Borealis(12)

“What’re you gonna do?” McEwan said.

“I’ll be in the pilothouse, trying to restore power to our radio and GPS,” Mike said. “We good on this?”

“We’re good,” Charlie advised.

“Good as ever,” said Bryan.

As they began filing out of the room—

“Hey.” Mike pulled Charlie to one side, leaning close to his ear. “Do me a favor and peek in on our guest before you head down, will you?”

“Sure.”

She was still in Mike’s room where she’d spent the night. Charlie knocked on the door, but when she didn’t respond, he opened the door slightly. Poked his head inside. The lights were off in the windowless room. The girl sat stock-still on the edge of the cot, her bare feet on the floor, her hands folded in her lap, illuminated by the vertical sliver of electric hallway light coming in through the half-open cabin door.

“Jesus, I’m sorry,” Charlie blurted, quickly looking away.

She was completed naked, the curls of her raven-colored hair just long enough to cover the swells of her smallish breasts.

“Oh. Hello, Charlie.” Her voice was childlike, simplistic somehow. “You’re awake early. It’s still dark.”

“We’re always awake early.”

“How are you?

“I’m…I’m okay.” He grinned in spite of his embarrassment—or, more likely, because of it—and held up two casual fingers over his eyes. Still, he could see her peripherally. “You didn’t happen to see Sammy this morning, did you?”

“The young boy who saved me last night?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“No, sir.” She actually shook her head from side to side, like a stage actor being overly dramatic. “No.”

“Sit tight,” he told her and quickly departed, a flush of red having blossomed at each cheek.

Down belowdecks, they wandered through an ink-black labyrinth of industrial pipes and steam valves, of rattling compressors and twitching radium needles arcing across grime-caked dials. Charlie played the flashlight’s beam along the ductwork, breaking light into cobwebbed corners and back behind narrow crevices. Behind him, Joe’s boots shushed along the planking. The constant hum of the generators resonated in Charlie’s back teeth and, at the end of the tapered black walkway, bending down where the pipes came in too close to his head, the vibrations caused an enormous spider’s web to quiver like the plucked string of an upright bass. In these temperatures, the web’s occupant was no longer in attendance, having either vacated by virtue of arachnid intuition just prior to the trawler’s departure from Saint Paul Island or simply disintegrated in the subzero temperatures into filaments of frozen bug dust.

“Sammy ain’t down here.” Joe’s voice, punctuated by the chattering of molars, echoed off the pipes. “Ain’t nothing down here, Charlie.”

“Sammy?” Charlie called, his own voice booming in the cramped space. “Kid, you down here?”

“Why’s it so cold?”

“Dunno.”

“Charlie, man, you don’t find this strange? First it’s this chick running naked on a ’berg, next thing we know the kid’s gone missing.”

“You sayin’ there’s some connection?”

“I’m sayin’ it’s pretty f*cked up, amigo. That’s what I’m saying.”

Something cold and wet fell in Charlie’s face. He directed the flashlight toward the overhead which was only about a foot from his face, and saw icicles forming along the ductwork.

Joe saw it too. Muttered, “That ain’t good.”

The flashlight flickered then winked off. Charlie groaned. He cracked it several times against the heel of one hand but the light did not come back on.

“Let’s beat it topside,” Joe said, already retreating into the darkness through the maze of pipes.

Topside, the rest of the crew was in a panic. Bryan and McEwan were unsuccessful locating any sign of Sammy Walper and Mike was still fiddling with the power grid in the control room with no success. The sun had just started to peek up over the horizon, the sea like liquid mercury, and the pots would soon need to be collected.

Charlie rapped knuckles on the control room door three times before Mike, looking haggard and frustrated, opened it.

“No dice,” Charlie informed him. “I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, Mike, that the kid might’ve gone overboard.”

“Don’t say that. Anyway, how in the world…?”

“Beats me. He was pretty shaken up last night. Maybe…I don’t know…maybe he went topside for a smoke and fell the f*ck over the side.”

“That’s pretty goddamn queer.”

“Whole thing’s queer,” said Charlie. “What’re we gonna do about the pots?”

Mike rubbed the back of one hand across his forehead and looked instantly exhausted. “Guess we pull ’em. We’re here, ain’t we? Fuck.”

“Then what?”

“You mean do we head back to Saint Paul? I don’t see no other alternatives, do you? Kid’s gone, for Christ’s sake. We gotta report it or something. Tell the police.”

“You been in to check on our guest this morning?” Charlie asked.