The Terror

by Dan Simmons

it’s true that the ice pack squeezing ever more tightly against Terror is always rumbling, moaning, cracking, snapping, roaring, or screaming.

In Dr. McDonald’s opinion, her tongue had not been sliced off but had been chewed off near its root, either by Silence herself or by someone or something else.

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.

As far as the World Beyond our intrepid Expedition is concerned, as Hamlet said, The rest is silence.

There is a smear of red ice on the railing where he must have been standing when he saw the large shape coming at him through the blowing snow.

Streaks of blood, looking quite black in the lantern light, lead out beyond the fire holes into the ever-changing maze of pressure ridges and ice spires, all more sensed than seen in the darkness. “It wants us to follow it out there, sir,” says Second Lieutenant Hodgson,

Shaking the stocking, Crozier looks into Lady Silence’s eyes. They are as black as the holes in the ice through which the Terrors lowered their dead until even those holes froze solid.

It just went back down into the ice—like a shadow going away when the sun goes behind a cloud—and by the time we got to Lieutenant Gore he was dead.

Something huge and wet rose between him and the light. The darkness was absolute. His inches of breathable air were suddenly taken away, filled with the rankest of carrion breath against his face.

The men knew. Crozier knew what they knew. They knew it was the Devil out there on the ice, not some overgrown arctic bear.

Also, Davey’s hair, which had been a rich reddish brown the first week in November, was pure white when he came out of his funk. Some of the men said that Lady Silence had put a hex on Leys.

There seemed to be two holes punched into that pale triangle of a head—eyes?—but they were at least fourteen feet above the deck.

“I find myself wondering if we might have encountered one of the last members of some ancient species—something larger, smarter, faster, and infinitely more violent than its descendant, the smaller north polar bear we see in such abundance.”

Goodsir wanted to scream. He could feel the presence of something down on this dark hold deck with them. Something huge and not human.

Harry Goodsir felt as if he were watching all this from a great distance. The professional part of his mind noticed with cool detachment that the furnace, as poorly banked as the low coal flames had been, had melted the man’s eyes, burned away his nose and ears, and turned his face into the texture of an overbaked, bubbling raspberry flan.

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. Crozier felt none of that despair. Not yet. More important to him at the moment was the blue flame of determination that still burned small but hot in his breast—I will live.

The mirage image had been a final offering from some evil arctic god that seemed intent on tormenting them all.

“You’re late,” said Blanky. He could not help it that his teeth were chattering. “I’ve been expecting you for a long time.” He threw his peg leg and its rattling harness at the shape. The thing did not try to dodge the crude missile.

The five boats were now officially named Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short. Crozier had grinned at this. It meant the men were not so far gone into hunger and despair that their English sailors’ black humour did not still hold a cutting edge.

The ice boulder turned.

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.

It leaned its huge upper body over the gunwales. It huffed a fog of ice crystals into the air between Hickey and the bow and the caulker’s mate inhaled the carrion breath of a thousand centuries of death-dealing. Hickey would have fallen to his knees and worshipped the creature at that moment if movement had been an option, but he was quite literally frozen in place. Even his head would no longer turn.

The wind came up and howled around the pinnace and sledge, creating distinct musical notes. Hickey imagined a mad god-thing from Hell in a white fur coat playing a bone flute. It came for him next.

The Tuunbaq, deprived of its monstrous spirit form but still monstrous in essence, soon changed form—as all tupilek do—into the most terrible living thing it could find on Earth. It chose the shape and substance of the smartest, stealthiest, most deadly predator on Earth—the white northern bear—but was to the bear in size and cunning as a bear itself is to one of the dogs of the Real People.

They could not kill this God That Walked Like a Man—even Sila, the Spirit of the Air, and Sedna, the Spirit of the Sea, could not kill the talipek Tuunbaq. But they could contain it. They could keep it from coming south and killing all of the human beings and all of the Real People.

These sixam ieua were able to communicate directly with the Tuunbaq—not through the language of the tuurngait helping-spirits as the mere shaman had attempted, but by directly touching the Tuunbaq’s mind and life-soul. The spirit-governors-of-the-sky learned to summon Tuunbaq with their throat singing.

The aurora casts curtains of light from the starry zenith to the white-ice horizon, sending shimmers to the north, to the east, to the south, and to the west. All things, including the white man and brown woman, are tinted alternately in crimson, violet, yellow, and blue.

Fur dripping like a priest’s wet and clinging white vestments. Burn scars raw amid the white. Teeth. Black eyes not three feet from his own and looking deep into him, predator’s eyes searching for his soul… searching to see if he has a soul. The massive triangular head bobs lower and blots out the throbbing sky.