Aurorarama

by Jean-Christophe Valtat

  “The Polar Kangaroo, you mean?”

  “We know him as Kiggertarpok here,” she said. “You could not have chosen, or been chosen by, a better ally. He protects the city much better than I could do. Now, if you will …”

  She showed him a comb made of narwhal tusk at the edge of the well. “I suppose you did not sleep through that part of the class.”

  Gabriel advanced and took the comb. The well was so deep the eyes could not fathom it. It was full of seals and walruses gliding around in a complicated choreography, and it stank atrociously, he thought. As he drew closer to Helen, he could see that she looked tired and sick, her skin waxen and wrinkled, the hands on her lap awfully maimed, with all the upper phalanxes neatly cut away, as if devoured by some wild animal. But for someone he had seen dead a few months before, she was not so bad.

  As the ritual demanded, he started unravelling and combing her long tangled hair, slowly, carefully, hoping she would not notice that his penis was slowly metamorphosing back into some bigger, harder-shelled crustacean. For a man who thought a few hours (years? centuries?) earlier that Stella would be the very last woman he would ever desire, this was nothing short of a miracle. Such was the power of the Sea Goddess.

  She sighed with pleasure, her eyes half-closed.

  “So what brings you here?” she eventually asked.

  “I supposed it was you.”

  “No. You brought me here. If I can be of any use.”

  “I have no idea. People usually come to find you about food, don’t they? But that would be Brentford’s business, not mine.”

  “Yes. I have heard, through the grapevine, so to speak, that he’s been running the Greenhouse. I’d be curious to see the kind of crooked vegetables he grows. It’s not my line, however. As you know, I specialize in animals. I was quite a huntress in my youth.”

  “I seem to remember Brentford was having a problem about hunting quotas. But I could not tell you what the problem was, exactly.”

  “I know and I’m taking care of it. Just pass the message along, if you will.”

  “You’ll have more chances to speak to him than I will. He also told me you had given him some kind of rendezvous. At the North Pole.”

  Helen stood silent, for a while.

  “To be quite exact I sent a messenger. Brentford is on his way, I think. And, as you see, I’m not,” she conceded.

  Gabriel tried not to sound reproachful.

  “You have sent him to his death, then.”

  “I sent him away from his death. You did not approve of his marriage any more than I did, did you? He’s worth much better than that … What’s her name? Sybil. She was the last girl who should have been allowed to be called by such a noble first name. Very much the girl-next-stage door, isn’t she?”

  Gabriel could not believe it. Women, he thought, nodding his head as if he had hit the mother lode of philosophical truth.

  “I hope he will pull it off, though.” said Helen, as if to herself, with an accent of real concern.

  “It is not too late to help him.”

  “I’ll help him by not helping him. He can do more by himself than he thinks. He only has to find out how much. You, I can help. Or, at least, I can help some people who want to meet you.”

  “And who would that be?” asked Gabriel.

  She sighed and turned toward him.

  “You talk a lot … Maybe you should quit shamanism and become a hairdresser instead,” she said. “In any case, thanks for the combing. I badly needed it. I see fewer and fewer shamans these days. But you seem to have appreciated it as well,” she added in a teasing tone. Goddesses, thought Gabriel, move in mischievous ways.

  “Isn’t there a part where my clothes come flying back to me?” he asked, her downward glance reminding him he was naked.

  But the voice that answered wasn’t Helen’s.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  The Phantom Patrol

  Wonderfully—really wonderfully—like the Tree of Knowledge in Eden, he said, was that Pole: all the rest of earth lying open and offered to man—but That persistently veiled and ‘forbidden.’ It was as when a father lays a hand upon his son, with: ‘Not here, my child; wheresoever else you will—but not here.’

  M.P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud, 1901

  It was the cold that woke Brentford: a sudden revolt of all his shaking flesh. His head hurt from some blow that had knocked him out, but passing his gloved hand over his cropped hair, he felt only a swollen knot at the back of his head, probably from a clomp against the stove. Thank God he’d had his hood on to protect him. Things could have been worse. They were merely catastrophic.

