The horizon was in a swirl. The dim light of the sun sifted through an incessant whirling of snow. Grey cold air blotched in soft yellows touched the open nape of Norman Applewood as he trudged through the ever deepening snow drifts. The blistering grey mass that whipped and turned about him stifled his every step. His eyes set hard in a tight squint behind a bundle of ripped clothes and scarves that blew free from him in whisping tails akin to Medusa's mane.
Norman pushed on, his breath in cadence with every step. Beneath him, beneath his boots and the frozen crusted prints of his soles, 4 meters of ice covered the sea. The ice stretched out in every direction and from where he walked it could have covered the globe. A thick eerie white air reduced the visibility to only several meters. Norman's path did not waiver; he set each step, no matter how strained it appeared, in a continuous line. The billowing drapes of his head bobbing slightly between two peaked shoulders. A ruffled trench coat wrapped his torso in stiff frigid wool, its length sagging below the knee. The leather of his boot set as inflexible concrete that joined his trousers at the ankle. A messenger bag strewn to one hip, its contents minimal.
Then, as in the great Arctic northlands, the ice began to break up in heaves. Afterwhich, coal black earthen rock jutted out here and there, born from under huge cascading waves of tumbling ice. The tides had brought them to and fro, here to grow and cant.
A few narrow channels of flat snowy ground made its way past the tidal sawtooths that ripped and chewed up at the surface world. The grinding warble of flexing ice womped and chortled impishly. The elements are in a game here that only those that get between them lose.
In the interest of keeping his interruption between the elements brief, Norman marched forth between two monolithic outcroppings and stepped up an icy etched stair. He swung one foot up and over a mound of snow. The seat of his trouser saddled up over the width of what could be a great white bear before his second foot followed. Land. An island before him appeared only a few meters at a time. The visibility was still poor but he knew the path ahead from this aspect and reckoned he would be back inside in only another few moments.
To the cabin. To the last remnants of a former settlement. A forlorn fishing port, abandoned on the isle of Haoúton.
The bedraggled head dress of scarves continued to unfurl in the wind as Norman trudged uphill. His boots skating across iced over tidal pools and small serrated bits of rock exposed to the windward side of the island. He heaved his body over the great trundled mass of shoreline boulders and gained a bit of ground tufted in short tundric shrubs. The howl still swept at him, intending to pin him to the approaching wall. His right arm extended to the broad side of the cabin. His gloved hand rising and falling as it stammered through the veracious gales of winter air. His hand swung away from him, drifting over the battered remnants of wooden shingles as if blind, in need of a guide to the other side, to round the corner.
The front of the cabin was a simple structure. A few windows with circular warped glass panes fastened over by crystallized shutters of chipped red painted trim. A knotty pine bench that was as inviting for a rest as a seat on the knee of a cadaver. A rusted wind chime of tin cans and flattened cutlery hung from the roof, clattering vivaciously. A sign by the doorway hung from two nails read “hYttE I8I2.”
Norman grinned with intent as he moved eagerly towards the door. He reached out, his body jerking with a comic almost theatrical effort as he turned the knob and curled within the angled gap shoulder first before quickly shutting the door behind him and cutting out the gale. The wind continued to blow but now it only bounced off the membrane of this cell in muffled hums and thralls. Inside the air was still, a musk of tobacco, fish oil and tanned seal hide rested upon the entryway. Norman sat on a wicker catch and leaned down to knock the snow from his legs and unlace the strappings to his footwear. He removed each of his galoshes and left them by the door, got up and while unbuttoning his coat, strode towards a parlor with a lit and yet less than radiant wood stove in the center of the room upon a circular block of masonry. Above the vents of the stove door a large H was expertly crafted and adorned in twisted pedals shaped with inlaid copper. The latch of the stove was a spiral of black polished chrome.
With fingertips blackened by frost, Norman grasped a log from the pile cradled in the copper riveted tin tray by the stove. A curled hand clawed and flung open the latch to swing open the stove. The other hand tossed the log to the back of the gaping hole. The contraption lay open like a shucked clam as he watched the log roll over its pool of innards, a belly of wriggling smooth amber and soot. The log settled with a crunch of embers as he secured the door and latch back in place.
Norman stood up straight. A sizable smile came peeking out from his still wrapped head. He tugged at the cloth fittings from the ears to his chin revealing more large white teeth from between tightly drawn lips and aged creased cheeks. He let out an exuberant breath and opened his eyes wide to survey the inner chamber of the hut. Bushy brown eyebrows still stiff with frozen ends. Upswept nostrils and a pointed tipped nose with a humped bridge. The pores of his skin wide and as prevalent to the eye as freckles. His face swelled in the warmth, pale skin gone rose.
