It shouldn't be hard to see what is rewritten and what is still rough. I followed several people's suggestions in the rewrite part -- thanks to all.


Walking the Longlight
Colleen Drippe’
This isn’t going to be a scientific account of Dr. Jonsson’s last arctic expedition. That would be beyond my powers. Nor do I know whether he continues his mad quest elsewhere in the solar system, for I have lost touch with him. Discount my words if you wish, but I have to make some record of what I saw. I owe it to the dead.
I will begin where things began for me – at the lodge in Grise Fiord, Ellesmere Island, in the late spring of 2075. Grise Fiord is a small town these days, though it was once an Inuit settlement of no more than a couple hundred people. The lodge is it’s biggest and nicest hotel, a jumping off place for an ever diminishing number of tourists.
Bjorn Haagen and I were sitting in the bar, but we were not wasting time. Waiting was one of our main duties and we did it well.
“It’s a hoax,” Bjorn said wearily. “How could they be anything else?”
I picked up my beer, eyeing it critically. Of course the brew wasn’t local, but I couldn’t help wondering how long it been travelling. And how long had it waited for me in some warehouse – not improved at all by the wait?
“The old man’s crazy,” he added. “But this has to be a low point!”
I shrugged and set down the mug. “You knew what we were in for when you signed up,” I reminded him. “We both did.”
“Damned southerner.” Bjorn was drinking ale, new stuff from one of the new malts. I remember wondering if it came from Greenland. But even in our steadily warming climate, they weren’t growing barley yet in Greenland.
“Dr. Jonsson may have lived in the US,” I said absently, “but you know he came from Iceland.”
Bjorn snorted. “His money didn’t.”
I made another attempt on my beer. “No,” I agreed. Our boss had made his fortune in robotics, though nowadays he let the company run itself. “But if Dr. Jonsson thinks the site is worth checking out, then we check it out,” I added, swallowing with a grimace. “And we do it his way. At least we don’t have to use snowmobiles and backpacks like they did in the old days.”
At this, my friend – for he considered himself that – laughed out loud. It was an understandably bitter laugh. We had been waiting three days now for a team of ghouls. They were Jonsson’s latest craze in unorthodox archaeology, and of course they weren’t really eaters of the dead. They had been dubbed ghouls because they were supposed to seek out death – sites of ancient death and, hopefully, burial. They were supposed to be psychics.
I smiled a little tightly, watching Bjorn. Like many Greenlanders his ancestry was a mix of Euro-Scandinavian as well as Inuit and he was currently going through an ethnic identity crisis. He dreamed of hunting seals on the no longer frozen sea, his rifle and his snowmobile his only companions. Or maybe he skipped a generation and dreamed of a dogsled. In reality, his father was a potato farmer. In reality, there were trees growing about a quarter of the way up the coast.
“No,” he said at last. “No snowmobiles.” I hoped he wasn’t going to bring up his great grandfather again – how old Knud Calloway had broken through the ice in December of all months, when it should have been five feet thick, and died of hypothermia before they could get him thawed out.
As for me, I was content with modern technology. We had flown into Grise Fiord and we would go out the same way as soon as we had done our job and satisfied Dr. Jonsson once more that he was chasing rainbows – which we did and he did on a pretty regular basis.
Suddenly Bjorn looked up. “There!” He pointed to the door as a trio of obvious southerners came diffidently inside. The days of heavy parkas were passing most places, though you still needed one here in the winter. But this was June and the sun made a long, bright daylight which merged gently into twilight as it skimmed just above the horizon for an hour or so in what passed for night. A heavy windbreaker was enough when you went out and some days you didn’t even need that.
These three had windbreakers whose newness almost hurt my eyes as they paused inside the door, obviously looking for us. I stood up and waved them over to our table.
Ghouls. There were an increasing number of so-called sensitives of one sort or another, fostered by various new corporations where fiddling about with the brain was legal. Like most people, I was by no means convinced they would be good for more than a lucky guess.
I watched them as they approached, wondering what we had here. In appearance, they were true southerners, their fine, dark features standing out among the red faced Euro types and the round cheeked Inuits. As one of them turned toward us – a girl, I saw with surprise – I could see her eyes deepset in bruised looking sockets. There was a red circle mark in the center of her forehead.
When I saw that Bjorn wasn’t going to do the honors, I pulled out a chair and invited them to join us. I was a bit nervous after all. “Jean Gautier,” I said, trying to sound friendly. But when it came to it, I withheld my hand.
“Manoj,” one of the men told me, ignoring my rudeness with a courtesy that could have been indifference. “Dhaval. Kamela.” He pointed first to his companion and then to the girl. They seated themselves at our table.
They were of the blood of the deadlands. Nowhere else would there be parents so desperate as to sell their unborn children to the corporations. Everything had collapsed along the earth’s fat middle into a horror of floods and tides, with baking, blistering days and howling cyclone nights. These would be the lucky ones, I supposed. At least they got out.
I wondered what mark their adaptation had left on them. I had seen other, cruder types, even chimeras bred for special tasks. But these were new to me. Would I find their difference in their eyes? Would there be shadows of the dead past? Dying horrors, speaking dust -- or incipient lunacy? Those eyes were as dark as the eyes of any Inuit but deeper, shadowed in their bony faces. Dr. Jonsson thought they saw through time – that they did not entirely live in the present. He had been quite enthusiastic about them.
Bjorn scowled at the trio. “Did you bring gear?” he asked. “Luggage?”
“Yes,” one of the men told him. “We have a flyer. Dr. Jonsson sent a pilot with us.”
“Where’s he?”
“At the office. He was to book rooms for our employer and some of his staff before taking us all out to the site.”
Bjorn groaned. “Jonsson’s here?”
The young man, Manoj looked nervously down at his hands. “Not yet. He wants us to – to spend some time out there first. Then he will come. The pilot can tell you about all that.”
“I bet he will,” Bjorn muttered. “Mammoth bones. Atlantis. Cimmeria –”
