The Ice King (A Witch Ways Whisper)

by Helen Slavin

  In the cold hard confines of the laboratory Vanessa did not understand what was happening. The boxes and sample bags she pulled out of her bag offered up commonplace scraps of everyday lichen and mosses. Dr Byrne was reading over Vanessa’s notes for the day, going over the gridsheet, flicking the paper back and forth.

  “This is the wrong grid reference.” Dr Byrne’s voice was tight and low and she looked pinched.

  “What? But that can’t be…” Vanessa looked at the map, at her own markings and co-ordinates. She was out by over half a mile.

  “It can be. It is.”

  Vanessa was mortified. The co-ordinates, all the samples, the notes, the light readings, everything was skewed.

  “But I was…I used the compass…I took my readings…I know how to use a compass…I was there. I don’t…I don’t…” Vanessa could say nothing more, angry tears were starting to choke her. This event might just be a horrid mistake but Dr Byrne would most probably not forgive her; she did not suffer fools.

  “Which compass did you take?” Dr Byrne was mulling over the results, her mouth twisting and curling through the thoughts. Vanessa Way reached into her kit for her compass. It was the one she had brought from home, a present from her mother, the most state of the art one they could find in the outdoors shop in Woodcastle. Dr Byrne took it from her, examined it, compared it to the company compass.

  “Good quality. Better in fact than the company one…OK.” Dr Byrne handed back the compass. “It is what it is, Vanessa. Write it off. There’s a storm coming in tomorrow. We can start again day after.”

  “But …it just can’t…” Vanessa picked up the contents of the first sample box, the red soldier lichen maddened her, it had been blue. “It was blue…I don’t underst…This was a cool blue colour.” it was so obviously red, embarrassingly red, blush red, cringe red. “This is wrong…all wrong.” she began to open all the boxes, struggling with anger. She shook her head to rid herself of the damming tears.

  “No matter.” Dr Byrne turned away “Write it off. It happens.”

  “But it didn’t happen.” Vanessa knew she was making it worse with her desperation and Dr Byrne headed out without a backward glance.

  Angela Byrne had been hungry enough, an hour or so ago, to consider making the effort of cooking up her favourite Pasta alla Norma in the bearpit of the research station kitchen. After her debacle with Vanessa Way she barely had the appetite for a cup-a-soup.

  She couldn’t understand what had happened, especially in the light of Vanessa’s obvious distress. It was not that the girl had slacked off or made a genuine mistake. It was clear that she felt certain she had taken the readings and sightings that she had taken. Dr Byrne felt she knew her young colleague very well. As a consequence, after leaving Vanessa she had checked out her own work and here too there were oddities and anomalies. Her pillar samples showed odd concentrations of sodium and potassium, some samples had shown traces of gold as if they were sprinkled through, impossibly, with the precious metal. Nevertheless, whatever the cause, the entire day’s work was thrown and it rankled with Angela. As she boiled the kettle for the powdered soup her mind redrew the map they worked from. They both knew it so well, literally every last square foot of it, such was the detail of their research. As she looked back over the day, she remembered the biting wind that had blown through the forest that had affected her own work pattern; the air so bitter she had to turn against it. It was possible that both she and Vanessa had become disorientated. Angela Byrne thought she didn’t need to be such a hard case. She had been impatient and unfair.

  As she thought this, she was aware that Dr Finbar was stirring his tea with one of her lab thermometers. It must be a hallucination?

  “Finbar?” Angela glared at the tea. Finbar looked up at her, bewildered.

  “What? They’re my teabags…”

  “But not your thermometer…”

  Finbar looked at his hand, he shrugged, wiped the thermometer on a tea towel and handed it back.

  “What the hell are you doing with…?”

  “Christ woman…I needed a few bits of kit. I put everything back…”

  “Put everything back? What do you mean ‘everything’?”

