RESONATION
“W
hy would I let go?” Silence raged at me. “Why would
I
let go?” I shot back.
“Because you’re going to drag us both down into the pit!”
“You want me to sacrifice myself?” I demanded.
“You want
me
to sacrifice
myself?”
he spat back.
My shirt—on Silence’s back—gave its own complaint. The seam along one shoulder popped open, and thread by thread it started to tick itself wider.
My weak arm slipped from the shirttail but clenched onto the trousers’ waistband.
Silence groaned. “You’re going to cut me in half!”
“Now, just hold tight—”
“Good advice!”
I took a deep breath, willed strength into my wounded arm, and gathered my legs for a midair leap. I lunged up and caught a handhold higher on the ripping shirt. “This would be easier if I didn’t have a wounded arm.”
“You’re telling me.”
My good hand clawed higher, dragging my body up over the icy edge of the crevasse. Scrabbling, scraping, swearing—I scrambled up beside Silence and wedged my hands in the crack beside his.
We lay there on our stomachs and stared at our bloodied hands jammed into the crack. Between panting breaths, we could hear a tinkling sound, like a thousand tiny, brittle chimes—splitting and cracking.
“Is that what I think it is?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“So—we’ve got to get off this slab?”
“Yes.”
“Even though moving could send it plummeting into the crevasse?”
“Yes.”
The race was on: Two exhausted, freezing men with only two good arms between them shimmied side by side on a frictionless surface above a thousand-foot plunge.
“The crack is widening!” Silence said.
As we watched in horror, the two-inch crack became a four-inch crack—then one foot wide, then a yard … .
Then we were falling.
The great wedge of ice beneath us lurched downward. For a second, I thought we’d plunge right into the abyss, riding on the head of that gigantic spike. Instead, the tip of the spike snagged the wall of the crevasse. Silence and I stared into each other’s terrified eyes as the ice wedge slowly teetered away from the cliff face and out over the thousand-foot plunge.
“Pull yourself up!” Silence shouted beside me. He dragged his body up the edge of the ice wedge, struggling to get on top and kicking me in the process. “Pull yourself up!”
Clinging with frozen fingers, I scrambled up beside Silence.
A moment later, the head of the ice wedge struck the far wall of the crevasse.
Boom!
If we hadn’t moved, we would’ve
been spattered across the face of the cliff. Instead, Harold Silence and I shuddered atop a great bridge of ice that spanned the chasm. As the boom reverberated away into the depths, little splitting sounds filled the air. A fine network of cracks spread through the ice beneath us.
“We need to get off this bridge,” Silence advised.
“Yeah.” We scooted backward, sliding on our bellies toward the wall of the chasm behind us.
The cracks widened into actual gaps in the ice. The central span of the ice bridge slumped, on the verge of giving way.
“Well,” I said, “I hate to die beside a stranger. If you know your name, you’d better tell me now.”
Silence locked eyes with me, gritted his teeth, and shoved himself upward. I did likewise, and we stood with our backs to the cliff face.
With a tinkling roar, the ice bridge bowed downward and lost all cohesion. The span disintegrated, each block launching itself into clear air. I gave a strangled yelp as the solid mass cascaded away into a cloud of clods and then into blue oblivion.
Even the ice beneath our feet shifted and slid down.
Roaring, Silence swung around and gripped a crack in the ice cliff. I grabbed a narrow ledge just as our footing gave way entirely. Once again, we hung side by side above the crevasse—though this time we were on the other side.
“Now what?” I asked.
Silence laughed, and the sound echoed below us as if the great glacier were deeply amused at our plight. “Not having any memory gives me a very clear head, you know.”
“Clear, yes,” I said, feeling my grip begin to fail. “Empty. Echoing even.”
Silence stopped laughing and started singing. His voice was loud and somewhat grating, wandering up and down the scales.
“Really, Silence—do you think now’s the time for singing?”
“Yes,” he said, his blue eyes fixing mine. “The thing about ice is, it’s crystals.”
“So?”
“The thing about crystals is, they have resonance points.”
“So?”
“Oh, memory must be such a blight. Think, Thomas! Think!”
I blinked, staring at the icy cliff before me, the vertical fissures in it, the possibility for a crack to open and let us climb. “You’re singing to find the resonance frequency of the ice?”
Instead of answering, Silence began to sing again. His voice echoed down the throat of the chasm and back up, and the ice before us began to hum.
“That’s it! That pitch there!” I said.
“Well, help me out, then.”
I joined my voice to his, trying to match his pitch, trying to find that singular note. The striated sheet of ice before us began to crackle and groan. We centered in on one high tone. The ice between us shivered. We sang louder, holding the note, and soon little crystals shook free of the wall.
Suddenly, a whole chute of ice shattered and plummeted away like a chandelier dropping from a ceiling. It sluiced down between us and plunged into the icy rift, opening up a crevice that we both lunged for.
In the next moments, we were climbing, frozen hands and feet scrabbling on ice, bent backs bashing against each other. Inch by inch, we shimmied higher until at last we
clawed our way to the top of the glacier and lay on our backs, panting.
“You know, Silence,” I said hoarsely, “ever since I met you, it’s been one insane predicament after another.”
“I could say the same,” he responded.
“Yes, but
my
life was different before this. Your life—who knows?”
We breathed a while more and then sat up, staring soberly over the cliff.