“Bjorn.” I glanced over at the girl and caught her looking at me. I was remembering a few things I had read about the ghouls. Tabloid stuff.
“Well what do you expect?” Bjorn said, turning to me. “He wants us to find a city buried since – when? How old were the glaciers anyway? Since the Pleistocene? A city! Everyone knows the first people came here less than ten thousand years ago and they were too busy surviving to build any damn cities!”
I had to agree with him. I had seen a few digs along the edges as the ice melted away – back in Alaska where I had worked summers during my college years. We found lodge stones, collapsed huts, grave goods and frozen bodies. The tribal elders were always called in and usually everything was reburied somewhere away from the glacier mess. The days of archaeological pirating were long gone.
“Trees,” the other young man said suddenly. Dhavel, if I remembered correctly. “It’s hard to believe there were trees here once.”
I started. “Millions of years ago,” I said. “Paleocene. Surely –”
Dhavel smiled a thin smile. “We studied the area,” he explained in his soft voice. “We could never – never –” He spread his hands. “Anyway, it is only human beings who speak to us. Not trees. Not animals.”
“And these human beings,” Bjorn asked, ironically, “they do speak? What do they say?”
Suddenly Kamela smiled -- and in that moment she ceased to be a ghoul. There was a brightness in her, a remembrance of the southern sun before it became her enemy and, ultimately, ours. “It isn’t like that at all,” she said, and her voice was golden, rich with the remembered summer that had gone sour. “We use what words we can to describe what cannot be described.” She turned that smile on me. “Please understand that we do not communicate with – with those who have gone before us. We do not speak to them. We only listen. No, not even that.” She spread her hands helplessly. “I don’t know what we do.”
Someone chuckled at this and we all looked up. A very blonde man had come upon us as silently as the wolves who still lived in Quttinirpaaq Park. His longish hair was cut straight across in thick bangs and he needed a shave. “Everything delivered,” he said, indicating the southerners.
“You must be the pilot,” Bjorn said.
He gave a little mock bow. “Thorsteinn Ingolfson,” he said and we all introduced ourselves.
We were a disparate group sitting in the bar at the end of the world. The southerners, it turned out, had come from Bangladesh, now entirely under water. Ingolfson was an Icelander like our boss, and Bjorn and I were both from the western other hemisphere.
I sighed, wondering how this particular expedition would go. After lunch, we would be flying over mud flats and one or two shallow lakes and the remains of some of Ellesmere’s last glaciers. The land itself was as chaotic as our company. Already new vegetation was supplanting the dying arctic ecosystem. It was a disaster, they said down in Ottawa, but they had other things to worry about – fallen coastlines and hurricanes, hordes of refugees, and outbreaks of insects and disease brought in from the south. We might have gone digging in the national park itself and they would not have cared. As it happened, someone else did care and there was trouble later. But that was later.
Our site was in what had been the Prince of Wales Icefield. Radar imaging had indicated unusual stone formations beneath the soil – a regularity that, predictably, Dr. Jonsson translated into ruins. His wife, a geologist, did not agree. They had quarrelled and she had threatened to take a job on the moon where not even her husband’s vivid imagination could conjure up ancient ruins.
“Mud,” she had said. “You’re throwing your money in the mud!” And then he had said some things and she had said some more things.
Bjorn and I had stood nervously by while this was going on. Some of that money was being thrown our way, too. Hired straight out of college, Bjorn an anthropologist and my own degree in archaeology, we had been working for the doctor for almost three years. We were used to his bizarre quests.
I ate my lunch – Greenland potatoes and mutton – and hoped he wouldn’t show up for at least a few days. Even if I didn’t know exactly what the sensitives were supposed to do, I knew they needed peace and quiet to do it. Glancing uneasily from Bjorn to the girl with the strange eyes, only one thing was clear to me at that moment.
Bjorn and I would earn our share of Jonsson’s money.
* * *
Things at the site began as they were to go on: Bjorn and I did most of the work setting up. There was a crew of course – Jonsson had at least thought of that. But they had come to dig, not set up quarters. They had their own transport and went back to Grise Ford at night. God knows what they did all day, but judging by their bloodshot eyes, I had a pretty good idea what they did back at the lodge.
We put up the bubble huts and set up the kitchen with its small dining area. I knew I’d end up with the cooking because Bjorn isn’t talented in that direction and the pilot made himself scarce. As for the other three, they had their own job and frankly, I didn’t want them touching my food.
Bjorn hesitated on quarters for these latter. Were they a set? Did two of them go together? In the end, we set up two huts a little apart from ours and left them to sort themselves out. I saw Ingolfson watching Kamala as she brought her things out of the flyer and hoped we wouldn’t have any of that particular sort of trouble.
As it turned out, one thing the crew had done was to stake out the area indicated by the radar. It was a rough hillside triangle, thin-soiled and stony, with patches of early flowers growing low. There were no bushes of any sort, no willows or birches, no ling. Above, the higher slopes were mostly bare, topped by the remains of last winter’s snow and what looked like an unstable bit of primordial ice. A stream or two snaked downward from the ice angling away from our campsite, which was a good thing since our camp was actually in a hollow, a smooth little bowl gouged out aeons ago by the glacier.
I tried to imagine a city in this place. Even thousands of years ago, this must have been at the very end of just about everything. But we had been through all this before in Patagonia and other places, and Jonsson just did not give up. He was an incorrigible dreamer. The whole idea of spiritual dowsing was so utterly Dr. Jonsson. And this same scene would almost certainly be repeated next year in Siberia or wherever the winds of obsession next blew the doctor’s wandering intellect until –
But I could not see any further than that. Success? That would be worse.
