The Ice King (A Witch Ways Whisper) (9 page)

The wind tried to pick her off the ladder, her fingers barely able to hold. She was too cold, there was no warmth inside the centre now with the power out. She had no idea how to restart the generator, no one had shown her how and there were no instructions in any of the files or folders. As she climbed the tower she thought of fire, of soft flames. She would make a fire.

The thought of that warmed her mind and she tackled the comms mast. Dr Bale had been on the computer prior to his own demise and Vanessa had worked out that the satellite dish was connected correctly but had in fact been shifted out of alignment by the recent heavy weather. With this knowledge she felt strong, as though she knew what to do. It would take a few adjustments and then she would be connected to the world once more.

Except that in the night the storm had split the dish, the crack was a hairline fissure through the top left quadrant of the dish. Vanessa, perched on the structure, and the breath breathed out of her and was snatched into the prevailing wind. There was nothing to be done about this, she could not even cry, her face was too cold. She could not move for a moment and so she remained, clinging to the skeleton of the tower. She shut her eyes for a second or two, searching for her strength. When she opened them the sky was no longer dark, instead it was lit by a shimmering curtain of green.

Aurora
.

A memory pinked in Vanessa’s head. A day at the lake. A snowglobe in the eye of a pike. Just when she thought she did not have any more adrenalin, her body called in emergency supplies.

Faltering step by shaky step back to earth Vanessa stood in the snow as it whirled about her. The wind tugged at all her clothing, pushed at her back, shoved at her front. She had no idea what she was doing.

Fire. Yes. That would be good. That was what she was doing.

She dragged the sled indoors to help her move Dr Byrne’s body. Since the wall had been ripped out of the common room it seemed sensible to keep both bodies in there.
Ursus Maritimus, Polar bear.

The snow had blown inside her hood and leeched into her base layers. She changed out of one set of Arctic gear into another and warming herself with thoughts of the fire she would make. It was not a difficult task, her mother had taught her how many years ago and there was plenty of flammable stuff in the centre. There were the wooden joists in the roof of the common room, where it had fallen in, that would burn for the longest.

Once her stock of fuel was neatly stacked in the kitchen she realised that she could not make a fire, there was no chimney, no means of opening one up without freezing to death. At first a bleak panic swamped her and then she remembered the air vents. An hour in the store room turned up some metal pipe for a flue, a half roll of ceiling insulation that might prove useful and some duct tape.

The oven in the kitchen came away easily from its fittings and Vanessa spent several hours bodging it into a sort of woodburner. The flue fixed to the air vent and the smoke carried out. She didn’t care where. She had just under two weeks to get through.

Once again, she thought she would not sleep in her makeshift kitchen bunk, lined with cardboard, the sleeping bag pulled up and covered with a duvet to try and make it feel like home. Nowhere on earth, she thought, could feel less like home. She lay watching the flames in her fire. She knew she was asleep when, once again, the dream stranger took up his place in the corner of the room.

come closer

The dream stranger climbed into her bunk, spooned up against her, the warmth from his body, the lanolin and leather scent of his tweed jacket folding around her. His arm was curved tight around her waist, his other hand touched her hair, the fingers tender in the strands that fell across her face. She shifted so that she could see his face, she saw the marks tattooed into his skin, crisp black inked runes rising up from his temples into his hair and he smiled, a soft familiar expression. His eyes. One brown. One green.

“There’s no time.” he said and once again, she woke with a start.

She was not cold, even though she saw that the fire had gone out. The clock on the kitchen wall told her that it was another day, one more morning closer to rescue and she decided her best option would be to get up.

She spent some time assessing the food stores and rationing out what she could eat. With the cold she could expect to eat more for energy. If she was careful there were enough foodstuffs to keep her going until the supply plane showed up.

As she set about cooking a breakfast of porridge she realised that mentally she needed something to do, a distraction from possible doom ridden thoughts. She thought she would go over her notes on the Ice Man. It was too cold to develop the film in the camera today so that would wait until she was rescued. The phrase echoed in her head. The supply plane would come as scheduled. They would find her. She lit the fire once more, warmed the kitchen, heated the porridge. They would come. They would find her. Rescue.

