All nightmare long, p.12
All Nightmare Long, page 12
No no no, he said again, and when he took in a breath to scream he tasted sweet steam.
“Here,” Marshall said. “Kurt? You awake?”
Kurt’s eyes snapped open. He looked around the cramped tent and nodded, leaning to his left ready to sit up. “Yeah, fine. Nodded off.” And saw them, he thought. And I saw them moving out there in the storm!
“What’s up mate?”
“Up?”
“You’re acting weird.”
Kurt took a grateful sip of the tea. It burnt his split lips but he relished the pain.
“Well . . .”He sipped some more and sighed, making a decision. “I saw something out in the snow, over by the rock outcropping to the east. Couple of bodies.”
“Yeah?” Marshall was interested, not shocked. They both knew how many people had died in this vast place, and how many of those had never been seen again. Marshall had climbed Everest several years ago, and often told Kurt about the bodies he’d seen up there. He said they weren’t spooky or sad, just lonely. They’d died doing what they loved.
“But they were weird,” Kurt said. “They didn’t look...normal. Human. It was like they were mannequins, or something. You know, unfinished.”
“Could’ve been really old,” Marshall said. “Cold can do weird things to a body. Cold, dry air dries the corpses out, leeches all the fluids from them.”
“But their faces,” Kurt said, blinking and seeing that face staring at him. “Their eyes.”
“Should’ve told me!” Marshall said. The revelation seemed to have cheered him up. “When the storm’s passed we’ll go and check them out together.”
No way, Kurt thought, but he didn’t say that. He didn’t want to sound scared.
They finished their tea. The storm roared on. Neither of them spoke again for some time.
Kurt thought of Bindy, turning his loose wedding ring and trying to care.
The tent grew darker as snow piled up outside. Kurt kept the stove burning, and the air remained musty and heavy. He didn’t mind. He was so used to the burning touch of cold on his skin that it was good to feel something else. And he knew it would be over soon. The storm would pass, they would dig themselves out, and their journey home would continue.
They’d leave those things behind.
Marshall mumbled in his sleep. He shifted, kicked his feet in the tight sleeping bag, then shouted. Kurt sat up and stared, not used to his friend making such a noise. He was always such a deep sleeper, and Kurt had always been jealous of just how quickly he managed to fall asleep. Clear conscience, Marshall would say. Now he twitched and moved, and when he kicked again he came dangerously close to knocking over the stove burning between them. It had a cover, and if tipped over there was an auto shut-off. But it was still a risk.
“Marsh?” His voice sounded thick and heavy, as if the warmer air held it longer. It was strange not seeing his breath condense. Moisture dripped from his beard. “Marsh?”
Marshall rolled onto his back again, kicking his feet in the sleeping bag. Its hood had twisted and fallen to half-obscure his face, and in the poor light Kurt couldn’t make out whether his eyes were open or closed.
“Marshall!” He spoke louder, fighting against a gust of wind that roared around their tent.
Marshall stiffened, grew still, then started breathing easier. Bad dreams.
Kurt settled again, and passed the time by assessing his body, alternately tensing and then relaxing muscles from his toes up to see where problems might lie. The first two toes on his right foot had gone almost two weeks ago—he knew they were darkened, stiff, and it was likely that he’d lose them. But the rest of his toes seemed fine. It was surprising that he hadn’t suffered more.
They’d agreed that they would only call for rescue if one or both of their lives were in danger. Frostbite, weight loss, snow blindness, borderline starvation, these were acceptable risks for the adventure they had embarked upon. They’d spent two days at the Pole, recovering at the research station there, but they’d found themselves keen to continue, working their way back towards the coast where they’d be able to pronounce their expedition a success. They’d both lost a huge amount of weight, and when Kurt looked in a mirror inside one of the huts he’d let out a startled cry. He’d not recognised himself.
Marshall had laughed at that. “Few people who come here and do the sort of thing we’re doing go home the same person.” he’d said. “This place changes people. Got to accept that.”
