A Dream of Ice (24 page)

Even Bundy noticed and glanced around, his goggled eyes coming to rest in Siem's direction.

Suddenly Ivor griped, “What in the great white hell is goin' on? I feel like I'm at a bloody rock show!”

With little wind to scatter sound, his words rang clearly over the work site. There was a chorus of agreement.

“That's exactly it,” someone said. “I feel like I have a big sound speaker on my stomach.”

“Not a speaker,” Ivor said. “A subwoofer.”

“Yes,” Siem said. There seemed to be a very low-pitched, sub-audible frequency, something none of them had ever experienced.

The team was silent a moment, looking toward the horizon. But their world was still empty save for the modules and vehicles . . . and shadows that looked out of sync.

Everyone jumped when the last hydraulic leg started jacking up.

“That's all we need,” muttered Bundy. “Mass hysteria.”

“What about the PALAOA recording?” Siem asked. “Could that be the problem?”

The Perennial Acoustic Observatory in the Antarctic Ocean was a German effort located northeast of the Troll station, under the ice and underwater. A year or so ago they had picked up a remarkably loud, very deep buzz that sounded like a droning airplane engine. “A bit like the world's largest didgeridoo,” as one of the Australians had described it. And the Germans had confirmed that there were no ships anywhere within a thousand miles of the receiver, so to date the source was another of Antarctica's multitude of mysteries.

“We'd actually hear it if that were it,” said Bundy.

“And we're not underwater anyway,” Ivor said, wandering over.

“Maybe we'd better call the Norweg—” Trout started, then looked back at the dark power module. “Oh. Damn.”

“You think it could be seismic?” Siem asked.

Trout shook his head. “If it was an earthquake, we wouldn't feel it in our guts but nowhere bloody else.”

The hydraulic leg stopped when it had fully retracted. The silence was as empty as the vista surrounding them. Everyone set their shovels to the snow. Because the air was still and crystal particles of ice did not stir, no one saw a blank space of air pucker about a hundred feet from the module. Slowly, the void sucked itself into the invisible shape of a circle. Then it blew itself out.

The team didn't see it but they felt it in their bellies. Nearly everyone cursed and swung their hands to grip their torsos, dropping their shovels.

The air puckered again in a different spot, in the shadow of a module, collapsing on itself like a vertical sinkhole. The shadow shrank, then expanded, so this time half the team saw it and cried out. A moment later the air snapped back to normal. Amid the shouting, Bundy, the nearest, ran to the spot and stood in it, waving his arms around.

“I don't feel a damn thing!” he called.

Then there was a horribly recognizable sound—metal, wrenching. They spun and watched as the facing wall of the nearest blue module pinched inward, as though grabbed from the inside. It continued to implode with a crunching noise until it formed the shape of a circle. Then the metal flew outward with a metallic shriek. The surrounding joints held, the wall did not detach, but it warped as it expanded, leaving it bulbous and grotesque.

Almost instantly, the air behind Siem sucked back, his shoulders with it. Trout grabbed his sleeve and pulled hard. Siem opened his mouth but couldn't scream. Trout jerked him free just as the air blew convex, knocking Siem to his knees, then facedown. In shock, he quickly raised his head and shook the snow from his face as Trout bent protectively over him.

There was another metallic squeal. This time it was a leg of the module they'd been working on. As the air pulled back, the leg bent with it, and suddenly there was a flash of light like sustained lightning, brilliant and unyielding. As the first painful shock of the magnesium-white flare subsided, the glow seemed to possess a shape.

“Do you see that?!” Ivor shouted.

“Yes!” everyone called out.

They were staring at the mostly featureless mask of a human face. As it continued to form it began to burn. Strangely, the high, all-consuming fires did not throw off any heat.

What appeared to be a mouth opened wide.

“
Ul . . . !
” it cried in a voice that sounded like a monstrous Antarctic gale.

Almost at once another metal leg bent the other way. Unsteady now, the huge module began to list to one side. The team shouted and ran from under it. Fingers struggling beneath his thick gloves, Trout dragged the still-prone Siem by the shoulders, as the big blue beast leaned until its side crashed to the snow.

The team was openly scared now, looking in all directions for the next anomaly, unconsciously clumping together for protection. Trout urged Siem back on his feet.

There was another suck of air about seven or eight feet above them—and the face beneath the fire took on greater substance, now with more rough detail: its mouth open, eyes wide.

“
Ul . . .vor . . .ul . . .vor!
”

Two men fell to their knees, clutching their sides.

“What is it?” Trout said in a trembling voice as he retreated from the group.

“This is insane!” Bundy shouted back, looking from Trout to the circle.

“I see . . . eyes . . . the mouth!” Siem whispered.

Bundy didn't answer. He was looking up at the face of fire, its dark eyes scanning the group as though they were searching. The manifestation seemed to be struggling, repeatedly trying to stabilize and failing.

“
Ulvor!
” it cried again. “
Ulvor o Glogharas!
” This time it was clearly a human-sounding voice, intensely magnified, the words echoing across the ice like a sonic boom.

The face gained sharpness, clarity, even as the flames licked at it. The eyes were pearls of black amid the bronzed silhouette.

Parts of a body became visible now too. There was a bare shoulder and hands that were engulfed in tongues of flame moving in slow, sinuous gestures.

The air was pulsing more violently now. A full figure formed, all of it ablaze, hovering in the air, looking, looking . . .

“
Vol!
” it screamed. “
Enzo pato Vol!
”

And then the air exploded and the figure was gone.