These gloomy thoughts occupied me all the while I put together my idea of supper – flap jacks and fried sausage. I would have made pea soup as well, but there wasn’t time and anyway, Bjorn had a prejudice against it. I hoped the southerners weren’t vegetarians, but they were. Next time, I’d make the soup.
Dishes done, I straightened up and looked outside. It must have been around eight o’clock when I happened to glance up the slope onto the marked out area. All three of the southerners were up there, just sort of strolling about. One of the men was smoking a cigarette. I think they were talking among themselves, but it was too far away to hear what they were saying..
Bjorn and I settled ourselves in the dining area and turned on the tv. After a time, the pilot joined us. There was a soccer game on – Russia versus Canada – and we watched it to the end.
During the commercials, I fetched beer while Ingolfson made popcorn. I found myself glancing at him from time to time, wondering what he thought about our expedition. How well did he know our employer? It was hard to tell. There was something reserved about the Icelander – a holding back, as though he watched us from behind his eyes. Or maybe I was just thinking of those eyes watching Kamela.
I could see that Bjorn was uncomfortable too. Later, after the pilot had gone back to the flyer – where he would bunk alone – Bjorn went off without saying anything, to the hut we were to share. He took a couple of beers with him.
I lingered outside the kitchen, hunched in my own windbreaker, the undiminished sunlight keeping me on edge. A wind was rising, chasing scudding clouds in from the east. I thought those were rainclouds coming in and maybe if it grew darker, I would be able to sleep after all.
Up on the site, one of the southerners still paced, moving slowly, almost strolling. I wondered which one it was, but could not be sure at this distance. Something told me, however, that it was the girl, Kamela. I don’t know why I seemed to know this. Nor could I guess what thoughts, if any, haunted her in that place. According to Jonsson, we were field testing their so-called talent for the corporation. His influence, or rather, money had secured us this dubious privilege.
I wished the girl would come down. I did not like to think of her alone up there, especially with the weather changing. But then I saw that she was not, after all, alone. One of the others, looking strangely tall in the distance, was poking about on the lower part of the slope.
I turned away, drawing my coat together. The wind that blew over from Greenland’s shrunken icecap was growing colder and I decided to turn in. In the hut, Bjorn was asleep, a copy of Peter Freuchen lying face down on the floor next to his bed. I shook my head, grinning a little. He’d be dreaming about the olden days when Freuchen and Rassmussen explored the frozen north and the world was a far different place from the one we inhabited.
How many times this world had changed, I thought as I composed myself for sleep. I lay in artificial darkness, remembering that it wasn’t really dark outside, until suddenly I wanted to get up again – to walk, to run, to climb the hill and hills beyond. Instead I tossed and turned until – maybe around two AM – I fell into an uneasy slumber.
I dreamed of the site, the triangle above our camp. First there was ice and then came the rapid melting – for as natural things went, that melting must have been rapid indeed – and then the draining mud, the stones and the thin, arctic soil. All these things passed before me as they had happened in reality, but with a new urgency that was almost like fear.
I watched that thinning ice, saw the soil emerge -- and shuddered. “They’ve taken the cover off!” I cried. “Don’t let them take the cover off!” The ground moved, humping up beneath my feet.
At this, I screamed – or tried to – and woke.
By then it must have been around three in the morning. I rose and went outside, hurrying across to the mess hut in the sleety rain, glad that the hillside was hidden by mist. I brewed coffee, knowing I would sleep no more.
It was hard to shake off the nightmare. I kept thinking that the southern girl was still up there walking the mist – walking and walking the longlight as she stitched past and present together. In my mind’s eye I could see her hair set free in an inky cloud, flowing over her slim shoulders and down her back, beaded with the moisture that had destroyed her low lying country. That same moisture that was destroying the arctic.
* * *
The new day brought it’s own problems and my lack of sleep did not help any. In a sort of stupor, I cooked up a breakfast that was almost a repeat of our supper, only I added oatmeal for the southerners. Bjorn came in while they were eating, and Ingolfson followed, looking as though he had slept no better than I.
I watched him furtively. He never once turned his eyes toward the southerners as he ate, neither did he speak to Bjorn nor me. I saw him go out and back to the flyer in the rain.
The day crew did not come. Now that we had arrived, the site no longer needed guarding – if it ever had – and they would wait back at the lodge for Jonsson’s arrival.
Bjorn and I went back to waiting. Greenland television did not provide much during the morning hours and it was all in a language only Bjorn could understand. The Canadian stations were only marginally better.
Then there were the southerners. I wondered if they would go out, but cold, sleety rain was apparently not in their contract. They all looked tired and the two men did not seem to be on very good terms this morning. Kamela ignored them, wandering around the room until her attention was caught by the box of games Bjorn always brought along. We had been stuck like this before and hadn’t always had electricity available.
Manoj and Dhaval wanted to play poker and Bjorn was agreeable. Kamela and I tried Parcheesi but it wasn’t much fun with two. What I really wanted was to talk to her, to get to know her a little, but I didn’t make much progress. We switched to chess.
About lunchtime, the Icelander came in and made a sandwich and I got up and opened a few cans for the rest of us. It was still raining.
I wondered if this was normal weather for the arctic. Who could say? As the sun warmed, the earth warmed. Would we end up with a world of shallow seas and primaeval jungle? I didn’t know. Meanwhile, the rain fell and the earth became mud.
I don’t think anyone went up to the site that evening. We watched television and drank beer while the southerners kept up their desultory quarrel and the pilot wandered in and out, dripping water on the floor. Bjorn lit a pipe, which he only did under duress, and I kept trying not to assume the role of peacemaker. It wasn’t my responsibility if everyone was unhappy.
