The Ice King (The Witch Ways 0.5)(24)
come closer
The dream stranger climbed into her bunk, spooned up against her, the warmth from his body, the lanolin and leather scent of his tweed jacket folding around her. His arm was curved tight around her waist, his other hand touched her hair, the fingers tender in the strands that fell across her face. She shifted so that she could see his face, she saw the marks tattooed into his skin, crisp black inked runes rising up from his temples into his hair and he smiled, a soft familiar expression. His eyes. One brown. One green.
“There’s no time.” he said and once again, she woke with a start.
She was not cold, even though she saw that the fire had gone out. The clock on the kitchen wall told her that it was another day, one more morning closer to rescue and she decided her best option would be to get up.
She spent some time assessing the food stores and rationing out what she could eat. With the cold she could expect to eat more for energy. If she was careful there were enough foodstuffs to keep her going until the supply plane showed up.
As she set about cooking a breakfast of porridge she realised that mentally she needed something to do, a distraction from possible doom ridden thoughts. She thought she would go over her notes on the Ice Man. It was too cold to develop the film in the camera today so that would wait until she was rescued. The phrase echoed in her head. The supply plane would come as scheduled. They would find her. She lit the fire once more, warmed the kitchen, heated the porridge. They would come. They would find her. Rescue.
As she ate the porridge she took the time to scan the Regulations Manual. It prohibited the lighting of fires. It contained details of correct sewage system maintenance. The emergency protocol involved electricity and communications masts. But the map showed her a complete breakdown of the site including a small shed at the edge of the complex that she had never paid overmuch attention to. Once or twice she had seen Dr Bale coming out of it or going into it. It had a padlock on it which she thought funny. The Arctic was not really the place for random crime.
Random crime. Was that what had happened to them? Was someone out there still? Part of her thought it would be a useful activity to head out and find evidence, footprints, snowcat tracks, anything instead of the nothing that existed. She would need answers for the questions that would arise when she was rescued. When. Not if.
Fuelled by porridge, she exited via the hole in the common room wall and made a patrol of the centre.
She found what remained of Dr Bale, a black-red splather on the snow, bones were cracked and jutting but Vanessa found she could not be sick, what she witnessed was too far removed from human. She carried on. There was not one other sign of life or death, not a track or trail anywhere. The cold bit at her and so she headed back indoors.
She surveyed the site map once again. So. There was a maintenance store, a small nondescript building on the other side of the complex. She checked Dr Bale’s desk for any sort of inventory but found none. What were the chances that there was another satellite dish in there? She would get through today and tomorrow she would take a chance on the maintenance shed. She would make plans. Plans would keep her alive. Plans and tinned food and fire.
Later in the afternoon Vanessa abandoned her revision of the Regulations Handbook and headed to the workroom to retrieve her notes. She was relieved to find the notebook in tact, the pencil placed where she had left it as if nothing whatever had happened in between these two moments. As she flicked back a page her eye was caught by a glint on the microscope slide and she found herself sliding onto the stool and peering down through the lens. The moment she did the spectacle and science that she found within pushed her fear and anxiety aside and she lost herself in the miniature universe.
She was drawing the images she could see, the patterns and crystallisation of the Ice Man’s ice. She was struck by the way the light caught and refracted in the sample. It must be an optical illusion. Her work light was off because of the pow—
The power was off. There shouldn’t be light, there shouldn’t be microscope because the microscope was electric. She stood up from the bench at once, the stool clattering to the floor behind her. Where was the light source? She looked down at the slide, the ice itself gave off a light. Record. Her mind struggled forward, reached for her lifeline of knowledge; ursus maritimus, ursus arctos, ursus arctos horribilis, Observe. ursus maritimus, ursus arctos, ursus arctos horribilis There was a scent in the air. Familiar. ursus maritimus, ursus arctos, ursus arctos horribilis Smokey honey and wet wool, but it was only as she turned and saw that the ice coffin and its occupant were gone that she made a sound.
The water had collected in icicles around the pallets they’d rested it on and there were plants and leaves refrozen into it. It looked like an ice throne, a thing of sculptural beauty. There was no sign of the body. Vanessa did not move. Bears and bones roamed her head. Her eyes took in the room.
What she saw was a tired looking man backed into the farthest corner of the workroom. His clothes, which looked to Vanessa like tweed trousers and a heavy woollen outdoors jacket, were stained dark and he was bearded. His salt and pepper hair was swept untidily back from his face and he looked warily at her.
Vanessa’s heart had been invaded by the moths that earlier had fluttered round her head. She felt the edge of the counter behind her digging into her back and trusted in the reality of that. ursus maritimus, ursus arctos, ursus arctos horribilis She was here. She was alive. They would rescue her.
“Where am I?” his voice rasped in English. He was not, it appeared, stone age or bronze age.