The White Darkness

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  I tore up my mental postcard to Nikki, then twisted each of the pieces into tiny pellets, then flew in specially trained skuas to eat the pellets and fly out to sea in forty different directions. “So you don’t actually . . .” I said, “you don’t actually—you know—love me or anything. I mean, no worries! That’s fine! I don’t mind! Understood. I never really . . .”

  “Well, of course I do! Of course I love you, Sym!” cried Sigurd, pitching his voice an octave lower, astonished that I should even ask. He threw his arms around me and pulled me close, so that our fat, bulgy suits were squashed flat between us and our various Velcro fastenings stuck to one another. He lifted my chin with one finger. The tip of his nose brushed mine. “Why else would I say it? Believe me, there’s no one I’d sooner be with than you! We’re in this together. Didn’t I say I’d always be there for you?”

  “There?” said Titus tartly. “Where?”

  “There. It’s an expression,” I explained.

  “It’s a geographical disposition.”

  “There. Here. Around. On hand. Okay?”

  “Ah!” said Titus, enlightened. “Lurking, you mean.”

  “Uncle Victor . . . was I named after John Symmes?” I asked.

  We had reached the mountains and—quite according to the Plan—the Axel Heiberg Glacier, our route between the Horlick Mountains and the Queen Maud Mountains, through to the plateau. It flowed down from the sky—a vast river of ice; river rapids frozen in their course. After the confusion and chaos of the Shear Zone, it looked like a great open highway to Heaven. The slope was shallow. The Hagglund coped, throwing its gruff voice into the mountains to be answered by growling, multiple echoes.

  “You were indeed, lass. You were indeed. Your father had his head screwed on in those days. We might have been here long ago if he’d not gone soft. That was the plan—for Larry to come along. We could have done this together, if it hadn’t been for Larry’s backsliding.” Uncle Victor gave a snort of contempt, and his round and scaly head, red from snowburn, took on the shape of a boxing glove. “The man lost his nerve. Think on, lass. Learn by it. He that sets his hand to the plow . . .” (Sometimes you would think Uncle Victor was a Bible reader, if he didn’t have John Cleeves Symmes for his Messiah.) “Don’t know where the rot set in. Got soft, Larry did. Got flabby. Big disappointment to me, your father. Had the makings of a first-rate second in command.”

  Tell me about when I was little. Tell me about when I was small. I had forgotten, until Victor started to talk, how I used to ask that all the time, toddling about with the photo albums, dumping them in my mother’s lap. Tell me about when I was little. Tell me about when I was small. Little kids are such sentimentalists, always harking back to Happier Times.

  “Right up until Iceland he was grand. One hundred percent committed! Five-year plan, we had. All sorted. Then the fire went out of him. Bit by bit. No backbone. No stamina for the spadework, the research.”

  “He couldn’t help getting ill, I suppose,” I said.

  The boxing glove opened a little, showing a glimpse of pink dentures, a flicker of spittle. “Ill? He didn’t get ill! He got mediocre, is what! Settled for mediocrity and the second rate. Settled for shot peening is what! Do-mes-ti-ci-ty.” Victor threw up his hands, the pain of betrayal vivid in his eyes. “Started begrudging the money! Started fretting about bankruptcy, about paying the mortgage—the mortgage, I ask you! Tuh! Petty-mindedness. Every day he’d come up with some new, petty, ifsy-andsy-butsy piffling little . . . The man shrank, that’s what! No word of a lie, Sym! The man shrank to this!” He held his finger and thumb together in my face, holding between them the smallness of my father’s memory. Behind it came his face, pushing into mine; a face looming through the crib bars to say Boo! “He STOPPED BELIEVING!” Victor confided, half angry, half apologizing that he had to be the one to break the bad news to me. And what bad news was that again?

  My father was an alcoholic? My father experimented on beagles in the basement? My father was partial to mouse-dropping sandwiches? My father was a cross-dresser? My father turned into a werewolf every full moon? No. Far, far worse. My father had stopped believing in John Cleeves Symmes.

  Tell me about when I was little. Tell me about when I was small. Children are so sentimental.

