The Terror

by Dan Simmons

  Crozier asked Blanky how this could be — how could two men fire shotguns at an animal at point-blank range and draw no blood? — but the Ice Master ventured no opinion. Inside, of course, he knew.

  Davey Leys was also alive and unharmed. The forty-year-old on bow watch must have seen and heard much — including quite possibly the thing on the ice’s first appearance on deck — but Leys was not talking about it. Once again David Leys could only stare silently. He was taken first to Terror’s sick bay, but since all of the surgeons needed that bloodstained space to work on Blanky, Leys was transported by litter to Erebus’s more spacious sick quarters. There Leys lay, according to the Ice Master’s talkative visitors, once again staring unblinkingly at the overhead beams.

  Blanky himself had not come through unscathed. The thing had clawed off half of his right foot at the heel, but McDonald and Goodsir had cut and cauterized what was left and assured the Ice Master that — with the help of the carpenter or ship’s armourer — they would rig a leather or wood prosthesis held on by straps so that he could walk again.

  His left leg had taken the worst of the creature’s abuse — flesh raked away to the bone in several places and then the long leg bone itself striated with claws — and Dr. Peddie later confessed that all four of the surgeons had been sure they would have to amputate it at the knee. But slowness of infection and gangrene in a wound was one of the few blessings of the arctic, and after resetting the bone itself and receiving more than four hundred stitches, Blanky’s leg — although twisted and wildly scarred and lacking entire tracts of muscle here and there — was healing slowly. “Your grandkids will love them scars,” said James Reid when the other Ice Master made a courtesy call.

  The cold had also taken its toll. Blanky managed to keep all of his toes — he would need them for balance on the ruined foot, the surgeons told him — but had lost all fingers save for his thumb on his right hand and the two smallest fingers and his thumb on his left hand. Goodsir, who evidently knew something about such things, assured him that someday he would be able to write and eat gracefully with just the remaining adjoining two fingers on his left hand, and be able to button his trousers and shirts again with those two fingers and the thumb on his right hand.

  Thomas Blanky did not give a good gob fart about buttoning his trousers and shirts. Not yet. He was alive. The thing on the ice had done its best to make him otherwise, but he was still alive. He could taste food, chat with his mates, drink his daily gill of rum — already his bandaged hands were capable of holding his pewter mug — and read a book if someone propped it up for him. He was determined to read The Vicar of Wakefield before he shuffled off what was left of his mortal coil.

  Blanky was alive and he planned to stay that way for as long as he could. In the meantime, he was strangely happy. He was looking forward to getting back to his own cubicle aft — between Third Lieutenant Irving’s and Jopson’s,the captain’s steward’s, equally tiny berths — and that would happen any day now, whenever the surgeons were absolutely sure they were done snipping and stitching and sniffing at his wounds.

  In the meantime, Thomas Blanky was happy. Lying on his sick bay bunk late at night, the men grousing and whispering and farting and laughing in the darkened berthing space just a few feet beyond the partition, hearing Mr. Diggle growl out his commands at his lackeys as the cook baked biscuits deep into the night, Thomas Blanky listened to the grind and growl of the sea ice as it tried to crush HMS Terror and allowed it to put him to sleep as surely as would a lullaby from his long-sainted mother’s lips.

  22

  IRVING

  Lat. 70°-05′ N., Long. 98°-23′ W.

  13 December, 1847

  Third Lieutenant John Irving needed to know how Silence got on and off the ship without being seen. Tonight, one month to the day since he’d first found the Esquimaux woman in her lair, he would solve the puzzle if it cost him his toes and fingers.

  The day after he first found her, Irving reported to his captain that the Esquimaux woman had moved her den to the forward cable locker on the hold deck. He did not report that she appeared to be eating fresh meat in there, mostly because he doubted what he had seen in that terrifying second of staring into the small flame-lit space. Nor had he reported the apparent sodomy he’d interrupted in the hold between Caulker’s Mate Hickey and Seaman Manson. Irving knew that he was abrogating his professional duty as an officer in the Royal Navy’s Discovery Service by not informing his captain of this shocking and important fact, but …

  But what? All John Irving could think of as a reason for his serious breach of duty was that HMS Terror had enough rats aboard it already.

