Ghosts! he thought vaguely. There’s a cave full of ghosts out there. But I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, I am a ghost myself. But who would have thought that being a ghost would be so boring? Now then, Cathcardo! No self-pity! Just remember!
His memory did its best. Meteors, maps and even mukluks rushed one after the other through his ghostly head (which was still slightly crooked, but he would try putting it perfectly straight in a minute). In the meantime, he remembered the way the icy edges of the land had trembled and seemed to shrink into themselves when the meteor struck. The Riddle had been tossed like a toy ship. Why, he’d even written a poem about it all in the ship’s logbook.
The ship’s logbook!
The Captain came to a standstill. Of course. The ship’s logbook! Why hadn’t he looked at it before? Soon after he had woken he had seen that logbook sitting safely on the desk in his cabin, but in his confusion he had forgotten it. Suddenly, everything was simple. He’d go down to his cabin, read the logbook by his own blue glow, and every last detail about his fatal voyage would come back to him.
Captain Cathcardo strode to the companionway as manfully as was possible for a gliding ghost. As he climbed down, darkness fled before him, driven off by his eerie blue light. He stepped through his cabin door as if it didn’t exist, for by now he knew that he and the door were real in such totally different ways that they didn’t interrupt one another.
There was his bunk. There was his sea trunk. There was his captain’s desk. And there on that desk sat the ship’s logbook, just as he had seen it when he first woke up, bound and rebound in glassy ice. Soon, he would be breaking that ice and turning the pages. Soon, every detail of the fatal voyage would be his once more.
But things didn’t turn out that way, for Captain Cathcardo couldn’t open his logbook. By now, that logbook, like the cabin door, was real in such a different way from the Captain that his scrabbling fingers went right through the ice, right through the cover, right through the pages. It seemed as if he would never be able find out just what it was he most needed to remember. He stared around in vexation.
And, as he did this, he found himself looking down, accidentally at first, into his own bunk and not just at it; something he had certainly not done when he had first risen out of it hours, and possibly days, earlier.
It is hard for a ghost to feel terrified. They can be puzzled, irritated and lonely, and, of course, they frighten other people, but they are almost never afraid themselves. Yet now, the Captain (who had been such an adventurous captain all his days – one who had tackled snowstorms and walked on hot meteorites), felt himself melting with terror. His mitts actually began to dissolve in the cabin air. Quickly, quickly, he pulled himself back into shape – for, after all, a ghostly shape was a lot better man no shape at all – staring all the time at the other frozen shape tucked into the cabin bunk. It seemed to stare back at him through its shroud of ice. Deep inside that shroud he could make out a twisted face… the face of a dead man… his own face.
But that was not what terrified him. He already knew that he must be dead. But through that glacial shroud he could see that the body had a knife plunged into it. Many years ago someone had crept up beside him. Many years ago someone had stabbed him and left him dying in his bunk. The same someone, he was suddenly sure, had been after that box full of diamonds he had brought back after exploring the meteorite. And he knew – knew beyond all doubt – who that someone must have been. For, even though he could not see the knife clearly through the twisting layers of ice, he could see it well enough to recognise it.
There was no doubt about it! That knife had belonged to his great friend, the First Mate, Escher Black. And now he also remembered, as if it were yesterday, that Escher Black had been the only one to whom he had mentioned those diamonds. He had confided in Escher Black as if he were telling a happy joke. And during the night his friend must have crept up on him, stabbed him to death and stolen the jewels.
It was all a nasty shock, even for a ghost.
CHAPTER 20
Penguins and Ghosts
Outside, above the snow hut, the sun swung itself in its great summer circle, but Bonniface, his three children and Corona Wottley all slept deeply.
Edward was the first one to wake. He looked at the others stretched on their plastic-covered foam-rubber mattresses, all in double-down sleeping bags of the most colourful and cosy designs. Bonniface had a red sleeping bag, Corona a blue one. Sophie’s was a cheerful yellow and Hotspur’s was violet. As for Edward’s own sleeping bag, it was a bright spring-leaf green.