  There was a snigger from the table where Craig was slurping up egg noodles with black bean sauce, the sauce making little black flecks of stickiness on the surface of the table. She shot him a glance and looked back at Finbar who was squirming.

  “You should have kept your mouth shut Finbar my man…” Craig was pushing this and Finbar grimaced at him.

  “Shut up, Craig.”

  But Craig would not shut up.

  “He’s had his grubby little paws over all your equipment…how do you think your centrifuge got broken? Hm? The elves?”

  Finbar picked up the hot teabag he’d just fished out of his mug and lobbed it at Craig.

  As she moved down the corridor Dr Byrne decided to broach the subject of a placement for Vanessa at the university. It would help with the apology she was going to make and Vanessa would understand how highly she regarded her. Together they could go through the equipment and see what faults and flaws Finbar had left behind. This was a lucky break after all, if it hadn’t been for today’s setback she might never have discovered his underhand actions. Now they had a chance to make the necessary corrections and calibrations.

  Dr Byrne knocked at Vanessa’s door several times and got no response. She put her head around the door.

  “Vanessa?” the room was empty.

  In the kitchen, which now smelt of processed cheese and body odour, Dr Byrne asked the assembled Professors,

  “Has anyone seen Vanessa?”

  “I have.” Craig put his hand up after it had lifted a tinned hot dog to his greasy looking mouth. “She’s about five feet five tall and she’s got mid length browny red hair…”

  He grinned widely before Finbar pushed him off his chair and a small fight broke out.

  Vanessa Way was nowhere on site. After searching everywhere Dr Byrne checked the snowcats. One was, as she had anticipated, missing.

  *

  At the inlet Vanessa rode the snowcat up to the spot where she had been working. Her childhood in Havoc Wood had meant she was not afraid of the dark, nor of the trees or anything that might inhabit them. Indeed tonight seemed particularly beautiful, the sky was lit with the Milky Way. She parked and, hefting her rucksack onto her back, she checked her own compass against the company compass she had brought from the lab. Both gave the same readings and, satisfied, she moved off. The moment she did so her own compass twitched and the needle shifted 90 degrees. Vanessa halted and took a deep breath as she looked at the two compass faces. It was time for an experiment. She moved forward another few steps and as she did so, her own compass shifted again another few degrees south. Another few steps, another few degrees. What was the compass drawn to? She turned on her heel and looked out across the landscape to see if there was anything, that might be obvious to the naked eye, that could be affecting the compass. Her gaze moved methodically over the trees in the near and far distance, edging the vast expanse of frozen lake.

  She turned in the direction of the compass. Her control compass, in her right hand, whirled around to point North and Vanessa made a mental note. She walked towards the edge of the trees, the faulty compass twitched slightly to show her she was going in the wrong direction. She turned out again, moved across the frozen surface. Forwards, backwards, seven steps, three steps, five steps and then the needle on the compass began to spin slowly like a clock being wound. She looked down. There seemed to be nothing visible. There were no markings on the snow, no stones or rocks that might generate a magnetic field of any kind however weak. There was just the snow, the frozen surface of the lake.

  The Lake. Vanessa had a very unscientific feeling about this experience. Her head was not clear at all; it was filled with moths all looking for some kind of light.

  She knelt and scraped a gloved hand across the snow. There
had been snowfall a few days ago, the top was crusted but, a few inches beneath, her hand scraped at the packed ice. She noted the colour, the texture and then scraped a bit more. Her glove smoothed the ice, the warmth from her making it glassier. There still appeared to be nothing to see and yet, if she checked the compass it was spinning, not fast, just smoothly around and around. She reached into her rucksack for a scraper.

  She had been scratching at the surface for only a moment when she saw the hand.

  *

  It was some hours before Vanessa skidded to a halt at the research centre, the glassy ice coffin dragging behind the snowcat, rigged with a tarpaulin. It was several more hours of effort to bring the entombed body into the workroom at the back of the centre and rest it on a tarp and a selection of pallets.

