truck is here already, there must be a chance of getting out. Her eyes brighten as she lifts the phone, only to confront a stony silence. Damn. Damn. She has been cut off.
Damn the weather. Damn Donna.
She pulls on her boots, still damp from yesterday’s fruitless searches, fights with the rarely used front door and rushes outside. Her stepping stones are massive white snowballs, deceptively soft, as if they might collapse on impact. She crouches and scrambles over her stream, followed by an excited Lola, who rolls and delves in riotous joy, shamelessly in love with the stuff. She watches the snowplough disappear into the distance, stares at its tail lights, then down at the road. It has made some small impression, the snow has been churned so it banks the sides, but already the surface is white again. Where has the machine gone now? Perhaps, if Georgie hurries, she could follow it and escape?
But dammit, what about Donna?
If only she could get free. Resentment storms in her head as she stares hopelessly at the road. She herself is already covered, it sticks to her coat like fuzzy white burrs, grim and determined. There’s no getting away from it, she cannot attempt to drive in this.
Unable to accept defeat, she struggles across the road to the farmyard, her feet sinking in deep pockets, snow sliding inside her boots, she has to fight hard to keep going. The Buckpit brothers are still busy milking and the glow from the parlour is softer than usual, the sound is different, quieter. She walks straight in, not bothering with platitudes, not caring if the testy Mrs Buckpit should come to wither her with one of her glances. She even forgets about the ashes, Georgie’s business is urgent and nothing is going to stop her.
Lot turns round and stares at Georgie inanely, hands on the steaming udders of a cow. He wrings out a grimy cloth. Georgie, ignoring his sullen stare, wades straight in. ‘I have to get out today. It is essential that I get out, and I wondered if you could give me a tow up the hill with the tractor.’ Not an unreasonable request from one neighbour to another, but seeing the look on his bovine face she quickly amends her request, ‘afterwards, of course, when the milking is finished. I’ll pay you for your trouble.’
The lout carries on with his work, clanking the metal gate and waiting as another cow obediently sways into position. She will have to repeat her request, although it’s quite obvious that he heard her the first time, but just as she is about to speak he turns and proves her wrong, ‘And where do you think you’ll be going?’
‘I just want help to get out of here, it can’t be this thick everywhere else.’
‘Oh but ’tis. ’Tis everywhere.’
‘What?’ How does he know? They haven’t got a radio, let alone a TV? ‘It can’t be all over?’
‘Mostly.’ And he wags his oversized head, it moves rhythmically from side to side, like the tails of his cows, and his hair is equally black and tufted. ‘They said so on the CB before the aerial snapped.’ A CB radio? Ah yes, that’s the reason for the outsized aerial on the top of the Land Rover.
Could he be her adversary
, this burly brute of a man, could it be he who stood so unnervingly, the figure in the fields, staring in such sinister fashion? Stalking? Skulking around her woodshed at night? No, not Lot. He wouldn’t have the wit for a start…
‘If it wuz remotely possible for either of my sons to help you this morning, d’you honestly think they’d have the time?’
Georgie turns round wearily. So the shrew has been keeping watch, huddled at her kitchen window. Does nothing get past her?
‘I realize this weather must cause extra problems…’
‘
Extra problems?
’ And the Buckpit bitch gives a keen-eyed, skeletal smile. ‘We’re on a generator already as it is, we can’t get the milk out. We’ll have to throw the lot away. I’d have thought, if you were planning a journey, it might have been wise to check the forecast before you went.’
Georgie shrugs her shoulders desperately. ‘I have been far too worried about my dog to be taking notice of ordinary things, as you know. And anyway, this is an emergency.’ But the numbness in her cold feet is slowly spreading throughout her body, leaving her wooden, empty, the fight frozen out of her.
‘I see the dog came back then. Of its own accord.’
And Lola gazes up at the woman, willing to be friendly, even with this charmless character, so forgiving is she.
Georgie protests, ‘She was brought back, Mrs Buckpit, by the person who took her away.’
