Christopher Fowler - Personal Demons

As Sabin was the only man in the kingdom who had learned to master time, he assumed the responsibility of helping to bury the Sultan and attend his mourning rituals. Even the Grand Vizier (once he could be found and woken) agreed that this was appropriate and seemly.

The clocks were never wound again. The once-great empire of Omar Mehmet Shay-Tarrazin never emerged from its reverie. Sabin Darr was finally granted the freedom of the kingdom. He resolved to return to his village, and requested the slave-girl Safieh as a reward for his unstinting loyalty to the Sultan. The Grand Vizier was happy to grant him this, and to seal good fortune on the couple's union, presented them with a golden clock.

The hands of the clock did not move. Its interior mechanism had been removed, and the case had been filled with diamonds and sapphires.

For Sabin Darr, who had lost his family and his fingers, but not his sense of time, the world started to revolve once more.

He had been gingerly attempting to unfold a copy of the Sunday Times , but the newspaper snapped apart in his hands and shattered into dozens of pieces. Kallie swore angrily as he shovelled the shards into a pile with his boot; some of the broken edges were razor-sharp. There was nothing else to read in the apartment except his father's books, but there was no way of getting them off the shelves without a blowtorch, which he figured would somewhat defeat the object. Someone had given him some old magazines, but these were now stuck fast to the kitchen table, their covers rippled together in a lurid mosaic.

Kallie wondered how much longer Bennett would be. He had gone to the shops three days ago – or was it four? Perhaps he'd run into friends and gone to stay with them. Well, good riddance. Bennett had been camping out on the sofa for over two months now. Not bad for a guy who was 'just passing through the neighbourhood'. He had supposedly called in to see how his old schoolfriend was faring, but in the last eight weeks all he had done was empty the larder and try to repair the refrigerator. The refrigerator! Why in the name of everything perverse would he want to do that? The only reason Kallie hadn't thrown it out into the hall was because it would not fit through the kitchen door, which his father had replaced after drunkenly burning the old one two years ago.

He walked over to the window and rubbed away a patch of ice with the back of his glove. Across the street was the bus depot where no buses ever ran. Not too many people passed by, either. Most had learned their lesson the hard way, leaving the comparative warmth of their homes only to become disoriented in the blizzards and stumble into snowdrifts. It didn't take long for a body to cool down in these temperatures. His father had been fond of describing a time when you could see the curving green meadow of Primrose Hill from the bedroom windows. All Kallie had ever seen was a perpetual ice-haze hanging in the air, obscuring a sun that at its best was as watery as an uncooked egg.

There seemed little point in trying to lead a normal life now. Everything conspired against it. The solution, his eternally optimistic father had always told him, was to stay busy. Edward had stayed busy right until the end, refusing to acknowledge the fact that he was slowing down, moving with ever-increasing decrepitude, like a clockwork toy at the end of its winding. Finally he had overestimated his stamina on a trip to town and had failed to make it back to safety before a storm of truly biblical proportions had set in. The blizzard lasted for over three months. When it subsided, the landscape had changed its proportions entirely, and his father had presumably become part of the great permafrost ridge that separated North London from the city centre.

Kallie realised with a shock that he was cold. Cold. Normally the word held little meaning. It was a permanent state of being, an endless dull ache in his bones, a spiteful stinging in his nerve ends, a dead sensation that dragged at his limbs, numbing his extremities, slowing his brain and thickening his blood. He forced himself to think. It was his only defence against the pervasive cold. Physical exercise brought only a temporary respite, sweat turning to icewater. He looked about the barren grey room, as uninviting as a Soviet state flat, and forced himself to think.

The only problem with Bennett not coming back was that Bennett had taken his wallet, ostensibly to buy food. The reason for deciding to trust a man who had never shown an ounce of reliability was obscure to him now. He looked over at the telephone, willing it to ring. It wouldn't, of course, even if Bennett had bothered to note the number. The mechanism was encrusted in ice, as indeed was the entire exchange, although he had heard a rumour that certain members of parliament could still operate some kind of closed circuit telecommunication system – presumably for use in emergencies.

Well, what was it now if not an emergency? The entire apartment, the entire apartment complex, the entire city, the entire country was frozen solid, and had been for twenty-two years, and with each passing year it grew a little colder, a little more still and silent, as the national heartbeat slowed to a weak and distanced blip.

Kallie was twenty-four years old, but held no memory of those fabulous sun-soaked times before the great freeze. Like a man blind from birth, he had not even been granted the pleasure of memories. Bennett was a year or so older, and swore he could recall laying in long grass with the sun in his eyes, so light and bright it hurt to look into the sky. But almost everything that came out of his mouth was a lie. He said he had seen shops open in Oxford Street. He said he knew people who could take them South, far beyond the reach of the ice. He said if they waited inside long enough the government would find a way to make it warmer. All lies. But he was right about one thing; they could not survive without food. That was why Kallie let him go. They had been living on beans and tinned luncheon meat, which was edible if you made a couple of holes in the lid of the can and gently heated it over the stove. But ten days ago the last gas ring had ceased to work, even though the council had promised to keep the pipes clear. There was no news coming in at all now that Mr Jakobowski had stopped calling by. Perhaps it was over; the last warm body had chilled to a blue cadaver and the city was finally a postcard snowscape.

And perhaps Bennett had found a pub open somewhere and was spending his money with a bunch of his drunken mates. Kallie knew there was nothing for it but to find out for himself and go outside. He would certainly die if he stayed here. His last source of heat – the gas ring – had packed in. The electricity still worked intermittently, but there were no electric radiators to be had, not unless you were rich enough to buy one on the black market. There was nothing left to eat except boxes of dry cereal, and he hadn't any milk to put on them. In the last few days, the temperature in the apartment had plunged, although he imagined it was still a long way above the subzeros in the street below. It hadn't helped that he had thrown his typewriter through the window in a fit of temper two days ago. The keys had jammed, and he lacked the patience – and the required agility of his numbed fingers – to repair it. What alarmed him more was the fact that he no longer really cared what happened to him. It would be easy to escape this bitter place; he just had to open all the windows, remove his greatcoat and lay down on the bed for a few minutes. Perhaps that was his only choice. But not just yet. Not before he visited the outside world one last time.

He added an itchy red woollen sweater to the other layers of his clothing, then wound a scarf around his chest. Over this he struggled into his greatcoat, dug out leather gloves with split seams, tucked his jeans into the tops of his battered Caterpillar boots.