An early cold sky cuddled up to the new-risen sun for warmth as Richard rose from his tiny, tattered bedroll in his tiny, tattered tent, all alone with just him and his beard.
“Here we go, here we go again,” he grumbled and fussed as he got dressed. “The same, the same as the day before, the same as it’ll be again,” he said as he ate his bannock still-hot and with the tiniest sliver of butter (such luxury!). “Ah well, ah well, oh well, here we are,” he said, and with ice axe and shovel and plenty of spirit he took himself up and walked towards his work.
Richard’s work was more square miles than he’d care to imagine and more thousands of tonnes than you could shake a tree at, and it was made almost entire of old, raw ice that was older than the concept of sin itself. Walking towards it, you could feel the air grow ancient and chill on your tongue, taste the tang of water that had almost forgotten what it was like to be a liquid. Richard was used to it by now, and thought it was the finest drink to be had in the world, once your teeth quit chattering.
But pleasure was merely a part of his experience. There was work to be done, and judging from the dark shadows in the ice, work none the sooner. Richard unslung his ice pick and took to a trot, hurrying the slippery, stony way all the way up and over to the creeping edge of the glacier, the tip of a slow-grinding ice river. It was all colours inside, if all colours were blue and white and frozen.
Also, there was something very green. Richard was particularly interested in that something that was very green. It was his job. But what he’d seen, that wasn’t the green he saw now. No, no, that wasn’t it at all. Still too deep inside to have been what caught his eye. No, no, oh there, there it was!
There it was, hanging half outside the ice and half in, made of frozen flesh and weariness and too many limbs, greener than a fern, than a gangrenous cut. One of those things that tickled that little nerve at the back of your mind, that saw something that wasn’t right, wasn’t the sort of thing you saw outside of bad dreams.
It meowed at him.
Richard gave it a cheery smile, a quick whistle, and brought down his ice pick as close to the center of what he could call its body mass as he possibly could, as hard as he could. It creaked and cried and sprayed itself all teal and vermillion across the ice, staining it sticky-warm for an instant before it freeze-dried black. A thing with claws on it (a limb? a head?) reached for nothing, twitched, and went boneless.
“Nasty, nasty,” said Richard, clicking his tongue. “Too close these days, they come too close. A bit farther and your left leg would’ve been out, and a bit farther than that and your other left leg would’ve been out, and then you could’ve tugged a bit and come out and oh my oh my would we have some troubles then, so many, so much. Yes indeed.” He shook his head, and used the blade of his space to chop the thing to pieces, a laborious, lengthy process. Burial was out of the question, of course, not with all that permafrost, so he poured a little gasoline on it from a can he kept for that very purpose, set it alight with a match, and moved on before the smell arrived.
“Too many,” he told the man he met as he came around the curve. “Too many of them nowadays. Why, I barely have time to sleep as it is, and there are at least half a hundred more due within the month. Good day to you, and a good morning! What’s your name?”
The man Richard had met blinked an unnecessary amount before replying. “Uh, Trevor.”
“Nice to meet you, it is very nice to meet you! Not so much company up here, you know? A bit lonely, very much so. Tell me, why are you here?” Richard saw no reason to stop walking as he spoke, and Trevor broke into a brief jog to catch up with the question.
“You’re here to hike, of course!” Richard answered for him.
“Yes,” said Trevor, “and,” and Richard was talking again.
“A good walk, absolutely. Without a shred of doubt the finest exercise known to man. As am I! But my walk, it is for business and pleasure both. Come, walk with me! See what I see, what I do!”
“I’m here to take some measurements,” Trevor finished, but Richard was walking faster now and soon both their lungs were too busy with that to go about talking. Besides, there was plenty to look at. Fresh, deep green pines. Rolling, rocky hills. Shining, clashing streams that leaked from the glacier’s innards all over the place. A bird made a bizarre noise somewhere.
It really was very lovely.
“Wonderful, isn’t it, it is,” said Richard after a time, slowing down to a pace that let both feet touch the ground again. “Just wonderful. A breath of air here is as good as a feast. What did you say you were here for again?”
“Measurements,” said Trevor, with some difficulty. Richard’s legs looked like driftwood coated in sheepskin, but they moved like windmill blades. “Measuring. The glacier.”
