Lord of All Things (44 page)

He had spoken too soon. The ice shield that covered the whole island sloped slowly upward toward the center, so that they were still always climbing, however slightly, as they hiked. It wore them down.

Charlotte dropped back until she was walking alongside Angela, who was marching forward with machinelike regularity. “Hey,” she said once she was sure the men were out of earshot. “You and Leon…is that still a thing?”

“What about me and Leon?”

“Well, back in Amsterdam you said you liked the look of him,” Charlotte said, gazing at her own breath freezing into a cloud. “And then in Helsinki you said you’d have to take a closer look…”

Angela laughed. “I’ve finished taking my look. You can have him. I’ve noticed that you want him.”

It was childish, of course. Girlish dreams. No question. It was
wicked even. Yes. But indulging in fantasies of her and Leon made the
rest of the trip so much sweeter—irresistibly so.
…
Now Charlotte smiled when he pointed the camera at her. She flirted with the lens, that dark, gleaming eye. She cast it smoldering glances when he focused in on her. Let him wonder what she meant by that. Quite a lot. Perhaps, she told herself, they might find some pretext for a trip up onto the glacier together. Just Leon and her and a tent. Did these sleeping bags zip together? She knew there were some models designed in such a way that two bags could be joined together to make one big one, though she hadn’t checked to see whether that was true of the ones they had brought. The grandiose scenery! The endless emptiness! This stark, seemingly unchanging landscape, where even time itself seemed frozen into place. It was sublime. Primeval. It had to be an incredible experience to come here with a man, a real man, to be alone here with him. Alone together.

Charlotte looked at the photographer. How nimble he was. How surefooted as he went for the best angles. How elegantly he wielded the camera. Leon smiled back, seeming to understand her thoughts, to enjoy what was unfolding between them. The pounding of her heart was due to more than just the upward slope of the glacier they were marching across. How strong the sun was up here! It was a good thing she had put on sunblock. And a pity she hadn’t asked Leon to help her apply it. Next time perhaps. It was childish. Girlish dreams. Wicked even. But she enjoyed it.

Something glittered on the ground ahead, something unusual enough to get her attention. Charlotte stopped where she was and bent down. It wasn’t a smooth bubble of ice, nor a snow sculpture formed by wind and frost; it was something metallic. Something quite ordinary. Some sort of hook, chrome-plated, maybe a door handle or some such thing. She wondered how it had gotten here.

Maybe it was from the missing jet? She put out her hand and was just about to pick it up when Leon called after her. “Charlotte!”

She straightened up and saw him waving his arm.

“Come on! We got it!”

She had fallen behind. The others were all standing around Morley, who was holding his GPS in his hand and pointing down at the ground. Zeroed in. Obviously, they were there at last.

“Come on!” Leon called again. “I want everyone in the picture.”

She hurried, almost ran. By the time she joined the others, she was out of breath and coughing, while they were already striking poses as though they had discovered the North Pole. Charlotte joined them and put her hood back, never mind how cold it was, and shook her hair free because she knew it would look good on camera.

And she forgot to mention the metal object she had found.

“It has to be around about here,” Morley said again, taking one step to the side, the GPS still in his hand. Then one more step. He was trying to pace out an area corresponding to the zeroes on his screen.

Adrian was already at work organizing the drilling. After they had all taken off their backpacks and put on their life jackets, he collected the pieces of the drill kit and began to assemble it.

“Excellent,” Leon called out, shooting like crazy. “The researchers at work. Super!” His camera whirred as he took shot after shot.

The sun was shining, the endless ice gleamed, the sky shone a deep blue.

“This is pointless,” Charlotte grumbled as she strapped on her jacket. It was uncomfortable and stiff as a board. “The ground’s like concrete here.”

“But we don’t know what might happen once we start drilling,” Adrian responded.

“What could happen? Almost fifty years later?”

“We don’t know,” he insisted.

“And then? If one of us falls into ice-cold water, what then? He may not drown, but he’ll freeze for sure.”

Adrian clearly didn’t want to think too hard about the worst that might happen. “Best to play it safe,” was all he said, and he turned back to the drill.

