by Mark Morris
* * *
In the café, when the lights had blinked out, Lena was momentarily sure she had gone blind. Even if the wiring had failed there should have been enough illumination coming in from the brightly lit street. But instead she was plunged into the murk ringing with the tinkle of broken glass and Bill’s cursing.
“What the hell?”
So, it was not her eyes. Bill’s voice was mingling with a whole array of incomprehensible noises that filled the dark: a shuffle; liquid gulping; choking sputter.
“Bjorn?”
The floor under her feet shook as if somebody else had walked into the shop, somebody with a giant’s tread. Bill grasped her hand and pulled her to where he assumed the door was.
“We are getting out of here!”
A wave of hot stink assaulted her nose. Mothballs? Wet dog?
Blood?
She was bumping into sharp invisible angles. There was a growling and a wallowing in the dark, sounds like a leaky faucet, like a legion of cats, like sobbing, like dying; her brain desperately sorting through a medley of images to put a name to what she was hearing. But the only image that kept coming back was the sign that said: “This bear is already dead.”
Bill’s hand slid from hers.
She blundered through the writhing shadow and then she brushed something, something shaggy and unclean. A cold spasm doubled her up, and the shaggy mass receded. She slipped on steaming wetness crusted with ice. And then she was outside, hatless and without her parka, crawling through the snow and refusing to look back.
But even if she had, she would have seen nothing.
* * *
The survivors of the Funken Lodge were few. Besides Nigel who had come to Spitsbergen after a messy divorce with a pair of skis and spent most of his time at the bar, there was a Danish woman who sobbed unceasingly, a Norwegian engineer named Oscar, and several Germans whose limited English seemed to have abandoned them altogether. But no administrative staff were around. Where were the receptionist, the waiters, the shop lady, the cleaners, all the human nuts and bolts that kept the machine of civilisation running? They had gone out together with the lights and had not come back.
Nigel tried his cellphone for the hundredth time. It was useless, all signal having disappeared the moment the darkness came. He turned on the flashlight app and let loose a swarm of bluish afterimages in Lena’s field of vision. The glare suddenly felt dangerous.
“Turn it off!” the Danish woman whose name Lena could not remember said venomously. “We need to conserve batteries.”
“Much good it’ll do!” Nigel muttered, but complied. Perhaps he too felt that bright light could attract unwelcome attention.
A crash of glass resounded in the restaurant, making everybody jump, but then Oscar emerged, carrying a bottle of wine and a loaf of rye bread. They were in no danger of starvation with the fully stocked kitchen, but they had to eat cold food – ‘cold’ as in ‘frozen’.
The man plunked down by the dwindling fire and slurped wine out of the bottle. The rest cast irritated glances in his direction but nobody said anything. It was strange, Lena reflected, how in all post-apocalyptic movies and books the survivors either banded together or turned against each other in a Battle Royale. Neither was happening here; they were just a handful of shell-shocked individuals rather than an emerging tribe or an arena of gladiators.
From outside came a crunching noise.
It was the sound fresh snow makes when it is crushed underfoot. It had become familiar to Lena and for a moment she was glad because it meant somebody was walking outside, somebody was coming in, perhaps Bill, miraculously returning… and then it hit her. It must have hit the rest of them at the same time because the Danish woman whimpered, and Oscar paused with the bottle lifted to his mouth, the black wine trickling down his chin.
They should not have been able to hear the footsteps through the triple-glazed windows of the Lodge. Not unless the walker was large and heavy – very large and heavy.
Lena knew she should be screaming or hiding under a chair – but all she felt was a glacial numbness. It was as if Bill’s absence (death) had spelled an end to the American Lena, cracked her identity open like a shell, and whatever was emerging was as unfamiliar to herself as it would have been to him.
She found herself with her face pressed to the window. Darkness had restored transparency to the glass walls of the lounge, which used to reflect back the shine of the multiple light fixtures. But now she could see outside, into the thick murk diluted by white swirls of snow. And something moved in the murk, a core of deeper darkness trailing wisps of rotten black. The shapeless shape blundered through the drifts and was gone.
Oscar swore. The Danish woman clapped her hand to her mouth.
“A polar bear…?” Nigel suggested uncertainly.
“Come on, man!” Oscar spat. “Even after Brexit you should know that polar bears are white!”
Something shifted in the sky, filmy green streaks of Northern Lights crossing the starless vault. The snow grew brighter, reflecting the scattered glow.
“Look!” Lena pointed to the drifts under the window.
The snow was deeply dented by oval footprints, large enough to have been left by one of those famous Svalbard bears whose images decorated every mug and T-shirt in the shop. But these footprints bore the unmistakable crisscross pattern of snow chains.
* * *
The Northern Lights winked out and then came back.
Lena regretted that Bill could not see them. Her thoughts moved slowly, wrapped up in the insulation of the hotel’s excellent Chablis. At least she had not drunk straight from the bottle like Oscar, she told herself with maudlin self-pride. She had found a glass. Alcohol really was fire-water, just like Nana had said. A momentary return of warmth was worth a hangover.
