Until the Night

From the Blue Notebook

I left Rebecca standing by the open water that separated us from Heiberg Island and headed back toward Dahlberg and Deville. The sky was fretted with high cirrus and the low-hanging sun bathed everything in red and gold. At any other time it would have been beautiful, but there was that growing smudge of darkness rolling toward us, and there was the scene before me.

It is commonplace these days for a man to be well versed in psychology. I am not such a person. At that time, that year, I had had little experience of outright madness. My earlier incarnation as a bush pilot had been stress-free in that department. In academia, in field research, I had encountered overwrought students, hysterical faculty members, countless florid eccentrics, but I had no experience of violent psychosis, if that’s what I was facing.

From half a kilometre off, I could see that Jens was down and Ray was standing over him. I won’t even attempt to convey my emotional state. I tried to empty my mind, to be readiness made flesh. The sun threw my shadow in a long dark tangent, as if it were being torn from me toward the magnetic pole.

Someone with training in psychological matters might have opinions about what would have been the proper way to handle the situation. The situation was there, I was who I was. I began talking to Ray as I approached—a hundred metres away, maybe a hundred and fifty—I knew he could hear me. But I chose to pretend I had not heard the shot, that I had not noticed Dahlberg lying motionless at his feet.

We must head that way, I told him, pointing. The current should take us to Meighen Island. They won’t send a plane for days. Ah, Jens—we’ll have to do something about that knee. Ray and I will put our heads together and come up with something.

As I talked on in this calm-in-the-face-of-disaster way, Ray did not so much as twitch. He stood, feet apart, arms a little away from his sides, head tilted downward. He looked like a man who had just shot a raccoon, or perhaps a cat by mistake.

I kept talking as I approached, one hand gripping the flare gun under my fleece. The flare gun is not a weapon. It is a plastic singleshot pistol not designed for accuracy. I needed to be close for it to be of any use at all. But I was not going to let Ray near Rebecca. I was not going to let him kill or injure me. I was not going to let him live.

There may be a submarine, I said. We might have luck with the radio. Or the sovereignty expedition could come through.

This was a falsehood. The sovereignty expedition, made up of dogs and soldiers and Inuit reservists, had come up Nansen Sound and was by that time halfway across the top of Ellesmere.

If there’s any sign of them, I went on, Rebecca will send up a flare.

I was within thirty or forty metres, close enough to see the gun in his hand, when Ray finally moved. It was perhaps not a direct threat, perhaps nothing much at all. He didn’t raise the gun at me. He merely looked at me. There was something mechanical in the movement—perhaps the stillness in the rest of his body, or the way he lifted his chin and then turned his face toward me in two separate motions, as if responding to typed-in commands.

Another man, of a more heroic cast, might have waited until he aimed his weapon. Might have ordered him to drop the gun. Might have made a run at him. Still talking, I pulled the flare gun from my pocket and fired.

The flare made a tremendous hiss as it corkscrewed toward him. I feared it would miss him entirely, but it didn’t. It caught in his down jacket and the phosphorus burned as white and brilliant as a comet. His coat was on fire and he turned this way and that, flapping his arms. I saw the gun fall and ran for it.

Ray managed to shake the flare from his jacket. The phosphorus hissed and burned in the slush, sending up clouds of steam. I had his gun now, and while he was trying to tear his jacket off, I shot him in the back. He fell at once to his knees and I shot him again, so that he toppled face down. I thought then and think now that his heart had already stopped, but I stepped closer and shot him in the back of the head to make sure.

The sight of his blood pumping into the snow made my gorge rise. I turned away and bent over the still form of Jens Dahlberg. Ray had shot him through the heart, and he lay on his back in a red cloud of blood. There was no breath, no pulse.

I checked the Glock’s magazine. Two rounds left. Presumably Ray had used the others to shoot Paul Bélanger and Murray Washburn before his spree was put on pause by our disintegrating island. I put the gun in the pocket of my fleece and turned around.

Rebecca had followed me. She was standing at the edge of a throbbing circle of brightness cast by the still-hissing flare, one hand covering her mouth.