The latch of the door moved with a click. The door itself opened slowly.
‘Who’s that?’ I said.
‘Oh, it is you,’ said a girl’s voice.
She came in, closing the door behind her.
‘What do you want?’ I asked.
She was tall and slim. Under twenty I guessed. Her hair waved slightly. Chestnut-coloured, it was. She was quiet, but one had to notice her – it was the texture of her as well as the line. She had placed my position by my movement and voice. Her gold-brown eyes were looking just over my left shoulder, otherwise I’d have been sure she was studying me.
She did not answer at once. It was an uncertainty which did not seem to suit the rest of her. I went on waiting for her to speak. A lump got into my throat somehow. You see, she was young, and she was beautiful. There should have been all life, maybe a wonderful life before her…And isn’t there something a little sad about youth and beauty in any circumstances…?
‘You’re going to go away from here?’ she said. It was half question, half statement, in a quiet voice, a little unsteadily.
‘I’ve never said that,’ I countered.
‘No,’ she admitted, ‘but that’s what the others are saying – and they’re right, aren’t they?’
I did not say anything to that. She went on:
‘You can’t. You can’t leave them like this. They need you.’
‘I’m doing no good here,’ I told her. ‘All the hopes are false.’
‘But suppose they turned out not to be false?’
‘They can’t – not now. We’d have known by this time.’
‘But if they did, after all – and you had simply walked out – ?’
‘Do you think I haven’t thought of that? I’m not doing any good, I tell you. I’ve been like the drugs they inject to keep the patient going a little longer – no curative value; just putting it off.’
She did not reply for some seconds. Then she said, unsteadily:
‘Life is very precious – even like this.’ Her control almost cracked.
I could not say anything. She recovered herself.
‘You can keep us going. There’s always a chance – just a chance that something may happen, even now.’
I had already said what I thought about that. I did not repeat it.
‘It’s so difficult,’ she said, as though to herself. ‘If I could only see you…But then, of course, if I could…Are you young? You sound young.’
‘I’m under thirty,’ I told her. ‘And very ordinary.’
‘I’m eighteen. It was my birthday – the day the comet came.’
I could not think of anything to say to that that would not seem cruel. The pause drew out. I saw that she was clenching her hands together. Then she dropped them to her sides, the knuckles quite white. She made as if to speak, but did not.
‘What is it?’ I asked, ‘What can I do except prolong this a little?’
She bit her lip, then:
‘They – they said perhaps you were lonely,’ she said. ‘I thought perhaps if’ – her voice faltered, and her knuckles went a little whiter still – ‘perhaps if you had somebody…I mean, somebody here…you – you might not want to leave us. Perhaps you’d stay with us?’
‘Oh, God,’ I said, softly.
I looked at her, standing quite straight, her lips trembling slightly. There should have been suitors clamouring for her lightest smile. She should have been happy and uncaring for a while – then happy in caring. Life should have been enchanting to her, and love very sweet…
‘You’d be kind to me, wouldn’t you?’ she said. ‘You see I haven’t – ’
‘Stop it! Stop it!’ I told her. ‘You mustn’t say these things to me. Please go away now.’
But she did not go. She stood staring at me from eyes that could not see me.
‘Go away!’ I repeated.
I could not stand the reproach of her. She was not simply herself – she was thousands upon thousands of young lives destroyed…
She came closer.
‘Why, I believe you’re crying!’ she said.
‘Go away. For God’s sake, go away!’ I told her.
She hesitated, then she turned and felt her way back to the door. As she went out:
‘You can tell them I’ll be staying,’ I said.
The first thing I was aware of the next morning was the smell. There had been whiffs of it here and there before, but luckily the weather had been cool. Now I found that I had slept late into what was already a warmer day. I’m not going into details about the smell; those who knew it will never forget it, for the rest of it is indescribable. It rose from every city and town for weeks, and travelled on every wind that blew. When I woke to it that morning it convinced me beyond doubt that the end had come. Death is just the shocking end of animation: it is dissolution that is final.
I lay for some minutes thinking. The only thing to do now would be to load my party into lorries and take them in relays into the country. And all the supplies we had collected? They would have to be loaded and taken, too – and I the only one able to drive…It would take days – if we had days…
Upon that, I wondered what was happening in the building now. The place was oddly quiet. When I listened I could hear a voice groaning in another room, beyond that nothing. I got out of bed and hurried into my clothes with a feeling of alarm. Out on the landing, I listened again. There was no sound of feet about the house. I had a sudden nasty feeling as if history were repeating itself and I were back in the hospital again.