  He was lying, he realized, on the ceiling of his ship. The Kinngait was almost upside down, tilting slightly to the side, sustained in that position by the stump of its broken mast. It was dark, as all the lamps had been broken, and freezing, because the stove had gone out. This was better than its having started a fire, but there was little chance, if any, that he could make it work again.

  Brentford had no idea of what time it was, or of his bearings. He was lost in the middle of the closest earthly definition of nowhere. Walking back the hundred-odd miles to New Venice in the February night would be nothing short of suicidal, but waiting for help in the overturned ship this far from the city did not make much sense, either, especially as the ice, which he could hear grumbling around him like an empty stomach, could very well crush him at any moment now. Both options seemed equally bleak, but they were still options … Which also meant that a mistake could be made. As the clenched-jaw survivor he was supposed to change into, he would almost have preferred to have no choice at all and instead go for broke without further soul-searching. Being dead was one thing, dead and wrong another.

  There were priorities, though. Light and warmth had to be found, or the weather conditions would decide for him. He did not want to end up like the captain of the fabled ship Octavius, found frozen, brittle quill in hand, in front of his logbook after thirteen years of drifting and wintering around the Arctic seas.

  He got up and dizzily raised his hands toward the deck hold, struggling to open the latch, his arm across his face to protect it from the tumbling contents. A manna of material crumbled down to what used to be the ceiling. His limbs quivering from the cold, Brentford groped about in the heap, hoping to locate a spare flashlight and the primus stove, which he hoped hadn’t suffered from its fall. He found the time excruciatingly long before he could place his hand on the Ever Ready lamp. And then there was light, revealing the disheartening chaos of the topsy-turvy cabin, the instruments broken, the maps scattered everywhere as if a storm had blown inside the ship. By chance, the solid glass windshields had been spared. He rummaged for the extra batteries, and for the primus stove that would save his life—whatever it would be saved for. From time to time a loud crack from outside made him start, but he controlled himself, remembering that he was going to suffer more from loneliness than from intruders. The stove was there, and it seemed in working order. It would not be enough to heat the cabin, but he would have warm meals for a while, and maybe reach Heaven with a full stomach, something many dead explorers would have envied him for.

  He retrieved a watch that, still ticking, informed him that it was around two o’clock, probably A.M. though maybe he had already reached a latitude where the polar night still extended throughout the entire day. From where he barely stood, the unhelpful stars were invisible, and he did not feel like going out to check them just then. His idea was to hope for the crack of dawn that would come sooner or later, then use his sextant and, according to his bearings, either abandon ship, dragging the spare light sled he had in the hold, or stay there and send some flashing balloon message.

  Rubbing his limbs through the extra fur clothes he had picked up, and using his flashlight as sparingly as he could, he Robinson-Crusoed or, rather, Allan-Gordoned his way through the following hours, trying to organize his anti-cabin in the most sensible manner while waiting for daybreak.
The top of his bunk, seemingly solid enough to hold his weight, had been fitted with a mattress and a caribou fur–lined bag, inside which he could enjoy relative warmth. That way, he would make, he thought, one of those comfortably tucked-in corpses that rescue parties sometimes end up finding, a grin of welcome on his blackened face.

  Using a wooden spoon, he ate clam soup from a half-warmed tin can and drank a little brandy straight from the bottle, trying hard to think of a way out of his situation while trying equally hard to forget about it for a while. Outside, the ice snored uneasily, grumbling in its sleep, having nightmares, no doubt, about all the men it had killed, ready to turn violently and smother the Kinngait. Great, thought Brentford with a sigh. He understood he was not going to sleep, as deep down some primeval, childish fear had gotten hold of his guts. Even the faceless banshee whom he had followed so blindly now filled him with a retrospective awe. He was finally dozing off a little, though, when the voices woke him up.

