The 9th Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories

THE GLOVE Roger Hicks

In the last days of that golden autumn, Morgan came down from Head Office and gave me the sack.

I had had a week’s warning of his visit – time enough to read between the few short lines of typescript under the Company’s impressive letter-head, so I thought I knew exactly what he had been sent to say.

It had been seven months since my accident – seven months since they flew me out of the ice – first to New Zealand, where they cut off my left leg – and then half-way across the world to this quiet sanatorium in Hampshire, where they are clever with artificial limbs and things like that. And all the time of my long drag back to health and sanity the Western Drilling and Survey Company had been footing the bill. I could not help reflecting that my worth to them in the field could hardly have compensated for what they were now paying out for me as I lay here useless and disabled. If I had been reasonable I would have realised, too, that a commercial company is not a benevolent society – that one day it would close its doors to John Farrant, a one-legged geological surveyor, who lay in a hospital bed drawing a fat pay packet for doing nothing.

But I was not being reasonable. I had lost a limb, and my job. And also, as salt for the wound, I had the knowledge that my friends of that past had written me off as a man who could not be trusted when the chips were down – a man who had lost his head in a short summer storm in that frozen wilderness at the bottom of the world.

In fact, I felt that my life had really come to an end in the fissure in the ice on the Ross Barrier, on the 15th March, 1962. And neither Morgan nor his company, for all their kindness, could erase the feeling. Somewhere, some time, I would have to rebuild that life, with the disadvantage of a tin leg, and doing office work, which I hated. But not now. Now I was drunk with the bittersweet gall of self-pity, and I was not going to let Morgan deprive me of that pleasure.

He did though. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘My name’s Chris Morgan.’

He watched with amusement as I fought to control the astonishment in my face. I had imagined some sort of embryo director, balding and paunchy, offering the Company’s condolences in pompous, impersonal phrases. Morgan wore a tweed sports-jacket, with leather at the elbows, and his hair was blown over his face any-old-how from driving fast in an open car. I noticed also that, when he looked at my leg standing there in the corner, with the two metal crutches, bright as sledge runners, beside it, his eyes did not slide away in embarrassment, as had those of so many other visitors. It was ‘call me Chris’ from the start, and he was so friendly that I was glad to do just that. After a moment I was glad that he had bothered to come at all.

He had brought two envelopes with him. The first was large and brown, slightly shapeless and bulging, as though it contained a shirt that one had carelessly left behind after a week-end with friends. The other – a white one – bore the Company’s official crest, and I hoped – and hated myself for doing so – that it might contain a final cheque.

When Morgan rose to put the two envelopes on the table beside my bed, I thought at first that he was going. Instead, he walked to the window and glanced at the October sunlight as it drew fire from the thinning leaves of the elm trees at the bottom of the sanatorium lawn. Still looking out of the window, he lighted a cigarette.

He turned, and watched me through the smoke. ‘John,’ he said; ‘this man you saw in the blizzard. Do you still think you saw him, even after all these months lying here?’

In the first few weeks in New Zealand, when the pain from my leg was driving me mad, I had shouted, and begged, and even wept for people to listen to my story: first, eagerly, to the Company agent in Auckland and to members of the expedition who had come to see me, and then, despairingly, to anyone who would listen – to welfare visitors and nurses, and even to the doctors on their rounds.

And all of them had the same knowing, shuttered look on their faces, as if they were saying to themselves: ‘This poor chap got gangrene in the Antarctic. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. . . .’

Still, they were fair – and that, if anything, made it harder. They searched – in the beginning. They even radioed to the Russian survey party, and to everyone else who was on the ice that summer. But nobody had a man missing, and nobody knew of any unreported expeditions.

So, quickly and quietly, the fuss died away, and the ramblings of a sick man were forgotten. And slowly, over the months, I had tried to forget too. And now, when I had steeled myself to put the memory of that frost-bitten face and staring eyes forever into a dark corner of my mind, here was a complete stranger asking me to bring it out into the daylight again.

It was too late. I could not fight the facts any more, and my voice was quiet and dispirited.

‘I’ve been proved wrong too many times, Chris. I accept that proof – or try to. I thought I saw a man in that storm. I thought it was him who dragged me to safety. Once I would have sworn that I saw him, but now’ – and I shrugged – ‘I just don’t know.’

It was a hopelessly inadequate answer, but it was also the truth; I really did not know any more.

I thought for a second time that Morgan was going, but he merely came over to sit in the chair.

‘If you can bear it, I’d like to hear it again, John. Right from the beginning . . .’

Most of the early part he must have known already: how I had met Tillotson by chance, had been persuaded by him to offer my services to the Company, and how I had eventually sailed for the southern continent in October, 1961. We were a party of twenty, including three hangers-on from the Royal Society.

