The Ice House

by Tim Clare

  Butler was already in the shade of the eaves, kicking his clogs off.

  Delphine slowed as she passed the fire pit. Her stomach gurgled. The nausea was gone. She was ravenous.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ said Butler. He held the door open.

  Delphine wiped away sweat. Sunlight glinted on the crater lake. The sky was a delirious azure against the red of the mountain.

  She peeled her vest away from her skin, raked her fingers through her hair. Her knees were trembling. She could not cower in this moment forever.

  Delphine took a long, slow breath. She entered the hut.

  Delphine’s breath caught.

  A woman on her side, one leg drawn up beneath her. White-gold hair was splashed over an angular skull. Her eyes were closed.

  Delphine stared, disbelieving. ‘Is she . . .’

  Butler blew smoke out his nostril slits. ‘She’s sleeping.’ He crushed his cigarette out on the lid of a box. ‘Shut the door.’

  The cabin was shady and sweetly cool, lit by electric bulbs and filled with the whine of a boxy plastic air-con unit. Cloth blinds hung across shuttered windows. Butler stood between stacks of ribbed military packing chests. There were boxes everywhere, filled with cartons of Marlboro Reds, generic paracetamol, shrink-wrapped designer shirts, single malt whiskies, newspapers. Behind him, planks on a pair of sawhorses formed a makeshift table. The table was covered with comms equipment – a black plastic tower case covered in dials, sliders and LEDs, headphones, a microphone on a desk stand and a single speaker. Dirty white cables snaked away to a dangerous-looking tangle of plugs in the corner.

  Delphine knelt beside the bunk. What was this feeling? A tightness in the centre of her forehead. A strange, thick resistance in her chest.

  ‘Alice?’

  The young woman lying before her did not seem real. The old Alice, the one Delphine had visited and cared for all the years, was gone. How peculiar. Perhaps the thing she was feeling was grief.

  She tried the name again. ‘Alice.’ Using it felt deeply odd. Not that the figure didn’t look like the Alice she remembered – quite the reverse. She was so familiar it felt like a cruel trick. ‘Alice?’ Delphine reached for her.

  ‘Let her sleep.’ Butler sparked a fresh cigarette. He snapped his lighter shut. ‘Eat and rest. Crossing the channel creates a big calorific deficit.’ He began walking towards the door. ‘I need to oversee bringing the last of our cargo from England. Oh – and don’t wander off down the mountainside. Don’t wander anywhere, in fact.’ He held his cigarette between thumb and long, slender forefinger, inhaling till the pink cartilage of his noseleaf folded in on itself. ‘Stay in the cabin. The mood down at the camp is . . .’ He stropped his toes across the rope-mat floor. ‘Just stay here.’

  ‘And do what?’

  Butler glanced round at the packing chests. ‘Pick out a gun?’

  Delphine flipped the catches on another moulded gun chest. Fully half of the containers in the hut were guns and ammo. Ms Rao had amassed a disturbing amount of firepower. She must have smuggled guns from all over the world.

  Alice slept on her bunk. Occasionally she would shift in her sleep, and Delphine’s heart would stop.

  Delphine lifted the lid and took out a Ruger submachine gun. She unfolded the butt and braced it against the fleshy part of her shoulder. It reeked of cleaning oil and grease. She aimed at a dark brown knothole in the hut’s far wall, imagined squeezing, emptying the magazine in under four seconds – the hot, angry rasp.

  She folded the stock and put the gun back in its foam cut-out. Too much.

  Another case had three black pistols, all chambered for 9mm – Russian military by the looks of them. Eh. A bit vanilla.

  She opened a third crate. Inside a grey foam cut-out was a matte-black shotgun. Remington 870. Twelve-gauge. Pistol grip with removable butt stock. Magazine extension.

  She tested the shotgun’s pistol grip in either hand, squinted down the rib. Not a patch on the elegant side-by-side fowling pieces of her youth. She shucked the slide action and heard that vulgar, showy ka-chuk.

  Delphine returned the shotgun to its crate. In adjacent cut-outs were black plastic sidesaddle and stock shell-holder mounts, still in their blister packs, and an aluminium mount for a mag light. She wondered if the weight of the torch would throw the aim off, or, if you mounted it on the cheek side, whether your supporting hand would naturally compensate. She could try it out – maybe strip the thing while she was at it and check all the parts. There was a workbench in the corner.

