THE FOLLOWING TEXT CONTAINS: VIOLENCE, CANNIBALISM AND UNREALITY.
Jim hasn’t felt her fingers in days.
Maybe it’s been weeks.
It’s probably been hours.
Time blends together up here in the cold. The ice, the snow, the rock, the sky. It’s all a white canvas with nicks and divots, with air that burns your skin with the sun and the whipping wind. It’s blinding. There’s nothing out here. There’s nothing she can see past the sun dogs reflecting whiteness sharp into her eyes. There’s nothing that moves outside the edges of her vision. There’s nothing she can hear but the sharp shuffling sound of her footsteps kicking up loose debris, mostly snow… often ice… sometimes bone.
Crunch.
This sound might as well alert predators around of her existence, she really should be more worried about that.
More notably when she lifts the ball of her foot, she finds a face staring back.
It’s Annabelle because it’s always Annabelle staring back. She doesn’t cry anymore, but she used to cry a lot at the beginning. Jim shuts her eyes and tries not to think of the squirming hunger in her gut.
She looks out of a tiny porthole of the ship that once floated along with the floes in the black water. The porthole reveals little, sometimes dips beneath the waves and through the sun casting murky green, a shape emerges, like an ink blot. Like an illness… like a blindness staining her vision. Jim’s heart races blood through her body so hot and sharp she begins to sweat and breath like she’s just run several kilometres.
The bleeding ink in the water forms teeth, a maw that opens up and rushes forth to smash against the glass—
She stands.
“Captain?” The voice of her first mate breaks her focus. She looks at him, watches his expression shift from something to concern. He says, “Are you alright, sir?” Prompted by the way she turns from him to the black waves licking against the porthole.
“Never better, Samson. Never better.”
Jim’s been walking for days. Probably. The sun doesn’t set to give her that sort of indication. It moves, rotates in the sky just enough to know that she’s still alive, that this isn’t all some sort of mirage or hallucination made up by her mind. Though, upon reflection, typically the sun ought to set, it’s not typical of it to circle dizzyingly for days at her crown.
Annabelle follows at her arm. She presses a false weight against Jim’s side, against her shoulder where she lays her cheek. A pressure where she holds Jim around her arms. Annabelle’s arms fitting into her like a piece of a puzzle that always places right.
But the weight is heavy this time. It pulls at her like the noose loose around her neck before the platform is pulled from beneath her feet.
“How much longer, Jim?” Annabelle whispers in her ear.
Jim’s voice is hoarse and dry and puffs out in ragged clouds of dewey smoke from her cracked and bloodstained lips, “N-nuh-not much … luh-longer. D-dearest.”
“You only call me dearest when you’re cross with me. Are you?”
Jim can feel the noose cinch tighter against her throat.
Crunch… crunch… crunch… she’s stopped looking at her feet and the stones they should be stepping on.
“Are you?”
“Mm—yuh-you left m-m—,” Jim swallows salt and dirt and dried blood in her throat.
“Sweetheart. I didn’t leave. I’m just here, at your side as I always am. You consumed of me so that the weight of my body could sink into the depths.
“And I would be free.”
Jim exhales and the breath comes sharp and short and cuts through her lungs and throat with effort she isn’t sure she has anymore. She drops to her knees, sharp debris—rocks… ice… definitely ice… certainly not bone—cuts into her knees. She wavers and avoids looking at Annabelle in the periphery of her vision. But that pressure lifts from her arms and cups her face in hands that should feel warm if Jim could remember what warmth felt like. Annabelle turns her face and she looks up into the sun.
The sun that circles overhead and crowns golden curling dogs in its wake.
“Not much longer, now, dearest.” She says.
The dogs push her back against the ground that rushes up to greet her. It’s not ground. Jim grimaces as bone forms a pile beneath her coat. With numb fingers she presses them to the point of ribs, of the body laying beside her. They aren’t sharp enough to break through her frozen skin.
“Th-they… used to say… mm… was the b-buh-best… m-muh-most…”
“If only, you had come home from this.”
“I-If… if only.”
She shuts her eyes and tells herself she’ll rest, if just for a moment.
They’ve been walking for a long, long time. Left the ship like a corpse to the ice that wedged it, days behind. Her and the crew and their miscellaneous dredgery to keep them all alive. Lifeboats and weapons and food and liquor. They’re supposed to have.
But Jim stands circumferenced by the shape of the environment. She straightens her hunched leering stance, fresh blood on her lips, wide colourless eyes searching. The ice loops around, in on itself in a shape it shouldn’t be able to out here. In the cold. She stares into it like she’s staring into the porthole of her Annabelle Lee…
Into the darkness, murky greens pooling into thick inky blacks, stretching out to her. She sweats, the liquid beading frost-bitten cold on the back of her neck, underneath her layers of thick hide. Her breath comes sharp against the wet blood on her lips, eyes wider and wider still.
“Captain.”
She reels around but she stands alone. She stares back into one set of tracks disappearing over the edge of the cliff. The mast of her ship no longer visible as she rests, holding skeletons at the bottom of the sea.
Jim startles when nothing wakes her.
It’s darker than it has been, the sun kisses the horizon but doesn’t stay to sleep with her. She breathes and breathes and breathes. Clouds of dewey smoke pass her lips, heart beating and pushing and fluttering against her ribcage.
She struggles, pushing against the weight of her coat pinning her down. She fights and pulls weakly before she calms, losing the will to push any harder and settles down in quiet defeat.
“Is this it? The famed secret of the north?” Annabelle’s tone is jeering.
Jim stares up at the gently changing hues of the sky, orange to yellow to white. The sun pushes the wind to burn her skin.
“Well this isn’t very exciting, Jiminy. I expected more.”
So did she. But there isn’t more. There can’t be more than this. Or that would mean she would have to keep going. Keep moving. But she’s tired. More than she has ever been known to be.
“You’re being quite boring.”
Loud snapping cracks rattle down into the ocean. Into the water that lurks. Into blackness below the whiteness at her back.
Something out here stalks her, something beneath the ice.
The overhead light swings its circular beam at her back as Jim hunches over the body, staring into its ribcage. Her face is covered in dripping red blood. Rending flesh from bone with eyes gone distant with madness. Her quarters would be silent if not for the wet sounds of meat and viscera being shoved into the dark hole of her mouth.
Jim curls over her and cries into the cavern of her corpse if she had any proper tears to shed. Instead she wails. Cries into her. Her hands smear blood across Annabelle’s face.
“Captain…?”
Jim looks to her first mate but only sees her. She was screaming earlier, her Annabelle Lee, but her face is dry of any tears when she looks to Jim.
“What have you done?”
Jim stares into her, fingers as they thread her ribcage.
Crack. Jim flinches and Samson stares back at her, horror contorting his face with a fear she’s never seen directed at her before. But looming in her periphery is a dark shape, circling.
Jim gasps and turns to Samson, “it’s come back”.
Jim’s breath escapes her in small laboured wheezes. The ice beneath her back’s broken free, swaying to and fro in the black water beneath her. She’s cold. So cold she can’t remember ever not being this cold. She breathes and with each breath she feels herself drift, further and further away. Annabelle grips her hands and kisses her lips and, carefully, she pushes against Jim, tipping the floe beneath the green waves.
The shock of the water cuts through Jim’s coat straight to her flesh. It claws sharply at her skin and pulls her in. She sinks, and the cold eats away at her, devours her, fills her lungs and slows her heart.
Jim stares up into the watery sun, circling overhead. The darkness circling at her back.
Its maw opens up to her and takes her in whole.