The White Darkness

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Everyone except me. The women’s tent, which a short while before had been like a theater set for The Trojan Women—all weeping and wailing—was peaceful now. Even Mimi was curled up in her sleeping bag, both arms clutched tight around her handbag, eyes flickering behind her lids. (Are dreams here in white on white, do you suppose?) The comforting cups of tea stood empty by each bed. Perhaps I should have had one, but Victor did not offer. He forbids me to drink tea—says it overstimulates the hypothalamus. I could have done with some comfort, though. For the first time since getting to Antarctica, I was afraid.

  Oh, we were bound to be all right; that wasn’t it. A party of tourists in trouble on The Ice was not going to be overlooked. Mike and Bob and Jon all said that the very lack of radio contact would soon bring ski-planes over from Byrd Base to check on us. No, that wasn’t it. Mine was a nameless, shapeless fear. The singing, raging happiness inside me—at the vicious beauty of this place—had drained away, and I liked me better when I was the one person not afraid.

  At home, I could have shut the book and put it back on the shelf. Now, somehow, Antarctica had overspilled the binding, overrun the bounds of safety. (It even seemed to have gotten into the tent, because it was unusually cold. You would hardly have thought the stove was working.)

  I rested my head on the pillow and pulled a down-filled imagining over my head. Sigurd.

  No! Not Sigurd! I sat bolt upright again, sweating despite the cold, and even more namelessly afraid than before. What’s wrong with me that the thought of Sigurd-son-of-Beowulf sets the stupidity alarms ringing overhead?

  Lying back, I shut my eyes and summoned up Titus—apologized for neglecting him. He did not seem to have noticed: Women’s company he could always take or leave. You know where you are with a man like Titus.

  “Why did you come here?” I asked him.

  “You brought me,” he said brightly.

  “The first time around, I mean. Ninety years ago. Why did you volunteer to try for the South Pole?”

  “Guaranteed promotion,” he said, turning the page of his book without looking up.

  “Don’t believe you.”

  His eyes glanced over the top of the page, and I refused to let him look down again. “India was palling, what with smallpox and bad tinned fish.”

  “Don’t believe you.”

  “The climate is very healthy, although inclined to be cold.”

  “That might have convinced your mother. Try again.”

  “It caught my imagination then. New horizons. That’s as far ahead as a man like me can see: the next horizon. I bore easily.”

  “Did you ever think you might die?”

  “Any number of times. India. South Africa . . .”

  “Don’t be obtuse. Here, I mean. Did you ever think, ‘This trip might kill me. This is the place I might die’?”

  Titus shrugged, his eyes elusive, evasive. I could have read every book that was ever written about him and still not known what answer he would come out with. Because nobody ever knew. Nobody has ever known. So even when he threw his book at me, I refused to blink, to relinquish the smoky brown of his eyes; The Peninsular War simply melted away in midair.

  “Enough of the doomed hero story!” he exclaimed. “I’m the great survivor, me! Think about it!” And he began to count on his fingers. “I was a sickly child but I made adulthood, look! Got enteric fever in South Africa. Some other kind in Turkey. Got shot at by my own men (understandable mistake: It was dark). Got shot in the thigh by the Boers. Interesting. Got yellow fever, smallpox, and food poisoning in India. Ran aground in a yacht off Belgium and nearly drowned everyone on board. Fell off any number of horses, any number of times. Crashed my motorbike . . . Surprising I ever made it to thirty-two, if you think about it. On nodding acquaintance almost, Death and I.” He looked across my shoulder—beyond me somewhere—frowned momentarily, nodded his head once, then glanced down, all the stubbornness gone from his mouth: “Still startling, though. In the end. When Death won’t take no for an answer. When He’s finally there in front of your—”

  I opened my eyelids and there, a few inches from my eyes, was a scarlet face, papery wrinkled and grotesque, with holes for eyes and a slit for a mouth. Its cheeks rattled loose and its nose was no more than an obscene bulge distorting the other features. I made to scream, but the air I snatched in was so cold that it wedged in my throat and choked me.

  “Time to go,” said the face, and its tissuey lips flapped quite away from the bone white of teeth. A flayed face? A burned face? A death mask?

