Until the Night

by Giles Blunt

  “As a matter of fact,” Priest said, “I think this is going very well.”

  He signalled for more drinks, and when they arrived he began to talk.

  Eleven months earlier. He said he remembered because he had just returned from Christmas vacation with the aged ones in London—Hampstead Garden Suburb, to be exact. Then to Algonquin Bay to get in a little skiing and northern solitude before venturing back into the belly of the monster in Ottawa and Toronto.

  “I was invited to dinner at a friend’s place. Fella named Brian I met at the squash club. I forget why Laura was there—they weren’t trying to set me up. I think she works with Brian’s wife up at the hospital. Pleasant evening, blah blah. Anyway, few days later I head back to Ottawa and—”

  “Where do you live, exactly? Here? Ottawa? Toronto?”

  “Ottawa. I’ve got my Swiss cottage here and a loft in Toronto, but the Toronto club runs itself at this point. It’s Ottawa I got to keep an eye on—thanks to your colleagues. Believe it or not, police investigations do tend to have a negative effect on the libido, as well as everything else.”

  “Doesn’t seem to have affected you.”

  “Yeah, but I’m exceptional.” He took a sip of his Guinness and contemplated the glass. “So I’m back in Ottawa a couple of weeks and I get a call from Laura. In town for some kind of conference. Wonders if I have time for a drink. Not dinner. Not coffee. Drink. I know what that means, and so do you. So, fine. We meet at the Shadow and we have a drink.”

  “I’m sorry—the Shadow?”

  “Yeah, the hotel. Shadow Laurier. Oh Christ, you’re not taking the piss about my accent, are you?”

  “I thought you said Shadow. I thought it might be another club.”

  “Non, c’est une plaisanterie. Que tu es snob! Tu penses que t’es tellement supérieure? La petite Pepsi avec son accent qui donne l’impression d’une chatte en chaleurs? C’est insupportable.” His French was infuriatingly good.

  “First point,” Delorme said, “you’ve never heard my accent. Second point, did you actually call me a Pepsi?” It was an age-old put-down of uncertain derivation for French Canadians, especially dizzy young girls.

  “I did. And I notice you’re sticking to English. Bit self-conscious, are we? Let me give you some advice, darling—never get between an Englishman and his accent. We grow up with a hundred of ’em buzzing in our ears, each with its own little class marker—and believe me, every one of us learns to negotiate that minefield very quickly indeed. That’s why we produce the best fucking actors in the universe.”

  “So why do you sound the way you do?”

  “If I felt like it, I could sound like Bertie Fuckin Russell, but I prefer to sound like someone with a dick between his legs. Awright, sistah?”

  “So you met for a drink.”

  He nodded. “Laura’d already had a couple. She was fun in a small-town kind of way. Very innocent. Marriage was in trouble, told me that straight off. And she pretended to be concerned that she was feeling sexually restless. Sexually restless—I’d never heard it put quite that way before.

  “So I take her back to the Lord Elgin, where the conference was, and I know this will shock you, Sister Delorme, but, well, I’m afraid we went to bed together. I cannot tell a lie. Would you like the details?”

  “No.”

  “I had the impression her nipples had been shamefully ignored. Very responsive, she was, in that area—quite electrified, really. And apparently no one of even average sexual IQ had addressed themselves to her clitoris. Amazing what women have to put up with. Men are terrible lovers, as I’m sure your own researches will confirm.”

  “How can you make the comparison?”

  Priest laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “You’re saying you’ve been in bed with lots of men?”

  “Correct!” He touched her hand, a brief pressure, then gone. “You are truly amazing. Have you ever even seen a penis?”

  “Could you just stick to the story?”

  “Week or so later, she looks me up here. Right here, same as you. Took the same seat at the bar, waiting for me to notice. So subtle. We have a bit of a chinwag and she casually mentions some married git she’s shagging. Didn’t stop her from coming on to me again. Only this time I wasn’t having any.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I look at someone like Laura Lacroix, I see tears and phone calls and overdoses and lots of just plain not-worth-it. Very attractive woman, Laura—looked a bit like you, frankly—but unfortunately a bit clingy.”

