Dan Simmons - The Terror

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.