Where the dead wait, p.1
Where the Dead Wait, page 1
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For all our past selves
Although this story’s particular Arctic setting is fictional, the effects of European expeditions and colonial expansion are real and felt to this day. I acknowledge the Arctic as the ancestral homelands of the Inuit Peoples; I pay my respect to the lessons of resilience of these lands and Peoples, both past and present.
I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes would reply to mine.
—MARY SHELLEY, FRANKENSTEIN
THEN CAMP HOPE, THE ARCTIC ARCHIPELAGO, AUGUST 31, 1869
WHO CAN BRING A CLEAN THING OUT OF AN UNCLEAN? NO ONE.
The smell hits Day in the face.
Crouching in the hut’s narrow entrance, he tries not to heave. He can’t afford to bring anything up: his last meal was boiled boots and lichen, supplementing the last of their rations. He presses a hand against his mouth. Grimy, his skin shriveled and yellowed, it looks more like a claw. All the fat has melted off him; even kneeling hurts. He’s only twenty-four, but might as well be four-and-seventy. He knows he won’t see another summer.
Day takes a deep breath. With his mouth covered, the smell is stronger, separates out into its component parts. Blubber, clinging to his nostrils. Urine, from the rusting can next to him—a latrine for those men too weak to make it outside. Sweat, layered deeper and deeper until it’s something meaty. He pinches his nose, but now the smell comes in over his dry tongue and swollen gums, and he can almost taste it, like chewing on a week-old piece of liver.
It’s cold, he thinks dully, it shouldn’t smell.
Late summer in the Arctic, the temperature hovering around freezing, today’s noonday sun staring down at them like a hole cut out of the sky.
This is a terrible place.
He squints. His eyes adjust to the gloom as his knees continue screaming. They all crawl around in here; there isn’t enough space to stand. Nine faces look at him, pale and ghostly, eyes too large, huddled in their sleeping bags. The stillness is awful.
“What is it, Captain?”
William Day, now leader of the Reckoning expedition—not that he wanted it—crouches in the entrance to Camp Hope, and surveys his meager kingdom. The ceiling is the overturned hull of an eighteen-foot whaleboat, greenish and damp with condensation, and the walls are oars packed tight with boulders, moss, anything they could pry from the frozen ground with fingers and nails. Their sleeping bags are stacked in two lines facing each other, like galley slaves. A quiet sucking sound as someone wriggles their feet, disturbing the muddy surface, and their neighbor curses as the cold soup trickles slowly down the incline towards him.
It almost makes Day long for a good hard frost.
Almost.
“Captain?”
The speaker is young Tom Sheppard, and his concern sounds perfectly genuine. When Day finds him in the dark, Sheppard’s got his journal clutched to his chest; he’d nursed it under his clothing all the way from the ship, taking it out each evening to cross the pages with a dense tight hand. There’s a stubby pencil tucked behind his ear: Sheppard sometimes licks the tip with a pink tongue, not particularly caring where it’s been. He’s younger even than Day, barely into his twenties, all long lean legs, and had begged by post for a place on this expedition. Day can imagine him on the deck of an ironclad warship, the air redolent with gunpowder, sun on his face. Scribbling his appeal, touchingly expressing his faith in the Open Polar C.
Day stares at him. Wonders how he could have been so wrong: about a man, about the Open Polar Sea. About everything.
There’s a shuffling in the entrance tunnel. Bent double, like a bear rooting out its prey, First Lieutenant Jesse Stevens pushes his way into the stinking warmth. Day can smell the cold on him, the unrelenting dark chill of the ice, and the men in the nearest sleeping bag sniff the air like bloodhounds. They’re all animals here.
“You have to tell them,” Stevens says. He has a very pointed nose, and the Cupid’s bow of his lips has never been disturbed by swelling gums. Scurvy tore through their party back on the ship: now starvation is the nearest cause of death, though it’s truthfully hard to distinguish the two. But Stevens’s mouth has never bled, and in the dim light of the single blubber lamp he still looks handsome: golden hair and thick red-tinged beard. The angel on Day’s shoulder.