  A cough from the back of the room. Delphine turned.

  Alice blinked, opened her eyes.

  Delphine ran to her.

  Alice looked around. She yawned. She closed her eyes.

  ‘Alice? It’s me.’ Alice wrinkled her nose and murmured. ‘Are you all right? It’s Delphine. I know I sound different but it’s me. Look.’

  Alice grimaced, squirming against the bunk. She rubbed her eyes. Her skin was shiny with sweat. She half-opened her eyes and peered at Delphine.

  Delphine felt the room dissolve around them. ‘Hello, darling.’

  Alice’s pupils flicked about. Her left eye was pink and watering. She frowned.

  ‘What’s happened to the . . .’ She winced, pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Ohhh . . .’

  ‘It’s all right. You’re all right.’ Words that would have sounded calm and authoritative in her old voice came out in an eerie singsong. ‘I’m here. Don’t worry. Everything’s fine.’ How much should she explain? How much was Alice capable of understanding? ‘Darling? Do you remember who you are?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Do you know who you are?’

  Alice smeared a palm over her clammy face. She nodded.

  ‘Of course. What time is it?’ Her voice was scratchy with sleep.

  ‘That’s a bit of a complicated question. Just gone midday, I think.’

  ‘Oh God.’ Alice took a deep breath and glanced around again. ‘Where . . .’ Her look became one of bewilderment. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Alice. You had dementia. You weren’t yourself. We’ve brought you to the other world.’

  ‘Oh.’ Alice studied her surroundings with renewed curiosity. ‘So this is all . . . We found it, then?’

  ‘Well. It rather found us.’

  Alice stared off to the side, her lips pressed into a slit. ‘Have I been away a long time?’

  Delphine’s image of her began to blur and break up. ‘Years and years.’ She took Alice’s hand. ‘Such a long time.’

  Alice yawned again – a big, toothy roar. She studied the fingers of her free hand. She peered through them at Delphine.

  ‘Whatever’s happened to your face?’

  Delphine touched her cheek, alarmed. ‘What?’

  ‘You’re all . . .’ Alice touched her own face, pinched the skin. She looked at her hand again, then sat up sharply. ‘Oh! Oh!’

  It took some time to calm her down. Delphine explained what had happened, how the threshold had taken seventy years from their physical ages, and Alice appeared to understand, but moments later she noticed her hand and the cycle began again.

  Eventually Alice wore herself out, and settled into a kind of stupor. Delphine went outside and filled two bowls with stew from the cauldron. It was thick and brimming with onions and peas, and Delphine went back for seconds. Butler had been right – she felt hungrier than she ever had in her life. She found a coolbox, cracked open two Cokes and drank both.

  As Alice ate, her alertness grew. She asked questions about where they were and seemed to retain the answers. She looked confused but oddly calm.

  ‘But why am I here?’ she said.

  ‘That was Martha’s price for cooperation. That we could bring you with us.’

  ‘Hm.’ Alice nibbled her stew. ‘And what did I think of that?’

  ‘I don’t think you were well enough to understand.’

  ‘Oh.’ Her tongue poked out the corner of her mouth, the wa
y it used to when she was concentrating very hard. She looked up. ‘What now, then?’

  Delphine gazed into her bowl. ‘I thought we might go on a little cruise.’

  A wide and bloody river flowed into the mouth of a cave. Thin, limpid things flickered through the russet water. Even in the shade, Delphine was perspiring. All around, the jungle loomed. There were more huts, and, incongruously, the ruin of a little stone church. A thick, cloying fecundity wafted over the river bank. Across the cave roof, the black volcanic rock was pocked with air bubbles and smeared in sheeny beards of moss. Tangle vines hung from the plateau above, some plaited together into spherical nests dripping with tiny fire-red birds. The river continued underground, fading into darkness.

  ‘What is it?’ said Alice, dazed, awestruck. She was wearing a wide-brimmed rush hat and a white blouse with flapping sleeves.

  ‘The Underkills.’

