Giants of the Frost

by Kim Wilkins

  The phone rang, jerking me back to reality.

  “Hello?”

  “Ah, Victoria, I hoped I’d find you there.”

  “Oh. Hi, Magnus.” I felt guilty and ashamed all at once; it made my face hot.

  “I’m back in Oslo, meeting the others at Ålesund tomorrow. We’re going to have drinks, we’ll miss you.”

  Ah, life used to be so uncomplicated. Drinks with the staff. I sighed.

  Magnus chuckled. “Don’t worry, we’ll have drinks when we arrive back on Wednesday too. How is everything there?”

  I opened my mouth to say what I should have: There’s a strange man on the island and he stole your gold pen and I’m locking down immediately. Instead, I said, “Everything’s fine. Nothing to report.”

  “Good girl. You’re doing a fine job, Victoria.”

  “Um . . . thanks,” I said. “I appreciate your saying so.”

  “I’m giving credit where it’s due, Victoria. You’re a smart girl, a capable girl. All in all, I think I displayed very good judgment in hiring you,” he said, without a trace of humor. “Now, I need to ask you something important.”

  I grabbed a pen and a piece of paper. “Go ahead.”

  “Do you think it’s a bad thing for a boss to become romantic with a member of his staff?”

  Words failed me. “I’m sorry?” I managed to choke out.

  His loud laugh in the receiver spiked my ear. “Don’t worry, Victoria, I’m not asking you out. It’s Maryanne.”

  “Maryanne?”

  “We met yesterday for lunch at Bygdøy, and took a romantic walk along the beach. She kissed me.”

  I realized I should gather together some kind of bluster and tell him off for being unctuous, but it seemed impolite to do so after I’d just lapped up his praise. “Magnus, I’m not sure that I’m the right person to ask about this,” I said.

  “Victoria, you’re a woman, and I’d value a woman’s opinion.”

  “Well, I . . . if she’s . . . I mean . . .” I trailed off into silence, wondering why I was embarrassed when clearly he should be. I tapped my pen violently on the desk.

  “Young people have it so easy.” Magnus sighed. “You and Gunnar, you’re at the age when you can think about love and talk about love and nobody shrinks from you. Nobody finds it distasteful.”

  “What’s that? Me and Gunnar?”

  He sniggered. “Victoria, it’s obvious to all of us that there’s something between you . . . some spark.”

  “No, no. We’re just friends.”

  “Gunnar doesn’t see it that way,” he said, channeling the spirit of a naughty schoolboy. “He told me that—Oh, that’s right, he asked me not to mention it.”

  I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to know what Gunnar had said about me.

  “Anyway, I was saying,” Magnus continued, “that romance is not reserved for the young. Do you know how old I am, Victoria?”

  I was guessing somewhere around his mid-creepies. “No.”

  “I’m fifty-one,” he declared in a revelatory tone. Voilà!

  I realized this was my cue to express astonishment. “Oh,” I said.

  “I know I don’t look it, I like to take care of myself, keep myself trim. But I’m not a young man anymore and I want to grab romance with both hands.”

  “Then perhaps you should pursue Maryanne,” I said, hoping this would be an end of it.

  “But I don’t know if she’s right for me.”

  “Then perhaps you shouldn’t. Magnus, I have some bad news for you.” The only way to change the subject.

  “Bad news?”

  “Your Mont Blanc pen. I took it out to the instrument field and now I can’t find it. I think I dropped it out there.”

  “What! Oh, Victoria, what were you thinking, taking it out in the forest?”

  “It was with the folder. I didn’t realize until I was out there. I’m really sorry.”

  “That pen was worth a fortune. It was a collector’s edition! A Meisterstuck!”

  “I know, I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Can you go out and look for it?”

  “I’ll try.”

  He had forgotten about Maryanne and romance for the over fifties, and babbled some instructions about meaningless tasks I was to perform until he returned, a penance I’m sure. I jotted them down and thankfully hung up the phone.

