Blood and Ice

by Robert Masello

  Right now, for instance, he tried to anchor himself in the moment, focusing first on the bow of the snowmobile coursing across the barren landscape, then, as he approached the shoreline, the languid soaring of a large white albatross overhead. It had been accompanying him for a while, dipping and rising in lazy circles that kept perfect pace with the progress of the two machines. Lawson had fanned out to his left and was making a more direct approach to the whaling station, while Michael hewed more closely to the shore, passing between the beach, strewn with bleached bones, and the ramshackle factory buildings. The two snowmobiles came together again in the wide-open flensing yard, and when the engines were turned off, the silence fell like a blanket. It took a few seconds for the ears to adjust, then Michael could hear the wind blowing snow across the frozen ground and the distant cry of the albatross. As he looked up, the bird circled again on its wide, outstretched wings, but showed no sign yet of alighting.

  Lawson slipped his goggles onto his forehead and said, “If the dogs were here, they'd have heard us coming-”

  “And we'd have heard them by now,” Michael agreed. “But we've got some time before the storm comes in, so why don't you look around down here while I go up the hill?”

  Lawson nodded, and taking hold of some ski poles for balance-Michael noticed that he was definitely limping-said, “I'll catch up with you in an hour.”

  Michael checked his watch, then climbed back on his snowmobile and revved the engine. He shot down the bleak alleyway that ran between what were once the boiling rooms, then up toward the church, with its crooked bell tower. Rather than try to navigate through the tombstones surrounding the church, he stopped the machine halfway up the hill and marched the rest of the way to the steps. Putting his shoulder against the heavy wooden door, he shoved it open, stepping into a humble, stone-floored church, with worn wooden pews; at the end of the center aisle, a trestle table had been set up as the altar. A crudely carved crucifix hung on the wall behind it. He'd been in such a hurry to leave the base that he hadn't bothered to bring all his camera equipment, but he ran off a few quick shots with his trusty Canon, nonetheless; knowing he still had a couple of weeks left on his pass, he planned to come back again and do it right-especially as, even then, perhaps a century or more since the church had been built, the place retained a strange air of expectancy. Somehow he would want to capture that, the feeling that at any moment the pews might once again be filled with weary whalers and the pulpit with a preacher reciting Scripture by the light of an oil lamp.

  Under a pew, Michael saw the torn covers of a prayer book, but when he tried to retrieve them, he found they were frozen in place. He took a shot of that-too arty? he wondered-then slipped the camera back under his parka and, pulling his gloves back on, walked toward the altar. He thought he heard a scratching sound- could there still be rats? — and stopped. So did the noise. An old leather volume, its title obliterated by time, rested on the trestle table. He took another step, and the sound became clearer. It was coming from behind the altar, where he saw a door, with a black iron bolt thrown across it. Perhaps, he thought, that was where the preacher had once lived. Or maybe it had been a storage space for whatever valuable objects-chalices, candlesticks, Bibles-the church had once contained.

  He rounded the trestle table, and suddenly he heard a sound that stopped him dead in his tracks.

  He went closer, and it came again, more distinctly. It was a voice-a woman's voice!

  “Open the door! Please, I can't stand it! Open the door, Sinclair!”

  Sinclair? Michael pulled off a glove again so that he could manipulate the lock and bolt, and through the wood he could hear the woman, breathing heavily, nearly sobbing.

  “I can't be alone! Don't leave me here!”

  He threw the rusty bolt and pried open the creaking door.

  What he saw left him dumbfounded. A woman-a young woman, loosely wrapped in a long orange down coat-staggered backwards, her face white with fear. She had long brown hair that fell around her face, and green eyes that, even in this dim light, offered a penetrating gaze. She backed up between a wooden table, with a bottle of wine on it, and a cast-iron stove that gave off a dull glow. Shredded prayer books and jagged pieces of wood were heaped in a corner.

  They stood speechless, staring at each other. Michael's mind was reeling-he knew this woman. He knew her! He had first seen those eyes at the bottom of the sea. He had first seen that ivory clasp, now peeking up on her breast, beneath a slab of milky ice. Sleeping Beauty.