He coughed slightly and cleared his throat.
“Ahl!” He blurted and coughed again. “Ahldrich, are you awake?”
Norman clapped his hands together and quickly shuffled them up and down against each other. He cupped his palms and blew a breath of air between them. Broad wooden exposed beams crisscrossed the hut. Its eaves darting out into four additions from the main room. One was a bunk room and cache. Another was the kitchen and pantry. The third and fourth were tackle, pelt storage and chart room. Norman made for the bunk room over a set of glossy wooden floor boards covered in an array of rugs and loose thrift.
Aldrich was there on his bed in the bunkroom, just as Norman had left him.
“You haven't moved an inch, Ahldrich!” He whined in a high pitch of alarm as he took big strides towards the bedside and pulled at the lattice that covered his shoulder.
“Remember the talk we had about Ehkbert,aye? He’s been sitting out in this god forsaken place for an eternity now, never to thaw out again. I tell ye, I'm going to go look at the ship and to tend ze fire while I'm gone but still you sleep, aye? Are ya asleep or have you died too? Want I to put your old bones out by the privy in the cold too? Egh gatz.”
Aldrich sagged under the bulk of his heap. Pulling up his knees towards his chest beneath a combination of burlap sacks and wool blankets, he groaned horsley. Norman edged onto the bed pressing his still frozen rear against Aldrich’s back.
“Well, ze ship is fine wouldnt’t ye like to know. The ice is bearing against her though. We otto hope the channel locks in solid and keeps from shifting anymore. The folds of ice out there, blocks thick as three meters shot from the depths, they'd be’r demise…aye?” He paused to look down at the man sized cocoon of dirty earth tone cloths. “You aim to ignore me lad?!” He paused and sweated out the silence with a narrowing patience.
“Methinks ye fiddle with ya-self long enough!”
Norman stood up with a resounding gurgle of a yell. “Baaaagghh!” He gripped the rails on the upper bunk, rattled the entire frame and then gave a mighty heave until the bunk tilted and touched the wall. He let the weight rock back towards him and wrenched it all down before him. The frame arching to a crash on the floor as he stepped back into the center room. Soot and dust took to the air. Particles in gloomy shafts of light littered the bunkroom in a chaotic swarm. A few busted cans rattled from the wreckages, vacant but the preservative scraps dried to the sides of the wringed aluminum. Norman eyed them with a gasp.
“You sit here. Sit here all day. And eat what we have left without me. Share with me not ye wretch. You… you glutinous creatin, un… in… ingrate. You!” Norman spoke curses as he moved, sidestepping across the cabin's main room towards the cabinetry on the opposing end. He threw open the latch with a twist of his fingers and drew open the doors. He side eyed the bunkroom, the debris still aloft stirred slowly in the air but lower. Aldrich shifted in a ball.
“Ye gaspin fur air now ain't ye? ‘Can't get out, can't get out, help me norm’… wroten scum.” His back turned to face the galley. “See us to the cupboard, aye. What have ya eaten else?” Norm’s eyes scanned the shelves and counted quickly.
“Three cans gone! Three! Oh and beans at that! You think I’d be gone 5 hours and not notice ye’d eaten three fuckin’ cans aye?!” Norman picked up a can of beans in the remaining stack of their food stores and pelted it at the toppled bed frame. He missed and it ricocheted into the corner of the bunkroom. Another gurgled yell and Norman quickly fired off four more cans, the third of which struck the burlap heap dead center and gave a blundering “yap!” followed by a low rising aggravated roar.
“Alright then!”
The sheets started to bounce and undulate. The fabrics surface quaked viciously until it finally split open and a limp arm spilled out like lava over the rails of the sideways bed frame. Aldrich’s head rose up next, streaming in anger.
“So I ate the beans! So what Norm, I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think. I dont care about you, this fucking island or the ship. I'm starving out here Norm! I couldn’t wait for you to come back. You… you could have died out there wandering out to the ship. Who cares anymore if the channel takes her. Be gone with it. The curse is but the hope we have that our world will change. Not that we are here. Not but any change comes to a man as withered in a hole such as this. And that I have chosen to accept! To lay here and eat ‘til we eat no more and starve and die like a fire without wood. Our heat will rise as will our souls through the uninsulated walls of this cabin and bind to the winds. We will take to clouds as a mist. Our souls are damned here… There is no hope.”
