by Claire North
with a distant creaking, like the bilges of a submarine before the metal cracks
like the settling of hot metal cooled too fast
the world grew still again.
Charlie looked back, and saw that the horizon, which had before been many hundreds of metres away, was now no fewer than twenty from his feet. Their tent, Sven’s bag, all was gone, and a fog of snow and shattered crystals, of disturbed mist and icy damp, filled the void where they had slumbered. He looked at Sven, and saw the other man lying on his back, the sleeping bag with its unconscious cargo still held close, knuckles white, never letting go.
Charlie turned away, took his bag off, crawled to the very edge of the glacier, and looked down into a melted land.
A land where no trees grew.
Water rushing out from beneath the ice, the ice floating on water.
A land of stone, and beyond the stone, the sea, stretching far away, the sea ice gone, a distortion of grey-blues and green-blacks, shadowy darkness against the endless light of the top of the glacier, and he thought, seeing it, that it was a strange kind of ugly, and knew now that Death had no need at all to show his face to anyone, before the ending came.
Sven said, “The satellite phone was in my bag.”
Charlie didn’t answer. Sven sat on his haunches, no jacket, no hat, and didn’t seem to mind. “We get him off the ice. It was foolish to stay here.”
Charlie looked wearily back at the sheets of ice between them and the ridge from which they’d come, and couldn’t see an end.
“You carry the bag. I’ll carry him.”
He nodded just once at the man in the sleeping bag, and Charlie helped lift him onto Sven’s back.
Walking.
If Charlie had still been wearing his watch, he would have smashed it.
He walked one step at a time, because he knew that if he walked ten steps further, he would die. Instead, he put one foot in front of the other, and that was a victory, and hadn’t been so hard really, so he then put another foot forward, and that was okay, and besides, it was clearly the first step he had ever taken, the first step of his life, and so the next one would be and so in this manner
forward.
Charlie walked.
Twice Sven lost his footing, and fell, dropping the man in the sleeping bag, who groaned once, and didn’t stir the other time.
Three times they had to stop, once for Charlie to catch his breath, twice for Sven to sit on the ice and shake. Charlie secretly gave him the last of the meat, pretended there was more. When they saw the edge of the ice, Sven seemed to have a sudden, second burst of energy, and nearly ran, until the straight line he took was stopped dead by a chasm in the ice, through which, far below, bubbling water ran. They walked another ten thousand steps before the chasm narrowed enough to cross. Charlie did not offer to carry the sleeping man; it would have been a futile gesture in this frozen world.
Rock far rock far
still far
near now?
near yet far
the ice roars the ice is breaking the ice is breaking beneath your feet walk and
a thundering behind, the world growing short again, the collapse chasing them as they moved
rivers of meltwater growing thicker now getting into Charlie’s boots dangerous so dangerous feet cold
feet cold
fingers cold
the wetness makes everything cold
Sven shivering
shivering now
wet is the enemy
the world coming apart
In a treeless land
in the place where all things dissolve beneath the endless sun
Charlie looked up and beheld a pale figure on the horizon, and the pale figure looked at Charlie and knew him for his own, and Charlie smiled, and looked away, and kept on walking.
Sleeping.
How had he come to be sleeping?
Lying on rock, the ice a few metres behind
lying on stone
Charlie lay sleeping on his back, the bag still on his back, beneath his back, arching his body, but his brain didn’t care, he was sleeping
Sven on the ground, fallen nearby, the sleeping man by his side
Charlie thought that, if he wasn’t so tired, he might be a bit resentful of this, the manner of his death in what were, frankly, by Greenland terms very mild conditions indeed
the wet being what would kill him of course, more than the cold
exhaustion
exhausted as the world fell apart
Then a voice, strange and new, brash, speaking English with a gentle southern accent, said, “Hold on, we’ll get your boots off now …”
Charlie slept, and in his dreams he was warm.
Chapter 21
“First you create a mood board …”
“Oh look at him cooochy-cooochy-coo …”
“There’s actually some very powerful things you can do with Excel now …”
“I just love saying oolong. Try it. Ooooolong …”
“This is the symbol of our club!”
“Have you been in an accident recently?”
“Reverse stitch at the beginning and the end to lock the seam and then …”
“Scared? Worried about knife crime? Get training now!”
“These two characters symbolise breath, which is also energy, and this is the four quarters of the world …”
“So they’d take an orange and inject it with water, then rub the surface down with formaldehyde …”
“Hello! Yes, ma’am, indeed yes, I am calling about your router; have you been having problems with your router, ma’am …?”
“Except it could also mean rice. As in … rice breath. Or alternatively gas meter, depending how you look at it.”
“I know you left it ambiguous, but for the movie we really need to know if it’s happy or sad.”
“You could be entitled to compensation!”
Chapter 22
A man sat on a rock outside a tent on the edge of a collapsing glacier, and checked his email.
