Fortnight of Fear

by Graham Masterton

“Monsieur,” the girl interrupted. “You needs must leave now.”

  “Oh, no,” said David. “Not without my wife.”

  “Your wife is forfeit, monsieur. From the day that the Pope’s council first met to rehabilitate me, one English woman was forfeit, every witch-year.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” David shouted at her. “I want my wife, and I’m not leaving without her!”

  “Monsieur,” the girl blazed at him; and her eyes brightened now, and the smell of burning hessian grew stronger. “A witch-year is three-score and seventeen years; and Satan demands that three-score and seventeen witch-years shall pass before the settlement is finally settled; and that in every witch-year an Englishwoman shall burn as I was condemned to burn, in the place of my imprisonment, until the English are forgiven and the Popes are freed of their obligation.”

  David stared at her. He felt as if the whole world were turning beneath his feet; as if time and gravity had no meaning at all; as if Hell were real.

  “You’re Joan,” he whispered.

  She laughed, and smoke poured out of her mouth, and tongues of flame began to lick at her shirt. “Ah, oui monsieur, Joan, burned at the stake for heresy and witchery! And then forgiven, for my Master Lord Satan would not have me sacrificed, not without seventy-seven sacrifices to redeem me! And the Pope’s council shook in their shoes, and knew no sanity, and heard the dead screaming in the night, and saw dead dogs running through the streets of Rome.”

  “You’re not taking my wife,” said David. His head pounded, his adrenaline-level was rising like a thermometer.

  “I have already taken her,” said Joan. “I came to her, and I talked to her, and she took all of her possessions and burned them. Now she, too, is prepared to be burned. Look at her! Regarde! She is waiting for that last embrace! She is impatient for it! And all I have to do is to take her into my arms!”

  “No!” yelled David.

  But Joan smiled and shook her head and fire licked out of her sleeves: David could hear it softly crackling. Then Joan turned back to Carole, and raised her arms, and Carole hesitantly came towards her, as if she really wanted to be burned; as if she were really happy to be sacrificed.

  David wasn’t sure if he were sleeping or waking, but he rushed toward Joan and clutched her in his arms with the terrible enthusiasm of a true martyr.

  He thought she might burn him. He was afraid she might burn him. But his only experience of burns was scalding his hand on a kettle. He wasn’t at all prepared for the blast of heat which roared through his eyebrows and his hair and which burst his lips open and shriveled his cheeks.

  She was so fiercely hot that he couldn’t even scream: couldn’t draw breath. But he knew that he had to hold her tight and never let go, or else Carole would die, and he couldn’t let Carole die for anything.

  He turned his head around, fighting for breath, too agonized even to groan. He was afire from head to foot, and the pain was greater than any pain he had ever experienced or could ever have imagined. Every nerve ending was alight. Every inch of skin was alight. He felt the insides of his thighs wrinkling with pain, and then his testicles burn. He cried out, “God! God forgive me!” although he wasn’t sure why. Then he gripped Joan’s burning body as tightly as he could, and pitched himself right through the wooden railings and over the cliff and the two of them cartwheeled through the night, fiery and screaming, until they hit the sand below and burned and burned.

  The next morning Carole stood on the beach with her hair blown by the wind. Robert and Jeremy stayed close beside her. The pompiers had already covered the ashes with a yellow tarpaulin, and an ambulance was driving across the sand with its red light flashing but no siren. A flight of geese crossed the estuary, honking plaintively as they flew.

  The gendarme from St Valéry came up to Carole and made a sympathetic face. “I am pleased that you are safe,” he told her. “I am sorry for what happened to your husband.”

  Carole nodded, with tears prickling her eyes.

  The gendarme said, “It will be impossible for other people to understand, you know that? But what your husband did was very brave. Also, it finished something for ever. It broke a chain, if you see what I mean. The burning of an English woman was necessary for this process to continue. Joan was cheated of that. His Majesty was cheated of that.

  The gendarme looked around, and Carole was surprised to see that there were tears in his eyes, too. “You know something?” he asked. “When Joan was burning at the stake, a priest risked his life to mount the burning brushwood and to give her a wooden crucifix, that she might hold it, and enter the kingdom of Heaven.

