For a minute he did not know where he was and then he remembered – Sir John’s Great Cabin, now the sick bay on Erebus. It was the middle of the night. All the whale-oil lamps had been extinguished and the only light came through the open door to the companionway. Goodsir had fallen asleep on an extra cot – seven men seriously ill with scurvy and one man with stones in his kidney were sleeping in the other cots. The man with stones had been dosed with opium.
Goodsir had been dreaming that his men were screaming as they were dying. They were dying, in his dream, because he did not know how to save them. Trained as an anatomist, Goodsir was less skilled than the three dead expedition surgeons had been at a Naval surgeon’s primary responsibility – dispensing pills, potions, emetics, herbs, and boluses. Dr. Peddie had once explained to Goodsir that the vast majority of the medicines were useless for the specific sailor’s ailments – most merely served to clean out the bowels and belly in an explosive manner – but the more powerful the purgative, the more effective the seamen thought the treatment was. It was the idea of medicinal help that helped the sailors heal, according to the late Peddie. In most cases not involving actual surgery, the body either healed itself or the patient died.
Goodsir had been dreaming that they were all dying – screaming as they died.
But these screams were real. They seemed to be coming up through the deck.
Henry Lloyd, Goodsir’s assistant, ran into the sick bay with his shirttails hanging out from under his sweaters. Lloyd was carrying a lantern and Goodsir could see that he had no shoes on. He must have run straight from his hammock.
“What’s going on?” whispered Goodsir. The sick men had not been roused from sleep by the screams from below.
“The captain wants you forward by the main ladder,” said Lloyd. He made no attempt to lower his voice. The young man sounded shrill and terrified.
“Shhh,” said Goodsir. “What’s happening, Henry?”
“The thing’s inside, Doctor,” Lloyd cried through chattering teeth. “It’s below. It’s killing men below.”
“Watch the men here,” ordered Goodsir. “Fetch me if any of them wakes or takes a turn for the worse. And go put your boots and outer layers on.”
Goodsir went forward through a milling of warrant officers and petty officers coming out of their cubicles and struggling into their clothes. Captain Fitzjames was standing with Le Vesconte at the head of the hatchway open to the lower decks. The captain had a pistol in his hand.
“Surgeon, there have been men injured below. You’ll come with us when we go down to fetch them. You will need your slops.”
Goodsir nodded dumbly.
First Mate Des Voeux came down the ladder from the deck above. Cold air rolled down with him, taking Goodsir’s breath away. For the past week Erebus had been rocked and battered by a blizzard and staggeringly low temperatures, some reaching down to −100 degrees. The surgeon had not been able to spend his allotted time on Terror. There had been no communication between the ships while the blizzard raged.
Des Voeux brushed snow off his slops. “The three men on watch haven’t seen anything outside, Captain. I told them to stand by.”
Fitzjames nodded. “We need weapons, Charles.”
“The three shotguns up on deck are all we’ve issued tonight,” said Des Voeux.
Another scream came up from the darkness below. Goodsir could not tell if it came from the orlop deck or deeper, from the lower hold deck. Both hatches seemed to be open below.
“Lieutenant Le Vesconte,” barked Fitzjames, “take three men down through the scuttle in the officers’ mess to the Spirit Room and hand up as many muskets and shotguns – and bags of cartridges, powder, and shot – as you can. I want every man on the lower deck here armed.”
“Aye, sir.” Le Vesconte pointed to three seamen, and the four shoved their way aft through the darkness.
“Charles,” Fitzjames said to First Mate Des Voeux. “Light lanterns. We’re going down. Collins, you’re coming. Mr. Dunn, Mr. Brown – you’re with us.”
“Yes, sir,” chorused the caulker and his mate.
Henry Collins, the second master, said, “Without guns, Captain? You want us to go down there without weapons?”
“Bring your knife,” said Fitzjames. “I have this.” He held up the single-shot pistol. “Stay behind me. Lieutenant Le Vesconte will follow us with an armed party and bring extra weapons. Surgeon, you stay by me as well.”
Goodsir nodded numbly. He’d been pulling on his slops – or someone’s – and seemed to be having a child’s difficulty in getting his left arm through the sleeve.
Fitzjames, his hands bare and wearing only a tattered jacket over his shirt, took a lantern from Des Voeux and plunged down the ladder. From somewhere below rose a series of terrible crashes, as if something was breaking timbers or bulkheads. There were no more screams.
Goodsir remembered the captain’s command to “stay by me” and fumbled his way down the dark ladder after the two men, forgetting to take a lantern. He did not have his bag of medical instruments and bandages with him. Brown and Dunn clattered after him, with a cursing Collins bringing up the rear.
The orlop deck was only seven feet below the lower deck but it seemed like another world. Goodsir almost never came down here. Fitzjames and the first mate were standing away from the ladder, swinging their lanterns. The surgeon realized that the temperature down here must be forty degrees below that of the lower deck where they ate and slept – and the lower deck’s average temperature these days was below freezing.
The crashing had stopped. Fitzjames ordered Collins to stop his cursing and the six men stood in a silent circle around the hatch opening to the hold deck below them. Everyone except Goodsir had a lantern and now extended it, although the small spheres of light seemed to penetrate only a few feet of the misted, freezing air. The men’s breath glowed in front of them like golden ornaments. The hurried footsteps banging on the lower deck above them seemed to Goodsir to be coming from miles away.
“Who was on duty down here tonight?” whispered Fitzjames.
“Mr. Gregory and one stoker,” replied Des Voeux. “Cowie, I think. Or maybe it was Plater.”
“And Carpenter Weekes and his mate Watson,” hissed Collins in an urgent whisper. “They were working through the night to shore up that stove-in part of the hull in the starboard for’ard coal-storage bin.”
Something roared beneath them. The sound was a hundred times louder and more bestial than any animal sound Goodsir had ever heard – worse even than the roar from the ebony room at midnight during Carnivale. The force of it echoed off every timber, iron brace, and bulkhead on the orlop deck. Goodsir was sure that the men on watch two decks above in the howling night could hear it as if the thing were on deck with them. His testicles tried to crawl back up into his body.
The roar had come from down in the hold deck.
“Brown, Dunn, Collins,” snapped Fitzjames. “Go forward past the Bread Room and secure the forward hatch. Des Voeux, Goodsir, come with me.”
Fitzjames stuck his pistol in his belt, held the lantern in his right hand, and clambered down the ladder into the blackness.
Goodsir had to use all his will just to avoid pissing himself. Des Voeux hurried down the ladder next and only an overwhelming sense of shame at the thought of not following the other men combined with a fear of being left alone in the dark set the trembling surgeon into motion after the first mate. His arms, hands, and legs felt as insensate as if they were made of wood, but he knew it was fear, not the cold, that caused this.
At the bottom of the ladder – in a black cold somehow more thick and terrible than the hostile outside arctic had ever felt to Harry Goodsir – the captain and first mate were holding their lanterns out as far as they could reach. Fitzjames had his pistol extended and fully cocked. Des Voeux was holding a standard boat knife. The mate’s hand was shaking. No one moved or breathed.