Aldrich flung his head back down into the nest of burlap. He stared up at the eaves of the bunkroom with cold brown iris’ cupped by the stiff ivory of his eyes. He had tears welled up that now rolled across his eyelids and over the skin of his temples. His misery was uncontainable, his woes were mounting. He lay belly up like a dog in forfeit. Given up to the desolation that surrounded the cabin, he let it invade him until all thought had frozen. Each despondent que to his reality cruelly adding to his frigid mindscape.
Forget it all and care not.
Then another can flew overhead, with no time to react it came tumbling through the cosmos to land square against Aldrich’s nose. The rim broke skin between his eyes and deviated his septum. Now tears and a dribble of blood rolled over Aldrich's eyes, over his temples and into his ears. Screams from both sides of the hut reverberated off the pine boards. Dirty soot stained fingers with haphazardly chewed fingernails dove to cradle the anguish that emanated from Aldrich’s face. He sat up and a gush of blood was released over his chest and onto his linen smock. Blood was smeared over his short whiskered jaw. The upper lip tufted with a young man's mustache and streams of red setting up to coagulate into a bulk of blackened deep merlot.
The screams came to a gurgled mutter and Aldrich hooted intermittently. He sat staring with a ferocious hatred at Norman whose face was stern, set in sullen disconcern.
“I don’t want tuh ear another word of forlorn mumbo-jumbi from ye lad. I want answers. The queen wants answers too if ye have furgetten.”
Norman walked with a steadfast gate to the little chart room and picked up a satchel and spear. He turned and held both items in the air in front of him. He eyed the man on the floorboards still squat, nested in the twine of ragged blankets of burlap and wool.
“Now, scour yer face ‘n’ either get to the study or get out to hunt so ye can replace the food ye stole.”
Aldrich gave a short snarky laugh of pessimism.
“Those are my options?!” Blood dripped from the tip of his nose to his lap to land on the back of his hands. He raised them up, whipping droplets across the cabin in gestures of defiant protest. “There ain’t been but one star in the sky for as long as we’ve been ‘ere. And that star is but a sol of infernal shapelessness. A weak orb that beckons at the memory of any solar devotee that inhabited this once beshined Earth…” Norman stood resolute with the items still raised in front of him. He took two paces towards the man in his nest.
“No stars mean no ob-ser-vations. And it ain’t even ‘dahk out ye git.’”
“Well then the decision should be an easy one.”
Their eyes were locked in an intense silent debate of reason until Norman took another step, creasing the line on his face and narrowing his stare as he towered over the amorphic pile.
“‘Er majesty awaits and our orders stand. Choose.Still, Norman pushed on, his breath in cadence with every step.
Beneath Norman, beneath his boots and the frozen crusted prints of his soles, 4 meters of ice covered the sea. The ice stretched out in every direction and from where he walked it could have covered the globe. A thick eerie white air reduced the visibility to only several meters. Norman's path did not waiver; he set each step, no matter how strained it appeared, in a continuous line. His billowing head bobbing slightly between two peaked shoulders. A ruffled trench coat wrapped his torso in stiff frigid wool, its length sagging below the knee. The leather of his boot set as inflexible concrete that joined his trousers at the ankle. A messenger bag strewn to one hip, its contents minimal.
Then, as in the great Arctic northlands, the ice began to break up in heaves. Afterwhich, coal black earthen rock jutted out here and there, born from under huge cascading waves of tumbling ice. The tides had brought them to and fro, here to grow and cant.
A few narrow channels of flat snowy ground made its way past the tidal sawtooths that ripped and chewed up at the surface world. The grinding warble of flexing ice womped and chortled impishly. The elements are in a game here that only those that get between them lose.
In the interest of keeping his interruption between the elements brief, Norman marched forth between two monolithic outcroppings and stepped up an icy etched stair. He swung one foot up and over a mound of snow. The seat of his trouser saddled up over the width of what could be a great white bear before his second foot followed. Land. An island before him appeared 5 to 10 feet at a time. The visibility was still poor but he knew the path ahead from this aspect and reckoned he would be back inside in only another few moments.
To the cabin. To the last remnants of a former settlement. A forlorn fishing port, abandoned on the isle of Haoúton.
The bedraggled head dress of scarves continued to unfurl in the wind as Norman trudged uphill. His boots skating across iced over tidal pools and small serrated bits of rock exposed to the windward side of the island. He heaved his body over the great trundled mass of shoreline boulders and gained a bit of ground tufted in short tundric shrubs. The howl still swept at him, intending to pin him to the approaching wall. His right arm extended to the broad side of the cabin. His gloved hand rising and falling as it stammered through the veracious gales of winter air. His hand swung away from him, drifting over the battered remnants of wooden shingles as if blind, in need of a guide to the other side, to round the corner.
