The Ice King (A Witch Ways Whisper)

by Helen Slavin

  The oven in the kitchen came away easily from its fittings and Vanessa spent several hours bodging it into a sort of woodburner. The flue fixed to the air vent and the smoke carried out. She didn’t care where. She had just under two weeks to get through.

  Once again, she thought she would not sleep in her makeshift kitchen bunk, lined with cardboard, the sleeping bag pulled up and covered with a duvet to try and make it feel like home. Nowhere on earth, she thought, could feel less like home. She lay watching the flames in her fire. She knew she was asleep when, once again, the dream stranger took up his place in the corner of the room.

  come closer

  The dream stranger climbed into her bunk, spooned up against her, the warmth from his body, the lanolin and leather scent of his tweed jacket folding around her. His arm was curved tight around her waist, his other hand touched her hair, the fingers tender in the strands that fell across her face. She shifted so that she could see his face, she saw the marks tattooed into his skin, crisp black inked runes rising up from his temples into his hair and he smiled, a soft familiar expression. His eyes. One brown. One green.

  “There’s no time.” he said and once again, she woke with a start.

  She was not cold, even though she saw that the fire had gone out. The clock on the kitchen wall told her that it was another day, one more morning closer to rescue and she decided her best option would be to get up.

  She spent some time assessing the food stores and rationing out what she could eat. With the cold she could expect to eat more for energy. If she was careful there were enough foodstuffs to keep her going until the supply plane showed up.

  As she set about cooking a breakfast of porridge she realised that mentally she needed something to do, a distraction from possible doom ridden thoughts. She thought she would go over her notes on the Ice Man. It was too cold to develop the film in the camera today so that would wait until she was rescued. The phrase echoed in her head. The supply plane would come as scheduled. They would find her. She lit the fire once more, warmed the kitchen, heated the porridge. They would come. They would find her. Rescue.

  As she ate the porridge she took the time to scan the Regulations Manual. It prohibited the lighting of fires. It contained details of correct sewage system maintenance. The emergency protocol involved electricity and communications masts. But the map showed her a complete breakdown of the site including a small shed at the edge of the complex that she had never paid overmuch attention to. Once or twice she had seen Dr Bale coming out of it or going into it. It had a padlock on it which she thought funny. The Arctic was not really the place for random crime.

  Random crime. Was that what had happened to them? Was someone out there still? Part of her thought it would be a useful activity to head out and find evidence, footprints, snowcat tracks, anything instead of the nothing that existed. She would need answers for the questions that would arise when she was rescued. When. Not if.

  Fuelled by porridge, she exited via the hole in the common room wall and made a patrol of the centre.

  She found what remained of Dr Bale, a black-red splather on the snow, bones were cracked and jutting but Vanessa found she could not be sick, what she witnessed was too far removed from human. She carried on. There was not one other sign of life or death, not a track or trail anywhere. The cold bit at her and so she headed back indoors.

  She surveyed the site map once again. So. There was a maintenance store, a small nondescript building on the other side of the complex. She checked Dr Bale’s desk for any sort of inventory but found none. What were the chances that there was another satellite dish in there? She would get through today and tomorrow she would take a chance on the maintenance shed. She would make plans. Plans would keep her alive. Plans and tinned food and fire.

  Later in the afternoon Vanessa abandoned her revision of the Regulations Handbook and headed to the workroom to retrieve her notes. She was relieved to find the notebook in tact, the pencil placed where she had left it as if nothing whatever had happened in between these two moments. As she flicked back a page her eye was caught by a glint on the microscope slide and she found herself sliding onto the stool and peering down through the lens. The moment she did the spectacle and science that she found within pushed her fear and anxiety aside and she lost herself in the miniature universe.

