by Ben Jones
We paused while he roped us together. The tunnel had narrowed now, and our lantern touched the walls on either side and showed the ceiling flickering above us. We had been walking for about fourteen hours altogether when the doctor called a halt finally. We ate some chunks of raw blubber and sucked some chips of ice, then moved off again.
The tunnel began to narrow and split off at last, several channels of different sizes heading up and off to the sides. Dr. Architeuthis took a few paces down each, and peered ahead with the lantern to find the main channel. On several occasions we had to go quite far down side channels before returning to the main channel. Some of the branches connected back to each other in flowing panes, what sailors called “eyes of God” in the icebergs, and some of the smaller channels opened to show large chambers beyond. The doctor hacked small markings in the walls with his knife when we moved out from one channel to the next. The noise echoed harshly in the cavernous darkness. The air was warm enough now that I shed my jacket and marched along in sweater and shirt, and even so I was sweating. Still the walls showed no signs of melting, and there was no running water anywhere.
Eventually the channels resolved back into a single channel, this one perhaps ten feet high and twenty feet across. It sloped steadily downward into the very heart of the glacier. The roof angled down also, and developed smooth ridges, like the shallows of a gentle sea. We stooped, and then crawled, the sides closing in as well as the top. We were now miles below the surface of the Barrier. For the first time I began to feel the weight of the ice above us.
“We’ll eat again here, and then make our way forward,” said the doctor. He opened the top of the lantern and inverted the cap, then filled it with ice chips and some blubber. It was a small hoosh, but as our first warm food in almost two days, it tasted succulent.
“What is the temperature, Doctor?”
“It is close to twenty degrees above zero,” he said. “Much warmer, and we’ll have to swim.” He grinned. “We must be nearly to the basin,” he continued. “I believe it will open on the other side into a tunnel similar to this one, leading into the archipelago.”
“Should we bring Reinhold and West into the glacier, sir? So West can recover in the heat?”
“We’ll find the way first, and then bring them on through. There may still be some rough sledging ahead and West is in no condition to manage it. They’ll come along soon enough. Reinhold has likely filled the tent with seal meat and they are gorging themselves on it as we speak.”
After the hoosh, I was feeling dozy. The air felt pleasantly warm. My legs and feet were aching from the prolonged march but it was wonderful to feel warm again. I could feel also mounting in my chest the dim echoes of the excitement I had felt on the Narthex as I first learned to read the instruments—that a fresh world was close, and due us; that our efforts had earned it and we were close to our deliverance. The doctor propped the lantern on his coat and tied it so that it would slide along the floor between us. The floor was ridged now also, and as we crawled forward my hands and knees slid and pitched. Soon we were inching forward on our bellies, sliding up and down between the ridges. We were both panting heavily. Finally the doctor paused, his head turned sideways and wedged between the ridges. I dropped my exhausted head to the ice, happy for the break. He worked his way free and inched back down to me.
“Kane,” he said, “you are small enough to fit through—you must go on ahead and see how far it is to the basin. Once we return with Reinhold, we can open the tunnel, but it would take us too long now. You go on ahead and report back the distance. I will wait here and run some tests on the ice.”
“Are you sure it opens out?” I asked. “That it doesn’t just end?”
“Think of the tunnel,” he said, “the mass of it, the speed of the rocks. That mass comes from somewhere; it doesn’t just ooze out of the ice. And the temperature—we must be close.”
Obediently I went forward, twisting my head and shifting my hips to work between the ridges. I counted my lurches forward to keep some sense of the distance. Behind me the doctor shouted encouragement as he hacked at the floor with his knife. I dragged the lantern behind me on the rope. Gradually I left him behind, hearing only the echoes of his knife on the ice. In the jostling, the lantern went out and I was left in the darkness. I slid my hands forward, expecting at any moment for the world to drop away; the passage narrowed and narrowed again. My coat got wedged in and I panicked for a moment, then backed out to free myself. I could not turn around, so I wriggled backward until the chipping grew louder. There I found space to turn around and made my way back. The chipping stopped and all I could hear was the doctor’s breathing echoing under the ice.
