The Explorer's Apprentice

91:A Life so Changed

Alison Lovett

Alison pulls a little girl out of the water.

Her hair crackles and breaks beneath Alison’s fingertips, like the finest and most brittle glass. The girl clutches a doll in her frostbitten fingers. Alison’s hand touches the cheek, but it’s so cold it’s as if the girl was never alive at all. Like porcelain. Her eyes are frozen shut.

Occasionally a wail will echo across the water, a melancholy call of “Is anybody out there?” So far, there are no answers.

Alison lets the girl float away again, another one of many, a lifeless doll.

“Keep checking!” shouts the new boatman.

“But sir, there’s no one out there…”someone mumbles.

A ringing starts in Alison’s ears as she dips her hands into the black water for the millionth time. She wonders vaguely if it’s a sign of frostbite. She’s stopped caring.

“Keep checking! Check them all, if you have to.”

She pulls up a ship guard. A teenage boy. A mother clutching a baby in her arms—now white with frost. Alison knows she will be seeing these people in her dreams, every last one of them, for a long time. She’ll see their eyes—white, lifeless pools of death in their still faces.

The ringing persists.

“Do you hear that?” asks the man next to her, as he pushes away another corpse.

“Like a ringing?” Alison’s own voice sounds strange to her. Frozen. They both stay silent for a moment listening.

“No… No it’s more like a whistle.”

Alison grabs the arm of the boatman. “Go back! You have to go back! There’s a whistle! A whistle! Someone’s alive!”

The lantern swings around, lighting a new collection of bodies in a pool of yellow. In one’s mouth lies a whistle, emanating a high-pitched shriek. No, not a body. There’s light in its eyes. There’s breath in its body. Its chest collapses and rises sporadically, like the breathing of a baby bird, as it puts everything it has into the whistle.

It’s a girl.

Alison helps drag the sopping wet body onto the floor of the boat, swaddling the girl with blankets and whispers. The men let her. “It’s okay, Marley,” she’s saying. “It’s okay. I’m here. You’re going to be okay now.”