The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, volume 15

Christopher Fowler Seven Feet

Cleethorpes was a crap mouser. She would hide underneath the sink if a rodent, a squirrel or a neighbour’s cat even came near the open back door. Clearly, sleeping sixteen hours a day drained her reserves of nervous energy, and she was forced to play dead if her territory was threatened. She was good at a couple of things: batting moths about until they expired with their wings in dusty tatters, and staring at a spot on the wall three feet above the top of Edward’s head. What could cats see, he wondered, that humans couldn’t?

Cleethorpes was his only companion now that Sam was dead and Gill had gone. He’d bought her because everyone else had bought one. That was the month the price of cats skyrocketed. Hell, every cats’ home in the country sold out in days, and pretty soon the mangiest strays were changing hands for incredible prices. It was the weirdest form of panic-buying that Edward had ever seen.

He’d lived in Camden Town for years, and had been thinking of getting out even before he met Gill; the area was being compared to Moscow and Johannesburg after eight murders on its streets in as many weeks earned the area a new nickname: “Murder Mile”. There were 700 police operating in the borough, which badly needed over a thousand. It was strange, then, to think that the real threat to their lives eventually came not from muggers, but from fast-food outlets.

Edward lived in a flat in Eversholt Street, one of the most peculiar roads in the neighbourhood. In one stretch of a few hundred yards there was a Roman Catholic church, a sports centre, a legendary rock pub, council flats, a bingo hall, a juvenile detention centre, an Italian cafe, a Victorian men’s hostel for transients and an audacious green-glass development of million-pound loft apartments. Edward was on the ground floor of the council block, a bad place to be as it turned out. The Regent’s Canal ran nearby, and most of the road’s drains emptied into it. The council eventually riveted steel grilles over the pipe covers, but by then it was too late.

Edward glanced over at Gill’s photograph, pinned on the cork noticeboard beside the cooker. Once her eyes had been the colour of cyanothus blossom, her hair saturated in sunlight, but now the picture appeared to be fading, as if it was determined to remove her from the world. He missed Gill more than he missed Sam, because nothing he could do would ever bring Sam back, but Gill was still around, living in Hackney with her two brothers. He knew he was unlikely ever to see her again. He missed her to the point where he would say her name aloud at odd moments for no reason at all. In those last days after Sam’s death, she had grown so thin and pale that it seemed she was being erased from her surroundings. He watched helplessly as her bones appeared beneath her flesh, her clothes began hanging loosely on her thin arms. Gill’s jaw-length blonde hair draped forward over her face as she endlessly scoured and bleached the kitchen counters. She stopped voicing her thoughts, becoming barely more visible than the water stains on the walls behind her. She would hush him with a raised finger, straining to listen for the scurrying scratch of claws in the walls, under the cupboards, across the rafters.

Rats. Some people’s worst nightmare, but the thought of them no longer troubled him. What had happened to their family had happened to people all over the city. “Rats!” thought Edward as he welded the back door shut, “they fought the dogs and, killed the cats, and bit the babies in the cradles...” He couldn’t remember the rest of Robert Browning’s poem. It hadn’t been quite like that, because Camden Town was hardly Hamelin, but London could have done with a pied piper. Instead, all they’d got was a distracted mayor and his dithering officials, hopelessly failing to cope with a crisis.

He pulled the goggles to the top of his head and examined his handiwork. The steel plates only ran across to the middle of the door, but were better than nothing. Now he could sort out the chewed gap underneath. It wasn’t more than two inches deep, but a cat-sized rat was capable of folding its ribs flat enough to slide through with ease. He remembered watching thousands of them one evening as they rippled in a brown tapestry through the back gardens. There had been nights when he’d sat in the darkened lounge with his feet lifted off the floor and a cricket bat across his knees, listening to the scampering conspiracy passing over the roofs, feet pattering in the kitchen, under the beds, under his chair. He’d watched as one plump brown rat with eyes like drops of black resin had fidgeted its way between books on a shelf, daring him into a display of pitifully slow reactions.

The best solution would be to rivet a steel bar across the space under the door, but the only one he had left was too short. He thought about risking a trip to the shops, but most of the ones in the high street had closed for good, and all the hardware stores had sold out of stock weeks ago. It was hard to imagine how much a city of 8 million people could change in just four months. So many had left. The Tubes were a no-go zone, of course, and it was dangerous to move around in the open at night. The rats were no longer frightened by people.