Feeling a little strange because, after all, he had slept overnight in his two layers of thermal underwear, Edward looked for his clothes. As he slid out of the sleeping bag, a huge, dry cold came at him like a ravenous dragon, so he didn’t waste time worrying about washing (and, after all, there wasn’t a bath or a shower for miles around). Instead, he scrambled hastily into layer after layer of clothes until he finally reached his survival jacket, his gloves, his mitts and mukluks, and crawled for the door.
He went down three steps and up three steps, almost as if he were tunnelling under the wall rather than simply going through it, and came out into a scene so white and crisp it was like crawling on to the surface of a newly-iced cake. Blue above – and there in the blueness, the bright button of the circling sun! White below, and white all around as far as the eye could see. But as Edward stared, enchanted, he saw that the white was not merely white. In places it sparkled and shone as if it were set with jewels. The slopes of distant mountains shone back at him as if they were acknowledging him to be every bit as wonderful as they were. Some distant ridges were blue-white, others were silver-white, while still others were shaded with a delicate and watery green. Clefts and rifts were grey: not a dull grey, but bright with a soft and shining silver.
And silence arched over them all. There were no voices… no sound of a single skiddoo… no sound of any distant black planes. There were none of the town sounds of distant neighbours, lawn mowers, roadworks, rustling leaves, birds or passing cars. The flag road was behind them. Edward was surrounded by a stillness so ancient he felt he might dissolve into it and become part of it forever. He kept thinking, Now! Now in this next second I’m going catch this silence. I’m going to take it in properly! But it always slid away from him. It was too huge to be held inside a simple, human head. It could only be felt in the blood, so in the end Edward gave up trying to listen and just stood there in the middle of it all. Later, he might take notes for his science fiction story. But, right then, all that mattered was seeing and feeling.
“Hi!” said a voice behind him, and there was a bundle of clothes coming out of the ice hut, with Sophie’s face looking over the top of the bundle. Edward smiled, but secretly he sighed a little too. He was glad to see Sophie, and yet he had loved the feeling of being alone with the silence. Now he would probably have to talk.
But Sophie didn’t say anything for a while, so they stood there, side by side, simply staring, until someone else exploded out of the ice hut behind them.
“Breakfast!” Corona was shouting. “Come on, you kids! I’ll show you how to light the little stove.” And immediately behind Corona came their father, pushing Hotspur in front of him. Things stopped being beautiful and strange and turned into family life once more, but that was all good fun. Having Corona around was almost like having a cheerful, clever, older sister, teasing but helpful too. Edward and Sophie found that, after all, they were happy to forget mysteries for a while and to concentrate instead on laughing. As for Bonniface – at first he watched them with a kind of smiling surprise, then he began to joke and join in as well, though he seemed a little taken aback to find that the Antarctic might have a funny side to it. Corona poured fuel into two little stoves, and then put water to heat on one of them, and bacon to fry over the other.
While breakfast cooked (and it cooked slowly because a little wind was blowing softly over the ice and bending the blue flames aw
ay from under the kettle and pan), Bonniface and Corona sat side by side looking at maps. The old maps showed where (according to the First Mate, Escher Black) The Riddle had run into trouble… where the ship (according to Escher Black) had been crushed by ice… and where Captain Cathcardo (according to Escher Black) had tumbled overboard and disappeared. They were still a long way from the place where The Riddle’s crew (according to Escher Black) had been forced to leave their ship to march overland to safety.
“There was a rumour – a wild rumour – that the expedition brought home diamonds among their geological samples,” said Corona a little wistfully.
“I’m not interested in diamonds,” cried Bonniface proudly. “I just want to find The Riddle, even if it is crushed to kindling wood. Because somewhere among that kindling wood I just might find Captain Cathcardo’s logbook. Diamonds! Hah!”
“Oh, yes! Hah!” agreed Corona. “All the same, if we did find a few diamonds lying round I wouldn’t leave them behind.”
