On the Third Day Read online

  Charlie felt the hairs on the back of his neck bristle.

  ‘– but darkness is nothing more than the absence of light.’ McAvennie’s voice was almost drowned by the crowd but his next words rang out loud and clear. ‘And we will light it up.’

  Inexplicable goose pimples spiked up all over Charlie’s body. He looked down at the half-eaten baked potato in his hand that had been given to him by a complete stranger and he felt his eyes sting.

  Just for a moment the desperation and despair had lifted and the whole crowd broke water to take a deep, plentiful breath. Emily stepped in front of Charlie to face him. Her wavy brown hair fell in front of her eyes. In the orange firelight the tips had turned auburn.

  ‘That was good, wasn’t it?’ she said.

  He looked back at the stage, at McAvennie, who was staring out over the crowd with a determined expression on his face. He was just standing there, looking out.

  They were having a fire again. Edward watched it passively from his grandmother’s bedroom window. He could never make out individual people but he liked to watch the orange light play against the cliffs near the lighthouse. He gazed at it emotionlessly. His uncle had taught him to be frightened of people and Edward fought back the urge to go down and talk to the other kids he so often saw running and playing on the beach or on the fields between the house and the camp.

  Behind him he heard his mum come into the room. The darkness disappeared as the light from the candle she was holding chased away the shadows.

  ‘It’s bedtime, Henry,’ she said.

  Edward didn’t correct her. She did it sometimes if she was tired. He turned to face the room and saw Mary standing at their mother’s side.

  They went through to the back bedroom. They didn’t need the candlelight because their uncle had made them learn the layout of the house in the darkness.

  The children slept beneath two blankets and wore hats to keep their heads warm. Miriam could have used the electric heaters, powering them through the car battery rigs Joseph had set up, but she didn’t know for how long they would last and was loath to use them until they absolutely could not hold out any longer. The weather was only going to get colder.

  The children sat on the edge of the bed as their mum crouched down in front of them in the same way she did every night. They said their prayers and then she grabbed them both into a tight hug.

  She always seemed so sad these days. She had never recovered from Uncle Joseph’s death. Tomorrow, he thought, he would try to do something to make her happy.

  She blew out the candle and it was dark again. The sheets were freezing as they climbed under them. The bedroom door closed and the children were alone.

  Edward lay on his back with his eyes open, determined to stay awake. He did the same thing every night because he didn’t want his sister to be awake in the dark on her own. She sometimes wanted to speak and Edward had made a promise to himself that he would always be there for her. He secretly liked the fact that he made these small gestures for Mary without her knowing.

  Tonight though she drifted into sleep quickly and without speaking. She slept on her back and always with one leg sticking out of the end of the blanket no matter how cold it was. Edward waited for a few moments to make sure she had drifted off and threw some of the blanket over the protruding limb. He didn’t know why because by morning it would be sticking out again. It always was.

  ‘I won’t let anything bad happen to you,’ he whispered.

  He said it every night, mostly for luck. So far nothing bad had happened to her, but he worried about what might happen if he stopped saying it, and he was not prepared to take the risk.

  The cold in the air intensified outside the fire’s warm bubble. The lambent embers beneath the blackened wood breathed slowly in and slowly out. The crowd that had gathered on the beach had all but disappeared and Charlie sat with Emily alone on one of the logs. Needles of cold pierced the fire’s warmth.

  ‘Come on. Let’s go back.’

  ‘Hold on,’ she said.

  Charlie sniffed. ‘You OK?’

  Emily nodded and said nothing. They stared into the fire a little while longer before mustering the energy to stand.

  The line of lightbulbs shining along the edge of the mud track leading back to their van glowed dimly. Beneath them, on the left, they made out the shapes of tent tops in the gloom.

  ‘It feels like one of those refugee camps.’

  Emily looked straight ahead. ‘Like?’

  The track was soft underfoot, the mud churned by countless sets of feet. Charlie was struck with a sudden thought: this is the place where we’ll die. He felt the familiar blackness gathering in his mind. Quickly he turned to Emily.

  ‘Did you feel something in the crowd tonight?’ he asked urgently.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Like, some connection.’

  ‘I think so.’ She breathed loudly between sentences to recover her breath. ‘We just need it.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Everybody’s been so scared for so long that when we get the scent of hope we –’ she thought about the right word – ‘over-compensate? There’s nothing wrong with doing it. I guess it’s just what happens,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t seem quite natural I guess is what I’m trying to say.’

  The going was difficult enough to make their legs ache.

  ‘Do you think you’ll be happy here?’ Charlie asked.

  Emily didn’t reply. He let the silence answer for her.

  ‘The people seem nice,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That man who gave us the potatoes was nice.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  They walked on in silence.

  ‘I wonder why the women in that house up there don’t come down here,’ Charlie said. ‘It’s got to be safer here than up there.’

  ‘Maybe they just want to be on their own.’

  ‘It’s a shame. Did it seem like there was something . . . off . . . with them?’

