The Ice King (The Witch Ways 0.5)(20)
“This is not her job Hardy.” Dr Byrne glared at him but Dr Hardy was immune to her stares now.
“No but it has to be done.”
“This falls into Craig’s remit.” Dr Byrne persisted “Craig should be the one repairing it. He is, after all, the engineer around here.”
Vanessa waited, caught between the two of them. Hardy slapped the manual against her chest and gave her a meaning look.
“The faster you get up there, Way, the faster this job is done.”
“That is not my point.” Dr Byrne’s hand reached to stop the manual flapping once again at Vanessa’s chest. Her fingers crumpled it slightly until Dr Hardy withdrew it. “My point is that Dr Bale is the engineer. Hm? Does he have a pizza he must urgently finish? Or possibly a critical Wordsearch he must complete? What is Dr Bale doing that is so vitally important?”
Dr Hardy gave a deep and weary sigh.
“Sleeping it off.”
Dr Byrne looked at him.
“I thought he drank all the beer days ago.”
Dr Hardy was shaking his head even before she was two words into the sentence.
“He’s got a still going. Been boiling up bloody pine needles or bark or something to make vodka. Last night he nearly poisoned himself. He’s in no state to do anything.”
Dr Byrne seethed in silence and, for once in his academic life, Dr Hardy let it go.
Half an hour saw Vanessa kitted out in her Arctic gear and trekking the short distance to the comms mast. It was a tall structure that reminded Vanessa of the skeleton of a lighthouse. It was, in a way she could not have explained, aesthetically pleasing even though she now had the task of climbing up the service ladder with a toolbox to try and fix the satellite dish.
The wind was slicing across the lake in blades of cold, Vanessa pushing her body into the strength of it. It was only a few hundred yards to the comms tower and yet it took her almost another half an hour, the wind hampering her every step. It did occur to her that it was not best practice to try and climb the tower in the prevailing gusts, but there was nothing else to be done. The only way to repair it was to climb up to the dish.
As it turned out, it was not the clip that was bust. As the wind howled around her and the frost crept across her goggles, Vanessa worked her way through the manual to try and discover the fault. All the connections seemed sound. She took it step by step clicking and switching and disconnecting and reconnecting until she had reached the end of the troubleshooting part of the manual. There seemed no other option but to climb back down and return indoors to see if anything she had done had solved the issues.
As she began her descent she turned to look towards the frozen lake. The wind had been picking up considerably and already she could see where a black line of storm clouds were rising from the horizon.
The comms were still out. Hardy, unable to find out the fault, dragged Dr Bale from his quarters and, wrapped in a duvet and looking very sorry for himself, Dr Bale attempted to interpret the new error codes now printing onto the computer screen.
Vanessa took up her studies in the workroom, she still had some more slides to work through and her attention focused on the minutiae trapped beneath the lens.
Time skewed. Vanessa felt it shift beneath her and looked up from the slides and her notes. The workroom was in darkness except for her work light and the light from the shadows shifting on the floor. She checked her wristwatch, relieved that she seemed only to have been daydreaming for fifteen minutes, it must be the cold. She thought she might need to fetch herself a mug of tea, stave off the cold of the workroom. She glanced up at the clock on the workroom wall and her heartbeat jumped a little, the clock face showing that not fifteen minutes, but three hours had passed. She checked her watch. There was a distinct time discrepancy.
She looked over her notes, she had been sitting looking into the tiny world of the ice fragments before her, except, what had she drawn? The strange lines and curves reminded her of something, she tugged at her mind trying to pull the memory free. The bark in the wood. The lines and markings that she had sketched were the ones that she had seen in the lichen, in the bark. She put the pencil down and took a deep breath. Once again she noted the anomaly between her own wristwatch and the clock on the workroom wall.
She turned, her foot unhooking from the stool at the countertop, reaching towards the floor. She stopped herself. The shadows shifted and flickered like the wind through the trees, and yet, when she looked up there was no moonlight outside, just the cold white downward light of the boundary light marking the end of the building. She looked at the shadows again, hooking her foot back onto the stool, shifting her position round.
The shadows filled the floor. They were beautiful, tree boughs and branches splintered into twigs, the light danced and blinked. Fierce little shafts of light. Diamond white. Snow white.
The light in the wood. The light with no visible source. Again, Vanessa felt the conflict inside her, the lifetime of Havoc Wood clashing against her hard won scientific knowledge. Outside, the storm clouds lowered, the wind battered at the building shaking the artificial security light on its bracket. The light, Vanessa saw, was at the wrong angle to create the shadows, not to mention the absence of a tree through which the light would cast such shadows. She watched the storm rattle the light, the dodging downward V of yellow. It bore no connection to the bright white light, to the crisp dark shadows.
Vanessa concentrated hard, she could sense, at the edge of her mind, the drift she had felt in the wood. There had to be some way of quantifying this, of recording this. She thought of her data from the day at the inlet, everything out of kilter.