The Veil (Testaments I and II) Read online

  “No one’s watching anymore,” she said. “No one judges. The disapproving eyes of society have pennies over them now. We can do whatever we wish.”

  I walked farther into the light.

  ***

  Everything was wrong about her now that I look back. Wrong the way everything is wrong with the world outside this cavern. Wrong the way everything inside this cavern is wrong. But I couldn’t see it in that moment because whatever was wrong was wrong with my mind too.

  There’s a muffled crack from overhead. I try to imagine what it could be. It’s loud, for sure, and the noise or the shock of it travels into every tendril. The whole cavern seems to move but it’s probably just a swaying of the tendrils, moving like mammoth kelp in a lazy ocean current. It sounds as though we’re encased beneath a mile of solid rock and that, somewhere in that immense coffin lid, there’s been a shift, a fissure appearing. Has something given way above us?

  I think about this and I find that I’m calm, untroubled by the idea. If the cavern collapses, we’ll fall and we’ll be crushed. It will be a quick and natural death. Relatively speaking. I don’t expect to make it out of the darkness. Having the life slammed out of me by countless tons of falling rock is about the best I can hope for right now.

  More percussions boom from overhead, sending jolts into the tendrils and into us. I hear people – most of them below me now – crying out into the purgatorial dark. Crying out to God, many of them, and I notice this with a kind of disdain. If there is a God, if God has not turned His back on His handiwork, then He is the creator of the tendrils as well as their victims. He is the bringer of the Hush and the sickness that came with it. Whom does He favour? Those who cry out with the greatest sincerity? Those who promise the most devout renewal of faith and the most pious observation of His edicts? Or does He now shine only upon the conqueror – the most powerful of all His creations?

  I stifle a laugh at the stupidity of my fellow captives – and my own, of course, since I can be no more certain of our purpose or destiny than those with unquestioning religious faith. Spasms ripple the tendrils and everyone who has made a noise in response to the sonorous tremors above begins to rise, massaged upwards by the irresistible clenching.

  But not me. Because I am quiescent and relaxed. The tendrils holding me do not move. Remembering is good. It works.

  Even if what I remember is… ruinous.

  ***

  The woman smelled because she hadn’t washed. It was the first thing I noticed as I approached her.

  She smelled of sour sweat and urine. Perhaps because of the strange light that ignited the entire room, it didn’t matter to me. The reverse, in truth. When I encountered the animalistic scents rolling off her, my cock set to bone in moments, fluid leaking like sap from a tapped tree. The dust around her shimmered, giving her a golden aura. She was an angel. My angel of the future. And she was right; here we were in the midst of the hills, miles from a society already dead for all we knew. No one else was here. We could…

  …be ourselves for once.

  I moved closer and the smells grew stronger. Oily flesh, unwashed hair, dirt left too long in creases of skin – I could see the filth collected under her fingernails, as though she spent her days grubbing through the muck of the farm, a faecal aroma rising and mingling with her hot, fermented breath.

  “I want you to use my body,” she said before I touched her, before I kissed her decay-scented mouth. “I want you to hold me in no regard and grant me no common decency or respect. All that is gone. There is only flesh remaining. The sweet, sweet stench of it and the eloquence of its pain. Make my body your voice and I will scream your poetry.”

  I reached out for her face with such tenderness, such unguarded honesty, and where I might have touched Tara before a kiss – on the cheek had she still allowed me – my hand dropped to squeeze the soft meat of the woman’s shoulder and to move from there to her throat. She looked into my eyes and I became the centre of her universe.

  The woman’s room was so dirty I couldn’t believe it had only been a short time since the Hush began.

  It looked as though the space had been left uncleaned for generations. As I made a ragdoll of her filthy body, I noticed lumps where the carpet met the skirting board and it occurred to me that there were mushrooms of some kind growing through the dirt-rich mesh. Something about the divine golden light that filled the room, something about the delightfulness of exploiting the woman’s flesh, something about it all being beyond the gaze of humanity’s eyes made everything that was bad about the farmhouse right, everything that was tainted there pure.

  Hating Tara became much easier after that.

  ***

  “What did you get?”

  I emptied the contents of my pack onto the kitchen table, wondering if Tara could smell my betrayal. A few cans of beef stew and spam. Several cartons of long-life orange juice.

  Two cardboard packets of quick rice. Some instant noodles.

  She nodded but didn’t seem impressed.

  “They had half a cow chopped up in the freezer but it was going off. It might be a long time before we find any fresh meat.”

  “You could catch a sheep or something.” She was looking out of the window.

  “The animals are all gone.” That got her attention.

  “What? Gone where?”

  “There isn’t a single farm animal for miles around. If you’d been outside you’d have noticed. No cattle. No sheep. No pigs. Nothing. Even the horses across the valley have gone.”

  Tara shook her head.

  “They can’t just be gone. They must have gone somewhere.”

  “Perhaps they’re Stricken now. Perhaps they’ve all been… taken.”

  Tara pulled a chair out from the table and sat down as though the strength had drained from her legs. The disappearance of the animals had touched her far more deeply than the disappearance of the people. If she’d been morose before, this made it worse. She reached out towards the cans, her fingers tracing their ridges and edges. She rubbed her fingertips against her thumb and then examined them.

