by Ann
We tried but failed to have a baby, perhaps because of a genetic difference between humans and Ice Men that made having children difficult. Without a baby to keep me busy, I found I had a lot of spare time on my hands. I’d straighten up the house in the morning, but after that had nothing to keep me busy. I didn’t have any friends to talk to or go out with, and I didn’t know anybody in the neighborhood. My mother and sister were still angry with me over marrying an Ice Man, and refused to get in touch. I was the family black sheep they were embarrassed about. There was no one to talk to, even over the phone. While the Ice Man was working in the warehouse, I stayed alone at home, reading or listening to music. I was a bit of a homebody anyway, and didn’t mind being by myself all that much. Still, I was young, and couldn’t put up with such a monotonous routine for long. Boredom didn’t bother me as much as the sheer repetitiveness of each day. I started to see myself as nothing more than a repetitive shadow within that daily routine.
So, one day I suggested to my husband that we take a trip somewhere to break up the routine. A trip? the Ice Man asked, his eyes narrowing. Why would you want to go on a trip? You’re not happy the way we are, just the two of us?
No, that’s not it, I replied. I’m perfectly happy. We get along fine. It’s just that I’m bored. I’d like to go someplace far away, see things I’ve never seen before, experience something new. Do you know what I mean? And besides, we never went on a honeymoon. We have enough saved up, plus you have plenty of vacation time. It would be nice to take a leisurely vacation for once.
The Ice Man let out a deep, nearly freezing sigh, which crystallized audibly in the air, then brought his long, frost-covered fingers together on his lap. Well, he said, if you really want to go on a trip that much, I don’t see why not. I don’t think traveling is all that great, but I’ll do whatever it takes to make you happy, go wherever you want. I’ve worked hard at the warehouse and should be able to take some time off. It shouldn’t be a problem. But where would you like to go?
How about the South Pole? I said. I picked the South Pole because I was sure the Ice Man would be interested in going there. And, truth be told, I’d always wanted to go see it. To see the aurora, and the penguins. I had this wonderful mental picture of myself in a hooded parka underneath the aurora, playing with the penguins.
The Ice Man looked deep into my eyes, unblinking. His look was like a sharply pointed icicle piercing deep into my brain. He was silent for a while, thinking, then with a twinkle in his voice he said, All right. If you’d really like to go to the South Pole then let’s do it. You’re sure that’s where you want to go?
I nodded.
I can take a long vacation in a couple of weeks, he said. You should be able to get everything ready for the trip in the meantime. That’s all right with you?
I couldn’t respond. His icicle stare had frozen my brain and I couldn’t think.
As the days passed, though, I started to regret bringing up the idea to my husband of a trip to the South Pole. I’m not sure why. It’s like ever since I mentioned the name ‘South Pole’ he changed. His eyes grew more piercing and icicle-like than ever, his breath whiter, his fingers covered with an increasing amount of frost. He was quieter than before, and more stubborn. And he was no longer eating, which had me worried. Five days before we were set to depart I decided I had to say something. Let’s not go to the South Pole after all, I said to him. It’s too cold, and might not be good for us. It’d be better to go to some ordinary place – Europe or Spain or somewhere. We could drink some wine, eat some paella, watch a bullfight or two. But my husband ignored me. He had this faraway look for a while, then turned to me and looked deep into my eyes. His stare went so deep I felt like my body was about to vanish right then and there. No, my husband the Ice Man said flatly, Spain doesn’t interest me. I’m sorry, but it’s just too hot and dusty. And the food’s too spicy. And I already bought our tickets to the South Pole, and a fur coat and fur-lined boots for you. We can’t let those go to waste. We can’t just back out now.
To tell you the truth, I was frightened. If we went to the South Pole, I felt sure something terrible was going to happen to us. I had the same awful dream night after night. I’m walking somewhere when I fall into a deep hole. Nobody finds me and I freeze solid. I’m frozen inside the ice, gazing up at the sky. I’m conscious but can’t even move a finger. It’s such a weird feeling. With each passing moment I’m becoming part of the past. There is no future for me, just the past steadily accumulating. Everybody is watching this happening to me. They’re watching the past, watching as I slip further and further away.
