Days of Night

by Jonathan Stone

  “What the hell is going on?” Hobbes asks Heller, privately, outside the door, as they exit the infirmary, before stepping out into the seventy-mile-per-hour wind and forty-five below together. They will all have to move together, use and enforce the buddy system, from now on.

  Heller takes a breath. Exactly what I feared, Manny. Exactly what I knew. “Unfortunately, Manny, what’s happening is that the killer is stuck in this new situation, same as we are, and this new situation is having its effect on them too—emboldening them because we’re preoccupied. And the bigger point—if they’re feeling the stress of this like we are, the pressure of it, then they’re feeling the need to act, to be themselves, to prove themselves . . .” He doesn’t verbalize the rest of what he has been thinking: before there’s no one left to prove it to.

  “And your being here is not a deterrent?”

  Heller smiles grimly. “My being here might be an accelerant.” He looks at Hobbes. “I think it was Trish Wong because of her association to me.”

  “So I killed her,” says Hobbes, in brooding, melancholy realization. “I assigned her to you impulsively there in the cafeteria, and that was her death sentence.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t blame yourself. We didn’t know anything like this would happen.”

  “We didn’t?” Hobbes looks at Heller, the accusation implicit: Did you know? Should you have known? Did you kill her, the moment you asked for an assistant?

  Heller doesn’t answer. He has already wrestled sleeplessly with that question.

  He could feel, in the infirmary with Calloway, Simmons, and Sorenson, Hobbes’s unspoken frustration with him. Annoyance triggered even with his very presence. Why haven’t you solved this yet? What are you doing? What’s taking so long?

  From Hobbes now comes something less accusatory—and more troubling. An expression in Hobbes’s eyes of stunned, abject incredulity. Wait. I may be dealing with the end of the world—and a serial killer?

  Hobbes looks up at him. “So now that you’re operating alone again, maybe it’ll stop?”

  Heller looks at him. “It won’t stop.”

  It’s only getting started.

  33.

  He had adored her laugh, reveled in her intelligence. Liked her eyes, her hands, her strong lean body. He had liked her more than enough, and she had liked him more than enough, here in the strangeness of the months-long night, to slip into bed with each other. And every time they did, it was both comfortable and new.

  He didn’t know if it was T3 hormonal disruption, for either or both of them—creating a greater sense of ease and companionship, or a greater threat and fear of loneliness—but they had enjoyed each other recreationally, emotionally, thoroughly. It was a good way, a gratifying way, to pass the night. The defined nights of the clock. The ill-defined long night.

  He is almost certain no one knew. Someone could suspect or speculate, but Heller doesn’t think anyone actually knew.

  So how much did the killer sense about the relationship? Anything at all? Did he or she observe something in Heller or Trish, or in the two of them together, that set the killer off?

  He thinks about who was close enough to see.

  But in these circumstances, in the strange and artificial arrangements of Antarctic winter, everyone is close enough. Everyone can see.

  Standing there in the infirmary, with Trish naked in front of him, in front of all of them—the body he had enjoyed on so many nights, the body that had equally enjoyed his—did the killer envision, anticipate such a scene? That Heller would be standing there with her naked, with Calloway, Hobbes, and the rest of them, discussing the autopsy? Was the crazy, disorienting pain of that moment part and parcel of the killer’s clever cruelty? This is more than a murder. It is an incidental—or knowing and intentional?—severing of his own soul.

  He has thought that at some deeper, unconscious level—deeper than the rational choice of exploring her love of nature, expanding her outlook and education—Trish was seeking opposites. Attracted to the opposite that Antarctica offered. Seeking the opposite of California’s gently insistent warmth in Antarctica’s relentless cold, the opposite of California’s stunning topographical variety in Antarctica’s sameness.

