The Wilful Eye

by Isobelle Carmody

  etern . . .

  Filled with a sadness she couldn’t name, Gerda wondered how she might break the spell of futility that bound him.

  The inexorable growl of an avalanche approached them, growing thunderous. Gerda heard a dog bark, and all the air seemed to freeze in the room. A shape solidified out of blinding white light.

  The ice queen. Gerda struggled to breathe.

  Somewhere close, Rudolph growled a bloodcurdling growl.

  Kai whimpered, and Gerda sensed him scrabbling near her feet, rearranging the icicles frantically. Gradually her eyes made sense of the chaos. The ice queen loomed enormous, fury sculpting her features, eyes sparking. Gerda found herself staring into the maw of the snow wolf. Her heart shrieked as she saw the ice queen lifting something – a syringe.

  ‘I should have known it wouldn’t work. Not on you,’ the ice queen said. Her voice was like crackling frost.

  Gerda stared – the syringe was empty. Understanding flashed into her brain – she’d been caught by the goons and jabbed. She was supposed to wander the kaleidoscope room forever, or if she found the exit . . . succumb to the snow blanket.

  The ice queen’s rage shimmered and she hurled the syringe away. Gerda recoiled.

  The shuffling near her feet intensified. Kai’s fingers worked feverishly, shifting the icicles.

  ‘I promised you the world to spell out that word,’ the ice queen told him, her voice a deathly hiss.

  Gerda sensed the outcome balanced on a knife-edge. Fight cold with heat. Then she understood with a certainty that made sense of everything. She heard her own strangled voice say: ‘Kai, I love you.’

  He looked up at her, blinking. He’d formed the word with the icicles.

  It glowed. eternity.

  At last, Kai scrambled to his feet. His hand in Gerda’s felt soft and warm. A sob escaped her, because she guessed the deadly puzzle.

  Eternity: she’d arrived just in time. Had Kai formed the word with his heart frozen, in the thrall of the ice queen, he’d have been hers for all time. Instead he’d spelt the word waking, and was now free. And free to love Gerda, if he chose.

  Eternity, her heart sang. Now Kai might live again.

  The ice queen’s scream summoned all the searing winds from the Poles, all the cutting sleet and chilling blasts. She smashed the enchanted word, snatched up an icicle and pointed her dagger at Gerda’s chest.

  Gerda’s peasant heart pounded and terror jolted through her. The snow wolf was upwind and mad with her scent. She floundered through the snow, lungs burning. She leaped for a pine branch, fingers too numb to grasp. Sobbing, she slipped, her legs bleeding, and the snow wolf circled.

  So this was how it ended . . . but Kai might escape.

  In an eye-blink everything changed. Eerie wailing rent the air and a flurry of movement blurred Gerda’s vision. Rudolph was clamped to the ice queen’s arm. She struggled but the dog hung on gamely. Fight cold with heat.

  The ice queen’s voice screamed of smashed ambition, frozen souls and broken dreams. She mobilised her infantry of battering hail and jagged icebergs, her fiercest storms and killing blizzards.

  The icicle quivered between the crumple of dog and ice creature, glinting bolts of lethal white light. Noise quavered and crystallised into a wild haunting howl, and Gerda saw blood spurting blue from the ice queen’s breast. In the struggle the icicle had been rammed into the ice queen’s ribs.

  Her army of snowmen faltered, and her sea glaciers groaned and fissured. The air about her keened until an aurora flamed in the sky. Before you freeze you burn. The riot of colour gradually flickered and dimmed. Rudolph lay still, red staining his ruff. A puddle of blue ink pooled on the floor. The ice queen had fled.

  Gerda ran to the dog and hugged him. He scrambled up and shook himself. Gerda checked his neck and chest quickly – the wound was only shallow.

  Still Kai stood stunned. Gerda peered into the room where the goons slept on, but nothing stirred, and now she realised nobody there would ever crawl off the couch.

  She took Kai’s hand, knowing he still struggled to make sense of his surroundings, a sleepwalker suddenly woken. I love you, her heart sang.

  But the words rang in her ears unanswered, and she saw she hoped for too much.

  ‘Come on, Kai,’ Gerda sighed, taking his hand, wondering if the Kai she longed for would ever come back. Would ever be capable of love. ‘Let’s go home.’