  She was drawing the images she could see, the patterns and crystallisation of the Ice Man’s ice. She was struck by the way the light caught and refracted in the sample. It must be an optical illusion. Her work light was off because of the pow-

  The power was off. There shouldn’t be light, there shouldn’t be microscope because the microscope was electric. She stood up from the bench at once, the stool clattering to the floor behind her. Where was the light source? She looked down at the slide, the ice itself gave off a light. Record. Her mind struggled forward, reached for her lifeline of knowledge; ursus maritimus, ursus arctos, ursus arctos horribilis, Observe. ursus maritimus, ursus arctos, ursus arctos horribilis There was a scent in the air. Familiar. ursus maritimus, ursus arctos, ursus arctos horribilis Smokey honey and wet wool, but it was only as she turned and saw that the ice coffin and its occupant were gone that she made a sound.

  The water had collected in icicles around the pallets they’d rested it on and there were plants and leaves refrozen into it. It looked like an ice throne, a thing of sculptural beauty. There was no sign of the body. Vanessa did not move. Bears and bones roamed her head. Her eyes took in the room.

  What she saw was a tired looking man backed into the farthest corner of the workroom. His clothes, which looked to Vanessa like tweed trousers and a heavy woollen outdoors jacket, were stained dark and he was bearded. His salt and pepper hair was swept untidily back from his face and he looked warily at her.

  Vanessa’s heart had been invaded by the moths that earlier had fluttered round her head. She felt the edge of the counter behind her digging into her back and trusted in the reality of that. ursus maritimus, ursus arctos, ursus arctos horribilis She was here. She was alive. They would rescue her.

  “Where am I?” his voice rasped in English. He was not, it appeared, stone age or bronze age.

  “You are at the De Quincey Langport Arctic Research Centre, just inside the topmost edge of Norway.” Vanessa was astonished at how level her voice sounded. It was the simple recitation of facts that helped. Yes. Here they were. Exactly here. And now. He took several moments to think about this during which time Vanessa looked at him, at the ingrained dirt of his skin, the bright light of his eyes, the intensity of his expression, the leather broguing of his well-worn boots. She had a strong sense of déjà vu. Not déjà vu. More intense, an idea of recognition.

  He did not move from his safe haven in the corner and Vanessa stayed beside the cold hard edge of the countertop. A fact. A stainless steel fact to link to so that she didn’t drift.

  “Where was I?” he asked. Vanessa thought that the quick answer was in the ice of the frozen lake but she also understood that this man wanted to know exactly where he had been found. She recited the co-ordinates.

  “Do you…have a map?” he asked. Maps seemed good to Vanessa, a map was something she could hold onto. She took one step into the room, tugged out the map from her workpapers and unfolded it. She looked over the landscape, a group of trees, a river, a lake, a forest, some high ground, some low ground, the reality of place. For some sort of mental safety that she didn’t quite understand, she placed her left hand firmly over the spot where the research centre huddled in the weather.

  “I found you just along this inlet…by the…” she was talking and pointing, her finger smoothing over the paper of the map and her mind recalling the exact place, the exact events, the needle of the compass spinning, showing her exactly the way. “Here…by this eastern edge of the lake…we’ve been taking samples and…” she realised then that the man had not moved from the corner.

  “Are you…?”

  “Atrophied. Slightly.” as he
answered she saw he was in fact leaning against the wall for support. There was a shimmering of fear in his face and a nervous edge to the smile he gave. He ran his hand through his unkempt hair, pushing it back from his face.

  “You were the one who chiselled me out of the ice?” he asked.

  “Yes.” This answer seemed to pain him.

  “The rest of your colleagues?”

  Vanessa did not want to answer. Stating the truth out loud made it real, unmanageable. The Ice Man stared her out.

  “All dead?” he asked with an air of certainty.

  Vanessa nodded. His face was distant with thought.

  “It is a harsh place.” He looked back at her with fresh energy. “You found me.”

  “I dragged you back on a tarp. I thought you were an archaeological find. Prehistoric.”

  He looked shocked at this and startled as if something tremendously important had just popped back into his head.

  “Archaeological?”

  “Yes. You know. Like Lindow Man…?”

  “Who?” Ice Man looked puzzled.

  “Or Tollund Man? The bog bodies…? Except you were…in the ice….”

  He looked, not quite blank at this, but still, he did not know what she meant.

