by Dan Simmons
If he couldn’t get out through the hull now, he’d have the Devil’s own time explaining why he came back up from the hold minus all of his outer layers.
He did fit. Just barely. Grunting and cursing, Irving squeezed through the tight space, buttons tearing off his wool shirt.
I’m outside the ship, under the ice, he thought. The idea did not seem quite real.
He was in a narrow cave in the ice that had built up around the bow and bowsprit. There was no room for him to get back into his coats and clothes, so he pushed them on ahead of him. He considered reaching back into the cable locker for the lantern, but a full moon had been in the sky when he’d been officer on watch a few hours earlier. In the end, he took the metal pry bar instead.
The ice cave must have been at least as long as the bowsprit — more than eighteen feet — and indeed may have been created by the heavy bowsprit beam’s working of the ice here during the brief thaw and freeze cycles of the previous summer. When Irving finally emerged from the tunnel it took him a few extra seconds of crawling before he realized that he was out — the thin bowsprit, its mass of lashed rigging, and curtains of frozen jib shrouds still loomed over him, blocking, he realized, not only his view of the sky but also any chance for the man on bow watch to see him. And out here beyond the bowsprit, with Terror only a huge black silhouette looming above, the ice illuminated only by a few thin lantern beams, the way forward continued into and through the jumble of ice blocks and seracs.
Shaking hard, Irving tugged on his various layers. His hands were shaking too fiercely for him to button his wool waistcoat, but that didn’t matter. The greatcoat was hard to pull on but at least the buttons were much larger. By the time he had his oil slops on, the young lieutenant was frozen to the bone.
Which way?
The ice jumble here, fifty feet beyond the ship’s bow, was a forest of ice boulders and wind-sculpted seracs — Silence could have gone in any direction — but the ice seemed worn down in a roughly straight line out from the ice tunnel into the ship. At the very least it offered the path of least resistance — and most concealment — away from the ship. Getting to his feet, lifting the pry bar in his right hand, Irving followed the slippery ice trough toward the west.
He would never have found her had it not been for the unearthly sound.
He was several hundred yards from the ship now, lost in the ice maze — the blue-ice trough underfoot had long since disappeared, or rather been joined by a score of other such grooves — and although the light from the full moon and stars illuminated everything as if it were day, he had seen no movement, nor footprints in the snow.
Then came the unearthly wailing.
No, he realized, stopping in his tracks and trembling all over — he had been shaking from the cold for many minutes but now the trembling went deeper — this was not wailing. Not of the sort a human being can make. This was the amelodic playing of some infinitely strange musical instrument … part muffled bagpipe, part horn hoot, part oboe, part flute, part human chant. It was loud enough for him to hear dozens of yards away but almost certainly not audible on the deck of the ship — especially since the wind, most unusually, was blowing from the southeast this night. Yet all the tones were one blended sound from one instrument. Irving had never heard anything like it.
The playing — which seemed to begin suddenly, increase its rhythm almost sexually, and then stop abruptly, as if in physical climax and not in the least as if someone was following notes on a sheet of music — was coming from a serac field near a high pressure ridge less than thirty yards to the north of the torch-cairn path Captain Crozier insisted on maintaining between Terror and Erebus. No one was working on the cairns tonight; Irving had the frozen ocean to himself. To himself and to whoever or whatever was producing that music.
He crept through the blue-lit maze of ice boulders and tall seracs. Whenever he became disoriented, he would look up at the full moon. The yellow orb looked more like another full-sized planet suddenly looming in the starlit sky than like any moon Irving remembered from his years ashore or brief assignments at sea. The air around it seemed to quake with the cold, as if the atmosphere itself were on the verge of freezing solid. Ice crystals in the upper air had created a huge double halo encircling the moon, the lower bands of both circles invisible behind the pressure ridge and icebergs round about. Set around the outer halo, like diamonds on a silver ring, were three bright, glowing crosses.
The lieutenant had seen this phenomenon several times before this during their night-winters up here near the north pole. Ice Master Blanky had explained that it was just the moonlight refracting off ice crystals the way a light would through a diamond, but it added to Irving’s sense of religious awe and wonder here in the blue-glowing ice field as that odd instrument began hooting and moaning again — just yards away behind the ice now — its tempo again hurrying to an almost ecstatic pace before suddenly breaking off.
Irving tried to imagine Lady Silence playing some hitherto unseen Esquimaux instrument — some caribou-antler variation on a Bavarian flügelhorn, say — but he rejected the idea as silly. First of all, she and the man who had died had arrived with no such instrument. And second, Irving had the strangest feeling that it was not Lady Silence who was playing this unseen instrument.
Crawling over the last low pressure ridge between him and the seracs from whence the sound was coming, Irving continued forward on all fours, not wanting the crunch of his lug-soled boots to be heard on the hard ice or soft snow.
The hooting — seemingly just behind the next blue-glowing serac, this one carved by wind into something like a thick flag — had begun again, rising quickly to the loudest, fastest, deepest, and most frenzied noise Irving had heard so far. To his amazement, he found that he had an erection. Something about this instrument’s deep, booming, reed-fluttering sound was so … primal … that it quite literally stirred his loins even as he shivered.
