The Wilful Eye (16 page)

Cloud plumes changed colour in the west as they reached a battered street sign and turned into Mawson Lane. The high industrial fencing continued, unbroken. Gerda touched the dog's head and they trudged on. The cutting winds whipped harder and an army of snowflakes wrapped girl and dog in a vortex.

The storm was so fierce that Gerda walked smack into a high white wall with the texture of iceblocks. Groping along it, she found a set of tall steel gates. Spy cameras were mounted high along the walls and near the gate, set to scan from about three metres out, not at the base of the wall. She knew a thing or two about spy cameras from working with the rubber girl. Gerda felt Kai's presence keenly. Perhaps the storm might be their friend, cloaking them from watchers.

The gates were clamped shut, so Gerda considered climbing the wall, shrugging off her backpack and burying it in the snow. But she might as well try to scale an ice cliff. She searched for hand-holds, but there were none on the sheer, slippery surface. Gerda sucked her numb fingers, thinking furiously.

‘Okay. We'll have to walk along the fence line and try to find a gap,' she told Rudolph. She groped along the perimeter, almost certain the whole compound was enclosed by the wall of giant iceblocks. Then Gerda heard a heavy scraping sound – the gates were grinding open! It could be her only chance.

‘Drop!' she hissed to the dog. Running low and close to the wall, she sank into the snow as close to the gates as she dared. A cloud-white sports car in snow chains throbbed through the gates. Gerda's breath caught in her throat – the ice girl sat at the wheel. Supremely confident, apparently careless of anything in her way, she looked neither left nor right. As the car cleared the gates they began lurching closed. Gerda dived between them, just as they snapped shut. Poor Rudolph nosed and whined on the other side of the bars.

No. That was good. He was her sentry, although she wished desperately the dog was beside her.

Her stomach growled and her nose ran, and she tried to remember when she or the dog had last eaten or drunk. She approached the grand entrance, suddenly weary.

It must be a trick. The door was creaking open, slamming shut, the plaything of angry gusts. She must hurry: the ice queen had gone, but for how long? Steeling herself, Gerda slipped into the entry hall. She waited and listened, pulse thudding in the sudden quiet. The interior was vast and blinding white, the floors slick and slippery as a skating rink, opaque ice-blue. Gerda's senses screamed, begging her back, but she was compelled to go on. It was risky, it was illegal, this breaking and entering into what must be the stronghold of criminals. The vast space offered no cover, but Gerda spotted a side door and eased through it.

She was grabbed and shoved to the floor. Just like that. Blindfolded, she felt eager fingers pawing her, then a sharp pain in her neck. The cold made her whole body rattle. Just as abruptly, they were gone, ripping away the blindfold. She had no idea who they were, or what they'd done.

Then she was caught in a kaleidoscope of shapes and colours and sounds, textures and smells, assaulting every organ, blinding her brain, massaging her body and making her heart whirr. Colours, at first soft and glowing and luminous, grew fiery and fierce. Gerda looked around her wildly, but knew she couldn't identify any danger because her brain was being tricked. Sights and sounds shrieked too loudly for attention, and her plan to find her way out again was slipping from her grasp. She was a prisoner inside this room of sublime torture forever. She felt herself churning down a waterslide, body being flung through crazy twists and turns. She thought fleetingly of Kai and fell through another doorway that narrowed into
a tunnel, leading down a darkened hallway decorated in the colours of futility, greys and fawns and black, with sharp red daubs. Nowhere led out and nothing gave hope. Needing a candle or a torch to see by, Gerda groped her way forward, trying to remember where she'd been going, and why. She hung suspended in elongated time, and struggled to remember what her dream was: to ever leave this room, or just to take another step? At last she was ejected, back onto the freezing floor, dumped with the miserable knowledge that they knew she was here, so she must have failed already. Gerda felt snowflakes settling over her and welcomed their cuddling warmth. They kissed her face and hugged her neck and wrapped her arms, gradually heating her body. She dozed and drifted, longing to travel down a tunnel into sleep. Then she jerked awake – it was a snow blanket. She remembered the Lapp woman's warning, and knew she had to stir.

Gradually Gerda made out shapes.