  Lying there, with typical Trish curiosity and expansiveness and imagination, she had asked Heller to think more deeply about what had made him say yes to the assignment. To talk about his own home, his own upbringing, and whether in some way that home and upbringing had brought him here. Lying there with her, and only because of her, he paused to consider it more—to go beyond the obvious answer of a temporary exit from the cold, muddy trench of his own lonely life. For him, it was not the attraction of an opposite—of an unknown. For him, Antarctica was, in some way, a chance to revise the past by shaping a more useful and meaningful present than his flawed past would have led to.

  In contrast to Trish, he thought, lying there with her, he knows winter. Winter is in his Vermont blood. Its harshness. But even in his native Northern Vermont, winter is sometimes merely picturesque. A season, not a permanent condition. Yes, Vermont winters can be tough. He knows the cold, grew up in it. But Vermont winter is about how man conquers winter, rugged farmers and craftsmen and crusty Yankee ingenuity. Antarctica is about how mankind can’t conquer it. How it’s too much. In Vermont, man wins. In Antarctica, man loses.

  That little insight comes back to haunt him. How here, you can’t conquer it. You can’t master it. It masters you. And, now, that is coming to pass. In a way more devastating than he could ever have predicted.

  Maybe someone knew of the relationship. Maybe knowing of it, they couldn’t resist. So much better than just killing Heller. Killing what he loves and letting him live. Letting him live with the guilty knowledge that she is dead only and purely because of him. If he had chosen someone else, if he had chosen no one, she would still be alive.

  And it’s worse than that. And maybe whoever did this to her knows it’s worse. Because he and Trish would sometimes spend the night together in Heller’s private room, but other nights, she would return to the dorm room she shared with a roommate—so if Heller had insisted on that night that she stay, if he had pulled her to him, curled her against him, she might still be alive.

  The killer may have been waiting for just this chance, may indeed have known, then, about their nights together, may have waited patiently for Trish to wander out alone, heading back to the dorm.

  Why hadn’t he pulled her toward him that night?

  A knife of guilt, twisting in him . . .

  Heller had made the decision to winter over just as he was getting to know Trish. Just at the moment when there was obvious affection—a spark, a flicker of aliveness, of attentiveness, of something in the relationship. His decision to winter over—so logically and somberly presented to Hobbes—“to reconstruct, re-create the conditions of the crime”—how much was it motivated by the chance to see things through with Trish, see what happened, see where it went?

  The knife of guilt . . . twisting deeper . . .

  And now, the killer is watching Heller walk around dead. Seeing what he does. An exquisite torture to witness. Who is this? Who is this, drawn out again by the Antarctic night, and now a permanent night? Drawn out under the perfect cover, the perfect distraction, of the prospective end of the world?

  34.

  What’s more unsettling to McMurdo? A second murder or the prospective end of the world?

  But the second murder and the end of the world are more interrelated than Heller would have thought.

  Both could be poisonings, he realizes. A global poisoning, it seems possible, of some sort, from an unknown, unidentifiable source. And if it is a deadly pathogen, it has poisoned the air, the atmosphere, the planet with an unprecedented lethality.

  And his inability to solve the individual poisoning, from a similarly unknown, so-far-unidentifiable, mysterious force—his inability to make any headway—is his personal version of global science’s fa
ilure.

  He begins to wonder vaguely if they’re more literally related. Could these murders be similarly microbial? Whatever seems to have afflicted the planet, is this some smaller, individualized version of it? The relationship of the second murder to the prospective global catastrophe is on the surface ridiculous. But is there something to it? Could this murderer have stumbled onto something similarly lethal? Inadvertently or intentionally unleashing something long dormant, suddenly and globally ignited? Part of him knows the thought is absurd . . . so is this his own T3 subtly settling in, starting to talk to him?

  There is for now at McMurdo a fragile sheet of cooperation, like a thin layer of ice, of permafrost—brittle, temporary, in danger of cracking suddenly, and certainly of melting slowly. Heller had looked around the room as Hobbes spoke. They were still too stunned, in too much shock, not to listen—blindly following, unthinkingly obedient. They are used to the rules, to organization. But under these stresses, what would happen? What could happen? And he realizes: anything. Anything at all. Their society is tentative. All bets are off. And order, civility, the rule of law, the veneer and maintenance of civilization—is it all going to come down to one lone semiretired subcontractor cop?

