The Ice Soldier

by Paul Watkins

  Three times we had gone out into the storm to find the Rocket, in the hopes of unpacking our sleeping bags and retrieving some of our food, as well as the miner-type head-lamps we had brought. The first time, I could not find the Rocket and staggered around in the whirling clouds of white, afraid not only that the coffin had been blown away but also that I would not be able to find my way back to the shelter of the plane.

  Something happened to me out there which filled me both with terror and with awe. As I wandered about in the snow, twisted this way and that by the wind, I had the sudden feeling that I was not alone. Everyone has had this sensation, sitting in a room, perhaps, and realizing that someone else has entered. You turn and see that other person. You make yourself believe you must have heard something, because otherwise how could you have known? It was that same feeling, and I immediately assumed that Stanley had come out to join me in the search. I spun around, trying to see where he was, simultaneously annoyed that he would have left the shelter of the cave, because now we could both be lost, but also glad to have his company. I kept turning, the storm ripping at my clothes and snow spraying across the ground and peppering my legs like ivory shotgun pellets. There was no one else. I even reached out into the gray haze, not trusting my eyes, afraid that there might be someone right in front of me whom I could not see and at the same time worried that my eyes were right and nobody was there. But the more my empty hands reached out into the screeching wind, the more certain I became that my first instincts had been correct. It was as if, in leaving behind the world we knew, Stanley and I had stumbled into a place where not only the boundaries of space had changed but also the boundaries of perception. My mind, once contained within the white walls of my skull, now seemed to flood out through its shield of bone.

  And now I knew, or thought I knew, that this presence in the air around me was Carton himself. Not the doctored remnants of the man inside his coffin but all of him, here and alive and aware, only hidden from the flimsy powers of my sight.

  But in that instant I forgot about the cold, and the wind, and about everything else except standing there, my arms outstretched, too amazed to let the fear take over.

  After some time, I didn’t know how long, I stumbled back to the plane and crawled inside.

  Stanley had torn up a piece of plywood from the floor. We used that as a primitive door to seal up the snow hole.

  I shook my head when Stanley’s wordless question showed across his face, the right side of which was swollen from his broken tooth.

  He sat back beside the candle and folded his arms and sighed.

  I wanted to tell him what had happened out there, but as I tried to put it into words, I realized it couldn’t be done. And now that the event had passed, I could no longer be sure, as I had been before, that it had actually taken place.

  The second time, after staggering around in the swirling white for half an hour, Stanley found the Rocket buried under a mound of snow about a hundred feet back from where we had left it when the storm hit. By then, Stanley was too cold to be able to dig away the snow and was forced to retreat to the plane.

  Although our hovel in the fuselage was sheltered from the wind, it was still below freezing inside. At first, it didn’t cross our minds to take the clothing from the dead man. Then, as we sat shivering side by side, Stanley and I found ourselves staring, by the candle’s feeble light, at the sheepskin trousers and the clunky fur-lined boots. There was no need to discuss what we were thinking. We had extra clothing, and sleeping bags, too, but all of that was buried in the Rocket. If we could get to that, we might be able to avoid the unpleasantness of stripping the corpse. But one way or another, we had to find a way to stay warm, or we would freeze to death in here. After twenty-four hours trapped inside the plane with the storm still raging outside, the threat of this was no longer a possibility but a certainty.

  We decided to make another attempt to retrieve our gear from the Rocket. On the first two trips out, we had gone only one at a time, in order to be able to keep the hole open and make sure the one outside could find his way back. This time, we decided we would both have to go. We armed ourselves with pieces of plywood prized up off the floor, removed the door, and stuck our heads outside.

  “Straight ahead,” Stanley shouted in my ear over the screeching of the wind. His mittened hand chopped in the direction of the Rocket, now completely buried under snow.

  I slapped him twice on the back and we crawled out.

  The wind was so strong that we could barely stand. We lumbered forward, hunched like animals unused to walking on two legs, constantly glancing back at the entrance to our cave. Afraid of losing track of each other, we held hands. By the time we reached the bank of snow under which the Rocket had been buried, our mittens had fused together in a frozen handshake.

