The Terror

by Dan Simmons

Something roars not twenty feet from him. It could be the wind finding a new route through or around an icy serac or pinnacle, but Crozier knows that it isn’t. He sets the lantern down, fumbles in his pocket, pulls the pistol out, tugs off his mitten with his teeth, and, with just a thin woolen glove between his flesh and the metal trigger, holds the useless weapon in front of him. “Come on, God-damn your eyes!” Crozier screams. “Come out and try me instead of a boy, you hairy arse-licking rat-fucking piss-drinking spawn of a poxy Highgate whore!” There is no answer except the howl of the wind.

Pulling the sledge next to Silence under a sky filled with violent color, he reminds himself that Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier believes in nothing. Or rather, if he believes in anything, it is in Hobbes’s Leviathan. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This cannot be denied by any rational man.