Stories – Page 3 – Mark Bould

Piqued Oil

energy-the-battle-to-keep-alaska-pipelines-flowing_66062_600x450 [A version of this piece first appeared in Salvage]

On 28 September 2015, Royal Dutch Shell – suddenly and without warning – announced their withdrawal from exploratory drilling in the Chuckchi Sea. This decision will cost them, depending on who you ask, somewhere between $4-8 billion in terms of money already spent or contractually committed. Many have found reason to celebrate this announcement – especially when it was followed a couple of days later by Alberta’s governor, Rachel Notley, declaring that there was no long-term future for the province or Canada as a whole to be found in the continued exploitation of the Alberta Tar Sands.

But for others, Shell’s press release – a bland technocratic utterance, an oleaginous misdirection, terse, wilfully oblique – was a cause for concern, a weird provocation.

What exactly has Shell done up there off the coast of Alaska? What have they found? Why are they not talking about it?

What haematophagic vegetal Thing from Another World did they accidentally defrost? What therianthropic congeries of cellular neo-liberalism? What ripe metaphor? What ravening alien maw?

How long until our skies are darkened by fleets of Nazi UFOs pouring out from the Hohlweltlehre’s Fourth Reich? How long until our lands are ravaged by their subhuman legions of Dero Sturmtruppen?

Did Shell really mistake that oozing nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence for oil? What rough shoggoth, its hour come around at last, is now slouching southwards to consume us? What Hyperborean sleeping abnormalities, what blasphemously surviving entities, have they disturbed? To the attention of what Elder Gods have their clumsy probings brought us?

Did they drill so deep into the crust that the Earth itself screamed?

Or have Shell, rather more mundanely, had a Mitchell-and-Webb epiphany? Did they stare into the abyss and find themselves staring back? Have they realised that they are the bad guys? Are they going to apologise? Are they going to shut down their chunk of the oil industry and devote future revenues from green energy to repairing the environmental destruction for which they are responsible? Does this retreat from the arctic mark the start of a new era that recognises the unsustainability of development? An era in which existing development will be radically redistributed?

If only.

This is not Armageddon. No plucky oilmen and hot-doggin’ roughnecks are going to divert the extinction event coming our way.

This is not The Abyss. Deep-sea drilling operations are not going to uncover some watery alien messiah.

This is not even On Deadly Ground. No possible blend of motivational-poster mysticism, misappropriated indigenous culture, pony tails and lardy kung fu can stop the oil companies.

Shell is clear on this. Like recent similar withdrawals by Exxon and Chevron, this is a temporary, strategic move based on the several variables. Their main concerns at this point are ‘the high costs associated with the project, and the challenging and unpredictable federal regulatory environment in offshore Alaska’. Their announcement must therefore be seen as a statement of intent: they will lobby and exert influence to get those regulations revised in their favour; they will develop and/or await the technologies that will sufficiently lower the cost of drilling, extraction and transportation; they will wait for global warming to make the Arctic more conducive; they will rely upon – and manipulate – oil demand and oil scarcity; and then they will return.

They say they will ‘cease further exploration activity in offshore Alaska for the foreseeable future’. As if they do not foresee this one. As if this is not their plan.

Notley talks about weaning Alberta – and Canada – off fossil fuels over the next century. A timescale which, however well-intentioned, however inadequate, might just coincide with the oil in the tar sands running out anyway, as peak oil gives way to oil depletion.

So while this weird flight from the icy seas might seem like a turning point in the story of peak oil, it is, in truth, more about piqued oil.

The monotonous self-serving corporate drone of Shell’s statement is designed to conceal only one thing: they are just a little bit miffed.

But rest assured. They were already regrouping, strategising, shifting resources and priorities before they even said a word. And remember: they can’t be bargained with; they can’t be reasoned with; they do not feel pity or remorse or fear. And they will absolutely not stop, ever, until the last drop of oil is made profitable and then wrung from the planet.

