Where the Dead Wait

by Ally Wilkes

Genres: Ghost; Thrillers; Gothic

Synopsis

An eerie, atmospheric Polar Gothic following a Victorian explorer in search of his lost shipmate and his own redemption—from the author of the “vivid, immersive” (The Guardian) horror novel All the White Spaces.

William Day should be an acclaimed Arctic explorer. But after a failed expedition, in which his remaining men only survived by eating their dead comrades, he returned in disgrace.

Thirteen years later, his second-in-command, Jesse Stevens, has gone missing in the same frozen waters. Perhaps this is Day’s chance to restore his tarnished reputation by bringing Stevens­­—the man who’s haunted his whole life—back home. But when the rescue mission becomes an uncanny journey into his past, Day must face up to the things he’s done.

Abandonment. Betrayal. Cannibalism.

Aboard ship, Day must also contend with unwanted passengers: a reporter obsessively digging up the truth about the first expedition, as well as Stevens’s wife, a spirit-medium whose séances both fascinate and frighten. Following a trail of cryptic messages, gaunt bodies, and old bones, their search becomes more and more unnerving, as it becomes clear that the restless dead are never far behind. Something is coming through.

Release date: December 5, 2023

Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

Chapter 1: Now: I: Lost London, January 5, 1882

1 NOW I: LOST LONDON, JANUARY 5, 1882
The relentless symmetry of the Admiralty building had always given Day a headache. Columns rose regularly, disappeared in orderly and predictable lines like soldiers, and square ceilings pressed down on him, a stone sky, like being buried under the earth. Looking to his right, he saw a set of mirrors marching off into the distance, reflecting him into eternity—unbroken, undistorted. A hundred perfect William Days, as if he’d come back from the Arctic shining and whole. He looked away quickly. He almost preferred the spitting, hissing rain outside, although this wasn’t proper weather, merely the suggestion of it.

They’d been expecting him. He didn’t dare hope this was a good thing. Some Admiralty man might have guffawed, slapped his thigh with mean glee: “Do you know who’s come forwards about the Stevens rescue? Do you know? Who does he think he is?”

Day rubbed his forehead, surreptitiously tried to get some of the rain out of his hat. Water pooled around his uncomfortable chair, his coat dripping like a shipwrecked mariner. Fitting, because—on his return from America all those years before—he had indeed been marooned; not on a distant island, or some foreign shore, but in his family’s three-story house in Russell Square. Although he had cause to be grateful that his father and supercilious older brother had somehow managed to pass on without him, and he’d never want for anything—although that idea almost made him laugh—it meant he’d live alone until the end of his days. Alone, but not quite forgotten.

And now he’d washed up back at the Admiralty again.

Sitting even more upright, Day fixed his eyes on the green door leading to the private offices. Change came creakingly slow, and everything was still as he remembered it from that rather cursory “investigation” years ago. The Reckoning expedition had never quite been under conventional Admiralty command, hence no court-martial, and no one had wanted indecent things to be made public; he supposed he was one of those indecent things.

Turning his hands over, he inspected them for cleanliness. Neat fingernails. His hands were soft. He would be forty in a few years, and his mid-brown hair was streaked firmly with licks of gray at his temples. His face was an honest one, people said, when they wanted to be kind. An ugly scar on the back of his left hand made him self-conscious; there were only so many situations in which one could wear gloves indoors. People always assumed it was something dramatic. He was quick to disabuse them: said it was an accident in the rigging as a midshipman, and they looked disappointed.

He wasn’t—quite—the monster people said he was.

But he’d always known, even back then, that William Day could never be fully exonerated. Not in the eyes of the public, or the press, or God. It would be madness to try. He could see them now, just as clearly as before: all those whisperers in uniform, elbowing one another when they saw him, falling silent as he passed through these echoing halls.

Murderer. Cannibal.

The green door opened, and a man left in high temper; he was very pale, with high well-bred cheekbones, a swoop of mahogany hair, and a face like curdled milk. Another, older, followed him by walking stick and determination, upper lip and chin covered with badgery whiskers. “It’s hardly to be borne,” the younger hissed. “Him? Hopkins has overstepped himself this time, the Arctic Council will—”

“Oh, the council will, will it?” the old man said with coolness. “The council has nothing to do with it. Let them sort this new disaster out themselves.”

