Blood And Ice Part 23

Murphy nodded in agreement, but said, "You mind going to see if he's okay? I just tried him on the intercom but he's not picking up."

Although Michael had hoped to join Charlotte and Darryl in the commons-he'd spent the whole day making notes in his room and had pretty much forgotten to eat-he could hardly say no.

"Don't worry," Murphy said, "I'll be sure to save you some grits." He turned to Lawson. "But how's your leg? You up to it?"

Lawson, who'd dropped the ski gear on his ankle, said, "It's fine-no problem at all. Use it or lose it."

To Michael, he always sounded a little like a coach on the sidelines of a big game.

"Might want to use some poles," Murphy said, and Lawson agreed. "Wind's gusting at eighty miles per hour."

They suited up and grabbed some ski poles from the equipment locker, and while the others poured into the brightly lighted commons, they turned the other way, up a long bleak concourse where the wind was whipping up little cyclones of ice and snow and sending them whirling, like tops, back and forth from one side to the other. Some gusts were so strong that Michael was blown back against a wall or half-buried fence, and had to wait to push off again until the wind had died down. Not that it ever stopped. There were times, in Antarctica, when you wished for nothing more than stillness, a temporary truce with the elements, a chance to stand still and catch your breath and look up at the sky. The sky could be so beautiful-so blue and pristine it looked like the most perfect thing imaginable, an enameled bowl fired to a hard blue glaze-and at other times, like now, it was simply a smudged bucket, a dull broad glare that was impossible to distinguish from the endless continent of empty ice it glowered over.

The ski poles were a good idea; Michael doubted he could have stayed upright without them. Lawson, with his sore ankle, would surely have been toppled. In fact, Michael made it a point to stay a couple of yards behind Lawson, just in case he went over and started to roll. Once the wind caught you and knocked you down on an icy patch, you could roll like a bowling ball until you hit some kind of obstruction; Michael had seen a beaker named Penske, a meteorologist, rolling past the Administration module one morning until he collided with the flagpole and hung on to it for dear life.

Michael rubbed one mitten across his goggles to clear away some of the snow, and for a second he wondered if he could make his fortune by marketing goggles at the South Pole that had their own winds.h.i.+eld wipers. He'd have liked to call out to Lawson, to ask him if the leg was really okay or if he wanted to turn back, but he knew that the wind would blow the words right back into his mouth-and the temperature was so low you could crack your teeth if you kept your mouth open too long.

They made their way past the glaciology lab-Michael glanced inside for Ollie, but if the bird had learned anything so far, it was to stay inside the crate on a night like this-and the marine biology lab, and the climatology lab, until Michael saw Lawson heading off to the left, toward a big, rusted-out trailer squatting on its cinder blocks like an old red rooster. Bright light shone out through its narrow window panels.

Lawson stopped to rub his ankle under the rough wooden trellis that framed the ramp, and motioned for Michael to go on ahead. The door was a steel plate-dented, scratched, and covered with the faded remnants of Phish decals-and Michael banged on it with his fist. Then, having given warning, he shoved it open and went inside.

His goggles immediately fogged up, and he had to slip them back on top of his head. He parted some thick plastic curtains, threw his hood back, and found himself standing in a sea of metal shelves and cabinets, all at least six feet high, and crammed with samples of indigenous moss and lichens. There were little white labels, inscribed in a spidery hand, on each shelf or drawer. Fluorescent lights flickered in the ceiling, and from somewhere among the impenetrable racks he heard the tinny sound of cheap speakers playing an endless jam.

And he also heard something else-a low, wet, snurfling sound. When Lawson came through the door, Michael instinctively motioned for him to keep silent. Lawson looked puzzled, but Michael gestured for him to stay where he was, by the door, and then, still carrying his ski poles, he started to thread his way through the maze of cabinets. Could it be another one of the dogs, Michael wondered? Or more than one? Should he back off and call the chief for reinforcements? But what if Ackerley was in big trouble and needed help right now?

