Pym (33 page)

This is when Angela Latham screamed. I forgot that she was even beside me until I felt her hand stop me from closing the exit door. And before I could figure out what was going on, she screamed again, and this time I heard the name she was yelling. It wasn’t mine.

Nathaniel Latham stood, bewildered, at the far end of the roof, separated from us by an army of monsters. All of Angela’s disinterest of only moments before, whether feigned or simply delusional, was gone and replaced by a selfless passion I had long accepted she didn’t have in her. They were closing in on him, having finally formed that circle that Captain Jaynes had begged for. Their horrible robes, packed in the fibers with ice and flapping heavily in a gust of polar wind, soon shrouded Nathaniel from our sight, but not before he could scream “Angela!” back to his wife and she could run out the door and after him. I tried to stop her. I tried to close the exit before Angela could escape to certain doom, but she was already too far out there. I tried to hold her wrists, tried yelling to her that it was hopeless, but years of step aerobics, spin classes, and Bikram Yoga made Angela too nimble for me. Ultimately, as those Tekelian warriors closest to us refocused on getting into the dome at the rest of us, it would take the strength of both Garth and Jeffree to remove me from the open door as well, as love overpowered my self-preservation. But they did.

The door was closed. When I turned around, the Karvels were armed and looking at me. Or at least looking past me, aiming their rifles at the demons that lay just beyond.

“Grab a gun and get ready to start shooting,” Mrs. Karvel instructed me without taking her eyes off the closed metal door. Already it vibrated as the percussion of an unknowable number of frozen fists banged on the other side, enraged.

“The heat. We have to turn up the heat. That’s what makes the poison work, that’s what killed the big guy. They can’t handle it, that’s their weakness,” Garth told them.

“You turn the heat up any higher and you’re liable to blow us all straight to hell. The damn thing’s broke, so just grab yourself a shotgun. I’m sure filling them with lead holes will kill them just as good.”

“My wife has never spoken a truer word,” the painter said, and he even put down the double-barrel in his hands for a moment to grab her face and kiss her.

“You fellas want to make yourselves useful?” Mrs. Karvel continued when he released her. “Then take the other exits and guard them too. Somebody cover the boiler room and somebody cover the garage door. Because they sure as hell are coming for us now. Just a matter of holding them long enough, right? As long as we keep firing these rifles, we’re going to do us just fine.” Mrs. Karvel gripped her Browning as she said this, giving it a little shake. Her husband did as well, massaging his hand along the hilt as he stared at the banging door. I wanted a gun too. I wanted to feel that strength, to have something to cling to. I wanted to know the texture of revenge, the weight of it. To at least feel powerful in this moment of complete doom. So loading up with arms and ammunition, Garth, the engineers, and I did just that. And it was as good to grab something within the tempest as I thought it would be.

But it was all illusion. The shooting began only moments after we left the room, the first gun blast coming as the Tekelians finally managed to burst open the exit door. I tried to count the shots as we made our way down the ladder to the main level, and the Karvels must have got off more than two dozen between them, stuttering their blast so that they could take turns reloading. Still, despite the impossibly long pauses between shots, the whole endeavor couldn’t have taken more than forty-five seconds. By the time the four of us had climbed down to the main floor, the guns went silent. In their wake was the dull sound of meat being pounded and the short yelps that could have come only from human mouths. The inevitable had come to pass, the beasts had stormed the gates, with all their might. I didn’t even bother looking to my compatriots to discern the moment. It was all so fast, but there was no question what was happening.

“Plan B! Plan B!” I began to yell to Garth, scuttling him toward the boiler room. I wanted it hot in there. I wanted it Texas hot. I wanted it hot like the very line of the equator. I didn’t want to simply defend myself: I wanted to see those monsters melting. I wanted them to be like the tigers in “Little Black Sambo,” pooled like butter on the floor. I didn’t care what else firing up the boiler would do, I was going to turn that thermostat as high as it would go and burn those beasts to the ground.

“I’ll do it.” Jeffree, his hand on my wrist, stopped me. “You don’t know nothing about anything mechanical, man. I’m not even trying to insult you. We’ll manage the boiler, even fix it if we have to. Leave this to the professionals. Leave this to Jeff Free.”