“Doctor,” I called. “I’ve gone as far up as I can. My coat got stuck into the ice. I think the condensation is making it stick.”
“Then take it off.” The doctor’s voice was suddenly up very close to mine, his face only a few feet away.
“Leave the lantern and your gear. You will move faster in any case, and the heat from your body may help you get through.”
I wriggled out of my jacket and out of my sweater. Underneath my bare skin, the ice was cool and impossibly smooth. It did not stick to my skin, nor soften or melt when I pressed on it. I dragged the lantern around and pushed it over to the doctor. He sparked it into light, and the light leapt off into the distance.
“Good boy, Kane. You are very nearly there. You are on the verge of doing something absolutely tremendous. You must get through. Force your way.”
I turned and pressed on with renewed energy, sliding easily over the ice without my jacket to restrain me. The plastic ice did not yield, but it did not hold me either. I slid ahead into the crevice and left the light of the lantern and Dr. Architeuthis panting behind me. His soft, insistent voice carried up to me even at a great distance, prodding and begging and exhorting me to strive onward, its pant and hiss bearing me up and on.
The undulant ice seemed to give way in the darkness before me, and on and on I went. The heat inside the glacier did not seem to be radiating from anywhere, but rather inherent in the glacier itself, as if I were inside some great beast, and I felt like I had become an equal part of it, not distinct but separated, and finding my way down to where it was I belonged. The passage continued to close until there was no gap between my head and the smooth edge of the ice, and still I went forward, rippling down into darkness effortlessly.
I awoke to the pound of blood in my ears, my body locked firmly into the ice. My reverie of progress had ended and I had been released to where I was: miles below the ice, in a thin shirt, in total darkness, without even the space to lift my head. I could feel the ice pressing in on all sides of me and I cried out in panic first, and then horror. The ice that I had felt opening I now felt closing, the fluid mountains rolling forward onto me, and I thrashed, though only within the loose confines of my own skin, and screamed and passed into unconsciousness again.
part three
Go Still
seventeen
The sharp jerk of my leg brought me back to my senses. At first I thought the doctor had somehow made his way up to me, but it was my mere heart again, drawing me back from what would be rest—for dying then would have been not only easy but pleasant. But the blood pulsed and ran in my leg, jabbed and yanked me back. Now I was very cold, and the ice was still unmelted beneath me, though it had yielded enough to let me move backward again. The slope was steeper than I had imagined and it was difficult to find purchase on; I angled first to the right and then to the left, and got stuck against one side or the other. My jaw, ankle, knee caught and twisted, bent and banged as I worked up and back, resting from time to time, and trying to turn around. The panic surged up in me in waves, paralyzing me as I pushed up against the mass of the glacier, straining to create the space for my own small pocket of heat. For once the cadence of my heart beating back against the ice fortified me, its endless revolt no longer aimed at me but become my ally and pushing back weakly
but relentlessly, impossibly, drawing me back into the wider, more open area of the passage and finally bringing the soft glow of the lantern into view.
“Yes? Yes?” shouted Dr. Architeuthis as soon as he heard me. “You have found passage? We are there?”
I scuttled the last yards into the low opening he had made and slumped against the wall.
“There is no way through,” I said. “The passage narrowed until I became trapped and was only able to extricate myself with great difficulty.”
“And did you throw a chunk of ice on ahead? To see if the basin was near? To see what lay ahead of you?”
“My arms were stuck beside me, my head wedged at an angle. There was no room to throw anything.”
“But ahead of you, was there heat? Light? Signs of any kind? Could you hear the flow of water?”
“Nothing, there was nothing.”
“Yes, well,” he said. “Perhaps if you could have had the heat of your body melt you through. We can return with some supplies—perhaps Reinhold has killed a seal—and with a few good feedings and perhaps a layer of grease on your skin, naked perhaps you may get further.” At this, my panic surged back.
