A Haunting in the Arctic, page 28
I stop. “What?”
He turns to face me. The look in his eyes is different, and I feel uneasy.
“Where did you buy your internet terminal, Dominique?”
“What?”
“Where?” he presses, shaking me. “You can’t remember, can you? You can’t remember, because you never bought one. You didn’t set up a TikTok account. You didn’t google, you didn’t film anything. It wasn’t real.”
He’s speaking so fast that the words are crashing into one another, his blue eyes wide and wild.
“Jens! Stop this!”
He claps his hands to my cheeks and pulls my face to his. “That thing I was trying to tell you? You’re dead, Dominique. We’re all dead. All of us.”
I pull away from him. “What are you talking about?” I say. Then, angry: “Stop it. Stop saying this!”
“I know you remember,” he says.
“What?”
He says it again, and I step back. “Why are you saying this?”
“You think you’re still alive. But you’re not. And neither am I.”
“Fuck you, Jens.”
I walk away, and when he reaches for my arm it might as well be a slap in the face. I pull away sharply, then spin around, my fists clenched. He sees.
“Nicky,” he says. “You were born Dominique, but everyone called you Nicky. Your father was George Abney and your husband was—”
I hit him, then, a hard crack across the cheek. “Don’t you dare talk about my husband!” A sob steals away the rest. But, too late—it’s as though the balloon has been pricked, and now the air seeps out, all the memories spilling from his words into my mind.
My husband. Allan.
The faces of the men.
Ellis. Lovejoy.
Daverley.
“Let me show you,” Jens is saying, his hand on my arm, and he is pulling me toward the pier overlooking the bay.
I’m asking him what he means by let me show you, until I realize that he has no interest in telling me. We are on the pier, the rotten wood making it difficult for my feet to find purchase. The force of the sea has ripped away most of the ice, carrying it in great chunks past the mermaid stone. If I slip, I’ll fall in, and the memory of Samara seizes me.
“Let me go!” I scream, right into his face. For a moment, he looks at me with what seems to be tenderness. And then, in one sudden move, he shoves me in.
I feel my feet leave the ground, my body flying through the frigid air. I hit the water on my side, my feet catching a block of ice.
I’m under, the shock of it tearing through me. Freezing water gushes down my throat and up my nose, stinging my eyes. All I can think about is getting up, getting out, finding air, and warmth. My hands flail and I kick hard, but it’s no use—the water is too cold, and soon my muscles won’t work.
My lungs are screaming for oxygen, panic ripping through me, bright as a comet. I reach up but my hands find a block of ice instead of the surface.
And then I stiffen. I can do nothing. Can’t swim. I can only hope Jens sees sense and tries to pull me out.
But I don’t drown.
Somehow, the water is no longer cold.
I look around, suspended in the dark. The panic softens. My lungs remember.
Shadows move in the depths, seaweed swaying there. I see a tail, long and black, flicking in the distance.
And I remember everything.
The Selkie Wife
October 1901
Cape Hooper, Greenland
Like all lies, the tale that Lovejoy told of Lír and the selkie wife was woven with threads of truth.
The sea was conscious.
This was the first thing she learned, once she left her body. Silvery strands of light radiated out from her like jute fiber, connecting her to the seals and whales and seaweed that drifted by, a vast web that spanned the planet in its past, present, and future dimensions.
Is this what you want?
A question posed by the sea.
Stay, and take revenge? Or go, and have peace?
There was no hesitation in her answer.
Stay.
A moment later, she felt something rest on her head, and when she reached up her fingers met the hard bone of the polar bear skull that Lovejoy had made her wear, the long fangs slender and sharp between her fingers. On her shoulders, two black guillemot wings, silken to the touch. The leg that had been human before joined the other, fusing, a muscular black tail. It was powerful enough to burst open the cage.
She swam out, relieved that her lungs were no longer straining for air. Bubbles drifted from her nose, and she saw clearly in the water. Her tail lengthened behind, twice the length of her former legs. Fish swam alongside as she moved into the blue depths. Above, the long shadow of the ship appeared, and she followed it, careful not to breach the surface.
Remember, the sea whispered, that revenge is a stone tossed into water. You can’t direct the ripples.
The wind had heard her songs, and the dark wishes folded inside them. In the currents of the sea they materialized, a scrim, a wraith unleashed, craving retribution.
I
Now
I’m in one of the turf houses, curled up inside the cage. How did I get here? How am I dry?
I look out through the bars of the cage. It’s the same one that Jens dragged from the sea. He is sitting next to me in a chair, and as my eyes adjust to the gloom, I see Leo and Samara there, too. I lurch. A moment ago I was underwater. Did I pass out? Surely they didn’t rescue me?
“Jens?” I call out. My voice wavers, fearful. “Will someone let me out?”
“We can’t,” Jens says. “The cage is in your head.”
I grip the bars and shake, the cold metal firm beneath my grip.
A moment ago I was underwater, my head bleeding. I reach up and touch it. There’s a faint pain there, but no wound. No blood. I grab the bars and shake the door. Nobody reacts.
“Well, she’s here now,” I hear Jens say. “You still want your revenge?”
