Blood and Ice

by Robert Masello

  As the dogs pulled the sled up the hill, their heads went down and their shoulders rose-these were powerful, well-trained beasts, and under other circumstances, he might have wished to compliment their owner. What Mr. Nolan had done with horses, someone had done with these dogs.

  But when the sled approached the church, the dogs slowed down to navigate their way through a random collection of stones and worn wooden crosses, marking the gravesites of the camp's dead. There was no order to the graves, and the words that had been chiseled on some of the tombstones were so effaced by the constant wind that they were virtually obliterated. An angel with no wings stood atop one, a weeping lady with a missing arm atop another. All faced the frozen sea.

  At the wooden steps leading up to the chapel, Sinclair applied the brake once again. He stepped off the runners and moved to Eleanor's side, but she was huddled down inside the sled and did not extend her hand to him.

  “Let's go in,” he said. “It seems the best shelter the camp affords.”

  And it would be needed soon. Dark clouds were filling the sky, and the wind was rising fast. He had seen such storms spring out of nowhere and batter the ship they had traveled on, driving them ever southward.

  But Eleanor did not move, and her face, pale to begin with, looked positively ghostly now.

  “Sinclair, you know why I-”

  “I know perfectly well,” he said, “and I don't want to hear a word of it.”

  “But there are so many other places,” she said. “I saw a dining hall, on our right side as we-”

  “A dining hall with no doors and a hole in its roof the size of St. Paul's.”

  His mention of the cathedral inadvertently reminded them both of a popular ditty they had once recited to each other, in happier days… about coconut palms as tall as St. Paul's, and sand as white as Dover. But Sinclair dismissed such thoughts from his mind and, putting a hand under her elbow, virtually lifted her out of the sled. “It's superstition and nonsense.”

  “It's not,” she said. “You remember what happened… in Lisbon?”

  It was not something he would soon forget. As they had stood before the altar in the Igreja de Santa Maria Maior-on what should have been a happy day for them-the hand of God himself had seemed to intercede. It was a lucky thing that Sinclair had been able to book passage on the brig Coventry for that very night.

  “That was happenstance,” Sinclair said, “and nothing to do with us. Why, that city has been struck by earthquakes countless times before.”

  He didn't want to indulge such fantasy. There were things to do, plans to make. As the dogs settled down among the gravestones, tucking their heads in and curling their tails around their hindquarters, he held Eleanor by one arm, and with his other hand on the hilt of his sword, ascended the snowy stairs. The birds that had been following them had alighted, lining the roof and spire like gargoyles. Eleanor's eyes went up and saw them, and when one cawed loudly, its beak extended and its wings flapping, she stopped in her tracks.

  “It's a bloody bird,” Sinclair said scornfully, dragging her up the remaining steps.

  There was a pair of tall double doors at the top, though one was knocked off its hinges and simply frozen in place. The other one he was able to push, with considerable effort, until it opened enough to let them pass. A snowdrift had piled up just behind it, and once he had stepped over it, he took Eleanor's hand and helped her inside.

  Their footsteps echoed hollowly on the stone floor. Rows of wooden pews faced the front, with moldering hymnals lying on some of the seats. Sinclair picked one of them up, but the few words that were still legible were not in English. Some Scandinavian tongue, if he had to guess. He dropped it on the floor, and Eleanor, instinctively, picked it up and put it back on the pew. The walls and roof, which had several holes of their own, were made of timbers that the relentless elements had polished to a fine flat sheen, every whorl and groove in the wood revealed as plainly as a wine stain on a linen tablecloth. The altar was a simple trestle table, with a rough-hewn cross hung from the rafters behind it. Eleanor, wrapped in the bulky coat, held herself back, her eyes averted, but Sinclair strode boldly up the nave. Stopping in front of the altar, he spread his arms and declared, as if presenting himself to a country squire who had invited him to come for a shooting party, “Well, here I am!”

  His voice echoed around the walls, joined only by the wind whistling through the narrow windows where the glass had long since fallen away.

  “Are we welcome here,” he called out, tauntingly, “or are we not?”

  A sudden gust blew the crest of the snowdrift up the aisle, the white flakes dusting the top of Eleanor's shoes. She quickly stepped into a row of pews.

