The Rope Eater

by Ben Jones

He dropped the flap and I heard his footsteps crunch away. I pulled my bag up around me and leaned back against the snow wall. The wind had dropped outside and silence settled over us. The stove did not sputter and the doctor and West did not stir. I closed my eyes, but the jerk-jerk-jerk of my chest kept me awake, making a crunch as it tapped my head against the snow. I couldn’t believe that my body wouldn’t avail itself of the chance to rest, but so it was—managing barely to survive his labors, the stubborn mule expects exhaustion, and regards anything else with uncomfortable suspicion. I listened to my heart for some pattern behind the brute muscling of blood, the secret for which its punishing had been preparing me. It slowed, then skipped and slowed again, my brain glancing dully off it. I opened my eyes and found the doctor awake and staring intently at me.

  “Reinhold?” he said sharply.

  “Inland, sir,” I replied. “A little antsy, and wanted to see if we were in the mountains yet. Been out about an hour or two, I guess. Are you feeling better?”

  “Much, thank you, Kane,” he replied. “West slowed down less than an hour after we started, and I carried him along most of the day.”

  “How much farther do you think, sir?”

  “Within ten or fifteen miles, I am sure of it. But the traveling is likely to get more difficult very soon. The mountains leading in will be steep, and we may not be able to continue across the ice.”

  “All due respect, sir, but how’ll he manage? Should we rest a few more days with him and then push on? Or leave him with a good load of food, and find our way in, then come back and bring him over?”

  “We can’t do that, I’m afraid,” said the doctor, “though it would be sensible. He’ll want to be along with us, even if it is difficult. I think we’re better off to cache the meat and bring him on the sledge. I know it’ll be hard, but it’s not a great distance now.”

  “Would it make sense to scout from here as a base? Find a route over the mountains and the glaciers without our gear?”

  “One more solid day’s march, and we can set up a base camp, and scout from there. It should bring us to the bay of the glaciers, and we can make our way inland from there.”

  “Will there still be mirages in the darkness?”

  The doctor gave me a condescending smile.

  “Mirages are creatures of the light—light reflected by air of different temperatures. It is possible that the even, strong moonlight could create some kind of mirage, but it is unlikely to be the sort of wholesale disguise that Dr. Strabo experienced.”

  “Another hoosh, Doctor.”

  I jumped as I heard West’s command issue sharply from within his bag. Dr. Architeuthis put on the pot, added some blubber to the wick, and some snow and meat to the pot. West sat fully enclosed within his bag, peering out at us suspiciously.

  “Reinhold?” he demanded.

  “Scouting inland to gauge an approach to the mountains,” answered the doctor.

  “No more side trips,” he said, pointedly ignoring me and speaking directly to the doctor. “No hunting, or running off, no meandering about. Forward only, and only as a group.” He settled back into the darkness. The doctor said nothing.

  West’s mug disappeared into his bag and there was an interlude of greedy mastication, then he thrust his mug out again and the doctor refilled it patiently. West ate a third mug and then cocooned himself completely into his bag. Outside I heard the crunch of Reinhold’s feet; soon after his voice boomed into the tent.

  “White glove and chocolate time, ladies? Or have we started the pinochle?”

  I smiled broadly. The doctor merely leaned forward as Reinhold sat heavily on his bag and stirred the hoosh pot.

  “Well?”

  “I went about two miles inland, sir, due east, then angled north for about a mile, then back here.”

  “And?”

  “Low hills all the way, and nothing but snow and ice. No incline to the north as far as I could see, but the snow came in before I got too far—that’s when I headed back. The light was pretty good up to that point, however. If there are mountains, they are liable to be north quite a ways still.”

  “If they are volcanic, it is likely that they rise quite sharply, as they will have arisen recently. What was the snow like?”

  “White, as usual, sir. Thick flakes as you’d expect with the temperature above zero. And quite a bit to come, by the looks of it.”

  The doctor continued his questioning for quite some time, with West emerging from his bag to listen more closely. None of it seemed to yield any new information of significance, though this did not seem to discourage the doctor. We finished the hoosh, doused the stove, and slept.

