TILL DEATH

Episode Seven

DAY 26

The kitchen clock hits midnight and I fall back onto the cold, hard floor of the sunroom. On the other side of the glass my wife's corpse labours in the strange night. The bright bulb of the sunroom throws reflections across that fragile glass. My own frantic face. The kitchen door behind me. Somewhere under all that though, there she is. Her slack face, twisted and melted by the rippled light, presses down on me, holding me still like some frigid night terror. Then she slaps a filthy hand against the bright glass. Instinctively, I kick my legs against the floor, scuttling across the tiles like a frightened insect until my back is against the wall. There I hold my mouth and fix my gaze so I can only see her from the corner of my eye, then I follow the hard wall to my right until I get to the door where I fall backwards into the kitchen. I pull the door shut, lock it, then lean on it, panting and sweaty. The world swims as the last of the whisky is blasted out of me by the force of adrenaline. What do I do? What the fuck do I do? I stagger around the kitchen holding onto the surfaces while I try to compose my thoughts. How did she get here? Has she climbed the fence? Or broken through it? I go over to the window to see if I can see a breach or some other flaw in my defences. It's dark, but the moonlight catches the fence and I see no such thing. Then I hear her. Her steps on the gravel, made distinct by her particular weight and gait. Her throat gurgling the way it did in her sleep sometimes. I turn away from the window, put my back once more to the wall and quiet my breath. I hear her scrabbling behind me, knocking over the pots that stand on the flags there, her flat feet sliding on the stray gravel. My hand slides up the wall, finds the switch and extinguishes the light. I drop to my knees and crawl across the floor in darkness toward the staircase. Maybe she can see me, or sense me, but at least I can't see her, and for now, that will have to do. Upstairs I cower in the corner of the bed I shared with the monster at the door and wait for sleep to take all this away.

I wake from a summertime dream and it takes me a full, aching minute to reassemble the events of the night before. Drink, darkness, nightmares on canvas, and then.... her. Dead. Alive. Outside. Still dressed from the night before I peer out of the little square window in the eaves of the bedroom. The fields have felt the delicate touch of the first frosts. I can't see her, but I can hear her. I open the window to look down. There is a hole in her head. I look away. There's a lot to think about. A lot to come to terms with. I knew the world had gone to shit but now the apocalypse is at my door, and now it has a face I once kissed, it is much harder to ignore. I deal with this by finding a thread of routine in this bloody mess. It's cold, so I light a fire, and it helps. Then I prepare my coffee, and that helps too. The smell of the steeping grounds and the sound of the spitting fire conspire to create something that feels almost like normality. I drag the leather armchair nearer the window and sit in it, drinking my coffee in the bright square the morning affords me. I can hear her footsteps on the other side of the wall.

"I thought you were gone," I say to the wall. The words catch in my dry throat. I feel guilty and afraid, and... something else.

"HmMmm, hmmm," she says on the other side of the wall. No, she doesn't say it. The sound just... leaves her. It's such a strange sound. Just like her and nothing like her all at once. The vibrations of the vocal chords are distinctly hers, but the frail hunger beneath them belongs to someone else. Something else. Something aching and primal. I sit back in the chair and feel the warmth of the sun magnified through the old glass. There, I listen to her sounds, both old and new. This chorus pulls me toward her as much as it pushes me away, but I stay where I am, in this bright square of borrowed blue.

DAY 27

I woke this morning to my breath turned to delicate ice in the corners of the bedroom window. I burned the last of the firewood early yesterday afternoon and as cold as I became once the night drew in, I could not bring myself to go outside to get any more. She's out there, and while she's out there, I must remain in here. I seek warmth by burning her pictures and her easels, feeding them to the flames until the sunroom lies vacant, cleansed of all her horrors. The heat that they summon permeates the old stone walls and eventually, the ice on the glass becomes liquid, then vapour. But the thin heat brings me no comfort. No comfort at all. Because now I have new horrors to endure. Wherever I am, there they are, on the other side of every wall. No matter which corner of the house I try to escape to, they are only ever just a brick away.

DAY 29

Winter is here. Where once it had been a delicate frost on an early window, now it is a diamond crust that surrounds me day and night. I am trapped in here both by it, and by her. If I am to survive the cold I know I must face her. I know I have to come to terms with her new form if I am to stand any chance of living through this, so as the sun sets I take my seat in the bare sunroom on a single stand chair and wait for her to arrive. The penetrating cold has been getting to her. I have observed this over the last couple of days, taking note of her slowing movements from behind bolted doors and twitching curtains, like a biologist observing some strange new species from the corner of his eye. Still, the ice and frost might cause her inertia, but it is her relentlessness that is her greatest strength. She comes, she comes, she comes. And sure enough, here she is. She rounds the corner stiffly, groaning, sliding across the cold glass and into my view. Her limbs look rigid at the joints and she moves like a badly oiled puppet. I let my eyes fall on her face for the first time. The slice of amber sun that remains in the sky behind her gilds her hair but hides her features. I am glad. Her stiff hands squeak against the windows in arthritic claws, reaching out for me. I wrap myself in a blanket and watch her movements thicken as the meagre heat of the day escapes and the sun sets fully. I can almost hear the ice chime as it forms on the glass in the deep, frigid darkness that remains. Brilliant new frost spikes across the smooth surface, crawling like a fabric knit by incorporeal hands. When it meets her own reaching hands it seems to grab and hold her, and as the ice quickens through her she falls as still as a statue, fingertips frozen against the frosted glass. I drop the blanket and walk across the empty space until only inches separate us, then just the cold, hard glass itself. In the stillness I regard her form, twinkling gently like the stars hanging in the void behind her, then I raise my hand to the glass, touch my fingers to hers, and she shudders.