Where the Dead Wait

by Ally Wilkes

Trying to wrestle his coat off, he hangs suspended, staring out into the shimmering debris that clasps around the ship’s hull, and feels a horrible, inescapable sense of the largeness of it all. Something infinite and vast and deadly. The ocean stretches from here to Spitzbergen, from Franz Josef Land to Alaska, and he’s a tiny speck in the emptiness, frozen, human, afraid. The perspective is ghastly.

Day is holding the captain’s blood-spattered Bible. Injuries never truly heal once scurvy sets in; old wounds reopen. Any kind of blow or insult—it comes back. That’s the promise of the Arctic: things always come back.

“The men are frightened.” She pulled the knife out as punctuation. “Men are dangerous when they are frightened.” Day didn’t know where to look. Above her boot, he could still see the tight smooth skin of her thigh. “Things aren’t like that here,” he said. It felt like he owed her an apology, although he wasn’t sure what for. “Men are like that everywhere, Captain Day.”

VIII: WHAT PASSES THROUGH

There is so much jumping around in regards of the timeline, and I know stylistically it is supposed to reflect how the main character, Captain Day, is pendulating between the present and his past horrors, but it does make reading difficult. I wish the transitions were a little smoother.

Stevens held up the tongue cradled in his hands, still sluggishly pumping blood at the root, offering Day a ghastly, lazy, almost erotic smile. Stevens’s tongue was usually so pink and dainty, sometimes seen when concentrating hard, or stuck out at the medical inspection with an air of insolence. Day had thought long and hard on that tongue, and how it would taste—wintergreen, he thought, but warm. The sort of warmth that would make everything else bearable. “The human mouth is filthy,” Valle had once said to him, tightly, but how could that be possible? Why was everything Day wanted disgusting and unclean?

Always one step ahead, Stevens gives voice to things Day won’t dare to articulate. As if he speaks directly to Day’s heart, his blackest and most awful heart.

His bones are sharp against the rocks. He’s made this thing his own, and has to see it through. There’s a certain relief in acquiescing to the course that has been chosen for him. “We should skim the fat off the top,” Stevens says. “For cooking.” The captivated men recoil, as if they’d put their feet too close to the fire, suddenly remembered it could burn. Stevens turns his head until it’s nearly resting on Day’s shoulder, a groove he slots into as naturally as if it’s made for him. He says, very low: “We need to get to that diary. Find out what he wrote about us.”

“Consider this my prescription for what ails you.” Valle bent in closer. “He wasn’t your friend. He wasn’t anyone’s friend. You should let him go. Don’t go running after him—you won’t make it back!” Day was startled to find a hot red feeling behind his eyes, as if he were on the verge of some horrible unraveling. He’d navigated by Stevens his whole life. Stevens was dreadful. But he was his. All those nights—didn’t they mean anything, anything?

He’d invited Stevens into his bed, had scoured off his own skin. He’d done it to himself. He was starting to understand: he’d done so much of this to himself.

“No.” Stevens sighs. “No, Will, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that of you.” He gives Day a sidelong glance, and his face is so open it hurts. “You don’t have it in you.” It sounds, just a little, like love. A cough rings out across the valley like a gunshot, and Day flinches, tries to quell his hammering heart. “You’re exhausted,” Stevens says, matter-of-factly. “You need to sleep. Come here.” Day stares at him. Like a beaten dog, he doesn’t know whether to cringe away.

It had taken a particular kind of hubris for Day to imagine himself so persistently surrounded by enemies.

But it wasn’t a sign that Stevens was still alive, that he and Day were somehow connected. This was just something he’d brought back from the ice, something he’d let lodge itself in his heart. He’d chosen the shape it would take: a shape capable of growing until it destroyed him. You make a god of the things you fear or love. What could be more natural than that?

If this land is savage, Day thinks, it’s because we brought our savagery with us.

How do you escape a haunted house, when both the ghost—and the house—are you?

“I knew he was eating our dead. I knew he—I could have worked out what he meant to do with Sheppard. But I closed my eyes. Closed my eyes to all of it.” Day gulps in an unsteady breath, almost a laugh. He can’t look at Avery. If William Day had turned out a monster, it was because he’d always had one at his side. The disappearing huff of a polar bear on the wind, stalking away, its dread purpose fulfilled. “I just didn’t think—I didn’t think he’d ever leave me. It was easier to tell myself I’d never known. It was easier than—to believe that.”

Peters opens his mouth, very deliberately, and spits something out. It’s the tip of Avery’s tongue. He says, wetly, “Speak no evil.”

What do you do with a haunted house? They’ve tried running. Day doesn’t think it can be destroyed. The only thing to do is to go after the house’s architect; prevent him from ever building another. Whoever had left the tattered tent had gone inland, and so would Day.

Stevens shrugs back his shoulders, like something spreading its wings at last, and Day knows he isn’t talking to Stevens at all, not anymore. This is something they’ve made, bigger and far darker. The weight of ambition. Of greed. Ready to— “Eat the world,” the manifestation finishes. “Come on. Let’s get on with it. Or are you waiting for me to eat you?”