The Queen of Sinister (2 page)

Caitlin looked into the elderly woman's face, as if seeing her for the first time. 'How do you do it?'

'What, dear?'

'Keep going ... not start wallowing in despair.'

Eileen didn't seem to comprehend the question. 'It's just what we do, isn't it? There's no point in giving in to it ... that doesn't do any good at all.'

Caitlin took a long, juddering breath. 'I think I will go home. Just for an hour or two.'

'You do that, dear.' Eileen gave her another hug, and this time Caitlin didn't want to break it.

The moment was disrupted by a thin cry from Daphne, Eileen's sister. She was staring at her hands with a shattered expression.

Caitlin knew instantly what it was. 'Oh God—'

They rushed to Daphne's side and sure enough the telltale black spots that marked the first appearance of the disease were visible on the wrinkled webbing at the base of her fingers.

Daphne looked up at them both with tearful eyes. 'Oh dear...'

Eileen wiped away her own tears, but the two of them remained calm. It wasn't as if the development was unexpected - they all knew the risks of contracting the disease. It didn't strike everyone; sometimes just one person in a family, sometimes all of them. Caitlin had no idea of the pathology, but it was a reasonable guess that extended exposure increased the chances of contraction.

Caitlin stared impotently at the thin collection of medicines. Eileen sensed her thoughts. 'Don't worry, dear - you go.'

'I can't leave now!'

'You know there's nothing you can do, Caitlin.' Daphne gave a weak smile, a tear trickling down her cheek.

Daphne was living, breathing, feeling, talking, but she was already dead. Within hours, the fever would hit. She'd lose all contact with the real world, imprisoned in dreams and memories of frightening intensity while the disease worked its insidious route through her system. The spots made strange patterns across the skin before reaching the glands, which swelled, turned black, filled with pus. Death would come three to four days later without the patient regaining consciousness.

Caitlin felt as if she was being torn apart by her inability to do anything worthwhile. All her years at medical school, in the surgery, all worthless.

'I don't want to leave you to all this,' Daphne said pitifully to Eileen, her frail voice betraying the wealth of emotion behind the simple statement. They'd been together all their lives, never married, supported each other through hard times, enjoyed the best, never even known a day apart for decades. And now it was all coming to an end.

Caitlin gave Daphne's arm a squeeze, silently cursing the impotence of the gesture to convey all the razor emotions but not knowing any other way to express them.

'I think we'll have a little time alone, dear,' Eileen said, her eyes brimming. She led Daphne away to a quiet corner where they crumpled into each other.

Caitlin watched them with feelings so raw they made her throat burn. That one symbol summed up everything she had felt over the past year: the suffering and the strength, the heartbreak and the hopelessness. The humanity.

Too exhausted to cry, Caitlin pulled her battered all- weather parka on tightly and forced her way out into the storm. The rain was cold and hard, the roaring wind buffeting her. Yet she felt swaddled in cotton wool, and that the harsh, uncompromising world was just a dream.

The sense of unreality had been growing since the Fall. It had started with the Government's unspecified announcement of some threat on the home front and the subsequent imposition of martial law and a media blackout. Travel had been limited, and with the telephone network down, the only available information was always leavened with an unhealthy dose of rumour, gossip and downright lies. Newcastle had been wiped out. The Royal Family was in exile. Nuclear disaster, a military coup, an attack by some rogue state - never identified - an epidemic of some awful bioengineered disease. She'd always discounted that last one, but the evidence of the past week had made her think it was probably the truth, or part of it. Perhaps the Fall had been caused by some conglomeration of all the rumours.

Whatever the answer, life in the intervening months had been too hard to give it too much consideration - the first weeks of near-starvation when the shops and supermarkets stopped being stocked, the slow crawl to set up the distribution of locally supplied food, and even more months on subsistence level while new sources were established. But slowly, slowly, they had got back on their feet ... until the plague had come.

She didn't know whether it had swept the country or if it was a localised phenomenon. It had come too fast, too hard, to comprehend.

She bowed her head into the gale and attempted to dodge the puddles, but without streetlights it was a struggle to see. They had some power during the day thanks to a wind turbine erected by a local engineer and solar panels scavenged from a nearby health farm, but it was conserved at night. The national grid hadn't come back on line; the nights remained black, friendless and frightening, filled with all the stories she had heard from the more superstitious residents.

It was just a short walk along the High Street, but then she had to negotiate the winding lane to their barn conversion; she wished they'd bought a place in the centre of the village. When she reached the rutted track, it was even darker than the built-up area, where at least a few candles had glimmered through the window panes. The trees, just coming into bud, pressed tightly on either side, the hedgerows wild and untrimmed.

Before she stepped into the lane, she couldn't help succumbing to the primal desire to glance behind her. It was then that she saw something strange and disturbing. They'd kept the electric lights on at the village hall since they had started using it as an infirmary-cum-mortuary and from her slightly elevated position she could now see the bright windows clearly above the rooftops of the houses at the lower end of the village. Yet when she had turned back, briefly those windows had been obscured. No swaying trees lay in her line of sight; something had passed in front of the hall, but from her perspective she knew it would have to have been something much larger than a person. It was a simple thing, barely worth comment, yet inexplicably it touched a nerve, triggering a ratchet of fear. She hurried along the lane, overhanging branches reaching down to grab at her hood. The lane was half a mile long, doglegging to the left before rising sharply to the ridge on which the converted barns rested. On the slope it became more exposed to the elements and she had to struggle to make progress against the gale which thrashed the trees on either side. Nothing could be heard above the maelstrom of the storm, yet she couldn't shake the feeling that there had been footsteps, or hoof beats, on the road behind.

