The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

The Eyes are White and Quiet ^{Carole Johnstone}

18.02.19 (Clinic: BAR55, 14.02.19)

Consultant: Dr. Barriga

Ophthalmology—Direct Line: 020 5489 9000/ Fax: 020 5487 5291

Minard Surgery Group, Minard Road, SE6 5UX

Dear Dr. Wilson,

Hannah Somerville (06.07.93)

Flat 01, 3 Broadfield Rd, SE6 5UP

NHS No.: 566 455 6123

Thank you for referring this young lady, whose optician suspected optic disc cupping. Her visual acuity is 6/6 in the right eye and 6/4 in the left. Both of the eyes are white and quiet. Intraocular pressure readings are 18mm/Hg in the right and 16mm/Hg in the left. She has open anterior chamber angles in both. The CD ratios are about 0.5. There is no significant visual field defect.

Her eyesight does not appear to be deteriorating. Her chief complaint is that of intermittent visual disturbance, but this was absent in clinic. There is no family history of glaucoma. I have not started her on any medication. Unless she has any further problems, she will be reviewed in the eye clinic in twelve months following a repeat visual fields test and central corneal thickness assessment.

19.08.19 (Clinic: BAR55, 15.08.19)

Consultant: Dr. Barriga

Ophthalmology—Direct Line: 020 5489 9000/ Fax: 020 5487 5291

Minard Surgery Group, Minard Road, SE6 5UX

Dear Dr. Wilson,

Hannah Somerville (06.07.93)

Flat 01, 3 Broadfield Rd, SE6 5UP

NHS No.: 566 455 6123

This patient was reviewed in the eye clinic today at her own request. Her visual acuity is 6/6 in the right eye and 6/5 in the left. The eyes are white and quiet. The CD ratio remains about 0.5 in both. There is no significant visual field defect and no evidence of glaucoma.

We have seen this young lady at least three times in the last six months, and can ascertain no physical cause for her complaints of intermittent visual disturbance and periods of “complete blindness.” These are reported as having lasted up to two hours on occasion, and she believes that their frequency is increasing.

I am of the opinion that we can do no more for her. I have referred her for psychological evaluation and discharged her from the eye clinic, with the advice to see her optician on an annual basis.

“I mean, all that fuckin’ gabbin’ and over-sharin’ like, everyone thinkin’ they’re bein’ all civilized again, and look how quickly that went the way of everythin’ else when they thought one had got in tonight.” He rocked back on his heels; the dirt crackled against his boots. The fire warmed her face and she leaned closer to it. She was always so bloody cold.

“Sharin’s never a good idea anyways. That posh divvy, he’s half mad on that Debbie one, the auld arse don’t know half as much as he thinks he does, Jimmy is more fuckin’ terrified of wild dogs than anythin’ could actually kill us. That’s all it is, ain’t it? Listenin’, findin’ out what makes folk tick, what makes ’em shit themselves. Survival instinct—if you’re smart like. Say nothin’ and let everyone else do the talkin’.”

He was from Liverpool and he was on his own. He had terrible teeth; often she could smell his breath before he even spoke. His name was Robbo. That was all she knew about him. That, and he did a whole lot of talking for someone so against it. He liked talking to her; she had no idea why.

“Why don’t you leave then?” she asked. It had started to snow: cold, glancing touches against her fire-warmed cheeks. She could hear the growing mutters and cries of dismay on the other side of the parked vans. They always built at least four fires now, one in each corner like a mobile Roman infantry camp.

“Nowhere to go is there? And folk need folk, like. That’s just survival instinct too, ain’t it? Some folks, they got that more than other folks. And, I mean, it’s not like you know which kind you’re gonna be till it happens, ay? Soft lads like Jimmy are scared of their own shadow, then you got the likes of Bob fuckin’ Marley runnin’ straight at everythin’ like a proper weapon. Debbie and that other bird—the Scottish one…”

“Sarah.”

“Right. Sarah. I mean, what have they done since we all hooked up, eh?”