Another day passed like this. The rain continued, the sky never changed from leaden daylight, and the Indians never ceased their bickering. At one point, Kamela put on her jacket and went out, but whether she went up the hill or into her hut, I don’t know. Neither did I try to keep track of the pilot.
The clouds cleared off about ten o’clock that night, but almost immediately a fog rose that was almost as thick as the rain had been. I stood in the doorway, peering out at the dripping landscape until I felt someone brush by me. Turning, I saw Kamela shrugging into her windbreaker.
Suddenly I remembered my dream. I did not want her to go up on the hillside alone.
It was foolish, this fear of mine. I tried to justify it – what if she met a polar bear? Or wolves? I started to say something – and then I saw her face.
She looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car. Or a lemming, running to its death. I reached for her and then let her go. No words of mine would have brought her back. Moving rapidly, she disappeared in the fog.
Rousing myself, I followed. I could not see her, but I knew where she was going. I never thought – I just went.
I passed among the huts, squelching mud, and climbed out of the little hollow. On the hillside, the fog thinned slightly, but I still couldn’t see her. Something loomed beside me, but it was only one of the stakes the crew had put in, shrinking to waist high as I came up to it. I stumbled over an outcropping of some dark stone and saw Kamela’s slight form ahead of me. She was not moving.
I froze in place, not wanting to frighten her, or worse, to make a fool of myself. I waited, but still she did not move. I became aware of a low keening sound. At first I thought it was the wind – but there was no wind. Slowly I realised it was Kamela I heard. It was horrible – a primitive, hopeless expression of grief.
A shiver ran up my spine, but still I did not dare to climb up to her.
I don’t know how long I waited there. It must have been twenty minutes or so. And then I heard running footsteps and a moment later one of the other Indians had come up to her and was shaking her, speaking rapidly and angrily in their own language. The other one joined him and I thought he was urging them both to come down.
She had stopped that dreadful sound as soon as the first one took hold of her. I could not see her face, but suddenly I heard her scream. She struggled, screaming and abruptly stopped. I think one of the men slapped her.
This would have been my cue to come forward. But something held me where I was. I watched the three head back down, the mist closing in behind them, leaving me along on the hillside. I felt as though I were suspended in cloud, lost in a place where anything could happen. And when the mist formed itself into a mythic apparition – a tall, striding figure, perhaps some Viking out of the past – I could only stumble backward, half falling as I dislodged a small shower of gravel.
The apparition whirled at the sound and I came face to face with the Icelander. He was as surprised as I. I’m afraid I started laughing then. I tried to explain but my words trailed off.
“The girl,” I said brokenly. “She was alone and – and she was making a sound. I – ”
“Ah,” he said. “She must have been hysterical.”
I didn’t like the way he said that, the way he explained away what I had seen. And when he asked if I had hurt myself falling, I told him coldly that I had not. It was only later that I wondered what he had been doing on the site. And later still, I concluded that he must have been following her.
There was no sound from the sleeping huts when I came back into camp. Bjorn was in the dining room watching another sports event and the Icelander did not reappear. The mist cleared, the sun came out sometime after midnight, and then more clouds blew in. Within an hour, it was raining again.
In the morning, the crew returned. Dr. Jonsson, they told us, was at Grise Fiord and the pilot had been summoned to pick him up later in the day. They were to set up a headquarters and more sleeping space.
Bjorn was co-opted into helping with the bubble huts, but I made cooking my excuse and headed back for the center of camp. I wanted to see Kamela.
Instead I met Manoj just leaving the dining hut. He had been looking for me.
“So Dr. Jonsson is coming?” he greeted me.
I told him what I knew.
“He will be disappointed,” the southerner said. “I am afraid we have not been able – I mean, there is nothing there. This was not a good place for a test.”
I nodded. “None of them are,” I said. “He isn’t looking for the sorts of things you’re supposed to be able to find.” I glanced behind him to the sleeping huts. “And the others?” I asked. “I mean – do they agree with you?”
He, too, glanced at the huts. “Oh yes,” he said. “But I have been chosen to tell him.”
“Not an enviable job,” I conceded. “But where is Dhaval? And Kamela?”
“He is coming now,” Manoj said hurriedly.
I waited.
“Kamela is still sleeping,” he added.
But I was not listening. I was watching the huts. I saw Dhaval emerge from one of them, pausing to light a cigarette. He seemed to be having trouble with it. Then he saw me and tried to look nonchalant. “You have heard?” he said, coming up. “We cannot help you with his project after all.”
I gave him half my attention, one eye on the huts. After a moment, Kamela peeped out of the other one. I caught her eye and she shook her head slightly. I turned away.
“Go on in and have some breakfast,” I told the men. “There are biscuits on the table and plenty of cereal.”
When they had gone in, I slipped over to the hut. “Kamela?” I called softly.
She moved aside the flap and gestured me inside. She did not look well.
“You must tell him,” she said rapidly. “That he is wrong. There is nothing here.”
“Nothing?”
“He must not waste any more money on this place. It is not worth digging.”
I remembered the sound she had made up on the hillside in the fog. I had not slept that night, remembering. And suddenly I wanted to believe her more than I had ever wanted anything before in my life.
A gust of wind rattled the plastic of the hut and I remembered the others. “I’ve got to go now,” I said. “I’m glad you are alright. I mean, that you didn’t catch cold or anything.” It was cowardly of me. I know it. I make no excuse. I left her helpless, trying to deny what she had seen, trying to lie. And failing.
In the confusion, I did not see her again that morning. Ingolfson left after lunch to pick up our employer and Bjorn challenged the two southerners to another game of cards. I was too nervous to play and went outside instead.
Several times I almost started toward Kamela’s hut but each time my nerve failed me. The rain had tapered off once more, but there was no sign of the clouds breaking up. I felt as though time had stopped, that there was neither day nor night but only this interminable pewter stillness. It was as though we had come to an alien planet.
