The Terror

by Dan Simmons

  And all the while, one had to keep moving — waving arms and shaking legs and stamping feet — or extremities would freeze.

  On a normal arctic summer, Mr. Des Voeux reminded Goodsir, citing their previous summer of ice-breaking southward from Beechey Island as an example, temperatures at this latitude on a sunny June day with no wind might rise as high as 30 degrees Fahrenheit. Not this summer. Lieutenant Gore had taken measurements of the air temperature at 10:00 p.m. — the time they stopped to make camp with the sun still on the southern horizon and the sky quite bright — and the thermometer read only −2 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature at their midday tea and biscuit break had been +6 degrees.

  The Holland tent was small. In a storm it would save their lives but this first night out on the ice was clear with almost no wind, so Des Voeux and the five sailors decided to sleep outside on their wolfskins and tarps with only their Hudson’s Bay Company blanket sleeping bags for shelter — they would retreat to a very crowded tent if bad weather blew in — and after debating with himself for a moment, Goodsir decided to sleep outside with the men rather than inside with just Lieutenant Gore, as capable and affable a fellow as Gore was.

  The daylight was maddening. It grew dim around midnight, but the sky was as light as an 8:00 p.m. London evening in midsummer, and Goodsir was damned if he could fall asleep. Here he was more physically tired than ever before in his life and he couldn’t sleep. The aches and pains from the day’s exertions also impeded sleep, he realized. He wished he’d brought some laudanum with him. A small draught of that would moderate the discomfort and allow him to sleep. Unlike some surgeons with a doctor’s certificate to administer drugs, Goodsir was not an addict — he used the various opiates only to allow himself to sleep or to concentrate when he had to. No more than once or twice a week.

  And it was cold. After eating the heated soup and beef from the tins and walking through the ice jumble to find a private place to relieve himself — also an outdoor lifetime first for him and one, he realized, that must be accomplished quickly if frostbite of very important areas was to be avoided — Goodsir settled in on one of the large six-foot-by-five-foot wolfskin-blanket sleeping robes, unrolled his personal sleeping bag, and crawled deep into it.

  But not deep enough to get warm. Des Voeux had explained to him that he had to remove his boots and slide them down into the bag with him so that the leather would not freeze solid — at one point Goodsir had pricked the bottom of his foot on the nails hammered through the sole of one of the boots — but all the men left on all their other clothes. The wool — all the wool, Goodsir realized not for the first time that day — was soaked through with his sweat and exhalations from the long day. The endless day.

  For a while around midnight, the light deepened toward twilight enough that a few stars — planets, Goodsir now knew from a private lecture at the ad hoc observatory atop the iceberg two years ago — became visible. But the light never disappeared.

  Nor did the cold. No longer moving or exerting itself, Goodsir’s thin body was defenseless against the cold that came in through the sleeping bag’s too-wide opening and that crept up from the ice through the hair-out wolfskin pad beneath him, crawling through the thick Hudson’s Bay Company blankets like some cold-fingered predator. Goodsir began to shake. His teeth chattered.

  Around him, the four sleeping men — there were two on guard duty — snored so loudly that the surgeon wondered if the men on both ships miles northwest of them on the ice, beyond the countless pressure ridges — dear God, we have to cross those again going back — could hear the rasping and sawing and snorting.

  Goodsir was shaking. At this rate he was sure he would not survive until morning. They would try to roust him out of his blanket and bag and find only a frozen, curled corpse.

  He crawled as far down into the sewn-blankets sleeping bag as he could, pulling the ice-ridged opening closed above him, inhaling his own sour-sweat smell and exhalations rather than be exposed to that freezing air again.

  In addition to the insidious light and the even more insidious creeping cold, the cold of death, Goodsir realized, the cold of the grave and of the black cliff wall above the Beechey Island headstones, there was the noise; the surgeon had thought himself accustomed to the groan of ship’s timbers, occasional creakings and snappings of supercold ship’s metal in the dark of two winters, and the constant noise antics of the ice holding the ship in its vise, but out here, with nothing separating his body from the ice except a few layers of wool and wolfskin, the groaning and movement of the ice beneath him was terrible. It was like trying to sleep on the belly of a living beast. The sense of the ice moving beneath him, however exaggerated, was real enough to give him vertigo as he curled more tightly into a fetal position.