“Hmm? There was a man just up here a while ago, doing that. A man just a year or so ago I think. Yes, he was the last person here. Why are you here then? They can’t have moved all that much, can they, can they now?”
“He never came back,” said Trevor.
Richard tsk-tsked. “Terrible thing. Dangerous things up here. Treacherous, nasty place, as pretty as it is. A rock looks sound, and then whoops it slips and down you bump down down down three hundred feet of cliff face, just like that. Terrible. Oh, and speaking of which, here we are, here we go! There we are!”
‘There’ was a deep crevasse in the glacier’s side, but thin, thinner than a man no more than twenty feet in, with a brief bulge before that formed by unknowable pressures. The ice was too cold to register as such; Trevor’s palms brushed it on the way in and his fingers vanished from his nervous system’s radar for some thirty seconds before brisk rubbing could restore them.
“You see that green? You see that sheen, down there, twinkling?”
Trevor looked. “Yes.”
“Well, that’s a problem, that is, that will be. In…oh…a week. Yes, I think a week.” He produced a ragged piece of paper and added to the scribbled ink that already coated over half of it. “Yes, I’ll have to come back here in three weeks. But here” – and he jabbed at a subtly different, nearby portion of the map -“here’s where we need to be now. Just checking here, just checking. Tell me, what do you see on the north wall?”
Trevor looked at the north wall. There was something hanging loose from the ice, and he said so.
“Yes, yes, that’s how it always is. Go take a look! Go on! Come on now.”
There was no drama to it, no sudden gasp of realization, no shock. Trevor was no closer than halfway to the dangling arm before he knew what it was, and before that he had suspected. An arm was an arm was an arm, after all, even if this one was a cartoon-froggy green and had too many joints in it.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” said Richard in his ear. “They always are, before they wake up.”
Trevor looked at it. “They wake up?”
“Yes, yes, yes. Unusual, isn’t it? I understand most life isn’t very happy after it gets frozen for a hundred thousand thousand years, not at all, but they don’t seem to mind.” Richard thought it over. “Well, they don’t seem to be in that bad shape, considering. They might mind. It’s hard to put any sort of meaning to the sounds they make, you know?” He shrugged and pulled out his shovel. “Should bleed out by the time it’s through, with any luck.”
“What’s that for?” asked Trevor.
Richard gave him a quizzical look. “What now?”
“The shovel.”
“Oh.” Richard looked at it. “I’m going to cut its arm off, knock it right to pieces. Blood flow’s sluggish when they’re mostly still frozen, but it should drop before it thaws. Most efficient way about it, you know, much better, much better than coming back in a few days to deal with it that way.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I just told you!”
“No, I mean why did you kill it? You’ve got something here that, that can live through whole-body freezing and come out again still moving! And you just chop it to pieces?”
“Oh yes, yes. Got to burn it too, mind you. Just a waste if you go to all that chopping and let the pieces sit there. Do you want to know what happens, what could happen, if something fancies a nibble or a snack from one of these misplaced limb-bits? I don’t.” Richard adjusted his glasses and shouldered his shovel, jiggling it absently as he felt his way through his sentences. “See, you’re thinking of this all wrong, Trevor my friend my buddy. This isn’t a study here, this is just disease management. Preventative medicine. Amputation, if you can grasp the abstract metaphor that I’m using, which I’m using.”
“They’re animals, not microbes. What, are you afraid they’re going to just pop out of the ice and sprint for it?”
Richard gave him an annoyed look. “Okay, Trevor, my buddy, my companion of the hike, we will see. We will try it your way this time, understood, all clear?” He shrugged the ice pick off his shoulder and tossed it to Trevor. “There you go, now just chippy-chip-chip your way in, no worries. Be careful though! It’s sharper than it looks, and we don’t want to bruise the poor dear thing with its poor dear self.”
Trevor took the pick, gave him a look right back, and started at it. The pick was old and the handle was worn near through, but the ice was strangely soft and pitted around the limb and came away like rotted cheese. Bit by bit, a form was coming clear. Another leg. A torso. A head. An eye.