  As they walked outside, she felt warmth touch her skin for the first time in weeks. The sun was out, and the snow was melting. She sensed that sometime soon, this unnatural winter would end.

  At last Kai spoke. ‘Gerda, you woke me from a dream.’

  She waited.

  ‘I dreamed I was in a long, sad queue of people, shuffling forward. The men were wearing hats. We were each given a bowl of soup. As they gave us the soup they asked: “Where will you spend Eternity?”’

  Eternity. Gerda thought of the statue-man in the old-time hat. It was starting to make sense. The Eternity Man had survived the soup kitchen, and it had inspired him to save souls. You chose your own eternity, and you could go to heaven or hell.

  Gerda knew she’d made her choice, but everything depended on Kai. Was she destined to spend eternity heartbroken?

  Now Kai sensed the boulder she’d wedged between them. He walked beside her, his hand sweaty in hers. He must be nervous: of saying something she didn’t want to hear.

  ‘Kai . . .’ she started sadly, caressing the dog’s head with her free hand.

  But Kai cut her off.

  ‘Gerda, did you mean it? What you said?’

  Gerda studied the slush at her feet, face burning.

  Kai lifted her chin gently. Little diamonds glinted in his eyes.

  ‘Gerda, I love you,’ he said. ‘I’ve loved you secretly since we were nine.’ Now everything burned, especially her ears. The snow dazzled underfoot.

  ‘. . . I was afraid to say anything, because I didn’t think you loved me, not like that, and it might have spoiled our friendship,’ Kai continued. ‘I thought having you as a friend would be better than not having you at all. Even if it was torture.’

  Gerda wanted to laugh and cry at once. Her heart was a bird, freed from the undersize cage of her ribs. Its feathers fluffed and its wings whirred experimentally. As their lips touched, she felt the soaring fusion of their souls. Gerda whispered: ‘Kai . . . I love you too.’

  They walked clasping hands, Gerda never wanting to let him go. And as Rudolph padded beside them, Gerda understood she’d become braver and wiser and older, somehow. She realised she and Kai had grown up, and she grinned as she saw in her mind’s eye how the light would go on in Grandma’s face when they came through the front door together. As they walked hand in hand, the road was crisp with jewels, and a rainbow beckoned them forward, painted over a steel-grey sky.

  I can remember feeling an irresistible urge to walk inside a book of fairytales. The book was old, with black and white pictures that brought that other world to life. A girl stood on a forest path. Luminous stars hung in the sky and deep drifts of snow coated the Christmas trees. The sparkle of stars and snow and freezing night was both fascinating and forbidding. Years later I think I remember that picture because it captured the duality of fairytales.

  Fairytales are full of ambiguity; equal doses of menace and enchantment. They warn us not to stray off the forest path, strike a bargain with the strange little man, or taste a forbidden treat. But temptation always leads to a journey, adventure, and ultimately, growth. That is, growing up. Fairytales entice us as kids because we’re the heroes. Somehow, we outsmart evil enemies, wield powerful magic, and solve impossible riddles. As bedtime stories, fairytales can be pretty bloodthirsty. They should keep little kids awake at night, petrified. But maybe kids can sleep because all the bad people end up dead.

  I wanted to write a story capturing some of these ambiguities; something rich and sumptuous, yet gritty and fierce. I hoped to create a world
we might recognise, while building a story that echoed earlier tales.

  A story about drugs – the thought hit me straight away while reading Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’. I’d never read the tale as a kid, so maybe that’s why it seemed so strange. As a kid your imagination carries you along the forest path, enticing you to nibble the gingerbread house, bargain with the beautiful fairy, or follow the talking raven. When you’re older, walking into the fairytale world is more difficult. To an adult, fairy stories can seem trite. Reading some of the Grimm tales in their earliest forms, the characters seem two-dimensional, the plots far-fetched, the messages either blindingly moralistic or mysterious and convoluted.

  But telling stories is as old as humans talking. Fairy stories talk to us across time, and we can’t help being intrigued.

