‘Doc, I didn’t want to wake you, so I left you,’ Krysty said on catching sight of him. ‘Hope that was okay. How are you feeling?’
‘Do you mean generally? Or are you being more specific—as in, do I feel quite insane today?’ Doc queried with as much of a grin as he could muster.
‘It wasn’t what I meant, but I guess it’s a fair question,’ Krysty mused. ‘I don’t know what you remember, but you kind of lost it for a while there.’
‘I’ll have to take your word for that,’ the old man answered, settling himself among them. ‘I have no recollection of any events after first leaving here and being caught in a blizzard.’
Ryan had been watching Doc carefully and had no doubts that the old man was telling the truth. There was something disingenuous about the old man. It was always easy to see when Doc was entering one of his mentally fragile phases, and equally it was easy to see when he had clarity of thought. Now was one of the latter times and Doc seemed genuinely confused about events. If nothing else, Ryan was glad to see the back of Joseph Jordan, whoever or whatever he may have been.
‘Dark night, there’s a lot that happened since then,’ J.B. said with a degree of wry understatement. ‘Where do we begin?’
Doc sat entranced while the events of the past few days were relayed to him. The trek across the wastelands, followed by their discovery by the Inuit hunting party when Doc tried to escape them. Their captivity in the Inuit settlement and near sacrifice in pagan- and Christian-inspired ritual to insure the fertility of the waning tribe. From this, the sudden emergence from fever of a new personality within Doc—that of the reincarnated Joseph Jordan. When the story reached this point, all watched Doc closely for some flicker of recognition, yet there was none. The only emotion to register on his face was that of astonishment.
From here, the old man’s astonishment mounted as they unfurled his plans to take on the ville of Fairbanks as a large-scale sacrifice to their Lord, and of the war party he had helped to prepare.
By the time that Mildred and Jak were relaying to him the doomed attack on the ville, and the manner in which they had almost been trapped within the burning streets, Doc’s face was ashen. Racing through his mind were thoughts of how his own insanity had nearly doomed his companions. Thoughts that jostled for space within his mind with others, that were darker and more introverted: how fragile was his mind, his personality, that it was able to be submerged so easily into some kind of disguise? How easy was it for him to sink into a kind of oblivion where he was able to threaten the very existence of those he valued most with no impunity?
‘Doc, Doc, are you okay?’
‘Eh?’ The old man shook himself from his reverie to see that the others were studying him closely. He realized that their story had ended and he had seemed not to acknowledge this.
‘I’m sorry,’ he began haltingly. ‘I just find it hard to comprehend. That I could have seemed to have functioned so clearly and yet to be advocating such madness. In fact, actively pursuing it.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘I have no recall of any of the events you have outlined, not even in the sense of a dream from which I was detached, merely the observer. What I recall is so much…less…’ He petered off, not quite sure where to begin.
In the ensuing silence Ryan scanned the companions as they sat around the kitchen of the redoubt. Mildred and Krysty, who seemed to have a better grasp of the complexities of Doc’s psyche than anyone else, were on edge, waiting for the old man to try to explain what had happened to him in his own mind. It was vital information for them, as they would be able to try to assess just where he was coming from…and perhaps where he was going to.
Jak was impassive. His scarred albino features were as grim and unreadable as they always were. Very rarely did any emotion escape the mask that he used to shield himself from the outside world. But he would be taking it in and making his own assessment.
J.B. looked like Ryan felt—as though he wanted to know what was happening with Doc but doubted that he could assimilate it. The two men had been friends for so long that Ryan was sure that J.B. felt the same way as he did. They were men of action and only used their sharp minds when action was called for. This was something beyond that range of experience.
Doc began again. ‘In my mind, I felt as though I were not here. Everything that I experienced on our journey to the Inuit ville was part of some test. I was back in the time from which I originally came. I was insane, locked in a padded room and going through these experiences as a kind of mental exercise. It was as though I were a rat in a maze, running blindly at the behest of some celestial scientist who had a purpose in mind for me, and if I reached the end of the maze I would be rewarded. Not with candy or cheese, but with the truth. A revelation that would explain why I was going through this whole experience…not just since landing here, but in the entire time since you, my dear friends, first saved me from the hands of Cort Strasser.
‘It seemed to me that in order to do this, I had to go through some kind of change, some kind of rebirth. I had to be like the butterfly that emerges from the chrysalis…even if that change meant that I had little or no knowledge of the life that I had experienced before that moment.
‘I suspect that that was the moment at which this man Jordan first made an appearance. I could not tell you who or what he was, only that once he appeared, I receded not just in your eyes, but in my own mind, as well. I have no recall of anything that happened after that, and only one fleeting memory from then until I awoke on the sled as we approached this place once more.
‘If I think about it, I can remember, just for a moment, standing in a log cabin staring at you all, wrapped in furs and skins. I tried to speak, but somehow the words would not come out. It was as though I were watching you through a gauze, as though I could hear you through a fog of white noise. My chest was constrained, making every breath something for which I had to fight, every syllable something that had to be forced from my lips. The words were there, but they would not come out.’
‘But it is fleeting, momentary, and after that there is nothing. Nothing until last evening, when I awoke to find myself on a sled, aware that something had happened, but not what that may be.’
Doc stuttered to a halt and shrugged, not knowing where to go.
‘I think that being here triggered things you didn’t want to remember and made you withdraw into yourself,’ Mildred said slowly. ‘Strange thing is, although it may sound like madness, it’s more a way of clinging on to your sanity.’
‘But at what cost?’ Doc spit bitterly. ‘What does it benefit me if I save sanity at the expense of losing identity? What use is it if I close down whenever things get too much? How does this settle with the notion that I am in some way a useful member of this group. Good heavens, Doctor, if I am to retreat into my own head at the drop of a hat, what possible use could I be to you? In fact, I could be nothing except a complete liability. And this is not a world in which to carry passengers.’
‘That’s for us to decide,’ Ryan cut in.
Doc shook his head firmly. ‘I cannot be responsible for such an eventuality.’
‘Then what do you propose to do about it?’ Krysty asked in a reasonable tone. ‘You want to stay here, alone? How long will you cling to your sanity then? You had a set of circumstances that are unlikely to occur again. I can’t see why you—’
‘But that is not the point,’ Doc shouted over her. ‘It may have been a one-off occurrence, but I cannot know that for sure, any more than you can. I cannot risk it happening again.’
‘Doc, the only way any of us can avoid a risk like that is by buying the farm right here and now, and that’s just stupe,’ J.B. said. ‘It’s this fucking place—it messes with our heads. Let’s just get the hell out and see what we feel like when we land somewhere else.’
It was a view with which all could agree, even Doc, who approached the idea with some trepidation, yet could see through his own fears how the