The Cold Beneath

by Tonia Brown

  I snorted in disgust. “Is this what you kept me alive for, then? So you could have someone exonerate you of your sins?” I pulled at my restraints, testing their fastness. She had bound me just loose enough to allow some comfort, but tight enough to keep me in place. “I bear my own sins, Geraldine. I don’t have the right to forgive yours, nor do I plan to. As far as I’m concerned, you can go to Hell, where you belong.”

  “I see,” she said, her voice sharp with disappointment.

  “How long then?”

  She furrowed her brow, unsure of my question.

  I smiled, weak but righteous. “How long have we been your little experiments? What first clued you in that the compound changed us in such a terrible way? When Morrow returned? Or did it take a bit longer for you to work out what caused it?”

  “Oh Pip,” she said. “You were always so naïve.” Then she laughed. Actually laughed. It was high-pitched and horrifying considering our mutual situation. When her laughter stopped, she looked me dead in the eye and said, “I knew long before Morrow’s death.”

  My skin crept at that laugh. “How long?”

  “I’ve known since Elijah died.”

  ****

  back to toc

  ****

  Thirty

  Doctor Goode’s Experiment

  She could have hit me with another dose of pentothal and not left me any more stunned than I was at her words. I slumped against the wall, all of the life dragged from me by her admission. She knew the whole time. While we were in Kentucky. While Lightbridge was pitching his voyage to me. While she was confessing Elijah’s deeds against me. The whole time, she knew what the compound was capable of.

  As if hearing my thoughts, she whispered, “I admit I wasn’t sure what precise effect the compound would have on human subjects. But I did know what it was capable of, because it turned out to do almost exactly what I created it to do. It keeps the body alive, even after apparent death.”

  “You knew Morrow would return?” I asked.

  “I hoped he would. Yes. I’ll admit it was a bit more gruesome than I planned on, but those are all just minor details.”

  I stammered, “You … you meant for this to happen?”

  “The wreck? No, of course not. The accident, the unfortunate wreck was just that. Unfortunate. No, I never meant for any of this to happen.”

  She proceeded then to tell me exactly how the accident came about.

  When Morrow’s body was returned to the medical bay, Geraldine and her students set upon it like a pack of vultures. Each was hungry to know why the man got back to his feet when the four of them were so sure he was dead. They prepared the body for examination, removing the knife from its resting place and stripping the corpse.

  Within moments of their dislodging the weapon, Morrow returned to apparent life again, leapt from the table top and attacked the medical staff. The men wrestled with him, trying to keep him quiet while Geraldine prepared a sedative injection. As she attempted to administer it, Morrow knocked her away, and she burst through the closed door and into the hallway. Before she could regain her feet, she watched in horror through the open door as Morrow grabbed one rack of chemicals from its bolted spot in the floor and threw it into the cabinet against the far wall. The resulting mix caused the explosion, sucking her medical students and Morrow out of the now-gaping hole.

  “Which is why you were in the hallway when we found you,” I said.

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “But you said you were on the pedometrics,” I said.

  “I said what I had to. I didn’t want to tamper with the results by revealing too much.”

  “What in the world were you thinking? What possessed you?”

  “I was thinking of my future. Of mankind’s future. Of longevity. Of godhood.”

  “Godhood? This is blasphemy!”

  “This is the philosopher’s stone, Philip. This is distilled immortality. This is what every doctor, every scientist, every human being on the face of the Earth would give his very soul to discover. A way to cheat death. And I found it.” She sat straight again, chin tipped up, nose held high in pride. “Not Elijah. Not you. Me. I did it. Me.”

  I saw her for what she was then, an evil conniving bitch hell bent on gaining notoriety for her precious discovery, no matter the cost. She and True North had so much in common. What were the lives of forty men when immortality lay on the line? My nausea returned, pushing my stomach to my throat. I retched with revulsion, heaved with hatred for her and what she had done to the crew.

  To Albert.

  To Lightbridge.

  To me.

  “You sacrificed us,” I said.

  “Don’t be so melodramatic,” she said.

  “You want melodrama? How about explaining to the world how you turned the Northern Fancy into a cage for your very own crop of the Modern Prometheus?”

  She cut her eyes at me, not amused by my mockery. “Is that absolutely necessary?”

  I sneered. “Victor would be proud.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Stop what? You sacrificed us, and for what? A compound that creates monsters?”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Then why don’t you tell me what it was like! Because I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around why anyone would do this!”

  “I was so close,” she said, ignoring my anger. “I spent years working on this formula. Years and years perfecting it. When Elijah died, I knew I would never get an opportunity to finalize it. I was close, I was so very close …” she paused to frown, swept up by ugly memories. “But he went and ruined it with a heart attack. He always had to be the center of attention, you know. It was hard enough being the wife of a famed scientist, but to be left as his widow? It was worse than being thought of as a whore. I was prepared to spend the rest of my life in his shadow, but to have it foreshortened like that was unbearable.”

  I thought I couldn’t be more disgusted by her actions. I was wrong. “You delivered us into the hands of the Devil for the sake of your reputation?”

