The Terror Read online

  Lieutenant Irving nods dolefully.

  “It takes less than a minute for an exposed finger or thumb — or any fleshy appendage — to freeze solid,” continues Crozier, who knows that this is a load of horse cobblers. It takes much longer than that at a mere fifty below, but he hopes that Irving doesn’t know this. “After that, the exposed member will snap off like an icicle,” adds Crozier.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “So do you really think there’s any chance that our visitor might be … compromised … out here on deck, Mr. Irving?”

  Irving seems to be thinking about this before replying. It’s possible, Crozier realizes, that the third lieutenant has put far too much thought into this equation already.

  “Go below, John,” says Crozier. “And see Dr. McDonald about your face and fingers. I swear to God that if you’ve gotten seriously frostbitten again, I’ll dock you a month’s Discovery Service pay and write your mother to boot.”

  “Yes, Captain. Thank you, sir.” Irving starts to salute again, thinks better of it, and ducks under the canvas toward the main ladderway with one hand still half raised. He does not look back at Silence.

  Crozier sighs again. He likes John Irving. The lad had volunteered — along with two of his mates from the HMS Excellent, Second Lieutenant Hodgson and First Mate Hornby — but the Excellent was a damned three-decker that was old before Noah had fuzz around his dongle. The ship had been mastless and permanently moored in Portsmouth, Crozier knew, for more than fifteen years, serving as a training vessel for the Royal Navy’s most promising gunners. Unfortunately, gentlemen, Crozier had told the boys during their first day aboard — the captain had been more than usually drunk that day — if you look around, you’ll notice that while Terror and Erebus were both built as bombardment ships, gentlemen, neither has a single gun between them. We are, young volunteers from Excellent — unless one counts the Marines’ muskets and the shotguns secured in the Spirit Room — as gunless as a newborn babe. As gunless as fucking Adam in his fucking birthday suit. In other words, gentlemen, you gunnery experts are about as useful to this expedition as teats would be on a boar.

  Crozier’s sarcasm that day hadn’t dampened the young gunnery officers’ enthusiasm — Irving and the other two remained more eager than ever to go get frozen in the ice for several winters. Of course, that had been on a warm May day in England in 1845.

  “And now the poor young pup is in love with an Esquimaux witch,” Crozier mutters aloud.

  As if understanding his words, Silence turns slowly toward him.

  Usually her face is invisible down the deep tunnel of her hood, or her features are masked by the wide ruff of wolf hair, but tonight Crozier can see her tiny nose, large eyes, and full mouth. The pulse of the aurora is reflected in those black eyes.

  She’s not attractive to Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier; she has too much of the savage about her to be seen as fully human, much less as physically attractive — even to a Presbyterian Irishman — and besides that, his mind and lower regions are still filled with clear memories of Sophia Cracroft. But Crozier can see why Irving, far from home and family and any sweetheart of his own, might fall in love with this heathen woman. Her strangeness alone — and perhaps even the grim circumstances of her arrival and the death of her male companion, so strangely intertwined with the first attacks from that monstrous entity out there in the dark — must be like a flame to the fluttering moth of so hopeless a young romantic as Third Lieutenant John Irving.

  Crozier, on the other hand, as he discovered both in Van Diemen’s Land in 1840 and again for the final time in England in the months before this expedition sailed, is too old for romance. And too Irish. And too common.

  Right now he just wishes this young woman would take a walk out onto the dark ice and not return.

  Crozier remembers the day four months earlier when Dr. McDonald had reported to Franklin and him after examining her, on the same afternoon the Esquimaux man with her had died choking in his own blood. McDonald said, in his medical opinion, the Esquimaux girl appeared to be between fifteen and twenty years old — it was so hard to tell with native peoples — had experienced menarche, but was, by all indications, virgo intacta. Also, Dr. McDonald reported, the reason that the girl had not spoken or made a sound — even after her father or husband had been shot and lay dying — was because she had no tongue. In Dr. McDonald’s opinion, her tongue had not been sliced off but had been chewed off near its root, either by Silence herself or by someone or something else.

