EPISODE TWELVE
1158 Words
TWELVE
They moved forward in single file, McQueen leading, sinking knee-deep with every step.
Twenty minutes later I took over at the front. Soon afterwards, I dropped without warning up to my waist. The language I used stimulating and helped break the rather forbidding silence that gone before.
We climbed steadily for the escarpment, which defied our efforts to get nearer. I continued at the front, finding as I toiled forward into the seemingly endless virgin white, that thoughts of Joanne kept forming in my mind, deep down more than glad when we came over the ridge and stood on the edge of the moor.
McQueen took out his binoculars.
"He's camped about a quarter of a mile over there."
As he pointed, he raised his binoculars and sighted them in the same direction, bringing his other arm back to steady the glasses. We stood around, grateful for the break, puffing and blowing noses. I saw McQueen stiffen, but Roome stood at his side first.
"What is it?"
McQueen continued to stare through the field-glasses, moving them back and forth a few degrees.
"There's no evidence of his camp, only some material, shredded and undulating."
"Let me look."
McQueen gave the glasses over to Roome, who stared through them for nearly a minute. When he lowered them, he looked around grimly?
"I don't like what I see. His camp appears ruined."
As we resumed our progress, our sense of urgency moved us faster through the shallowed, windswept flurry of the plateau. I caught up with Roome. We did not need preliminaries.
"Could be storm damage."
"Could be."
Roome sounded unconvinced.
As we drew closer, we began calling out, but the only sound in return we got, the audible undulation of the torn tarpaulin.
Closer still, vague snow-covered hillocks became discernible. Without a word being spoken we all ceased shouting then, as if by instinct, as though the place became hallowed ground, a graveyard.
In the awful silence which followed, the sound and sight of the waving canvas felt obscene, like some creature which inhabited the places of death: a vulture.
We reached it, Roome shooting out a hand and stopping its movement.
"Corporal Turner?"
We waited in vain for a reply.
"Give me a hand here."
Immediately Roome spoke we swarmed around the sailcloth, scooping out with our hands. The blackened, twisted frame of the tent soon stood out like a gutted ribcage.
McQueen staggered back; hands smothered in blood.
"Jesus!"
A camera, coated in the same thing altered blood before us, but no trace of Nick Turner.
"What the hell happened to him?"
McQueen seemed dazed, but we surveyed the uneven, lumpy surroundings.
"He must be around here somewhere."
Roome muttered.
"Spread out."
In a frenzy we began moving the bank of deep snow from the other mounds, using boots, hands, bits of broken metal.
"I found him."
Roome and McQueen gathered around, staring in silence at the shoulder that I uncovered.
I worked alone and even though our readiness for something dreadful, was high, when the last very white lump fell aside and revealed the head, we all stood rooted to the ground in shock.
It looked like a child's drawing in chalks, a face done on dark blue paper, with big eyes of arctic red snow.
Sightlessly, Corporal Turner, jaws open and lips pulled back in an emotionally dead animal scream of terror, gazed up at the sky from his white coffin.
I let my breath out in a whistle.
"Christ! He's had his eyes removed."
*
It took us the rest of the daylight just to get organized. The body of Turner covered in some remaining tentage, and lashed to two poles together, creating a makeshift stretcher. We recovered everything we could find, comprising the camera.
Darkness fell when we headed back. We were all grateful that Turner's body did not need to be touched. I shuddered at the thought of carrying the dead man over my shoulder, getting stiffer than rigor mortis set in. As, it looked like a mummy-shape it had an uneasy effect on me. That damned unease again.
By the time we got back to the gun-battery, there appeared to be no question of us returning to Onehouse that night, so we were put up for the night in a reserve bunk room.
Turner's carcass, now properly laced in a shroud, one of many stores for victims of accidents at sea, composed of RAF and Luftwaffe pilots, lay in the centre of another room on a table. On a side table the remnants of his box-camera.
Pendergrass, the cook, got to work on a meal, with Roome and I, relieved when McQueen offered us a hot shower.
"You needn't look so surprised," McQueen chided. "There might be a war on, but we possess all the mod-cons here you know."
The two of use plunged under the steaming jets, letting the hot water play over our bodies aching with fatigue. I slumped against the wall and squeezed shut my eyes, feeling the muscles soften and relax.
The food tasted delicious, the cutlets and chips washed down with man-size tea. Apart from our depression we ate with the hunger of men who accomplished a hard day's physical work.
Later, we sat in the mess room, around the stove in the centre. McQueen charged his pipe, fiddling with the tobacco. Once ready, he applied a lighted match horizontally across the concave shaped ending, sucking the air through and releasing great clouds of smoke from his mouth.
Satisfied it was alighting he took the stem from his lips and waved out the match.
"I don't understand who could do that - or why. The man's camp wrecked - a madman's work. And what is more, obviously during the blizzard. How could the other man live?"
Roome lowered the model ship he had been looking at.
"Perhaps he didn't - maybe he's out there now - freezing to death."
I shook my head. "Somehow, I don't think we are so lucky. Whoever it is seems to be impervious to the cold - as though he controls his own central heating."
McQueen laughed. "You're meaning he's glowing like an alien in the dark?"
"Yes - something like that."
McQueen frowned.
"Radio activity isn't hot like that is it?"
I shook my head.
"No. Why?"
"Well, I am thinking. It must be about the time that poor bastard in there..." He jerked his thumb towards Turner's room. "...being murdered, I picked up that radioactive signal. The direction is about right."
The room lost its struggling warmth, quickly becoming aware of the wild cold depths and the swirling drifts beyond the windows. The underlying anxiety, all around us, our isolation, enormous.
McQueen looked around, oddly embarrassed.
"I'll just make sure all the doors are locked."
Roome moved to the window and stared broodingly out at the dark blue of the snowdrifts.
"What the hell is it out there?"
- Writer
