The Terror

by Dan Simmons

a man who spent the first winter in the ice there grinding and polishing lenses for his own telescope, had told Crozier that the perturbation of the stars was probably due to rapidly shifting refraction in the cold air lying heavy but uneasy over the ice-covered seas and unseen frozen landmasses.

The lookout’s shotgun is propped against that altar. No man wants to touch metal out here in the cold, not even through mittens.

Messages were passed between the ships now only during those dwindling minutes of half-light around noon. In a few days, there would be no real day at all, only arctic night. Round-the-clock night. One hundred days of night.

and finally putting lines of sand down for traction,

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.

But Crozier can see why Irving, far from home and family and any sweetheart of his own, might fall in love with this heathen woman. Her strangeness alone—and perhaps even the grim circumstances of her arrival and the death of her male companion, so strangely intertwined with the first attacks from that monstrous entity out there in the dark—must be like a flame to the fluttering moth of so hopeless a young romantic as Third Lieutenant John Irving.

The first simple fact is that the scrabbling noise from the Dead Room is almost certainly the hundreds or thousands of large black rats feasting on Wilkes’s frozen comrades. The Norway rats—as Crozier knows better than the young Marine—are nocturnal, which means that they’re active day and night during the long arctic winter, and the creatures have teeth which constantly keep growing. This, in turn, means the God-damned vermin have to keep chewing. He has seen them chew through Royal Navy oak barrels, inch-thick tins, and even lead plating.

A week before the murder, the Indian had brought back a strong-tasting haunch of meat to the starving party, insisting that it had come from a wolf that had either been gored to death by a caribou or killed by Teroahaute himself using a deer horn—the Indian’s story kept changing. The ravenous party had cooked and eaten the meat, but not before Dr. Richardson noticed a slight hint of a tattoo on the skin.

The starving Indian and the dying Hood were alone when Richardson, off scraping lichen from the rocks, had heard the shot. Suicide, Teroahaute had insisted, but Dr. Richardson, who had attended on more than a few suicides, knew that the position of the ball in Robert Hood’s brain had not come from a self-inflicted gunshot.

Captain Crozier descends the short ladder to the lower deck, pushes through the sealed double doors, and almost staggers in the sudden blast of warmth. Even though the circulating hot-water heat has been off for hours, body heat from more than fifty men and residual warmth from cooking have kept the temperature here on the lower deck high—just below freezing—almost 80 degrees warmer than outside. The effect on someone who’s been out on deck for half an hour is the equivalent of walking into a sauna fully clothed.

At other times, even later at night when the ice’s moaning turns to screams, Crozier thinks that the ship has become his body and his mind. Out there—out beyond the decks and hull—lies death. Eternal cold. Here, even while frozen in the ice, there continues the heartbeat, however faint, of warmth and conversation and movement and sanity.

But traveling deeper into the ship, Crozier realizes, is like traveling too deeply into one’s body or mind. What one encounters there may not be pleasant.

The bottom hold deck below, with its terrible smells and its waiting Dead Room, is madness.

Because the entire deck-space lies beneath the level of outside ice, the hold deck is almost as cold as the alien world beyond the hull. And darker, with no aurora, stars, or moon to relieve the ever-present blackness.

Sir John ordered an Observatory be set up atop the giant berg, which towers more than twice as tall as our Highest Mast, and while Lieutenant Gore and some of the officers from Terror take atmospheric and astronomical measurements up there—they have erected a tent for those spending the night atop the Precipitous Ice Mountain—our Expedition Ice Masters, Mr. Reid from Erebus and Mr. Blanky from Terror, spend the daylight hours staring west and north through their brass telescopes, seeking, I am informed, the most likely path through the near-solid sea of ice already formed there.

The sight of both Erebus and Terror moored to the iceberg below us, a maze of ropes—what I must remember to call “lines” now that I am an old nautical hand—holding both ships fast to the Ice Mountain, the two ships’ highest crow’s nests below my precarious and icy perch so high above everything, created a sort of sick and thrilling Vertigo within me.

Crozier sees that it is as black as the inside of an eel’s belly outside, no stars, no aurora, no moon, and cold; the temperature on deck registered sixty-three degrees below zero six hours earlier when young Irving had been sent up to take measurements, and now a wild wind howls past the stubs of masts and across the canted, icy deck, driving heavy snow before it.

There seems to be no blood, but Crozier can see the Marine’s brains sparkling in the lantern light—sparkling, the captain realizes, because there is already a sheen of ice crystals on the pulped grey matter.

The pounding of running boots is felt but goes unheard over the wind screech.

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.