  Sometime around 2:00 a.m. — he had actually checked his pocket watch by the light filtering in through the bag opening — 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.

  Struggling with his sweat-frozen bag like a newborn trying to chew through its caul, Goodsir managed to free his head and shoulders. The freezing night air hit his face with enough cold force to make his heart stutter. The sky was already brighter with sunlight.

  “What?” he cried. “What has happened?”

  Second Mate Des Voeux and three of the seamen were standing on their sleeping bags, long knives they must have slept with in their gloved hands. Lieutenant Gore had burst from the Holland tent. He was fully dressed with a pistol in his bare — bare! — hand.

  “Report!” Gore snapped at one of the two sentries, Charlie Best.

  “It was the bears, Lieutenant,” said Best. “Two of them. Big bastards. They’ve been snooping around all night — you remember we saw them about half a mile out before we stopped to make camp — but they kept coming closer and closer, circling like, until finally John and me had to shoot at them to drive them away.”

  “John” was twenty-seven-year-old John Morfin, Goodsir knew, the other sentry this night.

  “You both fired?” asked Gore. The lieutenant had climbed to the highest point of nearby heaped snow and ice and was searching the area with his brass telescope. Goodsir wondered why the man’s bare hands hadn’t already frozen to the metal.

  “Aye, sir,” said Morfin. He was reloading his breech-loading shotgun, his wool gloves fumbling with the shells.

  “Did you hit them?” asked Des Voeux.

  “Aye,” said Best.

  “Didn’t do no good,” said Morfin. “Just with shotguns over about thirty paces. Them bears have thick hides and thicker skulls. Hurt ’em enough though that they went away.”

  “I don’t see them,” said Lieutenant Gore from ten feet up on his ice hill above the tent.

  “We think they come out of those little open holes in the ice,” said Best. “The bigger one was running that way when John fired. We thought it went down, but we went out on the ice far enough to see there weren’t no carcass there. It’s gone.”

  The sledge-hauling team had noticed those soft areas in the ice — not quite round, about four feet across, too large for the tiny breathing holes ring seals made, seemingly too small and too far separated for the white bears, and always crusted over with several inches of soft ice. At first, the holes had raised hopes for open water, but in the end they were so few and far between that they were only treacherous. Seaman Ferrier, walking ahead of the sledge late in the afternoon, had almost fallen through one, his left leg going in to above the knee, and they’d all had to stop long enough for the shivering sailor to change into different boots, woollies, socks, and trousers.

  “It’s time for Ferrier and Pilkington to take the watch anyway,” said Lieutenant Gore. “Bobby, fetch the musket from my tent.”

  “I’m better with shotgun, sir,” said Ferrier.

  “I’m comfortable with the musket, Lieutenant,” said the big Marine.

  “Get the musket then,
Pilkington. Peppering those things with shotgun pellets is just going to get them angry.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Best and Morfin, obviously shaking from their cold two hours on watch rather than from any tension, sleepily pulled off their boots and crawled into their waiting bags. Private Pilkington and Bobby Ferrier forced their swollen feet into boots retrieved from their bags and slouched off to the nearby ice ridges to keep watch.

  Shaking worse than ever, his nose and cheeks now joining his fingers and toes in feeling numb, Goodsir curled up deep in his bag and prayed for sleep.

  It did not come. A little more than two hours later, Second Mate Des Voeux began ordering everyone up and out of their bags.

  “We have a long day ahead of us, boys,” cried the mate in jovial tones.

  They were still more than twenty-two miles from the shore of King William Land.

  11

  CROZIER

  Lat. 70°-05′ N., Long. 98°-23′ W.

  9 November, 1847

  You’re frozen through, Francis,” says Commander Fitzjames. “Come aft to the Common Room for brandy.”