  He could be wrong, of course. It could have been some trick of the wind, some spillover from an interrupted dream, a classic Arctic hallucination. But as he pricked up his ears, now sure that he was awake, he could hear them again, not only the voices but also the steps that crunched closer to the ship. He could not believe it. People. Here. So soon. Grasping the flashlight, crawling out of the caribou sleeping bag, and banging his head against the lower edge of the upturned bunk, he managed to land on the ceiling and hurried toward the windshield. He had not dreamed. There were human shapes, all around the ship, all carrying hurricane lamps and cautiously approaching. He was about to flash his lamp when one of the shapes lifted its lantern to its own face.

  Brentford recoiled in horror.

  There was no face, nothing but a mummified grin and eyes bulging out.

  Brentford’s stomach knotted and he felt himself melting in a prickly cold sweat. He closed his eyes and looked again, trembling. There were seven figures, moving closer, their bearded faces all visible now, some yellowish and cracked, some swollen and black. They wore ragtag clothes, woollen greatcoats heavy with ice, sealskin jackets with fur hoods, frosted welsh-wigs or leather hats with earflaps, duffel knee boots or kamiks, large woollen or fur mittens—all holding rifles. Some of them wore wire snow-glasses that, thank God, hid their eyes. Their motley clothes, like their body parts, seemed to have been patched up and sewn together haphazardly.

  The Phantom Patrol. This couldn’t be true. Brentford, trembling, fumbled for his rifle and then tried not to move.

  The undead advanced slowly, silently, their rifles cocked. One of them stood a few feet in front of the ship, waving his lantern from left to right. Brentford tried not to breathe so as not to leave a blur on the glass that separated him from them. The phantom put the lantern at his feet, casting a long shadow behind himself, and then placed his fists on his hips.

  “Ahoy there!” he cried with what seemed to Brentford an American accent.

  Brentford crouched a notch lower, feeling as if he were being trussed up with ropes made of shivers.

  “We expected a warmer welcome, sir,” the man continued after a moment, turning toward the others as if to gather their approbation. “What kind of man would have such a hardened heart as not to salute fellow travellers in such a wilderness? Especially when those travellers have walked a long way to meet him and are, shall we say, rather hungry.”

  Some of the other men burst into a yellow, unpleasant laughter.

  “Believe me, sir,” the man went on, as the others came closer to him. “We have spent long periods of wintering in cramped cabins or tents, and there is nothing that we understand and value more than a man’s need for a little privacy.”

  The others nodded with conviction, some saying “Aye, aye.”

  “But, as we have also experienced, there is absolutely no place on earth where a man can feel more desperate and helpless when he is on his own.”

  A hum of approval greeted his words.

  “Here, kind sir, here and only here, can you learn to truly appreciate the value of someone being there to lend you a hand. Or a fresh leg.”

  The patrol roared, a sickly, grating laughter that curdled Brentford’s blood. The man silenced them with a gesture of his hand, before tipping his hat.

  “We are unforgivable. We attempt to address a gentleman but we haven’t introduced ourselves. Maybe we should do this now, mates.”

  Regrouping in front of the ship, the men all put their lanterns on the snow, in a row, a few feet from one another, and then, walking back together, formed a straight line behind the orator, who started his banter.

  “As you know, there is nothing worse under these latitudes than the lack of entertainment. This is why we are happy and proud to present to you the best success of the famous Royal Arctic Theatre since Harlequin Light. Ladies and Gentlemen, The Skating Rink Ting Ting or The Phantom Patrol’s Polar Pageant!”

  The men applauded, while Brentford, now a paralyzed block of anguish, wondered if going mad would not be the easiest way out of this demented situation.

  The master of ceremonies went and sat on a nearby block of ice, looking very comfortable.

  “Come on, Geo,” he shouted, turning toward the back row. At that command, one of the men emerged into the circle of light, striding like an automaton toward the “stage” lamps. He had a grey, sideburned, sallow face under his Eugenie hat, and his bulk was made larger by a thick brown greatcoat. He turned, showing, painted on his back, a coat of arms and a motto: “St. George and Merry England.” This was, Brentford suddenly remembered, what British sailors did to have some target to look at as they man-hauled sleighs in snowstorms. Having pirouetted again, the man psalmodied in a croaky, pathetic voice:

  I am Saint George that valiant knight

  All feet no toes for England’s right

  My cross stands on a useless land

  Show me the man that dare before me stand.

