The White Darkness

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “Made my gorge heave, but I couldn’t leave him alive in the water, not with the whales there. So I hit him. And hit him again. And again. Until he went quiet and sank.

  “After that Birdie Bowers’s horse went down, too, and I could see the beast was done for. I should have done Birdie a favor and killed that one, too—he didn’t ask me to—said it was his horse and he’d do it himself, but what does a Navy man know about animals? Nothing. . . . Thing is, I knew I’d be sick if I had to kill another horse the way I had Punch. So I showed him where to put the ice pick in—here or here . . .” And Titus spread a hand shaking with cold, wet with blood, across his own face (streaming with saltwater and melting ice) to show where the skull is most vulnerable to a sharp blow. . . . “The ponies weren’t of my choosing, poor little duffers, and I’d’ve chosen better, but you get fond of a beast—even the demons who want to break your shins or bite the ears off your head. . . . I’ve done better work than that day on the sea ice, I have to say.”

  Then he took hold of the pick by its head and turned the handle toward me.

  “Of course, to get the right degree of force, you have to take a back swing, and the movement scares the beast and it jerks aside, and the point goes through the cheek or bounces off the mane and then you’re in trouble, because the pony’s trying to get away from you, whereas up to then you had its trust. . . .”

  I reached out for the handle. . . .

  “Be sure to bury the creature’s head. You may be glad of it on the way back. You know, we dug up Christopher’s head, but it was rotten.”

  I took hold of the handle, but it was soft to the touch and recoiled from my fingers, and I woke and found I had, in my sleep, pushed my hand into Sigurd’s face as he slept on the bench seat opposite.

  So I told Sigurd I didn’t think I would be killing Uncle Victor with an ice axe, and he said that he had come to much the same conclusion himself, though he did not describe his dream and I didn’t describe mine. There’s a fearful intimacy about sharing dreams.

  I don’t know who Axel Heiberg was. A hole in my knowledge. A paragraph I skipped. A page Dad burned. I don’t know. I do know that the glacier named after him used to be called something else, this torrent of ice pouring down out of the sky. This is Amundsen’s Glacier. There are wave terraces built into it of contorted bands of blue and white ice. There are chasms, icefalls, and splaying crevasses in this stairway to the Plateau. Seracs stand here and there in the shape of chimneys, and sometimes, when the sun is in one particular quadrant of the sky, you could mistake them for figures or statues. Like Lot’s wife in the Bible, who looked back and was turned to salt.

  The angle of ascent was getting steeper. Our boots were good, but not good enough. As Sigurd and I walked ahead of the Hagglund, prodding ominous dips in the snow, we struggled to keep our feet. Terrifying. Once, where there was no snow for the tracks to grip, the tank slid backward, dragging us off our feet. Terrifying. Twice, three times we saw (or imagined) a dip in the snow with a yellowish tinge to it, and edged sideways and made detours. The noise of every maneuver was duplicated—multiplied by countless echoes bouncing back off walls of rock. We trudged on, sealed up inside our own thoughts, like vacuum-packed mackerel and no scissors to pry us open.

  But then suddenly Sigurd pointed up at a serac on the slopes above us and began grinning and waving. “I didn’t know you had a sister! Look, she’s the spitting image of you! It is you!” And to prove it he cupped his hands around his mouth and called out. “Hellooo!”

  The figure on the mountainside duly returned his call. “Hellooo!” To my eyes it looked like a child on Halloween, draped in a sheet. But in comparison with how I knew I was looking, it seemed quite a compliment. Sigurd called again: “DO YOU LOVE ME, SYM? I LOVE YOU!” and out of the jumble of echoes came the distinct reply: “I LOVE YOU!” The mountain growled its disapproval, like a pair of elderly oppressive parents, and then the serac laughed out loud—a girl’s voice that could only have been mine. Sigurd looked at me shyly out of the corner of his eye and nodded toward the mountain, wanting me to join in, wanting me to send him a message via this snow-haired go-between. “I’LL LOVE YOU FOREVER, SIGURD!” he called, falsetto, so that the girl on the mountainside declared her undying love and I covered my face in delicious embarrassment. The echoes streamed past my head like banners. It was fun! It was lovely! The sun shone with real warmth on the back of my head, and something trickled through me that was just as pleasant. He wanted me to call out myself—looked at me intently, all smiles and bright blue eyes, and nodded again toward the mountain, egging me on. Well, and why not? We were practically lovers. . . .

