Blood and Ice

by Robert Masello

  The first thing she did was to pour a lot of sugar into her coffee mug, and take a good long drink.

  “Just getting up?” Darryl asked. “ ‘Cause if you don't mind my saying so, you look like you should have stayed in bed.”

  “Thanks for the kind words,” she said, putting her mug down. “How does your wife not shoot you?”

  Darryl shrugged. “Our marriage is built on honesty,” he said, and Michael had to laugh.

  “The weird thing is,” she said, “when I was in Chicago, and I had car alarms going off in the middle of the night, and neighbors having parties till four in the morning, I slept like a baby. Here, where the place is as silent as a grave and the nearest car is parked about a thousand miles away, I'm awake half the night.”

  “You pulling your bed curtains closed?” Darryl asked.

  “Not on your life,” she said, dipping some dry toast in a runny egg. “Too much like a coffin.”

  “How about the blackout curtains on the window?”

  She paused, chewing slowly. “Yeah, I got up to fiddle with those last night.”

  “The idea,” Darryl admonished her, “is to close them before you get in bed.”

  “I did, but I could have sworn…” She stopped, then went on. “I could have sworn I heard something outside, in the storm.”

  Michael waited. Something in her voice told him what was coming.

  “Heard what?” Darryl asked.

  “A voice. Shouting.”

  “Maybe it was the banshee,” Darryl said, burrowing into his plate.

  “What was it shouting?” Michael asked, as casually as he could.

  “Best I could make out-and the wind was pretty high-it was something like ‘Give it back.’ “ She shook her head and went back to her toast and eggs. “I'm starting to miss those car alarms.”

  Michael could barely swallow his food, but he decided to keep his own counsel for a while.

  “Which reminds me,” she said, fishing in the pocket of her overcoat and removing a blood sample in a plastic vial. “I need a full blood assay done on this.”

  Darryl didn't look thrilled. “Why am I so honored?”

  “Because you've got all that fancy equipment in your lab.”

  “Whose is it?” he asked.

  “Just one of the grunts,” she said, offhandedly. “No big deal.”

  “Well,” he said, dabbing at his mouth with the napkin, “as it so happens, I do have some big news of my own.”

  Michael wasn't sure if he was kidding or not.

  “You are sitting, my friends, in the company of greatness. In that last set of traps, I captured a heretofore undiscovered species of fish.”

  Both Michael and Charlotte suddenly gave him their full attention.

  “This is for real?” Michael asked.

  Darryl nodded, grinning. “Although it is closely related to the Cryothenia amphitreta, which remained undiscovered until 2006, this specimen is as yet unrecorded.”

  “How can you be sure?” Charlotte asked.

  “I've consulted the definitive sourcebook, a little tome called Fishes of the Southern Ocean, and it's not there. Its head morphology alone is like nothing I've ever seen. It's got a bifurcated ridge above its eyes, and a purple crest.”

  “That's fantastic,” Michael said. “What are you going to call it?”

  “For the time being, I'm calling it Cryothenia — which means, ‘from the cold’- hirschii.”

  “That's modest,” Charlotte said with a laugh.

  “What?” Darryl replied. “Scientists name things after themselves all the time-and it will truly piss off a guy named Dr. Edgar Montgomery back at Woods Hole.”

  “Then I say go for it,” Michael said.

  “Now, what I'd really like to do,” Darryl said, “is catch a few more of them fast; there might be a whole school in the vicinity. The one I've got I'll need to dissect, but it'd be great to have a few spares that I could keep intact.”

  “Maybe you'll get lucky,” Michael said.

  “Murphy's ordered everyone to stay on base until the storm clears, but if I can get permission to go just as far as the dive hut, I'm going to drop some more nets and traps. You're welcome to come along-both of you. You could tell your grandchildren that you were there while history was being made.”

  Charlotte blotted up some more yolk, and said, “Much as I'd like to freeze my butt off fishing, I think I'll take a nice long nap instead.”

  But Michael, jumping at the opportunity to get off the base any way he could-especially since Eleanor was off-limits-said, “I'm game. When do you want to go?”

