We can see the Antarctic coast through the upper windows of Inverse Tower Six. Were the water remotely temperate, we could swim the distance to die comfortably of starvation in Marie Byrd Land.
The name sounds deceptively joyful. Merry Bird Land.
The woman who bore the name Marie Byrd was the wife of an explorer who was feeling sentimental. The land called Marie Byrd remains the largest unclaimed territory on Earth, an expanse of glacier-shrouded rock so inhospitable that no nation wants it.
No one has attempted the swim. Neither has anyone ruled it out. We peer through the welcome-floor windows, for now above the waterline, though this is changing by inches and minutes. Some of us climb up top. In shuddering cold, we measure the distance with eyes and nerves. We climb back down.
+
Speke won’t stop alluding to horror stories. In the Mountains of Madness. The Terror. No one else says anything. Nobody wants to be that guy from a Stephen King novel who’s worse than the creature on the cover.
When Speke first crawled from below, dripping and deathly cold, we threw blankets over his bony shoulders, poured him warm broth, slipped a wool cap over his stubbled scalp. His gallows humor we chalked up to trauma. He was, after all, the only survivor from the saturation decks five levels down.
Inverse Tower Six bobs in the sea, most of its body lurking iceberg-like under the surface, and the lowest levels are the saturation decks, pressurized against the water outside, everyone breathing helium and talking like the world’s toughest mice. The lower decks might as well be another planet. Someone climbing to us from down there should fizz like a shaken soda. Not Speke. We ignored his stares, his crooked little smiles, the way he never seemed to get warm. We swallowed unvoiced doubts, each confident we were alone in harboring them. Maybe we were bad with faces, we thought. Maybe we didn’t know the sat tank fellows well enough.
This morning, Millie dug up the manifest and rotation schedule.
Speke isn’t on them.
“Anyone remember the dog from The Thing?” Speke asks.
We all remember. No one answers.
“There’s this great scene,” he says. “The Thing pretends to be a dog. The other dogs in the pen realize Thing’s a monster, but instead of fighting back, they chew on the wire fencing, desperate to escape.”
Millie trades looks with Hiro, who’s on the VHF. All the movies Speke talks about were ordered from the DVD library by the saturation divers down in storage. Hiro swallows. Returns to maydaying.
I stand. “Gonna check the water level.”
“Say hi for me,” Speke says.
I feel his eyes on me all the way to the ladder.
+
Sven and Arnold play cards in upper berthing, bundled against the cold from below, from the bulkhead, from the Amundsen Sea on the other side. Sven warms fingers on a steaming mug. Arnold flips a card.
Maglite on, I descend.
At Q Level, my ears pop. I wrap my scarf around my face, feel my breath against my cheeks.
Shattered glass on the laboratory floor. Tubes. Beakers.
I check the supply rooms again. Same result. Anything of value already grabbed.
In The Thing they had guns. A flamethrower. We have soup.
I lean through the door to the next ladder. Point the Maglite down three steps, to the black rising seawater. There’s a face just below the surface. Eyes and mouth open. Lips glacial blue; flesh blanched. I don’t know Speke, but I know — knew — Justine.
The water gurgles. Like something colossal far below belched.
The tower rocks. Waves slosh. The water rises half an inch.
Far below, something’s gashed in the bulkhead. The flooded levels are dragging us down.
Another burp. Justine’s face bobs closer.
I shudder.
Back on Q Level, Hiro waits. Youngest guy on the crew, rail-thin in a coat too big, hugging himself and shaking.
“Still no answer,” he says.
“Keep trying,” I say.
“We’ve got another problem.”
“Go on.”
“We have three GPS devices, and they’re all giving different locations for us.”
When we reach the welcome level, Millie and Belo are eating MREs. Speke isn’t eating, still hasn’t touched his broth. He’s just watching.
Hiro and I drag out the hard-copy maps, locate a peak and a nearby peninsula with binoculars, and dead-reckon our position. Coordinates in hand, Hiro returns to maydaying.
Speke’s watching me again.
He asks, “Know the tale of Madame Coligny and the Homme Gelé?”
No one answers.
“This story took place in 1833, near the Desolation Islands,” Speke says. “Robert Coligny captained the Astrolabe on an Antarctic survey, his wife Carole accompanying. One morning the ship dashed its hull. Who knows how. Rock. Iceberg. Heck, maybe something reached up and clawed a hole in the bottom. Doesn’t matter. The Astrolabe sank so quickly, Carole found herself alone in a lifeboat.”
Over on Mary Byrd, frost trails plume from the distant peak.
Speke says, “Well, I say alone. It’s a peculiarity of the human mind that we can hear of monsters from every part of the world where there are people, yet we imagine none exist where no man treads. This world must teem with unnamed things.”
Hiro stops maydaying.
Speke continues, “Poor Carole’s in this small boat, shivering in blankets, mourning her drowned husband, when a hand thrusts out from the icy water and grabs the side of the boat. As a man pulls himself in, she rushes to throw one of her blankets around him. Now, the lifeboat has four benches. He occupies the first. She’s on the second. Thank you, he says. It’s nothing, she says. An hour passes, bobbing on the sea. She notices things. The man only shivers when he realizes she’s watching him. He says brrr like it’s a word. She stands, and, arms out for balance, clambers back to look over the stern. Now when she sits, she chooses the third bench. He rises, moves to the second bench, smiles at her. Carole moves to the fourth bench. I don’t know you, she says. The man rises again. The boat doesn’t rock at all, as if no one’s there. The man who doesn’t shiver sits on the third bench.”
We wait. Below and outside, certain death. Inside, Speke.
Who is now standing and looking at me.
He asks, “Want to know what happens next?”
+++