The White Darkness Read online

Jon kept insisting that our bodies would soon adjust—and then he got ill, too, and conceded that this was not quite what he had meant by “adjusting.” Hue Fah, anxious for her ailing husband, began asking, in her gentle little whisper, “What would happen if something . . . you know . . . happened?”

  Mike was bright with reassurance. Bacteria could not survive here, so it could not be an infection. Here even the common cold germ is put to flight by the uncommon cold. (Seems Antarctica is freer of germs than our guest toilet that no guests visit.) Besides, Dr. Hugh was in residence—rather more accustomed to treating broken bones and minor frostbite, true, but perfectly qualified to treat nausea, diarrhea, and headaches. “Dr. Hugh is rather unwell right now, but perfectly qualified . . .” said Mike.

  Even from his sickbed, Dr. Hugh could make a diagnosis. What else could it be but food poisoning? Some people started to murmur about refunds. Mr. Pogsbaum said he could have gone to Bali if he had wanted to get food poisoning. Colonel Oliver reminisced about seeing men die of eating bad shellfish in Bombay. Madame Boomerang-St.-Phew entertained us with the story of Augustus Caesar, poisoned by the figs on his own fig tree, because his wife had painted them with poison. I don’t think that helped.

  Me, I was perfectly fit. I wasn’t sleeping any better than the others, my brain confused by perpetual daylight. But I wasn’t sick. And I didn’t mind not sleeping. I’ve never minded not sleeping. It was a chance to wander the camp undisturbed, pulling the Great Secret behind me like a badly laden sled. It was a chance to think.

  One thing was absolutely clear to me. This one thing, this one certain thing kept arcing through my brain. I must tell Mum. Before we set off to make history, before we encountered the subterranean alien and his alien dog Spot; before we boldly went where no man had gone before (except perhaps Oates); before we entered into the Underworld of Odysseus and Aeneas, I must tell my mum. I’m sure it never crossed the minds of Aeneas or Odysseus, but they weren’t fourteen. Victor said he told Mum everything when he e-mailed (or rang?) from Paris. But what if he just said “Antarctica”? Or that we were “going south” for a couple of weeks? Staying on a few days longer in France was one thing. Going south was understandable. Going to Antarctica, even, was forgivable. But venturing to the door of a hollow planet and penetrating an alien world was not something to be kept secret from your mother. Nor was it the stuff of postcards:

  Having a wonderful time.

  Wish you were here.

  Rewrote science today.

  Also history.

  Met a subterranean monster

  and several dead explorers.

  Hope all is well with you.

  Weather continues chilly.

  Love . . .

  I looked into the distance until my eyes ached, trying to distinguish white shapes from a white background; looking for the onset of proper dark in a country where night stays away all summer. Then I lay down on my back and looked at a pink sky instead. Solar coronas sprinkled the pink, as though God had ripped up a rainbow and tossed the pieces to the wind. Nearby was an ice grotto the shape of a giant cello, strung with glistening icicles, its interior continually changing color as sunset lingered on and on. Even Mum would have had to admit that such things are worth a million pounds a blink. . . . But she was never going to see them. Neither was the bank manager. Not only had we cheated Mum out of all this, but there wouldn’t—couldn’t—be a penny left to ease her money worries by the time we got home. How had Uncle Victor scraped together so much money? And could he not have paid Mum some rent before he agreed to finance a movie?

  “I can’t afford for Mum to hate me too, Titus. Not her too!”

  “From my own experience of mothers, I think I can say . . .”

  But before the man in my head could supply reassurance, Sigurd Bruch was standing over me.

  “Rainbows. At two of the morning!” he said.

  “Do you think it’s really true, Sigurd?” I asked—which was astonishing, because right up until that moment, I hadn’t known there was the smallest doubt.

  “It is true,” said Sigurd peaceably. “No question. Your uncle is a very shining man. A genius man.”

  His faith made me ashamed. “But why does it have to be such a big secret? Why can’t we tell Jon and everybody? We can’t very well get there without him, can we?”

