December 2023
Skúmaskot, Iceland
Jens and Leo still aren’t back. It’s been forty-two hours since they went after Samara.
I’m so worried, I’m beside myself. What is actually going on? Samara died, and then she didn’t. Jens and Leo said they’d go and look for her in case she had actually walked off the ship with a brain injury and needed help, but they’ve not returned.
And I can’t stop crying.
Are they injured somewhere, or lost? Have they all walked off the project without telling me? Jens took his backpack, but his laptop is here. So is Leo’s. I don’t know whether to go and look for them or stay here and keep the fire going in case they come back.
It’s probably a very unwise move, but I decide to use what’s left in my solar charger to attempt to call Jens.
It doesn’t connect.
I try Leo, then Samara. None of the calls connect. I click on the TikTok app. They’ve not logged on to any of their socials. Jens’s TikTok seems to have been deleted. Or maybe it’s glitching again.
I do a livestream to connect with the 5,098 followers who have logged on, no doubt eager to see more of the Ormen or Skúmaskot or the logbook we found in the crawl space.
“Hi everyone,” I say, giving a little wave. My throat is tightening and I’m overwhelmed by the impulse to start crying again. Oh God. Hold it together, Dom.
“I have some news,” I say, digging my fingernails into my palm to distract myself from the sob that wants to explode out of my throat. “First of all, Samara is okay. I know the livestream cut off super abruptly so you were all probably really worried. So don’t worry! We’ll be announcing the winners of the contest very soon, and filming the dismantling of the Ormen, so stick around! And tell all your friends!”
I give a cheesy thumbs-up, shamelessly mimicking Samara.
“I’m going to log off now,” I say. “Because I need the battery to cook a meal. But I’ll upload more footage tomorrow, I promise.”
Heart emojis stream up the screen, and I see the battery begin to flash.
I make a peace sign and give what I hope is a strong, resolute smile. “Over and out.”
I promised I’d be honest with my followers, but I can’t do it. I don’t want to admit that they’ve all abandoned the project. That they’ve left.
The cabin plunges into darkness. That’s it—no more battery until the sun rises, though “rise” is inaccurate. A bright sun in the sky is a distant memory. Thinking of it now, I probably shouldn’t have promised to upload tomorrow, because really, I’m at the mercy of the elements.
I reach for the wind-up torch and turn it quickly, relishing the brief reprieve from darkness when it glows faintly.
Outside, the wind sounds like someone is singing. I hold my breath, listening as the melody deepens, a sound of humming. And then it fades to a whistle, the ship rocking in the wind’s hands.
I wrap myself in a thermal blanket and hold my hands to the fire bucket, an exhalation of warmth rising from embers at the bottom. I so wish Jens had stocked up the wood supply before he left. We’re pretty much out of doors, so either I start pulling up floorboards or I trek to the turf houses on the other side of the bay. But I’ll have to, at some point, if I want to stay warm.
The fog is thick tonight, draped over the volcano like the neck of a dragon. I think of Jens with his backpack and tent—maybe he has managed to find somewhere to pitch it, and Leo is with him. I think of the glow cast by his camping lantern, transforming the tent into a lime-green dome against the dark sky. Maybe if I climb to the top of the cliffs, I’ll spot it.
The thought gives me hope.
A voice in my head tells me I’m merely looking for a sense of purpose to distract myself from the terror of being alone, but I ignore it. I can’t give in to that voice.
My knife is sitting on the worktop in the kitchenette, a flicker from the LED safety light running across the blade. I lift it slowly and feel the whispers beneath my skin growing louder, almost shouting now. I slip the knife inside the sheath on my hip, for safety, and the voices stop. It’s a relief. Usually they don’t stop until I draw blood.
Instead, the cabin is quiet and I feel reassured to have my knife in place, its protection right where it needs to be. I can go outside with confidence, as long as I have my knife. I can go to the turf houses and collect fuel for the fire. I think I’ll make myself some porridge. I’ve not yet used the sachets I brought. I figured I’d spare them for an emergency, or for a time when I felt I needed a little boost. Some people use alcohol for a boost, I use porridge.
Outside, the fog lifts, and it’s so beautiful I pull out my phone and feel my heart sink when I remember that the battery is dead. It is literally like being inside a snow globe, one of the posh ones with the fir trees and foiled robins, a polar bear wearing a gold crown. I hadn’t expected to be so struck by the scenery; there’s been so much fog lately that I suppose I expected the same murky grimness. But tonight is heartbreakingly gorgeous, a silk of snow across the volcano and over the bay. The sky is a bruise, moonlight parting the sea with a silver causeway. It’s as though a great battle has been fought between Day and Night, the darkness showing off her regalia in triumph.
