The White Darkness Read online

  I heard Bob mutter under his breath, “Twenty pounds says he’s been contacted by aliens.”

  “Or found Jesus?” murmured Mike.

  The others were looking not at Victor but at me, as if I might have the key to the mystery. But I could only gape back at them, thinking, No, I’d know if Victor had found Jesus. The sound of my own name—something like my own name—had thrown me completely.

  “You’ll see! You just wait and see! You see if I’m not right!”

  Without realizing it, everyone took a step backward, away from the man shouting and weeping and exultant with happiness. Except for Manfred Bruch. He stepped smartly through an obstacle course of camera cases, fuel drums, grill, and tables, to stand in front of Victor and pull his fur-trimmed hood forward again over his head. “You are braver man than I, Mr. Briggs, to show your ears to such wind.”

  I noticed he did not let go of the hood but kept a grip of the fur to either side of Victor’s head, pulling their faces close together with a short, sharp tug. Victor fell silent. The party broke up very fast. The women cast uneasy looks at us, then went to the tents, the Leisuredome, the radio tent, or the toilet. The men went in search of the dregs of champagne, the Japanese whisky, or something else to eat. For all the vast surrounding emptiness, it was hard to escape farther than ten yards from one another.

  Manfred Bruch led Uncle Victor to the Hagglund—a big articulated truck on caterpillar tracks—and they got into the rear van. Sigurd offered me his help to climb in after them. On the inside it was rather like a high-tech motor home, festooned with electric cables, ear protectors, seat belts . . . and the sticky web of unspoken secrets.

  “Are you all right, Uncle? I’m sorry if I . . . Want a handkerchief?”

  But Victor was done with tears. Those still lying in the hollows of his eyes had frozen into strange platelets of frost that quickly dropped away: scales falling from his eyes. His face was resolute. “Sorry, Bruch. Apologies. Don’t know what set me off.”

  “We did agree, did we not? Absolute secrecy. We do not want the prize snatched from under our nose. Yes? We do not want to be like Captain Scott, yes, robbed of his triumph?” Bruch’s voice was richly soothing. His big fur mittens were folded around Victor’s. “What kind of surprise party, my friend, without surprise?”

  “It’s just that we’re so close! And then the lass spouting her rhyme . . . It brought it home to me. We’re here. This is it. You don’t know what it’s cost me to get this far, Bruch.”

  “Oh, but I do. I do! Believe me!” It was Manfred’s turn to hold his head in his hands, to contain his emotions. “After I study your work, and truth becomes plain . . . I am so filled with excitements—so bursting out with my joyful news, I think, I have to share my secret! With just one person, I must share this secret! And so I tell my wife. My Anka.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Victor, who had clearly heard this before (though I could not imagine how).

  Manfred’s face reproached him for his heartlessness. “She is gone,” he said, blue eyes widening with shock at the memory of it. “We lose her forever, Sigurd and I. She says I am mad and she leaves us.”

  Sigurd turned his head away and looked out the window. Manfred reached over and gripped his son’s shoulder, mutely apologizing for having caused a mother to walk out. Then, recovering himself, he said softly and bitterly, “Find out for yourself, if you must, my dear Victor. Go out now and tell our secret! See how they laugh in your face.”

  Victor shuddered visibly at the thought. “’Nough said.”

  “Have no fear, my friend. Soon enough they will cheer us, these doubters. Until this time, tell no one. This is crucial. Tell no one.”

  We sat, all four, plump as Michelin men in our snowsuits and hoods and gloves, the wind rocking the van.

  I did not like to intrude on their troubles, but I had to ask it: “Does that include me?’

  Chapter Eight

  Worlds Within Worlds

  The world is hollow. It’s a lot to take in.

  Like cracking an egg and finding nothing inside. Or a full-grown elephant.

  Apparently John Cleeves Symmes had it all worked out in his head 140 years ago—that planet Earth isn’t solid; it’s a hollow sphere. And inside it hang a series of lesser spheres stacked one inside the next. And there are holes top and bottom that let in the daylight. . . .

  It’s like cracking your skull and finding inside it a series of smaller and smaller skulls. It cramps your brain just trying to think about it.

