dEar

Dear Cissy,

I’m not sure you’ll ever read this letter, but I must write to tell you it’s over, at last. I killed Marley early this morning. He died in my arms.

How foreign the word looks on this page. Killed. Would you have thought me capable, Cissy? Little Arthur, who couldn’t kill an ant, now a bona fide killer. I suppose I should feel some pride. I did succeed where all the others failed. Yet, I’m left empty and tired.

With Marley dead, the disease can no longer spread. Or so the calculations would lead me to believe. I’m reminded now of a quote from the Bible — The first shall be last, and the last shall be first. I believe that’s how it goes, but I don’t have a reference at hand here in the manor house. Only technical books remain and a few terrible paperbacks. In any case, that Bible quote fits Marley, for he was the first to suffer from the disease and now, I hope, he will be the last.

I’m getting ahead of myself, Cissy. You don’t know any of the background. How could you? How long since we spoke? How long since either of us knew how the other lived? That doesn’t matter now. All you need know is they swore me to secrecy when they came to my office in Oxford. All the scientists had to sign a declaration of secrecy on penalty of death.

The death penalty! How insane we’ve become. Eighty years since they last tied a noose around a neck, and yet in a matter of months they ready the rope so eagerly. Not that it matters now. How would it matter with the country so emptied of people? Of those who made me sign the document, how many survived the first and second waves of the disease? Who remains to tighten the noose around my neck for writing this letter, Cissy?

None, I guess. I do hope you made it out of the country before the first wave hit. I hope you found France before the madness wiped out this country. I tried to contact you several times, I truly did.

I should have stayed in touch over the years, I know. It’s all my fault. If we’d kept in touch, I’d have known your location. I’d have come to you, Cissy, I promise. I wish now we’d not drifted apart.

I must stop with this now. My mood grows sour thinking about mistakes I can’t correct. This letter is as much for me as it is for you. I must tell someone the truth if only to keep my mind from slipping.

You saw the effects the disease had on people, didn’t you? Even I, cloistered away in my Oxford office, couldn’t ignore the reality unfolding around me. They likened the first stage to a mild confusion, but when half the population suddenly can’t remember their own name or how to turn off a gas cooker, it doesn’t seem so mild any longer. Do you remember that first weekend in June when the rash of house fires began? I saw satellite imagery of the country at the time, and it looked like some strange Guy Fawkes’ Night celebration. A million people died in that first weekend, we calculated. In some ways I consider them lucky. They escaped before the worst of it took hold.

I remember a conversation I overheard at that time. Two young mathematicians in the corridor outside my office chatted amiably about the carriers of the disease. They had decided to name them ‘ramblers’ before the joke wore out its welcome and reality hushed them both.

I’d forgotten that nickname until I arrived at the manor house, and I saw one of the diseased walking the road nearby. He reminded me of those men and women who’d cut along the path near to grandmother’s house in Burwash. Do you remember, Cissy, how happy they seemed? Do you remember how strange they looked out in all weathers without a care in the world?

The rambler I saw wore a bright smile and a yellow kagool the same colour of the captain’s sou'wester hat on the book we both read as children. Do you remember the fight we had over that book? Do you remember, Cissy, how that fight ended?

I’m smiling now, because I pictured mother’s face as she ripped the book in half and gave it to us. Yet, we continued to argue over which torn piece had more of the captain on it than the other.

Sometimes, I wonder if the arguments of our childhood ever ended. Seems we carried our rivalries with us into our own quiet little corners of existence and let them fester there. I, in Oxford, surrounded by my numbers and you…?

I must confess, I do not know who and what you became. The last I heard you’d settled in St Ives with a husband and a child. What of you now, Cissy? Do you have any more children? Does the marriage still hold?

What a fool! I spent all those years hidden away in silence, and now only silence remains. The birds don’t even sing here.

Excuse my maudlin digression. If I had more time, I would spend all of it in apologies. There’s an old typewriter here I’d considered using, but the ‘e’ key produces only uppercase letters, and I fear my touch-typing skills would only slow me down. So, I write this letter longhand, with apologies for my doctor’s scrawl. Where was I? Oh, yes, the ‘rambler’.