“It is not a matter of ten feet more, or a hundred,” I said. “The glacier closes off into nothing. There is no space for man to pass through.”
“It is always a matter of ten feet more,” he said fiercely. “Yours or another’s with more will than you, with more courage, more discipline; nothing is given, only wrested, and either you have the strength or you lack it.”
The wick of the lantern burned between us with perfect unwavering stillness, throwing out in silence a sphere that bent and distorted as it ran over the furrowed ice.
“And what if you get there, you make it, and burst out into the islands, and you are so broken and weak, broken and not made whole, that you cannot make your way back?” I asked.
“Then you will have something inside you, irrevocable and irreducible; you will have wrenched the whole world ahead, deflected it from its circling descent, and brought it forward. In generations of men, one man may. You.”
His voice was swallowed in the immense darkness and did not echo back.
“We shall make our way back out,” he said. “Regroup, resupply. With fresh meat from Reinhold, we can come back, dig deeper.” I said nothing, and we made the long trek back.
Reinhold had no fresh meat for us. When West came to, he was delirious, and Reinhold had been forced to strap him into his bag. He cackled with laughter when he saw us enter, and began cursing at me.
“Kane, how does it feel to be weak? Do you enjoy weakness and insufficiency? You miserable bastard. Eh? I’d be there now without you to hold me back. Thought I was doing you a favor bringing you along, dragging your bloated carcass behind me.” He subsided into mumbling, and the doctor sedated him.
“Me and the gentleman have just been exchanging recipes for pot roast,” said Reinhold. “Port, I told him. Nutmeg, says he, and he had a bit of distemper, so I restrained him.”
“Any lucidity at all?” asked the doctor.
“None, sir. Been awake as you saw him for the last ten hours or so. Wouldn’t eat the hoosh—said I’d poisoned it.”
“We’ll have to force march him back down to the cache if he’s to have any chance.”
“Does he, sir?” I asked.
“He just needs proper nutrition and some rest, Kane. A week or two of fresh meat and he’d be ready to head out again. We’ll leave in an hour, double march back to the cairn, and build a more substantial shelter. A week of the seal meat should have us looking differently. If West has recovered sufficiently we can return here and make another try.”
We beat each other into our stiff harnesses and moved off. Over us, the sky was no longer its flat black but shot through to the south with soft shafts of purple like the rain-slick bark of a tree where a bud will burst through. I looked over to the doctor.
“It’s coming,” he said, smiling. “A few more weeks.” We put our heads down and moved off. The sledge moved easily over the hard-packed snow and I was thankful to be free of the glacier. Hoosh at midday huddled under the tarp, and we were off again. West did not wake.
We made fair time; shapes of ice and drift loomed up with an odd but comforting familiarity like seeing the face of an old acquaintance in a crowd in a foreign city. It had taken us three days with the storms to get to the Barrier, but it had been only eight or nine miles. We reached the bay, though we could not see the cairn in the darkness; we took two hours to make a solid camp, banking up the walls and building a small entrance tunnel with a block of ice to keep out the wind. Reinhold carved the ventilation hole to the south, and then packed the entire outside with loose snow. The doctor lit the stove and made a thin hoosh with the remains of our rations. West revived enough to be fed some teaspoonfuls of hoosh, but vomited them up again and went back to sleep. The doctor brought out the lantern again to examine Reinhold and myself; satisfied that we were sound, he doused the lantern and we watched the soft light of the stove as we digested in silence.
I came to with a snap of the tarp and a painful stabbing in my head. I strained to open my eyes, but they were distant and leaden; I heard a tread like footsteps, the march of soldiers, and felt, within my dumb trunk, my heart, without the sense to yield; from my great distance, it seemed like a curiosity, then an affront, and on and on it beat, and gradually I felt pain return and drag me back, first a stinging in my shoulders and face, and then a burning across my back and stomach, like a jet of acid. At my elbows and knees it paused, then continued—a fierce itching, and shooting pains that made me cry out.
