Fortnight of Fear

by Graham Masterton

  We got down on hands and knees and edged our way into the tent. “I was out all night in a blizzard once,” said Rodney, touching the roof of the tent with his gloved hand. “The snow piled up so heavy on top that the canvas was only an inch away from my nose. And to think I used to get claustrophobic in the Tube.”

  We shuffled ourselves into a crouching position. By the darting, criss-crossing light of Michael’s torch, I had already glimpsed something very grim. But now he concentrated the beam on the center of the tent, and there was what he had brought me three-quarters of the way around the world to see.

  “Jesus,” I said, under my breath, and my breath froze against my chin.

  Rodney sniffed. “You couldn’t see it with the naked eye, but there was a deep crevasse just here. We discovered it when we started our sound survey. We dug down sixty feet or so … and this is what we found. We haven’t touched either of them.”

  Tangled together in the snow lay the remains of two human beings. If there hadn’t been two skulls, however, I wouldn’t initially have guessed that there were two of them. There were only shoulders and ribs remaining, and ripped-open snow-jackets. But what made the sight so horrifying was that on some of the bones, there were still some fragments of flesh, tanned by age and extreme cold to the color of prosciutto. One of the skulls had been stripped almost completely bare of skin and flesh, but the other was practically intact – the mauvish, frozen face of a man dying in abject terror – his eyes empty, his mouth stretched wide, his lips thick with frost.

  “Are you sure that it’s them?” I asked Michael. Inside the confines of the tent, my voice sounded oddly flat and featureless.

  Michael nodded. “Evans and Oates. No doubt about it.” He inclined his head toward the frozen face – still locked in a scream that had been screamed nearly eighty years before. “There were papers, bits and pieces. Not much, but enough for us to be completely sure.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes away from the gruesome, frost-encrusted remains. “I know that Evans collapsed and died around here, at the head of the Beardmore Glacier. But Oates didn’t walk out into the blizzard until they were well down on the Ross Ice-Shelf, only twenty-nine miles away from One Ton Depot.”

  “That’s right,” said Michael. “So the question is … how did Oates get all the way back here? He couldn’t have walked back. His feet were badly frostbitten, and the whole reason he walked out into the blizzard was because he couldn’t drag himself any further. Apart from that, even if he could have walked back, why on earth would he?”

  I peered at the remains more closely. “I think I can probably answer that,” I told him. “These bones have been gnawed. See there – and there – definite teethmarks, although it’s hard to guess what teethmarks. Eighty years ago, this crevasse could well have been the shelter for some predatory animal. It might have been following Scott and his party, the way jackals follow herds of antelope, just waiting for one to drop and die. Evans dropped, then Oates dropped. It dragged them both back here and used them for its winter food.”

  “James …” said Rodney. “I hate to be pedantic, but what kind of predatory animal could that have possibly been? There are plenty of walruses and seals and seabirds in the Antarctic, but there are no natural inland predators – no bears, no tigers, no snow-leopards … nothing that could have used these men as a winter larder.”

  I turned to him seriously. “A starving man is a predatory animal.”

  Rodney looked dubious. “Scott wasn’t the kind of man who would have condoned cannibalism, surely? He was reluctant even to eat his dogs. And there’s not a single word in his notes that suggests it so much as crossed his mind.”

  “I’m aware of that,” I told him. “But you asked me what happened to these men and I told you. The probability is that some predatory animal dragged them here and ate them. Now, whether that predatory animal was a rogue husky or a man who was prepared to eat anything and anyone in order to survive, I just don’t know … not until I’ve made all the necessary tests.”

  Michael said, “You think it was Scott, don’t you?”

  I didn’t reply. It was difficult, even now, to compromise one of the most glorious tragedies in British history.

  But Michael persisted. “You think that Scott was lying, don’t you … and that they might have killed and eaten Evans and Oates, just to keep going? All that stuff about Oates going out into the blizzard so that he wouldn’t be a burden to the other three … you think that was so much guff … an inspired bit of heroic invention?”