Then I wake up and find the Ice Man sleeping beside me. He makes no sound as he sleeps, like something frozen and dead. I love him, though. I start to cry, my tears wetting his cheeks. He awakens and holds me close. I had an awful dream, I tell him. In the darkness he slowly shakes his head. It was only a dream, he says. Dreams come from the past, not from the future. Dreams shouldn’t control you – you should control them.
You’re right, I say – but I’m not at all certain.
So we ended up taking a plane to the South Pole. I couldn’t find a reason to call off our trip. The pilots and stewardesses in our plane barely said a word the whole way. I was hoping to enjoy the scenery as we flew, but the clouds were so thick I couldn’t see a thing. Before long, the windows were covered with a thick film of ice. All this time, my husband just quietly read a book. I felt none of the usual excitement and happiness you feel as you set out on a trip, merely the feeling that we were fulfilling what we’d set out to do.
As we walked down the ramp and first set foot at the South Pole, I could feel my husband’s whole body tremble. It all happened in the blink of an eye, in half an instant, and his expression didn’t change a jot, so no one else noticed. But I didn’t miss it. Something inside him sent a quiet yet intense jolt through him. I stared at his face. He stood there, looked up at the sky, then at his hands, and then let out a deep breath. He looked over at me and smiled. So this is where you wanted to come? he asked. That’s right, I replied.
I knew the South Pole was going to be a lonely place, but it turned out to be lonelier than anything I could have imagined. Hardly anyone lived there. There was just one small featureless town, with one equally featureless hotel. The South Pole isn’t much of a tourist destination. There weren’t even any penguins, not to mention any aurora. Occasionally I’d stop passersby and ask where the penguins were, but they’d merely shake their head. They couldn’t understand my words, so I’d end up sketching a penguin on a piece of paper to show them, but all I got was the same response – a silent shake of the head. I felt so alone. Step outside the town and all you saw was ice. No trees, no flowers, rivers, or ponds. Ice and nothing but – a frozen wasteland as far as the eye could see.
My husband, on the other hand, with his white breath, frosty fingers, and faraway look in his icicle eyes, strode tirelessly here and there. It wasn’t long before he learned the language and spoke with the locals in hard, icy tones. They talked for hours, intense looks on their faces, but I didn’t have a clue what they could be talking about. My husband was entranced by the whole place. Something about it appealed to him. It upset me at first, and I felt like I was left behind, betrayed and abandoned.
Finally, though, in the midst of this silent, icy world, all strength drained out of me, ebbing away bit by bit. Even, in the end, the strength to feel upset by my situation. My emotional compass had vanished. I lost all sense of direction, of time, of the sense of who I was. I don’t know when it began, or when it ended, but before I knew it I was locked away, alone and numb in the endless winter of that world of ice. Even after I’d lost almost all sensation, I still knew this: The husband here at the South Pole is not the husband I used to know. I couldn’t say how he’d changed, exactly, for he still was always thoughtful, always had kind words for me. And I knew he sincerely meant the things he said. But I also knew that the Ice Man before me now was not the Ice Man
I’d first met at the ski resort. But who was I going to complain to? All the South Pole people liked him a lot, and they couldn’t understand a word I said. With white breath and frosty faces they talked, joked around, and sang songs in that distinctively spirited language of theirs. I stayed shut up in my hotel room gazing out at the gray skies that wouldn’t clear for months, struggling to learn the complicated grammar of the South Pole language, something I knew I’d never master.
There weren’t any more airplanes at the airport. After the plane that carried us here departed no more landed. By this time the runway was buried beneath a hard sheet of ice. Just like my heart.
Winter’s come, my husband said. A long, long winter. No planes will come, no ships either. Everything’s frozen solid, he said. All we can do is wait for spring.