‘Hey! Anybody here?’ I called.
Several voices answered. I opened a nearby door. There was a man in there. He looked very bad, and he was delirious. There was nothing I could do. I closed the door again.
My footsteps sounded loud on the wooden stairs. On the next floor a woman’s voice called: ‘Bill – Bill!’
She was in bed in a small room there, the girl who had come to see me the night before. She turned her head as I came in. I saw that she had it, too.
‘Don’t come near,’ she said. ‘It is you, Bill?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought it must be. You can still walk: they have to creep. I’m glad, Bill. I told them you’d not go like that – but they said you had. Now they’ve all gone, all of them that could.’
‘I was asleep,’ I said. ‘What happened?’
‘More and more of us like this. They were frightened.’
I said helplessly: ‘What can I do for you? Is there anything I can get you?’
Her face contorted, she clutched her arms round her, and writhed. The spasm passed, and left her with sweat trickling down her forehead.
‘Please, Bill. I’m not very brave. Could you get me something – to finish it?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can do that for you.’
I was back from the chemist’s in ten minutes. I gave her a glass of water, and put the stuff in her other hand.
She held it there a little. Then:
‘So futile – and it might all have been so different,’ she said. ‘Good-bye, Bill – and thank you for trying.’
I looked down at her lying there. There was a thing that made it still more futile – I wondered how many would have said, ‘Take me with you,’ where she had said, ‘Stay with us.’
And I never even knew her name.
9
Evacuation
It was the memory of the red-headed young man who had fired on us that conditioned my choice of a route to Westminster.
Since I was sixteen my interest in weapons has decreased, but in an environment reverting to savagery it seemed that one must be prepared to behave more or less as a savage, or possibly cease to behave at all before long. In St James’s Street there used to be several shops which would sell you any form of lethalness from a rook-rifle to an elephant-gun with the greatest urbanity.
I left there with a mixed feeling of support and banditry. Once more I had a useful hunting-knife. There was a pistol with the precise workmanship of a scientific instrument in my pocket. On the seat beside me rested a loaded twelve-bore and boxes of cartridges. I had chosen a shot-gun in preference to a rifle – the bang is no less convincing, and it decapitates a triffid with a neatness which a bullet seldom achieves. And there were triffids to be seen right in London now. They still appeared to avoid the streets when they could, but I had noticed several lumbering across Hyde Park, and there were others in Green Park. Very likely they were ornamental, safely docked specimens – on the other hand, maybe they weren’t.
And so I came to Westminster.
The deadness, the finish of it all, was italicized there. The usual scatter of abandoned vehicles lay about the streets. Very few people were in sight. I saw only three who were moving. Two were tapping their way down the gutters of Whitehall, the third was in Parliament Square. He was sitting close to Lincoln’s statue, and clutching to him his dearest possession – a side of bacon from which he was hacking a ragged slice with a blunt knife.
Above it all rose the Houses of Parliament, with the hands of the clock stopped at three minutes past six. It was difficult to believe that all that meant nothing any more, that now it was just a pretentious confection in uncertain stone which could decay in peace. Let it shower its crumbling pinnacles on to the terrace as it would – there would be no more indignant members complaining of the risk to their valuable lives. Into those halls which had in their day set world echoes to good intentions and sad expediencies, the roofs could in due course fall; there would be none to stop them, and none to care. Alongside, the Thames flowed imperturbably on. So it would flow until the day the Embankments crumbled and the water spread out and Westminster became once more an island in a marsh.
Marvellously clear-fretted in the unsmoked air, the Abbey rose, silver-grey. It stood detached by the serenity of age from the ephemeral growths around it. It was solid on a foundation of centuries, destined, perhaps, for centuries yet to preserve within it the monuments to those whose work was now all destroyed.
I did not loiter there. In years to come I expect some will go to look at the old Abbey with romantic melancholy. But romance of that kind is an alloy of tragedy with retrospect. I was too close.
Moreover, I was beginning to experience something new – the fear of being alone. I had not been alone since I walked from the hospital along Piccadilly, and then there had been bewildering novelty in all I saw. Now, for the first time I began to feel the horror that real loneliness holds for a species that is by nature gregarious. I felt naked, exposed to all the fears that prowled…
I made myself drive on up Victoria Street. The sound of the car itself alarmed me with its echoes. My impulse was to leave it and sneak silently on foot, seeking safety in cunning, like a beast in the jungle. It needed all my will power to keep myself steady and hold to my plan. For I knew what I should have done had I chanced to be allocated to this district – I should have sought supplies in its biggest department-store.
