Felt lost and bewildered.
Wide grew.
Locked in another day.
Saw the sea.
The sea did not change.
Ran away again.
Home, thankful for the miles of dark green forest between him and the sea. Settled back into his studies. Didn’t throw up a hallelujah, but he worked at it, a little. Met Jeanrenaud in a campus coffee shop. Followed it with pizza and Jeanrenaud’s fascination with old Antarctic accounts. Waving his cigarette about like a conductor’s baton, John-Claude spoke of Danforth and the two Poe letters from 1849, which he’d discovered in his grandfather’s papers, and spun a narrative about the allusions and assertions of something Other that waited beyond the Lighthouse at the End of the World. “Tarnished accounts of a lost land.
Alien things
.” The songs on the jukebox faded in space and time as the chest of destruction was opened.
Mysteries. The clash of natures and destinies.
As a kid he was never big on sci-fi books or books in general. Movies, sure, but not books. Yet he’d loved Verne’s
Journey to the Center of the Earth
and some Edgar Rice Burroughs and, for a heartbeat, Erich von Däniken. Thoughts of something akin to Pellucidar took flight.
Call of the wild, sure. Back across the ferocious sea … “A spectral land of ghosts and desolation, a wild untamed place, but it may present the opportunity for an achievement like no other—I want to look into the abyss and see if there’s anything tangible there.
“Glory, my friend. If we find it. If we bring back proof.”
Got sucked in and signed on.
Sailed away, some laughed, into menace. South.
Felt the cold come, grow, it challenged the blue right out of the sky.
Pure white. Majestic blue. Mountains immortal when the Romans held slaves, when humans first rigged hopes on the light of the moon. Picturesque. For a time.
In the caverns below the discoveries came—
Surroundings lost order, new time came out of its burrows in the cold ground. Silent salted afraid with wild. Abundant was burnt out of future …
And he ran. Soiled by weakly and imprudent, carrying puniness and little else, he fled. Panic his route.
No more mystery. Just strangeness and wind. Wind. A saraband of dissonance, of devil-music. Wind. The vigor of its bristling speech presses its muscle to shoulder, to neck, presses—slashes, threatens ribbons savagely wrought. Finds its way in, gives winter. An epidemic of wind.
Weakened by terrors, not moving. Going under. No satin-lined box to put terrible in. No undertaker. Every breath slower than the last.
“Nobody’s … here.
“No—”
Nic. The luster of her California laugh when she asked if he had a penny to have his fortune told. Nic. The new existence, built with fever arrows, he discovered as she danced to “I Feel Love” in that black slip.
He thought it was silk. If soft moonlight was black …
Nic. Primal, free.
By anyone’s standards she was pretty, alluring. The right nose, right cheeks, just high enough. Perfect lips, jawline a statue in a museum would kill for, but her eyes, dig through the glimmer of a pirate’s treasure chest and you would not find better.
Beautiful.
Pieces of home.
The sleepy village, the histories of soft, the casual flowers along Wilson Creek Road … Fourteen, staying up all night under a full July moon listening to an owl who was not rooted to branches and the pull of the stars …
The middle years of infatuations, pushing off capacious branches to see if its wings could explain the horizon, inhaling theories, new spells some of which held, and small successes …
Ransacking sixteen and carting away whatever true he could find …
Socks on the rail, coffee on the back-porch with the ripe conference of yellow-tinted finches at the feeder while the smaller dark birds sat in branches waiting …
WHITE
hatching another exclamation of
WHITE
.
Fun. Skiing the white majestic at Gore two days after Christmas with Mike and Lena. Eight, making snow angels with Suzy, giggling wildly the whole time. Twelve, the snowman snowball fights with Dom and shoveling the driveway and the two-story snow-fort next to Jimmy Cammarere’s pigeon coop. The cozy table by the window in Petta’s Italian restaurant on New Year’s Eve with Nic and the velvet doe standing on the frozen creek.
Cold took it all. Every disguise and accent of memorial in the barracks of his memory. Leeched without a word, burned the layers of past in its blasting
NOW
. Dates. Learned.
Her blue silk blouse. The words of apology that weren’t suited for the bed.