The front of the cabin was a simple structure. A few windows with circular warped glass panes fastened over by crystallized shutters of chipped red painted trim. A knotty pine bench that was as inviting for a rest as a seat on the knee of a cadaver. A rusted wind chime of tin cans and flattened cutlery hung from the roof, clattering vivaciously. A sign by the doorway hung from two nails read “hYttE I8I2.”
Norman grinned with intent as he moved eagerly towards the door. He reached out, his body jerking with a comic almost theatrical effort as he turned the knob and curled within the angled gap shoulder first before quickly shutting the door behind him and cutting out the gale. The wind continued to blow but now it only bounced off the membrane of this cell in muffled hums and thralls. Inside the air was still, a musk of tobacco, fish oil and tanned seal hide rested upon the entryway. Norman sat on a wicker catch and leaned down to knock the snow from his legs and unlace the strappings to his footwear. He removed each of his galoshes and left them by the door, got up and while unbuttoning his coat, strode towards a parlor with a lit and yet less than radiant wood stove in the center of the room upon a circular block of masonry. Above the vents of the stove door a large H was expertly crafted and adorned in twisted pedals shaped with inlaid copper. The latch of the stove was a spiral of black polished chrome.
With fingertips blackened by frost, Norman grasped a log from the pile cradled in the copper riveted tin tray by the stove. A curled hand clawed and flung open the latch to swing open the stove. The other hand tossed the log to the back of the gaping hole. The contraption lay open like a shucked clam as he watched the log roll over its pool of innards, a belly of wriggling smooth amber and soot. The log settled with a crunch of embers as he secured the door and latch back in place.
Norman stood up straight. A sizable smile came peeking out from his still wrapped head. He tugged at the cloth fittings from the ears to his chin revealing more large white teeth from between tightly drawn lips and creased cheeks. He let out an exuberant breath and opened his eyes wide to survey the inner chamber of the hut. Bushy brown eyebrows still stiff with frozen ends. Upswept nostrils and a pointed tipped nose with a humped bridge. The pores of his skin wide and as prevalent to the eye as freckles. His face swelled in the warmth, pale skin gone rose.
He coughed slightly and cleared his throat.
“Ahl!” He blurted and coughed again. “Ahldrich, are you awake?”
Norman clapped his hands together and quickly shuffled them up and down against each other. He cupped his palms and blew a breath of air between them. Broad wooden exposed beams crisscrossed the hut. Its eaves darting out into four additions from the main room. One was a bunk room and cache. Another was the kitchen and pantry. The third and fourth were tackle, pelt storage and chart room. Norman made for the bunk room over a set of glossy wooden floor boards covered in an array of rugs and loose thrift.
Ahldrich was there on his bed in the bunkroom, just as Norman had left him.
“You haven't moved an inch, Ahldrich!” He whined in a high pitch of alarm as he took big strides towards the bedside and pulled at the lattice that covered his shoulder.
“Remember the talk we had about Ehkbert,aye? He’s been sitting out in this god forsaken place for an eternity now, never to thaw out again. I tell ye, I'm going to go look at the ship and to tend ze fire while I'm gone but still you sleep, aye? Are ya asleep or have you died too? Want I to put your old bones out by the privy in the cold too? Egh gatz.”
Aldrich sagged under the bulk of his heap. Pulling up his knees towards his chest beneath a combination of burlap sacks and wool blankets, he groaned horsley. Norman edged onto the bed pressing his still frozen rear against Alrich’s back.
“Well, ze ship is fine wouldnt’t ye like to know. The ice is bearing against her though. We otto hope the channel locks in solid and keeps from shifting anymore. The folds of ice out there, blocks thick as three meters shot from the depths, they'd be’r demise…aye.” He paused to look down at the man sized cocoon of dirty earth tone cloths. “You aim to ignore me lad?!” He paused and sweated out the silence with a narrowing patience.
“Methinks ye fiddle with ya-self long enough!”
Norman stood up with a resounding gurgle of a yell. “Baaaagghh!” He gripped the rails on the upper bunk, rattled the entire frame and then gave a mighty heave until the bunk tilted and touched the wall. He let the weight rock back towards him and wrenched it all down before him. The frame arching to a crash on the floor as he stepped back into the center room. Soot and dust took to the air. Particles in gloomy shafts of light littered the bunkroom in a chaotic swarm. A few busted cans rattled from the wreckages, vacant but the preservative scraps dried to the sides of the wringed aluminum. Norman eyed them with a gasp.