‘Well, we wouldn’t know anything about that. And now, if you don’t mind, God willing, we’ve more to be getting on with…’
But she just can’t leave it at this. Georgie attempts to persevere by attracting Lot’s attention again. The thin and weedy Silas, with cow manure all over his hands, is watching and picking his teeth with the needle end of a syringe. ‘So you don’t think there is any chance, not even later when things have calmed down?’
The woman answers for her sons. ‘What makes you think anything’s going to calm down? There’s wuss to come, midear. They say it’s gonna be bad, real bad, wuss than we’ve had it before. Luckily,’ and she stares coldly at Georgie, ‘we have made preparations, I suggest you go back home and do the same yesself. While you can.’
While she can?
Mrs B. seems to be prophesying the end of the world as we know it, and her thin voice crackles with triumphant foreboding.
There is no way to vent her indignation. There is nothing to do but accept. On her unsteady way back to the cottage Georgie strains to see Chad Cramer’s place, but all there is is a distant shape, she cannot even tell if the Land Rover has gone. The snow is deeper already, in those last few short minutes. She rubs angrily on the windscreen of her car, but no colour, no metal shows, just the odd piece of black tyre tells her it is still there under the mound of white.
It would be impossible to drive it down the few feet to the ford, let alone up either of the inclines which lead out of Wooton-Coney.
So be it. Sod’s law. But if Georgie is truly as helpless as she feels, she reminds herself that so is her evil protagonist. She will keep her door locked and chained. She will keep Lola in sight at all times.
She calls the dog to her side as she goes to free the chickens. Even this job proves difficult, because Mark’s intricate homemade lock has frozen up and she has to work hard to shift the tiny sliding door, wiping her face free of snow as she goes, and seeing the corn she so recently scattered disappearing under the thick white covers. It might be kinder to keep the fowls inside this morning, warm and comfortable on their perches. They, too, are uneasy, the unusual silence must have shocked them, she misses their contented clucking sounds.
It’s no good, dammit, she can’t shift the bloody door, so she takes off her gloves and works on the small flap window with frozen fingers. With a sudden snap it opens, and Georgie peers inside. Where are they? They should be roosting. Instead they are on the floor of the hut, but wait, there’s something horribly wrong. She brings her eye to the hole and stares in.
They don
’
t have heads any more.
That’s all. Do you understand what I’m saying? They have no heads. Just raw stumps with sticky red bones ending at the neck, and their beautiful russet feathers are clogged with blood. They lie, quite still, on the floor of the house in a neat, plump row, as if on a slab in a butcher’s shop. Placed there neatly. Where the slaughterer put them.
Last night all was hope, now there is nothing but horror. Now, for some desperate reason connected to keeping her sanity, she has to open the door, even if it means breaking the blasted thing down. She tramps determinedly through the snow, through the deep orchard grass, to the woodshed for a spade. She carries it back to the chicken house and bashes the spade against the flimsy construction again and again until it splinters and gives way. She flings down the spade and stares in breathless terror, thrusting her arm inside and pulling out bodies, one at a time, every one identical, every pretty head chopped off in exactly the same place. But there aren’t any heads to be seen, just bodies, and she lays them down in a row on the snow and regards them with dismay.
A total revulsion.
A wreath of scarlet carnations.
Where are the heads? Oh, dear God. What has he done with the heads? She starts searching.
While Georgie is out there dealing with death the wind begins to whine. It starts on a whistle of just two notes. The whine turns into a snarl, gusting the snow into her face and stinging her skin in a series of vicious slaps. It tears down the valley like a cartoon wind, a tatty grey streamer with evil intent. With its sharp teeth it is almost smiling.
Useless to question who or why. Georgie wants to be far away, she wants to nurse her frightened sickness, but inside her cottage is the furthest she can go. There is nothing can be done for the chickens, so she leaves them and the holes in their necks, red and searing in the snow. Whoever is doing this hates her, for some unknown reason this is the truth, although she can offer no explanation, she can’t apologize or make things right because she doesn’t know who he is, or what the hell he wants from her. But his perfect hatred drums in her ears and turns her blood to ice.
With a shuddering certainty Georgie knows that this is the work of the figure on the hill. And now she has seen the violence.