He was still deciding what to do when his mobile buzzed its way across the work counter.

“Is that Edward?” asked a cultured, unfamiliar voice.

“Yeah, who’s that?”

“I don’t suppose you’ll remember me. We only met once, at a party. I’m Damon, Gillian’s brother.” The line fell warily silent. Damon, sanctimonious religious nut, Gill’s older brother, what was the name of the other one? Matthew. Fuck. Fuck.

“Are you still there?”

“Yeah, sorry, you caught me a bit by surprise.”

“I guess it’s a bit of a bolt from the blue. Are you still living in Camden?”

“One of the last to leave the epicentre. The streets are pretty quiet around here now.”

“I saw it on the news, didn’t recognize the place. Not that I ever really knew it to begin with. Our family’s from Hampshire, but I expect you remember that.”

Stop being so damned chatty and tell me what the hell you want, thought Edward. His next thought hit hard: Gill’s condition has deteriorated, she’s made him call me.

“It’s about Gillian, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid — she’s been a lot worse lately. We’ve had a tough time looking after her. She had the problem, you know, with dirt and germs-”

Spermophobia, thought Edward, Mysophobia. A lot of people had developed such phobias since the rats came.

“Now there are these other things, she’s become terrified of disease.”

Nephophobia, Pathophobia. Once arcane medical terms, now almost everyday parlance. They were closely connected, not so surprising when you remembered what she’d been through.

“It’s been making life very difficult for us.”

“I can imagine.” Everything had to be cleaned over and over again. Floors scrubbed, handles and counters sprayed with disinfectant, the air kept refrigerated. All her foodstuffs had to be washed and vacuum-sealed in plastic before she would consider eating them. Edward had watched the roots of fear digging deeper within her day by day, until she could barely function and he could no longer cope.

“She’s lost so much weight. She’s become frightened of the bacteria in her own body. She was living on the top floor of the house, refused to take any visitors except us, and now she’s gone missing.”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t seem possible, but it’s true. We thought you should know.”

“Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

“She couldn’t have gone anywhere, that’s the incredible part of it. We very badly need your help. Can you come over tonight?” This is a turnaround, Edward thought. Her family spent a year trying to get me to clear off, and now they need me.

“I suppose I can come. Both of you are still okay?”

“We’re fine. We take a lot of precautions.”

“Has the family been vaccinated?”

“No, Matthew and our father feel that The Lord protects us. Do you remember the address?”

“Of course. I can be there in around an hour.”

He was surprised they had found the nerve to call at all. The brothers had him pegged as a man of science, a member of the tribe that had helped to bring about the present crisis. People like him had warmed the planet and genetically modified its harvests, bringing abundance and pestilence. Their religion sought to exclude, and their faith was vindictive. Men who sought to accuse were men to be avoided. But he owed it to Gill to go to them.

He used the short steel bar to block the gap in the door, and covered the shortfall by welding a biscuit-tin lid over it. Not an ideal solution, but one that would have to do for now. The sun would soon be setting. The red neon sign above the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet opposite had flickered on. It was the only part of the store that was still intact. Rioters had smashed up most of the junk-food joints in the area, looking for someone to blame.

Pest-controllers had put the massive rise in the number of rats down to three causes: the wetter, warmer winters caused flooding that lengthened the rats’ breeding periods and drove them above ground. Councils had reduced their spending on street cleaning. Most disastrously of all, takeaway litter left the street-bins overflowing with chicken bones and burger buns. The rat population rose by thirty per cent in a single year. They thrived in London ’s Victorian drainage system, in the sewers and canal outlets, in the Tube lines and railway cuttings. Beneath the city was a maze of interconnected pipework with openings into almost every street. They moved into the gardens and then the houses, colonizing and spreading as each property became vacant.

One much-cited statistic suggested that a single pair of rats could spawn a maximum number of nearly a hundred billion rats in just five years. It was a sign of the burgeoning rodent population that they began to be spotted during the day; starvation drove them out into the light, and into densely populated areas. They no longer knew fear. Worse, they sensed that others were afraid of them.

