Zodiac Station

Forty-seven

You expect ice to be clammy when you touch it. Your body heat goes to work and the surface gets slick. But not in the glacier. As I lowered myself in, bracing myself against the sides of the chute, the ice remained dry as dust. Against the vast cold of a glacier, a human body doesn’t count for much.

The hole dropped a couple of metres, then angled away down a gentle slope. I crawled down after Greta, careful not to tangle myself on the rope. The tunnel was almost a perfect cylinder, as if it had been bored out by machine. Under my hands, the milky white walls swirled like marble.

The slope got steeper. Rather than waste energy, I sat down on my bottom and let myself slide, like being in a water pipe.

‘Stop!’ said Greta. The desperate voice you use to a child who’s about to run into the street. I grabbed my rope and just stopped myself bumping into her.

She leaned to one side so I could see over her shoulder. My torch beam shone into almost perfect darkness, dropping away far beyond where the light could reach.

‘Lucky you stopped where you did.’

I twisted my head to see more. Something flashed: a blade of light cutting the darkness in two. I brought the light back on to it and saw an icicle. Not the kind you get dripping from your gutters during a cold snap; this was taller than me and probably as broad at the top. At the bottom, it was as sharp as a needle. And we were going to be descending right under it.

‘Is that stable?’

Without answering, Greta went over the edge. Gripped the ledge, then became a glow of light slowly dimming. I didn’t look down.

I don’t know how long I waited there, eye to eye with the icicle. Whenever I moved my head, even a twitch, the light twisted so that the icicle seemed to wobble. Then I felt a tug on the rope. With a deep breath, I slipped over the edge. It wasn’t so bad, actually. The hole was narrow enough I could keep one hand on the descender, paying myself out, and the other steadying myself on the wall. I was terrified of knocking that icicle.

And suddenly I was hanging in air. Instinctively, I flung out my arms, flapping and waving, but didn’t touch a thing. With no hands on the rope, I fell backwards, was weightless for a moment, then jerked on the harness and see-sawed back up.

The rope swung and snagged. I heard an enormous crack above me. Whatever was holding the rope suddenly let go; I jerked down another metre, but something was falling faster. I actually felt the frigid air on my cheek as the icicle passed inches from my face.

‘Look out!’

It shattered on the floor, while I hung in space, splayed out flat like a dead man in a swimming pool. Like Hagger at the bottom of the crevasse.

‘Are you OK?’ I called.

The wait almost killed me. Then Greta’s voice came up from the depths.

‘Alive.’

I kicked my legs and strained forward until I got hold of the rope. I almost tore my stomach muscles, and I was sweating like mad. As soon as my hands had stopped trembling, I found the figure-eight descender and started paying out the line again. It was a long time before my feet touched the ground. When I did, I could hardly stand up.

Greta turned on her torch — she’d been saving the battery — and emerged from the darkness. There was blood on her cheek, and water, where an icicle fragment must have hit her.

‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled. An apology’s rarely felt so inadequate. Greta’s face made sure I knew it.

I shone my light around. We were at the bottom of a huge shaft, as high as a cathedral, which tapered at the top like a wine bottle. I couldn’t see any way out, except a low crack just above the floor. Not even a tunnel, just a fissure in the ice.

‘There’s no way we can get through there.’

She pointed to scratches on the ice. ‘Martin did.’

We took off our ropes and harnesses. I felt that odd feeling of weightlessness you get driving without a seat belt, but there was no other option. We only had a few metres of rope left.

And miles to go before I sleep.

I’m not claustrophobic, normally, but I nearly didn’t make it. It was the narrowest space I’ve ever been in. My helmet scraped along the ceiling, and my chin almost touched the floor. I couldn’t lift my head to look in front, couldn’t even crawl. I lay on my belly, arms and legs out, squirming forward a few millimetres at a time. Each time I tried to breathe, my back touched the roof and I flinched with panic. All I could think of was a million tons of ice over my head, pushing down. How much would it take to pinch this tiny tunnel shut?

I heard Annabel’s voice in my head. Glaciers don’t stand still. They’re fluid. The ice is actually flowing very slowly, moving outwards under its own weight. Back then, it had seemed academic.

Suddenly, I realised I could breathe again. The tunnel had opened up, not much, but enough that I could get off my stomach and look up.

As I raised my head, the torch beam glinted on a million points of light, a diamond-crusted ceiling like something out of ‘Ali Baba’.

‘Ice crystals,’ said Greta.

Looking closer, I could see how perfect they were. Each was a mathematical miracle, the ice extruded almost paper-thin into a hexagonal spiral. When I touched one with the tip of my glove, it shattered into a hundred pieces. So fragile I wanted to cry.

I crawled on, trying not to hit my head on the crystals. Each time I did, tiny granules of ice shivered down the back of my neck like guilt.

And then they stopped falling, because the roof had taken off high over my head. The walls spread apart and became a round tunnel as wide as a sewer pipe. Grey ice walls rising out of crumbly rock, with a slick of cloudy white ice running down the centre like a stream.

I undid my helmet so I could take off my hat and neck-warmer. After a moment’s thought, I took off one of my jumpers, too, and put my coat back on.

‘Shit,’ I swore.

‘What?’

I showed Greta my dangling zipper. Somewhere, dragging myself over that ice, I’d broken it. Every time I tried to do it up, the coat just peeled apart again.