He peered around the last serac.
Lady Silence was about twenty feet away across a smooth blue-ice space. Seracs and ice boulders circled the spot, making Irving feel as if he’d suddenly found himself amid a Stonehenge circle in the ice-haloed and star-crossed moonlight. Even the shadows here were blue.
She was naked, kneeling on thick furs that must be her parka. Her back was in three-quarters profile to Irving and while he could see the curve of her right breast, he could also see the bright moonlight illuminating her long, straight, black hair and setting silver highlights on the hillocked flesh of her firm backside. Irving’s heart was pounding so hard that he was afraid she might hear it.
Silence was not alone. Something else filled the dark gap between Druidic ice boulders on the opposite side of the clearing, just beyond the Esquimaux woman.
Irving knew it was the thing from the ice. White bear or white demon, it was here with them — almost atop the young woman, looming over her. As much as the lieutenant strained his eyes, it was hard to make out the shape — white-blue fur against white-blue ice, heavy muscles against heavy ridges of snow and ice, black eyes that might or might not be separate from the absolute blackness behind the thing.
The triangular head on the strangely long bear neck was weaving and bobbing like a snake, he saw now, six feet above and beyond the kneeling woman. Irving tried to estimate the size of the creature’s head — for future reference in terms of killing it — but it was impossible to isolate the precise shape or size of the triangular mass with its coal-black eyes because of its odd and constant movement.
But the thing was looming over the girl. Its head was almost directly above her now.
Irving knew that he should cry out — rush forward with the pry bar in his mittened hand since he had brought no other weapon except for his resheathed ship’s knife — and try to save the woman, but his muscles would not have obeyed such a command at that moment. It was everything he could do to keep watching in a sort of sexually excited horror.
Lady Silence had extended her arms,
palms up, like a popish priest saying Mass and inviting the miracle of the Eucharist. Irving had a cousin in Ireland who was popish, and he’d actually gone to a Catholic service with him once during a visit. The same sense of strange magical ceremony was being played out here in the blue moonlight. Silence, without a tongue, made no noise, but her arms were thrown wide, her eyes were closed, her head was thrown back — Irving had crawled far enough forward that he could see her face now — and her mouth was open and wide, like a supplicant awaiting Communion.
The creature’s neck thrust forward and down as quickly as a cobra’s strike and the thing’s jaws opened wide and seemed to snap shut on Lady Silence’s lower face, devouring half her head.
Irving almost screamed then. Only the ceremonial heaviness of the moment and his own incapacitating fear kept him silent.
The thing had not devoured her. Irving realized that he was looking at the top of the monster’s blue-white head — a head at least three times larger than the woman’s — as it had closed, but not snapped shut, its giant jaws fitting over her open mouth and upthrust jaw. Her arms were still flung wide to the night, almost as if ready to embrace the gigantic mass of hair and muscle enfolding her.
The music began then.
Irving saw the bobbing of both heads — creature’s and Esquimaux’s — but it took him half a minute before he realized that the orgiastic bass hootings and erotic bagpipe-flute notes were emanating from … the woman.
The monstrous thing looming as large as the ice boulders beside it, white bear or demon, was blowing down into her open mouth, playing her vocal cords as if her human throat were a reed instrument. The trills and low notes and bass resonances came louder, faster, more urgently — he saw Lady Silence raise her head and bend her neck one way while the serpentine-necked, triangular-headed bear-thing above her bent its head and neck in the opposite direction, the two looking like nothing so much as lovers straining to plunge deeper while seeking to find the best and deepest angle for a passionate open-mouthed kiss.
The musical notes pounded faster and faster — Irving was sure that the rhythm must be heard on the ship now, must be giving every man on the ship as powerful and permanent an erection as he was suffering at this second — and then suddenly, without warning, the noise cut off with the suddenness of the climax of wild lovemaking.
The thing’s head reared up and back. The white neck bobbed and coiled.
Lady Silence’s arms dropped to her naked sides as if she was too exhausted or transported to hold them out any longer. Her head lolled forward over her moon-silvered breasts.
It will devour her now, thought Irving through all the insulating layers of numbness and disbelief at what he had just seen. It will rend and eat her now.
It did not. For a second the bobbing white mass was gone, shuffled swiftly away on all fours through the blue Stonehenge of ice pillars, and then it was back, bowing its head low before Lady Silence, dropping something onto the ice in front of her. Irving could hear the noise of something organic hitting the ice and the smack had a familiar ring to it, but right now nothing was in context — Irving could make sense of nothing he saw or heard.
The white thing ambled away again; Irving could feel the impact of its huge feet through the solid sea ice. In a minute it was back, dropping something else in front of the Esquimaux girl. Then a third time.
And then it was simply gone … blended back into the darkness. The young woman was kneeling alone in the ice clearing with only the low heap of dark shapes in front of her.
She remained that way for another minute. Irving thought of his distant Irish cousin’s popish church again and the old parishioners who stayed praying in their pews after the service had finished. Then she got to her feet, quickly slipping her bare feet into fur boots and pulling on her fur pants and parka.