  It seems the rot set in in Iceland. At Snaefellsnes. Not finding the northerly Portal where Jules Verne said it would be, Larry Wates began to have doubts. He began to harbor heretical thoughts: that the shot-peening business was actually his livelihood, not just a way of affording the search for Symmes’s Hole; that the need to keep the business afloat should come before the fun of exploring. Having remortgaged the house once, he wouldn’t do it a second time—said his wife and daughter deserved a secure roof over their heads. Said an Antarctic trip was just too expensive.

  In time, Larry Wates, backslider of Croxley Green, grew resentful of the long hours he had to spend shot peening while his business partner read Ice books and saved Larry’s daughter from a shoddy education system.

  “Jealousy, lass! Pure jealousy, that’s what it was!”

  In the end it was career planning that tipped the balance. As Victor said: “I told Larry I was training you for a trip into the Inner Spheres . . . and you know what? The shutters came down! Complete stone wall. Total breakdown in communications. There’s none so deaf as them as don’t want to hear!”

  To think it! This father of mine so lacked vision, this Larry Wates, that he tried to cancel his daughter’s appointment with Destiny. He said no to his only daughter’s becoming the first visitor to Symmes’s hollow world; tried to stop her from becoming an ambassador to the realm of Innerworld; tried to forbid a trip to Antarctica; said he refused to sacrifice her to Victor’s Grand Plan.

  Tell me about when I was little. Tell me about when I was small. Daughters are such sentimentalists. My father turned down the Eighth Wonder of the World in favor of keeping me safe! Dad said no: He refused to let Victor dump me down Symmes’s Hole and feed me to the monsters in the basement.

  And the second band of iron broke, and the princess could both blink her eyes and move her hands.

  “Did Mum know?”

  “Lillian? Nay. Women lack the imagination for truly Great Projects. No steel in them. Shopping and knitting, that’s about their weight. Shopping and cooking and breeding and knitting. Leaky, too: not to be trusted with a secret. She has her strengths, Lillian, but don’t bother to go looking to your mother for scientific rigor. I never did. But Larry! You’d’ve thought my own chum, my own business partner—my own second in command—could be counted on to show a bit of backbone! Wouldn’t you? Eh?” His eyes, magnified behind his glasses, appealed to me to see the tragedy of the situation: His best friend had let him down.

  “So it wasn’t that he didn’t . . . you know . . . love me, sort of thing,” I said tentatively.

  “Call it Love, do you, to mollycoddle a child? Call it Love to rob her of her chances, eh?” Victor roared. “Larry wasn’t stupid! He could have played his part! As it was, he just . . . he just . . . just . . . made himself a nuisance, pure and simple. Obstacle in t’road!”

  A barrier to enlightenment, in fact. How extraordinarily lucky then, wasn’t it, that this Larry Wates should have died so young.

  “So he had to go, didn’t he, Uncle Victor? Like the airplane. Have I got it right?”

  “Exactly. His dying, that freed up the funds a good bit,” said Victor, nodding in agreement with himself, and recovering his good temper as he remembered. “There was his life insurance, for a start. Took out a big business loan on the strength of that—sold off the heavy machinery, stopped paying the bills. . . . Cut down on the rent I was paying on my place! Moving in with your mother meant I could sell up. Channel it all into the Project!”

  I felt wiser now. Though sometimes a dose of enlightenment tastes a lot like swallowing bleach.

  “Dad loved me, Titus.” (I would have told my proper boyfriend, Sigurd, because that’s what peo
ple do, isn’t it? But Sigurd never knew the people involved. He didn’t know about the skull-rats or the jackals at the window or the wine vinegar or the punches or the golden syrup dripping off the mantelpiece. Titus has known me a long time. He’s my 125-year-old-and-valued friend.) “Dad loved me, Titus! Uncle Victor poisoned him for it—emptied the bank, wrecked the business, murdered him for it—but Dad loved me!”

  Titus had turned his blanket-cloth hat inside out and was studiously picking out clumps of curly black hair from its stained and grubby lining. It’s a casualty of cold weather and not enough food and having to wear your hat all the time, even in bed: Your hair starts to fall out. Mine is.

  “Dad loved me all along, Titus!” I said again.

