Dan Simmons - The Terror

Fitzjames had lost another of his petty officers, Stoker Tommy Plater, on the day in March when the thing had gone on its murderous rampage on the lower decks. Only Thomas Watson, the carpenter’s mate, had survived the thing’s attack down on the hold deck that night, and he had lost his left hand.

Since Thomas Burt, the armourer, had been sent back to England from Greenland even before they’d encountered real ice, that left Erebus with twenty surviving petty officers. Some of these men, such as the ancient sailmaker, John Murray, and Fitzjames’s own steward, Edmund Hoar, were too sick with scurvy to be useful, while others, such as Thomas Watson, were too mauled to be of help, while still others, such as the flogged gunroom steward Richard Aylmore, were too sullen to be of much use.

Crozier told one of the men who was obviously fagged out to take a break and to walk with the armed guard while he, the captain, took a turn in the harness. Even with six other men pulling, the terrible exertion of hauling more than fifteen hundred pounds of canned food, weapons, and tents was a strain on his weakened system. Even after Crozier fell into the rhythm – he’d joined sledging parties since March, when he first began dispatching boats and gear to King William Land, and well knew the drill of man-hauling – the pain of the straps across his aching chest, the weight of the mass being pulled, and the discomfort from sweat that froze, thawed, and refroze in his clothes were all a shock.

Crozier wished they had more able-bodied seamen and Marines.

Terror had lost two of its rated sailors – Billy Strong, torn in half by the creature, and James Walker, the idiot Magnus Manson’s good friend before the giant fell completely under the sway of the little rat-faced caulker’s mate. It had been fear of Jimmy Walker’s ghost in the hold, Crozier remembered, that had brought the hulking Manson to his first point of mutiny so many months ago.

For once HMS Erebus had been luckier than its counterpart. The only able seaman Fitzjames had lost during this expedition had been John Hartnell, also dead of consumption and buried in the winter of ’46 on Beechey Island.

Crozier leaned into the straps and thought about the faces and names – so many officers dead, so few regular sailors – and grunted as he pulled, thinking that the thing on the ice seemed to be deliberately coming after the leaders of this expedition.

Don’t think that way , Crozier ordered himself. You’re giving the beast powers of reasoning it doesn’t have .

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

One of the Royal Marines walked by, carrying a musket rather than shotgun in the crook of his arm. The man’s face was completely hidden by caps and wraps, but from the slouched way the man walked, Crozier knew that it was Robert Hopcraft. The Marine private had been seriously injured by the creature on the day a year ago in June when Sir John was killed, but while Hopcraft’s other injuries had healed, his shattered collarbone left him always slouching to his left as if he had trouble maintaining a straight line. Another Marine walking with them was William Pilkington, the private who had been shot through his shoulder in the blind that same day. Crozier noticed that Pilkington didn’t seem to be favouring that shoulder or arm today.

Sergeant David Bryant, Erebus ’s ranking Marine, was decapitated just seconds before Sir John had been carried off under the ice by the beast. With Private William Braine dead on Beechey Island in 1846 and Private William Reed disappeared on the ice on 9 November of last fall while sent to deliver a message to Terror – Crozier remembered the date well since he had walked to Erebus from Terror in the dark himself that first full day of winter darkness – the beast had reduced Fitzjames’s Marine guard to only four: Corporal Alexander Pearson in command, Private Hopcraft with his ruined shoulder, Private Pilkington with his bullet wound, and Private Joseph Healey.

Crozier’s own Marine detachment had lost only Private William Heather to the thing on the ice, on the night the previous November when the creature had come aboard and bashed the man’s brains out while the private was on watch. But amazingly, shockingly, Heather had refused to die. After lying comatose in the sick bay for weeks, obscenely hovering between life and death, Private Heather had been carried by his Marine mates to his hammock forward in the crew berthing area and they had fed him and cleaned him and carried him to the seat of ease and dressed him every day since. It was as if the staring, drooling man was their pet. He’d been evacuated to Terror Camp just last week, bundled up warmly by the other Marines and set carefully, almost royally, into a special one-man toboggan made for him by Alex “Fat” Wilson, the carpenter’s mate. The seamen had not objected to the extra load and had volunteered to take turns pulling the living corpse’s little sled across the ice and over the pressure ridges to Terror Camp.

That left Crozier five Marines – Daly, Hammond, Wilkes, Hedges, and thirty-seven-year-old Sergeant Soloman Tozer, an unschooled fool but now commanding officer among the total of nine functional surviving Royal Marines on the Sir John Franklin Expedition.

After the first hour in harness, the sledge seemed to slide more easily and Crozier had fallen into the rhythm of panting that passed for breathing while hauling such dead weight across such nonslippery ice.

That was all the categories of men lost that Crozier could think of. Except for the boys, of course, those young volunteers who had signed on to the expedition at the last minute and had been listed on the roster as “Boys” even though three of the four were a full-grown eighteen years old. Robert Golding was nineteen when they sailed.

Three of the four “boys” survived, although Crozier himself had been forced to carry the unconscious George Chambers from the burning Carnivale compartments on the night of the fire. The only fatality among the boys had been Tom Evans, the youngest in demeanor as well as in age; the thing on the ice had plucked the lad literally from beneath Captain Crozier’s nose as they were out on the ice in the dark hunting for the missing William Strong.

George Chambers, although recovering consciousness two days after Carnivale, had never been the same. A bright lad before his violent encounter with the thing, the concussion he received reduced him to a level of intelligence even below that of Magnus Manson. George was no living corpse like Private Heather – he could obey simple orders according to Erebus ’s bosun’s mate – but he hardly ever spoke after that terrible New Year’s Eve.

Davey Leys, one of the more experienced men on the expedition, was another man who had physically survived two encounters with the white thing on the ice but who was as useless as the literally brainless Private Heather these days. After the night the white thing encountered Leys and John Handford on watch and then chased Ice Master Thomas Blanky into the darkness, Leys had slipped back into his earlier state of unresponsive staring and had never returned from it. He had been transported to Terror Camp – along with the seriously injured or those too ill to walk, such as Fitzjames’s steward, Hoar – bundled in coats and tucked into one of the boats being dragged atop a sledge. There were too many men now sick with scurvy, wounds, or low morale who were of little use to Crozier or Fitzjames. More mouths to feed and bodies to haul with them when the men were hungry and sick and barely able to walk.

Weary, realizing that he had not really slept the past two nights, Crozier tried counting the dead.