  But she wasn't sleeping, and she wasn't dead.

  She was alive-breathing hard, and haltingly.

  Michael's mind went into a kind of shock. The woman was there, right before him, cowering only a few feet away, but he could not accept the evidence of his own eyes. That woman, who'd been frozen stiff, was moving and sensate. His thoughts went off in a dozen directions, searching for some reasonable explanation, but came rushing right back again empty-handed. What explanation could there possibly be-suspended animation? a vivid hallucination that he would awaken from at any second? Nothing he could think of could possibly account for the terrified young woman now standing, feebly, a few feet away.

  Raising his bare hand to calm her, he noticed a tiny tremor in his own fingers. “I'm not going to hurt you.”

  She appeared unconvinced, cringing against the wall, beside the window.

  Slowly, without taking his eyes away from her, he pulled his glove back onto his already numb hand. What else should he say? What should he do? “My name is Michael… Michael Wilde.”

  The sound of his own voice was oddly reassuring to him.

  But not, it appeared, to her. She didn't answer, her eyes flitting around the room as if assessing any chance of escape.

  “I've come from Point Adelie.” This, he surmised, probably meant nothing to her. “The research station.” Would that make any sense, either? “The place where you were. Before… this place.” Though he knew she spoke English-and with an English accent, no less-he wasn't sure if his words were making any impression at all. “Can you tell me

  … who you are?”

  She licked her lips, and nervously brushed a strand of hair away from her face. “Eleanor,” she said, in a soft but agitated tone. “Eleanor Ames.”

  Eleanor Ames. He said the name to himself several times, as if trying to anchor it in reality that way.

  “And you're from… England?” he ventured.

  “Yes.”

  Placing a hand on his chest, he said, “I'm from America.” The whole thing was becoming so absurd he could almost laugh-he felt like he was reading from a bad sci-fi script. Next he should pull out a ray gun, or she should demand to be taken to his leader. He wondered for a second if he was on the brink of losing his wits.

  “Well, it's nice to meet you, Eleanor Ames,” he said, again nearly laughing at the sheer absurdity of it all.

  And damned if she didn't gently subside, in a quick curtsy.

  Quickly, he let his eyes sweep the room. The iron bedstead was covered with a dirty old blanket, and there were a couple of the bottles, the ones from the sunken chest, nestled underneath it.

  “Where is your friend?”

  She didn't answer. But he could see a fast calculation going on behind her eyes.

  “I believe you called him Sinclair?”

  “He's gone,” she said. “He's… abandoned me.”

  Michael didn't believe that for a minute; he could tell that she was, for whatever reason, covering for him. Whoever, and whatever, this woman would truly turn out to be, her expression and voice betrayed all the palpably human emotions; nothing too mysterious was going on there. And as for the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of this Sinclair person, it paled in comparison to all the other questions thick in the air. How had she become imprisoned in a glacier? And when? How had she escaped from the block of ice in the lab? Or found her way here, to Stromviken?

  Or-and this was the biggest, most inconceivable, question of
all, the one that rendered all the others incidental-how had she actually come back to life?

  If there was a polite way of asking any of them, Michael sure as hell didn't know what it was.

  A bag of dog kibble was propped against the wall. He'd start simple, with an easy one. “So this Sinclair,” he said, “he's got the sled dogs with him?”

  Again, another quick calculation, before she must have realized there was nothing to gain from further lies. Her shoulders slumped. “Yes.”

  There was an awkward pause. He could see now that her eyes were red-rimmed, and her lips were cracked. She licked them. His eyes went to the open bottle on the table. He knew what was in it.

  But did she know that he knew?

  When he looked at her again, he could see that she did. Her eyes were downcast, as if in shame, and a hectic flush rose into her cheeks.

  “You can't stay here,” he said. “A storm is coming. It will be here soon.”