The rest had made a similar discovery because they were all dozing in drunken stupor in front of the dying fire, buried under their piled-up parkas and blankets as the windows bloomed with rime on the inside. But the Northern Lights were bright enough to call her to the glass wall again and gape at the greenish arc that pulsed in irregular gasps of ghostly fire.
Nana had told her that the Chukchi called Aurora Borealis ‘the eyes of the dead’. She had told her about other things as well: the persecution under Stalin; the scattering of tribal encampments and the confiscation of their reindeer; death from alcoholism, poverty and despair. Lena had not listened. The American Lena had not wanted to know. And when Nana told her about the shamanic power of her grandfather Sergei who had died in the post-Soviet turmoil, she chalked it up to an immigrant’s pathetic pride, clinging to the useless heritage she could not wait to be rid of.
But history has a way of catching up with you, she thought. History is etched in every cell of your body.
Nana had told her Sergei could call blizzards upon his enemies, could freeze blood in their veins, could make their bones shatter like icicles. She had thought it was as useless a superpower as they come. What was the need for ice magic in the ice-bound land? Why call the curse of cold upon your foes if nature did it for you?
But what if the curse was lifting and another, bigger, curse was following in its footsteps?
The giant had not come back. A short snowstorm had erased the footprints and the rest of the survivors had agreed that it was a polar bear, after all. Lena did not argue with this conclusion. The book she had rescued from the fuel pile and hidden under a pillow, the book in Russian, remained her secret. They would not believe her, in any case. And even if they did, what good would that do?
The book, with the fading logo of the USSR state publishing company “Young Guard”, was called Arctic Labour Heroes: Coalmining on Spitsbergen.
* * *
The knock on the door came at 5:15 p.m.
Lena knew it because this was the last time she looked at her cellpho
ne. The battery was down to one per cent. She scrolled through the album Bill had shared with her, looking at the faces in the snow, the toothed maws of dark houses, the indistinct figure crawling among the dogs’ shelters. Why had he refused to see what was in his photographs?
The tiny screen blinked out, echoing the darkness outside. The fire in the fireplace was still alive, but only just, anaemically licking the wooden planks Nigel had found in the storage closet. Besides Lena, he was the only one awake; the rest were hibernating, as if sliding down the evolutionary scale, adapting to winter-sleep.
The lounge was above the entryway. When the lights had been on, one could see all the way down. Now darkness lapped at the landing like stagnant water.
Lena and Nigel exchanged glances. The Brit pulled out his own cellphone which still had enough battery to produce a flickering yellow beam.
“Don’t go,” Lena said.
The barricaded entrance door drummed under a rain of blows. Nigel started down the stairs, carrying his pathetic puddle of light with him. And then a voice.
“Lena!”
Nigel paused, his upturned face a playground of skittering shadows.
“Your husband?” he asked and afterwards Lena recalled a hesitation in his voice as if he knew the answer and did not want to say it. And so did she but she hesitated too, unwilling to put it into words because if she did it would all be over, and her world – the normal ordinary world of suburban California, work, marriage, exotic vacations – would be gone, flooded, submerged.
Her hesitation lasted only a couple of heartbeats, but it cost Nigel his life. He was down in the entryway when the door burst open in an explosion of glass fragments and an arm reached for him. It was an arm, not a paw, wrapped up in tatters of padded parka fabric. It was as thick as Lena’s waist and its rough skin was peppered with black hair and dotted with crudely done tattoos: blue hearts, and vodka bottles, and crossed shovels, and red stars. The black-rimmed fingernails, each the size of a postal envelope, tore into Nigel’s throat as he choked on his own blood, and pulled him through the hole in the door, his screams dying into a liquid gurgle.
Lena did not remember running down but here she was, the icy blast from the outside lacerating her face, as she picked up Nigel’s cellphone and focused its light on the figure that still waited outside, standing there silently as if it wanted to be seen by her – as perhaps it did.
The creature – the kelet, the forgotten name of the Siberian evil spirit popping up in her head uninvited – was so tall that its head disappeared into the gloom and she could not see its face. But she could see the faces that grew out of its broad chest like clusters of grapes: faces of men, hard and frostbitten, ravaged by weather and smoke; men who had laboured in the black bowels of the island for the hidden light. Men who had been crushed when a coal seam collapsed or suffocated when methane flooded the tunnels. Men of Mine Seven.
And Bill’s face was among them, even though he had never worked in a mine, had never put his gym-toned body through the meat grinder of physical labour as these men had. Slack and empty, his face recognised her and grinned idiotically.
Had the kelet reached in and dragged her out like live bait from a fisherman’s tin she would not have resisted. The enormity of what she was seeing silenced the instinct of self-preservation. But it turned around and walked away, revealing the broad back into which bodies of sled-dogs were frozen like fish into the ice on the surface of a winter lake. The clothes that its human core had worn barely clung to its gnarled contours. Its feet were horny and splayed, the snow-chains ingrown like nails. It trailed a ragged mass of something like torn skins or quasi-human silhouettes, or three-dimensional shadows… but the cellphone blinked out, and Lena was left standing in the numbing stream of black air.
