The Terror

by Dan Simmons

Something, Francis Crozier suspects, has dug down through these tons of snow and tunneled through the iron-hard slabs of ice to get at the hull of the ship. Somehow the thing has sensed which parts of the interior along the hull, such as the water-storage tanks, are lined with iron, and has found one of the few hollow outside storage areas—the Dead Room—that leads directly into the ship. And now it’s banging and clawing to get in. Crozier knows that there’s only one thing on earth with that much power, deadly persistence, and malevolent intelligence. The monster on the ice is trying to get at them from below.

The true Arctic Council legends—most in their seventies—were, to the nervous Franklin that night, more like the coven of witches in Macbeth or like some cluster of grey ghosts than like living men. Every one of these men had preceded Franklin in searching for the Passage, and all had returned alive, yet not fully alive. Did anyone, Franklin wondered that evening, really return alive after wintering in the arctic regions?

“What is this?” he cried in alarm. “What is this? There’s a flag thrown over me!” Lady Jane stood, aghast. “You looked cold, John. You were shivering. I put it over you as a blanket.” “My God!” cried Captain Sir John Franklin. “My God, woman, do you know what you’ve done? Don’t you know they lay the Union Jack over a corpse!”

Even without the lantern, Crozier could find his way through the dark and rat-screech here; he knows every inch of his ship. At times, especially late at night with the ice moaning, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier realizes that HMS Terror is his wife, mother, bride, and whore. This intimate knowledge of a lady made of oak and iron, oakum and ballast, canvas and brass is the one true marriage he can and will ever know. How could he have thought differently with Sophia?

But it’s the mind analogy that bothers Crozier the most. Haunted and plagued by melancholia much of his life, knowing it as a secret weakness made worse by his twelve winters frozen in arctic darkness as an adult, feeling it recently triggered into active agony by Sophia Cracroft’s rejection, Crozier thinks of the partially lighted and occasionally heated but livable lower deck as the sane part of himself.

Shards and spears of ice reflect the lantern light through the foot-long holes in the hull, but in the centre is something much more disturbing—blackness. Nothing. A hole in the ice. A tunnel. Honey bends a piece of the splintered oak farther in so Crozier can shine his lantern on it. “Holy fucking Jesus Christ fucking shit almighty,” gasps the carpenter. This time he does not ask his captain’s pardon.

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.

I have not been able to Imagine a worse winter than the one we have suffered frozen into this small anchorage in the lee of Beechey Island itself, set in the cusp of larger Devon Island, but Commander Fitzjames and others have assured me that our Situation here—even with the Treacherous Pressure Ridges, Terrible Dark, Howling Storms, and Constantly Menacing Ice—would be a thousand times worse out beyond this anchorage, out where the Ice flows down from the Pole like a hail of Enemy Fire from some Borean god.

When the door is shut, Irving says, “It’s William Strong and Tommy Evans, sir. They’re back.” Crozier blinks. “What the devil do you mean, back? Alive?” He feels the first surge of hope he’s had for months. “Oh, no sir,” says Irving. “Just… one body… really. But it was propped against the stern rail when someone saw it as all the search parties were coming in for the day… about an hour ago. The guards on duty hadn’t seen anything. But it was there, sir. On Lieutenant Little’s orders, Shanks and I made the crossing as quickly as we could to inform you, Captain. Shanks Mare as it were.” “It?” snaps Crozier. “One body? Back on the ship?” This makes no sense at all to the Terror’s captain. “I thought you said both Strong and Evans were back.” Third Lieutenant Irving’s entire face is frostbite white now. “They are, Captain. Or at least half of them. When we went to look at the body propped there at the stern, it fell over and… well… came apart. As best we can tell, it’s Billy Strong from the waist up. Tommy Evans from the waist down.”

And more pertinent to the central question, why did one Francis Crozier keep returning to these terrible places time after time, serving a nation and its officers that have never recognized his abilities and worth as a man, even while he knew in his heart that someday he would die in the arctic cold and dark?

