The Glaciermen #7: Shaman

Early access prepublication manuscripts of "The Glaciermen"

Hey everybody, hope this finds you well. You know, sometimes when I’m writing this, I’m surprised by what happens next. Ideally that means you will be too.

Something I didn’t see coming happened in this one. You probably won’t either, but hey, I figure I’d give you a chance to take a guess. Let’s find out if your powers of precognition are up to par, shall we?

(Link to the last one, in case you missed it.)

Anyway, here’s the next bit:

Eye Sockets

Lee liked the old man, who after telling his story had resumed his silence and returned to his meditative breathing. Sandy and the fat man had both been silent for a while, too, the large man apparently contented with frequent pulls from the flask in his jacket pocket.

Lee was not sure if he believed the whole story about the shaman making children with a spirit monster, but then again, he did not know how humans made babies either, so he supposed anything might be possible.

He remained skeptical, but the presence of flesh and blood creature-men living inside the glacier certainly tipped the scales of his belief—they had to come from somewhere after all, and the old man’s story was as good an explanation as any. He decided to call the blue men tunlaq like the creatures from the story.

Lee sat pondering it all for a while, eventually stopping to stand up. It had been at least an hour since they had arrived at the pit, and the cold was getting to him, so he decided to move around to warm himself. At first he simply paced back and forth near Sandy and the others, occasionally stamping his feet and rubbing his hands together. There were less than twenty of them left now, huddled and shivering together in the center of the pit—all except for the old man, who still sat apart from the rest.

The pit was large and Lee grew restless. He glanced up at the tunlaq guards around the perimeter of the pit. They stood silent and still, not having moved even once since the ordeal began. How do they do it? Lee wondered.

His curiosity soon got the better of him, and he stepped a few paces away from the others toward the wall of the pit. The guard nearest to him gave no indication of having noticed. Lee crept forward a few more steps, now half way between the others and the wall. Still no nothing from the guard. He took another step. No reaction.

Lee walked almost all the way to the edge in this fashion. Step, pause, wait, step again. Soon he was standing directly under the tunlaq guard, who remained still as a statue. For the first time Lee was able to look closely at the strange blue skinned man without the imminent threat of death. Is this really the child of a shaman and a spirit monster? Lee wondered. 

Upon inspection, the differences from a normal person were clearly visible—glowing blue skin, large eyes, long limbs—but Lee had seen pro basketball players with long, muscular limbs, and he knew people came in all shapes and sized, eyes included. Other than these differing attributes, they looked more or less like half naked men with shaved heads. That did not explain the glowing blue skin, though, but Lee decided he would figure that out later.

Without warning, the tunlaq guard broke from his forward stare and looked straight down at Lee, dark eyes piercing as if they could see into his very soul. Startled, Lee jerked backward, stumbling and falling onto his hindquarters.

Together as one, all of the guards began to thump their spears against the ice, simultaneously chanting a whispered word in time with their thumping. 

“Chak-ta… chak-ta… chak-ta…”

Lee scrambled backward on all fours toward the center of the pit to rejoin Sandy and the others. The chanting continued unabated, and the survivors huddled tightly together in the center of the pit, waiting for the next inevitable horror to unfold.

Lee clung tightly to Sandy, who hugged him back with equal vigor. The fat man cradled himself, rocking back and forth, muttering incoherently. Only the old man did not react, still sitting unperturbed by himself, breathing calmly through his nostrils.

The chanting carried on, and the captives remained in subdued stillness, occasionally sharing furtive glances between each other. Seconds turned to minutes, and yet nothing happened. The tunlaq guards simply kept pounding their beat and chanting the word over and over in a skin crawling whisper.

“Chak-ta… chak-ta… chak-ta…”

More minutes passed.

The fat man began clutching his head, eyes squeezed tightly shut, trying to block the chanting by covering his ears. Suddenly his eyes sprung open, and he burst out,  “I can’t take this anymore… just make it stop!”

He let out a wavering moan, clawing at his ears with gloved hands, spewing a long string of profanities.

He shouted at the guards, “Kill me already, damn it! Just kill me and make it end!”

Then he broke away from the others, stumbling toward the wall of the pit. He did not stop himself, colliding into the ice wall before collapsing against the floor, writhing and crying out, still clutching his head. The others watched with glued stares, unable to look away as the large man thrashed on the ice.

Then he sat up and began pulling at his jacket, struggling to tear it off with reckless abandon. After he had succeeded in removing the bright red coat, he then pulled frantically at his boots before giving up and pulling off his sweater. He continued taking off clothing until he wore only a pair of paisley boxers, his pants clumsily pulled down to his ankles where they tangled on his boots.

With hysterical laughter he began scratching at the corner where the floor met the wall. He kept clawing until he broke his nails, blood smearing amongst the shavings of ice where he scratched. After a few long minutes he seemed to run out of energy, succumbing to fatigue and falling onto his back, bare skin against the ice.

Wisps of steam rose from his skin into the cold, dry air of the pit. The blue light of the torches played curling shadows onto the ice through the trails of rising vapor. The fat man’s large form shuddered weakly as low sobs carried across the pit toward the others. Eventually the sobs stopped, and the man did not move again.

