the house by the sea pt. 7: she still loves me

They cycled back to the house by the sea. It was starting to get dark when they arrived back and they could still see the smoke rise from the caravan park and knew it would burn out soon enough. Linda pulled her clothes off and sat in the bathtub and drew her knees up to her chest, and he poured water over her body from a metal saucepan and gently scrubbed the blood and dirt from her skin and she sat limp as he did so. She held onto his shoulder as she stepped out of the bath and he passed her a towel and the smell of detergent made them both feel hopeless. He took his clothes off and climbed into the bathtub also, and Linda carefully measured the water into the pans and washed him clean. He wrapped a towel around his waist and went into the living room and lit a number of candles, and opened a can of pink salmon which he forked onto two plates along with some of the dry crackers from their provisions. Linda came in with clean clothes on and sat down on the sofa and he sat down next to her and poured them each a small scotch and they ate their meagre dinner together. When the food had gone he put the plates onto the table and put his arm around Linda’s shoulders and he felt her tense up as though it were some kind of unspoken agreement, that this was all too much, that although they didn’t know how long they could continue they at least knew it couldn’t be long. Their past romance felt extraordinarily inane, not because of the seriousness of the problem but for other reasons that their every gesture hinted at but never revealed. Before the problem they had both hated television and made a point of saying so, but now it was gone they mourned it like an absent lover, and imagined whole series of programmes whose neat and unchallenging narratives they could follow together from beginning to end. They still sat before it with dreadful expectation of the truth it might once again share.

The fallen darkness was ferocious and even the lighthouse some distance away that had shone electric for several generations stood pitch and untended. They heard through the persistence of the hustling waves what they thought was a car engine and without thought he blew each of the candles out and the dark of the room was total and he heard Linda shift in her seat and they both crept to the window which he had had wood enough to board only roughly with two planks and which was still mostly exposed and for which he now cursed himself and waited. Soon after headlights passed slowly and they could hear laughing and conversation and a pick-up truck passed the house and pulled into the grassy field just across the road that bordered the cliff, and stopped and the engine was shut off but the lights left burning. From the window they could see two men and two women climb out of the cab and they were drinking and acting drunk and they sprayed beer foam from shaken cans as though they had stumbled out of a long party and not yet realised what had happened to the world. The two men kissed the women and groped them roughly and rubbed the flat palms of their hands over the denim seam between their legs and the women laughed and seemed to talk to each other while they did so. They all opened another beer from a stack they kept under the seats in the cab and the men goofed around and sank them in only a couple of chugs and egged each other on and slapped each other’s backs like primates and tossed the cans away over the cliff, and the women sipped theirs and looked around at the silhouettes of the part-demolished houses that rose from the soil like skeletons. The men opened up the back of the truck and he could see them pick up a length of rope each and yank and pull and two bodies fell to the ground hard, and they were not dead but infected, their hands tied together and the ropes that the men held tight in two hands noosed around their necks. They pulled them up to their feet and they could hear the moaning from the house. They were females, their breasts wept from large wounds and their bellies sagged with death like aprons above their pubis, and he could see their torn flesh, the skin that had stretched over distended parts and had now split and showed dead bone beneath liquefying organ tissue, the mouth of one slashed wide open in a grotesque grin that blew limp around a kicked-in jaw. The men held them firmly like triumphant hunters awkwardly photographed, and the women took lengths of wood from the back of the truck and walked to the dead with considered steps and posed kind of sexy alongside them and the men cheered and then they started hitting them with the wood, swinging it with everything they had into their torsos and their legs but not their heads, not their brains, and the dead moaned but couldn’t fall because of the ropes, and the wood tore chunks of flesh off and a whole breast fell and they stamped on it in the wet grass. The women hugged and then they took the neck ropes from the men and kissed them and the men took a saw each from the truck and they hacked off the arms of the dead in stuttered ugly cuts, and fucked around with the felled limbs like horror props, and they punched and kicked them and the sound of it overcame even the sea and he and Linda felt nauseous and hopeless for what hope was there. They took the ropes back from their girls and dragged them over to the weak fence along the cliff, and looped the ropes around a couple of thicker fence posts, and with the dead bound they pulled out their genitals and raped them ecstatically, looked round laughing at each other, sizing up, and at the drinking women who laughed also, and their white buttocks were stark in the night, and they came immeasurably quickly soaked through with blood and weird body liquids, and they all laughed more while they picked parts of their dead insides that had broken off or been pulled out by the reaming from the ends of their pricks, and spent as they were they stamped onto the heads of the dead until their boots sank through brain and it was done. The girls kissed them like heroes and they ground themselves into their men, their real men, and the men went down on them there in the grass and did so until their cunts and their buttocks clenched and their thighs quivered trembling in the night. Linda went to the bathroom and slammed the door behind her and he head her crying, but he could only watch frozen, indifferent, and hope to something that no one would find them.

A couple of minutes after and they strode like lovers back to the truck and turned the engine over, and Linda returned from the bathroom. He took her hand but she pulled it away and he could understand why. Their eyes had adjusted well to the dark and he looked around the room and saw only a grave as he did outside. The truck crawled very slowly past the house and one of the men leant forward in his seat and stared and they both dropped to the floor under the force of his gaze and pressed themselves up against the wall beneath the window as flat as they could and they heard a voice say “hey stop the truck”, and in that instant they thought it was over. There was a slight squeak of brakes and one of the truck doors opened, and they could hear footsteps in the tall weeds out front and plant pots falling over, felt the slight shadow cast of a face and shoulders at the window. The boards, he thought. The boards scream inhabited like voices or lights. “Hey I think there’s people in here.” The screwdrivers were on the table. The knives were in the kitchen. “Hey,” the voice said again. They could feel him pressing against the window, adjusting his hand above his eyes to see better. Then footsteps around to the door. Tried the handle, knocked even, then tried his shoulder. “This place is fuckin boarded up from the inside. There’s people in here.” The man pushed the door with his shoulder again and inside he hugged Linda and said sorry but not aloud. Another voice said “who fuckin cares let’s the fuck go” and the women in the truck laughed. There was another kick at the door so hard the walls moved and a framed picture fell and smashed. “Shit,” they heard the first voice say, and the truck door closed and the sound of the wheels on gravel got further away then far away and then disappeared and only the sea remained and their breathing.

After an hour had passed they carefully pulled the boards from the front door and each took a long screwdriver and they crept from the house and looked for signs of people along the road and away down the cliff but there were none. The chimney smoke from the caravan park had ceased and its absence was prominent. It was cold in the wind and felt colder so late at night. They closed the front door and walked across the road and into the field, then over to the dead still tied to the fence. They looked at them in silence for a few moments and thought separately similar things. They thought how foolish it was to think that the problem made this happen, thought how this was already here, all of it, how the problem simply let it out. How that was the worst thing of all. He untied the ropes from the fence and lifted the bodies one by one and dropped them over the edge and they fell like substances and not bodies to the water below. When he turned around to Linda he had tears in his eyes because of the wind and she heard something and turned around but was so quickly bitten on the shoulder that earlier he had held in his hand and the noise of the tearing flesh was unreal. She screamed and fell backwards and clutched the wound as though she could pick the virus out with her fingers and then stood and ran back to the house. The dead came toward him with Linda’s blood the colour of life around its mouth and with one hand he held it tightly and his fingertips sank a way into the spongy flesh and he precisely pushed the screwdriver through the side of its head, and to his surprise he felt no malice or vengeance and only a kind of very fragile nostalgia for something vague and uncertain. He returned to the house like stepping back in time, or rushing forwards.