  He sat down beside me, leaning back on his gloved hands. “When this secret it break loose, everybody will come! With cameras and guns. The armies they put a fence around it and say ‘Top Secret.’ The Americans say it is belonging to them, or who knows? Maybe they bomb it—pchhhneow! Then there is war to decide who is King of this Underground. The United Nations they say, ‘Nobody must know about this. It will make big panic. Shut out the cameras. Shut out the ordinary people. Shut the Holes.’ It is hush up. But us . . . we tell whole world! We make them to see with their own eyes! Our film, it makes Lord of the Rings look like Mickey Mouse. Until the film crew come, we must tell nobody. Yes?”

  I considered this. It made sense. But it did not change my resolve to tell Mum. So I confided that, too. (It felt awkward, mentioning mothers when he had just split up from his, and he did flinch tremendously when I said it.) “I’ve got to phone her, Sigurd. It’s only fair. It might get dangerous.”

  Sigurd was silent for a while; then he said, in his singsong Scandinavian lilt, “You tell your mother all things? Always?”

  “She thinks I’m in . . . I don’t know if she knows I’m . . .”

  “You tell her all your secrets? When you meet a boy? No, sure!”

  “But I don’t—”

  Bending one elbow, he leaned over and looked into my eyes—the only bit of my face left showing with my hood cords pulled up tight. His eyes were very, very blue, with a rim of gray around the iris. “You tell her about me? No, sure!”

  “You wanted to Ski-Doo!” I said on the spur of the moment, and sat up sharply. “Let’s Ski-Doo.”

  “At two o’clock in morning?”

  “Why not? The sun’s out!”

  So that’s what we did, Sigurd driving, me riding behind, skirting the tents, shushing through the loose snow, slaloming between the safety flags, then speeding out onto the sastrugi. On the concrete-hard corrugations the machine bucked and bounced, pecking into the dips, lurching out of them again and taking off at the crests so that the engine gave a howling shriek of excitement, and so did we. I had to wrap my arms tight around Sigurd’s waist and hang on with all my strength, as my seat lifted clear of the saddle, then thumped down again, compressing the spine to the length of a penny whistle.

  Our helmets clashed. Our hair tangled with each other’s Velcro loops and straps and buckles.

  On our way back, we could see the camp staff all standing by their tents beckoning, but Sigurd steered in a wide arc and brought us in across the landing strip. The driving bands rasped horrendously over the blue ice, then lost their grip so we waltzed around and around, out of control, skidding, sliding, spinning, yelling.

  It was terrific.

  After we had been shouted at by Jon and Vicenzo, and before we went to our separate tents, Sigurd looked me steadfastly in the eye, his golden curls making a sun’s corona around his head. “Remember, Sym. Your uncle is a very shining man.” Then he kissed me on the mouth and told me again not to tell my mother.

  About the kiss?

  About Symmes’s Hole?

  I don’t know: The two things blurred.

  And I couldn’t even tell Titus about the kiss. For some reason he was nowhere around that night. Out counting ghosts, maybe. Or I forgot to look. It’s a shame. I could have asked him if it was true that, instead of crawling to his death, he had found Symmes’s Hole. Then again, how could he possibly have told me?

  Titus never says anything that I don’t, in my heart of hearts, already know.

  In the end, I left it too late to phone Mum on the camp radio. Next morning, it was out of action. Bob said it looked as if a glass of Japanese whisky had been stood
on top of it and had spilled down the back, onto the circuitry. There was a good deal of ill-will expressed toward whoever had done it, but nobody owned up. I thought of asking Madame Dormiere-St.-Pierre or Jon if I could use their fancy Iridium satellite telephones, but Uncle Victor says you should never ask favors of strangers because it places you under an obligation to them.

  Anyway, I’m too shy.

  Chapter Ten

  A Slight Change of Plan

  Hi, Nikki!

  Not Paris after all—u’ll guess from the penguin pic on the front. Antarctica, hey? Even Maxine might be impressed. Uncle V. is making a scientific discovery and he wanted me here. U’ll prob. hear about it before I get back. Penguins stink, but not as much as fur seals. Everything else is too big to fit on here—icebergs, sky, glaciers. All except people. Went Ski-Dooing last night with Sigurd, who’s 16 with hair. Even Maxine would etc. etc. His dad is filming V’s discovery. If I die, watch the film, will you? And go and see Mum. She’ll be stupendously fed-up.

