Phantom Frost

by Alfred Wurr

  As the light of Larry’s flashlight lit the wall next to me, I stepped forward, gasping with pleasure at the feel of the cold snow on my weary, hot feet. With a stomp, I sank into the inch of fresh snow up to my neck, unable to get lower in such a thin layer. I moved forward into the tiny aperture, pushing my backpack ahead of me for a few feet before emerging on the other side.

  My hat had brushed against the tunnel’s ceiling and fell from my head as I’d pushed my way through. Looping an arm through a strap of my pack, I popped up out of the snow and reached back to retrieve it, hearing the sounds of sliding rocks and scrabbling footsteps growing in volume on the far side.

  On my side, large fans hummed and rattled somewhere in the distance, blowing a cool breeze across my sunburned exterior.

  Out of the fire, into the frying pan.

  I blinked, peering into its murky depths. Faint light from a portable light stand ten feet ahead glowed softly, then died, leaving me in a closet of darkness, save for a fading afterimage. It occurred to me that they must shut off the lights in the passageway when not needed. Got to save power, and fuel for the electrical generators, I mused.

  I hadn’t brought a flashlight, but fortunately I didn’t need one. I can light up a room with more than just my magnetic personality when I want to—bioluminescence, the scientists called it. Basically, I’m a bit like a firefly, except my entire body lights up when I do it, not just my tail. Well, I don’t have a tail, but you know what I mean.

  The scientists theorized that I’m from one of the Earth’s poles and that I have this ability for that reason. It made sense. I can’t see in the dark any better than they can, and being able to glow on demand would be useful when you’re living in months of darkness. Then again, another theory is that my people use it to communicate or for defense, to confuse and deter predators. Either way, it comes in handy.

  With a thought, I became luminous, bathing the area in dim light, casting shadows that rose like inky black monsters on the rocky walls as I moved. I opened the lab coat that I’d worn since my escape, casting more light to my front, making it easier to see the path before me. Two people could walk abreast with their arms outstretched and their fingertips would’ve just touched the walls. Heavy boot prints in the dust snaked ahead of me, doubtless made by soldiers and scientists that regularly travelled this path—who had come here years ago and stayed to pilfer the secrets entombed within. My lip curled at the sight of the discarded candy bar wrappers and aluminum cans that littered the floor.

  I moved deeper into the cave and turned sideways as the walls closed in a short distance ahead. I ran my hands over the rough, heavily textured volcanic rock on either side. The two sides looked like adjoining pieces of the same puzzle, suggesting the rock had been torn apart by great seismic forces.

  This tunnel’s recent, geologically speaking, I thought, stepping over the broken fragments littering the floor at my feet.

  I squeezed along the passageway until it widened again. The air cooled to an almost tolerable level, and the tunnel appeared to brighten ahead. I stopped luminescing and confirmed that a light source lay in the distance. The first rule of covert infiltration is do not skulk about, when possible, lit up like a Christmas tree, so I resumed my trek with my own light off.

  The widening walls of the tunnel stopped at a large white curtain, attached to iron pitons driven into the rock. I drew it aside and slipped through a slit in the plastic that served as the only doorway.

  Floodlights, some atop light stands, others attached to scaffolding, revealed a giant amphitheatre carved out of volcanic rock, with five-foot-wide concentric rings of stone dropping with each level toward the room’s centre. At four points on the circle, stairs ran from top to bottom. The highest level, where I stood, was twenty feet wide, ringed by great sculptures that had also been carved out of the volcanic rock. The room crackled with frost energy, directionless like fog. Everywhere, yet coming, it seemed, from nowhere in particular.

  The ceiling was a rounded dome upon which carvings depicted an open sky, the sun on one side, moon and stars the other. Landscapes around the circumference showed varying terrain: mountains, prairies, forests and stormy seas. Upon these two-dimensional lands, great creatures battled, telling a story, or stories, of ancient quarrels.

