A Haunting in the Arctic, page 23
For a moment, it feels magical. I’m sure the vodka has helped, but I feel warm inside. The tide has pushed most of the snow off the sand, and so the black beach sits like an inky margin against the perfectly white snow, cottony and untouched. I climb up to higher ground, looking out over the bay to my left and the beach to my right. I wonder if I’ll see the horses again. I haven’t seen them since that first night. I wonder if the dead horses in the cave put them off coming here.
The walk to the turf houses sobers me up and gets me into a good sweat. I had almost forgotten how much a brisk walk helps clear my head. I must remember that—even when the weather is as bad as it has been, get outside, Dom! You know it works.
Carrying the turf back, though—I didn’t think that through. I should have brought a sledge of some sort, a sheet of metal or plastic. I carry as much as I can, then leave it on the ground outside the Ormen and carry up as much as I need to get the fire going.
I break up the turf and feed it to the fire, then set a lid on it with the kettle on top of that. It’ll take ages for it to boil, but I’ve got time, and it gives me something to look forward to. The solar packs will be full of charge tomorrow, now that I’ve got some light, and I’ll be able to upload the footage from the last few days and film some new stuff. I’m looking forward to that. And I’m looking forward to seeing how many new followers I’ve got, and how many have subscribed to my paid content. Yes, Dom. There is lots to look forward to. Really, though, I’m itching to check whether Jens and Leo have contacted me. Whether they’ve walked back to the nearest town and have sent me a message, letting me know they’ve found Samara.
That they’re coming back.
Shit, the snow has gotten really heavy. I need to get the rest of the turf before it gets too wet. I head outside, moving too fast across the slush. I manage to throw my arms out and stop myself from falling backward. At the ladder, I pause, sensing something nearby. It’s not just the snow, or my pounding heart rate from the almost-fall.
There is someone standing right below, directly at the bottom of the ladder.
At first, I think it’s one of the others. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? They never left me! They went for a walk and got lost, and now they’re back!
But it’s not Samara, or Leo, or Jens.
It’s the woman, her back turned to the ladder. Her wet shoulders glistening in the dark.
I give a shout and fall backward with fright, and there’s a loud bang from where I catch my head on the sharp corner of the raised platform of the forecastle.
I hear the knock of feet against the rung of the ladder, one after the other.
And everything goes dark.
IV
I can’t tell if I’m dreaming or if I’m underwater.
I can see shapes floating around me, a huge one above. At first, I think it’s a whale, but then the shape of a rudder comes into view and I know it’s a ship. I am instantly filled with rage, such hatred that it seems to burn inside me. I want to scream with fury.
I start to move toward the shape, and I know what I need to do. I need to get on board that ship and kill everyone on it.
I come to. My mouth is filled with something, and it takes a moment to realize that I’m not underwater but on the top deck of the Ormen, lying flat on my back with my arms spread out at either side and a mouthful of snow.
I pull myself slowly upright, the back of my head throbbing from where I fell. Muddy slush is all around me. Luckily, I’m wearing my waterproofs, so I’m dry, if very sore and annoyed at myself for getting drunk. Then I remember what caused me to fall—I saw something at the bottom of the ladder. The woman. She was standing with her back to me.
My heart racing, I look over the side, and instantly I see it—the shape of someone there. But then my eyes adjust, and I realize it’s just a shadow. The moon has cast a shadow of the rocky outcrop and thrown it across the snow, and it looks very like a person standing there. Jesus Christ. That was why I fell?
A shadow?
At once relieved and annoyed, and still quite drunk, I head back inside the cabin, where the fire is throwing out a tremendous amount of heat. Oh, blissful heat! I pull off my hat and coat, then step out of my waterproofs. My fingers find a small amount of blood and a large lump, about the size of an egg, at the back of my head from where I fell. I must have been unconscious for at least a few minutes. I could have a concussion. But I feel okay, just sore, and suddenly ravenous.
I find one of Jens’s fancy food packets on the worktop and decide to make use of it. Korean Style Beef and Rice. Oh my God—I rip open the packet and eat it cold, each mouthful the most amazing food I’ve ever tasted. Jens is not here to tell me otherwise, and it’s technically still Christmas, for crying out loud. Forget turkey and trimmings—cold, vacuum-packed Korean Style Beef and Rice is the best goddamn Christmas dinner in existence.
The rest of the turf is still at the bottom of the ladder. So I know I have to go out there and get it, and I’ll confront whatever waits for me. If it’s a ghost, I’m going to laugh in its face. I’m going to tell it to go fuck itself.
I fetch my knife and fasten the holster around my waist, slipping the knife inside.
It has stopped snowing. The wind has died down on the deck. It was singing before, but now it’s so completely silent. Only the wash of the sea, but even that seems muted.
I step carefully through the slush to the side of the hull and stare down at the bottom of the ladder. I can see the turf, half-buried in the snow. No footprints. No ghost.
I gather the turf and head back up the ladder, a shiver running down my spine. I still feel watched. Despite all my bravado, despite the knife in my sheath, I can’t bring myself to turn around.