He came sauntering up the path near to the manor house as I arrived with my Army escort. I hadn’t seen a soul in six months, barring the soldiers accompanying me from Oxford, and the sight of the man in his bright yellow kagool stirred a useless hope within me. If this man could survive, surely, we all had a chance? I thought.

As we neared him, the full horror of the disease came into view. I’d heard stories of how it twisted the features. I’d heard rumours it turned people into gibbering wrecks with a taste for blood. I’d heard of rotting flesh and eyes turned as black as ink. I’d never heard once of the joy.

The rambler had a wide smile. His eyes flashed brightly, full of happiness. If I’d seen him in passing, I’d have thought he’d won the lottery. But as the army Range Rover slowed to a stop, I saw how that smile masked the madness beneath.

He wore his joy like a mask, Cissy. A terrible, porcelain face fixed tightly to the skin. Blood dripped down from a wound on his forehead, and his fingers hung limply at his side like torn gloves.

Without a word of warning, one of my army escorts jumped out from the vehicle and shot the man in the head.

Later, after I’d settled into my quarters on the second floor of the manor house, I heard one of the soldiers, I cannot tell you whom as they both died before I got to know their names, ask a favour of the other.

“If you ever see me smiling like that, put me down,” he said.

“Done,” the other replied.

How could I have known then a smile equalled death? How could I have known Marley started it all, when I didn’t know my own role at the manor house or of his existence?

I’m getting ahead of myself again, Cissy. I apologize. A little more background, if you’ll indulge.

Long before the disease took hold, the manor house hosted hunting parties. With an abundance of red deer on the grounds, they turned the yearly cull into a paid event. Over time, as the hunters dwindled, the owners sought a new attraction.

Marley provided just such an attraction, suffering as he did from leucism. In a stag the effects of it produce a pure white coat, white antlers, and deep red eyes. They could sell tickets alone on the off chance of seeing the magnificent beast.

I must say, Cissy, Marley did stand out. The first time I saw him, I thought I had seen a ghost as he appeared through the mists. He stood twenty feet away from me at the edge of the lawns, no fear in his red eyes, only curiosity. Later, after reading the notes of my dead colleagues, I discovered they’d given him his name after Dickens’ chain-rattling spectre.

If only they’d made the connection to that story earlier, the world might not have fallen into such a terrifying silence. If only they’d seen his arrival as a warning against the future. But they had no reason to believe Marley had an infection or that the disease could jump from animal to human. Who could have known?

In the first stage of infection, the deer show signs of confusion and disorientation just as we humans do. During the second stage the brain rots, and the poor animal often tries to commit suicide. Blood stains the trees all over the grounds where the deer have rammed their skulls until they died.

The manor house has similar smears on its walls now, but the deer didn’t cause them. I saw their creation first hand, not long after I met Fay.

At twenty years my junior, Fay had accomplished twice as much as I at that age. I envied her intelligence, but more so her sociability. Scientists make for unsociable creatures, favouring their lonely obsessions over most human interactions, but not Fay. Before I’d had a chance to stutter out my name, she’d taken my hand and given me a potted history of the who, what, where, and why of her life.

I forget most of it now, except the one question she asked of me: “Do you think it’s a form of CJD, doctor?” she said.

Oh, Cissy, what I didn’t know might have filled an encyclopaedia. I had no clue what the acronym stood for. I’d focused for twenty years on data to the detriment of all else. I stalled my answer until a senior army officer thankfully interrupted to inform us of a briefing we must attend.

CJD, my dear Cissy, is Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, a degenerative brain ailment many scientists predicted as the cause of the initial outbreak. They were wrong. They were so dreadfully wrong. As was I.

My ignorance mattered little to Fay. Over the following days, our research helped form a strong bond between us. Her expertise fixed on biochemistry, mine data, and together we started to piece together a model of the outbreak. More importantly, we used the model to pinpoint where it all began.