Day finds himself shaking his head.
There’s a murmur from the men; a small sound of interest, at the two of them in disagreement, and Stevens gives him a look. He doesn’t say it out loud, but Day can hear as clearly as if he’d shouted. They don’t need words, the two of them.
If you won’t do it, I will.
“What is it?” Sheppard says again, in his lilting southern accent. His eyes are wide and apparently guileless, but then, they all have wide eyes now. Skin retreats, hollows out, as their bodies consume themselves. Sheppard looks between Day and Stevens, then back again. A mute expression of horror as he appreciates the danger he’s in.
Day puts down the bundle he carries. He notices, with some interest, that he’s trembling. “Second Lieutenant Tom Sheppard. You’re under arrest.”
A sharp intake of breath.
“What?”
“You heard him,” Stevens says softly, from his position just behind Day.
Day’s hands shake as he pulls back the cloth, displaying the contents of the bundle they’d found concealed by the creek. A few pieces of hardtack, dried to the texture of a raisin and the hardness of a cannonball; Day estimates—as dispassionately as possible, trying to swallow down the rush of saliva—that this represents the daily ration for four or five men, depending on how carefully it’s broken up. A Virginia tobacco tin, filled with fuel alcohol. The sealskin cloth itself, when they’ve been chewing anything they can get their hands on, anything that will keep mouth and teeth busy, when the rations are so meager as not to be worth the name.
Men crane their necks to look at these treasures, because that’s what they are: treasures. It’s nearly a year since they left the ship.
If Sheppard were merely hoarding, Day might have been able to find a way to show mercy. He could maybe have confined him to his sleeping bag, like poor Blackman near his end, lashed in tight as the delirium of scurvy made him babble, sing snatches of hymns, and bend his wrists back at the joints, crab-like and pained.
But that kindly narrative is no longer possible. In the dim light of Camp Hope, the gleaming copper handful of rifle cartridges tells all. They make a chinking sound in Day’s shaking hands.
“You’re under arrest for theft and attempted desertion—”
“You dirty bastard—” one of the men bellows, and tries to crawl from his sleeping bag to launch himself at Sheppard. Kicking and thrashing, the struggling man has to climb over several others, and there’s a shriek of pain, a horrible stink, as he crosses Campbell, whose feet are badly frostbitten. A hubbub of raised voices. Coughs and splutters. Shadows dancing around the walls.
Sheppard doesn’t move, his mouth hanging open in a perfect circle of surprise, making him look almost unbearably young.
His attacker bares his remaining teeth, clenches his fist laboriously. Day doubts he has the strength to do any real damage, but it’s the principle of the thing. Now, more than ever—today, more than ever, with what Day knows is up on that grave-ridge—discipline is important.
There’s a sharp taste in his throat when he thinks of the grave-ridge, and once again he has to fight the urge to heave.
“Have Sheppard separated,” Day says to Stevens.
His second-in-command nods.
* * *
They go out to execute young Tom Sheppard later in the evening, well before civil twilight falls. It’s nearly all the same in the Arctic summer, where daylight never truly relents, but Day wanted to give Sheppard time to make peace with his god.
He doesn’t see how such a thing would be possible, himself: there’s no god at Cape Verdant. Ewing, sensitive Ewing, sometimes leads them in bleating prayer, but they have only one Bible left. All the others have long since been torn up for kindling. Nearly every single verse in that lonely Bible has been underlined, pages thumbed translucent with greasy fingers, and someone has ripped out the book of Job, so beloved by their dead Captain Talbot. Sheppard leaves the Bible behind when Day and the other officers come to fetch him; places his hand flat on its cover for a moment, as if trying to absorb some—comfort? Absolution? Day doesn’t know.
The grave-ridge looms, watchful, above their camp: the overturned boat and red tent sit in its long horseshoe shadow, protected from the gales blowing in across the frozen water. The signal flag flaps in the hollow breeze.
