The Terror

27 CROZIER

It will not end.

The pain will not end. The nausea will not end. The chills will not end. The terror will not end.

Crozier writhes in the frozen blankets of his bunk and wants to die.

During his lucid moments this week, which are few, Crozier laments the most sane act he had performed before retreating to his demons; he had given his pistol to Lieutenant Little with no explanation other than to tell Edward not to return it unless and until he, the captain, asks for it while on deck and in full uniform again.

Crozier would pay anything now for that charged and loaded weapon. This level of pain is unsupportable. These thoughts are unsupportable.

His grandmother on his late, unlamented father’s side, Memo Moira, had been the outcast, the unmentioned and unmentionable Crozier. In her eighties, when Crozier was not yet a teenager, Memo lived two villages away – an immense, inestimable, and unbridgeable distance for a boy – and his mother’s family neither included her in family events nor mentioned her existence.

She was a Papist. She was a witch.

Crozier began sneaking over to her village, cadging rides on pony carts, when he was ten. Within a year he was going with the old woman to that strange village’s Papist church. His mother and aunt and maternal grandmother would have died if they had known. He would have been renounced and exiled and held in as much scorn by that proper Irish-English Presbyterian side of his family as the Naval Board and Arctic Council had held him in for all these years just for being an Irishman. And a commoner.

Memo Moira had thought him special. She told him that he had the Second Sight.

The thought did not frighten young Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier. He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service – the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting. Once, when he was twelve, shortly before he ran away to sea, he told Memo that he wanted to become a priest, and the old woman laughed that wild, husky laugh of hers and told him to put such nonsense out of his mind. “Being a priest is as common and useless as being an Irish drunkard. Use your Gift instead, Young Francis,” she’d said. “Use the Second Sight that has been in my family for a score of generations. It will help you go places and see things that no person on this sad earth has ever seen.”

Young Francis did not believe in Second Sight. It was about that same time that he realized that he also did not believe in God. He went to sea. He believed in everything he learned and saw there, and some of these sights and lessons were strange indeed.

Crozier rides on crests of pain rolling in on waves of nausea. He awakens only to vomit into the bucket that Jopson, his steward, has left there and replaces each hour. Crozier hurts to the cavity in the center of his self where he is sure his soul had resided until it floated away on a sea of whiskey over the decades. All through these days and nights of cold sweat on frozen sheets, he knows he would give up his rank, his honours, his mother, his sisters, his father’s name, and the memory of Memo Moira herself for one more glass of whiskey.

The ship groans as it continues to be squeezed inexorably to fragments by the never-ceasing ice. Crozier groans as his demons continue to squeeze him inexorably to fragments through chills, fever, pain, nausea, and regret. He has cut a six-inch strap from an old belt, and to keep from moaning aloud he bites down on that in the darkness. He moans anyway.

He imagines it all. He sees it all.

Lady Jane Franklin is in her element. Now, with two and a half years of no word from her husband, she is in her element. Lady Franklin the Indomitable. Lady Franklin the Widow Who Refused to Be a Widow. Lady Franklin the Patroness and Saint of the Arctic that has killed her husband… Lady Franklin who will never accept such a fact.

Crozier can see her as clearly as if he does have Second Sight. Lady Franklin has never looked more beautiful than now in her resolve, in her refusal to grieve, in her determination that her husband is alive and that Sir John’s expedition must be found and rescued.

More than two and a half years have passed. The Navy knows that Sir John had provisioned Erebus and Terror for three years at normal rations but had expected to emerge beyond Alaska in the summer of 1846, certainly no later than August of 1847.

Lady Jane will have bullied the lethargic Navy and Parliament into action by now. Crozier can see her writing letters to the Admiralty, letters to the Arctic Council, letters to her friends and former suitors in Parliament, letters to the queen, and, of course, letters to her dead husband every day, writing in her perfect, no-nonsense script and telling the dead Sir John that she knows that her darling is still alive and that she looks forward to her inevitable reunion with him. He can see her telling the world that she does this. She will be sending sheaves and folios of letters to him off with the first rescue ships about now… Naval ships, to be sure, but also quite probably private ships hired with either the dwindling money of Lady Jane’s own fortune or by subscriptions from worried and rich friends.