From her small cottage she watches, face white, staring and horrified, a prisoner held against her will, wanting to beat her head on the wall, longing to scream for help. But there is no-one. It is only Lola’s comforting presence that keeps her sane and steady. Perfectly still within her house she watches the snow accumulate, she sees the wind take it away and build shapes of a crazy structure, no rhyme, no reason, just madness all around her. Never before in her life has Georgie been closer to something so mindless or so completely wild. Now it whistles down the chimney, invading her sanctuary and cutting her off from the rest of the world. Her hands shake. Her body jerks. She can no longer see the rest of the hamlet and it is doubtful that anyone could make it from one house to the other. Even Donna, in her desperation, could not reach Georgie now, her own garden has disappeared. And inside the cottage it is dark, some endless night has descended. They have the firelight, they have the weak glow from the candles, and that is all.
Suddenly, without warning, the last vestige of security has been gutted around her and Georgie knows she is waiting, in a scene set by some hostile hand, and all she can do is wait like a puppet for destiny to unfold.
She eats. But does not remember eating. She remembers nothing for the rest of this endless day, it disappears in a haze of horror, and she comes out of her self-induced trance when she hears a frenzied knocking at her door.
Her fright leaps inside her. No-one has ever knocked there before.
It has to be Donna. Someone to talk to, thank God. Somehow the girl has made her escape, but she hasn’t been able to reach the back.
So now it has come to this. At first Georgie stares at the banging, unable to move in her terror. The whole cottage appears to shake. Menace is everywhere. Above the wind comes the voice of a man. ‘
For God’s sake
, Jesus, is there nobody in this fucking place?’ BANG. SLAM. BANG. SLAM. Lola cocks her ears, she walks to the door and sniffs underneath it. She wags her ridiculous tiny tail and looks back at Georgie expectantly.
Not Donna.
Then who?
There is no chain for the front door. With its massive lock and its dungeonlike key it is too staunch to need one. Like a sacrifice attuned to her doom, Georgie steps forward mechanically and turns the key, and at her movement the candles flicker and dim. Once again she pauses to listen, licking her lips like a threatened beast, and she might well be snarling.
It is open a fraction when the body falls in with a whump. It must have been leaning against it. In a second her bulky visitor is back on his feet and shouting.
‘
For God’s sake hurry up.
The lad’s over there. The snow-plough went over his foot and this was the nearest place to get help. I’m going to have to carry him here, but I had to make sure there was someone…’
All the candles blow out in the wind. Georgie can smell their deadness. The stranger clutches her arm without really looking at her.
Is this a trap?
Does a grisly fate he in this man’s hands? Does he want Georgie out there so he can murder her? Cut off her head and lay her out on the snow, neatly, with the chickens?
But now she sees that his eyes are sincere, with nothing in them except concern. ‘Come on, he’s in agony. We’ve got to hurry, get him into the warm before…’
Something automatic takes over. ‘Just a sec, I’ll get the torch if someone’s injured.’ Can this be her own voice, coming from nowhere and sounding so firm, her old sensible, capable self emerging from the depths of her terror? She even has the presence of mind to shut Lola in the kitchen before she follows her agitated visitor out.
‘It’s going to take two, I can’t move him alone.’
They hang together in order to move. Speech is impossible, although he tries to mutter his explanations. Breathing is difficult enough. The wind howls like a banshee, there is nothing to see except snow. They move like blind men, one arm feeling in front and the other linked together. He seems to know where he’s going, his old tracks are just about visible. What is the time? It must be almost seven o’clock, back in her London life she might be having a drink after work, cooling off before an evening at the ballet, soaking in a perfumed bath.
Thank God it’s not far. No more than fifty yards. The great shape of the snowplough looms out of the greyness while, at the same time, the torchlight illuminates the ashen face of the man on the ground. ‘The bloody thing’s broken down on us. It slipped back on him while he was underneath.’
How bright the boy’s blond curls are, and what an odd thing to notice at a time like this. Nervously Georgie adjusts the beam and takes it down over his thick donkey jacket, down his navy overalls towards the ankle that has been hurt. The older man is bent down already, reassuring, she supposes, trying to strengthen his friend in his pain.