  He looked up and gave a gentle little smile. “Naturally,” he said. “Who wouldn’t?”

  Dear Titus. Sweet thing to say. What an excellent friend to have in a crisis. What a pal. Warmed by his words, I pocketed him, like a slab of wholesome peppermint cake, for later.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “If You Want to Please Me Very Much, You Will Fall Down When I Shoot You.”—Oates

  “I’ll help you kill him, if you like,” said Sigurd when I told him about Victor murdering my father.

  It took me aback to begin with, but the more I thought about it, the more it appealed: the idea of killing Uncle Victor.

  “Just do me a favor and pretend to go along with him, for now,” Sigurd added, “or he may turn on us, like he did on Manfred.”

  By rights we ought to strand him, I decided, as he had stranded Manfred Bruch. But then he would always be there, creeping into the corner of my eye, into the landscape of my dreams, like Manfred was always limping into view.

  No, we should poison him, I decided, as he had poisoned Manfred, as he had poisoned my dad and anyone who stood in his way. There are no soft social niceties out here, Uncle Victor—like courts or the Law. Just natural justice.

  “Sym and I would like to go in the back van now,” said Sigurd, with a brazen and suggestive smirk. “For a bit of . . . you know.”

  I half expected Victor to roar and bluster, to deplore the decline in moral standards, the laxity of youth, to lament bygone days when young people showed self-control and joined the Scouts rather than fornicate like rutting stags. . . . But of course he didn’t. When I am old, I shall stand on street corners with a bullhorn and harangue passersby about the moral decline in uncles.

  It was all right for Sigurd: He knew why he had made the suggestion to go in the back van “for a bit of . . . you know.” Me, I wished someone would show me what script we were working from. Was this just an excuse to search the van for Victor’s tea bags? Or was it for “a bit of you know,” because he was in love with me?

  Either way, I never thought it would be like this. I never thought (as Sigurd’s mouth closed over mine) that I would be left thinking anything at all, let alone about the snowburn inside his mouth or that the CCTV camera was still on and that Victor was watching us, checking on us, spying on us. After a minute or two, the red light went out. But Sigurd said we had to keep up the pretense, just in case it was a test and Uncle Victor turned the camera on again to check we truly were misbehaving ourselves. That’s what Sigurd said, anyway, as he wrestled with my clothing and his own.

  How you do it in the Antarctic is this: First you have to take off your overmitts, then your big jacket, then your quilted shell jacket, then your fleece jacket and glove liners, your neck gaiter and body bib and salopettes . . . I recalled how Scott’s men used to play a game called Furl Topgallant Sails that consisted of trying to rip the shirts off each other’s backs. But there, you see: Why was I letting my thoughts wander at all at a time like this?

  Next you have to find the top of your sweatsuit bottoms, and the tight waistband of your long thermal pants. By that time, even in the shelter of the van, your hands are getting so cold you can’t feel details or fastenings. . . .

  When Sigurd’s chilly hands found the crumpled red silk of my Paris skirt packed down the leg of my thermals, he rather lost momentum. I explained about the slit made by the falling icicle, and how I was hoping the silk would keep the cold from getting in, and when he found the silk had stuck to all the blood, he peeled it off ever so gently and fetched the first-aid kit. “Can you do it?” he said glumly. “I don’t really do blood.”

  And there, inside the first-aid box, were the homemade tea bags! All that was left of them, anyway. They were color coded: red label and mint green; blue for murder and yellow for cowards? I didn’t know. Neither of us knew. That was the trouble. Which ones would kill? Which would bring on nothing worse than a stomachache? Which would send Victor to sleep and which would perk him up with a mild dose of tannin? I don’t know what I had expected: instructions for use? a skull and crossbones? government health warnings?

  We had to abandon the idea of being poisoners, because how can you poison a man with camomile, or finish him with what might turn out to be Earl Gray?

  In torrid whispers, heads close, reminding each other of what he had done to us, we settled on killing Uncle Victor by brute force. With an ice axe. (I should say, in our defense, that we were very, very scared.)