Crozier, rising from his visions, tries to sit up in his bunk and smile. The chills make him shake like a topgallant in a gale. He vomits into the almost full pail. He falls back onto his sweat-soaked, bile-smelling pillow and closes his eyes to ride the waves of his seeing.

Whom would they send to save Erebus and Terror? Whom had they already sent?

Crozier knew that Sir John Ross would be champing at the bit to lead any rescue parties into the ice, but he also sees that Lady Jane Franklin will ignore the old man – she thinks him vulgar – and will choose his nephew, James Clark Ross, with whom Crozier had explored the seas around Antarctica.

The younger Ross had promised his young bride that he would never go on a sea exploration again, but Crozier sees that he could not refuse this request from Lady Franklin. Ross would choose to go with two ships. Crozier saw them sailing this coming summer of 1848. Crozier saw the two ships sailing north of Baffin Island, west through Lancaster Sound, where Sir John had sailed Terror and Erebus three years ago – he could almost make out the names on the bows of Ross’s ships – but Sir James would encounter the same relentless pack ice beyond Prince Regent Inlet, perhaps beyond Devon Island, that holds Crozier’s ships in thrall now. Next summer there will be no full thaw of the sounds and inlets Ice Masters Reid and Blanky had sailed them south through. Sir James Clark Ross will never get within three hundred miles of Terror and Erebus.

Crozier saw them turning back to England in the freezing early autumn of 1848.

He weeps as he moans and bites down hard on his leather strap. His bones are freezing. His flesh is on fire. Ants crawl everywhere on and under his skin.

His Second Sight sees there would be other ships sent, other rescue expeditions this year of our Lord 1848, some most likely launched at the same time or earlier than Ross’s search party. The Royal Navy was slow to act – a maritime sloth – but once in motion, Crozier knows, it tended to overdo everything it undertook. Wretched excess after interminable stalling was standard procedure for the Navy Francis Crozier has known for four decades.

In his aching mind, Crozier saw at least one other Naval expedition setting sail for Baffin Bay in search of the lost Franklins this coming summer and most probably even a third Naval squadron sent all the way around Cape Horn to rendezvous, theoretically, with the other search-party ships near the Bering Strait, searching for them in the western arctic, to which Erebus and Terror had never come within a thousand miles. Such ponderous operations would stretch into 1849 and beyond.

And this is only the beginning of the second week of 1848. Crozier doubts if his men will live to see the summer.

Would there be an overland party sent up from Canada to follow the Mackenzie River to the arctic coastline, then east to Wollaston Land and Victoria Land in search of their ships stranded somewhere along the elusive North-West Passage? Crozier is sure there will be. The chances of such an overland expedition finding them twenty-five miles out at sea to the northwest of King William Island are nil. Such a party would not even know that King William Island was an island.

Would the First Lord of the Admiralty announce in the House of Commons a reward for the rescue of Sir John and his men? Crozier thinks he will. But how much? A thousand pounds? Five thousand pounds? Ten thousand? Crozier closes tight his eyes and sees, as if on parchment hanging before him, the sum of twenty thousand pounds offered for anyone who “might render efficient assistance in saving the lives of Sir John Franklin and his squadron.”

Crozier laughs again, which brings on the vomiting again. He is shaking with cold and pain and the clear absurdity of the images in his head. All around him the ship groans as the ice crushes it. The captain can no longer tell the groaning of the ship from his own moans.

He sees an image of eight ships – six British, two American – clustered within a few miles of one another in mostly frozen anchorages that look to Crozier like Devon Island, near Beechey, or perhaps Cornwallis Island. It is obviously a late arctic-summer day, perhaps late August, mere days before the sudden freeze that may capture all of them. Crozier has the sense that this image is two or three years in the future of his terrible reality this moment in 1848. Why eight ships sent out for rescue would end up clumped together like this in one location rather than fanning out throughout thousands of square miles of the arctic to hunt for signs of Franklin’s passing makes no sense to Crozier whatsoever. It is the delusion of toxic madness.

