Dennis Wheatley - Sixty Days to Live

At three o'clock they were passing through Monken Hadley, where the buildings became more numerous, and half an hour later, in the middle of Barnet, they came to a place where the road disappeared, being completely blocked. At first they wondered what the snow-covered eminence in their path might be but as they mounted it the uneven surface beneath the snow soon showed them that they were walking on heaped-up bricks. A whole block of shops and flats had collapsed and been swept by the flood right into the middle of the highway. Here and there things projected from it; the top of a lamp-post, a broken wireless mast with a tangled aerial still attached and a stout pole, from the top of which dangled a cord with some snow-whitened lumps which proved on investigation to be frozen articles of clothing still pegged on to a washing line.

The light of the short, wintry afternoon was fading so when they had passed over the great mound they set about looking for a suitable place in which to pass the night. Now that twilight was falling the snow made it difficult to pick out from a distance the houses that were still standing, as only an occasional slab of wall or tree trunk from which the snow had fallen relieved the blank whiteness of the landscape.

After a little they came to a flat-roofed building on a corner where two roads crossed. Its door stood wide open and, on going in, they found it to be a road-house. Great heaps of snow had drifted in through the open doorway and half filled the lounge, partially covering many of the brightly painted tables and chairs which had been thrown into heaps by the flood.

Forcing open a door at one side of the lounge they found it led to an office. The hideously swollen figure of a drowned man, now frozen stiff, was set fast in three inches of ice through which they could still see the carpet. They shut the door quickly and tried another on the far side of the lounge.

It opened into a bar where most of the bottles had been swept from the shelves by the inrush of the waters, their broken fragments frozen into the glassy surface of the floor making it as dangerous to walk on as the top of a park wall. Red-topped stools were scattered about in confusion and the till on the counter stood open.

Picking their way carefully through the broken glass they looked at the labels of the unbroken bottles, selected one of Cherry Brandy which was almost full, and had a couple of rounds of extremely welcome drinks. The liqueur warmed them up and they set about exploring the small hotel with renewed vigour.

It was getting dark now but they found some candles in the kitchen and, when several of them were lit, the place looked like some weird, fairy cavern as the light glinted on the icicles, the frozen floor and the snow which had drifted in through the windows, turning them to rainbow hues. There was a fair supply of food, all of which had gone bad before it had been frozen; but in a cupboard they found some tins of soup, sardines, vegetables and fruit as well as some bottles of coffee essence. Delighted with their find, which ensured them of several future meals, they hurried upstairs.

Each room had to be broken into as the doors had first swollen and then been frozen. In one room they came upon three more corpses; one, that of a woman, having been left by the receding waters dangling grotesquely from the top of a wardrobe. The sight of the poor drowned bodies made them feel slightly sick so they quickly left them and busied themselves choosing other rooms in which to sleep.

They were tired now after their long day and very cold. All of them were longing for a quick evening meal to warm them up and the joy of crawling between the sheets of comfortable beds immediately afterwards to sink into a long deep sleep.

But suddenly they realised that they were faced with a horrid problem. As with the sofa upon which Lavina had sat down in the house where they had had their midday meal, all the beds and bedding were frozen solid. How could they possibly unfreeze and dry them again so that they could be used that night?

Life Must Go On

For a few moments they dejectedly discussed various methods of setting to work. The sheets and blankets could not be pulled off the beds as they were frozen to the mattresses and to have endeavoured to hack them off would have torn them in pieces. The only solution seemed to be to thaw out each set of bedding at one operation and as no ordinary fire would give out enough heat for such a proceeding Gervaise said that they must light a super bonfire.

Through the broken window of the back bedroom in which they were talking they could see a smaller building only about a hundred yards away across the garden and, going downstairs, they walked over to it. The place was a fair-sized cottage, evidently much older than the inn as it was half-timbered and had no electric fittings.

'Our luck is in,' said Gervaise. 'This place will suit us admirably, and as the people here used oil lamps there must be a drum of paraffin about somewhere.'

In the kitchen they found one two-thirds full, so returning with it to the living-room they smashed up the lighter furniture, piled the heavier pieces on top of it, sprinkled the whole heap with the paraffin and, touching the oil off with a match, ran out of the cottage.

For some moments Gervaise was anxious as to whether his plan would work. He feared that the snow in the room and the ice that saturated the furnishings would prevent the fire getting a good hold as they thawed and sputtered down into it. But, with an angry hissing, the flames licked at the beams which spanned the ceiling and the fire was soon eating through the floor boards of the room above.

The next job was to get the beds down into the garden. When one of them had been hacked free of the frozen floor it was found that owing to the weight of the ice with which it was laden it was much too heavy to carry downstairs, so the men of the party heaved it out of a window and others after it; then laboriously dragged them through the snow over to the cottage, from the sitting-room window of which big flames were now spurting.

It was a tiring, muscle-wrenching business and darkness had long fallen by the time they had got six beds set up on end in a row before the glowing pile of red-hot logs and bricks; but the fire also served to revitalise them with its heat after their long day in this new and terrible frozen world.

Margery, meanwhile, had thawed out some of the tinned food and boiled some snow on a small fire that Lavina had made in a brick surround on the concrete floor of a garage which adjoined the kitchen of the inn. They fed round the fire and having washed the meal down with some drinks from the bar they re-crossed the garden to see whether their beds had thawed.

The sheets and blankets had fallen away from the sodden mattresses and, now wringing with water, were lying in heaps on the wet ground. Having wrung them out as well as they could they hung them up on a wire fence which the melting snow had disclosed at the side of the cottage. While the men turned the mattresses and prevented the clothes from scorching, the girls made a tour of the hotel bedrooms and collected such items as they could find which might prove useful and brought these too down to be thawed at the roaring blaze.

It was past one in the morning before the mattresses were thoroughly dry and fit to sleep on without fear of chills or rheumatism. Carrying them back to the inn they laid them out on the billiards-tables of a big games-room next to the lounge Still in their clothes they drew the blankets over them and fell asleep, utterly exhausted.

When they were awakened by the pale morning light it was snowing again with that same gentle persistence which had marked the previous five-day blizzard, and Gervaise said he thought it would be inadvisable to attempt to go farther until the fall had ceased. After breakfast, as it seemed that the snow might keep them there for another night, they set to work trying to make the place as habitable as possible.