Empty World by John Christopher Page B

the curtains were drawn and it was in shadow. He saw a bed made up, the whiteness of sheets . . . then the darker vertical shadow that hung in the centre of the room. The rope was secured to an old-fashioned brass light fitting; a chair was overturned on the carpet.
    He just managed to reach the bathroom before being sick.

8
    A FTERWARDS NEIL RETAINED NO RECOLLECTION of the drive back to Princes Gate, and only a blurred impression of the evening that followed. He remembered lethargy and chill and a headache. He went early to bed, wondering if he were getting a cold.
    In the morning, though his thoughts were clearer, the headache and the weariness—a leaden feeling dragging down mind and body—were still present. He had not bothered to stock up with medicines—he had been in good health so far and there was a chemist’s shop within easy reach. His father had been agreat believer in massive doses of Vitamin C for aborting head-colds. He had just about made up his mind to get up and go out to get some when the thought struck him: whatever was wrong was not the common cold, or any other disease harboured by man. The whole brave company—not just the cold, but measles, chicken pox, poliomyelitis, glandular fever and the rest—had found oblivion along with the creature who for millenia had been their host and victim.
    He stayed in bed all that day and most of the next. It had not been an illness at all, he realized later, but shock: arising not only from the sight of the hanging body, the head slumped to one side, but from the shattering of hopes. Along with that went a bitter awareness of the narrowness of the margin by which the hopes had failed. Hours—certainly no more than twenty-four. A watch had been ticking on the dangling wrist when he touched the cold flesh. If he had found the balloon a day sooner—if he had set out sooner from Princes Gate. . . .
    Despair and self-recrimination ran their course and were superseded by another emotion: curiosity. In his mind there was the image of death, a horror that could still shock for all that he had seen sincethe Plague came. He had a desperate need for something more than that. This had been a boy like himself, who had survived as he had, and tried to go on living in the deserted world. He felt he must know more about him, be able to think of him as something other than a dangling corpse.
    The notion of going back there was unthinkable, but in the moment of revulsion at the thought he remembered something. Before he fled the house he had picked up the diary. It must still be in the pocket of his anorak.
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    Neil read it that evening, by candlelight.
    The style of writing was clear, simple and neat like the sketches, and the thoughts expressed had a similar clarity. He had been in the middle of reading Daniel Defoe’s “Journal of the Plague Years” when the new Plague struck; and that had decided him to keep a journal.
    He had been at a boarding school in the west country which had been one of the earliest to close down and send its pupils home. And home, Neil realized with surprise, had been the place where he had found him. His father had been something to dowith shipping, and apart from his parents he had an elder brother at University and a sister who was a photographic model.
    It appeared to have been a warm, close family. When disaster struck, they stayed together. They too had rejected the mass burials. His mother had died first, and they had buried her in the garden. The others had gone in their turn: he had buried his brother last. It was set down calmly, with no show of emotion.
    Yet the sense of gradual but inexorable destruction was chilling. Neil compared it with his own case—the sharp numbing impact of total disaster. He saw how much less bearable the other might be; and for the first time realized how what had happened that rainy Saturday afternoon had been a shield against