  Delphine turned to see Butler standing a little way up the bank, eating chunks of steaming meat off a skewer. Grease dripped onto the silty ground. ‘Underground river network branching south and west,’ he said. ‘This was all in your primer.’

  Vesperi orderlies were loading crates from a jetty onto a long sampan-style riverboat. Most of the boat was sheltered by a barrel-arch roof covered in rigging. The stern was a squared-off raised platform surrounded by a low railing like the aftcastle of a pirate ship. On the open bow was a big headlamp.

  Butler let out a piercing trill. A pair of vesperi looked up from the deck of the rear boat. He tumbled his index fingers, and the orderlies flipped the plastic crate they had just dumped so it was lid-side up.

  ‘They’re a bit distracted today,’ he said. ‘Latest rumour is a settlement a hundred miles south has vanished. Might be nonsense. Anti-Jejunus guerrillas might have skinned them all. Still.’ He thinned his eyes. ‘Ominous.’

  Delphine stood holding Alice’s hand. ‘So we’re heading . . . in there?’

  ‘Mm.’ Butler dragged the skewer laterally through his fangs, shearing off the last of the meat. ‘Camp’s not happy. No one’s been south for weeks. The orderlies have been begging me to block the tunnels off. Seal in the monsters.’

  ‘Are there monsters?’ said Alice.

  Butler wiped his mouth. He tossed the skewer into the water.

  ‘That’s rather a question of perspective.’ He began walking down to the jetty. ‘Come. I want to show you something.’ Delphine’s clogs were remarkably stable in the soft silt – practical, rather than eccentric indulgences. She took them off when she reached the jetty. Her bare soles moved onto rough, swollen planks.

  Butler stopped at the jetty’s end. Without looking down, he stepped across a yard of water onto the bow. Delphine reached the same spot and hesitated.

  He looked at her askance. ‘You’re not afraid of water, are you?’ ‘Don’t be stupid.’ But when she looked at the gap, there it was again – a jolt of vertigo. For years she had braced herself before tackling the drop from the front doorstep to the gravel. She had trained herself to be careful, fearful. A woman of her age no longer ‘fell’. She ‘had a fall’. It had passed from verb to noun. A fall was an object, something one acquired. It had permanence.

  She looked down at her new body – this miraculous biddable flesh. Already today it had carried her up a mountain.

  She backed up, ran and jumped.

  She cleared the gunwale. She landed; the boat rocked. Her foot skidded on wet deck, momentum throwing her forwards. The river swung towards her.

  Butler grabbed her wrist. She jerked back, found her balance. He slapped something into her palm.

  ‘You’ll need this.’

  She looked. She was gripping a sickle. The blade’s crescent interior had been whetted to moon-white sharpness.

  Before she could ask what it was for, Butler leapt onto the roof, beating his wings for extra lift. Delphine doubted she could get that much height off a standing jump. The boat’s roof was covered in a lattice of rope rigging. She tried grabbing the rope and pulling herself up using her arms. To her astonishment, she could do it. She was a little ungainly, but good Lord. How many decades had it been since she had enjoyed this kind of strength-to-weight ratio? It felt like flying.

  Butler stopped amidships and stamped twice on the roof. ‘Sleeping quarters here.’

  He dropped from the roof onto the raised deck of the stern. He pushed the tiller aside, stooped, and flipped a latch in the floor. Delphine hopped down beside him. He lifted a hatch.

  Beneath, dirty water lapped round the fin-shaped curve of something black and oily.

  ‘It’s for hacking weeds off the propeller,’ said Butler, looking up. ‘There’s a catch in the handle.’

  Delphine found the recessed button and pressed it with her thumb. It clicked. Nothing happened. She flicked her wrist and the sickle shot out towards Butler’s face. The hooked tip stopped an inch from his eyes.

  He frowned. ‘Don’t do that.’

  Delphine held the sickle up. It was about three feet long, all told – natty-looking piece of kit. She thumbed the catch and the shaft slid back inside the handle.

  Butler slammed the hatch. ‘And don’t ever open this while the engine’s running.’ He fastened the little steel twist-latch with a grunt. She passed him the sickle and he slotted it into a pair of brackets on the cabin’s outside wall. ‘Right. You can learn the rest on the move.’ He stood. ‘We set off at sunset.’

