History Thaws

Nils stared uncomprehending at the hide-wrapped bundle at his feet.

He could feel a part of him – the cold, rational pilot that sat behind his monkey brain – noting that the tip of his nose and the ends of his fingers were already getting frost-nipped. He knew exactly, exactly ¸what he should be doing: close the door, seal the thermal edges, get in front of one of the great heaters, or better yet the central furnace, and warm his core and his extremities. He should get help from one of the others – he could hear Katinka in the kitchen, never shy with the clattering of pans or the relentless punk music, no matter the hour, or Sergio, hacking his lungs up in the bathroom down the hall.

All of those actions made sense. It was the extra step that had crept in that ground his process to a halt. What should he do with it, whatever it was?

It was large, overhanging the concrete porch on each side, and looked heavy, although again his rational side, fighting a losing a battle, noted the lack of drag marks in the surrounding snow.

Somebody had carried this here? Somebody big, by the gaps between the treads.

That seemed to rule out bringing it in – it was almost certainly a two-man lift and touching it, or anything outside at this time of year without gloves, was a quick way to lose some skin.

Leaving it outside seemed the most sensible option, were it not for the fact that somebody was watching him. He could feel their gaze like a weight, hiding and staring, lying very still as they formulated their own decision.

Perhaps to close the door would be a rejection? The three great raps on the door that had brought Nils out in the first place certainly argued intelligence, or at least intent. Nils had thought it was Tiguak – back from his rounds early.

Now his eyes flicked to-and-fro from each likely hiding spot, the only part of him that could seemingly still move. The vehicle shed was buttoned-up – Tiguak’s plough tracks the only sign of life. A blue tarp flapped at its edge in the fresh breeze – its metal eyelets ringing as they tapped against the shed and Nils’ nerves alike.

The further storage shed windows were opaque with frost – although perhaps someone had got in round the back and even now stared out at him?

No – they had to be further out. The tracks marched to the door then turned straight around.

Nils had loved the terrain when he first arrived – the boulder-pocked hills as they climbed from the sea, now seething a sullen grey, and he’d spent his summer leisure time amongst them, brushing off his youthful geologist to picture how each stone had come to rest where it had. Some were more curious than others, more like megaliths than anything natural - isolated chunks of dark stone in a field of cream rock, the weathering seemingly too uniform. He had a bundle of drone photographs in his room – hoping maybe to plot them on a map and solve the mystery that way when he got a free moment.

He'd loved the snow too. He was one of those seemingly rare souls working for the company who’d had a reasonably happy childhood, well-adjusted people rarely volunteering to spend eight months alone in the dark for the same pay you could get working at a petrol station – and each fresh snowfall had been a mini-Christmas, no matter how often it came.

Now for the first time in his life he looked out at that glittering carpet and felt fear.

The sun was bright and still climbing, Nils eyes stinging in the glare as he attempted to scan the ground. Backwards and forwards, “Like a typewriter!” had repeated their search and rescue instructor from their two weeks survival ‘orientation’ near Tromsø – although he had intended it for a man overboard situation, or someone cut off outside.

Nils couldn’t feel his fingers anymore – or the wind that had knifed itself effortlessly through his pyjamas. Not that he would have noticed anyway above the screech of mammalian brain – demanding he flee, flee, flee, overridden by his civilised side holding the handbrake and asking from what?

This modern impulse, to try and stop and analyse rather than listen to your gut, was what eventually killed him.

Instead, he stared, eyes narrowed and watering painfully as the moisture froze, at the surrounding landscape. Tiguak spent most of his day keeping the surroundings flat, along with a road, a canyon really, that cut through the two-storey drifts to the lonely, firmly shuttered, boat-house.

It had never seemed so threatening; the alternate freezing and thawing create a ragged assortment of slushy depressions, shiny-slick slopes or collapsed burrows where the great boulders crested the drifts.

Anyone, or anything, could hide out there.

There! Movement - only snow, melting in the heat.

There! There! A fox? Startled into movement, maybe. But by what?

Nils traced the fox’s path until his eyes came to rest onto one of the largest of the standing stones, its crown still rearing defiantly over the taiga. Down one side an undercurrent of snow had fully collapsed, forming a natural cave, it’s thin roof glittering blue. He saw nothing there. Probably Mr. Fox was just hungry, an early riser?

Then, he saw it.

A hand.

Impossible. Absurd. They’ll laugh at me when I tell them.

They were the only station for a hundred miles and everyone from the seven-person crew was accounted inside, except for Tiguak, and Nils could see his snow-plough’s little green pennant, waving merrily as it wound its way to the distant boathouse.

There’s no way that could be a hand.

No way.

It’s just some driftwood, some snow and shadow mixed, your tired brain demanding you see something to justify this stupidity.

Not a hand.

Nobody in the world could have hand that big. Nobody in the world could have hair right down to the knuckles like that.

That’s a hundred, a hundred and fifty metres away. A hand that big would be the size of your chest!

It was just rocks. Just pebbles. Just a trick of the light.