Lieutenant Irving realized that he was shaking wildly. At least part of that was from the cold, he knew. He’d be lucky if he had enough warmth in him and strength in his legs to get back to the ship alive. He had no idea how the girl had survived her nakedness.
Silence swept up the objects the thing had dropped in front of her and was now carrying them carefully in her fur-parka arms, the way a woman would carry one or more infants still suckling at her breast. She seemed to be heading back to the ship, crossing the clearing to a point between the Stonehenge seracs about ten degrees to his left.
Suddenly she stopped, her hooded head turning in his direction, and although he could not see her black eyes, he could feel her gaze boring into him. Still on all fours, he realized that he was in full sight in the bright moonlight, three feet away from the concealment of any serac. In his absolute need to get a better view, he had forgotten to stay hidden.
For a long moment neither of them moved. Irving could not breathe. He waited for her motion, a slapping of ice perhaps, and then for the quick return of the thing from the ice. Her protector. Her avenger. His destroyer.
Her hooded gaze moved away and she walked on, disappearing between the ice pillars on the southeast side of the circle.
Irving waited another several minutes, still shaking as if from ague, and then he struggled to his feet. His body was frozen through, its only sensation coming from his now detumescing, burning erection and from his uncontrollable shaking, but instead of staggering toward the ship after the girl, he moved forward to where she had knelt in the moonlight.
There was blood on the ice. The stains were black in the bright blue moonlight. Lieutenant Irving knelt, tugged off his mitten and underglove, set some of the spreading stain to his finger, and tasted it. It was blood, but he did not think it was human blood.
The thing had brought her raw, warm, freshly killed meat. Some sort of flesh. The blood tasted coppery to Irving, the way his own blood or any human blood would, but he assumed that freshly killed animals also had such coppery-tasting blood. But what animal and from where? The men of the Franklin Expedition had seen no land animals for more than a year.
Blood freezes in a few fast minutes. This thing had killed its gift to Lady Silence only minutes ago, even as Irving had been stumbling around out here in the ice maze trying to find her.
Backing away from the black stain in the moonlit snow the way he might back away from a pagan stone altar where some innocent victim had just been sacrificed, Irving concentrated first on trying to breathe normally — the air was ripping at his lungs as he gasped — and then on urging his frozen legs and numbed mind to get him back to the ship.
He would not try going in through the ice tunnel and loose plank to the cable locker. He would hail the starboard lookout before he got in shotgun range and walk up the ice ramp like a man, answering no questions until he spoke to the captain.
Would he tell the captain about this?
Irving had no idea. He didn’t even know if the thing on the ice — which must still be nearby — would let him return to the ship. He didn’t know if he had the warmth and energy remaining for the long walk.
He only knew that he would never be the same again.
Irving turned to the southeast and reentered the forest of ice.
23
HICKEY
Lat. 70°-05′ N., Long. 98°-23′ W.
18 December, 1847
Hickey had decided that the tall, skinny lieutenant — Irving — had to die and that today was the day to do it.
The diminutive caulker’s mate had nothing personal against the naive young toff, other than his poor timing in the hold more than a month earlier, but that was enough to swing the scales against Irving.
Work and watch schedules kept Hickey from his task. Twice he had rotated onto watch duties when Irving was officer on deck, but Magnus Manson had not been on duty abovedecks either time. Hickey would plan the timing and method of the deed, but he needed Magnus for the execution. It was not that Cornelius Hickey was afraid of killing a man; he’d cut a man’s throat before he was old enough to go into a whorehouse without a sponsor. No, it was simply the means
and method that this murder called for, which required his idiot disciple and arse-fuck buddy on this expedition, Magnus Manson.
Now all the conditions were perfect. It was a Friday morning work party — although “morning” meant little when it was as dark out as midnight — with more than thirty men out on the ice repairing and improving the torch-cairns between Terror and Erebus. Nine musket-armed Marines were, in theory, providing security for the work parties, but in truth the line of working men was spread out for almost a mile, with only five men or fewer under the command of each officer. The three officers here on the east half of the dark cairn trail were from Terror — Lieutenants Little, Hodgson, and Irving — and Hickey had helped sort the work parties so that he and Magnus were working on the farthest cairns under Irving.
The Marines were out of sight most of the time, supposedly prepared to come running should there be an alarm but really just doing their best to stay warm near the fire roaring in the iron brazier set up near the highest pressure ridge less than a quarter mile from the ship. John Bates and Bill Sinclair were also working under Lieutenant Irving this morning, but the two were chums — and lazy — and tended to stay out of the young officer’s sight so they could work at the next ice cairn as slowly as they pleased.
The day, though dark as night, was not as cold as some recently — perhaps only forty-five below out — and almost windless. There was no moon or aurora, but the stars vibrated in the morning sky, shedding enough light that if a man had to walk out of the range of a lantern or torch, he could see well enough to make his way back. With the thing on the ice still out there in the darkness somewhere, not many men wandered far. Still, the very nature of finding and stacking the correctly sized ice chips and blocks to repair and enlarge a proper five-foot-tall cairn required the men to keep wandering in and out of the lantern light.