Shadowplays

by W. D. Gagliani

  Something dark rose up in me. I threw the hot food at him and missed. I wasn’t hungry anymore. We had no words for each other - they’d all been said.

  So life went on. Frank was different, there was no doubt about it. He barely talked to me, and when he did, it was with contempt that he’d somehow concealed for months. I continued to cook for us, but Frank never ate. I guess he must have been eating whenever I was out at the dome. I still took that walk twice daily, and I still forged his initials carefully, as if he were still doing his share for science. What shit! It was all me. I was doing it all in that godforsaken hut and in that dome. I took my readings carefully and recorded them in the log and then signed the entries, drawing either my own initials as I always had or, every other time, drawing Frank’s - “FLG.” No one would ever know he’d caught the Bug. I couldn’t tell on a buddy, even if he was driving me apeshit.

  About a week after our last fight, the one about the steak we didn’t have, we made up. Or I made up with him, anyway. He was on his back in his bunk again and ignoring me.

  “Man, I think this’ll be the last tour, buddy, ” I said. I hoped we could talk. You know, bury the hatchet, as they say. I mean, we hadn’t talked in days. “I just can’t take this isolation anymore, and this darkness. And the fucking wind.”

  To be fair, the sky was getting lighter every day. But noon still seemed sort of like twilight, and the wind screeched through rips in the hut’s canvas. Two days before I’d fixed the cup anemometer - a gust of wind somewhere between sixty and seventy miles per hour had knocked the cups right off the damn thing, so I had to climb the bastard and put in one of the replacements. I had begged Frank to give me a hand, but he wouldn’t budge. Wouldn’t even look at me. So I’d gone out on the Ice and climbed the tower with a safety line that I had to unclip every few steps so I could clip it above me and take a few more steps. Two hours later, I had come crawling into the Jamesway and collapsed on the floor, all my limbs frozen and my face rubbed raw by the wind despite the mask.

  “Why bother?” Frank had asked no one in particular from his bunk. While I had to admit that he was partly right, it also made me so angry that I could barely focus my eyes. I’d noticed that happening before, too, like the coming light was bothering my pupils or something.

  Well, Frank had his version of the Bug. I might as well be entitled to mine. Take your pick.

  “You know what I’m sayin’ about the wind? It drives the breath right out of your lungs and digs at the inside of your stomach. Course, you been staying real cozy while I’ve busted my ass covering for you. So maybe the wind isn’t getting to you anymore, eh Frank?” I laughed.

  Frank mumbled something that I couldn’t catch.

  “What?”

  “I said why don’t you just shut up and leave me alone.”

  “Okay, Frank. Have it your way. Just a couple more weeks of this, and we’ll be out of each other’s greasy hair. Right?” I asked the girls.

  But they wouldn’t answer. They were getting just like Frank.

  So I cooked for both of us again and watched Frank’s food get cold across the table from me. Another peace offering wasted. Thank God we were going to see real daylight soon.

  The next day, Frank tried to kill me.

  It happened during the night reading. I took down numbers and ate a chocolate bar and forged his initials again. I’d been writing that the “day” readings were mine and the “night” his. I figured this system would do to cover his dereliction of duty. Frank was still a buddy, Bug or no Bug, and I wasn’t going to let him get in trouble when we got back to McMurdo. Jesus, when were we going to get back? I shrugged, then checked my - his - initials, and closed the logbook with a snap. It was about half-filled with tiny penciled entries, all in my careful hand and with both our initials displayed near the dates.

  Wait. I sat up straight. Feverishly, I riffled through the log’s blank pages. A date was circled in red, a date that was coming up. I’d been damned careful with the initials, but I had neglected to disguise my own handwriting in the actual entries. What would they make of that? It was too late to change them, unless …

  Unless I brought Frank the logbook and we went over it together. That was it. We’d go back, and he’d just write in the entries after I erased them. Simple. I unzipped my parka and shoved the logbook inside, between the heavy sweater and woolen shirt. Then I slid the face mask up and over my nose and mouth, and snapped the new goggles over my eyes. I could barely see, but I had little choice. The wind was gusting at sixty-five, and ice chips were digging into anything too soft to withstand the assault. The red paint had long since been flecked off the instrument tower, and every other surface was as pockmarked as my face.

