The Rogue

Conor Matthews peeled himself away from his bed linens. He was a polite man, before, but now after these long months he didn’t care, he was too fucking cold to care.

He dressed in the warmest clothes he had, which weren't enough, and shamed him to slip into. They stank of the worst parts of him.

Whicker-blurs of his desk honed into some dim sort of view. Blinking the sting out of his eyes, he looked at the letter. For so many months of endless winter he kept it as a bastion of hope; of promise; of better horizons. Now it lay stained and grey. Sullied by the very twilight of tundra Nicholas promised would soon be gone.

By then. By now. By too many lives ago.

By the power vested in me and by the authority of my esteemed office, by the order of the king and by the honour of the crown, I, Nicholas Aston-Weybridge, hereby and henceforth declare that the hysteria surrounding the subject of the so-named “tundra” is as unfounded as it is false, both in nature, and especially to the concerns of cogent and educated minds.

To put it in simple terms; cold-snaps in our climate are not of need of consideration to the realms of measurable - nay, measured - sciences.

It is a mere snap of the cold. Nothing more.

To move from our cities would be folly of the highest order. To abandon our lives would be foolhardy. And to assume the end of sunnier shades of our days would be to follow the simpler shards already simple minds.

It has happened before, and it shall - after this “tundra” passes us by - occur again. And ever shall the good folk of God’s kingdom of man remain.

Signed,

Dr. Nicholas Aston-Weybridge.

13th of February, 1857.

The Royal Academy of Arts & Science.

Reading this was sobering, after the summer months of twisting winter. Almost in a daydream, Conor’s mind flourished; in the chill of his bedroom, recalling his last meeting with Nicholas.

Long before today, before the winter lasted and lasted, dragging on beyond all known borders... long before the thousands of dead and leagues of dying, long before hope had hung itself and the city of London lay frozen and deceased.

It was, for all intents and purposes, a mere formality of a meeting. Conor didn't recall taking it seriously. And to Nicholas, it was a sign of serious disrespect.

Conor saw it - reliving it:

The walk across the bridge. The nod of the hat he gave the officer as he ebbed from light to lampless shadow in the night. The base of the brass knocker and the sheer sideways snowfall. Nicholas’s home, an onyx block of three storeys, just across the Thames from his own home. Once a mere stroll, and now a death sentence to behold.

Conor was looking at it, now, in the now; all hewn in white in the greying ice - while seeing it as it was, before:

Warm mahogany, regal to the eye. All broad squares and writhing wrought iron, from gate to gutter. Big brick and broad balconies. A home hewn from the halls of lords. Owned by a damned bull of a man.

Conor always felt small here.

It was, in short, the perfect home for him.

Inside. Only the butler and Nicholas were home. Claire and Ginny were away. His son William a soldier, long lost in some mission or another. A muggy golden warmth went rolling from the fireplace. The rows of books glowed like golden ruby rectangles in Nicholas's ample library. Conor sat alone, leafing through the myriad of long letters, all of them rebutting Nicholas's claims.

Conor had been sent by The Herald (a fact Conor almost forgot; he was a journalist, before becoming a survivalist). The king himself had ordered an inquisition. Nicholas beard pursed into a braided knot upon hearing of it. He refused to look at the letters Conor had brought. He didn't want them on his table, either.

The Herald, Conor told Nicholas, had sent Conor to confirm beyond any doubt that there wasn’t more to be concerned of... the cold seems to be unnaturally cold, and had set in as early as July, this year (last year, Conor thought in the present). The people were frightened. Conor sat in wait while Nicholas sat nonplussed, practically scolding Conor to the bone for not simply referring back to his letter for further reassurance on the matter.

Conor - half in his room, half still in memory - looked from the letter back out the window and across the snowy river, staring around the rings of framed frost and millimetres of glass, out to Nicholas’s home. Something about it was captivating him, today.

But what of the concerns others in science have offered? Conor asked, noting his own words in shorthand and keeping ready to write Nicholas’s own. If you'll forgive me, old friend, they describe something worse. He turned a paper, readying to read; "something may be afoot which-"

Which what, precisely? Nicholas boomed from his belly, ironing Conor into the chair with a glare. Interrupting him without a care. Tamping all hubris down with his patented, stolid stare. Even in the dark his pupils were pointed pincers. Do I hold some ulterior motive? Does my allegiance not align with the crown? What may I be hiding? Because I certainly have not missed anything. Is my education that of a peasant? Do my peers usurp me? He sat back from his retort with a sigh of creaky chair leather. What might I be missing which your humble journal might have found to be of such glaring import to the world? What have the geniuses in the world found that I might have missed?

A sight in the skies broke the theatrical memory, rocking Conor back into the moment. His heart beat, too ripe with too much hope, at the sight of what began blinking out from a parting in the clouds... he gasped, scarcely believing it; staring agog at the moon for the first time in months:

She was framed with blue - actual blue. Such precious, rare light - in a soft crest of daylight. A daylight moon, piercing the clotted clouds, hanging like a crescent halo over Nicholas’s home.

Moon, home and the frozen white ribbon of the River Thames.

The memory recalled him, again, he basked in the fingers of flickering firelight (perhaps it was the memory of the warmth which kept this memory coming); Conor set himself to remain level, sitting still in the face of simmering rage. He explained that he had, in fact, come to add to the broader picture, so as to tell to the best of his ability what was happening to our country and our world.

Nicholas could barely stifle his laughter. It came out in a single gruff bark.