  One hour later, they were cruising across the ice on a snowmobile, with Michael driving and Darryl hanging on in back. Michael had been riding snowmobiles for years, and normally he'd found the experience exhilarating, but snowmobiling in Antarctica was something else. The air was so blisteringly cold that any inch of skin that was exposed could burn like fire, then go totally numb, in a matter of seconds. He had to keep his head down over the handlebars, with his ski mask covering his face, his goggles over his eyes, and his fur hood gathered tight around his head.

  It was a blissfully short ride to the dive hut, squatting out there on its cinder-block legs, and Michael let the vehicle glide to a slow stop at the foot of the ramp leading up to the door. The moment the sound of the motor died away, the roar of the wind took over. It whipped around them, nearly knocking Darryl over. Michael grabbed him by the shoulder to steady him, then helped carry the gear inside. Just getting the door closed again was a fight in itself, the gusting wind threatening to tear it right off its hinges.

  “Jesus,” Michael said, collapsing onto the wooden bench and brushing his hood back with his mitten. The hut, with its gaping hole in the middle of the floor, was not much warmer than it was outside, but at least they were protected from the wind. Darryl flicked on the heaters, and they both simply sat, shivering, for a minute or two before trying to do anything at all. As the heaters worked, a fine mist rose up off the water below and hung like a pall over the diving hole.

  “Got a lot of ice clogging up the hole,” Michael observed. “We're gonna have to break that up before we try to lower anything.”

  “Why do you think I invited you along?” Darryl said as he tried, without removing his thick gloves, to fasten his nets and traps to the long lines.

  “I should have known.” Michael looked around at the racks of tools and equipment fixed to the wall or lying on the floorboards. Ice saws, steel cables, spearguns. The most likely candidate was a sharp-tipped spade, but he found it impossible to hold without taking off his mittens; reluctantly, he did so. He still had glove liners on underneath, but at least they were slim enough that he could slip his fingers through the handle.

  The water, covered with a thin film of fresh ice, lay a couple of feet below, and it was awkward work to plunge the tip of the spade down, crack the ice, then pull the spade back again for another strike. It reminded Michael, inevitably, of shoveling the driveway after a big storm when he was a kid. His dad was always telling him to get out there and do it now-”it won't get any easier when it's had time to freeze over”-and Michael remembered well the peculiar pain, the one that would travel right up his arms, when he drove the tip of his shovel into what looked like loose snow but turned out to be hard-packed ice. The shudder would course down the length of his entire spine and even his teeth would ache. He was getting to relive that sensation, only over and over, and the shoulder he had dislocated in the Cascades began to complain bitterly.

  Eventually, he had reduced the ice at the bottom of the hole to a slushy mush, though he knew the ice would quickly start to knit itself together again.

  “You about ready?” Michael asked, feeling a rivulet of sweat running down the small of his back.

  “Almost… there,” Darryl said, testing the clamp on a trap shaped like an hourglass. The line was like a giant charm bracelet, looped and coiled around the baseboards of the hut, with nets and lur
es tied to it at various spots. Darryl crawled toward the hole on his knees, and at its very rim he leaned over to drop the weighted end of the cable into the water.

  “Clear away?” he asked, and Michael used the spade to spread the slush to one side. Darryl fed the line into the hole, and the lead weight at its end pulled it straight down. The winch, to which it was attached, hummed as the line dropped, carrying several of Darryl's devices into the depths of the polar sea.

  Michael used the spade to keep the ice shards away, until it was suddenly jerked, mysteriously, from his grasp, and rattled down the ice hole like a log shooting down a flume.

  “What the hell?”

  Darryl laughed and, looking up, said, “Murphy's going to charge you for that.”

  Michael started to laugh, too, but then Darryl plunged forward, too, headfirst, into the hole. Michael thought he must have been snagged by the cable somehow, and instinctively he stamped his foot on it to keep it from playing out, but the line simply burned beneath his rubber boot and kept on unspooling

  And it wasn't the cable, anyway.