Edward had always known about the dangers of disease. As a young biology student he had been required to study pathogenic microbes. London had not seen a case of plague in almost a century. The Black Death of the Middle Ages had wiped out a third of the European population. The bacterium Yersinia pestis had finally been eradicated by fire in London in 1666. Plague had returned to consume 10 million Indians early in the twentieth century, and had killed 200 as recently as 1994. Now it was back in a virulent new strain, and rampant. It had arrived via infected rat fleas, in a ship’s container from the East, or perhaps from a poorly fumigated cargo plane, no one was sure, and everyone was anxious to assign blame. Rats brought leptospirosis, hantavirus and rat-bite fever, and they were only the fatal diseases.

Edward drove through the empty streets of King’s Cross with the windows of the Peugeot tightly closed and the air-conditioning set to an icy temperature. Lying in the road outside McDonald’s, a bloated, blackened corpse had been partially covered by a cardboard standee for Caramel McFlurrys. The gesture, presumably intended to provide some privacy in death, had only created further indignity. It was the first time he’d seen a body on the street, and the sight shocked him. It was a sign that the services could no longer cope, or that people were starting not to care. Most of the infected crept away into private corners to die, even though there were no red crosses to keep them in their houses this time.

The plague bacillus had evolved in terms of lethality. It no longer swelled the lymph glands of the neck, armpits and groin. It went straight to the lungs and caused catastrophic internal haemorrhaging. Death came fast as the lungs filled with septicaemic pus and fluid. There was a preventative vaccine, but it proved useless once the outbreak began. Tetracycline and streptomycin, once seen as effective antibiotics against plague, also failed against the emerging drug-resistant strains. All you could do was burn and disinfect; the city air stank of both, but it was preferable to the smell of death. It had been a hot summer, and the still afternoons were filled with the stench of rotting flesh.

Edward had been vaccinated at the college. Gill had blamed him for failing to vaccinate their son in time. Sam had been four months old when he died. His cradle had been left near an open window. They could only assume that a rat had entered the room foraging for food, and had come close enough for its fleas to jump to fresh breeding grounds. The child’s pale skin had blackened with necrosis before the overworked doctors of University College Hospital could get around to seeing him. Gill quickly developed a phobic reaction to germs, and was collected by her brothers a few weeks after.

Edward dropped out of college. In theory it would have been a good time to stay, because biology students were being drafted in the race to find more powerful weapons against the disease, but he couldn’t bear to immerse himself in the subject, having so recently watched his child die in the very same building.

He wondered why he hadn’t fled to the countryside like so many others. It was safer there, but no one was entirely immune. He found it hard to consider leaving the city where he had been born, and was fascinated by this slow decanting of the population. An eerie calm had descended on even the most populous districts. There were no tourists; nobody wanted to fly into Britain. People had become terrified of human contact, and kept their outside journeys to a minimum. Mad-cow disease was a comparative picnic, he thought, with a grim chuckle.

The little car bounced across the end of Upper Street, heading toward Shoreditch. The shadows were long on the gold-sheened tarmac. A blizzard of newspapers rolled across the City Road, adding to the sense of desolation. Edward spun the wheel, watching for pedestrians. He had started to think of them as survivors. There were hardly any cars on the road, although he was surprised to pass a bus in service. At the junction of Old Street and Pitfield Street, a shifting amoeba-shape fluctuated around the doorway of a closed supermarket. The glossy black rats scattered in every direction as he drove past. You could never drive over them, however fast you went.

There were now more rats than humans, approximately three for every man, woman and child, and the odds kept growing in their favour. They grew bolder each day, and had become quite brazen about their battle for occupancy. It had been said that in a city as crowded as London you were never more than fifteen feet away from a rat. Scientists warned that when the distance between rodent and human lowered to just seven feet, conditions would be perfect for the return of the plague. The flea, Xenopsylla cheopis, sucked up diseased rat blood and transported it to humans with shocking efficiency.

A great black patch shimmered across the road like a boiling oil slick, splitting and vanishing between the buildings. Without realising it, he found himself gripping the sweat-slick wheel so tightly that his nails were digging into his palms.