  Already I was imagining myself tucked into my sleeping bag, eating bean stew from a can, a dozen candles burning around me. We worked fast, grunting with the effort.

  Even though he was standing right next to me, all I could see of Stanley was a bowed gray form with a misshapen head, as if he were not solid but only a bizarre compression of the air.

  Almost as soon as we began work, our plywood shovels struck a layer of ice, like a blanket of glass over the coffin, against which the wood splintered and broke. When we tried to use the smaller pieces, they broke and splintered once again. We could see the perforated sides of the cargo container and the outlines of the bags lashed neatly in place. Beneath the ice, only a few inches away, lay all that we needed to survive.

  As Stanley’s shovel cracked into yet another piece, he gave a strange, whining growl and threw away the scraps of wood. Then he tore off his mittens and began scratching madly at the ice. This did no good at all, leaving only faint chalky trails on the surface.

  I threw away my own shovel and patted him on the arm, to tell him it was no use.

  But he swatted my hand away and began to pound against the coffin, the strange, bestial cries continuing.

  I hooked my hands around his chest and began to drag him back towards the plane.

  At first he resisted, but then he went slack in my arms, as if he had fainted. He hung there, dead weight, while I shuffled backwards towards the plane.

  I fell into the entrance and the two of us floundered into the fuselage.

  For a while, we both just lay there, half on top of each other, huddled in the darkness. Then I reached across and fumbled for the candle lamp. Once I had it in my hand, I lit a match.

  The first thing I saw, when the flame hissed into life, was Stanley’s face.

  The sight of him shocked me. It was his eyes. They were exactly like the eyes of my father’s mastiff when I’d brought it to the vet’s to be put down. The old dog, grown tired of its silly name and helpless owner, had become so weak that it could not stand up. My father had been too upset to come along, so I’d had to carry it in from the car by myself, no easy task since the mastiff weighed over a hundred pounds. From the look in its eyes, I could tell that it knew what was about to happen. I set the dog down on the floor of the vet’s office.

  The vet, a red-faced man named Plunkett, with white hair and a white mustache gone yellow at the ends, was already filling a syringe. Dr. Plunkett turned to me and nodded. “It will be all right,” he said.

  I took one last look at Trouble.

  He was watching me, his jowls draped on the floor and his black nose twitching as he drew in shallow breaths. I looked for some forgiveness in those eyes, but there was only the blindness of fear.

  Now those eyes were Stanley’s.

  I was also beginning to break. I seemed to be falling away inside myself, growing fainter, melting away.

  I don’t know how long I had been lying there when suddenly a jolt passed through me, like the shudders of an earthquake against the insides of my ribs. I scrambled to my feet.

  Stanley remained on the ground, eyes closed, lips turning blue.

  “You’ll die if you lie there
any longer!” I shouted at him. When he did not move, I kicked him.

  His eyes opened.

  “Come on!” I yelled. “Get the clothes off that corpse before you turn into one.”

  I stamped over to the pile of wreckage and began tearing away at it. I was expecting it to be incredibly heavy but, to my surprise, some of the boxes were only made of cardboard instead of metal. Even more surprising, most of them were filled with long strips of tin foil, which spilled out over the floor like confetti. The only heavy objects were the large yellow cylinders, which turned out to be for oxygen, although these were cracked and empty now.

  The dead man lay at the bottom of this heap, arms at his sides, hands inside brown fur-lined gloves. His head was swathed in a leather flying helmet and face covered by a rubber oxygen mask with only a shred of the hose remaining. The rest appeared to have been violently torn away. He wore large goggles with a single lens over both eyes, unlike the goggles Stanley and I wore, which had separate lenses for each eyepiece. Mercifully, we could not see his eyes, as the lens had been shattered and the inside was coated with ice.