  A big beefy hand, cobalt blue, was reaching out from under the floorboards of the hut and wrestling with the collar of Darryl's parka. Darryl's feet were kicking wildly, and he had one arm in the water and one flailing at his attacker.

  Michael grabbed at his boots and struggled to pull him up.

  A head, too, appeared now, from the space between the floorboards and the ice. A big head, with a frozen beard, and crazed white eyeballs.

  Danzig.

  His eyes locked on Michael, and like a lion distracted by more appealing prey, he loosened his grip on Darryl and started to haul himself up into the hut.

  Michael kicked him in the chin-it was like kicking granite- and pulled again on Darryl, who had managed to push himself up from the funnel. Ice crystals sprayed around the hut, and Darryl was screaming for help.

  Michael couldn't offer any. Danzig, covered with a silver sheen of ice, had propped both of his arms on the floorboards and was lifting himself like Poseidon rising from the deep.

  “Give… it… back,” he snarled, through what remained of his ravaged throat, and Michael kicked out at him again. Danzig grabbed at his boot, but it was wet, and it slipped right through his fingers.

  Darryl had backed up out of the hole and rolled under a bench, where he was scrubbing the frozen water from his head in a panic. He still looked like he didn't know what had hit him or what was happening.

  But Michael did, and Danzig was on his knees now, lumbering to his feet, icy water streaming off his soaking flannel shirt and jeans. Michael whirled around, scanning the walls, and his eye fell on the speargun normally used in defense against the leopard seals. He leapt over the wooden bench and yanked it from the wall. Danzig stumbled over the cable line and nearly fell, and Michael just had time to prime the gun and point it at the hulking creature coming at him. There was barely enough room to extend it between them before he pulled the trigger and the triple-pronged barb exploded into Danzig's heaving chest. The force of the thrust sent him reeling, backpedaling on the wet floor, until he managed to stop himself at the very edge of the gaping hole, his fingers clutching at the spear embedded in his flesh. His mouth opened wide, then, as he looked up in shock, Michael put out a boot and sent him tumbling backwards into the icy funnel. There was a loud splash, and a gurgle, a crackling of ice… and then, apart from the hum of the heaters, silence.

  Darryl was moaning and shaking the frigid water from his head, as Michael dropped to the rim of the hole, still holding the speargun, and looked down.

  There was nothing to see but the taut, steel-reinforced cable holding Darryl's traps, and a shimmering tracery of blue-white ice, already weaving itself together again above Danzig's watery grave.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  December 18, 1 p.m.

  Sinclair stood in the open doors of the church, and stared out into a blinding white snowstorm so thick he could not see as far as the bottom of the stairs. Even the dogs would not be able to navigate in those conditions.

  Putting his shoulder to the doors, he pushed them closed again and turned around to take in his kingdom… a bleak chapel, where the sled dogs lay sprawled on the stone floors or curled up into tight balls between the ancient pews. Where the relentless wind battered the walls and whistled through the cracks in the timbers and window frames. A massive cage, that's all it was… and he was the beast imprisoned inside it.

  His thoughts wandered to a day-a Sunday afternoon-when he had taken Eleanor to the London Zoo. He had hoped to amuse her, but it had not gone as well as he had expected. Each animal in its cage seemed only to make her more forlorn, and though he had never looked at them in that way, he began to see the captive creatures through her eyes. So many were alone, confined to small spaces with no natural elements-no bushes or trees, no rocks or sand or cooling mud-to afford them a sense of what they knew, or instinctively desired. Eleanor had clutched his arm and they had wandered down the winding path, past the rows of thick iron bars, until they had come to the most popular exhibit of all.

  The Bengal tiger.

  Its coat a sleek tapestry of black and orange and white stripes, the tiger had padded back and forth and back and forth in a space barely wide enough for it to turn around in. A crowd of onlookers gawked from only a few feet away, and several children pulled faces whenever the beast leveled its baleful glare in their direction. One of them whipped an acorn through the bars, and the nut bounced off the tiger's snout. The tiger roared, and they laughed and clapped each other on the shoulder with glee.

