The Ice King (A Witch Ways Whisper) (6 page)

PART FOUR

Arctic ‘85

What delighted and depressed Dr Angela Byrne about her intern, Vanessa Way, was that the young woman was full of intelligence and passion and creativity and that, before many more years passed, that intelligence would be questioned, the passion dimmed and the creativity crushed.

Vanessa Way was resourceful and hardworking. There was no task too small, no project too large. She had been out in the field from forest to tundra, she had learnt to use the snowcat in one lesson and could, in fact, strip it down. Dr Byrne felt she could trust Vanessa Way with her life, and that was quite something out here in the far north where Norway and Finland, Sweden and Russia all began to blur into the snow.

The male contingent at the research station were, in Dr Byrne’s less than medical opinion, like primates that had undergone one too many neurological experiments. Dr Byrne had been carrying them for too long and, once she got the measure of Vanessa, she realised that she didn’t have to carry that burden any longer. She could leave the men to their idleness and atavism and she and Vanessa could do the proper research.

To provide an example; Dr Finbar Hardy, a rather portly climatology professor from Dublin, didn’t go out to collect samples or measurements if he deemed it ‘too cold’. As a consequence, he had not left the building since November.

“Little Miss Way is just too bloody enthusiastic.” was Dr Tom Crowe’s chief complaint about the diligent and energetic young intern. “She’s just bloody infuriating.” he stirred his porridge. He was running low on oats and it was another two weeks before the supply plane dropped in.

“I call her Tigger.” Dr Finbar Hardy confessed, eating his powdered egg which he had prepared in a style that might be called scrambled.

“I’d tap that.” said Dr Craig Bale. As he lifted his spoon of Shreddies to his mouth a Sabatier knife sliced past his ear and landed with a thwonk in the surface of the table. It twanged back and forth a little, giving some idea of the velocity at which it had been thrown.

“If you so much as look at her too long Bale, that is the knife I will use to cut off your balls.” was Dr Angela Byrne’s farewell.

“Someone’s got a crush.” Bale muttered.

“I heard that.” shouted Angela from some way down the corridor.

Today the two colleagues were travelling up the frozen lake to take pillar samples from the permafrost in a narrow inlet that reached out from the lake, into the forest that edged it. The two had worked well together and amassed more data and samples in the two months since Vanessa’s arrival, than the male members of the research team had in almost a year. Dr Byrne meant to make up for all the lost and wasted time. Where before she had been tired out with the effort of being such a one-man band, Vanessa’s arrival and skill had given Dr Byrne renewed energy. She had determined, in fact, that she was going to offer Vanessa Way a position in her department at the university.

Today, if the pillar sampling went according to plan, they were also going to work through a grid they had mapped of the lakeside forest area and log all the flora and possible fauna that was out there. Already Vanessa had shown a wide ranging knowledge of lichen and they had begun a detailed record of the local forest nearest to the centre and the species present within.

As they skimmed across the frozen lake on the snowcats, the sky gunmetal above them, Angela thought that as soon as they all returned to civilisation she would like to introduce Vanessa to her youngest brother, Mottram.

They had been working on a section of the lake several miles to the east and their track along the shoreline now led them into a small inlet that poked its icy finger deeper into the forest so that the trees formed a dense horseshoe around the narrow point of frozen lake. They had grid marked the area into square metre boxes on their maps.

“If you work your way down the first row of grids we’ve marked on this eastern side and I will work down the west and we can meet up in three hours?” Dr Byrne suggested. Vanessa nodded agreement and, unloading their kitbags, they left the snowcats at the edge of the inlet and walked inward. It was a satisfying walk of less than half a mile, the trees closing in on three sides, spiking the air with their needle scent and what had been a bright blue Arctic sky clouded over, the air growing colder and heavier.

At the apex of the inlet they began working their separate grids and moving apart from each other. Vanessa was quickly lost in her task, noting the tree species and working her way through their task sheet of scrapings and sampling. Each lichen that she found she could name, lichens had been a favourite since her childhood, she loved the colours and the idea of the symbiosis of the two lifeforms helping each other to survive. Teamwork. That was how she had described their existence to her mother. The lichen were neither one thing nor another and yet they could survive almost any habitat.