  “I LOVE—”

  Then the first shot rang out, and we threw ourselves on our stomachs and slid helplessly downhill on slippery neoprene, tangling in our own safety ropes. It was Manfred Bruch! It had to be him! Dogging our footsteps, he had lain in ambush, knowing the route we would take, and now he had us in his sights! I pictured him, foot turned under, bare hands drawn up his sleeves, panning and zooming, fading and cutting through the lens of a telescopic rifle. Orange, like Sunny Delight, stained the snow where Sigurd crouched on hands and knees, shuddering.

  Then the glacier cracked its knuckles again, ice moving with jerky but imperceptible slowness, giving off cracks as loud as pistol shots. Not Manfred Bruch after all, but a far more dangerous enemy: unthinking, implacable Nature. Our nerves were stretched like piano wires and this place was systematically breaking them, note by note. The glacier’s thunderous rumblings weren’t funny anymore; they tied my guts in knots. Its snapping fibers broke our hearts with every deafening crack.

  After lunch, as we were refueling and I was holding the funnel for Uncle Victor, Sigurd held his belly and said he had to go. A bolt of fear went through me, in case his stomachache meant he had somehow earned Victor’s annoyance and he was poisoned too. But Sigurd himself did not seem worried, and I was proud of him for walking off out of sight, to relieve himself in privacy.

  We waited and waited, I to congratulate him on his bravery, Victor to get under way.

  “I’ll have to come and go, of course,” Victor said, tipping the heavy can. From inside it came half-thawed diesel—a sort of diesel Slush-Puppy. “I’ll have to keep the Outside World informed about my observations. But you and whatsisname—the boy—you can establish yourselves. Permanent like. Job for the young, that. Pioneering. By heck! What I’d give to be your age again!”

  “Establish ourselves?”

  “Blaze the way, manner of thing.”

  One pair of humans. For delivery to the Inner Spheres of the Earth.

  “To my way of thinking, their science will be more advanced. Politics, too. Meritocracy, wouldn’t be surprised. If my projections are right, it won’t be a bad place to raise nippers.”

  A breeding pair, even.

  “Look at those first settlers in America! Virginia! Look where that led!” said Victor triumphantly.

  Wrong. The first ones died. I know I had a shoddy education, Victor, but the Virginians weren’t the first colonists in America. The first settlers died. To a man. To a girl. I don’t say so, though, because I’d promised Sigurd not to cross Victor, not to do anything to make him mad. Wait till Sigurd heard that ours was a one-way journey—only ever a one-way journey; no return ticket; no going back. Victor meant us to make a home together in the Underworld.

  “How will you get back, Uncle?” I asked. “After you leave us there. There’s not enough diesel for anything. Fifty miles. Anything.” Was he envisaging an industrialized Underworld, then, complete with transport for the use of visitors? Scott’s motor sleds recycled, perhaps. Alien jetpacks. Rent-a-Sled. A bus terminal. A Mercedes concession. Would they have diesel as well as five-star unleaded in their subterranean pumps? Uncle Victor didn’t answer my question about how he was going to get home. Oh, I’m sure he has an answer. I think the question may have offended him by calling his planning into doubt.

  Ten minutes passed, b
ut we thought nothing of that. Victor in particular thought nothing of it; after all, he was hard put even to remember Sigurd’s name. Then a voice came down the mountain:

  “I’ve found it! It’s here! Come quick!” It was a high, hallooing voice—echoes muddling the words into one another—but the urgency was still plain, the wild joy unmistakable. “I’ve found it! They’re down there! I’ve seen them! Come quick. Come now! Come quick. Come see! I’M UP HERE!”

  My leg was stiff from sitting. The glacier ice was slick. Along the rim of the white highway a crevasse of prodigious width bared its sapphire teeth. But we did not stop to think.

  “Come quick! There’s someone down there! It was true what you said! My God! It’s vast!And look at that!”