  “Did you see her again?”

  “Yeah, I told you. Ottawa. When she showed up at Risqué and got fucked silly. You ought to try it sometime.”

  “You’ve said in the past you like sex games. Tying people up. Role playing.”

  “It’s called fun, sister. It’s not my sole occupation.”

  “And you also like sex outdoors.”

  “You’re taking a suspiciously deep interest.”

  “So let’s say you were going to abduct a woman for sexual purposes. You’d—what?—take her to someone’s backyard and do it out by the garage?”

  “I don’t abduct women. I’ve no interest in abducting women. Seducing women, yes. Allowing women to express their own sexual nature, yes. Abducting, no. Not my style.”

  “What if it were your style?”

  “It isn’t. But I can tell you a very nice place for it. You know the former Deep Forest Lodge?”

  “It’s not former. It never opened.”

  “On a moonlit night, I can tell you, there’s nothing like it. Like doing it in a haunted house, but outdoors at the same time.”

  “Sounds horrible.”

  “Some women like horrible. Like to be tied up. Like to be scared.” He waggled long fingers at her and made a ghostly sound, “Wooooo …”

  “You think women like to be beaten and killed too?”

  “I said scared. It’s called a frisson—or is that word not available in your FC vocabulaire? Must say, I thought at first you were just tightly wound, a little repressed, a little starved for it. But on closer acquaintance, I’m beginning to think you’re just dead fucking boring.”

  Delorme stood up and slapped a twenty on the table. “This round’s on me, Romeo.”

  “Oh, Christ—D.C. Delorme’s been watching cop TV.”

  “It’s Detective Delorme, or Sergeant Delorme, when I’m on duty.”

  “Well, promise me one thing, Sergeant. Promise me you won’t come back unless you really do want to suck my cock.”

  Ronnie Babstock woke in the dark. Earlier, the moon had lit the room like a street lamp, but now it had moved on. He was in the old house, in town, the house he had shared with Evelyn. He had intended to sell it, had even bought the new place out on the lake, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to leave this place. He slept better in this house. Usually.

  He rolled over and tilted the alarm clock on his bedside table. 3:22. Hiss of air from the heating vents. The house was not ancient, but all houses make noise, especially in the cold. Something metal was ticking at odd intervals.

  Insomnia had troubled Babstock much during his younger years, but now, nearing sixty, he generally slept through the night. It wasn’t supposed to work that way, but he wasn’t complaining. So what had woken him at 3:22 on this particular night? He didn’t need the bathroom, and the house was not unduly cold even though he kept the thermostat pretty low for sleeping.

  There were wakings that felt bad—a sudden yell in a dream that tears you from sleep, or the phone going off in the hollow of the night—and yet you could turn over and be right back to sleep. Other times, your eyes open for no reason at all but sleep is out of the question. He lay still, trying to take the measure of his own response.

  After a while he got up and put on his bathrobe and went down the hall to the bathroom. He opened the cabinet and took out a prescription bottle, opened it and tapped out a single pill. He broke it in half and put one half
back in the bottle, then poured a quarter of a glass of water and took the other half. As he was closing the cabinet door, he froze.

  Please help me.

  It sounded like a young woman, a girl even. He spun around and leaned slightly to see around the bathroom door frame and down the hall. Night light glowing at the top of the stairs. That ticking sound again. He stood waiting.

  It couldn’t be neighbours. Babstock’s property was large’ he had no neighbours. It must be the memory of a dream.

  Oh, God, I’m so cold …

  “Who’s there?” He had to clear his throat and repeat it. “Is there somebody there?”

  He knew it wasn’t Evelyn, despite what he had said to Cardinal. Although which of us can say if the voice survives the trip across that threshold? He turned on the hall lights, upstairs and downstairs. A weapon of some sort seemed advisable, but he was not a hunter and owned no guns.