“Well, for the time being, we’re safe,” Silence said. “Safe from the gunman. Safe from Anna.”
I glared at him. “You’re a cold one.”
“They can’t get at us in a straight line. They’ll have to go twenty miles in either direction, or straight back—”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. She saved you. She saved me.”
“She’s plotting with the gunman.”
I was incredulous. “She stayed behind to stall him!”
“Or to join him.”
I shook my head angrily. “You’re too old to understand.”
“I understand perfectly. You’ve fallen for her.”
“She’s fallen for me.”
Silence stood and slapped snow off his backside. “You see, that’s where you and I differ. You think love explains everything about Miss Anna Schmidt. I think loyalty does—her loyalty to the gunman. That key unlocks all she has done—and all she will do.”
“None of it matters. It’s all over now. Past and future. Done,” I said bitterly, getting up and stepping away from the precipice. One step turned into two and four and a dozen, and Silence fell in stride beside me.
“It’s not over, Thomas,” Silence said. “We’ve bought
ourselves time. That’s all. The gunman and Anna will be back.”
“They’re after you, not me.”
“Anna’s been after you from the beginning.”
“You don’t know. You weren’t there. I went after her. She had a picnic for one, and I practically invited myself along.”
“When did she buy the cheese?”
“What?”
“There was a bottle of wine in the carriage and the remains of a baguette—fair enough. You can’t buy half a bottle of wine or half a baguette. But there were also the wrapping papers of
two
hunks of cheese.”
“Maybe she likes cheese!”
“A girl with a twenty-four-inch waist does not eat two hunks of cheese. Did she buy the cheese before you approached her or after?”
“You twist everything around.”
“It’s a simple question. Before or after?”
“Before, all right?”
Silence nodded. “She was planning to reel you in.”
“She was walking away! All I saw was her backside.”
“Proves my point.”
“Oh, you’re insufferable,” I said. “I wish you’d get your memory back so you could give up your little guessing games.”
“Guessing games!” Silence spat.
“You’re just a palm reader.”
Silence planted his feet in the snow and grabbed my right hand. “I do read palms, my boy, but none of that mumbo jumbo about lifelines and heart lines. It’s not the future that’s written on your palm, but the past. Look here.” He pointed to my fingertips. “See how these are blunt on the ends—and yet your nails are quite long. You’ve been a nail-biter from
childhood, which gives your fingers this shape—and it tells that your life has been a fretful one until lately. The fine condition of your nails now shows a year of relative bliss, but look here—look at these fresh tooth marks. You’ve begun biting again—in the last two days!”
“Mumbo jumbo.”
“What of these little pinch points between your index and middle finger—little burn scars that healed up perhaps a year ago. A cigarette would be too thin to admit this many sparks this far down. It was cigars, then, that you’d taken up smoking. Eh? A year of cigar smoking—in a kind of ferocious way—starting two years ago. Why, then? Why does a young man take up cigar smoking? Because he wants to be an old man, a big man. Because he’s nervous—or full of sudden grief. Answer me this, Thomas. Was it two years ago that your father died?”
“Hey!” I yelped, pulling my hand back.
“Don’t be so surprised. I knew of that already from the rings.” He lifted my left hand and pointed to the thick callus under my father’s ring and the thin callus under my own ring. “You’ve had two years to build this callus, two years back to your father’s death, but only one year since you graduated from Christ College, Cambridge.”
I pulled my left hand away and began walking, a tingle of dread moving up my spine. “I know who I am. Who are you, Silence? Read your own palm.”
Silence matched me stride for stride. “I have been. Of course I have. There are many scars there for so thin a hand. The palm has tobacco burns, the sort that would come from embers falling from a pipe, and acid burns as from mixing caustic chemicals. The back of the hand has black powder scars from firing a gun, and here—do you see these?” He rolled back his sleeve and showed me the purple depressions of veins leading from his inner elbow.
“Opium.”
“More likely, cocaine. These are recent scars. If I were an opium addict, I would not be able to think clearly now that I have been without the stuff for two days. No, I must be addicted to a less-invasive poison.”
“But a poison, all the same.”
“True enough.”
“So, then, who is Harold Silence?” I pressed. “A cocaine addict—perhaps a drug dealer, whose hands are burned with whatever caustic chemicals he uses to prepare his wares, whose hands are burned from the guns he has shot to defend his criminal empire?”
“Perhaps,” Silence said quietly.
“Perhaps? What other explanation could there be for these scars?”
Silence took a while to respond. “The evidence tells what I have done, but not why I have done it. I’ve shot cocaine in my veins—but why? An addict? A drug lord? I’ve shot guns—but why? To oppose the law, or to uphold it?”
I laughed grimly. “The cocaine-addicted crime fighter—yes. A very plausible explanation. And I suppose this madman trying to kill you is a criminal you have brought to justice rather than a rival drug lord—or even a police officer trying to bring you in.”
“He’s not that. No police officer would shoot an innocent man and steal his horse.”
“Right,” I said. “Still, we know more about the gunman than we do about you.”
“That fact will soon be remedied,” Silence said, gesturing out ahead of us. We had reached the base of the glacier and gazed out past the tailings, across a broad valley, to a green land. At the other side of the green land lay a large city,
gleaming in the sun. “There will be a sanatorium there. There will be food—”
“Yes, food …”
“And bandages, and nurses, and perhaps a doctor—who can help me regain my mind.”