  The interior of the little church was cool and dark. Gnarled black briars snaked across the floor, mostly dry and dead. Odd, cobweb-like structures hung between them, rainbowed like a soap bubble. The air had a sweet smell, like pine mixed with cinnamon.

  A tingle spread across her scalp and down the nape of her neck. She heard whispers.

  Delphine turned round. Martha stood in a pool of soft green light cast by her own eyes. She was writing in her notepad. She finished and tapped the paper with the end of her pencil – bap.

  ‘Yes, all right, all right. No need for surliness.’ Delphine took the notepad and began reflexively patting her pockets for her reading glasses before remembering. She read:

  henry was here.

  She stared at the words. ‘What do you mean?’ She handed back the pad. ‘When?’

  don’t know. long time ago i think. but he was here.

  Delphine gazed upon the damp stone walls with a queasy reverence. ‘Are you sure, dear?’

  Whisper, whisper went the pencil.

  it’s a feeling. like the one i got before thompson died.

  Delphine glanced around the church, imagining hints of him everywhere. All at once, it had taken on the hallowed sadness of a tomb.

  As dusk settled across the mountainside, giant moths began to surge from the cave in papery helixes, burning pages rising from a bonfire. The Underkills echoed with the whispering gossip of their wingbeats.

  The boat burbled away from the bluing light of the settlement, its electric lamp cutting a wedge through the mist. The craft sat low in the water, fat and laden, engine purr translating into a soft chattering of cargo crates. Vesperi orderlies lined the jetty, watching. When Delphine glanced back a final time, they were just silhouettes.

  Butler stood at the stern, scalp fur slicked back, one hand on the tiller. His high, jackal ears twitched and swivelled – every so often his noseleaf creased as he spat another cannonade of clickspeak into the void.

  Delphine stood on the foredeck, straddling the steaming lamp. In her right hand, she held the Remington, six one-ounce slugs in the sidesaddle mount, another six buckshot shells clipped to the stock. In her left hand hung the sickle, edge glinting.

  Martha flew a short way ahead, jinking right and left, her eyes leaving faint trails in the wet air. Delphine breathed through her nostrils. The vibrant jungle stink was turning to something dank. The temperature dropped.

  How strange, not to know the exact weight and flavour of tomorrow. To stand on the edge of time.

  ‘Well,’ she said.

 
Mist rolled through the gleam of Martha’s eyes. Alice’s hair was wet with condensation.

  At Delphine’s feet, the river unzipped in a puzzle of froth. Wake reflected off the rock walls and struck the hull with glassy slaps. The engine’s growl echoed, layering and doubling until it surrounded them. She let the shotgun muzzle rest on the foredeck. The vibrations passed up her arm, into her chest.

  The tremor was calming. Familiar. It felt like being old.

  CHAPTER 6

  A TIME TO PLUCK UP THAT

  WHICH IS PLANTED

  (Four weeks before the inauguration)

  Räum trotted through the gate, stepping from dirt to cobbles. His roadshoes clack-clacked on the new surface. Hagar jerked his reins and he came to a standstill. She pulled off her goggles and let them hang around her neck.

  Masillia had grown.

  The plaza was bustling: skroon-drawn carriages nosed sluggishly through a contraflow of bodies. She cast about for the post office; in place of the familiar gabled roof and salt-warped timbers rose an imposing structure of pale stone, big as a temple. The old wooden veranda, with its slumped roof and flaking blue paint, was now a flight of stone steps leading to a grand portico supported by four caryatids – tall white statues sculpted with flowing belted gowns and expressions of defiant stoicism. She knew who they would be before she marked the roundness in the jaw, the steep cheekbones and the downturned eyes. Still, it was a jolt to see Mitta there – gigantic, multiplied, sealed in Gallian marble. His silence a rebuke.

  Morgellon had doubled-down on his grief, baking it into the very architecture. His old valet’s sainthood was all but formalised, Mitta’s treachery forgotten. Or, rather, denied. Replaced by an icon of eternal loyalty. But even statuary was fleeting.

  People were rushing up and down the steps clutching parcels and envelopes, or brandishing string-bound folders of documents. So it was still a post office? Huh. Plus ça change.