‘I suppose I won’t freeze.’ To tell the truth, it didn’t feel cold at all. The ice wasn’t so dry here. When I rested my hand on it, I could feel the surface poised to melt.

Ice is an insulator; it sits on top of the rock like a heavy blanket. With a million tons of it over my head, that wasn’t reassuring.

The look on Greta’s face didn’t reassure me either. ‘A broken zipper’s no good when we get out.’

I shrugged. ‘We’ve got a lot of bridges before we have to cross that one.’

The tunnel looked wide enough to walk, after the interminable crawling. But Greta didn’t do it the easy way. She braced her hands and feet against the edges of the passage, straddling the centre, and manoeuvred her way forward like a spider.

‘Isn’t there a faster way?’

‘Not if you want to stay dry.’ She nodded at the carpet of white ice in the middle of the floor. ‘It’s a stream. The top freezes, but the water flows under it.’

Curious, I smashed the ice with the heel of my boot. She was right. A small, steady stream ran underneath, unhindered by the ice. I took off my glove and dipped my hand in. The water was so cold it burned. When I wiped my hand on the lining of my hood, the water left a pink smear on the fur.

‘We’re on the right track.’

I copied Greta’s awkward stance, straddling the stream and crabbing my way forward. It reminded me of one of those playground games, two logs set in a V and the goal is to walk forward with one foot on each until it gets too wide and you fall off. I remember doing it with Luke in the park near our house, dangling him over the gap (he was smaller, then) while my legs splayed further and further apart, until I looked like a gymnast or an eighties rocker. And then we collapsed in a heap of giggles and—

I should have concentrated. My foot hit a rock; my arms scrabbled on the glassy walls. I lost my balance and fell — straight through the ice.

The shock hit me like the electric chair. I went under and took a mouthful of water that almost stopped my heart. I touched bottom — not deep — pushed up, and felt resistance. Something pushing me back down. I was under the ice, I was going to die, and the only thing crowding out the panic was wishing I could be with Luke one more time.

Then something caught me a glancing blow on the cheek. The ice cracked and my head popped up. Greta hauled me, dripping and screaming, from the stream. I leaned against the wall. I was soaked through. I could feel the cold crawling deep into me, worming into my bones so I’d freeze from the inside out. I coughed out a big gulp of water. I could taste it: filthy with sediment and chemicals from the rock. And who knows what else?

‘You have to go back.’

‘No.’ I imagined myself squeezing through that fissure in my wet clothes. I’d freeze right into the ice, become part of the glacier. I couldn’t go that way.

She didn’t argue. Perhaps she saw the logic; more likely, she didn’t want to waste time talking me out of my own funeral. ‘Then you have to keep moving.’

Cold, miserable, I followed as fast as I could. I was shivering so violently, I struggled to keep myself upright. When I slipped, which was often, I didn’t have the strength to brace myself; I just crashed through the ice again, back into the water, and had to wait for Greta to haul me out. I didn’t feel it so much after the first time.

I thought of Martin. I remembered how his clothes had been frozen when we found them, and how I’d wondered about it then. He’d done this alone.

Was it worth it? I asked him through chattering teeth.

At that level of survival, the mind collapses and there’s nothing but your body. I could feel every hair pricking up, every breath condensing in my lungs. The warmth in my blood and the cold in my bones battling for my soul.

Once the lines had come into my head, I couldn’t shake them. They repeated themselves again and again, the way snatches of music sometimes do when I’m lying in bed and can’t sleep. White noise — oblivion.

The passage ended in a jumble of ice and black rocks. I was almost too far gone to notice, but I did hear a noise. The trickle of invisible water, running down under the rocks into the stream.

‘The mine,’ said Greta, as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

We crawled through the hole, over rocks and ice still filthy with coal dust, into another world. More tunnels, nothing like what we’d been through. Straight and even, with cross-tunnels at right angles making a regular grid. More like being in the crawl space under a floor than how I ever imagined a mine.

It would have been easy to get lost in there. In places, wooden splints shored up the roof, chalked with still-legible Cyrillic letters. They must have meant something to someone, but not to me. Luckily, there was the stream to follow, running through a channel it had carved out of the rock floor. And I could hear a noise, a mechanical hum that got louder as we crawled on up the stream.

Ahead, something glowed ethereal white among the shadows and soot. I thought it was a trick, the torch beam blurring or burning my eyes, but no amount of blinking and shaking my head would move it.

It was a concrete wall. Water from a drainpipe splashed at its base, the source of the stream. Above it bulged a round door, about three feet across, with a locking wheel like something salvaged from a submarine.

I tried the door. No joy, but I was so weak that didn’t mean much. Greta added her hands to mine, and we heaved together.

The wheel turned. A seal hissed. The door moved inwards. Soft yellow light spilled through the crack.

‘No locks on Utgard.’ Certainly not here. A glacier, a mountain and an abandoned mine would be enough to deter most visitors. Not to mention the fact they’d killed the last man who found it.

Greta must have had the same thought. She got out her pistol and loaded a flare cartridge. In any normal world, that would have been my cue to leave: back to the Sno-Cat, back to Zodiac, all the way back to Cambridge and Luke.

But this was a long way from normal, and I was one degree off hypothermia. If I didn’t keep moving, I’d freeze solid right there.

I pushed open the door and clambered through.