There are the most beautiful textures, too, as though we’ve had some kind of weird wind that has combed across the snow, lifting it slightly in tessellated formations. I don’t mean to go on about it—actually, I do—but it’s alarming how the same piece of land can look so different according to the light.
The light is a costume. A skin.
It’s Christmas Day.
I have spent so many Christmas Days alone that it shouldn’t bother me. But I feel utterly gut-punched today. I feel utterly confused by the Samara thing. By the fact that no one has contacted me. I managed to turn my phone on for a few minutes to check my messages and the TikTok account. For about a minute it looked like the project account had vanished. Nothing on there. I panicked. Had one of the others deleted it? We all had admin control. But then it popped up again. Jens, Samara, and Leo have gone dark digitally, too. They’ve not messaged me, and they’ve not posted anything on their own accounts. None of them.
If I’m honest, I feel abandoned, which I know is terribly self-pitying and childish, but there it is. It feels like there is more to this feeling, that it has layers.
The project TikTok has tons of messages from our followers, though, checking in on us all. Mostly, the comments are super nice. And we’ve got a lot of new followers. I didn’t even count them, that’s how low I feel about everything. Before, it really mattered to me. Now it doesn’t. I don’t even care if I never explore again.
I post some old footage of me and Jens researching stuff online from 1973 before my phone dies again. It’s crap footage but at least it shows us doing something.
The knocking against the hull has started up again, and maybe it’s my imagination but it has a rhythm that doesn’t seem to be in time with the waves. It’s starting to drive me insane. I’ve gone outside a couple of times to see if I can move the chain that’s causing the sound, but the rocks are icy and if I fall and crack my head open . . . well, no one is coming for me.
I did see the chain and it was moving for sure, but it wasn’t moving in a rhythmic, knock-knock-knock way. That’s the rhythm of the sound from the inside. Three knocks, and a pause. Then another three, followed by another pause.
I’m sitting here listening to it and there’s nothing I can do. I can’t record it, can’t contact anyone. I have the overwhelming sense that someone is outside.
I can literally feel them looking at the Ormen. If I close my eyes I can almost see myself inside, a little silhouette framed by the cabin window. As though I can see from two angles at once.
Stop it, Dom. You’re being paranoid again. You have the feeling that someone is outside because the knocking sounds like someone is at the front door. Keep it together, will you?
I keep looking outside, partly to see if one of the others has returned, or in case I see the woman. Ghosts can’t knock, can they?
I keep thinking of what Samara said so poetically about sound being a revenant, a trace.
No. The knocking is from the chain. Maybe in the morning I’ll try to fix the chain so that it doesn’t bang into the hull. Keep focused. Christmas Day is just another day, right?
It’s still Christmas Day and I’m drunk. I climbed down into the hold to see if I could find some vodka. It took a lot of rummaging through debris and I went over on my ankle, but I got lucky. This bottle of vodka is absolutely gorgeous and has put a real shine on what was otherwise starting to feel like a proper pity party. Go me.
I’ve actually had a pretty productive Christmas. The project has almost ten thousand followers. Ten thousand! A month ago, that would have been my goal. I can’t just up and leave, because I’ll be ending the story before its natural conclusion of the ship being destroyed. I just have to make sure I have enough charge for when the breakers arrive. And I’ll also need to think carefully about how to get close enough to film it all without getting arrested. Demolishers and breaker crews hate squatters. They’re often briefed before going in on the possibility of environmental protesters, and sometimes they come with police. It’s when they come alone that you have to be careful. They’ll not even wait for you to be arrested—they’ll just beat the shit out of you.
I’ll need to hide. Maybe I’ll leave the Ormen a day or two beforehand and hide out in one of the caves.
I also spent this afternoon setting up my sensor camera on the tripod here in the main cabin, where I’m going to sleep from now on. I want to see if I’m doing something in my sleep when I have nightmares. I want to record myself and get a clearer idea if something wakes me up or triggers me, and maybe I’ll figure out how to stop it.
I put on my balaclava and coat and take the camera off the tripod mount to do some filming. A little bit here and there will give me enough to make a nice reel of Christmas Day alone here on the wreck. Some of the comments on the TikTok account said I was brave. I usually disregard that kind of stuff but actually, it made me feel better. Maybe this is a total badass thing to do. It’s not my fault that the others left. They had the freedom to stay or go, and they left. Fine. I can choose to stay or go, and I’m choosing to stay.