  He lifted his hand, and offered Carole a crude oak cross. “I found it here, on the beach, amongst the ashes. It was not burned at all. I think, you know, that it must belong to you.”

  Carole took the cross and pressed it close to her chest. Then she turned and walked back to La Colonne de Bronze, with Robert and Jeremy following her.

  In the lounge, she found madame, dressed in black. “Madame, my husband’s passport, please.”

  Madame opened her cashbox and handed Carole the maroon passport without a word. Carole opened it up, and saw that David’s photograph was charred by a dark-brown diagonal scorch-mark.

  She closed his passport, closed his life, and walked out into the gray overcast morning, where her boys were waiting for her.

  The Sixth Man

  Selborne, Hampshire

  Although much of The Sixth Man is set in Antarctica, the real dark heart of the story beats in Selborne, in Hampshire. Selborne village is the birthplace of the Rev Gilbert White, 1720–93, the pioneering naturalist, and remains today very much as he knew it in the 18th century, with a giant old yew tree in the churchyard, and pollarded lime trees outside the butcher’s shop. Gilbert White’s 17th-century house, The Wakes, is now a museum which is jointly devoted to White himself and to Captain Oates, the ill-fated Antarctic explorer. Here you can see photographs and documents and artefacts which bring the suffering of Captain Scott’s party into chilling life.

  Afterward, you can climb the steep zig-zag path which Gilbert White helped to make up to the top of Selborne Hanger, and look out over the warm, spectacular countryside, and think about the meaning of ambition, and self-sacrifice, and the meaning of fear itself.

  THE SIXTH MAN

  We were walking back to the house when Michael said, “I’ve discovered something rather strange. I don’t quite know what to do about it.”

  It was a perfect English summer’s day. There was a deep, sweet smell of meadowgrass and clover, and above us the clouds lazed slowly over the Lyth like huge cream-colored comforters. Not far away, next to the split-rail fence, a small herd of Jersey cows stood thoughtfully chewing, and occasionally flicked their tails.

  “Do you want to tell me what it is?” I asked. Michael was a petroleum geologist, a discoverer and an exploiter of oil-fields in far-flung and undesirable places, and not exactly the sort of chap who ever thought anything was “strange”, let alone worried himself about it.

  “I’ve found a photograph,” he said. “I’ve looked at it again and again. I’ve even had it examined by the photo-lab. No doubt about it, it’s quite genuine; but it makes no sense at all; and I’m afraid a lot of people are going to be quite embarrassed and hurt about it.”

  We reached the edge of the meadow and climbed over the stile. I didn’t push Michael any further. He was always careful and deliberate in his choice of words, and it was obvious that he was genuinely disturbed.

  “I think I’d better show you,” he said, at last. “Come into the study. Would you like a beer? I think I’ve got a couple of cans of Ruddles in the fridge.”

  We made our way through the tangled dog-roses at the end of his garden, past the overgrown sundial, and in through the old-fashioned kitchen. His young wife Tania was out, collecting their three-year-old son Tim from playschool. Her apron lay across the back of the chair, and a freshly-made apple-pie stood
in a circle of lightly-dusted flour. I had known Tania long before I had known Michael; and in a funny way I still wished that she and I could have loved each other more. It was unsettling for me to see her carrying Michael’s son in her arms.

  Carrying frosted cans of beer, we climbed the uncarpeted stairs to Michael’s study. There was a smell of warm days and dried-out horsehair plaster, and oak. Michael’s house had been built in 1670, but his study had all the equipment that a petro-geologist needed: an IBM computer, a fax machine, seismic charts, maps and rows of immaculate files and books and atlases.

  He took out a large black folder labeled Falcon Petroleum: Ross Ice-Shelf, laid it flat on his gray steel desk, and took out an envelope. Inside the envelope were several copies of old black-and-white photographs.