Yes. This was the drug laboratory she'd expected. She heard a broadcast game in a distant room, the noise competing with music. The dazzling white of the room clashed with its dirty apparatus – filthy trestle tables and glass tubing, bunsen burners and cutting boards, more grey-stained than white. Drumloads of chemicals. Yellow anthills of powder with the glow of fake jewels or coarse crystals. Ugly sparkling bling. Yes. She had found the lair of the ice queen, and it was deserted. She hadn't expected that.

Gerda caught a movement in the corner of her eye. Gor- illas with guns? Lethal semiautomatics? She crouched and squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, warding off bedtime monsters. Perhaps they wouldn't see her if she couldn't see
them
. But nobody came. She crept on. Gerda found the room where the game was blaring, saw three goons asleep on couches, snoring, scrawled with tattoos. The room was thick with smoke or fog. Then, from a distant corner of the drug lab, came a movement faint as a flutter of wings. This time she knew by instinct – Kai. She crept towards it, picking her way through the trestles and drums and tubing.

But it wasn't Kai. Gerda gasped. A strange, shrivelled creature cowered there, covering its head with its hands. It looked like an underweight gnome or a hairless monkey, and its skin was grizzled and dull. It peered up from under its hands out of eyes that were dead tree hollows. Transparent blood vessels crisscrossed its chicken-bone arms, and its lips and fingers were blue. Its forehead wrinkled as it grimaced and she saw its receding gums. Gerda held her breath – was it going to raise the alarm? But it stayed mute. It watched her through empty eyes that would haunt her for ever after, eyes she'd seen somewhere before, but dead of hope. The same eyes as Grandma's, after Kai had left home. Gerda felt her heart convulse in
her chest – it
was
Kai. She reached down to help him to his feet, and he flinched away from her, his skin as cold as stone.

His fingers closed on a long, sharp icicle, and Gerda stepped back: was he so much the ice queen's plaything that he might try to kill her? But his fingers only quivered. Perhaps it would be kinder to kill
him
.

‘Ugly,' he cackled.

Gerda felt the wobbling jelly of her heart go sliding down a crevasse. She studied the icicles clustered in front of Kai. Strangely, they seemed to shape letters.

eter . . .

Was he trying to make a message?

Tears rolled down Gerda's cheeks and the creature that was Kai stared up at her, bewildered and detached.

A tear plopped onto his face. In disbelief, she saw one eye widen and glisten, then the other. In those eyes where hope had died, a light was slowly kindling. Something glittered and echoed as it fell to the floor – a tiny shard of glass, ejected from his eye. The shattered mirror from the party! Gerda picked up the fragment and saw her own face, shockingly distorted. She caught the reflection of Kai, the well-built friend she remembered. But the same wrinkled creature stared up at her. Now she knew why her friend had hated her and fled. Lodged in his eye, that shard of mirror had distorted the way Kai saw the world. Everything beautiful had seemed ugly, and everything crooked, true.

The eyes gleamed huge. At last Gerda glimpsed the Kai she'd missed, and as her tears fell, fresh blood bloomed on his chest. His skin was mottled marble and his lips were ink-stained blue. How to warm him?
Fight cold with heat.
Impulsively, Gerda gathered the bird-wing shoulders and kissed Kai full on the lips. They were cold as steel.

A thin glass dagger ejected itself from his chest and fell, the sound a spoon might make. Another shard of the mirror! It had frozen all feelings from his heart.

A long sigh of recognition escaped Kai, and rosy pink crept from his lips across his face.

‘Gerda,' he breathed.

Gradually the fragile body grew warm. A smile spread over Kai's face, lighting it in the way that sunrise warms the world. He was testing his arms like pulleys, struggling to move the icicles, to shape the word that obsessed him.

etern
. . .

Filled with a sadness she couldn't name, Gerda wondered how she might break the spell of futility that bound him.

The inexorable growl of an avalanche approached them, growing thunderous. Gerda heard a dog bark, and all the air seemed to freeze in the room. A shape solidified out of blinding white light.

The ice queen. Gerda struggled to breathe.

Somewhere close, Rudolph growled a bloodcurdling growl.

Kai whimpered, and Gerda sensed him scrabbling near her feet, rearranging the icicles frantically. Gradually her eyes made sense of the chaos. The ice queen loomed enormous, fury sculpting her features, eyes sparking. Gerda found herself staring into the maw of the snow wolf. Her heart shrieked as she saw the ice queen lifting something – a syringe.