The craft range in size from a small schooner and a yacht-sized craft far too flimsy for such serious ice work to 144-ton and 81-ton American ships strange to Crozier’s eye to an odd little 90-ton English pilot boat crudely fitted out for arctic sailing. There are also several proper British Naval vessels and steam cruisers. In his aching mind’s eye he can see the names of the ships – Advance and Rescue, these under the American flag, and Prince Albert for the former pilot boat, as well as the Lady Franklin at the head of the anchored British squadron. There are also two ships Crozier associates with old John Ross – the undersized schooner Felix and the totally inappropriate little yacht Mary. Finally there are two true Royal Navy vessels, Assistance and Intrepid.

As if viewing them through the eyes of a high-soaring arctic tern, Crozier can see that all eight of these ships are clustered within forty miles of one another – four of the smaller British craft at Griffith Island above the Barrow Strait, four of the remaining English ships at Assistance Bay on the south tip of Cornwallis, and the two American ships farther north, just around the eastern curve of Cornwallis Island, just across Wellington Channel from Sir John’s first winter anchorage at Beechey Island. None are within two hundred and fifty miles of the spot far to the southwest where Erebus and Terror lie trapped.

A minute later, a mist or cloud clears, and Crozier sees six of these vessels anchored within a quarter of a mile of one another just off the curve of a small island’s shoreline.

Crozier sees men running across frozen gravel under a vertical black cliff wall. The men are excited. He can almost hear their voices in the freezing air.

It is Beechey Island, he is sure. They have found the weathered wooden headboards and graves of Stoker John Torrington, Seaman John Hartnell, and Marine Private William Braine.

However far in the future this fever-dream discovery is, Crozier knows, it will do him and the other men of Erebus and Terror no good whatsoever. Sir John had left Beechey Island in a mindless hurry, sailing and steaming the first day the ice relented enough to allow the ships to leave their anchorage. After nine months frozen there, the Franklin Expedition had left not so much as a note saying which direction they were sailing.

Crozier had understood at the time that Sir John did not feel it necessary to inform the Admiralty that he was obeying their orders by sailing south. Sir John Franklin always obeyed orders. Sir John assumed that the Admiralty would trust that he had done so again. But after nine months on the island – and after building the proper cairn and even leaving a cairn of pebble-filled Goldner food cans behind as a sort of joke – the fact remained that the message cairn at Beechey Island was left empty contrary to Franklin’s orders.

The Admiralty and Discovery Service had outfitted the Franklin Expedition with two hundred airtight brass cylinders for the express purpose of leaving behind messages of their whereabouts and destination along the entire course of their search for the North-West Passage, and Sir John had used… one: the useless one sent to King William Land twenty-five miles to the southeast of their present position, cached a few days before Sir John was killed in 1847.

On Beechey Island, nothing.

On Devon Island, which they had passed and explored, nothing.

On Griffith Island, where they had searched for harbours, nothing.

On Cornwallis Island, which they had circumnavigated, nothing.

Down the entire length of Somerset Island and Prince of Wales Island and Victoria Island along which they had sailed south for the entire summer of 1846, nothing.

And now, in his dream, the rescuers in the six ships – now all on the verge of being frozen in themselves – were looking north to what open sea remained up the Wellington Channel toward the North Pole. Beechey Island revealed no clues whatsoever. And Crozier could see from his magical arctic tern’s high viewpoint that Peel Sound to the south – down which Erebus and Terror had found their way a year and a half ago during that brief summer thaw – was now, in this future summer, a solid sheet of white as far as the men on Beechey Island and sailing Barrow Strait could see.

They never even consider that Franklin could have gone that way… that he could have obeyed orders. Their attention – for the coming years, since Crozier sees that they are frozen in solid now in Lancaster Sound – is to search to the north. Sir John’s secondary orders had been that if he could not continue his way south to force the Passage, he should turn north to sail through the theoretical rim of ice into the even more theoretical Open Polar Sea.

Crozier knows in his sinking heart that the captains and men of these eight rescue ships have all come to the conclusion that Franklin had gone north – precisely the opposite direction he had in fact sailed.

