The Riddle of the Frozen Phantom. Margaret Mahy

wasn’t even the smallest cabin boy in sight. “All hands aft!” he shouted, just in case, but no one joined in with a cheery. “Aye aye, Sir!” He tried again. “Escher! Escher Black! Heave to, Escher!”

      Silence!

      “I’ve lost my pendant and I’ve lost my memory. I’ve lost my ship’s crew and I’ve lost my best friend,” he said to himself, climbing the companionway. “Something terrible must have happened for Escher Black would never desert me. But I mustn’t waste time worrying. I must remember! Now! Why does The Riddle look so strange? I do know ships don’t usually look like this. It really is a riddle.”

      For the ship seemed hung about with frozen sails and veils of ice. Ice curved all the way around The Riddle. Ice arched over it, masts and all. I’m in a cave, thought the Captain (looking high, looking low as he worked things out). So he was.

      The cave was dim, but not quite dark. Light, rather like the light that was still seeping out of the Captain himself, was finding its way through cracks and twisting shafts in the white, glittering roof. It was beautiful but very puzzling.

      A slanting bridge, swollen with ice, connected the icy ship to the frozen land. That must be the gangplank, thought the Captain. I’ll just slither down it, walk off a little way and look back at The Riddle. If I put a bit of distance between me and the ship – if I look back at it – I might get some clues.

      But he couldn’t walk down that gangplank. It wasn’t just the iciness of it. He couldn’t so much as set foot on it. Whenever he tried, the air seemed to thicken and freeze in front of him. Try as he might, he could not take a single step away from The Riddle.

      Suddenly, the Captain understood! He wasn’t an ordinary captain any more. He was a ghost captain… a phantom… a spook! He wasn’t living on The Riddle (wherever it might happen to be), he was haunting it. He must be dead.

      Just for a moment the Captain was terrified.

      “Help!” he cried aloud. His ghost voice sprang away from him like a salt sea breeze. It swirled around the cave then shot off towards the bright, outside world. “Help! Help! Help!” the Captain cried three times. “Help! Help! Help!” went the echoes, on and on, up into the overhead tunnels through which the light was seeping into the cave, and out into the unknown space beyond.

      The captain heard his own echoes fly outwards and upwards, but there was no reply. He was all alone, haunting a lost ship, in an unknown cave, somewhere in a desert of ice. He would have wept with despair if he hadn’t been the ghost of a particularly brave man.

      What he did not know was that his three cries for help were already flying at great speed through the outside world, every one of them determined to find the right listener.

       CHAPTER 3 The First Listener

      “Help!” went the Captain’s first call.

      If an ordinary person had shouted. “Help!” the cry would have dissolved into the Antarctic air. But the Captain had called out in a ghost voice. His first cry flew like a stormy petrel across the islands and salt seas of the great Southern Ocean. It flew above schools of whales and crossed the secret airy routes of the wandering albatross until it came to New Zealand, a country made up of islands, jam-packed with possible listeners.

      Most ears are closed to a ghost cry. All the same, some ghost cries can be very persistent. This one searched for a special ear – an ear that would welcome it and invite it in, and at last it found one. It curled its way through the caves and tunnels of this ear, and into the sleeper’s dreams.

      “Help!” The explorer Corona Wottley sat up in bed, running her long fingers through her carroty curls as she did so.

      “That’s funny!” she cried aloud. “That’s very strange. Was that someone calling for help?” Her head was swimming with visions of ice and snow. “Albino penguins!” she exclaimed. “It’s ages since I wondered about that colony of albino penguins. There were lots of stories about it, but no one has ever found out if it really exists. And what about the lost ship… what was it called? Yes! The Riddle! I haven’t thought about The Riddle for years either. Why not? Bonniface Sapwood may have given up searching for it, the great big wimp, but that doesn’t mean everyone else has to give up. If I set out now – immediately, if not sooner – and if I am strong and brave and determined, I might be the explorer who finds The Riddle. And I could look for the albino penguins at the same time. Suppose I found The Riddle and the white penguins too. That would show Bonniface Sapwood he isn’t the only Antarctic explorer in the world.”

      She leaped out of bed and began to do a few warming-up exercises to get herself fit for the Antarctic, where warming-up exercises are particularly important.

       CHAPTER 4 The Second Cry for Help

      “Help!” The second ghost cry flew over the great Southern Ocean just as the first had done, and found the same country made up of islands. And at last the second cry found an ear that had been waiting for just such a cry, without quite knowing what it was waiting for. While the beautiful explorer, Corona Wottley, was beginning her exercises, an eye was opening in a mansion high on a hill in the middle of the business area of a great city… an eye so dark with black thoughts and wickedness you couldn’t tell where the iris left off and the peering pupil began.

      That eye stared up at a ceiling painted white – white as paper, white as snow – a ceiling that glittered from time to time with sharp little rainbows. Then, on the other side of the long nose, a second black eye opened, too, and these two eyes stared up at the points of rainbow glitter, a little sleepily at first but then sharply, and (within a second) more sharply still. Below those eyes, below the nose, there was a movement. A mouth began curving in a long, thin smile… a smile so cruel and greedy that it couldn’t really count as a smile even if it did turn up at the ends.

      The owner of that smile sat up in bed. He was wearing black pyjamas with diamond buttons. His sheets were made of black silk. His blankets were spun from the finest black wool, and his quilt was made from the skins of rare, coal-black foxes. And, though the ceiling was so white and glittering, the walls of his bedroom were made out of polished ebony. So he was cuddled and contained by darkness.

      Directly opposite the end of his bed a huge framed map hung on the wall, and any explorer worth his salt would have been able to tell at a casual glance that it was the map of the Antarctic.

      “The Riddle!” the man in black pyjamas murmured to himself. “Why haven’t I thought of The Riddle for such a long time? I suppose with all those diamonds Grandaddy stole (and which came to me when he died, ha! ha!) I haven’t really needed to remember it. But that cry I just dreamed – that cry of Help! – has reminded me all over again. Of course, I’ve still got plenty of those diamonds left over,” (here he looked up at his glittering ceiling) “but a man can always do with more. Besides, Grandaddy may not have brought them all back with him, and if he didn’t, it’s my sacred duty to search for any that he might have left behind him. Yes! The Riddle must be found. It will be found. But who can I get to find it for me – because a delicate man like me can’t go turning the Antarctic upside down. A man like me needs someone else to do all the actual searching. I hate walking in snow. Now who? Who?

      “Aha! I have it. Bonniface Sapwood! Just the man. Now that I’ve remembered The Riddle, Bonniface