Faked Passports (44 page)

“Fine, darling, fine,” Erika laughed. “That's all the better. We've got lots of reindeer antlers in the meat store. If you'll get me a pair I'll fix them on its head. I think, too, it would be more effective if we could blacken the brute a bit. What about some soot?”

Gregory fetched the antlers and Freddie succeeded in raking down half a bucket of soot from the flue in the chimney with which they black-powdered the snow-devil. By the time they had finished the moon was high above the trees and in its eerie,
silver light the totem of age-old evil seemed to radiate malignance even to its creators.

They spent another half-hour in acting like demons themselves by pulling down the tents, ripping them to pieces, blunting the edges of the circular saws and smashing in the sides of the lorries with axes; but they did not interfere with the engines, as the last thing they wished to do was to rob the Russians of the means of making a speedy departure, and occult forces although at times mischievous and dangerous would hardly be likely to sabotage machinery hidden under the bonnets of the lorries. It was one o'clock in the morning when, chilled to the bone and exhausted with their labours but highly satisfied, they gathered again in the house.

When they were all thoroughly warmed up once more it was decided that the two girls should sleep the night through while the men took turns to watch at the entrance to the camp; but they agreed that they must be clear of the house again by seven o'clock, although there would still be over three hours of darkness to go, in case the Russians plucked up courage to return first thing in the morning.

At six they were all up again. After a good, solid, hot breakfast they took great pains to dispose of any evidence that they had spent the night there but threw the officer's things all over the floor and turned the heavy table over on its side as though the poltergeist had been at work. Gregory fed the horses and led them back to the sleigh while Freddie dug a pit in the snow by the extremity of the wires which led into the house. Angela took up her position some distance to his right where she could see the front of the building and could signal to him without being seen from the camp. When Gregory returned all four of them settled down to wait.

It was half-past ten before the Russians put in an appearance and then, even from a distance, Angela could see that the poor wretches were in an extremity of misery, from having had to spend the night out on the open road. Some of them were limping as though affected by frost-bite in the feet; four of them were being carried by their comrades and all of them were bowed as though they no longer had the vitality to walk erect. Shambling through the snow they reached the edge of the clearing and halted there in a scared, silent huddle as they took in the devastated state of their camp and the grim, black figure that stood out so clearly against the dead whiteness of the ground.

Several of them turned to run again; but the officer gave a sharp order which halted the men, and they all stood there jabbering excitedly for several moments before plucking up the courage to advance. In wonder and fear they approached the witches' circle, those behind pushing forward the ones in front. For a time they stood staring at the malignant-looking beast, but none of them had the courage to cross the trodden track where they obviously thought that snow-demons had danced the night before. Then they split up into little groups and began to collect their broken, scattered belongings.

The officer and two of the men walked resolutely over to the house. Angela gave them a couple of minutes to take in the overturned furniture and the equipment which had been strewn about then she signalled to Freddie. He pulled hard on one of the wires and in the deep stillness of the forest they heard quite clearly the crash that followed.

With yells of fright the officer and his men came bounding out of the door and it was a good five minutes before they mustered the pluck to go in again. Angela signalled. Freddie pulled another wire. There was another crash; and out came the frightened men again as though an enraged lion were after them. This time they made no further attempt to enter the house but, getting a long pole, proceeded to fish the officer's belongings out of the room, through the open doorway, without crossing the accursed threshold.

When they had rescued the things from the poltergeist's lair the officer gave a shout and his half-frozen men came straggling towards him through the snow. He addressed them for a few moments then, apparently inspired by some new impetus, they scattered and quickly began to load up their six lorries.

Angela's stratagem had succeeded and her victory was complete. Three-quarters of an hour later, except for a little scattered rubbish, there was not a trace of the Russians in the clearing. Bag and baggage they had moved on further north to form a new camp in a more congenial atmosphere; and it was a safe bet that they would not select a place within several miles of that devil-ridden spot.

Freddie brought the horses and sleigh back and after clearing up the smashed crockery they were able to settle down in their refuge as though they had never been driven out of it. Nevertheless, after their midday meal Freddie and Gregory went out and felled two tall trees on either side of the track so that they fell across it. Then they cut the lower branches from
many others and fixed these firmly among the boughs of the fallen trees; thereby forming a screen which would prevent any other troops that passed along the road seeing the house from it even in daylight.

That night they were able to get the news over the wireless again and from an English commentary on the past week's events—by a neutral—learned of the terrible earthquake in Turkey which was said to have killed 20,000 people and to have wrecked a score of towns and hundreds of villages, many of which were still in flames; while their unfortunate inhabitants who had survived the quake were suffering acutely from having to camp out in the Anatolian snows. Two German cruisers had been sunk by British submarines right in the mouth of the Elbe—another splendid feat of naval daring—and the first Canadian troops had arrived in England without a single casualty.

Nearer home the Soviet Generals had been hurling division after division of their troops against the Mannerheim Line in a new offensive. It was reported that the Russians were ill-equipped, ill-led, and abysmally ignorant creatures who had not the least idea what the war they were waging was about. Many hundreds of them among the thousands of prisoners taken said that they had never even heard of Finland, that they fought only because they were ordered to, and that Communist Party members drove them on to the Finnish lines by keeping machine-guns trained upon their backs. Yet that did not affect the fact of their overwhelming superiority in numbers in spite of which the Finns had broken every attack, and the great offensive was said to be weakening.

No trace of Bimbo and his wives, Mutt and Jeff, had been seen since they had taken refuge in the forest with the rest of the party on the arrival of the Russians. They had stood near that evening watching the preparations for the first ghost attack; but it had been impossible to explain to them what was being planned. They evidently had not associated the making of the catapults and the cutting of the devil masks with the dancing lights and horrid screaming later in the evening; and so had been just as terrified as the Soldiers. In any case, they had disappeared into the great forest as unexpectedly as they had come out of it and the party at the trapper's house never saw them again.