And I feel like I’m confronting some personal stuff out here, too. I haven’t told anyone about the rapes in . . . actually, I can’t even remember a time that I told someone. And yet I told Samara. That took courage. Saying it aloud felt like I’d been punched in the chest. I know I’m not ready to go any further down memory lane, though. The whispers beneath my skin get too loud when I start to think of that, and I know what happens then. I’ll need to cut, and I know it’s not a good thing, the cutting. I don’t like to cut when I’m exploring. I’ve become so good at stopping my memories, at blocking my mind from looking into the past at all, it barely feels like it’s there for me anymore.
The sun is finally lifting into the sky, brightening the horizon with a weak dusk light. Thank God! Keep shining, sun! We’re past the winter solstice now, so maybe we’ll get a little more light during the day. I’m just thinking about my solar chargers. Every second of light counts.
Outside, snow is falling again. This is also a good sign—it’s getting warmer, though it’s still minus fourteen. I had started to worry that the temperature would continue to drop, and the fire wouldn’t light. It would be game over, then. Plenty of explorers have been killed that way, especially now, with the weather being so extreme.
The deck is slushy, and I walk carefully toward the ladder, noticing the way the wind sounds like singing again. I pause and get my phone out of my pocket to record it, turning all the way around to get the top deck in a nice three-sixty spin. The singing has stopped, which is typical, so I put my phone away and head back to the ladder and climb down to the sand.
For a moment, it feels magical. I’m sure the vodka has helped, but I feel warm inside. The tide has pushed most of the snow off the sand, and so the black beach sits like an inky margin against the perfectly white snow, cottony and untouched. I climb up to higher ground, looking out over the bay to my left and the beach to my right. I wonder if I’ll see the horses again. I haven’t seen them since that first night. I wonder if the dead horses in the cave put them off coming here.
The walk to the turf houses sobers me up and gets me into a good sweat. I had almost forgotten how much a brisk walk helps clear my head. I must remember that—even when the weather is as bad as it has been, get outside, Dom! You know it works.
Carrying the turf back, though—I didn’t think that through. I should have brought a sledge of some sort, a sheet of metal or plastic. I carry as much as I can, then leave it on the ground outside the Ormen and carry up as much as I need to get the fire going.
I break up the turf and feed it to the fire, then set a lid on it with the kettle on top of that. It’ll take ages for it to boil, but I’ve got time, and it gives me something to look forward to. The solar packs will be full of charge tomorrow, now that I’ve got some light, and I’ll be able to upload the footage from the last few days and film some new stuff. I’m looking forward to that. And I’m looking forward to seeing how many new followers I’ve got, and how many have subscribed to my paid content. Yes, Dom. There is lots to look forward to. Really, though, I’m itching to check whether Jens and Leo have contacted me. Whether they’ve walked back to the nearest town and have sent me a message, letting me know they’ve found Samara.
That they’re coming back.
Shit, the snow has gotten really heavy. I need to get the rest of the turf before it gets too wet. I head outside, moving too fast across the slush. I manage to throw my arms out and stop myself from falling backward. At the ladder, I pause, sensing something nearby. It’s not just the snow, or my pounding heart rate from the almost-fall.
There is someone standing right below, directly at the bottom of the ladder.
At first, I think it’s one of the others. That would make sense, wouldn’t it? They never left me! They went for a walk and got lost, and now they’re back!
But it’s not Samara, or Leo, or Jens.
It’s the woman, her back turned to the ladder. Her wet shoulders glistening in the dark.
I give a shout and fall backward with fright, and there’s a loud bang from where I catch my head on the sharp corner of the raised platform of the forecastle.
I hear the knock of feet against the rung of the ladder, one after the other.
And everything goes dark.
I can’t tell if I’m dreaming or if I’m underwater.
I can see shapes floating around me, a huge one above. At first, I think it’s a whale, but then the shape of a rudder comes into view and I know it’s a ship. I am instantly filled with rage, such hatred that it seems to burn inside me. I want to scream with fury.
I start to move toward the shape, and I know what I need to do. I need to get on board that ship and kill everyone on it.
I come to. My mouth is filled with something, and it takes a moment to realize that I’m not underwater but on the top deck of the Ormen, lying flat on my back with my arms spread out at either side and a mouthful of snow.
I pull myself slowly upright, the back of my head throbbing from where I fell. Muddy slush is all around me. Luckily, I’m wearing my waterproofs, so I’m dry, if very sore and annoyed at myself for getting drunk. Then I remember what caused me to fall—I saw something at the bottom of the ladder. The woman. She was standing with her back to me.
My heart racing, I look over the side, and instantly I see it—the shape of someone there. But then my eyes adjust, and I realize it’s just a shadow. The moon has cast a shadow of the rocky outcrop and thrown it across the snow, and it looks very like a person standing there. Jesus Christ. That was why I fell?
