| |
After sixty-two days in the cold, the desert, the unexplored landscape where words hardened into solid shapes and every breath might have frozen his soul, Kurt’s wedding ring fell off. He only removed his glove for a moment, needing the more dextrous use of his bare fingers to unhook frozen gear from the sled. And for a few seconds he didn’t even notice that the ring had slipped away. It was like that sometimes down here, as if the cold could slow brain functions in the same way that it thickened oil and paraffin, made every movement three times harder than it was the day before. He saw it drop from his finger and sink into the snow, but it was several heartbeats before he said, “Shit.”
He’d thought that metal contracted in the cold. Enough, at least, to keep it on his finger. But he supposed his loss of weight from starvation and excessive effort had finally superseded the ratio of gold shrinkage.
“Shit. Shit!” He had the good sense to put his glove back on before digging into the snow.
“What the hell?” Marshall asked. They were the best of friends, closer than brothers, but they had experienced strange moments on this expedition when they hated each other.
“My wedding ring,” Kurt said. “Bindy will kill me.”
“I doubt she’ll even care,” Marshall said, and he continued the laborious effort to set up camp. The sky was clear right now, a startling blue streaked with fingertrails of cloud high up. But a bad storm was coming, and they had mere hours to prepare.
“Can’t you help me?” Kurt asked.
“Why don’t you just—!” Marshall shouted, loud, breath glistening in front of his face and then breathing to the ground as a million tiny diamonds. He sighed. “Sorry. Yeah. Sorry.”
The cold played strange tricks on the men. On day seventeen, Kurt had seen a line of camels on the snowscape to the east, walking slowly up the rocky ridge from the ice fields. He’d insisted that they were there, and even after Marshall told him he was hallucinating—and Kurt acknowledged that—the camels were still visible, slow and lazy. On day thirty, Marshall swore that his dick had fallen off. He’d tried stripping his layers to find it, preserve it in ice so that the surgeons could reattach it after the expedition. Even exposed, his sad shrivelled member turning blue in its nest of frost-speckled hair, he’d made Kurt grab it to make sure it was still attached. On day forty-seven, a day before they reached the South Pole, Kurt and his sled had slipped into a shallow crevasse, and it had taken Marshall four hours to haul him out. By then Kurt was trying to scream, but the cold had swollen his throat and frozen his pain inside.
The cold ate into a person. The physical effects were obvious, but the psychological impact was more insidious. They had hardly shared a harsh word in the thirty years they’d known each other before this adventure, but on day fifty-three Kurt had threatened to fucking gut Marshall if he didn’t finish every last drop of his soup.
Such things were laughed about afterwards. They were doing this through choice, and they knew that odd things would happen. That made it almost bearable.
“Here it is,” Marshall said. “Stupid sod. Don’t lose it again.”
“Oh, mate,” Kurt said taking the small gold ring from his friend. “Marshall, thanks.”
“Stupid sod.” Marshall went back to unpacking the tent and equipment from the sled. “Now let’s get a shift on. I don’t want to freeze to death today.”
“How about tomorrow?”
“Nah, not then either.”
Kurt smiled as he slipped the ring back on. “How about three days’ time.”
“Help me with this.”
“How about a week next Thursday?”
“Fucking prick!”
They finished erecting the small tent, and while Marshall zipped himself inside to light the stove and start melting snow for cooking and drinking, Kurt set about tying down the camp. He hammered stakes into the ice and tied the two sleds to them. Then he banged in more stakes and made sure the tent was secure.
Hands pressed into the small of his back he stretched, leaning back and looking around. As always, it still felt like he was pulling that damn sled across the ice. It might be months before he didn’t feel like he was pulling all that weight. But it was worth it.
The desolate Antarctic landscape was as beautiful as it was deadly, and he never felt more alive than when he was on some mad expedition or other with Marshall. And this was the maddest of all. It was one of the harshest places on Earth, and survival took every ounce of intelligence and strength, endurance and ruggedness. It was that more than anything that had brought them here. The rest of the world was an endless distance away, so remote that it felt like a dream. Here and now was all that mattered.
Marshall had probably been right about Bindy not caring if Kurt lost his wedding ring. They’d been drifting apart for years, and she’d effectively told him that “another fucking adventure” would cost him his wife. She wanted kids and security, a three-bed house and a Labrador. He wanted danger and challenges, the satisfaction of taking on the elements, the thrill of extremes. Jack London had written “the function of man is to live, not to exist”. Kurt was living as well as he could.