There was no ledger or birthday that remained hidden or intact.
White fire and no clock. No undo.
They’d stood at the doors. Leveled their electric torches. Opened, the eruption of an existence that changed every man. The smell that was not friendly.
Jeanrenaud, “This changes everything …
everything
.”
Engel’s quick “Follow me.” A command burning along the slope of coveting.
Step by step and further they climbed right into it. Chambers and passages that detailed an alien prehistory, blazing architecture—Stonehenge and the pyramids kid’s toys, carvings of both art and science, corridors and bridges and rooms it would take years to survey and penetrate. Step, standing in grim, brushed and imprinted by facts that compromised, commandeered, all that had been formalized by human understanding. Chambers that capsized the grids and structure of fact, the hammer that swept aside every model of geologic, biologic, and astronomical. They opened it and the harsh enemy targeted lives.
Black fire raged.
Engel screamed, “Shoggoths!” He was the first to be absorbed by violence.
Impossible wrote.
Forces with no middle ground whirled and hysterics encountered zero.
And he ran—ignored the blunt of cold to be free of finished.
Now he sat. A thing that did not flap. A thing in a land with nothing to burn. No sky in the grave of apart.
Apart. Struck. Trapped.
Mouse to cat’s cold, warm left. An hour ago? A day? With so many pieces missing he couldn’t tell.
He stopped, maybe it was
was stopped
, stumbled. Fell and his adrenaline-fueled fight-or-flight response didn’t raise a “Get up!” Every signal of difference he had—
his
steps,
his
bowls, the speed and acts of
his
nerves,
his
tell—was pinned to this nation of
WHITE
. Barely had his idiot left. Lost a mitten and followed it by dropping his goggles, got spun around and couldn’t find them.
He wasn’t supposed to be out in this inhuman shit. Not in this vast blistering of
WHITE
influenced only by unsympathetic
COLD
. No one was. Not alone.
Coyne, former Marine hard-stripe sergeant and still a major-league hardass laid down the rules for everyone: “No one, man or dog, goes out in Condition 5 weather. On your own, you die out there.”
He’d heard it. Knew it.
Wished he’d remembered it.
Asshole.
Stupid … How many times did he tell everyone?
“Other side of that door is
fucked
all the way to dead. Shitload of pain before you get there too.”
Alone, bent and small, whatever grit he ever possessed weathered out of him, with no acceleration to movement and no ship to turn from
DEATH
everywhere toward a map of places.
Being terrified after Ancient was jarred awake hadn’t helped. Maybe a few seconds of cautious sense and he’d have taken the SnowTrac, not the dogs. Would have sealed him off from the wind and it had a heater. Instead he shot himself into a death-struggle with raw snow and exposure, from there his spirit hadn’t been enough to interfere with or challenge the solid radiation of cold.
Tired. No climb to summer on his tongue. No wings to force into labor in this grave of
WHITE FIRE
.
Tied down. Crushed.
Dead man.
Fleeing into a Condition 5 weather situation without proper supplies. “Asshole.”
Asshole.
Split.
Leviathan-shattered.
Dead man. Winter-sculpted.
The white-tomb swells. His eyes cry out no name. His face froze, no longer a carpet of features.
Sure wasn’t like this when they got past the stalactites and opened the doors and leapt past and ran with their upside-down imaginations. The air was blissful, stank, but it was warm. It was here, their lamps shone on gold’s delirium. Really here.
“We … Christ, we found it!”
“Glory, my friend.”
Proof.
Smiles, brio that needed no translation. Shaking hands.
Behind him Herbie’s foreign accent summed things up. “Wow.”
He heard Professor Roosevelt drop his Ph.D. “You ain’t shittin’.”
He agreed. All that and more. This discovery would free him. It would bring money, maybe some fame, and there’d be interviews and features in the press, and, he was willing to bet, down the road documentaries and movies. If he let it, this could release him from the past where Nic took the full measure and killed herself. He might be able to get some of himself back, or maybe avenues he’d never considered would greet him with some kind of guiltless redemption. No vague to the mind-bending impressions they stood admiring; it was all right in front of him waiting to pull him from anger and grief. Eyesight for the blind.