Somebody had stripped the provision department of the Army and Navy Stores, all right, but there was no one there now.
I came out by a side door. A cat on the pavement was engaged in sniffing at something which might have been a bundle of rags, but was not. I clapped my hands at it. It glared at me, and then slunk off.
A man came round a corner. He had a gloating expression on his face, and was perseveringly rolling a large cheese along the middle of the road. When he heard my step he halted his cheese, and sat on it, brandishing his stick fiercely. I went back to my car in the main street.
The probability was that Josella, too, would have chosen a hotel as a convenient headquarters. I remembered that there were several around Victoria Station, so I drove on there. It turned out that there were vastly more of them than I had thought. After I had looked into a score or more without finding any evidence of organized squatting, it began to seem pretty hopeless.
I looked for somone to ask. There seemed a chance that anyone still alive here might owe it to her. I had seen only half a dozen capable of moving since I arrived in the district. Now there seemed to be none. But at last, near the corner of Buckingham Palace Road, I came across an old woman sitting huddled on a doorstep.
She was tearing at a tin, with broken finger-nails, and alternately cursing and whimpering over it. I went to a small shop nearby and found half a dozen tins of beans overlooked on a high shelf. I discovered a tin-opener, too, and went back to her. She was still futilely scrabbling away at her tin.
‘You’d better throw that away. It’s coffee,’ I told her.
I put the opener into her hand, and gave her a tin of beans.
‘Listen to me,’ I said. ‘Do you know anything of a girl round here – a girl that can see? She’d be in charge of a party, most likely.’
I was not very hopeful, but something must have helped the old woman to keep going longer than most. It seemed almost too good to be true when she nodded.
‘Yes,’ she said, as she started the opener.
‘You do! Where is she?’ I demanded. Somehow it never occurred to me that it could be anyone but Josella.
But she shook her head.
‘I don’t know. I was with her lot for a bit, but I lost ’em. An old woman like me can’t keep up with the young ones, so I lost ’em. They’d not wait for a poor old woman, and I couldn’t never find ’em again.’
She went on cutting intently round the tin.
‘Where is she living?’ I asked.
‘We was all in a ’otel. Dunno where it is, or I’d’ve found ’em again.’
‘Don’t you know the name of the hotel?’
‘Not me. ’Tain’t no good knowing the names of places when you can’t see to read ’em, nor nobody else can’t, neither.’
‘But you must remember something about it.’
‘No, I don’t.’
She lifted the can, and sniffed cautiously at the contents.
‘Look here,’ I said, coldly. ‘You want to keep those tins, don’t you?’
She made a movement with one arm to gather them all to her.
‘Well, then, you’d better tell me all you can about that hotel,’ I went on. ‘You must know, for instance, whether it was large or small.’
She considered, one arm still protectively about the tins.
‘Downstairs it sounded sort of hollow – like it might be biggish. Likely it was smart, too – what I mean, it ’ad them quiet carpets, an’ good beds, an’ good sheets.’
‘Nothing else about it?’
‘No, not as I – Yes, there was, though. It ’ad two small steps outside, an’ you went in through one of them round-and-round doors.’
‘That’s better,’ I said. ‘You’re quite sure of that? If I can’t find it, I can find you again, you know.’
‘’S Gawd’s truth, mister. Two small steps, an’ a round-and-round door.’
She rummaged in a battered bag beside her, brought out a dirty spoon, and began to taste the beans as if they were one of the jams of paradise.
There were, I found, still more hotels round there than I had thought, and a surprising number of them had round-and-round doors. But I kept on. There was no mistaking it when I did find it. The traces and the smell were all too familiar.
‘Anybody here?’ I called, in the echoing lounge.
I was about to go further in when a groan came from one corner. Over in a semi-dark recess a man was lying on a settee. Even in the dimness it was possible to see that he was far gone. I did not go too close. His eyes opened. For a moment I thought that he could see.
‘You there?’ he said.
‘Yes, I want to – ’
‘Water,’ he said. ‘Fer Christ’s sake gimme some water – ’
I went across to the dining-room, and found the service-room beyond. The taps were dry. I squirted a couple of syphons into a big jug, and took it back with a cup. I put them down where he could reach them.
‘Thanks, mate,’ he said. ‘I can manage. You keep clear o’ me.’
He dipped the cup into the jug, and then drained it.
‘Gawd,’ he said. ‘Did I need that!’ And he repeated the action. ‘Wotcher doin’, mate? ’Tain’t ’ealthy round ’ere, you know.’
‘I’m looking for a girl – a girl who can see. Her name’s Josella. Is she here?’