  So I doused the lantern and stepped up, into the ice storm. It wasn’t a whiteout, since that condition occurs when there’s hardly any wind at all, but it was close enough. A whiteout is reflection that turns everything to milk and blends horizon with sky until you might as well be swimming in a bath of the stuff. Right then the horizon didn’t even exist, and the hut might as well have been perched on the dark side of the moon. The only thing linking me to that warm Jamesway was the nylon safety line railing, strung from hut to dome and flapping like a flag on its thin posts.

  I took hold of the line with both mittened hands and began the trek. I tried to breathe through my nose, since drawing in breath could easily bruise a lung. I pulled myself along, warmed only by the thought of hot soup - okay, hot salted water some half-wit had once christened soup while delirious or drunk or both - and some chocolate and the girls. Step after difficult step, the crunch of the snow under my boots lost as soon as it was created, I counted posts and slowly reached the halfway mark - a three-foot stretch of line dyed brilliant red. It was almost as comforting to see as the door of the Jamesway would be.

  With my arms doing the work and my mind trying to propel me forward to the hut, the stove on high, the hot soupy stuff and my hands warm as they cupped the mug, I suddenly found that the line was limp - much more limp than it should have been between posts.

  I pulled faster and heard my breath rattling in my throat - or, rather, felt it rattling there - and my steps got longer and quicker and the ice drove into my open mouth and I almost didn’t care because I could see something just barely but it was coming up and I was home, I was almost -

  Frank had untied the nylon railing and somehow brought it back around and what was in front of me now wasn’t the Jamesway but the dome. I had spent a half hour walking and was exactly where I had started from.

  For the first time, I contemplated death. I was at the dome.

  I looked back, toward where the hut would be, and saw for the first time that the line of posts did curve slightly to the right. There was no way I could find the hut in the storm, not without the railing to guide me.

  Panting from exertion, the bruises in my lungs and nostrils throbbing, I straddled the railing and fell into the doorway and down the five steps. My face mask was gone, torn off sometime during the walk. My nose and lips were numb. My cheeks were slabs of marble.

  Hands trembling, I flicked the switch on the lantern and watched a whole lot of nothing happen. I turned it a dozen times, the click of the switch loud even above the wind outside. I followed the cable out the door and started pulling, wrapping the thin wire around my hand and elbow. It was cold and stiff, but it came. It came all too easily. The snipped end reached my hands and I saw the metal poking through the clean cut. In a rush of anger, I threw the useless cable out the door and turned back into the dome. I lit the stove and forced myself to calm down and think -

  Calm down and think.

  It was obvious. Frank had tried to kill me. He hadn’t actually failed yet, I realized as I tasted vomit at the back of my throat. I was alive, yes, but as long as he was there, in the Jamesway, and I was here, there wasn’t much I could hope for beyond a cold resting place. The Bug had finally driven him to the edge, and now he was after me, and I was dead because
there were still two weeks until the relief plane would come and it was still night and I started to cry.

  Tears froze in my beard, pinching as they pulled the individual hairs away from my skin.

  Maybe I could survive - wait out the storm - and make it back to the hut. It wasn’t impossible.

  But what if the weather continued like this for weeks?

  Antarctic weather is characteristically unpredictable - hell, I knew that - and a weeklong storm was nothing new, especially during the tail end of winter. And a two-week storm didn’t stretch the limits of my imagination much, if you know what I mean. Even then, the relief plane might have to wait another week for a long enough slot to bring up our replacements and the Camp Ten expansion materials. I might have to survive in the dome for three weeks or more.