  At the theatre’s centre stood an immense circular green-domed structure just like I’d seen in my dreams, nearly the height of a three-storey building, supported by thick fluted columns, on a raised platform at the centre of a mirror-calm pool of water. Graduated steps led up to the building from the amphitheatre floor. Its architectural style was suggestive of the ancient Greek or Roman temples I’d read about in books, though not quite a match to either.

  Are those marble pillars? I asked myself. Where’d they get marble around here? And how did it survive whatever tremors opened the passageway in?

  Sixty feet from the temple lay a raised circular dais, accessed by steps leading up to it from the floor of the amphitheatre, surrounded by shadows, and brightly lit by several floodlights aimed at its surface. Behind it, massive crystal pillars rose from the floor to the ceiling, sparking like Tesla coils. Hovering above the dais as if by magic was a pulsating sphere of white light, spinning on its axis. Arcane symbols and glyphs decorated the floor of the platform, glowing with blue light, just visible beneath the brightness of the energy sphere and overhead lamps. Much of it was indecipherable to me, but I could read some of the text, even though it wasn’t English. In carved letters, one sentence read: Unto the Allfrost, Underfrost Come, and the Frostchild Keep the Earth.

  Across the room, metal scaffolding supported a large, flat wooden platform, reachable by a timber walkway that lay off to my right, upon which several people moved and worked. Among them stood the threesome that had passed me outside in the camp, still gabbing, their words visible as puffs of fog in the cool air, as they pointed to the complex equipment arrayed around the chamber.

  I recognized the video cameras resting on tripods aimed at the dais, but not much else. Above them, long rectangular boxes, each with a short round tube protruding from one side, pointed at the ball of energy and the large crystals behind it, held in place by articulating robotic arms. They resembled the video cameras below them but lacked the telltale lens.

  After a moment, I realized some of the robotic arms held canisters with long hoses leading to nozzles also aimed at the sphere and crystal pillars. The labels on the fat white containers were too far away to read, but something about the way they were poised made me think of fire extinguishers.

  These were the primary focus for the three scientists, and their colleagues who sat behind a clear polycarbonate viewscreen that lay between the dais and the viewing platform. A soft glow tinged their faces green as their heads bobbed up and down between the floating energy sphere and whatever their monitors showed them. Only the two soldiers that stood in the back showed no interest; one looked bored, the other spoke briefly into a handheld radio and checked his watch.

  I slipped deeper into the room, keeping to the shadows, and stifled a swear as I bumped into something hard and metallic. My hand shot forward, grabbing the edge of a shiny steel container as it tipped, catching it inches before it banged against the stone floor. A work of art itself, the floor was a mosaic of interlocking stones, depicting themes like those of the wall and ceiling reliefs surrounding me. I moved it back into position like it held nitroglycerin and bent down to read the label. Liquid nitrogen. I gave the container a light shake. Empty. More of them, identical to those suspended above the dais at the room’s centre, extended into the darkness ahead.

  The cavern hummed with the sound of air-conditioning vents exhaling their cold breath into the room like sleeping ice dragons, cooling the massive void in the earth. The temperature in the cavern felt just above freezing, making me more alert and clearer-headed than I had felt since leaving the facility. The air felt thicker too, almost damp, perhaps the result of humidifiers.

  Cooling such a l
arge area must have taken weeks, I thought. I guess tons of rock help keep it that way, but why go to the trouble? I could only guess that this somehow involved the thermal reduction that the scientists had discussed on their way into the chamber. Seeking answers, my feet padded along, as silent on the stone floor as on plush carpet. Huh, no echo from the machinery either, I thought. It’s like the walls absorb sound instead of reflecting it.

  As I circled the upper level at a glacial pace, I could see that the sculptors had hewn large sections of volcanic rock from the outer walls, leaving portions behind, out of which they had chipped and chiselled massive statues of wondrous and terrible creatures in fearsome poses. Behind them, the walls themselves displayed figures posed as if they were leaping from solid rock into thin air, entombed prisoners struggling to escape.

  The pool encircling the building was my first goal. I circled around behind it so that the stone edifice of the temple-like structure lay between me and the viewing platform, hiding me from sight.