The researchers remained where they were, stunned into silence. All except Siem who sought and found Trout.

“Can you explain that?” Siem demanded.

“Localized aurora . . . St. Elmo's fire. There
is
a sane explanation.”

“Well I know someone who might be able to,” he said. “I am going to get Mikel Jasso.”

C
aitlin was done with caution.

She'd been careful after the incidents with Jacob. She'd been tentative but complicit about communing with Galderkhaan. She'd been taking advice from well-meaning but cautious, cerebral people who barely understood what she had experienced, who did not grasp what she felt she was capable of.

That time was over. It was time to treat these deep mysteries like she had treated the rest of her life before Maanik had entered it: with action.

Caitlin let Jacob sleep. She arranged him under his covers, and, without hesitation, stalked to her living room, grabbed her keys, and left her apartment, locking Jacob in. She pushed the door to the stairwell so hard it crashed against the wall. She'd take the bad-mother guilt if he drummed and she didn't answer. What she had to attempt would only take a few minutes and either fail . . . or succeed. She could risk that. The presence of strange persons in spirit was bad enough. But this new intruder had somehow appeared in the flesh. Running up the steps two at a time, she jabbed a key at the final door and burst onto the roof of her building.

Planks were laid for a deck but the furniture had been pulled aside
and tarped against the early onset of cold. It wasn't quite a 360-degree view; a building loomed to block the north, another impeded half the view of the Hudson River. But to the east and south, it was all streetlights, the dark silhouettes of water towers, a few luridly colored LED spires.

Caitlin raised her arms as if to embrace the skies and all the time that had passed under them. Her soul felt primal, stripped of civilization and inhibition, ready to journey.

She couldn't use the
cazh
. For one thing there was just one of her. From everything she had seen in Galderkhaan, the ritual required at least two or more. For another, she could not risk leaving here, spiritually. If Jacob did more than drum, if he woke and she wasn't there or god forbid went into crisis . . . well, she had to be there.

Finally, and perhaps most frightening to her, Caitlin could not risk
wanting
to leave. She remembered how ecstatic she'd been in the UN that night as the mass of souls took her up with them. It was like the addicts she had treated: To a one, they knew what they were doing was unhealthy. But they liked the way it felt.

With purpose bordering on fanaticism, she planted her feet toward the southeast and looked across the city. The bay wasn't visible but she knew where it was. She oriented toward “big water” just as the Galderkhaani had done so many millions of years ago, and extended her arms toward it. The connection was immediate. It was similar to what she had felt in the train coming back from the session with Odilon—total expansion of self in every direction. But now that she wasn't resisting, it was exponentially more intense and more pervasive. The Eastern mystics professed it and people made it a joke: “Make me one with everything.” But that's exactly what it was.

This is real. I'm not imagining it.

Very slightly, she pointed the first two fingers of her right hand. The result was almost visible, it was so potent. A white—
veil
was the only word that came to mind—stretched from her body and began to coagulate, to writhe like smoke, moving, seeking through the city,
probing and elongating. Caitlin felt her heart galloping as the serpent moved south and east, rising and hovering below the clouds and then suddenly striking down toward the earth. It stopped cold on Chinatown. There was the woman from the subway. Caitlin could feel her as if she were standing right next to her. She turned toward Caitlin in shock.

Come back here
, Caitlin thought at her sharply.
Now.

Her own voice was loud in her head and, apparently, outside of it; Caitlin heard several dogs barking before she dropped her hands and the conduit snapped shut. Arfa must have been freaking below her.

Her breathing and heartbeat became regular as she came back to where she was. She was proud that she had
done
it. And she
had
done it. Now all she had to do was go downstairs and wait.

Jacob continued to sleep peacefully. Arfa was nowhere to be seen. When she tired of waiting, she paced into the living room and, by force of habit, turned on the TV. The local station had breaking news about animal insanity across Manhattan. Now that Caitlin was paying attention, she realized that the dogs she'd heard barking hadn't yet stopped.

Central Park Zoo got the most attention. Cell phone video showed monkeys that wouldn't stop howling. The sea lions were screaming too, and some of the birds kept flying into the sides of their cages. On the phone, the keeper for the zoo's rain forest habitat reported that the animals had grouped together, regardless of species, with their bellies flat on the ground and as much foliage for camouflage as they could find.

“The boa constrictor is apparently taking a nap,” the anchor reported. The video showed the reptile coiled in a corner, wrapped around itself seemingly at rest.

Caitlin thought back to the profound experience with the snake in Haiti.

“What are you doing?” Caitlin asked aloud, pondering the snake. “Observing? Waiting? Ignoring?”

Perhaps all or none of the above. Caitlin thought about other snakes that had fascinated her throughout her life, from the serpentine shape of her “spirit” headed toward Chinatown, to the snakes of Medusa and the Garden of Eden, to Cleopatra and the caduceus—the symbol of the medical profession. Her world.

“Why you?” she wondered, watching the big snake on TV. “Maybe the scientists are right,” she mused. It was all there in an airplane magazine article she read a year or so ago. Researchers believed that superstring structures bound all matter on a subatomic and supercosmic level. Perhaps they got the name wrong. It could be the strings were snakes.

The news report concluded with a late-breaking update that emergency room visits were up dramatically with victims of bites, mainly from dogs, cats, rodents, and what were being described as “kamikaze pigeons.”

Caitlin bolted from her seat and went searching for Arfa. She found him in her bedroom closet, having forced his way under the door. He was cowering and emitting the tiniest of mews. He hunched even more as she ventured closer. Unlike the other animals, he did not attack.