  ‘They’ve probably had some bad things happen.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Like everyone. ‘We should go and see them again. If they won’t come down here we should go up there. Wouldn’t it be better for them if they knew there was always someone there for them?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You don’t think so? Or you don’t want to go?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s up to you.’

  She stopped and looked at him. Her eyes were glazed in the cold, and the dim reflections of the lightbulbs shone in them. They hugged each other and kissed.

  ‘Shit.’ He sighed. His guard dropped. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ she whispered, holding him. His head was on her shoulder and she placed her fingers through the loose curls of his dark hair. ‘It’s going to be OK.’

  It felt like the fluttering of butterfly wings. She lay on her back and ran through the familiar thoughts that came at night time. The light from the tanker was long since dead and the room was dark, save for the watery glimmer of moonlight. When the skies were clear, the stars were so bright now.

  Strange mixtures of fear and joy, panic and calm broke over her one after the other, none of them lasting for more than a few moments. There was no way to hold on to a feeling for long.

  Butterfly wings again. Somewhere inside her. She put her hand to her stomach and waited. Her mind wandered to the next day and to the food they would eat. As time went on and as the garden yielded less and the supplies waned, so too did the ability to plan further ahead. It had become so difficult to think more than a day in advance. To contemplate something far away would lead to despair. Food was running out. The bottled water had been used up months ago and they now relied solely on the rainwater from the two large rain collectors Joseph had built.

  She closed her eyes even tighter. There were so many things he had done that they so utterly relied on. In daylight
it was easier to cope with the fact. In daylight the water collectors were nothing more than practical things that held no deeper meaning than the functions they were built to perform. But at night she could not fight back the resentment of using things he had made.

  The butterflies again. This time the tiny sensors in her hands felt them. There it was. Real. She fanned her fingers out across her belly and imagined the tiny foetus on the other side reaching out its hand and touching it against the side of the womb to its mother’s, separated only by a few inches of flesh. Not really separated at all. It kicked again and Miriam’s heartbeat quickened. She thought for a moment that it might even have been excitement. Maybe that was what it was.

  Bringing life into the world seemed like insanity, but if that was true, then the depth of emotion she felt when the baby kicked would not be there. But it was. She had already worked that through in her mind weeks ago. It was like a white pulse of electricity that ran in a band up her body that felt, simply, amazing. That was the truth. It was her baby, not his.

  The kicking stopped and Miriam found herself out of breath. But then the light feeling dissipated as fast as it had emerged because that was how her body worked nowadays, and the reality of what was happening returned. With it came the undercurrent of panic.

  The camp in the hollow down below was still growing. There were too many people. It would be like a microcosm of the world before the Sadness had struck. And in so much, it was doomed to fail. It didn’t matter how many of them were good people. It would only take a handful to ruin everything. She closed her eyes and waited again, with her hand on her stomach, for another butterfly.

  The darkness in him was worse at night. Charlie would lie there and feel it mist up around him. He had hoped that getting to the camp would keep it at bay, but they had been here for a week now and it was coming back stronger.

  He slept on his side, facing away from Emily, and when he did he could feel his heart beating in his chest. Sleep was a precipice. As he approached its edge and peered over he could sense the cessation of his heart. It seemed too ephemeral, nothing more than a slab of meat held precariously in place by fleshy webs in the dark casket of his ribs. If he fell asleep he would die.

  Vertigo swirled in his head and he snapped awake with a jolt, stepping back from the precipice. It was not death itself he feared, it was more its constant proximity. It never went away, it was always so close. Life was so easy to snuff out. That was the frightening part. He tried to blot out the things he had seen happen to his family. The memory was there, staring at him, but instead of confronting it, it was easier to turn away and gaze instead into the black, a membrane that could filter out those thoughts.

  He threw off the covers and let the cold air soothe his skin. He could hear the faint sound of Emily breathing next to him. She had never lost the ability to sleep. No matter what happened Emily was always able to absorb it and move on. He envied her. Her ability to deal with anything that life threw at her was both incredible and annoying. She slept on her back with her head tilted to one side and he looked at her face in the darkness for a moment. The knowledge of her presence always made him feel better. Quickly he sat up and pulled on his jeans. The air was so cold that his skin bristled with goose pimples. The final piece of clothing was his trusty deer-stalker hat that he had been given as a Christmas present last year. He thought how blissful life had been back then, of how nobody in the whole world knew what was about to happen. Everybody had assumed as part of their instinct that things would last.

  Charlie slipped through the door and closed it behind him as quietly as he could. The fence that separated the camp from the fields beyond was directly in front of him. A delicate low mist hung just above the ground. This wasn’t the first time Charlie had walked the camp at night, but he had never seen a mist like this. The moonlight caught in it and seemed to give it a magical quality. Since the arrival of the Sadness the world’s properties had intensified. Whereas before a sunset had been pretty to look at for a few moments, it was now something much more. What in the old days had been nearly beautiful had now been returned to its full glory. It was as if the world itself had become more alive.