She might have literally frozen in place had not the snow brightened to improbable pink and looking up, she saw the Northern Lights again, purplish lavender this time, undulating in the sky like a cosmic opera curtain. It was rare, such a display, and even now the wonder of it made her move.
She went to the changing room where outer gear was kept. Her own parka was not there anymore but there were plenty of others, belonging to the guests and personnel who would not be coming back. She bundled up and put on fur-lined boots with snow chains. They were too big but it hardly mattered.
The Northern Lights flickered out, then on again, enough illumination to keep her on the track that led away from the sightless corpse of the Funken Lodge up into the mountains. She found that her eyes had adjusted enough that she could see their white humps against the clear jet sky. She was staring at them, trying to remember if there was a moon tonight, when she collided with another bundled-up figure coming down from the heights.
They avoided falling into the snow by clutching at each other. The newcomer’s face was hidden under the layers of scarves, but she saw the blue eyes.
Irina dragged her to a barn mantled in white. There was an equally mantled snowmobile parked nearby. Somebody in the hotel had tried a snowmobile after the lights went out but it had not worked. Nothing worked: cars and minibuses in the Lodge’s garage were so much useless junk.
They stood in the nook of the doorway. Irina pulled down her face protector.
“Did you see it?” she whispered.
Lena nodded.
“It’s because of the melt,” Irina went on feverishly. “I heard old people talking… but I thought it was chepukha. Nonsense.”
“I found a book,” Lena said. “Russian. An old one, Soviet times. Mine Seven was theirs, wasn’t it?”
“It collapsed. Tunnels were flooded. People killed.”
“They called them Heroes of Labour in the book, but the medals were awarded posthumously.”
“Old Sven was the only Norwegian there. He worked in the office. He said one of the miners was… Chukchi. From Siberia. A powerful shaman, so he said. He put a spell on the mine. A curse. But it was frozen into the ice. Just like their bodies. They were never recovered. The families got empty coffins and medals.”
“And now the ice is melting…” Lena said.
“Yes. The ice is melting.”
“Old Sven… they grew on him. Like frost on a tree.”
Their eyes met.
“I was in the gallery when it happened,” Irina said. “Having coffee with Sveta.”
Sveta was another Russian girl who worked in the art gallery shop.
“Anybody alive?” Lena asked.
Irina shook her head.
“What are you going to do?”
“I will go down to the harbour. Maybe…”
Adventfjorden was free of ice; perhaps a ship would come in. Or a plane – Longyearbyen had an airport, and somebody on the mainland was bound to raise the alarm.
If they did not have bigger things to worry about. Ice was melting everywhere, oceans rising, carrying tides of old diseases and old curses, the mud of the past flooding the present.
“Come with me,” Irina said.
Lena stared toward the mountains where the red banner of Northern Lights was unfurling once again.
“Where is Mine Seven?”
“Up there. But you… there is nothing you can do.”
“I am from Siberia,” Lena said. “My family lived in the Arctic. My grandfather was a Chukchi.”
“But… do you know how…?”
She did not. The legend that Grandfather Sergei had been a shaman may have been just that: a family legend. Nana’s chant may have been a lullaby, for all she knew. But if magic was melting, could not another kind of magic freeze it back, put it in the permafrost where it belonged?
This was a slender hope. But it was all she had now: the Chukchi Lena emerging from under the melting slush of her American identity. She had to try.
They embraced, kissing each other on frozen cheeks. And Lena climbed the shivering moun
tain toward the black maw of Mine Seven, where rusting pieces of broken metal lay in puddles of inky water.
It Doesn’t Feel Right
Michael Marshall Smith
It was all going so well.
Monday had been a debacle, and so we approached Tuesday morning with dedication, focus, and a willingness to play nice. I leapt out of bed at the first sound of activity, jammed my feet into slippers and wriggled into a sweatshirt, moving swiftly so as to give Helena a chance to keep dozing. I hurried next door and ushered Tim out of his bedroom as quickly and quietly as possible. Once downstairs I engaged our son in cheerful banter – or so it seemed to me – while making him a boiled egg and soldiers. He sat at the table (after only about ten minutes’ encouragement) and ate it without making it into too much of an issue. I heard the distant sounds of my wife going into the bathroom to shower, and checked my watch. 07:24 – a little ahead of a schedule designed to see wife and child departing for school at 08:15, at the latest.
Good good.
Tim declared himself sufficiently full of egg, asked for and was given permission to get down and go into the family room, where he further requested to be allowed to watch an episode of Ben 10. This was denied, as part of a long-standing attempt to avoid TV early in the day, especially a show which – while not entirely pointless – involves too much shouting, posturing and inter-species violence for my liking. Tim made it clear that he found this denial unacceptable. We reached a compromise that saw the TV going on, but for an episode of Postman Pat: SDS, a spin-off of Postman Pat, which finds our plucky mailperson upgraded to parcel-delivery troubleshooter – solid, wholesome entertainment from the BBC which has no shooting or death in it whatsoever.