There was not far to go, now. But as Kurt sat wrapped in his sleeping bag, feeling how weakened he had become in his time on the ice, he was further from home than ever before. It wasn’t just distance and time, but remoteness. They were deeper in the wilderness than they had ever been, and closer to the pure unknown.
Marshall muttered again. Incomprehensible words mostly, but then one phrase that stood out harsh and stark. “My eyes are mine!”
Kurt’s blood ran cold. He leaned across and shook his friend, rolling him back and forth in his sleeping bag, but Marshall would not wake. He stiffened beneath Kurt’s hand, went limp, stiffened again, and all the time he was whining and mumbling wretchedly.
Kurt sat back, watching his friend dream and fighting a sudden, overwhelming desire to close his own eyes. He blinked slowly. It was dark in there.
Wind groaned around the tent, the storm given voice. He held his breath, but doing so meant he heard Marshall’s haunted mumblings clearer.
Breathing deeply, tiredness swept over him again.
What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I stay awake?
But there was plenty wrong with him, and he knew it. Exhaustion, both physical and mental. Weakness caused by calorie deficiency. Aching bones, pulled muscles, torn ligaments, shoulders and back rubbed raw by the sled straps. The excesses he had been subjecting his body to for almost ten weeks, the intense cold, the endless hours of pulling and shoving, hacking routes through ice ridges to advance three miles in a day, climbing and slipping, falling and standing again because to stay down was to die. Everything was wrong with him, but he could not sleep.
He did not wish to find the dreams his friend was having right now.
“I should never have told you about them,” he muttered. He unzipped the sleeping bag and started pulling on his wet clothes. They were slightly warmed by the air inside the tent, at least. But he knew that would not last.
He’d freeze in minutes outside, but he couldn’t stay in here.
The landscape was transformed. The horizon had been dragged into dozens of feet instead of miles. The wide sky was hiding, the rolls in the land were swallowed by the snow, and all tracks and prints he and Marshall had laid down had been consumed.
He hugged his coat tight, pulled the heavy scarf over his mouth and nose, made sure his snow goggles were well fitted, and started out to the east. He tied the end of a cord to one of the tent uprights and played it out behind him as he went. It was his way back.
Kurt leaned into the wind, head down as he pushed onward. He seemed to get there quicker than before. Perhaps he’d drifted away while walking, mind wandering somewhere warmer and safer, but he could not remember where.
At first he thought they’d gone. It can’t have snowed that much! he thought, struggling to fight down the excitement. Gone and buried again, they would be out of sight, out of mind. He could return to the tent and wake Marshall. He’d tell him that everything was all right. Then they’d wait for the storm to pass and make the final drive for the coast.
But then he saw a shape ahead between swirls of snow, tucked behind another ridge of rock, and he knew that he was in the wrong place.
Wind had raised a flap of the tent, uncovering the two bodies underneath. The storm whined between rocks, wind so harsh that it was stripping old snow and ice from the corpses rather than allowing new snow to settle. Against every instinct he went close, because he had to see.
One of the bodies had been turned onto its side, the arm beneath it propping it up, head dipped. Could the wind have done that? Perhaps fresh exposure to the elements had contracted dried tendons, or the frozen ground beneath the body had shrugged, lifted? The other corpse still lay on its back but its face had changed. It was fuller, not so death-like. Its lips were thicker, nose more sculpted.
Its eyes were open.
They stared unblinking as flakes kissed them and were lifted away by the wind.
Kurt needed to run but he stumbled forward instead, dropping to his knees and lifting off his goggles so that he could see for sure. The blankness had gone from these bodies. They looked like death-sculptures close to completion, rather than rough, lifeless forms.
He wanted to destroy them. If he’d brought a knife or an ice axe he’d have set about them, smashing and hacking them into pieces that were nowhere near human, and held no resemblance to . . .
But could he really move that close?