  XSymX

  There are Antarctic postage stamps. No mailboxes or mailmen, but there are stamps. (I think the design should be white snow on a white background, surrounded by white perforations: Set the philatelists a challenge.) Jon doled out free postcards and encouraged us all to have them ready for the weekly plane: proof for our friends that we had truly been to the end of the Earth. So I wrote to Mum and I wrote to Nikki. The postcards would take weeks to get home, but they would be proof. No word of a lie.

  I was propped up in my sleeping bag, before dawn (if dawn existed, which it doesn’t), thinking everyone else around me was still asleep. Then I heard the sound of crying outside—not wild lamentations but a sort of choked sobbing. I peered around the murky women’s tent for an empty sleeping bag, and sure enough, Madame Dormiere-St.-Pierre was outside.

  She was in the toilet—a G-shaped enclosure with no roof on it—and looked like someone stuck at the center of a maze, who despairs of getting out. If you are more than five feet tall, your head sticks up above the wall while you are using the toilet, so I could see her horned snow bonnet bobbing to and fro. I didn’t think I could very well disturb her, but she saw me standing there and wailed, “Oh, honey!” so distractedly that I went inside. She had finished using the toilet, but the zipper had stuck on her snowsuit, catching on the clothing inside. As I crouched down to free it, she continued to weep inconsolably, big tears splashing down onto my hands.

  “You really shouldn’t cry,” I said. “Your eyes might freeze up.”

  “Oh, but this place, honey! It’s this place! It scoops you out, kinda thing. Crabmeat outa a crab! It so smalls you down, don’t it?”

  “Pardon?”

  “It so makes you small! So much nothing. I’m good, me. At what I do, I mean. Don’t get me wrong, but I’m real good! Eighty-seven thousand I did on my last title—inside of a year! But here? Nobody. Nothing. Piecea grit in the Himalayas. Life’s a candle. Out, just like that. Shops! Where’s the shops!”

  “You were expecting shops?”

  “Naw. What am I, stupid? When I’m down at my place in Florida, do I miss the shops in New York? Hell, no! Do I think Where’s my friends? I gotta get back to my friends? My mom? We don’t even get along! But here! This place, I just miss everyone and everything like I’ll go crazy if I don’t see them right now.”

  “Why don’t you phone them? I would if I had a nifty phone like—”

  “Well, that’s just it, though, honey! I lost my phone! Musta put it down someplace to take a photograph—or on the whale-type boat, maybe! And the camp phone’s busted! Just picture if you were in this place and no one knew it and you couldn’t get a call out to them. . . .” And there she sat, on the closed portable toilet, missing Manhattan and her friends—“Oh God for a tree!”—and sobbing her heart out, the bells on her snow hat jingling heartlessly. So I wrapped my arms around her, because I couldn’t think what else to do, and she put her head on my shoulder and her makeup on my white neoprene, and told me to call her Mimi in future. “It don’t seem to get to you the same way, honey.”

  “Do you know, there are mossy things living here called lions because they’re as big as the wildlife gets. Not half an inch high.”

  “They got a head start on me, honey. I’m shrinking every damned minute I stay here,” said Mimi.

  “You should go home, then. On the plane. Tomorrow.”

  She shot me a look of desperate disbelief. “Could I? Could I really? I’m supposed to be here three weeks!”

  “Big empty airplane. Who’s going to stop you?” You would have thought I had personally freed her from Death Row. “I don’t think you’d be on your own. So many people are feeling wretched.”

  She stroked the fur around the rim of my hood with a trembling forefinger. “Not you, though.”

  I shook my head. It did not seem any time to start explaining.

  “He sure is cute, that Sigurd.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean—”

  “D’you know what? His pa’s planning on making a movie outa my last book: The Crimson Slippers. Gonna collaborate, him an’ me. Hey! I can invite you out during the shooting! Spend some time with blond-boy. Manfred’s pretty cute, too, wouldn’t you say?” She giggled girlishly.

  I ran the mended zipper up and down a few times, and Mimi kissed me on the forehead with her glossy lip-balmed lips. “That Sigurd’s sure got the hots for you, babe.”

  “Oh, I don’t think—”

  “You be sure’n fix to meet up with him someplace warm next time. This Frigidaire is enough to cool any guy’s ardor.”