“Yes,” Leo says, right as Samara says, “No.”
“What?” Leo says, turning to her. Samara clasps her hands together, and she looks tearful.
“Can someone tell me what’s going on?” I ask.
“We’re dead,” Jens says flatly. “All four of us.”
“We’re not dead, Jens,” I say, a sob in my voice. “We’re all very much alive.”
I just want him to let me out. I want to go back to the ship, and light a fire, and feel the safety of the cabin and the wood holding me close.
“Not in the real world,” he says in a low voice. “Nice to see you’re remembering things, though. Aren’t you?”
I open my mouth to shout out I’m not dead! but I remember the smell of Captain Willingham’s cabin, teak and the earthy tang of pipe smoke, the amber glow of his oil lamp on the desk, my own reflection staring back at me from the window behind him. Beyond that, a strip of ocean, black as night, and the thump of the waves against the hull. The sway of the boat churning my stomach.
You must have stowed away.
And then they violated me, over and over again.
When I killed Lovejoy, they put me in the cage and threw it into the water.
The dreams I had. They were my own memories.
Everything was different. Something had switched inside me. I could see that now. I didn’t feel time the way I used to. I would go to sleep and wake a week or even a year later. I would look out of a window and watch the seasons change, the trees turning from green to red to black naked branches, stripped of their leaves by wind and rain. The world around me moved on a different set of wheels. I didn’t change, didn’t grow old. But I still felt like me. I saw my face when I looked in a mirror. I got hungry, and tired, and happy, and angry, and I had dreams.
Sometimes I met people who spoke to me, and I knew they were in the river of time that I was in. They were like me, in the world and not in it, moving at a different speed. Unseen, invisible, but here.
Dead.
I remember.
I remember the man in the park, and waking in the hold of the ship. I remember the apologetic smiles of the men who appeared at my cabin door.
I remember what happened next.
I remember Daverley’s hand being cut off. They thought he had helped me kill Lovejoy, but he didn’t. All he had ever done was try to protect me. He died from blood loss, never returning home.
I remember taking revenge on the residents of Skúmaskot for burning down the whaling station, for preventing me from escaping when I might have had a chance to return home. To return to Allan. To live the life we promised each other.
“Let me out,” I say again, rattling the bars with my fists. “Please. We can just leave, okay? The four of us. It doesn’t matter that the coast guard have left. We can use the drone to help find our way . . .”
“We can’t get out,” Leo snaps. “Like, ever. Skúmaskot is a labyrinth.”
I stare at him. “What do you mean, a labyrinth?”
“I mean, you walk and you walk and you walk and you’ll come back to the ship. You go any direction, you run as hard as you can, and you will always, always come back to the ship. Swim, walk, run, dig . . . always the same. Circles. Every cave, every current . . .” He stops, his tears shining with tears of anger. “It’s because of you. You are doing it.”
I shake my head. “I’m not. I’m promise you, I’m not doing anything . . .”
“I believe you,” Jens says.
“Oh fuck you, Jens,” Leo says, kicking the air in frustration.
“I do,” Jens tells me, ignoring Leo. “I don’t think you are consciously doing this.”
“So, what—it makes it okay that she’s doing it subconsciously?” Leo asks Jens. “We’re all in her fucking self-created hell, her own personal Valhalla, and we literally cannot leave . . .”
“We’re trapped in your nightmare,” Samara screams, her voice bouncing off the hard surfaces of the room. “We’re inside your fucking memories! The horses in the cave? They weren’t real. They were your memories. The cameras, laptops . . . all in your head. And you possessed Leo. The poem on the table . . .” She starts to sob. “I didn’t know a ghost could possess another ghost. Jesus Christ.”
“She’s not possessing anyone,” Jens says quietly. “It’s the legacy of what happened to her on the Ormen. Trauma is an element, remember?”
I listen, trying to make sense of it all. My heart is beating so fast, and I feel nauseated. How can any of this be real?
“I just want to go home,” Samara says after a thoughtful silence. “Like, wherever we’re meant to go. I want to move on.”
Samara tells me she was a field recordist working on a research project in Svalbard. Her parents were so proud. They’d grown up in Jim Crow, and here was their daughter, getting a doctorate, then a postdoc for a project in the Arctic.
“We were on a ship. The Ormen.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “There was a guy from Argentina, Diego. Another postdoc, really sweet. I liked him a lot, and we really hit it off. And Leo . . .” She turns her eyes to him, and I realize he was there, too.
“I’d felt on edge the whole trip,” Samara says. “I kept having nightmares. I put it down to being seasick, being away from home. Then I started to hear Diego ranting. We all did.”
“What was he ranting about?” Jens asks.
“He said he kept seeing someone, or something,” Leo says. “A woman, or a mermaid. He stopped coming out of his cabin. Then Professor Joffre found him in his room half bleeding to death. He’d cut his feet apart. We thought he was having a psychotic episode.”
“We called the station on Svalbard to see if we could arrange for him to go home,” Samara says. “And then he had a gun. I remember him turning the gun on Leo.” Her voice drops to a whisper. “Diego shot him.