  A mask.

  Uncle Victor was wearing one of the face masks that the technicians use if they have to go out in a blizzard. Faceless. Featureless. There was no telling what expression lay behind it.

  “Where are we going?”

  His voice skittered between low and piping shrill, on the verge of hysteria. “To find Symmes’s Hole, of course!” How often he must have practiced saying those words: To find Symmes’s Hole, of course!

  Chapter Eleven

  The Heart of the Barrier

  Dear Nikki,

  Today we stole an amphibious truck and drove out of Aurora onto the Ice Shelf. We are going in search of a hole in the Earth’s crust, and if we find it Uncle Victor says no one is going to care about one little truck. I think I must be asleep. Or maybe mad. I’ve often wondered: Is madness hereditary? Or can you catch it from dirty toilet seats? I know you don’t believe me. I don’t believe me either. Don’t worry. They will come after us. You can’t lose a big, red two-cabin tractor truck in a white country. And Sigurd and his dad are on board, too. So as long as someone comes after us—and catches us—we will be fine. Give my love to Mum.

  XSymX

  “Did you leave word, Uncle? Say where we were headed?” I shouted above the noise of the engine.

  “Say again?”

  I tried to picture us from above. A ladybird on a sheet of white paper. A slice of tomato on a tablecloth. The Hagglund has huge caterpillar treads that leave tracks across the ice like the teeth of a zipper. People were bound to find us.

  But snow, like TV interference, was falling across our path and pattering against the windows so thick and fast that I couldn’t even see in the side-view mirrors, let alone what tracks we were leaving in our wake. Our red roof was piled high with gray diesel cans—and by now a deep layer of snow, as well. So how easy would we be to spot from the air? And what plane would come looking for us? Not the twin Otter sitting crushed beneath the radio mast at Camp Aurora.

  Inside the Hagglund, we were sealed in so tight, I could almost persuade myself it was a theme-park ride, a flight simulator, with computer-generated pictures in place of windows. After ten minutes, the doors would open, dreary English daylight would stream in, and a bored attendant would tell us to take all our belongings with us. Except that time went by and there was no end to the neck-wrenching roll and dipping of the Hagglund clambering over ridges of ice as high as breakers. The multitude of curly cables hanging from the roof thrashed to and fro; a pencil on the floor rattled up and down, up and down. At first there were flag corridors, red rags flickering past the base of the windows, occasionally scraping the side of the van. We seemed to be driving some hellish slalom. Then the flags were fewer and farther between. Then the flags stopped. The Hagglund careered on, though, nose tipped down. We had negotiated the steep downward incline into a vast, stark, empty whiteness like a dish of smoke. I was pitched forward against my seat belt, head close to the windshield. Then we leveled off, because we were no longer crossing the union between dry land and sea. We were well and truly out at—

  No, I didn’t know about this place. I didn’t want to know what I knew. I’m stupid and the victim of a second-rate education, and Uncle Victor has an IQ of 184. If he had planned this, he knew what he was doing.

  He was driving us over the sea.

  I knew that for certain, because there was a GPS satellite navigation system positioned between Victor and me, faithfull
y recording our progress over a splendid map, and the dot that was us had crossed the outline of Aurora Island and moved out onto the Ross Ice Shelf.

  The Ross Ice Shelf. Did you know: Some of the ice is half a mile thick?

  Except where it isn’t.

  It’s a big bite taken out of the coast. It’s the chip in the edge of God’s dinner plate, which He mended with a slab of ice the size of France. It would be a giant bay, but the ice spreading out from the plateau reached Ross Bay and just kept going, pushing a lid out over the water a thousand yards thick.

  Except where it isn’t.

  All noise was shut out by the ear-protectors clamped over my head. And since the electrical feedback stopped me from using my hearing aids, I was sealed inside my own personal silence as well. The only voice I could hear at all was Uncle Victor’s, whose headset had a microphone attached. There was a tape deck in the dashboard in which someone had left a cassette. Clearly the music was reaching the driver, because Victor was singing along to Lee Konitz and “I love Paris in the winter, when it’s snowing . . .” as he drove us out to sea.

