The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

EQALUSSUAQ ^{TIM MAJOR}

As Lea had predicted, Peter threw a tantrum the instant he opened the front door to find her standing on the step. As she scooped him into her arms, he shuddered against her. She had imagined that he would be taller, visibly older, in the twelve weeks that had passed. If anything, he seemed to have become lighter.

“Don’t fret, now,” she said. “Mum’s back.”

Peter buried his face into her shoulder, depositing mucus onto her cardigan. More like a newborn than a six-year-old. His blond hair had begun to sneak over the tips of his ears.

With her usual tact, Lea’s friend Karen had already stepped soundlessly into the lounge, leaving mother and son to their reunion. Lea closed the front door with her hip and entered Karen’s house. Peter regained his calm but still said nothing. He wriggled free of Lea’s embrace to sit close beside Karen on the sofa. Anyone might have assumed she was his mother, not Lea.

“So. Tell me,” Lea said.

Karen wrinkled her nose. “I won’t lie. It was tougher this time. But we had our fair share of fun. Didn’t we?” She rubbed Peter’s head, but he shrugged her away in order to glare at Lea.

“And at school?”

“Worse. More biting. Poor Daphne’s parents said they’ll call.”

Lea winced. Stains marked Peter’s cheeks, though he wasn’t crying. Old tears.

“Peter, listen,” she said, “What did we agree, before I left? About how you treat other children?”

Peter only shook his head. Based on past experience, it would take days for him to thaw. Until then, he would be impenetrable. An iceberg.

“That’s not all,” Karen said. “I couldn’t think how to tell you by email. Last week, Thursday, he ran away. I was frantic.” Her hands began to tremble. Lea glanced down and saw that her own hands shook a little, too. “The whole island helped me search for him. We found him in one of the refuge huts out on the causeway. He’d been trapped there for hours, Lea.”

A shudder ran through Lea’s body. She felt chill sting her skin, then seem to penetrate to her bones in an instant. “Thursday? The fourteenth?” she said, her jaw tight to stop her teeth chattering. “You’re sure?”

Karen shrugged. “Pretty sure.”

Lea examined her friend’s expression. There was concern there, but it was directed at Peter, rather than Lea herself. The news mustn’t have reached Britain yet. Or maybe the media didn’t judge the story as dramatic as it had seemed first-hand.

She glanced at Peter. What was the appropriate parental response to the news about his attempted escape from Lindisfarne? A mother ought to know, instinctively.

On the fourteenth of September, when she had slipped beneath the water—perhaps for the last time ever, she reflected now—the cold had seemed more absolute than it ought. She had felt a sudden shock of fear then, during that solo dive, easily comparable to the fear she experienced during the incident later that day. Perhaps it had been a response to danger back at home. Perhaps she had a maternal instinct, after all.

“You understand, don’t you?” Karen said. She was choosing her words carefully, too. Forcing herself not to scold Lea in front of her son. “He wasn’t trying to get away, so much as he was trying to get closer to what he wanted. He was trying to follow you.”

Lea made her excuses to Karen, with vague arrangements to meet later in the week. As she stepped over the threshold, Karen gripped her arm.

“I know it was an important trip for you,” she said. “I understand why you went. And it’s not that I mind having him here. You’re closer to me than my sister, and Peter’s like a son. But three whole months, Lea, and not a single phone call from you… I can’t do that again, okay? Not for a while.”

Lea nodded and shuffled into the street with her shivering child.

It was only when Peter had finally fallen asleep that Lea had the chance to check the contents of her duffel bag. She pushed aside the thick parka and dirty laundry to retrieve the hard black case beneath. Inside, six portable hard drives made a neat row. Throughout the journey, she had suffered from paranoia; all those weeks of work contained within something so easily lost. On the bumpy flight from Ilulissat she had woken shouting from a doze, certain that some atmospheric phenomenon had wiped the drives.

She booted her computer, slipped out the first drive, and ran a backup. She exhaled fully for the first time in days. Safe and sound.

When all of the backups had finished, she glanced towards the staircase. No sounds from Peter. Guiltily, she slipped on her headphones. If he yelled now, she wouldn’t hear it.

She selected a file at random and clicked play. A waveform appeared onscreen, reassuring in its dark fluidity. Her eyes narrowed as she concentrated on the skittering sound. Onscreen, a dark peak broke up and away, matching a corresponding sound in the headphones. She smiled. The call of a black-legged kittiwake. Her thighs had ached terribly after she had crouched for hours with her rifle mic pointed at the nest.