  “Bog bodies?”

  “The ones they found at Tollund in Denmark and in Cheshire. Ancient people. Preserved.” Vanessa felt a sense of dread as once again he took several moments to process his thoughts.

  “What year is this?” the man asked at last. Vanessa’s heart was pounding very hard now, there was a damp woolly smell coming off the tweeds the man was wearing. She had to take a second to sift her thoughts and find her voice amongst the layers of clothing that were struggling to keep thoughts or heat in.

  “What year do you think it is?” she whispered. The man looked very directly into her eyes and revealed all his fear and sorrow.

  “1925.”

  Vanessa struggled. She managed to nod but was shaking hard and had a feeling that she was in a nightmare and that at any moment she might wake up and the body in the ice would still be waiting in the workroom, unthawed. Everyone would be alive and argumentative. She could feel the folds of the map beneath her fingers. A little frost had formed on the surface of it.

  “What year is this?” as he asked once again Vanessa picked up the pencil from the pot and wrote the answer down.

  “1985.” he read the number, traced his hand over it. “Sixty years…” he said, almost to himself, his face concentrating, calculating. Vanessa noted the rough state of his hands, the healed over scars and nicks, the dirt beneath his nails. He made an attempt to stand, managed to stumble towards the bench. Vanessa rushed to help him, her arms looping under his shoulders, his weight bearing down on her. She looked up, at the dark, greying hair, the bearded face, the eyes one brown, one green.

  “There’s no time.” he said, and it began to snow.

  The snow fell exactly like a blanket. Vanessa, holed up in the kitchen for the duration, divided her observations between the sleeping Ice Man swaddled onto a camp bed by the far wall and the view of the lake through the triple glazed window. The sky was the most beautiful colour she had ever seen, a bronze green that intensified as the snow fell in heavier flakes.

  The snow stacked, layering and layering until the triple glazed windows of the research centre were half hidden by drifts. As the view of the distant lake vanished so a small dark space of fear and doubt stained Vanessa’s heart.

  As the Ice Man slept on Vanessa moved about the centre making mental lists, taking stock of what supplies were left and generally running away from the dark patches in her head and heart.

  She checked on the sleeping Ice Man. He had been asleep for five hours, she had kept a careful note of the kitchen clock and, once or twice, compared it to her own watch. They were keeping two lines of time, her own watch, she noticed, was once more keeping the unreal time that she had labelled ‘wood time’. By her wristwatch the Ice Man had slept only half an hour.

  Despite the differing time zones the Ice Man woke and was hungry and Vanessa was prepared.

  “Here.” she offered a bowl and a spoon which he took gratefully.

  “Soup.” he said and sipped up a spoonful. “Not from a tin.” he smiled at the flavoursome liquid.

  “Brewed from scraps and leftovers.” Vanessa made the short statement. The Ice Man’s eyes drifted up above the spoon to meet hers. There was a moment between them. The makeshift oven cum downcycled woodburner ticked with heat.

  “You should have left me in the ice.” he looked away, sipped more soup.

  “What is happening?” Vanessa asked. The simplest approach seemed best in the circumstances. All her ideas of reporting and recording, of observing and rationalising weren’t going to work so she reached for the one thing her mother had always relied on. Instinct.

  “I must travel to Far North.”

  Vanessa felt a spark of anger.

  “That’s the future. I want you to tell me what is happening now? What happened here?”

  “You must tell me, you bore witness.”

  He looked at her once more with his brown and green eyes. Vanessa gathered all her thoughts.

  “There was a storm… and some sort of bear attack. My colleagues were killed” there were the bald facts and saying them aloud did not make them any more comprehensible.

  “But not you.” the Ice Man finished his soup, wiping the dregs up into his mouth with the stale dog end of the last of the bread. Once again his eyes met hers. Vanessa took a moment to think of this. Had she been in the centre when the first attack happened? Or had she still been trudging back from the hopeless mission to the comms tower? She placed herself firmly in the centre. She had been changing her clothes and then she’d gone to the workroom to continue her notes.

