by Dan Simmons
“I will find it terrifying,” says the mother, a drab middle-aged woman with a perpetual frown line bisecting her forehead from her tightly pulled, greying bun to her heavy, frowning eyebrows. “I don’t know why I allow you to talk me into this.”
Crozier can only marvel at the flat ugliness of the American rural dialect. Most of the Americans he has known have been defecting sailors, U.S. Navy captains, or whalers.
“Hurry, Mother!” The girl commanding her mother in such a bossy tone is 15-year-old Margaret Fox. She is modestly dressed and attractive in a simpering and not especially intelligent way that Crozier has noticed is often the case with the few American women he has met socially. The other girl at the table is Margaret’s 11-year-old sister Catherine. The younger girl, her pale face only just visible in the flickering candlelight, more resembles her mother, down to the dark eyebrows, too-tight bun, and incipient frown line.
The lightning flashes in the gap between dusty drapes.
The mother and two girls join hands around the circular oak table. Crozier notices that the lace doily on the table has yellowed with age. All three females have their eyes closed. Thunder shakes the single candle’s flame.
“Is someone there?” asks 15-year-old Margaret.
A crashingly loud rap. Not thunder, but a crack, as if someone has struck wood with a small mallet. Everyone’s hands are in sight.
“Oh my!” cries the mother, obviously ready to throw her hands up over her mouth in fear. Her two daughters hold tight and keep her from breaking the circle. The table rocks from their tugging.
“Are you our Guide tonight?” asks Margaret.
A loud RAP.
“Have you come to hurt us in any way?” asks Katy.
Two even louder RAPs.
“See, Mother?” whispers Maggie. Closing her eyes again, she says in a theatrical whisper, “Guide, are you the gentle Mr. Splitfoot who communicated with us last night?”
RAP.
“Thank you for convincing us last evening that you were real, Mr. Splitfoot,” continues Maggie, speaking almost as if she were in a trance. “Thank you for telling Mother the details about her children, telling all our ages, and for reminding her of the sixth child who died. Will you answer our questions tonight?”
RAP.
“Where is the Franklin Expedition?” asks little Katy.
RAP RAP RAP rap rap rap rap RAP RAP rap RAP RAP … the percusssions go on for half a minute.
“Is this the Spiritual Telegraph you spoke of?” whispers their mother.
Maggie shushes her. The rapping breaks off. Crozier sees, as if he can float through wood and see through wool and cotton, that both girls are double-jointed and are taking turns snapping and popping their big toes against their second toes. It was an amazingly loud rapping sound from such small toes.
“Mr. Splitfoot says that the Sir John Franklin whom the papers say everyone is seeking is well and with his men, who are also all well but very frightened, on their ships and in the ice near an island five days’ sail south of the cold place where they stopped their first year out,” intones Maggie.
“It is very dark where they are,” adds Katy.
There come more rappings.
“Sir John tells his wife, Jane, not to worry,” interprets Maggie. “He says that he shall see her soon — in the next world, if not in this one.”
“Oh my!” Mrs. Fox says again. “We have to call for Mary Redfield and Mr. Redfield, and Leah, of course, and Mr. and Mrs. Duesler, and Mrs. Hyde, and Mr. and Mrs. Jewell …”
“Ssshhhh!” hisses Katy.
RAP, RAP, RAP, rapraprapraprap, RAP.
“The Guide does not want you to speak when He is leading us,” whispers Katy.
Crozier moans and bites his leather strap. The cramps that had begun in his gut now rack his entire body. He shakes from the chill one moment and throws off the blankets the next.
There is a man dressed like an Esquimaux — animal-fur parka, high furry boots, a fur hood like Lady Silence’s. But this man is standing on a wooden stage in front of footlights. It is very hot. Behind the man, a painted backdrop shows ice, icebergs, a wintry sky. Fake white snow litters the stage. There are four overheated dogs of the type used by the Greenland Esquimaux lying on the stage, their tongues lolling.