She chose another track. Instantly, her headphones filled with a burping, chuckling noise. She checked the filename against the handwritten description in her notebook. Earless harp seals, slithering on the ice as they huddled together.

She settled into the swivel chair, sipping wine as she browsed through the tracks. Her hands shook only a little now, the lingering fear subsiding. The tracks were all pristine. A month of good work.

The most recently-used drive was easily identifiable, as its surface was scuffed and scratched. When she had awoken in the hut on the fifteenth, she had insisted that it be found and brought to her immediately. When she had finally made herself understood to the Inuit guides who watched over her, and they had relayed the message to her colleagues, and the hard drive had been located, she had cursed at Nils for allowing it to be handled so roughly. The look on her producer’s face as he handed it over was easy to read. After what’s happened, his expression said, you’re worried about the work?

She had earned her reputation as a killjoy early on in the expedition. Of the seven-man team, she was the only one who refused to play along with the in-jokes about the island where they had been based for the first fortnight, insisting on using its Greenlandic title, Qeqertarsuaq, rather than the anglicised Disko Island. She had asked for the Earth, Wind and Fire to be turned down during the jeep ride from the airport. She had complained to Nils when someone had scrawled DISKO SUCKS in Tippex on one arm of her wetsuit. And when, on the first day of work proper, her first hard drive of sound recordings had been replaced with another containing only one track, a repeated twenty-second loop of the Bee Gees singing “Staying Alive,” she had thrown a tantrum that would have awed her six-year-old son.

She didn’t care then and she didn’t care now. She had the files.

She hooked up the most recent hard drive and selected the first track, labelled 14Sep16_001. Her two glasses of wine had left her a little drunk. She raised her hands like a conductor as the track played.

It began with a gulp. The sound of her own body slipping into the water, probably. She shivered now. Hadn’t the thought passed through her mind, at that moment, of Peter’s fate if she were to freeze there in Baffin Bay? Even at the time, she had recognised the thought as uncharacteristic. If she was being honest, she hadn’t thought about Peter a great deal, up to that point in the expedition. But being alone in icy water, far from assistance, might make anyone behave oddly. From underwater she had looked up at the towering iceberg above, its edges knife-sharp from its recent calving from the Jakobshavn glacier. Refraction had made it bend towards her. She had felt impossibly fragile.

Bubbling sounds followed. Her last exhalation before she had settled herself into position. As the bubbles ceased, the background sounds became more easily audible. Lea leant forward to turn up the amp.

The creaking sound reminded her of her grandmother’s rocking chair against wooden floorboards. Except there were layers beneath, too. A sighing, a throb of life. The quiet belch of bubbles released from somewhere in the depths and pushing along the underside of the iceberg before finding freedom at the water’s surface. The rumble and snap of the iceberg itself as its regions thawed or refroze. An embrace of womblike warmth that eclipsed the physical memory of the water’s icy chill.

It was good. A beautiful, living sound in its own right, as well as fulfilling producer Nils’ brief of demonstrating the rate of thaw for the TV documentary. Lea sipped wine and conducted the orchestra of creaks and burbles. It was good.

Even back then, floating twenty feet down, she had had the distinct thought, This is the best yet. Then, as she had stifled her shivers in order to hold the microphone tight and to track the fast-moving iceberg, This is the best work I might ever do.

At the time.

By lunchtime, during the team meeting at the tiny base situated north of Ilulissat, a new opportunity had presented itself. An achievement that might easily surpass the glacier groans.

The second camerawoman, Reeta, was first to notice the change in the Inuit guide, Sighna. She interrupted Nils’ summary of footage gathered that morning to rush over to Sighna and steady him, preventing him from toppling into the open brazier in the centre of the hut. Lea and the others watched on in silence as Reeta tried to grasp Sighna’s hands. He wrenched them away and pressed them to either side of his head. He shook as though he were trying to squeeze his skull. He hissed a word, again and again and again. Eqalussuaq.

Nils tried to speak to Reeta, but she waved him away. He returned to stand next to Lea, his arms folded. He had never been good at inaction. Some other members of the team moved away from Sighna and Reeta, too, similarly embarrassed.

“Eqalussuaq,” Nils whispered.

“What does it mean?” Lea asked.

“It’s a name,” Nils said. “Or two names, depending how you think about it.”

