Arctic Smoke

by Randy Nikkel Schroeder

  She turned away. “Keep north.”

  He hummed a sleek and twisting melody. His front teeth were chipped. After minutes the melody disappeared, though Seri could not remember its end. Rooke stared at his picture burned with two holes—stroking it, then crushing it, then gently unfolding its creases with one hand.

  When they stopped at the last station, Seri looked in the washroom mirror and started. Her face was salt-white. She was the witch, causing the land to wither, the same way Pharoah’s indecision caused the plagues, the same way Satan’s games caused Job’s cattle to die. She splashed her face with freezing water, came to her senses. Phone Gran soon, get another verse. Gran was the live coal in her heart.

  “God is my rock.” Seri looked up to the mirror again.

  The checkout person was a child with mismatched eyes.

  “Sorry,” she said. “This credit card is maxed. You a witch, ma’am?”

  Seri dug her Visa. “Try this one.”

  The lines chuckled and whirred. The child handed back. “Sorry. Something wrong with that one too. So are you?”

  “Wait here,” Seri said. “I have a third in the car.”

  She trotted back, heart tripping, trying not to think of Gran, or God for that matter.

  “Better hammer it.” Rooke grinned.

  “There’s much trouble loose.” An old Inuit woman sat in the back. “Someone’s let the demons loose, forcing against nature, pushing too hard.”

  Seri turned, reached back and opened the door. “Out. Now.”

  The woman smiled, eyes crinkling, cheeks pouring inward. “The harder you dig, the more dirty you get.”

  “Now.”

  The woman hobbled out. At the station doorway, the child limped forward, finger raised.

  Seri turned to Rooke.

  “Three,” he said, still grinning.

  “Three what, Jesus goddamn it?”

  She floored the car and spun out onto the ice, seatbelt undone, still dangling from the door.

  † † †

  A small ship listed west, frozen neatly at the waterline. The Ferry Queen.

  “Lovely pun.” Rooke said. “Perhaps this elf knows the way to Foggy Island.”

  A tiny man perched a stool below the boat’s stem, wearing only a white linen suit, reading aloud from a great Bible and cutting from a chunk of meat with a knife. Behind him, the boat’s ghostly funnel rose from a superstructure caped with mist.

  “Ferryman!” Seri stepped from the car.

  The man looked up, lips bloodstained. “The island you seek is directly behind me.” He spit. The spit froze before it hit the ground.

  “How did you know we. . . ?” Rooke tapped the hood with his spoon. “Thank you. Where?”

  The man gestured over his shoulder with the knife. Drops of seal blood scattered, froze in pearls while airborne.

  Seri stared. At first, all she could see was the jaundiced moon behind columns of fog. Then a hazy hump, a small mountain smudged with mist. The smoky pillars shifted, and the moon unrolled a carpet of lemon light to reveal the south side of the island. It seemed half submerged like an iceberg, drawing up to a small volcano spider-webbed with polygons.

  “A trick of the moon,” said the ferryman. “Not a volcano. A pingo.” He pointed to Rooke. “He can see.”

  “And at the top of the pingo?” Seri pointed at the hill’s summit, where a sprawling mansion pulled shapes from the night.

  “The Hotel Agartha. Canada’s oldest hotel. An impossibility, given the erosion and the ancient lake beneath.”

  Seri nodded. “And there is a festival there?”

  The ferryman smiled. “A gathering. Yes.”

  Seri got the feeling they’d been circling the island for days without seeing it.

  “Has this island always been here?”

  The ferryman closed the Bible and looked down at her. “No. It floats up and down the Mackenzie, depending on the season. Come, I’ll take your keys. There are no roads where you go.”

  “No.” Seri crunched a foot in the cobbled snow. “I’ll keep those, thank you.”

  “It’s the law.”

  “We are the only law here,” Rooke said.

  Seri nodded. They were clicking now.

  “Very well,” said the elf. “Clearly you have missed the signs.”

  Seri ignored him. “Will we find what we seek?”

  “What do you seek? Love?”

  “No,” Seri said. “That I already have.”

  The ferryman gobbled seal and remained silent. Finally Seri stomped off toward the island, Rooke following.