With relief, I saw the flier return.
Immediately modern civilisation closed in on me. The first to emerge was Dr. Jonsson’s secretary, a model 907 android. His lawyer, Trent Debenham followed, and then his wife, the other Dr. Jonsson. Being an American, she used his surname even though it was a transitory patronymic (Icelanders still didn’t use family names) and had written several books under her married name. Her first name was Mac. Our Dr. Jonsson followed and, by the glum look on his face, I could guess that her arrival on Ellesmere Island had been entirely unforeseen.
“And the lawyer, too,” Bjorn breathed to me. “This does not look good.”
Jonsson walked over to us. He was wearing a sweatshirt and seemed oblivious to the weather. “I’ll want everyone assembled for a meeting at” – he looked at his watch – “eleven sharp,” he said and started to turn away. “The ghouls as well,” he added, with unnecessary coarseness, turning back. “Anything to report?”
I shook my head. “They’ve been up there,” I told him. I wasn’t going to tell him they had given up on the site. I wasn’t going to tell him anything I didn’t have to.
The android passed me, carrying several bags, and I stepped out of its way. Its pleasant, expressive, psychologically correct face looked about as human as some of the Mayan carvings we had helped Dr. Jonsson uncover the summer before.
The rain continued and I put on a pot of soup to simmer for lunch. Bjorn and the Indians were still playing poker. We all squelched when we stepped outside and headed for the new meeting hut and I thought it must be pretty bad up at the site. As we passed the three new sleeping modules – much more roomy than ours – we could hear low voices arguing. Debenham stepped out of the center one and joined us, grimacing distastefully as he put his feet down in the mud.
“Everything okay here?” he asked.
I nodded, still giving nothing away. I wondered if the two Dr. Jonssons were getting ready for a parting of the ways. Her money had built his company, so that parting would not be easy to negotiate.
“Had a little trouble with the government,” Debenham said as though he read -- and dismissed -- my thoughts. “Inuits, actually.”
This shouldn’t have surprised me. They’d been here longer than anyone else and, logically, their own ancestors were the most likely remains we would find. Of course.
Our boss and his wife emerged behind us. I could not hear their conversation as we sloshed ahead in the muck, only the tone of it which wasn’t good. But mostly, all I could think of was getting inside and, hopefully, warm.
The girl wasn’t there, so Mac went back to fetch her. The two young men settled themselves as far from the android as they could get. The pilot arrived just after the two ladies and suddenly we were all one happy family.
I could see our boss was still hyped up despite the weather and his wife. Obviously Manoj -- or was it Dhaval? -- hadn’t worked up the courage to tell him the bad news. But he had this other problem on his hands. Already the Inuits were seeking an injunction and within the next few days would probably get it.
“Completely ridiculous,” Dr. Jonsson told us. “But if we are going to dig, we need to get started.”
“Dig for what?” Mac demanded. “Those rock formations? You won’t find anything and you know it.”
“It is,” I ventured, “a pretty large area up there. We didn’t bring enough equipment to take out the whole hillside.”
He waved this aside. “I have other reasons to think we’ll find what we’re looking for. And I think they know it. That’s why they’re trying to stop us.”
This was news to me. I wondered if the old man was becoming paranoid.
He launched on a rather obscure explanation of certain tales and legends. I saw Bjorn shake his head but he didn’t say anything. It wouldn’t have helped.
Mac was not so reticent and the only thing our meeting accomplished was to instill in us a sense of urgency. We were all going up on the hill, apparently, sensitives and nonsensitives. Bjorn and I were going to dig test holes while Jonsson consulted radar maps and told us where to dig.
The Indians looked sick. I could see that their collective nerve had failed them. But I wasn’t going to say anything. Even when I caught Kamela’s desperate glance. There was, after all, nothing up there. There couldn’t be.
So no one argued – Mac because she knew it was a waste of time, Bjorn and I because he was paying our salaries. The southerners looked cold and unhappy and ready to head back to their own headquarters – in England, I think. Drenched and dripping, their new windbreakers already spattered with mud, they were just three young people, sadly out of place. Only Dr. Jonsson still tried to believe in them.
Only I could see that they were terrified.
As the afternoon wore on, the rain returned. We shuffled and slopped about, trying to dig, struggling even see each other. Bjorn and I stayed with the doctor. Sometimes we met one of the southerners, so I know they were still up there. Debenham did not come and I only caught one glimpse of the pilot, though even that surprised me, since I didn’t think Jonsson’s command included him. Sometime later, the rain got so bad we had to give up and go back down to change our clothes.
I cooked us supper, and no one complained. It was hot and they were cold. Jonsson retired to his hut early while the rest of us drank hot chocolate and – the rain stopped.
No one woke him. By common consent, we broke up and went to our separate beds. It was nearly midnight and I was very tired. At first my sleep was dreamless. Or at least the dreams were the usual innocuous muddle. Only slowly did more sinister elements begin to creep in.
The ice, the rock, the mud. I had just been up there. I had dug. And all the time I had been watched, through the rain, through the earth. Watched by something languid, something thawing slowly –
Fighting awake, I rolled myself out of bed once more and sat up. A sound had woken me. A sound like a door closing.
I crept outside and looked around. The light was long and grey and I could not see the sun. Streamers of mist alternately hid and revealed the hillside above me. The ice crown beyond looked like a pitiful wet rag thrown carelessly over the summit and forgotten. Below, a shadowy figure was moving toward the site.
At first I thought I was still asleep. I paused, shivering a little in the damp breeze. Was that the girl again? But surely nothing would get her up on the hillside again – not alone, at any rate.
And then I glanced over at the flyer. The door was open, the catch not caught, swinging a little back and forth in the wind. I hurried to the machine, peered inside. It was empty and I closed the door softly, remembering the sound that had woken me.