We were put ashore on the 7th November beyond Butter Point, about as near the head of McMurdo Sound as you can get so early in the summer. It was a grand site for a camp – or so I thought – with the plume of cloud from Mount Erebus, forty miles away across the Sound, blowing away into the astonishing blue of the sky like the tail of an Olympian racehorse.

But we did not stay. ‘In mid-summer the sea ice will break away into the open ocean to the north.’ And since Helmut Jansen had been chosen to lead the party, because of his exceptional experience of Norwegian expeditions to the Antarctic, we did not argue. By the end of that month we had moved – generators, radio transmitters, survey equipment and all – a hundred miles south to Moore Bay, in the lee of Mount Morning. We were on the Great Barrier and ready to go.

Long ago, before the war, old Sir James Morgan – Chris’s father – had had this dream of the vast mineral wealth to be wrung from this frozen land. Over the years he had piloted his beloved company successfully through the uncharted waters of big business intrigues and take-over bids in order to finance that dream. Now, three years after his death, Chris and his elder brothers had cast the old boy’s private fortune on the waters, to bring the vision to life.

Our orders had been to find some evidence to justify the extravagance: oil-bearing shale, mineral ore – anything.

As the shadows lengthened across the lawn, a nurse came in, bringing tea. Chris Morgan did the honours.

‘You must have some idea now of what’s down there, John. What do you think?’

I wondered what answer he wanted. I also thought of the enormous sums of money the Company had already spent – including the two huge, yellow Sno-Cats; mail once a fortnight by courtesy of the U.S. Air Force (who had been supporting a mission of their own in the seaward end of McMurdo), and our own ski-fitted Beaver plane. And all I could say was: ‘Not much.’

He did not seem to be worried, but I thought he needed an explanation.

‘There are granite outcroppings in the upper reaches of the Beardmore Glacier – Jansen reported them. There might be tin there, or even copper, but it’s too inaccessible, Chris. You’d never get it out.’

He nodded. ‘But you reported oil in the Mulock Inlet, didn’t you?’

I corrected him. ‘Hell, you read my report, Chris. I reported sedimentary rock. There’s fossil-bearing sandstone, and limestone as well – even some coal. But that doesn’t mean anything except that oil could be there.’ I tried to convince him. ‘The big boys have floated fortunes on far more promise than that, and still found nothing. Besides, Chris, I saw this stuff ‘way up in the icefloes coming off the Worcester Range. You can’t move Sno-Cats or any sort of equipment in places like that.’

He had read my report all right, and I supposed that he just wanted to hear me talk – to judge what sort of person I was. To judge also whether the rest of my story could be believed. . . .

And so, as the tea grew cold on the table, I tried to bring to life for him a place that he had never seen – a vast, silent continent which – excepting only for beauty – the Almighty, when he dealt out the cards, had quite forgotten.

I tried to tell him, hunting for words, about the Ross Ice Barrier – a sheet of ice four hundred miles wide and a thousand miles long; always the same, and yet never the same. Sometimes that great snow plain was flat, and sometimes blown into fantastic wave shapes by who-knows-what primeval wind. Sometimes you could glide over its surface effortlessly all day, and at other times, for no apparent reason, you would sink and flounder until you were exhausted.

I told him also how the temperatures he knew meant nothing down there. How, on a windless day, we used to sunbathe during the lunch break in fifteen degrees of frost. And how, in the same temperature, when the wind blew the snow clouds off the bastions of South Victoria Land, a man could die from frost-bite and exposure.

I do not know if he understood, but he nodded often, and asked few questions.

And so we came to the things that Chris did know. How we had organised ourselves into two parties – Jansen and his group going south to the Beardmore and working their way back; while Tillotson and I moved down from the base camp to meet them.

From time to time the Beaver used to fly groups of us back to base to rest up and get the mail. But the news we brought – and the news we received from the other party – was always the same. Slate and diorite here; limestone and sandstone there. Coal, yes, but not oil. Always the possibility of something, but never anything definite.

And so the weeks went by. We were due to leave for home in the latter half of February, but in the second week of that month a telegram had come from London – probably Chris had had some hand in composing it – asking us to stay on as long as the weather held. The final decision was left with Jansen.

I remembered Tillotson flying down to Cape Parr, just south of the eighty-first parallel, to confer with Jansen, and I told Chris about it.

‘We were talking of staying until the light started to go in April. The weather was so good.’ And I thought back to those endless, sunlit days.

‘What stopped you?’ asked Chris, somewhat belligerently it seemed to me, and I began to think of him again as ‘Morgan’.

