Crozier elbowed his way forward through the mob – the mass surging forward and then back as those in the front thought twice about actually entering the ebony gloom – certain now that if he couldn’t end this farce before the finale, at least he could shorten this final act.
He’d no sooner entered the darkness with twenty or thirty men at the front of the procession who’d also halted upon stepping in – his eyes had to adapt in here, and the black soot on the ice gave him a terrible sense of falling into a black void – when he felt the blast of cold air against his face. It was as if someone had opened a door in the wall of the iceberg that loomed over everything. Even the costumed figures here in the dark were still singing, but the real volume came from the pushing mobs still back in the violet room.
RULE, BRITANNIA! BRITANNIA, RULE THE WAVES;
BRITONS NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER
SHALL BE SLAVES!
Crozier could only just make out the white of the disembodied bear’s head emerging from the ice over the ebony clock – the chimes had struck six now and seemed terribly loud in the darkened space – and he could see that under the taller, swaying, white bear-monster’s form, Manson and Hickey were finding it difficult to keep their balance on the sooty ice, in the icy blackness with the north canvas walls flapping and rippling wildly with the wind.
Crozier saw that there was a second large white shape in the room. It also stood on its hind legs. It was farther back in the darkness than Manson and Hickey’s bearhide-white glow. And it was much larger. And taller.
As the men fell silent and the clock was striking its last four chimes, something in the room roared.
THE MUSES, STILL WITH FREEDOM FOUND, SHALL TO THY HAPPY COAST REPAIR;
BLEST ISLE! WITH MATCHLESS BEAUTY CROWNED, AND MANLY HEARTS TO GUIDE THE FAIR!
Suddenly the men in the ebony room were shoving backward against the still-pushing throng of seamen trying to get in.
“What in God’s name?”asked Dr. McDonald. The four surgeons, all in Harlequin costumes but with their masks hanging down now, were recognizable to Crozier in the brighter violet glow coming around the canvased curve between the rooms.
A man in the ebony room screamed in terror. There came a second roar, unlike anything that Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier had ever heard; it was something more at home in a thick jungle of some previous Hyborian Age than in the Arctic of the nineteenth century. The sound ground so low into the bass regions, grew so reverberating, and emerged so ferocious that it made the captain of HMS Terror want to piss his pants right there in front of his men.
The larger of the two white shapes in the gloom charged forward.
Costumed men screamed, tried to push backward against the wave of the forward-pushing curious, and then ran to the left and right in the darkness, colliding with the nearly invisible black-dyed canvas walls.
Crozier, unarmed, stood where he was. He felt the mass of the thing brush past him in the darkness. He sensed it with his mind… felt it in his head. There was a sudden stench as of old blood, then the reek of a carrion pit.
Princesses and faeries were throwing off costumes and cold-weather slops in the darkness, clawing at the black walls and fumbling for their boat knives on their buried belts.
Crozier heard a meaty, sickening slap as huge plate-sized paws or knife-sized claws slammed into a man’s body. Something crunched sickeningly as teeth longer than bayonet blades bit through skull or bone. In the outer rooms, men still sang.
RULE, BRITANNIA! BRITANNIA, RULE THE WAVES!
BRITONS NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER
SHALL BE SLAVES!!
The ebony clock concluded its striking. It was midnight. It was 1848.
Men used their knives to slash through the black-dyed walls and strips of wind-tormented canvas were immediately whipped into the flames of torches and tripods out on the ice. Flames leapt skyward and almost immediately engaged the rigging.
The white shape had moved out into the violet room. Men there were screaming and scattering, cursing and shoving, some already slashing at the walls there rather than trying to make the long run out through the compartment maze, and Crozier shoved seamen aside as he tried to follow. Both walls of the ebony room were ablaze now. More men screamed and one man ran past Crozier, his Harlequin costume, Welsh wig, and hair shooting flames behind him like yellow silk streamers.
By the time Crozier shoved himself free of the surging mob of fleeing, costumed forms, the violet compartment was also burning and the thing from the ice had moved on to the white room. The captain could hear the shouts from scores of men as they ran ahead of the white apparition in a wave of waving arms and shed costumes. The web of beautifully rigged ropes attaching the canvas and spar struts to the overhanging iceberg was burning now, the patterns of flame slashing like scribbled runes of fire against the black slate of sky. The hundred-foot wall of ice reflected the flames in its thousand facets.
The spars themselves that rose like exposed ribs along the burning walls of the ebony room, the violet room, and now the white room, were also on fire. Years of storage in the virtual desert of the arctic dryness had leached all moisture from the wood. They fed the flames like thousand-pound pieces of tinder.
Crozier gave up all hope of mastering the situation and ran with the others. He had to get out of the burning maze.
The white room was fully engaged. Flames shot up from the white walls, from the canvas carpets on the ice, from the former sheet-draped banquet tables and casks and chairs and from Mr. Diggle’s metal cooking grill. Someone had knocked over the mechanical disk player in their panicked flight and the oak-and-bronze instrument reflected the flames from all of its beautifully crafted faces and curves.
Crozier saw Captain Fitzjames standing in the white room, the only figure not costumed and not running. He grabbed the motionless man by his slops’ sleeve. “Come, James! We have to go.”
The commander of HMS Erebus slowly turned his head and looked at his superior officer as if they had never met. Fitzjames had that small, absent, maddening smile on his face again.
Crozier slapped him. “Come on!”
Pulling and tugging the sleepwalking Fitzjames, Crozier stumbled through the burning white room, out through the fourth room, whose walls were more orange with flames than with dye now, and into the burning green room. The maze seemed to go on and on. Costumed figures lay on the ice here and there – some moaning and with ripped and mauled vestments, one man naked and burned – but other seamen were stopping to help them up, shoving them onward and outward. The sea ice underfoot, where there were no burning canvas carpets, was littered with shreds of costumes and abandoned cold-weather gear. Most of these tatters and fabrics were either ablaze or the about to burn.
“Come on!” repeated Crozier, still tugging a stumbling Fitzjames in his wake. A seaman lay unconscious on the ice – young George Chambers from Erebus, Crozier saw, one of the ship’s boys, although twenty-one now, one of the drummers in their early burials on the ice – and no one seemed to be taking notice of him. Crozier released Fitzjames just long enough to lift Chambers over his shoulder, and then he grabbed the other captain’s sleeve again and began running just as flames on either side exploded to the rigging above.
Crozier heard a monstrous hissing behind him.