  I hoped.

  Keeping to the gloom, I descended the steps to the pool’s edge. Near the centre, symbols glowed beneath the surface, distorted by the water’s refraction.

  I stuck my hand in, going in to nearly my elbow before my fingertips brushed the cold stone floor, checking the depth. I yanked an empty water bottle from my backpack, screwed off the lid, and refilled it, then did the same for the rest. The pool did not appear to miss it. Resupplied, I waded carefully out to the centre to get a better look, soaking up moisture like a sponge. As I did so, ripples radiated outward, splashing against the pool’s rim, the lip of which lay just a few inches higher than the swells.

  As the liquid coursed through me, my eyesight improved, bringing the world into sharp focus. My other senses, too, became hyperacute; the smell of wet stone, dust, and people tickled my nose and the hum and whir of machinery boomed in my head. Time itself appeared to slow as a roiling wave of ice-cold energy, electric, rose like quicksilver from my core to my tips. I shimmered briefly with a palette of iridescent whites as my watery exterior crystalized in an instant, restored to a hard, frosty shell. I shivered with delight as the wind of the AC fans blew over my snowy flesh, now tumescent with renewed moisture, tingling and turgid.

  I resisted the temptation to draw upon it to freeze and frost the earth, summon snow from the air around me, and call forth a blizzard that would make this cavern a wintry paradise. As much as I’d have enjoyed it, the people nearby would’ve surely noticed, so I held back.

  The water sank lower, half its original height now. Thin ice had begun to form at the periphery of the pool as my presence cooled its dwindling waters. The symbols on the pool’s bottom glowed brighter in the shallowed water but still meant nothing to me. I knelt, reaching out a hand to touch them.

  As my fingers traced their letters, the word tholos popped into my head, then the word akontia. Their meanings drifted to the surface of my mind from the depths of my amnesia. Tholos referred to a circular building, a temple, just like the one in which I now stood, while akontia were javelins used by soldiers—peltasts—of Ancient Greece. I had to wonder what a temple of Ancient Greece was doing in the middle of the Nevada desert and what any of it had to do with me.

  I stumbled and put a hand over my mouth, trying not to hurl. My tissues were dissolving like a sugar cube in warm tea. When I’d first entered, my outer shell had hardened, forming a protective layer of ice that regulated the absorption of water, giving my body time to transform and integrate it, but I’d stayed too long. The excess water ate at that barrier like a horde of starving piranhas, breaking it down, allowing too much water to pass through.

  Drained by my desert trek, my bone-dry frame had had more room to spare than usual, but the extra time that had bought me had just run out. I needed to get out of the water immediately. As my vision blurred, I lumbered to the side of the pool, then staggered and fell. My arms broke my fall, smacking hard against the pool’s stone border.

  I should have stayed closer to the edge, not waded out into the middle, I realized, in perfect hindsight.

  Then, in my delirium, I heard Scott’s voice in my head saying, “Beat yourself up later, Shivurr. Get out now.”

  My arms felt like they belonged to someone else as I dragged myself onto the stone shore and collapsed with a wet squish.

  Sorry, Scott. Looks like I may not make that rendezvous after all, I thought as I lost consciousness.

  Chapter 4

  Stay Frosty

  My eyeballs throbbed in their sockets, as if pushed outward from the inside, as the hiss of a nitrogen dispenser nudged me awake, and I fluttered my eyelids. The last time I’d felt this way—during a bout of depression—I’d drunk every soda in the fridge and hadn’t slept for a week.

  Reluctantly, I staggered to my feet and looked around, my eyes slits. Flashes of light strobed near the room’s centre, illuminating statuary and casting shadow monsters on the distant walls. I peered around one of the tholos’s pillars. The scientists stared at the dais, where the energy sphere still hovered like football fans watching the Super Bowl during overtime.

  I slogged my way around the edge of the chamber, shedding water like a wet dishcloth dragged across the floor, and hoped the blare of equipment and voices buried the sound of my footsteps. Taking no chances, I stayed in the deep shadows, beyond the range of the floodlights, and hid behind whatever objects I could find.