It was three months after we’d come to the South Pole that I realized I was pregnant. And I knew one thing: that the baby I was going to give birth to would be a tiny Ice Man. My womb had frozen over, a thin sheet of ice mixed in with my amniotic fluid. I could feel that chill deep inside my belly. And I knew this, too: my child would have the same icicle eyes as his father, the same frost-covered fingers. And I knew one more thing: our new little family would never step outside the South Pole again. The outrageous weight of the eternal past had grabbed us and wasn’t about to let go. We’d never be able to shake free.
My heart is just about gone now. The warmth I used to have has retreated somewhere far away. Sometimes I even forget that warmth ever existed. I’m still able to cry, though. I’m completely alone, in the coldest, loneliest place in the world. When I cry, my husband kisses my cheeks, turning my tears to ice. He peels off those frozen tears and puts them on his tongue. You know I love you, he says. And I know it’s true. The Ice Man does love me. But the wind blows his frozen words further and further into the past. And I cry some more, icy tears welling up endlessly in our frozen little home in the far-off South Pole.
Replacements
Lisa Tuttle
Lisa Tuttle (1952–) is an American writer of fantastical fiction who lives in Scotland. An early member of the Turkey City Writer’s Workshop, she won the 1974 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Science Fiction. Her first novel came out in 1980 and was co-written with George R. R. Martin. Since then, Tuttle has published more than a dozen novels, including Lost Futures (1992), Mad House (1998), and The Mysteries (2005). Collections include A Nest of Nightmares (1985) and My Pathology (2001). The chilling and atmospheric ‘The Replacements’ (1992) is a weird classic, often reprinted, including in the Joyce Carol Oates-edited American Gothic Tales.
Walking through gray north London to the tube station, feeling guilty that he hadn’t let Jenny drive him to work and yet relieved to have escaped another pointless argument, Stuart Holder glanced down at a pavement covered in a leaf-fall of fast-food cartons and white paper bags and saw, amid the dog turds, beer cans, and dead cigarettes, something horrible.
It was about the size of a cat, naked-looking, with leathery, hairless skin and thin, spiky limbs that seemed too frail to support the bulbous, ill-proportioned body. The face, with tiny bright eyes and a wet slit of a mouth, was like an evil monkey’s. It saw him and moved in a crippled, spasmodic way. Reaching up, it made a clotted, strangled noise. The sound touched a nerve, like metal between the teeth, and the sight of it, mewling and choking and scrabbling, scaly claws flexing and wriggling, made him feel sick and terrified. He had no phobias, he found insects fascinating, not frightening, and regularly removed, unharmed, the spiders, wasps, and mayflies which made Jenny squeal or shudder helplessly.
But this was different. This wasn’t some rare species of wingless bat escaped from a zoo, it wasn’t something he would find pictured in any reference book. It was something that should not exist, a mistake, something alien. It did not belong in his world.
A little snarl escaped him and he took a step forward and brought his foot down hard.
The small, shrill scream lanced through him as he crushed it beneath his shoe and ground it into the road.
Afterward, as he scraped the sole of his shoe against the curb to clean it, nausea overwhelmed him. He leaned over and vomited helplessly into a red-and-white-striped box of chicken bones and crumpled paper.
He straightened up, shaking, and wiped his mouth again and again with his pocket handkerchief. He wondered if anyone had seen, and had a furtive look around. Cars passed at a steady crawl. Across the road a cluster of schoolgirls dawdled near a man smoking in front of a newsagent’s, but on this side of the road the fried chicken franchise and bathroom suppliers had yet to open for the day and the nearest pedestrians were more than a hundred yards away.
Until that moment, Stuart had never killed anything in his life. Mosquitoes and flies of course, other insects probably, a nest of hornets once, that was all. He had never liked the idea of hunting, never lived in the country. He remembered his father putting out poisoned bait for rats, and he remembered shying bricks at those same vermin on a bit of waste ground where he had played as a boy. But rats weren’t like other animals; they elicited no sympathy. Some things had to be killed if they would not be driven away.