  Crozier would prefer whiskey, but brandy will have to serve. He precedes Erebus’s captain down the long, narrow companionway toward what had been Captain Sir John Franklin’s personal cabin and which is now the equivalent of Terror’s Great Room — a library and off-duty gathering place for officers and a meeting room when necessary. Crozier thinks that it says good things about Fitzjames that the commander kept his own tiny cubicle after Sir John’s death, refitting the spacious aft chamber into a common area and sometimes sick bay for surgery.

  The companionway is totally dark except for the glow from the Common Room and the deck is canted more steeply in the opposite direction from Terror, listing to port rather than starboard, down by the stern rather than bow. And although the ships are almost identical in design, Crozier always notices other differences as well. HMS Erebus smells different somehow — beyond the identical stench of lamp oil, dirty men, filthy clothes, months of cooking, coal dust, pails of urine, and the men’s breath hanging in the cold, dank air, there is something else. For some reason, Erebus stinks more of fear and hopelessness.

  There are two officers smoking their pipes in the Common Room, Lieutenant Le Vesconte and Lieutenant Fairholme, but both stand, nod toward the two captains, and withdraw, pulling the sliding door shut behind them.

  Fitzjames unlocks a heavy cabinet and pulls out a bottle of brandy, pouring a large measure into one of Sir John’s crystal water glasses for Crozier, a smaller amount for himself. For all of the fine china and crystal their late expedition leader loaded aboard for his and his officers’ own use, there are no brandy snifters. Franklin was a devout teetotaler.

  Crozier does no snifting. He drinks the brandy down in three gulps and allows Fitzjames to replenish it.

  “Thank you for responding so quickly,” says Fitzjames. “I expected a message in response, not for you to come in person.”

  Crozier frowns. “Message? I haven’t received a message from you in over a week, James.”

  Fitzjames stares a moment. “You didn’t receive a message this evening? I sent Private Reed to your ship with one about five hours ago. I presumed he was spending the night there.”

  Crozier shakes his head slowly.

  “Oh … damn,” says Fitzjames.

  Crozier pulls the woolen stocking from his pocket and sets it on the table. In the brighter light from the bulkhead lamp here there are still no signs of violence. “I found it during my walk over. Closer to your ship than mine.”

  Fitzjames takes the stocking and studies it sadly. “I’ll ask the men if they recognize it,” he says.

  “It could belong to one of mine,” Crozier says softly. He succinctly tells Fitzjames about the attack, the mortal wounding of Private Heather, and the disappearance of William Strong and young Tom Evans.

  “Four in one day,” says Fitzjames. He pours more brandy for both of them.

  “Yes. What is it you were sending me a message about?”

  Fitzjames explains there had been sightings of something large moving through the ice jumbles, just beyond the lanterns’ glow, all that day. The men had fired repeatedly but parties going onto the ice had found no blood nor other sign. “So I apologize, Francis, for that idiot Bobby Johns firing at you a few minutes ago. The men’s nerves are stretched very tightly.”

  “Not so tightly that they think that thing on the ice has learned how to shout at them in English, I hope,” Crozier says sardonically. He takes another sip of the brandy.

  “No, no. Of course not. It was pure idiocy. Johns will be off his rum ration for two weeks. I apologize again.”

  Crozier sighs. “Don’t do that. Rip him a new arsehole if you like, but don’t take his rum away. This ship feels surly enough already. Lady Silence was with me and wearing her God-damned hairy parka. Johns may have got a glimpse of that. It would have served me right if he’d blown my head off.”

  “Silence was with you?” Fitzjames allowed his eyebrows to ask the questions.

  “I don’t know what in hell she was doing out on the ice,” rasps Crozier. His throat is very sore from the day’s cold and his shouting. “I almost shot her myself a quarter mile from your ship when she crept up on me. Young Irving is probably turning Terror upside down as we speak. I made a huge mistake when I put that boy in charge of looking out for that Esquimaux bitch.”

  “The men think she is a Jonah.” Fitzjames’s voice is very, very soft. Sounds travel easily through the partitions in such a crowded lower deck.

  “Well why the hell shouldn’t they?” Crozier feels the alcohol now. He hasn’t had a drink since last night. It feels good in his belly and tired brain. “The woman shows up on the day this horror begins with that witch doctor father or husband of hers. Something has chewed her tongue out at the roots. Why the hell shouldn’t the men think she’s the cause of all this trouble?”