  He could see that she was lost, and confused. What was her relationship to Sinclair? He had, after all, locked her in this room and gone off God knows where. Was he her lover? Her husband? Was he the only person in the living world that she knew? Was he the only person in the world that she could know? Michael wasn't even sure what questions to ponder. All he did know was that he couldn't leave her there, in the freezing church. He had to find a way to get her to leave with him, right away.

  “We can come back for Sinclair later,” Michael suggested. “We won't abandon him. But why don't you come with us now?”

  At the mention of the word “us,” he saw her eyes grow wide and glance through the open doorway into the empty church. Who else, she was clearly wondering, was about to intrude upon her?

  “I have a friend with me,” Michael explained. “We can take you back to the station.”

  “I can't,” she said.

  Michael could guess what she was thinking-or at least some of it. “But we can take care of you there.”

  “No, I won't leave,” she said, though her voice faltered and even her expression seemed to change. It was as if the protest alone had drained the last of her energy. She moved away from the window and sat on the edge of the bed, her hands supporting her on either side. A rising wind rattled the shutters, and a draft made the fire in the grate glow brighter.

  “I give you my word,” he reassured her, “no one will harm you.”

  “You won't mean to,” she said, “but you will.”

  Michael wasn't sure what she was getting at, but he heard in the distance the buzzing of Lawson's snowmobile as it climbed the hill. Eleanor looked up in alarm. What, Michael wondered, would she make of that noise? Would it have any significance?

  What world-what time-had she come from?

  “We have to go,” Michael said. Eleanor sat, clearly trying to concentrate her thoughts, as still as a statue, as still as he had seen her in the ice.

  As still as Kristin had been, in her hospital bed.

  The snowmobile was coming closer, the roar of its engine penetrating the empty church. And then it stopped outside.

  Eleanor Ames looked fixedly at Michael, as if trying to think through a confoundingly difficult puzzle-just as he was doing. He could only imagine all the questions in her mind, all the factors she was trying to balance out. The lives-not only her own- that she was trying to save, or protect.

  “Hello?” Lawson called out. “Anybody home?” His footsteps echoed on the stone floor.

  Eleanor's fingers worried the ratty blanket.

  Michael, for fear of saying the wrong thing, said nothing more.

  “Hey, Michael, I know you're in here somewhere!” Lawson called out, strolling toward the altar. “We've got to get rolling.”

  Eleanor's expression was filled with anguish… and an exhaustion Michael had seen only once before, on the face of a man who had spent the entire night single-handedly trying to save his house from a wildfire in the Cascades. To no avail.

  She coughed, but she was too weary to lift a hand to cover her mouth.

  “Can you tell me something?” she said, in a voice filled with defeat and resignation.

  “Of course. Anything.”

  Lawson was close enough that Michael could hear the squelching of his boots just outside the door.

  “Whatj year is this?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  December 16, 11:30 a.m.

  The wind, when Sinclair left, had been low, but it was coming up fast. He had guided the dogs down through the ramshackle buildings of the whaling station-past the blacksmith's shop, where dozens of harpoons, some as long as the lance he had carried into battle, were still mounted in racks against the wall-and toward the northwest, where he could see a low ridge of ice, obscuring anything beyond. He doubted he would find anything on the other side, but what choice did he have? Surrender himself, and Eleanor, to the ministrations of those from whom they had narrowly made their escape? Sinclair trusted no one

  … and never would again.

  Even, sad to say, his own beloved. He'd locked Eleanor in the rectory before leaving because, in her present weakened state, he did not know what she would do; he feared that when she awoke, she might succumb to some sudden impulse and attempt to do away with herself. How precisely that could be done, he wasn't sure. He knew that their corruption, despite its awful price, afforded them protection from maladies that would kill anyone else-cholera, dysentery, the mysterious Crimea fever… even a hundred years, or however long it had been, imprisoned at the bottom of the sea. But whatever devilish mechanism fueled their endless life could not, he suspected, withstand corporeal destruction. He glanced down at the back of his torn boot, where the dog had ripped at his calf. The wound beneath had stopped bleeding, it had even healed over, but in some indefinable way it was not living flesh. It was a patch, a scab, a plaster-something helping to hold together a walking, talking, breathing skeleton. He could break, it seemed, but he could not wither.

