The Terror

London to complete his Naval education in artillery on the gunnery training vessel HMS Excellent, Irving had spent his weekends meeting, courting, and enjoying the company of several attractive upper-class young ladies, including the obliging Miss Sarah, the shy but ultimately surprising Miss Linda, and the truly shocking – in private – Miss Abigail Elisabeth Lindstrom Hyde-Berrie, with whom the fresh-faced third lieutenant soon found himself engaged to be married.

John Irving had no intention of being married. At least not while he was in his twenties – his father and uncle had both taught him that these were the years in which he should see the world and sow wild oats – and most probably not when he was in his thirties. He saw no compelling reason to marry while he would be in his forties. So although Irving had never once considered the Discovery Service – he had never enjoyed cold weather, and the thought of being frozen in at either of the poles was both absurd and appalling to him – the week after he awoke to find himself engaged, the third lieutenant followed the promptings of his older chums George Hodgson and Fred Hornby and went along to an interview on HMS Terror to apply for transfer.

Captain Crozier, obviously in foul spirits and hungover that beautiful spring Saturday morning, had glowered, harrumphed, scowled, and quizzed them carefully. He laughed at their gunnery training on a mastless ship and demanded to know just how they could be of service on an expedition sailing ship which carried only small arms. Then he asked them pointedly if they would “do their duty as Englishmen” (whatever on earth that meant, Irving remembered thinking, when said Englishmen were locked into a frozen sea a thousand miles from home) and promptly assured them of berths.

Miss Abigail Elisabeth Lindstrom Hyde-Berrie was distraught, of course, and shocked that their engagement should be extended over months or actual years, but Lieutenant Irving consoled her first with assurances that the extra money from the Discovery Service duty would be an absolute necessity for them, and then by explaining his need for the adventure and then fame and glory that might well come from writing a book upon his return. Her family understood these priorities even if Miss Abigail did not. Then, when they were alone, he coaxed her out of her tears and anger with hugs, kisses, and expert caresses. The consolation grew to interesting heights – Lieutenant Irving knew that he might well be a father by now, two and a half years after the consoling. But he had not been unhappy to wave good-bye to Miss Abigail some weeks later as Terror slipped her moorings and was pushed away by two steam tugs. The disconsolate young lady stood on the docks at Greenhithe in her green-and-pink silk dress under a pink parasol and waved her matching silk pink handkerchief, using another less-expensive cotton handkerchief to dry her copious tears.

He knew that Sir John fully expected to stop in both Russia and China after negotiating the North-West Passage, so Lieutenant Irving had already made plans to transfer to a Royal Navy ship assigned to one of those waters, or perhaps even resign from the Navy, write his adventure book, and look after his uncle’s silk and millinery interests in Shanghai.

The hold was darker and colder than the orlop deck.

Irving hated the hold. It reminded him, even more than did his freezing berth or the dimly lit, freezing lower deck, of a grave. He only came down here when he had to, mostly to supervise the stowing of shrouded dead bodies – or the parts of dead bodies – in the locked Dead Room. Each time he wondered if someone soon would be supervising the stowing of his corpse down here. He lifted his lantern and headed aft through the slush-melt and thick air.

The boiler room appeared to be empty, but then Lieutenant Irving saw the body on the cot near the starboard bulkhead. No lantern glowed, only the low red flicker through the grate of one of the four closed boiler doors, and in the dim light, the long body stretched out on the cot looked dead. The man’s open eyes stared up at the low ceiling and he did not blink. Nor did he turn his head when Irving came into the room and hung his lantern on a hook near the coal scuttle.

“What brings you down here, Lieutenant?” asked James Thompson. The engineer still neither moved his head nor blinked. Sometime in the past month he had quit shaving, and whiskers now sprouted everywhere on his thin, white face. The man’s eyes lay deep in dark sockets. His hair was wild and spiky with soot and sweat. It was near freezing even here in the boiler room with the fires damped so low, but Thompson was lying only in his trousers, undershirt, and suspenders.

“I’m looking for Silence,” said Irving.

The man on the cot continued to stare at the deck above him.

“Lady Silence,” clarified the young lieutenant.

“The Esquimaux witch,” said the engineer.

Irving cleared his throat. The coal dust was so thick here that it was hard to breathe. “Have you seen her, Mr. Thompson? Or heard anything unusual?”

Thompson, who still had not blinked or turned his head, laughed softly. The sound was disturbing – a rattle of small stones in a jar – and it ended in a cough. “Listen,” said the engineer.

Irving turned his head. There were only the usual noises, although louder down here in the dark hold: the slow moan of ice pressing in, the louder groaning of the iron tanks and structural reinforcements fore and aft of the boiler room, the more distant moan of the blizzard winds far above, the crash of falling ice carried down as vibration through the ship’s timbers, the thrum of the masts being shaken in their sockets, random scratching noises from the hull, and a constant hiss, screech, and claw-sliding noise from the boiler and pipes all around.

“There’s someone or something else breathing on this deck,” continued Thompson. “Do you hear it?”

Irving strained but heard no breathing, although the boiler sounded like something large panting hard. “Where are Smith and Johnson?” asked the lieutenant. These were the two stokers who worked round-the-clock here with Thompson.

