Elana Gomel's story "Mine Seven'' has a similar geographic setting to Michelle Paver's spectral tale of 1930s Arctic explorers, Dark Matter. But it takes place ninety years later, which makes all the difference. Gone are isolated cabins, dogs, and paraffin lamps. Gomel gives the reader U.S. tourists eager for a look at the Aurora borealis.
....Tomorrow was a relative term. In mid-January in Svalbard the sun never rose above the horizon. Darkness was the same whether one was asleep or awake; in the middle of breakfast or having a nightcap. It was like being in a fever dream. The sluggishness of time thickened Lena's blood. She was perpetually cold, her body repelling the generous warmth of the hotel's blazing radiator heaters.
Lena, of Chukchi descent, and her husband Bill are enjoying the climate-controlled amenities of Longyearbyen's Funken Lodge.
Until the lights go out, and an entity literally embodying the region's dead toilers descends upon their cozy enclave.
Her hesitation lasted only a couple of heartbeats, but it cost Nigel his life. He was down in the entryway when the door burst open in an explosion of glass fragments and an arm reached for him. It was an arm, not a paw, wrapped up in tatters of padded parka fabric. It was as thick as Lena's waist and its rough skin was peppered with black hair and dotted with crudely done tattoos: blue hearts, and vodka bottles, and crossed shovels, and red stars. The black-rimmed fingernails, each the size of a postal envelope, tore into Nigel's throat as he choked on his own blood, and pulled him through the hole in the door, his screams dying into a liquid gurgle.
Lena did not remember running down but here she was, the icy blast from the outside lacerating her face, as she picked up Nigel's cellphone and focused its light on the figure that still waited outside, standing there silently as if it wanted to be seen by her – as perhaps it did.
The creature – the kelet, the forgotten name of the Siberian evil spirit popping up in her head uninvited – was so tall that its head disappeared into the gloom and she could not see its face. But she could see the faces that grew out of its broad chest like clusters of grapes: faces of men, hard and frostbitten, ravaged by weather and smoke; men who had laboured in the black bowels of the island for the hidden light. Men who had been crushed when a coal seam collapsed or suffocated when methane flooded the tunnels. Men of Mine Seven.
"Mine Seven" is a brief story, slingshotting scenes in a way supremely unnerving to the reader. The examination of a social milieu facing the first hours of crisis, usually the meat of an upstairs-downstairs doomsday story - whether supernatural or not - is elided, contributing to an atmosphere of disorientation and crisis.
"Mine Seven" is an excellent story of characters in a situation of final extremity.
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"Mine Seven" can be found in Mark Morris' anthology After Sundown.
Jay
11 November 2021
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