  Should he continue his investigation? Or is doing so putting his own head in the sand? His own way of not being able to process what is happening to them? Is he simply in shock, in the same way that he has observed everyone around him is? He’s presumably no more or less human than anyone around him. Sure, he can have perspective on everyone else—but you can never get enough perspective on yourself.

  How much of this is T3 talking?

  35.

  Simmons and Bramlett institute some systems for tracking food and medicine usage.

  Some tighter controls, some more-serious reporting procedures.

  The biggest change is the daily briefing.

  There isn’t much to say at the initial ones.

  Heller knows what Hobbes is really doing. It’s a way of creating closeness, a bond, a sense of family and mission. Hobbes is sensing they might need that.

  It’s also a way of keeping an eye on one another. In case certain people indicate that they are heading off in their own psychological directions. Into uncharted psychological terrain. That might need a little help, some redirection, some restraint.

  Heller has no illusions. It’s what Hobbes can do—the little bit he can do—in the wake of the second murder, and to try to head off a third.

  36.

  They are thinking about their own families, of course. Their own wives and sons and daughters and parents. Personalizing the global catastrophe in order to absorb it. Or personalizing it because we are human. Because we think about our own lives. Because it’s a self-protective way to keep from thinking of it in broader terms. In its broader reality.

  Putting human scale on it. Did my wife, my daughter, my mother, my brother experience a fast death? A slow death? Sudden? Painful? Suffering or no suffering at all, instantaneous? But they would never ultimately know, would they? It was therefore the ultimate mystery story. It would have no ending. The lives—life itself—had an ending. Finality. But the story itself, the nature of that ending, the particulars of it—that might have no ending. Ever. The ultimate crime story. A massive crime, against humanity, and at McMurdo they might never know if it was humanity’s own crime against itself or if humanity was merely an innocent victim, a bystander. The ultimate crime story, the final crime story. And humankind would not be solving it. It would go into the cold-case file. The ultimate cold-case file. How appropriate that it would be here, in Antarctica, the final disposition of the ultimate cold case.

  He is thinking about Ann, living outside Toronto, moving up there from Michigan, farther, ever farther away from him. He is thinking about his daughter, Amy, in her freshman dorm at NYU in downtown Manhattan. Hey Dad, I’m going to minor in astronomy. Her sweet little smile. Manhattan—Grand Pathogen Central. Pandemic Ground Zero. Picturing them minutely, obsessively, and then, he notices, his mind reeling back, cutting the images off, something primal and protective going on in the synapses, some special neurological defense, summoned only in extremis. Something temporary. He weeps in the shower. He weeps before sleep. And then tries to push it aside, because he knows—they all know—they must, for the moment anyway, put survival ahead of weeping.

  There is an unspoken agreement not to talk about it. Not to bring up relatives and friends. Not just yet. Not right now. An unspoken agreement that they are all in the same position. The exchange of looks suffices for the sharing of suffering. And they don’t really know yet. They don’t really know. They are scientists. This is a scientific community. They will, with an ingrained scientific skepticism, with the skepticism and detachment of their training, await the weight of evidence.

  They are the families gathered in the airport waiting lounge, awaiting word of the flight. The families gathered above the mine, awaiting word of the fates down below. Gathered outside the hospital, awaiting word about the surgeries following the attack.

  Which is to say they know, but they don’t know.

  And the downed flight and the collapsed mine and the busy ER—now it is a planet. Now it is human history. A problem of scale that the mind cannot process.

  Multiply this effect—this personal brooding, this profound and impending sense of loss—by each personal reaction. Each one different, each one unpredictable, because for each, it is unprecedented. Some suffering in silence, but some about to scream, about to unleash, about to explode.