The bearded man in the heavy parka is talking from the white-speckled podium. “I speak to you today for humanity, not for money,” says the little man. His American accent grates on Crozier’s aching ear as fiercely as had the teenaged girls’. “And I have traveled to England to speak to Lady Franklin herself. She wishes me Godspeed on our next expedition — contingent, of course, on whether we raise the money here in Philadelphia and in New York and in Boston to mount the expedition — and says that she would be honoured if the sons of the United States were to bring home her husband. So today I ask for your generosity, but only for the sake of humanity. I ask for this in Lady Franklin’s name, in her lost husband’s name, and in the secure hopes of bringing glory to the United States of America… .”
Crozier sees the man again. The bearded fellow is out of his parka and naked and in bed in the Union Hotel in New York with a very young naked woman. It is a hot night and the bedclothes have been thrown back. There is no sign of the sledge dogs.
“Whatever may be my faults,” the man is saying, speaking softly because the window and transom are open to the New York night, “I have at least loved you. Were you an empress, darling Maggie, instead of a little nameless girl following an obscure and ambiguous profession, it would be the same.”
Crozier realizes that the young naked woman is Maggie Fox — only a few years older. She is still attractive in that simpering American way, even without her clothes on.
Maggie says in a tone much more throaty than the teenager’s imperious command Crozier heard earlier, “Dr. Kane, you know I love you.”
The man shakes his head. He has lifted a pipe from the bedside table and now frees his left arm from behind the girl to tamp in the tobacco and light it. “Maggie, my dear, I hear those words from your little deceitful mouth, feel your hair tumbling onto my chest, and would love to believe them. But you cannot rise above your station, my dear. You have many traits which lift you above your calling, Maggie … you are refined and lovable and, with a different education, would have been innocent and artless. But you are not worthy of a permanent regard from me, Miss Fox.”
“Not worthy,” repeats Maggie. Her eyes, perhaps her prettiest feature now that her plump breasts are covered from Crozier’s view, appear to be brimming with tears.
“I am sold to different destinies, my child,” says Dr. Kane. “Remember that I have my own sad vanities to pursue, even as you and your venial sisters and mother pursue your own. I am as devoted to my calling as you, poor child, can be to yours, if such theatrical spiritualist poppycock can be called a calling. Remember then, as a sort of a dream, that Dr. Kane of the Arctic Seas loved Maggie Fox of the Spirit Rappings.”
Crozier comes awake in the dark. He does not know where or when he is. His cubicle is dark. The ship seems dark. The timbers moan — or is that an echo of his own moans of the last hours and days? It is very cold. The warm blanket he seems to remember Jopson and Goodsir setting on him is now as damp and frozen as the other bedsheets. The ice moans against the ship. The ship continues its answering groans from pressured oak and cold-strained iron.
Crozier wants to get up but finds that he is too weak and hollow to stir. He can barely move his arms. The pain and visions roll over him like a breaking wave.
Faces of men he has known or met or seen in the Service.
There is Robert McClure, one of the most guileful and ambitious men Francis Crozier has ever known — another Irishman intent on making good in an English world. McClure is on the deck of a ship in the ice. Cliffs of ice and rock rise all around, some six or seven hundred feet high. Crozier has never seen anything like it.
There is old John Ross on the stern deck of a little shi
p — a sort of yacht — heading eastward. Heading home.
There is James Clark Ross, older and fatter and less happy than Crozier has ever seen him. The rising sun shines through ice-rimmed jib lines as his ship leaves the ice for the open sea. He is heading home.
There is Francis Leopold M’Clintock — someone Crozier somehow knows has searched for Franklin under James Ross and then come back on his own again in later years. What later years? How long from now? How far in our future?
Crozier can see images flit by as if from a magic lantern, but he does not hear answers to his questions.
There is M’Clintock sledging, man-hauling, moving more quickly and efficiently than Lieutenant Gore or any of Sir John’s or Crozier’s men ever have.
There is M’Clintock standing at a cairn and reading a note just pulled from a brass cylinder. Is it the note that Gore left on King William Land seven months ago? Crozier wonders. The frozen gravel and grey skies behind M’Clintock look the same.
Suddenly there is M’Clintock, alone on the ice and gravel, his sledging party visible coming up several hundred yards behind him in the blowing snow. He is standing in front of a horror — a large boat tied and lashed atop of a huge cobbled-together sledge made of iron and oak.