A shadow?
At once relieved and annoyed, and still quite drunk, I head back inside the cabin, where the fire is throwing out a tremendous amount of heat. Oh, blissful heat! I pull off my hat and coat, then step out of my waterproofs. My fingers find a small amount of blood and a large lump, about the size of an egg, at the back of my head from where I fell. I must have been unconscious for at least a few minutes. I could have a concussion. But I feel okay, just sore, and suddenly ravenous.
I find one of Jens’s fancy food packets on the worktop and decide to make use of it. Korean Style Beef and Rice. Oh my God—I rip open the packet and eat it cold, each mouthful the most amazing food I’ve ever tasted. Jens is not here to tell me otherwise, and it’s technically still Christmas, for crying out loud. Forget turkey and trimmings—cold, vacuum-packed Korean Style Beef and Rice is the best goddamn Christmas dinner in existence.
The rest of the turf is still at the bottom of the ladder. So I know I have to go out there and get it, and I’ll confront whatever waits for me. If it’s a ghost, I’m going to laugh in its face. I’m going to tell it to go fuck itself.
I fetch my knife and fasten the holster around my waist, slipping the knife inside.
It has stopped snowing. The wind has died down on the deck. It was singing before, but now it’s so completely silent. Only the wash of the sea, but even that seems muted.
I step carefully through the slush to the side of the hull and stare down at the bottom of the ladder. I can see the turf, half-buried in the snow. No footprints. No ghost.
I gather the turf and head back up the ladder, a shiver running down my spine. I still feel watched. Despite all my bravado, despite the knife in my sheath, I can’t bring myself to turn around.
Research, that’s the ticket.
Sorry, Samara, but you’ve left your laptop behind and it has fifty-three percent battery life, so I’m using it to check out the academic articles you’ve downloaded.
I’ve locked the cabin door, and my knife is out on the dining table next to me. I risk a glance at the window.
She’s left a screenshot open. It’s of the newspaper article from 1901 about the missing girl, the daughter of the first owner of the Ormen.
I stare at the name. Nicky Duthie. There’s a scratch starting up in the back of my mind. I click on the bottom right, where the other open browsers are minimized. One of them is the photograph we all stared at, trying to work out if the blurry figure slightly out of shot was a woman. Leo said they thought the photograph showed a woman on the ship, which wasn’t unusual. Ship captains sometimes brought wives along, though it was mostly a North American tradition, not common among Dundee whalers. My mind turns to the crew roster that mentioned twenty people on board when there were twenty-one, and the logbook that mentioned a prostitute . . . These were all from 1901.
I stare at the photograph of the figure, halfway out of frame. The scratch at the back of my mind intensifies. Nicky Duthie went missing in May 1901 and was still missing in October. The photograph on board the Ormen was taken in August 1901. It feels like a leap of imagination to even wonder if she’s the figure in the photograph.
No. It’s ridiculous. Why the hell would the shipmaster’s daughter be on board as a prostitute?
It’s midnight. My body clock is whacked, and I’m still tipsy, so I’m nowhere near ready for sleep. I pour some coffee from my flask and use a little of the solar charger to crank up the internet. No messages from the others, which makes my heart sink. Maybe I should stop looking.
Samara is still logged into the academic resource, so I search for info on the Ormen from the 1970s. Jens and I had been searching for information from 1973, but I decide to widen the dates until 1990. An article pings up from 1976, and I give a laugh of surprise. We’d made our search too narrow—that was where we were going wrong!
Letter Delivered Years Late Sheds Light on Crew’s Disappearance
Laura Finlayson, 28, from Auburn, NSW, last saw her fiancé, Dennis Gordon, three years ago, when he boarded a research ship headed to the Arctic. Sadly, it was to be the last time the happy couple would set eyes on each other. Dennis sent letters home every week, and Laura began to worry when he failed to write.
“I knew as soon as the police pulled up outside my door,” she says sadly. “I just had a feeling.”
In 1973, Laura was informed that the ship Dennis had been on—known as the Ormen—had been located by the Russian coast guard. None of the crew had been located, however, and while searches were continuing, it was highly unlikely that anyone would be found alive.
Laura moved to the Gold Coast several months later. “I couldn’t manage without Dennis,” she said. “Our home became an excruciating place for me to live, so I needed to find a new place to make a fresh start.”
This seems to be part of the reason why Dennis’s letter didn’t reach Laura until August 1976. The new tenant at Laura’s previous address in Brisbane finally managed to forward Laura’s mail, and among the mail was a letter from Dennis.
