Blood and Ice

by Robert Masello

  But this felt worse somehow. This felt like a killing ground, and he knew that the tundra he was standing on had once been ankle deep in blood and guts. The blackened rails rose, like a roller-coaster track, straight into the dilapidated building a few hundred yards up the hill; mechanized carts had carried the desirable parts of the whale into the processing facilities, while the rest of the bones and offal had been shunted off to the guano pits and the reeking shoreline, where clouds of birds, shrieking with delight, had descended upon the still-steaming piles.

  As Michael fumbled to collect his tripod and waterproof equipment bag-it was too cold to take off his gloves for more than a few seconds-Danzig set the snow hook, like the emergency brake on a car, to keep the dogs from dragging away the sled. Then, for extra security, he tied the snub line to an iron skip wagon, missing two wheels and upturned on the frozen earth. Kodiak, watching him closely with his marble-blue eyes, sat back on his haunches, waiting.

  “I'm going to give them their snack now,” Danzig said. “This is their favorite part of the trip.”

  A couple of the wheel dogs, the ones who ran closest to the sled, pranced in place, already licking their chops as Danzig pulled a stiff burlap sack from the handlebars.

  “I'll pass,” Michael said, as Danzig took out several knotted ropes of beef jerky.

  Danzig laughed and said, “Don't say I didn't offer.”

  Picking his way across the rusted tracks and over the icy, wind-scoured earth, accompanied only by the yips of the pack and the cawing of some skuas-drawn no doubt by the dogs and the jerky-Michael thought that this might well be the most desolate place he had ever seen.

  The ice block slowly continued to disintegrate in the tank, until small chunks were breaking off, much sooner than might have been expected… almost as if something inside the block were exerting pressure from within. One jagged piece, the size of a baseball, broke off the bottom of the block, just below the spot where the toe of the man's boot could now be seen, and floated free. It drifted on the water, until it got closer to the PVC pipe that was draining the water from the tank and keeping it level; there, it was sucked into the mouth of the hose, where it stubbornly lodged.

  Gradually, the water in the tank, replenished by the other pipe, rose, but as it did, it ran up into the topmost fissures and invisible brine channels, like blood rushing to fill untraceable veins and capillaries. An ear, put to the ice, would have heard a sound like static, as the ice crackled and crumbled… and a sound, too, of something else. Of scratching. Like nails on glass.

  The beach at Stromviken was not like any other Michael had ever surveyed. It was a massive boneyard, covered with gigantic skulls and spines and gaping jaws, all bleached to a dull white by the punishing wind and the austral sun. Some were the remains of whales that had been slaughtered at Stromviken, others were the residue of whales that had been butchered at sea by so-called factory ships, their carcasses thrown back into the ocean and eventually washed up here. Lying among the bones and rocks, sunning themselves in the cold glare, was a handful of elephant seals, who paid no attention to the man in the bulky parka and green goggles, pointing the camera in their direction

  … just as they had paid no attention to the men who had come there years before, who had then gone about slaughtering them as indiscriminately as the whales.

  But unlike the whales, the elephant seals, with their trunklike noses and brown bloodshot eyes, had been easy to catch and kill. On land, they were clumsy and moved slowly. Sealers had only to walk right up to them, punch them on the nose, and when the animals reared back on their flippers in surprise, thrust a lance several times through their heart. Sometimes it would take the better part of an hour for the animal to bleed out, but once the bulls were rounded up and killed, the sealers could move on methodically to slaughtering the cows, still protecting their young, and then, if they weren't too small to bother with, the cubs. The skinning was the hard part; it took four or five men to properly flay a fully grown elephant seal, then to separate the thick yellow blubber from the flesh beneath. Most of the seals, hunted nearly to extinction, yielded one or two barrels of oil apiece when the boiling was done.