The music was getting louder, but so was the strange lapping sound. Like somebody slurping soup. Or cereal. Was that all it was? Ackerley, deaf to the world, eating a bowl of cornflakes and rocking out? Michael found himself wedged between two towering cabinets, one marked GLACIAL MORAINE, SW QUADRANT, and the other reading SPECIMENS, STROMVIKEN SITE. But there was a chewing sound, too, so maybe it wasn't cereal. More like a stew maybe. Why would you eat some microwaved c.r.a.p in a lab trailer when Uncle Barney was serving up hot grits at the memorial dinner?

He peered through some of the shelves and saw a long lab counter, not so different from Darryl's, with a couple of sinks, a microscope, some bottles of chemicals. But no one was sitting on the lab stool. And now that he looked again, he saw that a couple of potted plants were upended, and one of them had smashed onto the floor. An iPod was cradled on a shelf between its own tiny speakers. Michael stepped out of the shelves and closer to the lab table. The eating noises were coming from the other side, from down near the floor, and as he moved around the corner, he saw the tips of two rubber boots, their clasps undone, sticking out. He gripped the ski poles harder.

The eating sound became a rending sound, like flesh being torn, and when he got all the way around, he saw first the broad expanse of a flannel s.h.i.+rt, stretched across the shoulders of a big man, huddled over a body on the floor, and busy at work. If he hadn't known better, Michael would have thought, in that first instant, that it was Danzig.

Who was dead.

He raised one of the sharp-tipped ski poles and shouted, for want of anything better to say, "Hey! You! Stop what-"

But he got no further. The huddled man's head whipped around, startled, the beard so matted with blood it looked like it had been coated with a bright red paintbrush. His eyes were red-rimmed, too, and blinking furiously. Michael was so stunned he fell back, and the man leapt up at him, snarling. One of the poles went flying, clattering against a cabinet, and Lawson hollered, "What's going on?" and started cras.h.i.+ng through the labyrinth.

The man clutched at Michael's collar, almost as if seeking something-his help?-and his breath reeked of blood and decay. But worst of all, it was Danzig-dead and frozen Danzig, with his throat torn out by the dog-whose fingers were ripping at the fabric of Michael's coat. Michael staggered back against another set of shelves, and the whole rack toppled over, taking him and Danzig down onto the floor amid a hail of dirt and seeds. Michael banged him in the face with the handle of the pole, wis.h.i.+ng he could somehow get the sharp end into action. Danzig's face hovered above his own, his teeth stained with blood. His eyes were black with rage and-though Michael would only have time to think of it later-a bottomless grief, too.

Another pole suddenly flashed past Michael's head and gouged a hole in Danzig's shoulder. The man reared back, then jumped at Lawson. But his boots skidded on the loose seedpods, and he had to scramble to get up again. Michael quickly rolled over and stumbled to his own feet. Danzig had shoved Lawson, not all that steady to begin with, out of the way; he was sprawled on the floor, waving his ski poles wildly.

But instead of continuing his attack, Danzig stumbled away and went barging through the shelves with his arms swinging like an ape's, pulling one rack after another down onto the floor behind him. Sod and seeds and gravel flew everywhere, and by the time Michael had clambered over the detritus and made it through the plastic curtains and out to the door, the only thing he could see was a slick of blood on the ramp and a dark shape staggering blindly through the trellis and on into the maelstrom outside.

December 15, 10:30 p.m.

"What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?" Murphy said, once Michael and Lawson had cornered him in the kitchen. Uncle Barney was just out of earshot, frying up one final skillet of grits. "Danzig is dead, for Christ's sake!"

"He's not," Michael repeated, keeping his head and his voice low. "That's what we're trying to tell you."

"You saw him, too?" Murphy said to Lawson, looking for confirmation of the impossible.

"I saw him, too." Lawson glanced at Michael, as if urging him to continue.

"And he's killed Ackerley" Michael said.

Murphy looked as if he was about to swallow his own tongue. The blood drained from his face.

"We found Ackerley in his lab," Michael said, "already dead, and Danzig was mauling the body. In fact, he's out there somewhere right now."

Murphy leaned back against a freezer, plainly unable to process what he was being told-and Michael couldn't blame him. If he hadn't seen it with his own eyes-if he hadn't been attacked himself-he wouldn't have believed it either.

