Blood and Ice

by Robert Masello

  Michael and Charlotte waited for her to finish.

  “I do still have a will of my own.”

  And Michael had just caught a welcome glimpse of it.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  December 21, 3:15 p.m.

  “Vampires.”

  The word hung in the air of Murphy's crowded office like a piece of rotten fruit, and no one wanted to be the first to taste it. Darryl had tossed it out, but Michael and Charlotte and Lawson just sat there, stunned, waiting for someone else to take the bait. It finally fell to the chief to break the impasse.

  “Vampires,” he repeated. “That's what you're saying we have on our hands?”

  “Only in a manner of speaking,” Darryl said. “I took some samples from Ackerley analyzed them, and they show the same remarkable properties I saw in the samples from Danzig.” Turning to Charlotte, he said, “And, by the way, they were the same properties as I saw in that sample you asked me to analyze. The one marked E.A.”

  “Eleanor Ames,” Charlotte said, and when Murphy threw her a look like that's supposed to be a secret, she retorted, “As long as we keep operating in the dark, we're not going to get anywhere. Can't we all just get on the same page?”

  And Michael had to agree. “Eleanor Ames is the name of the woman from the ice,” he explained to Darryl.

  “Sleeping Beauty?”

  “We found her at Stromviken.”

  “How'd she get there?”

  “By dogsled.”

  “Yeah, but who took her there? And why?”

  “She went on her own. With Sinclair, the man who was frozen with her.”

  “You're missing my point. Who drove the sled?”

  “They're alive,” Michael said. “They went there on their own. That's what I'm trying to tell you.”

  Darryl laughed, and even slapped his knee lightly. “Right, yeah, okay. I thought we were having a serious meeting here.”

  “We are,” Michael said, and when Darryl looked around, from Lawson to Charlotte to Murphy, and saw that no one else was laughing, the smile left his own face.

  “Holy moly” he said, solemnly.

  “Holy moly's about right,” Murphy seconded.

  “And she's been quarantined in the sick bay ever since,” Michael added. He saw no reason to mention her little excursion to the rec hall.

  Darryl looked around at them all one more time, just to make sure they weren't pulling his leg, but the sober expressions they still wore told him they were not. His next reaction was indignation. “And you didn't tell me? You all knew, and nobody thought I should be told, too? Especially since I was the guy who had to do all the donkey work back in the lab?”

  “It was my call,” Murphy said. “I didn't want word getting out. This place has been enough of a circus already.”

  Darryl was still fuming, but after he'd sputtered out a few more words of protest, and they'd managed to apologize and calm him down, he went on with his disquisition. “Well, their blood-that's including your Miss Ames, who I'd really like to meet sometime, now that I've finally been voted into the inner circle-isn't like any human blood I've ever seen.”

  “In what way?” Charlotte asked. To Michael, it sounded as if she was the one holding something back. How could they ever solve this puzzle if everyone had separate and secret pieces?

  “It's not just depleted of the red cells,” Darryl said. “It's actively consuming them. It's as if this blood were from cold-blooded creatures trying to become warm-blooded, as if reptiles, or some of those fish I've been dredging up from the bottom, were trying to emulate mammals by ingesting hemoglobin-but failing at it over and over again, and having to then replenish their supply.”

  “Which they can only get from other human beings?” Michael suggested.

  “I'm not so sure about that. The species barrier should make that the case, but this is such a strange disease that I can't actually confirm it. Someone suffering from it would probably make no such distinctions. The anemia would become so great, they would try to rectify it with anything available, like a drug addict scrambling for any kind of a fix.”

  “But how can they keep going at all,” Charlotte asked, perched on the edge of her folding chair, “without red corpuscles to carry the oxygen through the bloodstream? Their organs would stop functioning, and their muscles and other tissues would decay. Wouldn't they just run out of steam?”

  “That's close to what Ackerley described in the notes he wrote in the meat locker,” Michael interjected.

  It was Charlotte's turn to look puzzled-what notes? — but Michael just gave her a wave to indicate he'd fill her in on all that later. There were way too many secrets still.