V
Research, that’s the ticket.
Sorry, Samara, but you’ve left your laptop behind and it has fifty-three percent battery life, so I’m using it to check out the academic articles you’ve downloaded.
I’ve locked the cabin door, and my knife is out on the dining table next to me. I risk a glance at the window.
She’s left a screenshot open. It’s of the newspaper article from 1901 about the missing girl, the daughter of the first owner of the Ormen.
I stare at the name. Nicky Duthie. There’s a scratch starting up in the back of my mind. I click on the bottom right, where the other open browsers are minimized. One of them is the photograph we all stared at, trying to work out if the blurry figure slightly out of shot was a woman. Leo said they thought the photograph showed a woman on the ship, which wasn’t unusual. Ship captains sometimes brought wives along, though it was mostly a North American tradition, not common among Dundee whalers. My mind turns to the crew roster that mentioned twenty people on board when there were twenty-one, and the logbook that mentioned a prostitute . . . These were all from 1901.
I stare at the photograph of the figure, halfway out of frame. The scratch at the back of my mind intensifies. Nicky Duthie went missing in May 1901 and was still missing in October. The photograph on board the Ormen was taken in August 1901. It feels like a leap of imagination to even wonder if she’s the figure in the photograph.
No. It’s ridiculous. Why the hell would the shipmaster’s daughter be on board as a prostitute?
It’s midnight. My body clock is whacked, and I’m still tipsy, so I’m nowhere near ready for sleep. I pour some coffee from my flask and use a little of the solar charger to crank up the internet. No messages from the others, which makes my heart sink. Maybe I should stop looking.
Samara is still logged into the academic resource, so I search for info on the Ormen from the 1970s. Jens and I had been searching for information from 1973, but I decide to widen the dates until 1990. An article pings up from 1976, and I give a laugh of surprise. We’d made our search too narrow—that was where we were going wrong!
Letter Delivered Years Late Sheds Light on Crew’s Disappearance
Laura Finlayson, 28, from Auburn, NSW, last saw her fiancé, Dennis Gordon, three years ago, when he boarded a research ship headed to the Arctic. Sadly, it was to be the last time the happy couple would set eyes on each other. Dennis sent letters home every week, and Laura began to worry when he failed to write.
“I knew as soon as the police pulled up outside my door,” she says sadly. “I just had a feeling.”
In 1973, Laura was informed that the ship Dennis had been on—known as the Ormen—had been located by the Russian coast guard. None of the crew had been located, however, and while searches were continuing, it was highly unlikely that anyone would be found alive.
Laura moved to the Gold Coast several months later. “I couldn’t manage without Dennis,” she said. “Our home became an excruciating place for me to live, so I needed to find a new place to make a fresh start.”
This seems to be part of the reason why Dennis’s letter didn’t reach Laura until August 1976. The new tenant at Laura’s previous address in Brisbane finally managed to forward Laura’s mail, and among the mail was a letter from Dennis.
“In the letter, Dennis mentions a guy on the research ship who had started to spend his days ranting and raving,” she says, visibly upset by the memory. “He says this colleague was acting really out of sorts, not like himself at all, and that it was very upsetting and disruptive. He said that the chief [Dr. Andrea Karsen] had locked the guy in his room for safety reasons. That strikes me as very coincidental, given that the ship went off-radar just a day or so afterward.”
I ask her what she thinks happened.
“Obviously, I can’t be sure,” she says. “But Dennis would never have shared something like that with me if he wasn’t really worried, or even scared,” she says. “I feel like he was almost writing it in case something happened, and then I’d understand that this was the reason for it. His letters never went into much detail about his daily routine and the people on the ship, so this really stood out. I do think it has something to do with the crew vanishing.”
Interestingly, the inventory for the ship when it was located adrift on the Barents Sea was missing a key object—a rifle, normally held in a safety box on the top deck. When the coast guard located the ship, they found that it had been damaged by storms, but most of the crew’s personal effects remained on board.
While speculation may not bring any of the researchers back, Dennis’s letter and Laura’s knowledge of her fiancé bring her some closure on a mystery that has torn at hearts for years.
My mind turns to the microscope that Jens found. The one with the hole in the metal casing that he said was a bullet hole. I get up to try to find it, but it’s nowhere to be seen.
The battery is running out on Samara’s laptop, so I do a quick check on three different search engines to see if I can find Dennis Gordon and Diego Almeyda linked together, but I don’t find anything. It strikes me that it’s worth trying the academic resource; after all, the scientists on the research ship probably published their papers. I type the names into the box marked Author and a single research paper pops up from September 1970: “Sea Ice Distribution in Franz Josef Land,” by D. Gordon and D. Almeyda.
My heart quickening, I read the paper, which has been scanned onto the website. I can’t make sense of it—lots about sea ice dynamics and the distribution of mean ice drafts—but I see that Dennis Gordon was a PhD researcher at the University of New South Wales, while Diego Almeyda was a geography lecturer at the University of Argentina.