  Although Michael knew they posed no threat to him, he approached them warily, not wanting to cause any undue disturbance. He wanted shots of the seals at leisure, not in alarm, and besides that, the creatures did smell pretty awful. The main bull, distinguishable only because of his enormous size, was molting, his shed hair and skin spread around him like a fouled carpet, and the cows, belching loudly, weren't much better. He stepped up onto a low-lying ventifact-a stone carved into a strange shape, almost like a top hat in this case, by centuries of wind-and framed his first shot. But it was hard enough to stand erect in the unceasing wind without trying to hold a camera steady; he would have to set up a tripod and do it the right way.

  As he dug around in his bag, the bull seal roared, and Michael could smell its breath, reeking of dead fish. “Jesus, have you ever heard of mouthwash?” Michael said, as he set the tripod down on a relatively level patch of the rocky beach.

  Water from the aquarium began to seep over the edge of the tank and drip onto the concrete floor, where it ran in rivulets toward the floor drains. The marine biology lab, like all the modules, was raised above the ground on cinder blocks, and the water simply coursed down some steel funnels and out onto the icy land below.

  The block of ice was now no thicker than a deck of cards in some places, its prisoners obscurely visible within. The first spot entirely to give way was at the bottom, where the chunk had fallen off and blocked the PVC pipe. The toe of a black leather boot protruded from it now, glistening like onyx.

  The melting continued, and a crevice appeared right down the center of the block; the bodies locked inside were like the flaw in a diamond, a strange imperfection in a giant crystal… and when the crevice widened and suddenly split, it was as if the ice itself were rejecting them. The halves of the ice block fell away on either side, and the seawater washed over the bodies of the soldier and the girl like a baptism. They were exposed to the air, bathed in the lavender light of the lab, and for several seconds they simply lay still, side by side, bobbing on the ice.

  The flaking chain yoked around their throats and shoulders held them together until, corroded by the centuries of ice and saltwater, it disintegrated and slipped to the bottom of the tank.

  Sinclair was the first to draw a breath. Half air and half water, it made him cough.

  Then Eleanor coughed, too, and an uncontrollable shiver ran the length of her body.

  What little ice was still supporting them began to give way, and Sinclair's boots searched for the bottom of the tank… and found it.

  He stumbled, swaying like a drunkard, to his feet, and quickly took hold of Eleanor's cold hand. Dripping wet, he raised her up from the chunks of floating ice. Her eyes were dull and unfocused, her long brown hair plastered to her cheek and forehead.

  Where, he wondered, are we?

  They were standing in a vat of some kind, filled with salt water up to their knees, in a place he could find no words for. No one else was there; the only living things he could see were strange creatures swimming in glass jars-jars that gave off a pale purple light and a soft hissing sound.

  He looked at Eleanor. She raised her hand slowly, as if she had never done so before, and her fingers instinctively went to touch the ivory brooch on her bosom.

  He sloshed to the rim of the tank, then over it. He helped her down onto the floor, water sluicing down all around them.

  “What is this place?” she asked, trembling, as he gathered her into his arms.

  Sinclair didn't know. For her sake, he hoped it was Heaven. But from his own experience, he feared it was Hell.

  PART III

  THE NEW WORLD

  “They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,

  Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;

  It had been strange, even in a dream,

  To have seen thos
e dead men rise.”

  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  December 13, 4:20 p.m.

  Michael was standing in the bow of the scuttled whale catcher when he picked up an ice-covered life preserver and, despite a couple of now-illegible letters, read the name of the ship off it; it had once been the Albatros, and it had sailed out of Oslo. But there were no albatrosses effortlessly soaring overhead now-only skuas and pretrels and squat, white sheathbills, all lured by the arrival of the dogsled and looking for handouts.

  From his vantage point, right behind the harpoon gun, Michael could gaze down at the beach, where the elephant seals had cooperated nicely for their photo op, and up the icy hill, past the warehouses and boiling rooms and flensing yards, to the uppermost structure in the station. It was an old wooden church, with patches of white paint still clinging to the walls and a cross, knocked askew, high atop its steeple. He used the zoom to take some long-distance shots, but it would be worth a closer visit later on.

