Free Tim Lebbon - Fears Unnamed by Tim Lebbon Page A

for good, someone called it the ruin.
    Then it had started to snow.

    Hayden had taken Charley upstairs, still trying to quell her hysteria. We had no medicines other than aspirin and cough mixtures, but there were a hundred bottles of wine in the cellar. It seemed that Hayden had already poured most of a bottle down Charley’s throat by the time the three of us arrived back at the manor. Not a good idea, I thought—I could hardly imagine what ghosts a drunken Charley would see, what terrors her alcohol-induced dreams held in store for her once she was finally left on her own—but it was not my place to say.
    Brand stormed in and with his usual subtlety painted a picture of what we’d seen. “Boris’s guts were just everywhere, hanging on the rock, spread over the snow. Melted in, like they were still hot when he was being cut up. What the fuck would do that? Eh? Just what the fuck?”
    “Who did it?” Rosalie, our resident paranoid, asked.
    I shrugged. “Can’t say.”
    “Why not?”
    “Not won’t,” I said. “Can’t. Can’t tell. There’s not too much left to tell by, as Brand has so eloquently revealed.”
    Ellie stood before the open fire and held out her hands, palms up, as if asking for something. A touch of emotion, I mused, but then my thoughts were often cruel.
    “Ellie?” Rosalie demanded an answer.
    Ellie shrugged. “We can rule out suicide.” Nobody responded.
    I went through the kitchen and opened the back door. We were keeping our beer on a shelf in the rear conservatory now that the electricity had gone off. There was a generator, but not enough fuel to run it for more than an hour every day. We agreed that hot water was a priority for that meager time, so the fridge was now extinct.
    I surveyed my choices: Stella, a few final cans of Caffreys, Boddingtons. That had been Jayne’s favorite. She’d drunk it in pints, inevitably doing a bad impression of some mustachioed actor after the first creamy sip. I could still see her sparkling eyes as she tried to think of someone new… I grabbed a Caffreys and shut the back door, and it was as the latch clicked home that I started to shake.
    I’d seen a dead man five minutes ago, a man I’d been talking to the previous evening, drinking with, chatting about what the hell had happened to the world, making inebriated plans of escape, knowing all the time that the snow had us trapped here like chickens surrounded by a fiery moat. Boris had been quiet but thoughtful, the most intelligent person here at the manor. It had been his idea to lock the doors to many of the rooms because we never used them, and any heat we managed to generate should be kept in the rooms we did use. He had suggested a long walk as the snow had begun in earnest and it had been our prevarication and, I admit, our arguing that had kept us here long enough for it to matter. By the time Boris had persuaded us to make a go of it, the snow was three feet deep. Five miles and we’d be dead. Maximum. The nearest village was ten miles away.
    He was dead. Something had taken him apart, torn him up, ripped him to pieces. I was certain that there had been no cutting involved as Brand had suggested. And yes, his bits did look melted into the snow. Still hot when they struck the surface, bloodying it in death. Still alive and beating as they were taken out.
    I sat at the kitchen table and held my head in my hands. Jayne had said that this would hold all the good thoughts in and let the bad ones seep through your fingers, and sometimes it seemed to work. Now it was just a comfort, like the hands of a lover kneading hope into flaccid muscles, or fear from tense ones.
    It could not work this time. I had seen a dead man. And there was nothing we could do about it. We should be telling someone, but over the past few months any sense of “relevant authorities” had fast faded away, just as Jayne had two years before; faded away to agony, then confusion and then to nothing. Nobody knew what