Out of the Ice (16 page)

We walked into the room and I studied the floor. All the boards were consistent. There was no sign of a trapdoor. Comfortable sofas were upholstered in pale blue fabric. A round coffee table was immaculately decorated in pink and silver. An elaborate ashtray on a stand was in Art Deco style. Above a grand fireplace, a convex mirror in Regency design – gilded, with small round balls dotting its circumference – made me jump when I saw our reflections. Then I froze as I glimpsed a fourth person. A tall, blonde-haired woman in a stylish 1950s woollen dress, blue with white bands, hurried past in the passage. I turned sharply and stuck my head out – but there was no one there. She’d vanished into thin air. I turned back to the mirror: only our reflections. My mind was playing tricks again. Was I coming down with a bad case of Toast?

Travis and Kate were bent over an old wind-up gramophone with a pile of thick seventy-eight records stacked on a table beside it. ‘These are from a much earlier period. Classical,’ said Kate, pulling a record from its slip, to Travis’s scowling disapproval.

I walked out, my pulse quickening, and headed along the corridor. The next room was empty. The room after that, the kitchen, had simple cupboards and a table with six chairs. I checked the cupboards. Empty. There was nothing on the scrubbed-pine benches either, and no sign of anything that could lead underground. The woman couldn’t have been real; there was nowhere for her to go. I wasn’t just toast – I was
burnt
toast. Yet I felt completely normal. I’d never experienced anything like it.

The whine of a thin violin drifted into the air, joined by a cello and oboe. A thrill slipped up my spine. The music fitted gloriously. It was sparse and serene. I imagined the living room full of people, the fire blazing and wind roaring outside, the gramophone turned up loud.

With effort, I slid a rusty bolt and swung open the back door, which clearly hadn’t been used in years. In an enclosed porch was a tiny bathroom and toilet, untouched for decades.

Upstairs all four bedrooms had been stripped of possessions. Only the empty beds with delicately carved bedheads remained, looking sad and abandoned. I took photos, and then went back to the lounge room, filming the furniture while Kate recorded details on my laptop, placing the house within my mapped grid and putting in GPS coordinates. The music swirled around us.

When the record ended we went next door, to a house that was even larger and just as pretty, painted a deep rose. But as soon as I entered I felt it – someone had been here recently, perhaps was even living here. The lounge room was filled with blond wood furniture, neat pinstriped cushions scattered about. There were two coffee tables and ashtrays brimming with cigarette butts. I inspected them closely, taking photos.

‘Do you think someone’s been here smoking?’ said Travis.

I peered again at the butts. These had no lipstick on them. They smelled stale and rank.

‘Maybe,’ I said, trying to think rationally. If someone was here, there were no tracks in the ice outside, and today with the sun the streets were softer, and there would have been. I walked back and checked. I could see our three sets of footprints, but no other signs of disturbance.

I ducked inside again and collided with Travis who was coming out. ‘Follow me,’ I whispered and went quickly upstairs, taking care to make no sound. All the doors off the corridor were shut. I stopped, making sure Travis was behind me. I whipped open the first one. The bed was fully made up with pillows and a thick blue and white eiderdown. I strode across and pulled open the covers. The sheets looked clean and had a pleasant scent of fresh air tinged with salt. ‘Good enough to sleep in,’ I mumbled and walked out. There were no wardrobes or cupboards, nowhere to hide.

The next room was similar: a single bed with sheets and blankets that smelled fresh and inviting. On a freezing day in a blizzard, I could imagine curling up here myself.

The third room had a double bed, again comfortably made up. There was a huge wooden wardrobe. I flung open the door and stepped back, alarmed. It was full of clothes.

Carefully I went through them, coathangers clanging quietly, matching my rattled nerves. The clothes were boys’ outfits: woollen trousers and thick woollen shirts in a checked pattern. The size of a teenage boy. They would fit the boy I thought I saw in the ice, the boy who looked like Hamish. I shivered, hoping I wasn’t going mad. These clothes were from decades ago. Why would a boy be down here wearing them? Now I wasn’t even making sense to myself.

Travis stepped forward. ‘Vintage 1950s,’ he said. ‘They’d sell for hundreds.’

‘Don’t get any ideas,’ I warned, but my mind was already far away, trying to remember what the boy in the cave
had
been wearing. Was it a checked shirt or a T-shirt? I shut my eyes, trying to visualise, but all I could see was his face, screaming for help.