In that one moment, I believed Jeffree was every bit as heroic as he always told everyone he was. His jaw was so square, his forehead so shiny, the cowrie shells around his neck announcing a triumphant chorus as he spun around, possibly smelling his mechanical prey. I no longer saw a fool, an incompetent. This was a man. A silly man sometimes, sure, but a man nonetheless. Jeffree knew the dangers of his task, that if he was going to make a successful escape he would have to cross back through the BioDome to get to the snowmobiles. Jeffree knew this, and he took this nearly suicidal action anyway. Jeffree got to be the hero, and for my part, in that moment, I was actually happy to have him on our side. I would like to think that maybe I had never truly “gotten him” before this moment. Jeffree had simply stood outside the proper context. And Carlton Damon Carter caught him there in his element for digital posterity, both Jeffree’s heroic speech and his impalalike bouncing away toward danger. After Jeffree disappeared down the storage corridor, Carlton Damon Carter put down his camcorder, closed the LCD display screen, and then handed it to me. He didn’t say a word either, just pressed it into my hands, folded his own hands firmly around my own before giving them a squeeze. Carlton Damon Carter’s eyes, his actions, imparted everything. He knew that most likely this would not be a task they would return from. That if he didn’t give up his camera now, there was a good chance no one would get to see any of this.

“Film me too, as I run after him,” Carlton Damon Carter whispered. And then, chasing after his husband, he was gone.

Arthur Gordon Pym lay in our sailboat, a bottle of bourbon in one hand and my bag of bones in the other. Whatever exploration he’d been making of the facility had been halted by his blood alcohol level. Fetal and clinging to the bag of the late Dirk Peters as if the remains were his to control, the man was completely oblivious to the coming storm. I didn’t bother waking him to get my treasure back, just grabbed it and swung it over my own shoulder for good measure. The sailboat was already too heavy to lift off the ground without Pym in it, so Garth and I dragged the boat along with us on the way to the exit. With the screams of the beasts echoing behind us, we could see their long and violent shadows along the corridor walls, and we pulled faster. As we passed the piles of bulk snack treats and liquid refreshments, Garth and I simply knocked the boxes into the sailboat on and around Pym, who offered not a peep of complaint, not even opening his eyes.

At the garage, the Karvels’ snowmobiles sat pristine and factory clean, looking as if they were virgins to the continent of powder that lay just outside the hatch door. As we tied the boat to the vehicles, a rope to each tow, we listened for sounds of an outside presence waiting for us when we opened the doors but heard none. No, all the sounds of intrusion were coming from inside the terrarium. The wailing, the aggravated howls, the metal clanging and glass breaking.

“We got to get the hell out of here, dog. We can leave the doors open, see if Jeffree and C-note make it out from a distance, but this sitting and shitting thing ain’t going to work,” Garth said, his eyes stuck on the door to the hallway behind us. And Garth was right. His face was covered in toothpaste, but he was right. Our gas tanks were full, the engines started. I was sitting on a bright pink bike with floral decals, but I didn’t even care at this point. We hit the door opener and were out onto the snow at full speed the moment the gate had risen high enough for us to duck through.

Garth and I were about five hundred yards away, steering a path clear of the enemy camp, when the first explosion went off behind us. Such was the power of the blast and the sound it produced that I lost control of my speeding snowmobile from the vibrations. Still, it was nothing compared to the second explosion, which left my ears ringing to the point of deafness and knocked me completely over, my snowmobile skidding off beyond me.

I righted myself on the snow as soon I had gathered my senses. Behind me, a quarter of Karvel’s amazing dome was now nothing more than fire and ruin, the section where the boiler was situated consumed by a fire that spread across the surface of the roof.

“Jeffree,” I said aloud.

“It’s not their fault,” Garth said back at me, but my mind had not even gotten that far. The destruction of a quarter of the 3.2 Ultra BioDome, and the impending destruction of the rest of the building, paled in its catastrophic weight in comparison to the long line of ice caves that I could see were now imploding.

