“I found it!” Henry yelled as he revealed the doorway and a circular wheel to open it. He tried to turn the wheel but it was immovable. He pulled on it with all his strength. Nothing happened. He wasn’t sure which way it should turn and he threw his weight behind it as he yanked the wheel erratically from side to side. Still it did not shift.
Mary reached for another icicle and broke a piece from it for her ammunition. The mother snow leopard had returned to its feet once more, but it could not stand properly. Mary diverted her attention again to the bairn, but it did not move. Then behind it appeared a much larger creature, ferocious-looking and twice the size of the bairn. The adult male.
“Get it open!” Mary screamed over her shoulder.
Henry heaved and finally felt the wheel begin to give way as he pulled upon it.
The large snow leopard leaped at Mary as she let fly her catapult.
Henry glanced around and watched the shot scrape meaninglessly past the creature vaulting toward his sister.
Mary fell rearward, yet it wasn’t from the anticipated collision with the beast. The door had finally yielded and the girl was hauled from the waist from behind. Mary fell back through the doorway where the floor was hard and cold and the air stale and dank.
Henry slammed the door in the creature’s face and the din echoed off into the dark, uncharted passageways of the ship. No reply came from within, but outside, the creature pounded and scratched at the door that obstructed it. Finally, after minutes that seemed like eons, it ceased. Henry wasn’t convinced that the creature had gone away and there was no way he was going to open the door to check.
Silence engulfed them.
They lay on the floor for some time, catching their breath, the same way they had after hauling the seal onto the ice. Light filtered in through the porthole and formed an arch in the hallway. Thin luminescent strips that had once marked the floor and trailed the handrails of the corridor had been long covered by dust and frost. Their guiding light was masked and only hinted at in places by an eerie green radiance at irregular intervals.
Henry stood finally and produced the LED torch from his pocket. He wound it ten, then twenty times until the wondrous light presented itself and illuminated the bulk of the immediate darkness that had swallowed them.
“What a crafty thing, this torch. It’s like a titchy sun,” marveled Henry. Mary sat with her legs folded and her knees under her chin.
“Shame it can’t make us warm, Hen. Feels colder in here than outside. I don’t like it,” Mary said, shivering as she spoke. Her hand bled where she’d caught it on the side of the doorway as she’d fallen backward through it. Henry pointed the wound out and Mary shrugged, then licked the blood away.
Henry patted the inside of the hull. “Ain’t no wood. It’s tin or something. You’d prefer it outside?” He looked at the porthole, expecting one of the snow leopards to appear within the frame.
“Let’s just stay by the door for a while. No need to go off snooping. We’re all right just here.”
“I didn’t…” Henry began.
“I know you, Henry-brother. You’ll want to spend days here, picking it apart and bringing treasures to Father to please him. We don’t need possessions. We got what we got.”
Henry took some time to reply. He squinted into the darkness at the faint green glimmers that traced the unknown path ahead, away from the entrance door. The torchlight caught the tangles of frozen cobwebs which had draped themselves along the corridor unceremoniously. Henry had heard of spiders and the webs he saw reminded him of the stories he’d been told, yet he knew of course that even on the ship there were none, unless one lay perfectly frozen somewhere.
“Aren’t you curious, Mare? You found this place. You spotted it. Don’t you want to explore the relic?”
“I’m nosey about it. I won’t lie to you. My heart banged so hard in my ribs I thought I’d drop dead there an’ then when I saw this place. But I think I just want to stay here. I’m scared. Even the smell of it in here, it’s not right. The air ain’t normal.”
“It’s just anteek. This place will have everything we need. We could bring the family here. Big Whites couldn’t get inside to bother us none. Wouldn’t need no wire. Ginger Lanner won’t find us here and even if he did, we’d make him sweat to breach this tin.”
It was then, most likely from the ordeal they’d just gone through, that Mary confessed to her guilt about Ginger Lanner.
