Fortnight of Fear (32 page)

“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, that'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
.

Michael stood in front of the man like an obedient soldier reporting to his captain. Then the man raised both hands, and plunged them into the front of Michael's anorak, plunged them right through fabric and skin and living flesh. With a grisly cracking noise that I could hear even over the screaming blizzard, he literally ripped Michael inside-out, in a storm-bloodied chaos of lungs and heart and wallowing stomach.

The blizzard blew even more fiercely then, and obscured them. Trembling, muttering with fright, I closed the tent-flap and sat huddled in my anorak and my blankets, waiting for one kind of death or another.

I said the longest prayer that any man ever said, and hoped.

The tent flap opened and I found myself sitting in a triangle of sunlight. There was no blizzard, no wind, only the distant whistling of helicopter rotors, and the sounds of men shouting.

It was Rodney. He said, “James! My God, you're still alive.”

I sat with Tania on top of the Lyth, looking out over
Selborne. It was one of those still, hot, timeless August evenings.

She said, “Mike used to love these summer days.”

I nodded. Two house-martins swooped and dived just above us. Very faithful, house-martins, always return to the same house to build their nests, every year.

“Sometimes I get the feeling that he's still with us,” she remarked.

“Yes,” I said. “He probably is.”

“He didn't suffer, though, did he?”

“No,” I told her. “All three of them were killed instantly, no pain. They wouldn't even have felt the fire.”

“You were lucky,” she said, a little sadly.

“Come on,” I coaxed her. “Let's get back.”

I helped her up from the grass, and together we made our way down the hillside, between the gorse-bushes and the brambles. At one point, Tania went on ahead; and I stopped for a moment and looked back, at the warm and fragrant woodland, and those peaceful summer slopes, and at my own shadow, tall and black and motionless, like a memory of something that has never been.

Las Vegas, Nevada

No city in the world combines fun and panic in such a heady mixture as Las Vegas. I don't gamble, but I was completely won over by the glitter, the glitz and the sheer hysteria. Even when people are having a wonderful, wonderful time in Las Vegas, they seem to be conscious that the cold breath of death is blowing down the backs of their necks. It's not just the desert that surrounds Las Vegas that makes it so surrealistic. It's not just the lights and the wedding-chapels and the Jetson-style architecture. It's the feeling that people have come here because they're desperate, because they need a short-cut to wealth and happiness or whatever other joys that life has never dealt out to them.