"The Crevasse" (2009) by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud
North American Lake Monsters: Stories (2013) by Nathan Ballingrud
Readers unfamiliar with "The Crevasse" may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.l
In his 2004 story "Spells for Halloween: An Acrostic" Dale Bailey wrote:
A is for Abaddon, the Kingdom of the Dead. Madness comes to men too long stranded on the ice. In 1912, Captain Robert Falcon Scott perished following an assault on the South Pole. His journal survives. An unpublished entry preserved in the Rare Book Room of the British Library describes a strange experience. Three days from their final campsite, Scott and his remaining men found a stairway hacked into the ice. Down and down and down it wound, into a bottomless abyss, but no one among them dared descend. A stench of brimstone rose up from the sundered earth, the sound of distant screams. No later expedition has confirmed Captain Scott’s experience. Of one fact, however, all who brave the frozen continent are certain: Hell is cold.
That last (Miltonic) sentence also suits "The Crevasse," a collaboration between Bailey and Nathan Balingrud.
There were fourteen of them. Four men, one of them, Faber, strapped to the back of Garner’s sledge, mostly unconscious, but occasionally surfacing out of the morphine depths to moan. Ten dogs, big Greenland huskies, gray and white. Two sledges. And the silence, scouring him of memory and desire, hollowing him out inside. It was what he’d come to Antarctica for.
Garner, expedition doctor, and comrades Bishop and Connelly, have been sent back to the team base depot with Faber, who has broken his leg.
Garner joined the expedition after his return home from France to sudden widowerhood post-1918. He joined the expedition because – like many John Buchan characters – he wanted to lose himself through routine and physical exhaustion.
Elizabeth had fallen victim to the greatest cosmic prank of all time, the flu that had swept across the world in the spring and summer of 1918, as if the bloody abattoir in the trenches hadn’t been evidence enough of humanity’s divine disfavor. That’s what Elizabeth had called it in the last letter he’d ever had from her: God’s judgment on a world gone mad. Garner had given up on God by then: he’d packed away the Bible Elizabeth had pressed upon him after a week in the field hospital, knowing that its paltry lies could bring him no comfort in the face of such horror, and it hadn’t. Not then, and not later, when he’d come home to face Elizabeth’s mute and barren grave....
When the dog team and sledge carrying Faber breaks through the ice into a crevasse, Garner is ordered to climb down and cut lead dog Atka loose before the team, sledge, and wounded man are lost.
While accomplishing this, Garner sees that the crevasse disguises a vestibule to an enormous underground structure.
In their tent that night, Garner can still hear Atka crying from the crevasse.
Atka howled, a long rising cry that broke into pitiful yelps, died away, and renewed itself, like the shriek of sirens on the French front.
“Jesus,” Garner whispered.
He fished a flask out of his pack and allowed himself a single swallow of whiskey. Then he sat in the dark, listening to the mournful lament of the dog, his mind filling with hospital images: the red splash of tissue in a steel tray, the enflamed wound of an amputation, the hand folding itself into an outraged fist as the arm fell away. He thought of Elizabeth, too, Elizabeth most of all, buried months before Garner had gotten back from Europe. And he thought of Connelly, that aggrieved look as he turned away to deal with the injured swing dog.
Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to do it.
Crouching in the low tent, Garner dressed. He shoved a flashlight into his jacket, shouldered aside the tent flap, and leaned into the wind tearing across the waste. The crevasse lay before him, rope still trailing through the pitons to dangle into the pit below.
Garner felt the pull of darkness. And Atka, screaming.
“Okay,” he muttered. “All right, I’m coming.”
Once again he lashed the rope around his waist. This time he didn’t hesitate as he backed out onto the ledge of creaking ice. Hand over hand he went, backward and down, boots scuffing until he stepped into space and hung suspended in a well of shadow.
Panic seized him, the black certainty that nothing lay beneath him. The crevasse yawned under his feet, like a wedge of vacuum driven into the heart of the planet. Then, below him—ten feet? twenty?—Atka mewled, piteous as a freshly whelped pup, eyes squeezed shut against the light. Garner thought of the dog, curled in agony upon some shelf of subterranean ice, and began to lower himself into the pit, darkness rising to envelop him.
One heartbeat, then another and another and another, his breath diaphanous in the gloom, his boots scrabbling for solid ground. Scrabbling and finding it. Garner clung to the rope, testing the surface with his weight.
It held.
Garner took the flashlight from his jacket, and switched it on. Atka peered up at him, brown eyes iridescent with pain. The dog’s legs twisted underneath it, and its tail wagged feebly. Blood glistened at its muzzle. As he moved closer, Garner saw that a dagger of bone had pierced its torso, unveiling the slick yellow gleam of subcutaneous fat and deeper still, half visible through tufts of coarse fur, the bloody pulse of viscera. And it had shat itself—Garner could smell it—a thin gruel congealing on the dank stone.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, Atka.”
Kneeling, Garner caressed the dog. It growled and subsided, surrendering to his ministrations.