At that instant Thomas Blanky realized that the seamen whom he’d silently cursed as being superstitious fools had been right; this thing from the ice was as much demon or god as it was animal flesh and white fur. It was a force to be appeased or worshipped or simply fled.

Thomas Blanky did not give a good gob fart about buttoning his trousers and shirts. Not yet. He was alive. The thing on the ice had done its best to make him otherwise, but he was still alive. He could taste food, chat with his mates, drink his daily gill of rum—already his bandaged hands were capable of holding his pewter mug—and read a book if someone propped it up for him. He was determined to read The Vicar of Wakefield before he shuffled off what was left of his mortal coil. Blanky was alive and he planned to stay that way for as long as he could. In the meantime, he was strangely happy.

Irving saw the bobbing of both heads—creature’s and Esquimaux’s—but it took him half a minute before he realized that the orgiastic bass hootings and erotic bagpipe-flute notes were emanating from… the woman. The monstrous thing looming as large as the ice boulders beside it, white bear or demon, was blowing down into her open mouth, playing her vocal cords as if her human throat were a reed instrument. The trills and low notes and bass resonances came louder, faster, more urgently—he saw Lady Silence raise her head and bend her neck one way while the serpentine-necked, triangular-headed bear-thing above her bent its head and neck in the opposite direction, the two looking like nothing so much as lovers straining to plunge deeper while seeking to find the best and deepest angle for a passionate open-mouthed kiss.

Behind the headless admiral, who obviously was meant to be the late Sir John Franklin even though it had not been Sir John decapitated that day at the bear blind, ambled a monster ten or twelve feet tall. It had the body and fur and black paws and long claws and triangular head and black eyes of a white arctic bear, but it was walking on its hind legs and was twice the height of a bear and with twice the arms’ length. It walked stiffly, almost blindly, swinging its upper body to and fro, the small black eyes staring at each man it approached. The swinging paws—the arms hanging loose as bell pulls—were larger than the costumed crewmen’s heads. “That’s your giant, Manson, on the bottom,” laughed Erebus’s second mate, Charles Frederick Des Voeux, next to Crozier, raising his voice to be heard over the next stanza. “It’s your little caulker’s mate—Hickey?—riding on his shoulders. It took the men all night to sew up the two hides into a single costume.”

Lady Silence had watched while he packed away the old napkin and his mother’s crock—items that he realized much later she might very much have wanted—but now she touched her cheek with the silk handkerchief a final time and tried to hand that back to him. “No,” said Irving, “that is a gift from me. A token of my friendship and deep esteem. You must keep it. I would be offended if you do not.” Then he tried to sign and act out what he had just said. The muscles along either side of the young Esquimaux woman’s mouth almost twitched as she watched him. He pushed her hand holding the handkerchief back, taking care not to touch her naked bosom as he did so. The white stone of the bear amulet between her breasts seemed to glow from its own illumination. Irving realized that he was much, much too hot. The room seemed to swim a bit in his vision. His insides lurched, calmed, then lurched again. “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…

Silence. The crashing, thudding, and screams had all stopped. Goodsir wanted to scream. He could feel the presence of something down on this dark hold deck with them. Something huge and not human. It could be twelve feet away, just beyond the puny circles of the lantern glow.

Still leader of this ill-fated expedition, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier realized for the first time that he was no longer captain of a ship in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy Discovery Service. That part of his life—and being a seaman and Naval officer had been his life since he was a boy—was over forever.

Crozier knew how quickly the full onslaught of scurvy would weaken all of them. For this 25 miles to King William Land with light sledges and full teams, on full half rations for the crossing, on a runners path that had been beaten into the ice for more than a month, they had to cover a little more than eight miles a day. On the rough terrain or coastal ice of King William Land and south, that distance might be cut in half or worse. Once the scurvy began having its way with them, they might only cover a mile a day and, if the wind died, might well not be able to pole or paddle the heavy boats upstream against the current of Back’s River. A portage of any distance in the weeks or months to come might soon become impossible.