  Another tall, bearded man, with a greyish hollow face, no lips over his square white teeth, and a U.S. Cavalry hat on his head, jumped into the lights and pretended to defy the English sailor:

  Here comes I, I am the Snipe

  And I am carrying Stars and Stripes

  Saint George thinks he’s valiant and bold,

  If his blood’s hot, it’ll soon be cold!

  The two men drew knives from sheaths inside their coats and, crouching on their creaky joints, exchanged murderous glares, ready to lunge at each other’s throat, until a third sailor, wearing a tartan sash across his sealskin jacket and a helmetlike worsted cap, interrupted them to declaim with a Scots burr:

  I’m MacGlashan, ma body’s steeled

  Nae man can make a Scotsman yield

  I’d rather set ma blood to flow

  And lay Snipe and George doon in the snow!

  The first two valiant knights turned at the same time toward this new opponent, but then there came up from behind them an older, bulky, yellowish fellow dressed in thick furs, carrying what seemed to Brentford a huge piece of driftwood. In a stentorous Irish brogue, he declared:

  In come I, ould Belsey Bob

  On me shoulthers I carry me knob,

  A fryin’ pan and wid yer thighs

  I will make hot or cold mince pies!

  Four men now stared at each other, weapons in hand, rolling defiant glassy eyes, threatening each other and not daring to make the first move. This sick pantomime went on for a while, until a smaller ashen fellow, with his nose fallen off, trotted quickly between them and announced himself:

  In comes I, Little Twing Twang,

  The lieutenant of the Press Gang.

  I craved money from my mates

  Now I’ll sweep the food from their plates!

  As the others turned toward him, he put a black finger to his cracked lips, and winking a horrible wink, indicated to them the sixth protagonist, approaching slowly, like a ghost, into the mock limelight. This one was nothing more than a skeletal shadow, disappearing within a greatcoat much
too large for his long bony limbs. One of his hands, cut at the wrist, had been replaced by wooden spoon tightly tied to the stump. He spoke with a hissing voice, as if in agony:

  Here comes I, I’m Hump-back Jack,

  Dyin’ shipmates on my back,

  Out of mine I’ve got but five,

  All the rest be starved alive.

  The five others suddenly jumped on him and pretended to slaughter him with large stabbing gestures, as he dramatically knelt down on the icy ground. Then, instead of sharing their spoils, the killers turned against one another, fighting like knockabout clowns, until, one by one, they all fell on the snow in histrionic agonies, except the so-called Saint George, who, his foot on the heap of corpses, addressed the master of ceremonies:

  Doctor! Doctor! I’ll give five pounds

  To cure these men of mortal wounds

  The master of ceremonies stood up and came forward to observe the agonized sailors, with his hands behind the back of his fur coat. Brentford, starting at the word doctor, thought he detected a passing resemblance to a portrait of Octave Pavy, the drowned doctor of the hideous Greely failure. His fear now blended with a strange feeling of fascination as he followed the dialogue:

  I’m the famous Doctor Phoenix

  And there is nothing I can’t fix

  But I shall not come under ten,

  announced the doctor proudly.

  Saint George:

  For Doctor Phoenix, ten Pounds then!

  But please, what made you a doctor?

  The Doctor:

  I’ve travelled far and then some more: From the fire spot, the cupboard head,

  Up stairs and then to bed.

  Saint George:

  Is that all, sir?

  That far and no farther?

  The Doctor:

  I’ve travelled high, I’ve travelled low,

  Through Hail, rain, and frost and snow.

  I have been to the farthest North

  Where roasted pigs come trotting forth

  Forks in their arses, squealing Eat me

  All the way to the Open Sea.

  I have cured Charles Francis Hall