Yet their fortnight's stay had proved an invaluable blessing for, during it, they had taught their hosts their method of fishing
and how to recognise the spoor of certain animals—bear, reindeer, wolf, lynx, hare and fox, several of which were fit for human consumption. After the Lapps' departure Freddie and Gregory used to go out most days on their own and often brought back some animal or fresh fish, the supply of which from the frozen lake appeared quite inexhaustible.

Among the trapper's stores there were few luxuries but such as there were had been set aside for special occasions; so on Christmas Day they were able to have a gala dinner although not a single course of it was in any way similar to the fare they would have had at home. They felt confident that the King would be making a personal broadcast, as usual; so, remembering that such broadcasts took place at about three o'clock, Greenwich “mean time”, and knowing their own longtitude to be roughly 30° West, Freddie began to tune in at a few minutes before four. With bent heads they sat round the radio, listening intently. After a little while they heard a faint, indistinct mutter, not a word of which could they catch, but it went on for about ten minutes and they felt certain that it had been the King of England speaking to the people of his Empire and all those of British race and sympathies who were scattered over the five continents and the seven seas, which filled the English members of the party with a strange satisfaction.

For the rest of the evening they got dance-music from nearer stations and amused themselves with a Christmas-tree which Erika had dressed with some of the store of candles, cut into small pieces, and hung with presents. Their gifts to one another were little things that they had made in secret during the past week and brought all the more joy to their recipients in that they were the product of time and thought instead of easily made purchases.

By December the 30th, when Finland had been at war for a month, not only was the Mannerheim Line still intact, as Loumkoski had said it would be, but a Finnish Suicide Squad of two hundred and fifty ace skiers had penetrated into Russia and cut the Leningrad-Murmansk Railway; which magnificent achievement was immediately followed by a smashing Finnish victory on the Suomussalmi front where two more divisions of Soviet troops had been surrounded and cut to pieces.

Over Christmas they had used the wireless extravagantly and by New Year's Eve they found to their distress that it was growing fainter. Even the nearest stations became difficult to pick up, so they decided to conserve it as much as possible by
only listening to the news twice a week. Yet by January the 6th it had faded out entirely. The batteries were dead and although they had searched through all the stores they had failed to find any replacements.

For the last week snow had been falling in greater quantities every day. The barricade of felled trees and branches across the track now appeared as a solid barrier of snow, twenty feet in height, shutting them completely away from the road. Fresh falls of snow had long since obliterated the rubbish left by the Russians and the Satanic snow-god which Erika had fashioned was now a cone-shaped pillar; the only landmark which broke the smooth, crystal-white carpet of the clearing. On cloudless days when the sun shone for an hour or two low over the tree-tops there was a temporary thaw. The monotonous patter of drips would start about one o'clock, only to cease again shortly after two as the melted snow froze into icicles which got longer and longer as the days passed, until by early January the trapper's domain was like a fairy scene in a pantomime portraying the Ice King's realm. The cold was so intense that they never went out except on the necessary business of visiting the stores in the block or tending the horses, and occasionally on longer expeditions to secure fresh food.

The icy air seemed to have driven even the Arctic animals into some secret shelter of their own. Only the wolves still evinced their presence by their dismal howling at night; and even Freddie, who was the hardiest of the party, found that he could not remain out long enough to follow the occasional spoor they saw for a sufficient distance to get a shot at a bear or reindeer; so they had to content themselves with fish.

But each expedition to the lake became more hazardous as although they knew the way there well now there was always the danger of being caught in a heavy snow-storm. When returning from the lake on January the 18th Freddie and Gregory were surprised by a blizzard in which they lost themselves for an hour while they could not see more than two yards ahead. They only found the house again by sheer good luck, and decided that to make further fishing expeditions would be courting death.

Their inability to hunt or fish any longer explained why the Finnish trapper had laid in such a large stock of dried meat and tinned stores; for without these things any family in that region would have starved to death long before the thaw set in.

By the end of January they were completely snow-bound and the radio which had kept them in touch with the outer
world had been silent for three weeks. In all that utter stillness no sound had reached them except the occasional howl of a wolf or the dripping of the trees, and that of their own voices and movements in the one big room where they lived and slept.

They knew that they had at least three months to go before the thaw would start in that high latitude. In the meantime two wars were raging; one, with bitter intensity, only a few hundred miles away; the other a strange, unusual sort of war which had so far consisted of ceaseless naval vigilance and tip-and-run aircraft raids, but a war upon which hung the fate of their countries and the future of all civilisation. Yet they could learn nothing of them since they were cut off from the world just as surely as though they had been dead.

But the Timeless Ones who fashion for all mankind their trials and opportunities decreed that they should leave their refuge long before the thaw set in.

In the long dark days, when the grey light filtered through the remaining panes of window for such a little time that it seemed as though they were living in perpetual night, their only occupation was telling stories and seeking to improve Gregory's memory, as there were no books in any language that they could read, no games to play or radio to listen to.

By the end of January he had reacquired quite a considerable stock of miscellaneous knowledge but countless facts and many episodes in his own life about which the others could not inform him still remained a closed book. For instance, although he had eight scars from old wounds on his body he did not know how he had acquired any of them, except the cut on the back of his head which had caused him to lose his memory and the wound on his shoulder which he had received on the night of November the 8th during the Army
Putsch
in Berlin. He talked intelligently again about the subjects he had mastered, but rather in the manner of a bright schoolboy than in that of an extraordinarily well-informed man and, while he entered cheerfully into any pastime or job that was suggested, he seemed entirely to have lost his initiative and to be incapable of producing any new ideas as to how they might wile away the endless hours.