He did not know how long he’d been hearing the dripping before he recognized it for what it was. He slipped his boots on and went out to the stairwell, but there was no leak or stain on the floorboards. And yet he could smell the damp; he could smell the cold. He looked at the door to the ice house, and there the stain of head-shaped damp, the torso, a slow ooze of water through the pores of the cracked and peeling wood making the bare beginnings of the legs.
Rudy walked slowly to the door to examine it. As his warm breath—life breath, love breath—hit the stain, it vanished.
He opened the door without much difficulty; he’d pretty much destroyed the jamb the night before. Only a small amount of the light from the stairwell lamp slipped into the chamber, but tonight he was reluctant to switch on the overhead bulbs inside the ice house. The square of ice ahead of him seemed to glow with its own inner, grey light. From this distance fog appeared to swirl just beneath the hard surface.
In the camps, his father had told him, you eventually had nothing but your naked body to protect you from the cold. Any clothing you night have meant very little. As did wealth or status. Then his father had told him the cancer felt like an invasion of ice into his body. Cold, numbing memory that froze his cells one at a time, not at all like the consuming fire he’d always imagined cancer to be.
Rudy approached the square window of grey ice. Staring into it was like staring into a cross section of the frozen pond itself. Shadows flickered across the grey surface. He twisted his head, looking for moths against the light, but there were none. He stared again at the ice, and knew then that the shadows were just beneath the surface, and not on its top. He stretched his hands out, fingers spread, and set them gingerly against the ice, careful to keep the contact on the subtle side, afraid his fingertips might adhere and then he’d lose them, substituting wounds for them. The ice grew dark where he touched it; the shadows of his hands in the ice appeared to grasp the hands themselves. Then the shadows of his hands in the ice floated away from his hands and grasped the sides of his shadow head, his skull head with gaping eye holes and absent mouth screaming and screaming as it stared at him.
Rudy backed away but his shadow self in the ice did not move. Rudy backed away and saw the naked form floating in the ice, emaciated and cold, consumed by hatred, accusing him with its stare. And Rudy thought of Auschwitz, and Treblinka, and that last picture of his father’s cancer-ridden body, and some poor soul drowned so long ago in Ice House Pond, harvested and preserved in Old Finney’s secret ice palace.
The body disappeared, and the ice was a murky grey again.
IV
The last thing Rudy wanted to do that next morning was negotiate the road into town, but he had little choice now.
Lately, mornings had been warm enough to cause considerable snowmelt each day, but that actually made the roads even more treacherous. The pick-up veered dangerously as it topped the slight hill that marked the edge of his property. Rudy fought the wheel and then let the truck slide down most of the remainder of the decline.
The town’s biggest bookstore was the Harbor Bookshop, which had a large selection of local histories, most of them of the privately printed kind. There were also several volumes of facsimile newspapers, compilations of historically significant police reports, and other document collections of historical interest. A small selection of contemporary paperback novels was displayed on wire racks at the front of the store; they appeared to be largely ignored. During the two hours Rudy spent in the store he saw only one customer examine them: a fat man in a fuzzy red coat who eventually bought one of the dark-covered horror novels whose cover displayed a man’s decaying head, worms encircling the fixed iris of the left eye. The man asked for directions to the nearest hotel and the elderly clerk told him how to get there.
The rest of the stock was about a twenty/eighty per cent mix of new and used hardcovers, university and scientific presses, local and small presses, handmade volumes, fine editions, charts and prints, and occasional unclassifiable dusty paperbacks. All in no particular order. In the few instances where shelves had actually been labelled, the labels were nonsensical (Books We Wished We Had Read, Imaginary Countries, Working Titles, Character Assassinations), or useless (the three shelves carefully labeled Classics were empty). But the good grey clerk appeared to know where every book contained within the shop’s shadowed walls was located, however obscure. Each of Rudy’s inquiries brought a flood of title names and locations. Eventually, he had gathered all the sources he thought he might need. The clerk guided him to an overstuffed chair, almost showing its springs, and left him.