It was irrational, stupid even, but it pulled tingling sparks up from the pit of her belly. She looked back again, saw nothing but darkness and the movement of shadowy vegetation.

Get off the road! a voice in her head said. The notion was so powerful and so unexpected it was shocking. There was no reason for her to be scared, but then an overwhelming sense of presence came upon her from nowhere, a feeling so frightening that she fought the urge to run. Someone was behind her.

She looked back again. The storm rushed all around. Stupid. She was getting as superstitious as some of those villagers who had come to believe there were ghosts and devils and mythical beasts away in the countryside.

When she returned her attention to the path ahead she was startled to see a big black bird standing in the centre of the lane. It was a hooded crow, bigger than any she had ever seen before. That it was there at night, in the middle of a storm, was discomfiting enough, but the way it kept one beady eye fixed on her brought a chill to her spine.

Caitlin took two steps forward to shoo it away, but it still didn't budge. She had never experienced anything so unnatural. Everything about the bird frightened her. She had the uneasy feeling that it wouldn't let her pass. Hesitating, she gave in to her irrationality despite herself and clambered over a gate into a field before moving into the trees that lined the road.

Peering over the hedge, she saw that the crow was no longer there. Typical, she thought, uncomfortable as the wet undergrowth soaked her jeans. That'll teach me to be childish. Yet the feeling that something was coming up the lane behind her was still growing; goose pimples ran up and down her arms.

Caught in the wind, the trees, bushes and grass moved with an eerie life of their own. She forced her way through the dripping vegetation, the wind slowly dropping as the storm finally began to move away, the staccato drip of rain from branches the final percussive reminder.

Caitlin realised she was holding her breath; her instinct was responding to something beyond her senses, but whatever was out there gradually crept into the edge of her perception. At first she thought the wind was picking up again, until she noticed that there was structure to the sound.

Whispering, she realised with a strange chill. People talking in rustling voices, yet making no attempt to remain unheard. The conversation floated amongst the trees, insinuating itself within the drip-drip-drip of rain, growing louder as it approached.

It sounded so bizarre. Caitlin wondered who would venture out at that time of night in such a fierce storm. The lane only led to four barn conversions and Caitlin couldn't imagine any of her neighbours talking in such a strange manner.

Yet as the whispering intensified, Caitlin realised it was not becoming any more comprehensible. It seemed to her a foreign language, at times like Russian, something northern and guttural, at others incorporating the florid clicks and glottal stops of an African tribal dialect. The hairs on her neck grew erect.

With a feeling of rising dread, she quickly dropped to her haunches, holding her breath tight in her chest. The road was just about visible through the hedge.

The whispering surrounded her like icy fingers playing along her spine. Although she couldn't understand the words, it carried with it an air of menace, cunning and, floating underneath it, something profoundly despairing. The complex sounds did not appear likely to have been formed in a human throat.

The Whisperers were accompanied by a heavy tread that she at first took to be horses, but as the ground began to vibrate at each fall, it became clear something much larger was approaching.

Thoom-thoom-thoom. It made her think of some enormous machine as the tremors ran up into the pit of her stomach.

Nearly here now, she thought. The whispering insinuated into her mind, set her teeth on edge, made her think black thoughts. She was surprised at how scared she felt; not the fear of disease or starvation, but something more profound and unfocused.

Her instinct told her to take no risks of being discovered, but she had to look. Steadying herself with one hand on the sodden ground, she peered through the gaps in the hedge just as movement entered her frame of vision.

She could only perceive glimpses of the whole, a jigsaw puzzle of disturbing fragments that her conscious mind put together despite warnings from her subconscious to leave well alone. There were indeed two riders, but their mounts, though like horses in form, were clearly not: they were much larger, hugely powerful, and appeared to have a scaly hide and cloven hooves. Caitlin tried to rationalise what she was seeing, but could find no context.

She saw even less of the Whisperers, yet obliquely the threat increased. Their legs were unpleasantly thin, as if only bones lay beneath the fluttering rags wrapped around them. What she saw of their clothing only added to her impression: broken chain mail, corroded gauntlets, worn, rotten leather. The heavy aroma of loam hung in the air, as if they had scrambled their way, mounts and all, from beneath the earth. The sibilant whispering floated all around. Caitlin didn't move, didn't swallow, barely breathed, praying they would pass quickly and take the overwhelming atmosphere of dread with them. Yet just as they were about to move on, they stopped. The whispering died away, and somehow the eerie silence was even worse.

They could sense her. She was sure of it in some instinctive way she couldn't comprehend. Her heart thundered.

The heavy hoofbeats sounded again, this time coming towards the hedge behind which she was hiding. Could they see her? Surely it was impossible in the dark.

The horses that were not horses drew close. Soon the first rider would be able to peer over the top of the hedge. And what awful thing would she see when she looked up into that face?

Desperately, her gaze darted around. She could attempt to run through the thick trees that would preclude the mounts pursuing her, but sooner or later she would have to cross open fields.

Just as she prepared to launch herself into the undergrowth, wild activity erupted further along the lane. It was difficult for Caitlin to comprehend what was occurring: a blood-chilling screaming tore through the night, rapid movement flashed in shadow form, only partially glimpsed through the hedgerow. The Whisperers paused in their advance. It was the crow, Caitlin guessed.

For an agonising moment, Caitlin remained frozen. Then, when she thought she couldn't bear it any longer, the Whisperers guided their grotesque mounts away from the hedgerow into the centre of the lane, and advanced towards the source of the disruption.