“I remember trying to tie my T-shirt around Leo’s leg to stop the bleeding,” Samara continues, her voice trembling. “And then there were more gunshots, huge bangs, and everyone fell around me. Diego pointed his shotgun at me and I pleaded with him not to. I could see he was crying and mumbling that he was sorry. And he shot me.”
I feel like someone is pulling me backward into an enormous hole, and then I’m falling and can’t stop. I hear the gunshots, like the popping sounds of the ice through Samara’s microphone. I remember Leo racing across the bay, leaping and ducking and diving, as though he’s trying to dodge a bullet.
Eternally trying to dodge the thing that killed him.
“And then what do you remember?” Jens says.
Samara opens her mouth to speak, but the words don’t come immediately.
My mind flickers with bright images, nauseating in their strength.
I haunted the horses, the prized horses of the men who owned the fishery, sending them to their deaths. I haunted the people who lived there, sending them running with fear, until not a single soul remained.
I hid in the wood, in the oil cans, in the hold of the ship, small as a knot. I changed form. I became.
I saw the explorers who stayed on the Ormen, heard their conversations. Picked up the shifting languages and turns of phrase, their technologies. Time moved in a staccato frenzy, whole years feeling like minutes. I was present and absent at the same time. I was a trace, a fragment. A haunted haunting.
Leo has calmed down, his arms folded and his chin to his chest like a scolded child. “Let me ask you something: what’s the definition of insanity?”
“What?”
“It’s doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting something to change.”
I blink. “I don’t understand.”
Leo throws his head back and laughs. It’s a horrible sound, a forced laugh. The sound of torment.
“Do you even realize how many times we’ve tried to fix this?” he says. “How many times we’ve tried to get you to, I don’t know, do whatever you need to do in order to let us leave?”
“No,” I say.
“Two hundred twelve,” Samara says in a low voice. “This is attempt two hundred twelve.”
“You used to hang out in the turf houses,” Leo says. “You would only come onto the ship at night.”
“You spent the longest time in the cage,” Samara says. “You were this . . . creature. A selkie. Half human, half fish, half wolf or fox.”
“That’s three halves,” Leo says.
Jens looks up at me, tugging at his pink beanie. “And then, you changed. The tail went. Your face became more human. You became like this.”
He runs his hands down in front of me. “Human,” he adds.
Samara gives a loud, pained sigh. “It gave us hope.”
“We hoped that the wreck being broken would change something,” Jens says sadly. “And when you said something was ‘Lovecraftian,’ we thought that this time was different.”
“About twenty years ago,” Leo adds, “I showed you a book on the ship by H. P. Lovecraft, and we talked about things that were in his style. You know, Lovecraftian. It was a sign you were starting to remember.”
Flashes of memory spool in my mind, erratic, a bombardment of smells and textures. Leo screaming at me to remember, to wake up. Samara on her knees by the pier, begging me to let her go. Countless times. I didn’t know how to do what she asked.
I couldn’t.
Finally, my thoughts turn to Morag, and it burns in me. The guilt of it. How can I ever make it right? The effects of guilt are stronger than any haunting.
It changed me, over and over and over again.
II
The cage melts away. In a moment, I’m sitting on one of the empty chairs with the others.
I look around, astonished.
“What happened?” I ask.
“The cage is only real in your mind,” Jens says. “In this world. Or realm, whatever you want to call it. You must have done something.”
“I didn’t,” I say.
“You did it without realizing, then,” he says.
I look down at my hands, my knees. I still feel pain. I eat. I bleed.
I think of the woman I saw on the beach, at the bottom of the ladder, at the three rocks farther down the coast. It was me, traces of who I’d been as a haunting. My memories eclipsing, superimpositions of the past and the present. Present absences, with all the ruptures in time and space that they create. Like guilt.
“You killed me,” Leo tells me, the anger burning in his eyes. “I fucking hate you. I’ve been stuck here for decades. I wanted to trap you in that fucking ship and sink you forever to the bottom of the ocean.”
“Easy, now,” Jens says.
Leo looks like he wants to kill me. He can’t, I realize, but he can still hurt me. I don’t know the rules here. In this realm.
“I’m sorry,” I say, glancing at Leo.
He scoffs. “You’re sorry? That’s it?”
“Just . . . let us go home,” Samara says, holding up her hands. “Whatever you’re doing to keep us here . . . just stop, okay?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Leo lunges at me, but Jens reaches out to stop him, and his shirt falls away, revealing his stump. Osteosarcoma, he told me. Liar. He’s Daverley. He risked his life on the Ormen for me. Jens Daverley. I hadn’t realized that he had died, too, but I see it now, like a shared memory—he bled out when they cut off his hand. He never returned to Dundee.
I think of the way he spoke of his wife, Eilidh. I’ve kept him here. Maybe if he left, he could be with her.
Maybe it’s too late.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. Then, turning to Leo and Samara, “I’m sorry about Diego. About everything.”
I’m pretty sure it’s not enough for what I’ve done. I have died a thousand times over. The girl who was drowned on the Ormen was filled with revenge. Delirious with both trauma and guilt, she drove the living to their deaths out of revenge. Some part of her was me, despite how much it hurts to admit it.