  “Friend.” Rooke stopped and turned. “Will you at least tell us what month it is?”

  “Today is the perfect day to seek love,” The ferryman called from behind the mist. “Today is Valentine’s Day.”

  † † †

  The Hotel Agartha was built of stone, inlaid with ice chips and a permanent lacquer of hoarfrost. The hotel’s bulk squeezed all the oxygen from the ice until it glowed a glacier blue, blue veins between shingles, blue haze filming windows.

  Seri stared through her breath fog as she climbed the pingo. The hotel was built in overlapping styles, a herd of old stone mansions. The only light was a burnished orange glow in the turret window. A murmur of smoke poured from one of many chimneys, pooling, drifting down as if too old or sleepy to float skyward. Seri had a sudden impression of animals lurking in the hotel’s heart, scuttling on footpads, watching from cracks and vents.

  The lobby had a strange honey odour. Sweet, but the sweetness of decay. A cheerless fire cracked in the stone hearth, fed by shingles and what looked to be an unhung door with brass knob. Seri squinted. Atop the door, as if in offering, were a smoky pillow and three sizzling apples.

  Rooke followed Seri to a great wooden counter, on which a rotating fan swept back and forth, rustling an old calendar and whistling at intervals across the bottle-top of an ancient Coke bottle. Seri shivered and wondered at the fan. It was freezing in the hotel, despite the fire.

  Seri tapped the bell. A thin curl of smoke drifted across the calendar page, dispersed at the fan’s wind. Then a head slowly rose from behind the counter, giving Seri a start. A boylike head, but beautiful, pageboy cut and dark glasses fogged over, cigarette holder clenched between ivory teeth.

  “Hello,” the woman said, stretching the o in a luxurious sigh. “Ah.” She smiled at Rooke. “You have the vision.”

  Bespectacled Rooke licked dry lips. “We’re looking for a brother lost—once, now, and forever.” He thrust the picture at her. She smiled. Smoke pooled beneath her nostrils.

  “The man in this picture,” Seri clarified. “Have you seen him? We need to know if he’s arrived early.”

  The woman drew cigarette from teeth, clutching it between thumb and pinky. After minutes she chuckled. “It is not good to stay at the Agartha for too long.” Spoken slowly.

  Again Seri sensed animals, hibernating in vents and closets, dreaming of spring, white-furred and bearded as prophets.

  Rooke bent his spoon against the counter’s wood. “Raise a star for us in this dark landscape.”

  Seri sighed. Come on, Ted, drop the hogwash poetry. “Is the man here, ma’am?” she said.

  “Sprinkle some angel dust,” said Rooke.

  “We need details,” said Seri.

  “Before the days lengthen,” said Rooke.

  “This information is time-sensitive.” Seri was actually catching his rhythms.

  Rooke leaned into his spoon. “Well?”

  Seri nodded. “Well?”

  The woman watched smoke wind between her fingers. “Would you like a room? I do not recommend more than a week’s stay.”

  “Listen.” Seri leaned into the fan so her hair riffled. “We are law enforcement. We’re setting a sting for this man. He’s supposed to be on this island. Soon. We need to be absolutely certain he’s not here yet.”

  “Teleological time,” Rooke added. “White time.”

&nbs
p; The woman sucked smoke and nodded. “Today is a rather tricky concept.”

  “Is this the only hotel on the island?” Seri said.

  “It is.”

  “Can I see your guest book?”

  She slid a fat book towards Seri, who opened to the latest page and ran her fingers over the signatures: John Thompson, John Abbott, Arthur Meighen, John Alexander Macdonald. . . . Nothing recent here. Seri snapped shut the book and pushed it back. “We’ll take two rooms.”

  “Two is a rather tricky concept.”

  Seri ignored her. “Two rooms.”

  “We’ll wait. Like spiders.” Rooke smiled. A kindly, krinkly, bespectacled grandfather’s smile.

  The woman handed over a pair of old ringed keys, eyebrows arched beneath foggy glasses.

  “Spiders,” she said, blowing her s’s like smoke.