Well, of course. The Herald is hoisted high with fright, these days. Your wonderful editor often assumes hyperbole to be worthy of print and page. My dear peers might seek to sully my office, offering “contrasting opinion” to the matter. Thereby muddling the matter further. Bah! “That we might have entered into a new age of ice.” “That our world might have fallen from alignment with our star.”

He rolled his eyes, looking as though he might spit. His broad bearded face twisted into a knot of distaste.

Poppycock of the highest order. There is nothing, I repeat; nothing any man, woman or child might afford themselves with better; my opinion on the matter is sound. There is naught afoot here but a common spell of cold. Nothing more.

He swiped a hand over it and then leaned into Conor over his black suited barrel of a torso. So close, Conor almost cried for Nicholas to take care his beard almost dipped into the candle flame; dancing merrily on the table between them both.

He didn't listen or care, leaning close enough for Conor to see the wrinkles cracking shadows around his eyelids.

This is but a phase of natural occurrence. Nothing more. And more fool you if the matter is not closed, henceforth, by my absolute certainty.

He leaned back for the last time, fixed with a frown, fanning a fringed slice of shade over his eyes.

It will be over within the month. Mark my words.

And so, the words were marked. And here the thirteenth morning of July rises to the same frigid scene, more than five months later.

How long will it last? Conor had asked, placing his notebook back down to stare blank at the ceiling.

Check the calendar. He rumbled back. I trust the winter finishes off at the same time every year. Unless my peers have chosen to question the times of the month, as well.

The memory finished. Conor stared. It had been the first hint of cloudless sky Conor had seen since November, last year. And it hurt worse still to see the grey drown it all away.

❧

The clouds closed around the moon and the blue faded to grey; shrouded, became the day. Once again the lands of London hung grey and guttering white. All snow and unbreakable ice for miles around the eye.

But no candlelight.

Conor blinked, barely believing it. Looking away and looking back, his heart gave a shimmering thud.

That was it! That was why he was captivated by Nicholas's home this morning. No light. There was no candlelight in Nicholas’s window!

Conor could barely stand, so he sat, rocked from the shock of it. There was only one meaning behind such an action. Nicholas had even sent a boy over in June with a ruby red nose and newer (much more cowed) letter in hand to tell of it.

It sat beside the other (more brash letter) with something of a sombre tone to its note:

When the candle goes out, the cause has been found.

I must admit I was incorrect. It pains me to say it, but it is true. And I shall not let go of the matter until I learn of the source of this endless snow and misery.

Look to my study, every day, and come when the fire is gone.

I will find the cause of this tundra. Of this, you have my word.

N. A. Weybridge.

Conor never saw the little boy again, who brought the letter. He wondered if he survived. One look outside could bring only a grave certainty that he too would have died.

How many stayed? How many people were dead because of Conor coddling this man? Because he entertained his ego. Because believing authority was more of comfort than questioning what was right before the eyes.

A sharp knock at the door jarred Conor into a numb, head thumping jump. Water; he was dehydrated.

‘Mr Matthews?’ Came the voice of Jenny, their housekeep. Her voice little more than a door mouse’s squeak, threading through the oak.

‘Yes.’ He said, glancing from the shrouded moon to the dark square of window, blackened without candlelight; Nicholas Weybridge’s study. The candle was still out. He still could scarce-dare believe it.

‘Yes, what is it?’

‘It’s Cassandra, sir.’ The strained sounding girl said behind the door - felling his heart to the floor in an instant.

‘What is she doing?’ He asked, because he couldn't bare to ask how she was. She’d been sick for weeks, falling so mere moments after their daughter had passed.

‘She’s awake, sir. And... I think, she’s asking for you.’

There was an arid note of hesitant haste between housekeep and homeowner. Conor dared not fill it, not with a sense of relief and definitely not with words. Instead he stood rooted within it, frozen, he started shivering, listening through the sound of the wind as it tugged and tore at the windowpane.

He broke the tension, walking in tight strides, he opened the door to see her still standing on the other side of it; puzzling at something.

‘Is she okay?’ Conor asked, barely able to take the silence any longer.

It was as though she couldn't speak. She began looking around for answers, finding none but her own:

‘She’s not making very much sense, sir.' She looked in a glance over her shoulder. 'I think you had better hurry down, I don't want to leave her for too long.’

His hopes sank with his heart. The delirium was still taking her. Last week she thought their daughter was alive; he didn't dare correct her, and was forced into silence. Listening in agony to the present tense promises of love and pride as though their dead daughter was still playing in the other room.

He hoped to God she wouldn’t say any of this, again. He was almost certain he’d crack and go mad with the guilt and the grief of it.

‘I'll be right behind you.’ He told her, realising he was not dressed well enough and began folding jackets over himself in the icy sting, stilling himself to beat his will against another day in another month of the tundra's endless winter.

Hoping this day wouldn't be her last.

❧

I should never have listened to Nicholas...

He went alone down the stairs. Tender tendons bit under the skin with every step down. Even here in the bowels of the house the air was maddeningly cold. So cold it stole warmth from everything. Even his breath came out clean with no steam; no warmth even within him.

Shouldn’t have listened, should have left when we had a chance...

The door to the middle floor living room rolled creakingly into view.

Before the sickness came. Before our Julia died...

The door, seemingly on its own, opened. The scent of sickness belched out from within. The heat - the only heat held in the whole home - of metallic breath, sweat soaked humidity and body odour came out in a rolling wave.

The smell of death. He'd smelled it before, not too long ago.

‘Conor.’ Came Cassandra’s call. So weak it yanked at the strings of his heart; he once said, so many years ago, that their hearts were tied. She loved him more for saying it. She gave him a daughter because he so passionately meant it. But now she was tugging away from this plane of life. Those same strings were jerking his heart to ribbons; pulling him in, closer to the bed, to a crouch; to her side.

