The Chilling by Riley James

Author:Riley James [Riley James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2024-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

21

The ice cliffs rose straight out of the water, complete with mock turrets at the top and lined ridges like brickwork. To Sally, they looked like the walls of an ancient burial place, a white sepulchral city. She had no doubt that this frozen piece of land had interred many a human body over the years, including a number of heroic early explorers and maybe some of the later ones too. It was like Bill had said the week before—there were a hundred ways to die out here.

Sally was in a hurry to affix a few more tracking devices before the weather set in. She’d sent Kit back to the station to start the data analysis. Only a few seals had hauled out at the study site that morning, so their work had been slow. Sally just needed to tidy up a few things before she joined her; she’d be done in five minutes.

The wind picked up her open coat from the bottom, flapping it noisily about her back and shoulders. She shivered and did her best to re-zip the coat with clumsy mittened hands. Grey clouds hung low in the sky, permitting only the thinnest strip of pale blue above the glaring white expanse. She tried to concentrate on the task at hand, but her mind kept returning to the conversation with Kit that morning.

‘You sound really paranoid,’ Sally had said, throwing a nervous side glance at her friend on the ice.

‘Maybe.’

‘No one else is worried about Nick being here, you know,’ said Sally with a smile. ‘You’re the only one making a fuss.’

‘I know, I know,’ said Kit. ‘It’s like he’s bewitched everyone somehow. No one has a bad word to say about him. Even Prudence was telling me the other day what a perfect gentleman he is—a “perfect gentleman”, her exact words!’

‘Wouldn’t have thought that was a compliment, coming from Prudence,’ muttered Sally, fiddling with a device.

‘I just don’t understand why everyone is so keen to embrace him, so intent on having a laugh with him, when twenty-three of his crewmates are possibly dead or dying out there on the ice. It seems macabre and cold-blooded. Am I the only one who thinks that? Why does everyone seem to have forgotten about the Petrel crew?’

Sally was aware that at Australian Antarctic Division headquarters, finding the crew was the top priority. While there were no longer any icebreakers in the region, at Davis Station helicopter pilots were still carrying out search operations whenever the weather permitted. The media continued to speculate about what had happened to the ship and how so many people could have disappeared in an age of global satellite systems. But as far as topics of conversation at Macpherson went, people rarely mentioned the expeditioners, who’d been missing for thirty-nine days.

‘They haven’t forgotten them,’ said Sally. ‘It’s just that it’s not humanly possible to keep up that level of grief and concern for weeks on end, you know. Everyone has a natural aversion to unhappiness. They want to get back to happy, so they want to think the best, to hope for the best.

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