by Dan Simmons
Irving was checking on both cairns while frequently giving the men a hand with the physical labour. Hickey only had to wait until Bates and Sinclair were out of sight beyond the curve in the trail through the ice blocks and Lieutenant Irving’s guard was down.
The caulker’s mate could have used a hundred iron or steel instruments from the ship — a Royal Navy vessel was a treasure trove of murder weapons, some of them quite ingenious — but he preferred that Magnus simply blindside the blond-haired dandy of an officer, haul him off twenty yards or so into the ice, break his neck, then — when he was well and truly dead — rip some of the toff’s clothing off, smash in his ribs, kick in his pink-cheeked happy face and teeth, break an arm and two legs (or a leg and two arms), and leave the corpse there on the ice to be found. Hickey had already chosen the killing ground — an area of tall seracs and with no snow underfoot in which Manson would leave boot prints. He’d warned Magnus not to get the lieutenant’s blood on him, not to leave any sign that he’d been there with him, and, most important, not to take time to rob the man.
The thing on the ice had killed men with about every variation of violence imaginable, and if the physical damage to poor Lieutenant Irving was vicious enough, no one on either ship would give a second thought as to what happened. Lieutenant John Irving would be just another canvas-wrapped corpse for Terror’s Dead Room.
Magnus Manson was not a born killer — just a born idiot — but he’d murdered men for his caulker’s-mate lord and master before. It would not bother him to do so again. Cornelius Hickey doubted that Magnus would even ask himself why the lieutenant had to die — it was just another order from his master to be obeyed. So Hickey was surprised when the physical giant pulled him aside when Lieutenant Irving was out of earshot and whispered with some urgency, “His ghost won’t haunt me, will it, Cornelius?”
Hickey patted his huge partner on the back. “Of course not, Magnus. I wouldn’t tell you to do nothing that led to having a ghost haunt you, now would I, love?”
“No, no,” rumbled Manson, shaking his head in agreement. His wild hair and beard seemed to leap out from under the wool comforter and Welsh wig. His heavy brow furrowed. “By why won’t his ghost haunt me, Cornelius? Me killin’ him while not having nothing against him and all?”
Hickey thought fast. Bates and Sinclair were walking farther on to where a work party from Erebus was erecting a snow-block fence along a twenty-yard stretch where the wind always blew. More than one man had gotten lost in whiteouts there, and the captains thought that a snow fence would improve the couriers’ chances of finding the next cairns. Irving would make sure that Bates and Sinclair were busy on their task there, and then he’d walk back to where he and Magnus were working alone on the last cairn before the clearing.
“That’s why the lieutenant’s ghost won’t haunt you, Magnus,” he whispered to the stooping giant. “You kill a man in heat of temper, now that’s a reason for that man’s ghost to come back and try to get even with you. It resents what you did. But Mr. Irving’s ghost now, it’ll know there was nothing personal in what you had to do, Magnus. It won’t have no reason to come back to bother you.”
Manson nodded but did not look completely convinced.
“Besides,” continued Hickey, “the ghost won’t be able to find its soddin’ way back to the ship now, will it? Everyone knows that when someone dies outside here, so far from the ship, the ghost goes straight up. It can’t figure its way through all the ice ridges and bergs and such. Ghosts ain’t the smartest blokes around, Magnus. Take my word on that, m’love.”
The huge man brightened at hearing this. Hickey could see Irving returning through the torchlit gloom. The wind was coming up and causing the torch flames to dance wildly. Better if there’s wind, thought Hickey. If Magnus or Irving make some noise, no one’ll hear.
“Cornelius,” whispered Manson. He looked worried again. “If I die out here, does that mean my ghost won’t be able to find its way back to the ship? I’d hate to be out here in the cold so far away from you.”
The caulker’s mate patted the slop-shrouded wall of the giant’s back. “You ain’t going to die out here, love. You have my solemn promise as a Mason and a Christian on that. Now hush and get ready. When I take off my cap and scratch my head, you grab Irving from behind and drag him to where I showed you. Remember — don’t leave no boot prints behind and don’t get no blood on you.”
“I won’t, Cornelius.”