  I had a Russian doll when I was little. It twisted apart at the waist, and inside it was another one. And inside that, another. And inside that . . . Dad used to spread them out on the carpet—all the top and bottom halves, all mixed up, big and small, and I had to put them back together. In the end, the dog got hold of it and swallowed the smallest wee one, the baby: I liked that one best. And the others got so bent that they wouldn’t screw back together again or stack. No matter how hard you pushed. There was nothing to do but to put them on the fire. The paint blistered, I remember: five faces peeling off . . .

  I’m sure Victor’s right. You don’t spend fifteen years studying something and then get it wrong. Not if you’re Uncle Victor, you don’t. He’s a genius, with an IQ of 184. And it wasn’t as if he was denying the whole of Science and Geography: His methods for tracking down Symmes’s Southern Hole had been very scientific.

  “Two tectonic plates collided just yonder. East Antarctica, West Antarctica. That’s how I narrowed it down, see. Symmes’s Hole has to be somewhere along that seam! And the Earth’s crust’s thinner hereabouts than anywhere! Well-known fact! So it’s got to be here somewhere! Symmes’s Hole. You can see that, surely? Don’t let’s give Mr. Bruch here the idea you’re thick!”

  He said the name as often as possible: Symmes’s Hole. After fifteen years of self-imposed silence, he savored it like a holy wafer that enriched his soul even as it melted on his tongue. I tried to picture how it was spelled, this place with my name. Symmes’s Hole.

  “Any questions?” said Victor.

  I had plenty: like why he had never thought to tell me, never told his “apprentice,” his “right-hand girl,” his “journeyman” about John Cleeves Symmes or this quest to find the Southern Hole. But I said nothing. I suppose he’d wanted to be sure—to have all the facts at his command—to wait for the proof only his own eyes could give him—give us.

  “Your uncle is a very shining man,” said Manfred Bruch, leaning toward me across the van. “Truly. A genius.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “It will be an honor to film the summit of his life work!”

  It was astonishing to think that this lion-maned Viking with his square jaw and noble profile was actually in awe of a cuddly Yorkshireman who favors nightshirts and for years has collected, in a Jacobs Cream Cracker tin under the bed, the pith of all the oranges he eats.

  So I couldn’t fathom why I felt so low. Surely it was better to be here making the discovery of the millennium than just on some mad, spur-of-the-moment jaunt? Shock, I suppose.

  “Does Mum know?” I asked.

  “Say again?”

  No. Plainly not. It must be our little secret, I supposed. Well, not that little, really. The biggest-ever secret, in fact, in the history of history.

  But there was no point denying the facts. I’m not thick, and the Earth’s crust hereabouts is thin. Two tectonic plates collided here, leaving tiny perforations: TEAR HERE TO OPEN. Somewhere near the North Pole, and somewhere down here, too, there are portals in the Earth that open onto a subterranean labyrinth: worlds within worlds. Somewhere near here—out on the Barrier or up on the Polar Plateau itself—lies a geographical soft spot, like that hole in a newborn baby’s head. Soon we would push in our thumbs and pry open the secret.

  “Why has no one found it before, Uncle?”

  “Oh, but they have, lass! Any number! Think of all those men who’ve disappeared near the Poles! North and South. Not died, not succu
mbed and got brought home rigid: disappeared! Hudson and his son, for one! Disappeared. You’ve read enough about them, girl! I bought you all the books, didn’t I? By my way of thinking, they got lost—happened on the Holes—found their way inside—met the Insiders . . . Just that they never came back to tell of it, that’s all! Franklin! He’s one! Oates! There’s another for-instance.”

  “Oates?”

  “Brains on, Sym. Captain Scott’s man! Titus Oates! Searched high and low for his body, didn’t they? Fine-tooth comb, manner of thing. Found nothing. And this in a place you could find your ski six months after you lost it? Never believe it!”

  I searched and searched inside my head, but found nothing there either; nothing, no one—only a series of nesting spheres and all of them whirling like gyroscopes. It was such a lot to take in. A cavity in the Antarctic wilderness? A sanctuary where the lost and dying found succor, down in the deep, dark places?

  It’s a lot to take in.

  A place with my name.