In Defence of Uncles Dancing Badly at Weddings

He has always been there, out on the dance floor. Middle-aged, a little paunchy, should certainly know better. Grooving to a music no one else can hear. A music that was ancient before even vinyl. A music of weirdly shifting tonic scales, inconsistent rhythms and unmotivated changes of tempo that your non-uncle ears are denied. You get the DJ’s set list; he breaks on through to the other side.

The uncle used to pass through the world, performing his offices, confident that each moment of strut, each tendon-cracking disco move, each bump and every grind would be erased through the strange counter-mnemonic alchemy of nocturnal celebration. He could hand-jive with impunity, and twist with no fear of anachronism. He could even do that hands-on-hips/alternating shoulder-dips thing that he vaguely remembered Suzy Quatro doing.

Cameras changed all that. And the rise of video, coinciding with the decline of the mother-in-law joke, gave him new prominence as a stock character in mediocre observational humour.

In the digital era, he is pinned and mounted like some rare and lurid bug for all to see. A gif that keeps on giving.

But he is the uncle of the bride. And so he dances. Badly. Because it is a duty. Because it serves a higher purpose. And because he loves her.

There are Ancient Ones to be propitiated. His near-shamanic-trance moves, the product of too much champagne and an excess of white-boy funk, lullaby them back into their ages-long slumber.

He invents tipsy-core. (It’s a pun, and not a good one – keep up!)

He pogos. To Dolly Parton.

He timewarps.

He dances on. He passes through the veil. Transmutes. No longer the jowly, ungracefully balding fifth Baldwin brother, he becomes a whip-thin young Jagger, a snake-hipped James Brown.

He waves his hands in the air like he don’t care.

He stays out there dancing when the track changes, when the DJ slips from music of black origin to music that is too obviously black. That way, with him out there, it does not look like a race thing. You think you are dying of embarrassment? The uncle dancing badly dies of shame for your sins.

But even he draws the line at Whigfield.

Another day, another dollar

A route through the maze was not something he could intuit. Of that he was certain.

The skinny shadows told him it was around about noon. He stopped at a corner, nestled into the angle between the walls. They were grey, fifteen, maybe twenty, feet high and uniform apart from their roughly textured surface.

From where he sat, he could see for dozens of feet in each direction. A clear field of fire. If he had a gun. And the ego, or malice, it took to use one.

He could not put his faith in chance. It was appealing, to take a random turn here, another there. To press on. To cover ground. But the odds against it working were so great that he could not calculate them.

His water supply was running low. He had no food, but was not hungry anyway. He could not figure out why that was. All of his appetites had dissolved. He had to force himself to drink. Swallowing was hard. His throat felt bruised.

There was not an ounce of energy left in his limbs, but he rose to his feet, a little unsteadily.

If he could rise further, rise like Icarus, even momentarily, and look down from above to see how far it stretched. Whether he was closer to one of the outer walls than the others. What lay beyond.

He started to walk. That was what he did. It was what he always did.

If he stayed in one place, he could keep better track of the passage of time. Mark it off, day by day, in prison-house scratches. Four vertical, one diagonal. Over and over again. But instead he kept moving. With some kind of systematicity, he told himself, though he might have been lying.

Movement, he thought, the orderly passage through space over time, proved it wasn’t all the same.

Intermittently, he left markings on the walls. Glyphs and sigils. Doodles. Not to mark a route he might one day want to retrace, but to force a sense of difference on the walls that enclosed him. To make change seem real. To construct a lie of progress.

But a realisation had been growing slowly inside him. Metastasising, and with it an awful dread.

There was no way out.

It was not a maze at all.

It was a fucking allegory.

My Cardigan is My Kronstadt!