He made himself look to make sure the thing was not still alive. Nothing should be left to suffer. But his heel had crushed the thing’s face out of recognition, and it was unmistakably dead. He felt a cool tide of relief and satisfaction, followed at once, as he walked away, by a nagging uncertainty, the imminence of guilt. Was he right to have killed it, to have acted on violent, irrational impulse? He didn’t even know what it was. It might have been somebody’s pet.
He went hot and cold with shame and self-disgust. At the corner he stopped with five or six others waiting to cross the road and because he didn’t want to look at them he looked down.
And there it was, alive again.
He stifled a scream. No, of course it was not the same one, but another. His leg twitched; he felt frantic with the desire to kill it, and the terror of his desire. The thin wet mouth was moving as if it wanted to speak.
As the crossing-signal began its nagging blare he tore his eyes away from the creature squirming at his feet. Everyone else had started to cross the street, their eyes, like their thoughts, directed ahead. All except one. A woman in a smart business suit was standing still on the pavement, looking down, a sick fascination on her face.
As he looked at her looking at it, the idea crossed his mind that he should kill it for her, as a chivalric, protective act. But she wouldn’t see it that way. She would be repulsed by his violence. He didn’t want her to think he was a monster. He didn’t want to be the monster who had exulted in the crunch of fragile bones, the flesh and viscera merging pulpily beneath his shoe.
He forced himself to look away, to cross the road, to spare the alien life. But he wondered, as he did so, if he had been right to spare it.
Stuart Holder worked as an editor for a publishing company with offices an easy walk from St. Paul’s. Jenny had worked there, too, as a secretary, when they met five years ago. Now, though, she had quite a senior position with another publishing house, south of the river, and recently they had given her a car. He had been supportive of her ambitions, supportive of her learning to drive, and proud of her on all fronts when she succeeded, yet he was aware, although he never spoke of it, that something about her success made him uneasy. One small, niggling, insecure part of himself was afraid that one day she would realize she didn’t need him anymore. That was why he picked at her, and second-guessed her decisions when she was behind the wheel and he was in the passenger seat. He recognized this as he walked briskly through more crowded streets toward his office, and he told himself he would do better. He would have to. If anything drove them apart it was more likely to be his behavior than her career. He wished he had accepted her offer of a ride today. Better any amount of petty irritation between husband and wife than to be haunted by the memory of that tiny face, distorted in the death he had inflicted. Entering the bu
ilding, he surreptitiously scraped the sole of his shoe against the carpet.
Upstairs two editors and one of the publicity girls were in a huddle around his secretary’s desk; they turned on him the guilty-defensive faces of women who have been discussing secrets men aren’t supposed to know.
He felt his own defensiveness rising to meet theirs as he smiled. ‘Can I get any of you chaps a cup of coffee?’
‘I’m sorry, Stuart, did you want …?’ As the others faded away, his secretary removed a stiff white paper bag with the NEXT logo, printed on it from her desktop.
‘Joke, Frankie, joke.’ He always got his own coffee because he liked the excuse to wander, and he was always having to reassure her that she was not failing in her secretarial duties. He wondered if Next sold sexy underwear, decided it would be unkind to tease her further.
He felt a strong urge to call Jenny and tell her what had happened, although he knew he wouldn’t be able to explain, especially not over the phone. Just hearing her voice, the sound of sanity, would be a comfort, but he restrained himself until just after noon, when he made the call he made every day.
Her secretary told him she was in a meeting. ‘Tell her Stuart rang,’ he said, knowing she would call him back as always.
But that day she didn’t. Finally, at five minutes to five, Stuart rang his wife’s office and was told she had left for the day.
It was unthinkable for Jenny to leave work early, as unthinkable as for her not to return his call. He wondered if she was ill. Although he usually stayed in the office until well after six, now he shoved a manuscript in his briefcase and went out to brave the rush hour.
He wondered if she was mad at him. But Jenny didn’t sulk. If she was angry she said so. They didn’t lie or play those sorts of games with each other, pretending not to be in, ‘forgetting’ to return calls.