  Crozier had been astonished — not so much by the fact of the missing tongue, but from hearing that the Esquimaux wench was a virgin. He’d spent enough time in the northern arctic — especially during Parry’s expedition, which wintered near an Esquimaux village — to know that the local natives took sexual intercourse so lightly that men would offer their wives and daughters to whalers or Discovery Service explorers in exchange for the cheapest trinket. Sometimes, Crozier knew, the women just offered themselves up for the fun of it, giggling and chatting with other women or children even as the sailors strained and puffed and moaned between the laughing women’s legs. They were like animals. The furs and hairy hides they wore might as well be their own beastlike skins as far as Francis Crozier was concerned.

  The captain raises his gloved hand to the bill of his cap, secured under two wraps of heavy comforter and therefore impossible to doff or tip, and says, “My compliments to you, madam, and I would suggest you consider going below to your quarters soon. It’s getting a bit nippy out here.”

  Silence stares at him. She does not blink, although somehow her long lashes are free of ice. She does not, of course, speak. She watches him.

  Crozier symbolically tips his hat again and continues his tour around the deck, climbing to the ice-raised stern and then down the starboard side, pausing to speak to the other two men on watch, giving Irving time to get below and out of his cold-weather slops so that the captain doesn’t seem to be following hard on his lieutenant’s heels.

  He’s finishing his chat with the last shivering lookout, Able Seaman Shanks, when Private Wilkes, the youngest of the Marines aboard, comes rushing out from under the canvas. Wilkes has thrown on only two loose layers over his uniform, and his teeth begin chattering even before he delivers his message.

  “Mr. Thompson’s compliments to the captain, sir, and the engineer says that the captain should come down to the hold as quick as you might.”

  “Why?” If the boiler has finally broken down, Crozier knows, they are all dead.

  “Begging the captain’s pardon, sir, but Mr. Thompson says that the captain is needed because Seaman Manson is near to mutiny, sir.”

  Crozier stands up straight. “Mutiny?”

  “‘Near to it’ were Mr. Thompson’s words, sir.”

  “Speak English, Private Wilkes.”

  “Manson won’t carry no more sacks of coal past the Dead Room, sir. Nor go down in the hold no more. He says he respectfully refuses, Captain. He won’t come up, but he’s sitting on his arse at the bottom of the man-ladder and won’t carry no more coal back to the boiler room.”

  “What is this nonsense?” Crozier feels the first stirrings of a familiar dark Irish anger.

  “It’s the ghosts, Captain,” says Marine Private Wilkes through chattering teeth. “We all hear ’em when we’re hauling coal or fetching something from deep stores. It’s why the men won’t go down there below orlop deck no more unless the officers order ’em to, sir. Something’s down there in the hold, in the dark. Something’s been scratching and banging from inside the ship, Captain. It ain’t just the ice. Manson’s sure it’s his old mate Walker, him … it … and the other corpses stacked there in the Dead Room, clawing to get out.”

  Crozier checks his impulse to reassure the Marine private with facts. Young Wilkes might not find the facts so reassuring.

  The first simple fact is that the scrabbling noise from the Dead Room is almost certainly the hundreds or thou
sands of large black rats feasting on Wilkes’s frozen comrades. The Norway rats — as Crozier knows better than the young Marine — are nocturnal, which means that they’re active day and night during the long arctic winter, and the creatures have teeth which constantly keep growing. This, in turn, means the God-damned vermin have to keep chewing. He has seen them chew through Royal Navy oak barrels, inch-thick tins, and even lead plating. The rats are having no more trouble down there with the frozen remains of Seaman Walker and his five unlucky comrades — including three of Crozier’s finest officers — than a man would have chewing on a strip of frigid salted beef.

  But Crozier doesn’t think it’s only the rats that Manson and the others are hearing.

  Rats, as Crozier knows from the sad experience of thirteen winters in the ice, tend to eat one’s friends quietly and efficiently, except for their frequent screeching as the blood-maddened and ravenous vermin turn on one another.

