by Don Wilcox
CHAPTER X
Invisible Terror
Without Gandl’s help we might have perished.
It was a grueling job, getting back to shore through the deep snow. The treacherous pitfalls were hidden and there were no trails to follow.
But there were landmarks of a sort. We neared the shoreline.
There were three igloos.
Where nothing had been before except the jagged icy banks of a narrow inlet, three spherical snow-covered houses showed white against the black waters.
As we approached the nearest of these we made out the figure of Cedric Peterson.
“The Professor!” I gasped. “What’s he doing here?”
“Looking for us, most likely,” said Steve, and he called, “Helloooo—”
“Sssh!” I gasped. “You’ll bring on another one I of those things—”
“What things—Oh, you mean—”
“The ice prison, of course. Don’t you remember, it was when we were shouting that the thing suddenly came over us.”
By that time the Professor was motioning us to be silent. When we got closer he began whispering and pointing to the igloos.
“I dug my way out,” he said. “But it was a tough job. I froze six fingers. That spherical wall is all of three feet thick.”
The Professor was in bad shape from too much cold. He showed us the mittens he’d worn the ends out of, fighting at the ice.
“I went round and round in the blackness,” he said, “before I realized what I was up against.”
“How’d it happen?” Steve asked. “Were you yelling at the time?”
“Exactly,” said the Professor. “That’s what did it. The air is so saturated with moisture that the sound waves crystallized, and there I was, captured by my own voice.”
“There are many dangers here,” Gandl said dryly.
“We’d better not do any more shouting,” Steve warned, holding his voice down to a whisper. Then with a hint of anxiety he said, “Who were you shouting at? Did you see her—the queen?”
“I thought I saw her pet tiger,” said the Professor. “But on closer inspection I determined that it was a polar bear. And it was at that moment, precisely, that my voice began to function.”
Our eyes turned to the other two igloos.
“Was someone with you?”
“The captain and Shorty,” said the Professor. “I assume that they are in those two remaining mounds of ice, either frozen to death or slowly going mad like caged animals.”
“Come on,” said Gandl.
We found a ledge that the snowdrifts had left bare, and it furnished enough stones to serve as tools in our half-frozen hands.
We broke through the second igloo and were rewarded by finding Shorty Barnes, very much alive. In fact, there was the liveliest light in his bulging eyes that I had ever seen.
“They’ve been chasing me,” he whispered in a weird manner. “They’ve been chasing me all over the place. It was a nightmare.”
“Exactly,” said the Professor. “A nightmare that would drive any man insane if it went on for long. It’s against man’s nature to be trapped in the dark.”
“Who did it?” Shorty gasped. “Who was that monster?”
“Take it easy, Shorty,” said the Professor. “You’ll get over those bad dreams before long. Come on, we’ve got to get Captain French.”
We hurried on to the last igloo, and tried to pay no attention to Shorty’s erratic mumblings about his delusions of monsters creeping after him in the dark.
As we broke through the two-foot wall of the third igloo, we were greeted by a very unhappy growl.
“The captain!” Shorty said with a sigh. “Come on out, Captain.”
Out came a big polar bear. It charged off across the snow.
“Gee, golly,” Shorty gasped. He had been on the verge of entering the place. Now he keeled over and fainted.
The polar bear almost got away from us. But Steve had the presence of mind to get a revolver into action. He fired three times, and in the thick twilight we could see the big animal stumble into the snow.
Steve and Gandl made for the beast, and another bullet finished it. Hideous fears were on us now. What had happened to the captain? Had he been caged in with the bear?
We examined the fresh blood that was already freezing around the bear’s mouth.
“It could be from the bullet,” said Steve, not too confidently. “But if it is, what in the name of heaven happened to Captain French?”
Our balloon of terror was punctured by an angry cry from the second igloo.
“Come here, you damned no-good sailors. What is this, desertion? Or mutiny?”
We raced back to the ice mound from which we had rescued Shorty a few minutes before. Captain French was emerging from it, using the most vigorous language.
We approached him with a chorus of “Sssssh!”
He wasn’t a man to be easily quieted, and he was all pent up with rage. He had been neglected and’ deserted. He thought he had fallen into some curious crevasse, and no-one had come to his rescue, and he’d been going round and round trying to keep out of reach of some monstrous animal that he couldn’t see in the blackness.
“I didn’t dare yell,” he whispered hoarsely. “But I didn’t lose my head. I puffed and snorted like a mad animal, and I bluffed it out, whatever it was. I think it was a bear.”
“It was me,” said Shorty.
The captain gave a sullen bark, then, that would have bluffed out any beast in the arctic, and he commanded that this incident was closed, once and for all and we were never to mention it again.
That brusque command might have stuck, but for one little comment from the Professor which bore deep into the minds of all of us and began twisting and spinning like an icy diamond drill.
“Are we to forget,” the Professor said dryly, “that our voices may freeze over us at any moment? There’s death in these instantaneous igloos. We’ve all been lucky to get off this easy.”
The captain’s gruff rejoinder was not very satisfactory.