‘Hello, my love.’ He said, hanging his head at the sight of her.

‘She’s come here, Conor.’ She told him through dry, cracked lips. Carrying on a conversation they were already having, in her mind. Like his attention had wavered and she had it again.

Her blue eyes now amber glass in firelight. This was the only room left with a fire still raging, but not for long. Their stock was all but spent.

‘My love-’

‘She’s come.’ She interrupted, her words little more than whispers. ‘She blankets t... world and... her energy... so-spent.’

Conor looked at Jenny. Jenny looked back with a face of embering ash; drawn and grey. The face of the tundra.

‘Well...’ Conor said. ‘Yes. I’m sure.’

He placed a hand to hers and finally he made the decision. It was done. They were done. He would stand, turn and tell Jenny to make ready their things; they were leaving this godforsaken place. They were heading south, far beyond the continent. He wouldn’t risk another day in the tundra without a doctor for miles around. She might not be able to stand, but if they wrapped Cassandra in every felt and skin they could find, in a cart, with a horse, she might make it to where she could get well again.

But Cassandra said the words which stopped him dead on the floor, rocking him to the core:

‘The candle is out.’

Conor gasped. His skin flared with goose-flesh.

‘What?’

‘The candle,’ Cassandra croaked, eyes sightless in delirium, ‘is out.’

He turned to Jenny. Her eyes were amber saucers, too. Confusion and fear were parts of a mask she now wore. A mask, he was certain, lay upon his own face, as well.

‘Black square with only-’ she coughed so fiercely her throat rattled and scraped. But he knew what she was about to say. His mind reeled. How? How could she know... I’ve never told her...

‘He found Her,’ she went on, ‘he found her and he did wrong. But you will do right, I know... I know you will. She will show you... my love. She wants to show you all she can.’

Conor’s guts twisted in his belly. Jenny was right. She was making no sense. He looked around swiftly and saw there was a small puddled litter of spent candles. He almost hit himself for being so stupid.

‘Please, my love. Don’t waste your strength.’

She went on as though he hadn’t spoken. Talking through a throat so dry it raked against her words, tearing like tree bark against raw skin:

‘He isn’t kind like you, Conor - in the might of the moment, she’ll show me before she tries; you must go. You must go. The energy must be spent or none will live. Here or there.’

She looked at him, then. And the remembrance of who she was before this foul sickness took her almost tore his heart away. She looked so proud. So limitless in her pride for him; the man who was too much a coward to get her away when he had the chance. If she had any senses left, she’d do well to blame him. He certainly did.

‘Don’t cry my love.’ She said softly, squeezing his fingers with a grip like smoke. A hand hot enough to cause a brand. ‘Our daughter will see.’

Something snapped. Not with a crack, but with a whimper within. She didn’t remember anything. Jenny was right enough, but Conor knew it was worse. She was far beyond making any sense at all. The sickness took Julia, first. And now the sickness was stealing her away too.

Conor sniffed, adding a curve to his lips, a brute-force grin. He even made his eyes smile for her; it made her sharp, sallow face blur as tears fell from his eyes.

‘You must go. All is... lost, if you don’t.’ She said.

‘My lo-’

‘Don’t “my love” me, Conor.’ She hissed, making him flinch. Sudden in her anger, snipping off any doubts with a sentence of stone, forged with the last of the force she had left.

Could it be true? Was she telling him to go Nicholas's home?

‘Promise me. Pr-’ she coughed for minutes, he didn't dare interrupt, ‘Promise me you will go there.’

If there was any doubt about her cogency before, it was gone now. Her amber-light eyes pierced his, daring him to defy, daring him to doubt.

He couldn’t. No matter what he thought or what he wanted for her, he couldn’t betray her demand. If Nicholas's will was iron Cassandra's was diamond, even in sickness. Immutable and unstoppable. It reminded him of the tundra.

‘Okay.’ Conor said. Sniffing again and steeling himself with a nod and a sharp in-breath. ‘I’ll go. I’ll go to him. And I swear we will leave this place.’

‘Promise?’

He nodded. ‘I promise you.’

He squeezed her hand, again. But she was already sleeping. The sleep of the dead and dying. Exhausted from the effort of pulling tendrils of truth from some otherworldly shade of existence.

❧

If the cold in the home was a menace the tundra itself was a terror. Wrapped to the point of stifling stiffness, coated and clothed in every warm scrap of cloth and skin he could find, he made his way to the source of the blackened window from the hollow box of wooden warmth he’d been trapped within for the worst part of half a year.

He wore everything, even a skeepskin rug under his coat, covering his back. Another over his front. He’d even taped his feet with rags of wool and leather. But still the ragged, raging frost assaulted him, cutting through his wears as sharp scissors slice through silk. Stealing through every gap, cutting to the bone. Frosting his veins and freezing his marrow.

All this - such mad agony - he felt just taking the first tentative steps from his door. He planed upon making way to the bridge and onward to Nicholas’s home. But by the time he reached the river he was ragged and trembling, certain he would die before his destination drew anywhere near. The bridge was half a mile away. Nicholas’s home just opposite his own, sitting like a mirror image across the white ice of the Thames.

There was nothing else for it. He took the river. Hoping to God himself that he wouldn’t crack the surface and plunge to his death below. But his fears were unfounded. The river was frozen solid. A fact which scared him worst of all.

How did she know? His mind whined as he stumbled down the way. How did she know about the candle?