Rattus rattus. No one knew where the black rat had originated, so their Latin name was suitably unrevealing. The brown ones — the English ones, Rattus norvegicus — lived in burrows and came from China. They grew to nearly a foot and a half, and ate anything at all. They could chew their way through brick and concrete; they had to keep chewing to stop their incisors from growing back into their skulls. The black ones were smaller, with larger ears, and lived off the ground in round nests. Edward had woken in the middle of the night two weeks ago and found a dozen of them in his kitchen, feeding from a waste bin. He had run at them with a broom, but they had simply skittered up the curtains and through a hole they had made in the ceiling to the drainpipes outside. The black ones were acrobats; they loved heights. Although they were less aggressive, they seemed to be outnumbering their brown cousins. At least, he saw more of them each day.

He fumigated the furniture and carpets for ticks and fleas, but still developed clusters of painful red welts on his ankles, his arms, his back. He was glad that Gill was no longer here, but missed her terribly. She had slipped away from him, her mind distracted by a future she could not imagine or tolerate.

Damon and Matthew lived with their father above offices in Hoxton, having bought the building at the height of the area’s property boom. These had once been the homes of well-to-do Edwardian families, but more than half a century of neglect had followed, until the district had been rediscovered by newly wealthy artists. That bubble had burst too, and now the houses were in fast decline as thousands of rats scampered into the basements.

As Edward climbed the steps, spotlights clicked on. He could hear movement all around him. He looked up and saw the old man through a haze of white light. Gill’s father was silently watching him from an open upstairs window.

There was no bell. Edward slapped his hand against the front door glass and waited. Matthew answered the door. What was it about the over-religious that made them keep their hair so neat? Matthew’s blond fringe formed a perfect wave above his smooth scrubbed face. He smiled and shook Edward’s hand.

“I’m glad you could make it,” he said, as though he’d invited Edward to dinner. “We don’t get many visitors.” He led the way upstairs, then along a bare white hall into an undecorated space that served as their living quarters. There were no personal effects of any kind on display. A stripped-oak table and four chairs stood in the centre of the bright room. Damon rose to shake his hand. Edward had forgotten how alike the brothers were. They had the eyes of zealots, bright and black and dead. They spoke with great intensity, weighing their words, watching him as they spoke.

“Tell me what happened,” Edward instructed, seating himself. He didn’t want to be here any longer than was strictly necessary.

“Father can’t get around any more, so we moved him from his quarters at the top of the house and cleaned it out for Gillian. We thought if we couldn’t cure her we should at least make her feel secure, so we put her up there. But the black rats…”

“They’re good climbers.”

“That’s right. They came up the drainpipes and burrowed in through the attic, so we had to move her. The only place we could think where she’d be safe was within our congregation.” Ah yes, thought Edward, the Church of Latter-Day Nutters. I remember all too well. Gill had fallen out with her father over religion. He had raised his sons in a far-right Christian offshoot that came with more rules than the Highway Code. Quite how he had fetched up in this biblical backwater was a mystery, but Gill was having none of it. Her brothers had proven more susceptible, and when the plague rats moved in the two of them had adopted an insufferably smug attitude that drove the children further apart. Matthew was the father of three immaculately coiffed children whom Edward had christened “the Midwich Cuckoos”. Damon’s wife was the whitest woman Edward had ever met, someone who encouraged knitting as stress therapy at Christian coffee mornings. He didn’t like them, their politics or their religion, but was forced to admit that they had at least been helpful to his wife. He doubted their motives, however, suspecting that they were more concerned with restoring the family to a complete unit and turning Gill back into a surrogate mother.

“We took her to our church,” Matthew explained. “It was built in 1860. The walls are three feet thick. There are no electrical cables, no drainpipes, nothing the smallest rat could wriggle its way into. The vestry doors are wooden, and some of the stained-glass windows are shaky, but it’s always been a place of safety.”

Edward had to admit that it was a smart idea. Gill’s condition was untreatable without access to a psychiatrist and medication, and right now the hospitals were nightmarish no-go areas where rats went to feast on the helpless sick.