"So, he's not in the body bag," Murphy said, thinking out loud, "and he's not in the core bin where we put him."

"No," Lawson said, "he's not."

"And Ackerley's dead, too," Murphy repeated, as if simply to let the terrible information sink in.

"That's right," Michael said. "We should go after him-now- before he gets too far."

"But if he's gone stark raving mad," Murphy said, as if clutching at a ray of hope, "he'll just freeze to death out there."

Michael didn't know what to say to that. It sounded perfectly reasonable-of course a crazy man, without even a hat on, would surely die either from exposure or from falling into a creva.s.se-but at the same time he wasn't sure of it at all. Nothing made sense anymore. He had been with Danzig in the infirmary; he'd watched as Charlotte recorded his time of death. Whatever was running around out there on the ice wasn't necessarily Danzig at all. Michael didn't know what to call it.

"What did you do with Ackerley's body?" Murphy asked, trying hard to collect himself.

"It's where we left it," Michael said. "Charlotte should examine it as soon as possible. And then we need to store it somewhere."

Uncle Barney said, "Excuse me, gents," opened the freezer to retrieve some b.u.t.ter, then limped back out of earshot.

"Not where we put the last one," Murphy said, keeping his voice low. "We'll use the old meat locker outside. If Dr. Barnes is wrong about this one too, I don't want it running amok like the other one." He suddenly caught himself, and said, "You know what I'm saying. I mean, Danzig was a great guy, and Ackerley was a nice enough fella, too, but this is all just so G.o.dd.a.m.n bad, so G.o.dd.a.m.n awful ..." He trailed off, clearly flummoxed at everything he had to deal with.

But Michael didn't think Charlotte had been wrong. Impossible as it was to accept, Danzig had died, then somehow come back to life-though that was not an argument he was prepared to make just now.

Lawson bent down to nurse his bad ankle, made worse by the scuffle in the botany lab. And Murphy's hair suddenly looked a lot more salt than pepper.

"We could look for Sleeping Beauty at the same time," Michael said, eager to get the go-ahead from Murphy. "And her Prince Charming."

"Not to mention the sled dogs," Lawson said. "If the NSF finds out that the last team ever allowed down here-the dogs that poor Danzig had to get grandfathered in-are missing in action, it's going to be a bureaucratic nightmare."

"Danzig used to run them to Stromviken," Michael said, "and the forecast's good, for a change. This storm is pa.s.sing."

"Not for very long," Murphy said. "Last report, a new front's due by early evening tomorrow."

"All the more reason to get on it," Michael said.

Lawson nodded his agreement.

"What about your ankle?" Murphy asked. "Looks like you're favoring it."

"Snowmobiling's no problem. And if we do find them-the dogs or the bodies-at least I know how to drive the sled back to camp."

"All right," Murphy said, as if he could no longer argue the point. "But not tonight. Get some solid rack time, then, first thing in the morning, if the weather allows, I'll log you in on a trip to the whaling station." Reaching for the walkie-talkie fastened to his belt, he added, "I'll tell Franklin to have a couple of snowmobiles at the flagpole, ga.s.sed up and ready to go, by nine a.m."

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO.

December 16, 9:30 a.m.

SINCLAIR HAD BEEN GONE FOR HOURS, and while Eleanor's greatest fear was that something would prevent him from returning at all, she also dreaded the state in which he might return. He had been in a black humor when he left, seething with rage at the endless storm and bristling at his confinement in the freezing church.

"d.a.m.n this place to h.e.l.l!" he'd shouted, his words echoing around the abandoned chapel and up to the worn beams in the roof. "d.a.m.n these stones and d.a.m.n these timbers!" With one arm, he'd swept a candleholder off the altar and sent it spinning across the floor. Stomping down the nave, his bootheels ringing on the stone, he'd thrown open the creaking door to the graveyard outside and hurled his imprecations at the leaden sky. He'd been answered by a chorus of forlorn howls from the sled dogs, curled up in b.a.l.l.s among the markers and tombstones.

She especially feared him when he was like that, when he chose to issue his challenges at the heavens. She was convinced that he'd already had his answer, in Lisbon, and she had no wish to hear that verdict again.