“They’re just scared.”

“I’m fuckin’ scared. Don’t stop me helpin’ out, goin’ on patrol. I mean, explain that, ay? You look at the animal kingdom, right? It’s not like Peter fuckin’ Rabbit wakes up one night and thinks, fuck it, what’s the point? I can’t be arsed runnin’ away from anythin’ that wants to ’ave me for brekkie. Might as well give up and die like. Or just cry meself to sleep in me nice comfy VW.”

She smiled. “It’s not the same.” He was rattled. He was always wired, always opinionated, but the events of the day and then the wild dog that had snuck past the fires had got to him. His sweat was fresh, but it smelled bad; it reminded her of the days when no one had understood what was going on. When everyone had been trying so desperately to get away from a thing that they hadn’t yet realized was everywhere.

“I mean, fuck, look at you, ’ann. You don’t just go out on reccies, you fuckin’ lead a few. And you can’t see your arse from your fuckin’ elbow.”

She didn’t answer.

“Arr ey, you can’t, come on like. I’m not bein a fuckin’ dick. It’s a valid fuckin’ point.”

She liked the way his fucks and likes and dicks always sounded like the hissing hot water siphons of the coffee shops that she used to hide in when her sight started getting really bad. It was comforting somehow. She liked the way that he admired her too. Even before she’d proved her worth to everyone else, he’d always been the first to volunteer to sit watch with her. Back when she’d just been the blind girl.

There had been many convoys in those first few months, but none had stopped for her—or if they had, they’d moved on swiftly again without her. This one had initially said yes, she suspected, only because of Robbo. And as convoys went, it only just qualified. One of the vans was his beat-up Ford, still smelling of methylated spirits and paint and hash. The other—the VW—had belonged to a Brethren couple whose names she had already forgotten.

Robbo swore when they both heard sudden movement behind him.

“Grub’s up, ladies.”

“Nice one,” Robbo said, pretending that he hadn’t cursed, that he couldn’t hear Marley’s low chuckle. “Want some scran, ’annah?”

She put out her hands and relished the sudden warmth of the foil tray. “Thanks.”

Marley was big, she could tell. Sometimes—often—she could sense something other than scorn or tightly wound caution in him, especially when they were alone. Once, he had followed her to the shallow pit that they always dug on the periphery of their camp, and as she’d squatted and peed, she’d felt him watching; she’d breathed in the sea smells of him. If it wasn’t for Robbo, she knew that she’d have a lot more to fear from Marley than she already did.

After Marley left them alone again, Robbo attacked his stew with gusto. She suspected that he always ate with his mouth wide open; she found the sound of that oddly comforting too. She ate quietly, mechanically, tasting nothing at all.

“Why won’t this snow fuckin’ stop?” he eventually muttered. “Last thing we fuckin’ need is another fuckin’ whiteout.”

“I’ll be able to hear them,” she said, and he heaved a great sigh, even though it was a lie. It never failed to amaze her how easily that lie had been believed from the very start, as though the immediate consequence of her blindness should be a nearly preternatural sharpening of all her other senses. They did believe it though—all of them—and it was just as well. It made her useful, maybe indispensable. She knew that even Robbo’s surrendered Peter Rabbits remembered the night that the Whites had ambushed them while they’d all been sleeping. She knew that they remembered her warning scream, the dead White at her feet next to the opened VW door, the bloodied crowbar in her hands. When the Brethren couple had staggered out of the van, they’d pulled their coats tight around their bellies, crying and sobbing that God had saved them.

“Oh, aye?” Robbo had said, after discovering the body of a Pakistani man, whose name Hannah had also forgotten, lying by the makeshift entrance to their camp. “What he do to piss Him off then, ay?” The Pakistani had died badly. Even though Robbo had never told her exactly how, she’d been able to smell it; she’d been able to see it through the horrified witness of everyone else.

They’d burned both bodies on the periphery of their camp, and then buried the smoking bonfire under heavy, wet clods of grass.