  In the morning the wind was up, and the snow blowing heavily, but the doctor decided we should push ahead in any case. First we dug a hole out of the tent space to hold the extra meat, and then built a considerable cairn on top of it from blocks of snow. We took about a week of seal meat, and stashed the rest. West remained inside his bag the entire time, and indeed did not come out even as we were dismantling the hut and loading the sledge. Reinhold looked quizzically at me, but said nothing. We heaved West’s bag onto the sledge as gently as we could, and strapped him down. We bound our own frozen bags onto the back, slipped into the harness, and pushed off.

  The thick snow dragged on the sledge, and the harness bit into my shoulders, but the work did keep us warm. The wind buffeted us from the west and north, nearly knocking me into the sledge a few times; the drifts built up quickly, and we were soon forced to haul the sledge with our hands in order to guide it up and down without jarring West too badly. Marching in the wind and snow is never pleasant; adding the darkness and the newly laden sledge made it distasteful. We had been marching for about two hours, making perhaps a mile or two, when West wriggled his head free from the bag.

  “Enough, you fools!” he shouted over the wind. “Make camp and wait for the storm to blow out.” He disgorged himself from the bag and stood stamping his feet as we rigged up the shelter. As soon as the tarp was over the sledge, he threw his bag inside, and we built up the snow walls on the outside. The doctor went in and fired the stove. When we came in, there was a hoosh ready for us. West again ate several portions, and retreated into his bag. Reinhold and I ate in silence. After he had finished, and trimmed the stove down, the doctor announced that he was going to run some tests while we waited out the storm; he pulled out of his bag and began to put on his heavy mitts.

  West shot out of his bag.

  “You will remain in the tent,” he said evenly.

  “I must run some tests,” said the doctor, “gauge our distance and direction; make sure that we are still closing in on the glaciers.”

  “We are, and you know that we are. There is no further need of testing.”

  “We could, by following the eastern shore exclusively, have been turned to the east into a smaller bay or channel. A few quick tests will—”

  “We go together or not at all. You seek the discovery for yourself. I have brought you all here, paid for everything. You will not leave me behind now. There is no further need of testing.”

  “We have only limited—,” began the doctor.

  “There is no need,” said West. “Now I suggest you rest, as you will need all of your strength.”

  The doctor removed his mitts and returned to his bag. After a time, he consoled himself by experimenting with the ice at the floor of the tent—scraping it up into a small vial, adding to it, shaking the vial, and examining the results. He brought out Strabo’s book and pored over it again in the dim light.

  From that point forward, West ceased to speak entirely; he had long ago stopped talking to Reinhold and me; now he did not speak to, or look at, the doctor. Communication became a set of grunts and stares. As he stirred, he expected to be fed until he stopped putting out his mug. If he kicked the stove, he expected it to be lit. The storm blew on for long hours, for a day, then two. Reinhold went out periodically to dig a passage clear and to clear th
e snow from on top of the tent. We went out only to relieve ourselves. Every time any of us left our bags, West emerged from his and sat stiffly alert, listening to make sure we did not go far. The doctor spoke little, whether from anger or shame or preoccupation, I could not tell. He passed the time by endlessly recalculating numbers from his notes and comparing them to the journal. He muttered to himself and nodded and added new annotations to his notes.

  Six hooshes later—roughly on the afternoon of the second day— the wind abated and the temperature plunged. Even deep inside our cave of ice, now sealed by the frozen condensation of our breath, we could feel the air harden and grow brittle, and hear the wind begin to scrape. West came out from his bag and poked his head outside.

  “Come,” he yelled in to us, “the wind is down. We’ll put in a full march now and see if we can’t reach the glaciers.”

  We scrambled up and threw the remaining rations and supplies into our packs. We pulled our frozen bags out the tunnel and began to hack at the drifts that had built up around the sledge.

  “Come on, come on!” shouted West. “We cannot stay here in the cold.”