  But Lady Silence’s apparently magical appearances and disappearances — although accepted by the superstitious crew as final evidence of her witchcraft and ignored by Captain Crozier and the other officers as a myth — seemed far more important to young Irving than whether a caulker’s mate and shipboard idiot were pleasuring each other in the stinking darkness of the hold.

  And it was a stinking darkness, thought Irving, in the third hour of his watch crouched on a crate above the slush and behind a pillar near the forward cable locker. The stench in the freezing, dark hold was getting worse by the day.

  At least there were no more half-eaten plates of food, tots of rum, or pagan fetishes on the low platform outside the cable locker. One of the other officers had brought this practice to Crozier’s attention shortly after Mr. Blanky’s amazing escape from the thing on the ice, and the captain had flown into a fury, threatening to cut off the rum ration — forever — of the next man stupid enough, superstitious enough, addle-brained enough, and generally un-Christian enough to offer up scraps of food or mugs of perfectly good watered-down Indian rum to a native woman. A heathen child. (Although those sailors who had gained a peek of Lady Silence naked, or heard the surgeons discussing her, knew that she was no child and muttered as much to one another.)

  Captain Crozier had also made it completely clear that he would tolerate no show of white-bear fetishes. He announced at the previous day’s Divine Service — actually a reading of Ship’s Articles, although many of the men were eager for more words from the Book of Leviathan — that he would add one extra late-night watch or two seats-of-ease thunder-jar disposal duties to each man for every single bear tooth, bear claw, bear tail, new tattoo, or other fetish item he saw on that hapless sailor. Suddenly the enthusiasm for pagan fetishes became invisible on HMS Terror — although Lieutenant Irving heard from his friends on Erebus that it was still thriving there.

  Several times Irving had tried to follow the Esquimaux in her furtive movements around the ship at night, but — not wanting her to know that he was following her — he had lost her. Tonight he knew that Lady Silence was in her locker. He had followed her down the main ladder more than three hours ago, after the men’s supper and then after she had quietly and almost invisibly received her portion of “Poor John” cod and a biscuit and glass of water from Mr. Diggle and gone below with it. Irving posted a man at the forward hatch just forward of the huge stove and another curious sailor to watch the main ladderway. He arranged for these watches to trade off every four hours. If the Esquimaux woman climbed either ladder tonight — it was already past 10:00 p.m. — Irving would know where she went and when.

  But for three hours now the cable locker doors had been tightly shut. The only illumination in this forward part of the hold had been the slightest leakage of light around the edges of those low, wide locker doors. The woman still had some source of illumination in there — either a candle or other open flame. This fact alone would cause Captain Crozier to have her plucked out of the cable locker in a minute and returned to her little den in the storage area forward of the lower-deck sick bay … or thrown out onto the ice. The captain feared fire in the ship as much as any other veteran sailor and he seemed to harbour no sentimental feelings toward their Esquimaux guest.

  Suddenly the dim rectangle of light around the ill-fitted lock
er doors disappeared.

  She’s gone to sleep, thought Irving. He could imagine her — naked, just as he’d seen her, pulling her cocoon of furs around her in there. Irving also could imagine one of the other officers hunting for him in the morning and finding his lifeless body curled here on a crate above the slush-flooded hull, obviously an ungentlemanly cad who had frozen to death while trying to sneak a peek at the only woman on board. It would not be an heroic death report for Lieutenant John Irving’s poor parents to read.

  At that moment a veritable breeze of icy air moved through the already frigid hold. It was as if a malevolent spirit had brushed past him in the darkness. For a second, Irving felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise up, but then a simple thought struck him — it’s just a draft. As if someone has opened a door or window.