  The Grimm brothers began collecting tales in Germany in the early 1800s. ‘The Snow Queen’ was written later (first published 1845), but follows the Grimm tradition. There’s no middle ground for women in fairy stories – they are either evil witches (the Snow Queen), or young, fair and innocent, like Gerda. But ‘The Snow Queen’ is unusual because, instead of the handsome prince rescuing the princess, the boy is saved by the girl. I found a translation of Hans Christian Andersen tales at home, not a shortened, sanitised, modernised, illustrated story for kids.

  Reading ‘The Snow Queen’ as an adult, I thought: What kind of drug was that Hans Christian Andersen on?

  What was weird? Everything . . . wicked elves fly away with a looking glass that distorts everything people see, making beautiful things ugly, and vice versa. High above the earth, the mirror shatters, lodging shards in people’s eyes (so everything good they see seems bad or wrong) and turning their hearts to ice. Immediately I thought of drugs. And that’s just the prologue.

  The story introduces little Gerda and Kay, the girl and boy next door. Later, the Snow Queen snatches away Kay (whose name in another telling is spelt Kai) and Gerda goes on a complicated, fantastical quest to find him. When she finally tracks him to the Snow Queen’s lair at the North Pole, Kai is almost frozen to death. The Snow Queen has set him a task he struggles even to remember: to spell the word ‘eternity’ from icicles. If he succeeds, the Snow Queen promises, he will be his own master, and she will give him ‘the whole world’ . . . and ‘a pair of new skates’! Paralysed in the Snow Queen’s thrall, Kai seemed a potent allegory for somebody trapped in a half-life because of drug addiction. In my head the fairytale morphed from the Snow Queen to the ‘Ice Queen’, an evil witch peddling methamphetamines. The image of Kai numbly trying to spell ‘eternity’ became my springboard for the story.

  I also began wondering about the Eternity Man, Arthur Stace. I knew very little about him except that he came from Sydney and chalked the word ‘eternity’ on pavements. It became known as his ‘one-word sermon’. That alone seemed a great reason to set the story in Sydney. But I had to turn the city into a bleak snowfield. Increasingly wild weather and predictions of global dimming made an endless winter in Sydney seem fittingly sinister and even plausible.

  I wondered about the life of Arthur Stace, and why he kept writing ‘eternity’. Was it some message he took from reading ‘The Snow Queen’? I did some research. He was a poor man in soup-kitchen queues during the Depression. He may have been hardly literate, so he probably hadn’t read ‘The Snow Queen’. My mum gave me the vital clue, which I wrote into my story. During the 1930s, religious organisations ran soup kitchens (as many outreach organisations do today). As they handed you your bowl of soup, my mum said they asked you: ‘Where will you spend eternity?’ Chalking the pavements was Arthur Stace’s way of making people remember to confront that vital question in their lives. I’m not religious, but again, the idea hit me between the eyes – take drugs and you might take the fast track to eternity.

  Ultimately Gerda’s goodness and innocent love for her childhood friend defeat all the Snow Queen’s evil defences and her shape-shifting sentries. As the original story ends, Gerda and Kai have grown up, but I did not want them falling in love and living happily ever after. I did some reading about methamphetamines – ‘ice’ – and about the speeded-up, obsessive behaviour of users. Violence, self-harm and premature ageing go with prolonged use of the drug. I wanted to write a rich, layered tale with a seamy underbelly. In my mind, the boy doing drugs was rescued, but didn’t get the girl and didn’t live happily ever after, because that would be very unlikely in real life. But the editors wanted something more like a fairytale. I gritted my teeth. I thought furiously. I did nothing. Finally, I tried two endings: rewrote the original and created the one they suggested as well. I was surprised to find theirs worked better. After the ice queen was killed off, Kai’s secret hope of love and Gerda’s disbelief built another crest of dramatic tension before the story closed.

  Almost as an afterthought, I remembered the little book I was desperate to walk inside, all those years ago. Now I saw it through adult eyes. In ‘Eternity’, I wanted to create an undercurrent, something beyond the delight of seeing crisp foreign snow and a forest full of Christmas trees. I wanted to evoke the way a child in Grimm times would feel. I see the child now, trudging in the snow, alone in the dark, straining to hear the howl of a wolf on the wind.

  ‘ There,’ he said, breath steaming in the icy air. ‘Look there between the trees.’

