Free White and Other Tales of Ruin by Tim Lebbon

time she was near enough for me to see the look in her eyes she had collapsed down into a drift, leaving a memory there in her place. Something flitted past the window, sending flakes flying against the wind, bristly fur spiking dead white leaves.
    I blinked hard and the snow was just snow once more. I turned and looked at Ellie, but she was concentrating too hard to return my stare. For the first time I could see how scared she was — how her hand clasped so tightly around the shotgun barrel that her knuckles were pearly white, her nails a shiny pink — and I wondered exactly what she was seeing out there in the white storm.
    By midday we had done what we could. The kitchen, one of the living rooms and the hall and staircase were left open; every other room downstairs was boarded up from the outside in. We’d also covered the windows in those rooms left open, but we left thin viewing ports like horizontal arrow slits in the walls of an old castle. And like the weary defenders of those ancient citadels, we were under siege.
    “ So what did you all see?” I said as we sat in the kitchen. Nobody denied anything.
    “ Badgers,” Rosalie said. “Big, white, fast. Sliding over the snow like they were on skis. Demon badgers from hell!” She joked, but it was obvious that she was terrified.
    “ Not badgers,” Ellie cut in. “Deer. But wrong. Deer with scales. Or something. All wrong.”
    “ Hayden, what did you see?”
    He remained hunched over the cooker, stirring a weak stew of old vegetable and stringy beef. “I didn’t see anything.”
    I went to argue with him but realised he was probably telling the truth. We had all seen something different, why not see nothing at all? Just as unlikely.
    “ You know,” said Ellie, standing at a viewing slot with the snow reflecting sunlight in a band across her face, “we’re all seeing white animals. White animals in the snow. So maybe we’re seeing nothing at all. Maybe it’s our imaginations. Perhaps Hayden is nearer the truth than all of us.”
    “ Boris and the others had pretty strong imaginations, then,” said Rosalie, bitter tears animating her eyes.
    We were silent once again, stirring our weak milk-less tea, all thinking our own thoughts about what was out in the snow. Nobody had asked me what I had seen and I was glad. Last night they were fleeting white shadows, but today I had seen Jayne as well. A Jayne I had known was not really there, even as I watched her coming at me through the snow. I’ll be with you again.
    “ In China, white is the colour of death,” Ellie said. She spoke at the boarded window, never for an instant glancing away. Her hands held onto the shotgun as if it had become one with her body. I wondered what she had been in the past: I have a history , she’d said. “White. Happiness and joy.”
    “ It was also the colour of mourning for the Victorians,” I added.
    “ And we’re in a Victorian manor.” Hayden did not turn around as he spoke, but his words sent our imaginations scurrying.
    “ We’re all seeing white animals,” Ellie said quietly. “Like white noise. All tones, all frequencies. We’re all seeing different things as one.”
    “ Oh,” Rosalie whispered, “well that explains a lot.”
    I thought I could see where Ellie was coming from; at least, I was looking in the right direction. “White noise is used to mask other sounds,” I said.
    Ellie only nodded.
    “ There’s something else going on here.” I sat back in my chair and stared up, trying to divine the truth in the patchwork mould on the kitchen ceiling. “We’re not seeing it all.”
    Ellie glanced away from the window, just for a second. “I don’t think we’re seeing anything.”
     
    Later we found out some more of what was happening. We went to bed, doors opened in the night, footsteps creaked old floorboards. And through the dark the sound of lovemaking drew us all to another, more terrible death.
     
     
    three: the colour of mourning
     
    I