How this man had signal on his admittedly chunky phone was a bit of a mystery to Charlie, as he blinked his way back to full consciousness. How, in fact, this man, dressed in bright high-tech blues and heavy walking boots, a hat upon his head and walking sticks resting by his side, had come to be here at all was something of a wonder.
Charlie crawled from the sleeping bag in which, somehow, he’d been laid, and looked around.
To his left, sleeping, Sven, huddled in a sleeping bag that presumably belonged to the man with the phone. Beyond him, still in Sven’s sleeping bag, the man they’d pulled from the ice, his eyes open, awake, staring up at the sky, silent.
In this strange quartet, Charlie felt suddenly like the most ignorant man on earth. He looked at the man with the phone, equating this machine somehow with an almost mystic authority, and said at last, in English, “Hello,” and immediately felt stupid for picking a stupid language.
The man looked up, smiled, and replied in the same language, tinged with something that might have been cricket, or maybe department stores, or maybe just a long time spent bickering with academics. “Hello. How are you feeling?”
Bewildered, it took Charlie a little while to process these words, to process this language, in which time the man put his phone into a pocket, stood, brushed down the front of his trousers self-consciously and came to squat by Charlie’s side.
He was in his early forties, or perhaps older and well-kept by exercise and doctors in that state in which he could be at once perceived as both youthfully energetic and mature and authoritative. His pale skin was reddened with the cold, but didn’t yet have the circled patch of white around the eyes that prolonged walking beneath the northern sun gave, the light absorbed by glasses or goggles. His hair, where it stuck out beneath his hat, was dark brown, and almost perfectly straight. His eyes were grey-green, and if Charlie had to speculate, beneath the layers of coat and waterproof material was
a well-kept body that perhaps enjoyed swimming, maybe lifted a few weights—nothing excessive, nothing less than what good form required.
He smiled at Charlie, and the Harbinger of Death felt again very small, and wondered if, when the glacier had finished collapsing into the sea, the land that was exposed beneath it would buckle, shift with the weight gone from it, sudden hills bursting up like sunflowers in spring.
“You’re staring,” said the man gently, into the silence of Charlie’s spinning mind. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I …” His voice came ragged and alien, someone else’s. He tried to find some spit in his mouth to swallow, found he didn’t have any. Wordlessly, the man gave him a flask, and he drank gratefully, and then a little too much, gagging on the water and nearly choking it out again. The man waited until he had his breath under control, taking little sips, and then murmured:
“I’ve called an ambulance. They should be here in a couple of hours.”
“I … Thank you. You’re …”
“It’s a helicopter. It needs to fly up from the south, but the weather’s good and it should be able to make a clean landing.”
“Thank you. How did you … I mean, why are you here?”
“I had a helicopter take me to the edge of the fjord. The climb was easier than I expected. Are you the Harbinger of Death?” the man asked, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Charlie sat up straight, head wheeling as blood readjusted to this dangerous change of position. He squeezed his eyes shut until the world was still, and for a moment couldn’t distinguish between the blood in his ears and the roaring of the breaking glacier at his feet. “Yes,” he mumbled at last. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Patrick Fuller. I was invited to see the end of all things.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you? Didn’t you invite me?”
“I don’t know who you are. Why are you … What do you mean, the end of all things?”
A little surprised, the man called Patrick leaned back, studying Charlie’s face anew, and seeing nothing in it but bewilderment. He smiled again, patted him gently on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”
Then he rose, and went back to his stone, pulled out his phone and resumed texting.
Chapter 23
The man they had dragged from the ice
a man with a scraggly white beard, silver hair
skin burned by the cold
the ends of the fingers on his left hand, black, ready to be snapped off like twigs
lay still as Patrick held his head and Charlie held the cup and he swallowed the painkillers down
body little more than bones, too weak to move by himself at first, had to be raised to sit
the man they had saved from the collapsing world
looked at the tin of tea that Charlie had somehow, miraculously, brought with him from the other side of the planet, and said, a little distant through the drugs now shooting through his system, “You can’t get this stuff where I live. Go on then, let’s have a cup.”
Patrick set up a small burner and put a metal cup on it. Charlie added his cup, and the three of them sat in silence round the blue flame as water started to boil. Sven lay in his bag, eyes open, watching them, and didn’t speak.
Patrick said, “I don’t know your names …?”
“Charlie.”
“Ule. The quiet one is Sven.”
“How do you feel, Mr. Ule?”
“Professor Ule, and my actual name is … To hell with it, Ule is fine.”
“You were in a bad way.”
“Who says I’m not now?”
“Your fingers, your feet, I took your boots off and …”
He shrugged. “Amputation doesn’t bother me.”
“Are you in much pain? I have more painkillers, but I don’t know if—”
“Why do you have the tea?” Professor Ule cut in, quick and hard, attention on Charlie, causing Patrick’s eyes to flicker a little in disapproval at the unexpected interruption.
“Hm? Oh—it’s my job.”