The lead stalls after that, so I go out onto the top deck to search for the safety box mentioned in the article. The main cabin is really the only addition from the research era, but a rifle wouldn’t have been stored in a safety box way back in the early 1900s. It might have been a box that was already there, but I figure I might find a modification of some kind, maybe an old lock that was from the 1970s.
Nothing.
But as I’m standing on the deck, finally a song comes into my head. The lilting melody that slid into my thoughts when I was in the captain’s cabin, a tune that befits the words of the poem that Leo carved into the dining table.
these seas no more will cause thee strife
if you’ll become my selkie wife
I think of the missing woman. Nicky Duthie, daughter of the Ormen’s owner. I feel the same scratch at the back of my mind start up again, the blurred face at the edge of the photograph flashing in my mind.
Samara’s laptop battery is at twenty percent; my own is dead. Jens’s and Leo’s laptops are both password-protected. I kneel down to the internet terminal. Jens’s solar charger has one bar left. Quickly I plug the internet terminal into it and log online, returning to Samara’s laptop and logging back into the section of the academic resource where all the old newspapers are digitized. I search “Nicky Abney” and find a mere four articles, two of which are about another woman entirely. But one from late October 1901 mentions that George Abney’s daughter has not yet been found.
Hat Found near Dock Suggests Foul Play; Abney & Sons Latest
A hat that George Abney’s wife claims belonged to their missing daughter has been found near the docks of Dundee.
Mrs. George Abney, wife of the owner of Abney & Sons, identified the hat on Tuesday evening, following the disappearance of her oldest daughter, Nicky Duthie. Mrs. Duthie’s husband, Private Allan Duthie of the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guard, is said to have been killed shortly after Mrs. Duthie went missing, having sustained injuries at Fort Prospect in September.
Chief Constable James Richie of Dundee City Police says the discovery of the hat is a major step forward in the case, and has reiterated his invitation to the public to come forward with information. It is feared that Mrs. Duthie boarded a ship and set off for a new life while her husband was overseas.
Mrs. Abney is quoted as saying, “I have no reason to believe that my daughter left these shores freely. I plead again for information, and assurance of her well-being.”
So she was a widow, and doubtless without realizing it.
The battery is at nine percent. I scan quickly through the articles on George Abney. There are dozens, many of them focused on the business, and some photographs. He is a stout, proud-looking man. His obituary indicates that he died by his own hand; the wording is a plea to God to spare his soul.
I stare at the photograph of him smoking a cigar with the prime minister, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, the scratch at the back of my mind growing worse.
What did you do to her, you bastard? I think. What did you do?
Nicky
I
October 1901
Banks Bay, Greenland
Nicky remembered the weeks after Morag’s death. It had felt as though the world itself had been ripped apart, a strange reality in which she and Allan had to relearn their own lives, their own selves. A reality in which nothing had meaning, or sense. She had thought she might go mad.
It was two months after the funeral when she had woken to find Allan on the small balcony of Morag’s bedroom. He was naked. It was early, still dark.
“Allan?”
He was standing, his back to her, looking down at the garden below. She reached out to touch him and he spun around with a roar. She reared back, and he charged at her, ranting. His face taut with fury, a stream of expletives and accusations that didn’t make sense.
“How fucking dare you! Don’t you ever touch me again, do you hear?”
She had fallen to the ground, and he had stood over her, a hand raised. A terrifying moment.
“Don’t,” she had whimpered. “Please.”
Her plea seemed to wake him up, his face softening, as though he’d returned to his own mind. He dropped the hand that had risen to strike her and staggered backward. Then he locked himself in the bathroom. She got up and moved tentatively to the door, pressing her ear to the wood.
She heard sobbing. Allan had never cried. She had never heard this sound. But she knew its nature. He was broken. He was a man without his daughter. He was expected not to mourn, but to carry on as though nothing had happened. He had worked the day after, as expected. She had witnessed the grind of it, but felt powerless to do anything.
“Allan, please let me in.”
“I’m sorry.”
She took a breath, steadying herself. “I know you are. It’s all right. Please let me in.”
Eventually, the door unlocked, and she stepped inside. She found him sitting on the toilet bowl, hands on his knees, his gaze on the floor.
“You frightened me earlier,” she said.
“I know.”
“I love you.”
He didn’t answer. Then, after a few moments: “I’ve enlisted to fight against the Boers.”
She thought she’d misheard him. “What?”
“In the Transvaal,” he said, looking up. His jaw tight. “My father was a soldier. It’s my duty.”
She laughed, thinking he was joking.
“I resigned from the mill yesterday.”
“You resigned?”
“I told them why.”
“Allan,” she said. “You can’t be serious.”
“I leave in two weeks.”
She was too stunned to answer. He was leaving? It felt like a punishment. She had blamed herself every single moment of every day for what happened to her daughter. If she had only listened to Allan and returned home earlier, if she had checked that the front door was locked behind them, if she had instructed Mrs. Mackie to check on her . . . so many things she could have done to prevent this gaping hole in their lives.