The chanting continued, “Chak-ta… chak-ta… chak-ta…”

Lee looked to Sandy, eyes wide, and asked, “What happened to him? I don’t understand.”

“You shouldn’t have had to see that,” she replied, pulling at him to turn away from the rapidly cooling corpse.

Lee, concerned, repeated, “What happened?”

“Well…” Sandy said, trying to think of a soft way to phrase it before giving up. “He froze to death, I think. That looked like hypothermia, sort of. It probably got him first because of the alcohol. It makes your blood go to your skin, which is bad for staying warm. At the end, when someone is cold for too long, usually they simply fall asleep forever. In rarer cases, though, their brain stops working right and they go kinda crazy. They think they’re too hot and take off their clothes, then they try to find a crevice to hide in—and if they can’t find one they try to make one.”

Lee looked at the fat man’s corpse, then back to Sandy. “I’m cold, too. Is that going to happen to me… or you?”

“No, sweetie, we’ll figure something out before that happens.”

“But how do you know?” Lee demanded. “How are we gonna stay warm?”
Sandy tried to put on a confident face for the boy. “We’ll huddle close, and we aren’t drinking alcohol like he was. We’ll be okay. I promise,” she said, ruffling the top of Lee’s hooded head with a gloved hand.

Lee opened his mouth to protest again, but the chanting of the blue men suddenly stopped. He looked up at them in time to see them move for the first time in an hour, dropping unison from their standing position into a cross legged pose. They all turned to look toward the far side of the cavern. Lee followed their eyes, and there, in the unnatural flickering blue light of the torches, a new figure approached out of the gloom of one of the tunnels.

He was taller than the other tunlaq, his chest and arms bulging with massive, blue-glistening muscles. In one hand he clutched a crooked staff tipped with twisted roots shaped like a mangled hand stretching upward to claw at something. Instead of a shaven head, like Lee expected, on top of his neck was perched the bleached skull of a caribou, with large antlers protruding high up, almost scraping against the ceiling of the tunnel. He stepped to the edge of the pit, head scanning back and forth as he surveyed the prisoners huddled together in the pit. The eye sockets of the skull were shrouded in darkness. Somehow the shadowy hollows seemed to consume light rather than merely obscure it.

Lee hugged closer to Sandy, a chilling fear taking hold of him, as if the warmth left in his torso was suddenly draining away. As he shivered next to Sandy, the old man rose to his feet, calmly stepping around his trembling companions to place himself between the captives and the skull-headed man.

Not taking his gaze from the skull-headed man, he said to the others, “Do not move from where you are. This is their shaman. Whatever you do, stay behind me.”

With deliberate movement of arthritic fingers, the old man unbuttoned his parka, shrugging it off onto the ice. Lee glanced urgently at Sandy, wondering if now the old man was also going crazy from getting too cold. The old man continued to carefully remove the other layers on his torso until he stood bare-chested in the frigid air. Lee’s eyes grew wide.

The old man’s skin was covered from waist to neck in tattoos. Most were swirling patterns and symbols that Lee did not understand, but there were also mountains, a river, and animals, so many animals. Most prominent was the great bird covering the entirety of the old man’s upper back and shoulders. It was a long feathered hawk, with wings spread wide, beak open in a mighty call. Around its talons coiled a long dark snake with an open jaw sporting razor teeth and a forked tongue protruding as if in a hiss.

The old man spread his arms out wide, then in a loud voice began to speak at the skull-headed shaman, “I am Aklaq Siqiniq, and I am not afraid of you, tunlaq!”

He then switched to a language Lee could not understand, probably his native tongue. Then Lee’s mind jumped—the sound of these words was similar to the banter of the guards as they brought them through the tunnels.

The shaman had watched unreactive as the old man had removed his clothing, and still did nothing as he spoke in initially. But when the old man transitioned to the native tongue, the shaman aggressively stamped his staff. A deep growling shout emanated from behind the skull, then its eye sockets flashed. Licking tongues of blue flame materialized the formerly dark hollows. A collective gasp ran through the prisoners.

The old man took a small step back, but held his ground and continued speaking. He gestured toward the other prisoners, then pounded his chest with a closed fist. When he finished, he shifted his feet, adopting a defensive stance and raising his hands in front of him, ready.

The shaman threw back his skulled head, and guttural laugh echoed over the pit. Then he held a hand over the tip of his staff and chanted something. The twisted roots of the staff tip began to crackle with sparks. He lowered the staff toward the old man, muscles twitching as if he were tensing his entire body all at once. With a pained cry, his entire body wrenched.

The air boomed in the cavern as a massive bolt of purple energy exploded from the tip of the staff, screaming through the air to collide with the old man. The shockwave of the impact blasted across Lee and the other prisoners, knocking them back, and the old man launched backward, flying over their heads to smack against the far wall of the pit. He bounced from the wall and collapsed against the floor of the pit, smoke from an enormous cavity in his torso where his chest had been.

The skulled-headed shaman laughed again, looked to the terrified prisoners, and lifted his hand. The silent captives looked up in terror. Then he snapped his fingers. All the light in the cavern was snuffed in an instant, shrouding everything in total darkness. A moment later the torches flamed back to life, and the shaman was gone.

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And that’s it for now folks

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