They watched as Reeta helped Sighna to sit and gathered rucksacks to make a cushioned throne.

Nils continued, “I read the name first in a book of Greenlandic legends. Kind of a cute one. Some old woman washed her hair in urine—I know, go figure—then dried it with a cloth, which then sailed away on the wind, into the ocean. It became Ekalugsuak, and its descendants, Eqalussuaq.”

The first-unit director, Terence, was listening. He stuck out his tongue. “So what’s the significance of this progeny of a piss-cloth, then?”

“It’ll be of interest to you, Terry, professionally speaking,” Nis replied. “Eqalussuaq is an animal. The Greenland shark.”

Lea saw Terence’s eyes widen. He turned to Reeta, still kneeling beside the Inuit guide, whose lips were moving even though his voice had quietened. “Hey. Hey. Ask him why he’s saying that word.”

Sighna looked up blearily as Reeta asked the question in Greenlandic. He lifted his hands from his ears, only for a moment. He spoke in a voice too low for Lea to hear.

Reeta turned. “He says it’s close. No, that’s not quite the word. I don’t know. Exalted? High up.”

“Shitting hell,” Terence said. “Meaning the Greenland shark is close? Does he know that for a fact?”

The guide was still speaking to Reeta, his lips trembling as he spoke. Reeta frowned and nodded, her palm raised to the man, perhaps as a signal for him to remain calm.

“What’s the deal?” Lea whispered to Nils. “What’s so exciting?”

Nils pressed his hand on his face, drawing it downwards until his jowls bounced. “It’s the biggest bastard out there. Twenty-plus feet and with the oldest living to two hundred years. It’s notorious, but partly that’s just because of the toxicity of the flesh—remember in the port bar last night, I told you the natives use the phrase ‘shark-sick’ to mean drunk?”

Reeta stood up. She glanced at Sighna, who had slumped back into the pile of rucksacks. “It’s all a bit of a jumble. My translation skills—” She blinked, perhaps registering the expressions of her team members. “Sighna says the shark coming close always affects him in this way. Says his head hurts, it’s hard to concentrate. I’m not sure I’m getting this right, but he’s complaining about something loud. Shouting. Maybe screaming.”

Terence held her by the shoulders. “And the shark? He thinks it’s nearby?”

“He’s positive. Although I don’t know why you’d treat that as—”

“Where?” Terence was already packing gear into a bag. He whistled to get the attention of the assistant director and another of the cameramen, who were deep in conversation at the far side of the hut.

“All the way back where Lea was this morning,” Reeta said. “Right at the foot of the Jakobshavn glacier.”

Terence and Nils exchanged glances. After a few moments, Nils shrugged his approval. “I’ll buzz the boat crew. We’ll meet them as close as we can get.”

Lea started gathering her kit, too. “I’ll show you the way down to the water.” She turned to Nils. “So this shark’s a catch, right? A rarity?”

Nils’ face had turned pale. “Like you wouldn’t believe. They almost never show their ugly faces. If one’s come close to the surface—”

She was first in the jeep, turning over the engine and gesticulating orders for the other team members to hurry.

Lea pulled off her headphones and listened for Peter. Still no sound. She scrolled down the filenames on the hard drive. The file size of the final track was enormous. Whoever had been operating it remotely from the boat must have let the recording run on, afterward, while she was being hauled out of the sea. Her index finger paused over the mouse button. She turned in her swivel chair and lifted the phone.

The call went to voice mail. She hung up and tried again. This time, after several rings, Nils answered.

“It’s Lea. I need to see it.”

“Lea? It’s—what time is it?”

“I don’t know. Late, I guess. Can you send me the footage?”

“Jesus. Are you alright?”

“I’m just not tired, that’s all. Got back this afternoon.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it. How are you? I thought they were going to keep you in longer.”

“It was only concussion, and I couldn’t bear it any longer. It was so cold. Hospitals are never cold.” Lea shuddered at the thought of her bare feet against the cold, tiled floor of the ward at Queen Ingrid’s Hospital.

A pause. “Have you spoken to anyone?”

“I’m not a talker. You?”

“Yeah. I mean, of course. My wife, kids, my two best friends. I spoke to Carl on the phone, too, as soon as I got home. Two days too late to be anywhere near the first to offer commiserations, of course, but—” Abruptly, the phone line hummed with static. It took a few seconds for Lea to realise that Nils was sobbing. “Fuck. Lea. Carl was—I don’t know. He refused to blame me. Said I’ll be welcome at her funeral. But… Reeta was part of my team. She was my responsibility. If it wasn’t my fault, then I don’t know who. And then there was almost you, too.”