“To bring tea to an old man on the ice?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of job is this?”
“I’m the Harbinger of Death. I was given your name, told to find you, bring you some tea. It’s never been this hard before. Perhaps it’s meant to warm you up?”
Silence a while. The three sat as the water boiled, and out on the ice, the world grew shorter, caving away, the frozen world tumbling down to dust. At last Professor Ule grunted, just a single sound, “Ah.”
They listened to the world fall apart.
Then, “Ah,” he said again, and with a little shake of his head, “Well, here’s a thing I didn’t expect.”
“I don’t entirely understand,” mused Patrick. “You’re the Harbinger of Death, but as I understand it, you’ve just saved this man’s life?”
“Yes,” murmured Charlie, mostly to himself. “It looks that way, doesn’t it?”
Ule reached forward and removed one bubbling cup from the burner. Patrick turned off the heat. “This isn’t how you’re supposed to do it, of course,” muttered the Professor as tea was added and stirred around. “Water onto the tea, not tea into the water, wrong kind of cup, wrong kind of boil, wrong kind of water really, but …” He blew a little cloud of steam off the top of the cup. “You make do, yes?”
So saying, he tried a sip, and his body seemed to sigh in relief as the heat sank down through him. Charlie and Patrick shared a mug. It didn’t taste as bad as Charlie had feared. Patrick tried a little, wrinkled his nose, tried a little more, muttered he could probably get used to it, but really he was an Earl Grey kind of man.
Sven watched, and said nothing.
A few metres from their feet, the world cracked beneath the summer sun.
Ule said: “So. Harbinger of Death. Like the work?”
“Yes. I mean … this was … this trip is the first time that I … but yes.”
“Do you only visit the imminently deceased, or is it more …” A vague gesture with a wrinkled, blackened, soon-to-be-lessened hand, taking in the world around.
“So far the work is varied,” Charlie replied. “I went to Palmyra before the bombs were rigged to find a statue of Baal, had a fresco in a Byzantine church in Sicily removed before it was torn down to make way for an office block. In Scotland a man taught me how to fish with my hands; in Peru I talked with a woman whose language will never be heard again. My employer feels it is important to honour … a manner of life, as well as the living themselves. He says that to know what it is that is ending, first you must walk down the roads they themselves have taken, and breathe the air they have breathed. I like travel. I like meeting people. I think … It makes me feel …” His words trailed away.
“Even people about to die?” asked Patrick, and then, seeing Ule’s eyes flicker to his face, added, “Oh, I mean, I don’t think …”
“It is a good question to be asked in this place,” the other replied with a placating hand. “In this place especially.”
Charlie’s face crinkled. “Sometimes … There was a child, and she … and her parents, they cried, but the girl was … Sometimes there is strength in reality. When I come, things that were terrifying ideas become tangible.”
“And you bring tea.”
“And sometimes I bring tea, yes.”
“And who fears tea?” mused the Professor, rolling the mug between his blackened, bitter fingers.
They sat in silence. Across the ice, an internal chord played, a small island collapsed into the maelstrom, the drums rolled, the horizon grew a little nearer. Ule flexed his bloodless feet inside his boots, rolled his head from side to side, took another sip. Sven watched in silence.
Finally Patrick said, “I was sent an email. It asked me to come to this place, at this time. It was from an address in Milton Keynes, signed by a woman called Samantha on behalf of Death.”
“There is a Samantha in the Milton Keynes office,” Charlie murmured, not looking up from his contemplation of the falling ice sheet.
“Death has an office?” interrupted Ule, quick and curious.
“Travel arrangements, accommodation, bulletin reports, theatre tickets, gourmet dining—I once had to fly a fugu chef to the jungles of Colombia. Do you know how hard it is to find bamboo socks in Boko Haram-controlled Nigeria?”
“Death is picky?”
“Death can be unpredictable. Death … likes to behave in what he sees as a human way. Sometimes it is human to go walkabout with no shoes on. Sometimes it is human to take a bicycle along a dangerous highway, and sometimes … sometimes it’s human to want a shisha pipe in Pyongyang.” He glanced up at the silence of his companions, taking in the raised eyebrows on Patrick’s face, the concentrated frown on Ule’s. “I told you the job had its interesting moments,” he muttered, looking away again. “Karaoke night with the Harbinger of Famine in a camper van on the Yalu river was one for the grandkids.”
Again they lapsed into roaring, melting silence.
Then, “What did this email say?” asked Ule. “The one from Samantha in Milton Keynes?”
“Oh—various salutations and greetings, some praise for my work, a few predictions of things to come, an invitation to see the ending of the world.”
“Was that the phrase?”
“Something like that. Ending, turning, changing, death—the language was a bit florid. At first I thought it was a joke, but a few others received them too, a couple of people I know, one or two very interesting characters. I did a little research and … well. Even if it was hokum, it seemed like a curious notion, so here I am.”
