Dan Simmons - The Terror

Half an hour later, when the last boats were hundreds of yards to the south of him, Captain Crozier had come back with Mr. Honey, the carpenter.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Mr. Blanky?” snapped Crozier.

“Just giving it a rest, Captain. I thought I might spend the night here.”

“Don’t be an ass,” said Crozier. He looked at the snapped-off peg leg and turned to the carpenter. “Can you fix this, Mr. Honey? Make a new one by tomorrow afternoon if Mr. Blanky rides in one of the boats until then?”

“Oh, aye, sir,” said Honey, squinting at the broken peg with an artisan’s scowl at the failure – or mistreatment – of one of his creations. “We ain’t got much spare wood left, but there’s one extra jolly boat rudder we brought along as a spare for the pinnaces that I can turn into a new leg as easy as you like.”

“D’you hear that, Blanky?” asked Crozier. “Now get off your ass and let Mr. Honey help you hobble to catch up to Mr. Hodgson’s last boat there. Quickly now. We’ll have you fixed up by tomorrow noon.”

Blanky smiled. “Can Mr. Honey fix this, Captain?” He tugged off the wooden cup of the leg and detached the clumsy leather-and-brass harness.

“Oh, Christ damn it,” said Crozier. He started to look more closely at the bleeding raw stump with the black flesh surrounding the white nub of bone but quickly pulled back his face from the smell.

“Aye, sir,” said Blanky. “I’m surprised Dr. Goodsir ain’t sniffed it out before this. I try to stay downwind of him when I’m helpin’ him out in the sick bay. The boys in my tent know what’s up, sir. There’s nothing to be done for it.”

“Nonsense,” said Crozier. “Goodsir will…” He stopped.

Blanky smiled. It was not a sarcastic or sad smile but an easy one, filled with some real humour. “Will what, Captain? Take my leg off at the hip? The black bits and red lines run all the way up to my ass and private parts, sir, with apologies for being so picturesque about it. And if he did operate, how many days would I be lyin’ in the boat like old Private Heather – God rest the poor bugger’s soul – being hauled along by men who are as tired as I am?”

Crozier said nothing.

“No,” continued Blanky, puffing contentedly on his pipe, “I think it’d be best if I rested here awhile on my own and just relaxed and thought some thoughts about this and that. My life has been a good one. I’d like to think about it some before the pain and stink get so bad I’m distracted.”

Crozier sighed, looked at his carpenter and then at his ice master, and sighed again. He took a water bottle from the pocket of his greatcoat. “Take this.”

“Thank you, sir. I will. With gratitude,” said Blanky.

Crozier felt in his other pockets. “I have no food with me. Mr. Honey?”

The carpenter came up with a moldy biscuit and a sliver of something more green than tan that might have been beef.

“No, thank you, John,” said Blanky. “I am truthfully not hungry. But, Captain, would you do me a huge favor?”

“What is that, Mr. Blanky?”

“My people are in Kent, sir. Near Ightham Mote north of Tonbridge Wells. Or at least my Betty and Michael and old mum were when I set sail, sir. I was wondering, Captain, I mean if you have luck on your side and have the time later…”

“If I get back to England, I swear I’ll look them up and tell them that you were smoking and smiling and sitting as comfortably on a boulder as a lazy squire when last I saw you,” said Crozier. He pulled a pistol from his pocket. “Lieutenant Little’s seen the thing through his glass – it’s been trailing behind us all morning, Thomas. It’ll be along presently. You should take this.”

“No, thank you, Captain.”

“You’re sure about this, Mr. Blanky? Staying behind, I mean?” said Captain Crozier. “Even if you were… with us… for just another week or so, your knowledge of the ice might be very important to us all. Who knows what the conditions will be out on the pack ice twenty miles east of here?”

Blanky smiled. “If Mr. Reid weren’t still with you, I’d take that to heart, Captain. I surely would. But he’s as good an ice master as you could ask for. As a spare, I mean.”

Crozier and Honey shook hands with him. Then they turned and hurried to catch up to the last boat disappearing over a distant ridge to the south.

It was after midnight when it came.

Blanky had been out of tobacco for hours and the water had frozen in the bottle where he’d foolishly left it sitting on the boulder next to him. He was in some pain, but he did not want to sleep.

A few stars had come out in the twilight. The wind from the northwest had come up, as it usually did in the evening, and the temperature had probably dropped forty degrees from its noontime high.

Blanky had kept the broken peg leg and its cup and straps on the boulder next to him. While his gangrenous leg tormented him and his empty stomach clawed at him, the worst pain tonight was from his lower leg and calf and foot – his phantom limb.

Suddenly the thing was just there .

It loomed up on the ice not thirty paces from him.

It must have come up through some invisible hole in the ice , Blanky thought. He was reminded of a tent fair in Tunbridge Wells he had seen as a boy, with a rickety wooden stage and a magician in purple silk with a tall conical hat embroidered with crude planets and stars. That man had appeared just like this, popping up through a trapdoor to the oohs and ahs of the country audience.

“Welcome back,” said Thomas Blanky to the shadowy silhouette on the ice.

The thing reared up on its hind legs, a dark mass of hair and muscle and sunset-tinted claws and a faint gleam of teeth beyond anything, the Ice Master was sure, in mankind’s racial memory of its many predators. Blanky guessed that it was more than twelve feet tall, perhaps fourteen.

Its eyes – a deeper blackness against the black silhouette – did not reflect the dying sun.

“You’re late,” said Blanky. He could not help it that his teeth were chattering. “I’ve been expecting you for a long time.” He threw his peg leg and its rattling harness at the shape.

The thing did not try to dodge the crude missile. The shape towered there for a minute and then rushed forward like a wraith, the legs not even visibly moving to propel it, a monstrous mass sliding rapidly toward him across the rock and ice, the dark and terrible solidity of the shape finally opening arms to fill the ice master’s vision.

Thomas Blanky grinned fiercely and clamped his teeth down hard on the stem of his cold pipe.

The only thing keeping Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier moving forward into the tenth week on the boat march was the blue flame in his chest. The more tired and empty and sick and battered his body became, the hotter and fiercer the flame burned. He knew it was not merely some metaphor of his determination. Nor was it optimism, as such. The blue flame in his chest had burrowed toward his heart like some alien entity, lingered like a disease, and centered in him as an almost unwanted core of conviction that he would do whatever he had to do to survive. Anything .

Sometimes Crozier came close to praying that the blue flame would just go out so he could surrender to the inevitable and lie down and pull the frozen tundra up over himself like a child under a blanket settling into his nap.

Today they were stopped – not pulling the sledges and boats for the first time in a month. And they had unpacked and clumsily pitched the large Sick Bay tent, although not the large mess tents. The men were calling this otherwise unremarkable place on a small bay along the southern coast of King William Land “Hospital Camp.”