‘She was here. But you’re too late, chum.’
A sudden suspicion struck me like a physical stab.
‘You – don’t mean – ?’
‘No. Ease orf, mate. She ain’t got what I got. No, she’s just gone – same as all the rest what could.’
‘Where did she go, do you know?’
‘Can’t tell you that, mate.’
‘I see,’ I said, heavily.
‘You’d best be goin’, too, chum. ’Ang around ’ere long, an’ you’ll be stayin’ for keeps, like me.’
He was right. I stood looking down at him.
‘Anything else I can get you?’
‘No. This’ll last me. I reckon it won’t be much longer I’ll need anything.’ He paused. Then he added: ‘’Bye, mate, ’n’ thanks a lot. An’ if you do find ’er, look after ’er proper – she’s a good girl.’
While I was making a meal off tinned ham and bottled beer a little later, it occurred to me that I had not asked the man when Josella had left, but I decided that in his state he would be unlikely to have any clear idea of time.
The one place I could think of to go to was the University Building. I reckoned Josella would think the same – and there was a hope that some others of our dispersed party might have drifted back there in an effort to reunite. It was not a very strong hope, for common sense should have caused them to leave the town days ago.
Two flags still hung above the tower, limp in the warm air of the early evening. Of the two dozen or so lorries that had been accumulated in the forecourt, four still stood there, apparently untouched. I parked the car beside them, and went into the building. My footsteps clattered in the silence.
‘Hullo! Hullo, there!’ I called. ‘Is there anyone here?’
My voice echoed away down corridors and up wells, diminishing to the parody of a whisper and then to silence. I went to the doors of the other wing and called again. Once more the echoes died away unbroken, settling softly as dust. Only then as I turned back did I notice that an inscription had been chalked on the wall inside the outer door. In large letters it gave simply an address:
TYNSHAM MANOR
TYNSHAM
NR DEVIZES, WILTS.
That was something, at least.
I looked at it, and thought. In another hour or less it would be dusk. Devizes I guessed at a hundred miles distant, probably more. I went outside again and examined the lorries. One of them was the last that I had driven in – the one in which I had stowed my despised anti-triffid gear. I recalled that the rest of its load was a useful assortment of food and supplies. It would be much better to arrive with that, than empty-handed in a car. Nevertheless, if there were no urgent reason for it, I did not fancy driving anything, much less a large, heavily-loaded lorry, by night along roads which might reasonably be expected to produce a number of hazards. If I were to pile it up, and the odds were that I should, I would lose a lot more time in finding another and transferring the load than I would by spending the night here. An early start in the morning offered much better prospects. I moved my boxes of cartridges from the car to the cab of the lorry in readiness. The gun I kept with me.
I found the room from which I had rushed to the fake fire-alarm, exactly as I had left it; my clothes on a chair, even the cigarette-case and lighter where I had placed them beside my improvised bed.
It was still too early to think of sleep. I lit a cigarette, put the case in my pocket, and decided to go out.
Before I went into the Russell Square garden I looked it over carefully. I had already begun to be suspicious of open spaces. Sure enough I spotted one triffid. It was in the north-west corner, standing perfectly still, but considerably taller than the bushes that surrounded it. I went closer, and blew the top of it to bits with a single shot. The noise in the silent Square could scarcely have been more alarming if I had let off a howitzer. When I was sure that there were no others lurking I went into the garden and sat with my back against a tree.
I stayed there perhaps twenty minutes. The sun was low, and half the square was thrown into shadow. Soon I would have to go in. While there was light I could sustain myself; in the dark, things could steal quietly upon me. Already I was on my way back to the primitive. Before long, perhaps, I should be spending the hours of darkness in fear as my remote ancestors must have done, watching, ever distrustfully, the night outside their cave. I delayed to take one more look around the Square as if it were a page of history I would learn before it was turned. And as I stood there, I heard the gritting of footsteps on the road – a slight sound, but as loud in the silence as a grinding millstone.
I turned, with my gun ready. Crusoe was no more startled at the sight of a footprint than I at the sound of a footfall, for it had not the hesitancy of a blind man’s. I caught a glimpse in the dim light of the moving fire. As it left the road and entered the garden I saw that it was a man. Evidently he had seen me before I heard him, for he was coming straight towards me.
‘You don’t need to shoot,’ he said, holding empty hands wide apart.
I did not know him until he came within a few yards. Simultaneously he recognized me.
‘Oh, it’s you, is it?’ he said.
I kept the gun raised.
‘Hullo, Coker. What are you after? Wanting me to go on another of your little parties?’ I asked him.