  I leaned back in my chair, feeling strangely deflated. The thrill of fear (negative though it had been) was gone. Vidar wasn’t a romantic hero, just a common thief, my boss was a jerk and the island would be inhabited again in just two days. My own company weighed on me; I was bored with the endless monologue of numbers and rationalizations in my head.

  Most of all, I felt let down by Vidar. I realized this was ridiculous. I didn’t know him, but he had asked me to trust him and I had, and now I would probably never see him again.

  And I wanted to see him. I wanted that very badly indeed.

  Eleven

  I had eaten nothing but bread and cheese in my room for the last few days so I went to the galley for lunch, determined to cook myself something with vegetables in it, lest I succumb to scurvy. I made a stir-fry and took it to the rec hall to eat. The big empty space echoed with the sound of my chopsticks and plate.

  Footsteps near the door. I looked up. Vidar. He stood there in Gunnar’s clothes, lit from behind by the bright outside, wordless, motionless. A surge of fear. Why had he returned? I jumped out of my seat.

  “Victoria?” he said at last, and a puzzled expression crossed his face. “Is something wrong?”

  “Magnus’s pen,” I blurted out.

  “Who?”

  “I won’t call the police if you just leave now.” Yes, and just how long would it take for the police to respond to that particular emergency call?

  “The police?”

  “You took Magnus’s pen,” I said, angry now.

  He felt in the pocket of Gunnar’s track pants. “This pen?” He approached, his hands spread out in front of him. “Why does it frighten you so? You’re trembling.”

  I snatched the pen from his hand. “Because I didn’t know you were a liar and a thief, and I wonder what else you might be.”

  “No, no, Victoria. I didn’t steal the pen. I didn’t know it was valuable. I borrowed it to draw you a map, you see?” He unfolded a piece of paper and handed it to me. “I wasn’t comfortable in the storeroom, so I headed back to my camp. I drew a map so you would know where to find me if you needed me, if I could repay you somehow for your kindness.”

  I glanced from his face to the map and back again. Sleepless shadows were smudged beneath his eyes.

  “You must believe me, Victoria,” he said softly. “I’m not a liar and I’m not a thief.”

  “Then explain what the hell you’re doing here,” I said, guarding my voice, my body, my heart. And when he opened his mouth to refuse, I said, “Don’t tell me you can’t, that’s bollocks. I’m nobody special. I’ve no friends in high places to repeat it to, and you assured me you haven’t broken the law, so what does it matter if you tell me?”

  He dropped his head. “I’m sorry. Victoria. Perhaps one day very soon you’ll understand, but I—”

  “Just tell me who you’re hiding from,” I said.

  Vidar pushed up his sleeves and held his elbows, the gesture of an eight-year-old boy. I noted a long scar on his left forearm, a knotwork tattoo around his right wrist. “My father,” he whispered. “He must not find out where I am.”

  “Your father? You’re afraid of your father?”

  In an instant he had pulled himself up tall. “No, of course I’m not. Not for myself. I’m afraid of what he might do to . . . to those I love.” He ran a hand through his long hair. “He’s a very powerful man.”

  Suspicions formed. Who was his father? Head of a multinational corporation? A billionaire playboy? Didn’t Norway have a royal family? I had met men like Vidar before: despite a background of privilege, they wanted to escape
their families, their fates. I could understand that.

  “He sounds like a nasty piece of work,” I said.

  Vidar found this turn of phrase amusing. He smiled guardedly. “He is.”

  “He’d actually hurt people you love to punish you?”

  “He would.” Somber now, Vidar’s gaze darted away from mine. “He already has.”

  “Just for the hell of it?”

  “No. For very powerful reasons.”

  “What did he do?”

  He slid his hands in his pockets and shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  I realized my lunch was going cold. “Do you want something to eat?” I said. “There’s more in the pan.”

  “I would, yes,” he said hesitantly. “I’ve eaten nothing but bread and cheese for days.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Wait here.”

  When I returned with a plate for him, he was sitting at the end of the table, diagonally across from my seat. He picked up the chopsticks I offered him and eyed them carefully.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. “You’ve never used chopsticks?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll get you a knife and fork.”