The sledge looks like something Crozier’s carpenter, Mr. Honey, would build. It has been assembled as if it was meant to last for a century. Every join shows care. The thing is massive — it must weigh at least 650 pounds. Atop it is a boat that weighs another 800 pounds.
Crozier recognizes the boat. It is one of Terror’s 28-footers — one of the pinnaces. He sees that it has been extensively rigged for river travel. The sails are furled and tied and shrouded and iced over.
Climbing onto a rock and looking into the open boat as if over M’Clintock’s shoulder, Crozier sees two skeletons. The teeth in the two skulls seem to gleam at M’Clintock and Crozier. One skeleton is little more than a heap of visibly chewed and heavily gnawed and partially devoured bones tumbled into a rough pile in the bow. Snow has drifted over the bones.
The other skeleton is intact, undisturbed, and still clothed in the tatters of what looks to be an officer’s greatcoat and layers of other warm clothing. The skull still has remnants of a cap on it. This corpse is sprawled on the after-thwarts, its skeletal hands extended along the gunwales toward two double-barreled shotguns propped there. At the body’s booted feet lie stacks of wool blankets and canvas clothing and a partially snow-covered burlap bag filled with powder-shot cartridges. Set on the bottom of the pinnace midway between the dead man’s boots, like a pirate’s booty about to be counted and gloated over, are five gold watches and what looks to be thirty or forty pounds of individually wrapped chunks of chocolate. Also nearby are 26 pieces of silverware — Crozier can see, and knows that M’Clintock can see, the personal crests of Sir John Franklin’s, Captain Fitzjames’s, six other officers’, and his — Crozier’s — on the various knives, spoons, and forks. He sees similarly engraved dishes and two silver serving plates sticking up out of the ice and snow.
Along the 25 feet of pinnace bottom separating the two skeletons lies a dizzying array of bric-a-brac protruding from the few inches of snow that have accumulated: two rolls of sheet metal, a full canvas boat cover, eight pairs of boots, two saws, four files, a stack of nails, and two boat knives next to the bag of powder-shot cartridges near the skeleton in the stern.
Crozier also sees paddles, folded sails, and rolls of twine near the clothed skeleton. Closer to the pile of partially devoured bones in the bow are a stack of towels, bars of soap, several combs and a toothbrush, a pair of handworked slippers just inches from scattered white toe bones and metatarsals, and six books — five Bibles and The Vicar of Wakefield, which now sits on a shelf in the Great Cabin of HMS Terror.
Crozier wants to close his eyes but cannot. He wants to fly away from this vision — all these visions — but has no control over them.
Suddenly Francis Leopold M’Clintock’s vaguely familiar face seems to melt, sag, then reform itself into the visage of a younger man, someone Francis Crozier does not know. Everything else stays the same. The younger man — a certain Lieutenant William Hobson, whom Crozier now knows without knowing how he knows — is standing in the same spot that M’Clintock had and is peering into the open boat with the same expression of sickened incredulity that Crozier had seen on M’Clintock’s face a moment earlier.
Without warning, the open boat and the skeletons are gone and Crozier is lying in a cave of ice next to a naked Sophia Cracroft.
No, it is not Sophia. Crozier blinks, feeling Memo Moira’s Second Sight burning through and from his aching brain like a fist of fever, and now he sees that he is lying naked next to a naked Lady Silence. They are surrounded by furs, and they are lying on some sort of snow or ice shelf. Their space is illuminated by a flickering oil lamp. The curved ceiling is made from blocks of ice. Silence’s breasts are brown, and her hair is long and very black. She is leaning on one elbow amid the furs and looking at Crozier with some earnestness.
Do you dream my dreams? she asks without moving her lips or opening her mouth. She has not spoken in English. Am I dreaming yours?
Crozier feels her inside his mind and heart. It feels like a jolt of the best whiskey he has ever swallowed.
And then the most terrible nightmare of all comes.
This stranger, this blend of M’Clintock and someone named Hobson, is not looking down at the open boat with two skeletons in it but is watching young Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier secretly attending Catholic Mass with his witch-Papist Memo Moira.
It was one of the deepest secrets of Crozier’s life that he had done this thing — not only gone to the forbidden service with Memo Moira but partaken of the heresy of the Catholic Eucharist, the much-derided and forbidden Holy Communion.