  Sinclair turned around and with his arms still out, said, “Do you see? Not a word of protest.”

  He knew that Eleanor feared him when he was in this mood- black and challenging and itching for a fight. But ever since the Crimea, this dark side had been brewing in him, as inescapable and ungovernable as a shadow.

  “I can't imagine more suitable accommodations,” he said. He looked all around, then spotted a door with great black hinges behind the altar. The rectory, he wondered? His black boots ringing on the stony pavement, he walked around the side of the altar- littered, he could see, with ancient rat feces-and pushed it open. Inside, he saw a small room, with one square window covered by a pair of shutters. It was furnished with a few sticks of furniture- a table, a chair, a cot, whose blanket was rolled up in a ball at its foot… and a cast-iron stove. Dismal as it was, it was as if he had just stumbled into the drawing room at the Longchamps Club, and he could barely wait to show it to Eleanor.

  “Come along!” he shouted. “We've got our suite for the night.” Eleanor clearly didn't like coming so close to the altar, but she also didn't want to cross Sinclair. She came to the door and peered in; he threw his arm around her shoulders and held her tight. “I'll get the things from the sled, and we'll see what we can make of this, eh?”

  Alone, Eleanor stepped to the window, parted the shutters, and looked out-a strong wind was blowing the snow across an icy plain, dotted with several more tombstones, most of them toppled and broken. On the far horizon, a ridge of mountains lay like the jagged spine of a reclining beast. There was nothing in any of it to greet the eye, or lift the spirit, or offer even a scintilla of hope; in short, there was nothing to persuade her that this was anything other than a panorama of damnation, lighted forever by a cold dead sun.

  The wind rose even higher, whistling in the eaves of the church and rattling the very walls.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  December 13, 9:30 p.m.

  “Just hold the bandage,” Charlotte ordered. “Just hold it in place!”

  Michael pressed it to Danzig's throat-blood was still seeping through-as she cut off the end of the sutures and dropped her scissors into the pan.

  “And keep an eye on his blood pressure!”

  Michael watched the monitor-the pressure was low, and dropping all the time.

  From the moment she had rushed into the kennel, Charlotte's hands had never stopped moving with rapidity and assurance. She had bent over the gasping Danzig, and with her own fingers, closed the gaping hole in his throat. At the infirmary, she had inserted a breathing tube, anesthetized him, stitched the wound, and was now inserting an IV, to give him a transfusion.

  “Is he going to make it?” Michael asked, not sure if he really wanted to know the answer.

  “I don't know. He's lost a lot of blood-his jugular was severed-and his windpipe's damaged, too.” She hung the plasma bag on the rod and, after making sure it was working, readied a syringe. “I told Murphy to call for assistance. He needs a lot more help than we can give him here.”

  “What's the shot for? Rabies?” The bandage he held was damp and stained a deep pink.

  “Tetanus,” she said, holding it up to the light and tamping on the plunger. “We don't even have rabies vaccine down here. But then, there aren't s
upposed to be any dogs, either.”

  She administered the shot, but before she had even withdrawn the needle, there was a mad beeping from the BP and EKG monitors.

  “Oh, shit,” she said, tossing the used needle into the sink and ripping open a cabinet on the wall behind her. “He's crashing!”

  An ominously steady tone filled the room.

  She charged the defibrillator pads-something Michael had seen done on a dozen medical shows on TV-then applied them to the barrel of Danzig's hairy chest. His flannel shirt had been cut away, and the skin was orange from a coat of mercurochrome. One of the pads landed on a tattoo-the head of a husky-and Michael wondered if it was supposed to be Kodiak. Charlotte counted to three, yelled, “Clear!” then pressed the pads down while the sudden charge made the body jump. Danzig's head went back, and his body arched upward.

  But the monitors kept up their steady drone.

  Again she yelled, “Clear!” While Michael hovered a foot away, she hit Danzig with another charge. The body jerked again… but the lines on the blue screens stayed flat. Several of the stitches had popped.

  Breathing hard, her braids hanging down beside her face, she tried it one more time-there was the faint smell of barbecued meat in the room-but nothing changed. The body flattened out again, and lay perfectly still. Blood seeped slowly from his torn neck and Michael had nothing to sop it up with.