“That’s a good love.”
The lieutenant came closer in the darkness, moving into the dim circle of light thrown by the lantern on the ice here near the cairn. “Almost finished with this cairn, Mr. Hickey?”
“Aye, sir. Just set these last blocks up here and it’s done, Lieutenant. Solid as a lamppost in Mayfair.”
Irving nodded. He seemed to be uncomfortable to be alone with the two seamen, even though Hickey was using his most affable and charming voice. Well, fuck you, thought the caulker’s mate as he continued to show his gap-toothed smile. You ain’t going to be around much longer to put on such dandified airs, you blond-haired, apple-cheeked bastard. Five minutes and you’ll be just another frozen side of beef to hang down in the hold, boyo. Too bad them rats are so hungry these days that they’ll eat even a fucking lieutenant, but nothing I can do about that.
“Very good,” said Irving. “When you and Manson are finished, please join Mr. Sinclair and Mr. Bates on working on the wall. I’m going to walk back and bring up Corporal Hedges with his musket.”
“Aye, sir,” said Hickey. He caught Magnus’s eye. They had to intercept Irving before he walked back along the dimly visible line of torches and lanterns. It would do no good to have Hedges or another Marine up here.
Irving walked to the east but paused at the edge of the light, obviously waiting for Hickey to set the last two blocks of ice in place at the top of the rebuilt cairn. As the caulker’s mate bent to lift the penultimate square of ice, he nodded to Magnus. His partner had moved into position behind the lieutenant.
Suddenly there was an explosion of shouts from the darkness to the west. A man screamed. More voices joined in the shouting.
Magnus’s huge hands were hovering just behind the lieutenant’s neck — the big man had removed his mittens for a better grip, and his undergloves loomed black just beyond Irving’s pale face in the lantern light.
More shouts. A musket fired.
“Magnus, no!” shouted Cornelius Hickey. His partner had been about to break Irving’s neck despite the commotion.
Manson stepped back into the darkness. Irving, who had taken three steps toward the shouting in the west, whirled in confusion. Three men came running along the ice path from the direction of Terror. One of them was Hedges. The roly-poly Marine was wheezing as he ran, his musket held in front of his massive bulge of belly.
“Come!” said Irving and led the way toward the shouting. The lieutenant was carrying no weapon, but he’d grabbed up the lantern. The six of them ran across the sea ice, out of the seracs, into the starlit clearing where several men were milling. Hickey could make out the familiar Welsh wigs of Sinclair and Bates and recognized one of the three Erebuses already there as Francis Dunn, his caulker’s-mate counterpart on the other ship. He saw that the musket that had fired belonged to Private Bill Pilkington, who’d been in the hunting blind when Sir John was killed last June and who had been shot in the shoulder by one of his fellow Marines during those moments of chaos. Now Pilkington was reloading and then aiming the long musket into the darkness beyond a fallen section of the snow fence wall.
“What has happened?” Irving demanded of the men.
Bates answered. He, Sinclair, and Dunn, as well as Abraham Seeley and Josephus Greater from Erebus, had been working on the wall under the command of Erebus’s first mate, Robert Orme Sergeant, when suddenly one of the larger blocks of ice just beyond the circle of lantern and torchlights had seemed to come alive.
“It lifted Mr. Sergeant ten feet into the
air by his head,” said Bates, his voice shaking.
“It’s the God’s truth,” said Caulker’s Mate Francis Dunn. “One minute ’e was standin’ among us, next minute ’e’s flying up into the air so alls we can see is the bottom of ’is boots. And the noise … the crunching …” Dunn broke off and continued breathing hard until his pale face was all but lost in a halo of ice crystals.
“I was coming up to the torches when I saw Mr. Sergeant just … disappear,” said Private Pilkington, lowering the musket with shaking arms. “I fired once as the thing went back into the seracs. I think I hit it.”
“You could’ve hit Robert Sergeant just as easily,” said Cornelius Hickey. “Maybe he was still alive when you shot.”
Pilkington gave Terror’s caulker’s mate a look of pure venom.
