The Terror

by Dan Simmons

Strong, no sign of black smears on the ice, no sign that anything living or dead has come this way.

I listen to the wind howl and think of those two cold Low Heaps of Loose Stone out on that black, windy isthmus, and I think of the dead men in those two cold Holes, and I think of the Featureless Black Face of Rock, and I can imagine the fusillade of snow pellets already working to eradicate the letters on the wooden headstones.

Should that be the case, he said, his voice fierce, we’ll just have to bloody well walk home, shan’t we?

Crozier saw their eyes then: Fitzjames’s eyes and Le Vesconte’s and Des Voeux’s and Couch’s and Hodgson’s and Goodsir’s and the others’ there. And he knew—through Memo Moira’s Second Sight or his demonstrated captain’s sense or just through the clear, unfiltered-by-thought perception of a completely exhausted man—he knew that something had happened and that nothing would now be as he had planned or hoped and might never be again.

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.

Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the last six months has persuaded him otherwise. Has it?

Whatever had taken possession of the ship was as virulent as the plague.