Since discussing the importance of footwear in building the mass movement that will propel Jeremy to power in 2020, thus laying the foundation of the coming socialist republic, I have been wary of issuing any further statements for fear of Fleet Street distortion and misreporting, but thankfully since Jeremy became leader the press has been acting with characteristic restraint. However, the mailbag has swollen with letters from revolutionary cadre asking for clarification and advice on the knitwear issue which prevented me from joining the shadow cabinet. I do not have time to reply to them all individually, but I hope this example – from Thee Faction propagandist Babyface – will address many of your concerns.

Fraternal salutations, comrade!

A friend of mine, a gentleman of about your age, is about to plunge into cardigan-wearing. You’ve long worn them, and have retained your punk rock and hard left credentials, not to mention your cultural commentator status. Any advice for him on picking out a cardigan that lets you hang on to this stuff? Or is it all in the attitude?

Up the workers!

That I have received so much correspondence of this sort in the last two days indicates the magnitude of the issue. At the same time, that my good comrade is reduced to such transparent pretence – asking on behalf of ‘a friend’ – demonstrates how far-reaching in its effects is the Blairite virus and its on-message Stalinism.

I replied thus:

It is of course almost entirely a matter of attitude. It is also important to stubbornly persist in buying the same cardigan – or close enough that the uninitiated cannot tell – for decades. For off the shelf cardigans, Marks & Spencer’s plain black or very dark grey are good starting points, especially if you can find one where the wool is coated in teflon – this prolongs its life, helps a little in rainy circumstances, and enables you on occasion to refer to it as your ‘NASA space cardigan’. It is imperative, though, to cut out the labels so no one knows you bought it at M&S.

On the whole wool vs. blended fabric question, I have my own very clear preference, but at the core of my disagreement with Jeremy is my belief in a genuine broad church that welcomes diversity.

Is it permissible for knitwear entryists to photoshop their cardigan into old pictures on their social media? That is a matter of individual conscience.

All this takes me back a number of years to that odd period a decade or so ago when, at various leftist events, Alex Callinicos would flirt with me. Knowing that I was not a member of his party, but might be of use to it, he would lavish me with fleeting attention, coyly pretending to not quite remember who I was. However, I knew from comrades who had succumbed to his blandishments, that as soon as the seduction was over he would ignore me, and no amount of paper sales would ever win his affections. Even in those days, I did not really sense how toxic his party’s version of democratic centralism would prove, but our not infrequent discussions of couture soon revealed an immovable obstacle – any discussion with other cadre of the revolutionary and dialectical significance of the cardigan would be treated as an attempt to form a faction, resulting in my summary expulsion. There were, it seems, still some sticks that could not be bent.

Now I do not want to risk conjuring up a nightmare image of Jeremy on his Mao-ist bicycle, leading us into a future in which drab hand-knitted sweaters have become not just a re-education tool but a uniform foisted upon all. That, after all, is why we have a free and impartial press.

But it is clear to me that Jeremy’s claims about the superiority of the jumper, even when quoted in context, are irrational, mystificatory and profoundly undialectical.

This issue must be addressed.

And I say to him, as I said to Callinicos all those years ago, my cardigan is my Kronstadt! ¡No pasarán!

Comrade Bould
Cardiganista Corbynista

Why I Will Not Serve in Jeremy Corbyn’s Cabinet

Overcome with Corbynista euphoria, as so may others have been in the last 48 hours, I popped into town this morning to buy some new shoes. To welcome the first signs of the coming socialist republic, I didn’t just buy new shoes – for the first time since Michael Foot was party leader, I bought an entirely new style of shoe. This symbolic shift from the three-hole hard leather to the five-hole soft leather Doc Marten represents not – as my critics have claimed – that the shop did not have any of the former in stock in the right size but the deeply-held belief, shared by Jeremy and I, that the labour movement is a broad church. Co-operation requires concessions, and it is incumbent upon us all to welcome diversity and change.