“They almost look like us,” Robbo had whispered to her later. “When they’re dead at least, like. When they’re not runnin’.”

After that, they stopped sleeping in the vans. After that, not one member of the convoy voiced an objection when she started taking point, same as everyone else. There was always someone ready to hold onto her elbow and take the weight of her pack. A few weeks after the dead White, the Brethren couple didn’t return from an easy supply run. No one volunteered to go looking for them.

“So, what kind of folk are you, Robbo?” It wasn’t what she wanted to ask, not even close, but she needed to start somewhere. They never talked about anything that was worth something. They never talked about where they’d come from, because none of them believed they’d ever be going back. And they never talked about where they were going, because they weren’t going anywhere. They were just moving. And progress was slow. It was safer to scout routes and camps on foot before bringing up the vans behind. The vans weren’t for travel any more; they were for escape. She’d been on point today, and the two days before that, and Robbo had held her elbow for all of them. That was why tonight of all nights, she needed somewhere to start.

“I’m still here, ay? What’s that tell you?”

She swallowed. For a brief moment, fear swallowed her up, doubt pinched fingers against her windpipe. “Tell me something from home. Tell me something about before, about you before.”

He sighed. It still rattled a bit inside his chest, even though he’d run out of the last of his bifters weeks ago. “Aright, ’annah. Don’t see the fuckin’ point like, but aright.”

She heard him change position, move a little closer. “Anythin’s better than bein’ on your own, ain’t it? That’s just how it is. It’s why we’re all still here, ain’t it? I had this mate, right. We’d been mates since school—not bezzies like cause he was a bit nuts, and you know what kids are, you’re not about to hang out with the soft lad. Anyways, we stayed in touch cause we lived on the same estate, we both worked in the Asda, and went to the same pubs on the weekend. And this guy, ’ann, he was somethin else, man. He was like them abandoned puppies they used to show on ad breaks. He was built like a brick shithouse like, but soft as shite on account of his ma beatin’ him up every time she took a drink when he was a kid, and his da tryin’ to shag him every time she wasn’t lookin’. All he wanted, right, was someone, anyone. You could fuckin’ smell it off him.”

When Robbo coughed, she nearly told him that it was okay, that he could stop if he wanted to. But she didn’t. She shook the snow free of her blanket before pulling it tighter around her shoulders. She blinked her eyes, brushed icy fingers between her eyelashes, offering Robbo at least the illusion that she could see him. “Did he find someone?”

Robbo’s laugh sounded angry, but she knew it wasn’t. “Yer, he did. She likely didn’t know her luck till she didn’t. Folk never know what to do with unconditional love like, d’you know that, ’annah? They think it’s all they want till they get it. It wrecks with your head cause it makes no sense at all. It’s like them pop-up targets at the shows. After a while you just need ’em to stay down, you know?”

She nodded, even though she had no idea at all.

“By the time they’d been seein’ each other six months, she’d shagged half the estate behind his back.”

“Did he find out?”

That angry laugh again. “Yer he did.”

“What happened?”

When he didn’t answer, she stabbed at the fire with a stick, sending up sparks of heat between them. Her heart was still beating far too fast. “Robbo?”

“He walked in on them,” he muttered, and then suddenly he was talking too fast and too hard again; she struggled to keep up. “He whacked her over the ’ead with an ’ammer, and then he took a carvin’ knife to the fella. And then he fronts up to my house, covered in their blood, and asks if he can come in like, if he can borrow a fuckin’ towel. And I say go’ed, lad, no worries, have a shower while you’re at it. And I phone the bizzies the minute he does.”

He was breathing too heavily. She could nearly feel the hot, choppy distress of it. “You did the right thing, Robbo. He’d killed people. What else could you have done?”

“Are you for real with this shit or is it just an act? I didn’t call the bizzies cause he’d killed people and it was the right fuckin’ thing to do, ’annah. I called ’em cause I thought he was gonna kill me. And he came to my house cause he knew I’d do it, he knew I’d grass ’im up.”