  He went down the stairs and walked swiftly through all the rooms, one after another, switching on light after light. Nothing. No one. No furniture disarranged. Windows and doors secure.

  I’m losing my mind, he told himself. The voice was in my dream and now my dream life is leaking into my real life.

  The voice again. I’m going to die. I know it.

  Not a dream. The voice was in the house. He went into the hall and opened an ornate wooden box that had been in the family forever. Then the armoire. He opened the vestibule door and felt the wall of cold from outside.

  He looked behind the couch. He climbed the back stairs and checked the other bedroom. Closets. No one.

  The words had been so disconnected, so discontinuous, he could not even be sure of their direction.

  Night terrors, he told himself. You haven’t had night terrors for fifteen years. Dementia, could be. I’m losing my mind.

  He went downstairs and pulled a bottle of Highland Cream from the liquor cabinet. He reached to the top shelf for one of the really expensive crystal glasses—in times of stress he took comfort in material reminders of his wealth—and poured himself two fingers. He took a swallow. Another. The quivering in his knees began to subside.

  He stood in the kitchen, glass in hand, listening. He turned forty-five degrees to the right. Nothing. Then to the left. Silence. Just that metallic ticking—irregular and, in normal circumstances, inaudible.

  He went into the living room and sat in his favourite leather chair and opened the Le Carré novel he’d been reading. He wanted the company of a man who understood paranoia. The dangers of delusion.

  From the Blue Notebook

  The first time I stepped onto ice pack above 80°' N, I was utterly vanquished by the immensities of white and blue. A voice not my own reverberated in my skull and rib cage both: You should not be here, it told me—no one should be here. A friend of mine who is a neurosurgeon had the exact same thought the first time he inserted a gloved finger into the cerebral cortex of a living human being.

  It costs a small fortune to keep a man alive in the Arctic for any length of time, and governments and funding agencies like to be sure that anyone they put there is capable of completing a mission. We all had to undergo not just physicals but psychological exams before we were cleared. It was also for that reason that Arcosaur enjoyed the services of Jens Dahlberg, an expert in Arctic medicine and nutrition, as camp physician.

  I do not belong here is an idea that can very rapidly turn crippling. Many an Arctic adventurer has had to make the humiliating call for rescue in a matter of days, undone not by the cold but by looking into the face of what might have been called—before overuse rendered the word useless—the awesome. Air so preternaturally clear that you can see the curve of the earth. And in all that vista nothing but snow and ice and, in summer, veins of open water. Even the most thoroughgoing atheist can be destabilized by setting foot where only gods should walk. In that white desert, the only thing worse than a crack opening up beneath your feet is a crack opening up in the psyche of the man next to you. Arctic missions rely on people like Jens to weed out such risks.

  We each had our area of expertise. Vanderbyl was oceanography, a man who mapped mountains and valleys no human eye had ever seen. I was ice, Wyndham snow. Rebecca was clouds. Her tools were radar, lidar and radiometers, and she spent many hours a day staring at readouts and computer screens in an effort to define the vertical structure of cloud water contents. She measured the size of droplets and crystals, properties that determine how energy is exchanged between the Arctic surface and the atmosphere.

  She was embarked on a long-term project to measure how clouds interact with aerosols, and how they change with the seasons and from one year to another. At some point in the future her findings would be correlated with mine and Wyndham’s on seasonal meltage. Already by this time, which was 1992, much research had been done on global warming, and the models were predicting an especially high rate of warming in the Arctic. But so far (surprisingly, given the dolorous certainties to come) we had found no hard evidence of it.

  And I hoped desperately we wouldn’t find any. I had nightmarish visions of oil platforms and tourists overrunning the only place on the planet I felt at home. Of all of us, Wyndham was the most pessimistic. When depressed, he would spin scenarios of catastrophes—of floods and cyclones and mass migrations. I wasn’t willing to call him paranoid, as some of the others did. Instead, I chose not to think about it, the way one chooses not to imagine the death of a spouse.

  What happens in your ideal world? I asked Rebecca one day.