  In the winter twilight, the snow was no longer sparkling white, but grey as a dim tide between the trunks. The lights of the chateau blazed from every window through a lattice of bare branches. Belle caught her breath. What wealth! What waste and extravagance!

  ‘Same as before,’ her father muttered. He fumbled at her elbow and hurried her forward. ‘I thought I was dreaming then. I was ready to curl up and die, I was so cold.’

  Belle was cold right now. She had no feeling in her fingers and a constant, dull ache in her feet. No layers of clothing could keep this cold at bay, not even the extra woollens and cloaks taken from Belle’s older sisters. They had left Delphie and Elise snuggled up in bed at home, the only place to stay warm in the freezing cottage.

  ‘Miles from anywhere here,’ said Belle.

  ‘Yes, I took a short cut that didn’t work out. But it was all meant to be, don’t you see? For you and your prince.’ Her father was impatient. ‘What do you think of this for a front door?’

  It was three times as high as the doors of their cottage. Belle followed her father up the stone steps, so wide and deep they seemed made for giant feet. He turned a massive iron ring in the door, and pushed it ajar.

  ‘Shouldn’t we . . .?’ Belle ventured.

  ‘Knock? I never knocked last time. See, he doesn’t get up till after nightfall.’

  What about servants? Belle wondered, but held her tongue.

  The warmth inside was wonderful. They stood in a hall like a long church nave, with endless stone columns that met in arches overhead. Between the columns were niches enclosing busts and portraits. A smell of burning candle wax hung in the air, and some other smell less easy to define: a kind of thick animal musk.

  Behind them, the door creaked shut as if moved by an invisible hand.

  ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry.’ Belle’s father was keyed up with nervous excitement. ‘You’re going to be a prince’s bride. The luckiest girl in the world.’

  He marched down the hall as far as a circular table on which lay a small glittering casket. The sides and top of the box were decorated all over with miniature mirrors.

  ‘Aha, here it is,’ he muttered.

  He lifted the lid and peeked inside, taking care to shield the contents from Belle’s view. When he snapped it shut again, an avid light shone in his eyes.

  ‘The bride price?’ Belle asked. She was only a month past sixteen, and had never contemplated marriage until two days ago. Now she was curious to know what she was worth.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ Her father didn’t want to discuss it. ‘For the good of the family. Your marriage saves us from freezing to death
this winter, Belle.’

  For the time being, he left the casket lying where it was and continued on to an open door further down the hall.

  ‘Hurry up, slowcoach.’ He looked back with an ingratiating smile. ‘I’ll show you where I went.’

  The dining room was warm and bright, with a great fire blazing in the hearth. Reflections of a dozen candelabra danced on the polished wood surfaces of sideboards, cabinets and a huge oval table. Velvet drapes tied back with golden cords framed a darkening scene of snowy trees through the four tall windows.

  Belle and her father had eyes only for the feast spread out on the table. There were soup tureens, salvers laden with cold pies and ham, silver-wrought baskets containing bread and pastries, bowls of grapes, peaches and strawberries, impossibly out of season. Most enticing of all were the rich savoury aromas of roast meat that escaped from under the lids of the covered dishes.

  Belle’s father clapped his hands. ‘Same as last time. Sit down and eat.’

  ‘What about the prince?’

  ‘Prince Arrol Torayne de Lanceray. No, he won’t eat with us. This is for any weary passing traveller. But specially for you.’

  He pulled out a chair and Belle sat down at the table. Surveying the magnificent spread before her, she noticed a flower vase in the middle of all the silverware. Instead of flowers, it held a single, leafless, thorny stalk: the stalk of a rose with its bloom snapped off. It looked completely out of place, like a cry of penury in the midst of plenty.

  ‘Go on, eat,’ said Belle’s father. He was already gulping down pies and pastries as fast as he could. He sat perched on the edge of a chair as though ready to spring up and leave at any moment. What was his hurry?

  ‘You’ll stay until he comes, won’t you?’

  Her father shook his head. ‘No need. He never comes down before nightfall.’

  Belle looked out through the windows. ‘It’s nightfall now.’

  Her father’s only response was to stuff even more food into his mouth until his cheeks bulged. He was like an over-wound clockwork doll, every act performed with feverish urgency.