‘I should have known it wouldn't work. Not on you,' the ice queen said. Her voice was like crackling frost.

Gerda stared – the syringe was
empty
. Understanding flashed into her brain – she'd been caught by the goons and jabbed. She was supposed to wander the kaleidoscope room forever, or if she found the exit . . . succumb to the snow blanket.

The ice queen's rage shimmered and she hurled the syringe away. Gerda recoiled.

The shuffling near her feet intensified. Kai's fingers worked feverishly, shifting the icicles.

‘I promised you the world to spell out that word,' the ice queen told him, her voice a deathly hiss.

Gerda sensed the outcome balanced on a knife-edge.
Fight cold with heat.
Then she understood with a certainty that made sense of everything. She heard her own strangled voice say: ‘Kai, I love you.'

He looked up at her, blinking. He'd formed the word with the icicles.

It glowed.
eternity
.

At last, Kai scrambled to his feet. His hand in Gerda's felt soft and warm. A sob escaped her, because she guessed the deadly puzzle.

Eternity
: she'd arrived just in time. Had Kai formed the word with his heart frozen, in the thrall of the ice queen, he'd have been hers for all time. Instead he'd spelt the word waking, and was now free. And free to love Gerda, if he chose.

Eternity
, her heart sang. Now Kai might live again.

The ice queen's scream summoned all the searing winds from the Poles, all the cutting sleet and chilling blasts. She smashed the enchanted word, snatched up an icicle and pointed her dagger at Gerda's chest.

Gerda's peasant heart pounded and terror jolted through her. The snow wolf was upwind and mad with her scent. She floundered through the snow, lungs burning. She leaped for a pine branch, fingers too numb to grasp. Sobbing, she slipped, her legs bleeding, and the snow wolf circled.

So this was how it ended . . . but Kai might escape.

In an eye-blink everything changed. Eerie wailing rent the air and a flurry of movement blurred Gerda's vision. Rudolph was clamped to the ice queen's arm. She struggled but the dog hung on gamely.
Fight cold with heat.

The ice queen's voice screamed of smashed ambition, frozen souls and broken dreams. She mobilised her infantry of battering hail and jagged icebergs, her fiercest storms and killing blizzards.

The icicle quivered between the crumple of dog and ice creature, glinting bolts of lethal white light. Noise quavered and crystallised into a wild haunting howl, and Gerda saw blood spurting blue from the ice queen's breast.
In the struggle the icicle had been rammed into the ice queen's ribs.

Her army of snowmen faltered, and her sea glaciers groaned and fissured. The air about her keened until an aurora flamed in the sky.
Before you freeze you burn
. The riot of colour gradually flickered and dimmed. Rudolph lay still, red staining his ruff. A puddle of blue ink pooled on the floor. The ice queen had fled.

Gerda ran to the dog and hugged him. He scrambled up and shook himself. Gerda checked his neck and chest quickly – the wound was only shallow.

Still Kai stood stunned. Gerda peered into the room where the goons slept on, but nothing stirred, and now she realised nobody there would ever crawl off the couch.

She took Kai's hand, knowing he still struggled to make sense of his surroundings, a sleepwalker suddenly woken.
I love you
, her heart sang.

But the words rang in her ears unanswered, and she saw she hoped for too much.

‘Come on, Kai,' Gerda sighed, taking his hand, wondering if the Kai she longed for would ever come back. Would ever be capable of love. ‘Let's go home.'

As they walked outside, she felt warmth touch her skin for the first time in weeks. The sun was out, and the snow was melting. She sensed that sometime soon, this unnatural winter would end.

At last Kai spoke. ‘Gerda, you woke me from a dream.'

She waited.

‘I dreamed I was in a long, sad queue of people, shuffling forward. The men were wearing hats. We were each given a bowl of soup. As they gave us the soup they asked: “Where will you spend Eternity?”'

Eternity
. Gerda thought of the statue-man in the old-time hat. It was starting to make sense. The Eternity Man had survived the soup kitchen, and it had inspired him to save souls. You chose your own eternity, and you could go to heaven or hell.