  The entrance to a hollow planet.

  Worlds within worlds.

  And inhabited.

  But if Uncle Victor says so, it must be true. Mustn’t it?

  Chapter Nine

  Solar Corona

  It must be true, if Uncle Victor says so.

  Anyway, Manfred Bruch had proof.

  He had come across Uncle Victor through an Internet chat-room site called Thoughtextreme.com and been quickly convinced by Victor’s arguments. Being a film director, his one desire was to film the discovery of Symmes’s Hole and whatever breath-stopping marvels the interior revealed. Fame held no interest for him—“in my work I see this ‘fame.’ It is a nothing”—but the desire to capture the discovery on film had become his sole ambition.

  He had mortgaged his house, cashed in insurances, canceled film projects, lost his wife, all in furtherance of the truth, all the while urging Victor to let him help in the search. How to find the precise coordinates? The exact sites at Earth’s either end where the Holes lay. The precise position where open portals allowed sunlight to slide obliquely in and illuminate the cogwheel workings of the world.

  “First there was that dinosaur—whole and complete. You saw it in the news, yes? Two years back, yes? Then your uncle found the fossil,” said Manfred.

  “You put me on to it,” said Victor generously. “I was at a low ebb after Iceland. Getting downhearted. Getting messed about by idiots. Then I tied up with Bruch here, and things started to come together. Like he says, it was just after they found that dinosaur—entire, intact dinosaur, eh, Bruch? And there was a discussion about it on Thoughtextreme. I knew it was significant. I told them: Sooner or later there’ll be a better find than that, gentlemen! Sooner or later there’ll be fossil evidence of INTERIOR LIFE! I was beating my head against a brick wall, though . . . till Bruch signed in. He saw where I was coming from. I told him, sooner or later there’d be fossil evidence found near the Portals. Subterranean species unknown on the surface . . . Fossils of the ONES INSIDE! Didn’t I say, Bruch? A fossil would be the first physical proof? And it was! Bruch found it! I told him it must exist, and damn me, he found it! A mammalian fossil! On eBay. Some Chinese tourist picked it up east of the Dry Valleys. Didn’t know what he was looking at. Advertised it for sale on the Net! You got all that oriental scribble translated for me, didn’t you, Bruch?”

  “I cannot afford to buy this treasure myself,” Bruch interjected, “but your uncle . . .”

  “What a coup! What a thing to own! I’ll never fathom why the scientists hadn’t snapped it up.” He leaned toward me, showing me his palm, drawing on it tenderly with an index finger. “A hand, Sym! The fossil of a primate’s hand! I bought it! I own it! Nothing like anything ever found before! And on the eastern side of the seam! All the other fossil beds are on the western side. Only one explanation! Must’ve come from Down There! From the Inside!”

  I studied his quaking palm, imagining a baby-size hand. “On eBay,” I said. He had never shown it to me, this most prized possession of his.

  They were fellow enthusiasts, the two of them. Like train spotters or soccer fans, they rejoiced in shared memories of triumphs, setbacks, and strokes of luck.

  “Bruch has this chum at NASA,” said Victor.

  “I learn photography with this man at college when I am young,” Manfred explained.

  “Managed to sneak looks at satellite photos of The Ice. Big-scale stuff. Really big-scale stuff.”

  “Your excellent uncle tells me where to look. . . . And I look. . . . And there it is! Symmes’s Hole!” His blue eyes were wide, his lashes so blond that they were almost invisible. As he spoke, he swept his hands back over hair brindled blond and gray, and he looked from one to the other of us as if dealing cards for a game on which a fortune depended.

  Sigurd meanwhile was opening and closing one of the Velcro loops on his snowsuit over and over again with a flick of his finger.

  “Let’s be having it, then,” said Victor in his bluff, most matter-of-fact Yorkshire, but one fist was clenched tight around the toggles of his hood: He was a man in freefall, about to pull the ripcord of his parachute; about to see his salvation. “Let’s see this photo then, Bruch. And the coordinates.”

  The Viking unzipped his suit and took out a photograph, which he laid facedown on the table under the flat of his hand. Victor leaned toward it so that his zipper made a scraping sound on the table edge: a photograph, taken from Outer Space, of Symmes’s Hole.

