The White Darkness

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Unnerved now, Manfred peered out into the auditorium: Why wasn’t the audience booing? “That fossil!” he giggled. “Don’t you know there’s a whole industry out in China, turning out hoax fossils? Hundred pounds, I paid!” He looked to Sigurd for a witness to back up his story. Sigurd averted his eyes. “Found something advertised in Chinese script on eBay—God knows what it was—an alarm clock, antique chopsticks, for all I know! You weren’t about to check what it really said, were you? Why would you check? This was your good friend Bruch telling you: It’s a fossilized hand from Antarctica, and it’s yours for a snip at ten thousand pounds!” So expansive was Bruch that I wondered if he wanted us to applaud him. The trouble he had gone to! The ingenuity he had shown! This leech, this bloodsucker, this parasite.

  But the hatred I felt for Bruch was nothing to what I felt for myself. All along I had had my doubts about miniature fossil hands for sale on eBay. And what had I done about it? Hadn’t it crossed my mind that the photo could be an enlargement of anything—badger’s burrow, a French toilet, a hole on a miniature golf course? But had I said so out loud? Too afraid of crossing Victor, of losing his good opinion, I stowed all my misgivings out of sight, like dirty magazines on top of a wardrobe. Every crime like this needs someone like me to look away and say nothing.

  Sigurd was leaning up against me, uncomfortably heavy, like a dog seeking affection. I didn’t want him anywhere near me, this accomplice, this conspirator. I tried to shift, but Sigurd had me pinned against the bulkhead. His drink was untouched. He was barely breathing for fear of what would happen next.

  Uncle Victor gathered up the cups as if we had all finished, and emptied the dregs out the door. “Well?” he said eagerly.

  “Well?” said Manfred, lurching to his feet. The fire extinguisher slipped out of his grip and landed on his boot.

  “Let’s get on, then. No harm done,” said Victor equably. “Never set much store by your data anyway, you being a foreigner. Always better to be self-reliant. Don’t fret: I’ve got my facts straight.” His voice bounced along like a song in a musical—Join in, children, ladies, gentlemen!

  I thought it was just a saying, but Bruch’s jaw really did drop. His mouth fell open in stark astonishment. Victor did not see it; he was already stumping back to the driver’s cab, jerking his elbows outward from the shoulder to expand his lungs, rolling his head on his neck to ease muscle tension. At the base of the steps he flexed his knees once or twice, preparing for another stint at the wheel.

  Manfred went after him. “Don’t you get it, Briggs? Those coordinates! I made them up! Invented them! Faked it! Listen, Briggs, there are no coordinates! I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Briggs, but face it! Give up! You’ve got your million back! Get us out of here before we all get killed!”

  “Wasn’t a bad guess. You were there, or thereabouts with your numbers,” said Victor generously. “There or thereabouts. I’d pretty much narrowed it down already, of course. But you weren’t far out.” And adjusting the slide rule of his reasoning to allow for a few minor glitches, my uncle went back to the job in hand. He was quite satisfied that Fate and Genius would steer him to the correct coordinates.

  Manfred ran after him, fumbling at his Velcro-fastened breast pocket, pulling out the bank draft. “Look! Here! Have it back! What is it? It’s only money!”

  “Oh, that,” said Victor, and something about the way he said it finally opened the Viking’s eyes to the truth. The draft fluttering between his fingers, made out to Manfred Bruch for one million pounds, was worth nothing. There was no million pounds. The confidence trickster had met his match in one of his own victims.

  Manfred started to laugh. It gave him a pain in his side, but he laughed anyway—a mewling, quacking laugh of sheer admiration. “Shit, you’re better than I am!” was what he said. And Victor laughed with him—smiled, anyway—and asked the Viking if he would be so kind as to rescue Sigurd’s red face mask before it blew away altogether.

  The tissuey red circle of material was rolling gently over the ice, away from the van, and Manfred made a couple of grabs at it before it came to hand. He was talking to himself under his breath, cursing himself for being taken in by a rank amateur. By the time he turned around, the tank was moving, circling the spot where he stood, turning slowly around to retrace the track marks left in the snow by Manfred’s mad dash toward the mirage.