  “Here,” he said, and passed one over. As far as I could see, it was the famous photograph of Captain Scott and his ill-fated party at the South Pole. Wilson, Evans, Scott, Oates and Bowers, frost-bitten and making no pretense of being bitterly dejected. I turned it over, and on the back there was a typewritten label: Captain Robert Scott and party, South Pole, January 17, 1912.

  “Well?” I asked Michael. “What of it?”

  “There were supposed to be five of them,” he said. “Actually, of course, there were originally only supposed to be four – but for some inexplicable reason Scott took Lieutenant Bowers along on the last leg to the Pole, even though they didn’t have enough food.”

  “There are five of them,” I told him.

  “Yes, but who took the photograph?” Michael insisted.

  I gave him the photograph back. “They operated the camera with a long thread, everybody knows that.”

  “Everybody supposes they used a thread. But if that’s true … then who’s this?”

  He handed over another photograph. It showed Scott standing beside the small triangular tent left by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who had beaten the British expedition in their race to the Pole by just over a month. There was Oates, bending over beside one of the guy-ropes; there were Evans and Bowers, standing close together, Bowers making notes in a notebook. But in the background, about fifty or sixty yards away, another figure was standing, in a long black coat, and a huge black hat, neither of which remotely resembled any of the coats or hats that the rest of the party were wearing.

  Michael tapped the photograph with his finger. “Presumably, this picture was taken by Dr Evans. It’s not the kind of photograph you could take with a thread, anyway, not with the type of camera that Scott took with him to the Pole. Too far away, too difficult. But look at the caption … Dr Evans hasn’t attempted to give any special emphasis to this unknown sixth man; and none of the others seem to be concerned that he’s there. Yet, he isn’t mentioned Scott’s diary; and we know for a recorded fact that only five set off on the last leg across the polar plateau. So where did he come from? And who is he? And what happened to him, when all the rest of them died?”

  I stared at the photograph for a long time. The mysterious sixth man was very tall, and his hat had a wide sweeping brim, like a coal-heaver’s hat, so that his face was obscured by an impenetrable shadow. He could have been anybody. I looked at the back of the photograph, and read, R. Amundsen’s Tent At The Pole, January 17, 1912. No mention at all of the man in black. A mystery, nearly eighty years old, but Michael was right about its sensitivity. At the time, the tragedy of Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition had moved a whole nation to tears; and there were many people in England, even today, who would find any revisionist explanations of their fate to be gravely offensive.

  “Where did you find this?” I asked Michael.

  “In the private papers of Herbert Ponting, the expedition’s photographer. I was looking for pictures of the Ross Ice-Shelf and the Beardmore Glacier, the way they used to be.”

  “And you don’t have any idea who this sixth man could be?”

  Michael shook his head. “I went through Scott’s diary with a fine-tooth comb. I checked Amundsen’s account, too. Amundsen left nobody behind at the Pole; and he saw nobody else.”

  I held the photograph up to the window. “It’s not a double exposure?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  I shrugged, and handed the photograph back. “In that case, it’s one of the great unexplained mysteries of all time.”

  Michael grinned, for the first time that afternoon. “Not if I can help it.”

  The Chinook helicopter slowly circled and then landed on the ice, whirling up a white blizzard that sparkled and glittered in the sunlight. The cargo doors were opened up immediately, and the orange-jacketed engineers heaved out tools and ropes and crates of supplies. Michael wiped his spectacles with his thumb, and then tugged the hood of his parka tight around his chin. “You ready?” he asked me.

  The Antarctic wind sliced into the open cargo doors like frozen knives. “I thought you said this was summer,” I told him, following him along the fuselage, and then down the steps to the ice.

  “It is,” he grinned. “You should try visiting here in June.”

  Slowly the Chinook’s rotor-blades flickered to a standstill. Michael led me across the hard-packed ice to the largest of the nine huts that made up Falcon Petroleum’s Beardmore Research Station. It looked like rush hour. Sno-Cats bellowed from one side of the station to the other, dog-teams panted past us, and dozens of riggers and engineers were working on aerials and scaffolding and two more half-finished huts.

  The research station covered more than eleven acres, and the once-pristine Antarctic ice was strewn with discarded caterpillar-tracks; broken packing-cases; and heaps of wind-blown rubbish.

