The Cave: A standalone Halloween novella (Christoffer Petersen's Halloween Specials Book 1) by Christoffer Petersen

Author:Christoffer Petersen [Petersen, Christoffer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aarluuk Press for Supernatural Crime
Published: 2022-11-10T05:00:00+00:00

6

The rigid inflatable boats burred through the black sea to the shore, batting and bumping lumps of ice from the hull, slowing to negotiate interconnected floes, and again to force a channel through new ice not yet fast. Snow flurried in the dark winter twilight above them, settling on Marcie’s hair and filling the seams and weave of Knud’s jacket. He glanced at her for perhaps the sixth time since leaving the Pyotr Pakhtusov and experienced a surge of adulterous musings when she returned his look, and another when she smiled. Vince Goodnight was alone with the Russian boat crew in the first inflatable, leading the way through the ice. They had agreed the other five in his party would remain onboard the ship. Goodnight wasn’t the youngest of the Americans, but he was the spryest and possessed a seemingly infinite pool of energy that had Knud, twenty-years his younger, struggling for breath when he followed him up the stairs of the ship to the open deck, and then again when they descended the zigzag metal stairs to the floating pontoon with the RIBs. Knud wondered if the older man would struggle under the weight of the breathing apparatus they had stowed in the boats but guessed there was little that would slow Vince Goodnight down, and, considering his obsession with the entity they believed responsible for the rock inscriptions, this close to the cave there was nothing that would stop him in his quest to uncover it.

“What you need to understand, Mr Bertelsen,” Goodnight had said when they donned suitable gear for the excursion in the mudroom, “is the potential for longevity.”

“Of life, you mean?”

“Yes.” Goodnight frowned as if there might be something else worthy of investing significant – some might say outrageous – sums of money pursuing. “You’re in your fifties, are you not?”

“Well,” Knud said, shuffling as if he might be offended. Goodnight waved away the Greenlander’s sensitivities with a wrinkled hand.

“When you reach my age, you realise there is too little time remaining to be concerned about what might or might not offend someone. Speak your mind, follow your heart, and fuck…” He smiled at Knud’s reaction. “You heard me,” Goodnight said with a wry smile. “If your heart doesn’t race at the thought of a good fuck, and even if it’s a poor one, then you don’t deserve to live.”

“But the ship,” Knud said once he had recovered from the septuagenarian’s candour. “The expedition…”

Goodnight nodded to the Russian crew that they would be along shortly, and gestured for Knud to sit on the bench opposite him. “When you reach sixty, if you have been lucky enough to evade cancer or anything equally unpleasant and debilitating, then the chances are you’re going to live a long life. It might be foreshortened by diet and poor choices…”

“Or an energetic fuck?” Knud suggested.

Goodnight humoured him with a smile and then continued. “If you reach your mid-sixties in good health, then you might – as did I and my

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