Conor didn’t know and he didn't dare question it. His eyes lingered upon the blackened window of Nicholas’s study and his mind still made no sense of it. She couldn’t stand, for goodness sakes! How could she have known about the candle?

I never told her... and immediately after, I must have told her... as if denial were a cure for impossibility.

He rakes his mind for any memories to the contrary, but none arose. He even asked Jenny if she’d seen his Cassandra, anywhere; perhaps standing somewhere in the middle of the night, sleepwalking:

“I was beside her all of the night, sir. For every night.” Was all she said. Visibly mortified, just as Conor was, both of them drowned in the moments after she fell back into her sickly slumber.

Conor had left confused, crippled by a looming feeling of queasy unease. Not even the nightmarish cold of the tundra itself could extinguish the weight of the words Cassandra gave him. He obsessed over them between every laboured step.

The quicker he went the flatter his reserves were pressed. Food was scarce. Little more than a string of fat remained behind his skin. But the work of wading over icy snow kept his body - if not his feet, nose and hands - warm enough to keep moving. In dry weather it was little more than a ten minute stroll. In the tundra, it took him over half an hour to finally wade up the opposite ridge of the river. Gasping and drenched in his layers with sweat freezing frostbite to his forehead.

He scrambled with the last of his strength to the road up after the river, finally, holding himself up against a lamppost, dazed, sighing great huffs of grey, glittering clouds.

The home ahead stood like a gravestone, punching up from the snow, embedded in the ice.

Just like that; Conor wanted to run away... something about the place seemed to menace out at him, darker from the gloom which hung behind the glass, beneath the brick, some foul sensation spoke silent whispers of fear into him.

What if something is wrong? What if bandits have ransacked the place?

Or worse... whatever worse could possibly be.

Look around, yourself, Conor thought spitefully, charging himself to move, burning inwards; everything here is wrong. Get moving before you kill yourself, standing.

He went forth, pushing on with little to no energy, only dizziness and hunger were keeping him going - hoping to himself in the arid silence for someone, anyone, to still be alive in the city with a horse and a cart.

Praying for someone to help take his family away from this hollow hell.

To preserve all he had left.

❧

When Conor first met Nicholas he was astounded by his bravado. His home had once reflected him; standing tall and proud and confident in the streets of the city.

This home lay still and flat under sheets of snow, with none of the air of the Nicholas of old. Conor’s heart thumped twice in his chest; a bright, white pulse-pair of anxious fear. Fear to go in, fear to stay away. He looked at the door - barred solid with snow and ice - without any desire to knock, whatsoever.

You’ve come this far. You must keep your promise. You must see. You must know what Nicholas knows.

If indeed he knows anything at all.

All too late, it dawned upon him how foolish this expedition truly is. Nicholas could have simply left the city all together. And now he was guilt ridden into following the orders of his poor, delirious wife; charged with the task of knocking on the door of what looked an awful lot like an empty, lifeless home.

He looked around. The white streets of London curved over and around, snow-smooth and mute. It shocked him to see how little snow there really was, relative to the incomprehensible cold. Considering how long the tundra had been here, he’d have expected more. Even rain, it seems, didn’t want anything to do with London. It would rather save itself in the skies, blotting the heavens away for hundreds of dark and dreary days.

All notions of fear about the house swept away as a maddeningly stiff breeze pounded against him, just as he reached the door the wind wound like wires around him, tormenting him; almost weeping from a gale so sharp it could kill.

He reached; no knocker. Only a dimply set of hollow, splintered eyeholes from where someone had unscrewed and stolen it.

‘Nicholas!’ He cried, slamming a palm against the door. His knuckles too tender to knock with. But the gloves and wraps blunted the slaps to little more than muffled pads, no louder than the breathy crunches his boots made as he’d walked here across the river.

‘Nicholas! I’m here! Come let me in before I freeze.’

It was intended to sound jovial, almost friendly. He instead sounded hysterical. His own voice sounded too muffled from a mouth wrapped more than his ears were. Panic set in, it was like fighting in a dream, every blow too feeble, every word a whisper. He couldn’t breathe. And another frosty gale sliced at him, making him gasp and shudder.

He tried for the door. Wrenching at it, whining. All notions of polite decorum utterly forgotten and abandoned. If he couldn’t get in he’d break in. The cold drove him wild. It didn’t budge, he pulled harder, pulsing away from it from hip to shoulder in a trembling waves of frustrated effort. A cruel image conjured itself in his mind; he’d found here by some later passer by, frozen like a statue; one carved by a sculptor possessed by frustrated entrapment.

But then the ice gave in in a peculiar way, he looked to the frame, it was a door which one pushes to open.

Now he hoped to God it wasn’t locked.

He almost didn’t want to try. He would be driven mad before dying in this horiffic wind if he tried and lost to a lock.

But another slice of ice battered him. He screamed and turned his wrist, it slipped, shaking so violently he could barely grasp the knob again. But he forced his own hand and it did! He clutched it with all his might. He turned it, pushing hard, pressing through a thick seal of whining ice with every muscle straining tight.

The house took a long, frigid breath as the door opened and swallowed him. Conor slammed it shut without a second thought as soon as his feet were free of its swing. Gasping air through painful, radiating, ice-frosted teeth.

He left the door unlocked... He thought, rubbing his eyes with numb, frozen fingers after ripping his gloves off to try blowing them hot again. Trying to tell himself anything could have possessed Nicholas to leave his front door unlocked... anything at all. There was nothing to worry about.

Nothing here at all to be afraid of.