“The ship’s logbook is much more important,” repeated Bonniface obstinately “I want to know exactly where The Riddle travelled and exactly what happened when it got there. I want to walk in Captain Cathcardo’s very footsteps.”
So saying, Bonniface pointed at a place on his biggest map and started speaking in rather a school-teacherish voice.
“Cathcardo was a hero!” he said. “An Antarctic hero! Mind you, all the crew were brave. But now, before we set out for the day, might be the very moment for me to discuss a strange idea that came to me in my dream.” He looked at Corona sternly. “And you’re not to laugh at me!”
Corona sucked in her cheeks, making the face of an explorer determined not to laugh at another explorer.
“You see,” said Bonniface in a deep, important voice. “I think Escher Black may have been wrong about exactly where they all were when disaster overtook them. He might have misread the maps. I know he says that they came all the way round here…” his finger moved across the map, “…but perhaps—”
“You’re right,” burst out Corona, peering at the map and frowning. “That is a long way for a shipwrecked crew to have walked. But Escher Black did say—”
“When I had the dream that pushed me into this adventure,” Bonniface interrupted, “the dream-thought came to me that Escher Black might have made a mistake.” He looked challengingly first at Corona and then at his children, as if they might all want to stick up for Escher Black’s story. Suddenly, his challenging expression changed. “Sophie, are you all right?”
“Of course,” said Sophie. She did not want to tell him that she had suddenly jumped and clapped her hands across her heart because, under her Antarctic clothes, the pendant had also jumped, just as if it had been given a fright or had recognised an old enemy. “Have you got any idea what sort of mistake Escher Black might have made?” she asked.
“I-I-I thi-i-nk,” declared Bonniface slowly, stretching his words to make them sound particularly important, “that we should try to locate the Inlet of Ghosts.” He looked around defiantly this time.
“What inlet? What ghosts?” asked Edward.
“Members of The Riddle’s crew muttered that they had anchored in an inlet flickering with strange, waddling ghosts,” explained Bonniface. “Of course, no sensible person believed them, and Escher Black just shrugged and said the crew were all superstitious. (Well, a lot of sailors are very superstitious so he was probably right.) But my research shows that there are other wild tales and rumours about a haunted inlet on this stretch of coast, and it suddenly came to me (in my dream, that is) that we might travel along here…” he pointed at the map “…keeping an eye open for any inlet that other people might not have noticed.”
“You’re guessing wildly,” cried Corona.
Bonniface frowned and sighed. “Yes!” he admitted. “But it is my theory. Are you laughing at me?”
“Most people would laugh at you, but I won’t,” said Corona. “Because I dreamed that cry of ‘Help!’ too, you know. And I also felt I’d been given a clue, though my clue seemed to be something to do with penguins.”
“Penguins!” exclaimed Bonniface, rather scornfully “All you can think of is penguins!”
“Hey! Whoa back!” cried Corona. “After all, I listened to your mad theory You listen to mine. I woke up out of that ‘Help’ dream, just as you say you did—”
“I did. I did!” said Bonniface quickly. Sophie patted his hand to quieten him.
“—and I woke up (like you) thinking I must go and find The Riddle and rescue whoever it was who was calling for help—” Corona went on.
“That’s exactly what I felt,” said Bonniface, interrupting her yet again.
“—but I found a little picture haunting a space behind my eyes,” Corona said. “White penguins!”
“White penguins!” cried Bonniface. “There are no such things as white penguins!”
“Well, that shows how much you know,” said Corona sternly. “There are occasional white penguins – albino penguins. I’ve even seen one or two of them. They have backs and wings of a slightly greyish-white, but their fronts shine like silver. Apart from that they are like any other penguins. They nest and look after their eggs and so on. But there are also wild tales of a whole colony of albino penguins, rather like the tales you were mentioning about the Inlet of Ghosts – and not too far from where you are pointing, either.”
Hotspur made a sudden penguin sound. He leaped to his feet and began to dance in the snow as if he were trying to tell them something. But as usual he was trying to tell them about it in some bird language – possibly penguin – so it wasn’t much use. Bonniface thought Hotspur might be frightened at the thought of ghostly white penguins and put his arms around him to comfort him.
