“I’m not taking them back with us,” said Striker.

  “As if you have a—” The Dame and her many voices cut out.

  There was only one place she could be. The damn thing had yet to collapse. Maybe it never would. Maybe the grotto was simply cleansing itself, waiting for the next round of visitors to arrive, beings it could infuse with the horror of what had happened on this island, the bloody hollow dented in the floor fully thawed.

  The Dame was right. Striker did know what had happened down there. Maybe she had known ever since her very first vision in the cabin when she’d picked up the ax. The silver blade lopping off the sick man’s entire hand though only the tips of a few fingers were frostbitten. The grotto wasn’t just some storage pantry. It was a graveyard. The long white bone she’d pulled from the floor hadn’t belonged to a seal or even a whale. Limb by limb the men had killed each other off. They had pared each other down like dying trees, the severed parts thrown in the hoosh. In his soiled leather mask the doctor keeping himself and his lackeys alive by mutilating the sick and the unyielding and blaming it on frostbite or infection. Hacking off an entire arm or leg at the first sign of injury though the patient might have fully recovered with the right care. And all the while the doctor acting as if the men should be grateful for his intervention. With each surgery telling the unlucky patient in his thick brogue it’s fur yer ain gude, aye. The silver hatchet rising hungrily in the air until the hand that wielded it was the only hand left.

  How many times had Striker and Ama been told some decision was for their own good? Learning to swim. Going to church. Moving to Zinnia Trace. Anytime the world tells you something is for your own good, a road your life could have traveled gets erased. After that, you can never know what might have happened. All you can do is keep going.

  The fog thinned just enough. The child hadn’t gone far. She was standing only a few feet away on a ledge overlooking the crater. Her face stony as ever. Striker felt her own legs shake as she approached the edge. She had to move fast while the child was still visible.

  “Lucy,” she whispered, extending her hand. “We have to go.” Only the beating of her heart infused the moment with a sense of time.

  The rat pressed itself flat on the girl’s shoulder. It looked like it was gearing up to pounce. Finally the child reached out and took Striker’s hand. It was surprisingly warm. Striker realized the little girl was the first person she’d willingly touched since the accident. She was startled by the comfort it gave her.

  “Merrily merrily merrily,” sang a voice. “Life is but a dream.”

  The Dame stepped out of the fog. Her skin shimmered, her whole body bursting with an unearthly light. Striker knew it wasn’t the ocean she was hearing swelling in the distance. It was the sound of the old gal’s heart sloshing behind her ribs. The organ enlarged and swollen, the thing brimming with water. The old-fashioned word for that was dropsy, wasn’t it? Of course. As the island thawed, Jane Foley was filling up. The Antarctic dead were seeping in through her pores, hungry to be carried home. She was almost to capacity. They were drowning her and she didn’t even know it, an army of icy wraiths shape-shifting all over her body.

  The Dame stepped closer. Her form flickered. Face after gaunt face rising to the surface. Suddenly the features of a young man stabilized on her skin. Instinctually Striker shielded Lucy with her body.

  The man was small in stature and rail thin, his stick-like arms outstretched. The man’s hair shorn close, his scalp nicked and scabby.

  “Please,” he said, voice hoarse as if he’d been screaming.

  It was the woman who had stowed away at the turn of the last century to be with her beloved. “We’ve been waiting,” pleaded the woman. “Our only hope of home is you.”

  Suddenly they were all visible, the mist teeming with their spectral forms. As many as forty men dressed in rags, beards ratty and gray. They were the dead of the island, the ones who’d been stranded and left desperate. A menacing figure stood at the front of the group. The man a full head taller than the rest. His face smooth and without expression, his eyes barely visible behind the slits in his mask. The leather stippled with blood.

  It was the doctor. The man who had performed surgery even when only a bandage was called for, hacking off arms and legs, butchering the sick and even the healthy who questioned his authority.