She opened her mouth to speak, maybe to say sorry, but he hadn’t finished. She could hear his boots scraping against the ground, and she could still hear the agitated puff of his breath.

“And as they’re cartin ’im off, still fuckin’ wet from me fuckin’ shower, he says to me, it’s okay, Robbo, like he fuckin’ means it, and I stay standin’ there on the doorstep in me skivvies and slippers, worryin’ about the fuckin’ neighbors.”

“I used to be a troll.”

He coughed again. “What?”

She gestured at the snow. “Before all this. When I still had my sight and the world still had the internet. I worked nightshift in a petrol station as a cashier, and dayshift in online chat rooms as a troll.”

She could nearly hear him blinking. It made her suddenly want to laugh.

“You mean, like, you were one of them blerts gets people to off ’emselves for shits and giggles?”

“No,” she said quickly, though not for exoneration. “I just did what you said before. I watched and I listened. I worked out people’s weaknesses and used them.”

“You’re pretty fuckin’ good at it like,” he said, with a low, sheepish chuckle, because he was a lot cleverer than everyone else thought he was.

For a while, he said nothing else. She couldn’t hear even the sound of his breathing any more, only the cracks of the firewood, the muffled conversations on the other side of camp, the closing, echoless shroud of settling snow. In her mind’s eye, she could see the clustered pine trees that she’d been able to smell just before they made camp. She imagined them padded with new white shoulders, their cones sparkled with frost, dark trunks in shadow. She imagined the abandoned towns and villages and cities made new, smothered under all that breathless white and quiet. And she imagined all the camps doubtless just like this one: small bastions of fiery resistance, like coastal dun beacons passing along messages of doom.

She started when Robbo made a sudden movement, cleared his throat.

“What the fuck d’you do it for?” He sounded angry, and she could understand that at least. Robbo hadn’t only thought that her blindness meant she could hear and smell better, he’d thought that it meant she was better. Better than anyone else.

And she’d thought about the why a lot too. Most often, she’d posed as a man, a predator, whose misogyny had hidden behind feigned interest and casually cruel charm. “I don’t know. I just did.”

She heard a sound: the cracking of a snow-heavy branch maybe, or a starving wild dog trying to hunt. In an instant she was afraid again, uncertain again. She reached out her numb hands toward the fire. “Do you ever get tired, Robbo?”

“Sure.” That self-conscious chuckle again. “Do I wish I’d just stayed in the house and drunk meself to death instead? Deffo sure.”

Some snow crept between her blanket and skin, cricking her neck. “Do you think we’re both better people now?”

“No. Do you?”

“No.” She smiled, and it hurt her chapped lips. “Is there any more of that nasty rum?”

“There ain’t much left, but you’re welcome to it.”

“We can share it.” She heard the screw of the hipflask, and then the tinny slosh of its contents. When Robbo got up to walk around the fire, she could hear his boots sinking into the snow, and the creak-like sound of them shifting inside it before lifting free. The snow had got deep fast. When he squatted down next to her, she could instantly smell the rum, his breath, his sweat. Goosebumps prickled her skin. Perhaps her other senses were getting better after all.

“You okay, ’annah?”

“Yeah,” she said, feeling the cool smoothness of the hip flask against her open palms, putting her numb fingers around its opening before guiding it to her lips. She coughed as soon as she swallowed, and then put it to her lips again before pausing.

“It’s okay, you finish it,” Robbo said.

When he started getting up, she reached out for him, tugging on his coat. And when he squatted back down, she released a breath that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. She didn’t take another drink, but she swallowed anyway.

“I can see them, Robbo. The Whites. I’ve always been able to see them. Right from the start.”

He lost his balance. She heard his legs going out from under him, boot heels scraping against buried dirt, his arse hitting the snow with a nearly funny whump.

