The Terror

by Dan Simmons

The lookout’s shotgun is propped against that altar. No man wants to touch metal out here in the cold, not even through mittens.

The two long boards from the outer hull have been smashed and bent inward by some inconceivable, irresistible force. Clearly visible in the light from the slightly shaking lantern are huge claw marks in the splintered oak—claw marks streaked with frozen smears of impossibly bright blood.

Lat. 70°-05′ N., Long. 98°-23′ W. 11 November, 1847 It has been one year, two months, and eight days since Sir John’s eventful conference aboard Erebus, and both ships are frozen in the ice roughly where they were that September day in 1846.

When the rum ran out—when the men’s daily noon supply of grog disappeared—then, Lieutenant Irving knew, as all officers in the Royal Navy knew, mutiny would become a much more serious concern.

Crozier drank heavily that week. The melancholia that usually hovered over him like a fog now lay on him like a heavy blanket.

The Ice Master was too injured and too exhausted to crawl any farther. Let whatever was going to happen to him happen now and may a Sailor’s God fuck to Hell this fucking thing that was going to eat him. Blanky’s last prayer was that one of his bones would lodge in the thing’s throat.

“The question now,” said Fitzjames, “is whether their many hours of labour and ingenuity have gone to serve the expedition… or the Devil.”

Crozier hurts to the cavity in the center of his self where he is sure his soul had resided until it floated away on a sea of whiskey over the decades.

Abandoning ship was the lowest point in any captain’s life. It was an admission of total failure. It was, in most cases, the end of a long Naval career. To most captains, many of Francis Crozier’s personal acquaintance, it was a blow from which they would never recover.

“ ‘In the midst of life we are in death,’ ” Fitzjames recited from memory,