Revolving Door: Volume 2
Frostbite - I
Content warnings (contains spoilers)
This chapter depicts animal death.
In the nuclear-stricken expanse of Siberia, hunger is the essential condition of all life. Gnawing, clawing hunger, stripping faces of colour and hearts of warmth.
In the depths of the months once known as summer, snow pools deep enough to bury a corpse. The sea brings no ships; the phantom memory of crop cycles lingers only in moth-bitten calendars. And all bow to the tyranny of hunger. How much is left in the stores? Is there a house one can raid? Are there rats left with flesh on their bones? Fed or dead. Fed or dead. Every day, one casts the dice again.
Teetering on the northern tip of Krasnoyarsk Krai is the city of Dikson, once obscure through its remoteness, and now, briefly, saved by it. It has no name for itself, but it is where the researchers of the Dmitri Melnikov return to roost from September to April each year. Here, all vegetation has long abandoned efforts to grow, from the skeletal trees to the weeds in the cracks of the snow-blanketed streets.
It is up one such street that Artur trudges, towards the lighthouse where he has holed up since returning from the ice sheet.
At Frantsa Iosifa last year, there were days when Artur felt like a child watching through the window on a winter’s night. He sensed a glow of joy, just out of his grasp and knowing, and while the scientists' keyboards clattered away, he fussed over his vessel, seeing to maintenance and repairs.
Well, the Dmitri Melnikov was never his, by all rights. But learning to pilot the icebreaker, he developed a bond like that between horse and rider, learning its habits and demands by heart. It was his in the same way that a hearth fire belonged to the dweller: a comfort and a companion, its absence leaving an ache.
But last year's voyage was not like the ones before. On the return, Dr Andreyeva and her team chattered and drank as if they could see the silver lining of the nuclear winter now. But on being asked, the head scientist simply said, “No, no, not the end of the winter...but a chance...that humanity may live past it. This oil trap may fuel all of Siberia for a decade yet. And a decade is a long time...”
Then around him readouts were printed from machines, and the bespectacled doctor, all sharp edges lined by age, was gone into her euphoria once again.
But to what end?
Artur pauses on the front step of the lighthouse. The scintillating snow mirrors nothingness back at him. To what end to we weather this winter? Then he imagines the flash of a face in the fog, like a haunting, of a woman whom the months have somehow failed to scour away. His breath catches.
For the chance, he thinks. Then he hears a whimper.
“I return every year in February,” Sabina said, the day she left the lighthouse empty behind her. Since that morning, Artur has tracked his calendar religiously.
This month is the first February since her departure. In the intervening year, he has watched the world dwindle at a glacier's pace. When he arrived back here, the village by the lighthouse hill was all but threadbare.
Still, with the tools aboard the Dmitri Melnikov—borrowed with the blessing of the researchers—he has spent the rest of the sub-zero months restoring the pale tower. First the door, refurbished with a spare lock from the basement, then the broken staircase rail, he repairs the lighthouse for no reason other than that he needs something useful to do.
Some days, he sits in the light room and watches the static sunset. Other days, he wanders to the town centre, passing rusty cranes and toppled shipping containers, the snow starting to pile inside them. Sometimes the fog is so thick that he cannot see his own boots.
All the while, in the village beneath the hill, families vanish every week, rubbed out by the frost and the starving rats. Though Artur has watched the long silence whittle the population away, there are still a number who know him well enough to put a name to his face.
So follow the jokes: “That madman Artur is repairing the lighthouse! He thinks he can save ships! Their captains shall live to die another day.”
He has heard Selma regaling her husband like so as he passes, and the man answers, “If I had as many hours as he, I would spend them readying for the day the village starts eating each other to live.”
“I’ve seen the way Ustin watches our house. Like some hungry dog at the sight of meat. He will be the first to turn when our stocks are exhausted, just you watch.”
“But that Artur will be the first to go. Eaten in his own lighthouse.”
Artur has never dignified them with an answer. Heedless they will continue to mutter as he passes, shovelling snow off the unused driveway.