However, after lengthy discussions over the weekend, it became clear that our new leader was utterly intransigent on the question of home-knitted sweaters and would never embrace our revolutionary comrade, the noble cardigan. This is a key point of difference on policy which I believe it would be dishonest to deny exists. If Jeremy’s clear victory on Saturday demonstrated anything, it was a desire for politicians to be true to what they believe – I want to abide by this. Given this difference, I would find it difficult to abide by the collective responsibility that comes with serving in the shadow cabinet.

Furthermore, I must denounce as groundless rumour the vile calumny, being circulated by disgruntled Blairites and the Tory press, that I intend to cease wearing black t-shirts to everything – as hopefully today’s other new purchases in the backdrop of the above picture make clear.

Mark

My Holiday in the Peak District, final day

Day 1, 2, 3, 4am, 4pm, 7, 11, 17, 21.

I should never have…

I have his dreams, I see the ancient temple beneath the rocks, I see where the face is

was

it is no longer there

later
Peering out of the windows at what my watch assures me must be noon – even in this thick caul of fog there is some light out there, though it is diffused, lacks direction, is too ambient even to cast a shadow – there is nothing but a luminous watery haze. Something moves out there. Not the black dog nor the white hare, their duty of prolepsis is long over and they have fled. What moves out there is vast and inhuman.

Sometimes I think I am the bottom of an alien ocean and above me a leviathan courses through the deeps, pursuing elephantine prey with a stately grace born of its immensity. Sometimes I feel its shadow fall on this narrow house. Terror turns to hope. How can something as miniscule as a human life even be noticed by a being so colossal?

I know this is just idle fancy.

The thing outside is terrene, mineral. Asperous. It moved so slowly for millennia that it appeared to be without life. Perhaps its liveliness was twisted out of sight in another dimension. But now it walks the Earth again.

later
It is coming for me. I know that, though not how I know that. I can only surmise that hidden in the words of the codex by some ancient steganography were words, curled up like a virus, waiting to be woken, words that infiltrated my mind, replicating and replacing neurons, wiring themselves into me. And that by some strange conjunction of influences, I was drawn here. And they leapt again, from me to the even older text Charteris unearthed, and activated something within it.

later
I see I have become quite mad.

later
What we think of as madness is really knowledge, perhaps even a kind of truth. I see the world differently now, and it is twisting me, making me other. Who knows what I will have become by the time my rescuers arrive?

But I am not so delusional as to expect rescue any more, or respite.

The thing out there is quartering the ground. It is drawing close.

It will not be long until it finds me.

later
It’s in the trees! It’s coming!

***

Fin

My Holiday in the Peak District, day 21

Day 1, 2, 3, 4am, 4pm, 7, 11, 17.

It is now ten days since we last ate. Even the honey with which I rendered the bitter tea palatable has run out. I suspect Charteris of stealing tiny amounts each day, and whenever I am now forced to drink such amaroidal stuff I must quell a rage that swells in my chest and throat. I fear it is not part of me but that thing within me that was summoned here, and that as I grow weaker it grows stronger.

Trapped in this Cimmerian gloom, I struggle to recall what daylight looks like. All there is is lethargy and a sense of inevitable withering.

The thin and desperate cries of Dyson and MacReady have fallen silent now.

Something is moving around out there.

Charteris shambled fitfully around the cottage, regressing into the very likeness of a villager, his hands becoming awkward appendages, capable only of clenching and clutching. Occasional moments of lucidity interrupted his constant mumbling occasionally, but it was clear his sentience was fading. He slept a lot, but restlessly. He tossed and turned as if animated by some idiot cosmic puppeteer, his strings badly tangled. He would, with persistent dull regularity, awake screaming in terror. When I tried to quiet him, he muttered over and over that ‘It is gone, it is gone’. After several days of such obscure maunderings, I realised that he had been dreaming about the crypt, about the stone face in the wall. He has infected my imagination. Even now, when I try to recall that strange grotto, I can visualise it perfectly, but the face is no longer there.