"Sinclair," she'd ventured, leaning for support against the door-jamb of the rectory, "shouldn't we bring the dogs into the church? They'll die if left outside, unprotected."

His head had whipped around, and in his eyes she could see that mad feverish gleam she had first seen at Scutari.

"I'll warm them up," he growled, and then, in his greatcoat, he'd stalked out into the storm, not even bothering to pull the door closed behind him; he seemed impervious to the hostile elements. A cloud of ice and snow had whirled into the church, and she had heard the barking of the dogs as Sinclair harnessed them to the sled.

Eleanor had gathered her coat around her, the one made from the miraculous fabric, and made her way to the open door. She had seen Sinclair standing at the back of the sled, swearing at the dogs as they ran down the snowy hillside. When they were out of sight, she put her weight against the rough wood and pushed it closed.

The exertion made her weak, and she slumped into the last pew. Afraid she was about to faint, she bent her head to the back of the pew in front of her and rested it there. The wood was cold but not entirely smooth, and she could see, very close up, some words- a name?-carved into it. But whatever it was, it wasn't English and the letters were nearly worn away. All that she could discern were some numbers, in the form of a date-25.12.1937. Christmas Day-1937. And she simply let her gaze remain there, while her mind turned this information over and over. It had been 1856 when she and Sinclair had embarked on their ill-fated voyage aboard the Coventry. And if this inscription, these numbers, were indeed a date, then they had been carved eighty-one years after she had been cast into the sea.

Eighty-one years. Time enough for everyone she knew-and everyone who knew her-to be dead.

Then her thoughts leapt forward again, because the place had so clearly been deserted for years, probably decades, and how many more years did that suggest? How long was it, she wondered, that she had slept in the ice at the bottom of the ocean? Had centuries pa.s.sed? What world was it that she now, however unhappily, inhabited?

She removed her glove and ran her fingers over the letters in the wood, as if to feel the truth of them. At first, even this sensation was unnerving, its tactile nature so overwhelming; she still wasn't yet used to feeling anything physical at all. After so long in the ice, her skin was new, almost foreign, even to her. Between Sinclair and herself, there had been little communion. Of course, there was always the question of propriety-their secret, and aborted, union in the Portuguese church counted for naught in her mind. And there was, in the frigid and awful place where she found herself now, nothing to kindle ardor of any kind ... or nurture so much as a warm thought.

But in her heart, Eleanor knew that there was also something more than that standing in the way, something that would always be there, serving as a constant reminder and an ever-present reproach, and while it was the one thing that bound her to Sinclair, possibly for eternity, it was also the one thing that held them apart. Each could see, in the other's pallor and in the other's desperate eyes, a more urgent need and imperative desire. Tellingly, their lips were cold, their fingers like icicles, and their hearts as guarded as swords in their sheaths.

In that respect, little had changed since the Crimea. Deprivation was all she knew.

No sooner had the Nightingale nurses arrived at the Barrack Hospital in Scutari-so named because it had originally been the Selimiye Kislasi barracks of the Turkish army-than they discovered there was not enough of anything, whether it was bandages or blankets, medicines or stump pillows (to support what remained of amputated legs or arms). Eleanor had never seen, or even imagined, such squalor as she encountered there, and even some of the ladies who had served in workhouses and prisons declared that they, too, were shocked at the way the British wounded were treated. Men who had had limbs sawn off on the battlefield were left unattended and without medication of any kind, unable to move or even feed themselves. Soldiers who had succ.u.mbed to dysentery, uncontrollable diarrhea, or the mysterious "Crimea fever" that had raged through the ranks lay in the crowded corridors, on thin, blood-soaked pallets, begging in vain for a cup of water. The stench from the open sewers that ran below the barracks was unbearable, but the cold from the broken windows was so great that the men had taken to stuffing the holes with straw, which further intensified the miasma in the wards. Several of the more delicate ladies immediately fell ill themselves, and so became more burden than help from the very start.

Eleanor and Moira, like most of the others, were first put to work darning sheets and was.h.i.+ng linen-not what they had come all that way to do. They had come to nurse the wounded men, to a.s.sist the doctors and medical staff with their surgical operations, but there was such hostility and suspicion on the part of the doctors that the nurses were refused admission to many of the wards and given no cooperation when they did gain entry.