“They’re all I can see.” She felt a need to explain that was pretty much redundant now—but the omission had been too heavy. All those weeks of people trusting her, holding her elbow, thinking she was benignly special, their good luck charm. She’d helped them, but not enough. Not in the ways that she could have. And now there was this.

“That’s boss, ’annah.” But his voice was careful, guarded. Maybe even a little disappointed in her. “And I can understand like, why you never let on. You’d be the same as them folk who didn’t go blind in that Triffid thing, ay? Every cunt’d want a piece of you.”

She tried to smile when he immediately cursed—when he realized what he’d said and tried to take it back. It made her like him more. It made the choppy beating of her heart choppier.

“You’re right, Robbo. You’re right, it’s the same.” But it wasn’t. She hadn’t kept quiet about being able to see those fast and silent white horrors, like nets of bloated muslin twisted by the wind, because she’d been afraid of being exploited. She’d done it because she’d wanted to feel wanted, needed to be needed. Just like all of those yellow days spent hunched over her laptop in the grimy, freezing kitchenette of her bedsit. She’d needed to feel powerful.

She took another swallow of rum and it went down better than the first. This time she didn’t cough. When she shook the flask, it gave a tinny, almost empty slosh. “You finish it,” she said, pushing it against his coat.

“Why d’you make us stop here tonight, ’annah?”

She could hear the quiet neutrality in his voice, the cleverer, fearful certainty. She pictured those fiery dun beacons again.

“Do you know what I think, Robbo?” she said, feeling self-consciously histrionic despite herself, despite the circumstances. “I think the world would be better off without us. I think the land and the sea and everything living in both would be better off without us. And I think that God—if there is one—would be better off without us too.” She stopped, wiped tears as well as fat flakes of snow from under her eyes before turning back towards Robbo, the heat and sweat and fearful certainty of him. “But I need to know what you think, Robbo. I need you to tell me what you think.”

He shifted, got back onto his haunches. When he spoke, she could hear the smile in his words as well as all that fear. “I think we’d be the ones better off without fuckin’ God, ’annah.” He immediately tutted, as if his answer had annoyed him, and then sighed a long, low sigh. “I reckon love’s just another excuse for hate.”

“Good,” she said. Her own breath left her in a shuddery exhale that she imagined as a silvery plume of smoke. “Me too.”

The world will be white and quiet, she thought. Nothing but white and quiet.

“Aren’t you going to finish the rum?” she said instead, and her teeth were suddenly chattering too much; she bit her tongue.

“It’s okay, ’annah,” Robbo said, taking hold of both of her hands and pulling them into the warmth of his chest. She could feel his frantic heartbeat against her knuckles.

She thought of his mate being led out to the police car, still wet from his shower, looking back at Robbo in his skivvies and slippers. She squeezed closed her eyes. The world will be white and quiet, she thought, the world will be white and quiet, like a mantra that she’d once believed in but now no longer trusted at all.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

She kept hold of Robbo’s hands as she lifted up her head, as she opened her eyes. She gripped them harder as she let herself see all those bloated fists of white wind around them. All those casually cruel eyes, hungry dark mouths. The hundreds—maybe now even thousands—of them crouched inside the expectant silent hush. They weren’t waiting for her; they weren’t waiting for anything. They were simply taking their pleasure, stretching it as far as they could.

She remembered how it had felt to know that she had someone caught and trapped by her smiling lies; how the anticipation of destroying all she had built up had so often loomed larger than the final act itself. And how that need to purge—to pass along all her fear and furious loneliness, like a contagion of fire along headland and cliff—had never waned, never ever lost its power. She was sorry for it now—sorry for all of it—but she’d never lied to herself. She’d never pretended that if the Whites hadn’t come she would ever have stopped.

The world will be white and quiet.

“It’s okay, ’annah,” Robbo said again, pressing the wet prickle of his face against her own as those eyes, those mouths, all that eager, twisted white rushed over the camp in a suffocating fog that would soon not be quiet at all. “It’s okay.”

And she believed him, she trusted him, she clung onto him. Even though he was blind.