The Terror

by Dan Simmons

“To do what?” demanded Peglar. “Just to wait to die?” “To wait in comfort, Harry.” “To die?” said Peglar, realizing that he was almost shouting. “Who the fuck wants to wait in comfort to die? At least if we get the boats to the coast — any of the boats — some of us may have a chance. There might be open water east to Boothia. We may be able to force passage up the river. At least some of us. And those who make it will at least be able to tell the rest of our loved ones what happened to us, where we were buried, and that we were thinking of them in the end.” “You are my loved one, Harry,” said Bridgens. “The only man or woman or child left in the world who cares whether I am alive or dead, much less what I may have thought before I fell or where my bones will lie.” Peglar, still angry, felt his heart pounding inside his chest. “You’re going to outlive me, John.” “Oh, at my age, and with my infirmities and proclivities toward illness, I hardly think …” “You’re going to outlive me, John,” grated Peglar. He shocked himself by the intensity of his voice and Bridgens blinked and fell silent.

“I want to say goodbye today and never have to do it again.” Bridgens nodded mutely. He was looking at his boots. The fog rolled over the boats and sledges and moved around them like some alien god’s cold breath. Peglar hugged him. Bridgens stood upright and brittle for a moment and then returned the hug, both men clumsy in their many layers and frozen slops.

Its eyes — a deeper blackness against the black silhouette — did not reflect the dying sun.

“The inlet,” sneered a seaman named George Thompson. The man was known for drunkenness and laziness. Crozier could not cast the first stone at him for the drinking, but he despised laziness.

Crozier decided that he would shoot Hickey first. His hand was on the pistol in his pocket. He would not even remove the weapon from the greatcoat for the first shot. He would shoot Hickey in the belly when he got three feet closer and then pull the pistol out and try to shoot the giant in the center of his forehead. No body shot was guaranteed to bring Manson down. As if his thinking about shooting had made it happen, there came the crack of a shot from the direction of the coastline. Everyone except Crozier and the caulker’s mate turned to see what was happening. Crozier’s gaze never left Hickey’s eyes. Both men turned their heads only when the shouting started.

The long awaited and Universally Cheered Open Water was a vicious Trap. The Ice will not give us up. And the creature from the ice will not allow us to leave.

Spare us a little, that we may recover our strength; before we also go hence and be no more.

What Crozier most wanted to do was to kill the thing itself. Unlike the majority of his men, he believed it was mortal — an animal, nothing more. Smarter, perhaps, than even the frighteningly intelligent white bear, but still a beast. If he could kill the thing, Crozier knew, the mere fact of its death — the pleasure of revenge for so many deaths, even if the rest of the expedition still were to die later from starvation and scurvy — would temporarily lift the morale of the survivors more than discovering twenty gallons of untapped rum.

How could Goodsir and a few other attendants to the dying survive the coming winter here? Crozier knew that the surgeon had voluntarily signed his death warrant by volunteering to stay behind with the doomed men and Goodsir knew his captain knew it. Neither man spoke of it.

“All this natural misery,” Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. “Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse? Can you answer me that, Mr. Hickey?” The caulker’s mate, Manson, Aylmore, Thompson, and Golding stared at the surgeon as if he had begun speaking Aramaic.

“You’re turning the caulker’s mate into a bogeyman,” said Des Voeux. “He done that to his self already,” said Andrews. “But not a bogeyman, the Devil. The actual Devil. Him and his tame monster, Magnus Manson. They sold their souls — God-damn them — and received some dark power for it. Mark my words.” “You’d think that one real monster would be enough for any arctic expedition,” said Robert Thomas. No one laughed. “It’s all one real monster,” Edward Couch said at last. “And not a new one to our race.”

Hodgson Insisted, I apologize again, Doctor. But I have to tell someone how Sorry I am for Betraying the Captain — who was always Good to Me — and for Allowing Mr. Hickey to take you Captive like This. I sincerely Regret it and I am Dreadfully Sorry. I Lay there Silently, Saying nothing, Giving the boy nothing.

Together, in a battle that lasted for ten thousand years and which left craters and rents and vacuums in the fabric of the spirit world itself, Sila and Naarjuk defeated the terrible Tuunbaq’s attack. As all tupilek who have failed in their assassination assignments are destined to do, the Tuunbaq then turned back to destroy its creator … Sedna. But Sedna, who had learned all of her lessons the hard way since even before her father had betrayed her so long ago, had understood the danger the Tuunbaq posed to her even before she created it, so now she activated a secret weakness she had built into the Tuunbaq, chanting her own spiritworld irinaliutit incantations. Instantly the Tuunbaq was banished to the surface of the Earth, never able to return to the spirit world nor to the deep bottom of the sea nor to hold pure spirit form in either place. Sedna was safe. The Earth and all its denizens, on the other hand, were no longer safe. Sedna had banished the Tuunbaq to the coldest, emptiest part of the crowded Earth — the perpetually frozen region near the north pole. She chose the far north rather than other distant, frozen areas because only the north, the center of the Earth to the many inuat gods, had shamans there with any history of dealing with angry evil spirits.

One soul, his older, more-tired soul, knows that he has been a failure in every way a man can be tested. His men — the men who trusted him to lead them to safety — are all dead or scattered. His mind hopes that some have survived, but in his heart, in his soul of his heart, he knows that any men so scattered in the land of the Tuunbaq are already dead, their bones bleaching some unnamed beach or empty ice floe. He has failed them all. He can, at the very least, follow them.

He does not want to return to Terror. Crozier has learned enough about survival in the past months that he thinks he can find his way back to Rescue Camp and even to Back’s River given enough time, hunting as he goes, building snow-houses or skin tents when the inevitable storms arise. He can seek out his scattered men this summer, ten months after he abandoned them, and find some trace of them, even it if takes years. Silence will follow him if he chooses this path — he knows she will — even though it means the death of everything she is and everything she lives for here.

Englishmen — especially the old arctic hands — love to believe that Esquimaux are primitive but peaceful people, slow to anger, always resistant to war and strife. But Crozier has seen the truth in his dreams: they are human beings, as unpredictable as any other race of man, and often descend into warfare and murder and, in hard times, even cannibalism.

Francis Crozier believes in nothing. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the last six months has persuaded him otherwise. Has it? Together, they pull the sledge farther out onto the pack ice.

I will see you in a few minutes, Crozier signed to Silence. She actually smiled. Do not be stupid, she signed. Your children and I are coming with you.

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 Francis Crozier inua still alive and well in Taliriktug had no illusions about life being anything but poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But perhaps it did not have to be solitary.