Matthew seated himself opposite. “Gillian settled into the church, and we hoped she was starting to find some comfort in the protection of the Lord. Then some members of our congregation started spending their nights there, and she began to worry that they were bringing in plague fleas, even though we fumigated them before entering. We couldn’t bear to see her suffer so we built her a special room, right there in the middle of the apse-”

“-We made her as comfortable as we could,” Damon interrupted. “Ten feet by twelve. Four walls, a ceiling, a floor, a lockable door and a ventilation grille constructed from strong fine mesh.” He looked as sheepish as a schoolboy describing a woodwork project. “Father directed the operation because he’d had some experience in carpentry. We moved her bed in there, and her books, and she was finally able to get some sleep. She even stopped taking the sleeping pills you used to give her.” The pills to which she had become addicted when we lived together, thought Edward bitterly. The habit I was blamed for creating.

“I don’t understand,” he said aloud. “What happened?”

“I think we’d better go over to the church,” said Matthew gently.

It wasn’t far from the house, smaller than he’d imagined, slim and plain, without buttresses or arches, very little tracery. The former Welsh presbytery was sandwiched between two taller glass buildings, commerce dominating religion, darkening the streets with the inevitability of London rain.

Outside its single door sat a barrel-chested black man who would have passed for a nightclub bouncer if it weren’t for the cricket pads strapped on his legs. He lumbered aside as Damon and Matthew approached. The small church was afire with the light of a thousand coloured candles looted from luxury stores. Many were shaped like popular cartoon characters: Batman, Pokemon and Daffy Duck burned irreverently along the altar and apse. The pews had been removed and stacked against a wall. In the centre of the aisle stood an oblong wooden box bolted into the stone floor and propped with planks, like the back of a film set. A small door was inset in a wall of the cube, and that was guarded by an elderly woman who sat reading in a high-backed armchair. In the nave, a dozen family friends were talking quietly on orange plastic chairs that surrounded a low oak table. They fell silent with suspicion as Edward passed them. Matthew withdrew a key from his jacket and unlocked the door of the box, pushing it open and clicking on a light.

“We rigged a bulb to a car battery because she wouldn’t sleep in the dark,” Damon explained, waving a manicured hand at the room, which was bare but for an unfurled white futon, an Indian rug and a stack of dog-eared religious books. The box smelled of fresh paint and incense.

“You built it of wood,” said Edward, thumping the thin wall with his fist. “That makes no sense, Damon. A rat would be through this in a minute.”

“What else could we do? It made her feel safer, and that was all that counted. We wanted to take away her pain. Can you imagine what it was like to see someone in your own family suffer so much? Our father worshipped her.”

Edward detected an undercurrent of resentment in Damon’s voice. He and Gill had chosen not to marry. In the eyes of her brothers, it was a sin that prevented Edward from ever being treated as a member of the family. “You’re not telling me she disappeared from inside?” he asked. “How could she have got out?”

“That’s what we thought you might be able to explain to us,” snapped Matthew. “Why do you think we asked you here?”

“I don’t understand. You locked her in each night?”

“We did it for her own good.”

“How could it be good to lock a frightened woman inside a room?”

“She’d been getting panic attacks — growing confused, running into the street. Her aunt Alice has been sitting outside every night since this thing began. Anything Gillian’s needed she’s always been given.”

“When did she go missing?”

“The night before last. We thought she’d come back.”

“You didn’t see her leave? Edward asked the old lady.

“No,” replied Alice, daring him to defy her. “I was here all night.”

“And she didn’t pass you. Are you sure you never left your chair?”

“Not once. And I didn’t fall asleep, either. I don’t sleep at night with those things crawling all over the roof.”

“Did you let anyone else into the room?”

“Of course not, Alice said indignantly. “Only family and regular worshippers are allowed into the church. We don’t want other people in here.” Of course not, thought Edward. What’s the point of organized religion if you can’t exclude unbelievers?

“And no one except Gillian used the room,” Damon added. “That was the point. That was why we asked you to come.”

Edward studied the two brothers. He could just about understand Damon, squeaky clean and neatly groomed in a blazer and a pressed white shirt that provided him with an aura of faith made visible, but Matthew seemed in a state of perpetual anger, a church warrior who had no patience with the unconverted. He remained a mystery.

“Why me?” Edward asked. “What made you call me?”

Momentarily stumped, the brothers looked at each other awkwardly. “Well — you slept with her.” Presumably they thought he must know her better for having done so.