  Charlotte mopped her brow with the back of her sleeve, glanced one more time at the monitors, then fell back onto the stool behind her, her shoulders slumped, her face wet with sweat. Michael waited-what were they supposed to do next? Surely this couldn't be it.

  “Should I pump his heart?” he said, rising from his own stool and placing his hands above Danzig's chest.

  But Charlotte simply shook her head.

  “Shouldn't I at least try?” Michael said, pressing down with the heel of his hands, as he had seen done in CPR classes. “Should I give him artificial respiration?”

  “He's gone, honey.”

  “Just tell me what I should do!”

  “Nothing you can do,” she said, looking up at the clock. “If you want to know, he was gone from the second that damned dog got at him.”

  Without looking behind her, she reached for and found a clipboard on the counter. She lifted the pen on its chain and recorded the time of death.

  Danzig's eyes were still open, and Michael closed them.

  Charlotte flicked off the machines, then picked Danzig's walrus-tooth necklace up off the floor, where she'd hastily thrown it.

  “That was his good-luck charm,” Michael said.

  “Not good enough,” she said, handing it to Michael.

  They sat in silence, the corpse lying between them, until Murphy O'Connor put his head in the door.

  “Bad news about the chopper,” he said, then, taking in what had happened, mumbled, “Oh, sweet Mother of God.”

  Charlotte removed the transfusion line. “No rush,” she said. “They can come anytime.”

  Murphy ran his hand back over his salt-and-pepper hair, and stared at the floor. “The storm,” he said. “It's gonna get a lot worse before dawn. They said they'd have to wait for it to blow over.”

  Outside, Michael could hear a raging wind pummeling the walls of the infirmary like a hail of angry fists. He hadn't even noticed it till now.

  “Christ almighty,” Murphy muttered. He started to turn away, then said to Charlotte, “I'm sure you did everything possible. You're a good medical officer.”

  Charlotte looked unaffected by the praise.

  “I'll send Franklin in, to help with the body.” Then he looked at Michael. “Why don't you come down to my office? We need to talk.”

  Murphy walked away, and Michael wasn't sure what to do. He did not want to leave Charlotte alone-not with the body-at least not until Franklin, or somebody, got there.

  “It's okay,” she said, as if intuiting his problem. “You work the ER in Chi-town, you get used to dead people. Go.”

  Michael got up and slipped the walrus-tooth necklace into his pocket. Then he went to the sink, where he scrubbed his hands clean.

  Franklin came in and, as Michael went out to the hall, Charlotte called after him, “And thanks, by the way. You make a good nurse.”

  In Murphy's office, he found Darryl warming his hands around a cardboard cup of coffee-it was clear that Murphy had just told him about Danzig's death-and the chief himself was sitting back, looking utterly depleted, in his desk chair. Michael leaned up against a dented file cabinet and for a minute or so no one said a word. They didn't have to.

  “Any ideas?” the chief finally said, and another silence fell.

  “If you're referring to Danzig and the dog,” Darryl finally ventured, “no. But if you're referring to the missing bodies, then there's one thing that I think is pretty clear.”

  “What's that?”

  “Somebody's gone off his rocker. Maybe it's a case of the Big Eye.”

  “I've been doing a check,” Murphy replied, “and so far everybody's accounted for-even Spook. Nobody's in a daze-at least any more than usual-and nobody's gone off the reservation.”

  Darryl pondered this, then said, “Okay. Then whoever it is, they hid the bodies somewhere-it's cold enough out there that they'll just freeze solid again-then they hightailed it back to the base.”

  “And the dogs?”

  Darryl had to think about that, but Michael knew that the dogs, unless they were restrained somehow, would have come back on their own.

  “Can they survive in a storm like this?” Darryl asked, and Murphy snorted.

  “For them, it's a day at the beach. They'll hunker down and sleep right through it. The bitch of it is, any tracks they left are already gone.”

  But Michael had a hunch where they might have gone. “Stromviken,” he said. “That was their routine exercise run.”

  “Could be,” Murphy said, mulling it over, “but if somebody drove them there-even if there was time, which looks pretty damn unlikely-how'd he get back to base without them? Nobody, not even I, could have walked back here alone, much less in this weather. Ain't nobody going nowhere in this soup.”