❧

The home howls, from somewhere inside, to the tune of the storming winds; a fireplace was screaming. Conor’s breath blew out in thin white wisps, Cassandra’s words were still haunting him, itching at him like thistles to the spine:

The candle is out...

Conor gave a shout, letting the home know he was here, but nothing came back. Only the haunting howl cried back to greet him. Like Conor’s own home, this place was rigid with the cold. Too frozen even to tremble, too little energy left to shiver, the floorboards didn’t creak as he walked gingerly forward.

Alone. Totally alone.

Go to him...

Conor needed fire. Fire, before he braved the steps, to warm before he went on. He needed his hands back; they’d curled to calcified claws. He quickened on numb feet, stumbling towards the source of the screeching, on to the fireplace, hoping to find it where he left it months before, hopefully with wood-stock, in the library.

Promise me...

‘STOP IT.’ Conor growled. Pressing his wife and her words from his ragged mind. Forcing Nicholas’s in instead:

When the candle goes out, the cause has been found.

‘What did you find, Nicholas?’ Conor asked to himself.

More fool the fool who follows a fool. Came his bitter mind’s reply.

He found the library from memory and breathed a silver-scarf of a sigh, reeling with relief; merciful splits of firewood still remained. He would bathe in fire if he could get it high enough. He couldn’t even feel his feet or his fingers.

Conor set himself about, finding a flint and steel just above the mantle. He was giggling excitedly, near hysterical with the thought of warmth. He struck. Stuck. Hissed a curse and struck again at the kindling, moaning with relief when fire came to birth in the shrill, howling hovel in the wall. The fire was like a kiss. Conor thought it impossible, in the tundra; pure and passionate relief from suffering cold; it still existed. He almost forgot how it felt to feel relief. To feel good again.

He sat bathing in it, so golden a sensation he could shine with the joy of it. He could stay here for hours, if he let himself. But he wouldn’t. He had to leave the golden glow of this corner and find whatever he came here for, eventually. But for now, the fire was a siren, calling all his attention into it..

‘Conor.’

His veins pulsed with pressure at the sound of his name through a rake of a voice. He turned at the hip, and there stood Nicholas. Eyes sunken and beard stringy, clutching in clusters to a table edge of chin and jaw. He looked half a man thinner. Conor looked to his hand and flinched; he was holding a snake, it lay coiled in his hand by his ragged slope of a waistline.

‘Good God, Nicholas.’ He grunted, standing, bringing his head into the tundra outside of the orb of heat he’d created. Staring through fuzzy yellow fire stains into the shadows; his eyesight ruined from gazing into the firelight. He could see little more than a silhouette of him. He had to look off, slightly, just to make out a feature or two.

‘The candle.’ Conor offered, as though to explain this intrusion. ‘I had to come.’

Nicholas nodded. ‘Yes.’ His shadow-black head turned - a boney, pondering profile - and then it hanged, face to the floor. ‘The candle. Yes, you would come to find out, wouldn’t you?’

‘Where is your family?’ Conor asked, regretting asking it immediately.

Nicholas, he looked to the side, faraway. Conor remained silent as a grave. How didn’t it occur to him - He might have lost them, too... - to be more tactful. Just one glance at the silhouette of the man spoke silent poems of loss; so painful it wasted him.

‘I was wrong, Conor.’ He admitted, omitting the query entirely. His throat a tight bind, words broken as hammered glass. ‘It’s nothing I... nothing we could ever hope to fight... much less contend with...’

The following pause was pure pressure. Conor felt it pulsing behind his eyeballs.

‘I saw it. With my own eyes I bore witness to it.’ His dark head shook, no. Over and over; no. ‘Nothing to do, now. Nothing we could ever do.’

Conor swallowed at nothing, his dry throat clicked as wood popped in the fireplace. ‘What is it?’ He asked, both wanting to know and not, all at once. Conor waited there for what might have been moments, or maybe minutes. Hours even. Time stole itself away as Nicholas stood still, staying silent.

‘I wonder if you know it’s name.’ He said at last, unlocking the held breath in Conor’s chest, drawing both gazes of the men together - one set burning, another glassy with fog. ‘I did, long before I knew what it was...’

He did know.

He couldn’t tell why; he didn’t know how he could know, but the name flowed from his lips all the same.

‘The Rogue.’ He said.

‘Curious, isn’t it?’ Nicholas asked, laughing disjointedly, as though the two had shared a joke. Conor could only watch, mortified, as Nicholas went away, walking off, strolling as a man of eighty years might hobble.

Conor followed, incensed by the name which floated from his mouth but which missed his mind completely. Conor went, winding through the halls of this broken and beaten home, right on the heels of Nicholas.

By the time he hobbled over to the last door he saw him pass through, wincing on his beaten, stiffened limbs, Conor wished he never followed at all.

❧

Conor stumbled into the kitchen, knocking through the doorway and almost falling over at the scene therein:

Heads bowed over their bowls. Hands cloying, some at the neck, some simply strewn in agonised hooks across the table. Bodies thin and blue. Skin sallow and stretched. One of the women tall and the other one little, orbited by bowls which the mother had tipped and the little girl collapsed head first into.

He’d killed them. Poisoned to death. He read the source of it - the cause of their deaths - as easily as as his mind now read the memory of Nicholas’s silhouette, hunched, back in the library; the posture of a broken mind.

The mind of a murderer.

‘I’d have buried them, were the ground not solid, outside.’ Nicholas said from beside him, frightening Conor into a startled turn; fully expecting an axe to steal his consciousness away in a sickening swing.

