The Ice King (A Witch Ways Whisper) (10 page)

The snow stacked, layering and layering until the triple glazed windows of the research centre were half hidden by drifts. As the view of the distant lake vanished so a small dark space of fear and doubt stained Vanessa’s heart.

As the Ice Man slept on Vanessa moved about the centre making mental lists, taking stock of what supplies were left and generally running away from the dark patches in her head and heart.

She checked on the sleeping Ice Man. He had been asleep for five hours, she had kept a careful note of the kitchen clock and, once or twice, compared it to her own watch. They were keeping two lines of time, her own watch, she noticed, was once more keeping the unreal time that she had labelled ‘wood time’. By her wristwatch the Ice Man had slept only half an hour.

Despite the differing time zones the Ice Man woke and was hungry and Vanessa was prepared.

“Here.” she offered a bowl and a spoon which he took gratefully.

“Soup.” he said and sipped up a spoonful. “Not from a tin.” he smiled at the flavoursome liquid.

“Brewed from scraps and leftovers.” Vanessa made the short statement. The Ice Man’s eyes drifted up above the spoon to meet hers. There was a moment between them. The makeshift oven cum downcycled woodburner ticked with heat.

“You should have left me in the ice.” he looked away, sipped more soup.

“What is happening?” Vanessa asked. The simplest approach seemed best in the circumstances. All her ideas of reporting and recording, of observing and rationalising weren’t going to work so she reached for the one thing her mother had always relied on. Instinct.

“I must travel to Far North.”

Vanessa felt a spark of anger.

“That’s the future. I want you to tell me what is happening now? What happened here?”

“You must tell me, you bore witness.”

He looked at her once more with his brown and green eyes. Vanessa gathered all her thoughts.

“There was a storm… and some sort of bear attack. My colleagues were killed” there were the bald facts and saying them aloud did not make them any more comprehensible.

“But not you.” the Ice Man finished his soup, wiping the dregs up into his mouth with the stale dog end of the last of the bread. Once again his eyes met hers. Vanessa took a moment to think of this. Had she been in the centre when the first attack happened? Or had she still been trudging back from the hopeless mission to the comms tower? She placed herself firmly in the centre. She had been changing her clothes and then she’d gone to the workroom to continue her notes.

“Whoever, whatever it was that killed my colleagues…it came for you.” the theory had burned into her head.

“Yes.” he did not even try to lie. He looked directly at her, wiped soup from his beard.

“Why not me?” she asked.

“Because you were the one who dragged me out of the ice.” he put the bowl down and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his thighs. “I need to travel to Far North.”

“And you need to go before they come back.”

He nodded.

“This last was just the scouting party, riding ahead. Snow will hold them, for a while. They will come with the next storm.”

“Who are they?”

He gave her an assessing look, long lasting, off-putting, but Vanessa Way had grown up with Hettie Way at Havoc Wood, she’d faced down Alizon Wilde. She did not blink.

“The Wild Hunt.” he said. Vanessa heard an echo of Dr Byrne.
Hunters
.

“These hunters…they lost you in the ice.” Vanessa was trying to find pieces to place in the puzzle. “Sixty years ago?”

The Ice Man nodded. Again their eyes met.

“There’s no time.” he said and this time Vanessa did not question the comment, she merely looked at her own watch, at the way the hands had not moved and yet the kitchen clock ticked onwards. He moved across to her, reached his own arm down so that she could see his pocket watch, it showed the same time as her wristwatch.

“Do you want to borrow the snowcat?”

He shook his head.

“I need you to take me to the inlet. Back to where you found me. I can find my way from there.”

“Why did you come here?” Vanessa asked “Back in 1925.”

Ice Man looked at her.

“It’s a long story.”

“We’re snowed in.” Vanessa stood her ground. Her mother had a phrase she used sometimes when things were going awry and she couldn’t find her way through it, that word was ‘mazed’ as if someone was messing with your personal geography. It occurred to Vanessa that her mother’s word fitted this situation, fitted everything since the out of kilter day at the inlet. As she thought back over those events she remembered the horse in the trees.
Transport
.

Another, more terrible word wrote itself into her mind.
Trap.
What’s the difference between a maze and a trap?

