Killer

Simon swung the axe up. “It’ll be all right,” he said, “hang on.” But the old man didn’t hear. He swung the axe down. As he did so, the ocean exploded up, and the whale reared into the air, mouth agape. Simon’s concentration faltered. The axe wavered by six inches and took the old man’s fingers off at the knuckles. The hand sprang free, spraying blood. Simon watched, unable to move, as the old man toppled forward, head-first, into the mouth of the whale. He just had time to scream. The whale, with the doctor’s legs sticking grotesquely from its mouth, fell back. The water closed.

Simon dumbly swung the axe again, this time true. The edge of ice split away and fell, taking the doctor’s fingers with it. He sank to his knees and leaned against the axe, still trying to believe it.

Then Ross was beside him, and Job.

“What . . .” began Ross.

“What happened?” screamed Kate, coming up over the crest at a rush. Ross caught her arm and swung her round bodily away from the edge.

“He went over. He dropped his glasses and went over. He caught the edge, but the killer . . . I . . . he was reaching out, with his hand. He couldn’t see. He was reaching out, and the whale . . .”

Job picked him up. Ross took Kate and led her stiff body down the hill.

Kate was numb. She couldn’t believe it. She felt no pain, no grief. She didn’t even feel sick. She felt nothing. She couldn’t believe it.

Job held Simon as he vomited over the edge of the crystal cliff. The wind came more firmly stripping away the fog. The sea brightened and began to ripple. At the bottom of the crystal cliff a small piece of ice turned. Buried in it, almost as white as the ice itself, were four fingers neatly severed just above the knuckle. Job shivered and almost vomited himself. A deep superstitious fear swept over him.

He watched the white fingers for a moment more until the water closed over them.

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During the first hour after the doctor’s death, a steady wind rolled away the heavy bank of fog, but while the floe had been covered, the weather had undergone a radical change. In place of the high bright blue of the sky, there was now a low ceiling of fat grey clouds pressing down against the sea and moving restlessly towards the west. The blinding power of the light was gone, and instead there was a heavy, threatening gloom. The sky was reflected in the oily grey of the ocean which lifted itself into sullen waves under the persistent prompting of the wind. The grey sky and the grey sea stretched to a vague grey horizon, and only the ice had life. The floes, their crystal interfaces seeming to multiply what little light there was, continued to glow with the blue of a paraffin flame, making it seem as though they contained some individual form of energy which lit them like cold neon. Even under the surface of the sea they burned mysteriously.

The dark clouds closed against the dark ocean. As though a plug had been pulled from the lower sky, thin trails swirled in a whirlpool in the air thousands of miles across. The storm continued to follow its sluggish course west. Four days ago it had closed Barrow Field for seventy-two hours, now it was raging over the Bering Strait, its leading edges already disturbing Russian airspace.

They sat in the gloom of the tent, silent for more than an hour, each a prey to thoughts they dared not entrust to the others.

Job thought of the white fingers floating on the grey-green sea, embedded in a shard of ice. He had realised quickly enough that they had to be the doctor’s fingers, and yet the deep dread they bore in him had not abated. He attacked the superstition of such dread from the levels of his Methodist education, and yet he could not break its power over him. He forced his mind on to thoughts of his wife and children, of his home in Togiak. But the fingers rose unbidden to his mind again; nails pale; joints swollen; the knuckles seemingly burst open like over-ripe plums; the stubs of bone. He flooded his mind with memories again, like a child who has had a nightmare thinking of nice things in the dark. His preoccupation was so deep that he was blind to the gathering shadows, deaf to the freshening wind, unaware of the change in the weather.

Simon Quick thought of nothing. Over and over to himself he was saying, “I am thinking of nothing, I am thinking of nothing. There is nothing for me to think about.” It seemed to him quite logical and acceptable that he should think like this. It seemed to him the best way to stop himself cracking up.