The Terror

by Dan Simmons

In this cold, teeth can shatter after two or three hours—actually explode—sending shrapnel of bone and enamel flying inside the cavern of one’s clenched jaws. Sometimes, Crozier knows from experience, you can hear the enamel cracking just before the teeth explode.

“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!”

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.

I was full of piss and vinegar in those days, not to mention too stupid to know better, in other words still in my twenties,

Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it’s better for a man to stay inside his own mind.

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.

Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse?

If there is a Hell—in which I no longer Believe, since this Earth and some of the People in it are Hell enough for any Universe—I would be and should be Cast Down to the Worst Bolgia of the Lowest Circle. I Don’t Care.

When a shaman gets nervous, Crozier knew, everyone gets nervous.