  He was completely frozen, and even though we managed to undo the zipper on his sheepskin jacket, we would have had to break his arms to remove it. So instead, we lifted him carefully off the floor and cut the jacket down the middle of his back. We were then able to peel it away.

  Stanley immediately put this on and fastened it around him with his trouser belt, while I removed the sheepskin trousers, which, thankfully, had zips from the top to the bottom of both legs and so did not have to be cut.

  Beneath the sheepskin outer layer, the dead man appeared to have several more layers of clothing, all buried beneath an olive gabardine flying suit. In one of the leg pockets attached to the front of each shin, I found an unopened emergency-ration tin.

  After five minutes of flapping his arms, Stanley pronounced himself warm. “For the first time in bloody ages,” he added. He then went and tugged the gloves off the dead man’s hands.

  This was our first real look at the corpse. Until now, he had remained anonymous beneath his clothing. But now the alabaster-white fingers, the nails flat gray and blackened at the tips, pointed at us as if casting a spell. The shape of them reminded me of Carton’s hands, and the way that he aimed them in greeting.

  Stanley’s own hands were held in front of him in the same rigid shape by the still-frozen gloves. Slowly, as the minutes passed, the fingers of the gloves began to wiggle as the warmth of Stanley’s body loosened the leather. He bent down, picked up some of the tin foil, and sprinkled it over the dead man, covering him up as if with a matting of flowers.

  Meanwhile, I struggled into the trousers, and soon my kneecaps stopped feeling like chips of ice beneath the goose-bumped skin.

  Beyond where the boxes of foil had piled up was a door. I turned the handle, set my shoulder to it, and fell into an empty space where, I realized from numbers printed up and down the metal supports, the bombs must have been stored. Beyond this point was the cockpit. I could see the backs of the seats belonging to the pilot and copilot, and between these the engine throttle handles. The front of the plane had caved in, and it looked as if the controls had been smashed into the seats. Moving forward, I saw that both seats were empty. The rest of the crew must have bailed out, leaving the dead man behind. I wondered how far the plane might have flown without anyone at the controls. Miles perhaps. Maybe hundreds of miles.

  I returned to the foil-strewn cave to find that Stanley had discovered a parachute, which had been hanging on a rack on the wall. He had opened it and now stood draped like a monstrous bride in the folds of the white shroud. He had opened the emergency-ration tin and was nibbling at the rock-hard chocolate.

  I stared at him.

  He gave me a haughty look. “Not exactly Friday afternoon at the Montague, but at least things have improved enough that I feel confident in saying that they could be worse.”

  I took the piece of chocolate he held out and gnawed at it until a lump broke free. It was not like regular chocolate, even when it wasn’t frozen. The stuff contained a gritty mixture of coffee, cocoa, and, I think, some kind of milk powder. It was better than nothing but not by much.

  Further rifling of the man’s pockets revealed a half-full pack of Lucky Strikes, with the logo “It’s Toasted” on the green-and-red packaging.

  From then on, Stanley and I were more or less comfortable on our bed of tin foil, both of us wrapped in pieces of silk parachute to keep warm, letting clumps of chocolate dissolve inside our mouths and smoking our carefully rationed supply of cigarettes.

  The candle ran out, but it no longer mattered. I drifted off to sleep, dreaming that the storm had quit and we were on our way again.

  Sliding back into consciousness again, I realized that something was different. I blinked, but my eyes were useless. I sniffed but smelled nothing other than my own stale breath. Suddenly I knew what it was. It was quiet.

  The storm had finished.

  I nudged Stanley awake.

  We dug our way out yet again and crawled into a world lit almost bright as day by the full, white face of the moon.

  Standing, we looked around us. As far as we could see, the rolling surface of the glacier was covered with glittering snow. It was as if the stars themselves had fallen from the sky and come to rest among us.

  In the distance stood Carton’s Rock. The black stone seemed to merge with the night sky, leaving the streaks of ice and snow suspended like flames in the night.

  Stanley’s breath plumed about his head. The sheepskin jacket, which had begun to come apart, hung in shreds from his arms and his back.

