“Mr. Hickey. Anything?”

“Nothing since them shots… that one shot… almost two hours ago, sir. Just a while ago I heard, I think I heard… maybe a scream, something, Captain… from out beyond the ice mountain. I reported it to Lieutenant Irving, but he said it was probably just the ice acting up.”

Crozier had been told about the sound of the shot from the direction of Erebus and had quickly come up on deck two hours ago, but there’d been no repetition of the sound and he’d sent no messenger to the other ship nor anyone out on the ice to investigate. To go out on the frozen sea in the dark now with that… thing… waiting in the jumble of pressure ridges and tall sastrugi was certain death. Messages were passed between the ships now only during those dwindling minutes of half-light around noon. In a few days, there would be no real day at all, only arctic night. Round-the-clock night. One hundred days of night.

“Perhaps it was the ice,” says Crozier, wondering why Irving hadn’t reported the possible scream. “The shot as well. Only the ice.”

“Yes, Captain. The ice it is, sir.”

Neither man believes it – a musket shot or shotgun blast has a distinctive sound, even from a mile away, and sound travels almost supernaturally far and clearly this far north – but it’s true that the ice pack squeezing ever more tightly against Terror is always rumbling, moaning, cracking, snapping, roaring, or screaming.

The screams bother Crozier the most, waking him from his hour or so of sound sleep each night. They sound too much like his mother’s crying in her last days… of that and his old aunt’s tales of banshees wailing in the night, predicting the death of someone in the house. Both had kept him awake as a boy.

Crozier turns slowly. His eyelashes are already rimmed with ice, and his upper lip is crusted with frozen breath and snot. The men have learned to keep their beards tucked far under their comforters and sweaters, but frequently they must resort to hacking away hair that has frozen to their clothing. Crozier, like most of the officers, continues to shave every morning, although, in the effort to conserve coal, the “hot water” his steward brings him tends to be just barely melted ice, and shaving can be a painful business.