Dan Simmons - The Terror

Shaking his head and realizing that his eyelashes are almost frozen to his cheeks, Crozier begins descending the way he’d come, twice almost falling onto the rising bayonets of ice before slip-sliding the last eight feet or so to the surface where Evans is waiting.

But Evans is gone.

The Baker Rifle lies in the snow, still at half-cock. There are no prints in the swirling snow, human or otherwise.

“Evans!” Captain Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier’s voice has been trained to command for thirty-five years and more. He can make it heard over a sou’westerly gale or while a ship is white-foaming its way through the Strait of Magellan in an ice storm. Now he puts every bit of volume he can muster into the shout. “Evans!”

No answer except the howl of the wind.

Crozier lifts the Baker Rifle, checks the priming, and fires it into the air. The crack sounds muffled even to him, but he sees Hodgson’s lantern suddenly turn toward him and three more lanterns become dimly visible on the ice from the direction of Terror .

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.

He sets the lantern down, fumbles in his pocket, pulls the pistol out, tugs off his mitten with his teeth, and, with just a thin woolen glove between his flesh and the metal trigger, holds the useless weapon in front of him.

“Come on, God-damn your eyes!” Crozier screams. “Come out and try me instead of a boy , you hairy arse-licking rat-fucking piss-drinking spawn of a poxy Highgate whore!”

There is no answer except the howl of the wind.

From the private diary of Dr. Harry D. S. Goodsir:

1 January, 1846 -

John Torrington, stoker on HMS Terror, died early this morning. New Year’s Day. The beginning of our Fifth Month stuck in the ice here at Beechey Island .

His death was not a surprise. It has been obvious for several months that Torrington had been in the advanced stages of Consumption when he signed on the expedition, and if the Symptoms had manifested themselves just a few weeks earlier in the Late Summer, he would have been sent home on Rattler or even with the two whaling ships we encountered just before sailing west across Baffin Bay and through Lancaster Sound to the Arctic Waste where we now find ourselves wintering. The sad Irony is that Torrington ’s doctor had told him that going to Sea would be good for his health .

Chief Surgeon Peddie and Dr. McDonald on Terror treated Torrington, of course, but I was present several times during the Diagnosis stage and was escorted to their ship by several of Erebus ’s crewmen after the young stoker died this morning .

When his illness became Obvious in early November, Captain Crozier relieved the 20-year-old of his duties as stoker down in the poorly ventilated lowest deck – the coal dust in the air alone there is enough to asphyxiate a person with normal lungs – and John Torrington had been in a consumptive invalid’s Downward Spiral since then. Still, Torrington might have survived for many more months had not there been an Intermediating Agent of his death. Dr. Alexander McDonald tells me that Torrington, who had become too weak in recent weeks even to allow his short Constitutionals around the lower deck, helped by his messmates, came down with Pneumonia on Christmas Day, and it had been a Death Watch since then. When I saw the body this morning, I was shocked at how Emaciated the dead John Torrington was, but both Peddie and McDonald explained that his appetite had been waning for two months, and even though the ship’s surgeons altered his Diet more heavily toward Canned Soups and Vegetables, he had continued to lose weight.

This morning I watched as Peddie and McDonald prepared the corpse – Torrington in a clean striped shirt, his hair recently and carefully cut, his nails clean – binding the usual clean cloth around his head to keep the jaw from dropping, then binding him with more strips of white cotton at the elbows, hands, ankles, and big toes. They did this in order to hold the Limbs together while they weighed the poor boy – 88 Pounds! – and otherwise prepared his body for burial. There was no discussion of Postmortem Examination since it was obvious that Consumption accelerated by Pneumonia had killed the lad, so there was no worry of contamination reaching other crew members.

I helped my two surgeon colleagues from HMS Terror lift Torrington ’s body into the coffin carefully prepared for it by the ship’s able Carpenter, Thomas Honey, and by his mate, a man named Wilson. There was no rigor mortis. The carpenters had left a residue of Wood Shavings along the bottom of the coffin, so carefully constructed and shaped out of standard ship’s mahogany, with a Deeper Pile of shavings under Torrington’s head, and because there was yet little Scent of Decay, the air was scented primarily by the wood shavings .

3 January, 1846 -

I keep thinking about John Torrington’s Burial late yesterday.

Only a small contingent of us attended from HMS Erebus, but along with Sir John, Commander Fitzjames, and a few officers, I made the Crossing on Foot from our ship to theirs, and hence the extra two hundred yards to the Shore of Beechey Island .

I have not been able to Imagine a worse winter than the one we have suffered frozen into this small anchorage in the lee of Beechey Island itself, set in the cusp of larger Devon Island, but Commander Fitzjames and others have assured me that our Situation here – even with the Treacherous Pressure Ridges, Terrible Dark, Howling Storms, and Constantly Menacing Ice – would be a thousand times worse out beyond this anchorage, out where the Ice flows down from the Pole like a hail of Enemy Fire from some Borean god.

John Torrington’s crewmates gently lowered his coffin – already covered with a fine blue wool – over the railing of their ship, which is Wedged High on its own pillar of ice, while other Terror seamen lashed the coffin to a large Sledge. Sir John himself draped a Union Jack over the coffin, and then Torrington’s friends and messmates set themselves into Harness and pulled the sledge the six hundred feet or so to the ice-and-gravel shore of Beechey Island .

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. At any rate, this entire procession – coffin, sledge, man-haulers, officers, surgeons, Sir John, Royal Marines in full dress concealed under the same drab Slops the rest of us were wearing – was illuminated only by bobbing lamplight as we made our way across the Frozen Sea to the Frozen Shore. Men from Terror had chopped and shoveled away at the several recently arisen Pressure Ridges which stood between us and the graveled beach, so there were few Deviations from our sad Route. Earlier in the Winter, Sir John ordered a system of Stout Poles, ropes, and Hanging Lanterns to line the shortest route between the Ships and the graveled isthmus where several Structures had been built – one to house much of the ships’ stores, removed should ice destroy our vessels; another as a sort of emergency bunkhouse and Scientific Station; and a third housing the armourer’s forge, set here so that the Flames and Sparks should not ignite our tindered shipboard Homes. I have learned that Sailors fear fire at sea above almost everything else. But this Course of wooden Poles and Lanterns had to be abandoned since the ice is constantly shifting, rising up, and scattering or smashing anything set out on it .