punch them on the nose, and when the animals reared back on their flippers in surprise, thrust a lance several times through their heart. Sometimes it would take the better part of an hour for the animal to bleed out, but once the bulls were rounded up and killed, the sealers could move on methodically to slaughtering the cows, still protecting their young, and then, if they weren't too small to bother with, the cubs. The skinning was the hard part; it took four or five men to properly flay a fully grown elephant seal, then to separate the thick yellow blubber from the flesh beneath. Most of the seals, hunted nearly to extinction, yielded one or two barrels of oil apiece when the boiling was done.
Although Michael knew they posed no threat to him, he approached them warily, not wanting to cause any undue disturbance. He wanted shots of the seals at leisure, not in alarm, and besides that, the creatures did smell pretty awful. The main bull, distinguishable only because of his enormous size, was molting, his shed hair and skin spread around him like a fouled carpet, and the cows, belching loudly, weren't much better. He stepped up onto a low-lying ventifact-a stone carved into a strange shape, almost like a top hat in this case, by centuries of wind-and framed his first shot. But it was hard enough to stand erect in the unceasing wind without trying to hold a camera steady; he would have to set up a tripod and do it the right way.
As he dug around in his bag, the bull seal roared, and Michael could smell its breath, reeking of dead fish. “Jesus, have you ever heard of mouthwash?” Michael said, as he set the tripod down on a relatively level patch of the rocky beach.
Water from the aquarium began to seep over the edge of the tank and drip onto the concrete floor, where it ran in rivulets toward the floor drains. The marine biology lab, like all the modules, was raised above the ground on cinder blocks, and the water simply coursed down some steel funnels and out onto the icy land below.
The block of ice was now no thicker than a deck of cards in some places, its prisoners obscurely visible within. The first spot entirely to give way was at the bottom, where the chunk had fallen off and blocked the PVC pipe. The toe of a black leather boot protruded from it now, glistening like onyx.
The melting continued, and a crevice appeared right down the center of the block; the bodies locked inside were like the flaw in a diamond, a strange imperfection in a giant crystal… and when the crevice widened and suddenly split, it was as if the ice itself were rejecting them. The halves of the ice block fell away on either side, and the seawater washed over the bodies of the soldier and the girl like a baptism. They were exposed to the air, bathed in the lavender light of the lab, and for several seconds they simply lay still, side by side, bobbing on the ice.
The flaking chain yoked around their throats and shoulders held them together until, corroded by the centuries of ice and saltwater, it disintegrated and slipped to the bottom of the tank.
Sinclair was the first to draw a breath. Half air and half water, it made him cough.
Then Eleanor coughed, too, and an uncontrollable shiver ran the length of her body.
What little ice was still supporting them began to give way, and Sinclair's boots searched for the bottom of the tank… and found it.
He stumbled, swaying like a drunkard, to his feet, and quickly took hold of Eleanor's cold hand. Dripping wet, he raised her up from the chunks of floating ice. Her eyes were dull and unfocused, her long brown hair plastered to her cheek and forehead.
Where, he wondered, are we?
They were standing in a vat of some kind, filled with salt water up to their knees, in a place he could find no words for. No one else was there; the only living things he could see were strange creatures swimming in glass jars-jars that gave off a pale purple light and a soft hissing sound.
He looked at Eleanor. She raised her hand slowly, as if she had never done so before, and her fingers instinctively went to touch the ivory brooch on her bosom.
He sloshed to the rim of the tank, then over it. He helped her down onto the floor, water sluicing down all around them.
“What is this place?” she asked, trembling, as he gathered her into his arms.
Sinclair didn't know. For her sake, he hoped it was Heaven. But from his own experience, he feared it was Hell.
PART III
“They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;
It had been strange, even in a dream,
To have seen those dead men rise.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
December 13, 4:20 p.m.
Michael was standing in the bow of the scuttled whale catcher when he picked up an ice-covered life preserver and, despite a couple of now-illegible letters, read the name of the ship off it; it had once been the Albatros, and it had sailed out of Oslo. But there were no albatrosses effortlessly soaring overhead now-only skuas and pretrels and squat, white sheathbills, all lured by the arrival of the dogsled and looking for handouts.
From his vantage point, right behind the harpoon gun, Michael could gaze down at the beach, where the elephant seals had cooperated nicely for their photo op, and up the icy hill, past the warehouses and boiling rooms and flensing yards, to the uppermost structure in the station. It was an old wooden church, with patches of white paint still clinging to the walls and a cross, knocked askew, high atop its steeple. He used the zoom to take some long-distance shots, but it would be worth a closer visit later on.
He'd already explored the bowels of the ship, which in some ways looked like it had been abandoned for years-rusted panels, broken windows, warped stairs-but in other ways looked as if it had been tenanted the day before. On a galley table, a fork and knife were still neatly crossed on a tin plate. A bunk bed was made up with a striped woolen blanket and a white sheet, folded back at the top. In the wheelhouse, a frozen cigar butt rested on a win-dowsill. Even the harpoon gun, mounted on a raised steel platform like a machine-gun turret, looked as if it could still go about its deadly work-if it could be aimed. Michael had tried to make it swivel, and tried again, but the entire assembly was frozen solid.
“Hey, watch where you point that thing,” he heard Danzig call out from the beach below. He was standing in the petrified jaws of a blue whale.
“It's not loaded,” Michael replied.
“That's what they all say.” Danzig, walrus teeth hanging down around his neck, his beard blowing in the wind, stepped out of the jaws like some Norse god choosing to walk among men. “You get what you came for?” he asked.
“Some of it. Why?”
“Because I need to get back.”
Michael was on board with that. For the past few hours, no matter how hard he had tried to forget the block of ice in Darryl's lab, it had never been far from his thoughts. Was he missing some great shot?
“I'm expecting a call from my wife,” Danzig added.
Danzig had a wife? It struck Michael as funny in a way-so banal, so ordinary-coming from such an original