“Mr. Sergeant wasn’t alive,” said Dunn, not even noticing the exchange of glares between the Marine and Hickey. “ ’E screamed once and the thing crunched ’is skull like a walnut. I seen it. I ’eard it.”
Others came running up then, including Captain Crozier and Captain Fitzjames, looking wan and insubstantial even in his heavy layers of slops and greatcoat, and Dunn, Bates, and the others all rushed to explain what they had seen.
Corporal Hedges and two other Marines who had run to the commotion returned from the darkness to say there was no sign of Mr. Sergeant, only a thick trail of blood and torn clothing that led off into the thicker ice jumble in the direction of the largest iceberg.
“It wants us to follow,” muttered Bates. “It’ll be waiting for us.”
Crozier showed his teeth in something between a mad grin and a snarl. “Then we won’t disappoint it,” he said. “This is as good a time as any to go after the thing again. We have the men out on the ice already, we have enough lanterns, and the Marines can fetch more muskets and shotguns. And the trail is fresh.”
“Too fresh,” muttered Corporal Hedges.
Crozier barked orders. Some men went back to the two ships to bring the weapons. Others formed up in hunting parties around the Marines, who were already armed. Torches and lanterns were brought from the work sites and assigned to the killing parties. Dr. Stanley and Dr. McDonald were sent for in the low probability that Robert Orme Sergeant might still be alive or the higher probability that someone else might be injured.
After Hickey was handed a musket, he considered shooting Lieutenant Irving by “accident” once out in the dark, but the young officer now seemed wary of both Manson and the caulker’s mate. Hickey caught several concerned glances the toff was throwing toward Magnus before Crozier assigned them to different search parties, and he knew that whether Irving had caught a glimpse of Magnus behind with his arms raised in that second before the shots and shouts were first heard or whether the officer simply sensed something wrong, it wouldn’t be as easy to ambush him the next time.
But they would. Hickey was afraid that John Irving’s suspicions would finally cause him to report to the captain what he’d seen in the hold, and the caulker’s mate could not abide that. It wasn’t so much the punishment for sodomy that bothered him — seamen were rarely hanged anymore, nor flogged around the fleet for that matter — but rather the ignominy. Caulker’s Mate Cornelius Hickey was no mere idiot’s bum-bugger.
He would wait until Irving lowered his guard again and then do the deed himself if he had to. Even if the ships’ surgeons discovered that the man had been murdered, it wouldn’t matter. Things had gone too far on this expedition. Irving would be just another corpse to deal with come the thaw.
In the end, Mr. Sergeant’s body was not found — the blood and strewn clothing trail ended halfway to the towering iceberg — but no one else died in the search. A few men lost toes to the cold and everyone was shaking and frostbitten to some extent when they finally called off the hunt an hour after their supper should have been served. Hickey did not see Lieutenant Irving again that afternoon.
It was Magnus Manson who surprised him as they trudged back to Terror again. The wind was beginning to howl at their backs and the Marines slouched along with rifles and muskets at the ready.
Hickey realized that the idiot giant next to him was weeping. The tears instantly froze to Magnus’s bearded cheeks.
“What is it, man?” demanded Hickey.
“It’s sad, is all, Cornelius.”
“What is sad?”
“Poor Mr. Sergeant.”
Hickey shot a glance at his partner. “I didn’t know you had such tender feelings for them damned officers, Magnus.”
“I don’t, Cornelius. They can all die and be damned for all I care. But Mr. Sergeant died out on the ice.”
“So?”
“His ghost won’t find his way back to the ship. And Captain Crozier passed the word when we was done searchin’ that we’re all having an extra tot o’ rum this evenin’. Makes me sad his ghost won’t be there, is all. Mr. Sergeant always liked his rum, Cornelius.”
24
CROZIER
Lat. 70°-05′ N., Long. 98°-23′ W.
31 December, 1847
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day about HMS Terror were low-key to the point of invisibility, but the Second Grand Venetian Carnivale on New Year’s Eve would soon make up for that.