I pulled out a shirt. It was a pale lemon check pattern, 1950s-style, heavy and warm. Two more were checked in red and blue.

I took out hand-knitted woollen jumpers and thick coats. They were also vintage, from the days when Fredelighavn was alive. On a top shelf in the wardrobe was a row of woollen caps.

I hadn’t found any other clothes in the houses I’d seen.
Was
this whole thing staged? A show village, just for me?

Although, if the boy existed, he hadn’t been acting. I had seen – or
imagined
I’d seen – real fear. But if it was all in my head, why? We were tested for psychological health before we came to Antarctica, and were briefed to tell our Station Leader if we had problems. I didn’t want to confess anything – certainly not to Connaught, who probably thought all women were crazy anyway. Not even to Georgia. I determined to keep my thoughts to myself.

I went to the door of the fourth room and stopped abruptly as I heard a faint trace of movement. Travis nodded – he’d heard it too. I turned the carved wooden door handle and could feel Travis tensing his muscles behind me, flexing up ready to defend. The door swung freely and we looked in. The entire room was empty. Sunlight beamed through a window onto the floorboards, cutting a rich yellow swathe of light.

‘That’s odd,’ said Travis, looking around everywhere. I did the same: up and down, across the smooth, timber-lined ceiling with no manhole, no break. Along the white walls, and the floor. There was nothing.

We retreated downstairs to the kitchen, where Kate was checking through cupboards: some were empty, some were full of canned food. There was no sign of an entrance above, or below. Nothing to explain the rustling.

The bathroom hadn’t been used for decades and had no trapdoor or manhole.

Frustrated and perplexed, we moved on to the house opposite. It was huge, the largest of all, painted the colour of a ripe orange, with beautifully carved white fretwork on its porch covered in long, delicate icicles. The lounge room was first off the passage – it was almost the size of a ballroom. Its floorboards were waxed and mellow, the wide planks wafting a delicious honey perfume. On the walls hung portraits, and one in particular drew me towards it. In a huge gilt frame, a woman with piercing blue eyes and long blonde hair swept up in a bun peered down sternly. She wore a simple white cotton blouse fastened at the neck by a carved brooch of a whale. Beside her hung a portrait of a serious- looking man, fair-haired, blue-eyed, in a navy sea captain’s uniform, his face etched in deep ridges from sun and salt and life on the wild ocean. Around them were paintings of their children – three snowy-haired boys.

Ingerline? I studied the woman. It was hard to tell her age, but she might have been close to forty. The painting was perhaps from the 1930s. If it was Ingerline, this was not what I had expected. Having built a cinema, I’d imagined her to be fun loving, but this woman looked strict and humourless. Maybe it wasn’t Ingerline – there must have been other captains and their wives running the whaling station after Lars Halvorsen. Presumably Ingerline didn’t stay until the demise of the place in the 1950s. How many years had she been down here? How could I find out?

Travis was gazing at the wide blue eyes that sparkled as if the woman were alive, and the full red lips beneath her pert nose. I found it hard to envisage this beautiful woman living here in this harsh environment. ‘She was good looking. Who is she?’ said Kate, and I jumped.

‘Steady on,’ said Travis, taking me by the elbow. ‘Are you okay? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.’

I laughed. ‘Do I?’

‘You know this woman?’ said Kate.

‘I think she’s Ingerline Halvorsen.’ I shuddered as I heard myself say the name out loud. My nerves really were stretched. ‘Although perhaps not.’

I strode out of the room and down the hallway. Children’s bedrooms were on both sides, with little carved white beds, fully made up with pillows, white sheets and thick blankets. Colourful childlike paintings covered the walls on yellowed paper, the edges curling up.

The kitchen was large, with an enormous table. I counted ten thatched chairs placed neatly around it. There was an electric refrigerator, pale pink, 1950s style, in one corner. Its door hung slightly ajar. There was nothing inside.

I opened a corner cupboard. It was lined with empty shelves.

There was a pot on the elegant coal-burning stove. I opened the lid and saw frozen water.

Cups sat face down on the bench beside the kitchen sink, as if they’d just been cleaned.

Other cupboards were full of bags of tea, coffee, flour and sugar.

I pulled down the stove door and smelled inside. The air was stale. It didn’t seem like it had been operated in a long time.