As she ate the porridge she took the time to scan the Regulations Manual. It prohibited the lighting of fires. It contained details of correct sewage system maintenance. The emergency protocol involved electricity and communications masts. But the map showed her a complete breakdown of the site including a small shed at the edge of the complex that she had never paid overmuch attention to. Once or twice she had seen Dr Bale coming out of it or going into it. It had a padlock on it which she thought funny. The Arctic was not really the place for random crime.

Random crime. Was that what had happened to them? Was someone out there still? Part of her thought it would be a useful activity to head out and find evidence, footprints, snowcat tracks, anything instead of the nothing that existed. She would need answers for the questions that would arise when she was rescued.
When. Not if.

Fuelled by porridge, she exited via the hole in the common room wall and made a patrol of the centre.

She found what remained of Dr Bale, a black-red splather on the snow, bones were cracked and jutting but Vanessa found she could not be sick, what she witnessed was too far removed from human. She carried on. There was not one other sign of life or death, not a track or trail anywhere. The cold bit at her and so she headed back indoors.

She surveyed the site map once again. So. There was a maintenance store, a small nondescript building on the other side of the complex. She checked Dr Bale’s desk for any sort of inventory but found none. What were the chances that there was another satellite dish in there? She would get through today and tomorrow she would take a chance on the maintenance shed. She would make plans. Plans would keep her alive. Plans and tinned food and fire.

Later in the afternoon Vanessa abandoned her revision of the Regulations Handbook and headed to the workroom to retrieve her notes. She was relieved to find the notebook in tact, the pencil placed where she had left it as if nothing whatever had happened in between these two moments. As she flicked back a page her eye was caught by a glint on the microscope slide and she found herself sliding onto the stool and peering down through the lens. The moment she did the spectacle and science that she found within pushed her fear and anxiety aside and she lost herself in the miniature universe.

She was drawing the images she could see, the patterns and crystallisation of the Ice Man’s ice. She was struck by the way the light caught and refracted in the sample. It must be an optical illusion. Her work light was off because of the pow-

The power was off. There shouldn’t be light, there shouldn’t be microscope because the microscope was electric. She stood up from the bench at once, the stool clattering to the floor behind her. Where was the light source? She looked down at the slide, the ice itself gave off a light. Record. Her mind struggled forward, reached for her lifeline of knowledge;
ursus maritimus, ursus arctos, ursus arctos horribilis,
Observe.
ursus maritimus, ursus arctos, ursus arctos horribilis
There was a scent in the air. Familiar.
ursus maritimus, ursus arctos, ursus arctos horribilis
Smokey honey and wet wool, but it was only as she turned and saw that the ice coffin and its occupant were gone that she made a sound.

The water had collected in icicles around the pallets they’d rested it on and there were plants and leaves refrozen into it. It looked like an ice throne, a thing of sculptural beauty. There was no sign of the body. Vanessa did not move. Bears and bones roamed her head. Her eyes took in the room.

What she saw was a tired looking man backed into the farthest corner of the workroom. His clothes, which looked to Vanessa like tweed trousers and a heavy woollen outdoors jacket, were stained dark and he was bearded. His salt and pepper hair was swept untidily back from his face and he looked warily at her.

Vanessa’s heart had been invaded by the moths that earlier had fluttered round her head. She felt the edge of the counter behind her digging into her back and trusted in the reality of that.
ursus maritimus, ursus arctos, ursus arctos horribilis
She was here. She was alive. They would rescue her.

“Where am I?” his voice rasped in English. He was not, it appeared, stone age or bronze age.

“You are at the De Quincey Langport Arctic Research Centre, just inside the topmost edge of Norway.” Vanessa was astonished at how level her voice sounded. It was the simple recitation of facts that helped. Yes. Here they were. Exactly here. And now. He took several moments to think about this during which time Vanessa looked at him, at the ingrained dirt of his skin, the bright light of his eyes, the intensity of his expression, the leather broguing of his well-worn boots. She had a strong sense of déjà vu. Not déjà vu. More intense, an idea of recognition.