But Nicholas didn’t move, not one muscle. He just stood there, staring, as a drunk does the fiftieth drink. Eyes wide and sightless, looking from Conor’s mortified mask of a face and staring over to them, looking through the ruins; the life he’d seeded and the woman he’d supposedly loved.

‘You’ve gone mad.’ Conor said, now trembling out fear and boiling with rage. Somewhere in the red hue of his mind something snapped, and Conor found himself raging in Nicholas’s wasted, wan face.

‘You son of a whore. DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’VE DONE!?’

Somewhere between the rage and the space of a moment Conor had tore at him, grabbing at him, squeezing him by the scruff of the neck and pressing Nicholas against the wall, clutching at him by a scrap of collar in a grasp so tight his fingertips were choking his thumb. Yet, Nicholas’s eyes remained still. Even as the vessels pulsed, full of pounding pressure, in and around them, his eyes remained locked upon Conor. Staring, uncaring, until it became all too apparent; he wanted death, by any means. And Conor found he didn’t want to give him such a gift. His hand loosened, and after regaining himself, Nicholas answered:

‘Mercy.’ He croaked, turning his gaze, looking their way - so swift a response it seemed born from base instinct; shot from his blackened heart. ‘I’ve committed an act of mercy.’

Conor’s skull thudded. Nicholas truly believed what he was saying. Somewhere behind those flat, colourless eyes, he saw, something had snapped, leaking in with something sour, something soulless, and now there was only one course for Nicholas. Conor looked down, stealing a glance at the snake he thought he saw before - the long rope coiled in Nicholas’s fist.

‘There is nothing - NO HELL IN EXISTENCE - worth murdering them for.’ Conor raged, feeling his rage wane and the fear creeping back in. ‘You’ve gone mad.’ He told him (though he didn’t believe it... which unsettled him worst of all.)

Nicholas might be so far removed from this world his eyes seemed set many metres deeper in his skull, but those eyes weren’t that of a lunatic’s. They were pits of defeat.

With a whippish flick of the eye, he looked right at Conor. ‘Oh?’ He uttered. ‘So certain, are we? You must know more than I.’

He walked to the white-walled windows. Staring at the sunny white glow of the built up snow with his back to both life and death, framed by black and white.

‘The sun is out, old friend.’ He said in simple tones. ‘You might see for yourself, if you leave quickly. Or check my study, first, if it pleases you. The answers are in there, too.’

And then he turned, uttering the words which stilled the blood in the veins:

‘The Rogue is waiting for you... She was, I suppose, waiting for all of us... at the beginning and in the end.’

Conor found himself - lost - staring from what seemed like a mile away. Watching as Nicholas began the last of his days on Earth; knotting a noose beside his wife and child with gnarled and knotted fingers.

Conor wanted him dead, yet he wouldn’t want to kill him. Conor recalled enough of the man he always was, even now, even in the tundra; he wasn’t ready to become evil, like Nicholas had; a devil in his own home.

But he wasn’t going to stop him, either.

With little more than a twitch - a ghost of a reflex of a gag - Conor turned his back on Nicholas and left him to his ungodly work. Walking away on broken limbs with a shattered heart, he began up the stair. On and up to the study. It reeled him in from below, calling in the howling silence like a terrible temptress.

Conor felt all too curious as to what could possibly crack the mind of this man he once knew; the Nicholas Weybridge. A man he once saw to be solid as stone, reduced to this.

Reduced to madness.

❧

The climb up the stairs was three storeys of hell, but Conor didn’t care. He just wanted to know and to be done with it. If he knows, he can decide where to go - if there really was anywhere he could go. After all, he hadn’t received word from the equator in months. It could be a tundra, too, for all he knew.

If there was any certainty of survival, anywhere at all, it would be in the study. It was the only reason he was climbing up there at all.

Now removed from Nicholas’s madness, he found himself connecting the threads; rationalising how much grief and guilt Conor felt, and how his must pale in comparison to Nicholas’s. He found himself believing the man to be mad. Driven to desperation by the deeds he’d done, as a stubborner man, months ago.

That was what he told himself, anyway. Conor could feel the cracks in his own mind, too, stinging like splinters. He was close to losing his mind. The tundra will do that to you.

By the time he reached the upper floor, Conor was all but spent.

Energy must be spent.

‘Yeah.’ Conor said, panting at the top floor landing. ‘Completely spent.’

The door he’d voyaged for now stood directly in his sight. Five full strides and it was inches from his nose. He reached, grasped, turned the handle and pushed. No desire to draw this out. It whined with tightened hinges, but opened easy enough, flooding the eyes with light, and the familiar sight of his own home stood out, just across the river.

The sun was shining shards from the sky to the sleet. It brought tears to his eyes which flooded to the floor as he rushed to the window to see it. But the day was late. He couldn’t see where the sun was, only what it was landing upon; the snow glittered, shining brilliant white. It was enough to bring hope up from somewhere deep within.

A hope which the contents of this room would soon extinguish entirely.

The candle was here. What was left of it. It had indeed burned to the hilt, rippling into the wood in a solid waxy puddle. It went out, indeed. Dying in its own time.

He looked around. The room was a tundra all of its own, a thrashed reflection of the degraded mind which’d worked wantonly within it. What once had been in pristine order was now a dishevelled dystopia of disarray; papers, letters, news and literature of all sorts littered every surface as though a storm had cut through the study; strings sliced from one pile to another; it was clear to see, a desperate attempt to tie something together had been made.

He glanced at one of the news articles, he recognised a face. Dickens had died, a fack Conor almost forgot about.

FOUND FROZEN, the headline screamed, letters laying louder upon the page than the howl the fireplace made.