  “No!” Geraldine leapt to her feet in anger. “You don’t understand. You men never do. I lost everything when he died! My research facility, my backing. Everyone abandoned me. Most of the community only supported my research to humor Elijah. With him gone, they pulled up stakes and left me to rot.”

  I understood. Her story came into focus then. Her warped version of reality made a sudden mad sense. “Then along came Lightbridge with a floating maze of willing lab rats, all ready for the abusing.”

  “Pip, you mustn’t think of it like that.” Geraldine’s anger faded at the man’s name. She returned to her seat with a gentle smile. “Lightbridge rescued me.”

  “You mean he outfitted you. How tempting that must have been. One moment you lose your entire base of research, and the next you are presented with a full crew of healthy men. All without families. All without homes. All without recourse. Who would miss them when you were done with them? No one. Not even you.”

  “I admit there were some failed subjects, but overall—”

  “Subjects? For God’s sake, Geraldine, they were men! Human beings! Not mice!”

  “They served a purpose greater than they will ever know. Or understand. Even greater than Lightbridge’s precious True North.”

  “Ah yes, back to your savior. How do you thank the man for giving you this golden opportunity? For rescuing you? You kill him.”

  Geraldine hung her head at that. So there was some emotion left in her? “I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

  “I understand that you used us.”

  When she raised her head again to me, that wicked smile had returned. “You know, I wanted to bring you in on it. From the start, I wanted to tell you and have you help me. I needed your help. I needed someone’s help. Not even my students knew what was really going on. But you? You could have known. You could have helped me.”

  “What made you change your mind?”


  “Simple. I couldn’t spare you. I needed the numbers.”

  “Numbers?” I echoed.

  She shrugged. “It’s the only reason you were brought aboard to begin with.”

  “But … Lightbridge’s legs …”

  “His legs? Do you still think that’s why you were invited along?” Geraldine sat amidst the moaning, writhing corpses of our crewmates and laughed as though she hadn’t a care in the world. She looked mad. She was mad.

  I felt like a disenchanted child, one who had just learned that the real way of the world involved facts and figures and not just his bright imagination or fantasies.

  As her laughter wound down, she asked, “Did you really think I could spend ten years married to the foremost expert in bio-mechanics and not be able to manage a pair of silly old clockwork legs?” Geraldine took to her feet and made a round of checking on the bound men as she took notes and continued to talk. “No, after I caught sight of the crew numbers, I knew my research would be incomplete without at least a half dozen more subjects. But Lightbridge was stalwart. The most I could do was squeeze in a few medical students.”

  She paused at Albert, prodding his swollen hands with her pen before jotting down a few notes. He struggled to claw at her, but to no avail. We were all bound very tightly. She might have been mad, but she still tied a hell of a knot.

  “And how did I come into it?” I asked. “Why me?”

  “It’s funny actually,” she said. “I discovered that his penchant for perfection was his greatest weakness. He was always going on about how much he trusted men who had an emotional investment in their work.”

  Which was exactly the same thing he said to me that sunny spring morning he begged me to join him. “You were able to squeeze in one more subject by convincing Lightbridge I was invaluable based on my work? Very clever.”

  “I have to admit it wasn’t too hard. Once I turned on the waterworks and had a little bit of a breakdown over my guilty conscience, he almost ran to fetch you. It was touching. It took a bit more effort to persuade him to let you bring your manservant along.”

  “Bradley?”

  “Yes. I was overjoyed to see him on the carriage with you. I spent that whole week convincing Lightbridge you couldn’t function without him. Otherwise he would have stayed behind.”

  “Bradley,” I whispered. “I can’t believe he died for the sake of filling out your numbers.”

  “Now, Pip, it was more than just that. And besides, it’s not my fault you started shooting them like fish in a barrel once my back was turned.”

  “What choice did I have? Why did you run off like that? Certainly you knew they would rise again. Why not stay here and wait and gather your precious information once the dead started to walk?”

  “And miss collecting data in the field? The side effect of a lowered core temperature is just fascinating. Don’t you think? I mean immortality is one thing, but you men hardly notice how cold it really is around here.” She stopped to shiver, as if proving her point. “I had to record it in action. And who would give up the chance to see True North? You should have come with us. It was quite unforgettable.”

  “You forget. I had to stay here and tend to these … subjects.” I nodded at the men about us.

  She flashed me a pert frown. “You don’t have to sound so annoyed about it.”

  “I sound annoyed because I am annoyed. What else would you expect me to be? Grateful? Appreciative? You’re responsible for the death of nearly forty men, Geraldine. Forty God-fearing, hard-working, good men. Dead. Because of you.”

  Geraldine had little to say to that.

  Now, I realize that our conversation up to this point seems like an awful lot of privileged information for someone who was just a mere subject in her experiments. The truth is I was prompting her for it, keeping the conversation flowing because I was trying to buy time. On some level, perhaps Geraldine needed to get it all off of her chest, but while I busied her mind and her mouth, I worked myself free from her bonds. She might have tied a hell of a knot, but I was still a man of dainty constitution, as well as dainty form. The belts and ropes might have been tight enough to keep the larger workmen under wraps, but with a fair bit of wiggling, I was able to slip my hands free. I kept them at my back as I fished for another subject to distract her.