“It was me that put you all at risk. I thought he seemed nice. I dropped my guard and let him into our lives. It’s my fault we had to move and we nearly died in a snow storm trying to put distance from everything. It’s all me. But if we can see this place from way off, so can others. So, could he. Sometimes, it’s best to be small and unseen. I know you,” Mary pointed into the darkness ahead, “you’ll walk down there and want us all to follow with sleds and skins packed up.”
“It wasn’t your fault. He might’ve killed you if you’d gone for the sling. Maybe, he trekked Father and me back to the homestead and it was us that brought him into our lives. Not you, Mare. We can’t know it and it ain’t worth spit.”
“I thought you all…”
“No. He was just this bad thing that appeared and went away. None think bad of you.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Done and dust.”
“Thank you, Hen. I mean it. I’ve dreamt it over and over,” Mary replied.
“As for this place here? It’ll be Father who decides. Maybe it’s just dark and empty through and through. But I don’t fancy loading up those sleds for a long time. That last trip nearly killed us all and I know it.”
Mary kept quiet.
Henry saw her indecision and started to walk away from the entrance door, taking the light from the torch with him.
“Come, sister,” he said, knowing she wouldn’t stay on her own, nor let him explore and face dangers without her.
Mary looked back toward the porthole where the beasts remained outside. She stood slowly, then came toward him, weapon drawn once more.
The first body was slumped in the corridor, not thirty steps from the entrance. It looked to Henry like it had not been long dead; it wasn’t skull and bones. It was a woman, with skin still upon her face and most of her hair remaining upon her head, scraped back from her forehead and tied with a simple band.
She wore a once-red boiler suit with epaulets on the shoulders, and had not decomposed beneath the clothing she wore, as her body still had a shape to it. A tear announced itself unexpectedly and snaked a path down Mary’s cheek until she swiped it away.
“Min Gud! Poor girl. And not much older than us,” she said under her breath.
“She’s a Great-Great.” Henry studied the corpse. The woman’s eyes had lost their color. Her skin was cerulean and it shimmered in places from the ice. “Cold came quick and froze her solid. She’s been like this ever since.”
“Looks like she died yesteryear, not a hundred ago,” Mary said solemnly.
“It means no one has been here all this time. None have messed with her, or eaten her. It’s a good sign. She’s near perfect.”
In the woman’s left hand was a claret-colored drinking cup bearing an emblem that once meant something. The cup was stained brown within from the contents.
“They’d not foreseen it. They weren’t as lucky as yours and mine,” Mary said, tapping the cup with the tip of her boot, but not daring to touch the corpse.
“They might have known it was coming, but were too far out to do anything. I doubt something this big moved faster than a human on foot.”
“I bet it could have gone fast. Mother said the water moved quicker before it got stuck under the ice. Called them, waves. The Great-Greats could have shifted this for sure. They knew everything,” Mary replied.
They came to a series of doorways which were the cabins and there they found more bodies of the crew, all well preserved from the sudden freeze that had captured a moment in time; a final moment
for the people on board the MV Greyhound.
The floors were angled where the ship wasn’t level and it took a while to get used to, but they made their way slowly through the rooms on the two floors above the deck with the directing light of the torch.
They admired the signs and safety posters on the walls, and the furnishings; the beds with their pressed linen, the metal lockers that held the personal effects of those that lay wherever they fell when the ice came; packets of cigarettes, ID badges, keys, combs and communication devices, a holograph of a family portrait taken at New Year’s Eve on The Bund (according to the laser inscription), two wristwatches, a deck of cards and the most exciting find for Mary, which was a book that had a butterfly upon its cover. It was called ‘Papillon’ and Mary held it as if it were the most precious thing on Earth.