He wakes in the night. His own moaning has awakened him. There is light, but his eyes cannot stand the light so he tries to understand what is happening just through the burning of touch and the crash of sound. Two men – his steward, Jopson, and the surgeon, Goodsir – are stripping him of his filthy and sweat-soaked nightshirt, bathing him with miraculously warm water, and carefully dressing him in a clean nightshirt and socks. One of them tries to feed him soup with a spoon. Crozier vomits up the thin gruel, but the contents of his full-to-the-brim vomit pail are frozen solid and he is vaguely aware of the two men cleaning the deck. They make him drink some water and he falls back into his cold sheets. One of them spreads a warm blanket over him – a warm, dry, unfrozen blanket – and he wants to weep with gratitude. He also wants to speak but is slipping back into the maelstrom of his visions and cannot find or frame the words before all words are lost to him again.

He sees a boy with black hair and greenish skin curled in a fetal position against a brick-tile wall the colour of urine. Crozier knows that the boy is an epileptic in an asylum, in some bedlam somewhere. The boy shows no movement except for his dark eyes, which constantly flicker back and forth like a reptile’s. That shape am I.

As soon as he thinks this, Crozier knows that this is not his fear. It is some other man’s nightmare. He was briefly in some other mind.

Sophia Cracroft enters him. Crozier moans around the biting strap.

He sees her naked and straining against him at the Platypus Pond. He sees her distant and dismissive on the stone bench at Government House. He sees her standing and waving – not at him – in her blue silk dress on the dock at Greenhithe on the May day that Erebus and Terror sailed. Now he sees her as he has never seen her before – a future-present Sophia Cracroft, proud, grieving, secretly happy to be grieving, renewed and reborn as her aunt Lady Jane Franklin’s full-time assistant and companion and amanuensis. She travels everywhere with Lady Jane – two indomitable women, the press will call them – Sophia, almost as much as her aunt, always visibly earnest and hopeful and strident and feminine and eccentric and bent to the task of cajoling the world to rescue Sir John Franklin. She will never mention Francis Crozier, not even in private. It is, he sees at once, a perfect role for Sophia: brave, imperious, entitled, able to play the coquette for decades with the perfect excuse for avoiding commitment or real love. She will never marry. She will travel the world with Lady Jane, Crozier sees, never publicly giving up hope that the missing Sir John will be found, but – long after real hope is surrendered – still enjoying the entitlement, sympathy, power, and position that this once-removed widowhood affords her.

Crozier tries to vomit, but his stomach has been empty now for hours or days. He can only curl up and suffer the cramps.

He is in a darkened parlour in a cramped, fussily furnished American farm home in Hydesdale, New York, some twenty miles west of Rochester. Crozier has never heard of either Hydesdale or Rochester, New York. He knows that it is spring of this year, 1848, perhaps only a few weeks in his future. Just visible through a crack in the drawn, thick drapes, a lightning storm surges and flashes. Thunder shakes the house.

“Come, Mother!” cries one of two girls at the table. “We promise you will find this edifying.”

“I will find it terrifying,” says the mother, a drab middle-aged woman with a perpetual frown line bisecting her forehead from her tightly pulled, greying bun to her heavy, frowning eyebrows. “I don’t know why I allow you to talk me into this.”

Crozier can only marvel at the flat ugliness of the American rural dialect. Most of the Americans he has known have been defecting sailors, U.S. Navy captains, or whalers.

“Hurry, Mother!” The girl commanding her mother in such a bossy tone is 15-year-old Margaret Fox. She is modestly dressed and attractive in a simpering and not especially intelligent way that Crozier has noticed is often the case with the few American women he has met socially. The other girl at the table is Margaret’s 11-year-old sister Catherine. The younger girl, her pale face only just visible in the flickering candlelight, more resembles her mother, down to the dark eyebrows, too-tight bun, and incipient frown line.

The lightning flashes in the gap between dusty drapes.

The mother and two girls join hands around the circular oak table. Crozier notices that the lace doily on the table has yellowed with age. All three females have their eyes closed. Thunder shakes the single candle’s flame.

“Is someone there?” asks 15-year-old Margaret.

A crashingly loud rap. Not thunder, but a crack, as if someone has struck wood with a small mallet. Everyone’s hands are in sight.

“Oh my!” cries the mother, obviously ready to throw her hands up over her mouth in fear. Her two daughters hold tight and keep her from breaking the circle. The table rocks from their tugging.

“Are you our Guide tonight?” asks Margaret.

A loud RAP.

“Have you come to hurt us in any way?” asks Katy.

Two even louder RAPs.