  He walked carefully down the hill and found the main mud track by keeping his eyes on and following the line of lightbulbs that ran along it. The camp was so quiet. He pictured everybody in their caravans and tents, sleeping soundly. He liked that there was nobody around. It gave him space to think.

  After seeing so many awful things happen, the fact that a place like this camp could exist, and had existed for many months, was miraculous.

  The mist occupied the slice of air from knee to waist height. He could see it moving in the light. In some parts, where it was thicker, it glimmered as though fireflies were in it.

  He reached the road and turned left. Through the darkness, with the mist still clinging low to the ground, he saw a dark figure up ahead between the two ornate stone pillars at the car park’s entrance.

  Without breaking stride he continued onwards. As he approached the pillars the figure resolved into the shape of a man wearing a dark cloak. The mist flowed around him. The thin crescent of a new moon hung in the clear night behind the figure and the idea that he was already dead and this was some final test became suddenly more real. Charlie slowed and waited to see if it would move.

  Standing there, hooded, still in the blackness, the figure looked at Charlie. Charlie stopped, unwilling to go any further.

  The man spoke. ‘You want to pass?’

  His voice was quiet but easily audible through the silence. The ‘s’ was drawn out into a snake’s hiss.

  Charlie wanted to turn and run.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Charlie went to speak but his voice deserted him. He cleared his throat and said, understanding how foolish he sounded, ‘Toilet.’

  The man in the dark cloak was still. ‘I don’t think I can allow that.’ He breathed deeply. ‘So what now?’

  Charlie didn’t like the way his ‘s’s were elongated.

  ‘I’ll go back,’ he said.

  ‘Why go back? What is “back”?’

  Charlie had no answer. The danger he felt from the man was palpable and growing.

  ‘If,’ he said, ‘you had seen what I have seen you would understand.’ He moved forward a step and when he did, the mist around him became animated, flowing into the space in which he had been standing. ‘The great road of truth opened up in front of me and the carcasses of the ages were strewn along it,’ he said in the slow, quiet, steady voice that the ill people used, though this man was not ill: the accompanying sense was not there. ‘This is what it looks like. A world without hope. We have reached the crack of doom.’ The cloak was so dark it might not have been there at all.

  ‘Who are you?’ Charlie said.

  No, the man wasn’t ill. But he wasn’t normal either. There was something in him, as if he was halfway between sick and healthy.

  ‘It is the prism you stare through when hope has gone that truly matters. We can each of us look upon the same thing and see something different; it is a filter of many colours. Would you like me to tell you what I saw in the world? When I was hopeless –’ the man lifted a hand into the air, and Charlie felt something very old pass through him – ‘I saw a lack of reason.’

  The cloaked figure took one final step forward in silence and Charlie saw at last that it was not a cloak he was wearing at all. Nothing more than a thin blanket was thrown around him. The hood was just a part of the blanket. The dark void where the face should be started to materialize into substance. A thin, pallid oval of skin grew out of it. Slowly, the man reached up to his hood and pulled it away to reveal a skeletal head. The skin around the face was taut and unblemished. He wore a thin smile with narrow lips. A clump of dark hair at the dome of the skull looked blue in the moonlight.

  ‘I saw it all,’ he said again. And he opened his mouth. His tongue emerged from the gaping maw and Charlie took his first step back
wards.

  The reality of what he was seeing did not click into place immediately. His brain needed to align the physical sight of it with how the tongue could possibly have come to be like that. At first it looked like there were two tongues inside the mouth, like two fat snakes in their nest. But that was not so. The tongue was forked. The moonlight revealed that an untidy V had been cut out of its centre to create two distinct tips that tapered to thin points. The man stared at Charlie to watch his reaction. There was something like glee on his face. The eyes seared into him from their sunken depressions. Charlie felt their malevolence and the contempt in which they held him.

  ‘I’m going to go,’ said Charlie.

  ‘You think this,’ the man gestured around him, ‘is going to save you?’

  Charlie turned to leave.

  ‘You think this is paradise?’

  As Charlie walked away he heard the footsteps behind him, following. He stopped and turned back.

  ‘Bad things will come here. Bad people. You know who I’m talking about. You’ve seen them and the things they do. We all have.’ He smiled again. ‘I’m here already. And when others arrive you will see what will happen. You will tear yourselves apart. It is in our nature. Nothing more than savages.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  The night came to life and threw itself around them. There was an invisible barrier between Charlie and the rest of the camp. He felt isolated. The wild vibrancy of the world howled all around him.

  The figure turned and walked away but his voice carried on the air when he spoke.

  ‘I am the man who returned.’

  Her mother had gone down to the camp and returned with the two eggs.

  ‘I like the Scottish man.’

  ‘He’s being nice because he wants the house, Mum.’

  Her mother turned the cake mixture between her fingers. For a moment Miriam thought she was going to let the comment pass.