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.
He crept through the blue-lit maze of ice boulders and tall seracs. Whenever he became disoriented, he would look up at the full moon. The yellow orb looked more like another full-sized planet suddenly looming in the starlit sky than like any moon Irving remembered from his years ashore or brief assignments at sea. The air around it seemed to quake with the cold, as if the atmosphere itself were on the verge of freezing solid. Ice crystals in the upper air had created a huge double halo encircling the moon, the lower bands of both circles invisible behind the pressure ridge and icebergs round about. Set around the outer halo, like diamonds on a silver ring, were three bright, glowing crosses.
The lieutenant had seen this phenomenon several times before this during their night-winters up here near the north pole. Ice Master Blanky had explained that it was just the moonlight refracting off ice crystals the way a light would through a diamond, but it added to Irving’s sense of religious awe and wonder here in the blue-glowing ice field as that odd instrument began hooting and moaning again – just yards away behind the ice now – its tempo again hurrying to an almost ecstatic pace before suddenly breaking off.
Irving tried to imagine Lady Silence playing some hitherto unseen Esquimaux instrument – some caribou-antler variation on a Bavarian flügelhorn, say – but he rejected the idea as silly. First of all, she and the man who had died had arrived with no such instrument. And second, Irving had the strangest feeling that it was not Lady Silence who was playing this unseen instrument.
Crawling over the last low pressure ridge between him and the seracs from whence the sound was coming, Irving continued forward on all fours, not wanting the crunch of his lug-soled boots to be heard on the hard ice or soft snow.
The hooting – seemingly just behind the next blue-glowing serac, this one carved by wind into something like a thick flag – had begun again, rising quickly to the loudest, fastest, deepest, and most frenzied noise Irving had heard so far. To his amazement, he found that he had an erection. Something about this instrument’s deep, booming, reed-fluttering sound was so… primal… that it quite literally stirred his loins even as he shivered.
He peered around the last serac.
Lady Silence was about twenty feet away across a smooth blue-ice space. Seracs and ice boulders circled the spot, making Irving feel as if he’d suddenly found himself amid a Stonehenge circle in the ice-haloed and star-crossed moonlight. Even the shadows here were blue.
She was naked, kneeling on thick furs that must be her parka. Her back was in three-quarters profile to Irving and while he could see the curve of her right breast, he could also see the bright moonlight illuminating her long, straight, black hair and setting silver highlights on the hillocked flesh of her firm backside. Irving’s heart was pounding so hard that he was afraid she might hear it.
Silence was not alone. Something else filled the dark gap between Druidic ice boulders on the opposite side of the clearing, just beyond the Esquimaux woman.
Irving knew it was the thing from the ice. White bear or white demon, it was here with them – almost atop the young woman, looming over her. As much as the lieutenant strained his eyes, it was hard to make out the shape – white-blue fur against white-blue ice, heavy muscles against heavy ridges of snow and ice, black eyes that might or might not be separate from the absolute blackness behind the thing.
The triangular head on the strangely long bear neck was weaving and bobbing like a snake, he saw now, six feet above and beyond the kneeling woman. Irving tried to estimate the size of the creature’s head – for future reference in terms of killing it – but it was impossible to isolate the precise shape or size of the triangular mass with its coal-black eyes because of its odd and constant movement.
But the thing was looming over the girl. Its head was almost directly above her now.
Irving knew that he should cry out – rush forward with the pry bar in his mittened hand since he had brought no other weapon except for his resheathed ship’s knife – and try to save the woman, but his muscles would not have obeyed such a command at that moment. It was everything he could do to keep watching in a sort of sexually excited horror.
Lady Silence had extended her arms, palms up, like a popish priest saying Mass and inviting the miracle of the Eucharist. Irving had a cousin in Ireland who was popish, and he’d actually gone to a Catholic service with him once during a visit. The same sense of strange magical ceremony was being played out here in the blue moonlight. Silence, without a tongue, made no noise, but her arms were thrown wide, her eyes were closed, her head was thrown back – Irving had crawled far enough forward that he could see her face now – and her mouth was open and wide, like a supplicant awaiting Communion.
The creature’s neck thrust forward and down as quickly as a cobra’s strike and the thing’s jaws opened wide and seemed to snap shut on Lady Silence’s lower face, devouring half her head.
Irving almost screamed then. Only the ceremonial heaviness of the moment and his own incapacitating fear kept him silent.