The science would bore you, but it will come as no surprise that Marley was the first case in the country. He’d passed all checks they’d given him before transportation to England, but no checks existed for the disease. An outbreak of something similar in the American bison population had occurred previously, but remained isolated and ignored.

With the discovery of Marley as our ‘patient zero’, we tried to capture and study him. Even with the help of the few remaining soldiers, he’d vanish without a trace as soon as we got close. Some of the more superstitious amongst the group began to believe him more than an animal. I heard whispers of omens and portents, of punishments from God and End Times. None of that mumbo-jumbo scared me. It was Fay who brought the terrifying reality of our situation home to me a little while later.

Only a few days after our last expedition to find Marley, Fay woke me in the middle of the night, her face hovering inches above mine. I hoped, as all do when woken from sleep to a terrifying reality, that I remained in a dream.

“Who am I?” she said, and followed with a rush of questions so quick they merged into one: Whereamiwhareyouwhatyearisithwhereisit?

I had no answers that would satisfy her raving. I knew only the disease had taken control of her mind.

Fay scrambled off the bed and ran to the other side of my room. Stood in the open doorway, her body silhouetted by the light from the hall beyond, she began to pound at the side of her head with closed fists. The thud of bone against bone filled the quiet.

I tried to reach her, but as I approached, she hit me in the jaw and sent me failing to the ground. By the time I’d risen to my feet and reached the door, Fay stood at the other end of the long corridor beyond.

She’d stopped hitting herself, but the absence of that awful sound of knuckles against the skull only worried me more. My fear grew as she started to sing.

Oh, she had a pleasant enough voice, dear Cissy, but at three in the morning all songs sound sinister. Especially as song remembered from your own past.

The song she sang reminded me of our visits to the Duke of Edinburgh pub in the village. Do you remember how mother and father would take us there for lunch after Sunday mass? Mother would play a song on the jukebox every time. I don’t remember the name or who sang the tune, but I remember the lyrics: To every season...turn...turn...turn.

Fay sang those words as if she’d plucked them from my memories. I tried to convince myself again I was the dreamer still dreaming, but I couldn’t wake up. I stepped out into the corridor as one would onto floorboards turned black after a house fire. I shouted for her to stop, but she continued to sing, repeating the chorus until it became nothing more than a jumble.

Toeveryseasonturnturnturn.

Toeveryseasonturnturnturn.

Toeveryseasonturnturnturn.

I searched the closed doors along both sides of the corridor. Surely, one of the others would wake at the noise and come to our aid? How could anybody sleep through all this?

I would soon have my answer. They weren’t sleeping, Cissy, they were infected.

Fay stopped singing abruptly, but I didn’t even gain the reprieve of silence. She began to laugh. A chuckling giggle thrown out through the manor house and echoed back. Only, the returned echoes didn’t belong to her, Cissy, they belonged to others. A dozen manic laughs rumbled up from below in unison. Soon, the floor beneath me shook with the horrific sound.

Instinct drove my hands to my ears, but I couldn’t block the terrifying sound. I thought to turn and run, but I had no idea where I might escape. Inside the house madness had taken hold, and beyond only the woods and the deer waited. I felt trapped, Cissy, and convinced I too would soon start laughing. I could feel some strange, untamed instinct, pulling at the corners of my lips.

Then it stopped. As abruptly as the laughter had exploded out of Fay’s mouth, it ceased, and a long silence took its place.

I waited in that dreaded silence for her to move, but I wouldn’t have dared guess what nightmarish action would follow.

Fay took a tentative step forward. Under the dim throw of the wall lights her face was as yellow as the s’owester on our beloved children’s book. She wore a smile as fixed and porcelain as the poor rambler who’d met us on that first day outside the manor house. I braced myself for a gunshot fired by a soldier hidden in the shadows, but none came.

Smiling, she approached me, and I could do nothing but stand and stare at her.

She stared through me. Her eyes fixed on the opposite end of the corridor and the wall there.

I knew then what would happen. It came to me in a red flash before my eyes.

