The beach at Stromviken was not like any other Michael had ever surveyed. It was a massive boneyard, covered with gigantic skulls and spines and gaping jaws, all bleached to a dull white by the punishing wind and the austral sun. Some were the remains of whales that had been slaughtered at Stromviken, others were the residue of whales that had been butchered at sea by so-called factory ships, their carcasses thrown back into the ocean and eventually washed up here. Lying among the bones and rocks, sunning themselves in the cold glare, was a handful of elephant seals, who paid no attention to the man in the bulky parka and green goggles, pointing the camera in their direction…just as they had paid no attention to the men who had come there years before, who had then gone about slaughtering them as indiscriminately as the whales.
But unlike the whales, the elephant seals, with their trunklike noses and brown bloodshot eyes, had been easy to catch and kill. On land, they were clumsy and moved slowly. Sealers had only to walk right up to them, punch them on the nose, and when the animals reared back on their flippers in surprise, thrust a lance several times through their heart. Sometimes it would take the better part of an hour for the animal to bleed out, but once the bulls were rounded up and killed, the sealers could move on methodically to slaughtering the cows, still protecting their young, and then, if they weren’t too small to bother with, the cubs. The skinning was the hard part; it took four or five men to properly flay a fully grown elephant seal, then to separate the thick yellow blubber from the flesh beneath. Most of the seals, hunted nearly to extinction, yielded one or two barrels of oil apiece when the boiling was done.
Although Michael knew they posed no threat to him, he approached them warily, not wanting to cause any undue disturbance. He wanted shots of the seals at leisure, not in alarm, and besides that, the creatures did smell pretty awful. The main bull, distinguishable only because of his enormous size, was molting, his shed hair and skin spread around him like a fouled carpet, and the cows, belching loudly, weren’t much better. He stepped up onto a lowlying ventifact—a stone carved into a strange shape, almost like a top hat in this case, by centuries of wind—and framed his first shot. But it was hard enough to stand erect in the unceasing wind without trying to hold a camera steady; he would have to set up a tripod and do it the right way.
As he dug around in his bag, the bull seal roared, and Michael could smell its breath, reeking of dead fish. “Jesus, have you ever heard of mouthwash?” Michael said, as he set the tripod down on a relatively level patch of the rocky beach.
Water from the aquarium began to seep over the edge of the tank and drip onto the concrete floor, where it ran in rivulets toward the floor drains. The marine biology lab, like all the modules, was raised above the ground on cinder blocks, and the water simply coursed down some steel funnels and out onto the icy land below.
The block of ice was now no thicker than a deck of cards in some places, its prisoners obscurely visible within. The first spot entirely to give way was at the bottom, where the chunk had fallen off and blocked the PVC pipe. The toe of a black leather boot protruded from it now, glistening like onyx.
The melting continued, and a crevice appeared right down the center of the block; the bodies locked inside were like the flaw in a diamond, a strange imperfection in a giant crystal…and when the crevice widened and suddenly split, it was as if the ice itself were rejecting them. The halves of the ice block fell away on either side, and the seawater washed over the bodies of the soldier and the girl like a baptism. They were exposed to the air, bathed in the lavender light of the lab, and for several seconds they simply lay still, side by side, bobbing on the ice.
The flaking chain yoked around their throats and shoulders held them together until, corroded by the centuries of ice and salt-water, it disintegrated and slipped to the bottom of the tank.
Sinclair was the first to draw a breath. Half air and half water, it made him cough.
Then Eleanor coughed, too, and an uncontrollable shiver ran the length of her body.
What little ice was still supporting them began to give way, and Sinclair’s boots searched for the bottom of the tank…and found it.
He stumbled, swaying like a drunkard, to his feet, and quickly took hold of Eleanor’s cold hand. Dripping wet, he raised her up from the chunks of floating ice. Her eyes were dull and unfocused, her long brown hair plastered to her cheek and forehead.
Where, he wondered, are we?
They were standing in a vat of some kind, filled with salt water up to their knees, in a place he could find no words for. No one else was there; the only living things he could see were strange creatures swimming in glass jars—jars that gave off a pale purple light and a soft hissing sound.
He looked at Eleanor. She raised her hand slowly, as if she had never done so before, and her fingers instinctively went to touch the ivory brooch on her bosom.
He sloshed to the rim of the tank, then over it. He helped her down onto the floor, water sluicing down all around them.
“What is this place?” she asked, trembling, as he gathered her into his arms.
Sinclair didn’t know. For her sake, he hoped it was Heaven. But from his own experience, he feared it was Hell.
PART III
THE NEW WORLD
“They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;
It had been strange, even in a dream,
To have seen those dead men rise.”
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
December 13, 4:20 p.m.