They haven’t bothered to tie up their prisoner—there’s nowhere to go from this rocky little semicircle of land. Miles of featureless gravel cliffs to the west; ice to the north, east, and south, shining like a shattered mirror. It seems to rotate like a puzzle whenever you turn your back. Look, to the east: a berg shaped like a bear. Now it’s turned to face south. Now it’s crept back on itself. Now it’s sunk out of existence. You can make it
Visibility in the channel ends after a few hundred yards, and the haze never seems to lift entirely, not for pounding sun nor howling winds. Day thinks there’s never been anywhere more cut off, more profoundly distant from all human civilization, than Cape Verdant. Even the name is a lie. The ground is hard black rock, sharp enough to cut their hands.
This land is savage. Here all savagery dwells.
Perhaps Sheppard hasn’t run because he hopes Day will relent; hopes his inexperienced acting commander will stumble over the limits of his own authority (can he have a man executed?) or, more likely, can’t bring himself to bury yet another body. Day isn’t a hard man, after all.
But hope—the word has become something they spit, sneer, imbue with all the irony of dying men.
Day swallows. The exertion of climbing the shallow ridge has him bent nearly double. Up here, the peaceless wind tugs at his tattered clothing, scours the dirt and shrapnel away from the row of graves. He steers the party until they’re out of sight. He feels, rather than sees, Penn’s brass buttons winking through their thin covering of gravel. The dead are always watching; reminding him of their presence. As if he could forget.
He didn’t want this. He didn’t want any of this.
“I will—” He coughs. “I will read the order.” He pulls it out. His own handwriting looks like a swarm of ants, barely recognizable.
“Second Lieutenant Thomas Sheppard, trusted with our only firearm, has been found stealing food and ammunition. Those taken together show he intends to abandon his colleagues to their deaths…” Day moistens his wind-chapped lips. “Abandon his colleagues to their deaths by starvation. These actions display a wickedness”—his voice drops—“and treachery that cannot be tolerated. Sheppard is therefore to be shot today, as we have no sure means to confine him.”
Sheppard continues to stare up at him, trusting. Day wishes he’d look away. Sees, in his mind’s eye, Sheppard’s hand lingering on that Bible, fingertips pressed lightly on the cover.
“This is necessary for the expedition to survive. After the death of Captain Nicholas Talbot, I, William Day, give this order.”
It’s the day after their rations finally ran out. He’d consulted with the doctor, with their scratched-off calendar, to get the date as accurate as possible. Keeping a record is the bread and butter of any officer; this scrap of paper will explain what happened here, whether or not it will ever be read by another living being. It shows he had good reason, legitimate reason, to execute Sheppard. The paper feels commensurately heavy. It’s precious.
Day looks around. They have only one working rifle, the one Sheppard usually wears. Normally there’d be some anonymity for executions: several guns, one loaded, allowing each man to comfort himself with the thought that the fatal bullet came from another. But what are they going to do—get out knives, up here in the open air, and take him to ground like prey?
“Stand still,” Stevens says, gently. Stevens is a good shot, good at everything to which he turns his hand. He’d volunteered. Day had noted, with leaden humor, that it wasn’t as if there were any chance of missing. Stevens had shrugged, pale eyes narrowing.
Day realizes now that Stevens thinks Sheppard might run. The sun shines down on them, makes Day’s skin itch.
“I didn’t do it,” Sheppard says suddenly. He seems to come to his senses, recognize where he is: out on the grave-ridge, surrounded by the emaciated officers who’d survived the Reckoning.
They shouldn’t have left the ship, Day thinks, with a clarity that startles him.
Sheppard must be freezing, because he hadn’t put his mittens on after relinquishing that Bible, but it hardly matters now. He turns around, looks Day in the eye. “Please! I didn’t. You have to believe me!”
Day won’t look away. He won’t. Sheppard deserves this much.
