David Gilman - Ice Claw

“Don’t cut my clothes,” he said. “They’re all I’ve got.” He slipped back into unconsciousness.

The doctor hesitated. There was something in the boy’s desperate plea that he recognized. Max could not know that Dr. Marcel Riveux was a volunteer in the mountains during his off-duty hours; that he was someone who understood the lure of the high valleys and felt an affinity with others who knew the thrill of the slopes.

He shook his head at the nurse. And instead of cutting Max’s clothes away, he helped ease them from his body.

The hospital was well equipped with the latest technology. The highly specialized teams of doctors meant that each patient received the most up-to-date treatment.

Max lay in the doughnut-shaped Magnetic Resonance Imaging scanner, eased slowly beneath the machine’s all-seeing eye. This tomb swathed him in technology. Illuminated only by the equipment’s beam, the darkened cocoon scanned his brain and spine. The machine made deep, resonant sounds. One like a car alarm running out of power, another like a badly tuned guitar amplifier, both giving way to hissing like a steam train’s. This sighing breath mimicked a breeze catching tree branches. Max saw dabs of light, speckled like snow on high boughs, as the sound soothed him into darkness and sleep.

The consultant was fascinated by his young patient. Everything seemed normal; there was no brain damage, no skull fracture. But the deep-brain activity indicated that Max had gone into an unusual neurological condition. Images scanned of Max’s brain were like satellite shots of Earth taken from space, colored details of shape and form, but different areas of his brain were hot spots of activity. A twisted knot of color, the neocortex, which is responsible for thought processes, and the limbic system, which takes care of emotions and dreams-both showed heightened activity. But it was the area called the reptilian brain-responsible for instinct, survival, breathing and heartbeat-that made the consultant conduct another test.

A PET scan has nothing to do with taking a sick animal to a vet-PET stands for positron emission tomography and it uses a highly specialized piece of equipment that investigates the biochemical composition of the brain. This boy had almost animal instincts. The scan showed virtually no sign of trauma for someone who had experienced extreme danger. For one moment during the scan the consultant thought Max had died-his brain had gone into an almost deathlike state. But then the man realized that this animal instinct, or whatever it was, had sent Max into a kind of deep sleep-like hibernation. No different from a bear in winter. The consultant’s logic grappled with the rare glimpses of the extraordinary activity within Max’s brain. There were secrets within the boy. Whatever they were, he needed more time to analyze them, but one thing was certain-he knew the boy was special.

Max finally awoke, stiff and sore, in a hospital room with the muted sounds of two nurses talking. The younger of the two had her dark hair tied back, and her slender fingers traced information on a chart at the foot of his bed. The other woman was older, more like the age his mum would be if she were still alive.

He lay still, his instincts keeping him from moving-like a wounded animal. His mind absorbed information and tried to fill in the blanks. He had no idea how he had got here, or which hospital he was in. And then he remembered. Jumbled words from a dying man hammered inside his skull. The memory triggered a gasp of breath and the two women looked at him.

“Ez … fida-eheke … ”

The older woman moved closer and touched his brow. “What did you say?” she asked in her accented English.

“I don’t know …,” Max muttered. The foreign words wouldn’t form on his tongue. He saw the monk’s wild face again. Watched as his mouth made the sounds. Listened again.

“Ez ihure … ere fida-eheke … hari … ere.” Max stumbled over the words.

The nurses looked at each other, and then the younger one spoke gently. “Do you know what you have just said, young man?”

Max shook his head. The women looked concerned. The same nurse said, “I am French Basque. That’s my language. Do you speak it?”

“No,” Max said. “What does it mean?”

The two women spoke to each other in rapid French. Max couldn’t catch it. The young one eventually shrugged.

“It means: Trust no one-they will kill you.”

The hospital team was thorough. Max had been X-rayed, scanned, checked, cleaned up and pronounced uninjured except for bruised ribs and the aftereffects of the cold. He was lucky to be alive, but they insisted he be kept overnight. It had been Bobby Morrell who raised the alarm. When Max had told him he was going back into the mountains, Bobby immediately warned the ski patrols when they heard the avalanche.

The doctors’ usual questions had to be answered. Where were his parents? Was he on school holidays? How long was he staying in the Pyrenees? Where was he staying? How much money did he have?

Max explained everything, and someone said something about contacting his father; then they left him in peace. Max lay quietly for an hour or more, watching the image in his mind play over and over again.

He had been sucked into two startling events: Sophie and the monk. In both cases he had been involved in different, violent attacks by men using the same black-and-white camouflage. He really should tell the police. What would his dad do? He’d think it through and make his own decision about what course of action to take-and then do it. There are times you’re put in a situation that only you are meant to sort out, Max .

“Where are my things?” Max asked the young nurse when she returned to check his temperature.

She opened the small wardrobe in which Max’s clothes were hung. From a drawer she pulled out a sealed brown envelope. Inside were his blue nylon Velcro wallet and his green silica Moldavite wristband. His father’s watch was missing, the scratches on Max’s wrist confirming that the terrifying events hadn’t been a dream. A dull ache, a sense of loss about the watch, momentarily distracted his feelings from the nightmare scenario he had recently escaped. He said a silent, Sorry, Dad .

In addition to Sayid’s misbaha , there were the two items the monk had ripped from his neck and thrown at Max seconds before he died. The first was a rosary and crucifix, its necklace broken, most of the beads now missing, and the second was a leather cord looped and tied through a brass disk, slightly bigger than a ten-pence piece. Four equidistant spokes inside the circumference of this ring secured what looked like a small rounded crystal, floating in the center of the circle.

Max fingered the disk and curled it into his palm. He suddenly felt very possessive about the dying man’s urgency in giving it to him. Max might have lost his own treasured possession, his father’s watch, but this pendant was so vital to the dying monk, so important, that he had entrusted it to the boy who’d tried to save his life. Trust, that was a huge responsibility, his father had always told him.

If only his dad were here now. Making the right decision about what to do would be so much easier. Maybe he should phone him and tell him about the last desperate moments of the monk’s life. But his father was in London, recovering from the torture he had suffered in Africa, and still struggling to remember things. The doctors believed he was making slow but definite progress, and because his dad worked for an international agency that sometimes helped the government uncover massive environmental threats, he was being well cared for in a private nursing home. Max couldn’t burden him with any of this. He knew that when the authorities finally got through to the nursing home in England to explain Max’s accident, someone else would take the call. Which bought him time.