She was prickled for a moment by a memory of her mother, just a smile on a lakeside day and yet the sorrow she felt was like ice freezing through her. She took a moment, a deep breath, looked about her. She could see Dr Byrne in the near distance.

As she stepped back into her task her eye was caught by the sight of a lichen patched onto some bark litter that was half embedded in a nearby bank of snow. It was a particularly beautiful shade of green and as she lifted a small piece up with her clumsy gloves it seemed like lace, the light caught and angled inside it so that it looked bejewelled. Vanessa stared at it for a long time, her hand moving this way and that to trap the light in all the ways she could.
Fierce little shafts of light. Diamond white. Snow white
. She looked up and as she did so, the forest before her seemed suddenly sprinkled with light, the bark and needle litter glittered, the light travelled impossibly. It must be bouncing off the snow. Vanessa looked for reasons for the effect, but there was something awry about this light. There was no source for a start. The sunlight that had accompanied them on their journey from the research huts had long since been clouded over. She took a few steps out of her grid, as she did so her eye was drawn further into the wood by a patch of lichen mapped onto the trunk of a tree.

It was roughly the size of a good quality dinner plate and it ranged and clung to the bark of the tree showing three shades of green dependent upon how deep into the gnarls of the bark it had reached.
Such a beautiful green
. She sketched quickly, her gloves not hampering her quick pencil movements. There was a sound. Animal. She looked up. Something moved between the trees at some distance. A horse grazing the reindeer moss except it lifted its head and was taller than any horse she’d ever seen. The hide, a pale storm grey speckled darker here and there and swashed by the silver grey mane. She took a few steps closer. Should there be a horse here? She stumbled forward, her foot catching on a fallen branch. She lurched, catching herself, her arm reaching for the nearest tree. When she looked up there was nothing but trees. No horse. And she had wandered badly.

Vanessa had an odd sense of waking up from an uneasy dream. She looked around. She had definitely been awake, there was no way of taking a nap in this landscape. She was bundled into her arctic gear but the sense of having slipped out of kilter lingered and she looked at her watch. She had lost thirteen minutes. Surely not? It hadn’t taken her that long to walk from the edge of the lake? She orientated herself. She was only a few steps into the trees. She checked her light meter, noted the levels. She flipped the page on her task sheet and noted the new grid reference.

She took her usual care collecting samples of the tree lichen, a crustose form, probably a Rhizocarpon but she didn’t know which. She would have to look it up when she returned. As she wrote she grew aware of a brief wafting scent of honey. Where was that coming from? Vanessa sniffed the lichen, it smelled of cold and earth and bark, and yet, there was a distinct smoky honey scent in the air. Where was it coming from? Needle litter? A fungus in the mouldering bark? She made a note of it and labelled samples of each. She looked across to where Dr Byrne was working. All seemed normal. Except that Vanessa had spent her lifetime in Havoc Wood and understood the strengths of the forest. What she had felt just then, the sense of time shifting combined with the scent given off, was a biological power surge akin to the heat that her mother’s hand gave off on some encounters when she was out gamekeeping.

Vanessa continued mapping but the lichen proved a distraction. This one, with the blue heads looked like a
Cladonia Bellidifloria
, Red Solider Lichen but, as its name suggested, it ought not to be blue. Vanessa grew excited at the idea that she might discover a new lichen.
Starlight blue, fallen from the heavens
. There was that thought drift sensation again. Vanessa halted herself and felt dizzy, as if the landscape stretched slightly as it left her behind, or perhaps caught her up? She was unsure. Something was happening and it was not quite right. Once again she looked across the landscape to her colleague for a reality check. Dr Byrne, stooped over at the lake’s edge taking pillar samples, a sound of slowly ground snow, of metal implements, of breath.

Vanessa thought she might pack up early and head to the rendezvous point. She was aware that she was not thinking straight and this was no landscape in which to be woolly headed. She was also conscious of the idea that somewhere along the line ten minutes had drifted by without her noticing and she did not wish to be late, after all, Dr Byrne was not a patient woman.

