Winter Synth
by Jamey Toner
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
It was the Solstice: Neave’s favorite day. It was full dark when she got out of work, and she walked home by streetlight, feeling like weights were strapped to all of her limbs.
The café was crowded. She ordered a coffee, listlessly, and before she could start looking for a place to sit, she heard the old manic voice say, “Neavity Neave!”
Shrugging, she took the seat Tom offered. “Been a while, man, how’s the cold?” he asked.
“It’s gone. Along with the music.”
“You’re the cold, man, you’re the music.”
“They thawed me out.”
His eyes narrowed, and he chewed his lower lip. “You met ’em. I can see it. They want your power, man.”
She scoffed. “If I had any power, I wouldn’t be here.”
“No, man, your real power. They’re gonna eat you up, man.”
His relentless use of “man” was beginning to take on theophanic overtones. It was like a Homeric epithet, or an Old Testament injunction: “Remember, Man, thou art mortal.” Abruptly, she leaned forward, almost lunged forward, across the table. “What were you before, Tom? A poet? A painter, maybe?”
“Can’t ask me that, man.” He shook his head violently. “Can’t, can’t, can’t.”
“What are they?”
“They’re not people. They’re bad, man. They’re badness.”
“How do I get rid of them?”
His head kept shaking. “Can’t.”
She sat looking at the specter of her future. Then, suddenly, she thought, I can’t deal with this. Leaving before the coffee even arrived, she went out to find some bourbon.
At the Sikuaq General Store, there was a generous allotment of aisle space for alcohol. She found something cheap enough for her pittance of a stipend, and brought it up to the front. “Hey,” she mumbled to Atka, not meeting his eyes.
“Hello, Neave.” He peered at her. “You don’t look well.”
“My winter’s gone. All gone.”
Atka pursed his lips. “I’ve told you before, the winter isn’t ours. It comes when it comes.”
She thought about it. Tom kept saying the cold came from her, but look what had happened to him.
“Atka, do you believe in...in...” Suppressing her brisk, efficient Danish half, she managed to say, “Evil spirits?”
“I believe in what I see,” he replied.
“Is that a no?”
“It’s a yes. You see the wind by the moving of the leaves.”
Involuntarily lowering her voice, she asked, “Well, what do you... I mean, how do you get rid of them?”
“Every tribe has its own way.”
“What’s yours?”
His gaze was long and measured. “You go alone into the wilderness. Into the snow. Without food, without coat, without weapons. You bear the cold until it drives them out.”
“How do you know when they’re gone?”
“You know.”
Neave hesitated. “Have you ever seen... No, never mind, it’s none of my business.”
“Once,” he said quietly. “A bear with something bad inside. It was a long time ago.”
“Thank you, Atka.”
“Good luck, my friend.”
She left the bourbon on the counter. She went home and wrote an email telling her mom and dad she loved them. Then she took off her jacket and went for a walk. As she passed beyond the city limits, she looked back — once — at the warm lights behind her, before heading into the wilderness. Into the snow.
The Arctic stars glinted bleakly over the fields of everlasting wind. Ice crunched underfoot, and the steam of her breath turned to frost on her lips and chin. She began to be afraid for her life. She kept walking. She began to feel numb. She kept walking.
And slowly, glacially, through the numbness and the fear, something gathered around her like an aurora. Everything else was falling away, and at last there was space for her to breathe. She breathed in the cold — the cold that did not come from her — and let it fill her lungs and heart. Down to her core, down to her soul. I’ve been an idiot.
Then she saw them: two figures, motionless in the wind. All around them was darkness, but they were perfectly lit, as if by some weird bioluminescence. Mr. Brown, spectacularly ordinary, except that his Gucci loafers were stuck in a snowdrift; Mr. Green, infinitely solemn and grave, except that he was standing on his head.
“Hiya, fellas,” she said calmly. Out here, deep in the winter to which she belonged, she no longer felt any dread of these goblins.
Brown’s voice was equable. “Miss Settirsen, would you mind telling us what you’re doing?”
“You know damn well what I’m doing,” she replied. “And my name is Qaanaaq.”
“You’re not true Inuit, you know. This will kill you.”
“Then I’ll die a Winter Synth artist. And if I survive, then I will be true Inuit.”
“I really must insist that you stop this. Otherwise...” He flicked his eyes toward his silent colleague, and even he had a slight air of apprehension.
Green, still inverted, gradually lowered his legs to either side until they had dropped into a full splits with the toes pointing straight down. His face showed no sign of exertion, but retained its expression of noble sorrow.
Somehow, through the grotesque absurdity she was seeing, a Mr. Green-shaped hole in Creation opened up and, through it, she glimpsed all the things that could have been, that should have been, that failed for want of courage and tenacity. All the wasted potential of the cosmos.