They broke off, abruptly, when they saw Day sitting there, back pressed against the wall as if he were trying to disappear. “Excuse me,” he said.

The pale man made a strangled noise and grabbed his companion by the arm, ushering him quickly and roughly around the corner, out of sight. Day heard them speaking to each other in hushed voices, and swallowed. He’d seen the widening eyes, the flicker of contemptuous recognition: the moment he was judged instantly on the basis of the worst things he might ever have done.

Lieutenant Day of the Reckoning.

Or, as the papers insisted on calling it, the Reckoning disaster. His likeness had been passed around the illustrated news, a monster with beard and wild hair. Desperate and emaciated, they said, and it was utterly true: desperation was the natural state of Cape Verdant.

Day sighed. Who did he think he was? Stevens, his former second-in-command, had left civilization and disappeared once again into the frozen north. He, at least, still believed in the Open Polar Sea. But only two years of provisions, for an expedition three years lost—despite Stevens’s winking insistence that they could fend for themselves, Day knew the idea of such a large party surviving on hunting was ludicrous. The crew of the Arctic Fox would by now be on short rations, shortening rations, maybe no rations at all.

Day, more than anyone, knew what that was like.

“Mr. Day.” A face appeared. “Captain William Hopkins.” The stranger offered his hand. He had eyes set close together, like some small carnivorous animal, all sleek fur and pointed nose. “Won’t you come in? I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.”

The room beyond the green door was dimly lit, a fire in the grate, rain tap-tapping half-heartedly against the windowpanes. By the fireplace, twin high-backed armchairs in olive velvet, and a low table covered with correspondence and newspaper cuttings. The room looked disordered, but Day immediately had the impression that its occupant knew where to lay his hands on every single scrap of paper.

“Sit, please,” Hopkins said. Although the sky outside was too lazy to snow, the room was warm; Day could feel the heat start to suffocate him. A large chart table displayed the official map of the Northwest Passage, and Hopkins bumped into it, with an air of annoyance, on his way to the liquor cabinet.

Day accepted a whisky. Hopkins sat opposite. Up close, he was even younger than Day had first appreciated. But something about him appealed. He seemed like the rare kind of person who got things done.

“I had hoped to speak with the First Lord,” Day said delicately.

Hopkins frowned. “But he’s busy, busy. You know. Resources. Egypt.”

Day took a sip of whisky. He rarely drank, and it sat like acid inside him, in the tight hard knot of disappointment that had been building since he’d reached the Admiralty. Of course there were resource issues. Of course he’d come for nothing, and Stevens would be abandoned to his fate. Just another lost Arctic expedition, an American one at that.

Another act of vast indifference by the machine of British bureaucracy.

“If there’s another time, perhaps—”

“Not at all. I’m the one who answered you, Mr. Day. Needs must.”

Needs must—and the other half of the saying, when the devil drives. It reminded Day so strongly of Jesse Stevens that he found a prickling sensation running down his spine.

“The Stevens business is a concern of mine. Here—take a look.” Hopkins leaned forwards, perched on one bony buttock, and plucked something from the pile of papers between them. With a creeping sense of humiliation, one that made sweat gather under his arms, Day recognized some of those newspaper cuttings.

They came back in iron caskets! shrieked the headlines. Just six caskets, sealed for repatriation, to hide decomposition and—the rest. The separation of spirit and body, played out in ruthless and gruesome detail. All those other lives extinguished in the Arctic, left behind without a trace.

Hopkins, like everyone else, had heard the very worst about him.

The velvet cushions exhaled as Hopkins handed something to Day, with arched eyebrow, and sat back again. But it wasn’t what he’d expected: letters, addressed in a feminine hand to the First Lord. It felt wrong to be handling someone else’s correspondence.

For the sake of the debt which at least one of your countrymen owes my husband—

Day’s wrists prickled. He tried to put it down to the heat of the room, but there was something about that scrawling hand, and its vehement message. A debt.