  Dry-mouthed, I said, “Yes. But I don’t think you can blame anybody for what they did under extreme duress. Remember the Donner Party. Remember those schoolchildren when their aeroplane crashed in the Andes. You can’t judge men who were starving to death in the middle of nowhere when you’ve just eaten steak and eggs on the good ship Erebus.”

  We hunched our way out of the tent, climbed out of the ice-scour, and walked slowly back to the hut.

  “How long will it take you before you know for certain?” asked Michael.

  “Twenty-four hours. Not longer.”

  Michael said, “You remember that photograph I found? The one of Scott and all the rest of them at the Pole?”

  “Of course. Did you ever find out who that mysterious sixth man was?”

  Michael shook his head. “I decided in the end that it was probably Evans, in a different hat, and that he’d somehow managed to rig up a very long string to take it.”

  “You said you found papers, bits and pieces. Do you think I could see them?”

  Back in the hut, Michael brewed up some hot coffee, laced with whiskey, while I poked through the few pathetic remnants that had been discovered with Oates and Evans in the crevasse. A comb; a pair of leather snow-goggles (unglazed, and very ineffective, since plastic had not yet been invented); a single fur glove, dried up like a mummified cat; and a small snow-blotched diary. Most of the diary’s pages had stuck together, but at the back there was a single legible entry … not in Scott’s handwriting, but presumably in Oates’.

  It said, simply, Jan 18, now for the run home but Despair will soon overtake us.

  I sat sipping my coffee and frowning at the diary for a long time. The entry seemed simple enough, but the phraseology was odd. Apart from the capital “D” for “Despair”, why had he said that “Despair will soon overtake us”? Despair was an emotion that might certainly have overtaken anybody who found themselves at the South Pole, with 800 miles to walk to safety, and scarcely any hot food. But you didn’t normally talk about it overtaking you until it actually did.

  It was as odd as saying “Tomorrow, when we climb the mountain, we will be overtaken by fear.” The chances are that you certainly will be overtaken by fear, but you just don’t express it like that.

  I said to Michael, “Can we go to the Pole, and then slowly fly back over Scott’s route?”

  “If you think it’ll help. I was going to take you to the Pole anyway. Bit of a letdown to come all this way and not quite make it.”

  We left the research station at the head of the Beardmore Glacier at a little after seven o’clock the next morning. The Chinook lifted itself diagonally into the sunlight, and across the peaks of the Queen Alexandra Mountains, toward the polar plateau. The wind had been rising throughout the night, and when I looked down at the ice, I saw long horse’s-tails of snow waving across the ice.

  “Unlucky for Scott he didn’t have a helicopter,” Michael shouted, above the roar of the engines. He passed me a ham roll, wrapped up in cling-film. “Breakfast,” he told me.

  It was about three hundred and fifty miles to the South Pole from the research station, and the flight took us low over the icy plateau. “Terrible terrain for man-hauling sledges,” Michael pointed out. “Dragging a sledge across those ice-crystals is like dragging it across sand. No friction at all.”

  We were only twenty minutes away from the Pole when the pilot turned back to us and remarked, “I’m getting some adverse
blizzard reports, Michael. Looks like we won’t have too long.”

  “That’s all right, we just want a quick shufti,” Michael told him. “Besides, it’s tripe tonight, and I don’t want to miss that.”

  As we circled around the Pole, however, the winds began to buffet the Chinook violently, and I heard the rotor-gears whining in protest.

  “Are you sure it’s going to be okay?” I asked Michael. “We can always come back when the weather’s better.”

  “Don’t worry, we’re going to be fine,” he reassured me. “Here you are, Andy, put her down wherever you like.”

  “Is this really it?” I asked. “The actual South Pole?”

  “Didn’t expect to see a real pole, did you?” laughed Andy.

  We were almost down. Michael had unbuckled his seatbelt. Then abruptly the Chinook lurched and banged, and I heard metal screeching hideously against metal. I was hurled sideways, my shoulder colliding against the seat next to me. I heard somebody shout, “Jesus!” and then the whole helicopter seemed to tear open all around me, like a theater curtain being parted, and I was dropped face-first into the shatteringly cold snow.