"You'd think we was trying to steal their cuff links," Moira said in disgust at having been turned away from one of the sickrooms filled with casualties. "I can hear the poor beggars lyin' on their rags, pleadin' for a bucket, or a drop of morphine, and here I am, not more than ten steps away, doing what? Mending a hole in a sock!"

At first, Eleanor, too, had been puzzled that Miss Nightingale did not fight harder on behalf of her charges, but she soon came to see the wisdom of it. The British army had its own ways, and they had been set in stone for hundreds of years; by limiting the challenge her nursing corps presented, and avoiding confrontation whenever possible, Miss Nightingale had been able to gradually and unalarmingly expand the duties and responsibilities of her staff. Once the military command had come to see the benefits of clean linen and fresh bandages, they also began to appreciate the advantages of the hot tea and cereal, beef broth and jelly that the nurses prepared in their makes.h.i.+ft kitchen. And the men-mutilated, suffering, many times breathing their last on a threadbare blanket, far from home-came to bless the nurses, in their shapeless smocks and their silly caps.

But it was Florence Nightingale, in particular, who had won their hearts and admiration forever. She had fearlessly entered even the fever wards, where the doctors themselves refused to go (their att.i.tude being that the wretched souls inside would either struggle through it somehow, or else they would succ.u.mb, and that whatever the outcome, there was no point in their exposing themselves to the contagion). And although, for time immemorial, the officers had received the best available help and succor, while the privates and infantrymen were left to suffer the most horrible agonies with scarcely any attention paid to them at all, Miss Nightingale ministered to all the soldiers equally whether they were aristocrats or common conscripts. By breaking with such established protocols, she had proved herself a traitor to her own cla.s.s, winning few friends among the officers, but an undying devotion among the troops-and from Eleanor, too.

On their fourth night in Scutari, Miss Nightingale had come upon Eleanor refilling her water jug from the trickling fountain in the hospital-the water was a cloudy yellow, and barely potable at all-and asked her to accompany her on her nightly rounds. She was wearing a long gray dress, with a white kerchief gathered around her dark hair, and holding a Turkish lantern by the curved handle on its flat, bra.s.s base. "And please bring the jug with you."

Eleanor, who was seldom spoken to directly by Miss Nightingale, filled it to the brim, tucked a roll of bandages under her arm, and followed obediently a few steps behind. Eleanor was exhausted-it had been another grueling day-and although she knew that she would now be on her feet for hours, still she would not have given up this chance for anything. The Barrack Hospital was vast, and a tour of all its wards, which Miss Nightingale conducted nightly, was a journey of four miles. Wherever they went in the hospital, even the most antagonistic surgeons and impudent orderlies stood aside in Miss Nightingale's presence, and the two women were greeted instead by murmurs of thanks and signals of respect from the suffering soldiers. A boy who could not have been more than seventeen lay weeping in a cot, both of his legs gone below the knee, and Miss Nightingale stopped to comfort him and kiss his brow. Another soldier, missing an arm and an eye, she offered a cup of water, which he held in a shaking left hand, and for a moment Eleanor had to wonder if he was shaking from physical infirmity or from the shock of having such a well-bred lady tending to the likes of him.

Most of the wards were dark, save for the moonlight slanting through the broken windows and loose shutters, and Eleanor had to watch her feet lest she step on a sleeping, or dead, body. Miss Nightingale, a slight woman of erect carriage, seemed to move unerringly among the cots and patients, the glow of her lamp falling like a benediction on the dirty, bruised, and bloodied faces. More than once, Eleanor saw a soldier lean forward on the stump of a missing limb and bend his own lips to the air after she had pa.s.sed. Why, they are kissing her shadow, she thought.

Several times, Miss Nightingale stopped to offer a thirsty soldier a drink from the jug, or to replace a filthy bandage with a fresh one, but given the immensity of the hospital, and the bottomless well of need, she could only offer a smile, or a word, to most of those she pa.s.sed. But it was clear to Eleanor that this visit was a kind of covenant, a holy pact between Miss Nightingale and the soldiers, and she felt privileged to witness it.