  We swept off as much of the snow as we could from the Rocket, then sat down with our backs against the ice. For a long time, we looked at Carton’s Rock drifting in the strange sapphire light.

  The next morning, after a few hours’ rest inside the plane, we woke to find light streaming in through the sides of the hole we had walled up with plywood. After removing the plywood, I poked my head out through the opening and watched the rising sun spread like an egg yolk across the snow.

  Leaving the plane, we had to put our goggles on. It was too bright for the naked eye to see. And it was hot. We soon shed the remains of our extra clothing. The Rocket, too, gave up its crust of ice, and we gorged on beans and ham before shouldering our traces and heading out again across the glacier.

  The willow wands we had planted to mark our path had all been blown away. I wondered how far they had gone. With the force of the storm, there was no telling. I imagined them spun into the sky and falling to earth in some Italian’s garden like toothpicks from the gods.

  WE MARCHED UNDER THE fierce and cloudless sky.

  The silhouette of Carton’s Rock stretched across the empty whiteness.

  We stopped to stare at a leaf which had been carried in by the wind. Its edges were trimmed with the rusty browns and reds of autumn colors. Where the leaf lay on the ice, the sun had warmed it, melting a perfect indentation.

  Then we moved on.

  Our skin burned into painful maps of red, with tiny blisters pebbling our noses, ears, and cheeks. Only the space around our eyes, protected by the goggles, retained its original paleness. Our lips became horribly chapped, and whenever I relaxed my hands, they curled into clawing fists around the memory of the rope.

  Sometime around noon, Stan and I dropped in our tracks. We lay like overridden horses, wheezing with exhaustion.

  “Get up,” I told him.

  “You get up,” he replied.

  The coffin loomed between us. Sometimes it clicked in the sun, like a car with its engine just switched off.

  “You get up and then I’ll get up,” I mumbled into the snow.

  “First you get up.”

  I rose to my knees, head hanging down, my mittened hands like the paws of a half-invented beast, then staggered to my feet. “On your feet,” I told the figure sprawled on the other side of the coffin.

  Sl
owly, Stanley turned his head. The one glass eye blinked back the sun. Then, with a curse, he stood.

  Occasionally, we would crawl into the shade of a tarpaulin and pull the goggles from our faces. No expression showed on Stanley’s face, which looked to me as if it had been chipped from pink granite.

  It was early evening when we reached that hard gray line of shadow cast down by Carton’s Rock. As soon as we crossed into it, the cold closed around us like a trap made out of light.

  We had gone only a few feet when I heard a groaning sound from the snow beneath my feet. Stanley was walking away to my left, so that we pulled the Rocket behind us in the V formation we had found to be most effective.

  Slowly we both came to a stop.

  The earth grumbled again.

  Stanley and I looked at each other.

  And then suddenly he was gone.

  The coffin jerked across the snow towards him, and I watched in amazement as the rope which connected me to the coffin snapped tight like a whip, tore me off my feet, and pulled me forward, facedown in the snow. And then I was being dragged, my guts jammed up under my ribs and the wind jolted from my lungs.

  I raised my ice ax, jammed it into the snow, and leaned on it with all the strength I had left. Chips of snow and ice sprayed up around the ax blade, spitting into my face. As suddenly as it had started, everything came to a stop. For a moment, I just lay there, the pressure of the rope still painful across my middle, drawing the air carefully into my chest. As soon as I had my breath back, I called out to Stan.

  There was no reply.

  I called again.

  This time, I heard his voice.

  I turned my head slowly, afraid that my grip on the ice ax would slip.

  The rope which attached him to the coffin disappeared into a small hole in the ground.

  “Get me out!” he called, his words muffled underground.

  I could hear his ice ax clacking against the ice walls of a crevasse as he tried to find a grip so he could begin climbing up. Judging from the length of the rope before it trailed into the hole, I knew that he could not be more than ten feet down. I looked around for a place to anchor the rope, but there was none. “Prusik knot!” I yelled. “Tie a Prusik knot!”