The eye rotated, then the head moved, and the torso heaved, and the whole thing wheeled drunkenly out of its hollow, half-coated in slime and making noises like a loose fan belt. It reeled onto its side and lay there, legs kicking at the universe in general, arms askew.
“There,” said Trevor. He dropped the pick and stretched, wincing as he clutched at his back. “Damn, that puts a real -”
The frozen thing lurched itself to all five limbs with a drunkard’s grace, all coltish limbs and whinnies. Then it hurled itself teeth-first at Richard, its mouth opening maybe twice as wide as its head. Richard yelped, swore, and went down with it in a stumbling tumble of shovel, slime, and legs as Trevor snatched up the pick again and tried to aim for someplace that wasn’t Richard. For an instant, just an instant, the rolling stopped, and he sank the pick home, sending it straight through strangely soft tissues and straight into ice.
“Don’t worry, hold back now,” came Richard’s muffled voice. “I’m here, I’m me, I’m fine. Your friend isn’t, though.”
The thing was soft and brittle simultaneously, a freeze-dried sack of organs. During the tussle, as Richard called it, its own weight had crushed its chest through the handle of the shovel , tearing something important and spilling strange bloody fluids all over Richard’s shirt.
“Don’t lick it,” he’d advised. “It tastes like tin, it does, it really does. Or maybe copper, or nickel.” He’d stared at his fingers. “Maybe I should try it again, just to see, just to test.”
He had. The results hadn’t been revealed to Trevor.
The rest of the day had been educational. Trevor had walked around the glacier taking measurements, and Richard had walked around with him pointing out areas of “future developments” and “emergency zones.” The latter he tended to immediately, with Trevor standing witness.
The ice pick, he’d learned, was usually reserved for excavation. The shovel was the execution tool, as long as too much of the target wasn’t protruding. In that case out came the pick for a one-swing kill, as clean as any of that sort of thing could be said to be.
Which wasn’t very. Richard performed the taste test twice more, just to confirm his hypothesis, but the rest just had to be scrubbed. Poorly.
“How long have you been doing this?” asked Trevor. Camp had been increased in size by one tent, one man, and a shared package of marshmallows
Richard frowned. “Not sure, not totally, not at all. A while?” He shrugged, the motion like a dog shedding water, and popped another marshmallow into his mouth. “A while. The days don’t matter, you know, it’s true. Just the process. How long ’till the glacier’s melted, eh? How long ’till it’s all gone?”
Trevor looked at his notes. “I don’t have the rest of the data all in one place, and this is going to take a lot of work, but -”
“A while?”
“A while.”
Richard nodded, his stuffed cheeks jiggling like water balloons. “I’ve been here that long, I can be here longer. They’re getting denser, you know, it’s true, it is. The deeper in you go, the thicker they lurk. Barely any at all on the outer crust, none at all, but now there’s dozens and soon there’s scores, SCORES! Maybe there’s no center to it all at all, you think?” He laughed, spraying marshmallow splinters. “Just a big ball of slime and legs and eyes and gasping mouths and grasping hands. Such a sight that’d be, it could be!” The laughter broke off in a coughing rattle as the marshmallows ventured down the wrong pipe, and the rest of the evening’s conversation trailed away as both parties lost the taste for talk and headed to bed.
Trevor woke up first, five minutes later, because he’d carefully planned that to happen. He waited there for a second, ears wide open, and only began to move when he confirmed the faint sighing gasps of Richard’s lungs working overtime to turn air into snore.
In five minute’s time he was out and walking, heading to the glacier with his flashlight on its very lowest and least obnoxious setting. In less than a minute’s time he turned that off too; the stars and moon were out in full force, each trying to outshine the other. It was a different place at night, the world up near the rim of the glacier. Quieter for sure, but oh how that quiet turned the little sounds loud.
And that was out there, out in the world, where the trees and the sky lived. Up here, over there, where Trevor stood at the mouth of that icy little gap in the glacier?
Well a tombstone’s breath would ring like the end of the world.
Deeper in was better, easier on Trevor’s nerves, more reassuring. Being surrounded by creepy, scary things is much better than having those creepy, scary things happen within spitting distance of something nice and friendly and normal.
Not that it was creepy or scary in here, it was just
dark
and quite a bit
cold
that was all that it was. Even with that one eye staring at him at the back of the cave.