‘I’m sick of nothing adding up,’ I said. ‘This room looks like it’s just been used but then it seems it hasn’t been. This place is doing my head in.’

‘We need to find someone who knows about Fredelighavn,’ said Kate. ‘Aren’t there Norwegian scholars who’ve studied it?’

‘Not that I know of. It’s been an Exclusion Zone for years, so no recent study.’

‘There must be records. Shipping records, that kind of thing,’ said Travis.

‘Do you know where?’ I asked.

‘Sorry. I’m just an electrical engineer. But my father’s an academic, a history professor at Harvard.’ He blushed. ‘He left when I was thirteen. But I remember Dad researching through the night in his study. Sometimes I’d sneak in and watch until he’d look up and kick me out.’

‘Do you still see him?’ I said, surprised that he and I had a similar background.

‘Unfortunately no,’ said Travis, with a tinge of anger and sadness that I recognised.

‘What was his area?’ asked Kate.

‘American naval history. That’s why I know about the shipping records. They go way back.’

‘I’ll try to put out a few feelers in Norway,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anyone there but I’m sure I’ll find a way.’

‘I could help,’ said Travis. ‘I’ve got plenty of spare time.’

‘They don’t work you hard enough,’ said Kate and Travis laughed, his white teeth bright in his smooth tanned face. He caught me looking at him, and turned to me keenly. I turned away and headed upstairs, feeling myself blush. ‘Let’s see what’s up here,’ I called, floorboards creaking underfoot.

The first rooms had single beds with white sheets and floral eiderdowns. The master bedroom was at the end, stretching wide across the whole building. It was sunny and airy, the bed made up with pink sheets and a thick pink eiderdown. There were two large wardrobes, and photographs on a small table. I peered at them and reeled back in alarm: there was a photo of an older Ingerline – or the woman in the portrait downstairs, whoever she was – now in her fifties. And she was wearing a dress, blue with white bands, 1950s-style, exactly like the one worn by the woman I’d glimpsed in the mirror in the pink and blue house. If I was seeing ghosts I really was losing my mind.

‘Let’s go,’ I said, over-loudly. ‘I want to open that shed we couldn’t see inside the other day.’

I turned on my heel and fled.

‘But we haven’t looked in the wardrobes,’ Travis called as he flung one open.

Kate followed me. ‘What’s wrong, Laura? You’re scaring me again.’

‘Absolutely nothing,’ I said firmly and rattled down the stairs. Someone was messing around with me, was my scientific view. I didn’t believe in the supernatural.

Out in the street we waited for Travis, stamping our feet against the cold. The day was turning icy.

Kate scrutinised me but I remained silent. I had no intention of telling her what I thought I’d seen.

Travis came barrelling out. ‘Lots of old clothes. Men’s and women’s. Beautiful quality suits. Thick wool. And before you say it, no I didn’t touch them.’ He grinned. ‘Still, it’s a treasure trove. This place will make a phenomenal museum.’

Was that what whoever was behind this was hoping? Or were the clothes simply original and left here like so many other things? I’d have to go back and take a closer look. I quaked at the thought of being near Ingerline again – the portrait or the ghost. And why, if I
had
seen her ghost, was she haunting someone else’s house – assuming this place, with the portraits and photographs, was hers?

‘You brought the jemmy iron?’ I asked Travis as I headed off.

‘Sure. It’s in my backpack.’

I was beginning to know my way around. I took only two wrong turns before I found the locked shed.

Travis wedged the jemmy iron between the doors and crunched them open. We shone our torches inside through the darkness – there were no windows – and saw nothing but a few old mattresses piled in a corner, with blue and white ticking stripes.

‘Check the floor,’ I said, entering. ‘Look for anything that could lead underground.’

‘Why?’ asked Travis, puzzled.

‘Because I say to,’ I replied. ‘If the shed’s locked, something must be here.’ I pulled the mattresses out from the corner and Travis helped. There was only concrete floor underneath.

I walked around the shed, thinking about the massive building effort required to construct the village. Timber, concrete, corrugated iron and brick – it would have taken a lot of men to put Fredelighavn together each short summer, when the weather was warm enough to allow them to work. Which led me to a realisation: perhaps they left everything in the houses because they were certain they were coming back next season. They were used to doing that. Packing up and heading back to Norway in March each year, then returning the following summer. But if it was the whalers who locked this shed, and not Connaught, what were they trying to protect?