He tried to care about Bindy but could not make it happen. It was too cold, the incoming storm too terrible, to care about anything other than surviving the next few days.
“Toilet break!” he called, and Marshall muttered something from inside the tent. Kurt knew that they could well be confined in there with each other for days once the storm hit. He’d relish this one last opportunity to take a dump in private.
He tramped past the sleds, making a final inspection to ensure their equipment was tied down securely, then made for a rocky outcropping to the east. He knew from experience that it was further away than it looked, and after a few minutes tramping across the ice he reached it. Breathing hard, he turned around to make sure the camp was still in sight. The sky was still mostly clear, the sun was dancing with the horizon, and the storm was several hours away.
Behind the sculpture of snow and ice-speckled rock he found a tent.
Kurt gasped, breath stuck in his throat, his body refusing to react. Then he let out his held breath and took a step back.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered. “Hey, Marshall.” But Marshall was still inside their own tent across the snowfield. Maybe if Kurt shouted he’d hear, but . . .
But he didn’t want to call out to his friend. Not yet. He wanted to see what he’d found.
The tent was old. Very old. Almost shapeless, he could only tell what it was from the struts protruding like the smashed ribcage of a dead giant. The old canvas was its skin, and the humped shapes its distorted insides.
Kurt’s heart was hammering. He’d heard about occasional finds like this—explorers out on the ice discovering remnants of old camps, forgotten expeditions, sometimes even the sad remains of dead adventurers. But through all their adventures in Alaska, the Sahara, South America and Nepal, he’d never seen anything like this himself.
He moved closer. A gust of wind blew a haze of snow across the scene, and he winced as it grated the bare skin of his face. He should have worn his hooded coat and heavy face scarf, covered up. He was becoming clumsy, so many weeks into their journey that routines that could save their lives were too easy to let slip. It was the Antarctic summer, the cold a mere thirty degrees below. But frostbite could still strike, especially with the rising breeze adding to the chill factor.
He didn’t have long.
The tent material looked many decades old. It was holed in places, and when he grabbed at it a chunk came off in his hand. He knelt and lowered his face close to the snow surface, trying to see beneath the fallen tent. Trying to see what might be inside.
“I should get Marshall,” he muttered, words made ice and stolen by another gust of wind. They sprinkled on the rocks beyond the tent.
Maybe it had blown here from elsewhere. Perhaps it had been buried for many decades, and some of the recent, deeper thaws had brought it back to the surface. Or it could have been nestled here all along, covered with snow one year, exposed the next, a yearly cycle of burial and exposure.
He stood and turned away, emerging into the open again and ready to go and get Marshall. Then, looking back out across the ice fields towards camp, he blinked several times, trying to make sense of what he’d seen.
It was like trying to retrieve an old memory, not his most recent.
Something there, he thought, and he clambered back behind the rocks. Something not part of the tent. And there it was. He crouched down and tugged at a support spur. It snapped off and pulled a spread of canvas with it, and beneath there lay a leg. He worked quickly to uncover the body. The clothing confused him, so thin and slight for the harshness of even the best conditions this place might present. Then he realised that it was not clothing at all. The corpse was naked. It was leathery, weathered skin.
He worked faster, uncovering the whole form until he reached the corpse’s head.
And he cried out in revulsion and shock, stepping back and catching his heel on something buried in the ice—a timber support, a rock, a bone—and sprawling onto his back, never once taking his eyes from that face.
The plainest face he had ever seen. A blank. He had seen dead people before, but never like this, never so washed away. It was like a person who was not quite finished. The face held the features of a normal human, but even in death there was something so vague, so incomplete, that Kurt could not tear his eyes away. He wanted to. He needed to. But like a child fascinated with a crushed rabbit by the side of a road, he could only stare.
The eyes were sunken pits. The nose was a bump, unremarkable, shapeless. There was hair but it had been styled by ice and time into a shapeless wig. Flat lips were drawn apart over yellowed teeth, the mouth a slit as if sliced by a knife.
The figure stared just over his shoulder.
Kurt stood again, slowly. His shock receded and his heartbeat lessened. It was only as he backed slowly away that he realised there was another shape next to the first, partially hidden beneath the rest of the old tent, yet just visible. Its face, flat and blank.
He turned and tried to run, but his clothing was too heavy and thick, his muscles too weakened by eight weeks on the ice. He sprawled into the snow. It stuck to his chilled skin, reaching cold fingers into his mouth and eyes. He stood again and ran on, feeling a warmth around his crotch. He’d pissed himself.