Fay ran, and I pawed at her as she bolted past me, but I might as well have tried to reel in a spider’s web. A few feet from the corridor’s end she lowered her head, and a memory of the poor bull we saw at the Picador in Madrid came to mind. Do you remember, Cissy, how father took us there as children? Do you remember how the bull lowered his head just before he charged?

I’m sure I heard the roar of a Spanish crowd as Fay hit the wall with sickeningly wet thud, and her body crumpled to the floor. She twitched like the poor bull. Her head jerking as if a broken current was passing through it.

Somehow, I found the courage to approach her.

Oh, Cissy, such stupid thoughts crowded my head. I imagined I might resuscitate her and cure the disease. I imagined myself a hero.

Stupid. So stupid. The disease has no cure. We never figured out how it jumped from animal to man. All we knew was to kill the disease, you had to kill the hosts. All of them.

Fay was dead. The force of the blow had cracked her head like an egg. Her brains leaked out onto the floor, and her face was masked with blood, but still the terrifying joy of her smile remained intact.

I don’t know how I didn’t vomit. No, I tell a lie, I know why I didn’t, as a new sound distracted me. In quick succession, the wet thud of heads crashing against the walls rose all through the manor house. I didn’t count them then, Cissy, but in the immediate aftermath as I walked amongst the dead, I found thirty corpses. Thirty cracked eggs. Quaint, when I describe it that way, but I swear to you the dead aren’t quaint at all, especially after a few days in their company.

In the week that followed, I dared not go outside into the world for fear the disease now hung in the air like the morning mists. I dared not walk the house either, as I worried my proximity to the corpses would have the same effect. For a week, Cissy, I grounded myself in my room upstairs, surviving on what little snacks I’d gathered on that first, terrifying head count I’d done.

Isn’t it true, Cissy, all our guilty pleasures become our tortures if allowed? Do you remember how we used to sneak chocolate bars up to our rooms and eat them beneath the sheets at night? In the week after Fay and the others killed themselves, I ate my fill of chocolate for a lifetime.

What sleep I managed in that time consisted of a repeating nightmare. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. Neither I, in the dream, or the King’s horses could put him back together again. In that dream, as I gathered his pieces in my arms, a shrill, haunting sound would pull me out of the nightmare and into another.

Out on the mist-strewn grounds, Marley’s roar woke me nightly. Whether that call of his was for company, or out of anger, I wasn’t sure. There was nobody else to hear him, anyway, Cissy. The soldiers had killed all the other deer as we searched for him in our vain hope of synthesizing a cure.

After two weeks alone, I was sure the disease hadn’t infected me. In all that time I hadn’t cracked a smile, and the only madness I suffered was a bored mania any who’ve eaten the same food day in and day out might suffer.

Oh, Cissy, you should have seen me the morning I went out to put an end to Marley. I was like a child dressed up in his father’s clothing. I’d rummaged through the soldiers’ quarters and found a uniform two sizes too big. I wore a pair of combat boots three sizes above my own, and clomped around in them like Frankenstein’s monster let free.

Next, I found a weapon. I chose the simplest looking, as I’d never fired a gun in my life. I knew enough to know what a sniper rifle was and how it might be used.

The rifle I chose was longer than the others, it had a scope fixed to the top. Good for hunting, I told myself in an internal voice far surer than its owner ever could be. I stood before one of the upper story windows that morning, looking out into the early morning mists through the scope, and like a dream, Marley appeared.

I thought I was dreaming, or suffering some hunger-induced hallucination. The rifle shook in my grasp, and I had the notion Marley might sense my fears and run, but he didn’t move, Cissy. He turned his head, and I swear, fixed on me with those red eyes of his.

Without hesitation, I pulled the trigger. What I’d imagined would be the hardest act, squeezing the trigger and killing another living being, was as easy as flicking on a light switch.

Or, it would have been if I’d loaded the rifle beforehand. The end might have come then, if I’d done even the most basic checks. But what was I to know of how it worked? How was I, who’d spent thirty years with a head buried in numbers and theories, supposed to manoeuvre the practical mechanics of death?

