Demyan made a mental note to try and change that, although the simple fact in their village was that life was not kind, and the sooner Ilya learned to live with that, the better. Still, he wanted to make his life a little easier, and they needed to eat, so if the fish were indeed plentiful, it would be worth it. Let him forget their miserable existence and tomorrow they could both learn the true hardship of survival in their desolate and unforgiving land.
The door opened again and the solid outline of his father entered the room. He picked up a second duffel bag, one he hadn’t used before. It was bigger and appeared full. Normally, everything he needed while at the mine was stored on site, so his luggage from home was generally negligible.
Demyan watched his father reach the door, only to stop and look directly at his open eyes in the dark. “You’re awake. Good. I need to talk to you.”
“Yes, father?” Demyan asked, obediently.
“You’re now in charge. Do your best to keep Ilya alive. If you get into trouble, ask for help, the rest of our community will help.”
“Yes.”
“Good man. Next year you will be big enough to work in the mines. Maybe all three of us can move to Yakutsk. Would you like that?”
“Yes.” The mines were notoriously dangerous, inside men died nearly every day, but until he worked in the mines, they would live permanently on the edge of famine. Demyan could think of worse directions for his life to take.
“Good.” His father moved toward Ilya who appeared to still be asleep, and kissed him on the forehead in an uncommon show of fatherly affection. “Goodbye, my son. Obey your brother and he will look after you.”
Demyan watched as Ilya squeezed his eyes shut. It was probably for the best. Neither of them quite knew how to take their father like this. Perhaps the death of their mother had somehow softened him.
He watched as his father left in silence.
The goods truck came by and picked up his father on its way to Yakutsk. He waited a full ten minutes in silence. Then removed his sleeping bag, crossed the floor of the single small room and opened the door a crack to look out. He watched the truck leave the Oymyakon village in darkness. Demyan closed the door and woke his brother.
Ilya opened his blue-gray eyes. “Has he left?”
Demyan nodded. “I watched the truck leave.” He looked at his little brother. The kid was a runt, but despite his frequent beatings, he was filled with a natural ability and a tendency to fight, that ran in his family. For all his faults, he had to give it to the kid, he was brave and tough to the point of stupidity. “Are you sure you still want to go see it?”
“The mysterious lake?” Ilya sat up, now wide awake. “Of course.”
“Good. Then get your stuff together. It’s a long walk and you know we’re not supposed to know about it.”
Ilya slipped out of his sleeping bag.
He pulled up the two layers of thick snow-pants and slipped his arms into a fur coat. Like most people in his village, his heavy coat was long, reaching all the way to his midcalf. Below which he wore boots made of reindeer leather, with the fur still on. He grabbed his fur hat and then wrapped layers of knitted scarves around the lower part of his face. He then rolled his heavy fur coverings from his bed, and placed them inside his large rucksack. A hunter’s cabin they would use for shelter was a few miles short of the lake. They could stay there overnight and then fish tomorrow.
Demyan had already planned it out, including packing a small bag of food and cooking equipment. At times like this, he wondered why he and his brother fought at all. They both shared the ruthless will and defiant bravado of his father, even if his big brother had the physical size to back it up. They both knew people weren’t supposed to know or talk about the new lake, because of its close proximity to Boot Lake. But he and his brother wouldn’t listen to such nonsense. The lake was thawing and there were fish, so they would go and see it.
The lake had formed below an old ice field, twenty miles to the south-east of Oymyakon’s village. It was once used by the Alaska-Siberian air route as an airfield during World War II as a stepping stone to ferry American Lend-Lease aircraft to the Eastern Front. Now, part of the icy ground below had melted, making way for a large lake. The surface of which was still frozen solid, but below the ice, there was talk of a massive labyrinth of warm water, filled with fish.
The lake had appeared a few months ago, thawing during the start of winter as if by magic. Ilya had no superstitious doubt about where the lake had come from. It was clearly caused by a recent shift in the Earth which leaked hot water from deep thermal springs far below. His father had talked about these ancient moving plates on which the Earth rested like a house on its piers. It was how the hot springs formed near Oymyakon, and without them, their village would have perished years ago.
His mind turned to his father down the mine shafts. He’d once said that it was the movement of these plates that caused tremblors and mini-Earthquakes that were unable to be felt on the surface, but catastrophic to those down in the mines.
Oymyakon had plenty of such hot water pools. There was nothing mysterious about it. The thermal springs would spurt boiling water to the surface, thawing the ice, and making it warm enough for fish to survive all year round. If there was water, there would be fish, and he was hungry. Always hungry. So, he was excited to go to Lake Mysterious, as they had decided to call it.
It was midday by the time they reached the peak of a three-hundred-foot hill and stared down at the western edge of Boot Lake. The entire lake was approximately ten miles long from north to south and somewhere between two and five miles wide at varying parts, in such a way that it appeared to form the shape of a giant boot made of ice, superimposed on a sea of snow. The entire thing was angled downward, and a little askew. At the back of the field of ice were two smaller lakes that formed the shape of the heel. Two-thirds of the way up, an outcrop of dark igneous rock jutted out from the ice to form an island, almost in the shape of a boot buckle.
The rocky island jutted out of the ice in sheer walls of vertical stone, at least fifty feet high. On the top of which, were two man-made structures. One was an older building made of thick concrete with a heavy dome on top, from which multiple modern antennas protruded. To Ilya, the structure looked sinister, like some sort of old prison — a remnant of Stalin’s Death Camps — although no one in his village or elsewhere had ever been able to tell him what the island had once been used for. He had no doubt the building was just the tip of the iceberg, and that a series of hollowed out stone tunnels, penetrated deeply into the stone below, where he had no doubt, many men had once lost their lives.
To its right was the second man-made structure. This one much more modern. Its construction was completed nearly two years ago, and it was supposedly used for the sole purpose of producing the world’s largest geothermal power station.
In the distance behind it, right there in the middle of the lake, a cooling tower rose out of the sheet of ice, nearly seven hundred feet into the air and over a hundred feet long in a wide hyperboloid shape. They said the station was going to power all of eastern Siberia and most of the heavily populated west, too. But that was all some bullshit story. It had been running for two years and there still weren’t even any powerlines running out from it. In fact, although steam rose from its crest, there was no sign of where the power could have possibly been going — yet still, like some sinister neighbor, the monster seemed alive, and continued to breathe dark clouds of steam into the skies.