by M. T Hill
Before she knows it, Freya’s tablet is open, fingers responding mechanically to the security prompts. A few likes on her picture of the Reykjavik church from friends she hasn’t spoken to in years, like someone else’s anecdote now; a notification to say an anonymous user in Iceland has viewed her stream; and a direct message from the man she’d slept with: ‘Good luck with your fairy tale.’ She swears. How much had she told him? She opens her email. The usual spam. The airport asking her to review her time there. The airline and hotel in Iceland doing the same.
She selects the lot for deletion. She stops.
A knot. An email whose subject line is made from squares, which would’ve been deleted as spam just weeks ago. There in the sender field is a single world: freighter. She opens the email:
Miss F,
It was interesting to meet you and I am sorry we did not say goodbye in a helpful way. I find your details on the news sites. I email now because I have searched and there is one man who has written about climbing being his job before. It is the same way on his social profile, where we are friends (as you know). There are also scouting pictures (I have sent these) of the place he is now.
Of course he may not be your friend. You may confirm this for yourself. I am emailing because in ten days there is a press visit to this place. I cannot tell how I know, I think you may guess.
I must feed O now. Hungry boy!!
Good luck.
Replying is pointless. Freya’s anti-hack plugins, synced when she signed in, report Alba’s IP as masked. The email has been routed through an otherwise dormant botnet.
Freya opens the images attached to the email. Despite their poor quality, she recognises the background colours of a big urbex forum in each screengrab. She studies the pictures. Their subject is at first glance an old-style electricity pylon, decorated with lights. She soon realises the scale is off, and she’s looking at a kind of mesh pillar with a square cross-section, supported by cables that come off it at staggered heights. It’s like scaffolding, except vastly more complex. The structure is crowned with a fine-mesh spire. In one of the images, workers in helmets are walking by.
Freya rubs her face. Whatever it is, she can’t imagine a more tempting figure to an explorer – a climber or a steeplejack. Or both. It has that presence. But what is it? Where is it?
Freya rereads Alba’s email. These are Shep’s pictures. No question. Tomorrow morning she’ll call Mallory Limited again.
The Steeplejack
Shep won’t remember it, but in that Vertex night, the windsock flapping above his cabin, the throttled cries of terns overhead, he wakes to a delicate tinkling that seems too close to his head. He sits up in blue light, drawn to a shadow on the window: a section of the beta scaffold, projected there by the night workers’ floods. He watches this crisscrossing shadow, the flow of it, and Freya is almost beside him again, taking off her coat in his van.
When the tinkling stops, Shep sees a mosquito flying away from his body. He wriggles, realising he’s pushed a section of bare arm through the mosquito net. He withdraws and lies flat. The mosquito, a big one, continues to circle him, perhaps hoping for another go. He’ll wait for its wings to stop, try to slap it in time.
Then its ungainly loop is cut short, as though it’s been swatted, and the mosquito pops against the cabin roof.
Shep, too tired to consider it strange, lies back and closes his eyes again. Light friction on his eyelids tells him he’s left his sun-lenses in. That he was seeing things.
* * *
In the morning, bleary and hoarse, Shep makes porridge on the camping stove Kapper loaned to him. It’s already a bleak picture – a contractor alone with his ways, hands clumsy with fatigue – but as he stirs the gruel, the left side of his face starts itching painfully. He pinches his cheek, and it stings. It’s a bite, a big one. He puts down the spoon. It’s so swollen it’s like there’s a patch of whiskers missing from his cheek.
Shep goes to the bathroom for some antiseptic gel. Digs it out of his washbag and turns to the mirror.
There’s no bite. No swelling. But he was right – the skin is clear. The bristles in that spot are totally gone. How? It wasn’t like this before he went to bed. He decides he’d better shave the rest of his face. He lathers up and takes a disposable razor from its pack, and starts.
When he comes to the underside of his chin, he finds another patch of hair missing. He drops the razor. His neck and torso tingle. He drags off his T-shirt. He doesn’t understand. The mirror shows him where a patch of chest hair has also vanished. A patchy ladder formed from negative space runs from the nobbled gully between his pecs right down to his navel.