  “Stop that, right now!” Eleanor said, stepping forward to smack the hand of the boy about to launch another nut. The boy turned, stunned, and his scruffy friends rallied around him until Sinclair, too, stepped forward.

  “Get out of here,” he said, in a low but stern voice, “or I'll try tossing you into the cage.”

  The boy looked torn between impressing his friends and preserving his hide and when Sinclair reached out to grab his sleeve, he chose the latter course and scampered out of reach. But once he was a safe distance away, he stopped to hurl another acorn at Sinclair and shout a few defiant words.

  Sinclair turned back to Eleanor, who was staring fixedly at the tiger, which had stopped its endless rounds and was staring back at her. He dared not say a word-it was as if Eleanor and the tiger were silently communing. For as much as a minute, they held each other's gaze-an elderly spectator with white whiskers was heard to say, “Why, the lady's been Mesmerized”-but when she slipped her arm back through Sinclair's to walk away, there was a tear in her eye.

  Michael felt like he'd played the scene too many times before, trying to convince Murphy that the impossible was possible, that the unthinkable had occurred-a woman had been found frozen in the ice, that Danzig had been killed by one of his dogs, or that, after murdering Ackerley, he had returned once more to attack Darryl in the dive hut. The only advantage was that Murphy had by then become so accustomed to these strange conferences that he had stopped questioning Michael's veracity, or his sanity. Sitting behind his desk now, he simply combed his fingers through his thick salt-and-pepper hair-more salt, Michael thought, by the day-and asked his questions in a resigned, almost perfunctory manner.

  “But you're sure you got him this time, with the speargun?” he asked Michael.

  “Yes,” Michael said. “He's gone, for good.” But was he really as sure as he'd just sounded?

  “Either way,” Murphy said, “nobody goes to the dive hut until further notice. Make sure Mr. Hirsch gets that message loud and clear.”

  There was a burst of static from the radio behind his chair. “Wind speed, one hundred twenty, north, northeast,” a faint voice reported. “Temperatures ranging from forty to sixty below, Fahrenheit, anticipated to rise to…” There was further interference, then the voice returned, saying, “… high-pressure front, moving southwest, from Chilean peninsula toward Ross Sea.”

  “Sounds lik
e we might get a break tomorrow,” he said, swiveling in his chair and flicking it off. “About fucking time.” Then he turned back toward Michael with a printout in his hand. “Dr. Barnes's report,” he said, slipping on a pair of glasses to read aloud. “ ‘The patient, Ms. Eleanor Ames, by her own declaration an English citizen, of approximately twenty years of age’”- he stopped, glancing at Michael over the rim of his glasses-” ‘is in stable condition, with all vital signs now holding steady. There are still signs of recurring hypotension and heart arrhythmias, coupled with extreme anemia, which we will aggressively address once the blood work is complete.’ “ He lowered the paper and asked, “Got any idea when Hirsch will be done with that?”

  “Nope.”

  “Don't be too obvious, but give him a nudge.”

  “Wouldn't it be better coming from you?”

  “I don't want to arouse his suspicions any more than they might be already,” Murphy said. “For all he knows, he's just got another ordinary blood sample-let's keep it that way. And in case you hadn't noticed, he doesn't do well with authority figures.” He sat back, still brandishing the paper. “So this paper is the first official document, date-and time-stamped, confirming the existence of Sleeping Beauty.”

  “Eleanor Ames,” Michael corrected him.

  “Yeah, you're right. She's real enough now.” He conspicuously slipped the sheet into a blue plastic folder. “And as a result, everything from now on either has to go by the book,” he said, “or else it has to be left temporarily undocumented-and absolutely uncirculated. No paper trail, in other words, or loose lips. You do catch my drift?”

  Michael nodded.

  “The last thing we need here-the last thing in the whole fucking world-is any more scrutiny than we're already going to get, from the NSF and just about every other agency we deal with. I've got two years until I qualify for a full pension. I don't want to spend them filling out forms and giving depositions.” He gestured at a teetering stack of official-looking papers and forms in a desk tray. “See that? That's just the routine shit. Imagine if the latest headlines get out.”