Rudy found what he wanted in The Greystone Papers: A Century of Headlines, Major Stories, and Oddities, in the chapters concerning a twenty-year stretch of the Bay’s history: Old Finney’s stretch.
BAKER CHILD STILL MISSING
Constable Biggs still reports no leads in the case of John Baker, age six, still missing after twelve days. The boy was last seen in a field near The Hand where his father, Philip Baker, was gathering firewood …
PRESUMED ELOPEMENT
Mary Buchanan, mother of Ellen Buchanan, wishes to announce the elopement of her daughter with William Colbert of Hinkley. Earlier reports of foul play, Mrs. Buchanan informs us, are certainly the products of perverse and overactive imaginations.
HUNTERS LOST
County deputies and rescue workers are still searching the North Forest for Joseph Netherwood and his son Paul, who were separated from their hunting party Friday afternoon at approximately three p.m. when their dog Willy …
Dozens of other stories described similar events. Rudy gladly paid the exorbitant ransom the clerk wanted for the book.
The Harbor Bookshop sported an old-fashioned payphone booth. There were six Netherwoods in the phone book, but only one B.B.
Before leaving the store, Rudy made two more purchases: yellowed handbooks concerning the construction, maintenance, and day-to-day use of ice houses.
He ran into Mrs. Lorcaster coming out of the bookstore. She was bowed from the weight of packages, heading for an old station wagon. He grasped her elbow gently as she walked past, not recognizing him. “You didn’t tell me about all the missing people,” he said quietly.
She staggered slightly, and part of her load began to tilt. Rudy reached out to steady it. He caught a small bag in mid-fall and nestled it inside one of the larger ones. One of her lovely eyes peeked out at him from between the two largest bags. She didn’t seem so self-assured, so powerful now. She seemed more like what he’d have expected Lorcaster’s wife to be. “I … don’t understand,” she said.
“Emily.” He shook his head. “All those people a number of years back who ended up missing? Rural people, for the most part? People your grandfather would have known?”
“You’ve been talking to Mr. Netherwood. He’s a bitter, disturbed man,” she said.
“I’ve been talking to him, yes. But not about his missing relatives. I figure he’ll tell me all about them in his own good time. But I’ve seen strange things at the ice house, Em … Mrs. Lorcaster. In ice that must date back to your grandfather’s time.”
She put her bags down on the hood of the station wagon, letting them rumble. She was a sad lady, suddenly looking old. Now Rudy was feeling insensitive. “He was my grandfather and I loved him very much,” she said. “And he … he hated people around here. He’d come to that, all right. But I cannot believe he would actually do anything to anyone. I never knew that to be a part of his nature.”
“That house. That pond.” Rudy hesitated, searching for the right word. “They aren’t right.”
“Then do something, Mr. Green. At one time my grandfather built palaces.”
“And then?”
“And then my aunt died. She was three years old when she lost herself in the fog, and drowned in the pond. My grandmother, who’d always been so quiet, stewing in her silence, became quite mad. And something happened to my grandfather. He grew frightened of people, t
he way the mass of them intruded, the way life created death. He said that the Bay had its own will and its own way of populating itself out of the fog. He came to see the townspeople as not simply other, but other. They were no longer human, as far as he was concerned. But I cannot believe he would have killed. My grandfather built palaces, Mr. Green. Those hints of murder—that is simply Mr. Netherwood’s brand of gossip.”
“I’ll be hiring Mr. Netherwood, Emily. I think you should know that.”
“Whatever for?”
“For the ice business. And maybe I’ll be building palaces as well.”
V
Two days later, B. B. Netherwood met Rudy by Ice House Pond at six in the morning, as arranged. Netherwood was already there by the time Rudy had got out of bed and dressed and made his way through the thick snow around the side of the building. Snow had fallen again all evening, as it had several evenings in a row. And although the sun was out and there were no clouds in the sky, this was the coldest morning Rudy had yet experienced at the pond. It seemed as if his newfound determination to take charge of things had brought out a renewed stubbornness in the weather. The cold seemed to have leached much of the color out of the trees and sky, even his own clothes. The landscape he saw was like a faded picture in some grandparent’s photo album.