“Almost.” Lea tested the word ‘blame’ in her mind, holding it up against herself and her own actions. “But I’m okay. I am.”

“I’m glad,” Nils said, sniffing. “I’m so glad. If you ever need anything, Lea…”

“I just need you to send me the footage.”

The jeep skidded to a halt at the coast. Lea leapt out, jogging to the shore, scanning for corpses. Terence ran at her side, barely able to contain his glee at the prospect of discovering a bear or seal, evidence of one of Eqalussuaq’s rare forays above the surface. During the jeep journey, Nils had pulled up Google image results of seals found with rips that corkscrewed around their bodies. As she had glanced at the photos, Lea’s only thought had been to wonder what the attack must have sounded like.

They found nothing but the waiting boat. Its three crew members took Nils aside to speak to him, before allowing any of the production team on board. Even then, they remained far quieter than usual.

For three hours, the boat bobbed in the waters at the foot of the Jakobshavn glacier. After the first hour, Lea’s eyes grew tired of staring at the roiling waters and her stomach ached from leaning over the rail. She gazed up at the glacier and imagined that she could make out its creep, pushing across the sea towards the boat.

When Reeta volunteered to go below the surface, Lea stood at her side and insisted that she should go too. She held the microphone before her like a staff, as if to demonstrate her strength. Nils protested, of course, but Lea made her case again and again. If Eqalussuaq wasn’t down there, then she could simply gather more iceberg and background recordings. And if it was, then wouldn’t it be a crime to have video footage but no sound?

Lea refreshed her inbox until the email appeared. She followed the link to the fileshare site. While she waited for it to download, she darted upstairs to fetch a blanket, then drank another glass of wine huddled within it. It was getting colder all the time.

She opened the final sound file, 14Sep16_044, then clicked the pause button before it started.

The video finished downloading. She set it running. The video was far from broadcast quality, as it was the backup from the remote feed the rest of the team had viewed on the boat, rather than the master files. After a dizzying flurry of pixel artefacts and indigo bubbles, the image cleared a little. She saw herself, barely recognisable in her wetsuit, identifiable only by the Tippex marks on her shoulder: DISKO SUCKS.

Onscreen, she held up three fingers. Here, now, Lea copied the pose, then two fingers, then one. Then she clicked the play button on the sound file.

Suddenly, the bubbles produced by her scuba equipment were accompanied by gulping sounds through the headphones. Lea leant close to the screen, trying to judge whether sound and image matched. The underwater Lea tapped on the microphone, twice, producing dull thuds. Perfect sync.

It was as she remembered. Reeta’s camera swung smoothly around, performing a three-sixty turn to end up facing Lea again. Lea gesticulated and Reeta spun quicker, losing her balance. Lea shook her head. She hadn’t meant to suggest that she had seen anything that should be filmed, she had only meant to tell Reeta to point the camera somewhere other than towards her.

The gurgling sound increased in volume, the only clue that Lea had allowed herself to descend further. Reeta’s camera dropped, too, and the indigo screen darkened. When the bubbles lessened once again, Lea could hear the low grumbles and creaks of the icebergs above.

It was difficult to remember how long they had floated there, searching the darkness for signs of the shark. Even now, watching onscreen, Lea lost track. Her eyelids drooped. If it hadn’t been so cold, she might have slept.

A flurry of bubbles alerted her. The video artefacted again as Reeta bounced the camera around. When it stabilised, Lea could see herself once more, in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, barely visible against the blackness of the lower depths. This tiny Lea was looking up and away from Reeta’s camera.

And then there it was.

Eqalussuaq.

Lea felt a swell of disappointment. Even with its entire length visible, the shark seemed squat and small, making a horizontal stripe across the centre-left of the screen. Its tail was only a few pixels in height. She tried to judge the distance between her and it. Ten feet? Five? Both of them seemed to fidget, an effect of the camera shaking.

The shark seemed to hover before Lea, maintaining a consistent distance. The effect was as though it were tethered to her like a balloon. Onscreen, Lea stretched out her arm, pushing the microphone towards the thing. New sounds came from the headphones. Whooshes and hisses. Its fins as it adjusted its position.

Then, both Lea and the shark seemed to grow. Reeta was moving closer. Brave girl. For the first time, Lea felt a stab of guilt about what happened next.