There were ornate desks made of wood from a time when it was in abundance, and chairs with cushioned seats and armrests. Henry and his sister stayed at the top of the superstructure, never venturing down into the belly of the ship beneath the deck; much of it was below the ice, and that they feared the most. They explored offices with navigation charts, whiteboards and computers, and the canteen where a meal had been prepared and placed ready for serving. The sidewall of the canteen was missing and spears of ice hung around the gaping hole, so it looked like a mouth with razor teeth that allowed daylight to breach where once only a porthole would’ve given it opportunity. Half of the room was covered in snow and ice where the wind had brought it in without obstruction. If the vessel had protested once, it had been long silenced by the wind and was left defeated.
Mary and Henry didn’t touch any of the food preserved on the tables or in the serving counters, but in the galley that they entered through a set of double doors, they found rows of glass jars and canned goods. Mary read some of the labels, unsure how to pronounce the words. “Green Pitted Olives. Sardines in Oil. Pineapple Rings in Natural Juice. Pickled Cucumbers. Real American Hotdogs in Brine... Never heard of any of this boon.”
The body of the chief cook was bent over the stove, frozen in his chef whites with a thermometer in his hand that showed them how cold it always was in the galley, the small dial pointed at minus eight, They took no notice of his corpse – it was the tenth they’d come across within the hour – and they rifled through the drawers and cupboards about him as if he weren’t there, the torch providing light in what was the darkest place they’d ventured so far.
“Let’s try it,” Henry said, plunging a kitchen knife into the top of one of the tins before holding it to his nose to sniff the contents within. He pulled a face as he did so. He shook it and it made a sloshing sound, but the bulk of it rattled within. “Mainly frozen,” he added. “The chill out here, farther from landside, is enough to give a walrus frostbite!”
He poured some of the dark brown juice from the tin onto the palm of his hand. He put his hand to his nose tentatively.
“It’s been here forever. It’ll probably make you sick,” said Mary.
“Ain’t going outside until those creatures have found themselves a meal that ain’t us. We’ll stay here tonight, sleep in one of those beds. Head back tomorrow. Right now, I’m hungry, so I’m trying whatever grub these Great-Greats have to offer,” Henry replied.
“Mother and Father will be worrisome, Hen.”
“They’d prefer us alive and late, over dead and on the nose of it. When they hear our tale, they’ll forget their anger soon enough. We should find something to take back, to prove it right away.” Henry studied the knife in his hand which was unlike anything he’d ever seen. It was perfectly sharp. On the handle it read ‘Sheffield Steel,’ which meant nothing to Henry, but it brought up all possibilities of the significance of Sheffield. Was it the name of a legendary hunter, or soldier? Was it a place? Was it the name of a man who was good at making knives? Was it the name of a man who was known for gutting fish and other things? Was it the place where all knives came from, or all steel? Was Sheffield the name of the man who made these particular knives, but not all knives? Was Sheffield just a word that sounded nice and meant nothing to no one? Every object they beheld threw up so many questions they would never know the true answers to.
They looked at the body of the chief cook. His hair had been jet-black under a net and his leather skin much darker than theirs, or even Lanner’s. Henry couldn’t tell the man’s age, but he’d been clean-shaven when he’d died. He wasn’t a child and appeared to have been much older than Henry was. This confused him as both Lanner and Father had beards and he assumed that every male above a certain age would wear one. The idea of not wearing a beard (and appearing younger) was absurd.
“Do you think those people that lived on this yot-boat had families?” Mary asked her brother without taking her eyes from the chief cook.
“Some of them must’ve.”
“How sad to die out here, so far from them. I wonder if any of their families survived.”
“Maybe they did. Maybe this lot were linked with our lot. Don’t matter none. They’re still dead.” Henry didn’t mean it to sound as harsh as it came out and regretted it as soon as he’d said it.
“I’d like to think some of them did. Life isn’t that cruel, is it?” Mary said.
“I’m only ten and four, or six. I ain’t been here long enough to answer that.”
“Go on, then. Eat the anteek food. If you don’t drop, I might try some.” Mary picked up a tin of Peeled Whole Tomatoes and studied it.
“You will?” said Henry.
“I swear on your dead body,” Mary replied.
