Читать книгу Innocent Murderer - Suzanne F. Kingsmill - Страница 12

Chapter Six

Back in my cabin I opened the porthole and looked out at a swirl of fog and ragged masses of pack ice. What if we got caught in the ice, I wondered. The pack ice was fragmented — huge hunks of it were drifting about — but the winds could blow the separate floes together to form an impenetrable prison of ice. This was the land of Franklin’s ill-fated expedition in search of the Northwest Passage to the Orient. It wouldn’t be quite like Franklin because we had cell phones and GPS and helicopters and lifeboats, but I shuddered at the thought of the power of the ice creeping around the hull and squeezing until the rivets shot out and the water rushed in.

I craned my neck down the length of the ship. I was really restless. It felt like about 8:00, but the clock by my bed said it was 1:30 in the morning. There’s some–thing about a ship at night — even in the land of the midnight sun — that is ghostlike. The ship lay at anchor near Baffin Island, where we were supposed to go ashore to see if we could find some polar bears to ogle, but we couldn’t because of the pack ice. I wondered when the captain would weigh anchor and move us out. Surely it wasn’t a good idea to stay here? I tried sleeping but it was so hard with the light streaming in the window. A couple of sleepless hours went by.

Finally I got up, thinking I’d heard a knock on my door, but when I opened it there was no one there. The hallway was empty in both directions. I refrained from looking up, blocking out thoughts of a spider-like man clinging to the ceiling. As I stood there in the hallway the door at the aft end banged shut and then eased open and gathered for another bang. I smiled at my own jumpy nerves and went back into my cabin.

I still couldn’t sleep so I kicked into my sweats and runners and looked around for my winter jacket. I couldn’t find it so I grabbed my rain jacket and toque and went up on deck, past the eerie and sombre orange hulls of the steel life rafts, and around to the port side where the gangway went down to the sea when an expe–dition was afoot.

As I reached the railing I was surprised to see that the gangway was lowered. I looked out to sea, the wind buf–feting me. The fog was playing tricks with my mind but then I saw a shadow move out on the ice — a little white dog on white ice in a white fog. LuEllen’s little white dog; it had to be, there wasn’t any other little white dog on board. In fact, there were no other dogs on board.

I’m a real sucker for animals so I left the observation deck to get a better look. I went down the stairs to the gangway where I stopped and surveyed the situation. The dog was about twenty-five feet from the gangway and was eating away at an unappetizing lump of stuff on the ice, which had moved in on the ship. Why hadn’t Jason moved away? It looked like the cook had just dumped a bunch of garbage there. Was that allowed? There was only a one foot gap between the platform and the pack ice and I realized I couldn’t just leave the dog there. The ship could leave him behind.

I ran down the gangway, stepped onto the ice, and walked over to the dog, still gorging himself on the wind–fall. As I got closer he glanced up but went right back to eating. I approached slowly, so as not to frighten him, and wondered if he liked strangers. Martha had told me he was never out of LuEllen’s arms. Well, he sure was now. I reached down and grabbed him around his stomach; he was so small my fingers met. That’s not all they met. He wanted nothing to do with me and let me know by whip–ping his head around and sinking his teeth into my arm. Predictably, I threw him away from me. He landed in a puddle of ice-cold water and I watched as he struggled to regain his footing. I looked down at my arm and saw a row of indentations in my nice new rain jacket. Who’d have thought such a little dog could act like a pit bull. I looked back at the dog. He was standing now, looking uncertain and very stiff legged.

As I approached the dog again I heard some piece of machinery, or maybe it was several, come alive in a gentle hum. He’d begun to shiver and this time he let me pick him up without a protest. He was whimpering now, trembling and wet, and I put him inside my jacket where he took up hardly any room, but he felt like a little ice ball next to my heart.

I stood up and looked over the pack ice, wondering with a shiver what it must have been like to be Franklin, lost in this cruel white desert. That’s when I heard the drums begin to reel in the anchor. I wheeled to look at the ship, my heart and the dog’s wildly beating. I ran back toward the gangway and stared in horror at what I saw, or rather at what I did not see. The gangway was being raised. There was no way up and the pack ice and the ship had drifted away from each other.

I began to yell, my voice sounding lonely and useless in the eerie dawnish light, the sun sending shafts of golden light across the ship. It must have been about 3:00 a.m.

When would they notice I was gone? Maybe not until 9:00 a.m. It could be twelve hours before they doubled back along their course and found me — assuming they did find me. My piece of pack ice wasn’t standing still. It was drifting with the current. I weighed my options and eyed the watery distance between myself and the ship.

Even if I could survive the cold of a five-foot swim, once I got to the ship there was nothing to hold onto.

I yelled and yelled until my voice was hoarse. At one point I thought I saw someone looking my way, stand–ing partly in shadow near the controls for the gangway.

I renewed my yelling, but I must have been mistaken because they seemed to melt away. I turned and watched the anchor line going up and thought, “Is this how I’m going to die?”

The dog whimpered in my arms, bringing me back to my senses. I had to do something. I couldn’t just stand there. I walked along the pack ice towards the bow, yell–ing the whole way and scanning the ship for anything that might rescue me, but the noise of the engine drowned out my voice. I might as well have been yelling at a rock for all the help it would bring.

Again I became aware of the anchor line being reeled out of the water and panicked. The ship was leaving me here to freeze to death, just like Franklin. I looked at the chain for some moments before my mind got itself around it. My heart, already racing, had gone into over–drive. I wondered if I was crazy, but I couldn’t see a bet–ter way out of the situation. I ran along the pack ice to the anchor chain. Just three feet away, in a calm sea, if I had no choice I could do it. Even with the dog, I could do it. I was small enough. I put the dog in the hood of my jacket and before I could think anymore I backed up and ran, planting my feet at the edge of the ice at the last moment and jumping out and up, my hands reach–ing high.

Both my hands grabbed a link in the chain and immediately began to slip. I heard the little dog yip and then start whimpering. Frantically I coiled my legs around the chain and forced one hand through to grab the other hand. I looked up and saw the gaping hole, the chain ahead of me sliding into it, the rusty stains from where the anchor had rested against the side of the ship at sea. Slowly the anchor chain raised me up. As I entered the hole the chain slid sideways, catching three fingers of my left hand that were clasped with my right, and I screamed. I nearly let go in pain — which made me almost cry out again.

There was no danger of me slipping into the sea unless I lost my three fingers, which I decided wasn’t a good thing to dwell on. As my body entered the hole I had to let go of the chain with my legs and hung from my arms.

The dog was no longer whimpering, just shivering like aspen leaves in the wind, but I really had no mind for it or anything else except the light at the end of the tun–nel. I had no idea how slowly an anchor comes back to its mooring, but by the time my head broke out into the light my arms were screaming with pain. And suddenly, as the anchor chain hauled my body out of the hole my hands were clear, the awful, grinding pressure gone. I had the strongest urge to let go then, but I hung on until the chain pulled me clear of the tunnel and I flopped down on the deck like a stranded fish.