  By the time Manfred raised his first shout of protest, we were over the track marks and accelerating. By the time he realized what Victor was doing—by the time I realized—we were moving at ten miles an hour. The rear doors hung open. I remember one of the cups rolled along the floor and out the door onto the snow. Manfred started to run, calling out: “Briggs! No! Wait!” He ran and he gained ground. I watched him like someone in a film—unreal—the baddy getting his comeuppance. Sigurd meantime had struggled to his feet and was hanging from the hand straps, calling out to Bruch—“Come on! Come on! Run! Run!”—crouching on hands and knees to reach out a hand. Manfred ran like a demon possessed.

  Victor did not accelerate—not more than it took, anyway, to keep the sight of Bruch in his side-view mirror, to keep ahead of him. The surface changed from smooth ice to fractured blocks, and Bruch was leaping from step to step now, no longer shouting, his face contorted by agony, his eyes on us.

  His eyes on my eyes.

  “Come on, Bruch! Come on!”

  Sigurd and I held on to whatever we could and tried to reach out our hands to him. The change of surface forced the tank to slow. But now it twisted its long, articulated back, rolling us from window to window, from seat leg to seat leg, set the doors banging open and shut. One moment I lost sight of Bruch, the next we almost had him, his outstretched hand nearly touching ours.

  So when he turned his ankle on the treacherous blocks of ice, it was easy to read it in his face: how it felt to break a bone. I saw him pitch onto his face; saw the unnatural angle of his foot as he dragged himself upright again. “ANYTHING!” he screamed. “ANYTHING!” said his mouth, offering the world for a place aboard the bus. “ANYTHING!”

  But Victor had worlds enough already. Victor had the prospect of worlds within worlds, with several worlds to spare. He maintained speed and switched on the cassette player. Victor never did suffer fools gladly.

  For a long time, through the open rear doors, we watched the small figure crawling over the collage of deformed ice. For a long time we could hear him—sounds travel miles in the Antarctic. They last, too, those sounds. I don’t imagine I will forget them if I live for a hundred years.

  And what’s the likelihood of that?

  Chapter Fifteen

  Looking Back

  We never stopped looking back. Every time we came to a halt, I expected a figure, bareheaded, clad in a sky-blue snowsuit, to come toiling into sight. We both expected it. Sigurd said “Good riddance,” but he went on looking, waiting for the man with the broken ankle to catch up, to be taken back into the fold.

  “I’ll make Victor turn around. I’ll make him go back for your dad,” I promised, holding his hand a little tighter. Once again we were walking ahead of the tank, lashed to it by safety ropes, prospecting for crevasses in our path.

  “Italia Conti,” said Sigurd. It was like some foreign nobleman explaining his origins. But he was naming the drama school where he had studied acting. He was not Bruch’s son at all. “Apparently your uncle seemed to like the idea of Bruch being a family man—especially if he had a son. So, naturally, Bruch got himself a son! Advertised. Held auditions. I got the part. He’s not my dad.”

  After Bruch’s confession, it should not have surprised me that Sigurd came from Norwich and not from Norway. Yet I had no end of trouble separating him from the tissue of lies he had come wrapped in.

  “Maybe after your mother left, he just lost all sense of Right and Wrong!” I suggested, wanting to understand.

  But there was no mother. Bruch was a bachelor. There had been no massive debts, no personal sacrifices: Manfred had
gotten Victor to pay for everything. He had been milking Victor for two years at least—research expenses, bribes to his fictional friend at NASA, bogus fossils, travel tickets, the cost of “engaging a film crew.” There was no film crew—no film company of any kind. And yet man and boy had played their parts with such conviction that it was harder to credit the truth than the lies. It was harder to believe in the English Sigurd than the one with fractured English.

  He had another name—of course he did—but it did not register in my head. There are only so many mental adjustments you can make when it’s twenty degrees below.

  “I told you he was a shot peener!” I protested. “How could you possibly think he was a multimillionaire?”

  “How’s anyone supposed to know what a shot peener is?” Sigurd retorted. “For all I knew, it was something in the stock exchange! He managed to convince Bruch he had money!”