‘The temperatures, Chris. Sure, it was fine, but it was starting to fall into the minus tens and below at night. That’s getting dangerously low for equipment and vehicles. Dangerously low period, come to that.’ After all, it was his money – more or less – and he had a right to know if we had wasted it.

Morgan finished the story for me, lighting another cigarette – his eighth.

‘So you decided to go on for another month, and be back at base by the end of the third week in March.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That was about the size of it.’

Morgan began playing with the small white envelope, tapping it edgewise on his knee. ‘What did you think of that decision?’ he asked.

‘I think we were all relieved, really.’ And I stopped thinking of myself for long enough to feel sorry for him. ‘It was no good, Chris. Jansen wanted to look more closely at the area round Cape Selbourne, and I claimed to be on the verge of a breakthrough in the Mulock Inlet. But neither of us believed either ourselves or each other. We had just got to the stage of refusing to give up.’ And I really wanted him to believe that.

Morgan said nothing. He walked over to the window again, still tapping the envelope against the side of his leg. I could sense that something was brewing.

‘When did your party pack up the Mulock Inlet survey and head for base?’

‘The twelfth or thirteenth of March,’ I replied. I wondered what he was driving at. I was not left in doubt for very long.

‘Moore Bay and the base were about seventy miles north-east from you then. And yet you were found a hundred miles out on the Barrier, ‘way off course, on the fifteenth . . .’

He left the sentence hanging, as though he were thinking aloud. But I knew now which way his mind was working. He was wondering what madness had made us steer at right angles to our proper course for base – especially after I had told him that we were relieved to be winding up the expedition.

‘Blewett, the glaciologist, wanted to test the thickness of the Barrier Ice. Jansen was at least three days behind us, so we had plenty of time.’ I did not in fact have to defend our actions to him. We had agreed to take the Royal Society boys along, so it was only fair that we should have given them an opportunity to carry out some of their planned tasks. I was fighting a rearguard action all the same, though.

‘So you went due east then?’ Morgan asked.

‘As far as you go due anything in those latitudes,’ I told him. ‘We just went out at right angles to the land. Blewett was firing seismic charges every ten miles or so.’

I had reassured him on that point, but I knew that there were two questions he still had to ask. And, however friendly Chris Morgan was, the answers to those questions would have to be convincing if he was to believe me further.

He shot the first one from the hip. ‘Why were you by yourself that afternoon? Surely an elementary lesson in those environments is that you don’t go anywhere alone?’

My mind went back to the end-of-term feeling that had pervaded our whole party that afternoon, and I tried to put this across. Tillotson, Blewett and the rest of the group had gone on ahead to fire Blewett’s last charge. They’d left me, at my own request, to walk on behind them.

‘Chris, it was a place where we’d spent the last four months together. It was somewhere I wasn’t going to see again. I just wanted to be alone for an hour or two. That’s all.’

‘So you were just wandering about, savouring the atmosphere, a beer-mug’s throw from the Pole?’ He sounded more than sceptical.

‘Not wandering, Chris. I was marching up the tracks of the Sno-Cat. Besides,’ I added, ‘I could see the smoke of its exhaust about five miles away. That’s a lot different from aimless wandering.’

I do not know if he was convinced, but he gave me no time to try any further. He let go the second barrel while I was still staggering.

‘How in God’s name, John, does a blizzard come up in the middle of a Sunday afternoon walk without your noticing it?’

We had been careless there. It was no use denying it. For twenty-four hours the temperature had been high – too high when it was so late in the season – but we had been lulled into a false sense of security by weeks of fine weather. And none of us in the northern party was sufficiently experienced to interpret all the subtle shifts of the ice-field weather. True, the sky had been overcast at lunch, with a few small flakes of snow drifting idly down, and Tillotson had talked of the possibility of a storm. But, in the windless midday, we did not expect anything for at least twelve hours, by which time we would be well on our way to the base camp.

Out there on the Barrier, a hundred miles from land, and therefore with no physical object to break up the skyline, it was difficult to assess visibility with any accuracy. The first thing I had noticed was that I could no longer see the plume of diesel smoke going up from the distant Sno-Cat. At the same time a knife-like wind had sprung up from the table-land at my back, trundling the ice crystals along the surface of the Barrier like tumble-weed.

Whatever the failings in my story so far, Morgan had forgotten them. I could feel him tensing.

‘Were you frightened?’ he said.

‘No,’ I answered emphatically. And I was speaking the truth. ‘There was a standard procedure for that sort of occasion.’

I had taken advantage of the surface of the snow plain, which had been frozen into petrified waves, with about two feet vertical distance between trough and crest. On the top of one of these crests I had scooped together the loose snow to form a wall, and had squatted down in this improvised lee to wait for the Sno-Cat to find me. And all around me the wind had risen in earnest, blowing the snow horizontally before it.