A week. That was how long it’d been, hadn’t it? A week, that’s what Richard had said. And Trevor trusted Richard, which was why he was out here with Richard’s ice pick getting ready to dig free another one of the things that had just jumped on Richard’s head and tried to eat him.
Because he didn’t trust Richard, or his aimless smile, or the way his sentences repeated themselves inside themselves, as if he were trying to persuade himself. And because if he were trapped inside a wall of solid ice and saw someone who was getting ready to hit him with a ice pick, he’d damned well jump him first too, brittle bones, brittle body and all.
It took a long time, but the sun was still down when that one eye was open to the cool air and it blinked. Just like that, after how many million years, that eye blinked like it wasn’t a thing.
It took another time, but less of a long one, for the face to come free, along with most of one side. It was not a nice face. A face with too many jaws, for one thing, and not enough flesh. Its skin looked to have been mummified three times over, and a faint slime coated the ice where its body had lain.
Trevor looked at it. It looked back. Then its jaws worked, its mouth cracked open and shut with a sound like crumbling cockroaches, and it wrenched its face open wide and let out a shriek that could wake the dead in Chicago. One arm ripped its way free of the wall and jutted a single claw outwards, stretching towards something.
By the time Trevor realized it was pointing behind him, Richard had grabbed him and clubbed him to the ground and was hunched over him with his hands buried in his coat, reaching for neck.
“Now that’s not good, not nice at all,” he mumbled, breath whistling past yellowed teeth. Trevor writhed, but those arms, bone-and-nothing but they were, were surprisingly, frighteningly solid, locked into place with tendons made from steel rods.
“It’s no fun at all,” said Richard. He made a sound in his throat that had come from somewhere deeper down, somewhere that gurgled and hissed. “Not a bit. So lonely, you know, all so lonely, all shut out in the cold, because no one cared, because no one waited.” He wheezed out a sickened giggle and shook Trevor by the scruff like a puppy. “No, oh no, they all left me behind, left me out on the edges to spend all the days until the end of it all BY MYSELF and NO ONE CARED until good Marcus, sweet Marcus, my friend, my friend, my friend indeed I was a friend indeed.”
Trevor’s hands found something at the edge of their grip, and he swung it. It turned out to be the ice pick, which bounced away, split in two from the hardness of the human skull after it hit…
After it hit…
Several things made sense at once, in a way that made no sense.
“…Marcus?” asked Trevor, hauling himself up on his elbows.
Richard glared back at him as he scrambled upwards, winched up as much by knees as anything else, then he was blank where he stood, eyes open wide, shovel gripped in one mitten. And with those wide eyes and that far-off look, there he was, there was Marcus, gone for a year and missing since he walked off to do the job Trevor had done.
“Marcus?” he said. “Me? I was Marcus….” He shook his head and the shovel clenched into his fist. “No. That wasn’t me now. I’m ME now, and. And ME is RI-”
There was a crumble and a rattle and a shivering crack-crak of ice, and then the ice pick’s head and handle returned, each clutched in a claw of the thing in the wall and travelling at what felt like a thousand miles per second. Richard’s shovel came around, a rusty, broken blade, but slow, too slow, and the broken pieces of pick arrived like a hammer and chisel; first the handle, and then the blow that sent it shivering into his heart.
It went THud. Just like that. All hard at first, then meaty-soft. And then a tiny, chittering wail that rose and died away again almost before it began.
Marcus was Marcus again. All that leaked out of the hole in his chest was a green, fine powder, a busted and cracked shell of thin legs and brittle bones, a mess of ruin that matched the ruin the thing-in-the-ice had transformed its arm into when it killed Richard.
It was still sitting there, hissing softly, moaning a bit, rubbing its brokenness. And then, bit by bit, bone by bone, it lurched itself up until it was face to face with Trevor.
It blinked, which was strange to watch with five eyes. It dropped the bits of the pick.
And then it hugged him, careful and slow, making sure to avoid his bruised neck and its own injured arm.
It took two hours or so for it to seal itself back in the little ice burrow it had made. Trevor helped. And when he went back home with his measurements, he made special recommendation that the area be left alone. It could be unstable. Or something.
“Out in the Cold,” copyright 2012.