This one's my take on a "weird tale" in the vein of Robert Chambers or Algernon Blackwood... which means it's slow-moving and there's nary a psycho killer or tentacle monster in sight. Also, there's not a lot of sex here, so if you're looking for fast action this may not be your thing.
* * * * *
From September of 1928 a weekly advertisement accompanied by a portrait appeared in all the major European newspapers:
REWARD OF $1000 OFFERED β to any person providing information leading to the location of Josephine Hart, late of Massachusetts, daughter of Mr and Mrs Joseph Hart. Miss Hart is aged twenty-three, five feet eight inches tall, with brown hair and green eyes. Small round scar on back of left hand, beauty mark above left eye. Last seen in Paris, July 19th. Reward may be claimed at any office of Hart and Hayworth Shipping, Inc.
The affair became something of a nine days' wonder in those same papers, for the details might have been calculated to provoke public curiosity. Miss Hart was the sole surviving heiress to her father's considerable fortune; her mother had died in 1927, and an older brother had gone missing in action in the Great War. She had attended Vesey, a respectable ladies' college in West Massachusetts. After graduating
cum laude
she had embarked on a tour of Europe, escorted by two of the family's trusted servants. In Paris she had slipped away from her guardians to visit an unidentified acquaintance and had returned distraught, then vanished into thin air two days later.
Beyond that, the facts of the matter were unclear, but the journalists and letter-writers of the day were more than happy to interpolate. Week after week the papers embraced one speculation after another. Miss Hart had eloped to Munich with a penniless novelist β or perhaps to Moscow with a Bolshevik. She had been kidnapped for ransom β no, by white slavers.
The publicity and the size of the reward attracted a great many applicants offering information on Miss Hart. Many were simple cases of mistaken identity, and some were obvious frauds or fantasists, but a few told stories that seemed credible. A well-dressed woman with a beauty mark had been seen boarding a train in Munich. A brunette speaking very bad Swedish had lodged for a week in Stockholm. Gendarmes in Vienna brought up a drowned woman of the right height from the Danube, her face unrecognizable.
Hart and Hayworth employed private investigators to follow up the most promising of these leads, but in every direction they were disappointed. The Viennese woman's clothes matched those of a local actress who had fallen out with her husband. The Stockholm woman had departed with no forwarding address. Nobody had noticed where the woman from Munich had left the train.
By the end of the year, interest in the case had waned. Even after the events of October 1929 dealt a drastic blow to the Hart fortune, the advertisements continued to run
β
although less frequently and in smaller type. They ceased only in 1938 when old Joseph Hart passed away.
And there, for more than seventy years, the matter rested.
* * * * *
Northern Sweden, 1928
Josephine had passed from a world that was white and empty and achingly cold, into a dream of cool implacable vastness. After that, she was not sure when β or even if β she had drifted from the dream back into waking. She was conscious enough to think that the cold was less than it had been. There were other aches still, buried under the chill until now, but she was still too torpid to remember them... and there was a presence nearby.
"Are you there?" she whispered. "Is somebody there?"
"I am here." A light touch on her ankle, on her arm. She tried to sit up, but her limbs might as well have been made of lead.
"Where..." Her consciousness sharpened, she tried to open her eyes, but there was a flare of such brightness and pain that instantly she gasped and closed them again.
"You have snow-blindness. Let me cover your eyes."
Was it a man's voice? No, it sounded more like a woman's, although low and soft. Something across her face β snow perhaps? Cold enough to quench the fire in her eyes, anyway.
Her hair. She had cut it short, smudged her face to pass as a lad. Did her savior realize? "Josephine. Josephine Hart."
"I am called Karin. You lay down on the glacier, a few miles just after Norrkvarn. Now you are in my home, in my bed."
"Oh. Thank you." Piecemeal memories of a foolhardy journey, overconfidence fueled by the powder a pharmacist had given her to fend off sleep. Walking too fast, impatient with the goggles that had seemed unnecessary on a cloudy day. She had reached the first shelter near midday and continued on, determined to make two days' journey in one. She might have made it if she hadn't mistaken the path and wasted an hour in retracing her steps...
"Thank you... you live here? Are you a Lapplander? But you speak English?"