  It’s something else making the clawing and banging noises down on hold deck.

  What Crozier decides not to remind Private Wilkes of is the second simple fact: while the lowest deck would normally be cold but safe there beneath the waterline or winter line of frozen sea ice, the pressure from the ice has forced Terror’s stern more than a dozen feet higher than it should be. The hull there is still locked in, but only by several hundred heaped tons of jagged sea ice and the added tons of snow the men have piled alongside to within a few feet of the railings so as to provide more insulation during the winter.

  Something, Francis Crozier suspects, has dug down through these tons of snow and tunneled through the iron-hard slabs of ice to get at the hull of the ship. Somehow the thing has sensed which parts of the interior along the hull, such as the water-storage tanks, are lined with iron, and has found one of the few hollow outside storage areas — the Dead Room — that leads directly into the ship. And now it’s banging and clawing to get in.

  Crozier knows that there’s only one thing on earth with that much power, deadly persistence, and malevolent intelligence. The monster on the ice is trying to get at them from below.

  Without saying another word to Marine Private Wilkes, Captain Crozier goes below to sort things out.

  2

  FRANKLIN

  Lat. 51°-29′ N., Long. 0°-0′ W.

  London, May, 1845

  He was — and always would be — the man who ate his shoes.

  Four days before they were to sail, Captain Sir John Franklin contracted the influenza that had been going around, getting it, he was sure, not from one of the common sailors and stevedores loading the ships at London’s docks, nor from any of his one hundred and thirty-four crew members and officers — they were all healthy as dray horses — but from some sickly sycophant in one of Lady Jane’s circles of society friends.

  The man who ate his shoes.

  It was traditional for the wives of arctic heroes to sew a flag to be planted at some point farthest north, or in this case raised upon the completion of the expedition’s transit of the North-West Passage, and Franklin’s wife, Jane, was finishing her sewing of the silken Union Jack when he came home. Sir John came into the parlour and half collapsed onto the horsehair sofa near where she sat. Later he did not remember removing his boots, but someone must have — either Jane or one of the servants — for soon he was lying back and half dozing, his head aching, his stomach more unsteady than it had ever been at sea, and his skin burning with fever. Lady Jane was telling him about her busy day, never pausing in her recital. Sir John tried to listen as the fever carried him off on its uncertain tide.

  He was the man who ate his shoes, and had been for twenty-three years, ever since he returned to England in 1822 after his first, failed overland expedition across northern Canada to find the North-West Passage. He remembered the sniggers and jokes upon his return. Franklin had eaten his shoes — and he’d eaten worse on that botched three-year journey, including tripe-de-roche, a disgusting gruel made from lichen scraped from rocks. Two years out and starving, he and his men — Franklin had dazedly divided his troop into three groups and left the other two bands to survive or die on their own — had boiled the uppers on their boots and shoes to survive. Sir John — he was just John then, he was knighted for incompetency after a later overland voyage and botched polar expedition by sea — had spent days in 1821 chewing on nothing more than scraps of untanned leather. His men had eaten their buffalo sleeping robes. Then some of them had moved on to other things.

  But he had never eaten another man.

  To this day, Franklin doubted whether others on his expedition, including his good friend and chief lieutenant Dr. John Richardson, had succeeded in resisting that temptation. Too much had happened while the parties were separated as they stumbled through the arctic wastes and forests, desperately trying to get back to Franklin’s little improvised Fort Enterprise and the real forts, Providence and Resolution.

  Nine white men and one Esquimaux dead. Nine dead out of the twenty-one men young Lieutenant John Franklin, thirty-three years old and pudgy and balding even then, had led out of Fort Resolution in 1819, plus one of the native guides they’d picked up along the way — Franklin had refused to let the man leave the expedition to forage for himself. Two of the men had been murdered in cold blood. At least one of them was, without doubt, devoured by others. But only one Englishman died. Only one real white man. All the rest were mere French voyageurs or Indians. This was success of a sort — only one white Englishman dead, even if all the others had been reduced to gibbering, bearded skeletons. Even if all the others survived only because George Back, that confounded, oversexed midshipman, had snowshoed 1,200 miles to bring back supplies and — more important than supplies — more Indians to feed and care for Franklin and his dying party.