The odd thing about going so long without food is that I am too exhausted to do anything, yet too exhausted to sleep. My face is the colour of bruises. There is a rash spreading on my left arm. I found a patch of that fungus there and scrubbed at it too hard with a toothbrush. Cleansing my flesh, I broke the skin and gave it a way inside me. I scratch at it without realising until blood coats my arm.

Each day I press on slowly with my work on the printout of the writing on the tablets. My head is too blurry. The script remains elusive, dancing just outside the reach of my stumbling intellect. It taunts me.

I would not have done it.

It was not me that did it. It was that thing that he brought here inside me.

Several days ago, Charteris started wandering up to me at random moments and shaking me violently, interrupting my concentration. He kept claiming I was in a trance, incanting the ancient words on the sheets before me. He would not understand that it was impossible for me to do so, that there was no way for me to pronounce a language that had not been uttered on this world in millennia.

He will never understand now.

But as I sit here, alone at last, I cannot help but wonder whether he was speaking some kind of truth. My mind has not always been as focused as I claimed. With my disrupted sleep, it is no wonder I sometimes drift off a little while poring over these archaic texts. Perhaps in a state of hypnagogic liminality my consciousness slips, and whatever it is inside me that was summoned here gains egress from the realm in which it has been confined and some tendril of its dreadful being possesses me.

That would explain it.

That would explain how Charteris came to be lying at my feet, his head not merely bludgeoned but crushed – caved in, as if by the exertion of some monstrous pressure on skull.

It would explain how his blood came to be mingled with mine on my hands and arms.

At least I need no longer go hungry.

Final day

My Holiday in the Peak District, Day 17

Day 1, 2, 3, 4am, 4pm, 7, 11.

Mankind’s greatest folly is, it seems, to hope.

The fog has neither lifted nor even retreated.

Charteris and MacReady have twice now tried to reach the farm. Both times they returned empty-handed and clearly shaken.

Dyson can barely even bring himself to look in the direction of the orchard, yet as another day dawns without the prospect of food, it is he who suggested trying to make our way through the fog to the village.

At first I resisted taking part their expedition but, as they equipped themselves to leave, the prospect of being abandoned here filled me with a dire foreboding. They had the decency not to comment on the haste with which I join their preparations. We roped ourselves together as best we could with belts and ties, with Charteris in the lead position. He handed each of us a heavy duty flashlight. ‘We need to preserve the batteries,’ he said, ‘just in case, so let’s see how far we can get with just my torch.’

The fog was like a shroud. I could feel it tightening around us, almost. I could barely make out Charteris ahead of me, or Dyson behind me. MacReady brought up the rear, invisible to me.

Charteris set a careful pace, occasionally straying from one side of the lane to the other, and pressed doggedly on.

Time descended upon us like a cerement.

I have no idea how long we had been walking when Charteris abruptly halted. We clumsily concertinaed together. A car angled across the road blocked our way, its front doors wide open. It took a few moments for us to recognise it as the one in which Dr Raymond had driven off in search of a phone signal.

‘Why are both doors open?’ MacReady asked. ‘Did he have a passenger?’

The answer was not long in coming.

We snaked cautiously around the obstruction. The irriguous grass at the edge of the road was slippery underfoot; waterlogged nettles and stubby branches reached out of the hedgerow to sting and graze.

The fog blunted Charteris’s torch-beam, diffusing and curtailing its reach, but even in its feeble glow we could see the bodies lying in the road. Sprake, who the doctor must have found shortly after leaving us, his pasty body now almost blue, his skin mottled with the strange fungus that contaminated everything in this damned valley, and Raymond himself, as naked as his erstwhile charge, his jaundiced flesh bruised and bleeding. The broken corpses were arranged, as if by some seedy maniacal godling, in a sordid tableau of joyless copulation.

Nausea and unreason swept through me, unhinging me briefly.

Sickened as the others were, they were all for pressing on towards the village, but nothing could compel me to take another step in that direction. MacReady bristled and, when I would not bow to his threats of violence, he urged Charteris and Dyson to just leave me there in the road. ‘Let him keep the cadavers company,’ he snarled.