  “What the hell?” Finbar stood in the workroom doorway “ What the hell Way? Why did you bring this here? What were you NOT thinking out there?” his face was gingery red with anger but Dr Byrne overruled him.

  “It’s archaeology. A biological find. This possibly prehistoric specimen could tell us a great deal about the ecology of the area.”

  Finbar did not look convinced.

  “I just don’t think we need a dead body defrosting in the back room…It’s unhygienic.”

  “It isn’t a fish finger Finbar…I’m not asking you to eat it….” Dr Byrne was growing very tired of Finbar and his confederates, they were ruining her Arctic adventure. “Besides, Vanessa is in charge of it, it’s her find, her project.”

  Finbar headed off in a huff and at some point a few moments later there could be heard uproar from the kitchen area where the grazing habits of the other professors had been halted by Finbar’s news.

  Several more hours passed as Vanessa assessed the ice and tried various implements on it in an attempt to take pillar samples and then make an attempt to crack it open. Nothing would chip the ice, it was granite like in consistency.

  “I don’t know what to do.” Vanessa said to Dr Byrne “Is it better to get a heat source and melt it? I could rig it so that we collect the meltwater for tests.”

  Dr Byrne moved around the slab of ice. It was cold in the workroom, it was one of the oldest sections of the building, purposely isolated from the rest of the centre so that it could be used as a cold storage.

  “I say we rig it, as you say, so that we can collect any meltwater and we leave it overnight, return in the morning and see if the ice has softened at all and whether we can scrape it or crack into it.”

  They worked together until past midnight, their breath making clouds as the ice seemed to give off further coldness.

  Vanessa was up early, having hardly slept. She’d drifted off easily enough the first time but her sleep had been plagued by dreams. The dream had been familiar and yet scary, she could see herself pictured in a small globe, she watched herself walking further and further away under a sky shimmering green with the aurora. It ought to have been beautiful but it had woken her with a sense of unease.

  She moved quietly through the research centre, stopping in at the kitchen to make herself tea and toast.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” the voice was sharp. Vanessa dropped the knife she was using and turned as Dr Crowe stepped further into the room.

  “Er…I was just…having some toast…” Vanessa felt the need to pick up the square of bread as evidence. Dr Crowe reached for the bread and threw it into the bin.

  “You’re barred from food preparation areas. You have not been wearing a biohazard suit therefore you are a biohazard….” he looked very pleased with himself. “From now on you’re confined to the workroom with your icicle friend.”

  Vanessa was speechless but her stomach rumbled its complaint. Dr Crowe raised his eyebrows and grinned “Should have thought of that before you dragged the prehistoric popsicle back here.”

  Vanessa did not fret about this for long, once she was in the workroom she began to assess the ice man. She took measurements of the dimensions of the ice block and scraped samples of it so that she could run tests upon it.

  She had prepared slides of water droplets from the ice and she slid the first one under the microscope. Her notes were copious, the tiny droplet offering up an entire universe of microbes that she had not encountered before. The ice too, when she looked at it under the microscope showed intricate patterns and fractals that she struggled to draw in her notes.

  She looked up from the seventh slide and thought about the difference in the light coming through the triple skinned window. Outside was whiteness, the sky a colder white than the snow beneath today and the sun lower in the sky, a burnished orb making the snow glister with barbs of bronze light. Intricate shadows were cast on the floor. They were branched, limbs and spurs making a shifting treescaped network on the aged concrete. Vanessa looked up through the window, trying to work out the angle at which the sunlight was coming through and where the shadows were falling from. She could see nothing outside and she thought of what was beyond the wall, what was out there? It was just the small outbuildings, the snowcats, some storage tanks. It didn’t fit with the tree like shadows that were being thrown. She looked down again and picking up her pencil she began to sketch the shadows on a fresh page in her notes. As she observed them to draw them, she began to see that the shadow was indeed trees, here there were the fluttering ghosts of leaves cut out of daylight. It was very beautiful, she sketched on and on, there was a smoky honey scent in her nostrils, delightful, delicious, she felt warmed by the sunlight.