  Awed with the thought, I checked the supply cabinet. Fuel for at least a week, maybe two if I stretched it. Not bad, since I had rarely used the stove while taking readings. Food was another matter. I’d steadily nibbled on the emergency rations and chocolate until there was little left. The bottom of the storage locker peered at me emptily. There was a scattering of chocolate bars and protein supplements. A few days at most, especially at such temperature extremes, where the body requires some four times its normal caloric intake. I could hear that fucking fat major lecturing in my mind, and it wasn’t pleasant. I wasn’t in very good shape, foodwise. Water wasn’t a problem, except that I’d use up fuel melting it out of the doorway ice.

  I unpeeled and ate a candy bar.

  Then I sat and tried to think clearly.

  Take a new set of readings. See what the weather looks like. Pressure, same as before. Temperature, minus sixty-three Fahrenheit. Winds, fifty-eight, gusting to sixty-five. Hell, the standard charts don’t even bother with windspeed over forty, and the coldest windchill’s at winds forty and minus sixty: an incredible minus one forty-eight.

  Give or take a few worthless degrees, that’s what I faced out on the Ice.

  My only chance was to wait out the storm and hope that it wouldn’t last much longer.

  I glanced at the wooden floor and counted empty chocolate wrappers, the remains of dozens of visits. It seemed I’d had as much a hand in my own death as Frank, that bastard. I turned the stove as far down as I could so it would still heat a small circumference and curled up in the shabby easy chair. Sometime later, I fell asleep.

  Dreaming.

  And saw flashes and scenes of my two winter tours on the Ice and of what came before and saw too much and cried in my sleep. A mysterious figure repeatedly took my life in his hands and strung it around in a circle and led me to where I had started. Each time, I rushed out into the dark to stop him with hands numbed by the cold wind.

  And each time, I watched as my fingers fell off, one by one, leaving raw white stumps with which I could no longer grasp the limp rope. And when I caught a glimpse of the figure, my own face peered back at me from inside the fur-lined hood.

  I shuddered and moaned, but let myself dream on and off, preferring the release of nightmares to the real cold inside the dome.

  I occasionally awoke and remembered and the wail of the wind was one long sound outside as the ice drove itself in a frenzy and smashed into whatever obstacle man had so foolishly placed in its way. And I saw that man was foolish in thinking that any such place could be tamed, and, if anything, I sympathized with Frank for having felt that way just a few weeks sooner than me, that’s all.

  Frank had got the Bug, and I was going to die because of it. But maybe I deserved to die. Something was telling me that, too.

  I drifted in and out of sleep for hours or days, I’m not sure. When I remembered, I ate chocolate and turned up the stove with trembling fingers that fumbled at the tiny notched wheel.

  The wind. Always the fucking wind.

  I wanted a haircut. I cried and the tears froze.

  Like watching someone else wake up, I slowly opened my eyes and came to the realization that the wind - though it still screamed and hooted through the cracks of the

  dome - had lessened somewhat. It was downright quiet.

  Hands I couldn’t feel shook as I covered exposed skin and lifted myself out of the chair I’d considered my final resting place. Frost crackled and rained about my feet as my stiffened parka tore away from the chair fabric.

  When I stepped through the doorway, I knew what I would find. The wind had indeed died sometime during the “night,” and the new ice had settled. Two feet of hard, granular snow spilled into the dome, dribbling down the steps like water, and I ignored it. Leaving the door open, I stood on the Ice and saw that the nylon railing and posts were altogether gone, blown away after all. Now there was no proof.

  The anemometer was cupless again. Wires that fed the dials inside the dome were flapping limply, their insulation ripped ragged. The snow gauges were buried. I couldn’t have cared any less.

  Now that the air was clear again, the hut was visible fifty yards away. A little lower on the brightening horizon, maybe, and more rounded on top than before, but certainly there. It hadn’t blown away. By my reckoning, I had spent five days in the dome.

  My boots crunched almost happily in the new icy snow as I made for home.

  Off to my right, the polar morning peeked over the Scott Icewall. I stopped to watch as the thin rays painted the sky bands of pink and violet. I looked through the clouds of my breath, hoping to see the flickering Frank had seen for weeks, but there was nothing. Just ice and snow and wind, and the coming day.