  He'd already explored the bowels of the ship, which in some ways looked like it had been abandoned for years-rusted panels, broken windows, warped stairs-but in other ways looked as if it had been tenanted the day before. On a galley table, a fork and knife were still neatly crossed on a tin plate. A bunk bed was made up with a striped woolen blanket and a white sheet, folded back at the top. In the wheelhouse, a frozen cigar butt rested on a win-dowsill. Even the harpoon gun, mounted on a raised steel platform like a machine-gun turret, looked as if it could still go about its deadly work-if it could be aimed. Michael had tried to make it swivel, and tried again, but the entire assembly was frozen solid.

  “Hey, watch where you point that thing,” he heard Danzig call out from the beach below. He was standing in the petrified jaws of a blue whale.

  “It's not loaded,” Michael replied.

  “That's what they all say.” Danzig, walrus teeth hanging down around his neck, his beard blowing in the wind, stepped out of the jaws like some Norse god choosing to walk among men. “You get what you came for?” he asked.

  “Some of it. Why?”

  “Because I need to get back.”

  Michael was on board with that. For the past few hours, no matter how hard he had tried to forget the block of ice in Darryl's lab, it had never been far from his thoughts. Was he missing some great shot?

  “I'm expecting a call from my wife,” Danzig added.

  Danzig had a wife? It struck Michael as funny in a way-so banal, so ordinary-coming from such an original specimen as Danzig.

  Danzig must have guessed as much from Michael's hesitation, because he said, “It's not impossible, you know.”

  “But when do you see her?” Michael called back, even as he gathered up his equipment and stored it all in the bag. “I thought you lived here.”

  “Not all the time,” Danzig replied.

  “Where is she?” Michael asked, then said, “Wait. Tell me when I get down there.”

  When he joined Danzig among the bones on the beach, Danzig said, “Miami Beach,” and Michael inadvertently laughed.

  “What's wrong with that?”

  “It's not that. It's just not what you'd expect.”

  “Which would be?” Danzig said, as they turned back toward the dogsled.

  Michael only had to think for a second before replying, “Valhalla.”

  For the first few minutes, Sinclair and Eleanor simply accustomed themselves to breathing again. And then to moving. And finally to being alive… though where-and when-they had no idea.

  It was Eleanor who discovered the source of the heat in the room, a metal grate of some kind, glowing orange along the baseboards. She bent down in her wet clothes, trying to see the fire inside or smell the burning of tinder or gas, but she heard only a distant humming and smelled nothing at all. Still, she huddled close and whispered urgently for Sinclair to come near.

  Instinctively, they had both been whispering.

  “It's a fire,” she said. “We can dry our clothes.”

  Sinclair helped her remove her sodden shawl, and they draped it across a stool he drew close. Then she took off her shoes and laid them in front of the grill.

  “You, too,” she said. “Before something happens…” What that something could be defied the powers of her imagination altogether. She did not know if they were among friends or foe, in Turkey or Russia or, for that matter, Tasmania. She could hardly be sure, even now, that they were actually alive.

  But there wasn't time to dwell on any of it.

  “Take off your jacket,” she said, “and your boots.”

  He shrugged the uniform jacket off, and Eleanor spread it out. She put his boots beside her shoes. He unfastened his sword and, though keeping it close at hand, let it rest with the wet clothing.

  Then, they huddled close in front of the heat, staring into each other's eyes, and silently wondering what the other knew or understood

  … or remembered.

  Eleanor feared that she could remember too much. For so long-how long? — it was all that she had done… just dreamt and drifted and remembered everything.

  Over and over again.

  But what she was thinking of, with the clothes drying and her arms gathered tight around her own knees, was the night she had sat before the hearth, just like this, with Moira, in their cold room at the top floor of the boardinghouse in London… on the night that Miss Nightingale had announced her intention to travel, with a small company of willing nurses, to the Crimean battlefront.

