The first question everyone asked was why the horses hadn't run. The standing stones held them like a closed fist, like the folding in of a carnivorous flower. It wasn’t just that the stones had toppled; they'd constricted, exerting enough force to embed the luckless animals inches into the earth.

Martin was already on the scene when the other officers arrived. His gaze lingered now on the tapers of bone, impossibly delicate by contrast, curving up from the nearest carcass.

“There’s no blood,” noted Ware beside him, breath coming in clouds.

It was a spring dawn, stingingly cold. Ware shivered. Martin had gotten used to it.

“Better go check up at the Seven Widows, see if there’s anything similar,” he said, and Ware nodded as she broke away from the observers, cinching her jacket tighter with one hand and reaching for her radio with the other.

“I need you to get over there yourself,” he called after her.

#

Martin waited until the birds began to rise, then turned and trudged back alone over the moors. A cloying smell of sodden ash followed. The firefighters had put down the ritual fire left burning into the early hours, charring the clouds the colour of old blood and raising the alarm, but it hardly mattered now.

He made for the village. Above him, tracer lines of crows scattered in all directions. Their unease was deep and rasping.

The first tremors struck before he reached the outlying farms. He knew it’d be quick. Ware had been a good officer.

Starlings lifted from high boughs and wheeled through the sky in ugly overlapping waveforms, mistimed murmurations colliding with force, the fall of broken bodies shocking; at first just a handful but, as Martin made headway, in increasing numbers.

He looked out over surfaces becoming unreliable, fields waylaid by sinkholes like shallow inhalations. Away to his left, strips of dry stone wall began to curl like breakers down the hill, liquid and strange. From a farmyard rose yells and the skirling of dogs, and he suspected old man Cottle had reacted a little too slowly.

Martin entered the village. The leafy lanes gave cover from a gentle spring rain and a sky choked with disarray.

Smoke was billowing across graves and gardens from where the roof of the church had dropped like an inverted bear trap. People in their Sunday best hauled at arms outflung from the rubble. He looked into their eyes, saw them glassy with shock. Distant ambulances burred.

Martin smiled, and didn’t stop.

The day was just beginning.

I was 10 years old the day the grey clouds came. It was rare that the endless blue desert sky saw that much moisture. Typically, the sun shone over 300 days a year; but that was a long time ago.

“Look,” my mother pointed, “The clouds are kissing the mountains.”

My mother thought it was sweet, so near Valentine’s Day.

But the clouds never went away, and it wasn’t moisture that filled them. It was something else.

At first, the clouds were billowy and fluffy, like a child’s stuffed toy lamb, a flock making its way down the mountainside to play. We never suspected what it really was or what we would become. Who knew the clouds were its disguise. A wolf in sheep’s clothing. A predator that had caught the scent of its prey.

I can’t remember what the peaks of the mountains look like now. Too many years have passed.

The grey clouds moved in, carried on the wind. We thought the wind would blow the clouds away, but alas, the weather had other plans. Into the valley, the clouds came only to transform. Near the ground, they became an evil grey mist that slithered and gathered and held until everything blurred, lost its shape and then disappeared from view. Everything was still there but the fog had swallowed it. A grey blanket smothered us all.

One day, the sun ceased to shine. We were blind. Unable to see, life stopped; no one could drive. Planes could not fly. Ships could not steer.

Our homes were the only safe place, for a while. Then the grey fog stole in—under  doors, through cracks, clinging to us like a disease. Finally, one morning we woke from a long night, unable to see our hands in front of our faces.

No one knows why the sky fell. Perhaps it was because of our inability to care for our aging Mother Earth or resolve our petty human squabbles, which quickly withered in comparison to the power of the clouds.

Nevertheless, for now, the Grey rules us all. 

DW Milton is a pen name. The author has a day job but would rather be writing speculative fiction. ​