“In the letter, Dennis mentions a guy on the research ship who had started to spend his days ranting and raving,” she says, visibly upset by the memory. “He says this colleague was acting really out of sorts, not like himself at all, and that it was very upsetting and disruptive. He said that the chief [Dr. Andrea Karsen] had locked the guy in his room for safety reasons. That strikes me as very coincidental, given that the ship went off-radar just a day or so afterward.”
I ask her what she thinks happened.
“Obviously, I can’t be sure,” she says. “But Dennis would never have shared something like that with me if he wasn’t really worried, or even scared,” she says. “I feel like he was almost writing it in case something happened, and then I’d understand that this was the reason for it. His letters never went into much detail about his daily routine and the people on the ship, so this really stood out. I do think it has something to do with the crew vanishing.”
Interestingly, the inventory for the ship when it was located adrift on the Barents Sea was missing a key object—a rifle, normally held in a safety box on the top deck. When the coast guard located the ship, they found that it had been damaged by storms, but most of the crew’s personal effects remained on board.
While speculation may not bring any of the researchers back, Dennis’s letter and Laura’s knowledge of her fiancé bring her some closure on a mystery that has torn at hearts for years.
My mind turns to the microscope that Jens found. The one with the hole in the metal casing that he said was a bullet hole. I get up to try to find it, but it’s nowhere to be seen.
The battery is running out on Samara’s laptop, so I do a quick check on three different search engines to see if I can find Dennis Gordon and Diego Almeyda linked together, but I don’t find anything. It strikes me that it’s worth trying the academic resource; after all, the scientists on the research ship probably published their papers. I type the names into the box marked Author and a single research paper pops up from September 1970: “Sea Ice Distribution in Franz Josef Land,” by D. Gordon and D. Almeyda.
My heart quickening, I read the paper, which has been scanned onto the website. I can’t make sense of it—lots about sea ice dynamics and the distribution of mean ice drafts—but I see that Dennis Gordon was a PhD researcher at the University of New South Wales, while Diego Almeyda was a geography lecturer at the University of Argentina.
The lead stalls after that, so I go out onto the top deck to search for the safety box mentioned in the article. The main cabin is really the only addition from the research era, but a rifle wouldn’t have been stored in a safety box way back in the early 1900s. It might have been a box that was already there, but I figure I might find a modification of some kind, maybe an old lock that was from the 1970s.
Nothing.
But as I’m standing on the deck, finally a song comes into my head. The lilting melody that slid into my thoughts when I was in the captain’s cabin, a tune that befits the words of the poem that Leo carved into the dining table.
these seas no more will cause thee strife
if you’ll become my selkie wife
I think of the missing woman. Nicky Duthie, daughter of the Ormen’s owner. I feel the same scratch at the back of my mind start up again, the blurred face at the edge of the photograph flashing in my mind.
Samara’s laptop battery is at twenty percent; my own is dead. Jens’s and Leo’s laptops are both password-protected. I kneel down to the internet terminal. Jens’s solar charger has one bar left. Quickly I plug the internet terminal into it and log online, returning to Samara’s laptop and logging back into the section of the academic resource where all the old newspapers are digitized. I search “Nicky Abney” and find a mere four articles, two of which are about another woman entirely. But one from late October 1901 mentions that George Abney’s daughter has not yet been found.
Hat Found near Dock Suggests Foul Play; Abney & Sons Latest
A hat that George Abney’s wife claims belonged to their missing daughter has been found near the docks of Dundee.
Mrs. George Abney, wife of the owner of Abney & Sons, identified the hat on Tuesday evening, following the disappearance of her oldest daughter, Nicky Duthie. Mrs. Duthie’s husband, Private Allan Duthie of the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guard, is said to have been killed shortly after Mrs. Duthie went missing, having sustained injuries at Fort Prospect in September.
Chief Constable James Richie of Dundee City Police says the discovery of the hat is a major step forward in the case, and has reiterated his invitation to the public to come forward with information. It is feared that Mrs. Duthie boarded a ship and set off for a new life while her husband was overseas.
Mrs. Abney is quoted as saying, “I have no reason to believe that my daughter left these shores freely. I plead again for information, and assurance of her well-being.”
So she was a widow, and doubtless without realizing it.
The battery is at nine percent. I scan quickly through the articles on George Abney. There are dozens, many of them focused on the business, and some photographs. He is a stout, proud-looking man. His obituary indicates that he died by his own hand; the wording is a plea to God to spare his soul.
I stare at the photograph of him smoking a cigar with the prime minister, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, the scratch at the back of my mind growing worse.
What did you do to her, you bastard? I think. What did you do?