  My interest was entirely selfish, of course, and there may even have been a touch of irritation in it. It should not be possible for a woman to be such a dedicated scientist, such a humble and reliable trader in hard fact, and yet have such a beautiful neck and throat. I was not usually one to notice these things. When it came to the appreciation of female beauty, I had always been strictly an impressionist. But Rebecca taught me to be a detail man. I thought about the elegant and shifting columns of tendon and cartilage. I thought about her way of blinking exactly once whenever I spoke to her, as if capturing my remark like a lattice of crystals for later analysis. I thought about her fingers, slender and tapered, the nails perfectly formed, neatly shaped. Her skin was darker than mine, not quite tawny, and I had to suppress the desire to touch her hands as she typed, despite the wedding band.

  My ideal world?

  I had spoken to her from the doorway of her office. Only three of the scientists had private offices: Dahlberg, Vanderbyl and Rebecca. In Rebecca’s case, it was a matter of getting her instruments as far from the power shack as possible, because the generator tended to interfere with her readouts. The space was not much bigger than a graduate student’s carrel, but it had a porthole window over which she had hung a towel to keep the glare off her screens.

  My ideal world?

  She didn’t turn to face me but spoke to my reflection in her radar screen.

  In my ideal world, we don’t have a sea station here, a drift station there, we have an international network of cloud observatories: Tiksi, Hammerfest, Alert and Barrow—at least those four. And every day I get to chat with Russians and Danes and Americans about Arctic clouds. And you?

  It must be wonderful to be so easily amused.

  Now she did turn to face me. Why ask, if you’re only going to make fun? A coordinated network of stations is what we need. It’s going to take a lot more than a drifting dysfunctional family to figure out what’s going on up here.

  I didn’t respond, only stood for a few moments reading the Ice Island Regulations that were taped to every door in the facility.

  Please appreciate that this camp is in a very remote location. In the event of an accident, every effort is made to evacuate the injured party(s). However, we cannot control bad weather or radio blackouts, which can last up to 10 days. Exercise extreme caution and good judgment in your daily work and activities during your stay on the Ice Island. Thank you for your co-operation and have a pleasant stay.

&nbs
p; A few days later, I stopped at her door again. The temperature had dropped ten degrees and there were loud cracks and pops from outside. Ice contracting.

  I’ll tell you about my ideal world, I said. My ideal world is one where you turn around the moment you hear footsteps, because you hope it’s me.

  She shook her head, not looking. You can’t talk to me that way.

  You and Vanderbyl are breaking up. You’ve already broken up.

  She shook her head again. You can’t.

  But I am. I think you want me to.

  She removed her hands from the keyboard and folded them in her lap and looked down at them. When she looked up again, she pointed at her lidar readout. The screen resembled a spray of yellow and red confetti.

  You know what that is?

  No.

  You’ve just come in from outside. How would you rate ground-level visibility?

  Right now? If it wasn’t for the curve of the earth, you could probably see Denmark.

  Clouds?

  None. Not one.

  That—she tapped a trim fingernail on the screen—is a cloud. It’s not visible to the naked eye. It’s not visible to a telescope. It’s not even visible to infrared. I’m looking at a cloud here and I have no idea what it’s made of. I’m going to be analyzing these readings for the rest of my life. I wouldn’t want also to be trying to figure out if you love me or hate me. There’s only room in a life for so many mysteries. I couldn’t face coming home to another.

  A wave of bitterness took me by surprise. Don’t flatter yourself, I said. I just want to sleep with you.

  She gave me one of those single blinks. Data received. There was always the risk with Rebecca that you transmitted more than you knew. She raised her hands once more to her keyboard and resumed typing.

  If I thought that was true, she said, it might stand a chance of actually happening.

  5

  DELORME’S ALARM WOKE HER AT four a.m. She patted the bedside table to shut it off, cursed, and sat up on the edge of the bed. It was cold in the room and she was wearing nothing but the long T-shirt she slept in. The alarm was on the chair where she had put out her clothes the night before, placed there to ensure she got out of bed.