  “I love it,” I said, with more emphasis than I had intended.

  Mimi flinched, then shook her head in bewilderment. “And it don’t make you feel small, like a piecea grit?”

  She’s right. It does scoop you out, this place. Crabmeat out of a shell. Shrimp out of its sauce. Tears out of the bottom of your lungs. Laughter out of your knees. But being bad with words, all I could say was “I’m bigger here.” As she hugged me to her mended zipper, though, I did slide my postcards into the rear pocket of her snowsuit. “By the way, that nice American journalist man has a satellite phone, I think. So does Jon. You could ask to borrow.”

  “Is it true, Titus? Do you think this place is magic enough? Do you think I could rise above myself? Go home new? Bigger?”

  “People change,” said Titus warily. “Look at me.”

  “You don’t, Titus. That’s the whole point with you. I always know how you’ll be.”

  He drew his knees up to his chin, eyes twinkling in the lamplight, making fun of me. “Sometimes I’m startled by how much I’ve changed since you took me in hand.”

  I don’t like being made fun of by my own imagination. “I never stopped you smoking your pipe!”

  “Only the cigarettes.”

  “Cigarettes shorten your life.”

  “Not if you’re already dead. And I know memory plays tricks, but I don’t recall being an abstainer either, in my previous life. In fact, when I was abroad for my twenty-first birthday, flat on my back with a bullet in my thigh, I recall I dreamed of English draft beer and woke up crying.”

  “But why drink? Why would anyone want to drink? You saw what Dad was like when he drank!” I protested.

  But no. He hadn’t. Of course he hadn’t. Strictly speaking. The timing of the two things—Dad’s death, Oates’s arrival in my head—suddenly tripped me up, and my concentration faltered, and I lost sight of Titus, and found myself alone. Found myself in a tent full of sleeping, snoring people, my head full of times I did not want to remember: Dad drinking his way through the Christmas wine, the chocolate liqueurs, the cider vinegar. Trying to drown the rats he said were nesting in his skull.

  Inside my snowsuit, inside my sweatshirt, inside my thermals, under my braid, the short hairs on my neck stood on end.

  “People change. That’s all I meant,” said Titus, stroking them down again.

  “Even me?”

  �
��I daresay. I’d hate to bring untimely death on any fairies, but I don’t believe in Neverland.”

  “But you mustn’t change, Titus. You’re not allowed to change. Not here. Please! Everything’s fine. Make everything stay like it is.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, for all the world as if he were miles older than me, and not just the odd ninety years.

  This is how I made sense of it. What Sigurd really admired was Uncle Victor’s genius. But because Victor makes people nervous, Sigurd was being nice to me, instead. Admiration-by-association sort of thing. Not the hots. Definitely not. That would be ridiculous.

  But anyway, Sigurd certainly seemed eager to spend time with me all of a sudden. Every time I looked around, there he was. Admittedly there was no one else remotely his own age on the trip, but he could have hung out with Mike and Bob, with Jon, or with his sporty father. Instead, he sat down beside me at mealtimes. He took the seat beside me on the twin-engine Otter when we flew to see a colony of fur seals, and he wanted me in his photographs. He began teaching me how to schuss on skis.

  And it wasn’t the red silk skirt and camisole misleading him, because there was no chance to wear them. We were forever bundled up in snowsuits.

  I mean, I wasn’t sorry. I don’t mean that. It was just . . . odd. As if the Pixar lamp had come boinging over to shine in my face. It felt . . . odd.

  It put me in mind somehow of Maxine’s practical joke.

  One day after school a boy stepped up to me at the school gates. He only came as high as my armpit and wore studded leather cuffs around each wrist, but that’s not enough reason to be rude to a person, so I stopped to see what he wanted.

  “Maxine says you’re up for it,” he said. “Waddaya say? Wanna do it? My bruvver’s got a car.”

  I turned around so sharply to get away that my schoolbag hit him and knocked him off the curb and one of the bikes turning out of school very slightly ran him over. So I even had to apologize to the little—

  Not his fault, I suppose. Maxine had put him up to it. Just to see me run. Bearbaiting brought up-to-date for today’s modern audience.