Along the 25 feet of pinnace bottom separating the two skeletons lies a dizzying array of bric-a-brac protruding from the few inches of snow that have accumulated: two rolls of sheet metal, a full canvas boat cover, eight pairs of boots, two saws, four files, a stack of nails, and two boat knives next to the bag of powder-shot cartridges near the skeleton in the stern.
Crozier also sees paddles, folded sails, and rolls of twine near the clothed skeleton. Closer to the pile of partially devoured bones in the bow are a stack of towels, bars of soap, several combs and a toothbrush, a pair of handworked slippers just inches from scattered white toe bones and metatarsals, and six books – five Bibles and The Vicar of Wakefield, which now sits on a shelf in the Great Cabin of HMS Terror.
Crozier wants to close his eyes but cannot. He wants to fly away from this vision – all these visions – but has no control over them.
Suddenly Francis Leopold M’Clintock’s vaguely familiar face seems to melt, sag, then reform itself into the visage of a younger man, someone Francis Crozier does not know. Everything else stays the same. The younger man – a certain Lieutenant William Hobson, whom Crozier now knows without knowing how he knows – is standing in the same spot that M’Clintock had and is peering into the open boat with the same expression of sickened incredulity that Crozier had seen on M’Clintock’s face a moment earlier.
Without warning, the open boat and the skeletons are gone and Crozier is lying in a cave of ice next to a naked Sophia Cracroft.
No, it is not Sophia. Crozier blinks, feeling Memo Moira’s Second Sight burning through and from his aching brain like a fist of fever, and now he sees that he is lying naked next to a naked Lady Silence. They are surrounded by furs, and they are lying on some sort of snow or ice shelf. Their space is illuminated by a flickering oil lamp. The curved ceiling is made from blocks of ice. Silence’s breasts are brown, and her hair is long and very black. She is leaning on one elbow amid the furs and looking at Crozier with some earnestness.
Do you dream my dreams? she asks without moving her lips or opening her mouth. She has not spoken in English. Am I dreaming yours?
Crozier feels her inside his mind and heart. It feels like a jolt of the best whiskey he has ever swallowed.
And then the most terrible nightmare of all comes.
This stranger, this blend of M’Clintock and someone named Hobson, is not looking down at the open boat with two skeletons in it but is watching young Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier secretly attending Catholic Mass with his witch-Papist Memo Moira.
It was one of the deepest secrets of Crozier’s life that he had done this thing – not only gone to the forbidden service with Memo Moira but partaken of the heresy of the Catholic Eucharist, the much-derided and forbidden Holy Communion.
But this form of M’Clintock-Hobson stands like an altar boy as a trembling Crozier – now a child, now a scarred man in his fifties – approaches the altar rail, kneels, puts his head back, opens his mouth, and extends his tongue for the Forbidden Wafer – the Body of Christ – pure transubstantiated cannibalism to all the other adults in Crozier’s village and family and life.
But something is strange. The grey-haired priest looming over him in his white robes is dripping water on the floor and altar rail and onto Crozier himself. And the priest is too large even for a child’s point of view – huge, wet, muscled, lumbering, throwing a shadow over the kneeling communicant. He is not human.
And Crozier is naked as he kneels, sets his head back, closes his eyes, and extends his tongue for the Sacrament.
The priest looming and dripping over him has no Wafer in his hand. He has no hands. Instead, the dripping apparition leans over the altar rail, leans far too close, and opens its own inhuman maw as if Crozier is the Bread to be devoured.
“Dear Jesus Christ God Almighty,” whispers this watching M’Clintock-Hobson form.
“Dear Jesus Christ God Almighty,” whispers Captain Francis Crozier.
“He’s back with us,” Dr. Goodsir says to Mr. Jopson.
Crozier moans.
“Sir,” the surgeon says to Crozier, “can you sit up? Are you able to open your eyes and sit up? That’s a good captain.”
“What day is it?” croaks Crozier. The dull light from the open door and the even duller light from his oil lamp turned low are like explosions of painful sunshine against his sensitive eyes.
“It’s Tuesday, the eleventh day of January, Captain,” says his steward. And then Jopson adds, “The year of our Lord eighteen hundred and forty-eight.”
“You were very ill for a week,” says the surgeon. “Several times in the last few days I was sure that we had lost you.” Goodsir gives him some water to sip.
“I was dreaming,” manages Crozier after drinking the ice-cold water. He can smell his own stink in the nest of frozen bedclothes around him.
“You were moaning very loudly the last few hours,” says Goodsir. “Do you remember any of your malarial dreams?”
Crozier remembers only the sense-of-flying weightlessness of his dreams, yet at the same time the weight and horror and humour of visions that had already fled like wisps of fog before a strong wind.
“No,” he says. “Mr. Jopson, please be so kind as to fetch me hot water for my toilet. You may have to help me shave. Dr. Goodsir…”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Would you be so kind as to go forward and tell Mr. Diggle that his captain wants a very large breakfast this morning.”
“It is six bells in the evening, Captain,” says the surgeon.
“Nonetheless, I want a very large breakfast. Biscuits. What’s left of our potatoes. Coffee. Pork of some sort – bacon if he has it.”
“Aye, sir.”
“And, Dr. Goodsir,” Crozier says to the departing surgeon. “Would you also be so kind as to ask Lieutenant Little to come aft with a report on the week I have missed and also ask him to bring my… property.”
28 PEGLAR
Harry Peglar had planned it so that he received the duty to carry a message to Erebus on the day the sun returned. He wanted to celebrate it – as much as anything could be celebrated these days – with someone he loved. And somebody he’d once been in love with.
Chief Petty Officer Harry Peglar was captain of the foretop on Terror, chosen leader of the carefully picked topmen who worked the highest rigging, topsail, and topgallant yards in blaze of day or dark of night as well as in the highest seas and worst weather the world could throw at a wooden ship. This was a position that required strength, experience, leadership, and, most of all, courage, and Harry Peglar was respected for all of these traits. Now almost forty-one years old, he had proved himself hundreds of times not only in front of the crew of HMS Terror but on a dozen other ships on which he’d served over his long career.