The 28-year-old seaman Bill Closson died screaming silently and convulsing from gut pains and paralysis, but Dr. Goodsir had no clue what might have poisoned him until one of his mates, Tom McConvey, confessed that the dead man had stolen and eaten a Goldner can of peaches that no one else had shared. In the very brief burial service for Closson—his body lying without even a canvas shroud under the loose pile of rocks because Old Murray, the sailmaker, had died of scurvy and there was no extra canvas left anyway—Captain Crozier had quoted not from the Bible the men knew but from his fabled Book of Leviathan. “Life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,’” the captain had intoned. “It seems it is shorter for those who steal from their mates.”

The eulogy, such as it was, was a hit with the men. Although the ten boats they had been dragging and hauling on sledges for more than two months all had old names assigned to them from when Erebus and Terror still sailed the seas, the man-hauling teams of seamen immediately renamed the three cutters and two pinnaces always hauled during the afternoon and evening stint of hauling—the part of the day they hated the most since it meant regaining ground already won through the sweat of the long morning. 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.

“I’d almost like to go with you…,” began Crozier. Hodgson blinked rapidly. Several of the men looked at one another. “Just to see your faces when that gamble pays off with you walking across the ice and pressure ridges to find that Terror has been broken up by the ice just as Erebus was in March.”

Peglar had nothing but contempt for Aylmore, Hickey, and their sycophants. In Harry Peglar’s eyes they were all men with busy little minds and—except for Manson—an abundance of words, but no sense of loyalty.

Once again, the boats fanned out. Mr. Couch brought our boat back to the ice near the Inlet Opening, and we Rowed Slowly along the icy Shelf that rose about 4 Feet above the open water’s Edge. We stopped at each smear of Blood on the surface of the Floe and on the Vertical Face, but there were no more bodies. Oh, damn, moaned 30-year-old Francis Pocock from his place at the Sweep in the Stern of our Boat. You can see the bloody grooves of the man’s Fingers and Nails in the Snow. The Thing must’ve dragged him backwards into the Water.

Then I saw what Crozier was looking at. All around the Ice Floe in the recent snow—especially around the Corpse of Harry Peglar—were huge footprints, rather like a White Bear’s with claws visibly indicated, only easily Three or Four times Larger than any white bear’s paw prints. The thing had Circled Harry many times. Watching as poor Mr. Peglar lay Shivering and Dying? Enjoying itself? Had Harry Peglar’s last shivering Image on this Earth been of that White Monstrosity looming over him, its black, unblinking Eyes watching? Why had the thing not eaten our Friend? The Beast was on two legs the entire time it was on the floe, was all that Captain Crozier said.

How could Goodsir and a few other attendants to the dying survive the coming winter here? Crozier knew that the surgeon had voluntarily signed his death warrant by volunteering to stay behind with the doomed men and Goodsir knew his captain knew it. Neither man spoke of it.

Goodsir could only stare. “We’ll have only one cask of water but hundreds of Royal Navy–issued boots to eat?” “Yes,” said Crozier. Suddenly all eight men began laughing so hard that they could not stop; when the others ceased, someone would begin laughing again and then everyone would join in. “Shhh!” Crozier said at last, sounding like a schoolmaster with boys but still chuckling himself.

“All this natural misery,” Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. “Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse? Can you answer me that, Mr. Hickey?”

Jopson tried digging his chin into the frozen earth to propel himself forward another foot or two. He immediately chipped one of his last remaining teeth in two but dug his chin in again for another try. His body was simply too heavy. It seemed attached to the earth by great weights. I am only thirty-one years old, he thought fiercely, angrily. Today is my birthday. “Wait… wait… wait… wait.” Each syllable was weaker than the last.

The runners glide with a glassy efficiency, far more silently and smoothly than the boat-sledges from Terror and Erebus. Crozier is shocked to discover that he is still warm; two hours or more of just sitting still out on the ice floe has not chilled him, except for the tip of his nose.