“See, Mother?” whispers Maggie. Closing her eyes again, she says in a theatrical whisper, “Guide, are you the gentle Mr. Splitfoot who communicated with us last night?”

RAP.

“Thank you for convincing us last evening that you were real, Mr. Splitfoot,” continues Maggie, speaking almost as if she were in a trance. “Thank you for telling Mother the details about her children, telling all our ages, and for reminding her of the sixth child who died. Will you answer our questions tonight?”

RAP.

“Where is the Franklin Expedition?” asks little Katy.

RAP RAP RAP rap rap rap rap RAP RAP rap RAP RAP… the percusssions go on for half a minute.

“Is this the Spiritual Telegraph you spoke of?” whispers their mother.

Maggie shushes her. The rapping breaks off. Crozier sees, as if he can float through wood and see through wool and cotton, that both girls are double-jointed and are taking turns snapping and popping their big toes against their second toes. It was an amazingly loud rapping sound from such small toes.

“Mr. Splitfoot says that the Sir John Franklin whom the papers say everyone is seeking is well and with his men, who are also all well but very frightened, on their ships and in the ice near an island five days’ sail south of the cold place where they stopped their first year out,” intones Maggie.

“It is very dark where they are,” adds Katy.

There come more rappings.

“Sir John tells his wife, Jane, not to worry,” interprets Maggie. “He says that he shall see her soon – in the next world, if not in this one.”

“Oh my!” Mrs. Fox says again. “We have to call for Mary Redfield and Mr. Redfield, and Leah, of course, and Mr. and Mrs. Duesler, and Mrs. Hyde, and Mr. and Mrs. Jewell…”

“Ssshhhh!” hisses Katy.

RAP, RAP, RAP, rapraprapraprap, RAP.

“The Guide does not want you to speak when He is leading us,” whispers Katy.

Crozier moans and bites his leather strap. The cramps that had begun in his gut now rack his entire body. He shakes from the chill one moment and throws off the blankets the next.

There is a man dressed like an Esquimaux – animal-fur parka, high furry boots, a fur hood like Lady Silence’s. But this man is standing on a wooden stage in front of footlights. It is very hot. Behind the man, a painted backdrop shows ice, icebergs, a wintry sky. Fake white snow litters the stage. There are four overheated dogs of the type used by the Greenland Esquimaux lying on the stage, their tongues lolling.

The bearded man in the heavy parka is talking from the white-speckled podium. “I speak to you today for humanity, not for money,” says the little man. His American accent grates on Crozier’s aching ear as fiercely as had the teenaged girls’. “And I have traveled to England to speak to Lady Franklin herself. She wishes me Godspeed on our next expedition – contingent, of course, on whether we raise the money here in Philadelphia and in New York and in Boston to mount the expedition – and says that she would be honoured if the sons of the United States were to bring home her husband. So today I ask for your generosity, but only for the sake of humanity. I ask for this in Lady Franklin’s name, in her lost husband’s name, and in the secure hopes of bringing glory to the United States of America…”

Crozier sees the man again. The bearded fellow is out of his parka and naked and in bed in the Union Hotel in New York with a very young naked woman. It is a hot night and the bedclothes have been thrown back. There is no sign of the sledge dogs.

“Whatever may be my faults,” the man is saying, speaking softly because the window and transom are open to the New York night, “I have at least loved you. Were you an empress, darling Maggie, instead of a little nameless girl following an obscure and ambiguous profession, it would be the same.”

Crozier realizes that the young naked woman is Maggie Fox – only a few years older. She is still attractive in that simpering American way, even without her clothes on.

Maggie says in a tone much more throaty than the teenager’s imperious command Crozier heard earlier, “Dr. Kane, you know I love you.”

The man shakes his head. He has lifted a pipe from the bedside table and now frees his left arm from behind the girl to tamp in the tobacco and light it. “Maggie, my dear, I hear those words from your little deceitful mouth, feel your hair tumbling onto my chest, and would love to believe them. But you cannot rise above your station, my dear. You have many traits which lift you above your calling, Maggie… you are refined and lovable and, with a different education, would have been innocent and artless. But you are not worthy of a permanent regard from me, Miss Fox.”