The distant trees looked stiff and dead. There was no breeze. The thick snow swallowed his footprints.
He found B. B. Netherwood standing by a large pile of gear, apparently unloaded from the battered green snowmobile and its attached sled. Netherwood gazed out over the frozen pond, fixed and motionless, as if frozen himself.
Rudy purposely made as much noise as he could thrashing through the snow. Netherwood turned and went over to the bottom of the slope to wait for him.
“You have a personal interest in the pond, I believe,” Rudy said.
Netherwood scratched at his chin. “You must have figured that out from something you read in town, am I correct? An old newspaper or something?”
“According to the papers two Netherwoods were missing. I assumed, of course, they were relatives.”
“My daddy and my older brother Paul. Helluva kid, and a helluva dad, if truth be told. Although I was pretty mad at them for going hunting without me that day. But then I was only eight; I could hardly hold up the rifle.” Netherwood shuffled his feet, his hands buried in his baggy pants pockets as if that would keep him warmer.
Anxiety makes you cold, especially out here, Rudy thought. And then: This is crazy. “And you’ve thought about it all this time. Considered where, and how.”
“You don’t stop thinking about it, Mr. Green. The folks around here talk about things—I hear you have a lot on your mind, too. The fact that I was just a kid at the time doesn’t make much difference in the thinking about it, the dreaming about it, except maybe I’ve had a longer time for doing it.”
Rudy took a deep breath. The cold air seized his lungs, squeezing until they began to burn. “But why this place? What makes you think you’ll find out something about them?”
“The same reason you called me, Rudy. I really didn’t see you for somebody who’d go into the ice business, despite my coming to visit you the other day. Same thing that told me I’d find out something about what happened to Daddy and Brother right here on the pond, I suspect.” He looked directly into Rudy’s eyes. “Seen anything since you been here? Anything you’re afraid to tell ’cause folks might think you’re crazy?”
Rudy told him about the alternating freezing and melting leak, and the shadowy form in the ice trying to grasp his hand.
B.B. just nodded. “I’ve seen the worst storms you can imagine, bad as any tornado or hurricane, right over this pond and nowhere else. When they move away from the ice they don’t go anywhere—they just disappear. I’ve seen shadows big as a house floating under the ice. I’ve seen smaller ones, too, man-size and smaller. And sometimes they do a little dance, a little ballet. And there are days in summer, I swear the water gets all rusty and stinks like a slaughterhouse.”
“Something strange here, B.B., something very odd,” Rudy said.
“Something cold,” B. B. Netherwood replied.
Netherwood had brought his own tools: a carpenter’s toolbox and some good door stock, a push broom, some weatherproof paint, and various tools for cutting and handling the ice, although the tools hanging up in the cooling room were still in remarkable shape, greased, with the metal parts wrapped in oilcloth. Rudy told B.B. that frankly he knew nothing himself, except for what he’d read quickly in the two old handbooks he’d purchased, and so B.B. shouldn’t hesitate to give the orders. B.B. told Rudy to “get to sweeping, then,” while B.B. worked on the splintered door and jamb. “Looks like something et it,” B.B. said. Rudy told him what he’d had to do to get in and B.B. just shook his head.
The dust, seemingly harder to push in such cold, created a stench when it was disturbed, so bad that Rudy had to tie a handkerchief over his mouth and nose while he worked. He didn’t even want to think about what caused that smell. He used a shovel to remove the animal skeleton he’d found the other day.
He was impatient to get to what needed to be done, and find some answers. But he also wanted to do things right, and he knew this man Netherwood knew how to do things right. But still the practical and ultimately meaningless chore of putting the ice house back into working order reminded Rudy of nursing homes and concentration camps.
