The Terror

by Dan Simmons

the Excellent was a damned three-decker that was old before Noah had fuzz around his dongle.

The white terror had come out from behind a pressure ridge, torn off the seaman’s arm, and smashed his ribs to splinters in an instant, disappearing before the armed guards on deck could raise their shotguns.

stones. “Lieutenant,” persisted Best. “It’s Tom Hartnell.” “What about him?” snapped Gore. He

when his store of whiskey was gone, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was going to blow his brains out.

I’d feed Lord Stanley his balls cold in a fried dough of his own shit, thought Crozier. He said nothing but nodded that he forgave Sophia her choice of language.

Crozier’s private part went from parade rest to top of the mizzen in two seconds.

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

Handford.” Handford’s pale blob of a face nodded

other ship’s boys after supper on a tropical evening. He couldn’t pull himself onto the top spar—it was simply too coated with ice—but he found the shroud lines there and shifted from

The thing was not leaving. It paced round and round the three-berg box like some restless carnivore in one of London’s trendy new zoological gardens. But it was Blanky who was in a cage.

Men who read a lot have a more sensitive disposition, added Fowler. And if the poor bloke hadn’t read that stupid story by that American, he wouldn’t have suggested the different-coloured compartments for Carnivale—an idea we all thought was Wonderful at the time—and none of this would have happened.

Young Francis did not believe in Second Sight. It was about that same time that he realized that he also did not believe in God. He went to sea. He believed in everything he learned and saw there, and some of these sights and lessons were strange indeed.

But this form of M’Clintock-Hobson stands like an altar boy as a trembling Crozier—now a child, now a scarred man in his fifties—approaches the altar rail, kneels, puts his head back, opens his mouth, and extends his tongue for the Forbidden Wafer—the Body of Christ—pure transubstantiated cannibalism to all the other adults in Crozier’s village and family and life.

“Quite the contrary,” said Bridgens. “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.”

As Lyell showed and our Mr. Darwin seems to understand, Time… with a capital T, Harry… may be much vaster than we have the ability to comprehend.”

A mob is a brainless thing.”

The whiskey never seemed to compromise the man’s competence—he’s a fine sailor and officer—but it put a… buffer… a barrier… between him and the world. Now he’s there more. Missing nothing. I don’t know how else to describe it.”

“Toodaloo,” he said—three syllables he would agonize over for weeks to come, cringing in his bunk out of embarrassment even though she could not have understood the inanity and absurdity and inappropriateness of it. But still…

cattywampus

The young man obviously had meant it as a joke to lessen the tension but was rewarded with baleful and angry stares.

clean out the bowels and belly in an explosive manner—but

Doesn’t it? asked another, more fearful part of Crozier’s mind.

Another time on this very expedition, in the spring of 1847, Crozier had come on deck to find black spheres floating in the southern sky. The spheres turned into solid figure eights, then divided again into what looked like a symmetrical progression of ebony balloons and then, within the course of a quarter hour, evaporated completely.

Christ-fucking cob.

Crozier wondered idly if the gilt buttons on the uniform—each bearing the image of an anchor surrounded by a crown—would be there when nothing else but the boy’s bleached bones and the gold gunnery medal survived the long process of decay.

Aylmore, we all knew, harboured a small and resentful Soul.

A Million years of Man’s Medicinal Progress will never reveal the secret Condition and sealed Compartments of the Human Soul.

Peglar smiled at this even as his scrotum tightened at the thought of going into that black, cold water.

Sometimes the hunters knelt on the ice to lap at the blood.

only think about ending his own life because the fear that thought itself might continue on the other side of this mortal veil, “perchance to dream,” kept him from acting even toward quick, decisive, cold-blooded self-murder.)

St. Augustine when he said that the only real sin is human pain.

If any man on the Franklin Expedition understood that the human body was a mere animal vessel for the soul—and only so much meat once that soul had departed—it was their surviving surgeon and anatomist, Dr. Harry Goodsir.

The weakness radiating out from his center consumed him.

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.

The beauty of being dead, he knows now, is that there is no pain and no sense of self. The unhappy news about being dead, he knows now, is—just as he had feared many times when considering self-murder and rejecting it for just this reason—there are dreams. The happy news about this unhappy news is that the dreams are not one’s own. Crozier floats in this warm, buoyant sea of nonself and listens to dreams that are not his own.

What is hunting but one soul seeking out another soul and willing it into the ultimate submission of death?

For three days they both fast. They eat nothing, drinking water in an attempt to quell their belly’s rumblings; they leave the tent for long hours each day, even when the snow comes, to exercise and relieve tension.

but the voice of his unborn son.

Puhtoorak had been correct: this place was now home to piifixaaq—resentful ghosts that stayed behind to haunt the living.

The dead man’s eyes were brown marbles. His hair and beard were so long and wild that it seemed quite possible that they had continued growing for months after the man’s death. His lips had shriveled away to nothing and been pulled back far from the teeth and gums by tendons stretching and contracting.