Shame.

“I don’t suppose you ever met Mrs. Stevens?”

Day shook his head, swallowing the sour taste in his mouth. “They married after I’d left America.”

After he’d fled back to England to escape the reporters and the rumors and that horrible nickname, the one that followed him everywhere. He hadn’t even been invited to the wedding; there was no place for William Day at the feast. He found it hard to imagine Stevens married. Hard to imagine him anywhere but at Day’s own side.

“People say, don’t they, that he’s a great man. But you can imagine how indifferent the council has been, after that… Passage business.”

He wouldn’t say the name of Sir John Franklin out loud, and Day supposed he knew why: two ships lost, hundreds of men, nearly as many search parties, and all the Admiralty had got out of it was that line on the map, showing a wavering ice-filled strait, never seen passable. Quite useless to the plans of empire.

Hopkins refilled Day’s glass. “Mrs. Stevens”—a small snort at the name, as if the title were reserved for those of a loftier character—“is determined that her husband is still alive. Tell me, Mr. Day—do you believe the same?”

That was, after all, why he was here, in the third winter of Stevens’s expedition. Day couldn’t believe—refused to believe—that Stevens was dead. The man would have found a way to survive. He might be chewing on frozen blubber with the Natives. He might be manning the darkness of an ice-locked ship, hunting rats in the hold, small deer. He might even be eating his own boots. But he was alive. The north couldn’t kill that ceaseless, searching ambition.

And Day would know when Stevens died.

How could he not?

“Yes, absolutely,” Day said without hesitation.

“Good.” Hopkins unfolded his arms. “Good. Because you’re going to find him.”

Day stared at him, a small, uncomfortable flame of hope sparking into life.

“You’ve saved us the bother of asking.” Hopkins leaned forwards. “Myself—I’d have expected you to come begging before now.” It stung, and Day took a swallow of whisky to cover it. “You have no supporters, no—let’s be candid—no prospect of ever returning to service.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “I’ve located a ship. On behalf of backers who wish to keep their interest in Stevens… confidential. The council disapproves? Well, I’m not a member of that council. And the Admiralty has no more appetite for the north—not after the Passage, and then you.”

Day flinched at the callous economy of it. Two unconscionable disasters, one after another. Franklin and his one hundred and thirty-four men. William Day and his Reckoning. They’d both ended up gnawing on human bones, the last desperate resource.

A polite euphemism for cannibalism.

“Not an Admiralty ship,” Hopkins was saying. “A small expedition, crewed by whalers, and the Navy will loan you a handful of officers. But it hasn’t come cheap. If something were to happen, I would expect every effort to be made for the ship’s preservation. That should be paramount.” He paused, scowling. “Not abandoned, or sunk, or lost—hmm?”

The rain rapped on the windowpane.

“You were lucky you escaped court-martial the last time—but, I suppose, what was there to say? It must have been damned hard to watch.” Hopkins said this last with an air of grudging sympathy, captain to captain, as if inviting confidences. “No wonder the others never spoke of it.”

Losing one’s ship was always thought to be the worst disaster.

Day found his gaze going to the painting behind Hopkins’s head. It showed a storm-tossed sea of ice, lit with unforgiving slashes of gray and white. A ship’s splintered masts reached to the sky, and the mouth of the deep was opening. As the light shimmered, and the rain beat down outside, he could suddenly hear the waves crashing; the ice gnawing, crunching; the creak of her timbers. A dying ship, singing her death song, as loud as the silence following her end.

“I’ve read your statement,” Hopkins was saying, a glint in his eye. “Lost? As if she was yours to lose.” He steepled his fingers. “She took a nip. She went down.”

Day swallowed. Nodded his queasy agreement.

“You’ll lose no more ships. I’ve put a great deal of my influence behind this.”

The mask of genial, conversational diligence slid off. The eyes of the creature sitting in the chair were the half-glimpsed flares of distant cannon, and sweat trickled down Day’s back. Hopkins’s gaze was the simultaneous indifference and greed of empire. He might sit here beside his fire and receive a butcher’s bill featuring scurvy, frostbite, debility, pneumonia, or any one of the horrible ways to die in the Arctic. He’d receive it without blinking. He cared about his reputation, which was all.