“It’s all in my head,” Kurt said, and the storm rose as if to swallow his words. A corner of the old tent flapped, and he squinted, looking closer, wondering how canvas could be networked with shapes that looked like old, dried veins.
Its poles might have been bone.
He backed away, then turned and ran for the camp, pulling hand over hand on the cord as if to haul himself and the tent together. In a blinding surge of snow he tripped and was enveloped, cool dark digits fingering into gaps in his clothing, his ears, leaking through poorly fitting snow goggles. He struggled to stand with one hand, the other still clasped tight around the cord. If he let go of that he would be lost, and then he’d die out here on his own. Perhaps Marshall would find him when the storm settled. Or maybe he’d be discovered in a hundred years by exhausted, terrified explorers.
He stood and moved on, his focus on the cord that was his lifeline.
Inside the tent Kurt hurriedly zipped up, throwing off his coat and crawling into his cold sleeping bag. He turned up the stove and broke a couple of chemical warmers. Their effect was vastly lessened through overuse, but they still took the chill from his hands. “Not sure,” he said, shivering.
“Not sure what that was. Not certain...certain what I...I saw. Marsh? I dunno. But I think those bodies are moving.” He looked sideways at the man lying motionless in his sleeping bag. “Marsh?”
Marsh whined. It began so low and quiet that at first Kurt thought it was the wind. But the noise rose, growing louder, harsher. As it became a scream Kurt screamed himself, trying to drown that terrible sound in his own fearful cry. But his own voice faded while Marshall’s went on and on, and he reached out to shake his friend awake.
He would not wake. His eyes were wide, his mouth open, and when Kurt unzipped his bag he saw his friend’s hands clawed in front of him as if grasping something unseen.
Marshall took in a long, ragged breath and started screaming again. But the scream did not touch his face. There was no frown and no grimace, little of Marshall there at all. His wide eyes reflected nothing.
Kurt kicked himself away from his friend, hand striking the stove and knocking it on its side. He felt an ice-cold touch across his palm, and when he looked he saw the burn, already blistering and bubbling yet feeling like nothing. He waited for the pain to sink in but it was quiet, subsumed perhaps beneath Marshall’s endless scream.
“Shut the fuck up!” Kurt shouted. He pulled his fist back ready to strike, but held back at the last moment. Something was so terribly wrong. If he had to hit someone or something it was not Marshall.
He felt so tired. Despite the noise his own eyes drooped, he felt reality drifting even further away than it already was, and he reached up and gripped his cheeks between fingers, pinching himself awake.
It did not feel like resurfacing.
His eyes drooped again and he grasped the tumbled stove, waiting for long seconds before the searing pain finally scorched in. He opened his mouth, but Marshall screamed for him. The pain did not last for long. It was as if someone else had been subjected to the burn.
Out in the snow...he thought, and the idea of going out there and falling asleep was so enticing that he found himself unzipping the tent again, crawling outside, and slumping down in the fresh snow. Wind howled, but it was the usual emotionless scream that this continent was more comfortable with.
Marshall’s screaming seemed even louder out here, and even more shocking because he was out of sight. He competed with the wind and won.
It’s them, Kurt thought. Something about them, their stillness, their lifelessness, and he didn’t even see them.
He scrambled over to the sleds and unhooked one of the covers, throwing it back to reveal the tool rack. He snatched up a long-handled ice axe and turned into the storm once again. The cord was still attached, and he followed it towards where he had dropped it so recently.
Marshall doesn’t have nightmares. He’s strong. He just sleeps and walks. The nightmares are from somewhere else.
Just before he reached where the bodies should have been, he realised that Marshall’s screaming had stopped.
Behind the sheltering rock, just visible as grey silhouettes through the dancing, wild snow, he saw the two bodies standing with arms by their sides.
It was his lifeline. His umbilical back to the tent, back to reality, the thin cord bubbled with icy droplets stiff in his hands, waving in the wind and snapping back and forth. If he let go and lost it he’d stumble into the nothingness. Lose himself and die. It didn’t seem to matter, but each time he grabbed, the burns on his hands sang a short sweet song of agony. He grabbed hold of this, too, because it was real.