There had been four days of violent storms keeping the men inside in the days preceding Christmas — the blizzards were so fierce that the watches had to be shortened to one hour — and Christmas Eve and the sacred day itself became exercises in lower-deck gloom. Mr. Diggle had prepared special dinners — cooking up the last of the noncanned salt pork in half a dozen imaginative ways, along with the last of the jugged hares depickled from their briny casks. In addition, the cook had — with the recommendation of the quartermasters, Mr. Kenley, Mr. Rhodes, and Mr. David McDonald, as well as the careful supervision of surgeons Peddie and Alexander McDonald — chosen from some of the better-preserved Goldner tinned goods, including turtle soup, beef à la Flamande, truffled pheasant, and calf’s tongue. For dessert both evenings, Mr. Diggle’s galley slaves had cut and scraped the worst of the mold from the remaining cheeses, and Captain Crozier had contributed the last five bottles of brandy from the Spirit Room’s stores set aside for special occasions.
The mood stayed sepulchral. There were a few attempts to sing by both the officers in the freezing Great Room astern and the common seamen in their slightly warmer berthing space forward — there was not enough coal left in the hold-deck scuttles for extra heating even if it was Christmas — but the songs died after a few rounds. Lamp oil had to be conserved, so the lower deck had all the visual cheer of a Welsh mine illuminated by a few flickering candles. Ice covered the timbers and beams and the men’s blankets and wool clothing were always damp. Rats scuttled everywhere.
The brandy raised spirits some, but not enough to dispel the literal and emotional gloom. Crozier came forward to chat with the men, and a few handed him presents — a tiny pouch of hoarded tobacco, the carving of a white bear running, the exaggerated ursine cartoon face suggesting fear (given in jest, almost certainly, and probably with some trepidation lest the formidable captain punish the man for fetishism), a mended red-wool undershirt from a man’s recently deceased friend, an entire carved chess set from Marine Corporal Robert Hopcraft (one of the quietest and least assuming men on the expedition and the one who had been promoted to corporal after receiving eight broken ribs, a fractured collarbone, and a dislocated arm during the thing’s attack on Sir John’s hunting blind in June). Crozier thanked everyone, pressed hands and shoulders, and went back to the officers’ mess, where the mood was a little more lively thanks to First Lieutenant Little’s surprise donation of two bottles of whiskey he’d kept hidden for almost three years.
The storm stopped on the morning of 26 December. Snow had drifted twelve feet above the level of the bow and six feet higher than the railing along the starboard forward quarter. After digging the ship out and excavating the cairn-lined path between the ships, the men got busy preparing for what
they were calling the Second Grand Venetian Carnivale — the first one, Crozier assumed, being the one he’d taken part in as a midshipman on Parry’s botch of a polar voyage in 1824.
On that midnight-black morning of 26 December, Crozier and First Lieutenant Edward Little left the supervision of the shoveling and surface parties to Hodgson, Hornby, and Irving and made the long walk through the drifts to Erebus. Crozier was mildly shocked to find that Fitzjames had continued to lose weight — his waistcoat and trousers were several sizes too large for him now despite more obvious attempts by his steward to take them in — but he was even more shocked during their conversation when he realized that Erebus’s commander was not fully paying attention most of the time. Fitzjames seemed distracted, rather like a man pretending to converse but whose actual attention was riveted on music being played in some adjoining room.
“Your men are dyeing sail canvas out on the ice,” said Crozier. “I saw them preparing large vats of green, blue, and even black dye. For perfectly good spare sail. Is this acceptable to you, James?”
Fitzjames smiled distantly. “Do you really think we shall need that sail again, Francis?”
“I hope to Christ we will,” grated Crozier.
The other captain’s serene and maddening little smile remained. “You should see our hold deck, Francis. The destruction has proceeded and accelerated since our last inspection the week before Christmas. Erebus would not stay afloat an hour in open water. The rudder is in splinters. And it was our spare.”
“New rudders can be jury-rigged,” said Crozier, fighting the urge to grind his teeth and clench his fists. “Carpenters can shore up sprung timbers. I’ve been working on a plan for digging a pit in the ice around both ships, creating dry docks about eight feet deep in the ice itself before the spring thaw. We can get to the outer hulls that way.”
“Spring thaw,” repeated Fitzjames and smiled almost conde-scendingly.