That glimpse was enough to terrify her, not with bodily harm but with the swallowing up of her gift, her vision, her song. The snapping off of her narwhal’s tusk, the antenna that thrust up into the sphere of the gods. If she had been alone, she would have lost her nerve and fled back to her cubicle once again.
But she wasn’t alone. The ice was with her. Greenland was with her. She’d been a fool to think her power to create came solely from within. Yes, it was her mind and soul that refined and focused that power, but the cold — the winter — had no limits. Her art would never run dry out here.
“You can never create enough,” Brown said. His voice got no louder, but with every word, his mouth opened wider. “You can never fill us.”
“I don’t have to. I just have to outlast you.”
“Ahhh,” he said quietly. His mouth stretched open, wider and wider. “Ahhhhh.” His eyes never lost their dullness, even as his face distended like a rubber mask. There was no tongue inside, no tonsils, no teeth. Just blackness, just hunger. Like the vacuum between the stars, that maw sucked into itself whatever was not anchored to some rock.
But the cold, too, was rushing into that void. And the cold was endless. The more Brown inhaled, fighting to suck in Neave’s power, the more of the winter rushed down his fathomless gullet. And the more of the winter he swallowed, the greyer and paler he became. His hair turned to ice. His eyes wept sleet. His fingernails shattered, one by one.
Neave was trembling from the frigid air. She felt the moisture of her eyes freezing in her lashes. Her extremities were like tingling blocks of wood. She couldn’t have lasted any longer, but for a strange paradox, a riddle of the snow: that her strength came from this cold. The very thing that was killing her was also giving her life.
At last, Green spoke. “Stop, Neave,” he whined. His voice was petulant, puerile, the voice of a mean child on the verge of a tantrum. “Stop not letting us eat you. Stop it!”
She couldn’t speak and had nothing to say anyway. She just squeezed her eyes shut and tried to keep holding on. She had to be like her music: Winter Synth, which went nowhere and did nothing. It simply was.
“Stop!” Green shrieked. Then, deflating like a balloon, he was pulled into the abyss of Brown’s throat. Brown’s arms were sucked into his own mouth — then his feet, legs, and torso — then, horribly, impossibly, his head vacuumed itself up and disappeared.
The Unitary Confederation of Lepidopterists was no more.
Neave fell to her knees. The snow, eternal, was there to hold her up. The wind swirled around her like a mother’s shawl. In the distance, a wolf howled joyfully. And she began to laugh.
* * *
Another late afternoon hike to Sermitsiaq. It was almost 8:00 when Neave got back to Sofie’s place. There was a decent crowd, and a lone workman was troweling something near the entrance, where the new addition was coming along nicely. He smiled and nodded as she walked in. “Evenin’, Miss Qaanaaq.”
“Hey, Kuupik,” she said. “You’re working late.”
“I’m off tomorrow. Wanna make sure the plaster’s done so it’s dry for the morning crew.”
“You want some coffee?”
He shook his head, still smiling.
“Well, carry on, my friend.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Sofie had a mug waiting for her as she came up to the counter. “Hello, dear. On the house.” She winked.
“Thanks, Sofie,” Neave said out loud, privately adding, Aw, yeah. Free coffee for life was just one of the perks of being a full partner in the café.
Tom was at a corner table, sketching furiously in one of his notepads. Neave pulled over a chair. “Hey, Tom, how’s it going?”
He glanced up. “Hi, Neave. Going good, thanks.” Tom was off the drugs these days — apart from caffeine — and she’d commissioned him to do some of the art for her new website. For the first few weeks, his drafts had looked like kindergarten stick figures; but his skill was beginning to return.
“Whatcha workin’ on?” she asked.
“It’s a bear. Well, it’s gonna be a bear. It’s just sinews right now, you can’t look yet.”
She held up her hands. “Never interfere with an artist.”
Tom grinned. “You’d know that better than anyone.”
Neave took her cup and headed upstairs. With her settlement from the Bank of Greenland, she could have afforded a far better place; but this was her fortress now. Die Festung.
The old coffee-and-Snowspire ritual was working again. Like Tom, though less so, she had needed some time to recover her talents, but now they were sharper than ever. By the time she finished listening to her favorite Winter Synth album, she was crackling with ideas for her latest track, “Whatever Fuels the Cold Fusion.” It aimed to be a sound-painting of the night she faced down Mr. Brown and Mr. Green. It didn’t tell a story, of course; it simply sought to capture the feeling of that landscape, that vista, when Neave had thought it was the last thing she would ever see.
The good spirits were truly awake, and she settled in for a long, productive night. And as the synthesizer began to hum and the notes began to flow from her fingertips, she murmured the words that had become her pilot star, the cold fire on the ultimate northern horizon: “We didn’t choose the winter. The winter chose us.”
Copyright © 2025 by Jamey Toner