  An ice axe has four blades: a standard cutting edge, a banana blade, a semi-tubular one for boring holes in the ice for tent pegs and suchlike, and a hammer adze. If you fall over on a glacier, or if a gust of wind threatens to throw you to your death, you’re supposed to grab the axe head with one hand and the shaft with the other and ram the banana blade into the ice. Jon taught us that a hundred years ago, when we were innocent tourists and children and not paying close attention. If his ice axe lesson explained how to brain a man, I can’t have been listening. But as we watched and waited for Victor to sleep, we twisted the complex weapons in our hands and wondered how it should be done.

  “Why didn’t you say? About your leg?” Sigurd asked accusingly. But what answer could I give? At school, if you’re ill, there’s the Quiet Room to go to, lessons to miss, an advantage to be gained. Where would it get me now, here? Also, since belief is optional in these parts, I’m choosing not to believe in the cut in my leg. This is not a good place for getting injured.

  “Sleep, Uncle Victor.”

  Now that Manfred was gone, there was no one to share the driving. Sigurd insisted he didn’t know how, and I couldn’t reach the pedals. At long last, Victor was obliged to stop and rest.

  The no-noise of the Ice Shelf was left behind, and the mountains were not quiet at all. Thuds and rumbles emanated from the steep black fangs of rock, as somewhere, out of sight, avalanches slipped down, seracs—ice pinnacles—crumbled, wind blundered off the Polar Plateau into the first solid object in its path.

  We two lay quite still—stationary—knowing we had reached the spot where we would kill Uncle Victor, where he would die, where we would dispose of him in a shallow grave hacked out with the correct blade of a regulation ice axe. (When people find us—when the search parties pick up our trail—we don’t want to get into trouble, do we?)

  In the end, we settled on using the hammer adze, what with Sigurd not doing blood.

  We waited for Victor to fall asleep: His seat swung back and away from the steering column, his body sprawled in the bucket seat (so much less therapeutic than the VibroChair®). When we were sure he was asleep, we would creep up on either side of the van, wrench open the doors, and . . .

  I imagined his eyes flickering beneath his lids as he dreamed of his underground El Dorado. I hoped his dreams would be in black and white, though, so they’d make less mess when they spilled.

  And then, as we waited, my memory gave a violent, reflex twitch of its muscles. I didn’t ask to remember. I didn’t want to. But suddenly I realized that, of course, I already knew of an assassin whose advice we could ask, someone who had already killed with an ice axe. I had read his confession in one of those many, many Ice books Victor gave me as he trained me to be his underworld Ice Maiden.

  “Tell me ag
ain how it’s done, Titus,” I said.

  “On the way back from the depot-laying trip, Bowers and Crean and Cherry got into big trouble between Safety Camp and Hut Point. The sea ice had thawed, and it was breaking up under them. They camped overnight on an ice floe—woke up to find the floe had split in half. Nothing but a streak of water where Guts had been. Poor Guts. That’s why the killer whales turned up. And the skuas. Horseflesh on the menu. Anyway, Bowers and Co. managed to jump the other ponies from floe to floe and get them pretty close to the shore. The rest of us were there by then, trying everything we could to get them off. They tried to jump Punch over the gap, but he didn’t make it. He went in.”

  Titus paused, swallowing, turning his ice pick over and over in his hand, testing the sharpness of the tip with the ball of his thumb. (It wasn’t much of a tool in comparison with our fancy four-bladed jobs.) “Poor old thing,” said Titus, blinking too fast. “Struggling in the water. Terrified. Freezing. He’d go under, then come up again, coughing, shrieking. . . . I could see his eyes coming up through the water toward me. . . . The killers were closing in for a feast. Couldn’t have that.

  “Difficult to put in a clean blow, though, what with him thrashing about and me wet through and starting to freeze up. It took a few . . . We were nose to nose, pretty much. And I kept remembering feeding him on the trek we’d just done, building ice walls for him—and for what? This? All for it to end like this.

  “There was a terrific storm on the voyage from England—waves pounding over the ship, flooding the pony quarters all night long, knocking them over. Spent all night propping the little beggars back on their feet. Seeing Punch there in the water, I could remember myself, arms around his neck, dragging him to his feet over and over—Come on, old boy. Come on. . . .