  The temperature had dropped from a relatively comfortable twenty below zero to what had to be near fifty below. Even straining hard to free the sledge, I could not manage to get warm. My gloves froze, as did the sleeves of my coat, until I was just clubbing at the wall of snow with thick paddles of arms.

  “The doctor and I will begin marching. You follow in short order. We must be off.”

  West and the doctor moved off as Reinhold and I worked the sledge free. We had to be careful for the tarp, which was brittle and stiff, and anchored deeply under the drifts. Finally we got the sledge out, and piled the packs and bags on top, and then bent the tarp roughly over the heap. We lashed it down as best we could and began to haul.

  The days of inactivity had not helped to prepare us for the cold. The difference between a “moderate” twenty below and our current forty or fifty below was an order of magnitude: I did not even begin to feel my feet as we marched, despite angling my toes down and pounding them into the snow in an effort to get the blood into them. The wind sought out not just the gaps and seams, but wherever the fabric of my woebegone clothes had worn thin, and pulled the feeling from my limbs. First my arms, bound in the raddies, and then my legs went entirely numb, and moved of their own volition. My face burned and stung underneath my swaddling; I would find myself continually choking behind the mask of ice I had built up and I had to smash it off on my shoulder.

  Reinhold did not try to speak over the wind, but I heard him huffing out songs in the gaps, and could see brightness in his eyes from beneath his layers. We had gone barely a mile when we stumbled over the doctor and West. They had burrowed into the snow, with the doctor laying over West like a blanket.

  We pulled West onto the sledge and covered him again with the stiff bags. Then we pulled off into the blowing snow. Eventually the wind swung around behind us, and though we were still very cold, we made good progress. Finally the doctor called a halt again and we began to make camp.

  Rebuilding the shelter in the wind with our stiff limbs was impossible—we turned the sledge on edge and cut the lashings free along one side, and then pulled it over us. We were swiftly buried by the drifting snow. Huddled in the darkness, I felt utterly without choices—no sense to move, no energy, exhausted from the cold, deafened by the wind, locked in an unsteady band of white amid the empty black. Back at the camp, prodded by the experiments of the doctor, I had wondered what sat in the black that I could not see—microscopic creatures, energies without form like spirits, his rivers of air and earth. But here beneath the tarp, the world was emptied even of its horrors, of malice, intent, energy—simply was, and was not, life, and so was removing us from it. How many empty miles of ice and snow are possible? How many empty hours since light and dark had shaped chaos into time? It was not entropic, but static; growth was the aberration, and this the equilibrium. I made no action to resist or join, but lay in darkness waiting, persisting without hope.

  sixteen

  A hoosh cheered us considerably, and we regained the energy to build a proper hut. The softening wind lulled us again to sleep. I awoke to the doctor jostling me roughly.

  “Come on, come on,” he said excitedly. “Get your gear and come out. We’ve reached the Barrier.”

  I scrambled out of my bag and out of the tent. There, about five miles away, but clearly visible above the blowing snow, I could see a massive glacier, perhaps two hundred feet high, that stretched off in the darkness to the east and west.

  I hooted with joy, and Reinhold did a dance in the snow beside me, clapping me on the back and swinging my shoulders back and forth.

  “Where’s West? Is he coming out?”

  “Mr. West is not doing so well,” said the doctor. “He’s still unconscious. We’ll remain camped here so he can rest. Reinhold, you’ll hunt along the Barrier edge and tend to Mr. West. Kane and I will explore the face and see if we can find a way up or through.”

  “Couldn’t we find the edge and come up on the side, sir?” I asked. “Or will we find the mirage as we get closer and be able to hike in?”

  “We’ll have to see when we get close enough, Kane. It doesn’t look like we’ve come at it the same way as Strabo, though it is difficult to tell from this distance. I doubt that the mirage could persist in the winter. I think it most likely that we will either find a slope up and be able to climb to the top, then hike into the islands, or more likely, that we will be able to make our way through the underside, where seams of heated rock will have melted passages that lead us out into the archipelago.” I tried to imagine a black garden, warm and fragrant and lightless, great tropical fronds reaching over us, and rustling movements in the darkness.

