Robert Masello - Blood and Ice

Darryl was moaning and shaking the frigid water from his head, as Michael dropped to the rim of the hole, still holding the speargun, and looked down.

There was nothing to see but the taut, steel-reinforced cable holding Darryl's traps, and a shimmering tracery of blue-white ice, already weaving itself together again above Danzig's watery grave.

December 18, 1 p.m.

Sinclair stood in the open doors of the church, and stared out into a blinding white snowstorm so thick he could not see as far as the bottom of the stairs. Even the dogs would not be able to navigate in those conditions.

Putting his shoulder to the doors, he pushed them closed again and turned around to take in his kingdom… a bleak chapel, where the sled dogs lay sprawled on the stone floors or curled up into tight balls between the ancient pews. Where the relentless wind battered the walls and whistled through the cracks in the timbers and window frames. A massive cage, that's all it was… and he was the beast imprisoned inside it.

His thoughts wandered to a day-a Sunday afternoon-when he had taken Eleanor to the London Zoo. He had hoped to amuse her, but it had not gone as well as he had expected. Each animal in its cage seemed only to make her more forlorn, and though he had never looked at them in that way, he began to see the captive creatures through her eyes. So many were alone, confined to small spaces with no natural elements-no bushes or trees, no rocks or sand or cooling mud-to afford them a sense of what they knew, or instinctively desired. Eleanor had clutched his arm and they had wandered down the winding path, past the rows of thick iron bars, until they had come to the most popular exhibit of all.

The Bengal tiger.

Its coat a sleek tapestry of black and orange and white stripes, the tiger had padded back and forth and back and forth in a space barely wide enough for it to turn around in. A crowd of onlookers gawked from only a few feet away, and several children pulled faces whenever the beast leveled its baleful glare in their direction. One of them whipped an acorn through the bars, and the nut bounced off the tiger's snout. The tiger roared, and they laughed and clapped each other on the shoulder with glee.

“Stop that, right now!” Eleanor said, stepping forward to smack the hand of the boy about to launch another nut. The boy turned, stunned, and his scruffy friends rallied around him until Sinclair, too, stepped forward.

“Get out of here,” he said, in a low but stern voice, “or I'll try tossing you into the cage.”

The boy looked torn between impressing his friends and preserving his hide and when Sinclair reached out to grab his sleeve, he chose the latter course and scampered out of reach. But once he was a safe distance away, he stopped to hurl another acorn at Sinclair and shout a few defiant words.

Sinclair turned back to Eleanor, who was staring fixedly at the tiger, which had stopped its endless rounds and was staring back at her. He dared not say a word-it was as if Eleanor and the tiger were silently communing. For as much as a minute, they held each other's gaze-an elderly spectator with white whiskers was heard to say, “Why, the lady's been Mesmerized”-but when she slipped her arm back through Sinclair's to walk away, there was a tear in her eye.

Michael felt like he'd played the scene too many times before, trying to convince Murphy that the impossible was possible, that the unthinkable had occurred-a woman had been found frozen in the ice, that Danzig had been killed by one of his dogs, or that, after murdering Ackerley, he had returned once more to attack Darryl in the dive hut. The only advantage was that Murphy had by then become so accustomed to these strange conferences that he had stopped questioning Michael's veracity, or his sanity. Sitting behind his desk now, he simply combed his fingers through his thick salt-and-pepper hair-more salt, Michael thought, by the day-and asked his questions in a resigned, almost perfunctory manner.

“But you're sure you got him this time, with the speargun?” he asked Michael.

“Yes,” Michael said. “He's gone, for good.” But was he really as sure as he'd just sounded?

“Either way,” Murphy said, “nobody goes to the dive hut until further notice. Make sure Mr. Hirsch gets that message loud and clear.”

There was a burst of static from the radio behind his chair. “Wind speed, one hundred twenty, north, northeast,” a faint voice reported. “Temperatures ranging from forty to sixty below, Fahrenheit, anticipated to rise to…” There was further interference, then the voice returned, saying, “… high-pressure front, moving southwest, from Chilean peninsula toward Ross Sea.”

“Sounds like we might get a break tomorrow,” he said, swiveling in his chair and flicking it off. “About fucking time.” Then he turned back toward Michael with a printout in his hand. “Dr. Barnes's report,” he said, slipping on a pair of glasses to read aloud. “ ‘The patient, Ms. Eleanor Ames, by her own declaration an English citizen, of approximately twenty years of age’”- he stopped, glancing at Michael over the rim of his glasses-” ‘is in stable condition, with all vital signs now holding steady. There are still signs of recurring hypotension and heart arrhythmias, coupled with extreme anemia, which we will aggressively address once the blood work is complete.’ “ He lowered the paper and asked, “Got any idea when Hirsch will be done with that?”

“Nope.”

“Don't be too obvious, but give him a nudge.”

“Wouldn't it be better coming from you?”

“I don't want to arouse his suspicions any more than they might be already,” Murphy said. “For all he knows, he's just got another ordinary blood sample-let's keep it that way. And in case you hadn't noticed, he doesn't do well with authority figures.” He sat back, still brandishing the paper. “So this paper is the first official document, date-and time-stamped, confirming the existence of Sleeping Beauty.”

“Eleanor Ames,” Michael corrected him.

“Yeah, you're right. She's real enough now.” He conspicuously slipped the sheet into a blue plastic folder. “And as a result, everything from now on either has to go by the book,” he said, “or else it has to be left temporarily undocumented-and absolutely uncirculated. No paper trail, in other words, or loose lips. You do catch my drift?”

Michael nodded.

“The last thing we need here-the last thing in the whole fucking world-is any more scrutiny than we're already going to get, from the NSF and just about every other agency we deal with. I've got two years until I qualify for a full pension. I don't want to spend them filling out forms and giving depositions.” He gestured at a teetering stack of official-looking papers and forms in a desk tray. “See that? That's just the routine shit. Imagine if the latest headlines get out.”

Michael could well imagine. Already he was wondering what he would say-or not say-to Gillespie the next time they talked.

“So that's why I'm going to ask you, for the time being, to keep whatever you can under your hat. And while you're at it, do me one more favor.”

“I'll do whatever I can.”

“I want you to be the liaison, or whatever you want to call it, to Ms. Ames. Help Charlotte out, and keep me informed of what's up-how the patient's doing, what she's doing, what you think we need to address. I don't need to tell you, nothing that looks like this has ever happened before-anyplace or anytime-and I don't particularly want to broadcast that she's here to anybody who doesn't already know about it. I want to take that nice and slow.”

“But do you plan to keep her completely confined to the infirmary?” Michael asked. “Because she could go stir-crazy in there. I know I would.”