  Victor was running and skidding, crawling and slipping, sinking his axe into the ice to get purchase, sobbing with the exertion. I hoped he wouldn’t slip. I hoped Sigurd wouldn’t do anything foolish until we got there. I hoped the faces he was seeing were friendly. Then I didn’t think anything anymore, except where to put my feet, how to walk and not to fall, how to suck in the cold air without paying for it in pain, how to keep the strain off my left leg. . . . When Sigurd stopped calling, I was terrified.

  We must have climbed a hundred yards, cursing the lack of crampons, scared by the crevasse but all the time drawn to it, for where else would Sigurd be on this great white down escalator to the sky! How far could he possibly have gotten in so short a time and why would a call of nature have taken him so far from the tank? He can’t have been looking for a bush! After the flatness of the Shelf the gradient of the glacier was enough to make us sweat. “Wait, Uncle!”

  Victor was in no mood to wait. The cracks of the moving ice had no power to make him even flinch, so intent was he on reaching Sigurd’s side—seeing whatever Sigurd was seeing.

  “Uncle, wait!”

  “Cry out, lad! Let’s hear you!” Victor bawled through cupped hands, his goggles on top of his head, his jacket pulled loose at the throat.

  “We’d be quicker in the tank!” I called, and turned around and looked back.

  From lower down the mountain, you might even have mistaken me for a figure carved in ice. Or Lot’s wife, turned to salt.

  At first the sun was so bright in the glass of the windows that I could not see which way the Hagglund was facing—only the exhaust fumes hovering in the air above it. Then I saw the flash of the wing mirrors as it completed its turn and started out along the railway lines of its own tracks. Sigurd. He had cut loose the Nansen and thrown things out of the van onto the ice—dark mounds of cloth and equipment. A big suitcase. Tea bags. They made it look as if the vehicle had answered a call of Nature. Now he sped away, stealing the Hagglund, seizing the slimmest of chances not to die. Shedding surplus baggage in the process.

  You have to admire his cleverness: to use the echo effect to suggest he was above us on the mountain. You have to admire his forethought, in testing out, ahead of time, whether it would work or not: throwing his voice to the ice girl on the mountain, hearing her return it.

  Perhaps I should just say, in his defense, that he was very, very scared.

  Behind me, somewhere in the mountains, a corniche of snow subsided. Or perhaps it was an icefall breaking from its crag, or a serac crumbling.

  Polish the windows of Glasstown, Deighton, and tell the captain I’m coming home tonight.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Between You and Me, Things Aren’t Quite as Rosy as They Might Be.”—Oates

  We have come a long way. The air up here is thinner. Fear falls like acid rain;Victor must surely feel it. He is shedding skin like a bird molting. He’s shedding weight, too. He eats as he would at home, holding true to the articles of his dietary religion. And yet we are burning calories like autumn leaves. I can see their ash floating past my eyes as they burn.

  Electrical tape doesn’t last, I notice. There’s red silk spilling out through the slit in my snowsuit, but the cold is so intense that often I can’t feel it, only the stiffening of tendons, the beating of my heart, the clinging of my lungs to my backbone like two sick pigeons in a tree. We are hauling the sled toward the summit of the Axel Heiberg—Amundsen’s Glacier. A few icefalls, then we’ll be on the Polar Plateau. A white hole. Life in negative. Not just a lack of anything, but a space ready to devour existence itself. Off it comes the wind, the incessant, everlasting, inexhaustible wind. It never stops to draw breath. It licks the heat off you like a great animal toying with its food. They say The Ice tries to break a man open and reduce him to the essence. Won’t find anything inside me, eh, Titus?

  “Time to find out, dearie.”

  “Sigurd knew. He got the measure of me. I really thought Sigurd liked me. But he was just a con man, like the other one.”

  “Far too young for you, anyway,” says Titus, straight-backed and bristling slightly. “One hundred twenty-five is altogether a better age.”

  “I thought Uncle Victor loved me. But he only wants to drop me in a hole in the ground—sacrifice me to the great god Symmes. It’s Symmes he loves. The whole idea of Symmes. Even the books he gave me—even all my lovely books—the books where I read about you! They were just Victor educating me for all this stuff. Even my name . . . even my name was a part of it—part of his great Obsession.”

  “People do the oddest things,” says Titus, whirling one fur mitten on the end of its tape. “My mother was so grief-stricken when I died that she slept in my bedroom for the rest of her life—to feel close to me, I suppose, surrounded by my things. But she burned my polar diaries.”