“You think you’ll do the ice palace?” B.B. asked.
“If that’s what it takes,” Rudy replied.
“Hmmmm …” was all B.B. said, working his plane up and down the edge of the door.
Rudy swept until he could see clean stone flooring to all four corners. B.B. was still working on the door, trying to make it fit the opening, muttering about old houses, how there “wasn’t a single parallelogram in the whole damn lot of ’em,” so Rudy got ammonia and brushes and started scrubbing down the stone troughs. Even under the sharp bite of the ammonia he thought he could smell spoiled milk and vegetables, meat left too long in the season, even its blood starting to grey.
After another hour Rudy’s patience was wearing thin. The weight of the ice overhead oppressed him, and he imagined he could feel the pressure of the tons of frozen ice in the pond behind him, pressing its weight against the embankments, pressing against the world, freezing its way slowly to the muddy bottom, pushing its argument towards China, if it could. And turning greyer by the hour. Rudy expected an explosion at any moment would rip off the back of his skull.
“Done,” B.B. called from the other side, his form a silhouette against the brilliant light that filled the doorway. “Give me a few minutes to shovel out the raceway and chip the ice off the gate, then we can start. I brought along a few sandwiches we can munch on while we’re working, providing you got a clean jacket pocket.”
The raceway and gate took more than a little shoveling and chipping, but B.B. eventually got it done. The ice was like concrete; B.B. was scarlet-cheeked and drenched by the time he finally broke through. The dark, cold water rushed down the raceway to the front of the ice house. “It’s full of silt … or pollution … something …” Staring down at the water filling the raceway, Rudy could not see the bottom, even though it was only a couple of feet deep. The water was black, and dangerous-looking. Steam escaped where the water made contact with the warmer metal of the raceway.
“Yeah … something …” B.B. said, going for two sets of tools. “I just wouldn’t put my hand in it if I were you. I wouldn’t even look at it too long. Come on … we got ice to cut.”
B.B. brought out two each of two different styles of saw, as well as two “choppers”—something like thin-bladed hatchets. The chopper felt especially good in Rudy’s hand—as well-balanced and perfectly toothed as a surgeon’s instrument.
“Don’t waste the ice,” B.B. said. He chopped off a little from the edge where he’d begun removing the ice, making a remarkably clean horizontal line by the open, dark
water. Then he used the chopper to make his lines. “Two by three feet is a good size,” he said. “The size Old Finney designed this setup for, anyway. Ice should be about a foot, foot and a half thick here. If we’re lucky it won’t get much thicker or thinner than that anyplace else in the pond. But I don’t suppose we can hope for luck in these particular waters.” He chopped deeper through the lines, then used his saws to cut the rest of the way. The block looked remarkably perfect, like a giant ice cube, crisp corners, and grey as woodsmoke.
“I’ve never been good at estimating measurements,” Rudy told him, trying to keep his mind off the grey of the ice, or the even darker shadows that seemed to change position as B.B. used the pike to move the block down through the raceway. Or the vague unpleasant smell when a minuscule portion of the ice block melted, condensing on its upper surfaces.
“Don’t worry. The more of these you cut, the closer you’ll be getting to a perfect two-by-three. You won’t be able to help yourself. Once we cut a certain number of blocks, we move them down the raceway like this, then we’ll use a block and tackle to drag them up the ramp into the ice house upstairs. Usually another team works on that end of it, but the two of us’ll just have to work it double.”
B.B. proceeded to cut out enough of the ice to provide Rudy with a horizontal edge to start his own row. Or, rather, double row: both men started using five cuts to carve out two huge blocks at a time.
Rudy thought about Old Finney performing the same task so many years ago. He thought he even had Old Finney’s saw and chopper—they were far more worn than B.B.’s set. After a time he was able to lose himself in the work, chopping and sawing, aware only of the proscribed movements of his muscles, and the endless grey.
Absent Company Page 30