  He knew then how Lady Silence magically came and went from the Terror.

  Irving lit his own lantern, jumped off the crate, splashed through the sludge-slush, and tugged at the doors of the cable locker. They were secured from the inside. Irving knew that there was no lock inside the forward cable locker — there wasn’t even a lock on the outside since no one had any reason to attempt to steal cable hawsers — so therefore the native woman herself had found a way to secure it.

  Irving had prepared for this contingency. He carried a thirty-inch pry bar in his right hand. Knowing that he would have to explain any damage to Lieutenant Little and possibly to Captain Crozier, he jammed the narrow end of the bar in the crack between the three-foot-high doors and leveraged hard. There came a creaking and groaning but the doors opened only an inch or two. Still holding the pry bar in place with one hand, Irving reached under his slops, greatcoat, undercoat, and waistcoat and pulled his boat knife from his belt.

  Lady Silence had somehow driven nails into the backsides of the cable locker doors and run some sort of elastic rawhide material — gut? sinew? — back and forth until the doors were secured as if by a white spiderweb. There was no way that Irving could enter now without leaving a clear trace that he’d been there — the pry bar had already seen to that — so he used the knife to slash through the cat’s cradle of sinew. It was not easy. The strands of sinew were more resistant to the sharp blade than rawhide or ship’s rope.

  When the strands finally fell away, Irving extended the hissing lantern into the low space.

  The little cave-den he’d seen four weeks earlier was, except for the absence of any flame now other than his lantern’s, just as he remembered — the coiled hawsers pushed back and pulled almost overhead to create a sort of cave within the raised locker area — and there were the same signs that she’d been eating meals there: one of Terror’s pewter plates with only a few crumbs of Poor John remaining on it, a pewter grog mug, and some sort of storage bag that looked as if Silence had stitched it together from scraps of discarded sail canvas. Also on the locker deck was one of the ship’s small oil lanterns — the kind with just enough oil in it for the men to use when going above to one of the seats of ease at night. Its flue was still very warm to the touch when Irving removed his mitten and glove.

  But no Lady Silence.

  Irving could have tugged and jerked the heavy hawsers this way and that to look behind them, but he knew from experience that the rest of the triangular cable-locker space was crammed tight with the anchor ropes. Two and a half years since they had sailed and they still carried the stink of the Thames on them.

  But Lady Silence was gone. There was no way up through the deck and beams above or out through the hull. So were the superstitious seamen correct? Was she was an Esquimaux witch? A she-shaman? A pagan sorcerer?

  Third Lieutenant John Irving did not believe it. He noticed that the active breeze was no longer flowing around him. Yet the flame of his lantern still danced to some smaller draft.

  Irving moved the lantern around at arm’s length — that was all the free space there was in the crowded and cramped hawser locker — and stopped when the lamp flame danced the most: forward just starboard of the apex of the bow.

  He set the lantern down and began moving hawser aside. Immediately Irving saw how cleverly she had arranged the massive anchor line here — what appeared to be another huge coil of hawser was merely a curled section of another coil set into an empty space to simulate a stack of hawser, easy to pull aside into her den-space. Behind the faux hawser coil was the curve of wide hull timbers.

  Once again she had chosen carefully. Above and beneath the cable locker ran a complex webbing of wood and iron beams set in place during HMS Terror’s refitting for ice service some months before the expedition sailed. Up here by the bow there were iron vertical beams, oak crossbeams, triple-thick support struts, iron triangular supports, and huge oak diagonal beams — many as thick as primary hull timbers — lacing back and forth as part of the ship’s modern-design reinforcement for the polar ice. One London reporter, Lieutenant Irving knew, had described all the tons of iron and oak internal reinforcements, as well as the addition of African oak, Canadian elm, and more African oak to the English oak on the sides of the hull, as being enough to make “a mass of timber about eight feet thick.”