He did not move from his safe haven in the corner and Vanessa stayed beside the cold hard edge of the countertop. A fact. A stainless steel fact to link to so that she didn’t drift.

“Where was I?” he asked. Vanessa thought that the quick answer was in the ice of the frozen lake but she also understood that this man wanted to know exactly where he had been found. She recited the co-ordinates.

“Do you…have a map?” he asked. Maps seemed good to Vanessa, a map was something she could hold onto. She took one step into the room, tugged out the map from her workpapers and unfolded it. She looked over the landscape, a group of trees, a river, a lake, a forest, some high ground, some low ground, the reality of place. For some sort of mental safety that she didn’t quite understand, she placed her left hand firmly over the spot where the research centre huddled in the weather.

“I found you just along this inlet…by the…” she was talking and pointing, her finger smoothing over the paper of the map and her mind recalling the exact place, the exact events, the needle of the compass spinning, showing her exactly the way. “Here…by this eastern edge of the lake…we’ve been taking samples and…” she realised then that the man had not moved from the corner.

“Are you…?”

“Atrophied. Slightly.” as he answered she saw he was in fact leaning against the wall for support. There was a shimmering of fear in his face and a nervous edge to the smile he gave. He ran his hand through his unkempt hair, pushing it back from his face.

“You were the one who chiselled me out of the ice?” he asked.

“Yes.” This answer seemed to pain him.

“The rest of your colleagues?”

Vanessa did not want to answer. Stating the truth out loud made it real, unmanageable. The Ice Man stared her out.

“All dead?” he asked with an air of certainty.

Vanessa nodded. His face was distant with thought.

“It is a harsh place.” He looked back at her with fresh energy. “You found me.”

“I dragged you back on a tarp. I thought you were an archaeological find. Prehistoric.”

He looked shocked at this and startled as if something tremendously important had just popped back into his head.

“Archaeological?”

“Yes. You know. Like Lindow Man…?”

“Who?” Ice Man looked puzzled.

“Or Tollund Man? The bog bodies…? Except you were…in the ice….”

He looked, not quite blank at this, but still, he did not know what she meant.

“Bog bodies?”

“The ones they found at Tollund in Denmark and in Cheshire. Ancient people. Preserved.” Vanessa felt a sense of dread as once again he took several moments to process his thoughts.

“What year is this?” the man asked at last. Vanessa’s heart was pounding very hard now, there was a damp woolly smell coming off the tweeds the man was wearing. She had to take a second to sift her thoughts and find her voice amongst the layers of clothing that were struggling to keep thoughts or heat in.

“What year do you think it is?” she whispered. The man looked very directly into her eyes and revealed all his fear and sorrow.

“1925.”

Vanessa struggled. She managed to nod but was shaking hard and had a feeling that she was in a nightmare and that at any moment she might wake up and the body in the ice would still be waiting in the workroom, unthawed. Everyone would be alive and argumentative. She could feel the folds of the map beneath her fingers. A little frost had formed on the surface of it.

“What year is this?” as he asked once again Vanessa picked up the pencil from the pot and wrote the answer down.

“1985.” he read the number, traced his hand over it. “Sixty years…” he said, almost to himself, his face concentrating, calculating. Vanessa noted the rough state of his hands, the healed over scars and nicks, the dirt beneath his nails. He made an attempt to stand, managed to stumble towards the bench. Vanessa rushed to help him, her arms looping under his shoulders, his weight bearing down on her. She looked up, at the dark, greying hair, the bearded face, the eyes
one brown, one green
.

“There’s no time.” he said, and it began to snow.

The snow fell exactly like a blanket. Vanessa, holed up in the kitchen for the duration, divided her observations between the sleeping Ice Man swaddled onto a camp bed by the far wall and the view of the lake through the triple glazed window. The sky was the most beautiful colour she had ever seen, a bronze green that intensified as the snow fell in heavier flakes.