At the same time, her heart was forever in her throat. At each ward they entered, and in every bed they pa.s.sed, she was looking for Lieutenant Sinclair Copley-desperate to see him again, terrified of what she might find once she did. Each morning she checked the rolls, but she knew that they were fragmentary and sloppy at best, and Sinclair could be suffering and speechless, unconscious from a blow or delirious with fever, just a ward away. She had made what inquiries she could, and she had learned that his brigade, the 17th Lancers, had been dispatched under Lords Lucan and Cardigan to aid in the siege of Sebastopol. But news traveled slowly from the front, and even when it did come it was no more dependable than the hospital rolls.

They had nearly completed their circuit and were pa.s.sing through the last of the wards, when Eleanor thought she heard someone mutter her name. She stopped, and so did Miss Nightingale, who obligingly lifted the lamp up to cast a wider glow. On iron bedsteads, a dozen soldiers raised their heads or turned their eyes, but none of them spoke. The voice came again, and now Eleanor could see, in the farthest reach of the ward, below a window whose empty panes were stuffed with rags, a figure lying under a soiled sheet, his face turned toward them.

"Miss Ames?"

His face was so filthy she would not have recognized him, but the voice she knew.

"Lieutenant Le Maitre?" she said, moving closer.

The figure chuckled, then coughed. "Frenchie will do."

"This is an acquaintance of yours?" Miss Nightingale said, following Eleanor to his bedside.

"Yes, ma'am, it is. He is one of the Seventeenth Lancers."

"Then I will leave you to visit," she said, in a gentle voice. "We are nearly done, anyway." Taking a candle stub from the windowsill, she lit it with the flame from the lamp and left it with Eleanor. "Good night, Lieutenant."

"Good night, Miss Nightingale. And G.o.d bless you."

Miss Nightingale modestly inclined her head, then turned away, her long skirt rustling as she navigated past the other cots and patients.

Eleanor put the candle on the window ledge and knelt by the narrow bed. Frenchie, who had always been so smartly groomed, was wearing a torn white s.h.i.+rt crawling with lice; his hair was long and unwashed, and hung down over his fevered brow. He was unshaven, and his damp skin, even in the feeble candlelight, displayed a greenish pallor.

Eleanor had seen hundreds of men in such condition, and she knew it did not bode well. Quickly, she dipped a clean bandage in the remaining water and used it to begin mopping the sweat from his forehead. She only wished that she had a clean s.h.i.+rt with her, so that she could rip the lice-ridden one from his limbs. The sheet clung wetly to his lower body.

"Is it a fever," she asked, "or have you been wounded?"

Laying his head on the pallet, he drew the sheet away from his legs. The right one was scarred and b.l.o.o.d.y, but the left was worse- a yellowed bone protruded through the skin, and red striations ran up and down the s.h.i.+n. "You were shot?" she said, in horror ... and in shame that her thoughts had immediately gone to Sinclair. Had he been in the same battle?

"I was shot at" he said. "But my horse plunged into a ravine and rolled over on my legs."

She dipped the rag into the water again, and as she did so, he answered the question he knew she wanted to ask.

"Sinclair was not there. The last I saw of him, he was riding with Rutherford, and the rest of the company, toward a place called Balaclava." He pulled the sheet back over his ruined legs and licked his lips. "My canteen," he said, "it's under the bed."

She rummaged around-something with many tiny legs scuttled over her hand-before she found it and unscrewed the cap for him. She could smell that it was gin inside. She held it to his lips and he took a swig, and then another. His eyes closed. "I should have guessed that you would be one of the nurses," he whispered.

"What would you like me to do for you?" she said. "I'm afraid I don't have most of my supplies with me right now ..."

He shook his head feebly. "You have already done it," he said.

"Tomorrow, I'll come back on my rounds, and I'll bring you a fresh s.h.i.+rt, and a clean sheet, and a good razor ..."

He raised one hand an inch from the mattress to stop her. "What I would like," he said, "is to write a letter to my family."

It was a common request, and Eleanor said, "I will bring a pen and paper."