  Seri unlocked a tight fist. How long had she been clenching? Time to get hold of Gran, grab a good verse. Or else her cord to the real world was going to be more like Hansel and Gretel’s crumbs than Ariadne’s thread.

  “This is very important.” She stepped forward. “I need a working phone.”

  The woman chuckled. “We haven’t had a phone here in fifty years. A hundred years.”

  Seri clutched the lip of the countertop, glanced at Rooke, then at the woman again. “What?”

  The woman exhaled smoke at the fan, so it blew back at her and streamed into her nose. “A hundred years.” She shrugged. “A thousand years.”

  Seri breathed deeply, repeated Gran’s verse in her head. “This is a hotel. How can you not have a phone?”

  “One hour. One minute.”

  Seri’s fingernails pierced the wood. “A phone, damn it. How can you not have a phone?”

  The woman laughed, a sound like ice cubes in a tin bucket.

  “This is the Agartha,” she said. “We’ve never had a phone.”

  Seri coughed.

  “Or. . . .” The woman traced a finger across the fluted tip of the cigarette holder. “To be more accurate, we haven’t had a phone in forever.”

  † † †

  Seri could not remember walking through the hall or inserting the key in the door. When she heard Rooke’s footsteps in the hall, she loped across the carpet and flung open the door.

  “Ted.”

  He looked at her, but his lenses were foggy.

  “Ted, we need to make our plans and set the trap.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled the photograph, offered it without a word, then shuffled to his room. Seri unfolded the picture and stared at the eyeless man with the silvery hair, his body creased and re-creased. She stuffed the picture in her pocket and stepped back into her room to crack her notebook.

  As the hours unfolded crookedly, the desire for Gran’s voice became a restless ache. Seri climbed the winding steps up the turret to glance out across the Mackenzie, where, far below, between curtains of smoke, a blue Camaro idled next to the Ferry Queen. At this distance both ship and car looked like toys, gone missing from some hoarfrosted toy box. She moved closer to the window to get a better view, but a raven alighted the rail and stared at her through the glass until she turned away.

  Back in the hallways, she felt Rooke’s shadow looming. He hummed his melody, which vanished each time she leaned in to hear it. Soon she was dreaming in bed. Rooke was a raven, and she lay naked in the snow. He landed between her legs in a white explosion. His wings beat the inside of her thighs, and he gently inserted his beak inside her, till she could feel its hard hooked tip pressing her cervix.

  She roared to consciousness, hand flinging for the absent bedside phone. She leaped up shivering, folded and re-folded her clothes, pressing the creases, over and over. She scrawled Gran’s verse in her notebook, I shall never be shaken. But her own words appeared as arcane symbols, nothing she could interpret.

  “Do you have any hidden rooms?” she demanded of the night manager, now wearing a nametag that said Peart. “Anywhere we can perform surveillance from?”

  Smoke wafting sideways. “Perhaps you should summon your phantasm, in order to roam the ballrooms and hallways unnoticed.”

  “The phantasticus?”

  “There are many names.”

  Seri’s nails dug the counter wood. “You know Augustine?”

  “Which Augustine?”

  “The saint.”

  Peart shook her head, tonguing tendrils of smoke. “I know Augustine Rooke.”

  Seri’s thumbnail peeled from skin against the wood.

  Peart got a dreamy look. “He is very handsome. And so polite, even at his most driven, always sir this and sir that.”

  Seri’s nail peeled.

  “Dead now.” Peart sighed. “A century. Was he a saint for his relentless pursuit of evil? You tell me.”

  Seri pinched down the painful nail. “I beg your pardon?”

  Peart smiled around the cigarette holder. “You are following in his footsteps. Surely you know that.”

  “Bullshit,” Seri said, first time ever. The word tasted like vinegar.

  Peart winked.

  “Bullshit. Horseshit goddamned lie.”

  “Lie. Tricky concept.” Peart tipped her cigarette, blew it out like a candle. The cherry splashed to the countertop, still aglow. “You are a lover of myths and suburban faerie tales.”

  “Am not.” Seri scanned the counter. Phone here somewhere, somewhere, what kind of hotel.