  “Where does all this dust come from?” My neck prickled. My cheeks warmed.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The dust, Rob. I clean it away day after day and every morning it’s back again.”

  “I thought that was how dust… behaved.”

  “No. Not like this. And, you know, while we’re on the subject of dirt, I wish I’d known how filthy this place was going to be before we got here. I’d have brought more housework stuff.”

  “Jesus, Tara. No one’s going to come knocking unexpectedly on the door. It doesn’t matter if the place is a bit untidy. Nothing like that matters anymore.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about the… grime. This whole house is thick with it.”

  I sighed. Even the end of the world wasn’t going to stop Tara being meticulous around the house.

  “Next time I’m out I’ll get a bag of cleaning products. Bleach and stuff. Okay?”

  Tara stood up.

  “You’re not listening, Rob.” She put out her hand.

  “What?”

  “Come with me.”

  I broke a sweat instantly. This hand-holding, this ‘dragging me to the bedroom’ was often how she initiated lovemaking. But I couldn’t make love to her now. Not just because I didn’t want to, not just because she didn’t hold any interest for me anymore, but because underneath my clothes I reeked of the woman in the farmhouse. I stank of what I’d done to her.

  “Tara.”

  “Rob.”

  “Look, I…”

  “Just come with me.”

  She hauled me out of the kitchen, past the living room where Jake was assembling a thousand-piece jigsaw. He didn’t look up. She pulled me behind her, up the stairs and along the hall. Jesus, what was I going to say? I’d have to tell her I wasn’t well. She drew me on, past our bedroom and beyond Jake’s to the end of the hall. Here were two r
ooms we had no reason to go into, both extra bedrooms – though the one overlooking the fields might have made a decent study. She pushed open one of the doors and stood out of the way.

  “What?” I asked again.

  She nodded into the first room.

  “Look.”

  I almost had the sense that when I turned my back to her, she would either knife me or push me into the room and lock me inside. The paranoia was so strong I couldn’t move. “For God’s sake, Rob, just take a bloody look, will you?” I forced myself past her, my skin contracting, awaiting the tip of the blade or the shove. Neither came. The room was empty. It was dimly illuminated because the sun never reached this side of the house and what little light there might have been in the lee of the hill was obscured by the pines a few feet from the window. I was about to protest, to lose my patience with Tara, when I noticed the irregularity where the walls met the floor: pale ruffles where there ought to have been clean, straight lines. I frowned and moved closer. I don’t know why it wasn’t clear to me straight away. Especially since I’d seen this exact phenomenon less than an hour before. Perhaps I just didn’t want to believe there was a fungal colony coming up through our floor.

  “What is it, Dad?”

  My whole body jerked with the shock. No stab wound, no incarceration; just my boy in the wrong place at the wrong moment.

  Shit.

  “Uh…” I glanced at Tara for a prompt but her expression was neutral. Useless woman. Useless mother. “Well, it’s nothing really. I mean it’s… look, the house is filthy, Jake. It’s so dirty that we’ve got mushrooms growing in here.”

  Jake didn’t appear to believe me. “Mushrooms? No way.”

  “Seriously, Jake. It’s because no one lived here for such a long time. Three years – that’s almost half your life.”

  I watched his little mind working over the details. He tried to look around me.

  “Can I see them?”

  “I think it’s better you don’t come into this room.”

  “Come on, Dad. I just want to look at them.”

  I couldn’t really come up with a reason to stop him doing that.

  “Okay. A quick look. But then we’re going to close this door and lock it. From now on it’s out of bounds. Understood?”

  Jake had a habit of running a hand back through his hair when things didn’t go his way. He made this gesture at that moment and I knew we’d have to hide the room’s key very carefully. I needed to control the little situation we had brewing.

  “So do you want to take a look or not? Be quick, ‘cause I’m closing this door in five, four, three…”

  Jake pushed past Tara to the threshold of the room. I don’t know what he’d expected to see in there – a ring of red toadstools, perhaps – but whatever it might have been, what he did see didn’t make much of an impression. “Where are they?” I pointed.

  “Along the base of the skirting board.” He squinted into the gloom. “What, those ripply, blobby things?” I nodded.

  “Daaaad. They’re not mushrooms.”

  “Well, maybe not mushrooms exactly. But they are a kind of fungus and this room is far too dirty for you to mess around in. Come on, out you go.”

  “There’s better mushrooms than that in the woods, Dad. Much better.”

  I smiled at Tara. Perhaps we didn’t need to worry about him trying to get into the room after all. Still, I wanted it locked. I didn’t want to have to think about it.

  “I’m sure there are, Jakey— Jake.”

  Before either of us could say another word to him he was away along the upstairs corridor and thumping down the stairs. The thumping ended in the living room – beside his puzzle, I supposed. I backed out of the room, turned the key and looked at Tara.

  “Where do you want to keep it?”

  She put out her hand, palm up. “I’ll think of somewhere,” she said.