I wanted to point out to Morgan that this was hardly consistent with the actions of a man in panic, but I hoped that he would realise anyhow.

‘Why were you so confident that Tillotson would find you?’ I could see that Morgan was still probing for signs of loss of nerve, but again I could answer him without hesitation.

‘We noticed pretty soon after we got on to the Barrier that, in the early stages of a storm, it didn’t matter whether it was snowing or not. The wind blew the loose stuff away from the packed snow where the Sno-Cat had passed, making its tracks stand out like railway lines.

‘They only had to retrace their steps,’ I added.

Outside the window the sun had left the tops of the trees. When Morgan turned to me his face was in shadow, so that I could only see its outline against the deepening blue of the sky.

‘And this man, John – he just came at you out of the storm?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was looking down the tracks of the Sno-Cat. I never saw him until he was as close to me as you are now.’

And I looked at him standing there by the window. But all I saw was a wall of whiteness, and a man staggering down the troughs against the force of the blizzard. A man with hideous, bloodshot eyes, unprotected by goggles, which stared sightlessly into the stinging snow crystals. And a face that was the dirty grey of terrible frostbite.

Not talking to Morgan, but just thinking aloud, I said: ‘I never saw a dead man before, but that man was dying, Chris. And the way he staggered, he looked as though he’d been walking all his life.’ And ten thousand miles and seven months away I could still feel the hand of nameless horror plucking at the hairs on the nape of my neck.

‘So he walked right past you?’ And Morgan’s voice was as quiet as my own had been.

‘Only until I noticed his glove lying in the snow.’ I knew that Morgan was about to ask what use one glove could have been to a dying man, but I cut him short. ‘I just felt that it was terribly important to give him back his glove. He was so cold, Chris – so very cold.’

I had panicked all right then. Storms can come from nowhere, but not dying men. I had run after him, calling and stumbling into the blizzard. But already the storm had swallowed him up, and my only companions were the roar of the wind and the flying snowflakes, which stung like needles on my face.

Then I did see him again. I had somehow got ahead and to the right of him, and I could just see his head and shoulders behind the crest on my left. I had run towards him, shouting, but, as I came down the snow slope into the trough, the ground fell away underneath me – I had fallen through a small snow bridge. Not a big drop, but enough to break my leg at the joint. I heard the bone snap as the blackness closed over me.

When I came to there were hands under my armpits, dragging me out of the fissure. I thought at first that it was Tillotson, but the voice that said ‘take it easy’ wasn’t Tillotson’s. I knew whose it was.

God alone knows where that poor wandering man found his reserves of strength, but find them he did. For fully a hundred yards he half dragged, half carried me to a place that shielded me from at least the worst of the wind.

Before I fainted again, I remembered him putting his face close to mine, and saying, through cracked and blackening lips: ‘You’ll be all right.’

And there, hours later, Tillotson had found me, and had taken me back to base. But it was too late then: I already had frostbite. . . .

So that was my story. Chris Morgan could believe it, or scorn it like everybody else. Maybe I had lost my senses and imagined the whole thing. It really didn’t matter any more, but I knew that, for the rest of my days, I would never forget the compassion that had shone through the chill of death in the eyes of my rescuer.

Into the silence Morgan said, trying to keep his voice matter-of-fact: ‘You were clutching a glove when they found you, you know. It’s in that envelope. . . .’

I think I nearly passed out then. I gazed at him for a full minute in utter disbelief. Then I tore frantically at the stiff brown envelope.

It was a glove all right: a great, coarse, blue canvas one, with the fibres faded away on the palm, so that its colour there was grey-white, like the colour of its owner’s face. And it was very old.

As a schoolboy I had once gone on a sponsored skiing holiday to Austria. To kit me out, my father had opened a trunk in the attic, and had brought downstairs – heavy with bags of mothballs – the clothes that he himself had worn for a similar holiday thirty years earlier. That was where I had seen a glove like this one before.

Morgan had opened the other envelope, too. There wasn’t a cheque inside, but a snapshot: a close-up picture of a brass plaque, like those you see on the walls of churches or regimental chapels.

Morgan was talking. ‘I believe you saw a man, John. Some trick of time and place – I don’t know how – but you saw him. But I had to come down and hear your story to be sure. . . .’

And in that instant I knew too. And whatever Morgan said afterwards was lost in the roaring of the blood in my ears. For the plaque in the picture said: ‘Greater Love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ Underneath it gave a name that was written, in faded indian ink, on the inside of the glove – ‘Captain Oates, 15th March 1912’.

Outside, the rooks flew into the elm trees in the last of the day, and a nurse came in to turn on the lights.