  “But you’ve kept her aboard Terror for more than five months,” says Fitzjames. There is no reproach in the younger captain’s voice, only curiosity.

  Crozier shrugs. “I don’t believe in witches, James. Nor Jonahs much, for that matter. But I do believe that if we put her out on the ice, the thing will be eating her guts the way it’s devouring Evans’s and Strong’s right now. And maybe your Private Reed’s as well. Wasn’t that Billy Reed, the redheaded Marine who always wanted to talk about that writer — Dickens?”

  “William Reed, yes,” says Fitzjames. “He was very fast when the men did footraces back on Disko Island two years ago. I thought that perhaps one man, with speed …” He stops and chews his lip. “I should have waited for morning.”

  “Why?” says Crozier. “It’s no lighter then. Or not much lighter at noon, for that matter. Day or night doesn’t mean anything anymore, and it won’t for another four months. And it’s not as if that damned thing out there only hunts at night … or even just in the dark, as far as that goes. Maybe your Reed will show up. Our messengers have gotten lost before out there in the ice and come in after five or six hours, shaking and cursing.”

  “Perhaps.” Fitzjames’s tone echoes his doubt. “I’ll send out search parties in the morning.”

  “That’s just what that thing wants us to do.” Crozier’s voice is very weary.

  “Perhaps,” Fitzjames says again, “but you just told me that you’ve had men out on the ice last night and all day today looking for Strong and Evans.”

  “If I hadn’t brought Evans with me when I was looking for Strong, the boy would still be alive.”

  “Thomas Evans,” says Fitzjames. “I remember him. Big chap. He was not really a boy, was he, Francis? He must be … have been … what? Twenty-two or twenty-three years old?”

  “Tommy turned twenty this May,” says Crozier. “His first birthday aboard was on the day after our departure. The men were in good spirits and celebrated his eighteenth birthday by shaving his head. He didn’t seem to mind. Those wh
o knew him say he was always big for his age. He served on HMS Lynx and before that on an East Indian merchantman. He went to sea when he was thirteen.”

  “As you did, I believe.”

  Crozier laughs a little ruefully. “As I did. For all the good it did me.”

  Fitzjames locks the brandy away in the cabinet and returns to the long table. “Tell me, Francis, did you actually dress up as a black footman to old Hoppner’s lady of rank when you were frozen in up here in … what was it, ’24?”

  Crozier laughs again but more easily this time. “I did. I was a midshipman on the Hecla with Parry when he sailed north with Hoppner’s Fury in ’24, trying to find this same God-damned Passage. Parry’s plan was to sail the two ships through Lancaster Sound and down the Prince Regent Inlet — we didn’t know then, not until John and James Ross in ’33, that the Boothia was a peninsula. Parry thought he could sail south around Boothia and go hell-bent for leather until he reached the coastline that Franklin had explored from land six, seven years earlier. But Parry left too late — why do these God-damned expedition commanders always start off too late? — and we were lucky to get to Lancaster Sound on ten September, a month late. But the ice was on us by thirteen September, and there was no chance of getting through the Sound, so Parry in our Hecla and Lieutenant Hoppner in Fury ran south, our tails between our legs.

  “A gale blew us back into Baffin Bay and we were lucky sods to find an anchorage in a tiny, pretty little bay off Prince Regent Inlet. We were there ten months. Froze our tits off.”

  “But,” says Fitzjames, smiling slightly, “you as a little black boy?”

  Crozier nods and sips his drink. “Both Parry and Hoppner were fanatics for fancy dress-up galas during winters in the ice. It was Hoppner who planned this masque he called the Grand Venetian Carnivale, set for the first day in November, right when morale dips as the sun disappears for months. Parry came down Hecla’s side in this huge cloak that he didn’t throw off even when all the men were assembled — most in costume, we had this huge trunk of costumes on each ship — and when he did throw down the cloak, we saw Parry as that old Marine — you remember the one with the peg leg what played the fiddle for ha’pennies near Chatham? No, you wouldn’t, you’re too young.