“Good boy, Atka,” he whispered. “Settle down, boy.”
Garner slid his knife free of its sheath, bent forward, and brought the blade to the dog’s throat. Atka whimpered—“Shhh,” Garner whispered—as he bore down with the edge, steeling himself against the thing he was about to do—
Something moved in the darkness beneath him: a leathery rasp, the echoing clatter of stone on stone, of loose pebbles tumbling into darkness. Atka whimpered again, legs twitching as he tried to shove himself back against the wall. Garner, startled, shoved the blade forward. Atka’s neck unseamed itself in a welter of black arterial blood. The dog stiffened, shuddered once, and died—Garner watched its eyes dim in the space of a single heartbeat—and once again something shifted in the darkness at Garner’s back. Garner scuttled backward, slamming his shoulders into the wall by Atka’s corpse. He froze there, probing the darkness.
Then, when nothing came—had he imagined it? He must have imagined it—Garner aimed the flashlight light into the gloom. His breath caught in his throat. He shoved himself erect in amazement, the rope pooling at his feet.
Vast.
The place was vast: walls of naked stone climbing in cathedral arcs to the undersurface of the polar plain and a floor worn smooth as glass over long ages, stretching out before him until it dropped away into an abyss of darkness. Struck dumb with terror—or was it wonder?—Garner stumbled forward, the rope unspooling behind him until he drew up at the precipice, pointed the light into the shadows before him, and saw what it was that he had discovered.
A stairwell, cut seamlessly into the stone itself, and no human stairwell either: each riser fell away three feet or more, the stair itself winding endlessly into fathomless depths of earth, down and down and down until it curved away beyond the reach of his frail human light, and further still toward some awful destination he scarcely dared imagine. Garner felt the lure and hunger of the place singing in his bones. Something deep inside him, some mute inarticulate longing, cried out in response, and before he knew it he found himself scrambling down the first riser and then another, the flashlight carving slices out of the darkness to reveal a bas-relief of inhuman creatures lunging at him in glimpses: taloned feet and clawed hands and sinuous Medusa coils that seemed to writhe about one another in the fitful and imperfect glare. And through it all the terrible summons of the place, drawing him down into the dark.
“Elizabeth—” he gasped, stumbling down another riser and another, until the rope, forgotten, jerked taut about his waist. He looked up at the pale circle of Connelly’s face far above him.
“What the hell are you doing down there, Doc?” Connelly shouted, his voice thick with rage, and then, almost against his will, Garner found himself ascending once again into the light.
The hoped-for psychological oblivion provided by the Antarctic proves evanescent:
What he felt, though, was not the fire’s heat, but the cool breath of underground earth, the silence of the deep tomb buried beneath the ice shelf. The stairs descended before him, and at the bottom he heard a noise again: A woman’s voice, calling for him. Wondering where he was.
Elizabeth, he called, his voice echoing off the stone. Are you there?
If only he’d gotten to see her, he thought. If only he’d gotten to bury her. To fill those beautiful eyes with dirt. To cover her in darkness.
Elizabeth, can you hear me?
Ultimately, Garner and two comrades survive. They make it to the depot, there to await the return of the main team from the pole.
But the reader can already sense that Garner's days at the depot are numbered.
Garner leaned back onto his cot, looking at the ceiling. Although the long Antarctic day had not yet finished, it was shading into dusk, the sun hovering over the horizon like a great boiling eye. It cast long shadows, and the lamp Bishop had lit to read by set them dancing. Garner watched them caper across the ceiling. Some time later, Bishop snuffed out the lamp and dragged the curtains over the windows, consigning them all to darkness. With it, Garner felt something like peace stir inside him. He let it move through him in waves, he felt it ebb and flow with each slow pulse of his heart.
A gust of wind scattered fine crystals of snow against the window, and he found himself wondering what the night would be like in this cold country. He imagined the sky dissolving to reveal the hard vault of stars, the galaxy turning above him like a cog in a vast, unknowable engine. And behind it all, the emptiness into which men cast their prayers. It occurred to him that he could leave now, walk out into the long twilight and keep going until the earth opened beneath him and he found himself descending strange stairs, while the world around him broke silently into snow, and into night.
Garner closed his eyes….
Readers can write the conclusion: the reunion of Garner with Elizabeth in a city beneath the ice, there to "dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever."1
Postscript
My itinerary through polar fiction has been a long one: I first read "Who Goes There?" in a back-broken Hugo anthology in the early 1980s, while in high school. The first lines of Alan Dean Foster's novelization of John Carpenter's The Thing still echo: I have no other prose committed to memory, but I have that.2 Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" has been another long-time companion.3 I was fortunate to read it first in late December 1981, in a snow-bound Ohio farmhouse. I cannot recall a more fecund setting for a moment of reader reception.
Jay
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"The worst desert on Earth never gets hot. It boasts no towering sand dunes like the Sahara, no miles and miles of barren gravel as does the Gobi. The winds that torment this empty land make those that sweep over the Rub al Khali seem like spring breezes." [Alan Dean Foster, The Thing, 1982]
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