“Nothing to worry about,” he said reassuringly. “Don’t be frightened. Even if we do see albino penguins they’ll just be ordinary penguins, not monsters or ghosts.”
Sophie’s mouth fell open.
“But they might be ghosts,” she said.
“Sophie, don’t frighten Hotspur,” said Bonniface sternly, but Edward let out a shout of excitement.
“She’s right!” he said. “Dad – you woke up thinking of ghosts and Corona woke up thinking of albino penguins. But suppose, deep down, you were both thinking of the same thing.”
“Suppose those crew members who said they’d seen a lot of ghosts had actually seen albino penguins?” cried Sophie.
Hotspur now gave the cry of a triumphant penguin (probably an Adelie, though you couldn’t tell if it was albino or not). Corona and Bonniface stared at each other in amazement. At last Corona spoke.
“Let’s travel on, keeping an eye open for any mysterious forgotten inlets,” she suggested. “And if we do see anything like a ghost or an albino penguin, we’ll check it out.”
And in the end that is what they did, singing so loudly as they skiddooed along that they failed to hear a tiny throb high in the air above them. Someone was keeping an eye on them once more… and this time it was someone in a black helicopter.
CHAPTER 21
Whoops!
If you think you might need to land on a small patch of Antarctic ice or snow, a helicopter is more practical than a plane, even a ski-plane. But helicopters are much noisier and much more cramped than planes. Of course, Rancid Swarthy had insisted on having a private cabin in his helicopter, but he found himself boxed into a space about the same size as a wardrobe and knee to knee with Whizzy Tambo.
As for Crambo Tambo – he was sitting with the pilot and had been unnaturally silent for the last hour or so. Rancid wondered if he had fallen out, and rather hoped so. His evil eyes flickered with pleasure at the thought of Crambo crashing helplessly on the frozen coast below. Then he frowned. Just how good was Whizzy when it came to explosions? Crambo had certainly seemed to be the real expert. Rancid gritted his teeth. Even the champagne had lost its fine bouquet.
The edge of the Antarctic was unrolling below them, mostl
y white, but streaked with black rock and black stony beaches too. When he studied that edge through his state-of-the-art binoculars, Rancid could make out two little spots of colour, bright against the snow. One was red and the other was blue, and they seemed to be fairly frisking along, as if they were quite certain where they were going. Rancid even imagined he could hear the sounds of distant singing and laughing.
“Frisk away! Laugh away!” he muttered, jealous at the thought of other people (and not particularly rich people, either) having a wonderful time. “We’ll see who laughs last!”
At this moment, from just beyond the cabin door there came the sound of a crackling bang followed by a yell from the pilot. The whole helicopter rocked like an airborne cradle.
“I shall have to take action against that brother of yours,” hissed Rancid, dropping his binoculars and slapping the palm of one hand flat against the cabin wall, while he spilled valuable, vintage champagne with the other. “He must be made to understand that a Swarthy Industries helicopter is the wrong place for explosions.
“But he does love a good explosion,” said Whizzy, with a sentimental smile. “Give him something to blow up and he’s happy as the day is long. And he is getting bored with snow, snow, snow!”
“I don’t care whether he is bored or not, he mustn’t blow up my helicopter,” said Rancid. “And absolutely, utterly not when I am in it. Speak to him!”
“He’s just keeping in practice,” whined Whizzy. “A explosives man needs to practise all the time. And it’s not there work to him – it’s a deeply-felt commitment. Now, tell me more about your early struggles,” he added quickly, hoping to distract Rancid from Crambo.
But Rancid was totally sick of both Crambo brothers and was making secret plans to cause them deep suffering. After all, the Antarctic is a place into which people can utterly vanish, so I should take advantage of that, he was thinking, enjoying his own wickedness once more. Captain Cathcardo vanished, didn’t he? So I’m going to make sure the Crambo brothers vanish too, both of them! Ah, ha, ha, ha, HAH!
The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom Page 6