“Did you find it, Captain?” Sheppard says urgently. “Captain—the things they’re saying I stole—it wasn’t you, was it? I’ve been set up—Stevens—”
Stevens steps forward, rifle raised. The expression on his face is almost unreadable.
But Day knows him better than anyone.
* * *
Their grim duty complete, the execution party crawls back inside the overturned boat of Camp Hope. They’ll have to bury Sheppard in the morning; he’s been left to freeze, up where the clouds are starting to blow out sleet. He’s just a body now.
“Camp No-Hope,” Campbell mutters, his gaze feverish. “I’m going to die in here.”
Campbell hasn’t been out of his sleeping bag in nearly a week, not even to use the latrine tin, his system torpid on their diet of mostly inedible things. The smell from his bag tells them his legs are likely lost; the doctor says operating in these conditions will kill him from lockjaw.
“They’re gonna murder me,” Campbell mutters. “Kill me and eat me. Dead weight, I’ve heard them saying it. I’ve heard ’em.”
He doesn’t specify who—but conversations are broken off as the execution party returns. Sheppard had been very popular amongst the men, sometimes conducting careful “interviews” that seemed to consist largely of noting down their favorite songs, meals, girls. Any distraction was welcome. He’d also trained with their Native hunters, now long gone and much missed, along with all the larger game. He’d brought in an Arctic fox here, a hare there: Day had joined the others in insisting Sheppard must have the largest portions, their chewy little hearts. Still barely a mouthful. But they had to keep his strength up.
“I won’t let you down,” Sheppard had said quietly to Day, with all the earnestness of youth. Day feels ancient by comparison, warped and stretched like refractions in ice. “I won’t let us starve.”
But now James, who used to share Sheppard’s sleeping bag, is bartering his way out of that sodden sheepskin and into the relative comfort of buffalo. Sheppard’s possessions have become the camp’s new currency. Every man for himself.
Stevens nudges Day. He doesn’t need to speak.
Day knows he should insist Sheppard’s diary is located and turned over. It’s expedition property and should be surrendered. But Sheppard lies unburied, and Day’s heart squeezes. He can’t bring himself to do it.
Stevens gives him a look that’s a whisker from insubordination, and sighs. Day’s thought of sharing his sleeping bag, yearned for it—curling in beside him for the heat, their bodies together making a semicolon, two separate but closely connected ideas. They’d done so back on the Reckoning, when it was so cold belowdecks that the thermometers froze, but he doesn’t know how it would look to the men.
“Captain,” the doctor says urgently, emerging from the canvas flap at the rear of the hut. The horrible ruin of his face, crisscrossed with scars, makes him look like a gargoyle half-eaten by weather.
Day crawls down the small gangway. Behind the flap, beside their stove, Paver lies dying, his eyelids sometimes fluttering as if struggling to wake from a dream. Day hopes he’s somewhere else entirely. He’s been given the liquid from the soup they made yesterday, lichen and the last of the crumbled biscuit, the consistency of thin snot.
It’s the day after their rations finally ran out.
“How long?”
“Tomorrow, maybe,” Doctor Nye says, taking off his broken glasses to polish them. It would be humorous—an affectation, they’re all so grubby—if it weren’t so pitiful. “His organs are shutting down.”
Paver feels boiling hot to the touch when Day loosens his collar, presses a hand to his throat. It’s probably an illusion.
“The others will die,” Nye says, and Day reads accusation in his tone. “We will all die.”
* * *
There’s still no sign of night, and the sky crowds in on them.
Day sends Stevens up onto the grave-ridge with Jackson; now, he supposes, Second Lieutenant Jackson. Normally no one leaves the hut after dinner—which tonight is just tea dust; they can hardly spare the fuel to boil water—and they settle down to discuss food, maddeningly, right down to the drinks and desserts, conjuring five-course meals from the air. Raisin pudding with condensed milk. Hot rum and lemon punch. There’s a hallucinatory realness to it.
