Crozier began following the procession into the violet chamber and Fitzjames followed him. The captain of HMS Terror had never felt this way in all of his years of command; he knew that he had to stop this travesty of a lampoon — no Naval discipline could tolerate a farce in which the death of the expedition’s former commander became a source of humour. But at the same time he knew that it had already proceeded to a point where simply shouting down the singing, ordering Manson and Hickey out of their obscene monster suit, ordering everyone out of their costumes and back to their berths on the ships would be almost as absurd and useless as the pagan ritual Crozier was watching with growing anger.
The headless admiral, ambling bearthing, and the following procession of a hundred costumed men or more had not paused long in the violet room. As Crozier entered the violet-coloured space — the torches and outside tripod fires were whipping on the north side of the violet-dyed canvas wall and the sails themselves were rippling and cracking in the rising wind — he arrived just in time to see Manson and Hickey and their singing mob pause at the entrance to the ebony room.
Crozier resisted the impulse to shout out “No!” It was an obscenity for the effigy of Sir John and the towering bearthing to play this out in any forum, but unthinkably vile in that black, oppressive ebony room with its polar bear head and ticking clock. Whatever final dumb show the men had in mind, at least it would soon be finished. This had to be the finale of this ill-thought-out mistake of a Second Grand Venetian Carnivale. He would let the singing end of its own, the pagan mime close to drunken cheers from the men, and then he would order the mobs out of their costumes, send the frozen and drunken seamen back to their ships, but order the riggers and organizers to strike the canvas and rigging immediately — tonight — whether that meant frostbite or no. He would then deal with Hickey, Manson, Aylmore, and his officers.
The swaying, much-cheered headless admiral and swaying bear-monster entered the ebony compartment.
Sir John’s black clock within began striking midnight.
The mob of bizarrely costumed sailors at the rear of the procession began pressing forward, the rear ranks eager to get into the ebony compartment to see the fun, even while the ragmen, rats, unicorns, dustmen, one-legged pirates, Arab princes and Egyptian princesses, gladiators, faeries, and other creatures at the front of the mob, already making the turn and crossing the threshold into the black room, began resisting the advance, pushing back, no longer sure they wanted to be in that soot-floored and black-walled darkness.
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 he real volume came from the pushing mobs still back in the violet room.
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 bear-hide-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.
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 coldweather 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 platesized paws or knifesized 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.
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.