Shep picks up the razor, turning it. He touches the hairless flesh. A picture, now, with shaving foam everywhere, his brow puffy. The nude skin glossy on his face and body. No rashes, nicks, razor marks. It’s just clean. He leans into the mirror and angles his face to study the absence on his cheek.
The absence is spreading.
Shep leaps back with a sharp yelp. He clutches his face. His hair is disappearing. Going missing. He searches himself. Is it the contacts? Is that it? He pinches his eyes until they begin to water and redden. No – he’s tugging at naked cornea. Panicked, he leaps into the shower and turns it on full blast. The heat and steam quickly engulf him and he claws at his features, his sunburnt neck, and holds his face up to the showerhead as he turns the dial beyond the red line. The water hisses as it comes through, and above the peal in Shep’s ears, the heater grinds as it struggles to keep up. He winces and whinnies and chews his tongue. He wills himself to stand there for as long as he can bear it. The heat is a horrible balm, each jet of water a cutting torch. He knows he’ll go all the way to passing out, to lasting damage, before he pulls himself back.
The system trips. The heater dies. The water turns cold.
Shep squats on the shower floor in a miasma of chlorinated steam. A trickle of icy water spattering his back. The plughole between his feet and the cool air over his skin. More lost hairs, drawn like iron filings to a magnet, bunch together and skirt the plughole before they vanish. With a slow hand he traces his cheek. The tingling has stopped. Has the hot water worked? Stroking the gaps, he vividly remembers having sunstroke as a child, a night on his uncle’s spare room floor, delirious and scared, patting moisturiser onto a blister that slowly spread across his shoulders—
Someone banging on the door pulls him back to Vertex.
‘Shep? You up?’ Heavier thuds, perhaps a foot. ‘Billy?’ Kapper’s voice. More banging.
‘I’m up,’ Shep shouts, shakily. ‘’Sakes, Kap – I’m having a dump.’
The banging stops. Shep comes out of the shower and turns back to the mirror. He scarcely recognises himself. He splashes his face with cold water and staggers to his bunk, dizzy and uncoordinated. Miraculously he hasn’t scalded himself, though his cheeks and eyes are swollen.
‘Won’t be a sec,’ he says to the door.
‘Too late,’ someone says. Not Kapper, this time – it’s a woman’s voice. ‘You’ve missed the test briefing.’
Shep knows about this test. Yesterday, six days after the first test – six days after being consigned to the infirmary with symptoms of an ‘episode’ for which tests yielded no results – he and Kapper rode the tower’s central lift car to the beta’s topmost maintenance platform, eight hundred metres up, and got on with installing the last of the beacons.
Or was that yesterday? He’s overtired. He can’t account for the time elapsed. It could’ve been six weeks for all he knows – Vertex swallows you like that. And what if the second test has already happened and the woman means a different test, a third test? What if the navy’s programme is delayed? Shep racks his brain. He’s cracking up. The cabin warps around him. Has the test been postponed? He… he doesn’t remember. What if he’s been in the cabin all week – subsisting on scraps, living the same day over and over and over?
‘Shepherd?’ the woman says. ‘Are you coming?’
Shep starts for the door but stops at the bedside. A hazy flashback. A tinkling noise close to his head. A mosquito in half-sleep… He looks up. There it is – the splatter. His arms break out in goose bumps. There’s a slimy, cold substance under his bare foot. He looks at the floor to work out what he’s spilled.
‘There’s a press trip arriving tomorrow,’ the woman goes on.
There’s also a translucent substance on the floor, skinned like custard in places. A slug trail? Vertex has its creatures, but this would be an enormous slug – at least an inch wide. He wipes his foot on yesterday’s socks and follows the trail. It circles his bunk and runs into a tiny gap between the bunk frame and the wall.
‘You’re an ignorant sod, aren’t you?’ the woman shouts.
Shep hops over his bunk. The trail resumes between the bunk leg and the wall. It seems deliberate. Here the trail changes direction – goes upwards over the bunk frame, and onto Shep’s mattress.