  Once again we looked back over our shoulders. Once more we told ourselves that Manfred Bruch would catch up with us. But all that moved in the landscape behind us was the reeling, rolling Hagglund, its sun-bright windows obscuring the man behind the wheel. He could have been Tamburlaine the Great and we the conquered kings he forced to pull his chariot. Easier to believe than that it was my uncle Victor.

  “He may have fallen down a crevasse,” I suggested “At least then it would have been quick!”

  “Good riddance,” said Sigurd, not for the first time. (I should say, in his defense, he was beside himself with fear.)

  Hand in hand we walked toward the Transantarctic Mountains, now clearly visible. And if we had been walking through a minefield, we could not have been more scared. Each footstep was against all reason. We were going farther afield, when we should have been turning back. For all our feeble prodding about with ski poles, we were effectively testing for crevasses with our own body weight.

  “The snow’s a different color, apparently, and the surface dips, sort of,” I said, remembering my Ice books, as our pupils shut down against the brightness of an undulating landscape shaped by pressure ice, cloud shadow, and optical illusions.

  Later I said, “Why did you let it go so far? Why did you even agree to set out on this . . .”

  “Briggs told Bruch he’d stop the bank draft. The idea was for us to fly out on the DC-6. ‘What, no film crew? How terrible! Wherever can they be? Must go and find them!’ Out of it. Finish. Kaput. Disparus. You two would sit around waiting for us to come back. By the time you realized, we’d have had seven clear days to cash the money and disappear. Bruch even spiked the camp radio, in case Victor felt the need to phone his bank or tried to cancel the draft. Everything was about the draft. Everything. Worthless piece of bloody paper. Then the plane went up in flames. Ruined our whole game plan. I wanted to duck out, but not him. Oh no. Bruch had a check for a million in his pocket, didn’t he? And if the trip was off, Victor was going to cancel it, wasn’t he? So he had to go on looking like a believer. When Victor said jump, Bruch jumped.”

  “A million pounds!?”

  “Well? He looked to be good for it! His checks never bounced before! Manfred’s stuffed him for thousands already! Know what it costs to do the Antarctic with that Pengwings outfit? Your uncle does: He paid for all four of us to come. Apparently Manfred always tries to swing it so that he gets a free holiday out of a sting. Reckons these kinds of trips are perfect for lining up the next target; they attract just the right kind. Buenos Aires? Couldn’t contain himself! Every direction he looked, there was some rich old idiot begging to be ripped off, begging to put their money into a movie about themselves or their stupid passions. He was lining them up like bowling pins. Mimi and her romantic novels . . . Clough and his Performing Auks, Ms. Adolphus and her Amazing Penguins . . .”

  “He didn’t have his gloves, you know,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Manfred. Your dad.”

  And suddenly the lack of gloves made Bruch real again—flesh-and-blood real, not a character in a play, not an object of disgust, but someone who had given Sigurd his first acting job, his big break, his first script. A huge sob burst out of him, and he came to a halt and he put his hands to his head and he swayed and keened and sobbed, “Get him back, Sym! Get him back! Get him back! Get him back, Sym! Get Briggs to go back!”

  So I asked Victor to turn back: asked him for the sake of Sigurd, for my sake, for the sake of the Law, for the sake of his conscience, for the sake of not spoiling our nice outing—yes, I think I probably even said that. . . . I don’t know what I said. I only remember hugging him and hugging him and pressing my face against his, feeling the scales of peeling skin sharp as a dogfish, and the big pulse hopping in his neck, and me saying, “I love you. I love you. I love you, Uncle Victor! Please don’t leave Mr. Bruch out there in the cold! I’m sure he’s sorry! I’m sure he’s really, really sorry!”

  He heard what I said. He did. He didn’t pretend not to have heard. He didn’t tell me to buck up or think on, or to consider the facts of the case. He just wrapped both arms around my head and kissed me on the eyes. “There, there! Soft article! You think I’d leave him to suffer? I hope I’m a tad more humanitarian than that.”

  And he was, I knew, because he had loved me when Dad didn’t, and had taken care of us, and moved in and paid for the funeral and mowed the lawn and given me my Ice books and suggested a jaunt to Paris. . . .

  “That last drink would’ve finished him off in an hour or two,” Victor went on. “Nothing to fret about on that score. I’ve been easing him out of the picture ever since we left base camp! A little something toxic in every hot drink he drank. I just made the last one plenty strong.”

