The Ice King (The Witch Ways 0.5)(18)
As she thought this, she was aware that Dr Finbar was stirring his tea with one of her lab thermometers. It must be a hallucination?
“Finbar?” Angela glared at the tea. Finbar looked up at her, bewildered.
“What? They’re my teabags…”
“But not your thermometer…”
Finbar looked at his hand, he shrugged, wiped the thermometer on a tea towel and handed it back.
“What the hell are you doing with…?”
“Christ woman…I needed a few bits of kit. I put everything back…”
“Put everything back? What do you mean ‘everything’?”
There was a snigger from the table where Craig was slurping up egg noodles with black bean sauce, the sauce making little black flecks of stickiness on the surface of the table. She shot him a glance and looked back at Finbar who was squirming.
“You should have kept your mouth shut Finbar my man…” Craig was pushing this and Finbar grimaced at him.
“Shut up, Craig.”
But Craig would not shut up.
“He’s had his grubby little paws over all your equipment…how do you think your centrifuge got broken? Hm? The elves?”
Finbar picked up the hot teabag he’d just fished out of his mug and lobbed it at Craig.
As she moved down the corridor Dr Byrne decided to broach the subject of a placement for Vanessa at the university. It would help with the apology she was going to make and Vanessa would understand how highly she regarded her. Together they could go through the equipment and see what faults and flaws Finbar had left behind. This was a lucky break after all, if it hadn’t been for today’s setback she might never have discovered his underhand actions. Now they had a chance to make the necessary corrections and calibrations.
Dr Byrne knocked at Vanessa’s door several times and got no response. She put her head around the door.
“Vanessa?” the room was empty.
In the kitchen, which now smelt of processed cheese and body odour, Dr Byrne asked the assembled Professors,
“Has anyone seen Vanessa?”
“I have.” Craig put his hand up after it had lifted a tinned hot dog to his greasy looking mouth. “She’s about five feet five tall and she’s got mid length browny red hair…”
He grinned widely before Finbar pushed him off his chair and a small fight broke out.
Vanessa Way was nowhere on site. After searching everywhere Dr Byrne checked the snowcats. One was, as she had anticipated, missing.
*
At the inlet Vanessa rode the snowcat up to the spot where she had been working. Her childhood in Havoc Wood had meant she was not afraid of the dark, nor of the trees or anything that might inhabit them. Indeed tonight seemed particularly beautiful, the sky was lit with the Milky Way. She parked and, hefting her rucksack onto her back, she checked her own compass against the company compass she had brought from the lab. Both gave the same readings and, satisfied, she moved off. The moment she did so her own compass twitched and the needle shifted 90 degrees. Vanessa halted and took a deep breath as she looked at the two compass faces. It was time for an experiment. She moved forward another few steps and as she did so, her own compass shifted again another few degrees south. Another few steps, another few degrees. What was the compass drawn to? She turned on her heel and looked out across the landscape to see if there was anything, that might be obvious to the naked eye, that could be affecting the compass. Her gaze moved methodically over the trees in the near and far distance, edging the vast expanse of frozen lake.
She turned in the direction of the compass. Her control compass, in her right hand, whirled around to point North and Vanessa made a mental note. She walked towards the edge of the trees, the faulty compass twitched slightly to show her she was going in the wrong direction. She turned out again, moved across the frozen surface. Forwards, backwards, seven steps, three steps, five steps and then the needle on the compass began to spin slowly like a clock being wound. She looked down. There seemed to be nothing visible. There were no markings on the snow, no stones or rocks that might generate a magnetic field of any kind however weak. There was just the snow, the frozen surface of the lake.
The Lake. Vanessa had a very unscientific feeling about this experience. Her head was not clear at all; it was filled with moths all looking for some kind of light.
She knelt and scraped a gloved hand across the snow. There had been snowfall a few days ago, the top was crusted but, a few inches beneath, her hand scraped at the packed ice. She noted the colour, the texture and then scraped a bit more. Her glove smoothed the ice, the warmth from her making it glassier. There still appeared to be nothing to see and yet, if she checked the compass it was spinning, not fast, just smoothly around and around. She reached into her rucksack for a scraper.
She had been scratching at the surface for only a moment when she saw the hand.
*
It was some hours before Vanessa skidded to a halt at the research centre, the glassy ice coffin dragging behind the snowcat, rigged with a tarpaulin. It was several more hours of effort to bring the entombed body into the workroom at the back of the centre and rest it on a tarp and a selection of pallets.
“What the hell?” Finbar stood in the workroom doorway “ What the hell Way? Why did you bring this here? What were you NOT thinking out there?” his face was gingery red with anger but Dr Byrne overruled him.