All of this was performed in near Absolute Dark, of course, since even at midday, the sun makes no Appearance here in January and has not done so for three months. It shall be another month and more, they tell me, before the Southern Horizon welcomes back our Fiery Star.

I have learned that Sailors fear fire at sea above almost everything else.

It was snowing during the burial. The wind was blowing hard, as it always does here on this godforsaken Arctic Waste. Just north of the burial site rose Sheer Black Cliffs, as inaccessible as the Mountains of the Moon.

Occasionally a fragment of Cold Moon would appear from between quickly moving clouds, but even this thin, pale moonlight was quickly lost in the snow and dark. Dear God, this is truly a Stygian bleakness.

The sun was very bright and the men were already wearing the wire-mesh goggles that Mr. Osmer, Erebus’s purser, had issued them to prevent blindness from the sun’s glare.

the small round stones were frozen solid, as firm as London cobblestones in winter and ten times as cold, and this chill traveled up through their trousers and other layers covering their knees, then into their bones and up through their mittens to their palms and fingers like a silent invitation to the frozen infernal circles of the dead far below.

The midnight arctic twilight was being shattered by explosions of lightning so contiguous that they overlapped, setting the sky ablaze in flashes that left blinding retinal echoes.

(we could not afford the time to stop and melt snow on the spirit stoves, so we resorted to the Bad Idea of chewing on snow and ice—a process which depletes the body’s water rather than adds to it),

To the south, the sun dogs and halo had disappeared and only a sullen red sun glowed under the dome of sky.

“Jonah was given a commission by God to go to Nineveh and to cry against it because of its wickedness,”

“And just so have we been sent on our mission beyond the farthest known edge of the world, shipmates, farther than the Tarshish—which was only in Spain, after all—we have been sent out to where the elements themselves seem to rebel, where lightning crashes from frozen skies, where the cold never relents, where white beasts walk the frozen surface of the sea, and where no man, civilized or otherwise, could ever call such a place home.

and like Jonah we must pray unto the Lord, saying, ‘I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward thy holy temple. The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains: the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God.’

He smiled to himself as he realized that he was memorizing this scene, this moment, as a future anecdote for Jane and his daughter, Eleanor, and his lovely niece Sophia. He did that a lot these days, observing their predicament on the ice as a series of anecdotes and even setting them into words—not too many words, just enough to hold rapt attention—for future use with his lovely ladies and during evenings dining out.

wildly pumping heart. He tried to scream but inhaled salt water. I am in the sea. For the first time in my life, I am in the sea itself. How extraordinary.

the Greeks had reasoned long before the arctic and antarctic wastes were reached by explorers, were inhuman in every sense—unfit even to travel through, much less to reside in for any length of time. So why, wondered Crozier, did a nation like England, blessed to be placed by God in one of the most gentle and verdant of the two temperate bands where mankind was meant to live, keep throwing its ships and its men into the ice of the northern and southern polar extremes where even fur-wearing savages refuse to go?

Without another word she dived into the water in a perfect arc, her pale hands and white arms cleaving the mirrorlike surface an instant before the rest of her.

Perhaps it is fantastical, Captain. But you have not spent the hundreds of hours straining at the eyepiece of a microscope such as I have. We have little understanding of what any of these animalcules are, but I assure you that if you saw how many are present in a simple drop of drinking water, you would be deeply sobered.

And with the mostly uncharted bulk of arctic Canada to their south, King William Land to their southwest, and Boothia Peninsula beyond their reach to the east and nor’east, there was no real ice drift here—as

He was a smart man whose mind was stupid with the chemical by-products of constant fatigue.

It knows we’ve abandoned the ships, thought Crozier, staring through his brass telescope that had become scuffed and scarred from so many years’ use at both poles. It knows where we’re going. It’s planning to get there first.

Lieutenant Little took another temperature reading. It was–82 degrees.

Crozier had been working and giving commands from within a deep trench of exhaustion for many hours.

He had forgotten to don the gloves before lifting the telescope again and his fingertips and one palm had instantly frozen to the metal.

At least eighty men were at this graveside about a hundred yards from camp, standing like dark wraiths in the still-swirling fog.

Crozier fired, making sure to shoot high so as not to strike that face. The report was deafening, especially to nervous systems set on edge by scurvy.

Sailors who had tied off complicated rigging and shroud knots in the roaring darkness fifty feet out on a pitching spar two hundred feet above the deck on a stormy night off the Strait of Magellan during a hurricane blow could no longer tie their shoes in the daylight.

Men frequently fell asleep standing in the dimmed sunlight at midnight with a rock in each hand. Sometimes their mates did not even shake them awake.