In the cold hard confines of the laboratory Vanessa did not understand what was happening. The boxes and sample bags she pulled out of her bag offered up commonplace scraps of everyday lichen and mosses. Dr Byrne was reading over Vanessa’s notes for the day, going over the gridsheet, flicking the paper back and forth.

“This is the wrong grid reference.” Dr Byrne’s voice was tight and low and she looked pinched.

“What? But that can’t be…” Vanessa looked at the map, at her own markings and co-ordinates. She was out by over half a mile.

“It can be. It is.”

Vanessa was mortified. The co-ordinates, all the samples, the notes, the light readings, everything was skewed.

“But I was…I used the compass…I took my readings…I know how to use a compass…I was there. I don’t…I don’t…” Vanessa could say nothing more, angry tears were starting to choke her. This event might just be a horrid mistake but Dr Byrne would most probably not forgive her; she did not suffer fools.

“Which compass did you take?” Dr Byrne was mulling over the results, her mouth twisting and curling through the thoughts. Vanessa Way reached into her kit for her compass. It was the one she had brought from home, a present from her mother, the most state of the art one they could find in the outdoors shop in Woodcastle. Dr Byrne took it from her, examined it, compared it to the company compass.

“Good quality. Better in fact than the company one…OK.” Dr Byrne handed back the compass. “It is what it is, Vanessa. Write it off. There’s a storm coming in tomorrow. We can start again day after.”

“But …it just can’t…” Vanessa picked up the contents of the first sample box, the red soldier lichen maddened her, it had been blue. “It was blue…I don’t underst…This was a cool blue colour.” it was so obviously red, embarrassingly red, blush red,
cringe red
. “This is wrong…all wrong.” she began to open all the boxes, struggling with anger. She shook her head to rid herself of the damming tears.

“No matter.” Dr Byrne turned away “Write it off. It happens.”

“But it didn’t happen.” Vanessa knew she was making it worse with her desperation and Dr Byrne headed out without a backward glance.

Angela Byrne had been hungry enough, an hour or so ago, to consider making the effort of cooking up her favourite Pasta alla Norma in the bearpit of the research station kitchen. After her debacle with Vanessa Way she barely had the appetite for a cup-a-soup.

She couldn’t understand what had happened, especially in the light of Vanessa’s obvious distress. It was not that the girl had slacked off or made a genuine mistake. It was clear that she felt certain she had taken the readings and sightings that she had taken. Dr Byrne felt she knew her young colleague very well. As a consequence, after leaving Vanessa she had checked out her own work and here too there were oddities and anomalies. Her pillar samples showed odd concentrations of sodium and potassium, some samples had shown traces of gold as if they were sprinkled through, impossibly, with the precious metal. Nevertheless, whatever the cause, the entire day’s work was thrown and it rankled with Angela. As she boiled the kettle for the powdered soup her mind redrew the map they worked from. They both knew it so well, literally every last square foot of it, such was the detail of their research. As she looked back over the day, she remembered the biting wind that had blown through the forest that had affected her own work pattern; the air so bitter she had to turn against it. It was possible that both she and Vanessa had become disorientated. Angela Byrne thought she didn’t need to be such a hard case. She had been impatient and unfair.

As she thought this, she was aware that Dr Finbar was stirring his tea with one of her lab thermometers. It must be a hallucination?

“Finbar?” Angela glared at the tea. Finbar looked up at her, bewildered.

“What? They’re my teabags…”

“But not your thermometer…”

Finbar looked at his hand, he shrugged, wiped the thermometer on a tea towel and handed it back.

“What the hell are you doing with…?”

“Christ woman…I needed a few bits of kit. I put everything back…”

“Put everything back? What do you mean ‘everything’?”

There was a snigger from the table where Craig was slurping up egg noodles with black bean sauce, the sauce making little black flecks of stickiness on the surface of the table. She shot him a glance and looked back at Finbar who was squirming.

“You should have kept your mouth shut Finbar my man…” Craig was pushing this and Finbar grimaced at him.