There was no response from the others; the stale air stank and smothered. I croaked and struck out with my legs spastically, trying to rouse someone, but there was no stir. My head jabbed again sharply as if I had been struck with a hammer, and then struck again. I struggled to sit up, wavered, and fell back, throwing my arms out helplessly. They hit against the edge of the tarp and I dragged myself upright with it, pulling it out from under the edge of the snow wall in the process.
My clothes had frozen into blocks, and I beat myself against them. I dug my heels down and threw my head against the wall of the sledge behind me. Eventually I managed to work it loose and knock it backward, bringing the roof tumbling down on me. The outside air was crisp and fresh and I gulped it in. In the moonlight I could see what I had suspected—that West had worked free of his straps, crawled over to the ventilation hole, and blocked it with his glove. Densely packed into the tent, we had nearly suffocated in the storm. He lay curled beneath it, a grisly smile playing over his skeletal face.
I knocked the stove free from the sledge and rigged it roughly in front of me. Twenty minutes of wrestling, and a match held, and then the wick caught, and the thick yellow light spread under the tarp. I wedged the doctor’s pack onto the top edge of the sledge, creating enough space for the stove to burn freely and let the fresh air in.
Reinhold came to first, shaking himself like a big dog, and then smiling to see the flame. Next the doctor sat up, unseeing at first, like a somnambulist, staring at me with an angry blankness and down at the flame and back at me. In one pass his eyes cleared and he looked simultaneously relieved and exhausted.
I explained what had happened and he made his way over to West. West’s exposed hand was black and curled as if it had been burned in a fire. When the doctor raised West’s head from the floor of the hut, he revealed a torn flap in West’s cheek, open from beneath his nose back to the base of his jaw, still hooked on to the edge of the sledge runner. The bloodless skin looked like paper, the gums black over black teeth. Once the hut had warmed and the air cleared, we helped the doctor wrestle him out of his bag. His limbs were loose, and there was no substance to him, no mass of padding, like an armful of kindling. The doctor cut free his boots. West’s toes came off into his socks, and his feet were fully black, with streaks of black reaching above his knees. We worked him into one of the bags a
nd propped him between us, close to the stove. We pushed close to the stove. Reinhold made his way out of the tent to find the cache, and fired his rifle to signal to us when he found it.
With the heat, pain arrived, and receded, and we ate, and ate again.
“We must move again while we have the strength,” the doctor proclaimed.
“We do not have the strength,” I said. “We need to recover ourselves.” I looked over at Reinhold.
“West cannot recover out in this cold, and we will follow,” replied the doctor. “Our bodies are consuming themselves—sacrificing our fingers and toes, then hands and feet, trying to keep our hearts and heads functioning. They are cunning beasts that hoard the heat and leave our weaker parts to fend for themselves. We must get him, and ourselves, back to the camp before we are run to ground. We must push on as soon as we possibly can.”
Of our march I have few memories. One, that is easiest and so preoccupied me to the exclusion of others, was this: I began to go blind. You would think it would be easier to go blind gradually, light fading, edges softening, until the world retreats into blurred darkness—after all, the world was largely dark in any case, lit only by the stab of the stars and the slow wallow of the wick in blubber. But for me I think it would have been easier to have been struck blind, as they say, cast into darkness and left to find my way. As it was, in the final twilight days I had my sight to stew on, and dim outlines to keep me lost.
There was then uncertain space—objects rising up where none should be, and disappearing—and me, lost, battered prey. The mug resting by my leg, and with numb fingers seeking, but failing to find. The others were patient with me, but there was little to be done. Once you have had sight, you cannot lose that idea of space, but your rough fingers cannot shape what you find—it remains overlong, unfamiliar, undefined, chaotic—and your unreliable mind finds always the agency of malice behind it and not its own inability to imagine what you cannot see. In the last dark days when even the stove was a vague spot, I was still making my space in the same way, placing and ordering objects and fighting with my memory to translate through them. It took two days on the march for the memory of light and space to die out and to be truly in darkness.