  “My dear friend,” said Bruch quietly. “If persons find me with such a photograph it is . . . what do you say—‘all over’ with me. And with my spy friend at NASA. So, please . . .”

  “Yes, yes,” said Victor irritably, looping the wire stems of his reading glasses over his ears. “Who am I going to tell?”

  We saw it then—an indistinct mosaic of pixel squares showing a crater or a vortex. Black at the center, it looked like a whirlpool spinning, a Charybdis coiling itself into a dark and terrifying pit.

  “You look here at Symmes’s Hole,” said Manfred reverently. Uncle Victor’s eyes filled with tears. Seeing that, so did mine. Even Sigurd, whose face had been turned away since the mention of his mother, gazed fixedly at the photograph.

  Victor tried to pick it up, his nails scrabbling at the trimmed edges, trying to slide it toward himself across the table. “Where are the grid references? Don’t these things . . . You said there were numbers!”

  Bruch reached into the breast pocket of his suit and fetched out a fold of paper small as a bus ticket. Again he pinned it to the table with the flat of his palm. “The coordinates.”

  Their fingers touched as Victor reached out for the solution to his life’s work, but Bruch did not take his away. They sat for a moment, like chaste lovers, hand on hand. “One small matter,” said Bruch, leonine head erect and regal. “I regret to mention it. . . . But the money?”

  Manfred Bruch had sunk his all into proving the existence of Symmes’s Hole. He did not ask for the credit. He did not ask that the place be named after him, that the historians spell his name right. All he asked in return was the loan of money to finance his film.

  “I repay you one thousand times over, when the film it is released,” said Manfred.

  Uncle Victor seemed vaguely bored by the mention of money. (I wasn’t. It reminded me of Mum weeping in the bank manager’s office while he poked millet through the bars of his budgie’s cage.) “Let’s do it, then. Let’s be done with the money side.”

  He fetched out a banker’s draft, folded almost as many times as a paper airplane, so I did not see how much it was costing him: that code, that password, that strongbox combination, that secret formula, that key to Symmes’s Hole.

  “So when do we go there?” I asked.

  “As soon as film crew flies in,” said Manfred. “Thursday?” He was so calm, so collected, so Scandinavian, slipping the check into a breast pocket.

  The door opened. It was Jon saying we ought not to get into th
e Hagglund—even the rear compartment—without permission. (He was still mistaking us, you see, for simple tourists.)

  Manfred lifted his hands to indicate we had been on the point of leaving. The little slip of paper containing the coordinates caught the draft from the open door and flurried into the air. Victor’s dangling gloves banged me in the face as he went thrashing past me, snatching and grabbing at the scrap of whiteness. It fluttered to the floor of the van and rolled closer to the doorsill, to the Antarctic wilderness beyond. Then it lodged under the rim of Jon’s boot. Victor, bulky in his suit, crawled and strained after it, slapping Jon’s toes. He pinched it up; his lips moved as he read the coordinates, memorized the coordinates, poked the sliver of paper deep into his pocket.

  Manfred had not moved from his seat meanwhile. He looked down now at Victor on his hands and knees, and it seemed to me—just for a fleeting second—that there was contempt in the arch of his eyebrow; as if even an Easter-egg planet full of sugar-almond worlds was not worth the indignity of going down on all fours.

  No one was feeling very well. The whole of the Pengwings Expeditionary Force was distinctly off-color. Jon had forewarned us often enough that we might feel poorly for a while, but people were put out to find just how ill that meant. The American journalist, for instance, was being violently sick anywhere and everywhere.

  It annoyed the staff. They couldn’t say so, of course, because the man had paid so much money to be there, but you could tell they resented it. It was bad enough having to bag up the contents of the toilet and fly them out to South America, without having to bag up the contents of the journalist’s stomach too. And Ms. Adolphus’s. And Clough’s.

  Mr. Pogsbaum complained, on the other hand, that it was bad enough to have to share a tent and do without a proper bed and drink Japanese whisky, without getting the squirts as well. Madame Doorbell-St.-Pierre lost her creative muse, driven out by a permanent headache, and couldn’t get on with her novel.