Leon prowled around them in ever-greater circles, stalking them like a panther and taking photographs the whole time. A panther in a bright-red anorak. “Ladies!” he called. “Maybe you could…” Then the rest was lost as he lifted the camera to his face once more.

“What?” Angela hollered back. “Speak up!”

“Could you do something that looks like you’re working!” Leon waved his arms. “From over here it looks like Adrian is doing everything, and you two are just standing and watching.”

Charlotte and Angela glanced at each other. The biologist chuckled. “Well, that’s what’s happening, isn’t it?”

“Hold on a moment. It’ll look better right away,” Adrian called back. He turned to Charlotte. “When Morley and I lift the first ice cores, you can be ready with the samples case.” He looked at Angela. “And you can—hmm, perhaps you can put up one of the marker poles. As though you’re giving us coordinates.” He pointed to a spot about five yards away. “Over there, for instance.”

Leon stood off to the side, waiting. Even from a distance, they could almost feel his impatience.

“Couldn’t drilling like this damage the jet?” Charlotte asked. “If it’s really down there.”

Adrian shook his head. “This is an ice drill. It wouldn’t have a chance against metal.”

“Folks! The sun will be disappearing behind the clouds any moment now!” Leon called again. “I’m not asking too much here, am I? Just do something. The main thing is that you aren’t just standing around.”

“Yeah, yeah!” Adrian looked around for Morley, who was still pacing the ice with his GPS. “Morley, how does it look?”

“I suggest we sink the first drill here”—he coughed and pointed down at his feet—“then in a grid at ten-meter intervals. That should do it.”

“Okay, take this then.” Adrian passed him the drill bits he hadn’t mounted yet.

“Hey, look what I found over here!” Leon called out. “What are these things?”

Charlotte turned her head and saw the photographer bending over, saw him reach out his hand, and she realized he was standing exactly where she had seen that gleam of chrome earlier. At the same time she realized what nonsense it had been to think it might be part of the vanished Tupolev jet: not a scrap from that impact could have lain on the glacier for forty years without being covered over with ice and snow. But before she could say anything, Leon screamed. It was a sound full of surprise and pain.

Adrian turned around. “Leon?”

Leon didn’t answer. He was still standing there, stooped over, his hand outstretched, and he wasn’t moving.

“Leon!”

For one complacent moment Charlotte was sure Leon was just playing a silly trick. Then Angela broke into a run and the others followed, leaving everything where it was. Leon still wasn’t moving. And the closer they got to him, the more clearly they could see why.

He had been impaled.

Angela stopped abruptly and put her hands in front of her mouth. Adrian stopped, too, and gasped, “Jesus Christ!” And Morley stumbled backward as though sandbagged, then turned around and threw up on the virgin white snow.

Right where Leon’s hand had touched the ground, three gleaming metal spikes reared up from the ice and speared his body like a fork spearing a canapé. One of the spikes had entered his right hand and emerged halfway up his forearm, only to pierce his head below the right eye. Another spike had gone into Leon’s right knee and come out at his lower back. And the last was lodged in his left thigh just below the hip. It was a vision from the worst of nightmares.

“Oh my God!” Angela exclaimed. “
Oh my God oh my God oh my
God!”

Perhaps the worst thing was Leon was still alive. He wasn’t even bleeding. There was not a drop of red on the snow around him.

Charlotte approached him. She did not know what she was doing or why; that moment she knew nothing at all. Her mind was completely blank, as empty as the icy wasteland. Her heart was beating so slowly that it seemed an iron weight lay upon it. Leon looked straight at her.

“This hurts so mu…” she heard him whisper, almost below hearing.

It was the last thing Leon van Hoorn would ever say. In the next instant he began to shrivel. His eyes lost their focus. His face slackened, and his features fell away. His skin wrinkled as though the bones, muscles, and fat beneath it were melting away. And then they saw that he was indeed melting: within seconds his head was no larger than a dried apple, his mouth was a tiny hole, his eyes had vanished, and the face was unrecognizable. The whole body dwindled away. His legs buckled, and his feet lifted clear of the ice, dangling like husks. Even his clothing was sucked up. The camera. The sunglasses he had been wearing against snow glare. His shoes shrunk down to little black knots, to clots, then vanished entirely. All that was left were three silver spikes, gleaming like swords, as tall as a man and shimmering all over with a rapid scurrying motion, like a nest of vengeful steel ants.

