Giants of the Frost (12 page)

Yet here I was, in the control room, still in my pajamas, dialing Mum's number back home in Lewisham. The phone rang seven times. Mum thought it was good luck to let the phone ring seven times. "Hello?"

"Mum?"

"Vicky! Are you all right?" She sounded panic-stricken, which didn't reassure me at all.

"Yes, yes, I'm all right. Why wouldn't I be all right?"

"Oh, Vicky, Bathsheba's warning has been weighing on my mind. Weighing on my mind like a brick. Are you coming home?"

Despite my fears, I grew irritated. "No, I'm not coming home."

"You can't fight against your path, Vicky. One day you'll have to get on it."

"How do you know I'm not already on my 'path'?" I asked.

"Because it feels all wrong and Bathsheba was very specific. A person with a name beginning with V is in danger from otherworldly forces."

I didn't point out that Bathsheba's prophecy was far from
specific
, and reminded myself that I had initiated this phone call and had better get on with asking her what I had to ask her, as much as it pained me to do so.

"Mum, I've been sleeping poorly, having terrible nightmares. In all the reading you've done, have you ever come across what it means to dream of being outside your body? Or trapped in your body?"

"Oh, Vicky!" I swear she sounded delighted. "That's it. That's what Bathsheba was talking about."

"I think they're just nightmares—"

"I'm going to see her tomorrow. I'll ask her about it. I'll take one of your old scarves, something with your psychic vibration on it." My mother always said "something" as though it were spelled "sumfink." This, along with her other mispronunciations, irritated me beyond measure. Mostly because I knew that under the veneer of my self-modified elocution, those same mispronunciations lurked.

"Psychic vibration?"

"I'll have to tell her what you've been dreaming about," she said. "Wait while I get a pen…" I heard the phone drop on the sideboard and cursed under my breath. What the hell was I doing, going to my mother for advice? Disturbed sleep was nothing new to me, especially after such a monumental life change. The bruises could have been caused by any instantly forgotten bump… perhaps the dream had been generated in response to them, not the other way around. I nearly hung up while she was away, as a moment of extreme clarity cut through the fuzz and fear of the last two nights. I had encouraged my (quite possibly clinically insane) mother to solicit advice from a (quite clearly fraudulent) psychic named Bathsheba. Bathsheba!

"Are you there, Vicky?"

"Yes," I replied mournfully.

"I must say, I'm very happy that you've finally come round to my way of thinking."

"Mum, I—"

"Now tell me about the nightmares. What happens?"

I sighed, knew I was in too far by then to pull back. "A hag. She comes and sits on my chest and tries to steal my breath."

"Oh, Vicky, I wish you would come home."

"And a stick-man in the forest tells me he won't hurt me."

"Ah, a nature figure. See, Vicky, it's all so clear. You're too far off your path."

"How do you know what my path is?"

"I know you're not on it. Chronic insomnia is a clear sign that you're out of alignment with the universe." I bit my tongue. I had asked for this.

"You'll get back on it eventually, I'm sure," Mum said in a reassuring tone. "I'll ask Bathsheba for advice. In the meantime, you need some sort of ward against evil spirits."

"Where am I going to get a ward against evil spirits?" It was almost impossible for me to form the sentence with my mouth, like trying to speak Spanish for the first time.

"I'll find out. Call me tomorrow night, I'll tell you what Bathsheba has to say. Now, Vicky, I want you to think hard about your future, about where the universe really wants you to be."

"Can you be more specific?"

Mum made that familiar snorting noise she employed to show me her disdain for anything specific, rational or scientific. "Don't fight fate, Vicky, it's dangerous."

"Thanks, Mum," I said through gritted teeth. "I'll call you." Dealing with my mother's mad extremes of superstition had helped. It made me feel more like myself, more able to dismiss what had happened there so far and plan to get some sleep. I got through the morning balloon launch and retired to my cabin. The rain had begun to ease, but the wind had grown stronger, howling through the trees and battering the windows. I got into bed. I closed my eyes. I couldn't sleep. My mind was a Grand Prix racetrack, my thoughts were Formula One cars zooming around and around: Mum, the hag, Skripi, Gunnar, Magnus, synoptic observations, hydrogen chamber, radar, Mum, the hag, Skripi…

I got up.