  “Once upon a time,” Peart relit her cigarette, one deft flash, “there was an itinerant preacher and hunter of all things wicked and unnatural, for whom the saying hell freezes over was quite literal, and who, following the philosophies of Mani, determined that north was the true direction of evil and so the direction of his calling, and who insisted, in typically deft fashion, that the heart was a museum of evil, and, furthermore, that this metaphor could be made flesh, enacted, in a ritualistic gesture of renewal, nay, salvation, in almost the manner of the Israelites of the Old Testament, for whom the physical and material act of building, of arranging, of the journey—”

  “Stop!” Seri cried. “I know the story, you know I know it, I’m not sure what you’re trying to—”

  “Don’t you want to hear the part about the frost demon’s heart?”

  Seri shook her stinging thumb. “Did Rooke put you up to this?”

  “Rooke is trapped far south, in another hotel, in a place called Lethbridge.”

  Seri punched the counter. “Not Augustine Rooke!” Her thumb flared, she paused. Why travel this labyrinth? Why unspool further this crimson thread? Surely there was a verse she was forgetting, something about steadfastness, something about Elijah. She took one deep breath. “Look. Are you absolutely certain you don’t have a phone?”

  Peart stared at her cigarette. “I’m not certain of anything. Are you?”

  † † †

  Was there a mythology somewhere, a proposition, a science, a religion, a model, a folkway, a cult even, where it was told that stories themselves became manifest and visible, were made flesh, leaped fully formed or even partial and asymmetrical—a trope here, an image there—from their fractal or liminal or intersticial space, from imaginary dimensions to the real world, where they entangled themselves with experience and history, with all that was quotidian and empirical, like viruses loose or far-flung refugees to be feared and rushed home with one-way tickets to the land of dreams and deliriums, or even, alternately, finally, offered status as true citizens? There must have been something in Seri’s triple degree, some tale somewhere, that knit the disparate threads of geography, pharmacology, and angelology, some paradigm that proposed or accounted for such myths, spun in dim light, given life, tracked in their migrations. A topography of mythic hallucinogens? A map of psychoactive myths?

  No.

  For God’s sake, that was nonsense. That was a collapse of distinctions Saint Augustine would abhor, an entanglement and diminishment of the truth no prophet would endure.

  † † †r />
  Seri awoke from a fitful nap, crouched at the bed, hands folded, knees and knuckles aching. Skeleton shadows twirled across the far wall, dancing on the room’s penumbral light.

  “Long time,” he said.

  She turned to see Rooke beside her, lenses aglow, open briefcase at his side, fingers feeding a paper-fire. His briefcase was almost empty. He was burning the last of the cut-up books and newspaper clippings. His diary collage was already blackened and curled, snowing soft grey ash at the ceiling.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  He smiled. “The only way to keep warm is to incinerate the past.”

  She unkinked her fingers. “Where’s my Bible?”

  He nodded at the flames. “Only one left now.” He plucked his own Bible from the case. Its covers flipped, revealing slashed and severed pages ready to fall.

  “Do you want it?”

  She stared. “No.”

  “May I have my picture back?”

  She handed it to him.

  He smoothed the creases. “The man in this photograph is here for one reason. To destroy my powder, and, in doing so, to renew his own spirit.”

  “Really. Great.” She was so tired.

  “He’s going to throw it back into the fiery cracks from where it came.” Rooke slid the picture between the dissected pages of his Bible. “That’s why he’s here. At the punk music festival.” He closed the Bible. “Where I go next.”

  “Ted.” Seri shifted. Her knees cracked. “Get it together for once. You invented the festival. This is our trap.”

  Rooke took a deep breath and stood. He marched to the door.

  Seri unkinked her aching knees. “Hold on. We have to plan this carefully.” She already had her notebook out.

  “Here it ends,” Rooke said.

  “Clarify yourself. These occultisms won’t do forever.”

  “Here is the final entanglement of threads—”

  “Whose?”

  “—postponed but inevitable. The butterfly effect.”

  “Ted,” she warned.

  “The final strike of the match or roll of the snowball.”

  “Ted, can you shut up for once?” She clicked her pen. “What are you going to do?”