Streams of white vapour rose from the hole like angry demons set free; they disappeared in the purifying turmeric-yellow heat of the lamp. A narrow spiral staircase, frosted over like the lock, descended into pitch darkness. Namdev recalled a trip years ago, to an ice-cream factory, and particularly its freezers.
“Any ice-lollies down there?” he muttered with a wry smile.
~Icewalla Part 03~
© Copyright 2004, Vishal K. Bharadwaj, All Rights Reserved
Excerpt from Barfeeli Maya (The Icy Illusion), by C.C. Kulkarni, 1952, published by Athena Shakti Publications (English translation by S.R. Savant, 1954):
Namdev crouched by the trapdoor and touched the splash of frost around it. The lock was frozen with a thin coat of particulate ice, that shone in the light of the kerosense lantern like a fiery dust of suns. He rapped the lock with the knob of his cane and the lock shattered like badly-made chikki. Retrieving his blade from the top-pocket of his safari suit, he thrust it through the seal of ice and flung the trapdoor open.
Streams of white vapour rose from the hole like angry demons set free; they disappeared in the purifying turmeric-yellow heat of the lamp. A narrow spiral staircase, frosted over like the lock, descended into pitch darkness. Namdev recalled a trip years ago, to an ice-cream factory, and particularly its freezers.
“Any ice-lollies down there?” he muttered with a wry smile.
With one last lungful of the stale — but warm — air of the house, Namdev carefully entered the narrow stairwell, hoping that a cotton safari-suit, a fedora, a kerosense lamp and the embrace of unseen gods would be enough to keep him from freezing.
When he had descended some ten steps, he leaned against the frozen spine of the stairwell and shone the lamp around, but though it sometimes seemed to catch the facets of some structure, it was too far away to see now.
“Is this a basement or a marriage hall?” Namdev said, loud enough that the returning echo only confirmed the latter.
The staircase seemed to descend forever; the passage of time was magnified by the cold. Namdev counted a hundred and eight steps.
Auspicious, he thought, and then heard a wet crunching sound at his feet. “Snow,” he whispered, shining the lamp there. It was an inch deep, and when he shone the lamp ahead a set of tracks led away and into the darkness. He followed the large impressions, that, Namdev deduced, belonged to a being around nine feet tall.
Now columns of clear ice rose up around him and disappeared beyond the reach of the lamplight; jagged trunks and smooth spikes, and then, around them, little boulders and pebbles. Snow began to fall, and in the distance the sound of water could be heard.
Quite suddenly, as if it hadn’t been there before, Namdev happened upon a stream. A stream of glowing blue water with a bed of smooth ice pebbles, and around it little shrubs of ice and nothing else. Namdev whirled the lamp around and saw that the footsteps he had followed — and indeed, his own — had been snowed over.
He walked along the crystalline bank, upstream. It seemed like hours; first the snow stopped, and then the stream widened, then narrowed, and just when it widened again the lamp died.
Odd, Namdev thought, this lamp should have lasted for another hour at least. He pulled his pocket-watch out of his coat pocket and consulted it in the glow of the stream. The watch had stopped; the hands read a quarter past three, which was about twenty minutes after he descened down the stairs.
He continued to make his way down the stream; the boulders got bigger, the ice shrubs thinned, and as he was now adapted to the low light he could see farther, and in the distance he could see that the stream disappeared some two hundred metres away behind an enclosure of boulders, from which a significant amount of light emenated. This, it would seem, was the source of the stream.
Reaching them he realised that the hole the stream poured from was too small for him (not that he wanted to risk entering the glowing water), and so Namdev unscrewed the top of his cane and folded open the grappling hook. The clap of the firing mechanism echoed far less than Namdev would have thought. There was an eerie muffled sound to everything here, including his footsteps over the glassy pebbles and the little snow. He tugged at the rope, then pulled himself up the slippery side of a boulder.
At the top of the boulder he looked inside the enclosure and gaped. In the centre the stream poured out like a slowly overflowing tea-pot and formed the river, but a little beyond it, at the edge of the small pond that the water’s source formed, was a tree.
A tree, like the rest of this place, constructed entirely of ice; and it glowed far more than anything else. At the base of the tree was the nine foot tall being, a humanoid, not glowing but caught sometimes in the tree and stream light.
And the humanoid turned to regard Namdev. Its face was that of a skull.
“Namasté,” Namdev said, still standing at the top of the rocks. He became keenly aware of how quiet it was here; the only sound was the distant whisper of the stream’s source.
“Good Afternoon,” the humanoid said, unmoving. Its voice was distorted and somewhat masculine, gentle, and seemingly came from inside Namdev’s own head.
“This is your domain, I take it.”
“Yes,” the creature said. “Please forgive the mess.”
Namdev chuckled and began to pull himself down the other side of the boulder. “You should see my house. This is like the Taj hotel by comparison.”
“Thank you,” the creature replied. “I try.” It sat down by the base of the tree, its ice body making little cracking noises as it did. The humanoid let out an exhausted sigh, which rose and disappeared in the crystal leaves above.
Namdev approached steadily, not wishing to appear either too apprehensive — which he was — or too confident. Now, with the burbling mouth of the stream between him and the resting humanoid, he stopped.
“I suppose you’ll want to kill me,” the creature said.
Namdev nodded.
“Very well,” the creature said plainly, and suddenly it bounded to its feet and in half a stride was upon Namdev. A massive fist descened upon him like a sledgehammer, and Namdev escaped it by a hair’s breadth. The icy pebbles shattered under the creature’s fist, and it strode forward to swing at it again. This time the man leaped to the side and rolled to safety.
Namdev held his cane forward and chanted a spell. The silver knob burst into light and the creature recoiled. “Melt in hell!” Namdev cursed, and let fly a green ether fireball from the knob of the cane.
The creature struck at the ball with its massive fists and with a terrific crack its left hand was consumed by the flame. Water dripped from the stump that was left, and for a long moment both Namdev and the creature looked at it. Then the creature barked a cold laugh and thrust its severed forearm into the glowing water of the stream. When it removed it a second later the hand was fully reformed. The creature ran for Namdev with its new hand’s palm outstretched. Namdev dodged its first attempt but the creature caught hold of his ankle and pulled him up, dangling him upside down.
Namdev aimed his cane for the creature’s head. The fireball struck but this time the nothing happened; the creature only had a few rivulets of water streaming down its cruelly laughing face.
“It appears you have lost,” the creature said.
Namdev then spotted the glowing ice tree between the creature’s legs. He was always one to follow a gut instinct.
“Funny,” he replied, “I was just going to say the same thing.” He pointed the cane at the tree and shot a fireball.
The tree shattered into countelss shards of ice; even in the deafening roar of the explosion he could hear the creature’s horrible screams. He opened his eyes long enough to see the creature itself melting, and the water of the stream losing its glow. Indeed all the ice around him was turning to water, now flowing into the hole from which the stream had emenated.
As Namdev stood the last of the creature’s head was melting into the water.
“I shall return,” the creature said.
“That’s what they all say,” Namdev replied.
To Be Continued…
