Dark Matter

by Michelle Paver

  Yanking off my headlamp and throwing back my hood, I strained for some sound to guide me. The sea was too far off, and the stream was frozen. I heard nothing but my own urgent breath.

  Lost. Lost.

  Inside my waterproofs, my sweat-soaked clothes chilled me to the bone. I willed myself to keep calm. Think logically. How do you tell up from down?

  Answer: you kick the snow ahead. If you can see where it goes, there’s level ground in front. If not, there’s a drop.

  Pulling up my hood, I refixed the headlamp. Which isn’t as easy as it sounds when you’re wearing mittens and your hands are shaking.

  My mind darted in panic. I saw myself stumbling further and further from camp, heading blindly for the icecap, falling down some forgotten mineshaft.

  I thought, when two days go by without any transmissions from me, Bear Island will raise the alarm. They’ll send a search party from Longyearbyen. Two days later – ice permitting – they’ll arrive. They’ll find a deserted camp and desperate dogs. Next summer, maybe someone will find my bones. All this flashed through my mind in an instant.

  Then I remembered the compass in my pocket. Idiot. All you’ve got to do is head north-east and you’ll reach the sea.

  I dropped the bloody thing in the snow. I scrabbled for it. Whipped off my mittens. Couldn’t find it. Shit. Shit.

  Found it. The arrow didn’t move. Not broken, surely not broken?

  I jiggled it. The arrow swung wildly. My hand was trembling, I couldn’t hold the compass steady. I set it on a rock.

  The arrow – the blessed little arrow – swung round – wavered – and went still. There. That way.

  Gasping, I stumbled downhill. I passed a patch of snow dotted with tufts of light-brown hair where a reindeer had rested, and this sign of life heartened me immensely. A few paces on, my headlamp caught the bright yellow spots of a dog’s frozen urine. Then I heard the distant yowls of huskies.

  Thirty paces more took me to the beach.

  ‘Jesus,’ I whispered. ‘Jesus.’

  In my wanderings I’d strayed a long way off course, and had fetched up at the eastern end of the bay, under the cliffs. Sagging with relief and ashamed of my panic, I turned my back on the cliffs and started along the shore, keeping close to the water for fear of losing myself again.

  The humped bulk of the emergency storehouse loomed out of the fog. Then the whale bones, glittering in the beam of my headlamp. At last I made out the bear post – and beyond it the miraculous glimmer of the lantern over the porch.

  I shouted for the dogs. ‘Upik! Pakomi! Anardark! Eli! Isaak!’

  No response. But that was OK; they’d come back when they were hungry. Eagerly, I hurried on.

  As I approached the bear post, my headlamp lit the cairn of rocks at its base, where a tuft of dead grass poked through the snow. The light touched the weathered grey wood of the post. Fog had darkened the blotchy stains to black.

  The dread came from nowhere. Without warning, my flesh began to crawl. I felt the hairs on my scalp prickle and rise. I couldn’t see anything except the bear post and its cairn of stones, but my body braced itself. It knew.

  Then, through the fog on the other side of the post, came an odd, muffled scraping. A sound as of metal dragged over rock.

  Jerkily I turned, the beam of my headlamp sweeping the fog. I saw nothing. And yet that sound was louder, more distinct. Clink. Clink. Coming closer. Towards me.

  My heart hammered in my throat. I tried to run. My legs wouldn’t move.

  It was in front of me now, the sound only a few feet away – and still I saw nothing. This can’t be. But I hear it.

  Clink. Clink.

  Silence.

  It had reached the post. It was so close that if I could have moved, I might have reached out my hand and touched – what? A presence. Unseen. Unbearably close.

  I stood helpless, not breathing, my arms clamped to my sides. Dread rising within me, a black tide drowning . . .

  Behind me, the patter of paws.

  With a moan I broke free. I staggered back. My snowshoes crossed. I fell.

  Isaak ran into the beam of my headlamp and stopped, ears pricked, tail tautly raised. His eyes gleamed silver, throwing back my light.

  As I got to my knees, he came towards me, lashing his tail. In his silvered eyes I saw the twin reflections of a dark round head.