All of a sudden Charlotte knew that she had seen this motion somewhere before.

“Get out of here!” she screamed, spinning around. “Run!”

3

They only stopped when they thought they were far enough away to be safe. Just as Leon had said, the sun had gone behind the clouds—but not completely: bright rays broke through here and there, one of them falling on the exact spot where Leon had been…
absorbed
. The spikes seemed to be getting smaller, withdrawing into the ice they had come from.

“What was that?” Morley gasped, pale as snow himself. “What in God’s name was that?”

“Nobody will believe us,” Adrian gabbled. “Damn it all. Nobody will believe any of this ever happened.”

Angela was trembling. Of the four of them, she was suffering most from shock. Her face was wet, and the tears had frozen to ice around the edge of her hood. Charlotte wished that she could cry, too, but she felt frozen inside. She felt nothing. All she could do was think, and all she could think was: Hiroshi. The thought pounded in her head like the pulsing of her blood.
All of this has something to do with Hiroshi’s machine!
But how could she explain that to the others? None of them knew Hiroshi, and Charlotte didn’t feel up to the task of explaining what she had seen on Paliuk. The feeling that she had lifted the veil of life, that she was connected to the real world, that she was truly alive here—that feeling was gone. This was a nightmare. Who would want to live in a nightmare? The only thing to do with a nightmare was escape it.

“What a goddamned…” Adrian stopped and then gave an inarticulate howl. “They’ll say we pushed him off a cliff! I can see us there already, in a Russian jail, accused of murder…”

“Even the camera’s gone,” Morley said hollowly.

“Devil’s Island.” Adrian waved his arms. “Saradkov is also known as Devil’s Island. Did you know that?”

“No.” Morley shook his head, his eyes wide.

“The copilot told me. He also had some dumb theory about where the name came from…Oh shit! The legends were right!”

“Devil’s Island,” Morley repeated. “Oh great. So what do we do now?”

As if in answer to his question, another steel blade shot out of the ice less than twenty yards away. And then another, closer.

“Run!” Charlotte screamed. What else could they do?

And so they ran again, ran as fast as they could, back the way they had come, while behind them the blades sprang from the ice like bear traps. But the blades were behind them. It seemed that whatever was after them couldn’t manage to cut them off, or lay a trap, or aim straight for them.

“We have to split up!” Adrian yelled as they ran. “One of us has to get back to the radio. Call for help.”

There was no trace now of the silence that had made such an impression on them as they climbed. Instead, their own ragged panting thundered in their ears, seeming to boom back from the distant glacier walls, and they heard the
SHIKK! SHIKK! SHIKK!
of the blades chasing after them.

“Call for help?” Charlotte shouted back. “You’re dreaming. By the time they’re here…” She didn’t finish her sentence, couldn’t bring herself to. There was no need to put it into words.

She looked around. Was she imagining it, or were they putting some distance between themselves and the…thing? The spikes seemed to be falling back, unable to keep pace. And they had changed: they no longer shot barely two yards out of the ice but stretched up higher, three yards, five, ten, then crumpled and fell in a fruitless attempt to snatch their prey.

Morley stumbled, screamed, fell down…Adrian was at his side straightaway, helping him up. Two blades shot up out of the ice behind them like metal monsters and flung themselves at the men—in vain, however, for Adrian and Morley were well out of reach.

Hiroshi. The thought still hammered in Charlotte’s mind. The movement she had seen on the spikes, that shimmering silver swarm: she had seen a rougher version of it on Paliuk. Somebody must have built a copy of Hiroshi’s machine, must have developed his creation. But why?

As Charlotte ran—staggering through snowdrifts, slipping over ice, struggling forward—she felt she was caught in a dream of helplessly running and never gaining ground. Hiroshi…What had he told her about what had happened to his machine? He had programmed it to break out of the crate it was being transported in and throw itself into the ocean. Where each and every unit was supposed to fall to pieces. But what if it hadn’t? What if it had somehow stayed…
functional
? What if it had grown? A machine that could build copies of itself; was it conceivable that a machine like that could change over time, could improve, and adapt? Could evolve in some mechanistic, technological way? But then…how had it gotten here? Why this island, of all places? Something didn’t fit.