Shep follows the mucus line, shinier on his sheets, towards his pillow. He holds his breath. He closes his eyes and grips the pillow at either side, tears the pillow away. The sheet underneath is a little damp, a little see-through.
Shep flips the pillow. Tears back the sheets. Stray hairs, dead mosquitoes, fluff.
He jumps on the bunk, ripping away the sheets, the harsh wool blanket, trying to find a trail away from his pillow. It goes nowhere. It stops beneath his pillow. The mucus trail stops under where he puts his head.
‘Shepherd?’
Shep goes to the door. ‘What?’
‘You’re late!’ the woman shouts. ‘Kapper knocked half an hour ago.’
But it can’t have been five minutes. He was just here.
‘Are you opening up for me?’
Shep unbolts the door to that beta scaffold sheen, night lamps still weakly on, the drone beacons blinking. The woman has her hands on her hips. He’s never seen her before. Not a contractor, either, because she wears a sort of safari expedition outfit: lots of hi-tech stuff, breathable fabrics. A comms loop dangling loosely from one ear. At a push she’d pass for a cycle courier. The right build, the urban war kit. The weary countenance.
‘You’re Billy Shepherd?’
He nods.
The woman grimaces over his shoulder. ‘What’s this about?’
‘What?’
‘What’ve you been doing in there?’
Shep turns around. Bare bunk, mosquito net, clothes, camping stove and pot, helmet. Harnesses and tools by the door.
‘It’s my cabin,’ he says.
‘The… paper?’
‘What are you on about?’
‘Are you all right?’
Shep pulls the door towards him, leaves a gap big enough for his face. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m not.’
‘Ashamed of yourself? Do you live like that back home?’
‘Like what?’
‘Gear up,’ the woman hisses, ‘and get over there. You’re pushing your luck, now. Big time. Insurers see the state of this, you’re on the next supplies ship out of here. I don’t even want to know what you’re playing at. No wonder Kapper’s asking for a new partner.’
Shep’s lost for words. Is it better to laugh, or shrug? Or to retreat inside and into himself? The woman’s terseness, her responses, seem false, contrived. Being accused of something with no defence is frustrating enough, but none of her reactions match with reality.
‘Well?’ she says.
‘Five minutes?’
‘You’ve got three.’ She nods sharply and marches off, an automated quad bumbling up the path to collect her.
Shep focuses on the tower. He’ll be up there soon. Everything makes more sense up there. He closes the door. He dresses facing the window so he doesn’t have to see the slug trail. So he doesn’t have to think about it. He puts in his sun-lenses. They burn a little – more than usual. No bother – that’s what you get for trying to scrape your eye out. It’s only when he notices that his hands are wet that he remembers where he left the carrycase. He opens it. It’s filled with the same substance he found on his bunk.
A kind of glamour is lifted. Shep falls backwards. An imprint on the flesh of his eyelids: the completed tower, crafted from gold sheet, a daedal spire. He stumbles over the bunk end. A hornet by the light bulb. A hovering Merlin. A flash in a corridor from which a winged creature emerged.
How long have I been on Vertex Island?
When Shep opens his eyes again, the cabin has changed. The floor is covered with streamers of twisted wet toilet paper. Here and there it’s plastered to the walls. It’s been rolled out from the bathroom, spread about in a way that tells him more than one attempt has been made to cover the floor between the bathroom door and his bunk. In one corner of the cabin is a pile of ashes. He stoops to it, and in the ashes there are dozens of twisted insect legs, tiny probosces. A pyre of mosquitoes, left like an offering. At the very top of the pyre lies a cracked case – a chrysalis. From it, half emerged, is the carcass of an enormous hornet. Except it isn’t exactly a hornet. It has the body of a hornet, but the head is an unfamiliar shape: a ring of eyes, an array of glittering tendrils where the legs or antennae have been pushed out or excised. It twitches when he breathes over it.
Like the beetle he found in the Lakes, the hornet has been hollowed out.
Shep pushes himself to his feet. The bunk has changed, too. His sheets are soiled and stinking. A tightly wound spiral of slug trail curls out from beneath his pillow into the centre of the mattress.
