Giles Blunt - Until the Night

Ronnie Babstock woke in the dark. Earlier, the moon had lit the room like a street lamp, but now it had moved on. He was in the old house, in town, the house he had shared with Evelyn. He had intended to sell it, had even bought the new place out on the lake, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to leave this place. He slept better in this house. Usually.

He rolled over and tilted the alarm clock on his bedside table. 3:22. Hiss of air from the heating vents. The house was not ancient, but all houses make noise, especially in the cold. Something metal was ticking at odd intervals.

Insomnia had troubled Babstock much during his younger years, but now, nearing sixty, he generally slept through the night. It wasn’t supposed to work that way, but he wasn’t complaining. So what had woken him at 3:22 on this particular night? He didn’t need the bathroom, and the house was not unduly cold even though he kept the thermostat pretty low for sleeping.

There were wakings that felt bad-a sudden yell in a dream that tears you from sleep, or the phone going off in the hollow of the night-and yet you could turn over and be right back to sleep. Other times, your eyes open for no reason at all but sleep is out of the question. He lay still, trying to take the measure of his own response.

After a while he got up and put on his bathrobe and went down the hall to the bathroom. He opened the cabinet and took out a prescription bottle, opened it and tapped out a single pill. He broke it in half and put one half back in the bottle, then poured a quarter of a glass of water and took the other half. As he was closing the cabinet door, he froze.

Please help me.

It sounded like a young woman, a girl even. He spun around and leaned slightly to see around the bathroom door frame and down the hall. Night light glowing at the top of the stairs. That ticking sound again. He stood waiting.

It couldn’t be neighbours. Babstock’s property was large’ he had no neighbours. It must be the memory of a dream.

Oh, God, I’m so cold…

“Who’s there?” He had to clear his throat and repeat it. “Is there somebody there?”

He knew it wasn’t Evelyn, despite what he had said to Cardinal. Although which of us can say if the voice survives the trip across that threshold? He turned on the hall lights, upstairs and downstairs. A weapon of some sort seemed advisable, but he was not a hunter and owned no guns.

He went down the stairs and walked swiftly through all the rooms, one after another, switching on light after light. Nothing. No one. No furniture disarranged. Windows and doors secure.

I’m losing my mind, he told himself. The voice was in my dream and now my dream life is leaking into my real life.

The voice again. I’m going to die. I know it.

Not a dream. The voice was in the house. He went into the hall and opened an ornate wooden box that had been in the family forever. Then the armoire. He opened the vestibule door and felt the wall of cold from outside.

He looked behind the couch. He climbed the back stairs and checked the other bedroom. Closets. No one.

The words had been so disconnected, so discontinuous, he could not even be sure of their direction.

Night terrors, he told himself. You haven’t had night terrors for fifteen years. Dementia, could be. I’m losing my mind.

He went downstairs and pulled a bottle of Highland Cream from the liquor cabinet. He reached to the top shelf for one of the really expensive crystal glasses-in times of stress he took comfort in material reminders of his wealth-and poured himself two fingers. He took a swallow. Another. The quivering in his knees began to subside.

He stood in the kitchen, glass in hand, listening. He turned forty-five degrees to the right. Nothing. Then to the left. Silence. Just that metallic ticking-irregular and, in normal circumstances, inaudible.

He went into the living room and sat in his favourite leather chair and opened the Le Carre novel he’d been reading. He wanted the company of a man who understood paranoia. The dangers of delusion.

Giles Blunt

Until the Night

From the Blue Notebook

The first time I stepped onto ice pack above 80°' N, I was utterly vanquished by the immensities of white and blue. A voice not my own reverberated in my skull and rib cage both: You should not be here, it told me- no one should be here. A friend of mine who is a neurosurgeon had the exact same thought the first time he inserted a gloved finger into the cerebral cortex of a living human being.

It costs a small fortune to keep a man alive in the Arctic for any length of time, and governments and funding agencies like to be sure that anyone they put there is capable of completing a mission. We all had to undergo not just physicals but psychological exams before we were cleared. It was also for that reason that Arcosaur enjoyed the services of Jens Dahlberg, an expert in Arctic medicine and nutrition, as camp physician.

I do not belong here is an idea that can very rapidly turn crippling. Many an Arctic adventurer has had to make the humiliating call for rescue in a matter of days, undone not by the cold but by looking into the face of what might have been called-before overuse rendered the word useless-the awesome. Air so preternaturally clear that you can see the curve of the earth. And in all that vista nothing but snow and ice and, in summer, veins of open water. Even the most thoroughgoing atheist can be destabilized by setting foot where only gods should walk. In that white desert, the only thing worse than a crack opening up beneath your feet is a crack opening up in the psyche of the man next to you. Arctic missions rely on people like Jens to weed out such risks.

We each had our area of expertise. Vanderbyl was oceanography, a man who mapped mountains and valleys no human eye had ever seen. I was ice, Wyndham snow. Rebecca was clouds. Her tools were radar, lidar and radiometers, and she spent many hours a day staring at readouts and computer screens in an effort to define the vertical structure of cloud water contents. She measured the size of droplets and crystals, properties that determine how energy is exchanged between the Arctic surface and the atmosphere.

She was embarked on a long-term project to measure how clouds interact with aerosols, and how they change with the seasons and from one year to another. At some point in the future her findings would be correlated with mine and Wyndham’s on seasonal meltage. Already by this time, which was 1992, much research had been done on global warming, and the models were predicting an especially high rate of warming in the Arctic. But so far (surprisingly, given the dolorous certainties to come) we had found no hard evidence of it.

And I hoped desperately we wouldn’t find any. I had nightmarish visions of oil platforms and tourists overrunning the only place on the planet I felt at home. Of all of us, Wyndham was the most pessimistic. When depressed, he would spin scenarios of catastrophes-of floods and cyclones and mass migrations. I wasn’t willing to call him paranoid, as some of the others did. Instead, I chose not to think about it, the way one chooses not to imagine the death of a spouse.

What happens in your ideal world? I asked Rebecca one day.

My interest was entirely selfish, of course, and there may even have been a touch of irritation in it. It should not be possible for a woman to be such a dedicated scientist, such a humble and reliable trader in hard fact, and yet have such a beautiful neck and throat. I was not usually one to notice these things. When it came to the appreciation of female beauty, I had always been strictly an impressionist. But Rebecca taught me to be a detail man. I thought about the elegant and shifting columns of tendon and cartilage. I thought about her way of blinking exactly once whenever I spoke to her, as if capturing my remark like a lattice of crystals for later analysis. I thought about her fingers, slender and tapered, the nails perfectly formed, neatly shaped. Her skin was darker than mine, not quite tawny, and I had to suppress the desire to touch her hands as she typed, despite the wedding band.