Angela screamed. Charlotte spun around, bathed in sweat, at the edge of collapse, and saw an enormous arm rear up out of the ice behind the biologist, flex, and stab straight down toward her like a scorpion’s tail. Angela was lost. She knew it. She raised her arms as though surrender would save her, falling backward in shock as the thing shot down…and then she glided out from under it as though plucked away by an invisible hand. The spike missed her and crashed into the ice, throwing up splinters.

“The life jackets!” Adrian yelled. “We can use them as sleds!” He threw himself down onto his stomach as he spoke, landing on the ice, and then shot away down the glacier at least twice as fast as if he had been running.

Of course. It was all downhill from here. Nevertheless, Charlotte hesitated to copy the others. She stumbled on in desperation until she heard a cracking, splintering sound behind her, horrifyingly near—so near that she dared not even turn around but flung herself forward, landing on her front so hard the air rushed out of her lungs and she sped away. By the time she recovered her senses, she was thumping and sliding down the hill, out of control. Ice and snow sprayed up into her face, her knees smashed repeatedly over ripples in the ice beneath her, and she was entirely at the mercy of gravity.

At
least
, she thought,
I can’t hear those damned things shooting out of the ice anymore
. All that Charlotte could hear now was the scraping rush of her own movement down the glacier. She squeezed her eyes almost shut, unable to see anything anyway, and felt the constant stream of ice crystals striking her face. Strangely, she didn’t feel like she was slithering across an ice shield but, rather, as though she were shooting through a white tunnel.

Somebody shouted. Adrian. She couldn’t understand his words. All she heard was that he was repeating them over and over with hideous urgency. All of a sudden the sounds made sense: “Turn around! Legs first! Steer!”

Charlotte opened her eyes wide and lifted her head. Straightaway, she saw what the problem was: she was shooting full tilt down a glacier that would eventually—all too soon—end in the Arctic Ocean. If she didn’t manage to brake in time, or at least steer toward the gap in the cliffs they had climbed up, she would shoot out over the edge of the glacier into the icy water below. Brake? She was going far too fast for that. She put out her arms and shoved her gloved fists against the ice…pathetic. It made no difference at all. She tried with her feet. There was a scratching, scraping sound, but she did not slow down by any meaningful amount. No point even thinking of steering. By now she could see the black sea surging sluggishly below. She didn’t have much time left.

Turn around. Maybe that would help. She tried to struggle into position, shoved a shoe into the ice, and ended up sliding along, full-length sideways, which slowed her down a little. Charlotte flailed helplessly, slid onward, then managed to grab hold of a lump of ice or stone or whatever with one hand and turn herself around. She was still on her stomach, sliding backward. She lifted her head.

There were the shining blades. Dozens of them. Coming for her.

A bump in the ice below flung her upward for a moment and she spun in the air, landing painfully hard—but on her back. Now she could steer. She rammed her boots into the ice, sending it spraying up in splinters all around her, and changed course. Like riding a luge in the Winter Olympics, except that she had no sled, just this miserable scrap of foam, and the prize was not a gold medal but her life.

She shot into the gap between the cliffs through which they had reached the plateau. It seemed a hundred years ago now. Beyond the gap there was no point in even trying to control the ride. Here, the only forces in play were gravity, inertia, and sheer blind luck. Charlotte tucked her head down between her shoulders and was flung up and tossed left and right, bashed and bruised, spun around. She rammed into rocks, and her parka ripped open. She felt snow in her face, felt pain, then stopped feeling pain and was only falling, ever downward, falling.
I’ll probably break my neck
, she thought.
But even that would be better than being
absorbed
.

But she didn’t break her neck. She came to in a huge heap of snow and ice and heard someone shouting, “Charlotte! Hey! Are you okay?”