  That was almost literally true for the actual bow and for the sides of the hull, Irving knew, but here where the last five feet or so of hull timber met at the bow in and above the cable locker, there were only the original six inches of stout English oak for the hull boards rather than the ten inches of layered hardwoods found elsewhere along both sides of the hull. It was thought that the areas a few feet to the immediate port and starboard of the heavily reinforced bow stem would have to be of fewer layers in order to flex during the terrible stresses of ice-breaking.

  And so they had. The five belts of lumber at the sides of the hull, combined with the iron-and-oak-reinforced bow and internal areas, had produced a marvel of modern ice-breaking technology that no other Navy or civilian expedition service in the world could match. Terror and Erebus had gone places where no other ice ship on earth could hope to survive.

  This bow area was a marvel. But it was no longer secure.

  It took Irving several minutes to find it, extending the lantern for drafts and feeling with his freezing bare fingers and probing with his knife blade to see where a three-foot section of the foot-and-a-half-wide hull timber had been loosened. There. The aft end of the single curved board was secured by two long nails that now worked as a sort of hinge. The forward end — only a few feet from the huge bow and keel timber that ran the length of the ship — had been only pressed into place.

  Working the hull timber loose with the pry bar — wondering how on earth the young woman could have done this with only her fingers — and then letting it drop, Irving felt the blast of cold air and found himself looking into darkness through an eighteen-inch-by-three-foot gap in the hull.

  This was impossible. The young lieutenant knew that Terror’s bows had been armoured for twenty feet back from their stems with inch-thick rolled and tempered plates of specially fitted sheet iron. Even if an internal timber were somehow dislodged, the ship’s bow areas — for almost a third of the way aft — were armour-plated.

  Not now. The cold blew in from ice-black cave darkness beyond the dislodged plank. This part of the bow had been forced under the ice by the ship’s constant tilt forward as ice built under Terror’s stern.

  Lieutenant Irving’s heart pounded furiously. If Terror were to be refloated miraculously tomorrow, she would sink.

  Could Lady Silence have done this to the ship? The thought terrified Irving more than any belief in her magical ability to appear and disappear at will. Could a young woman not yet twenty years old rip iron hull plates off a ship, dislodge heavy bow timbers that it had taken a shipyard to bend and nail into place, and know exactly where to do all this so sixty men aboard who knew the ship better than their mothers’ faces would not notice?

  Already on his knees in the low place, Irving found that he was breathing through his open mouth, his heart still pounding.

&n
bsp; He had to believe that Terror’s two summers of wild battle with the ice — across Baffin Bay, through Lancaster Sound, all the way around Cornwallis Island before the winter at Beechey Island, the next summer crashing south down the sound and then through what the men were now calling Franklin’s Strait — somewhere there toward the end, some of the iron bow armour below the waterline must have been dislodged and this thick hull timber displaced inward only after the ice had seized the ship in its grasp.

  But could something other than the ice have loosened the oak hull timber? Was it something else — something trying to get in?

  It didn’t matter now. Lady Silence could not have been gone more than a few minutes and John Irving was dedicated to following her, not only to see where she went out there in the darkness but to see if — somehow, impossibly, miraculously, given the thickness of the ice and the terrible cold — she was finding and killing her own fresh fish or game.

  If she was, Irving knew, this fact might save them all. Lieutenant Irving had heard what the others had heard about the spoilage in the Goldner canned stores. Everyone aboard both ships had heard the whispers that they would be out of provisions before next summer.

  He couldn’t fit through the hole.

  Irving pried at the surrounding hull timbers, but everything save for this one hinged board was rock solid. This eighteen-inch-by-three-foot gap in the hull was the only way out. And he was too bulky.

  He stripped off his oilskin slops, his heavy greatcoat, his comforter, cap, and Welsh wig and shoved them through the gap ahead of him … he was still too wide in the shoulders and upper body, although he was one of the thinnest officers aboard. Shaking from the cold, Irving unbuttoned his waistcoat and the wool sweater he wore under that, shoving them through the black aperture as well.