Here, a single word daubed neatly in brown.
STRATOSPHERE.
Shep rubs at the word; it flakes under his fingertips. He understands it perfectly. The mucus, the trail, still damp around it. Still drying. A separation occurring: the detachment of mind and memory from body and being. Not so much frightening as freeing. His stubble, his hair – was that all dreamed? Had it really happened?
He touches his denuded cheek. There’s a bright prick of pain in the tip of his finger. He sucks it, noticing a deeper, richer pain in his palm and wrist. He remembers: this finger has been hurting all night. All this time. It’d flared up the moment he witnessed the stubble being eaten from his face.
He pulls the finger from his mouth. It’s weeping plasma from a rusty-brown clot. He looks at the word on the sheets. It was him. He wrote this. He wrote this message to himself.
That Shep wants this Shep to know – this was you. This is an instruction.
Our blood ladder.
‘Stratosphere,’ Shep says.
He sits down on the bunk to tie his boots.
The Journalist
Freya leaves for work before the windscreen has fully demisted. There’s a ground frost, and from the scarps behind her parents’ bungalow rolls a low mist that gives the hills above Dillock a temporary appearance.
Freya yawns. She’s been churning all night, as she often does the night before a deadline, or had in those endless hours after she admitted things to her ex. In this case, she’s been anxious to speak to Shep’s firm and charm her way to the right information. She’d lain there, willing her alarm to go off. Waiting to make that call.
To stay awake, Freya sets the car to manual drive and listens to an old mp3 stick full of bland indie rock, up louder than the system can handle. Each bass kick makes the speakers cough static, the treble a painful wash. She doesn’t turn down the music when houses and streetlights appear and the speed limit dips to twenty. She stalls on a tricky junction because she can’t feel the clutch biting with the speaker vibrating by her foot. Nor does she hear the drivers leaning on their horns behind her. For the next few miles she ignores the irate white-van man hanging off her rear bumper. The onboard nav keeps whining, so she kills that as well.
Bleaching it all out is the plan. Deflect the terror of half-revealed things. Numb it, smother it, until she gets to the office and does what she needs to do with the details she gleaned from Mallory Limited’s scheduler. Little else matters the way these a
nswers do. Only doing will keep her sane now.
She parks and storms into the office, straight over to the editor’s door.
‘Come,’ her editor says.
Freya goes. Outlined by the warmth of a desk lamp in the far window, she catches her reflection, wild and botched. Her hair tied back but her ponytail lopsided. A lump of hardened toothpaste down one jacket lapel.
The editor stands up from behind her desk. ‘Freya? What on earth are—’
‘Morning,’ Freya says brightly. ‘I need your secure line.’
The editor studies Freya. A halting look. Feigned shock that someone would dare acknowledge what the phone is for. But Freya knows – they all do. It’s an unmonitored VOIP system built into an old black Bakelite unit, data encrypted via the parent company’s private satellite. When you see the editor using it, you know big news is about to drop.
‘What for?’ the editor asks coolly.
‘I don’t want anyone to hear,’ Freya says.
‘Not good enough. You work with journalists.’
‘Not at the moment, I don’t. Not technically.’
The editor tuts.
‘I won’t beg you,’ Freya tells her.
‘Are you in trouble? Is that it?’
Freya shakes her head. ‘No.’
‘I’ve been around long enough to know I’ve seen that face before. Do we need Legal up here? Have you been silly?’
‘It’s not like that,’ Freya says.
‘What, then?’
Freya puts a hand on the editor’s desk. ‘If I call from my desk phone,’ she says, talking low, ‘and you or Diligence check the records, you’ll think I’ve lost the plot. So will the rest of them. I want no dial-backs. No trace. It’s too sensitive.’
‘And you really can’t go outside and use your mobile?’
‘Not really,’ Freya says. ‘But you can stay and listen if you want. That’s fair enough.’
The editor touches her lips. ‘I’m not sure I want to listen. Frankly, I’m not sure about a few things going on here. You look tired, Freya—’