  That confounded Back. Not a good Christian at all. Arrogant. Not a true gentleman, despite his later being knighted for an arctic expedition sailing on this very same HMS Terror that Sir John now commanded.

  On that expedition, Back’s expedition, Terror had been flung fifty feet into the air by a rising tower of ice, then thrown down so violently that every oak plank in the hull sprang a leak. George Back brought the leaking boat all the way back to the coast of Ireland, beaching it just hours before it would have sunk. The crew had wrapped chains around it to squeeze the boards tight long enough for the vessel to get them home. All the men had scurvy — black gums, bleeding eyes, teeth falling out of their heads — and the madness and delusions that went with scurvy.

  They’d knighted Back after that, of course. It’s what England and the Admiralty did after you returned from a polar expedition that failed miserably, resulting in appalling loss of life; if you survived, they gave you a title and a parade. After Franklin returned from his second coastal-mapping expedition in the far north of North America in 1827, he was personally knighted by King George IV. The Geographical Society of Paris gave him a gold medal. He was awarded captaincy of the beautiful little 26-gun frigate HMS Rainbow and ordered to the Mediterranean, a destination to which every captain in the Royal Navy prayed nightly for posting. He proposed marriage to one of his dead wife Eleanor’s dearest friends, the energetic, beautiful, and outspoken Jane Griffin.

  “So I explained to Sir James over tea,” Jane was saying, “that my darling Sir John’s credit and reputation are infinitely dearer to me than any selfish enjoyment of my husband’s society, even if he must be gone for four years … or five.”

  What was the name of that fifteen-year-old Copper Indian girl that Back was going to fight a duel over at their winter quarters of Fort Enterprise?

  Greenstockings. That was it. Greenstockings.

  That girl was evil. Beautiful, yes, but evil. She had no shame. Franklin himself, despite all efforts never to look her way, had seen her slip out of her heathen robes and walk naked across half the length of the cabin one moonlit night.

  He was thirty-four years old at the time, but she was the first naked human female he had ever seen and
even now the most beautiful. The dark skin. The breasts already heavy as globed fruit but also still those of an adolescent, the nipples not yet raised, the areolae strange, smooth dark-brown circles. It was an image Sir John had not been able to eradicate from his memory — try and pray as he might — in the quarter of a century since then. The girl had not the classic V of pubic hair that Franklin had later seen on his first wife, Eleanor — glimpsed only once, as she prepared for her bath, since Eleanor never allowed the slightest light to illuminate their rare lovemaking — or the sparser but wilder wheat-coloured nest that was part of the aging body of his current wife, Jane. No, the Indian girl Greenstockings had only a narrow but pure-black vertical escutcheon above her female parts. As delicate as a raven’s feather. As pitch black as sin itself.

  The Scotsman midshipman, Robert Hood, who had already fathered one bastard with a different Indian woman during that endless first winter at the cabin Franklin had named Fort Enterprise, had promptly fallen in love with teenaged Copper squaw Greenstockings. The girl had previously been lying with the other midship-man, George Back, but with Back gone hunting, she’d shifted her sexual allegiance to Hood with the ease known only to pagans and primitives.

  Franklin could still remember the grunts of passion in the long night — not the passion of a few minutes, as he had experienced with Eleanor (never grunting or making a noise, of course, since no gentleman would do that), or even two brief bouts of passion, such as on that memorable night on his honeymoon with Jane; no, Hood and Greenstockings went at it half a dozen times. No sooner would Hood’s and the girl’s noises stop in the adjoining lean-to than they would begin again — laughter, low giggles, then soft moans, leading again to the louder cries as the brazen girl-woman urged Hood on.

  Jane Griffin was thirty-six years old when she married the newly knighted Sir John Franklin on December 5, 1828. They honeymooned in Paris. Franklin did not especially like the city, nor did he like the French, but their hotel had been luxurious and the food very good.