  It took a moment to recognise myself.

  11

  I found my way to the porch. Yanked open the door and slammed it behind me. Dragged off my outer things. Stumbled down the hall. The bunkroom. The main room. My torch beam sliced the dark. My breath smoked.

  I tried to light a lamp, but my hands were shaking too hard. I found a handful of birch bark and threw it in the stove with a couple of logs. At last I got them to take. I crouched, staring at the flames between my fingers. In my head I still heard that sound. Still felt that presence.

  My teeth were chattering, my clothes soaked in freezing sweat. I blundered back to the bunkroom, snatched dry things, undressed and dressed in front of the stove. I found a bottle of Scotch and splashed some in a mug and gulped it down.

  The whisky steadied me. I managed to light a lamp. And another and another. Suddenly I was ravenous. I made coffee and porridge. I gobbled it like a starving man. I ran to the slops pail and retched.

  I longed to hear voices. Normality. I tried the wireless. The receiver needed charging. Cursing, I pedalled the bicycle generator, not looking at the windows. I tuned in to the Empire programme. A play. The clink of teacups, the brittle chatter of women.

  I went to the north window and put my hands to the glass and peered out. The dogs were back: some curled up with their tails over their noses, some quietly chewing snow. All seemed oblivious of the bear post.

  It stood three yards from the window. I told myself it was only a log. A stick of driftwood.

  I went and sat at the table. My mouth was bitter with bile. I had heard those sounds. I had felt that presence. I had not imagined them.

  The radio play ended. The calm, efficient voice of the BBC announced the next programme.

  My wristwatch told me it was ten o’clock. I’d set out on the walk at eight. Only two hours? How was that possible? It felt like years.

  I needed something to still the panic. Something to make the sounds go away.

  Lurching to my feet, I blundered to the bookshelf, found Gus’ journal, and opened it. To hell with respecting his privacy. I needed him.

  The sight of his handwriting instantly gave me courage. It was round and schoolboyish, and he’d been so enthusiastic that at times he’d scored the paper. He’d filled pages with nature descriptions – birds, molluscs, plants – interspersed with reflections on the Arctic and on the characters of Norwegian sealers. I devoured it all, the more boring the better.

  As I’d expected, he kept mostly to facts, with little emotion; presumably that’s beaten out of you at Harrow. He was largely silent about Algie, although he mentioned me a few times, and of course I pounced on that.

  I don’t think Jack likes Algie very much, he’d written on the 31st of July, the day we saw Spitsbergen for the first time. Whenever Algie says something crass, which God knows is often enough, I can see Jack’s jaw tightening. I think it’s a physical effort for him not to slap Algie down. It’s really rather funny. That made me smile. Gus had noticed almost before I’d realised myself.

  Then, shortly after we’d arrived at Gruhuken, he remarked on my dislike of the mining remains. Jack has such intense responses to things, it must make life hard for him. And yet I do understand why he doesn’t like the ‘past poking through’ as he puts it, because I’m the same. I want Gruhuken to be ours, and ours alone.

  I was surprised, and gratified. I didn’t know he’d felt the same way.

  A few pages on, I came across a passage about Eriksson which I found vaguely unsettling. What an admirable fellow. Born to abject poverty on a farm in the Tronds; as children they went barefoot from
May to October (in north Norway!). Stowed away aged ten, never went back. No schooling, taught himself to read from the Bible. Deep regard for his ship and crew, if too reserved to admit it. Thoughtful, resilient, polite, unforgiving. Superstitious, too. This afternoon he had a pail of fish entrails thrown overboard to attract gulls: like many seamen, he believes they bring good luck and ward off evil. Algie laughed. I told him for Christ’s sake not to let Eriksson hear. I grew up with people like Mr E. Country people: devout Christians, but scratch the surface and you find some pretty rum beliefs. The funny thing is, there’s often something in them.

  Why had Gus seen fit to record that? And the date. The 9th of August. By then we’d been at Gruhuken a week.

  A day later, this: In one of my books it says that parts of Spitsbergen are haunted. I asked Mr E, but he wouldn’t say yes or no. He said (and I translate from his less idiomatic phrasing): ‘Up here a man becomes aware of things that he can’t perceive further south.’