By the time he reached camp he was exhausted. Marshall was still inside the tent, and when Kurt opened the flaps and tumbled inside he received a torrent of curses.
He’d let out all the heat.
––––––––
“Dickhead,” Marshall said. “Get them off. Get them dry. We might have another few hours of peace before the storm hits.”
“What does the forecast say?” Kurt asked. He still hadn’t told Marshall about the old tent.
Marshall checked out the small laptop sitting on a warming plate to encourage the battery back to life. “Four days of freezing our bollocks off,” he said. He said something else, too. A quip, a joke. But Kurt didn’t hear.
He wanted to tell Marshall, but he could not. The longer he left it, the weirder it would sound. Oh and by the way, I found two dead bodies that don’t even look like real people.
“Hey!” Marshall nudged him softly.
“Yeah.”
“Get those clothes off, Kurt. You need to get warm.”
“I’m fine, I’m okay.”
“Like hell. You’re no use to me dead. All skin and bone.”
While Kurt undressed and huddled deep into his sleeping bag, the words circled in his mind, and he realised why they sounded so strange.
The bodies he’d found were more than skin and bone. If anything they’d resembled shop mannequins.
“I need to get back out there!” he said, trying to unzip the sleeping bag. “I need to make sure.”
Marshall moved closer to him, one arm around his shoulder and the other offering a mug of hot tea. “Drink. All of it.”
The fight went out of Kurt just like that, and he realised that he’d probably been seeing things. He hadn’t taken his snow goggles with him, and had left himself open to the cold. It was harsher than he thought. It did stuff to the mind.
“Marsh, I’m cold.”
“Yeah. One guy I heard about on his last trip down here, he got so cold that his brain fluid froze. When they thawed him out he’d been reset as a six-year-old. All he wanted to do was get home and watch Power Rangers.”
“You’re so full of shit.”
“You know it.”
They drank hot tea together. Marshall rehydrated some spiced lentil and steak soup, and they hugged the warm mugs, spooning food into their eager mouths. They made small talk until the storm hit several hours later.
Then they hunkered down, listening to the wind, imagining the inches of snow being piled up and blown around them with every hour that passed.
They’ll be smothered, Kurt thought, and the idea pleased him. When we next get out of the tent they’ll be gone, and it’ll be like they never were.
In places like this, the dead should stay buried.
––––––––
Huddled into their sleeping bags, they listened to the storm. They didn’t talk very much. They sat either side of the stove, reaching out occasionally to adjust the gas up or down. Wet clothes hung around them. The small tent stank of sweat and piss from the drying gear, but they were more than used to that. It was the odour of exploration, and they had been in a place like this together many times before.
Boredom rarely touched Kurt. He thought of his childhood dreams and how far he had come. And he thought of Bindy, waiting for him back home if he was lucky, gone if he was not. That was another strange thing about existing in such an extreme environment—right now, back home didn’t seem to matter. London was as far away as the moon, and only the here and now was important.
A couple of hours into the storm, Marshall started brewing more tea. Kurt watched the blue flames kissing the pot, eyes drooping, blinking slower and slower, and then the pot and flames were gone.
The dead bodies appeared in their place. The storm was raging, scouring the landscape with ice fingers and teeth of frost, but around Kurt there was a circle of calm and peace. He approached the old, rotting tent and the things it might once have protected. They were moving. He could see that from far away, and though he had no wish to go closer his feet took him, tramping through fresh snow, ignoring the high winds and piercing cold that should be killing his exposed extremities. No no no, he thought as he walked closer, because the shape he’d uncovered seemed to be sitting up, turning its blank expression and empty eyes his way, leaning to the side ready to stand, shifting and quivering as if seen through a heat-haze, not a cold so intense that the marrow in his bones was freezing.
No no no, he said again, and when he took in a breath to scream he tasted sweet steam.
“Here,” Marshall said. “Kurt? You awake?”
Kurt’s eyes snapped open. He looked around the cramped tent and nodded, leaning to his left ready to sit up. “Yeah, fine. Nodded off.” And saw them, he thought. And I saw them moving out there in the storm!
“What’s up mate?”
“Up?”
“You’re acting weird.”
Kurt took a grateful sip of the tea. It burnt his split lips but he relished the pain.
“Well . . .”He sipped some more and sighed, making a decision. “I saw something out in the snow, over by the rock outcropping to the east. Couple of bodies.”