“Do you understand?”

Day swallowed. “Yes.” Vividly, he thought.

“I’ve turned down the rest of the contenders, you’ll be pleased to hear,” Hopkins said, easy again. “You know the man, after all. You know how he thinks.”

Day looked away quickly. Did anyone really know Jesse Stevens, he wanted to say.

But this—a new command. A new purpose. It was like being dragged back from beyond the veil; like having new life beaten, painfully, into him. The rain knocked on the windowpanes, and the grandfather clock in the waiting room started to chime. The answering thud in Day’s chest, the tightness around his ribs, make him press a fist to his sternum. His body, at least, knew that failure would be synonymous with death.

“To the details.” Hopkins stood. “You’ll sail via Greenland this coming season. Investigate those reports from the whaling ships. Look for cairns—wreckage. We might as well assume Stevens is retreading your own disastrous route—”

“Not mine.” His mouth was dry.

“I’m sorry?”

“It wasn’t my route. Captain Talbot commanded the Reckoning, until his death at God-Saves Harbor. I was his fourth lieutenant. Nothing more.”

“Of course, I forget.” Hopkins obviously hadn’t. He looked amused.

On the chart table, there was Baffin Bay, the once-fertile whaling grounds off west Greenland. Lancaster Sound opened to the west, and through that sound, bobbing about in a treacherous expanse of ice, was Beechey Island: the site of the Franklin relics. Then Talbot’s Channel, named for their own doomed expedition, headed north and west towards—what?

Talbot had thought he’d known. He’d been wrong.

“I did my best!” Day said. “When scurvy took all the other officers, the ship was… she was lost.” He twisted his hands together, his heart pounding.

A pause.

“I took command, and led the men overland and through the ice, for nearly three hundred miles, to—”

Shame squeezed his throat.

“To somewhere you couldn’t cross forty miles of water,” Hopkins said darkly. “While Jesse Stevens somehow made it out.”

Day realized he’d been shouting. He didn’t dare look at Hopkins. He picked up his whisky glass, hoping to hide the tremor in his hands. “If anyone is to be blamed for what happened—”

“Then it shouldn’t be you,” Hopkins said softly. “I see.” He smiled slightly.

They both knew what the papers said, though.

Day took a deep breath, held it in abeyance. It had been twelve years, three months, and eleven days since he’d left Camp Hope: the overturned boat, the hideous flapping butcher’s tent. The grave-ridge. He’d left his reputation on the grave-ridge.

“They mean to eat me!” Campbell had shrieked in those picture-post illustrations. “They mean to kill and eat me tho’ I’m very much alive!”

A story to chill all hearts, with a sick man slaughtered like cattle by the very commander who ought to have protected him. And its conclusion: William Day, a monster.

“How you must have waited, for a chance to undo the stain,” Hopkins said softly. A pause. “You will go, won’t you.”

“Yes. Yes, I—I’m very grateful.” Day felt it coming up from his chest, a slow tingling warmth that burned as it rose. “Captain Hopkins. I’m very grateful.”

The rain drummed on.

“Good. Your command comes with caveats, though,” Hopkins said abruptly. “You won’t like who you’re taking with you.”

Day stared. “I beg your pardon?”

Hopkins handed him a newspaper. Day’s heart sank at the masthead, then sank further at the photograph, dropping right into his polished boots.

The woman in the picture was not attractive, exactly: she had thick dark hair inclined towards waves, sternly center parted, and a rounded face. Striking, that was the word, but Day was no connoisseur of female beauty. One hand resting on a polished and grinning skull, she stared at the camera through deep-set eyes.

Olive Emeline Stevens, one of America’s most famous spirit mediums, although after marriage she’d confined her talents to more private sittings; it was even said she’d hand-picked men to watch over her husband in the Arctic. He made out an engraving on the wall behind her: “out of the animal’s darkness into the angel’s marvelous light.”

Day had seen enough of that animal darkness to desperately wish such a thing might be possible.