  He had fed the coordinates into the computer and the computer hadn’t objected. The course it plotted was dead straight—as the crow flies—so perhaps, like Dorothy inside her tornado, we’d be carried clean over all obstacles—pressure ice, crevasse, mountain, and glacier—to the Land of Munchkins. Unless we ran out of fuel.

  “How far is it, Uncle?”

  He couldn’t hear me, of course. I had no microphone on my headset. I could hear him but he could not hear me. That had a familiar feel, at least.

  There was even television—every luxury—a closed-circuit system to show the driver what was happening in the rear van. That was how I realized—finally—that Manfred and Sigurd were traveling with us. We were five miles out of Aurora before Victor turned it on and I saw them, strapped in tight, in the rear section of the Hagglund. Manfred was hanging on grimly to one of the hand straps that dangle from the roof, trying to brace himself against the pitching of the van. But Sigurd was clearly unconscious. Every sickening roll of the vehicle jarred him against his seat belts and snapped his head to and fro. His eye sockets looked too deep and his face too white, and his lips too loose. At one point he cracked his head against the window, and a pain went through my own skull, feeling it for him. Manfred reached out and pulled Sigurd’s hood up to cushion his head, but his manner was oddly detached, like a man restowing his luggage more safely.

  I didn’t want to think of the others, lying in their tents back at Camp Aurora, but I could not fail to recall the dreadful hours spent loading the Hagglund in the eerie, unnatural quiet of a community put to sleep.

  Crawling between them, stepping over them, packing my belongings, no clumsiness of mine had roused the women whose sleeping bags encircled mine. Furtively, while Victor was carrying luggage and provisions to the van, I tugged at Madame D-St.-P’s sleeve—“Mimi! Mimi!”—trying to rouse her so that I could whisper where we were going—leave word where we were going. But she only rolled onto her back, mouth falling open, eyelids not quite shut, like a baby sound asleep in its cot. Drugged. So much for the eccentric Englishman and his harmless supply of teas. There was never anything muffins-and-cream about Uncle Victor’s homemade tea bags.

  Then Victor came back, and I was his loyal apprentice again: part of the Great Quest, rolling fuel drums and filling the water tanks.

  As we heaved the huge suitcase into the backseat, dismantled a field-study tent, and crammed that too aboard, I kept expecting Jon or Mike or Bob or someone to burst from the men’s tent or offices to bawl at us and wrench the stolen property out of our hands. But the whole camp was silent, except for the rattle of flags, the groans of the burned-out plane, the crackle of wind-blown snow against the Hagglund. The slam of its doors, the revving of its engine woke no one.

  “DRUGGED?” I wrote in the condensation on the windshield, but Victor said he did not have his reading glasses, and kept on driving. He was very, very happy.

  After an hour or so Sigurd began to rouse, groggy and afraid. I watched him, spellbound. He no sooner opened his eyes than Manfred Bruch began talking to him. No, not to him, but talking—looking straight ahead, looking out the window, not looking at Sigurd’s face.

  At first Sigurd kept shouting, gesturing, raging at him—but of course I couldn’t hear the argument. Angry goldfish in a slopping bowl. At least he was awake. Perhaps by now the others were, too. Soon they would see who was gone, what was missing, and they would come looking.

  On what? In what? And did I really want them to catch us?

  Behind the stolen Hagglund, towed along on stolen rope, was a stolen Nansen sled and two stolen Ski-Doos. One of the Ski-Doos had long since fallen over and was banging along on its side, leaving a trail of fuel, pedals, dials, and spark plugs, buckling and denting, gouging at the snow like an anchor failing to wedge in the seabed. In the end, Victor stopped to cut it loose. Mustn’t mar the fuel consumption, he said.

  I took the chance to open my door, climb down, and stumble as far as the rear van. The light outside hit me like a train, and I realized that the windows must be tinted, keeping this aggressive whiteness at bay. The snow settled on me, big as leaves. As I stood there pulling at the door handles, Sigurd’s face loomed on the other side of the window, one cheekbone bruised, snarling with anger. The doors swung open in my face, and Sigurd pitched out onto the ice. It was a long way to fall.