“Not worthy,” repeats Maggie. Her eyes, perhaps her prettiest feature now that her plump breasts are covered from Crozier’s view, appear to be brimming with tears.

“I am sold to different destinies, my child,” says Dr. Kane. “Remember that I have my own sad vanities to pursue, even as you and your venial sisters and mother pursue your own. I am as devoted to my calling as you, poor child, can be to yours, if such theatrical spiritualist poppycock can be called a calling. Remember then, as a sort of a dream, that Dr. Kane of the Arctic Seas loved Maggie Fox of the Spirit Rappings.”

Crozier comes awake in the dark. He does not know where or when he is. His cubicle is dark. The ship seems dark. The timbers moan – or is that an echo of his own moans of the last hours and days? It is very cold. The warm blanket he seems to remember Jopson and Goodsir setting on him is now as damp and frozen as the other bedsheets. The ice moans against the ship. The ship continues its answering groans from pressured oak and cold-strained iron.

Crozier wants to get up but finds that he is too weak and hollow to stir. He can barely move his arms. The pain and visions roll over him like a breaking wave.

Faces of men he has known or met or seen in the Service.

There is Robert McClure, one of the most guileful and ambitious men Francis Crozier has ever known – another Irishman intent on making good in an English world. McClure is on the deck of a ship in the ice. Cliffs of ice and rock rise all around, some six or seven hundred feet high. Crozier has never seen anything like it.

There is old John Ross on the stern deck of a little ship – a sort of yacht – heading eastward. Heading home.

There is James Clark Ross, older and fatter and less happy than Crozier has ever seen him. The rising sun shines through ice-rimmed jib lines as his ship leaves the ice for the open sea. He is heading home.

There is Francis Leopold M’Clintock – someone Crozier somehow knows has searched for Franklin under James Ross and then come back on his own again in later years. What later years? How long from now? How far in our future?

Crozier can see images flit by as if from a magic lantern, but he does not hear answers to his questions.

There is M’Clintock sledging, man-hauling, moving more quickly and efficiently than Lieutenant Gore or any of Sir John’s or Crozier’s men ever have.

There is M’Clintock standing at a cairn and reading a note just pulled from a brass cylinder. Is it the note that Gore left on King William Land seven months ago? Crozier wonders. The frozen gravel and grey skies behind M’Clintock look the same.

Suddenly there is M’Clintock, alone on the ice and gravel, his sledging party visible coming up several hundred yards behind him in the blowing snow. He is standing in front of a horror – a large boat tied and lashed atop of a huge cobbled-together sledge made of iron and oak.

The sledge looks like something Crozier’s carpenter, Mr. Honey, would build. It has been assembled as if it was meant to last for a century. Every join shows care. The thing is massive – it must weigh at least 650 pounds. Atop it is a boat that weighs another 800 pounds.

Crozier recognizes the boat. It is one of Terror’s 28-footers – one of the pinnaces. He sees that it has been extensively rigged for river travel. The sails are furled and tied and shrouded and iced over.

Climbing onto a rock and looking into the open boat as if over M’Clintock’s shoulder, Crozier sees two skeletons. The teeth in the two skulls seem to gleam at M’Clintock and Crozier. One skeleton is little more than a heap of visibly chewed and heavily gnawed and partially devoured bones tumbled into a rough pile in the bow. Snow has drifted over the bones.

The other skeleton is intact, undisturbed, and still clothed in the tatters of what looks to be an officer’s greatcoat and layers of other warm clothing. The skull still has remnants of a cap on it. This corpse is sprawled on the after-thwarts, its skeletal hands extended along the gunwales toward two double-barreled shotguns propped there. At the body’s booted feet lie stacks of wool blankets and canvas clothing and a partially snow-covered burlap bag filled with powder-shot cartridges. Set on the bottom of the pinnace midway between the dead man’s boots, like a pirate’s booty about to be counted and gloated over, are five gold watches and what looks to be thirty or forty pounds of individually wrapped chunks of chocolate. Also nearby are 26 pieces of silverware – Crozier can see, and knows that M’Clintock can see, the personal crests of Sir John Franklin’s, Captain Fitzjames’s, six other officers’, and his – Crozier’s – on the various knives, spoons, and forks. He sees similarly engraved dishes and two silver serving plates sticking up out of the ice and snow.

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.”