In this long twilight of the world, the empty sea betrays no blink of light to show that any vessels still pass this way. For a while in its history, humanity thought it knew the sea in whole. Now, it is a mystery again.
Whatever lies on the other end of it, whatever ice or oil or flame, if there is a wonderland untouched by the grey light, that is someone else’s destination—not his.
There is a scruffy grey something nuzzling at the warm crack between the lighthouse doors—too big to be a dog, too small to be a bear.
As Artur draws closer, his breath shortens. He begins to make out the pointed ears of a wolf, and the lines of its ribs through its fur. It scrabbles at the wood with a mangy paw.
His heart kicks into high gear. He feels about in his pockets for something to defend himself, and comes up only with the key to the chain on his door. That chain hangs rusty over the head of the beast, creaking with every nudge.
Given how the creature’s skin hangs on its bones, he has more than a sliver of a chance of coming out on top, even unarmed. The scientists sent him home with rations, and he is doing well with them. This wolf does not appear to have eaten in days, if not weeks...
Artur creeps up the path, dodging loose rock, though he feels naked out in the open. At two metres away, he can see the tatters of its fur, the sallow skin showing through in patches.
His boot crushes a nobble of snow with a crunch. He freezes, but the wolf does not turn. Letting out a long, slow breath, he inches forth, one step at a time, ready to grapple it.
Its head flicks to a side. Its golden eye meets his. He tenses, arms ready to deflect its teeth.
But it prods the door crack again, this time with its eyes trained on him. He stumbles, gasping as his panic settles. Of course, it must want food, but it must know it is too weak to make prey of him. These creatures have no notion of right and wrong. It is not choosing to spare him out of decency—only desperation.
But he knows that the beast, with no pack in sight, hasn’t a week left to its life.
“Fine. Fine. You win.”
The wolf, though almost as large as Artur, watches quietly as he turns the key and the rusty chain clatters apart. He watches for his next motions, and when he does not move to halt it, it slinks through the gap into the shadow of the stairwell, head hung.
He follows after, sighing. It could be sick, only sick wolves seek out human company, he thinks with a grimace. It could kill you without meaning harm. Then what will Sabina say? She won’t say anything, because she’ll never find your corpse.
“One day, and then you’re out,” he snaps, already picking open the crates of rations that the scientists left him. As he does, the wolf, large enough to topple one such crate over, sits by his feet and watches, tucking its legs under its body. When he fishes out a bundle of dried meat, its head perks up, but it lacks the vigour to lunge for the morsels.
He peels the wrapper open, teeth gritted as the tang of dried meat hits him. Water drips near his feet; the wolf is slavering. He tosses the entire strip at his guest, and then plops himself down on the lowest step.
The wolf snaps up the offering, pressing it onto the floor with a paw and tearing chunks from the slice with its teeth. It makes short work of the snack. Watching, Artur shakes his head.
The ice sings, Artur learned last year. Pyotr, the bespectacled boy always eager to explain his craft, said, when floes rub against each other, they make a sound like whales, too deep to be heard by humans. Their voices reverberate far and wide, and the seabed echoes them back.
And with those echoes, the scientist saw the oil in the earth's crust, oil that had once been left untapped to protect the Arctic ice. The ice needs no protecting, now.
The night it was confirmed—when the icebergs creaked at the right frequencies and the seabed showed the oil in its belly—there was a long-distance radio message back to the mainland within an hour.
Artur has imagined the shape of the seafloor many times since then, its secret pockets and hills, and the places where it has been drilled open. In his work, he only ever skirted the surface of the deep. Yet these doctors know its reefs and ridges like the face of a lover, its shape felt out with the groans of shearing ice.
He was still merely floating upon the waves, as they talked with oil merchants of drilling through its bed. He watched them work through the night, faces lit from below. He slept at the bridge in stops and starts, wearing his furs, his breath fogging the glass.
In the morning, they told him a miracle had been worked, somewhere among those flickering screens. The birth of an answer to a world-ending question.
*
This two-week transit from Frantsa Iosifa to Dikson is different from every other: talk of family and hometowns floats on the air. They never talked of the future before. When they dock again in the home port, Artur sets down his passengers at the weathered pier in the fog, and steers to the dockyard for servicing.