But this form of M’Clintock-Hobson stands like an altar boy as a trembling Crozier — now a child, now a scarred man in his fifties — approaches the altar rail, kneels, puts his head back, opens his mouth, and extends his tongue for the Forbidden Wafer — the Body of Christ — pure transubstantiated cannibalism to all the other adults in Crozier’s village and family and life.
But something is strange. The grey-haired priest looming over him in his white robes is dripping water on the floor and altar rail and onto Crozier himself. And the priest is too large even for a child’s point of view — huge, wet, muscled, lumbering, throwing a shadow over the kneeling communicant. He is not human.
And Crozier is naked as he kneels, sets his head back, closes his eyes, and extends his tongue for the Sacrament.
The priest looming and dripping over him has no Wafer in his hand. He has no hands. Instead, the dripping apparition leans over the altar rail, leans far too close, and opens its own inhuman maw as if Crozier is the Bread to be devoured.
“Dear Jesus Christ God Almighty,” whispers this watching M’Clintock-Hobson form.
“Dear Jesus Christ God Almighty,” whispers Captain Francis Crozier.
“He’s back with us,” Dr. Goodsir says to Mr. Jopson.
Crozier moans.
“Sir,” the surgeon says to Crozier, “can you sit up? Are you able to open your eyes and sit up? That’s a good captain.”
“What day is it?” croaks Crozier. The dull light from the open door and the even duller light from his oil lamp turned low are like explosions of painful sunshine against his sensitive eyes.
“It’s Tuesday, the eleventh day of January, Captain,” says his steward. And then Jopson adds, “The year of our Lord eighteen hundred and forty-eight.”
“You were very ill for a week,” says the surgeon. “Several times in the last few days I was sure that we had lost you.” Goodsir gives him some water to sip.
“I was dreaming,” manages Crozier after drinking the ice-cold water. He can smell his own stink in the nest of frozen bedclothes around him.
“You were moaning very loudly the last few hours,” says Goodsir. “Do you remember any of you
r malarial dreams?”
Crozier remembers only the sense-of-flying weightlessness of his dreams, yet at the same time the weight and horror and humour of visions that had already fled like wisps of fog before a strong wind.
“No,” he says. “Mr. Jopson, please be so kind as to fetch me hot water for my toilet. You may have to help me shave. Dr. Goodsir …”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Would you be so kind as to go forward and tell Mr. Diggle that his captain wants a very large breakfast this morning.”
“It is six bells in the evening, Captain,” says the surgeon.
“Nonetheless, I want a very large breakfast. Biscuits. What’s left of our potatoes. Coffee. Pork of some sort — bacon if he has it.”
“Aye, sir.”
“And, Dr. Goodsir,” Crozier says to the departing surgeon. “Would you also be so kind as to ask Lieutenant Little to come aft with a report on the week I have missed and also ask him to bring my … property.”
28
PEGLAR
Lat. 70°-05′ N., Long. 98°-23′ W.
29 January, 1848
Harry Peglar had planned it so that he received the duty to carry a message to Erebus on the day the sun returned. He wanted to celebrate it — as much as anything could be celebrated these days — with someone he loved. And somebody he’d once been in love with.
Chief Petty Officer Harry Peglar was captain of the foretop on Terror, chosen leader of the carefully picked topmen who worked the highest rigging, topsail, and topgallant yards in blaze of day or dark of night as well as in the highest seas and worst weather the world could throw at a wooden ship. This was a position that required strength, experience, leadership, and, most of all, courage, and Harry Peglar was respected for all of these traits. Now almost forty-one years old, he had proved himself hundreds of times not only in front of the crew of HMS Terror but on a dozen other ships on which he’d served over his long career.
It had been only mildly ironic then that Harry Peglar had been illiterate until he was a twenty-five-year-old midshipman. Reading was now his secret pleasure, and he had already devoured more than half of the 1,000 volumes in Terror’s Great Cabin on this voyage. It had been a mere officers’ steward on the survey bark HMS Beagle who had transformed Peglar into a literate man, and it was the same steward who had made Harry Peglar ponder what it meant to be a man.