  Not at all in keeping with the brigade's motto, he reflected wryly. It was neither death, nor was it glory. Instead, it was a sort of way station, reminding him of the idle days the Light Brigade had been forced to endure in the Crimea.

  For weeks, they had done nothing but wait about, observing the infantry actions from their standing mounts, held in reserve, constantly, for a decisive moment that never seemed to come. Under the direction of Lords Lucan and Cardigan-two men, brothers-in-law, who despised each other thoroughly-the 17th Lancers had been shifted from one remote outpost to another, always held in check lest they be spent too soon. Sinclair, like many of the others, had begun to feel that they were becoming an object of derision among the other troops-the fancy horse soldiers, in their plumes and pelisses, their gold braid and their bright cherry trousers, munching on hard-boiled eggs and biscuits-while their compatriots did the dirty work of storming the redoubts. When, at one critical juncture, the Russian cavalry had been allowed to escape in total disarray without being pursued and annihilated, Sergeant Hatch, barely recovered from his bout with the malaria, had broken his pipe in disgust and thrown the pieces into the dirt.

  “Is it a gilded invitation they're waiting for?” he snarled, while reining in his impatient horse and throwing a dark look up at the heights, where the Commander in Chief, the elderly, one-armed Lord Raglan, could be seen with his telescope, surrounded by aides. “They won't get a better one than that.”

  Even Captain Rutherford, known as much for his imperturbable nature as his bushy muttonchops, appeared impatient, and after taking a long sip from his flask-filled with rum and water- leaned across his saddle and offered it to Sinclair. “It may be another long day,” he said.

  Sinclair had taken it and drunk deeply. Ever since the 17th Lancers had set sail, the war had been a vast, costly anticlimax-a violent journey across pitching seas that had killed off countless horses, followed by endless marches through narrow gorges and empty plains, all the while leaving bodies in their wake, food for vultures and vermin… and the
strange, scuttling creatures that they glimpsed only at night, lurking just beyond the pickets at their posts. Sinclair had asked one of the Turkish scouts what they were, and, after superstitiously spitting over his own left shoulder, the man had muttered, “Kara-kondjiolos.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “Bloodsuckers,” the scout replied, with disgust. “They bite the dead.”

  “Like jackals?”

  “Worse,” he said, searching for the right word. “Like… the cursed.”

  Whenever one had been spotted-never as anything more than a hunched-over shape clinging to the shadows or crawling close to the ground-Sinclair had noted that the Catholic recruits ostentatiously crossed themselves and everyone, regardless of faith, sidled closer to the campfires.

  It was a far cry, the foreign land he was traveling through, from his home. And though he had seen nothing so stirring ever since, he remembered well the flags and bunting, the brass bands and fluttering handkerchiefs, when the army had first boarded the ships in England. Even the town of Balaclava, once an idyllic little seaport, had been rendered unrecognizable. Before the British troops had arrived, the town had been a favorite retreat of the residents of Sebastopol, its pretty little villas famous for their green-tiled roofs and neatly cultivated gardens. From all reports, every cottage and fence post had been adorned with roses, clematis, and honeysuckle, and light green Muscatel grapes, ripe for the picking, hung in great clumps from the vines. Orchards carpeted the hillsides, and the pristine waters of the bay sparkled like crystal.

  And then the Agamemnon, the British navy's most powerful man-of-war, had steamed into the harbor, and the army-twenty-five thousand strong at that landing point alone-had made the town its base of operations. The villas were overrun, the gardens churned to mud, the vines trampled underfoot. With many of the soldiers sick or dying from diarrhea, the tiny landlocked harbor had become an immense and reeking latrine, foul with waste and refuse. Lord Cardigan, no fool, had elected to stay several miles away, on board his private yacht, the Dryad. There, his meals were prepared by his French chef, while a flock of orderlies and aides rode their weary horses up and down the steep hills to the harbor, carrying his dispatches. Among the troops, when out of earshot of an officer, he had come to be called “The Noble Yachtsman.”