Robert Masello - Blood and Ice

The flaking chain yoked around their throats and shoulders held them together until, corroded by the centuries of ice and saltwater, it disintegrated and slipped to the bottom of the tank.

Sinclair was the first to draw a breath. Half air and half water, it made him cough.

Then Eleanor coughed, too, and an uncontrollable shiver ran the length of her body.

What little ice was still supporting them began to give way, and Sinclair's boots searched for the bottom of the tank… and found it.

He stumbled, swaying like a drunkard, to his feet, and quickly took hold of Eleanor's cold hand. Dripping wet, he raised her up from the chunks of floating ice. Her eyes were dull and unfocused, her long brown hair plastered to her cheek and forehead.

Where, he wondered, are we?

They were standing in a vat of some kind, filled with salt water up to their knees, in a place he could find no words for. No one else was there; the only living things he could see were strange creatures swimming in glass jars-jars that gave off a pale purple light and a soft hissing sound.

He looked at Eleanor. She raised her hand slowly, as if she had never done so before, and her fingers instinctively went to touch the ivory brooch on her bosom.

He sloshed to the rim of the tank, then over it. He helped her down onto the floor, water sluicing down all around them.

“What is this place?” she asked, trembling, as he gathered her into his arms.

Sinclair didn't know. For her sake, he hoped it was Heaven. But from his own experience, he feared it was Hell.

December 13, 4:20 p.m.

Michael was standing in the bow of the scuttled whale catcher when he picked up an ice-covered life preserver and, despite a couple of now-illegible letters, read the name of the ship off it; it had once been the Albatros, and it had sailed out of Oslo. But there were no albatrosses effortlessly soaring overhead now-only skuas and pretrels and squat, white sheathbills, all lured by the arrival of the dogsled and looking for handouts.

From his vantage point, right behind the harpoon gun, Michael could gaze down at the beach, where the elephant seals had cooperated nicely for their photo op, and up the icy hill, past the warehouses and boiling rooms and flensing yards, to the uppermost structure in the station. It was an old wooden church, with patches of white paint still clinging to the walls and a cross, knocked askew, high atop its steeple. He used the zoom to take some long-distance shots, but it would be worth a closer visit later on.

He'd already explored the bowels of the ship, which in some ways looked like it had been abandoned for years-rusted panels, broken windows, warped stairs-but in other ways looked as if it had been tenanted the day before. On a galley table, a fork and knife were still neatly crossed on a tin plate. A bunk bed was made up with a striped woolen blanket and a white sheet, folded back at the top. In the wheelhouse, a frozen cigar butt rested on a win-dowsill. Even the harpoon gun, mounted on a raised steel platform like a machine-gun turret, looked as if it could still go about its deadly work-if it could be aimed. Michael had tried to make it swivel, and tried again, but the entire assembly was frozen solid.

“Hey, watch where you point that thing,” he heard Danzig call out from the beach below. He was standing in the petrified jaws of a blue whale.

“It's not loaded,” Michael replied.

“That's what they all say.” Danzig, walrus teeth hanging down around his neck, his beard blowing in the wind, stepped out of the jaws like some Norse god choosing to walk among men. “You get what you came for?” he asked.

“Some of it. Why?”

“Because I need to get back.”

Michael was on board with that. For the past few hours, no matter how hard he had tried to forget the block of ice in Darryl's lab, it had never been far from his thoughts. Was he missing some great shot?

“I'm expecting a call from my wife,” Danzig added.

Danzig had a wife? It struck Michael as funny in a way-so banal, so ordinary-coming from such an original specimen as Danzig.

Danzig must have guessed as much from Michael's hesitation, because he said, “It's not impossible, you know.”

“But when do you see her?” Michael called back, even as he gathered up his equipment and stored it all in the bag. “I thought you lived here.”

“Not all the time,” Danzig replied.

“Where is she?” Michael asked, then said, “Wait. Tell me when I get down there.”

When he joined Danzig among the bones on the beach, Danzig said, “Miami Beach,” and Michael inadvertently laughed.

“What's wrong with that?”

“It's not that. It's just not what you'd expect.”

“Which would be?” Danzig said, as they turned back toward the dogsled.

Michael only had to think for a second before replying, “Valhalla.”

For the first few minutes, Sinclair and Eleanor simply accustomed themselves to breathing again. And then to moving. And finally to being alive… though where-and when-they had no idea.

It was Eleanor who discovered the source of the heat in the room, a metal grate of some kind, glowing orange along the baseboards. She bent down in her wet clothes, trying to see the fire inside or smell the burning of tinder or gas, but she heard only a distant humming and smelled nothing at all. Still, she huddled close and whispered urgently for Sinclair to come near.

Instinctively, they had both been whispering.

“It's a fire,” she said. “We can dry our clothes.”

Sinclair helped her remove her sodden shawl, and they draped it across a stool he drew close. Then she took off her shoes and laid them in front of the grill.

“You, too,” she said. “Before something happens…” What that something could be defied the powers of her imagination altogether. She did not know if they were among friends or foe, in Turkey or Russia or, for that matter, Tasmania. She could hardly be sure, even now, that they were actually alive.

But there wasn't time to dwell on any of it.

“Take off your jacket,” she said, “and your boots.”

He shrugged the uniform jacket off, and Eleanor spread it out. She put his boots beside her shoes. He unfastened his sword and, though keeping it close at hand, let it rest with the wet clothing.

Then, they huddled close in front of the heat, staring into each other's eyes, and silently wondering what the other knew or understood

… or remembered.

Eleanor feared that she could remember too much. For so long-how long? — it was all that she had done… just dreamt and drifted and remembered everything.

Over and over again.

But what she was thinking of, with the clothes drying and her arms gathered tight around her own knees, was the night she had sat before the hearth, just like this, with Moira, in their cold room at the top floor of the boardinghouse in London… on the night that Miss Nightingale had announced her intention to travel, with a small company of willing nurses, to the Crimean battlefront.

Sinclair coughed, his cold white hand raised to his mouth, and Eleanor stroked his brow with her own stiff fingers. It was second nature to her at that point-she remembered doing this for so many of the wounded soldiers, lying in agony at the hospital barracks in Scutari and Balaclava. Sinclair looked up at her now, his eyes red-rimmed and wild, and said, “But you? Are you…” and then, for want of a better word, “well?”