It would be any second now.

The shark edged backwards—she hadn’t realised that at the time—before it leapt towards Lea. Her arm lifted to protect her face, producing loud gulps as the weight of the water pushed back against the microphone. Then, onscreen, Lea’s head raised to look directly at the shark as it came.

She remembered the sequence of events clearly, up to a point. Her memories filled in what the grainy footage had failed to capture.

She remembered seeing the thin threads that trailed from each of its eyes. Nils had described them during the jeep journey—parasites that itched and blinded the shark.

She remembered the moment in which the shark seemed to travel above her, rather than towards her, before its jaw dropped open.

She remembered the distinct difference between its two sets of teeth: broad and square below, thin and pointed above. An ugly phrase had repeated in her mind: seal ripping.

She remembered opening her mouth just as the shark did, releasing her grip on her scuba mouthpiece, and letting loose a storm of bubbles that almost, but not quite, obscured Eqalussuaq, and she remembered shouting at it. The recording failed to capture the words, but she spoke them aloud, again, now.

“Not me! Take her!”

Abruptly, a squall of sound shrieked through the headphones. Lea spasmed and one arm knocked the glass from the worktop, spraying red wine onto the screen. She ripped the headphones from her ears.

Onscreen, the open jaws of the shark shuddered, as if the shriek came from within.

What was that? Instinctively, she glanced at the waveform. Its shape was smoothly bulbous, without peaks.

She bent the headphone cup to listen with one ear. The shriek began again, even louder than before. Even with the amp dialled down, she could hardly bear to hear it. Now she could make out a guttural growl beneath the shrill static.

She flung the headphones down again.

Onscreen, silent, the shark turned. Now it faced the camera full on.

Perhaps Reeta wasn’t so brave, after all. At the moment that it was clear that Eqalussuaq was accelerating towards her, she let go of the camera. The blue light of the screen flashed bright and dark, bright and dark, as the camera spun and dropped down, down, down.

Upstairs, Peter began to howl.

She slept badly, imagining herself in the depths along with the abandoned camera. Something was down there with her, sinuous and sleek. It was a bad joke, she thought when she woke. Eqalussuaq, of the family Somniosidae. Sleeper shark.

The bulky headphones comforted her. As she strode towards the island’s coast, she listened to the live recording stream from the binaural microphones fixed to the exterior of the earphone cups. Her footsteps redoubled in her ears, lagging fractionally behind the real world, as if following her.

Lindisfarne could be defined by its sounds. The wind tumbling from the sea and up the rock outcrops. The cries of the gulls and the whip of their wings. The dense, tactile calm within the oasis of the priory ruins. Captured and suitably arranged, it all belonged to Lea.

Her pace quickened as she headed through the sand dunes to the pebble beach, putting distance between herself and home. The Arctic recordings weren’t scheduled to be delivered to Nils for another week, after Reeta’s funeral, and indexing the sound files would involve only a handful of hours of work. That morning, when she had returned from delivering Peter to school, she had lingered in front of the computer, unable to bring herself to boot it up. Eqalussuaq’s shriek had still echoed in her ears.

She had decided to distract herself by concentrating on other projects. Her record label had shown only muted interest in her proposal of manipulated ambient recordings from Lindisfarne, but they hadn’t heard even the raw audio yet. Following post-production work in the studio, the tracks could be wonderful.

She was still crouching beside an abandoned boat, leaning in with the binaural mics to capture its dull scrape against the pebbles, when she noted the time. All those weeks away from home had left her insensitive to the timing of the tides. She would have to rush to make it across the causeway and back before the sea made it impassable.

As she turned from the shore a faint sound registered in her headphones. She turned to the boat again. Had its hull made that screech? She turned her head from side to side to locate the direction. It was coming from somewhere out at sea. Shrill. As the high-pitched noise grew in volume, she heard a deep grumble beneath, and she thought of icebergs. She stared out at the water, half-expecting to see a disturbance, something cutting through the waves as it approached.

Nothing. At least, nothing visible.

But the volume increased, all the same. The screech and roar became more insistent. Louder.

Angrier.

After another ten seconds she could no longer bear the shrieking. She pulled off the headphones and sprinted back towards the dunes.