“I knew her until our son died, but then — well, when someone changes that much, it becomes impossible to understand how they think any more.” Edward hoped they would appreciate his point of view. He wanted to make contact with them just once. “Let me take a look around. I’ll see what I can do.”

The brothers stepped back, cognisant of their ineffectiveness, their hands awkwardly at their sides. Behind them, the church door opened and the congregation slowly streamed in. The men and women who arranged themselves at the rear of the church looked grey and beaten. Faith was all they had left.

“I’m sorry, it’s time for our evening service to begin,” Damon explained.

“Do what you have to do.” Edward accepted the red plastic torch that Matthew was offering him. “I’ll call you if I find anything.”

A series of narrow alleys ran beside the church. If Gill had managed to slip past the old lady, she would have had to enter them. Edward looked up at the dimming blue strip of evening sky. Along the gutters sat fat nests constructed of branches and bin bags, the black plastic shredded into malleable strips. As he watched, one bulged and disgorged a family of coal-eyed rats. They clung to the drainpipes, staring into his torch beam before suddenly spiralling down at him. He moved hastily aside as they scurried over his shoes and down the corridor of dirt-encrusted brick.

The end of the alley opened out into a small litter-strewn square. He hardly knew where to begin his search. If the family had failed to find her, how would he succeed? On the steps of a boarded-up block of flats sat an elderly man swathed in a dirty green sleeping bag. The man stared wildly at him, as if he had just awoken from a nightmare.

“All right?” asked Edward, nodding curtly. The old man beckoned him. Edward tried to stay beyond range of his pungent stale aroma, but was summoned nearer. “What is it?” he asked, wondering how anyone dared to sleep rough in the city now. The old man pulled back the top of his sleeping bag as if shyly revealing a treasure, and allowed him to look in on the hundred or so hairless baby rats that wriggled over his bare stomach like maggots, pink and blind.

Perhaps that was the only way you could survive the streets now, thought Edward, riven with disgust: you had to take their side. He wondered if, as a host for their offspring, the old man had been made an honorary member of their species, and was therefore allowed to continue unharmed. Although perhaps the truth was less fanciful: rats sensed the safety of their surroundings through the movement of their own bodies. Their spatial perception was highly attuned to the width of drains, the cracks in walls, the fearful humans who moved away in great haste. Gill might have been panicked into flight, but she was weak and would not have been able to run for long. She must have stopped somewhere to regain her breath. But where?

He searched the dark square. The wind had risen to disturb the tops of the plane trees, replacing the city’s ever-present bass-line of traffic with natural susurration. It was the only sound he could now hear. Lights shone above a corner shop. Slumped on the windowsill, two Indian children stared down into the square, their eyes half-closed by rat bites.

Edward returned to the church, slipping in behind the ragged congregation, and watched Matthew in the dimly illuminated pulpit.

“For this is not the end but the beginning,” said Matthew, clearly preaching a worn-in sermon of fire and redemption. “Those whom the Lord has chosen to keep in good health will be free to remake the land in His way.” It was the kind of lecture to which Edward had been subjected as a child, unfocused in its promises, peppered with pompous rhetoric, vaguely threatening. “Each and every one of us must make a sacrifice, without which there can be no admittance to the Kingdom of Heaven, and he who has not surrendered his heart to Our Lady will be left outside, denied the power of reformation.”

It seemed to Edward that congregations always required the imposition of rules for their salvation, and desperate times had forced them to assume that these zealous brothers would be capable of setting them. He moved quietly to the unguarded door of the wooden box and stepped inside, shutting himself in.

The sense of claustrophobia was immediate. A locked room, guarded from outside. Where the hell had she gone? He sat on the futon, idly kicking at the rug, and listened to the muffled litany of the congregation. A draught was coming into the room, but not through the door. He lowered his hand down into darkness, and felt chill air prickle his fingers. At first he failed to see the corner of the hatch, but as he focused the beam of the torch more tightly he realized what he was looking at: a section of flooring, about three feet by two, that had been sawn into the wooden deck beside the bed. The flooring was plywood, easy to lift. The hatch covered the spiral stairwell to the crypt. A black-painted Victorian iron banister curved away beneath his feet. Outside, Matthew was leading a catechism that sounded more like a rallying call.