  “What if he was using a snowmobile?” Michael said. “Could he have towed it along behind the sled?”

  Murphy assumed a quizzical expression. “I guess,” he said. “But then he's got the dogs towing the snowmobile, plus the bodies in the ice block-”

  “The ice block was very diminished,” Darryl interjected. “It would have completely collapsed soon.”

  Murphy paused, then plowed ahead. “Whatever you say. But then, whoever this is, he's leaving the bodies and the dogs out there somewhere-the whaling station, the rookery, an ice cave that we don't know about-and racing back here on the snowmobile, a snowmobile that nobody noticed was missing-”

  “And that nobody heard either coming or going,” Michael threw in.

  “Right,” Murphy said, wearily rubbing his graying hair again, “that, too. You see how none of this is adding up?”

  Michael saw his point, clearly. That was actually the first chance he'd had even to try putting the pieces of the puzzle together, but it was no surprise that Murphy already looked exhausted and utterly stumped.

  On Darryl's face, Michael noted a look of just plain anger. His lab had been desecrated and his most prized specimen stolen. “I don't think anyone could have done it alone,” he declared. “Getting those bodies out of the tank and into the sled, and in the very limited amount of time between the last time I'd been in the lab and when I found them missing?” He shook his head and said, “It had to be two people, at least, to carry this whole thing off.”

  “So,” Murphy replied, “what are you saying? You got any candidates in mind?”

  Darryl sipped the coffee, then said, “Betty and Tina? You sure you've accounted for them?”

  “Why on earth would Betty and Tina do this?” Murphy asked.

  “I don't know,” Darryl said, in exasperation. “But m
aybe they wanted to do the work themselves. Maybe they thought I took it away from them. Maybe they have some other agenda altogether.” He sounded not only as if he was grasping at straws, but as if he knew it himself. He threw up his hands in disgust, then let them flop back onto his lap.

  “I'll follow up with them,” Murphy said, in an unconvincing tone.

  “In the meantime, I want a lock for my lab,” Darryl insisted. “I've got my fish to look out for.”

  “You honestly think somebody's gonna come back for your fish, too?” Murphy replied. “Don't sweat it-I'll find you a lock.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  December 13, 10:30 p.m.

  While Sinclair went back and forth fetching provisions from the sled, Eleanor tried to make herself useful in the rectory. She unrolled the woolen blanket at the foot of the cot-it was stiff as a washboard-and found an old broom in the corner with which she tried to sweep some of the rodent leavings from the floor. She opened the grate of the cast-iron furnace and found a petrified rat inside, lying on a bed of splinters and straw. She lifted it out by its tail, tossed it through the window, then battened the shutters tight again. On the table, next to the stump of a candle and a ring of rusty keys, she found a packet of lucifers, and to her own amazement she was able to get one to light. She touched it to the tinder, and after a few seconds she had a small fire glowing in the furnace.

  She thought Sinclair would be pleased, but after he had set down some books and bottles from the sled, he looked askance at the blaze. “The smoke from the chimney,” he said. “It will give us away.”

  To whom? she thought. Was there another living soul for miles? Her heart sank at the idea of extinguishing the tiny, cheerful fire.

  “But this storm will dissipate it,” he said, thinking aloud. “Go to it, my love.”

  He went back out again, and Eleanor slumped, suddenly bereft of all her strength, onto the edge of the cot. The exertions of the past few hours had been too much. She felt as if she were about to swoon, and lay back, still bundled in her coat, on top of the coarse, striped blanket. The room was swimming around her. She closed her eyes, with her hands clutching the sides of the cot, just as she had done on the awful voyage to Constantinople so many years ago. The ship, a steamer called the Veens, had pitched and rolled in the heavy seas, and after leaving the port of Marseilles, it had lost its engines altogether for a time. Moira had been convinced that they were all about to die, that the ship was sure to break up in the storm and drown them all, and Eleanor had had to console her until the next morning, when the weather abruptly changed and the ship regained its power. Many of the nurses had been seasick or worse, and the sailors had to carry them up onto the stern deck where they could recover themselves in the fresh air and sunshine. Moira had dropped to her knees by the rail and offered up a volley of prayers.