Every paper said the same screed; so many dead, from every place and position. The Sovereign’s child, a politician, or seventy. Conor was certain there were more. Many more. All of it was like a long stacked prose of pain, punctuated by letters and articles and notes of all sorts. On the broadest wall lay circles of chalk, all circling one another with a swollen dot in the centre.

He’d certainly been hard at work, here. Fuelling himself with the death he’d caused by convincing the entire British Isles the tundra wouldn’t last.

On Nicholas’s mahogany table lay one piece of paper. Upon the page lay Nicholas’s writing. Atop the header of the page sat in bold cursive; The Rogue. And Conor read of it. Sickening his stomach with every dire word of it. Conor couldn’t believe it to be true.

How could such an ungodly thing be true?

A scrape sounded from downstairs, instantly followed by a vicious twang and the faintest whine of tensing twine.

Just like that, Nicholas Aston-Weybridge was no more. Hanged by himself beside the family he’d made and killed.

Conor almost envied him. Conor knew already he didn't have it in him to do the same. Even though he wanted to. The cold would never stop. He knew this now. He’d rose to the study to learn what Nicholas found out, and what he’d just read made him sick to the pit of his soul.

He knew now what hanged in the skies above the tundra. His skin crawled with the cruel truth of it:

The new moon of change:

The destroyer beyond the veil of grey.

The Rogue. It had indeed come for them all.

❧

A dent of deja vu cracked into Conor’s mind.

This has happened before, or perhaps I dreamed of it.

The Rogue. He said to Nicholas, automatic, unthinking.

Curious, isn't it? Nicholas said back. All too aware of the evil above us all.

Conor found himself again in front of his own home. Without a second thought he tugged the fresh seal of ice outwards, thinking Nicholas's is a push-in door, for no reason at all.

Feeling nothing, he went hobbling numbly into his home. He didn't feel the shame or the cold or the oppressive weight of the guilt, anymore. Perhaps he was mad. Or perhaps this cruel inevitability has finally set him free.

As soon as he came through to the dim entrance, he stood opposite Jenny, his housekeeper and helper through all of the great and the countless ills.

All for nothing. We've been striving for survival in a broken, sullied world, for nothing.

Perhaps Jenny has seen it as well, he reasoned. Standing still in the frame of the open door as tears fell in twinkling rivers from her eyes, cascading to the floor where they would doubtless freeze in mere moments.

'It's over.' Conor told her. Laughing now, hysterically. His throat tight and raking with the sobs underneath those humourless, humbled chuckles. He supposed it was dark to find it so titillating; but it was funny, in a way... Jenny and Cassandra might not see it that way, perhaps. But for the moment, Conor did. It was dead funny. Crushingly, achingly, heart achingly funny. No matter what they did, they were all going to die. No matter what they tried.

Jenny slow clapped a hand to her mouth, her puffy reddened eyes were swelling above it. She began to sob, as though she wanted to look away, but could not.

As though something terrible had occurred.

'Oh, Conor.' Was all she said. Not “Sir,” but “Conor.” And then the blanket of numbness flew away, Conor was frozen in fear, once again.

The look he gave her made her look away. She curled from the spine and the sobbing took her.

'What happened?'

She only sobbed harder. Doubling over with sorrow.

'TELL ME!'

But she wouldn't. She couldn't. And then there was no more consciousness; only action and vague sorts of senses which followed:

The rush to the stair; the hammer-footed stomp upwards; the boom of a door blasted nearly clean away from its hinges; he heard, felt and cared for none of it. He did it without feeling an ounce of it. He only felt pure, in that moment. Pure-full of scattering anguish as the sight of Cassandra became all of his vision.

Lying still. Lying so horribly still.

He stood breathing with rushed and ragged breaths, praying in the doorway. As though with every pass of breath he was trying, vying; encouraging her to do the very same thing. Her breast did not move. Her skin stayed smooth; uncreased and unmoved by the jerks and jostles of life.

He didn’t even say goodbye to her.

He never had a chance. She was - dead - asleep by the time Conor went away.

Something was tugging at his arm. To his blinded surprise, it was Jenny. He face pure white with anguish, was she apologising for something? Conor couldn't really tell.

As though speaking underwater; 'Let go. Let go of me.'

He was there beside her.

'Cassandra.'

The woman he fancied and fell for and married in the blissful breeze of spring.

The Rogue will come for us all, in the end.

Not for Cassandra... the sickness saw to that.

There was nothing else tying him here.

The Rogue has won. The tundra has won. There was nothing else to do but go out and meet it. He wanted to see it. He wanted to see it before he let the tundra take him.

❧

Conor stood centre-river, transfixed.

Jenny tried to stop him. She tried to keep him inside. He didn’t hate her for it because she simply didn’t know. She didn’t know this was here, at all.

The sun was shining into gold glades of sunset. The Rogue, beside it, in full view for all who looked to see it in the rare break between the clouds. Whether Jenny knew it or not, The Rogue was here already. Conor could attest to it. His very flesh was now curling at the sight of it; the source of the nightmare; the orb and destroyer; a rogue planet from the hellish hollows of the heavens.

In the sky it stayed almost still, dwarfing the moon beside it. It was near sunset - as it was in his dreams. It was not an orb, but a planet. A moon. A sphere of black and grey, half illuminated, cutting its foul crescent into a sidelong grin in the skies.

This... this was the source of the tundra. It imbalanced the delicate balance of our precious world, and Conor was undressing in front of it. Drinking it in, unblinking, as he started unwrapping himself, ready and willing for the cold to finally claim him.