Maybe they were following him. Or perhaps they were lost as well.
Marshall remained silent, and crawling back through the tent entrance and inside, Kurt saw why. His friend was not there anymore.
In his place was something that looked little like his friend. The similarity was vague at best, a rough attempt at impersonation. The body in Marshall’s sleeping bag was devoid of expression and anything that might make it human, yet it wore his clothes and hair, carried the old scar on his cheek and that scruffy, ginger beard. Other than that, he might have been carved from ice.
Kurt tried to shout, scream. His voice did not work. Maybe it was the cold, but he thought not. He was starting to feel more distant than ever before, not only from Bindy and home and everything beyond this place, but from himself. He was becoming a stranger.
But still he fled. There remained that part of him—a spark of hope amidst wretchedness—that grasped onto instinct and believed in survival. He burst from the tent and fell, scrambling to his feet, running in the direction he thought was away from them. He tripped again and went sprawling. The cold did not feel so cold anymore. The white was not so white. His senses seemed more remote, as if he were viewing his life through the wrong end of a telescope. He tried to call for his wife but no longer remembered her name.
He stood and ran. The storm swirled him around, sending him staggering into ice ridges and falling into drifts. Wind roared in his ears, a voiceless scream.
In the distance, two shapes approached through the whirling snow. They seemed to pass through the storm as if they were apart from it, and though Kurt tried to turn and run, his legs folded and he fell to his knees. He tugged the ice axe from his belt and held it up, ready to swing it, throw it, wield it in anger and fear.
The figures drew closer. They were naked but did not seem to feel the cold. One was Marshall, but his eyes were expressionless, no recognition there.
But Kurt recognised himself.
The other figure stood before him, head slightly tilted as it regarded him with an emotionless gaze.
Kurt went to swing the axe but dropped it into the snow. He reached out with both hands to ward them off.
The figure that was him snatched off Kurt’s glove, placed its thumb and forefinger around his wedding ring, and lifted it clear of his finger. There was no friction or resistance. It was as if he was no longer there at all.
The figure slipped on his ring, then the two of them turned their backs on Kurt and walked away into the storm, leaving him forever in the frozen white silence.
STRINGS
I wake in the early hours and hear scratching, and moaning, and the secretive whisper of something brushing along walls. When this happened before, Margot and Ray were still my friends and staying with me, and I believed their lovemaking to be the cause of the sounds. Trying to keep quiet for my sake, the height of passion took away their caution. The scrape of fingernails against a wall. The steady touch of bedding shifting somewhere beyond my room. Their groans, low and long as if such ecstasy could last forever.
This time, I know the noises aren’t caused by them, because Margot and Ray left three days ago. I suspect I’ll never see them again. They became worried about what we were attempting to do, though I think their fear is misplaced. I think they’re cowards.
I lie awake and listen, trying to place the sounds and figure out their source. They seem to be originating from inside my head as well as without, as if dreams can have echoes. I suppose they can. All this has happened because of a dream I had so many years before, a fervent desire that inspired and invigorated the three of us to try things never before imagined. That’s me: the dreamer. I was the driving force, the passion, though they were the ones with the knowledge. We all had to give something, and I was happy to be the guinea pig.
Another scratch. A deeper groan. I can’t yet understand what the noises mean, but in that cool, motionless darkness I realise that the time will soon come when I do understand. They’re clearer now than they were last time I heard them. Clearer, louder, and closer.
It’s working, I think, and the one thing I cannot do is open my eyes. Even in the dark, I fear that I will see.
“Don’t mind him,” Margot said, “he’s just being a prick.” I saw the look she threw Ray when she said it, and the brief flicker of some complex expression on his face. Part of it was annoyance, part excitement. I knew some of what he was feeling. Margot and I had been engaged until three years before, and I understood more about her than he’d ever know.