  “He said he had the sensation of being oxygen-deprived,” Michael went on, “as if his lungs weren't filling, no matter how deeply he breathed. And he said he needed to blink a lot, to clear his vision.”

  “Yes, that would make sense,” Darryl said. “The ocular mechanism would be compromised, too. But I'll say one thing in favor of this blood-it is amazingly, stupendously recuperative. Per milliliter, it's loaded with more phagocytes than-”

  “English, please,” Murphy interrupted, and Lawson nodded in agreement.

  “Cells that consume foreign or hostile particles,” Darryl explained. “Like a little cleanup squad. So if you couple that feature with its ability to extract whatever it needs from any outside source, you've got a very neat and self-regenerating system. Theoretically speaking, as long as its raw supply is periodically replenished with new blood-”

  “Its host can go on forever,” Charlotte concluded.

  Darryl simply shrugged in acknowledgment, and Michael felt as if a cold hand had reached inside his shirt to brush his chest. They were talking about these “hosts” as if they were the anonymous subjects in some medical experiment, but in fact they were talking about Erik Danzig and Neil Ackerley and, most important of all, Eleanor Ames. They were talking about the woman he had discovered in the ice, and brought back to life-a woman he had played the piano with, and interviewed on tape-as if she were some creature from a horror flick.

  Another silence fell, as the revelation and its ramifications made themselves felt in the room. Michael himself experienced an odd twinge of vindication. If anyone had still been harboring any doubt about the validity of Eleanor's story, if they were still questioning how she might have survived for so many years, frozen beneath the sea…

  But it did leave another question-what, if anything, could be done to remedy the disease? — unresolved. Michael knew it was what they were all thinking.

  Finally, the mood was broken by Murphy, who leaned forward, his fingers steepled on his desk, and said, “What's wrong with having her go cold turkey? What if she were confined and medicated and tranquilized-you guys have more drugs than you know what to do with-until the need just went away?”

  Darryl pursed his lips and tilted his head skeptically to one side. “If you'll forgive the analogy, that would be like denying insulin to a diabetic. The need wouldn't go away. The patient would simply go into shock, a coma, and die.”

  “Then how are we supposed to keep her adequately supplied?” Lawson asked, voicing the question they were all pondering. “Start a blood drive?”

  Murphy snorted and said, “I can tell you now, it'd be a hard sell with the grunts.”

  “But transfusions, from our present blood supply, could address the problem on a temporary basis,” Darryl suggested. He looked around at all of their faces. “Until we can figure out a cure- assuming one exists-I don't see how we can avoid doing something like that.”

  “I think she may have a head start,” Charlotte said, and Michael guessed that this was what she'd been holding back. “A plasma bag has gone missing. I thought I'd misplaced it, even though I couldn't imagine how. But now, well, I guess I know what happened to it.”

  Michael could hardly credit what he knew, in his heart, was probably true.

  “That's just great,” Murphy said in exasperati
on. “Just great.”

  Michael knew what was going through the chief's head-the endless reports he would have to write and the internal investigations he would have to conduct in order to account for all of this to his overlords. And how could he, really? They'd be carting him off to Bellevue in no time.

  “And let's not forget that there's still another one out there,” Murphy added. “And he's still on the loose.”

  The young lieutenant, Michael thought. Sinclair Copley.

  “It's awfully dangerous out there,” Lawson commented. “Unless he made it back to the whaling station, he's probably at the bottom of some crevasse by now.”

  “From your lips to God's ear,” Murphy said.

  But Michael wasn't prepared to give up so easily, nor did he feel it would be right. Given all that this man had already survived, who was to say he had succumbed to the storm, or the polar extremes? Glancing out the window at the clear skies and the low, drifting snow, he said, “We've got a break in the weather. We could use it to mount a search. If we know anything at all about the guy, it's that he's got a powerful will to live.”

  “And there's something else, too,” Charlotte put in. “We've got the most important thing in the world to him. Someone he'll want to get back-no matter what.”