The supine engineer shrugged. “With so little coal to shovel these days, I need them only a few hours a day. I spend most of my time alone, crawling among the pipes and valves, Lieutenant. Patching. Taping. Replacing. Trying to keep this… thing… working, moving hot water through the lower deck for a few hours each day. In two months, three at the most, it will all be academic. We already have no coal to steam. We’ll soon have no coal to heat.”

Irving had heard these reports in the officers’ mess but had little interest in the subject. Three months seemed a lifetime away. Right now he had to make sure Silence was not on board and report to the captain. Then he had to try to find her if she was not aboard Terror. Then he had to survive another three months. He would worry about shortages of coal later.

“Have you heard the rumors, Lieutenant?” asked the engineer. The long form on the couch still had neither blinked nor turned his head to look at Irving.

“No, Mr. Thompson, which rumor?”

“That the… thing on the ice, the apparition, the Devil… comes into the ship whenever it wants to and walks the hold deck late at night,” said Thompson.

“No,” said Lieutenant Irving. “I’ve not heard that.”

“Stay down here alone on the hold deck through enough watches,” said the man on the cot, “and you’ll hear and see everything.”

“Good night, Mr. Thompson.” Irving took his sputtering lantern and went back out into the companionway and forward.

There were few places left to search on the hold deck and Irving had every intention of making a fast job of it. The Dead Room was locked; the lieutenant had not asked his captain for the key, and after inspecting that the heavy lock was solid and secured, he moved on. He didn’t want to see what was causing the scrabbling and chewing sounds he could hear through the thick oak door.

The twenty-one huge iron water tanks along the hull offered no place for an Esquimaux to hide, so Irving went into the coal bunkers, his lantern dimming in the thick, coal-dust-blackened air. The remaining sacks of coal, once filling each bin and stacked from hull bottom to the deck beams above, merely lined the edge of each sooty room like low barriers of sandbags now. He couldn’t imagine Lady Silence making a new shelter in one of these lightless, reeking, pestilential hellholes – the decks were awash in sewage and rats scuttled everywhere – but he had to look.

When he was finished searching the coal storage lockers and the stores amidships, Lieutenant Irving moved out into the remaining crates and barrels in the forepeak, directly below the crew’s berthing area and Mr. Diggle’s huge stove two decks above. A narrower ladder came down through the orlop deck to this stores area and tons of lumber were hanging from the heavy beams overhead, turning the space into a maze and requiring the lieutenant to proceed in a half crouch, but there were far fewer crates, barrels, and heaps of goods than there had been two and a half years earlier.

But more rats. Many more.

Searching between and in some of the larger crates, glancing to make sure that the barrels awash in the slush were either empty or sealed, Irving had just stepped around the vertical forward ladder when he saw a flash of white and heard harsh breathing, gasps and caught a rustle of frenzied movement just beyond the dim circle of the lantern light. It was large, moving, and was not the woman.

Irving had no weapon. For the briefest instant he considered dropping the lantern and running back through the darkness toward the midship ladderway. He did not, of course, and the thought was gone almost before it was formed. He took a step forward and, in a voice stronger and more authoritative than he thought he might be capable of right then, shouted, “Who goes there? Identify yourself!”

Then he saw them in the lantern light. The idiot, Magnus Manson, the largest man on the expedition, struggling back into his trousers, his huge, grimy fingers fumbling with buttons. A few feet away Cornelius Hickey, the caulker’s mate, barely five feet tall, beady-eyed and ferret-faced, was pulling his suspenders into place.

John Irving’s mouth hung open. It took several seconds for the reality of what he was looking at to filter through his mind toward acceptance – sodomites. He had heard of such goings-on, of course, had joked with his mates about such things, had once witnessed a flogging around the fleet when an ensign on the Excellent had confessed to such doings, but Irving had never thought that he would be on a ship where… to serve with men who…

Manson, the giant, was taking an ominous step toward him. The man was so large that everywhere belowdecks he had to walk in a stooped crouch to avoid the beams, giving him an habitual hunchbacked shuffle that he used even in the open air. Now, his huge hands glowing in the lamplight, he looked like an executioner advancing on a condemned man.

“Magnus,” said Hickey. “No.”

Irving ’s jaw dropped farther. Were these… sodomites… threatening him? The prescribed sentence for sodomy on a ship of Her Majesty’s Navy was hanging, with two hundred lashes from the cat while being flogged around the fleet – literally from ship to ship in harbour – being considered great leniency.

“How dare you?” said Irving, although whether he was talking about Manson’s threatening attitude or their unnatural act, even he did not know.

“Lieutenant,” said Hickey, words rushing in that flute-high rush of the caulker’s mate’s Liverpool accent, “begging your pardon, sir, Mr. Diggle sent us down for some flour, sir. One of them damn rats rushed up Seaman Manson’s trouser leg, sir, and we was trying to set it right. Filthy buggers, them rats.”

Irving knew that Mr. Diggle had not yet started the late-night baking of biscuits and that there was ample flour in the cook’s stores up on the lower deck. Hickey was not even trying to make his lie convincing. The little man’s beady, evaluating eyes reminded Irving of the rats scurrying in the darkness around them.

“We’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t tell no one, sir,” continued the caulker’s mate. “Magnus here would hate to be made fun of for bein’ afraid of a little rat runnin’ up his leg.”

The words were a challenge and a defiance. Almost a command. Insolence came off the little man in waves while Manson stood there empty-eyed, as dumb as a