Adagio (Book One of the Muse series)

31. The Freeze

Tristan Hendry was absolutely irate. And she wasn't speaking. After she had helped me indoors, peeled off my sodden, freezing outer layer and unceremoniously plopped me in front of the potbelly stove in my robe, there was total, awkward silence in the room. Tristan now sat at a little wooden table next to me, reading a huge encyclopedia. She wouldn't even spare a glance in my direction.
After what seemed like a year and a half, I just couldn't take it anymore.

"Thank you."

"That was sophomoric." A pause, the sound of fingernails scratching old paper.

"Where are we?"

"Upping's research center."

"Oh. Does he still use it?"

Tristan glared down at me, condescension all over her face. "Does it appear that he's been recently?" And with that, she went back to reading.

Feeling humiliated, I quietly looked around the room. Everything was covered in semi-frozen cobwebs, and under them I could just make out the silhouettes of shelving and cabinets, which lined every wall floor to ceiling. It did indeed look like someone had worked here, but how on earth they had done it was the question. If there was an Upping, and he did do research way out here, how did he figure out how to get here without freezing to death or being eaten by something?

How he could have survived way out in this desolate place I had no idea, and I wasn't about to ask right now. Tristan hadn't even deigned to ask me if I was OK . . .

I stretched out on the thin throw rug next to the stove and heaved a sigh. There was nowhere else to lay, I mused; the only pieces of furniture were the desk, the chair where Tristan was studying and the small sitting room chair I had just been using. No sofa, no bed. Where did Upping sleep?

Idly scanning the shelves within my view, I saw stacks and stacks of what looked like textbooks, all dusty and grey, next to bottles and boxes and leather-bound notebooks. Tons of notebooks. There had to be fifty—no, a hundred—identically-sized and shaped small volumes, placed one after the other very neatly along the shelves, all with "T. Upping" etched in black ink on the spine. Where there weren't books, there was a funny assortment of other things—a dishful of rocks, a very old-fashioned pair of coke bottle glasses, and—what was that—hair? Bizarre.

Tristan returned the encyclopedia or whatever it was to the shelf, scanned for a second, and selected another volume. She almost looked like she knew her way around this joint. She almost looked like she knew her way . . .

"Where did Upping sleep?"

Tristan sighed impatiently, looked up from her book and said, "Nowhere."

"What did he eat? There's no kitchen here, no plates, no water . . . "

"He didn't eat here." Tristan let out another clearly audible sigh of impatience as a message to me to stop talking.

"Where did he eat, then? He's human after all, right? A guy's got to eat occasionally."

Tristan snapped the book shut loudly, and looked over at me with menace. "If it satisfies your seemingly unquenchable thirst for useless details, Theobald Upping once owned this property. The grounds, the resort, the whole of the area was his. He worked here, but ate, slept—and likely shat—on the estate. Is there anything else you would like to know at the moment, Elma?"

"No." I rolled away from him and toward the fire to think. Upping. If I were to believe Tristan, there was a roughly two hundred year-old doctor out there somewhere who studied supernatural creatures and did research in a deserted corner of the Arctic. And he was rich. OK, difficult to swallow that one, especially the—well, especially all of it. So what else? How else could Tristan know about this place, how could she navigate right to this tiny outbuilding way out here in Alaska, and how would she know so well what was in it?

I'd already established that Tristan had cash—that much was evident. What if SHE owned this place—the grounds, the resort, the whole of it? It would explain the royal treatment she got, the Architectural Digest-quality log cabin, the driver. It would be a perfect spot for her to have created this whole alternate reality. Right here in this shack . . . day after day after day, imagining, fabricating, constructing, recording . . .

I looked again at the sea of notebooks along the walls, and a chill ran down my spine. She knew which book was which, she knew where in this room to pick out the right volume. This room represented so many hours of writing, of hallucinating . . . it floored me.

And again I was afraid. The sheer weight of her sickness dawned on me then, hit me like a snowdrift. She had money, she had power, and she was insane. And I was trapped in the middle of the Alaskan wild with her as my only real means of survival. And she owned and controlled everything around us.

But no, that was ridiculous. Why couldn't she have done the same work in her office at the American University, or at Straythern, for that matter? There was no reason she'd need to schlepp to the corner of civilization just to write in a notebook and dream up such fantastical shit. And she'd been busy living and working too—when would she have done all of this? To boot, everything in this room was obviously quite old, and per the cobwebs, no one had been here in decades. What, did she do all this when she was sixteen? No, it didn't make any sense at all. Moreover, it just wasn't like her, as far as I could tell from our brief sequestration together. She was too . . . logical. But if not that, then what was the truth? There was a shack, and someone had worked here, and she was intimately familiar with it all.

The door to the secret compartment in my mind creaked open again. The possibility that Theobald Upping was real was as difficult to accept as Tristan's empty claim that she was supernatural to begin with, but what if it were true? Number one, Upping did have a lot of detail around him. Number two, Tristan gave a logical history, once you got past the fact that Upping was conducting sociological interviews with werewolves as a career and apparently had figured out how not to die of old age. Number three, Tristan WAS an academic, and she did know a hell of a lot about preternaturals, or whatever she called them. Finally, I thought with a twinge of poignancy that appeared mysteriously and unbeckoned, there was something much older than forty-something about her, though I had never been able to zero in on exactly what it was. Perhaps, through the supernatural fabrication, she had been trying to tell me she was different, but, for whatever reason, without divulging to me who she truly was? To tell me without telling me? Could it be, somehow? I petition the jury . . .
Was Tristan Hendry really Theobald Upping? If so, Theobald Upping was pissed.

"Let's go." She was at the door, holding my fire-dried coat and accessories in her hands. She said no more, but simply pushed her arms forward to indicate I should take the proffered clothing and get my ass dressed. I shrugged into everything as best I could, over the bathrobe, trying not to flash her even more than before as I maneuvered, and walked to the door like a recently reprimanded child. It infuriated me to no end to act this way, but I had to be on her good side, if only for my own good.

We walked around to the back of the shack, and there it was. A fucking snowmobile. Really? I trudge out on a treacherous Arctic rescue on a ridiculous whim that a deranged maniac is in trouble, when all the time she's styling around on a damn Yamaha? Give me a break.

She saw what I was thinking, but she didn't even give me her typical "aren't I clever and aren't you a boob?" smile. Nothing but sternness, nothing but a frozen brick wall. Shit. Instead, she wheeled the snowmobile (which was really pretty sick), about twenty feet away from me, and started tinkering with the starter.
I sneezed, and when I opened my eyes again Tristan was about to be killed.