  The cold hand that had brushed across Michael's chest earlier suddenly brushed him again, and to his own surprise clamped down like a vise.

  “Charlotte's right,” Darryl said. “When it comes to bait, we have the best.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  December 21, 11 p.m.

  Eleanor felt like a prisoner who had been returned to her cell. Dr. Barnes had left her yet another of the blue pills and a glass of water, but she did not want to take it. She did not want to sleep anymore, and she did not want to hide in the infirmary any longer… especially because the temptation in the white metal box was too great. (What, she pressed herself, had they called it? A fridge? Was that it?)

  Regardless, she'd seen the bags inside-clear like a haggis casing, but brimming with blood. And she could feel the need coming upon her, again. The very walls around her seemed drained of color, and she often had to close her eyes, then reopen them, simply to restore everything to its natural state. Her breath, too, was growing short and shallow. Dr. Barnes, she believed, had noted the change in her respiration, but Eleanor could hardly explain to her the cause-much less the remedy.

  And here she was, alone again, or, as Sinclair had often recited from his book of poetry, “All, all, all alone, alone on a wide, wide sea!” Where is Sinclair right now? In the church, sheltered from the storm? Or lost in the snow and ice, searching for me?

  She paced the room like a tiger she had seen in the London Zoo, back and forth, over and over again; even then she had felt for the poor beast's isolation and confinement. She struggled to keep her gaze from the “fridge” and her thoughts from straying into the same dismal channels. But how could they not? Her past life had been taken from her completely-her family, her friends, her very country-and her present life was reduced to a sick bay at the Southern Pole… and a ravening need that it appalled her even to think of.

  On that fateful night in the Barrack Hospital, after Sinclair had come to her, she had indeed rallied. By the next day her fever was nearly gone. Moira had exulted over her, and Miss Nightingale herself had brought her cereal and tea and drawn a chair up to her bedside.

  “We have missed you on the wards,” Miss Nightingale said. “The soldiers will be glad to see you back.”

  “I will be glad to see them, too.”

  “One soldier, I should think, in particular,” Miss Nightingale said, and Eleanor had blushed.

  “Isn't he the man who once barged into our hospital in London,” Miss Nightingale went on, while holding up a spoonful of cereal, “and required stitching up?”

  “Yes, mum, he is.”

  Miss Nightingale nodded, and when Eleanor had eaten the cereal, said, “And an attachment has formed between you since?”

  “It has,” Eleanor admitted.

  “My greatest fear, when recruiting my nurses, was that they would become too attached to certain soldiers in their care. It would reflect badly on the nurse herself, and more importantly, it would put our entire mission into question. You know, of course, that we have many detractors, both here and at home?”

  “I do.”

  “Narrow-minded people who believe our nurses are nothing more than opportunists and worse?”

  Miss Nightingale offered another spoonful of the cereal, and though Eleanor had not yet regained her appetite, she was not about to refuse it. “That is why I must ask you to do nothing-and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough-that would bring your service here, or ours, into disrepute.”

  Eleanor signaled her assent with a mute tilt of the head.

  “Good,” Miss Nightingale said. “Then I think we understand each other.” She got up, carefully placing the cereal bowl on the seat of the wooden chair. “I trust in your judgment and take you at your word.” With a rustle of her skirt, she went to the door, where Moira was waiting. “I'm afraid there has been more bloodshed near the Woronzoff Road. I will need you both to report for duty tomorrow at first light.”

  Then she was gone. Eleanor's head fell back on the pillow and stayed there until the night came… and with it, again, Sinclair.

  He had studied her face in the candlelight as if he were looking for clues, but seemed happy with what he saw. “You're better,” he said, putting his hand to her brow. “The fever's gone.”

  “It is,” she said, resting her cheek against his palm.

  “Tomorrow, we can leave this accursed place.”

  Eleanor didn't know what he was talking about. “Leave?” Sinclair was in the army, and she was to report for duty in the morning.

