Every Beast, Every Creeping Thing

Goodsir wakes from his thin sleep to the sounds of a murder — scuffling boots kicking up a spill of stones, a stifled cry, the rub of cloth against cloth. As a valued prisoner Goodsir hadn’t been left to the tender mercies of the other mutineers, but to Solomon Tozer’s watchful eye and too-vigilant trigger finger. There is another man in the tent with them, and if Goodsir stays very still just as he is, propped up against the canvas like a dead man with his eyes scarcely open to the cold air, he may find out who. A nocturnal ambush seems unlikely, and none of the men are well enough to do so much as lift a canvas tent-flap without generating an unholy commotion. Only one of them so far goes unscathed.

The stink of unwashed bodies has long since lost its savor, it’s as inescapable as the cold or the creeping fatigue that dogs every last man of them, but there’s a queer smell in the air nonetheless, a slickly animal smell. Hickey — of course it is Hickey, it could only ever be one man, Hickey the unspotted lunatic with his stripes and his pretenses of greatness. Tozer is enacting his own mutiny on a would-be tyrant gone weak and weird with starvation — or Hickey is punishing his sentinel for nodding off on watch. When will it be over? If Goodsir is lucky he’ll be next. If he’s unlucky he’ll be asked to doctor the result.

It had been quick and brutal, however Hickey had done for Lieutenant Irving — the better part of the mutilations had been done after death, he’d simply knocked him down and kept punching holes until Irving’s resistance flagged and the life left him. There had been a great letting of blood, but none on Mr. Hickey’s clothes, or painted in his hair and beard. Had he done it naked? Had he knelt on Irving’s chest, naked as a lover, and sawn the scalp free from his skull in one unbroken flap?

Goodsir is too conscious of himself to move a muscle — but the sounds of struggle go on, the hard quick sounds of unmuffled breath and the twisting of cloth between the fingers of a fist — a man groans, Goodsir knows not which, and there comes the even more disconcerting sound of Sergeant Tozer’s laughter.

It only takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the broken darkness, and by then what he sees is unmistakable to him. The two men are going at it like a pair of stoats, all claws and teeth — Tozer is the topmost in the clinch until Hickey pulls him down alongside himself, and Goodsir sees an unnervingly white flash of naked leg hooked over Hickey’s side, a hairy thigh spotted black with bruises. The lewd clinch is burned into his eyes now, painful as his cramping legs, and Goodsir wishes dearly that he could forget it.

How could anyone think of coupling at a time like this? The prickling horror that he may be witnessing a rape sweeps over Harry like water, but in the half-light of their lantern he sees a hand jut out to stroke Tozer’s tangled hair. Tozer lifts his head into the touch, like a dog. Mr. Hickey’s dog.

Hickey doesn’t know that he’s being witnessed — or doesn’t care. Tozer doesn’t know or he’d give his witness hell for it — unless Hickey has him so in thrall that he won’t make a peep even for his own modesty’s sake. He’s a Royal Marine, for Christ’s sake, how had he fallen so quickly and so far? It sends a strange quake straight to Harry’s gut.

“You have to let me,” Tozer says, no longer laughing but in earnest. Hadn’t he been a faithful Navy man once — a loyal man — a Christian man? A Christian of a different stripe than Sir John Franklin or Lieutenant Irving, of course, but not a vicious man, not strange —

“Suit yourself,” Hickey says, sounding brutally disinterested. Goodsir cannot see his face, only his twisted hip canting toward his bedmate and his hand, his white hand making a fist in the cloth of his own spread-out greatcoat. In the dark even blue wool shines black.