The hull of the Dmitri Melnikov is always battering ice, and its pipes and ballast chambers sometimes crack from freezing water. The shipyard is decaying in slow motion, like the rest of the coast, and its skeleton crew will need the whole fortnight to repair it with their hand tools and single operable crane. He watches, lovingly, as they patch its hull in the drydock, welding over iceberg gashes, readying it for its next voyage.
It is midway through the wait that he is called out to receive his yearly shipment of rations. It arrives from storage in a lorry twice as large as normal, and when the passenger door opens, out steps Dr Andreyeva herself.
She walks straight into a handshake. “Mister Volkov! I hope you are well. You have been nothing short of a blessing to our team. None of what we've done would have been possible without you.”
There is a telling sadness in her eyes. “Doctor Andreyeva,” he answers, “you're too kind. I only do what I best can.”
“Don't be down on yourself, boy. How can we ever thank you enough?” the doctor answers. “Your service has been invaluable to us. And I come here with good news, but painful news, too. We have spoken to Lukoil, and they have promised to take us there on their fleet next year. A free ride. So, for better or worse...this has been our last journey together, Mister Volkov. It is likely we will not be employing you again next year.”
He only allows the words a split second to tear through him. “You can’t refuse anything free in times like these,” he answers steadily.
“Know it was not a decision we came to lightly, for we have dearly loved working with you. As our thanks,” she continues, “we have brought you as much from our partners as we could afford as a gift at this time. I do not know how long these supplies will last, but our hope is two years, at least. And by then, with luck, we may have oil on the market again.”
Artur nods mutely as the lorry trundles up alongside them, and its driver kicks the passenger door open, waving him in, the way he does every year.
This was his last voyage. With the scientists, with the icebreaker, with that vicarious wonder. Ahead of him, the path is erased by snow.
He stands in the berth and bids the Dmitri Melnikov goodbye, and Andreyeva, and the Dikson shipyard. Then with his supplies, he boards the truck with the grinning driver, face never cracking with a smile, a frown, or a tear.
One evening becomes two. The wolf lingers around Artur in front of his stoked hearth. As he throws her one half of his dinner, he finds he can see how dogs may have been bred from them. There is no telling if her pack is still alive, but whether they are or not, they must be lost to her.
That is the only way that he can comfort himself into believing she would resort to this, besides madness or disease. She does not look diseased, particularly not after a few days’ nourishment.
“Not much left in this world for either of us, is there?” he murmurs, as she paws at the peeling tips of his boots.
Soon enough, the wolf starts to recognise his routines: he wakes up before the first crack of light, has a breakfast of tea and hardtack, then climbs to the light room to sit and drink till sundown three hours later.
She starts to follow Artur up and down the flights of stairs, despite his complaints and protests, despite ineffectual kicks into her flank. Eventually, he gives up, and lets her curl on the floor in the light room, the tips of her fur frosted by the light from the lens.
Now that she is better-fed, she has the bearing of a predator again: claws sharp as knives, haunches built for pursuit, ears that hear him from the other end of the stairwell.
“Let her in, Artur! She’ll die if you don’t,” he groans, glancing at the slumbering beast by his row of bottles, some full, others less so. “Those villagers were right. I’ll be the first to go.”
It is on the fifth morning of his new guest’s stay that Artur hears a knock on his door.
“What?” he grumbles. He wiggles his wolf-bitten slippers onto his feet as he ambles down the stairs. The knocking comes again, and he bristles. “Quit that racket!”
“Artur! Artur, it’s your friend, Ernst,” answers a muffled shout.
“Which Ernst?”
“The one living on the corner you pass every week on the way to the port! I should have known you would be so cold. You never even stopped to talk to your friend!”
Twisting the key in the lock, Artur loosens the chain just enough to open the door a crack, but does not remove it. “What do you want?”
Artur does know the face. Ernst is tall, bespectacled and pale, his cheeks hollowed out by eating too little. The glass of his lenses is chipped, and he squints when he speaks. “I, well, noticed you coming home last year with a massive truck. Absolutely massive! Truly wasted on a village of our size! I saw the man bringing crate after crate into your dingy lighthouse, but I could not for the life of me understand why you should need so many boxes.”
