Archive of Our Own ^beta

No one could have seen it coming.

They might have, had they observed close enough. There are always signs , when something so calamitous is about to happen. She had grown less playful, over the last couple of weeks; in the past few days, she was downright surly, scowling at Fitzjames and Le Vesconte when they tried to pet her and actually hissing at Mr. Hoar when he tried to feed her. All of this was brushed aside though; there were more pressing concerns, like being stuck on the ice and whatnot. 

They would pay the price for their carelessness. Jacko made sure of that.

They were made aware of the beast’s attack by a blood-curdling scream. Who knows what sparked her wrath? All they saw was the state of Sir John’s body in the aftermath. He died with his eyes wide open, horror made plain by his entire countenance– enhanced by the fact that Jacko had torn a gaping hole on the side of his neck. It was a mess of flesh and blood; in fact, she had managed to bite him down to the bone . Fitzjames and Hoar had rushed over to their captain’s cabin as soon as they heard his cry; Hoar almost fainted at the sight. 

The thin trail of blood leading out of the cabin was, at least in the immediate aftermath of the captain’s passing, overlooked . 

Dr. Stanley confirmed it was the monkey’s bite– too small and too vicious to be produced by anyone or anything else. Only Fitzjames and the lieutenants were made aware of that fact; to everyone else, his tragic passing was explained away as a heart attack. Goodsir was made to cut a piece of skin from the captain’s leg in order to sew it over his wound. Stanley had explained nothing to him, and he dared ask no questions. But he did not forget what he saw.

The monkey was nowhere to be found, initially. But soon she grew hungry again, and made herself known. 

A sneaky thing she was; there was a definite method to her madness. She found Des Voeux in the hold– only the devil knew what he went to do there, he hadn’t been ordered down, but there he was anyway. She tore off his manhood first, rendering his nether regions an unrecognizable mess which was somehow even more disturbing than her work on Sir John. It must have made him fall down; he probably tried to fight the thing off, if all the bites and scratches covering his arms and hands were an indication of how the battle went down. Then, she went for the jugular just as she had with the Captain; she topped it all off by pissing on his face. It was all so deliberate and organized it felt like something near a work of art– the product of a maddened genius. 

It was hard to explain away the death of a healthy 19-year-old without straining credulity, but they tried anyway. They attributed it to a previously unknown heart condition, discovered after the supposed performance of an autopsy. Few bought that.

Fairholme was next. He seems to have died as he lived: very quietly. He was known as a deep sleeper, and passed on not from grievous injuries but due to suffocation. It is believed that she might have landed gently on his face as he slept, soft enough not to wake him, but applying enough pressure to ensure he was smothered to death. She feasted on him afterwards, of course, but this she also did quietly, and he was not discovered until the morning– his head having been nearly severed from his neck by her work. They said to others he choked to death on a biscuit; an explanation which, naturally, was Le Vesconte’s idea. But it seemed as if Jacko was offended by this slight against the man she liked well enough to murder courteously and not viciously, and so Le Vesconte was next.  

This kill she seems to have relished; it was the first one for which she had an audience, and it exposed what had previously been a closely-guarded secret: there was a killer on the loose, and it was fucking Jacko of all people. It happened during a watch, in broad daylight– and yet no one saw where exactly she came from. All they saw was her grabbing Le Vesconte by his lovely gray hair, ripping large chunks of it out of his head, and then clawing out his eyes. The others, too stunned to intervene, watched as in less than a minute she made her way to his throat, savaged it, and then disappeared.

For a little while afterwards, having made such a spectacle of herself, she seemed content with only taking bits and chunks from a few unlucky sailors. Charles Best lost his big toe on his left foot; William Pilkington had to get by with half of his right ear missing. Lieutenant Gore lost a significant chunk of his lovely nose. Mutiny hung in the air and made it heavy; a desperate solution was worked out, sending all the men to berth on Terror for as long as the beast continued her rampage. Crozier had not believed it, at first; only when Dr. Stanley came on-board his ship, detailing with an impossibly calm tone how that little creature had somehow bitten off the little fingers of both of his hands, did he give any credence to that bizarre claim. And so the ship’s company were all crammed into Terror , which strained to accommodate all the paranoid and broken men which went to her for shelter.

If sending the men to Terror was a desperate solution, another one– one which would have been unthinkable at the start of this whole mess– was worked out. And it was suggested by Goodsir, of all people. Jacko had developed a taste for killing officers, he argued; it was likely that she was coming for Fitzjames, being as he was now the highest-ranking officer on the ship. Would it not be wise to make a… sacrifice? She would take him down, yes, but he would also take her with him. It took a little work, but eventually the much-depleted officer corps of Erebus – which now consisted of only Lieutenant Gore and Fitzjames himself– agreed. Stanley protested strenuously; he grew red with rage, and went so far as to state that his assistant must have lost what little he had of his mind with this outrageous suggestion. This in turn caused Lieutenant Gore to grow quite agitated, and for a brief moment it was thought that perhaps there would be a new death on the ship that was only tangentially related to Jacko-the-Ripper. But eventually all animosities were settled, and James Fitzjames set to work in becoming a martyr.

They prepared a poison; he scrubbed his whole body with it. To ensure that he would at least not be in pain as Jacko sunk her teeth into him and ate, he also drank the poison, sharing his last minutes in this world with Lieutenant Gore. Then the lieutenant retired for the night; he did not sleep, but essentially passed out after weeping and sobbing for hours and hours. He was roused the next day by Goodsir, who confirmed with a nod that their plan had worked out. The beast was gone, killed by her own monstrous appetites. And so was Fitzjames. All was well .

Much later on– after the rotten tins, the fire, their death march, his unlikely survival– Captain Crozier would reach the conclusion that it was for the best that no news of this would ever reach England. After all, how in the bloody hell would they be able to explain that?