Henry licked the palm of his hand, then tipped his head back and poured the juice from the can into his open mouth. It was the worst thing he had ever tasted and the texture of the bronze-colored juice made him heave; specks of frozen brine, tiny fragments of meat that had broken down and mixed with flakes of corroded metal. He couldn’t fool his sister. She laughed at his plight and finally Henry spat it out onto the galley floor, then wiped his mouth his sleeve.
“Maybe we should try another one. That tasted like puke.”
Five
A Duesenberg
There was no sight nor sign of the snow leopards when they left the next day.
The sky was clear, and they could see for half a league in every direction about them. It felt like a good day and Henry felt triumphant as they strode away from the container vessel, like he had when they’d placed the seal in the sled and started dragging it home.
Henry had insisted on walking around the exterior of the vessel before they left, so he could see the hole where the wall should have been in the canteen from the outside. It did indeed look like a mouth.
“I wouldn’t have been as keen on going in if I’d seen that face from the outside. It’s like a shark!” Henry had said, and Mary agreed.
Henry felt refreshed. They‘d slept in one of the cabins within the protective radiance of the torch. The bed had been equipped with a spongy mattress and Henry had felt like he’d been floating from the second his head touched the pillow. Henry was used to lying just inches above the cold, hard floor of the igloo, with little of anything to separate him from the ice itself.
In contrast, Henry began to suspect his sister had lain awake for most of the night. She looked beyond tired as they walked, although her mood was okay. She seemed unaware of Henry’s scrutiny, staring at the fur wraps around her feet as she trudged onward. Henry knew that to him, the ship was a wonder that had enabled them to step into the past, but he remembered Mary’s fear when they first entered the ship. To her, it was a tomb that showed them what had been lost to humankind.
As they took a final glance back at the ship, Henry caught his sister’s morose expression. He felt sad that something so amazing and promising could unsettle her the way it had. There was nothing he could do to change the way she thought, or felt. Henry knew it was Mary’s way and they were just different.
They’d taken a few things with them as proof of their find. Mary had tak
en the new book and a glass jar of pickles. She’d tried one and found it disgusting, but wanted to give the others the opportunity to come to the same conclusion. The jar itself was precious, as it could be used for holding water or extra blubber oil for the lamp. She’d also taken the cup that the girl in the hallway – the first corpse they’d found – had been drinking from. Henry had wanted to take the holograph portrait, but it felt like a trespass and Mary told him not to.
Henry found a bottle of bourbon whiskey in a drawer in the chief engineer’s quarters. He’d tasted that also, not knowing what it was, and although it had made him cough for some time, he found it warming afterward. He supposed it might benefit the boy-bairn if they needed to keep him warm again through the coldest times.
Henry also took a pearl hairbrush for Mother, a trouser-belt with a silver buckle that read ‘California State Bull Roper Champion 2027’ on it for Father, and one of the chief cook’s knives for Hilde for the gutting. He hadn’t originally intended on taking one of the dolls from the container for Iris, but he changed his mind as they passed it. He took a toothbrush from one of the cabins and some Toothpaste, which is what the Great-Greats used before people had to grind cuttlefish bone with blubber oil. They’d put everything into a rucksack they found in one of the lockers, and Henry thought they could give that to Martin. It would be a good heirloom and it was a practical gift.
Henry felt nervous as they neared the homestead; he knew too well what Father’s temper could be like. But it was Mother who unleashed her anger upon her children as they reached the igloo, striking her two eldest with the palm of her hand several times before hugging them. Father stood back, surprisingly calm. Henry thought he glimpsed a smile from Father, but it was hard to tell behind the thick beard that cloaked the lower half of his face, and he remained quiet.
Henry’s stomach churned, partly from the nerves, but mostly from the anteek food. He hadn’t been sick, but he felt off. He had wind, but daren’t fart in case he followed through, which Mary would’ve remembered until the end of her days and punished him for it whenever the opportunity arose to make his cheeks turn pink.
Ever Winter Page 5