  “A spoon, please,” he called after me.

  I settled at the table with him once more and watched him eat with a spoon, figuring this was how Scandinavian royalty must eat their rice.

  He glanced up, spoon halfway to his mouth. “Why have you been eating bread and cheese?”

  “It’s your fault actually.”

  “My fault?”

  “Well, not entirely. I’m here alone, you see. Ordinarily there are eight other people here, but the World Meteorology Conference is on in Switzerland and I volunteered to run the station alone. I’ve been hiding, frightened, in my cabin. I’ve been hearing noises—probably you—in the forest, outside. And having terrible dreams and weird feelings.”

  “I couldn’t have caused your terrible dreams or weird feelings,” he said.

  “No, no, I suppose not. I’m an insomniac, you see. I sleep very poorly a lot of the time, and when I get tired perhaps I imagine things.”

  He didn’t meet my eye and focused on his food. “What things? What dreams have you had?”

  “The hag,” I said. “Though I know it’s not real, it felt very real.”

  He put his spoon down carefully and steepled his hands under his chin, gazing at me. “Go on, tell me of this hag.”

  “I was paralyzed, and she came in and sat on my chest. I knew, somehow, that she intended to steal my breath.” The unnatural fear rippled over me again, even though it was daylight and I was no longer alone. Gooseflesh shivered along the backs of my arms. “And then there was Skripi,” I said, forcing brightness into my voice. “The stick-man who warned me about the draugr.”

  “A draugr is a thing to be feared,” he conceded.

  “You don’t believe in it, do you?”

  “I believe that legends arise from often-told tales, and that perhaps in each fable there lurks a shadow of honest experience. And if that is so, then it pays to be cautious—especially where a draugr is concerned.” The barest hint of a smile touched his lips, but I couldn’t tell how serious he was. “Tell me again of your dream of the stick-man. You called him Skripi?”

  “He met me in the forest . . . I mean . . . it sounds crazy.” I laughed nervously. What kind of impression was I making? “Of course, it was a dream and dreams are often crazy. He said he wouldn’t hurt me, and he said his name was Skripi, which I found out is Old Norse for—”

  “Phantom. Yes, I know.”

  “You know, but how could I know? Why would I dream a word in a language I’d never heard?”

  He shrugged and returned to his food. “Perhaps it wasn’t a dream.”

  “Ha ha. Funny. Anyway, now I know what some of the strange noises and shadows in the forest were, I don’t feel so bad about this place.” I toyed with a cold piece of carrot on my plate. “Now I’m not alone.”

  Vidar finished his food and stood up. I felt a keen sense of disappointment that he was leaving. “You’re going?”

  “I’ve taken up too much of your time. You have work to do.”

  I thought about all the data that I had to enter to catch up on the hysterical hours when I’d hid in Gunnar’s cabin, not to mention the meaningless tasks Magnus had dictated to me over the phone. Vidar was right. “Yes, I have.”

  He pushed the map over the table toward me. “This is where I am camped. If you would like to visit . . . otherwise, I’ll leave you be.”

  I looked at the map. His camp was a mile northwest of the instrument field.

  “I thank you, Victoria,” he said, touching my shoulder gently. “I thank you for your kindness and for trusting me. Good-bye.”

  “Bye.” I watched him leave, savoring the fantasy of visiting him that night. Foolish, maybe. Perhaps he was luring me into a trap. I didn’t entertain that thought for more than a half second. I felt safe with him, I knew he was gentle and honest and good, and I was certain that nothing ill could come of me following his path into the forest after work to find him.

  I suppose that the end of any path is rarely visible at the beginning.

  Dusk closed in and stars began to sparkle, and the barest breeze quivered in the trees. The faraway beat of the ocean hissed and shushed, and I locked up the station and headed to the galley. I heated some soup and poured it into a Thermos, and tucked the Thermos with two cups and four recently defrosted bread rolls into a plastic bag to take with me.