  Bafflingly, Gus made no further comment on this, but launched straight into two pages of nature notes. I’ve noticed that about him. He seems to have the ability to detach himself completely from anything disagreeable: to exclude it and immerse himself in something else. Maybe that’s another skill he acquired at Harrow.

  31st August. This place isn’t right. I’ve felt it ever since the Isbjørn left.

  What? What?

  That time in the canoe when I watched the kelp moving in the water. I saw such things.

  Christ. Christ, Gus, what did you see? Feverishly, I turned the pages. Nothing but bird behaviour and character studies of the dogs.

  I can’t believe it. All that time – weeks of living together – and he knew?

  16th September. Why hasn’t Jack felt anything? Last night we saw our first Aurora. I started to tell him, I wanted to. But he got that severe look and changed the subject. Can he really have sensed nothing? Of the three of us he’s the strongest, the most pragmatic and level-headed. And yet he’s perceptive, too, and has plenty of imagination. After all, he was moved almost to tears at his first sight of Gruhuken – and so concerned about an abandoned guillemot chick that he went back and spent ages trying to find it. So it’s odd that he should be the only one who has noticed nothing.

  The only one? Oh, surely not Algie . . .

  10th October. Poor Algie. This morning I dragged him off for a walk, and he confessed everything. He said, ‘I know it sounds the most fearful rot, but this place is giving me the pips. There are times when I feel sort of – watched. And once, on those rocks, I had the most dreadful thought. Or rather, not a thought, but an image in my head. I saw knives. I don’t want to say any more. And I smelt paraffin, I swear I did. I was desperate to get away but I couldn’t move, it was as if I were bound hand and foot. That image is still in my head, I can’t seem to get rid of it. It’s absolutely beastly.

  Now that winded me. Not fat, insensitive Algie, who whistled ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’ on his first encounter with the Northern Lights.

  A scrawled entry for the 14th of October. This morning Algie told me he’s started to hear things. He calls it a ‘waking nightmare’. I badgered him for details, then wished I hadn’t. I refuse to write them down. They’re too horrific. And what unsettles me most is that they closely resemble what I experienced in the canoe. Poor Algie, he’s in a frightful funk. And so ashamed. He made me swear not to tell Jack. I don’t think I could even if I wanted to. Besides, I don’t want Jack thinking I’m in a funk, too.

  I skimmed the remaining pages, but there was nothing more until just before Gus fell ill. I’ve begun to realise, he wrote on the 18th, that prolonged darkness can affect the mind in ways I’d never anticipated. There’s a lifeless stillness about this land which affects one shockingly. Perhaps I’m developing nerve strain, or that disorder the old trappers used to get. What did Jack call it? Rar? The extraordinary thing is that what I experienced in the canoe felt so intensely real. But of course it wasn’t. No doubt that’s in the nature of hallucinations, that they seem so real. After all, one’s dreams feel real, even though they’re merely artefacts of one’s mind; and if my brain can create such ‘pseudo-reality’ while I’m asleep, surely it’s capable of performing the same trick while I’m awake? And yet – to say that all this is an hallucination – how is that a comfort? To know that my own mind can create such horrors.

  That was almost the last entry. The next day, he fell ill.

  I sat stunned, staring at his writing on the page.

  Oh, Gus. You were going through all that, and I didn’t know. For your sake, I’m glad you’re safe in the infirmary at Longyearbyen; but if only I’d known. We could have talked of it. We could have borne it together, made sense of it.

  And yet if you were here now, Gus, and God knows I wish you were, I’d tell you that you’re wrong. Whatever you experienced, you didn’t imagine it. And there are worse things than hallucinations.

  I don’t believe for a moment that what I heard at the bear post was an ‘artefact of my mind’. It had objective reality. It was an auditory imprint, a lingering trace of some act of savagery which was once perpetrated here at Gruhuken.

  An act of savagery.

  Why did I write that? Why, on the strength of the clink of metal over rock?

  Because of the dread I felt. I wouldn’t have felt that dread if something appalling hadn’t happened here.

