Dan Simmons - The Terror

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 beast of burden, huge hands still flexed, passively awaiting the next command from his diminutive lover.

The silence between the men stretched. Ice moaned against the ship. Timbers creaked. Rats scurried close by.

“Get out of here,” Irving said at last. “ Now .”

“Aye, sir. Thank you, sir,” said Hickey. He unshielded a small lantern that had been on the deck near him. “Come, Magnus.”

The two men scrambled up the narrow forward ladder into the darkness of the orlop deck.

Lieutenant Irving stood where he was for several long minutes, listening to but not hearing the groans and snaps of the ship. The blizzard howl was like a distant dirge.

If he reported this to Captain Crozier, there would be a trial. Manson, the village idiot of this expedition, was well liked by the crew, however much they teased him about his fear of ghosts and goblins. The man did the heavy work of any three of his comrades. Hickey, while not especially liked by any of the other warrant or regular officers, was respected by the regular seamen for his abilities to get his friends extra tobacco, an extra gill of rum, or an article of needed clothing.

Crozier wouldn’t hang either man, thought John Irving, but the captain had been in an especially foul mood in recent weeks and the punishments could be dramatic. Everyone on the ship knew that just weeks ago the captain threatened to lock Manson into the Dead Room with his chum Walker’s rat-chewed corpse if the huge idiot ever again refused an order to carry coal on the hold deck. No one would be surprised if he carried out that sentence now.

On the other hand, thought the lieutenant, what had he just seen? What could he testify to, his hand on the Holy Bible, if there were an actual court of inquiry? He hadn’t seen any unnatural act. He’d not caught the two sodomites in the act of copulation or… any other unnatural posture. Irving had heard the breathing, the gasps, something that must have been whispered alarm at the approach of his lantern, and then seen the two struggling to raise their trousers and tuck in their shirts.