“Yeah?” Marshall was interested, not shocked. They both knew how many people had died in this vast place, and how many of those had never been seen again. Marshall had climbed Everest several years ago, and often told Kurt about the bodies he’d seen up there. He said they weren’t spooky or sad, just lonely. They’d died doing what they loved.
“But they were weird,” Kurt said. “They didn’t look...normal. Human. It was like they were mannequins, or something. You know, unfinished.”
“Could’ve been really old,” Marshall said. “Cold can do weird things to a body. Cold, dry air dries the corpses out, leeches all the fluids from them.”
“But their faces,” Kurt said, blinking and seeing that face staring at him. “Their eyes.”
“Should’ve told me!” Marshall said. The revelation seemed to have cheered him up. “When the storm’s passed we’ll go and check them out together.”
No way, Kurt thought, but he didn’t say that. He didn’t want to sound scared.
They finished their tea. The storm roared on. Neither of them spoke again for some time.
Kurt thought of Bindy, turning his loose wedding ring and trying to care.
––––––––
The tent grew darker as snow piled up outside. Kurt kept the stove burning, and the air remained musty and heavy. He didn’t mind. He was so used to the burning touch of cold on his skin that it was good to feel something else. And he knew it would be over soon. The storm would pass, they would dig themselves out, and their journey home would continue.
They’d leave those things behind.
Marshall mumbled in his sleep. He shifted, kicked his feet in the tight sleeping bag, then shouted. Kurt sat up and stared, not used to his friend making such a noise. He was always such a deep sleeper, and Kurt had always been jealous of just how quickly he managed to fall asleep. Clear conscience, Marshall would say. Now he twitched and moved, and when he kicked again he came dangerously close to knocking over the stove burning between them. It had a cover, and if tipped over there was an auto shut-off. But it was still a risk.
“Marsh?” His voice sounded thick and heavy, as if the warmer air held it longer. It was strange not seeing his breath condense. Moisture dripped from his beard. “Marsh?”
Marshall rolled onto his back again, kicking his feet in the sleeping bag. Its hood had twisted and fallen to half-obscure his face, and in the poor light Kurt couldn’t make out whether his eyes were open or closed.
“Marshall!” He spoke louder, fighting against a gust of wind that roared around their tent.
Marshall stiffened, grew still, then started breathing easier. Bad dreams.
Kurt settled again, and passed the time by assessing his body, alternately tensing and then relaxing muscles from his toes up to see where problems might lie. The first two toes on his right foot had gone almost two weeks ago—he knew they were darkened, stiff, and it was likely that he’d lose them. But the rest of his toes seemed fine. It was surprising that he hadn’t suffered more.
They’d agreed that they would only call for rescue if one or both of their lives were in danger. Frostbite, weight loss, snow blindness, borderline starvation, these were acceptable risks for the adventure they had embarked upon. They’d spent two days at the Pole, recovering at the research station there, but they’d found themselves keen to continue, working their way back towards the coast where they’d be able to pronounce their expedition a success. They’d both lost a huge amount of weight, and when Kurt looked in a mirror inside one of the huts he’d let out a startled cry. He’d not recognised himself.
Marshall had laughed at that. “Few people who come here and do the sort of thing we’re doing go home the same person.” he’d said. “This place changes people. Got to accept that.”
There was not far to go, now. But as Kurt sat wrapped in his sleeping bag, feeling how weakened he had become in his time on the ice, he was further from home than ever before. It wasn’t just distance and time, but remoteness. They were deeper in the wilderness than they had ever been, and closer to the pure unknown.
Marshall muttered again. Incomprehensible words mostly, but then one phrase that stood out harsh and stark. “My eyes are mine!”
Kurt’s blood ran cold. He leaned across and shook his friend, rolling him back and forth in his sleeping bag, but Marshall would not wake. He stiffened beneath Kurt’s hand, went limp, stiffened again, and all the time he was whining and mumbling wretchedly.
Kurt sat back, watching his friend dream and fighting a sudden, overwhelming desire to close his own eyes. He blinked slowly. It was dark in there.
Wind groaned around the tent, the storm given voice. He held his breath, but doing so meant he heard Marshall’s haunted mumblings clearer.
Breathing deeply, tiredness swept over him again.
What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I stay awake?