Eventually, Charteris agreed to return with me to the cottage while MacReady and Dyson continued on in search of help or haven.

That was four days ago.

The fog remains impenetrable, the transitions between day and night almost indiscernible in the gloom. Sometimes I imagine our timepieces running down, and I am filled with trepidation at the thought of being trapped here with no certain way to measure the passage of time.

‘They will return,’ Charteris says several times each day. ‘They will bring food. We will be rescued.’

Such pathetic hopefulness makes him seem small. He is shrinking in significance.

I have not told him that sometimes, through the fog, I hear Dyson and Macready calling out. Begging for us to help them find their way back to this paltry shelter.

They are lost.

Their voices are the voices of the damned, and with each hour that passes they grow weaker.

Day 21

My Holiday in the Peak District, day 11

Day 1, 2, 3, 4am, 4pm, 7.

Sprake has returned!

I fear what it portends.

Lower Wirklesworth is one of those villages that nowadays must share its vicar with three or four others in his parish. When he gave Charteris access to the church, it was on the understanding that we would not intrude on the days when services – which rotate between the villages – were being held there. Today is such a day. There is a wedding, I gather, though it is difficult to imagine any of his shambling parishioners seeking a religious blessing upon their unseemly propagation.

Finding it hard to concentrate on my work while the others began to stir, I happened to glance out of the window, and there, in the mist that shrouded the orchard this morning, I saw him. Sprake.

Naked, apart from a cape he seemed to have fashioned by reversing one of those hospital gowns that do not fasten up the back, he eagerly stroked at his tumescent manhood.

I rose, stunned, and the others followed my gaze.

Sprake spilled his seed onto the bark of a stunted apple tree, and danced away out of sight.

‘Bacchus and Priapus,’ Charteris laboriously quipped, ‘we should not be surprised to find him playing Pan, now should we?’

The other morning, when Charteris had sent us to our tasks, found a shovel and a supply of bin bags, collected and disposed of the animal debris ringing the cottage, even found a hose somewhere to wash away the blood and feathers and fragments of bone, I found myself for the first time ever beginning to admire him. He did it quietly, fastidiously, without any fuss, neither commenting on it nor expecting our gratitude. But today, as he mocked Sprake and seemed disinclined to aid him, any hint of approbation and esteem I might have felt died.

‘He’s out there, in this weather with no clothes,’ I said. ‘He’ll die of exposure if we don’t do something.’

Charteris stared at me, puzzled, as if seeing something for the first time, then ordered us to quarter the orchard for any trace of the poor bewildered man.

After a fruitless hour, we regrouped at the cottage. The mist was turning to fog, and we had still not breakfasted. Shortly after Dyson left for the farm to collect our supplies, a car pulled up. It was Dr Raymond, as sallow as ever. He had come to tell us of Sprake’s escape, and to see if he had returned here. ‘I didn’t inform the police yet, as I thought it might be resolved without any fuss,’ he explained. ‘You keep searching, I’ll drive out of the valley and call the rescue services once I can get some reception on this damn phone.’

Ten minutes later Dyson’s cries for help reached us through the thick and sodden air, ringing like a gong. The fog had become so thick he could not find his way back. Charteris and I went to make tea, while MacReady stood outside, calling at regular intervals to guide Dyson back.

He stumbled into the kitchen, empty-handed and clearly shaken.

‘I can’t find the farm,’ he explained.

I am the only one who never goes to there – I dread finding myself alone with any of the locals, whose unfocused physiognomies and hobbling brute forms I confess disturb me deeply – but I understand the path to it is straight and unbroken, with no junctures or offshoots that might mislead one, and Dyson has a level-head and steady nerve. I cannot make sense of his perturbation. He says he did not stray from the path, that it seemed to shift beneath him, like some inhuman sentience drawing him into its bosky tentacular embrace, sprouting ligneous ungulae to catch in his hair and clothes.