Edward dipped the light and stepped onto the fretwork wedges. Clearly Gill had been kept in the wooden room against her will, but how had she discovered the staircase to the chamber beneath her prison? Perhaps its existence was common knowledge, but it had not occurred to anyone that she might be able to gain access to it. The temperature of the air was dropping fast now; could this have been its appeal, the thought that germs would not be able to survive in such a chill environment?

He reached the bottom of the steps. His torch beam reflected a fracturing moon of light; the flagstones were hand-deep in icy water. A series of low stone arches led through the tunnelled crypt ahead of him. He waded forward and found himself beneath the ribbed vault of the main chamber. The splash of water boomed in the silent crypt.

With freezing legs and visible breath, Edward stood motionless, waiting for the ripples to subside. Something was wrong. Gillian might have lost her reason, but she would surely not have ventured down here alone. She knew that rats were good swimmers. It didn’t make sense. Something was wrong.

Above his head in the church, the steeple bell began to ring, cracked and flat. The change in the congregation was extraordinary. They dropped to their knees unmindful of injury, staring toward the tattered crimson reredos that shielded the choir stall. Damon and Matthew had reappeared in sharp white surplices, pushing back the choir screen as their flock began to murmur in anticipation. The dais they revealed had been swathed in shining gold brocade, discovered in bolts at a Brick Lane saree shop. Atop stood the enshrined figure, a mockery of Catholicism, its naked flesh dulled down with talcum powder until it resembled worn alabaster, its legs overgrown with plastic vines.

The wheels of the wooden dais creaked as Damon and Matthew pushed the wobbling tableau toward the altar. The voices of the crowd rose in adulation. The figure on the dais was transfixed in hysterical ecstasy, posed against a painted tree with her knees together and her palms turned out, a single rose stem lying across the right hand, a crown of dead roses placed far back on her shaved head, her eyes rolled to a glorious invisible heaven. Gillian no longer heard the desperate exultation of her worshippers; she existed in a higher place, a vessel for her brothers’ piety, floating far above the filthy, blighted Earth, in a holy place of such grace and purity that nothing dirty or harmful would ever touch her again.

Edward looked up. Somewhere above him the bell was still ringing, the single dull note repeated over and over. He cocked his head at the ribs of the vault and listened. First the trees, then the church bell, and now this, as though the forgotten order of nature was reasserting itself. He heard it again, the sound he had come to know and dread, growing steadily all around him. Raising the torch, he saw them scurrying over the fine green nylon webbing that had been stretched across the vault ceiling, thousands of them, far more than he had ever seen in one place before: black rats, quite small, their bodies shifting transversely, almost comically, as they weighed and judged distances.

They had been summoned to dinner.

They gathered in the roof of the main chamber, directly beneath the ringing bell, until they were piling on top of each other, some slipping and swinging by a single pink paw, and then they fell, twisting expertly so that they landed on Edward and not in the water, their needle claws digging into the flesh of his shoulders to gain purchase, to hang on at all costs. Edward hunched himself instinctively, but this exposed a broader area for the rats to drop onto, and now they were releasing themselves from the mesh and falling in ever greater numbers, more and more, until the sheer weight of their solid, sleek bodies pushed him down into the filthy water. This was their cue to attack, their indication that the prey was defeatable, and they bit down hard, pushing their heads between each other to bury thin yellow teeth into his soft skin. He felt himself bleeding from a hundred different places at once, the wriggling mass of rat bodies first warm, then hot, now searing on his back until they made their way through his hair, heading for the tender prize of his eyes.

Edward was determined not to scream, not to open his mouth and admit their poisonous furred bodies. He did the only thing he could, and pushed his head deep under the water, drawing great draughts into his throat and down into his lungs, defeating them in the only way left to him, cheating them of live prey.

Gill, I love you, was his final prayer. / only ever loved you, and wherever you are I hope you are happy. Death etched the thought into his bones and preserved it for ever.

In the little East End church, a mood of satiated harmony fell upon the congregation, and Matthew smiled at Damon as they covered the tableau once more, content that their revered sister was at peace. For now the enemy was assuaged, the commitment had been made, the congregation appeased.

Science had held sway for long enough. Now it was time for the harsh old gods to smile down once more.