Once more I peered up at the hillside. Yes, there he was – the Icelander then, making his way up to the dig. What on earth had he found that we had missed? Or – yes, I saw her then, Kamela just completing her dreary circuit. And just as I had imagined it, her hair was down.
But what had compelled her to go up there?
A horrible thought came to me and I could not shake it off. Was she sleepwalking?
As son as the thought came to me, I began to run. And what was the Icelander doing up there? It never once occurred to me that he might be doing the obvious – forcing his attentions on a pretty girl. I knew it wasn’t that. All my strength went into the climb. He was ahead of me, had not seen me – and now he was hidden by the mist.
I think I would have called for help but there was no time. I had to reach Kamela!
Once more the hillside came into view and I saw her turn. She did not move, just stood there, her hair blowing out behind her, her stance speaking fear beyond fear. I had no breath to shout as I saw Ingolfson close the distance between them.
And then, as I drew closer, he, too, stopped. There was something helpless in his own stance, something defensive as she raised one arm and pointed . She was speaking, but I was too far away to hear what she said.
Suddenly they moved. He, lunging, nearly had her and she, eluding, began to run further up the hill. Gasping for air, I forced myself to give chase. I was crossing the places I had dug yesterday, stumbling in the little trenches, fouling my clothes with mud. Finally I stumbled, half falling into a depression I had not dug – a place where the soil had subsided on its own.
I must have been dreaming after all, for there, beneath my feet, rose broken stone -- shaped stone. I laid hands on what I found, my fingers seeking the places where slabs came together.
I don’t know how long it was before I remembered the other two. I stood up, half dazed, and saw them nearer than I had thought. He had his hands on her shoulders and she was trying to get away. I don’t think they were saying anything because when I suddenly heard her scream, the sound tore through me, forcing me halfway out of the depression before I registered what was happening.
She was pointing beyond Ingolfson, screaming and screaming. I looked where she pointed and saw that the ice rag was moving apart. So was the mud – and the rocks. A lot of mud and rocks. The pilot saw it too. He cried out something – and I swear he spoke no language I had ever heard ! – and released the girl.
But it was too late for him. As for me, I was already running, sliding, tripping and half rolling back down the hillside, yelling a warning to those below. I don’t know what saved me – probably dumb luck as I fetched up against the mess hut. The others were tumbling out of their huts, making for higher ground. I joined them – but not before I had one last horrifying glimpse of the hillside.
The avalanche had covered everything, the trenches, the ruins – if they had ever been there – and most terribly, Kamela and the pilot. We clung to the stony ground as earth and stones swept over the campsite. Our sleeping huts were flattened and everything was buried under half a metre of debris before the slide petered out. We had to dig Debenham free. He had some broken ribs.
The two young men – Manoj and Dhaval kept shaking their heads when I tried to get some sense out of them. I had taken Manoj by the lapels and would probably have strangled him if Bjorn had not pulled me off. “You knew!” I kept shouting. “You knew it was up there!”
But they hadn’t known. They were just kids, doing what they were told. They had no more psychic sensitivity than Dr. Jonsson himself. They told us this over and over in their terror.
“But Kamela!” I cried. “She spent whole nights on the hill – walking.”
The boys shook their heads. “No,” they said. “She knew nothing. There was nothing there!” I did not need any preternatural senses to know they were lying.
But that was all I could get out of them. Once Mac realised that Kamela and the Icelander were up there, she called the Mounties on her satellite phone. They told us they would send another flyer at once. The ice was still slipping. We had to drag Dr. Jonsson away from the ruins of the camp.
* * *
We were at Grise Fiord when the rest of the glacier fell, taking most of the hillside with it. No one was going to dig that site for a long time. Maybe never.
I did not tell Jonsson what I had seen. He and Mac had their final quarrel at the lodge and separated, probably for good. Bjorn and I were left with the final details while Debenham was in hospital and the Jonssons in court. We sent Manoj and Dhaval back to England, filed a report on Kamela and tried to locate next of kin for Ingolfson. That was when we learned that neither his wife in Keflavik nor his father in Haugar had ever heard of him.
Bjorn only shrugged. He had thought from the beginning that Ingolfson was a shifty sort. Probably the man was wanted somewhere under a different name.
As to what I thought, I never told Bjorn. Even now, I try not to think about Ingolfson and his last moments there above the ruins on the island at the top of the world. I try not to feel a dark and fleeting pity for the exile, descendant of exiles perhaps, trying desperately to hide the story of what he was.
Other times, I tell myself that I imagined those ruins. That Ingolfson was a psychopath, a dangerous and erratic man. And I think of Kamela with regret, wondering if she believed in her strange gift or if, like her companions, she did what she was trained to do, hoping for a lucky find to bolster the myth that there were those who could look into the past and locate scenes of death.
I’m told the corporation gave up that particular line of research. I’ve no idea what became of Manoj and Dhaval – maybe they were trained for something else or maybe they were fired. As for Dr. Jonsson, I don’t think he ever suspected that he had found what he sought. He emigrated to Mars later and developed some very useful robots for that difficult planet while spending a certain amount of time and money looking for evidence that Mars and the asteroids had been visited in the prehistoric past. I never heard that he found anything conclusive.
As for Mac, I do not know what became of her. She may have gone to the moon after all.
Bjorn returned to school and plans to become a lawyer. As for me, I moved south. First Europe, then to Toronto. In my travels, I have stayed away from the edges of the world, far from the forgotten places. And I have tried very hard to forget that depression on the hillside and the tops of the walls that may not really have been there.
In fact, I wipe my hands on my trousers whenever I remember that I touched them.
End