“We’re going to be here a while…there’s time before you go on your way.” as the words left her Vanessa recalled her mother saying something similar on the countless occasions when some bedraggled stranger had taken refuge in the kitchen at Cob Cottage. What had her mother always said?

“There’s time enough to tell me.”

At these words the Ice Man, once again, gave her an odd look of recognition. He began to talk, as if reciting something long remembered.

“…
There is an enemy… in the Far North. He outlives his time. This king brings conflict of every sort to you. Hearts will clash, bones will break. You will take on the mantle that he ought to have shrugged off. Fate owns you Lachlan so she moves you like her little chess piece into the game
.”

He paused. “
You will be lost and she will find you
.”

The little dark patch of fear on Vanessa’s heart was taking on new depths, soot, carbon, sinking deep into her fibres.

“My name is Dr Lachlan Laidlaw and I came here, for the same reason as you Miss Way…” he waited.

“Which is?”

“To fulfil my destiny.”

It was as though he had leant across and swiped all the scientific equipment from the countertops, set all the Bunsen Burners aflame and Vanessa could not speak. Dr Lachlan Laidlaw’s eyes, intense as ever, softened their gaze but did not look away.

Vanessa thought of a day, a long time ago, of Pike Lake and the speckled skin of Esox Lucius, his teeth sinking into her skin, the small snowglobe of his eye and a vision of her, walking, walking, walking away in a snowstrewn, bronze skied landscape. She thought of her mother, of Havoc Wood, of gamekeeping.

“What about the wolf?” Vanessa threw the morsel into the mix. She remembered the wolf at the edge of the landscape. Dr Lachlan Laidlaw took in a breath, gazed at her as if she might be a miracle.

“You saw it too?”

“Yes. Once. A long time ago. And I dreamt of your eyes….” Vanessa wanted to hold onto her thoughts, to not be distracted or stray, to have focus. “…They’re odd.” she looked back into them and pushed back thoughts of the dreams she had had in the last few nights.
smokey honey lanolin leather the warm sweet scent of his breath across her skin.

“Heterochromia Iridium.” the Ice Man, Lachlan Laidlaw, informed her, the Latin reaching out to her in a way he was oblivious to.
Was he though?
Vanessa searched his eyes, there was something in them, something familiar, she was reminded of her recent dream, or was it a memory? She was puzzled at the drift her mind was undergoing, as if it was trying to be in two places at once, like the day at the inlet and the lost ten minutes. Without thinking she leaned forward to look deeper, as she did so the Ice Man turned his face away, took in a deep breath.

He cast his gaze slowly to the window, there was nothing in the whiteness outside. They spread out the maps and charts from the comms room and Lachlan Laidlaw shook his head, traced his finger across the emptiness, the contour lines of ridges, the crosses of forest and the blue of the lake.

“Where I have to go isn’t on this map.” he confessed “It’s out there.” he gestured to the window “If I can get to the inlet, if you will take me there, I can get to Far North.”

“Can you return from Far North?” Vanessa asked the question. Dr Laidlaw looked at her and after a moment’s pause shook his head.

“I doubt that.”

“Hearts will clash…bones will break…” Vanessa recalled.

“Not a great forecast is it?” Lachlan smiled.

“What if you give yourself an exit route?” Vanessa asked, her mind was already sorting the problem into solutions. “You don’t have a map to get you there…you’re relying on other forces…dimensions…Leave yourself markers, small signposts….”

He nodded, understanding.

“You mean a trail of crumbs, a thread through the labyrinth?”

“Yes. We could pull together a map of what we know about here, about the inlet. When you’re returning from the other side of it…from the other direction…”

“…I will be able to link the two.”

“Once you get yourself back to the wood at the inlet.”

Dr Laidlaw considered for a long moment.

“I will wait there for you.” Vanessa offered. “Keep watch for you. Time works differently there. I understand that much. I’ve experienced it.”

She was moving quickly now, rearranging the maps they had, turning a fresh page in the notes they were making. Vanessa tapped at the face of the company compass. “I’ve got True and Magnetic…” she mused. Dr Laidlaw shook his head.

“Far North is not on that compass.”