  “Kin ye draw oot the leviathan wi’ a hook? Or his tongue wi’ a cord ye let doon?” he declared. A terrible smell issued from his mouth. Spit glistened on the two yellow teeth sewn in the leather. “Kin ye pit a hook in his snoot? Or bore his jaw through wi’ a thorn?” The man was obviously insane, the mask his only vestige of being human. It disguised the gaping hole in him. All things divided by zero are zero. Striker knew if her own mask ever fell away, she would find herself wedded to the void. Like everyone she’d ever encountered, she’d been wearing it so long she didn’t even remember tying it on.

  The wraiths were closing in. The specters didn’t seem to walk so much as glide. An army of Antarctic dead moving with the mindlessness of glaciers. It was her they wanted and not the child. Already the woman who had disguised herself as a man was within arm’s reach. She grabbed Striker’s wrist, her grip like being kissed by both fire and ice.

  “Please don’t leave us here,” said the woman. Striker ripped her hand away. The woman’s mouth twisted into a snarl. “If it wasn’t for us, you’d already be dead,” she growled. “We gave you shelter. We fed you.”

  Striker knew what it would mean to merge with this broken woman. She would be left with only a distorted version of herself. The Antarctic dead were slavering to become corporeal again. They needed a host. They needed her. They wouldn’t be denied. Maybe it wouldn’t be all that different from life on Zinnia Trace. Being stuffed with other people’s stories, their beliefs.

  Suddenly the army of wraiths folded back into the fog. La Grande Dame strode forward gripping a shillelagh. The old gal strolled along like a woman out for a Sunday promenade. Dapperly picking the walking stick up and placing it on the pitted earth. “So many terrible things happened here,” she said as she circled Striker and the little girl. “And just think. This used to be the most pristine spot on earth.”

  “But we did this,” said Striker. “Whatever this is?” She waved around at the glittering landscape. “We carried it down here inside of us.”

  “Speak for yourself,” scoffed the Dame. Without warning she hurled the empty wine bottle through the fog. It whizzed past Striker’s head and smashed on a nearby rock. Voices began to echo in the mist.

  “Veronique.” The woman who’d been concealed as a man stepped forward again. Striker could see the woman’s face shining through the Dame’s, the woman interposing herself on the Dame’s body. The vision gave a sad smile. “When Doctor came for it, what else was I to do?” Striker felt her heart tremble. “I was weak and alone,” the woman said. “The only one who walked by my side was the Lord and in my hour of need the Lord stayed silent.” The woman disappeared in a thick band of fog, the Dame along with her. Her words echoed through the haze. “He said it was best for everyone,” the woman lamented. “He told me it would be like—”

  Doctor’s voice filled the mist. “Jesus feedin’ scran tae the wee masses. Blessed are they that are hungry, for they’ll be filled up.”

  The word was out of Striker’s mouth before she could stop herself. “Monster,” she whispered.

  “How dare you?”

  The Dame came charging out of the fog. She loomed ten feet tall. The stick gleamed in her hand. They were shape-shifting all over her skin. Her face distorted with faces. She had become porous. There was nothing solid left of her.

  Why had Striker ever thought of her as old? It had been the silvery hair. She was young, decades younger than the Baron. He had said as much while floating in the hot spring. There was even a possibility she was barely fifty.

  Striker gripped Lucy’s hand and turned to run. A sinkhole roared open at their feet. She managed to pivot. Their only hope was to head directly into the fog and cloak themselves in it. But she couldn’t even see her own legs let alone a path of escape down the volcano.

  “An’ Ham saw the nakitness o his faither an’ telt his brithers,” intoned the Dame. “An’ Shem an’ Japheth took a cloak, an’ laid it oan baith their shooders, an’ went backwaird, an’ covered the bare bits o’ their faither. An’ Noah wauked up, an knewed whit his younger son had dune.”

  Striker had never understood that Bible story. White Christians had used it for generations to justify their treatment of Black people. How did Noah’s getting drunk and passing out warrant Ham and his descendants being cursed into chattel slavery?

  It doesn’t.

