The Terror

hole. He was carrying a lantern. Blanky thought dully that it was like watching a gimlet-faced gnome being born.

In the end, all four surgeons had a go at him.

Blanky came in and out of his pleasant fog from time to time to see how things were progressing. Sometimes it was his own ship’s surgeons working on him – Peddie and McDonald – and sometimes it was Erebus’s sawbones, Stanley and Goodsir. Sometimes it was just one of the four cutting or sawing or packing or stitching away. Blanky had the urge to tell Goodsir that polar white bears could run much faster than twenty-five miles per hour when they put their mind to it. But then again – had it been a polar white bear? Blanky did not think so. Polar white bears were creatures of this earth, and this thing had come from somewhere else. Ice Master Thomas Blanky had no doubt of that.

In the end, the butcher’s bill was not so bad. Not bad at all, really.

John Handford, it turned out, had not been touched. After Blanky had left him with the lantern, the man on starboard watch had doused this light and fled the ship, running around to the port side to hide while the creature was climbing up to get to the Ice Master.

Alexander Berry, whom Blanky had presumed dead, had been found under the fallen canvas and scattered kegs right where he’d been standing port watch when the thing had first appeared there and then shattered the fore and aft ridgepole spar. Berry had hit his head seriously enough to have no memory of anything that happened that night, but Crozier told Blanky that they’d found the man’s shotgun and it had been fired. The Ice Master also had fired his, of course, from point-blank range at a shape that was looming over him like a pub wall, but there had been no trace of the thing’s blood anywhere on the deck at either site.

Crozier asked Blanky how this could be – how could two men fire shotguns at an animal at point-blank range and draw no blood? – but the Ice Master ventured no opinion. Inside, of course, he knew.

Davey Leys was also alive and unharmed. The forty-year-old on bow watch must have seen and heard much – including quite possibly the thing on the ice’s first appearance on deck – but Leys was not talking about it. Once again David Leys could only stare silently. He was taken first to Terror’s sick bay, but since all of the surgeons needed that bloodstained space to work on Blanky, Leys was transported by litter to Erebus’s more spacious sick quarters. There Leys lay, according to the Ice Master’s talkative visitors, once again staring unblinkingly at the overhead beams.

Blanky himself had not come through unscathed. The thing had clawed off half of his right foot at the heel, but McDonald and Goodsir had cut and cauterized what was left and assured the Ice Master that – with the help of the carpenter or ship’s armourer – they would rig a leather or wood prosthesis held on by straps so that he could walk again.

His left leg had taken the worst of the creature’s abuse – flesh raked away to the bone in several places and then the long leg bone itself striated with claws – and Dr. Peddie later confessed that all four of the surgeons had been sure they would have to amputate it at the knee. But slowness of infection and gangrene in a wound was one of the few blessings of the arctic, and after resetting the bone itself and receiving more than four hundred stitches, Blanky’s leg – although twisted and wildly scarred and lacking entire tracts of muscle here and there – was healing slowly. “Your grandkids will love them scars,” said James Reid when the other Ice Master made a courtesy call.

The cold had also taken its toll. Blanky managed to keep all of his toes – he would need them for balance on the ruined foot, the surgeons told him – but had lost all fingers save for his thumb on his right hand and the two smallest fingers and his thumb on his left hand. Goodsir, who evidently knew something about such things, assured him that someday he would be able to write and eat gracefully with just the remaining adjoining two fingers on his left hand, and be able to button his trousers and shirts again with those two fingers and the thumb on his right hand.

Thomas Blanky did not give a good gob fart about buttoning his trousers and shirts. Not yet. He was alive. The thing on the ice had done its best to make him otherwise, but he was still alive. He could taste food, chat with his mates, drink his daily gill of rum – already his bandaged hands were capable of holding his pewter mug – and read a book if someone propped it up for him. He was determined to read The Vicar of Wakefield before he shuffled off what was left of his mortal coil.

Blanky was alive and he planned to stay that way for as long as he could. In the meantime, he was strangely happy. He was looking forward to getting back to his own cubicle aft – between Third Lieutenant Irving’s and Jopson’s,the captain’s steward’s, equally tiny berths – and that would happen any day now, whenever the surgeons were absolutely sure they were done snipping and stitching and sniffing at his wounds.

In the meantime, Thomas Blanky was happy. Lying on his sick bay bunk late at night, the men grousing and whispering and farting and laughing in the darkened berthing space just a few feet beyond the partition, hearing Mr. Diggle growl out his commands at his lackeys as the cook baked biscuits deep into the night, Thomas Blanky listened to the grind and growl of the sea ice as it tried to crush HMS Terror and allowed it to put him to sleep as surely as would a lullaby from his long-sainted mother’s lips.

22 IRVING

Lat. 70°-05? N., Long. 98°-23? W.

13 December, 1847

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, addle-brained enough, and generally un- Christian enough to offer up scraps of food or mugs of perfectly good watered-down 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.