The ground turned from resolute to uncertain. It shook violently beneath us, until both of us were floored once more by the power and length of the quake. And even when our immediate ground grew less spastic, the roar of the landscape around us told of a destruction just beginning. Coffins of ice collapsing upon themselves where, only moments before, the still unbroken surface had sat placid. Yard by yard, the heat-weakened ice caves tumbled upon themselves, lines of jumbled ice succumbing like so many dominoes in a line of destruction I could see moving off into the sunset and toward the heart of the Tekelian empire.

Even Pym in his near-comatose state was momentarily awakened by the catastrophe, and had an opinion on the matter. Sitting up in the boat, staring left and right to see the surface collapsing into canals that stretched as far as I could witness, Pym seemed almost unfazed by the enormity of it.

“And so the heavens fell to earth,” he yelled when the worst had subsided, taking another lethal swig straight from the bottle’s neck before passing out again.

*
Or at least I haven’t.

The circumstances connected with the late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym are already well known to the public through the medium of the daily press. It is feared that the few remaining chapters which were to have completed his narrative, and which were retained by him, while the above were in type, for the purpose of revision, have been irrecoverably lost through the accident by which he perished himself. This, however, may prove not to be the case, and the papers, if ultimately found, will be given to the public.… Peters, from whom some information might be expected, is still alive, and a resident of Illinois, but cannot be met with at present. He may hereafter be found, and will, no doubt, afford material for a conclusion of Mr. Pym’s account.

—Note,
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym

IT would seem that
The True and Interesting Narrative of Dirk Peters
was that promised material that would reveal the true end of Arthur Pym’s
Narrative
, despite the fact that it was never delivered to the public during Peters’s lifetime.
^*
Of course, Dirk Peters did make the effort to construct those missing chapters, and his memory should not be impugned just because he (unlike Booker T. Washington) was unable to hire a ghostwriter who could sufficiently convey his story. Peters’s attempt to secure the services of Edgar Allan Poe to relay his story may have failed, but this was not to be the end of his ambitions in the matter.

In a folder at the bottom of the Dirk Peters papers sat an envelope somewhat different from the others in the collection. For one thing, this packet contained stubs from what appeared to be both train and ocean-liner tickets, both of which were dated in the spring of 1895. The note that accompanied them is even more difficult to decipher than the muddled script in the rest of the collection. Its lines are shaken, the curves large and slow—this would of course make sense if it was indeed written in 1895, by which time Peters would have at least been in his eighties, his poor penmanship having even further degraded. Here it is in its entirety:

Arrived in Amiens. The canals make it smell something horrible. I went to the writer’s house, had a copy of
20,000 Leagues under
[
sic
]
Sea
, going to tell him I like it, I want his help. I’m thinking that’s a good one, on account of it’s got an Indian in it, like me. That Nemo was a seafaring one two [
sic
], so if he can tell his story I don’t see why the man can’t tell mine. I speak a little of the Frenchy, so I plan on Parla vousing [
sic
] that to the man. Seems the book selling is behind him, and this Verne man he working at the politics. I ask the locals, they say just look for him. Then I see him like they say. It’s easy to see because the man got a bad limp, in his left leg, like the kind you get after you been shot. Well, I start feeling sorry for him, being a cripple, then I’m walking up to him telling him who I was and what I’m wanting. But then, after he listens for a bit and I tell him how that Poe man took my story from me and now for the truth I want Jules Verne writing in stead, being as my writing boy, he hits me with his cane! I run off a bit and then I’m glad he got a gimp leg, because I do believe he was still trying to kick me.

While there is no other historical record of this interaction, this final effort on Peters’s part to let his memoir be heard, it should be noted that
Le Sphinx des Glaces
emerged from Verne’s publisher just two years later.
^†
While the account that Verne gives bears little resemblance to the one Dirk Peters hastily relayed and is largely a hackneyed attempt to find closure to Poe’s original tale, there are points of interest nonetheless. Verne’s sequel has a black ship chef as well, much like Poe’s novel. Describing this chef’s reaction to being cast away on an iceberg, Verne wrote, “As a Negro, who cares little about the future, shallow and frivolous like all of his race, he resigned himself easily to his fate; and this is, perhaps, true philosophy.”

*
Material
is an excellent word for Dirk Peters’s collection;
debris
would be another less generous one.

†
Or as this book is also known:
The Sphinx of the Ice Fields
.