“You sit here. Sit here all day. And eat what we have left without me. Share with me not ye wretch. You… you glutinous creatin, un… in… ingrate. You!” Norman spoke curses as he moved, sidestepping across the cabin's main room towards the cabinetry on the opposing end. He threw open the latch with a twist of his fingers and drew open the doors. He side eyed the bunkroom, the debris still aloft stirred slowly in the air but lower. Aldrich shifted in a ball.
“Ye gaspin fur air now ain't ye. ‘Can't get out, can't get out, help me norm’… wroten scum.” His back turned to face the galley. “See us to the cupboard, aye. What have ya eaten else?” Norm’s eyes scanned the shelves and counted quickly.
“Three cans gone! Three! Oh and beans at that! You think I’d be gone 5 hours and not notice ye’d eaten three fuckin’ cans aye?!” Norman picked up a can of beans in the remaining stack of their food stores and pelted it at the toppled bed frame. He missed and it ricocheted into the corner of the bunkroom. Another gurgled yell and Norman quickly fired off four more cans, the third of which struck the burlap heap dead center and gave a blundering yap followed by a low rising aggravated roar.
“Alright then!”
The sheets started to bounce and undulate. The fabrics surface quaked viciously until it finally split open and a limp arm spilled out like lava over the rails of the sideways bed frame. Aldrich’s head rose up next, streaming in anger.
“So I ate the beans! So what Norm, I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think. I dont care about you, this fucking island or the ship. I'm starving out here Norm! I couldn’t wait for you to come back. You… you could have died out there wandering out to the ship. Who cares anymore if the channel takes her. Be gone with it. The curse is but the hope we have that our world will change. Not that we are here. Not but any change comes to a man as withered in a hole such as this. And that I have chosen to accept! To lay here and eat ‘til we eat no more and starve and die like a fire without wood. Our heat will rise as will our souls through the uninsulated walls of this cabin and bind to the winds. We will take to clouds as a mist. Our souls are damned here… There is no hope.”
Aldrich flung his head back down into the nest of burlap. He stared up at the eaves of the bunkroom with cold brown iris’ cupped by the stiff ivory of his eyes. He had tears welled up that now rolled across his eyelids and over the skin of his temples. His misery was uncontainable, his woes were mounting. He lay belly up like a dog in forfeit. Given up to the desolation that surrounded the cabin, he let it invade him until all thought had frozen. Each despondent que to his reality cruelly adding to his frigid mindscape.
Forget it all and care not.
Then another can flew overhead, with no time to react it came tumbling through the cosmos to land square against Aldrich’s nose. The rim broke skin between his eyes and deviated his septum. Now tears and a dribble of blood rolled over Aldrich's eyes, over his temples and into his ears. Screams from both sides of the hut reverberated off the pine boards. Dirty soot stained fingers with haphazardly chewed fingernails dove to cradle the anguish that emanated from Aldrich’s face. He sat up and a gush of blood was released over his chest and onto his linen smock. Blood was smeared over his short whiskered jaw. The upper lip tufted with a young man's mustache and streams of red setting up to coagulate into a bulk of blackened deep merlot.
The screams came to a gurgled mutter and Aldrich hooted intermittently. He sat staring with a ferocious hatred at Norman whose face was stern, set in sullen disconcern.
“I don’t want tuh ear another word of forlorn mumbo-jumbi from ye lad. I want answers. The queen wants answers too if ye have furgetten.”
Norman walked with a steadfast gate to the little chart room and picked up a satchel and spear. He turned and held both items in the air in front of him. He eyed the man on the floorboards still squat, nested in the twine of ragged blankets of burlap and wool.
“Now, scour yer face ‘n’ either get to the study or get out to hunt so ye can replace the food ye stole.”
Aldrich gave a short snarky laugh of pessimism.
“Those are my options?!” Blood dripped from the tip of his nose to his lap to land on the back of his hands. He raised them up, whipping droplets across the cabin in gestures of defiant protest. “There ain’t been but one star in the sky for as long as we’ve been ‘ere. And that star is but a sol of infernal shapelessness. A weak orb that beckons at the memory of a solar inhabitant that once beshined this earth…” Norman stood resolute with the items still raised in front of him. He took two paces towards the man in his nest.
“No stars mean no ob-ser-vations. And it ain’t even dahk out ye git.”
“Well then the decision should be an easy one.”
Their eyes were locked in an intense silent debate of reason until Norman took another step, creasing the line on his face and narrowing his stare as he towered over the amorphic pile.
“‘Er majesty awaits and our orders stand. Choose.”
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