Lea sat opposite Peter at the melamine table. He hadn’t touched his burger. There were dark shadows beneath his eyes. After the awkwardness of the apology to Daphne and her parents at the school gates, Lea had brought him to a McDonald’s in Berwick, but her desperation to maintain the pretence that it was a treat was wearing thin. Peter was a smart six-year-old. He understood that her delay on the island, and the high tide that now covered the Lindisfarne causeway, meant an enforced wait of four hours before they could return home.

“What if you’d got lost when you were away?” Peter said.

Lea flinched. Once again, she imagined herself freezing in Baffin Bay. If she’d found herself trapped down there, would she have prayed for Peter or would her final thoughts have been of her precious recordings?

“I had maps and people to show me around,” she said. She noted the petulance in her own voice.

“But you were far, far away.”

“Eat your food.”

Peter pushed away the greasy container. “Daphne said you weren’t coming back.”

“And that’s why you bit her?”

“I bit her because she’s a bitch.”

Lea sprung from her seat. “Don’t you dare use that kind of language!” She hovered beside him. What was she going to do, hit him?

Peter slumped further into his chair.

Lea sighed. It was fruitless to wonder where he’d learnt the word. She had no idea how he’d been living for the last three months. She would never have thought him capable of running away from home.

“Look,” she said, “I was far away, you’re right. But I found my way back to you, didn’t I?”

Peter’s sullen expression changed to one of quiet hope. “Like I’ve got a homing beacon? So you can always find me?”

“Exactly. I zoomed across the seas, from Greenland all the way back to here. And I won’t leave you again.” Instantly, she regretted the last part.

That night, after Peter had bathed, he insisted that Lea bring the portable radio into his bedroom. Karen, it transpired, had taken to leaving a radio on low volume, following a phase of interrupted sleep. The mutter of Radio 4 voices was unintelligible but soothing nonetheless, despite the static that wouldn’t quite abate, no matter where Lea tuned the dial.

Shadows in the depths. Smooth skin and sharp points.

Lea woke in a panic.

That shriek again. It pulsated, echoing around the walls and in her head.

She burst into the corridor and down the stairs. Behind her, Peter’s shouts mingled with the scream that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

The shrill sound was even louder as she neared her studio at the back of the house. She staggered with the pressure of it as she entered the room. The huge bookshelf speakers emitted waves of piercing white noise.

Lea lunged up at them. Once they were turned off, her body slumped in delayed shock.

She ignored Peter’s wails. In the kitchen she turned on the radio, then flicked it off as the squealing sound began again. The TV in the lounge gave the same result, though the picture was unaffected.

It was everywhere.

With shaking hands, she booted up the computer. She opened one of the iceberg sound recordings at random.

She saw what had happened immediately. Instead of a smooth waveform, the sound editor showed a single block of black, with only occasional slices missing, like shards calved from an iceberg. Tentatively, she lifted the headphones and pressed play. The scream was unbearable, even with the headphones held at arm’s length. The plastic buzzed and shook with the force of the sound.

She opened more and more sound files. They all appeared identical— masses of noise, black blots on the screen.

All of the recordings were gone. All of the sounds, eclipsed by a single shout. A shriek. A scream.

“No,” she whimpered. “Please. Anything but this.”

She staggered backwards. The loss of the recordings felt like grief.

She remembered how the sound had approached as she had stood on the shore of the island. A phrase from the day before echoed in her mind.

… across the seas, from Greenland all the way back to here…

She thought of Sighna, the Inuit guide, his hands clamped over his ears.

She thought of Eqalussuaq, its jaws wide. Its silent scream, back then. Its shriek, on the recordings.

Whatever she had picked up on her microphone, it hadn’t been a sound, not in the usual sense. It was something else. Something that she had trapped, or that had—what was the word? Hidden? No… burrowed. Torn and ripped and burrowed, hiding itself within her recordings.

And she had brought it home.

The bookshelf speakers began to rock. Lea shuddered. She could still hear the sound, though only faintly. She pulled the plug from the wall. The sound only grew in intensity.

Anger.

She felt an icy chill all over her body. The sound grew and grew and grew, dizzying, nauseating. It no longer came from the speakers. It seemed to be emitted by the walls, the air, her own skin.

“Stop!” she shouted. “Whatever you are, stop! Leave me alone!” Another phrase, the same one she had used when she had first encountered Eqalussuaq, pressed at her. “Not me!”

The scream stopped.

Lea waited. The calm felt like deafness. Tentatively, she plugged in the speakers and turned them on. Nothing.

Safe and sound.

