Crozier felt dizzy and a little nauseated from thinking about the men’s names and faces again. He could almost hear their voices. He could hear their voices.
Puhtoorak had been correct: this place was now home to piifixaaq — resentful ghosts that stayed behind to haunt the living.
There was a corpse in Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier’s bunk.
As far as they could tell without lighting lamps and going down into the hold and orlop deck, this was the only dead body on board.
Why did he decide to die in my bunk? wondered Crozier.
He had been a man about Crozier’s height. His clothes — he’d died under blankets in a peacoat and watch cap and wool trousers, which was odd since they must have been sailing in full summer — gave no clue to his identity. Crozier had no wish at all to go through his pockets.
The man’s hands, exposed wrists, and neck were brown and mummified, shriveled, but it was his face that made Crozier wish that the Preston Patent Illuminator overhead was not allowing in as much light as it did.
The dead man’s eyes were brown marbles. His hair and beard were so long and wild that it seemed quite possible that they had continued growing for months after the man’s death. His lips had shriveled away to nothing and been pulled back far from the teeth and gums by tendons stretching and contracting.
It was the teeth that were so upsetting. Rather than having fallen out from scurvy, the front teeth were all there and very broad and an ivory yellow and impossibly long — three inches long, at least — as if they had grown the way a rabbit’s or rat’s teeth continue growing until, unless worn down by gnawing something solid, they curve in and cut the creature’s own throat.
These dead man’s rodent teeth were impossible, but Crozier was looking at them in the clear, grey evening light coming down through the domed skylight of his old cabin. It was not, he realized, the first impossible thing he had seen or experienced in the last few years. He suspected it might not be his last.
Let’s go, he signed to Silence. He did not want to thought-send here where things were listening.
He had to use a fire axe to hack his way up through the sealed and nailed-shut main hatch. Rather than ask himself who had sealed it and why — or if the corpse below had been a living man when the hatch had been sealed so tightly above him — he threw the axe aside, clambered up, and helped Silence up the ladder.
Raven was fussing himself awake, but Silence rocked him and he began to snore softly again.
Wait here, he signed and went below again.
First he brought the heavy theodolite and several of his old manuals up, took a quick reading of the sun, and jotted his bearings in the margin of the salt-stained book. Then he carried theodolite and books below and tossed them aside, knowing that fixing this ship’s position one last time was perhaps the most useless thing he’d ever done in a long life of doing useless things. But he also knew he’d had to do it.
Just as he had to do what he did next.
In the dark Gunner’s Storeroom on the orlop deck he split open three successive kegs of gunpowder — pouring the contents of the first on the orlop deck and down the ladder into the hold deck (he would not go down there), the contents of the second keg everywhere on the lower deck (and especially inside the open door of his own cabin), and the contents of the third keg in black trails along the canted upper deck where Silence waited with his children. Asiajuk and the others on the ice had come around to the port side and now watched from thirty yards away. The dogs continued to howl and strain to get away, but Asiajuk or one of the hunters had staked them to the ice.
Crozier wanted to stay in the open air, even with the afternoon light waning, but he made himself go below to the orlop deck again.
Carrying the last keg of lamp oil left on the ship, he spilled a trail of it on all three decks, taking care to douse the door and bulkhead of his own cabin. His only hesitation was at the entrance to the Great Room where hundreds upon hundreds of spines of books stared back at him.
Dear God, would it hurt if I took just a few of those to help get through the dark winters ahead?
But they now carried the dark inua of the death-ship in them. Almost weeping, he dashed lamp oil across them.
When he was finished pouring the last of the fuel on the upper deck, he flung the empty cask far out over the ice.
One last trip below, he promised Silence with his fingers. Go on to the ice now with the children, my beloved.
The Lucifer matches were where he had left them in the drawer of his desk three years earlier.
For a second he was sure that he could hear the bunk creak and the nest of frozen blankets stir as the mummified thing behind him reached for him. He could hear the dry tendons in the dead arm stretching and snapping as the brown hand with its long brown fingers and too-long yellow nails slowly rose.
Crozier did not turn to look. He did not run. He did not look back. Carrying the matches, he left his cabin slowly, stepping over the lines of black gunpowder and deck boards stained by the whale oil.
He had to go down the main ladder to throw the first match. The air was so bad here that the match almost refused to light. Then the gunpowder lit with a whump, ignited a bulkhead he’d soaked with oil, and raced forward and aft in the dark along its own trail of fire.
Knowing that the orlop deck fire alone would have been enough — these timbers were dried to tinder after six years in this arctic desert — he still took time to light the lines of powder on the lower deck and open upper deck.
Then he jumped the ten feet to the ramp of ice on the west side of the ship and cursed as his never fully recovered left leg announced its pain. He should have clambered down the rigged rope ladders here as Silence obviously had had the sense to do.
Limping like the old man he was sure he would soon be, Crozier walked out onto the ice to join the others.
The ship burned for almost an hour and a half before it sank.
It was an incredible conflagration. Guy Fawkes Day above the Arctic Circle.
He definitely wouldn’t have needed the gunpowder or lamp oil, he realized while watching. The timbers and canvas and boards were so leached of moisture that the entire ship went up like one of the incendiary mortar bombs it had been designed to launch so many decades ago.
Terror would have sunk anyway, as soon as the ice thawed here in a few weeks or months. The axe-hole in its side had been its death wound.
But that is not why he burned it. If asked — which he never would be — he could not have explained why it had to be burned. He knew that he did not want “rescuers” from British ships poring over the abandoned ship, carrying tales of it home to frighten the ghoulish citizens of England and to spur Mr. Dickens or Mr. Tennyson on to new heights of maudlin eloquence. He also knew that it wouldn’t have been only tales these rescuers would have brought back to England with them. Whatever had taken possession of the ship was as virulent as the plague. He had seen that with the eyes of his soul and smelled it with all his human and sixam ieua senses.
The Real People cheered when the burning masts collapsed.
They’d all been forced to move back a hundred yards. Terror burned its own death-hole in the ice, and shortly after the flaming masts and rigging fell, the burning ship began hissing and bubbling its way to the depths.