  And—always, underneath, always the bottom line, the question always lurking, because Heller is Heller—what does this new information, this unprecedented new input, do in the mind of a serial killer?

  37.

  The ambitious winter projects that Heller heard so much about—learning Latin, reading Proust, constructing a beautiful jewelry box, writing the first draft of a novel—all fall quickly by the wayside. Put aside. Overwhelmed by events. Overwhelmed by preoccupation. Overwhelmed by the imagery, global and personal, assaulting them.

  Heller passes Trebor in the mess hall.

  “Still reading the locked-room mysteries?”

  Trebor looks away from him, shakes his head no.

  Heller understands the glum, wordless gesture.

  What’s the point?

  38.

  It creates an unusual, and maybe irresistible, opportunity for a serial killer.

  Heller knows the profile. Perhaps counterintuitively—given their profound delight and immersion in the gruesome, given their often-extreme exploration of blood and bone and skin—they are, in their typical-surrounding behaviors, essentially cowardly. They gravitate to safe situations, where they can exercise—even perfect—their perversities with impunity. The hitchhiking indigenous populations on Canadian Highway 16 in British Columbia. The sparsely populated Badlands reservations of North Dakota. The unpoliced prostitution streets of Juárez, Mexico. The favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Places where serial murderers have struck repeatedly. And now, counterintuitively, the closed, frozen, isolated borders of McMurdo Station may have just become one of those places. Added itself to that list.

  He thinks of that Norwegian kid, armed to the teeth, brazenly taking out an entire island of high school teenagers on retreat. One of the most horrendous and unpredictable cases. This is a little like that. They are now isolated in the same way. A group in the same way that might raise the ire and resentment of a psychopath several notches higher. To the breaking point.

  If the murders stop now, they might remain unsolved. So he knows he is hoping for a mistake. Which might mean—might require—another murder. A thought, a line of reasoning he would never admit to anyone aloud. Not even to Hobbes. Only barely to himself.

  Hobbes corners him in the cafeteria. “Can you come see me in my office in an hour?”

  “Sure. Something we can’t talk about here?”

  “It’s a bigger discussion,” says Hobbes.

&
nbsp; “I’m sure you have some sense of why I asked you here.”

  Yes, Heller does. Heller knows that Hobbes needs to now ask more of him. He knows that the investigation is inevitably going to take a back seat to issues of survival.

  Murder is primal. And yet it is now going to be usurped by something even more primal.

  Hobbes look glumly at him. “We’ve got some bigger policing issues ahead of us. People are stunned. We’re all stunned. We’re all trying to process the possibility of this. And Calloway is a good doctor, but he’s not a psychiatrist. We don’t have a psychiatrist at McMurdo.” He looks at Heller. “And there may not even be such a thing as a psychiatrist anymore.”

  He leans forward. “And I think you know as well as I do people are still in a state of shock. People are not processing this. But, eventually, they are going to. And we can’t expect people to take this calmly. They are going to awaken to the horror at some point. They are not going to be orderly. This is an existential terror—unprecedented for any of us. We can’t know exactly what to expect of people in this situation, but I think we can assume it will be things we don’t expect. I guess I’m saying we have to prepare for the unexpected from any of us, from anyone here . . . because we know it’s coming. Prepare for it the best we can. And part of that preparation is you . . . a bigger role . . . more expected of you, Joe. And, truthfully, I don’t think you even have a choice here.”

  “But, Manny, we still don’t really know what we’re dealing with north of us, right? It’s still speculation.”

  Hobbes looks at Heller. “Doesn’t matter, Joe. It’s what everyone thinks we’re dealing with. And we have to deal with what people think.”

  “But couldn’t this be . . . some kind of, I don’t know, mass T3 hallucination?” Some mass T3 state, Heller thinks vaguely. Some common virus, some shared cognitive poisoning spreading through, infecting McMurdo Station.