“I’ve come from Point Adélie.” This, he surmised, probably meant nothing to her. “The research station.” Would that make any sense, either? “The place where you were. Before…this place.” Though he knew she spoke English—and with an English accent, no less—he wasn’t sure if his words were making any impression at all. “Can you tell me…who you are?”
She licked her lips, and nervously brushed a strand of hair away from her face. “Eleanor,” she said, in a soft but agitated tone. “Eleanor Ames.”
Eleanor Ames. He said the name to himself several times, as if trying to anchor it in reality that way.
“And you’re from…England?” he ventured.
“Yes.”
Placing a hand on his chest, he said, “I’m from America.” The whole thing was becoming so absurd he could almost laugh—he felt like he was reading from a bad sci-fi script. Next he should pull out a ray gun, or she should demand to be taken to his leader. He wondered for a second if he was on the brink of losing his wits.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Eleanor Ames,” he said, again nearly laughing at the sheer absurdity of it all.
And damned if she didn’t gently subside, in a quick curtsy.
Quickly, he let his eyes sweep the room. The iron bedstead was covered with a dirty old blanket, and there were a couple of the bottles, the ones from the sunken chest, nestled underneath it.
“Where is your friend?”
She didn’t answer. But he could see a fast calculation going on behind her eyes.
“I believe you called him Sinclair?”
“He’s gone,” she said. “He’s…abandoned me.”
Michael didn’t believe that for a minute; he could tell that she was, for whatever reason, covering for him. Whoever, and whatever, this woman would truly turn out to be, her expression and voice betrayed all the palpably human emotions; nothing too mysterious was going on there. And as for the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of this Sinclair person, it paled in comparison to all the other questions thick in the air. How had she become imprisoned in a glacier? And when? How had she escaped from the block of ice in the lab? Or found her way here, to Stromviken?
Or—and this was the biggest, most inconceivable, question of all, the one that rendered all the others incidental—how had she actually come back to life?
If there was a polite way of asking any of them, Michael sure as hell didn’t know what it was.
A bag of dog kibble was propped against the wall. He’d start simple, with an easy one. “So this Sinclair,” he said, “he’s got the sled dogs with him?”
Again, another quick calculation, before she must have realized there was nothing to gain from further lies. Her shoulders slumped. “Yes.”
There was an awkward pause. He could see now that her eyes were red-rimmed, and her lips were cracked. She licked them. His eyes went to the open bottle on the table. He knew what was in it.
But did she know that he knew?
When he looked at her again, he could see that she did. Her eyes were downcast, as if in shame, and a hectic flush rose into her cheeks.
“You can’t stay here,” he said. “A storm is coming. It will be here soon.”
He could see that she was lost, and confused. What was her relationship to Sinclair? He had, after all, locked her in this room and gone off God knows where. Was he her lover? Her husband? Was he the only person in the living world that she knew? Was he the only person in the world that she could know? Michael wasn’t even sure what questions to ponder. All he did know was that he couldn’t leave her there, in the freezing church. He had to find a way to get her to leave with him, right away.
“We can come back for Sinclair later,” Michael suggested. “We won’t abandon him. But why don’t you come with us now?”
At the mention of the word “us,” he saw her eyes grow wide and glance through the open doorway into the empty church. Who else, she was clearly wondering, was about to intrude upon her?
“I have a friend with me,” Michael explained. “We can take you back to the station.”
“I can’t,” she said.
Michael could guess what she was thinking—or at least some of it. “But we can take care of you there.”
“No, I won’t leave,” she said, though her voice faltered and even her expression seemed to change. It was as if the protest alone had drained the last of her energy. She moved away from the window and sat on the edge of the bed, her hands supporting her on either side. A rising wind rattled the shutters, and a draft made the fire in the grate glow brighter.
“I give you my word,” he reassured her, “no one will harm you.”
“You won’t mean to,” she said, “but you will.”
Michael wasn’t sure what she was getting at, but he heard in the distance the buzzing of Lawson’s snowmobile as it climbed the hill. Eleanor looked up in alarm. What, Michael wondered, would she make of that noise? Would it have any significance?
What world—what time—had she come from?
“We have to go,” Michael said. Eleanor sat, clearly trying to concentrate her thoughts, as still as a statue, as still as he had seen her in the ice.
As still as Kristin had been, in her hospital bed.