  Just twenty-four hours ago the idea of heading off into the forest alone at night would have been unthinkable. Now I relished the thrill of my isolation in the soft darkness, the kiss of the breeze, the gleam of the lonely stars. My stomach fluttered with the sweet tension between promise and delay, and an ache of desire shimmered across my body, making my skin vulnerable to sensation. As I found my way through the trees, the dark weighing all around me and the tree branches like the frozen arms of some primitive nightmare creature, my mind tripped up over and over again. This was surreal. Who was I and what was I doing? During that walk through the ancient and gloomy passages of the forest, I realized something about myself. My obsession with divisible figures and regular shapes and logical explanations had forever kept me from taking even one step into the unknown. Why a ragged stranger with black eyes and a soft voice should lure me into that mystery was incomprehensible to my conscious mind, but in the hidden alcoves of my thoughts and my body, it made some sort of inexpressible sense.

  The reflected glow of a fire caught my eye and I headed toward it. Vidar sat with his back to me, but I could tell from a tensing of his shoulders that he knew I was there.

  “You came,” he said, without turning around.

  “I brought you food.” I walked to the fireside. The linen I had given him the previous night had been layered on the forest floor to make a soft place to sit. I settled next to the fire and pulled out the Thermos and cups. “Pumpkin soup. I hope you like it.”

  “I’m sure I will.”

  I ventured a glance at him as I poured the soup. He was more ragged than before, his hair unbrushed and stubble growing on his cheeks, Gunnar’s shirt stained with mud or charcoal or both. I tried to assess what age he might be: definitely older than me, perhaps in his midthirties. He met my eyes briefly, then leaned forward to throw a handful of twigs on the fire.

  “The fire’s nice and warm,” I said, handing him a cup of soup and a roll.

  “I find I can’t sleep without one, even in summer,” he said. “I’m so used to the sound of it, that quiet crack and pop. It’s the sound of still moments in tranquil places.”

  “Is that why you couldn’t sleep in the storeroom?”

  He tore off some bread and dunked it in his soup. “Yes. There were a lot of sounds.”

  I shrugged out of my anorak. “Oh, sorry. There’s equipment in the building. It’s always beeping or buzzing to remind you to do something.”

/>   We ate in silence for a few minutes. He still hadn’t smiled at me, or even looked at me for more than a few seconds, but I detected no coldness in his reception of me. I was not made uncomfortable by his reticence, as would ordinarily be the case. Whatever it was about him that made him so familiar to me, also made me content to sit with him in silence. As though the preliminaries to our sharing company had already been processed.

  Finally, he dusted crumbs from his fingers, and said to me, “Why are you here?”

  “Here with you? Or here on the island?”

  “Both. Either.” He smiled. “Start with the island.”

  “I’m here as a trainee. I’m helping on a climatology study.”

  “No, no. I didn’t ask what are you doing here. I asked why are you here. Why, not what.”

  I pushed a strand of hair off my face. “I’m running away from my mother,” I said, and laughed nervously. “Although I’ve never thought of it like that before.”

  “Why are you running away from your mother?”

  “Because I’m afraid of becoming like her.”

  He dipped his head in a nod. “Then we understand each other perfectly well.”

  “You’re afraid of becoming like your father?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I bet he’s not as bad as my mother.”

  “I bet he is,” Vidar replied quickly, with a laugh. “Still, there’s no value in competing.” He stood and held out his hand to me. “Come, let’s walk in the forest a little way.”

  I could feel myself beam. He helped me up, and I felt the reluctant withdrawal of his fingers from mine. I followed him away from the campsite into the cold pools of night that waited between the trees.

  I’d forgotten my anorak and tensed my shoulders against the chill. “This forest has always felt strangely familiar to me,” I said. “It’s weird.”

  “Perhaps it is familiar to you,” he replied. “Perhaps you have been here before.”

  “No, I’d remember.”

  “Before you,” he said. “Before Victoria.”

  This had never occurred to me. It was the kind of idea my mother would come up with. “You mean like reincarnation? Do you believe in reincarnation?”