  “I thought it was going to be all peace and solitude,” I shouted at Michael.

  He shook his head. “Not a hope. These days, the Antarctic is busier than a Bank Holiday in Brighton.”

  We entered the hut and stamped the ice from our feet. Huge fan heaters made the inside of the hut roaringly hot, and it stank of stale cigarette-smoke and sweat and something else, something musty, a smell which will always remind me of the South Pole, for ever and ever. It was almost like the smell of something which has been dead and frozen for a very long time, but is at last beginning to thaw.

  Michael said, “It’s a pretty gruesome life, but you get used to it. We get a regular supply of Johnnie Walker and porno videos from the Falklands.”

  He led me along a gloomy sisal-carpeted corridor, and then opened one of the doors. “Here, you’re lucky, you can have this room to yourself. Dr Philips had to go back to London for six weeks. His wife got tired of him being away so long, and she’s divorcing him.”

  I threw my suitcase on to the bed. The room was small, with a narrow steel-framed bed and a small desk and a packing-case which did duty as a bookshelf. On the chipboard wall was a color photograph of a large mousy-haired woman in a pale blue cardigan, with washing pinned up behind her; and next to it, a pin-up of a massively busty blonde with her legs stretched wide apart.

  I thought of Tania. “What does Tania think about you, being away for so long?” I asked Michael.

  “Oh, she doesn’t like it, but she lumps it,” he replied, rather evasively. He went to the window and peered out at the blindingly sunlit ice. “We all have to make sacrifices, don’t we? That’s what made Britain great – sacrifices.”

  I started to unzip my anorak, but Michael said. “Don’t take it off yet. Rodney Jones can probably take us out to see the drilling site pretty well straight away. That’s unless you’re hungry.”

  I shook my head. “The chaps on the Erebus gave me steak and eggs and all the trimmings.”

  We went back along the corridor, and turned left. The first room we came to was marked Seismic Studies. It was large and untidy, crammed with desks and packing-cases and all kinds of flickering computer screens and noisily-zizzing fax machines. A handsome thirtyish man with a thick gingery beard was sitting with his thick oiled fishermen’s socks propped up on one of the desks, reading a copy of Woman�
��s Weekly.

  “Hullo, Mike,” he said, dropping the magazine on the desk. “I’m thinking of knitting myself a guernsey and matching scarf, what do you think?”

  “You haven’t finished my gloves yet,” said Michael.

  “I’m having trouble with the reindeer,” Rodney retorted. “All those damned antlers.”

  Michael introduced me. “This is James McAlan, pathologist extraordinary, from Sussex University. He’s come to look at our discovery.”

  Rodney stood up and shook hands. “Glad you could make it. We don’t know what to do about it. I mean, we’re only geologists. Is this your first time at the South Pole?”

  “This is my first time at either Pole,” I told him. “Up until now, the furthest south I’ve ever been is Nice.”

  “Well, you’ll hate it,” said Rodney, enthusiastically. He picked up his wind-cheater from the floor, and banged it with the flat of his hand to beat the dust off. “Borchgrevink said that the silence roars in one’s ears. ‘Centuries of heaped-up solitude,’ that’s what he called it. Borchgrevink was a Norwegian explorer, one of the first to spend the winter here. I’ve spent three winters here, which qualifies me as the stupidest bugger on the base.”

  He led us back out of the hut and across the rutted ice. Off to our left, a pack of huskies were yapping and jumping as they were fed. “Bloody dogs,” Rodney remarked. “I don’t care if I never see another dog again, not one, as long as I live.”

  It took us only six or seven minutes to reach the site of the excavation. It wasn’t very impressive. A shallowish scour, surrounded by heaps of filthy broken-up ice, discarded equipment and a half-completed tower for seismological soundings. In the bottom of the scour, a green tent had been erected, to shield their discovery from the Antarctic weather, and protect it from stray dogs.

  Michael led the way down to the tent, and Rodney tugged free the frozen laces, and opened up the flap. It was solid with ice, and it made a sharp cracking noise as he turned it back. “You’ll have to crawl,” Rodney told us.