It was smooth. Not a crater upon its face. Black as coal. Three times bigger than the moon itself. It loomed so large, so broad and alien to behold, the very heavens themselves blackened along with it. After moments passed by Conor noticed with an odd-sick feeling how it orbited this tender, ruined world of his; he watched in mute horror as the moon moved nearer towards it, and The Rogue closer still. He forced himself to recall the papers he found laying upon Nicholas’s floors; those he read in a frantic daze after Nicholas hung himself; telling himself the two bodies - one heavenly, the other hellish - would not, in fact, collide. They were only orbiting in opposite directions.

And then the madness showed itself as complete, in Conor’s reality.

It was almost happiness he felt as Cassandra’s arms curled around him, warming his back with her bosom, nestling her cheek to his shoulder.

‘She came for you.’ The ghost of his wife told him, as she had done - when alive - just this morning. 'Isn't it incredible?'

For a while, he didn’t say a thing. The touch of her body might be because he was touched too by madness; cracked, at last, after such unending toil and turmoil; but to have her here, in any way, was enough to make him feel nearly whole. If this was madness, to hell with his sanity. He’d gladly give his life just to feel her near, again. To give away his sanity and all his senses for it seemed like a well met bargain.

‘How are you here?’ Conor asked, his voice softer by the snow. 'Am I mad?'

'Not at all.' She squeezed him. Really, lovingly squeezed him. 'I'm so proud of you, Conor. So very proud of you.'

Tears welled and began to fall, once again. All walls fell and the ache of agony made him crumble.

'Don't cry, my love. Our daughter will see.'

Almost by magic, a little hand curled around his own. Another tiny arm gripped in a gentle hook around his leg. He wanted to look, to pat Julia's head and kiss his wife but he didn't dare risk moving a muscle and chasing the illusions away.

What a beautiful way to die. Sanity was rated far beyond its worth. This moment was pure bliss. He never wanted it to end.

'This isn't the end.' Cassandra whispered, as though answering his very thoughts and feelings in earnest. 'If you choose it to be so; this is only the beginning.'

The Rogue rolled in it's orbit. Traversing so swiftly it would be gone before sunset.

'There isn't much time left.' Cassandra said, more serious now. Still holding him - warming him - but speaking with an urgency so solid her words could crack ice.

'Time left?'

No time left.

'The Rogue will set soon. She has already built the way for you but She won't be able to hold it for long.'

Conor shook his head, no; nothing made sense. Nothing about any of this made any sense, whatsoever. Luckily, his madness was there to fill in the gaps; Cassandra spoke swift as the wind.

'The Rogue was always bound to come here. But she can help, Conor. She wants to help us. She showed me. She showed me everything and I know She can stop the cold. She can stop the tundra Conor.'

And then Cassandra said it. Those words which haunted his dreams for every day of every month since the tundra fell upon the Earth:

'You can stop the storm. Her energy must be spent. You only have to step forth, my love. Just a step forth to save us all.'

He turned to see her, to look in her eyes and see for himself if what she was telling him could possibly true. To search for lies. To discern deceit. But she was gone by the time he looked - both of them - lost away by the whispering wind.

Conor's head fell. Too exhausted even to scold himself. He wanted their spectres to stay. But he turned them away.

A prickle of energy and the sound of crackling lightning fizzed behind him. His head raised. And Conor span on a heel to face a phenomenon he couldn't begin to explain.

It floated in the air above the ice. The Rogue looming still, now, above it. An orb, like glass, opaque and clear and reflective, all the same.

You can stop the storm. She’d said to him. Her energy must be spent.

Conor looked again at The Rogue. Black and deadly it was. But to his amazement, to his complete astonishment, it now stayed still, hanging in place more like a distant star, the moon still sliding behind it.

Perhaps it was true. Perhaps what she told him was true.

You only have to step forth. Rang in his ears. You can save us all.

❧

What Jenny witnessed as she watched him once again cross the frozen river was beyond all realms of comprehension. She would never speak of it to anyone. Not for her life, and not to a soul. Not even to herself after the years passed by and the world eventually warmed, coming back to life again, she would die before speaking a word of it. It would forever lie within her mind as a silenced and well forgotten memory.

But she saw it, all the same. She would never deny that.

She tried to stop him, but failed. So taken he was with grief, he was bent upon ending it all. She watched as he walked the Thames and stopped dead in the centre. She wondered worryingly if this was willing suicide she was witnessing, or perhaps it was grief fuelling madness; forcing him to commit it.

He looked to the west. He stared agog. She was then completely certain he was mad beyond reproach. He moved as though to strip himself bare, to end himself - but paused, as if feeling something beautiful beyond imagining. Staring in wonder at nothing in particular.

She held hope, for a moment, as she saw him hold his hand to his shoulder. She could breathe again once she saw him smile. And once again her heart sank as he began talking only to himself - speaking, she would soon learn and reason, to the new, midnight moon, hanging forever in place just over the western horizon.

She saw him turn. She watched him yearn. And finally she saw from so far away the subtle, long nod he seemed to give to the air to the east, as though accepting some unseen burden she could neither know nor fathom.

He turned once more to the west. He breathed and huffed a heavy cloud, and ploughed though it as he walked forward, marching off and towards his fate.

Jenny watched with tears blurring her sight. Her heart stripped to ribbons by the death of Cassandra and her daughter. A pain she would carry for the rest of her life.

But she never once wept for the brave Connor Matthews, who disappeared before her very eyes, that day. Walking forward upon the last ice of the age, before blinking out of sight in an instant, mere moments after he walked forward to meet with the mysteries of the heavens.

To be continued in the coming volumes

of the Godslight saga.

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