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They’d knighted Back after that, of course. It’s what England and the Admiralty did after you returned from a polar expedition that failed miserably, resulting in appalling loss of life; if you survived, they gave you a title and a parade.
From that time on, Franklin had never trusted an artist.
“Then, laddie,” whispered Ross, “if we’ve not heard from ye by 1848, I’ll come looking for you myself. I swear it.”
“My God!” cried Captain Sir John Franklin. “My God, woman, do you know what you’ve done? Don’t you know they lay the Union Jack over a corpse!”
At times, especially late at night with the ice moaning, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier realizes that HMS Terror is his wife, mother, bride, and whore. This intimate knowledge of a lady made of oak and iron, oakum and ballast, canvas and brass is the one true marriage he can and will ever know.
There is a solid cube of rats, extending more than four feet above the deck, as hundreds of them jostle for position to get at the frozen dead men.
“Holy fucking Jesus Christ fucking shit almighty,” gasps the carpenter.
Even Captain Sir John Franklin waved a bright red-and-green handkerchief at Lady Jane, his daughter, Eleanor, and his niece Sophia Cracroft, who waved back until the sight of the docks was obstructed by the following Terror.
Combined with the Words spoken in yesterday’s Divine Service, this, I have to assume, is the Best Possible Omen. 4 July, 1845— What a terrible Crossing of the North Atlantic to Greenland.
“Come on, God-damn your eyes!” Crozier screams. “Come out and try me instead of a boy, you hairy arse-licking rat-fucking piss-drinking spawn of a poxy Highgate whore!”
It would be ironic, he thinks, if their mystery guest, who first appeared on the day this nightmare began six months ago, has finally been carried off by the creature so linked with her appearance.
Hmmm
“God-damn it, woman,” he says softly. “You came a horny seaman’s second from being shot. Where the hell have you been, anyway?”
Sir John had never liked the idea of dogs on arctic expeditions. The animals were sometimes good for the men’s morale—at least right up to the point when the animals had to be shot and eaten—but they were, in the final analysis, dirty, loud, and aggressive creatures.
Harry D. S. Goodsir had begun drifting off into a state of semiconsciousness vaguely resembling sleep when he was pounded awake by two deafening explosions.
Crozier feels the alcohol now. He hasn’t had a drink since last night.
“They are, Captain. Or at least half of them. When we went to look at the body propped there at the stern, it fell over and… well… came apart. As best we can tell, it’s Billy Strong from the waist up. Tommy Evans from the waist down.”
Seaman Bobby Ferrier looked at the wood-and-metal poles holding the tent upright and said, “Well, fuck this,” and scrambled for the opening. Outside, cricket-ball-sized hail was crashing down, sending splinters of ice chips thirty feet into the air.
Goodsir had the urge to laugh but didn’t do so out of fear he might weep at the same time.
Dr. Goodsir was trying to save the life of the old Esquimaux man.” “Why?” asked Sir John.
There wasn’t ample room, especially with Sir John’s broad beam added to those beefy posteriors already lined up along the plank.
Odd sentence
He wondered if by some fluke of climate two tiny openings to the sea itself had remained open during all the intervening freeze and snow, thus revealing these two tiny circles of black water against the grey ice. The black circles blinked.
but then he reminded himself of one certainty: when his store of whiskey was gone, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was going to blow his brains out.
real
Suddenly the ice groaned louder, and the ship groaned back in response—trying to shift its place in the frozen sea but having no place to go. In recompense it squeezed itself tighter and moaned.
Wild few sentences
“Good Lord,” said Crozier. What he was thinking was, If I had been in John Franklin’s place, I would have called this Montagu fucker out to the field of honor and there put a bullet in each of his testicles before I placed a final one in his brain. “I hope that Sir John sacked the man.”
Crozier had never seen anything like it in a museum or zoo, much less in a lady’s bedroom. Of course, Francis Crozier had seen very few ladies’ bedrooms.
Crozier’s cheeks grew warm at the sound of the “my dear.”
Crozier looked to his right at the young woman. Sometimes it was very difficult to tell when Sophia was joking and when she was serious.
“Do your devils eat platypuses?” asked Crozier. The question was serious, but he was very glad that neither James Ross nor any of his crewmen had been around to hear him ask it.
Crozier could only stare. His easy smile became a dead man’s rictus. He was sure that his eyes were bulging out of his head, but he could not turn away, nor avert his gaze.
“Good God, Francis,” interrupted Sophia, “you are not going to propose marriage, are you?” Crozier had no answer to that. On one knee, both hands clasped and extended toward her as if in prayer, he waited.
you gotta kys
With luck he’d get almost two hours of a drunkard’s sleep before the next day of darkness and cold began. With luck, he thought as he drifted off, he wouldn’t wake at all.
Crozier drank heavily that week. The melancholia that usually hovered over him like a fog now lay on him like a heavy blanket.
“Berry?” he shouted toward the dark port side. He could almost feel the two syllables hurled astern by the howling wind.
Has it somehow blocked the forward hatch as well? At least it can’t climb the mainmast. Nothing that size can climb. No white bear—if it is a white bear—has experience climbing. The thing began climbing the attenuated mainmast.
he hurled himself into space with arms and hands extended, seeking one of the invisible hanging ratlines that should be—might be—could be—somewhere there,
Once again, Blanky acted before allowing himself time to think about the action. To think about this next move, sixty feet and more above the ice, was to decide not to do it.
At that instant Thomas Blanky realized that the seamen whom he’d silently cursed as being superstitious fools had been right; this thing from the ice was as much demon or god as it was animal flesh and white fur. It was a force to be appeased or worshipped or simply fled.
The Ice Master knew as he fell that his life now depended upon simple Newtonian arithmetic; Thomas Blanky had become a minor problem in ballistics.
What he was doing, Blanky realized, was running and dodging and swerving through his mental map of the ice fields and crevasses and small bergs that surrounded HMS Terror to the horizon.
Blanky’s last prayer was that one of his bones would lodge in the thing’s throat.
He could taste food, chat with his mates, drink his daily gill of rum—already his bandaged hands were capable of holding his pewter mug—and read a book if someone propped it up for him. He was determined to read The Vicar of Wakefield before he shuffled off what was left of his mortal coil. Blanky was alive and he planned to stay that way for as long as he could.
But what? All John Irving could think of as a reason for his serious breach of duty was that HMS Terror had enough rats aboard it already.
The monstrous thing looming as large as the ice boulders beside it, white bear or demon, was blowing down into her open mouth, playing her vocal cords as if her human throat were a reed instrument.
“Mr. Diggle,” he said to the fat Chinese woman with the huge breasts,
Men who read a lot have a more sensitive disposition, added Fowler.
Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it’s better for a man to stay inside his own mind.
It will not end. The pain will not end. The nausea will not end. The chills will not end. The terror will not end.