“Get a hitch on that bear and let’s get back to the ship. As far as Lady Lorruth is to know, we’ve not been in any special danger. We’ve all been out on a hunt—”
The captain noticed the faint smile on Gandl’s lips, and added hastily.
“I mean a bear hunt.”
CHAPTER XI
Terror Over the Ship
“Sssssh . . . Sssssh . . . Sssssh.”
That was the watchword on board the brig during the days that followed.
It was a double-edge hush. Loud talk was dangerous. Unguarded talk could be embarrassing.
For a few days the frightful menace of voices turning to ice was kept secret.
But keeping secrets on a small brig is no easy matter. Our community of wagging tongues and eager ears was too crowded. Every sailor was curious to know whether any of us had seen Veeva. They poopooed the idea that we had simply gone on a bear hunt, even though we now had a handsome fur to show for it.
“What, no tigers?” they would say.
And the Frabbel brothers added that if they had gone hunting they’d have come back with a tiger rug and live prisoner weighed down with gold ornaments.
“No more time for bear hunting,” Captain French would argue defensively, when the Frabbel brothers began annoying him with their agitations.
“There ought to be a calm before long,” Rake Frabbel retorted. “That’ll be our chance.”
“If any of you damned fly-by-nights go ashore we’ll run off and let you freeze to death,” the captain said.
“Come on, out with it, Captain,” said young Frabbel. And the second brother, Reuben—the one with cheek-whiskers that reached up to the bags under his eyes—joined the hecklers and climbed on the band wagon with an offer to bet a hundred dollars that the captain had already paid his respects to that “damned fetching ice lady.”
“You want to bet?” the captain snarled.
“Only
I ain’t got a hundred dollars,” said Reuben Frabbel with a taunting grin.
Meanwhile Lady Lucille was being as suspicious as a caged cat about twenty-four hours a day. And there the captain was finding himself in hot water aplenty.
“You’d be surprised,” Professor Peterson confided to me, “how the old boy has been arguing with Lady Lorruth. He insists we shouldn’t try to go on searching for her husband, unless we first pick up every scrap of information from those we pass.”
Our conversation broke off shortly. The girl was coming across the horizon, riding like the wind.
Professor Peterson and I, standing on the starboard deck, were the first to see her—we thought. The shore was a quarter of a mile away, and there was a light mist; but we couldn’t mistake the figures with the whirlwind of flying snow following in their wake.
“Look!” the Professor gulped. I cupped my hands to my mouth as if to shout to her. “Don’t;” he snapped. “Wait. Don’t make a sound.”
Girl and tiger galloped on across the white land, paralleling our course, making at least twice our speed. She made no effort to hail us. Rather, it appeared, she merely intended to keep abreast our progress.
Captain caught sight of her, and you could see the shudder that passed over him. He was bending over the rail at the prow, and had been supervising a job of mending an ugly ice gouge in the hull. Below him were the three Frabbel brothers in the dory, bouncing along beside the ship. The captain had given them this repair job to shut them up, I think. Certainly not because they were carpenters. And not because it was agreeable weather for such work. It was thirty-nine degrees below zero.
Young Frabbel noticed that the captain was looking off in the distance intently, and the husky young sailor turned.
He must have seen the girl just before she disappeared. The hammer slipped from his hand and splashed into the sea. And young Frabbel suddenly yelled—a shrieking note calculated to wake the high heavens.
He must have yelled again. I saw him yell. But I didn’t hear.
In the split second after his lips parted, it happened.
A huge spherical chunk of ice appeared against the side of the hull. It was like an immense white balloon bulging out through the ship. Less than a third of it was visible.
Then it turned and slushed into the water—a rounded chunk of ice with a sheer side that edged up out of the water. The overturned dory was caught within, and its keel could barely be seen through the dark green water.
The three Frabbels were somewhere inside that broken ball of ice. The object began to drift away from the ship, through the waves of green-black paint.
We worked fast. The captain’s orders were sometimes helpful, more often superfluous. It was a job that challenged every man who could throw a hook.
Presently the chunk of ice was spinning back toward us, and we could see that Reuben Frabbel was coming out of the trap alive. His arms were waving, but his legs were fast between the dory and the ice.
Gandl and Steve and four others braved the icy water. When they came back, many minutes later, with the aid of our ropes, they had done all that any men could have done. . .
Again the dory hung in its place on the foredeck.
And again, after three or four days, the voices of the Frabbel brothers were added to the noise of those rooms astern where cursing and obscene talk flourished.
But now there were two Frabbel brothers, not three. Rake, the oldest, had been buried at sea. . .
Lady Lucille rang the assembly bell and in her most vitriolic manner she gave us a dressing down.
“From now on,” she said, “this ship is going to be under the sternest of discipline.”
Then and there she authorized the captain to apply severe punishment—chains or worse—for any offenders.
I went away from this session with mingled awe and amusement. It was marvelous to see how uncertain of ourselves and of the expedition every man of us had become. Peril hovered around us. The sounds of clattering dishes, of slamming doors, of ringing bells—any noise whatsoever was taken as ominous.
This fear was a growing thing—like the fear that multiplies in a mob. And, strange to say, the new stillness was as much a reminder of the terror as any noise.
Shorty was the one who did the most talking about these strange ice traps.