Adrian. That was Adrian shouting. She managed to crawl to her feet. Her head hurt, and she felt it must be bruised all over. She was dizzy. When she looked down to see whether she was indeed standing on her own two feet, possibly even standing upright, she noticed the life jacket had been reduced to scraps and fragments held together by the webbing that had given it its shape. Charlotte looked up. Adrian was standing there, waving his arms wildly. Morley and Angela, so unsteady on their feet that it was painful to watch, were already staggering toward the hut. As though the devil himself were after them.

Ah yes. That was it. Charlotte turned her head and looked up at the gap in the cliffs, trying not to think about how she had come down there hundreds of yards more or less vertically. The devil. But his gleaming silver claws were nowhere to be seen. They had escaped.

“Charlotte!”

Adrian was clambering toward her…why? To drag her along behind him? To help her out of the snowbank? But she was already on her feet. She took a step and felt as though the ground were moving beneath her feet, as though the island were tipping into the sea.

“Come on.”

He reached her, took her by the arm, and supported her with exaggerated care. As though she were a china doll. But she was okay. Just a few scratches. She shook his hands off, unbuckled what was left of the life jacket, and let it fall.

“That was close,” she said and then realized it had been more than close for Leon. She found herself thinking of his Viking mane of dirty blond hair, his eager blue eyes, his impudent smile. Gone, all gone. Absorbed. Devoured.

“Yes,” Adrian said. “Goddamn it all.”

Every step hurt. As though someone had taken a hammer to her while she was unconscious.

“No injuries?” she asked. “As we came down, I mean.”

“You had the wildest ride. You overtook all of us, just shot past—
whoosh!
” He traced a low flat curve in the air with his hand. “When we got to the bottom, there you were on top of the avalanche.”

“That’s how I feel. Like an avalanche hit me.”

But she could walk. If there was nothing worse waiting for them, she wouldn’t complain.

Morley and Angela had already been in the hut for about five minutes when they arrived. Just as Adrian was reaching for the door, it opened and something big and bulky came out toward them: the boat, fully assembled. Morley and Angela were shoving it outside.

Adrian leapt back. “Hey, have you guys gone completely mad?”

“Goddamn all self-help books!” Morley said, sobbing, as he tugged and pushed and shoved. “Do what you’re afraid of. Whoever wrote that had no idea what he was talking about.”

“Fine, sure, but what are you doing?”

“What am I doing?” Morley snapped back. “I want to get off this island.”

“Where to, though?”

“Off the island first, think second!” he yelled like someone who might snap at any moment.

Since there was no way past the looming bulk of rubber and nylon, Adrian and Charlotte helped the two of them to get the dinghy completely out the door and then left them to it.

“Shit,” Adrian said as he opened the door to the living quarters. “I knew Morley would snap at some point.”

He fetched the radio out from under the bed, opened the box, and switched it on. He plugged in the antenna they had stretched out along the ceiling. Outside, they could hear Morley screaming, “No, goddamn it, don’t use the pump! Far too slow. Here, use the compressed-air bottles, this is an emergency.”

Adrian turned the dial and passed Charlotte the microphone. She squatted down on the floor in front of the transmitter and talked without pausing to choose her words. “SOS. SOS. Rogachevo base, this is Saradkov. This is an emergency. Can you hear us?”

She let go of the “Transmit” button and listened. Nothing. Just an ear-splitting howl of static, a cacophony of crackling and chirruping as though a swarm of electric locusts were flying toward them.

“They’re jamming the wavelength,” Adrian said, standing over her. “The damn things are jamming us.” He jutted out his jaw in grim determination. “Try again. As many times as you can. Try all the frequencies.”

Charlotte switched over to the emergency band and tried in English. “Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is Saradkov Island.” She bent imploringly over the microphone. “Can anybody hear us? This is an emergency. Our lives are in danger. This is Saradkov Island calling, coordinates: 80 degrees, 49 minutes north—”

“Oh my God!” Adrian yelled. “Look at that!”

Charlotte stopped. She saw the sheer terror in his face; he was looking out the window in the back wall. She stood up. Something was pouring down the side of the mountain, shimmering silver, slow and inexorable as lava but giving off a cold light.

And whatever it was, it was making straight for the hut.