  “This is mad,” he said, unable to stand up. (We were all unsteady on our feet after the rolling of the vehicle; no Ross sea legs.) “This is mad,” said Sigurd again and again. His father took hold of the back of his snowsuit to help him up—took hold so tightly that he actually lifted Sigurd clear of the ground.

  “Now, now, boy of mine,” said the Viking between gritted teeth. “Remember we go to find eighth Wonder of the World!” and he stood Sigurd back on his feet, like a man sinking a fence post. One hand kept hold of the suit. It puckered against Sigurd’s body, creased tight in the groin. Perhaps Sigurd was being reminded of his manners.

  Certainly he seemed to think twice. His voice recovered its singsong inflection: “Should I not stay at camp, I mean? Wait for film crew? Yes! I will go back to Aurora!” He was ignored.

  “How far is our journey?” said Manfred, as if only mildly curious to know.

  “Ooh. Three hundred miles, give or take,” said Victor cheerfully. “It’s nowt. A jaunt! You’ve seen the coordinates! It’s nowt! Walk in the park.”

  “Ah yes. The coordinates.” Manfred gave an odd bark of laughter. “What a stroke of luck. Fate, for sure, that it should be so close.”

  Uncle Victor is not a great believer in Fate. He is more a man for pulling himself up by his own bootstraps, but fortunately he did not choose now to argue the point. If you stand still for too long here, the cold clings to you like a wet shower curtain on a bare body. My clothes rattled around me—cotton and shell silk and neoprene. The channels of my ears contracted around the earpieces of my hearing aids in painful spasms that joined up into a perpetual ache, as I watched Victor putting diesel into the tank. He used a plastic funnel, like a bigger version of the mobile phone safety device, and in my odd frame of mind it seemed to me that he was pouring pain into my ears.

  “I’ll ride in the back with you this time,” I told Sigurd as Victor discarded the empty can.

  “No. No, I’m not going. It’s mad.”

  I could see the punch coming, so I don’t know why I chose that moment to step between Sigurd and his father and hustle him into the van. The punch hit me in the back instead, and knocked the wind out of me. But that was all right, because it served to wake me up. You can’t afford to get dreamy hereabouts. Anyway, Mum and I got quite tolerant of Dad and his fists toward the end. You have to be tolerant when people are afraid, that’s what Mum said. Still, there was something very odd about being punched by someone so calm, collected, and soft-spoken as Manfred.

  Not so charming a Viking,
then. Marshal your facts, Sym.

  Manfred did not seem to know what to do about having punched me by mistake. When he saw I was not going to say anything, he did not mention it either. Instead, he shut the van doors behind us, put an arm around Victor’s shoulder, and steered him away to the front van, inquiring in the gentlest of purrs whether he was absolutely sure we did have everything we would need for such a journey.

  Slyly, Sigurd watched them pass the windows, then made a rush for the door.

  “You can’t go back,” I said. He ignored me, fumbling with the complicated door lever in his slippery under-mitts. “Your dad locked it. It’s locked. Anyway, you can’t go back,” I said. “You’ve been asleep. We’ve come a long, long way! Have you any idea what a fluke it is that we got this far?”

  Actually, he was probably better off not knowing what kind of terrain we must have skirted or hopped over on the way down from Camp Aurora; how deadly and reckless our passage must have been once the guidance flags petered out. I didn’t want to know it either. Right then I wanted to un-know everything I knew about ice shelves, and curl up inside my head with Titus and an imagining. Go to Glasstown. But here was this nice boy who had been so kind to me. And when someone is kind to you, you have to return the favor: stick around; say something helpful.

  “You know the story of Hansel and Gretel?” I said.

  “Bugger off,” said Sigurd, slapping the locked door. Maybe he thought I was planning to tell him fairy stories to pass the time.

  The van started up. Sigurd flung himself down in his seat again and shut his eyes. He took one or two deep breaths. Then he appeared to be praying, lips moving ever so slightly. Or perhaps he had just retreated into his imagination too. Do boys do that? I never thought of it before.

  “We should try and leave some kind of trail, was all I meant,” I said doggedly. “Like Hansel and Gretel, you know? So that they can find us!”