The farm, he insists, is no longer there.

The fog is growing heavier, killing the light. I can no longer see the trees, though I sense them drawing closer – the spawn, perhaps, that Sprake returned to grubbily fertilise?

Day 17

My Holiday in the Peak District, day seven

Day 1, 2, 3, 4am, 4pm.

It is some time since I have had the opportunity to write. There has been so much to do, and the days have blurred into one another. My mind has been pre-occupied not only with that strange subterranean drumming – an incessant thrum that now seems to accompany me everywhere – and that monstrous visage, but also with the task which Charteris has set me. In order to pursue it, I have set aside, albeit temporarily and with much anguish, my translation of the codex.

You see, around the walls of that chamber are arranged twelve tablets, spaced equidistantly. The writing carved in each of them is in a language predating the text recorded in the codex, but clearly (I think) an ancestor to it. If MacReady and Dyson are correct, it dates from before the well-known proto-Elamite script and the controversial Dispilio Tablet, and even before the Vinča and Jiahu symbols that only a canting professional courtesy dares call ‘writing systems’.

My unease disappeared as I pored over the antediluvian writing, clumsily attempting to transcribe it while holding a torch. ‘We already have complete 3-D scans of them,’ Charteris said. I put my pen and pad away and just spend time taking in this wondrous find.

Each day I return to the chamber for a while to read the actual characters, but most of my time is now spent with a print-out of the scans, familiarising myself with this most ancient of tongues, beginning the laborious process of comparison, hypothesis and deduction, all of it tentative, most of it destined to being discarded. Charteris, not seeming to grasp that this is a life’s work, urges me on to premature and incautious attempts at rendering the script in English.

For all that my days now possess a common pattern, I continue to be disturbed and agitated. The scratching within the walls now follows me throughout the house. The squirrel continues to feed whatever it is in her nest. That dark shape lurks on in the orchard, and at the edge of my vision that white creature flits away before I can take it in. I realise I do not know the difference between stoats and ferrets and weasels and mink – could it be one of them? According to local miners’ superstition, a white hare is an ill-omened creature, presaging catastrophe. They say something similar about seeing a large black dog. I try not to think about it.

The rain is incessant now. It hangs in the air like a shroud.

Each morning as I focus on the ancient text, I become lost in concentration. MacReady and Dyson have both essayed repetitions of Charteris’s prank. On consecutive days, one or other of them stood over over me with a concerned expression on his face as if he had just woken me from an unearthly possession and dire incantations. Charteris brushed them away, making it clear I will not be chaffed in this way, but he too looks at me oddly.

This morning they are unable to continue such foolishness. When they come down from their beds, they find me pacing the kitchen floor in deep distress.

I had arisen early, as is my wont, and thrown back the curtains in my room. The squirrel was squatting there, just outside my window, as if waiting for me. I swear she looked directly at me, her rheumy eyes glaring coldly, as she raised her paws to her mouth and began to eat. Whatever she held was still alive, wiggling, screeching in pain as she gnawed at it. Once it ceased to move, she discarded it, and darted back to her nest. Just as I began to make out the form of her prey, she returned and repeated the performance. She did this six times. I watched in horror as she killed, partially consumed her young and scattered their corpses indifferently around her.

Sweetened tea was unable to quell the sickness mounting within me.

As I told the others about it, MacReady put on his coat and boots and set out to the farm for the day’s supplies. Within moments he returned, more pallid and shaken I suspect than even I had been this morning. ‘You have to come and see this. All of you.’

Outside, surrounding the cottage in a nearly perfect circle there is a ring of dead animals and birds, torn out of shape, ragged and distended, shattered; many are beyond even the most rudimentary of identifications.

We do not even try to formulate explanations.

We are stranded on an island in a blood-thirsty sea, our high-water mark limning the outline of some indiscriminate biological pogrom. The air reeks of a desperate foreshadowing.

Day 11