“Yes, and?”
“Well, last night, it occurred to me that you hadn't come out of your lighthouse in days. How could you have lived that long, I wondered, without going to the village? Then, all at once, it occurred to me what must have been in the lorry last year—food! Enough to feed a village!” Now his animated demeanour takes on a pleading quality. “Surely, surely now, you would have no use of so much?”
Only now does Artur hear a shuffle of feet on the snow, from another person out of sight.
“I am not giving it away,” he answers flatly.
“Oh, Artur. You have more than the rest of us combined! I reckon you have enough to feed the whole village for weeks! Surely you cannot turn your needy neighbour away in a time like this…”
“For God’s sake. I have lost my job. This is the last shipment I will ever get. Until they come back with oil, and I hope they do, this is all I have—”
Squinting down at Artur till now, Ernst’s face goes slack, and he jolts backwards with a cry, eyes round as the full moon. Pointing past Artur's feet, he shrieks, “Is that a wolf? What is that fiend doing in your home? Are you—are you feeding that thing?”
Artur stiffens as he feels the brush of a wet muzzle against his arm.
“What? He has a what?” A second voice, a woman’s.
Artur breathes faster. He tries not to show it. As their voices rise in a tumult of accusations, he reaches for the door’s crossbar and slams it shut in a jangle of chains, loops the chain round and round the bars, and locks it, and loops the chain again.
Amid the banging of fists on his door, he turns to the wolf and growls, “Hey, don’t do that again!” He kicks her rump towards the stairs, and she yelps as she skitters away. “Other humans don’t like your kind. I mean…I don’t like that you’re here either.” She stands higher than his waist, but yields as quickly as a berated puppy, trotting up the stairs beside him with a drawn-out whimper.
As she reaches the second floor, she picks up his boots and drops then before his feet. He sighs, pulling his first slipper off. “I’m blaming this on my ancestors.”
There must be whisperings of Artur’s guest. He can tell they have been lurking near the lighthouse street, for they leave tracks in the snow, pelted into the the ground all the way from the last fork in the road.
The wolf can sense his fear, or something like it. She hangs close to his legs as he rises from his unsteady armchair, her black-ringed golden eyes asking the questions she cannot speak.
He scratches her between the ears as he picks up a rag from the coat rack.
“Oh, if Sabina were here,” he murmurs as he starts to polish the chair’s arms, “she would know how to make those stupid people go away. She's learned. Well-read. She uses words better than I.”
By now, the wolf has wandered halfway down the steps. When she realises he isn’t following, she turns and gives a howl of pleading.
“Shh!” he hisses as he abandons the rag to the seat. “No howling. You'll draw attention. I'll come get you your snacks.”
Halfway down the stairs, Artur pauses. Out the narrow stairwell window, he sees four villagers talking in the snow, all facing where he is. He doesn’t think they can see him, but he hurries downward anyway, out of line of sight.
Sabina, he thinks, was wrong about one thing. There is little nobility in the average human heart, and people like she are the odd ones out in a world like this.
He wriggles his fingers under a crate lid and feels around for two handfuls of jerky. His companion comes skidding down the steps as he hands over the meat, and she licks his palm clean when she has finished it all.
“About time I named you, I reckon,” he mutters. “I’ll call you…oh, I am no wordsmith. I will call you…”
Every so often, a shadow passes in the grey that briefly thaws Artur’s apathy away. He polishes the lighthouse lens, and turns on the beacon as the sun descends.
Fixing the lamp last December was a simple wiring job—none too different from those repairs he has performed upon old boat lamps. A circuit part had rusted and snapped. Whoever once tended this lighthouse stocked it well. He soldered a new wire on, waving the fumes towards the stairwell.
This lighthouse must be much older than he is, older than his parents would be now, even. Every corner bears the memory of the one who used to live here—the coat rack and the remains of a moth-bitten jacket, the cigarette pack he found among the tools. There is not enough to know the old owner by, beyond their taste in vodka and furnishings. But it is enough to make the place feel haunted.