But there was plenty wrong with him, and he knew it. Exhaustion, both physical and mental. Weakness caused by calorie deficiency. Aching bones, pulled muscles, torn ligaments, shoulders and back rubbed raw by the sled straps. The excesses he had been subjecting his body to for almost ten weeks, the intense cold, the endless hours of pulling and shoving, hacking routes through ice ridges to advance three miles in a day, climbing and slipping, falling and standing again because to stay down was to die. Everything was wrong with him, but he could not sleep.
He did not wish to find the dreams his friend was having right now.
“I should never have told you about them,” he muttered. He unzipped the sleeping bag and started pulling on his wet clothes. They were slightly warmed by the air inside the tent, at least. But he knew that would not last.
He’d freeze in minutes outside, but he couldn’t stay in here.
––––––––
The landscape was transformed. The horizon had been dragged into dozens of feet instead of miles. The wide sky was hiding, the rolls in the land were swallowed by the snow, and all tracks and prints he and Marshall had laid down had been consumed.
He hugged his coat tight, pulled the heavy scarf over his mouth and nose, made sure his snow goggles were well fitted, and started out to the east. He tied the end of a cord to one of the tent uprights and played it out behind him as he went. It was his way back.
Kurt leaned into the wind, head down as he pushed onward. He seemed to get there quicker than before. Perhaps he’d drifted away while walking, mind wandering somewhere warmer and safer, but he could not remember where.
At first he thought they’d gone. It can’t have snowed that much! he thought, struggling to fight down the excitement. Gone and buried again, they would be out of sight, out of mind. He could return to the tent and wake Marshall. He’d tell him that everything was all right. Then they’d wait for the storm to pass and make the final drive for the coast.
But then he saw a shape ahead between swirls of snow, tucked behind another ridge of rock, and he knew that he was in the wrong place.
Wind had raised a flap of the tent, uncovering the two bodies underneath. The storm whined between rocks, wind so harsh that it was stripping old snow and ice from the corpses rather than allowing new snow to settle. Against every instinct he went close, because he had to see.
One of the bodies had been turned onto its side, the arm beneath it propping it up, head dipped. Could the wind have done that? Perhaps fresh exposure to the elements had contracted dried tendons, or the frozen ground beneath the body had shrugged, lifted? The other corpse still lay on its back but its face had changed. It was fuller, not so death-like. Its lips were thicker, nose more sculpted.
Its eyes were open.
They stared unblinking as flakes kissed them and were lifted away by the wind.
Kurt needed to run but he stumbled forward instead, dropping to his knees and lifting off his goggles so that he could see for sure. The blankness had gone from these bodies. They looked like death-sculptures close to completion, rather than rough, lifeless forms.
He wanted to destroy them. If he’d brought a knife or an ice axe he’d have set about them, smashing and hacking them into pieces that were nowhere near human, and held no resemblance to . . .
But could he really move that close?
“It’s all in my head,” Kurt said, and the storm rose as if to swallow his words. A corner of the old tent flapped, and he squinted, looking closer, wondering how canvas could be networked with shapes that looked like old, dried veins.
Its poles might have been bone.
He backed away, then turned and ran for the camp, pulling hand over hand on the cord as if to haul himself and the tent together. In a blinding surge of snow he tripped and was enveloped, cool dark digits fingering into gaps in his clothing, his ears, leaking through poorly fitting snow goggles. He struggled to stand with one hand, the other still clasped tight around the cord. If he let go of that he would be lost, and then he’d die out here on his own. Perhaps Marshall would find him when the storm settled. Or maybe he’d be discovered in a hundred years by exhausted, terrified explorers.
He stood and moved on, his focus on the cord that was his lifeline.
Inside the tent Kurt hurriedly zipped up, throwing off his coat and crawling into his cold sleeping bag. He turned up the stove and broke a couple of chemical warmers. Their effect was vastly lessened through overuse, but they still took the chill from his hands. “Not sure,” he said, shivering.
“Not sure what that was. Not certain...certain what I...I saw. Marsh? I dunno. But I think those bodies are moving.” He looked sideways at the man lying motionless in his sleeping bag. “Marsh?”
Marsh whined. It began so low and quiet that at first Kurt thought it was the wind. But the noise rose, growing louder, harsher. As it became a scream Kurt screamed himself, trying to drown that terrible sound in his own fearful cry. But his own voice faded while Marshall’s went on and on, and he reached out to shake his friend awake.
He would not wake. His eyes were wide, his mouth open, and when Kurt unzipped his bag he saw his friend’s hands clawed in front of him as if grasping something unseen.
Marshall took in a long, ragged breath and started screaming again. But the scream did not touch his face. There was no frown and no grimace, little of Marshall there at all. His wide eyes reflected nothing.