Well, Colleen, this is certainly a well-written piece and it is fairly entertaining. I have one overarching question, and I think I will leave the other much less important questions aside for now - what is it about? I have a feeling that I am missing something which I was intended to understand; or else, perhaps I am looking for a more concrete and specific point than you ever intended.

As I understand it, there was some kind of ruin buried in the dig site which Kamela knew about; Ingolfson was either the descendant of some ancestors buried in the dig site, or some kind of avatar of theirs; the falling of the hill was caused in some way by the activities of the digging crew; Ingolfson wished to thwart the success of the digging crew in discovering the ruin, or else Kamela wished to do so and Ingolfson wished to stop her. I am not asking for a clarification of details since I suppose you intended the answers to be uncertain, but if I am far mistaken in my understanding perhaps you could point out where.

The question I had about the 'ghouls' and their ability still stands, and I might add to it now a question about the sinister nature of the ruins: are they demon-possessed?

Thanks for your take on the story. My intentions? No demons -- and I don't think any justification for expecting them. I did not intend to make things clear -- they were not clear to the main character, after all. Nor were they clear to the Indians, who were not as scientifically sophisticated as the other characters. It is possible they believed in demons.
Question for you is -- were you entertained, satisfied?
This story is science fiction and I might be able to tweak it a bit to make that more clear. The unknown (there is an element of psychological horror in a lot of my work) can be a powerful element in a narrative. And the limitation of the human mind -- of Jean's mind in this case -- adds to this power.
Who was Ingolfson? Either an alien with a very long lifespan or the descendant of same. Or someone connected with aliens. Or maybe, as Jean considers, just a common crook who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
What brought down the ice? The rain. Such things are happening right now. I did my homework on this.
And for anyone interested -- a great deal of my preparatory reading was not explicitly used in the story. That is how research for fiction works -- writing is only the tip of the iceburg. Note that I never mentioned any theory about the cause of global warming. What I found was -- local problems seem to be human caused, but the big picture is most likely the sun. The (dry) ice caps on Mars are also thinning. We go through these phases --