  I circled the room until the wooden stage lay between me and the dais, so I could approach it from the rear. I snuck closer, keeping a twenty-foot statue of a monstrous creature between me and the people, then crouched behind it. Peering around its edge, I had an unobstructed view of the scene.

  “Oscillating photon bombardment now,” said a man seated by the computer terminals, his voice raised over the hum of machinery. I recognized him as the balding bearded scientist that I’d encountered on the way in. The gathered group watched, holding their breath, then smiled, gesticulating excitedly at the monitors. “Thermal equilibrium is holding.”

  “Cut the cryogenic applicator,” said the woman from the same trio of scientists that I’d seen outside. “Let’s see how it reacts.”

  “I’m seeing harmonic perturbation at the higher end. Temperatures are rising, but no disintegration.”

  “Okay, fantastic. Let’s not push our luck; disengage, shut it down.”

  Cheers erupted from the group as the technician typed in the commands at the terminal. The scientists shook hands and slapped backs, overjoyed by the apparent success of whatever they were doing.

  “Wait, something’s wrong,” the seated man said, worry in his voice. “It’s not stopping.”

  “What do you mean?” the woman asked, still shaking a fellow scientist’s hand. “Stop the bombardment.”

  “I did, Harriet,” he said, glaring at her. “The reaction is continuing on its own. It’s self-reinforcing.” His chair swivelled as he checked another screen. “Crystal temperature is still rising,” he continued. His fingers danced and keys clicked in a short burst. “It’s accelerating.”

  “Bring the applicator online,” Harriet said, walking to the terminal. “Give it a ten-second blast.”

  A robotic arm whined audibly, moving into position, followed by the hiss of the applicator. A cloud of steam billowed from the energy sphere like fog on a disco dance floor as the technician sprayed it with liquid nitrogen.

  “Terminating application cycle,” the technician announced after ten seconds, stopping the stream with a few clicks of the keyboard. He dragged a finger across the green screen, then tapped it hard. “Minimal effect.” He shook his head. “It halted during application, but it’s increasing again.”

  “Hit it again,” said the grey-haired scientist, the third member of the trio, walking over to the railing to stare at the orb now obscured by fog. “Fifteen seconds this time.”

  “I’ve got this, Marcus,” Harriet said. “Please, don’t interfere.”

  Marcus held up his hands a
nd took a step back. “By all means.”

  “Thank you,” Harriet said, nodding. “All right, Andreas, give it another blast. Fifteen seconds this time.”

  The technician, Andreas, moved to obey, and the sizzle of steam resumed. The cavern air was heavily clouded now. The energy sphere faded from view, lost in the cloud of vapour, its position betrayed only by an electric crackle and flashes of light, now tinged orange and yellow. The air felt noticeably warmer; the air conditioning, still blowing cool air into the room, thumped and rumbled like an old jalopy.

  The hiss of the cryogenic applicator died.

  “Anything?” Harriet asked, keeping her eyes on the fog.

  Andreas shook his head. “Still rising. It dipped slightly but started again. Infrared shows surface temp approaching five hundred Kelvin.” He poised his fingers over the keyboard and looked at Harriet. “Again?”

  “How much is left in that tank?” Harriet asked.

  “Enough for another twenty to thirty seconds, maybe,” Andreas replied, tapping the computer screen.

  “We should wait until the ventilation has cleared the air,” Marcus said, turning away from the railing. “Oxygen condensation is a concern. We don’t want to pass out in here.”

  “Good thinking,” Harriet said, nodding. “In fact, let’s clear the chamber of everyone non-essential.”

  Chairs squeaked across plywood and pens and clipboards crashed as everyone except Harriet, Andreas, Marcus, and one guard rushed for the exit.

  “Temperature is now seven hundred and fifty-five Kelvin,” Andreas exclaimed.

  “The rate of change is decreasing,” Harriet noted, pointing at something on another computer screen. She paused, studying the readout. “Yes, it’s equalized at seven hundred and eighty.”