  There was no smoke coming from the pipe chimney. Breath streamed out in front of me, and for the first time I felt the spring that would soon taint the air with a near-warmth. The relief plane might already have been a dot in the sky. I reached the hut and spent a few minutes clearing the doorway of new fall. Then I went in.

  It was dark, darker than outside. There was no light, no lantern or candle. There was no heat. My breath came in ragged little gasps, and my vision blurred as I looked around. Where was Frank? Where could he have gone?

  I felt around for the panel that led to the tiny alcove where the generator sat, silent. A flexible metal pipe led from the generator to a jagged opening carved into the wall, through the layers of ice and skin, and out. For the exhaust. Check the fuel gauge. Empty. Fuel gurgled as I poured, careful to not spill a drop or to give fumes time to gather. Then I started the generator and waited as the lights in the Jamesway flickered and gained intensity. I closed the panel and entered the main room.

  Frank was on the bunk.

  My first thought was that he was being pretty damned callous, lying there like that, not giving a damn about my life or death. My second thought was that I should kill him for it. My third thought was almost unthinkable, but I couldn’t keep it out of my mind as I dripped water or fuel - fuel - all the way to the bunk.

  He hadn’t moved. Not since before the storm. Maybe not for weeks.

  Maybe not for weeks.

  The grease-stained pillow was on his chest. I touched his face. It was solid. The pillow was encrusted, had frozen solid, too. His eyes were open and staring.

  A sound gurgled out of my lips. If he had sat up then, or winked, or moved a white hand, I would have run screaming from that hut and welcomed the slash of wind-driven ice particles down my throat. I turned away from Frank and went to the table, unzipping the parka and pulling out the logbook. The pages were frozen closed - nightmare sweat had frozen them together. I tore at the paper edges with clawing fingers and felt sharp pain as ice stabbed the soft skin under my nails. Forcing the covers open, I looked at the entries I had written, those with Frank’s initials and mine. Weeks.

  I half turned to face the bunk, hoping to see - to understand - and Frank spoke.

  “About goddamn time you got back. Get the stove lit and make it fast. I’m sick of you and I’m sick of this wind. And those lights out by the Icewall have been driving me nuts. Night after night, those damned lights flickerin’ on and off like some sort of code.�
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  Funny, for the first time in weeks I couldn’t hear the wind at all.

  I lit the stove and faced Frank.

  “You drove me apeshit,” I said.

  “You always were apeshit, ” he retorted. It was a neat trick. His blue lips didn’t move at all. My stomach tightened.

  “I hate your fucking guts!” I shouted. “I hate you, and I hate this place.”

  He laughed and that was enough for me. I leaped on him and dragged him off the bunk. He made a solid thunk as he hit the planks. I pried the pillow from its perch on his chest and felt stiffened material tearing there. I threw the pillow across the room, into the galley. Then I went to the stove and turned it way up, watching the flames grow taller and taller.

  I had to melt the ice off the pillow.

  Flames licked upward. Suddenly, I felt a spark strike my beard and smacked out its little yellow tongue, and the smell of burnt hair filled my nostrils. I dropped the pillow and watched as more sparks jumped and ignited the woolen blankets on the nearby bunk, the wet planks.

  “There is nothing worse than fire when you’re on the Ice.”

  “If you don’t die in it, you’re as good as dead anyway.”

  “Take care of your shelter, and it’ll take care of you.”

  “There is nothing worse than fire.”

  “Frank!” I shouted. “Fire! Frank!”

  There was no answer. His clothes had caught, and smoke was forming rapidly in the center of the room. There was a smell, sickly sweet and somehow revolting, that clung to my nostrils. The stink of burning polyester and Styrofoam gagged me.

  “Carbon monoxide is probably already forming.” It was fat Major Kane, sitting on my bunk. His face wore a bored look. The lecture was too much even for him.

  “Take care of your shelter, and it’ll take care of you.”