It took me another two days to figure out those mechanics, although I was no more confident two days later than I had been when that trigger clicked dryly at my squeezing. If anything, my confidence had waned. I dreamed on those last nights of Marley turning the gun on me like in a cartoon, but the dream had no humour to it. I’d wake, sweating, convinced Marley was watching me from the corridor, his red eyes glowing in the dark.

Dawn the next day, I finally saw those eyes up close.

I walked out into the woods with the night still clinging to the horizon, and the morning mists waiting impatiently at the edge of the world. I had no idea of how to track an animal or how I would continue to follow such a beast after I’d found him. Dressed in oversized fatigues, the rifle loaded and slung over my shoulder, I pushed on into the mists.

The rising sun brought Marley to me. He appeared on the crest of a hill; a silhouetted statue erected in some ancient time to some ancient god. He didn’t move, barring a few small nods of his head.

I failed a second time, Cissy. As I brought the scope up to my eye, I saw myself looking at blackness. At first, I was confused. How could such a simple thing as a glass lens suddenly stop working? Then I realised I’d put the lens cap back over the front of the scope before heading out from the manor house.

Scrambling, I took the lens cap off and aimed the gun once again.

Marley hadn’t moved. If he sensed danger, he had chosen to ignore it. There, atop the hillside, he was an ancient god and a perfect target.

Now, Cissy, I told you how I’d had no hesitation when I pulled the trigger the first time. But a repeat performance was not on the cards. My finger gained a drunk’s tremor. Sweat rolled down my face in a curtain.

The dead whispered in my ears then, not words, but the drumbeat of skull against wall. I heard the faint echoes of maddened laughter underneath it all. The disease had to end, and it would end where it began, with Marley.

The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.

I squeezed the trigger, and at the last moment, closed my eyes.

The shock from the bullet opened them up again. My ears felt as if they were stuffed with church bells, and a seasick roll came to my legs.

Do you remember, Cissy, the rollercoaster we visited as children? Do you remember how terrified I was and how you took my hand? You told me I wasn’t to be afraid. You told me it wasn’t going to hurt, and it would be over with soon enough.

I believed you then, and I wish I’d had you here holding my hand when I fired that rifle.

I found Marley a half mile from where my bullet had struck him. Sharp silver morning breaths fired out through his nostrils, and his white coat was stained red with blood. Looking into his bright red eyes, I saw him then for the first time, not as a ghost, not as the beginning of a nightmare, but as a living creature, unknowing of his part in a catastrophe.

My heart broke at the sight of him. I reached out to sooth his brow only to jerk it back a moment later.

I was still unclear as to how the disease spread. I’d survived, somehow, and I wasn’t going to push my luck there and then. For the same reason, I couldn’t just walk away and let him die slowly either.

I whispered a half-remembered prayer, aimed the rifle at Marley’s head, and wrapped my finger around the trigger.

Whatever instinct in creatures and men alike drives them to fight, it came alive in the both of us just then. Marley reared up and swung his antlers into my side, tearing a chunk off flesh from above my hip. And in that same moment, I whirled on him and squeezed the trigger.

I don’t know if Marley is the last, but I do know he is dead. Only time can tell now, Cissy, whether I did the right thing or not. I patched the wound up in my side before I started to write this letter, but my knowledge is lacking and I’m not sure if it will hold or not.

For now, I grow very tired. My lids are heavy and it’s getting harder and harder to write. Yet, at the same time, so many memories of us rush through my mind.

Do you remember, Cissy, that song mother used to put on in the jukebox in the pub? I don’t remember the name of it, or the name of the pub for that matter – the Golden Fleece? The Duke? Where was it, anyway? – but I do remember the lyrics, I think. I can’t help the smile on my face when I think of them now. Makes me feel happy. Makes me feel like singing.

To every season...turn..turn..turn..

#

This last part I writE on thE old typEwritEr. My arms arE numb, Cissy. I can’t hold a pEn. EvErything sEEms funny to mE now. EvErything is a jokE.

No timE lEft. No timE at all.

dEar.

This story appears in the collection, With Ravens Passing the Moon.