  Sinclair coughed, his cold white hand raised to his mouth, and Eleanor stroked his brow with her own stiff fingers. It was second nature to her at that point-she remembered doing this for so many of the wounded soldiers, lying in agony at the hospital barracks in Scutari and Balaclava. Sinclair looked up at her now, his eyes red-rimmed and wild, and said, “But you? Are you…” and then, for want of a better word, “well?”

  “I am…” she said, not knowing what else she could say. She was alive, apparently. Beyond that, she wasn't sure of anything. She was as lost as he was, chilled to the bone, in spite of the remarkably consistent heat from the grate. And weak, too-from ordinary hunger, as well as the unspeakable need.

  It crossed her mind that she could die again… and soon… and she wondered if it would feel any different this time.

  It could not be worse.

  Sinclair's gaze swept around the room, and she followed it. A thing that looked like an enormous spider was trying to clamber out of a square jar, filled with water and a pale purple illumination. There were long counters, like trestle tables, with basins, like flower sinks, in them. A black metal apparatus, with a white box beside it, sat before a stool, and next to that, she saw, just as Sinclair must have done, a wine bottle. He was already springing to his feet.

  He picked up the bottle, rubbed the label against the billowing sleeve of his white shirt, then examined it more closely.

  “Is it?” she asked.

  “I can't be sure,” he said, twisting the cork out. He put his nose to the top, then recoiled.

  And so she knew it must be.

  In his stockinged feet, he padded back to her and placed the open bottle between them, like a papa bird bringing an offering to the nest. He was waiting for her to take it, but she couldn't. It was too horrible to have awakened, after how long, from a dream-a nightmare-only to be plunged right back into it once you'd been restored to life. The bottle stood before her as a grim reminder, a memento mori. It represented death, but at the same time-if she was desperate enough to want it-life. She could smell the vile odor of its contents, and she wondered: Was that the very bottle he had raised to her lips on board the Coventry? If it was, then how had it come to be here, in this strange place, now? Had one of the sailors thrown it, too, into the heaving sea, after she had been chained to Sinclair? After…

  Her mind stopped dead, like a team of horses suddenly reined to an abrupt halt. She could not th
ink of it; she could not allow herself to. She had governed her thoughts for so long, she could not stop doing it now. She had to guide them, control them, even chastise them, like unruly children, if they went too far astray. To do anything else would be an invitation to madness.

  If, that is, she had not already gone mad.

  “You have to,” Sinclair said, urging the bottle on her.

  But Eleanor was not so sure. “What if,” she ventured, “after all this time…”

  “What?” he snapped, his eyelids drooping, then snapping open again. “What if, after all this time, everything has changed?”

  “It's possible, is it not, that-”

  “That what? God's in his heaven again, and we're safe as houses, and Britannia rules the waves?”

  There was a fire in his eyes again now. All that time, in the ocean, in the ice- no, her mind said, do not think of it, do not let it in — had done nothing to dampen his ardor, or his anger. That wicked flame, lighted in the Crimea, still burned. He was not the Lieutenant Copley who had sailed off for glory. He was the Lieutenant Copley who had been found, covered with mud and blood, lying among the dead and dying on a moonlit battlefield.

  “Shall I try it first?” he said, his face ruddy in the orange glow of the grate, and when she didn't answer, he raised the bottle, tilted his head back, and took a swig. His Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed, then bobbed again as the liquid tried to come back up again. He sputtered, gasped, then put the bottle to his lips again and forced some more of it down. When he dropped the bottle back into his lap, his light brown moustache was stained the color of a bruise.

  “There,” he said, “right as rain.” He smiled, and his teeth, too, were stained. He pushed the bottle toward her.

  “What we need,” she said, her eyes nonetheless drawn to the bottle, “is food. And water. Clean water, fresh food.”

  Sinclair scoffed. “Spoken like a true Nightingale. And we shall have those things. But you know, as well as I do, that right now you need something more.”