White and Other Tales of Ruin

Lucy-Anne was a good mother. She twisted in her seat and motioned Gemma to her, holding her yet again and shielding the girl’s eyes with the back of her seat.

“Get us out of here,” she said. “Doug, get us out of here, Doug, wake up …”

As the men looked up and saw him staring at them, Doug shoved the car into reverse. He slammed his foot on the gas and glanced in the rearview mirror. If there was another car coming they would meet, crash and burn. At least he hoped they would burn; he did not want to be left alive for these men to be able to get him, and to Lucy-Anne and Gemma, and do to them what they were doing to the family on the road ahead.

It was the dog that shocked Doug more than anything. Why the dog?

The engine screamed as the car slewed across the road. He glanced back at the scene receding in front of them and saw that the men had gone back to their business. It did not matter. He did not let up on the gas until he had clumsily steered back around the bend and spun into a farm gate to turn around. He smelled an acidic burning, the car crunched against a stone wall, Gemma finally struggled from Lucy-Anne’s grip and screamed.

Doug felt like screaming as well. Yesterday, normality, tainted with disquiet over what was apparently happening in the Mediterranean, and a subdued fear that it may come closer.

Today, this.

He shook his head and flicked tears across the dashboard. “We’ll try another road.”

Lucy-Anne did not answer. She was still trying to hug Gemma, protect her, hide her away from whatever had gone wrong with the world today. If only it were so easy.

That afternoon there was a government announcement over the radio. The Prime Minister gave ‘grave news’ about the southern suburbs of London — they were gone — but he assured people that everything was being done that could be done to find a solution to this crisis. Doug wondered just how far away the bastard actually was. The Arctic Circle, perhaps?

Gemma laughed childishly and said: “Tibia, fibula, tarsus, metatarsals, phalanges.”

Early that evening they saw the first signs for Edinburgh. The radio had said no more.

Uncle Peter was more than eccentric, he was plain insane … and he wanted people to recognise his insanity. His whole estate was floodlit against the night, revealing all of what he had done. Some of it, Doug thought, should have stayed well hidden.

As they cruised along his long, winding driveway, the first signs of this madness presented themselves. Every tree bordering the road had had its lower branches lopped off, the wounds daubed with black tar to seal them, the dead timber disposed of out of sight. Nailed to the naked trunks were animal corpses, a species for each tree: a squirrel on a sycamore, a sparrow on an elm, a deer on an oak. It was as if Uncle Peter were a game hunter, but he had run out of room for trophies inside his house.

And the house … this was fairly unusual as well.

“Holy shit,” Doug muttered under his breath as they rounded the final bend in the drive. It was a huge old monolith, stonework sills crumbling with age, windows distorted out of shape by the deadly subsidence plaguing the property and promising to drag it, eventually, back into the stony ground. From plinth to eaves the house looked quite normal, if dishevelled.

Above that, the gargoyles took over.

They were all huge, fashioned from plastic and fibreglass instead of stone, and more gruesome because of that. Garish colours and unsettling designs shouted across at them as they coasted to a halt. Bloody teeth, split throats, dragon-eyes, sabre toothed monstrosities that would surely be more than able to fulfil their duties … if, indeed, these things had the same employ as their more traditional greystone cousins. Stark artificial light gave them an added sense of the grotesque. They looked like a kid’s book made real.

“Mad as a hatter,” Doug said. “Uncle Peter has gone AWOL I think, Lucy.”

“He always was a bit offbeat,” she whispered, aghast.

“Wow,” was all Gemma could say. “Wow.”

The car stank. All three of them had urinated — Doug had refused to stop, even when Lucy-Anne had begged him and cried and cursed as she tried to miss her seat as she pissed — and they had not opened the windows for eleven hours. The fuel gauge had been kissing red for fifty miles, and for the last twenty Doug had been silently blessing Volkswagen’s caution. The food they had managed to bring with them had gone bad in the heat, a pint of milk had spilled, the oxygen cylinders had run out hundreds of miles back … the engine was making a sickly grinding noise … basically, they were on their last legs.

The car rattled and sighed as he turned off the ignition. He was certain it would never start again, not without a great deal of pampering and cajoling. He was equally certain that he would never need to do either.