Only twice in the months since his return has he seen a vessel on the bay, though he spends many waking hours in the gallery wearing his furs, a cup of tea cradled in his hands. The first time, it was a boat too small to be a hospital ship, and the second time, the ship had the wrong kind of machinery aboard—cranes for lifting cargo, though there was no cargo to be seen.
Phantoms in the night, gliding soundlessly through the fog. None ever call.
What use is hoping, if it will all turn out the same?
But in the town, he hears all kinds of whisperings—Lukoil has opened an office in town. Hulking carriers laden with oil rig scaffolds passed through last month. One of the port cranes is being repaired.
And what use is despair, but to kill any chance of salvation? Against all odds, the tiniest seed of hope is rooting in the snowfields of his sorrow.
They found oil. We found oil. We could live for ten more years…
Artur wakes to howling.
And shrieking men, and banging wood, and chains clattering against his door. The buzz and clack-clack-clack of a cutter, splintering the silence of several months.
He flies from the rickety bed onto his feet, gasping for air.
She’s not by the bed where she normally is.
But he can hear her. Her howls have turned to whimpers, somewhere far away.
“Binka!” he cries out, foregoing his boots, tripping down the stairs two at a time. “Binka! Stay away from her!”
There is a crowd at his door, surging together around some prize that he now sees—hoisted in two rugged men’s arms, snapping and writhing and howling—is the wolf Binka.
“What are you doing?” he bellows. “You broke into my home—”
“Why are you harbouring this mangy beast? There are enough plagues upon our town!”
“What a selfish fool! We are all starving, and you would rather feed this pest—what has gotten into your head? It's of more use dead than alive!”
“Stop!” Dizzy upon tides of rage and panic, he wrestles through five men and women at the door, none enough to hold him, but five more pile upon him, battering him blind. In flashes between heads he sees Selma and Ustin shove Binka onto the ground, still too frail to put up a predator’s fight. And then he sees Ernst, glasses flashing as he screams out a curse, hoisting a hunter’s rifle over his shoulder—
When the bullet booms out of the barrel, Artur flinches away. Once the echo of the explosion has faded, there are only human voices left, cheering at the sight of red.
The crisp air is rent by another bang. This time he hears the splatter of gore over the boom of gunpowder, before the cheers flood into the gaps again.
Artur feels a stirring inside him, something that has bubbled there for years, or maybe centuries—something that would destroy everyone and everything around him. He has always tried to drown it, time and time again, but every sorrow, every wound, has stoked it—a cruel hunger that would put this winter to shame.
Yes, there is nothing left in this world that he wouldn’t destroy.
With deadly calm, Artur fixes his eye upon Ernst.
“Leave,” he growls through his teeth, jaw clenched so hard it aches. He strides forward.
The man scampers back. “Patience, patience,” he breathes, “we were already on our way!”
“Leave.” Artur points a finger at him, then at the other ten gathered, all clumped together like sheep, hoping to be invisible among each other. Their haughty frowns have sloughed away, showing the bone-white terror beneath.
Even as he stands, the sky begins to stir around him. The snow starts to spiral into a howling vortex. They pull their coats tighter, scrambling backward, unsteady as newborn foals.
The wind swells into a gale, enough to rip leaves from trees, if there were still trees. Enough to rip scarves from necks. Blood dances off the ground. Binka’s head lies severed from her body. Her blood paints their hems red.
They finally start to run, eyes flicking wildly between him and the storm rising around him, with a superstitious terror somewhere between fear of God and the Devil. And then they cannot keep their eyes open, for the snow is shredding at their faces.
“Monster!” screeches Ernst. “Devil spawn!”
A blizzard rises around the lighthouse, and Artur is in its eye. The townsfolk pull what is left of their furs over their heads. They sprint and trip and fall. They bleed from a thousand cuts as they tear away across the snow, weeping, and the storm swallows them, and every footprint they have left, and the remains of the wolf he knew as a friend.
Artur tumbles to his knees and roars at the sky, tears freezing as they fall.