Dan Simmons - The Terror

“Aye, sir,” say Hornby and the seaman in unison. The pounding of running boots is felt but goes unheard over the wind screech.

Crozier stands and swings his lantern in a circle.

The heavy railing where Private Heather was standing watch at the base of the iced-over ratlines has been smashed away. Beyond the gap, Crozier knows, the heaped ice and snow runs down like a toboggan ramp for thirty feet or more, but most of that ramp is not visible in the blinding snow. There are no prints visible in the small circle of snow illuminated by the captain’s lantern.

Reuben Male lifts Heather’s musket. “It wasn’t fired, Captain.”

“In this storm, Private Heather couldn’t have seen the thing until it was right on him,” says Lieutenant Little.

“What about Strong?” asks Crozier.

Male points toward the opposite side of the ship. “Missing, Captain.”

To Hornby, Crozier says, “Choose a man and stay with Private Heather until Crispe is back with the hammock and carry him below.”

Suddenly, both surgeons – Peddie and his assistant, McDonald – appear in the circle of lamplight, McDonald wearing only light slops.

“Jesus Christ,” says the chief surgeon, kneeling next to the Marine. “He’s breathing.”

“Help him if you can, John,” says Crozier. He points to Male and the rest of the seamen crowding around. “The rest of you – come with me. Have your weapons ready to fire, even if you have to take your mittens off to do it. Wilson, carry both those lanterns. Lieutenant Little, please go below and choose twenty more good men, issue full slops, and arm them with muskets – not shotguns, muskets.”

“Aye, sir,” Little shouts over the wind, but Crozier is already leading the procession forward, around the heaped snow and vibrating canvas pyramid amidships and up the canted deck toward the port lookout station.

William Strong is gone. A long wool comforter has been shredded, and the tatters of it, caught in the man lines here, are flapping wildly. Strong’s greatcoat, Welsh wig, shotgun, and one mitten are lying near the railing in the lee of the port privy where men on watch huddle to stay out of the wind, but William Strong is gone. There is a smear of red ice on the railing where he must have been standing when he saw the large shape coming at him through the blowing snow.

Without saying a word, Crozier dispatches two armed men with lanterns aft, three more toward the bow, another with a lantern to look beneath the canvas amidships. “Rig a ladder here, please, Bob,” he says to the second mate. The mate’s shoulders are hidden under heaps of fresh – that is, not yet frozen – rope he’s carried up from below. The ladder goes over the side within seconds.

Crozier leads the way down.

There is more blood on the ice and snow heaped along the exposed port-side hull of the ship. Streaks of blood, looking quite black in the lantern light, lead out beyond the fire holes into the ever-changing maze of pressure ridges and ice spires, all more sensed than seen in the darkness.

“It wants us to follow it out there, sir,” says Second Lieutenant Hodgson, leaning close to Crozier so as to be heard over the wind howl.

“Of course it does,” says Crozier. “But we’re going anyway. Strong might still be alive. We’ve seen that before with this thing.” Crozier looks behind him. Besides Hodgson, only three men had followed him down the rope ladder – all the rest were either searching the upper deck or were busy hauling Private Heather belowdecks. There is only one other lantern here besides the captain’s.

“Armitage,” Crozier says to the gunroom steward, whose white beard is already filled with snow, “give Lieutenant Hodgson your lantern and you go with him. Gibson, you remain here and tell Lieutenant Little where we’ve headed when he comes down with the main search party. Tell him for God’s sake not to let his men fire at anything unless they’re sure it’s not one of us.”

“Yes, Captain.”

To Hodgson, Crozier says, “George, you and Armitage head out about twenty yards that way – toward the bow – then stay parallel to us as we search south. Try to keep your lantern within sight of ours.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Tom,” Crozier says to the only remaining man, young Evans, “you come with me. Keep your Baker Rifle ready but only at half-cock.”

“Aye, sir.” The boy’s teeth are chattering.

Crozier waits until Hodgson reaches a point twenty yards to their right – his lantern only the dimmest glow in the blowing snow – and then he leads Evans out into the maze of seracs, ice pinnacles, and pressure ridges, following the periodic smears of blood on the ice. He knows that a delay of even a few minutes will be enough to blow snow over the faint trail. The captain doesn’t even bother to remove the pistol from the pocket of his greatcoat.

Less than a hundred yards out, just where the lanterns of the men on the deck of HMS Terror become invisible, Crozier reaches a pressure ridge – one of those great heaps of ice thrown up by the ice plates grinding and surging against each other beneath the surface. For two winters in the ice now, Crozier and the other men of the late Sir John Franklin’s expedition have watched these pressure ridges appear as if by magic, rise with a great rumbling and tearing sound, and then extend themselves across the surface of the frozen sea, sometimes moving faster than a man can run.

This ridge is at least thirty feet high, a great vertical rubble of ice boulders each at least as large as a hansom cab.

Crozier walks along the ridge, extending his lantern as high as he can. Hodgson’s lantern is no longer visible to the west. Nowhere around Terror is the view simple any longer. Everywhere the snow seracs, drifts, pressure ridges, and ice pinnacles block one’s line of sight. There is one great ice mountain in the mile separating Terror and Erebus and half a dozen more in sight on a moonlit night.

But no icebergs here tonight, only this three-storey-tall pressure ridge.

“There!” shouts Crozier over the wind. Evans steps closer, his Baker Rifle raised.

A smear of black blood on the white wall of ice. The thing had carried William Strong up this small mountain of icy rubble, taking an almost vertical route.

Crozier begins climbing, holding the lantern in his right hand while he searches with his mittened free hand, trying to find cracks and crevices for his frozen fingers and already icy boots. He hadn’t taken time to put on his pair of boots in which Jopson had driven long nails through the soles, giving traction on such ice surfaces, and now his ordinary seaman’s boots slip and skitter on the ice. But he finds more frozen blood twenty-five feet up, just below the ice-jumbled summit of the pressure ridge, so Crozier holds the lantern steady with his right hand while kicking against a tilting ice slab with his left leg and leveraging himself up to the top, the wool of his greatcoat rasping against his back. The captain can’t feel his nose and his fingers are also numb.

“Captain,” calls Evans from the darkness below, “do you want me to come up?”

Crozier is panting too hard to speak for a second, but when he gets his wind back, he calls down, “No… wait there.” He can see the faint glow of Hodgson’s lantern now to the northwest – that team isn’t within thirty yards of the pressure ridge yet.

Flailing for balance against the wind, leaning far to his right as the gale streams his comforter straight out to his left and threatens to topple him off his precarious perch, Crozier holds the lantern out over the south side of the pressure ridge.

The drop here is almost vertical for thirty-five feet. There is no sign of William Strong, no sign of black smears on the ice, no sign that anything living or dead has come this way. Crozier can’t imagine how anything could have found its way down that sheer ice face.