  “Why are you telling me all of this?”

  “Because I need you, Pip.”

  “I know. As a subject.”

  “No. I need someone else to corroborate my claims.”

  “What claims?”

  “Of what happened here. What do you think I’m going to tell the rescuers once they arrive?”

  It was my turn to laugh. “Tell them the truth! That the crew was the subject of a mass experimentation that left them the equivalents of rabid animals. Tell them you’re at fault. Or is that not part of your collected data?”

  “Be reasonable. I didn’t want this to happen. And I shouldn’t suffer because of it.” Geraldine set her pad and pen on the long table against the far wall, taking a deep breath before she turned to face me again. “I have a story prepared, but I need you to back me up.”

  A story? With all that has transpired in this heartless wasteland of ice and death, she boils it down to a story? I stared at her, in silence, waiting to hear her grand tale of adventure and sorrow.

  “When they arrive,” she began, “We will tell them how the crew mutinied after the crash. How they killed Albert and Lightbridge and half of the other men. How the new régime went house sick after a week or so and ended up at each other’s throats until everyone was dead.”

  I had to hand it to her; the woman showed a talent for weaving the most believable of lies. She always had. “And why do you need me to prove this?”

  Making her way to my cot, Geraldine sat alongside me. She lowered her voice to a sultry purr as she whispered in my ear, “They’ll never believe a woman could survive that kind of madness on her own. Unharmed, or rather not abused.” I shifted my glance to her hand on my thigh as she began to stroke my knee through the fabric of my trousers. I raised my eyes to hers, where we locked gazes as she finished with, “But with you to protect me, and my virtue, they will have to believe.”

  I tried hard not to laugh at the idea of her having even an ounce of virtue left after everything she had done. “How is this going to work if I’m just destined to become one of those things?”

  “Because you’re not.” She lifted her free hand to my hair, where she ran her fingers through my wayward locks as if we were two lovers alone.

  Perhaps it was her proximity, or her soft caress, but I had trouble following her line of logic. “I’m not?”

  “Once you’re off the compound, you will revert to your normal state.” Her touch shifted to my forehead, dropping to caress my nose, then lips. “You’ll detoxify for a few days, during which your temperature should return to normal, and then you’ll be right as rain.”

  It took everything I had to keep my hands seemingly in my bindings and resist the temptation to push her away. Under her stroking fingers, I asked, “You can do that? You can just take it away like that?”

  “Of course.” She traced the line of my jaw, then followed the tense muscles of my neck until she cupped my head by the back of the skull. “It just needs to work out of your system. As long as you don’t suffer a loss of motor function between now and then, you should return to a perfectly normal state.” Geraldine brought her face very close to mine, her breath hot on my mouth. “And I need you perfectly normal for when the rescue party arrives.” With that said, she proceeded to kiss me, deep and strong.

  I sat there in silence, with her latched to my lips and her words echoing in my heart. On the one hand, she didn’t mean for any of this to happen. She intended to inject us, record the findings, and then wean us off the compound on our return trip. It wasn’t her fault the accident happened. It wasn’t her fault those men died in the fire. In some small way, she really did mean well.

 
And yet on the other hand, all of those men died for nothing. Lightbridge, Albert, Kidman, Bathos … all of those men died for nothing. She could have told us sooner. She could have warned us after the wreck, took us off the injections and saved everyone from this terrible fate. She could have, should have, but didn’t. She kept pushing it through our veins so she could continue to collect her precious results. She knew those men would rise to combat us while she was gallivanting about the North Pole. She knew I would have to deal with the revenants, yet she left me and the others alone with those nightmares. Clueless. Defenseless. Hopeless.

  Fury seized me again, filling me with a cold, hungry rage. As Geraldine finished sealing her deal, she lifted her lips from mine, then leaned back to take stock of my reply.

  Unfortunately for her, my reply was swift and vengeful.

  ****

  back to toc

  ****

  Thirty-One

  Reckoning

  “You murdering bitch!” I yelled.

  Without giving her a chance to escape my reach, I struck out, landing a square blow against her nose and knocking her to the floor. It was the only time in my life I struck another person in anger. Even when Elijah told me he had asked for Geraldine’s hand, I kept my rage to myself. But now? Now a lifetime of bottled fury flooded out in a vile torrent of ugliness. I scrambled to my feet with every intention of beating the woman to death for what she had done.

  And I would have too, if it weren’t for my weakened state.

  I still am unsure how long Geraldine had kept me under the pentothal, but when I rose to my feet it was as though I had forgotten how to walk. At first I almost folded double, my knees turning to water under my weight. But I caught myself on the edge of the cot before I could join Geraldine on the floor. Lifting my bulk, I stood as best I could over her as she stared up at me, holding her nose.