Vanessa waited for a moment more before reaching into her sweatshirt pocket. She checked the face of her own compass, the one from home, before placing it on the map.

“But it is on this one.”

He looked at it for a long moment.

Dr Lachlan Laidlaw had been alone for a long time, not counting the sixty years trapped in the ice. His journey Far North had dropped off any map he’d had in his possession and now he reached into his inside pocket for a small black cloth covered notebook. Apart from some foxing at the edges and small water stains, it appeared to have survived all its ordeals.

Lachlan opened it. Inside were his sketches of the route he had taken North as far as the inlet. He and Vanessa worked now to copy those maps and try and place them within the charted landscape they occupied. The compass disliked all the routes they tried to map, none married with the geography.

They worked for several hours, by the time on Vanessa’s wristwatch. The time on the kitchen clock seemed to halt and Vanessa made a note of it in her book. As they worked Lachlan told her of Todber and Murnhull, of a leather armchair by an Oxbridge window, the amber light of evening whisky. A black dog.

“Now Vanessa…” he said “Tell me about Pike Lake.” he looked very directly into her face. Vanessa’s breathing shallowed.

“How do you know about that?” Vanessa had been reticent. The most information she had given away was only the ‘Way’ part of her name. She had said nothing of her origins or history before her arctic internship. Vanessa was aware of the intense shafts of light coming in and casting shadows. The light seemed to reflect more than its necessary brightness,
diamond white
, as she looked down the shadows were waiting for her, branching and breaking up the surface of the concrete, reaching across the floor. The shadows were complex, intricate, once again the ghosts of the leaves fluttering and brittle. She took a step backward, the vertiginous feeling sweeping across her, she was awake and yet she was in her dream, Lachlan Laidlaw’s hand on her hip, his breath against her cheek.
Memory. Dream. Memory
. It was a zoetrope flickering in her head. She did not need to look at her watch to know that it had stopped. Lachlan Laidlaw’s hand reached for hers.

“I’ve waited sixty years for you to find me, Vanessa Way” he whispered, she looked up into the heterochromic eyes
green as the wood, brown as the earth.
She reached her fingers into his salt and pepper hair, pulling his face towards hers, his breath warm against her skin, her mouth on his, his mouth on hers.

Time slowed and stopped and twisted them together. The dome of the sky seemed to fold further outward, clouds rushed and melted, ice creaked, black feathers burst from trees and became crows, and his skin against hers was the most beautiful skin, the most known skin, her own skin before time began to chase them once more, and darkness fell.

Except it wasn’t darkness, it was the bronzed light of the Arctic and as the clouds intensified it was shimmered over with a cloak of green undulating light.

Aurora
.

They had been sleeping, spooned together in a cocoon spun from tweed and twill and sleeping bag. Vanessa awoke with a start and was about to speak but Lachlan’s hand clamped over her mouth, he pressed her closer to him, an arm protective around her.

“The Wild Hunt are here.” he whispered close, he began to move out of their bunk, pulling Vanessa with him. “Time to go.”

They scuffled about in the murky light, Vanessa reaching for her backpack. As she did so the backpack was snatched from her and the darkness deepened as if the snowlight and twilight had been blanked out.

“Lachlan?” Vanessa reached into the blackness, Lachlan’s hand reached for her, rough, pulling her to him and behind him, his body a shield for hers. There was a scent in the room, the cold bite of snow. There was a striking sound, a fizz and flare of flame and the rusty flickering light of a torch bathed the room. There were five men, all patinaed with dirt, their shoulders sheltered beneath animal skins, the light burnished the swords at their belts. One stepped forward; he was vast, to Vanessa it was like looking up into an oak, his shoulders a broad hulk of bone, a polar bears claws reached for each other across his chest, its shed skin shielding him against the snow. The smell of bear grease created a kind of olfactory force field around him.

“Hearts will clash, Lachlan Laidlaw, bones will break.”

Vanessa gasped at the sight of the dark inky tattoos of runic symbols that ran up into the man’s hairline. The man grinned.

“Here is where the Wild Hunt end you.” his mouth snarled and he reached a swift hand towards Lachlan, the fist clenching at his shoulder as he pushed him down to his knees.