The Terror

²² IRVING

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, addlebrained enough, and generally un-Christian enough to offer up scraps of food or mugs of perfectly good watereddown 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 locker 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 denspace. 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.

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.

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 caribouantler 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 blueice 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 threequarters 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 re-sheathed 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 bearthing 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 moonsilvered 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 furparka 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 under-glove, 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 re-entered the forest of ice.