  Burned them. His diaries. The words he had formed in his head; the words he had shaped by the movement of his hand. The pages he had brushed with the side of his wrist as he wrote. She burned them. Unimaginable.

  “Don’t struggle too hard to understand people, Sym. They’re hideously complicated. Unhappy people do the oddest, most terrible things, just trying to keep despair at bay. All you have to do is accept them . . . go around them . . . take evasive action.”

  When we put up the tent, it wrestles and buffets around our heads like the ravings of the mad, and although Sigurd probably off-loaded it with the best of intentions, he forgot to off-load the pegs. We lash it down to the sled, but it is really only our weight that holds it to the ground. And we are lightweights now, both of us. So the wind still picks up the tent at the corners. We are nothing but swag in a giant’s sack, the cloth lashing around our ears, making as much din as a dozen snare drums. It is impossible to talk.

  For all kinds of reasons.

  We have to get the sled down the icefalls; it’s our life-support capsule. I’ve come to hate it, as a convict must hate his ball and chain. But in a place where everything else is ten million years old, it represents civilization, I suppose: salvage from a previous life.

  Somewhere along the way, we must have passed the Butcher’s Shop: the place where Amundsen culled his dogs from thirty to eighteen. Too many to feed, and their meat was needed. It’s a dog-eat-dog world up here. Their ghosts have taken a liking to us: I can feel their jaws around my thigh and I can hear their howling all the time, all the time.

  Except from Glasstown, of course.

  There the windows are tight shut and the fires are lit. There Florence Chambers and Titus Oates tell each other stories, play bagatelle, and wax nostalgic to the sound of the Pianola. I am . . . she is . . . teaching Titus the words of Cole Porter:

  Whenever skies look gray to me,

  And trouble begins to brew . . .

  . . . which is quite a feat for an Edwardian, I can tell you. Titus reciprocates with “The Turnip and the Fly”—a cleaner version, I suspect, than the one he sang at Hut Point. He sings baritone, but his range is . . . well, limitless. A free-range baritone, you might say. For his voice goes as deep as regret and as high as . . . as high as here: this airless place. He is anywhere I am. He is inside me, and my brain closes around him like hands around a warm drink. In fact he’s more a part o
f me than my own limbs, because even though Amundsen’s dog ghosts sink their teeth into my cut thigh, they can’t reach deep enough to rip out Titus. And oh, I am so glad of him.

  Even though no one else in the world can find me now, he is never out of reach. Even though Time is a one-way street and it’s not taking me anywhere I want to go, with Titus I can travel to and fro through Time—to the Boer War, the Indian raj, the Curragh Races, Gestingthorpe in high summer, Hut Point. . . . There was an Otes at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, you know? (I wonder if he was scared, too.) From the windows of Glasstown I can see into the future as well—as far forward as my fifteenth birthday, when Titus has promised to take me to the top of the Eiffel Tower! I can’t express how glad I am of him.

  Uncle Victor also has plans for my fifteenth birthday. He pictures it happening in one of the inner spheres of the hollow Earth. He described it to me in the tent yesterday, but what with the noise from the loose fabric rattling and thrashing at our heads, all I could picture was a piñata with us inside and a thousand maniacal kids thwacking it with sticks. I don’t listen any longer, I’m afraid, to his theories of cold fusion and hydroponic food production or how sunlight is deflected underground. I have to concentrate very hard, you see, to get deep enough inside my head, and it doesn’t allow for listening and nodding and watching his lips so as to fill in the gaps in my hearing, and agreeing and asking sensible questions. And caring.

  Sometimes, when I help Mum change the beds at home and a snow of dust flies up, it does terrible things to her airways. She starts wheezing and coughing and forgetting how to breathe. The effect is the same up here—polar asthma. The air is thin, the air pressure is low, and each breath has only half the oxygen in it. Your pulse races and your heart thumps like a live person trying to get out of a sealed coffin. Whose sloughed skin and blanket fluff and dust-mite droppings are these, flurrying and whirling about our heads as we disturb this white bed of a landscape? This is the kind of place where Nature recommends you don’t exert yourself, ha-ha! This is the kind of place where Nature doesn’t recommend strapping a harness across your chest and leaning into it till your head throbs like the light on a police car and your chest cavity feels like a portion of Chinese spare ribs.