Duncan Kyle - Whiteout!

But I was also tired after all the concentration, and not particularly anxious to meet Smales that night. As soon as the TK4 was safely parked in the traction shed, I left the unloading of the portable generator in Reilly's big and capable hands and went off to bed where, despite the pail of weariness that hung over my mind, or perhaps because of it, I couldn't get to sleep and lay in the darkness, while the sheets gradually wrinkled themselves and imaginary corrugations developed in the mattress and I became progressively more uncomfortable. Finally, I switched on the light and lit a cigarette, and reached for the novel I'd started a few days earlier. I read for perhaps an hour, not taking in anything much, but forcing myself to keep going until, with my eyelids feeling like heavy steel shutters just waiting to clang down, I put out the last cigarette, stopped resisting gravity, let my eyes close and drifted off. I must have been down very deep because, though I was coughing, it didn't waken me, at any rate not immediately. When I did click into consciousness I was really coughing hard, almost choking and feeling dizzy, and there was an acrid smell of fumes in the air. I reached for the light switch, turned it on, but there was no light. A glance at the luminous hands of my watch told me it was 3 a.m., but that luminosity was all I could see. Meanwhile there was fire somewhere, though I could see no flame, and since the hut was wooden, I'd better get out of it quick. I began to fumble round in the dark, between cough spasms, trying to find the clothes I'd thrown round when I went to bed, and found some, but not all; in particular, I couldn't find trousers, and the thought of going out into the icy tunnels without them, fire or no fire, smoke or no smoke, wasn't attractive. Then my hand struck my book of matches, knocking them, naturally, to the floor, where I had to get down on my hands and knees and feel across the shiny linoleum for them. If anything I was coughing even harder, gasping for breath and beginning to feel woozy, and I broke two of the three remaining matches before I got the third one lit. By its light I saw smoke hanging in the air, but I'd known that it was there and I wasted no time looking at it, and concentrated instead on finding my trousers, socks and boots. Then I dressed hurriedly and with increasing difficulty, not bothering overmuch with buttons, zips or snap fasteners, because my head felt light and seemed ready to float away from me and it was as much as I could do to dress at all. When I tried to walk I lurched and fell and was violently sick, gasping and retching as I lay on the floor. I knew I was close to passing out, and what was worse, I'd lost all sense of direction. There were four walls in the room and I didn't know which held the door. My arms and legs were like collapsing balloons, my head was hardly there at all, and where the willpower came from, I don't know, but somehow I forced myself up on to my knees, felt for the edge of the bed, got some idea of my bearings, and set off across a million miles of linoleum for the door. About half-way, I thought I was going to pass out in the middle of the floor and die, and I remember that I no longer even cared. But then my knee landed on something pointed, a nail head sticking up through the linoleum, and the sudden sharp pain refocused my senses long enough to get me to the door, to find the handle, to turn it...

The handle turned, but the door did not move. I remember the dim hopelessness of the moment, hearing a weird distorted voice mumble the word 'locked', then another racking cough spasm that doubled me over . . , and suddenly the door was open and I was tumbling forward, somersaulting from the two-step-high level of the hut floor to the granulated ice crystals in the trench. There was precious little breath in my body, but the fall knocked what there was out of me, and I may or may not have blacked out for a second or two. Then I was gasping and coughing, lying among all that crystalline ice, but feeling cold air flood into my aching lungs. With my mind clearing, I realized why the door had appeared to be locked. It was because the Americans made doors that opened outwards, not inwards in the British fashion. Gradually I began to feel better. Not much better, but a little. My head ached fiercely, my lungs and stomach felt like half-perished rubber and the same rubbery, chemical flavour lay thickly in my mouth.

Also I was still in darkness. I sat up and got a whiff of smoke that made me cough again. Since the smoke must be coming from inside the hut, I must close the door. Getting to my feet started another spasm of giddiness and I sat down heavily, waited a few moments, breathing cautiously, then tried again. This time there was less giddiness; I swayed, but remained upright. After a minute or so, I stretched my arms out in front of me and began trying to feel my way towards something that would give me a basis for orientation. The snow wall didn't, and it was the first thing I encountered. Damn! The next was the other snow wall. I stood in the black cold, trying to decide whether the hut lay to left or right. It could only be feet away, in any case. Then I found it, sniffed smoke, reached the door and swung it to. With the door at my back, I knew I faced the entrance to the trench and had set off carefully towards it when the thought came that there could be others asleep in other rooms in the hut, who perhaps had not awakened and were even now in process of being suffocated by smoke. But Herschel had the other room in my hut, and beyond that lay a little rest room cum office. With Herschel still at Belvoir, the hut was therefore empty. That was a relief. But what about the other hut, towards the far end of the trench? I vaguely remembered that was empty too. A fair amount of the sleeping accommodation was empty, this late in the year, when most of the summer visitors had returned south. In any case, it was clear enough that whatever was burning was in my hut, not the other, and that the best course of action was to get out of the trench and raise the alarm.

I stumbled over my unfastened bootlaces, swore, and moved slowly forward again. The stumble must have thrown me slightly off course, because instead of reaching the door directly, I came first to the corner of the ice wall and had to work my way by touch.

Why was I in darkness anyway?

Then an icy little thought struck me. The door wasn't normally closed. I should have been able to see the lights of Main Street outside! I shouldn't be in darkness at all! I remembered the generator trouble, and thought that perhaps the lights were off as a precaution, and it was the middle of the night, with nobody moving about.

All the same, when my fumbling fingers found the door, it was locked. For long minutes, I attacked that damned door. I tried to pull it, to push it; I swung my weight against it, hauled on the handle as hard as I could. I shouted, screamed and kicked, with no result at all, except that I became hoarse with shouting and my fists grew sore with banging. Nobody heard me. There would be nobody to hear me, not at that hour when almost everybody at Camp Hundred would be soundly asleep and those who weren't, the men on duty, would be warm inside their various huts and staying there. I looked at my watch, grateful for the little points of luminosity, and discovered it was three-twenty, twenty minutes since I had awakened, and with more than three hours to go before I could reasonably expect some passer-by to hear me. And by God, but it was cold. My clothes weren't properly fastened either, which didn't help; there were plenty of little places where the chill air was getting at my unprotected skin, and though in the tunnel that was scarcely dangerous, it was most certainly damned uncomfortable. I spent the next few minutes putting myself in some sort of order, straightening wrinkles and tucking myself in, while I thought about the smoke and where it had come from. The obvious source was a fire somewhere in my part of the hut, but no fire had been visible. There was no red glow, no pinpoint of flickering light to suggest burning, and surely in twenty minutes a fire in a wooden hut would have spread? Or perhaps gone out? Yes, that was more likely. Certainly I was going to get very cold and uncomfortable standing where I was for three hours and more. I made my way back to the hut, more confident now in the dark, found the doorknob and opened it. My nostrils told me instantly that the place was still full of fumes and the small whiff I got set me coughing again. My lungs felt bruised, as though somebody had stamped on them, and I closed the door quickly. I couldn't use the hut, that was certain. I'd had a faint, crazy idea that if I could see what was burning I could perhaps dash in and pull it out to the trench, but that was certainly impossible. I felt my way along the side of the hut to the second wooden building, deeper in the trench. That was also a dormitory hut and the two weren't connected so there should be no fumes, and there ought to be beds in there, even if there were no blankets.