Nils rational brain – the part that was still working, chilled to slush – knew he was essentially babbling. This didn’t help him to stop.

You’ve just got cabin fever. Ha-ha-ha. Too much time looking at screens and snow and listening to Katinka talk about football.

It’s not a hand. That would mean that hand had carried that bundle and laid it, literally, at your door.

Why?

How could a trick of the light play another trick like that?

Not a hand.

The not a hand raised itself from where it clutched the rim of its tunnel, the arm elongating into darkness, and beckoned in an all too familiar motion.

Come here.

*

“Nils! What the fuck!”.

Nils felt his body jerk, from a curiously warm distance, and let out a gasp that condensed in front of his eyes. Ove’s hand was on his? shoulder, and the other man was attempting attempted to pull him away from the door, slush melting at his feet.

Nils saw himself resist, grabbing the doorway; the meaty thud as his fingers connected with the metal rim reaching his ears long before any sort of pain reached his brain.

“Nils! Nils! Come away from the door, are you fucking crazy?”. The anger in Ove’s voice had been replaced by concern, sliding into outright confusion as Nils refused to be pulled away. Ove wrapped his arm around the man’s torso – like trying to lift a side of frozen beef – and used the other to pull the fire alarm.

As the sirens wailed, the others came running – Jurgen in his frayed red long-johns and Ugg boots and Sergio wrapped only in a towel – they managed to pry Nils away from the door, leaving sticky red marks when his fingerprints came away.

Nils was raving by then. “It’s a gift! A gift! We can’t shut the door on it, it’s already angry enough!”.

Commander Göransson had taken one look at the scene – Nils fighting under his colleagues, the heaped skins outside the door – and slammed the door shut, engaged the thermal seals and, for the first time since the station had been built, slid the locking-bolt home.

At that, Nils had gone limp - his body apparently catching up to the fact that it was shutting down. As the others had started to wrap him in silver sheets of thermal foil, he had felt rather than seen – his pupils compressed to slits within swollen eyes– the commander kneel besides him. He tried to reach out and grasp his jacket, instead simply thumping a bloody paw against the man’s jacket; his fingers refused to bend.

“Don’t worry boss,” smiled Nils weakly. “It can’t have been a hand”.

*

Twenty minutes later, once Dr Chekwas had had a proper look, he’d announced to the worried crew that the cold’s bark had luckily been worse than it’s bite this time. Lucky Nils had been so fat to be honest. Nothing a little warmth, recovery and saline solution couldn’t fix, although he wouldn’t be hand-modelling any time soon.

He’d caught the commander’s eye however and, in that telepathic way shared by parents and old soldiers said something doesn’t add up here.

As he’d shooed the others away , Nils safely asleep under an enormous faux bear-skin in the room’s only bed: the barber’s chair propped in front of a PlayStation that usually held court having being pushed hastily to the side – the commander had remained behind, telling Sergio to get his outside clothes ready and wait for him by the door.

Göransson nodded once when they were alone, body held turned at the doorway, ready to bolt. “Tell me.”

Chekwas took a pull from his e-cigarette.

“Nils is steady. This is his third go-round, first two both winter-stretches. Spent a bit of time in the army, nothing heavy but at least one tour. He wouldn’t rattle easy, or frankly, be so stupid as to stand there and get frostbite for no reason.”

“Nope” agreed Göransson.

The only sign of his own stress was the hand that had strayed to his shirt pocket and its genuine cigarettes. You only had what you brought, the bureaucracy surrounding this place meant you technically imported then exported them just getting from the supply ship to shore and the bio-security laws meant everything was searched, and taxed. By weight they were more expensive than pure silver.

The whole station knew that when Göransson lit up, something had either gone very right or, more often, very wrong.

“He can’t have been exposed that long either,” continued Chekwas. “Fair enough he was just in his chaddis but I’d say 15 – 20 minutes tops?”.

“Likely enough. Lot of folk just off the corridor and they would have noticed the wind howling at least”.

“I’ll run some more bloods but even the initial e-scan says early hypothermia, no surprises there, and ocular damage. Bit quick for that but maybe he’s got weak eyes. The real puzzlers are the massive, and I mean massive, dumps of adrenaline into his system and this...”.

Chekwas wheeled over to Nils and pulled the bearskin down from his neck, exposing a great red rash along his upper chest.

Göransson made a sound in his throat Chekwas couldn’t quite parse. Taking a glass thermometer, Chekwas gently pulled down Nils lower eyelids.

“The yellow is just early snow-blindness – I’m not worried about that. But look at this”. He pressed down with the glass and Göransson noticed the same red rash, climbing all the way up the cheek to under the lid, where it had seemingly burst an angry purple.

They both looked up as they heard Göransson’s name called, Sergio apparently in position and losing his temper with one of the others. Paba half-stepped into the corridor, one hand on the doorframe. “Tell me, quick.”

Chekwas wheeled back, depositing his thermometer into the sink and washing his hands as he spoke. Göransson could see them reddening under the heat. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say hay-fever, real nasty and fast-acting though, a chemwar element maybe, although mild if so…or…”.