  It was a long time before I realized what had happened. I thought I was dead; or at least that my back was broken. But gradually I was able to creep up on to my hands and knees, and then sit up, and look around.

  A sudden gust must have caught the Chinook just on the point of landing – either that, or her rotor-gears had sheared, which had occasionally happened with Chinooks, and her two synchronized rotor-blades had enmeshed. Whatever it was, she was lying on her side, split apart, with her rotors sticking up into the Antarctic air like abandoned windmills. There was no sign of Michael, and no sign of Andy or his co-pilot. All I could hear was the rising wind.

  I crept cautiously back into the wreckage, sniffing for aviation fuel, in case of fire. I found Andy and his co-pilot sitting side by side, both with their eyes open, both plastered with blood, as if they had emptied pots of red paint over their heads for a joke, both dead. Shaking, I retreated from the cockpit and climbed back outside. It was then that I saw Michael standing about thirty yards away, without his glasses, looking stunned.

  “Are you all right?” I asked him.

  He nodded. “Are they dead?” he whispered.

  “Yes,” I told him. “I’m afraid they are.”

  “Oh, hell,” he said. It seemed to be the worst expletive he could think of.

  In the first two hours, our moods swung dramatically from hysterical relief to deep, silent moodiness. It was only the shock, and it soon began to wear off. We climbed back into the helicopter, trying not to look too closely at Andy and his co-pilot, and attempted to get the radio working. But one of the rotors (apart from shearing off the lower half of Andy and his co-pilot’s bodies) had cut right through the wiring, and it would have taken an honors graduate in popular mechanics to get it going again.

  “Still, they’ll come out looking for us pretty well immediately,” said Michael. “And we always carry a tent and emergency rations and survival kit.”

  We manhandled the bright orange tent out of the helicopter and set it up. It wasn’t easy, because the wind had risen to even great ferocity, almost a blizzard, and neither of us were particularly brilliant at playing Boy Scouts. However we managed to climb inside, and zip it up, and light the butane heater which was part of our survival kit. Michael managed to brew up two tin cups full of passable tea, with lots of sugar in it.

  “I reckon it’ll take them three hours to find us, at the outside,” said Michael, checking his watch. “We should even be back in time for supper.”

  But outside the tent, the blizzard rose to a long and unearthly scream, and we felt snow lashing furiously against the fabric. I opened the vent just a couple of inches, and all we could see outside was howling white.

  “Looks like we’re getting a taste of Scott’s expedition first hand,” Michael remarked, wryly.

  We both assumed that, since it was summer, the blizzard would have died away by morning. But it screamed all night, and when we woke up at eight o’clock the next day, the tent was dark, and it was still screaming. I tugged open the vent and a heavy lump of snow dropped in. During the night, the tent had been totally buried.

  “This can’t last much longer than twenty-four hours,” Michael said, confidently. “How about some morning tea?”

  But throughout the long hours of the day, the wind and the snow never abated once. It was well up to Force 8 – “buzzing like blazes,” as the ill-fated Bowers had described it. By six o’clock that evening, we were feeling tired and cold and depressed. What was more, our butane gas was running low.

  “There’s another two cylinders in the back of the stores locker,” Michael told me. So I tightened the laces of my hood, and scooped my way out of the tent, and into the storm.

  I had been in snowstorms before; in Aspen, and in the Swiss Alps. But I had never been in anything like this. The wind was screeching at me as if it were human, but insane. It actually had a voice. I was barely able to stand up, let alone walk, and all I could see of the crashed Chinook was a hunchbacked tomb of white snow and four twisted rotor-blades.

  However, I managed to plant one boot in front of the other, and with curses and grunts I began to traverse the space between the tent and the helicopter.

  I was less than halfway across it when I saw the sixth man.

  I stopped, staggering in the ferocity of the blizzard. I was already cold; but now I was chilled with an extraordinary dread; a fear that I had never experienced before in my life.

