And then…what? It was like running smack into the proverbial brick wall. What were their prospects, marooned as they were at the end of the earth? Where could they run? And for how long?
There had been boats, he remembered, at the whaling station—a big one, the Albatros, that he would never be able to launch on his own. And smaller, wooden whaling boats that might, with some repair, prove seaworthy, but Sinclair was no sailor. And they were surrounded by the most perilous of oceans. His only chance would be to embark in decent weather, and hope to be rescued by the first passing ship they encountered. Apparently, there was some commerce, and if he and Eleanor could acquire modern clothing, and come up with some plausible explanation, they might be able to board another ship and be transported back to civilization again. To lose themselves among people who did not know, nor would ever learn, their terrible secret. Once that much was done, Sinclair could rely on his native wits to carry them along. He had become, of necessity, a great improviser.
The outer door opened with the scraping of metal on ice and a burst of frigid air, refreshing after the stifling heat generated by the little heaters. Once all the coats and gloves and goggles had come off, Sinclair recognized him as the man—Michael Wilde—whom he had first encountered in the blacksmith’s shop. There, he had seemed a fairly reasonable chap, though Sinclair remained determined to trust no one.
He was carrying a book bound in black leather, with a gilded binding, in his hand.
“I thought you might want this back,” Michael said, extending the book, but Franklin was up like a shot to intervene.
“The chief said not to give him anything. You don’t know what he could use, or how he could use it.”
“It’s just a book,” Michael said, letting it be inspected. “Of poetry.”
That made Franklin frown. “Looks pretty old,” he said, riffling through the pages.
“Probably a first edition,” Michael observed, with a glance at Sinclair, to whom he handed it.
“It’s by a man named Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” Sinclair said, accepting it awkwardly between his cuffed hands. “And so far as I know, it’s never hurt a soul.”
Michael recognized the need for all the precautions but was embarrassed by it, nonetheless.
“So I saw,” Michael said, before reciting the few lines he remembered from school: “‘In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn, a stately pleasure dome decree: Where Alph, the Sacred River, Ran, Through caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea.’ I’m afraid that’s about all the poetry that ever stuck,” he said, but Sinclair looked nonplussed all the same.
“You know his work? Even now?”
“Oh yes,” Michael was pleased to inform him. “The Romantic poets are taught in high school and college. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats. But I still don’t know what the title of this book—Sibylline Leaves—means.”
Sinclair was smoothing the cover of the book as if he were stroking the top of a dog’s sleek head. “The Greek sibyls—seers?—wrote their prophecies on palm leaves.”
Michael nodded. He’d been impressed that this should be the book Sinclair held closest to his heart; it had been packed in his gear by the door of the church. “And I saw that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is in it,” he said. “That’s still a very famous poem. It shows up on a lot of required reading lists.”
Sinclair gazed down at the book, and without opening it, intoned, “‘Like one that on a lonesome road, Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned around walks on, And turns no more his head.’”
Franklin was looking utterly stumped.
“‘Because he knows, a frightful fiend,’” Sinclair concluded the passage, “‘Doth close behind him tread.’”
The words seemed to silence the chamber…and chilled Michael to the bone. Was that, he wondered, how Sinclair perceived his own flight? A lonesome journey, dogged by demons every step of the way? The haunted look on his face, the hollows around his eyes, the cracked lips, the blond hair matted to his head as if he’d been drowned—they all testified that it did.
Franklin, apparently afraid that the poetry recital might go on, said to Michael, “You mind if I take a break?”
“Go ahead,” Michael replied, and Franklin, tossing his magazine onto the crate, left.
When he was gone, Sinclair put the book aside and leaned back against the wall, while Michael removed the well-thumbed copy of Maxim from Franklin’s perch and sat down.
“You haven’t got anything to smoke, do you?” Sinclair asked, for all the world like one gentleman, lounging in a club, idly asking another.
“Afraid not.”
Sinclair sighed, and said, “The guard didn’t either. Am I to be deprived of tobacco for a reason, or do men no longer smoke?”
Michael had to smile. “Murphy probably left orders not to give you anything like a cigarette or a cigar. He might have thought you’d try to burn this place down.”
“With myself inside it?”