With shaking hands, she booted the computer, then scrolled down to the first recordings of that final day in the sea. She selected the first file. A low, warm, creaking sound came from the speakers. The song of the iceberg had returned, pristine and ethereal, its wheezing groan continuing without interruption. No screaming, no anger.

She selected another recording made that same morning, then another. All were unimpaired, the clean, clear sounds matching the smooth waveforms on the screen.

Breathless, she gathered recordings together in the sound editor, overlaying and overlapping them, until the orchestra of soft moaning sounds grew into a single, overwhelming, glorious song. Bubbles rose around her. She felt warmth despite the chill. She danced slowly as if underwater.

Only one unwanted, alien sound penetrated through. Lea finally registered Peter’s complaints from upstairs.

As she entered his bedroom, her son reached up blindly with both hands.

“It’s okay,” Lea said, rocking him against her chest. “It’s gone.”

Peter said nothing. Tears trickled down his cheeks, making twin spots on her pyjamas. His open mouth worked from side to side. Lea remembered making the same motion herself, as the plane touched down and she tried to restore her hearing.

“Stop shouting,” Peter murmured.

Lea frowned. Was he dreaming?

But then he looked directly at her. His voice sounded far away. “It hurts so much, Mum. Make it stop.”

She watched him writhe, his hands pressed against his ears and his face pushed into the pillow. She felt a sudden certainty that it wouldn’t help.

Peter’s body was slack in her arms as she made her way downstairs. She stood holding him, before her computer, watching the undulating shapes of the waveforms on the screen. The iceberg recordings continued playing. Warm and heavenly.

She hesitated for several moments before laying Peter down on the battered studio sofa. Her hands wavered over the computer keyboard.

Peter’s mouth contorted with pain, a thin white line pressed tight as if withholding something trying to force its way out.

It felt like a choice. Save the recordings, or Peter. Eqalussuaq was demanding that she choose.

She understood that her hesitation was unforgivable. She understood that she would spend her life attempting to rationalise the fact that she had even considered the alternative.

She looked at her son.

She chose.

14Sep16. Select all.

She wept a little.

Delete.

Peter whimpered as Lea smoothed his hair, then pressed his head further into the sofa cushion. His body shivered and shook. Clearly, he was still in agony.

She yanked out the plug to the computer and clawed at its case.

In the lean-to beyond the kitchen she found a hammer and chisel. As she cracked through the casing of the computer she shouted and wailed, a sound almost as feral as the scream on the recordings. The chisel revealed the internal hard drive, then fractured it. Once it was in pieces Lea turned her attention to the portable drives. In her desperation she shattered them all.

If anything, Peter appeared to be suffering even more now. His knees pulled up to his chin. As he rocked back and forth, his entire body spasmed.

Then his white lips trembled. They parted, showing his teeth.

The scream of whatever had followed Lea from the Arctic burst forth. Peter’s head rattled from side to side with the effort of restraining himself against the force of the sound.

Lea gripped his hands. She pleaded.

But she understood. Destroying the recordings wasn’t all that Eqalussuaq demanded.

“It’s not him you want,” she said in a whisper. “It’s me.”

Peter’s eyes opened.

Lea gripped the wooden arm of the sofa.

It hit her. Creaking limbs, something bellowing, screams that knifed through the water.

She clamped her hands over her ears, without any effect. The shriek took swipes at her head and torso, threatening to send her toppling. Her body convulsed with the cold.

Peter recovered within hours.

Lea’s tinnitus would be permanent, the doctor said, though over time it transitioned from excruciating to deafening to a persistent, wavering drone.

She stood on the rock outcrop at dusk, facing out to sea. She watched a flock of gulls, concentrating on the shifting shapes that they formed, at first a ribbon, then a fat arrow, then a winding river.

She stretched her body upwards, tracking the flock, then winced at a pain in her stomach. She pulled her cardigan and T-shirt up. The thing had left her, but it had also left its mark. If it had ever been a real wound, one might have said it was healing fast. It was clear that the scar would remain, though—a single line of ripped, raw, pink flesh that corkscrewed around her abdomen.

A wave curled into existence and bundled itself towards the shore. Once she might have worn her binaural microphones to capture the sounds of the wind and waves, but the ringing in her ears interfered with the recordings. Now the sounds of the island served only as a temporary mask over the hisses and shrieks.

Above her, for a few seconds, the flock of birds formed a new shape— something sinewy and snub-nosed. It flexed and flicked its tail as it swam across the darkening sky.