  “Come, Kane,” said the doctor abruptly, “let’s have a hoosh and be off.”

  We ate enormously, packed light bags, and left, Reinhold bellowing out three hearty cheers. We reached the Barrier easily enough—the ice was fairly even, and without a sledge or harness I felt fast and strong. The face of the Barrier was deeply fractured, with fissures running the two hundred feet down the face and disappearing beneath the ice. At the base of the glacier were low heaps of debris, fragments that had calved in the fall and been frozen in. Beyond this foot, the top of the glacier bent out over us, as if pushed from the top, rather than flowing along the bottom. Spears of ice protruded out like breached battlements.

  “You see that.” The doctor pointed. “The rocks must be melting the base of the glacier away even as the top advances, causing it to tumble over itself.”

  The pitch of the top did not show us any easy place to climb. The ice itself was not like sea ice or like freshwater ice; it was densely plastic and difficult to chip away. It came off in a spray of pellets rather than shattering into sharp chunks. The doctor examined the face of it carefully, breaking off pieces, tasting them, turning them over in his hands.

  We moved back and forth along the face, advancing into a few cracks, but never getting farther than a dozen yards or so before the crack closed or was filled by rubble. We turned to the west and moved along quickly now, the doctor poking his head in and out, rapping on the fissured walls in various places, then hurrying ahead to the next. A mile on, then two; the face of the glacier was remarkably consistent, not winding into bays and hollows, but forcing itself out in one uninterrupted mass. The moon rose and lit the fractured ice with blue and silver. Suddenly the doctor called out and ran ahead. In the distance loomed a vast semicircular opening cut out in the bottom of the glacier. It was more than one hundred yards across and reached up forty or fifty feet. The doctor stood in the entrance and bellowed, his arms stretched out over him in triumph.

  The walls of the opening were perfectly smooth as though polished and new; they had no cracks or fissures running through them, and the floor was smooth and black. It was like wandering into a cathedral that had been built overnight in all of its geometric pe
rfection; it pulled my breath up out of me.

  “Come come,” called the doctor. He had pulled a lantern out of his bag and lit it. I gasped.

  “I’ve had it in reserve,” he said, “for exactly this purpose.” After the dim yellow of the blubber lamp, the oil burned bright white, and the light burst out like a tiny sun. The doctor moved back into the tunnel, the light not even reaching to the sides.

  “It’s a meltwater river, created by the heat of the rocks. In the summer it must reach to fill the entire channel. Imagine, Kane—it must explode out of the glacier like the Nile in flood.” He was racing along now and I struggled to keep up, breaking into a run now and then. He was swerving from side to side to make sure we stayed in the main channel. In places, the smooth walls were scored by long, thick streaks that wound over and through each other like calligraphy done in a giant hand.

  “Rocks, in the turbulence,” he said. “Look at the size of them!”

  The meltwater tunnel ran on and on, straight back into the glacier, without dipping or curving, without cleft or declivity; occasionally we would see an opening high up in the wall where a tributary poured in from above. On and on we went, a mile, two, more, deeper and deeper. Finally it began to bend and dip, sending us sliding down a smooth slope. As we had been walking, I felt increasingly warm. I took it as a part of being out of the wind, and of our increased pace, but as we descended, the air felt warmer than it had felt in months.

  “Is it—,” I began.

  “Warmer? Absolutely. It is close to zero now and has been warming steadily as we descend.”

  “Will we come to the water? Or onto land?” I imagined a vast underground lake lined by grottoes filled with blue light reflected up off the water, waves lapping gently at the shore.

  “We may,” admitted the doctor, “but we should advance carefully. There must be a basin of meltwater at the head of the river. It must be below the level of the river and rise in the spring as ice melts from above and below. The basin fills until it overflows. Or perhaps the lava has its own season and rises in a slow tide of some kind, raising the levels of the meltwater. In either case, the ice is likely to slope down into the basin, and we would not want to slide down into the water.”