  He was standing so that he was just within view behind the whirling snow. Tall, with a black cloak that silently flapped, and a huge black hat. He said nothing, he didn’t move. I stood and stared at him and didn’t know whether to stagger back to the tent, or to shout out to him, or what.

  Hallucination, I thought. How could he possibly be real? Nobody could survive out in this weather … and besides, the last picture I had seen of him had been taken eighty years ago. No doubt about it – he’s an optical illusion. A snow-ghost.

  Still, I kept a close eye on him as I battled my way to the helicopter and back. All the time he remained where he was, sometimes standing in plain sight, sometimes almost invisible behind the snow. I heaved myself back into the tent and zipped it up.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Michael. His lips looked blue and he was chafing his hands.

  I shook my head. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “You’ve seen something.”

  “Of course not,” I told him. “There’s nothing to see but snow.”

  He looked at me narrowly and wouldn’t take his eyes away. “You’ve seen something.”

  The next day the blizzard was worse and we were almost out of butane. The temperature dropped and dropped, like a stone thrown down a bottomless well, and for the first time it began to occur to me that we might not be rescued – that the blizzard might go on for ever and ever, until we starved or froze, whichever came first.

  Michael volunteered to go back to the Chinook to see if he could rummage any more food, and anything that we could burn for heat. I helped him to crawl out of the tent, and then lit the lamp and started to brew up some drinking-chocolate, to warm him when he came back.

  But he was back almost at once, and his eyes were wide in their snow-rimed lashes. “He’s there!” he croaked.

  “Who? Who are you talking about?”

  “You know damn well who’s there! The sixth man! You must have seen him yourself!”

  He could see by the expression on my face that I had. He scrambled awkwardly back into the tent.

  “Maybe he can help!” Michael suggested. “Maybe he can help us escape!”

  “Michael, he can’t be real. He’s some kind of hallucination, that’s all.”

  “How can you say he’s not real? He’s standing right outside!”

  “Michael, he simply doesn’t exist. He can’t exist. He’s in our minds, tha
t’s all.”

  But Michael was too excited. “The South Pole only exists in our minds, but it’s still the South Pole.”

  I tried to argue with him, but both of us were hungry and numb with cold, and I didn’t want to waste energy, or hope. I brewed up the chocolate on the last few beads of dwindling gas, and we sat close together and drank it. All the time Michael kept staring at the tent-flap, as if he was gathering himself together to go out into the blizzard and meet the sixth man face to face.

  The blizzard had been screaming relentlessly for nearly five days when Michael grasped me by the shoulder and shook me awake. His eyes glistened red-rimmed in the dim light of our failing flashlight.

  “James, there’s no hope, is there? We’re going to die here.”

  “Come on, don’t give up,” I told him. “The blizzard can’t go on for very much longer.”

  He smiled, and shook his head. “You know it’s all up, just as well as I do. There’s only one thing left.”

  “You’re not going outside?”

  He nodded. “I understand now, who he is, the sixth man. Oates understood, too. He’s Despair. He’s the total absence of human hope. The Eskimos always used to say that in some intensely cold places, extreme human emotions could take on human shape. So did the Kwakiutl Indians.”

  “Come on, Michael, you’re losing your grip.”

  “No,” he said. “No! When Scott got to the Pole and found that Amundsen had got here first, he despaired. He knew, too, that they probably couldn’t get back alive. And that was the sixth man, Despair; and Despair tracked them down one by one; and you know what they say about Despair? Despair tears the very flesh, right off your bones.”

  Michael didn’t look mad; but he made me feel mad. He kept smiling as if he had never been happier. Despair will overtake us, that’s what Oates had written, and Michael was right. It did make some kind of inverted sense.

  He hugged me tightly. “I want you to look after Tania. I know how much you care about her.” Then he opened the tent flap, and crawled outside.

  Slitting my eyes against the blisteringly cold wind, I saw him trudge away, in the direction of the helicopter. Scarcely visible in the snow, I saw the tall man in black waiting for him, unmoving, infinitely patient. In some intensely cold places, extreme human emotions could take on human shape.