  “We can't very well stay here, can we? Not now.”

  Eleanor was confused. Why not? What had changed, apart from the fact that they had both recovered?

  “I'll manage to find some horses,” he went on, “though we might have to make do with just one.”

  “Sinclair,” Eleanor said, worried that his own fever might have returned after all, “what are you saying? Where would we go?” Was he delusional?

  “Anywhere. The whole damn country is a battlefield. Wherever we go, we shouldn't have any trouble finding what we need.”

  “What we need?”

  That was when he had met her gaze most steadily, cupping her face between his hands, before speaking. He had knelt by the bed and, in a low voice, told her a story, a story so terrible she had not believed him-not a word of it. A tale of creatures that haunted the Crimean night, and preyed upon the dying. (“I see it in my dreams every night,” he said, “and still I could not tell you what it was.”) Of a curse, or a blessing, that defied death itself. Of a need that never stopped… and to which she was now, like him, a slave. She couldn't believe it, and she wouldn't believe it!

  But she could feel the wound just above her breast-it had left a telltale scar-which Sinclair said was the proof.

  He kissed it now, contritely, and she felt the hot tears burning in her eyes. She turned her face to the wall, gasping for breath. The room, which had a tall window opening onto the sea, suddenly felt unbearably close and stifling.

  Sinclair clutched her hand, but she withdrew that, too. What had he done to her? What had he done to them both? If he was lying, then he was mad. If he was telling the truth, then they were both doomed to a fate worse than death. Eleanor had been raised in the Church of England, but she had never been particularly devout; she left that to her mother and her sisters. But what Sinclair was telling her was even to her mind a sacrilege of such magnitude that she could barely contemplate it… or dwell on the life that it would necessitate.

  “It was the only way I could save you,” Sinclair was saying. “Forgive me. Eleanor. Please say that you can forgive me.”

  But at that moment, she could not. At that moment it was all she could do
to breathe the damp air of the Bosporus, and consider what she might do…

  Even now, it was a dilemma that offered no easy way out.

  As she paced the floor of the infirmary, it was a struggle to keep her thoughts from the white metal box-with the blood inside it- that stood before her. All she had to do was reach out, open it, and take what she needed. There it was, beckoning to her.

  She forced herself to look away and went to the window.

  The constant sun imparted a dull glare that reminded her of the light in the sky on their ill-fated voyage aboard the Coventry. By the clock, it was getting on toward midnight, but she knew that there would be no proper night. Here, it was all a seamless unraveling of time, and she knew that she'd already taken, in the eyes of God, far more days than could ever have been her allotted share.

  Michael. Michael Wilde. The moment he came into her mind, she did feel her thoughts lift. He had been so kind, and then, when he had taken the liberty of joining her on the piano bench, so mortified at his transgression. Importunate as his conduct had seemed, Eleanor did understand she was in a new world, where customs differed. There was so much she would have to learn. Symphony orchestras that played from little black boxes! Lights that came on and burned steadily with the flick of a switch. Women-and African women, to boot-serving as doctors!

  Then she remembered how shocked her mother had been at the idea of her traveling to London-a single, unaccompanied young woman-to become a nurse. Perhaps everything that was once shocking eventually became routine. Perhaps the terrible toll of the Crimean War had startled the conscience of humanity and put an end to such mindless slaughter. Perhaps this world was a more enlightened one. A world where even ordinary things were made to smell sweet and nations settled their differences with raised voices but never raised swords.

  She allowed herself to feel an unfamiliar ray of hope.

  It had felt so good-so normal — to be seated at the piano again. Her fingers had so enjoyed touching the keys. It had brought back all of her lessons from the parson's wife, playing in the front parlor with the casement windows flung open and the family's cocker spaniel chasing rabbits across the wide green lawn. Mrs. Musgrove had a standing order with a music shop in Sheffield, and twice a year they sent her a selection of popular compositions. That was how Eleanor had come to fall in love with so many of the old, traditional ballads and songs, like “The Banks of the River Tweed” and “Barbara Allen.”