  No. There never was anything muffins-and-cream about Uncle Victor’s tea bags.

  “Greedy monkey,” Victor puttered on. “Thinking he could outwit me. Still, he served the cause. That’s no bad epitaph to put on a man’s grave, is it? ‘He served the cause of Science.’”

  “Was the South Pole worth it, Titus?” I asked inside my head. “One patch of snow just like all the rest. Was it worth anybody dying?”

  Titus shrugged. “Don’t ask me if death’s a tragedy, Sym. It’s not the right question.”

  “So the reason all those people got ill back at Aurora . . . ?” I said to Uncle Victor, extricating myself from his arms. “That was you, too.”

  “Couldn’t have a bunch of tourists tagging along, could I? Thinking they could do as they liked! Thinking they were on their vacation! (Half of them soft in the head, as it is.) Just needed persuading to take the plane home, that’s all. Give us elbow room. Leave us in peace.”

  “So you poisoned them,” I said, trying to sound as if the logic of it was plain for all to see. “Were they all dead, then, when we left . . . ?”

  “Christmas, no, child! Drugged is all! Just put them out of my road for a moment!” He added, with military crispness, “Had to free up the equipment, didn’t we? Had to free up the transport for the Big Push! Make certain of being first.”

  I thought back to the sleeping Camp Aurora: the Pogsbaums, Clough, Tillie and Brenda, and the rest. Not dead, then. Their nuisance value had not merited a fatal cup of Uncle Victor’s Lapsang souchong. Lucky them.

  “Of course, when Bruch showed signs of pushing off back to Punta along with the others, I had to reassess the situation.” Uncle Victor used the most reasonable of tones. “Had to nip that idea right in the bud. Happen he’d have tried to cash the check, and me with nowt in the bank. He was planning on taking that Sigurd of yours with him, too, and that would never have done, eh? Eh?” He nudged me with his elbow over and over again. “Eh? Eh? So the plane had to go.”

  “Go? The plane? What, you mean you set f—”

  I saw the DC-6 burn all over again, then: the fat orange tongue of fire unrolling through the fuselage, so bright that you could see the seats in silhouette even through solid metal; the wash of flame devouring the luggage on the ground.

  Not just the luggage . . .

  The pla
ne had to go. And why? To stop Bruch from trying to cash a dud check.

  “Did you take morphine, Titus? Before you went outside. I always wondered. Did you?”

  But Titus declined to say—declined, I think, to be in the same room with people as worthless as us, let alone confide the intimate circumstances of his death.

  I told Sigurd about the poisoning. Not about the plane, because that would have burned my mouth in the saying. But I told Sigurd that Bruch was certainly dead long since, of poisoning and cold. It was the only way to stop him looking over his shoulder, watching for Manfred to come limping into view.

  “I thought I saw him,” said Sigurd. “Just now. A man limping.” But he believed me, because he had learned better than to believe his eyes in Antarctica. We had them figured out now, those fictions of light—the mirages that promised palaces, the horizons scrawled with music, the undeserved haloes around the sun. We were getting used to the place, weren’t we?

  “I’ll look after you,” said Sigurd staunchly. “I’ll be there for you.” His nose shone green where his nose wiper had smeared sunblock around. I didn’t laugh out loud at the offer. You have to understand: He was beside himself with fear.

  On foot, some of the surfaces were exhausting. The Hagglund made light work of sastrugi, but for us two, walking out ahead of the vehicle, testing for crevasses, it felt like pulling ourselves over a colony of giant tortoises, dead and deathly cold. The cold was stupefying. There is only one good thing about cold: It stops you thinking. It stops you thinking about the nice journalist’s wife and children in Maine. It stops you thinking about crevasses and empty fuel drums and a bank draft for a million and fossil hands for sale on eBay. . . .

  The Hagglund, with robotic persistence, snapped at our heels, sometimes almost running us over. Uncle Victor, losing concentration, would let his foot rest heavy on the pedal and gain on us, and we were too tired to run, too cold to run. As we scrambled up one particular ice rumple higher than our heads, we reached a level with Victor in his driving cab. He was singing along to the tape deck and I could read his lips: karaoke Konitz.