The Fog - James Herbert [96]
And then the river was gone and the fog was brushing against the large plate-glass window in front of him.
Dawn. McLellan, Holman’s colleague at the Ministry of the Environment, stared from his bedroom window out at the fog. His eyes were heavy from unshed tears. He knew it was the fog, its yellowish tinge told him that. And he had been expecting it; his faith in his own government in times of crisis had never been great and he had expected them to bungle this.
He was much more aware of the danger than most of the general public for he had been closer to the strange occurrences through Holman and the dead Spiers, and many people still did not understand that it was not the fog that killed, but the madness it caused that drove people to their deaths.
He turned to look at his wife still snugly curled up beneath the bedclothes, asleep and vulnerable. As he thought of his children in the adjoining bedrooms, the tears of bitterness and frustration broke. How long would it take for the poison to work on their minds, to make them insane? What would it do to him? Would he be the one to take the lives of his own family? He struck out at the air blindly. There must be a way to protect them.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, taking care not to wake his wife, he tried to calm himself. There had to be an answer! Could he tie them up, or lock them in their rooms? But what about himself? What would protect them from him? Could he make sure they were protected from themselves and then go out and hopefully lose himself in the fog? No, he couldn’t leave them; it would seem like desertion. He had to think fast; God knows how long it took for the poison to take effect. For Spiers it had taken a day, for Holman, it was almost immediate.
Then he had the answer! It wasn’t ideal, but it could give them a little time; time enough perhaps for the authorities to take some kind of action, time for them to start saving lives.
He went into his daughter’s room and took the small toy blackboard from its easel, together with some chalk, carefully closing the door as he left so as not to disturb her. He went downstairs and, sitting on the bottom step, he chalked a message in large capitals on the board. Opening the front door, he placed the message on the doorstep, praying that it would serve its purpose. Then he went back upstairs and into the bathroom, taking the bottle of sleeping pills from the top shelf of the cabinet, the pills his wife sometimes found necessary to calm her from the rigours of raising three lively children. He filled a glass full of water and returned to his daughter’s bedroom. He lifted her forward on the bed, ignoring her feeble, half-asleep protests, and forced her to take five of the pills. Kissing her forehead, he laid her down again and tucked her in, then repeated the same operation on the boys next door. Paul had been awkward, but at the promise of a staggering reward, he’d complied. The next part would be more difficult. He would have to wake his wife, Joan, and explain why he was doing this. Was it his imagination, or could he really feel the beginnings of a headache?
Joan wept and at first refused to take the pills, but after much persuasion and then pleading, she agreed. For himself, he took eight, not knowing what the fatal dose would be, sure that the amount he had given to his family and himself was not too dangerous. Besides, under the circumstances, the risk had to be taken.
He climbed back into the warm bed and drew his weeping wife to him. They lay there, waiting for sleep to come.
Irma Bidmead always rose early. At seventy-three, her days were too short to be wasted on slumber. And her cats would be hungry.
She had thirteen cats, all of them strays that she had adopted. Or perhaps they’d adopted her. She would often roam the streets late at night with a bagful of morsels and scraps for the cats she found in the back streets of Kennington. The