‘No. You can put that thing down. Makes too much noise, anyway. That’s how I found you. No,’ he repeated, ‘I’ve had enough. I’m getting to hell out of here.’
‘So am I,’ I said, and lowered the gun.
‘What happened to your bunch?’ he asked.
I told him. He nodded.
‘Same with mine. Same with the rest, I expect. Still, we tried…’
‘The wrong way,’ I said.
He nodded again.
‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘I reckon your lot did have the right idea from the start – only it didn’t look right, and it didn’t sound right a week ago.’
‘Six days ago,’ I corrected him.
‘A week,’ said he.
‘No, I’m sure – oh, well, what the hell’s it matter, anyway?’ I said. ‘In the circumstances,’ I went on, ‘what do you say to declaring an amnesty, and starting over again?’
He agreed.
‘I’d got it wrong,’ he repeated. ‘I thought I was the one who was taking it seriously – but I wasn’t taking it seriously enough. I couldn’t believe that it would last, or that some kind of help wouldn’t show up. But now look at it! And it must be like this everywhere. Europe, Asia, America – think of America smitten like this! But they must be. If they weren’t, they’d have been over here, helping out and getting the place straight – that’s the way it’d take them. No, I reckon your lot understood it better from the start.’
We ruminated for some moments, then I asked:
‘This disease, plague – what do you reckon it is?’
‘Search me, chum. I thought it must be typhoid, but someone said typhoid takes longer to develop – so I’d not know. I don’t know why I’ve not caught it myself – except that I’ve been able to keep away from those that have, and to see that what I was eating was clean. I’ve been keeping to tins I’ve opened myself, and I’ve drunk only bottled beer. Anyway, though I’ve been lucky so far, I don’t fancy hanging around here much longer. Where do you go now?’
I told him of the address chalked on the wall. He had not yet seen it. He had been on his way to the University Building when the sound of my shot had caused him to scout round with some caution.
‘It – ’ I began, and then stopped abruptly. From one of the streets west of us came the sound of a car starting. It ran up its gears quickly, and then diminished into the distance.
‘Well, at least there’s somebody else left,’ said Coker. ‘And whoever wrote up that address. Have you any idea who that would be?’
I shrugged my shoulders. It was a justifiable assumption that it was a returned member of the group that Coker had raided – or possibly some sighted person that his party had failed to catch. There was no telling how long it had been there. He thought it over.
‘It’ll be better if there’s two of us. I’ll tag along with you and see what’s doing. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ I agreed. ‘I’m for turning in now, and an early start tomorrow.’
He was still asleep when I awoke. I dressed myself much more comfortably in the ski-suit and heavy shoes than in the garments I had been wearing since his party had provided them for me. By the time I returned with a bag of assorted packets and tins, he was up and dressed, too. Over breakfast we decided to improve our welcome at Tynsham by taking a loaded lorry each rather than travel together in one.
‘And see that the cab window closes,’ I suggested. ‘There are quite a lot of triffid nurseries around London, particularly to the west.’
‘Uh-huh. I’ve seen a few of the ugly brutes about,’ he said, offhandedly.
‘I’ve seen them about – and in action,’ I told him.
At the first garage we came to we broke open a pump and filled up. Then, sounding in the silent streets like a convoy of tanks, we set off westwards with my three-tonner in the lead.
The going was wearisome. Every few dozen yards one had to weave round some derelict vehicle. Occasionally two or three together would block the road entirely so that it was necessary to go dead slow and nudge one of them out of the way. Very few of them were wrecked. The blindness seemed to have come upon the drivers swiftly, but not too suddenly for them to keep control. Usually they had been able to draw into the side of the road before they stopped. Had the catastrophe occurred by day, the main roads would have been quite impassable, and to work our way clear from the centre by side-streets might have taken days – spent mostly in reversing before impenetrable thickets of vehicles and trying to find another way round. As it was I found that our over-all progress was less slow than it seemed in detail, and when after a few miles I noticed an overturned car beside the road I realized that we were by this time on a route which others had followed and partially cleared ahead of us.
On the further outskirts of Staines we could begin to feel that London was behind us at last. I stopped, and went back to Coker. As he switched off, the silence closed, thick and unnatural, with only the click of cooling metal to break it. I realized suddenly that I had not seen a single living creature other than a few sparrows since we had started. Coker climbed out of his cab. He stood in the middle of the road, listening and looking around him.
‘And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity…’
he murmured.
I looked hard at him. His grave, reflective expression turned suddenly to a grin.
‘Or do you prefer Shelley?’ he asked:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings,
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Come on, let’s find some food.’