Jeanrenaud slapped him on the back. John-Claude was glowing, as if he was eight and it was Christmas.
Didn’t hear the dogs growling.
None of them did. Too busy bringing out instruments to assist their intensity—spot to spot, artifact to artifact—“If we sequentially connect the complex growth shown in panel one, any analysis would lead to a discussion of heightened—” abandoning philosophy with physical fact—they wouldn’t let them break the spell.
Didn’t. For hours they guarded the brilliance of their new flame, let it nurture them. Until the harsh blows of long-forgotten hunted—
Understanding, enthusiasms, deeds, impetuous pride, gone in an aggressive gesture …
BLACK FIRE
.
He ran to survive.
Ran from bestial … From the corpses scrawled on the calendar of death …
Pushed the dogs.
Screamed.
Begged for fast and miles.
Then he lost a mitten.
And the first dog died …
No camp. No biscuits. No cigars with Connelly and Jeanrenaud.
No New York.
No steaks and quiet laughs in O’Reilly’s with Fred and Derrick …
Strolling the Park …
Pleasantly arguing with Tom after the Yankees game over which Ray’s was Ray’s, then off to try slices in both to, maybe, determine a winner … or just have another cold one and laugh …
He would never see Grandpa Charlie’s little white porch in Danbury again—the flowers, the clover, the rocking chair on the deck of the whaler where fish stories sailed …
Absent. Warm in a ditch with no ramp to the road of attaining.
Fingers numb freeze the sentence of cold’s law.
Nose. Frozen.
Cheeks frozen.
Feet beyond the acid throbbing, cold marble forever closed on the cream of warmth’s hospitable.
Skin chilled beyond any desperate command to reach or move in the cutthroat stronghold of clenching
COLD
.
Blood couldn’t get to the heart of the matter.
Looks at his fingers. Imagines warm. Tries to. But there’s no lust in it.
Looks again. Fails to grasp the myth.
All of him shivering, stammering, and paying dearly for the unstructured and unprepared flight—you better run his only thought.
Took the empty sled. Less weight, faster his only reaction to the absolute at his heels.
“Asshole.” More heat leaving.
He wanted a cigarette. Wanted a fire—wildfire or inferno, size mattered to his momentary lust.
“Grandmother Spider.” The myth of fire. There and gone from the page of desire. There were no spiders in this frigid waste. Hadn’t seen a clay pot either. Another myth with no basis.
Wanted a weapon that could repair the landscape. But the cold that was eating him told him those doors were locked.
Wanted his mind back. Wake up. Home. In bed. Bare feet on the hardwood floor to the bathroom mirror. Yawn. Mutter. Stare. Looking at days of little town blues.
Coffee. “Stayin’ Alive” on the kitchen radio.
Nowhere.
Nobody would come and help.
Nobody was left.
Chained.
Out of growing. Load bigger. Colder.
One hundred years ago. That expedition. Ridicule and disbelief dropped, true, no madman fantasy. Even the horrors.
Out of the storm of screams and viscera into this white hell. Screamed insane. Screamed fuck.
Fuck!
White fire. Monster. Biting, burning. Unrelenting.
No God.
Why? Would it have hurt to have one? Or a dozen? Savior—vessel, passage—compass—easing with bells and psalm. Just one rooted in light to grant beginning and Earth as a house of warmth. Someone to take the words of mouth and footsteps of pray and build a firmament and vineyard of soft and secure above the alone carved by the worm in this enormous illusion.
Why not?
He’d give up temptations and misfortune and heathen soul for just one.
Would have …
Would.
Cracked lips forced into existence. “
Sun
goddamnit.”
No sun.
No God. Wind. With no mend, pushing white with its current of suffering. Wind stretching, etching grieve, condemning head and hand.
Cold the true devil.
The white fire burns. Burns slave, passed shuddering and whimpering with swift horrors, besieges dazed with lost.
Wants a god to summon up and kill the devil with Bible. Wants a god to grant Icarus wings and fly away Home. Away from the white world.
One hundred years ago. The white fire. That black fire. That tore off their clothes. That tore up their souls. Tightrope. Ice. Fire. No saving net of soft landing in Heaven.