Hopkins tapped the photograph. Day’s thoughts went, vexingly, to their little cabin on the Reckoning: Jesse Stevens crammed in beside him on the horsehair mattress, boots beating out a lazy rhythm on the ship’s wooden backbones. Stevens was no husband, Day thought. Whatever else he was—

“Yes, I know.” Hopkins waved away his objections. “The Arctic is no place for the gentle sex, despite any custom of the whaling captains. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that they’d be glad to leave their wives behind?”

That wasn’t what Day had been going to say: if his face had worn horror, it had been the image of Stevens, casual in his bed, that had crowded into his mind; the accompanying warmth crawling up his spine, making his clothes too tight and too hot.

“And Mrs. Stevens says she’s used to adventure. I daresay she has a cohort of invisible Native spirit guides” (another snort) “to defend her honor. You can deposit her on the depot ship at the first hint of danger. She needn’t go anywhere you don’t want her. She needn’t necessarily see wherever you find her husband.”

The Admiralty man paused, delicately. “In whatever—conditions—you eventually find him.”

The waiting room was empty.

Day put his back to the green door, and exhaled. He’d been in there for hours. It had seemed like a lifetime—but then, he supposed, it had taken their Savior three days to be raised from the tomb.

He was to come back tomorrow, Hopkins had said sharply, and the day after. Things would be done properly this time. They’d already come to loggerheads over the naval lists, Hopkins continuously circling back to a certain Joseph Adams Lee, with his grandfather (that badger-haired gentleman) on the Arctic Council. “Given I’ve expended significant capital—and political goodwill—on this venture, I was hoping he’d be the natural choice for your second-in-command.” Drumming his fingers. Day remembered well his encounter with Lee the younger: the pinched white face, the look of disapproval, that boiling pit of shame. He could read Hopkins’s annoyance in the bounce of his neatly clad knee.

Day rubbed his jaw, hardly able to believe that he’d got away with any of it.

Outside, the rain had stopped, and a grim illumination filtered through the windows, cracked open to let in the chill air of London winter. A moth battered against the pane, attracted to the light but unable to find its way out; Day knew what it was like to be doomed to batter endlessly against something cold and hard. A boy was shouting at the gates, hawking newspapers.

Day felt his empty stomach clench. He’d been very careful not to be seen.

“Horrible end in the ice!” the boy was yelling. “The Reckoning lost!”

No. Had he heard that right?

His head felt full of hull-cracking pressure at the idea people might be talking about him already. Stevens was a hero, after all, and William Day just a joke to any giggling urchin who—growling, beast-like—pretended to gnaw ravenously at his own limbs. Day’s neighbors in Russell Square would be sitting down to their papers, pipes in hand, glancing nervously at their flocked wallpaper. How thin and fragile, those walls separating them from a monster. Civilization from desperation.

He stared up at the portraits, trying to work up the courage to step out; he gave Jane, Lady Franklin, a look of sympathy. She didn’t belong here, either—who had she been, before her husband was lost? Then she’d turned up at every meeting of the Arctic Council, been politely laughed out of countless rooms of white-haired explorers. Launched increasingly frantic appeals for Lord Franklin’s rescue. She must have suffered greatly.

He knew how she felt.

A breath of sharp air made him glance behind himself. The mirrors reflected the window, and in the dim light of late afternoon, the hundred perfect Days had vanished. The room was shadowy. A grandfather clock beat the time, perfect and unrelenting, malicious, every second taking the Stevens expedition further from his reach.

Lady Jane’s eyes were a kind of warning.

The painting on the opposite wall was a romantic view of a group of fur-clad Arctic Highlanders—Natives from the far north of Greenland, past Cape York. The light from their fire flickered on ruddy faces, picked an opening in the ice out of darkness. But sidling into the corner of the painting, insinuating himself into the scene, peering over their shoulders—

Stevens was back.

He never walked through walls, or rattled chains, or did anything Day associated with ghosts. Stevens was still alive, after all; their connection unsevered. This Stevens was hazy and indistinct, appearing only in glimpses: in paintings, in photographs, in mirrors. Anywhere you might find a reflection. Ghostly, yes, but not a ghost. Which was fitting, because Stevens had never—to Day’s knowledge, and despite his spirit-medium wife—believed the slightest bit in ghosts, or an afterlife, or anything of the kind.

