Borealis(24)

Steeling himself, he dropped his other foot down—hissed like a cat—and, poising the ice axe over his shoulder, pushing through the freezing water toward the rear of the engine room. Gears growled and chugged. His eyes slowly acclimated to the darkness. The furnace was a dead cylinder, hardly visible without its flickering yellow faceplate. Yet despite the loss of power throughout the rest of the boat, the turbines continued to hum from within an ancient steel enclosure.

He knew the fuel lines ran against the far bulkhead, though he couldn’t see them in the dark. On deadened feet, his lower jaw shaking like a maraca, he stepped around the turbine enclosure, feeling with hands pained by the sharp, cutting temperature, for the line spout. He could feel his breath freezing in front of his face—could imagine the vaporous cloud crystallizing in midair and raining in a shower of ice pellets to the sloshing water around his ankles. Touched something—the goddamn blessed motherf*cking line spout, thank you, Jesus.

And the water level was rising; he could feel it creeping up the legs of his cargo pants. Mike’s carelessness in traversing an ice field…

And there was someone else down here with him—

His breath caught in his throat. Froze. Dripping water sounds among the steady snarl of the turbines…and, somewhere behind him, the sound of someone wading through the water.

“Who’s there?” It was hardly a whisper—weak, ineffectual.

No answer.

He was shaking uncontrollably now, the ice axe growing increasingly heavy. Gripping it tighter, he gathered what strength was left in him to mutter, “Who the f*ck is there?” This time the sounds of the wading stopped but, again, there came no answer.

Fuck it, he thought. I’ll drag this whole f*cking boat—and everyone on it—straight to hell.

Hoisting the ice axe back over his shoulder, he expelled an exhausted grunt and swung the tool straight into the hub of the line spout. It was a solid strike, ringing through the heart of the Borealis. There came a teakettle hissing followed by a burning stream of hot fuel sprayed into the dark, scorching his flesh. Burned, he foolishly dropped the ice axe where it plunked through the frozen sludge. He dropped to his knees without thinking, though he immediately regretted his actions as his testicles retreated into the cavity of his abdomen and his muscles seemed to stiffen to broom handles.

Cold fingers clutched the nape of his neck. Charlie cried out and launched himself forward, sprinting in the sightlessness for the rung ladder. He heard the thing—

(the girl)

—slam through the water in quick pursuit. Hand over fist, he scrambled up the ladder, heavy boots tolling on the iron rungs, shrieking like someone in furious pain until he broke through the hatch and crawled across the floor toward the galley. But the corridor was midnight black, cramped like a coffin; there was no place to go.

Sour breath sawing from his lips, his chest hitching, Charlie Mears pulled himself into a ball and waited. Despite his blindness, he nonetheless trained his eyes in the direction of where he knew the engine room hatch to be.

Listening…listening…listening…

But she never appeared. There were no more sounds from below, save for the occasional thumping of ice against the bottom of the Borealis. He would have thought such a feat impossible, but in his exhaustion and before he knew it was happening, Charlie Mears fell asleep.





11


And awoke with a scream caught in his throat.

Couldn’t feel his fingertips; couldn’t feel his toes. Could he move them? He couldn’t tell. How long had he slept? There was no way to tell. Was he dead? He didn’t know.

But if he was dead, this was Hell.

He found matches in the galley. Igniting the corner of one of McEwan’s paperback Westerns, he carried it like a torch while traversing the inner deck of the Borealis. The corridor closed in around him, the darkness diluted to a chalky grayness. The walls were overgrown with frost, the corridor a frozen white throat, which, upon bringing the makeshift torch too close, would weep runnels of melting ice like tears onto steel-colored frozen pools on the floor.

Dynamo Joe Darling was now a mummified, dehydrated husk webbed in a gelatinous black tar on the floor of the head.

Charlie walked through the cabins, smelling the disuse and, beneath that, the stronger vein of putrefaction. Had he anything in his stomach, he would have vomited.

He noticed that the ship was no longer rocking. In fact, it seemed unusually calm.

Lastly, he poked back inside Mike Fenty’s old stateroom, still vacant. However, there was a moist, almost breath-smelling condensation to the air in the room. The flames danced off the paperback, already having consumed half the book while managing to fill the overhead with black columns of smoke, and Charlie had to creep farther into the room to make sure he was actually seeing what he thought he was.

The place on the cot where the girl had sat was darker than the rest of the fabric. It was a stellated, tentacled shape, like a cannonball-sized asterisk, that Charlie at first thought was due to water dripping down onto the cot’s fabric from somewhere up above. Dampened, darkened fabric. But when he touched the spot, his fingers came away dry as bone.

Taking a step back, he noticed two similar spots moldering on the floor—where, naturally, the girl’s feet would have been while she sat on the edge of Mike’s cot. It was a darkening of the wood, each one practically foot shaped. As if her flesh, not belonging to this world, was rotting whatever it touched, soiling it, marking it the way a wolf might mark its den.