  The mist was working against her. Striker crept along feeling the earth with her toes. At one point, she turned and pulled the child closer as she held a finger to her lips, signaling for quiet.

  Only it wasn’t Lucy’s hand she was holding.

  Striker couldn’t even scream as the woman with the shaved head drifted out of the fog. The woman didn’t say a word, just opened her mouth. A white string appeared between her lips. It was too awful but there was nothing else to do. Striker reached out and pulled.

  An amaryllis bloomed from the woman’s mouth. The blossom like a white trumpet. “Little ones to Him belong,” cooed the woman as she rocked an invisible baby in her arms. “They are weak but He is strong.”

  A chorus of voices filled the day. There was Trish and Doug calling that summer night long ago, begging the sisters to come home. There was the little girl at the pool, asking why she was dirty; the teenaged swim instructor’s laugher as he tossed Ama in the water. The old nun with the rheumy eyes telling the sisters about the urges the devil plants in every young girl’s heart. The nun warning them that if the girl should give in and throw herself down at Satan’s feet, her body will no longer be hers.

  The Dame’s voice carried the loudest. “How do you live with yourself?” she crowed. “At least I left my son at the hospital.”

  Striker felt something burning the skin of her throat. She touched the little gold cross to—

  << Everywhere the sound of children singing in the midnight hour. Outside the snow falling cold and blameless. Striker and Ama are sneaking back down to the basement room under the stairs, the humidifiers roaring like a storm. The human body is amazing. What normally takes hours, even days, can happen in thirty minutes when a teen girl is desperate enough. And all too often she is desperate enough. Teen girls giving birth at the prom, in the toilet at a gas station, in the silence of her room. Afterward willing herself to get up and walk, go back to her life.

  And later that day when the knock arrives at the door of the big white house at the top of the hill on Zinnia Trace, the two sisters are lying in bed. One sister quietly singing to herself while far away in a beautiful dream. The other sister fearful and cunning, a gash in the palm of her hand where her sister accidentally slashed it as the two worked to cut the umbilical cord.

  Quickly the bloody towels are found. Striker can’t look Trish and Doug in the eye. So many voices are coming at the two sisters, so many questions though no one is listening. No one ever has. They already know how this story ends. It was written before the sisters even arrived a decade earlier when everyone was assigned their roles to play.

  Places, everyone!

  And so it happens. Her sister is led away. Ama refuses to be seen by a doctor. Says take me straight to juvie, begins to shriek in that way she has. The pitch so high it gets inside your head and you want it to stop, will do anything it says to make it stop, and so they do. Within hours Ama is dead. No one even checks her body. They are all so sure about who she was and the nature of what happened. The little blue-red loaf lying on the floor. The umbilical cord full of blood running up into >>

  “I had a baby,” Striker whispers. “I abandoned it Christmas Eve. Told my sister it was our baby, her and me. Ama and Veronique forever. Told her we had to get rid of it. Said it was for our own good, that we had to look out for each other because no one else would. She didn’t say a word. Just scooped it up and played her part. She was arrested and taken away, where she killed herself. Nobody ever suspected.”

  Striker braces for the crushing wave of sorrow to break over her. After that interminable night, her grip on reality loosened. From then on she shaped her life to fit the story the world believed. Striker the model daughter. Ama the sister voted Most Likely to Fuck Up. But after Ama’s death, it was too much for one psyche to bear, so Dark Striker came and went as needed, more and bigger swaths of her life swallowed by fantasy and projection and then unexpectedly this white continent offering itself up like a mirror in which travelers like Shackleton and Scott and even Striker might finally encounter their true selves, the ice a vast fun house reflecting her life back to her, the things done and the things she did in the name of surviving.