Yes, I was entertained because of the well-written suspense. In addition, You've improved the opening paragraphs to give a better picture of the environment and the people.

But I also wanted a more satisfying conclusion. Give me more clues on what was seen. A stirring monster? A broken spacecraft? Ingolfson, if he is associated with the secret, is a hard one to understand, because he knows the ice is quickly melting. So why is he so protective of a few more years of secrecy? After all, the secret has been hidden for hundreds of thousands of years.

Is the secret a bad one? If so, why? Just because it makes the ghouls unhappy? What could happen if the secret is revealed? Is it only the dreams that make the secret terrible? Or is there something else?

What is making Jonnson so ambitious to uncover the site? What hopes does he have? Does he want to become ever richer? More powerful because he finds a new energy source? A method to control people? Super-intelligence from a forgotten space-borne civilization that died a long time ago? Give hints on Jonnson's motives.

Dustiam already put all of the questions I could think to ask; and for me the short answer is that I was entertained but not satisfied. There were too many remaining unanswered questions and so while many fascinating things were suggested none of them were realized enough to give the plot any feeling of certain weight.

JMJ
Thanks to both of you. This will really help with the rewrite and final polishing. Indeed, I will probably print out both your critiques and keep them beside me as I work.

Overall, I echo Matt's comments. I found the piece an interesting and enjoyable read, however I am left wondering "what is it about?", "what's the point"? I was entertained, but I think there was a bit too much mystery at the end for me to be satisfied. I expect that a secular audience would be satisfied, especially those who enjoy the TV series "The Outer Limits" which was known for tales like this. But I think from a Catholic perspective we were each hoping for some more hints as to what it was they discovered.

Some specific comments, most of which are grammatical nitpicking:

Quote:

The lodge is it’s biggest and nicest hotel, a jumping off place for an ever diminishing number of tourists.

There should be no ' in "its" when referring to the lodge as the town's biggest hotel. With it, you only use the ' as a conjuction of it is, not for possessives, if I recall correctly.

Quote:

I picked up my beer, eyeing it critically. Of course the brew wasn’t local, but I couldn’t help wondering how long it been travelling.

Should be "... couldn't wondering how long it had been travelling."

Quote:

We had flown into Grise Fiord and we would go out the same way as soon as we had done our job and satisfied Dr. Jonsson once more that he was chasing rainbows – which we did and he did on a pretty regular basis.

Something's not quite right with the end of that sentence ... I'm not sure what you're intending, are you saying that chasing rainbows is something "we and he did on a regular basis"? Also, I think that the word "pretty" can go, it doesn't add anything to "regular basis".

Quote:

These three had windbreakers whose newness almost hurt my eyes as they paused inside the door, obviously looking for us.

I think saying that the newness of the windbreakers "almost" hurt his eyes needlessly weakens the image and the sentence. I think saying that they simply "hurt my eyes" is a stronger image and tighter prose.

Quote:

There were an increasing number of so-called sensitives of one sort or another, fostered by various new corporations where fiddling about with the brain was legal.

Is it legal to tinker with brains in the corporations, or in the countries those corporations are based out of? My first image when reading this line was of a "cyberpunk" setting where corporations run the world rather than governments. I suggest you clarify this sentence.

Quote:

He gave a little mock bow. “Thorsteinn Ingolfson,” he said and we all introduced ourselves. We were a disparate group sitting in the bar at the end of the world.

"at the end of the world" struck me as a somewhat stock phrase. I am very guilty of using stock phrases a lot so I tend to look for them ... in moderation they can be fine, I suppose. But for this one, it seems to me that in our time Ellesmere Island is the end of the world, but in your timeline, it is much closer to "mainstream" civilization to the point that there isn't really an end of the earth anymore.

[quoteIt was hard to shake off the nightmare. I kept thinking that the southern girl was still up there walking the mist – walking and walking the longlight as she stitched past and present together.[/quote]

I think she's supposed to be walking in the longlight, right?

Quote:

Another day passed like this. The rain continued, the sky never changed from leaden daylight, and the Indians never ceased their bickering.

Up to this point, you've always referred to them as "southerners" and they were never identified as specifically being from India. I noticed that you seem to call them Indians from here onwards ... it seems inconsistent.

Quote:

As the afternoon wore on, the rain returned. We shuffled and slopped about, trying to dig, struggling even see each other.

Struggling even to see each other.

Quote:

As for me, I moved south. First Europe, then to Toronto.

It struck me as a little strange the contrast between the vagueness of an entire continent and then right after it a specific city.