  “Whoever, whatever it was that killed my colleagues…it came for you.” the theory had burned into her head.

  “Yes.” he did not even try to lie. He looked directly at her, wiped soup from his beard.

  “Why not me?” she asked.

  “Because you were the one who dragged me out of the ice.” he put the bowl down and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his thighs. “I need to travel to Far North.”

  “And you need to go before they come back.”

  He nodded.

  “This last was just the scouting party, riding ahead. Snow will hold them, for a while. They will come with the next storm.”

  “Who are they?”

  He gave her an assessing look, long lasting, off-putting, but Vanessa Way had grown up with Hettie Way at Havoc Wood, she’d faced down Alizon Wilde. She did not blink.

  “The Wild Hunt.” he said. Vanessa heard an echo of Dr Byrne. Hunters.

  “These hunters…they lost you in the ice.” Vanessa was trying to find pieces to place in the puzzle. “Sixty years ago?”

  The Ice Man nodded. Again their eyes met.

  “There’s no time.” he said and this time Vanessa did not question the comment, she merely looked at her own watch, at the way the hands had not moved and yet the kitchen clock ticked onwards. He moved across to her, reached his own arm down so that she could see his pocket watch, it showed the same time as her wristwatch.

  “Do you want to borrow the snowcat?”

  He shook his head.

  “I need you to take me to the inlet. Back to where you found me. I can find my way from there.”

  “Why did you come here?” Vanessa asked “Back in 1925.”

  Ice Man looked at her.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “We’re snowed in.” Vanessa stood her ground. Her mother had a phrase she used sometimes when things were going awry and she couldn’t find her way through it, that word was ‘mazed’ as if someone was messing with your personal geography. It occurred to Vanessa that her mother’s word fitted this situation, fitted everything since the out of kilter day at the inlet. As she thought back over those events she remembered the ho
rse in the trees. Transport.

  Another, more terrible word wrote itself into her mind. Trap. What’s the difference between a maze and a trap?

  “We’re going to be here a while…there’s time before you go on your way.” as the words left her Vanessa recalled her mother saying something similar on the countless occasions when some bedraggled stranger had taken refuge in the kitchen at Cob Cottage. What had her mother always said?

  “There’s time enough to tell me.”

  At these words the Ice Man, once again, gave her an odd look of recognition. He began to talk, as if reciting something long remembered.

  “…There is an enemy… in the Far North. He outlives his time. This king brings conflict of every sort to you. Hearts will clash, bones will break. You will take on the mantle that he ought to have shrugged off. Fate owns you Lachlan so she moves you like her little chess piece into the game.”

  He paused. “You will be lost and she will find you.”

  The little dark patch of fear on Vanessa’s heart was taking on new depths, soot, carbon, sinking deep into her fibres.

  “My name is Dr Lachlan Laidlaw and I came here, for the same reason as you Miss Way…” he waited.

  “Which is?”

  “To fulfil my destiny.”

  It was as though he had leant across and swiped all the scientific equipment from the countertops, set all the Bunsen Burners aflame and Vanessa could not speak. Dr Lachlan Laidlaw’s eyes, intense as ever, softened their gaze but did not look away.

  Vanessa thought of a day, a long time ago, of Pike Lake and the speckled skin of Esox Lucius, his teeth sinking into her skin, the small snowglobe of his eye and a vision of her, walking, walking, walking away in a snowstrewn, bronze skied landscape. She thought of her mother, of Havoc Wood, of gamekeeping.

  “What about the wolf?” Vanessa threw the morsel into the mix. She remembered the wolf at the edge of the landscape. Dr Lachlan Laidlaw took in a breath, gazed at her as if she might be a miracle.

  “You saw it too?”

  “Yes. Once. A long time ago. And I dreamt of your eyes….” Vanessa wanted to hold onto her thoughts, to not be distracted or stray, to have focus. “…They’re odd.” she looked back into them and pushed back thoughts of the dreams she had had in the last few nights. smokey honey lanolin leather the warm sweet scent of his breath across her skin.