They both pictured the white, wind-blasted landscape, hundreds of miles from anyone who cared – apart from perhaps a few academics, meteorologists or recently, speculative oil barons.

“Who’d chem a nothing station like this?”

Chekwas grimaced, less resigned to his fall from grace than he pretended to appear.

“Or?” prodded Göransson.

Chekwas grimaced again. He was loathe to discuss superstition - even if the section on cryptids had been part of the briefings: telling the newbies to fill out a ZSR or Zoological Sighting Report was a great gentle hazing tradition.

“Or animal allergy. He interacted with something with a lot of fur. Doing so freaked him out so bad he effectively blue-screened.” Another drag on the e-cigarette; the bubble-gum scent not quite matching how badly that sentence seemed to have rattled him to say.

Göransson nodded, jaw clenching. “Fuck.”

He finally stepped into the hall, attempting to put back on the calm face all leaders wear in times of crisis.

“Fuck!”

*

Outside, Göransson could still feel the bitter cold and winter through his double-rated company parka. The mid-morning’s brittle white sunlight had faded, replaced with shadowy concrete-gray clouds that promised only snow and gloom. Just like home.

The stares of the rest of the station he’d expected: faces pressed to every porthole and piece of glass – Sergio grinningly trading middle-fingers with everyone who caught his eye. Not Göransson’s style but it seemed to be reassuring people, oddly enough.

It was the other gaze, the one that tickled the hairs on the back of his neck, that made him glad he’d strapped on the heavy revolver. It had been issued long ago to protect from now wiped-out bears or equally extinct Soviets, it was kept on base from a mixture of institutional inertia, tradition and that nagging worried voice that all men carried into the true wilderness – you never know when you might need it.

Sergio spoke, Chilean-chipper despite the look in his eyes behind the frosted goggles. “Fucking spooky out here today, poh?”.

Göransson nodded. “Fucking spooky.”. He prodded the bundle with his boot, supple still despite the chill. “Reckon it’s about to get spookier?”.

Sergio laughed. “Things never really get better, do they jefe?”.

Göransson nodded. “Not in my experience”.

The outside didn’t match anything native he’d ever seen, although that didn’t mean much considering he’d only ever studied the Sami at school and the closest he got to ‘natives’ these days was spending money in Indian casinos when he was on leave and swapping salted-fish recipes with Tiguak.

Too many bad memories.

The company wasn’t that interested either; there wasn’t any serious record of habitation ever found on this coast, which was why he’d applied for it, and whenever anyone living was found in its other areas of interest, invariably on a big deposit of something valuable, then things got nasty.

Göransson spat.

That’s not me anymore.

Squatting suddenly, he unrolled the heavy bundle.

Göransson heard Sergio click a photo, alongside another sound: one that just didn’t make sense.

*

That photo would be the defining image of the whole incident.

It would be the one the company men, the government investigators and the conspiracy theorists alike would latch onto.

There were others – happy snaps of the crew from the before, gruesome polaroids of the after; blood and ice and burnt wreckage – along with some blurry video of gargantuan shapes moving inside snowstorms and what most agreed was Chekwas’ face as he raced, hyperventilating, through ice-carved tunnels.

There was better footage – crystal-clear HD with full audio, if you can believe it – but that never made it beyond the initial company response team. They testified, and even went to a prison for a while maintaing that, despite the surrounding evidence, it had simply disappeared, or been destroyed, or never existed, depending on the circumstances.

In reality it had been passed up the company chain where it joined a non-existent archive staffed by a non-existent team: it was watched, analysed, cross-referred then filed amongst the other ‘records’: battered leather journals, scratchy phonographs in dead languages and even ochre paintings, carved and coloured on bark.

The picture showed Commander Göransson, a greying Norwegian swaddled in winter gear, rumoured but not confirmed to have once been part of the company’s less salubrious ‘external affairs’ division, kneeling in front of an unrolled bundle of skins.

Inside, visible to the camera that is, was an eclectic set of artefacts: a scattered pile of wooden Inuit snow-glasses, two Lee-Enfield rifles – one snapped neatly in half, metal and all –a neon-pink snowboard and two laptops, all clearly stamped with the logo of Göransson’s erstwhile employer. One of the serial numbers was even partially legible, although no one had, publicly at least, tracked it as ever having left its place of manufacture.

Any of those alone would have been enough to trigger questions – hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles from where or when they were supposed to be. It was the snow-shoes however that got the story leaked and kept it circulating.

Horn-frames strung with something organic, they resembled primitive Esquimaux sets, although a hundred years out-of-date, even before they had switched to plastic. It was the size that seized the attention, once you’d parsed the scale.

Each foot would have had to be the size of a man’s arm to fit the enormous leather straps.

The photo had captured Göransson’s head moving, turning to a shadow out of frame on his right. Whatever it was - dismissed in the official account as ‘low cloud cover' - had clearly terrified the famously stoic commander: his hand was half-way to his revolver’s holster.

Neither were ever recovered – hand nor holster.