  She put the key in the back pocket of her jeans and walked away. She still had a yellow dust cloth tucked through her belt. As she passed the bathroom door she ran it along the top of the frame and then examined the darkened material. The look on her face might have been comical in other circumstances. Fury. Simple fury that she couldn’t keep the house clean. I knew I’d be the one who never heard the end of it.

  Never.

  There was a thought. How long were we going to stay here? How long could we bear the atmosphere that was growing and pressurising every corner of the house? I found myself thinking of alternatives to the original plan. It was a simple fact: something was wrong between us. It had been that way for a long time. Sooner or later it would force us to change.

  Maybe it would be better to take the initiative.

  I barely slept that night.

  On the far side of the bed, Tara breathed slow and shallow in a deep, almost-comatose slumber. Before the Hush, she’d always been the light sleeper. Now she was almost impossible to rouse. Since we’d relocated to Compton House, each time Jake crept into our room, crying in the aftermath of a nightmare, it was me who calmed him and let him climb into the bed. It was Tara he went to, of course, snuggling close to her for the rest of the night. No matter how he flailed and moaned in his own haunted dream world, Tara never once woke up.

  But we were alone that night and I lay there, rolling from one side to the other, thinking of the woman in the farmhouse. I remembered what we’d done and I imagined more. Scenario after scenario played out in my mind. I sweated under the duvet, entering a debauched half-dream state. The stink of her, which I thought I’d washed away in a shallow, tepid bath that evening, exuded from me. Much as I wanted her, I needed sleep. In the tropical heat under the duvet, I worked my cock to a functional discharge, so unsatisfactory I almost wept. The release allowed me to sleep but even then I found my way back to the farmhouse. The things we did then were worse. Much worse.

  I woke long before dawn, lying in the sticky mess of my own sexual fluids. I must have ejaculated half a dozen times or more in my sleep. By candlelight I did my best to wipe as much of it away as I could with a towel, wondering all the while what Tara might say if she woke up. She didn’t, though. I put my pyjamas and the towel in a bucket to soak and checked on Jake. In the hesitant glow of the candle he looked angelic. Like Tara, he was deeply asleep, the rhythm of his breathing almost impossible to see. I wrote a note for them:

  Dear Tara and Jake,

  Couldn’t sleep so I’m off early to search for supplies. Will bring cleaning products and other treasure! Don’t worry if I’m away until the evening. I’m planning to go farther afield and see what I can find.

  Love you lots,

  Dad xxx

  Forty minutes later, in the upstairs bedroom at the end of the hall in the old farmhouse, I forged my dreams into reality. My life until that day had been a quiet one. A safe, tedious and unthinking existence. I never expected to find paradise on Earth. I never once imagined that the world would have to end in order for me to discover it.

  ***

  I think about what we did in that room – as the light brightened from grey to gold, making time stretch perfectly; minutes into hours, hours into days. We found forever up there and it was a forever made of foul-smelling extremity, of complete release and honesty. We found the animals hiding in our human skins. Battered, scratched and bleeding, we mined each other, hollowed each other out in search of pleasure. And it was there, that pleasure; wherever we dug, we found it. It seems like a kind of insanity now, even though it still makes perfect sense. I’d be glad I did it if things had turned out differently.

  That’s such bullshit.

  I’m glad in spite of what happened. I can remember it all now. At least I had that time. At least I did one thing in my life with total commitment and without any consideration of the consequences. At least, for that one day, I existed nowhere but in the moment and pleased no one but myself. Shouldn’t we all have that experience at least once before we die?

  Two things are certain for me now. First, anyone w
ho didn’t have that opportunity before now isn’t going to get it.

  Second, we’re all going to die very soon.

  This world will be ours no longer. It will belong to something whose ravening and greed is even greater than our own.

  The memories of the farmer’s wife have aroused me and I’m unable to control my response. Hanging here in this abyssal vault far below the surface of the earth, in the grip of the massive tendrils, I have an erection you could use for a rounders bat. And the tendrils know this. Ever since I recalled the moment of entering that upstairs room for the first time, the tendrils have rustled and jerked. I’ve begun to slip upwards again. It isn’t just fear that excites them. Somehow, I have to stop myself from remembering the farmer’s wife and what we did. I need a little more time to consider. To judge myself. The only way I can stop this burning arousal – and stop the tendrils from lifting me prematurely – will be to recall the rest of it. After all, I can only hold one thought in my mind at a time and reliving what happened next will be enough to kill this suicidal salacity.

  Noiseless firebolts of fluorite erupt above me. They’re bright. Blinding after all this dark. All around me, the hanging garden of tendrils is alive with snake-like writhing as the colony squeezes its next victims up. Then there’s thunder again, so loud my skull is crushed by the sonic impact. The tendrils jerk hard, whipped upwards and released by whatever tectonic movements are breaking the rock from which they hang.

  For a moment, a wonderful moment of freedom and terror, I’m released. I drop, almost welcoming gravity and the black oblivion that gapes below. Then the tendrils regain their grip, coming together all around me with their cow-tongue roughness and glue-thick mucus. I stop falling. My heart is erratic and uneven, my pulse constricting my throat. But my erection is gone and the tendrils seem to have lost interest in me for the moment.