  Striker is alone on an unnamed island somewhere in the Antarctic peninsula, the sun unflinching, and she is coming to realize she can barely see, eyes burning as if rubbed with salt. Slowly, silently she searches the haze for Lucy, not even daring to call out. This must be how the child’s fathers felt, the kid constantly ghosting them. But now isn’t the place for fun and games. The Dame is somewhere out there in the hot white mist and she’s not alone. The air eerily sparkling. Every soul that has waited more than a hundred years for deliverance is pouring its way into the old girl’s bloodstream, her heart as if infested with worms. Striker knows now what the old woman saw out there on the Southern Ocean when the winds picked up and sent a kayak crashing through Percy’s skull. From out of the void Jane Foley heard the long-forgotten dead calling her to be their vessel, saw their faces in the waves. Wherever she is, her strength is becoming inhuman. The last dregs of her soul are losing out to whatever is thawing in the ice.

  Terror coils in Striker’s belly. Everywhere voices capering on the wind. Even in her blindness, figures appear in the vapor. The faces of starving men in whom the desperate animal has been revealed. After everything she’s done, she can hardly blame them.

  The fog begins to shimmer. On its surface scenes appear like a film on a movie screen. Tableaux of bloodshed and murder. A man hacking another man’s fingers off over a discrepancy in the size of his bowl of hoosh. Everything falling apart with the unexplained disappearance of their captain. Men crawling around on their naked bellies in the Antarctic night roaring madly at the moon. When the first cries of a baby come issuing out of the earth, the pandemonium is indescribable. Skeletal men pouring out of the cabin like ants and racing toward the grotto, those still capable of it drooling.

  The Dame shoots out of the mist. The old lady lifts the stick in her newly massive hand. Striker can see the blood rippling all over her body. Some of the wounds are ancient. Some new like the one on her bottom lip from gnawing on her own flesh.

  “I’ll ask one more time,” says the Dame. “Who did you hurt to get here?” But when Striker turns to face her, the place where the Dame was standing is empty.

  As a child, Striker learned from the nuns that in order to be saved, you have to see Christ’s face in everyone you meet. Already she can feel the shillelagh smashing through her skull. But don’t they also have to see Him in me, she thinks.

  “Hullo there.” The old girl reappears, gripping a shattered bottle by its neck. “Care for some wine?”

  Striker backs away but the Dame pops up behind her.

  “You know what your problem is?” The old woman leans over her shoulder and caresses Striker’s cheek with an icy finger. “Everything about you is wrong.” She disappears again, a chimera in the wind. Where the Dame touched her, the skin on Striker’s face is blackened with frostbite.

  Striker feels herself being herded toward the edge of the crater. More than once the walking stick comes smashing into the side of her head only to vanish at the last second, her skull kissed by a blast of icy wind. A weariness settles over her. There is nothing else to do. She sinks to her knees. She doesn’t know what is wanted of her and is tired of guessing. Hands up. Hands behind your back. Lie down. Up against the car. What’s your name? Shut up.

  The Dame strolls victoriously out of the fog. “You shouldn’t have come here,” she says in her patchwork of many voices. “You don’t belong.” With both hands she raises the shillelagh one last time high overhead. “You should have tried harder to get along,” the chorus that is the Dame sings. “You shouldn’t have been you.”

  Suddenly the winds shift. The island fills with the sound of rending. Bone from bone, rock from rock. The clamor crescendos until it’s unbearable, an event pregnant with seismic force. All Striker can think is the island is finally sinking into the sea. There are no winners. That’s what early twentieth century explorers discovered the hard way. Dominion over the earth begins with dominion over each other, but ultimately it’s a false power. It leaves you with nothing on which to build your church.

  The Dame and her many faces look confused. Striker closes her eyes and listens, quietly raising both hands in the air.

  There. Under the clang of total destruction. A single note. Clear and bright.

  Something falls out of the sky, the object massive as a bank vault. It lands squarely on la Grande Dame’s head, sending the person once known as Jane Foley to the ground.

  Not a drop of blood is spilled. Only water gushes out of the body as though it has sprung a leak. Two yellow teeth and a tattered scrap of leather lie in a sour-smelling puddle. Quickly the earth soaks up the fluids.