Kurt kicked himself away from his friend, hand striking the stove and knocking it on its side. He felt an ice-cold touch across his palm, and when he looked he saw the burn, already blistering and bubbling yet feeling like nothing. He waited for the pain to sink in but it was quiet, subsumed perhaps beneath Marshall’s endless scream.
“Shut the fuck up!” Kurt shouted. He pulled his fist back ready to strike, but held back at the last moment. Something was so terribly wrong. If he had to hit someone or something it was not Marshall.
He felt so tired. Despite the noise his own eyes drooped, he felt reality drifting even further away than it already was, and he reached up and gripped his cheeks between fingers, pinching himself awake.
It did not feel like resurfacing.
His eyes drooped again and he grasped the tumbled stove, waiting for long seconds before the searing pain finally scorched in. He opened his mouth, but Marshall screamed for him. The pain did not last for long. It was as if someone else had been subjected to the burn.
Out in the snow...he thought, and the idea of going out there and falling asleep was so enticing that he found himself unzipping the tent again, crawling outside, and slumping down in the fresh snow. Wind howled, but it was the usual emotionless scream that this continent was more comfortable with.
Marshall’s screaming seemed even louder out here, and even more shocking because he was out of sight. He competed with the wind and won.
It’s them, Kurt thought. Something about them, their stillness, their lifelessness, and he didn’t even see them.
He scrambled over to the sleds and unhooked one of the covers, throwing it back to reveal the tool rack. He snatched up a long-handled ice axe and turned into the storm once again. The cord was still attached, and he followed it towards where he had dropped it so recently.
Marshall doesn’t have nightmares. He’s strong. He just sleeps and walks. The nightmares are from somewhere else.
Just before he reached where the bodies should have been, he realised that Marshall’s screaming had stopped.
Behind the sheltering rock, just visible as grey silhouettes through the dancing, wild snow, he saw the two bodies standing with arms by their sides.
––––––––
It was his lifeline. His umbilical back to the tent, back to reality, the thin cord bubbled with icy droplets stiff in his hands, waving in the wind and snapping back and forth. If he let go and lost it he’d stumble into the nothingness. Lose himself and die. It didn’t seem to matter, but each time he grabbed, the burns on his hands sang a short sweet song of agony. He grabbed hold of this, too, because it was real.
Maybe they were following him. Or perhaps they were lost as well.
Marshall remained silent, and crawling back through the tent entrance and inside, Kurt saw why. His friend was not there anymore.
In his place was something that looked little like his friend. The similarity was vague at best, a rough attempt at impersonation. The body in Marshall’s sleeping bag was devoid of expression and anything that might make it human, yet it wore his clothes and hair, carried the old scar on his cheek and that scruffy, ginger beard. Other than that, he might have been carved from ice.
Kurt tried to shout, scream. His voice did not work. Maybe it was the cold, but he thought not. He was starting to feel more distant than ever before, not only from Bindy and home and everything beyond this place, but from himself. He was becoming a stranger.
But still he fled. There remained that part of him—a spark of hope amidst wretchedness—that grasped onto instinct and believed in survival. He burst from the tent and fell, scrambling to his feet, running in the direction he thought was away from them. He tripped again and went sprawling. The cold did not feel so cold anymore. The white was not so white. His senses seemed more remote, as if he were viewing his life through the wrong end of a telescope. He tried to call for his wife but no longer remembered her name.
He stood and ran. The storm swirled him around, sending him staggering into ice ridges and falling into drifts. Wind roared in his ears, a voiceless scream.
In the distance, two shapes approached through the whirling snow. They seemed to pass through the storm as if they were apart from it, and though Kurt tried to turn and run, his legs folded and he fell to his knees. He tugged the ice axe from his belt and held it up, ready to swing it, throw it, wield it in anger and fear.
The figures drew closer. They were naked but did not seem to feel the cold. One was Marshall, but his eyes were expressionless, no recognition there.
But Kurt recognised himself.
The other figure stood before him, head slightly tilted as it regarded him with an emotionless gaze.
Kurt went to swing the axe but dropped it into the snow. He reached out with both hands to ward them off.
The figure that was him snatched off Kurt’s glove, placed its thumb and forefinger around his wedding ring, and lifted it clear of his finger. There was no friction or resistance. It was as if he was no longer there at all.
The figure slipped on his ring, then the two of them turned their backs on Kurt and walked away into the storm, leaving him forever in the frozen white silence.