Sleep, or rather the getting-to-sleep aspect of it, had always been a miserable torture to me. Rather than endure the torture, I preferred to be active, to fill my waking time, and so it was that I spent my day wandering around a sodden haunted island in pajamas with blue hippos on them and a muddy anorak. Wretched, overtired, anxious, confused.

Night fell. The wind intensified, the rain dwindled. I launched the last balloon, then went back to my cabin and climbed into bed. I closed my eyes. I couldn't sleep. This time it wasn't thoughts keeping me awake. I had no trouble . dropping into that state of happy confusion that meant my brain was shutting down. But two steps down the hallway to sleep and I startled myself awake, my stomach twitching, my feet jerking away from an imaginary missed stair. Over and over I dozed, startled, dozed, startled. The wind raged. The panes were rattling, the door thudding softly in the jamb. I burrowed under the covers and tried not to try too hard to sleep.

That's when I heard it.

A knock. At the door of my cabin. Three sharp raps.

I sat up, pulling my covers up to my chin, and held my breath.

I must be mistaken, there's nobody else on the island, there can be nobody knocking, it must be
something blowing against the door.

Eventually my bursting lungs reminded me to breathe. No further knocking. Just the sounds of the wind. I dropped my head into my hands and moaned. I wanted more than anything to be home, near my mum, in my lumpy old bed, sleeping and sleeping and sleeping. My eyeballs felt as though they had been sandpapered and my brain didn't fit right in my skull. My neck ached, my back ached, my soul ached. The urge to put my weary head somewhere soft and succumb to oblivion was so strong it made me want to weep. And yet, sleep was just beyond my reach, behind a veil of half-formed fears and intensifying hysteria. Gradually, night receded, the wind calmed itself, and I drew my curtain and peered out at the day. Everything was dull grey. I couldn't tell left from right.

Only one solution remained for me. I had to sleep somewhere that wasn't my cabin or the control room. I had to sleep in Gunnar's bed. I stumbled to the door and warily opened it, remembering the knocking I thought I heard the previous night, and peered outside into the grainy daylight. I was utterly alone. Of course. I closed my cabin door behind me and, as I took a step, I saw something odd sitting at the foot of an old pot plant, just beside the lattice. I crouched to look.

It was an intricately woven bed of tiny twigs about the size of a small paperback, with a black skimming stone perched in the center. I recoiled from it, the weird mix of plant matter and crude workmanship. The stone had a symbol scratched on it, like a Y with an extra tine, like a three-fingered stick hand held up in a stop gesture. I glanced around again. Was it possible this had been here all along and I'd never noticed it before?

Of course it's not possible.

Perhaps I had just blithely walked past it every morning because I'd never been concerned about ghostly strangers knocking on my door before. Ever. In my life.

I needed to speak to Gunnar. I needed to call Magnus and tell him I wasn't coping on my own and he had to come back immediately. I kicked over the ugly bed of twigs, sending the stone skittering along the cement and into the dirt. I headed straight for the control room and phoned Magnus's cell phone. After four rings it connected to a machine, a disembodied Norwegian Magnus. I presumed he was asking me to leave a name and number, so I said, "Magnus, it's Victoria. Could you please call me as soon as you get this?" Then I hung up and started looking around for a directory of staff phone numbers. I had no idea where Gunnar was staying in Amsterdam, but his parents might. I flicked through the directory, found Gunnar's name, and a number under the heading "Next of Kin." I dialed, praying his English father would answer.

"
Hei, det er hos Holm
." A woman's voice. Damn.

"Um… do you speak English?"

"Who is this?"

"Ah, sorry. My name is Victoria Scott, I'm a friend of Gunnar's, stuck here on Othinsey—"

"Oh, Victoria, Gunnar has spoken of you. I'm Eva Holm, Gunnar's mother."

"Nice to meet you. I mean—"

"Gunnar isn't here."

"I know, he's in Amsterdam."

"Actually, he's on his way back here. I'm expecting him home tomorrow."

"Tomorrow?" That was one more long sleepless night away. I almost sobbed.

"Is everything all right?"

"I need to speak to him. Can you ask him to call me?"

"I certainly can. You sound anxious, my dear."

"I haven't been sleeping very well," I said, trying to make my voice calm and measured.