“They might hit us any time,” he would whisper. “They come just like that out of thin air.”
He snapped his fingers.
“And do you know what would happen? The whole ship would be covered by a great big ball of ice-tons of it—and over we’d go.”
His eyes would almost bug out of their sockets. In a picture it would have been funny. But I wasn’t in the mood to draw any caricatures.
All of this talk was maddening to Lady Lucille Lorruth.
To add to her visions of hideous disaster Steve Pound and Gandl made another short excursion over to the island coast. They returned with stories that reinforced Shorty’s calamity howling. They had sighted a dozen or more various-sized ice mounds that dotted one side of a deep V-shaped valley.
These wild terrors crystallized into a strict silence. Lady Lorruth had me make dozens of signs to post around on all corners of the ship.
“Make no noise.”
“Do not speak above a whisper.”
CHAPTER XII
Whisperings of Romance
There was a humorous side to all this whispering.
Terror is one thing; attraction for a beautiful girl is quite another. The sailors chose to believe that these ice-traps were a phenomenon of fogs and mists, and that this mysterious creature named Veeva had nothing to do with them.
And so, while we were stalled again by a dead calm, the boys began to cast longing eyes toward the shore.
The girl must be following us for some reason. Perhaps she had a favorite on board. One after another the seamen began to spruce up. Young Frabbel began shaving and sometimes went so far as to wash his face.
Looking back upon this now, I must admit that I was developing my own delusion the same as the others. I began telling myself that I might be the lucky man who would gain this girl’s favor. Hadn’t she rescued me with her own hands?
I had always supposed I would marry some day. It was just one of those things I had never got around to. At any rate, I began planning and wondering and scheming. This girl was too beautiful to be left living in this arctic wilderness.
How interesting it would be to her to come back to New York!
What a thrill she would get out of the skyscrapers, the noise of the city, the gay bright lights. This was my dream and the more I thought of it the brighter it grew. Mrs. Jim McClurg would be a valuable partner to an artist like me; she’d become the most popular young lady in all the town. And how she would enjoy it. Undoubtedly she would be grateful all her life if I rescued her from the monotony of this icy world.
But in this dream I always came to a dead stop when I remembered that she was a queen.
Queen of what?
Was she really a person of royal blood? Did she maintain responsibilities toward some little kingdom of Greenland natives?
I must see her again soon.
My dreams were coming along nicely when I began to notice strange traits among my fellow men. Why all this whispered clamor over shaving soap and razors? Why so much attention to the detail of combing our hair?
Why such a demand for pocket telescopes to spend idle hours gazing at the shore line to our right? Malonski, the steward, had to parcel out such things on a sharing basis.
Now and then our vigilance was rewarded—we would catch glimpses of the girl riding along over the icy hills; as Reuben Frabbel put it, “Within rifle range, only who gives a damn about a white tiger?”
Reuben gave a damn about something, judging by the fact that he’d clipped the whiskers off the upper half of his black face.
Those rare glimpses were what gave zest to the long hours of the dark winter, now on us.
By
this time we had all come to look to Gandl for authoritative information. Would this girl continue to follow us? Was she really a queen? Were there villages to supply her with food and shelter? Did she know this whole terrain?
Gandl’s silence was interpreted as yes or no, according to the answers we preferred.
Gandl was living in Shorty’s room now, and Shorty would come to me to complain.
“They’re overworking Gandl,” he said. “One man after another comes to him to ask confidential questions. And they all ask the same thing. Is she already married? And if she is, where’s her husband? What’s he the king of? Is he a good fighter? Does he have firearms?”
Even the captain, Shorty said, would make these inquiries. But about all anyone got out of Gandl was that she was a queen.
“Steve will tell you so himself,” said Gandl. “He heard her say it too. If she says she is a queen, she must be.”
And so, out of these indefinite encouragements, our delusions of hope multiplied.
Shorty came to me to tryout his talents as an actor. “I used to ride horses,” he said. “I been thinkin’—when we get back I could go on the stage with a trick riding act. Don’t you think so, Jim?”
Of course I heaped compliments on him and told him, “By all means you should be on the stage. With those bowlegs of yours you could ride a trick mule, at least. But what you really need, Shorty, is a beautiful lady that could ride a tiger.”
Shorty’s eyes fairly popped and he broke into a comical confession.
“I been thinkin’ over that angle too, Jim,” he said. “Maybe I’ve got a fortune waitin’ for me when I git back. And that girl—well, I got her smilin’ my way already. But don’t tell no one.”
He snapped his fingers at an imaginary horse, gave a frog-like jump as if leaping astride, and pranced off on his bandy legs with an air of a clown rider.
In contrast there was Steve Pound. Yes, Steve was smitten right along with the rest of us and he would come in for the most serious talks.
In fact he would make me feel guilty over being in love with the same girl. He was so earnest about it all.
“Jim,” he would say, “I’ve led a lonely life. The time’s come when I’ll stop these ocean voyages and settle down in some little rustic cottage by the sea. I’ve seen a lot of girls in my day but it takes a really beautiful person to bring a man like me to such a decision. I guess you can appreciate what’s on my mind.”