  The door burst open, the artificial light from the windowless corridor flooding over the floor, obliterating the shadows. Dr Finbar Hardy looked about as cross as she’d ever seen him and he was not a man given to good mood.

  “The comms mast is playing up. I need someone with small hands to fix it.”

  In the common room, Dr Finbar Hardy had the toolbox contents strewn about along with a scale model of the satellite dish.

  “Obviously it won’t be as small as this…” Dr Hardy said.

  “I understand that.” Vanessa was studying the fittings and connections and wondering what might fit into which and have to be attached to where.

  “The clip will have bust. It’s done it before.” Dr Finbar Hardy assured her, “All you have to do is swap it out for this one and make sure the connection is secured. It’s this black jackplug point here…” he indicated on a diagram from a maintenance manual. “You have to just slide out this connector and release this clip…” the movements he made were like a magic trick. “While you’re up there you could swap out the other two, saves you having to do it all another day when the others pop.” he folded the manual shut and offered it to her. Dr Byrne looked disapproving.

  “This is not her job Hardy.” Dr Byrne glared at him but Dr Hardy was immune to her stares now.

  “No but it has to be done.”

  “This falls into Craig’s remit.” Dr Byrne persisted “Craig should be the one repairing it. He is, after all, the engineer around here.”

  Vanessa waited, caught between the two of them. Hardy slapped the manual against her chest and gave her a meaning look.

  “The faster you get up there, Way, the faster this job is done.”

  “That is not my point.” Dr Byrne’s hand reached to stop the manual flapping once again at Vanessa’s chest. Her fingers crumpled it slightly until Dr Hardy withdrew it. “My point is that Dr Bale is the engineer. Hm? Does he have a pizza he must urgently finish? Or possibly a critical Wordsearch he must complete? What is Dr Bale doing that is so vitally important?”

  Dr Hardy gave a deep and weary sigh.

  “Sleeping it off.”

  Dr Byrne looked at him.

  “I thought he drank all the beer days ago.”

  Dr Hardy was shaking his head even before she was two words into the sentence.

  “He’s got a still going. Been boiling up bloody pine needles or bark or something to make vodka. Last night he nearly poisoned himself. He’s in no sta
te to do anything.”

  Dr Byrne seethed in silence and, for once in his academic life, Dr Hardy let it go.

  Half an hour saw Vanessa kitted out in her Arctic gear and trekking the short distance to the comms mast. It was a tall structure that reminded Vanessa of the skeleton of a lighthouse. It was, in a way she could not have explained, aesthetically pleasing even though she now had the task of climbing up the service ladder with a toolbox to try and fix the satellite dish.

  The wind was slicing across the lake in blades of cold, Vanessa pushing her body into the strength of it. It was only a few hundred yards to the comms tower and yet it took her almost another half an hour, the wind hampering her every step. It did occur to her that it was not best practice to try and climb the tower in the prevailing gusts, but there was nothing else to be done. The only way to repair it was to climb up to the dish.

  As it turned out, it was not the clip that was bust. As the wind howled around her and the frost crept across her goggles, Vanessa worked her way through the manual to try and discover the fault. All the connections seemed sound. She took it step by step clicking and switching and disconnecting and reconnecting until she had reached the end of the troubleshooting part of the manual. There seemed no other option but to climb back down and return indoors to see if anything she had done had solved the issues.

  As she began her descent she turned to look towards the frozen lake. The wind had been picking up considerably and already she could see where a black line of storm clouds were rising from the horizon.

  The comms were still out. Hardy, unable to find out the fault, dragged Dr Bale from his quarters and, wrapped in a duvet and looking very sorry for himself, Dr Bale attempted to interpret the new error codes now printing onto the computer screen.

  Vanessa took up her studies in the workroom, she still had some more slides to work through and her attention focused on the minutiae trapped beneath the lens.