  Writing that has put me in mind of something I haven’t thought about in years. And I don’t want to think about it now, so I won’t. I’ll take my lead from Gus. I refuse to write it down.

  On the kitchen shelf, his alarm clock tells me that it’s twenty to twelve. Time to go out for the twelve o’clock readings. I have to do it. Otherwise it’s won.

  But what has won?

  Steady on, Jack, you’re in danger of creating a monster out of shadows. Whatever it is, what you must remember is that it’s in the past. Something happened here once. Something terrible. But whatever it was, it’s in the past. Whatever you experienced was only an echo.

  It was simply an echo.

  12

  31st October, later

  I did go out at noon, and again at five. Both times, the dogs gave me a rapturous welcome and came with me to the Stevenson screen. They seemed completely at ease. I found that intensely reassuring.

  I haven’t been near the bear post since it happened. To reach the screen I took the back way, turning right out of the porch and looping round behind the cabin. I’m going to do that from now on.

  A few minutes ago I went to the window. I saw the shadowy shapes of the dogs, peacefully gnawing chunks of seal in front of the cabin. A light wind from the icecap is blowing spindrift over them, but they don’t seem to mind. I haven’t tied them to their stakes. I don’t see the point. They’re not going to run away. And like this they can warn me of bears.

  It’s such a normal sight. Inside, too, everything’s normal. Bright lamps, crackling stove. A whisky at my elbow, one of Hugo’s cigars between my teeth. When I look at myself in the shaving mirror, I see no horror, no fear. Nothing to connect me with the wild-eyed man who was retching into the slops pail a few hours ago.

  What I’ve got to remember is that others have overwintered here and they too must have experienced things – but they managed. Well, so shall I. I won’t let this beat me.

  So I’ve decided on a few ground rules.

  First. I’ll no longer kennel or tether the dogs, but will let them roam freely around camp. I’ll wedge the door of the doghouse open, so that they can come and go as they please, but still have shelter. I don’t think they’ll come to any harm. They were bred for the Arctic.

  Second. I’ll draw up a ration plan. It’d be unthinkable if Gus and Algie return to find that I’d squandered our supplies.

  Third. I’ll cut down on the drinking. (OK, that one starts tomorrow.)

  Fourth. No more than nine hours’ sleep a night. In this endless dark, one can easily sleep twelve hours or more �
�� but that must be resisted. I have to maintain a structure. Sleeping time, eating time, work time. That’s the ticket.

  Seeing these rules, neatly numbered on the page, is extraordinarily comforting.

  And it’s good to know that outside there are eight watchful huskies patrolling the camp.

  1st November

  A good day. I slept the regulation nine hours without dreaming, and was woken by Gus’ alarm clock.

  My new rules are working. When I’m not busy with the usual tasks, I’m tiring myself out with new ones: cleaning, laundry, weather proofing the doghouse with tarpaper securely tamped down and lots of straw bedding inside. I check the bay for ice (so far, thank God, it’s clear). And when I’m in the cabin, I keep the wireless on. I have chats in Morse with Ohlsen on Bear Island. And this afternoon I ‘spoke’ to Algie again. He told me that Gus is doing well, and I told him about my new rules (but not that I’m letting the dogs run wild). Twice he asked if I’m ‘all right’, and I said I’m fine. Stonewalling him gave me a perverse kind of pleasure. If he wants to keep things on the surface, then so will I. He knows what kind of place this is. He knows what he fled and I didn’t.

  But what does that matter? My rules are working, that’s the point.

  Things would be back to normal if it wasn’t for a ridiculous habit I’ve developed of peering out of the north window to check on the bear post. It’s ludicrous, I know, but I need to reassure myself that it isn’t quite as close to the cabin as I’d thought.

  Of course each time I look it’s exactly where it ought to be, a good three paces from the window. But here’s the irritating thing: afterwards, when I’ve been busy on something else, the doubt creeps back. In my mind’s eye the post is closer, and nearer the door, as if it’s about to gain entry. I know that’s preposterous, but I still have to go to the window and make sure. Which means that whatever I’m doing, the wretched thing is never far from my thoughts.