The Ice King (The Witch Ways 0.5)(17)
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.