"Gunnar said you suffered insomnia."

What was Gunnar doing telling his mum all this stuff about me? I was irritated with him, realized it was because I was tired, then became conscious that I hadn't spoken for five seconds.

"Victoria?"

"Um, yeah. I'm alone on the island and I haven't been sleeping well, and if Gunnar could just call me and put my mind at rest about a problem I'm having with… the equipment, it would be really good."

"Certainly, I'll pass on the message."

"Thanks. Good-bye."

"Good-bye, dear. I hope you get some sleep soon."

I hung up, annoyed that I hadn't spoken to either of the people I so sorely needed to speak to. I checked the clock and decided to catch up on work before the morning balloon launch, hoping that Magnus would return my call. No luck. At a quarter past twelve I let myself wearily into Gunnar's cabin. The rain had cleared, the wind had blown away the cloud. I could see miles of clean sky above me and the air was still. I shut, it all out and walked determinedly past all Gunnar's books (I didn't want to find that scratchy symbol inside one of them and learn it was a supernatural kiss of death) and climbed into his bed.

All around was the smell of him, warm and faintly musty. Reassuring. I closed my eyes. I disappeared—blissfully, finally—into sleep.

When I woke it was dark. But not quite dark. Gunnar's curtains were open, allowing some reflected light from the station. His cabin wasn't as sheltered by the forest as mine. I checked my watch. I had been asleep for six hours. I predicted I could easily sleep another six, or sixteen. I got up and almost closed the curtain when something caught my eye.

Filling the sky above the trees, a curtain of fluttering rainbow lights.

"Oh, my God!" I gasped. Aurora. I had never seen it before and I pressed my hands and face against the window to gaze at it. Soft undulations of pale orange and green fluttered gently from one end of the sky to the other. My first urge was to rush outside and look at it properly. The old Victoria would have, the one who scoffed at irrational fears. But I was too afraid, because Gunnar had sown that seed in my head… aurora storms coinciding with thieves on the island. It made absolutely no logical sense at all, but I couldn't bring myself to go outside. In fact, I went to both the back door and the front door to check they were locked.

Though I wasn't entirely certain what fearful strangeness I was so carefully locking out.

Thanks to Gunnar's cabin, its musty warmth and saggy bed, I finally caught up on all my lost sleep. As my tiredness abated and my mind cleared, the hysteria of the past forty-eight hours came to seem less and less justified. I still wasn't completely comfortable—I kept my head down and dashed to the admin building when I had a task to perform, and hurried back just as quickly—but I began to reassure myself that rational explanations were probably lurking around there somewhere. Perhaps the knocking on my door was an effect of the wind; the stone carving a lost possession that fell out of the sodden pot plant; the horrid nightmares a combination of suggestibility (Gunnar and his ghost stories) and stress (because sleep is
always
my anxiety barometer). Refreshed and no longer tired at the impolite hour of 3:00 a.m., I sat at Gunnar's desk and booted up his computer. It was networked with the control room and I spent an hour entering some of my fudged figures. Then the siren call of the Internet, that purveyor of unsubstantiated knowledge, seduced me. I found myself looking for sites about isolated sleep paralysis, or the hag. There was plenty written about her. All of it, every single page I found, comforted the sufferer that it was a common sleep disturbance, that evil spirits probably didn't exist and that, no matter how real it felt, it
absolutely was not real
.

Reassured, I explored further. Information about psychosomatic wounds was plentiful, mostly in relation to stigmata, where people bleed from their palms in imitation of the wounds of Christ. A couple of dull rib cage bruises were barely worth a raised eyebrow in comparison to that. I kept surfing, flicking from page to page, pleased to be on the mild end of the insanity continuum.

Finally, I searched for anything about odd stone carvings. I hit a site all about runes, the alphabet of carved letters that the Vikings used. I now surmised, remembering Gunnar's Viking fetish, that the stone I had found belonged to him. Pictures of the various letters of the alphabet loaded in front of me. Finally, the rune on the stone popped up:
Eolh
, a rune for protection from evil spirits. I leaned back in the chair and yawned. My mother would be pleased; she had told me to find myself some kind of ward and one had turned up. Then I frowned, remembering that I had kicked the stone off the cement slab. Was I going to crawl around on my hands and knees, scrabbling in the dirt for it?