The light of that campfire picked out his bright hair, though, a thousand miles from foggy London, and Day hugged his own elbows, a yawning in the pit of his stomach. Stevens was holding up a limp body: an Arctic fox. Its tongue lolled, its eyes glassy, a shocking amount of blood smeared over its muzzle and up Stevens’s outstretched arm. His gray eyes were gleaming, pink dots in his cheeks, a wide smile of triumph splitting his face. He looked healthy and whole, utterly at home; of course he did, in his north. He was carrying Sheppard’s rifle on his back.

It was the first time Stevens had gone hunting. A few days before he’d been sent into the ice-crammed channel to fetch help. Day had thought—no, he’d known—he’d been sending Stevens out to his death. He’d wrestled with it. He’d begged Fate itself to do something, do anything, to save him from having to make that choice. To prevent him from sacrificing Stevens, the thing he loved most, to the vanishing chance of rescue.

Stevens had lived, though, and brought the whalers. In making that choice, Day had succeeded only in creating his own shining double. The burnished side of the Cape Verdant coin. Maybe that was why some part of Stevens had stalked Day the last twelve years.

“Come home,” it seemed to say, as the ice glittered deadly and the blood crawled down. “Will. Come home.”

Pain sometimes helped. Day pressed his nails hard into his palms, making little half-moons. Stevens winked at him, and Day’s heart pounded in his chest. He was getting older now, but this version of Stevens never did. He was handsome and in the prime of his youth forever. The public loved Stevens, as they hated Day, and he obliged by doing the same himself.

With a rush of blood in his ears, Day realized he couldn’t do it—he couldn’t go back. He couldn’t fail again, whether or not it would mean death.

There were other sorts of death, after all, more bitter to the soul.

Hang Stevens. He couldn’t compare.

From outside, the shouts still came. “Deliverer of Cape Verdant—now lost hisself!” Laughter. This would be a good place to sell newspapers today.

Deliverer of Cape Verdant. Day ground his teeth.

After his journey through the ice, First Lieutenant Jesse Stevens had been the only survivor of a relief party that had originally numbered three. Recovered alone, he’d fallen to his knees in front of Jeremiah Nathaniel—an otherwise cautious whaling captain, who’d taken a very great gamble by being in Lancaster Sound so late in the season—and begged him to save his wretched comrades back on land.

“I cannot tell to what desperate measures they may now have sunk! Or what wickedness! Those poor souls!”

Deliverer of Cape Verdant.

It stung more than expected. Day had lost everything up there. His reputation. His self-respect. The only home he’d ever really known: the Reckoning, golden-tinted, creaking around him like a lullaby. Sometimes he thought he’d wake one day back in his cabin, and find that the years had vanished, Talbot was still in command, and Stevens was leaning in the doorway to taunt him gently for sleeping late. A gilded age.

Sometimes he felt he’d never really left.

Stubbornly, he looked back at the painting, where a shimmering and out-of-place Stevens held up his Arctic fox, bright-eyed and golden-haired. Looking like an illustration from a picture book, tempting and daring in equal measure. The discoverer, perhaps, of that Open Polar Sea, and its fabled shores; its people living in noble savagery, waiting for Stevens to come.

Day would have to walk into the throng outside, naked and defenseless as a skinned hare. His own name rang in his ears, that nickname given by the newspapers, and he sighed, feeling the weight of it in his stomach like a stone.

Eat-Em-Fresh Day.

II: SHE WHO ASKS THE SPIRITS GREENLAND, JUNE 18, 1882

They had their first sight of Godhavn when the clouds parted during Sunday service, its tabletop mountain shimmering on the horizon under a cloth of snow.

The Resolution had been blessed with clean sailing on their journey across the Atlantic and up the Greenland coast. To be on deck again—seeing the scudding clouds, hearing the waves, feeling the wind against his skin—was, to Day, a blessing. No ghosts lingered; no bloodstained former lieutenant showed his face. He looked up at the sky each night, at the beautiful di