Dan Simmons - The Terror

“All right,” said Crozier. “You go tell Dr. Goodsir I want him and for him to bring his medical kit and to dress warmly. I’ll meet the two of you at the boats.”

Golding led the four men out onto the ice – Crozier ignored the message from Des Voeux to come just with the surgeon and had ordered Bosun John Lane and Captain of the Hold William Goddard to come along with their shotguns – and then into the jumble of bergs and ice boulders, then over three high pressure ridges, and finally through serac forests where Golding’s earlier path back to the camp was marked not only by his boot prints in the blowing snow but also by the bamboo wands they’d hauled with them all the way from Terror . Des Voeux’s group had carried the wands with them two days earlier to mark their way back and to show the best pathway through the ice should they find open water and want the others to follow them with the boats. The moonlight was so bright that it threw shadows. Even the narrow bamboo wands were like moon dials throwing slashes of shadow lines onto the white-blue ice.

For the first hour there was only the sound of the laboured breathing, their boots crunching on snow and ice, and the cracking and groans all around them. Then Crozier said, “Are you sure she’s dead, Golding?”

“Who, sir?”

The captain’s frustrated exhalation became a small cloud of ice crystals gleaming in the moonlight. “How many ‘she’s’ are there around here, God-damn it? Lady Silence.”

“Oh, yes, sir.” The boy snickered. “She’s dead all right. Her titties was all tore off.”

The captain glared at the boy as they climbed another low pressure ridge and passed into the shadow of a tall blue-glowing iceberg. “But are you sure it’s Silence? Could it be another native woman?”

Golding seemed stumped by that question. “Is there more Esquimaux women out here, Captain?”

Crozier shook his head and gestured for the boy to continue leading.

They reached the “polyanna,” as Golding continued calling it, about an hour and a half after leaving camp.

“I thought you said it was farther out,” said Crozier.

“I ain’t never been even this far before,” said Golding. “I was back there hunting seals when Mr. Des Voeux found the thing.” He gestured vaguely behind and to the left of where they now stood by the opening in the ice.

“You said some of our people were injured?” asked Dr. Goodsir.

“Yes, sir. Fat Alex Wilson had blood on his face.”

“I thought you said it was George Cann who had a bloody face,” said Crozier.

Golding shook his head emphatically. “Uh-uh, Captain. It was Fat Alex who were bloody.”

“Was it his own blood or someone or something else’s?” asked Goodsir.

“I don’t know,” Golding replied, his voice almost sullen-sounding. “Mr. Des Voeux just told me to have you bring your surgeon’s things. I figured someone had to be hurt, if Mr. Des Voeux needed you to fix ’im.”

“Well, there’s no one around here,” said the bosun, John Lane, walking carefully around the ice edge of the polynya – which was no more than twenty-five feet across – and staring first down into the dark water eight feet lower than the ice and then back at the forest of seracs on all sides. “Where are they? Mr. Des Voeux had eight other men besides you with him when he left, Golding.”

“I don’t know, Mr. Lane. This is where he told me to bring you.”

Captain of the Hold Goddard cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Halloooo? Mr. Des Voeux? Hallooo?”

There came an answering shout from their right. The voice was indistinct, muffled, but sounded excited.

Motioning Golding back, Crozier led the way through the forest of twelve-foot-high ice seracs. The wind through the sculpted towers made a moaning, crooning sound, and they all knew that the serac edges were as sharp as knife blades and stronger than most ship knives.

Ahead of them in the moonlight, in the center of a small, flat ice clearing amid the seracs, the dark form of one man stood alone.

“If that’s Des Voeux,” Lane whispered to his captain, “he’s got eight men missing.”

Crozier nodded. “John, William, you two go ahead – slowly – keep your shotguns ready and on half-cock. Dr. Goodsir, please be so kind as to stay back with me. Golding, you wait here.”

“Aye, sir,” whispered William Goddard. He and John Lane tugged off their mittens with their teeth so they could use their gloved fingers, raised their weapons, half-cocked one of the heavy hammers on their double-barreled guns, and moved forward cautiously toward the moonlit clearing beyond the edge of the serac forest.

A huge shadow came out from behind the last serac and slammed Lane’s and Goddard’s skulls together. The two men went down like cattle beneath a slaughterhouse sledgehammer.

Another shadowy figure struck Crozier in the back of the head, pinned his arms behind his back when he tried to rise, and held a knife to his neck.

Robert Golding grabbed Goodsir and set a long blade alongside his throat. “Don’t move, Doctor,” whispered the boy, “or I’ll do my own bit o’ surgery on you.”

The huge shadow lifted Goddard and Lane by the scruff of their greatcoats and dragged them out into the ice clearing. The toes of their boots made grooves in the snow. A third man came from behind the seracs, picked up Goddard’s and Lane’s shotguns, handed one to Golding, and kept the other for himself.

“Get out there,” said Richard Aylmore, gesturing with the barrels of the shotgun.

With a knife still held to his throat by the shadowy shape Crozier now recognized by smell as the slackard George Thompson, the captain stood and half stumbled, was half pushed, out of the serac shadows and toward the man waiting in the moonlight.

Magnus Manson dumped the bodies of Lane and Goddard in front of his master, Cornelius Hickey.

“Are they alive?” rasped Crozier. The captain’s arms were still pinned behind him by Thompson, but now that the muzzles of two shotguns were trained on him, the blade was no longer at his throat.

Hickey leaned over as if to inspect the men, and, with two smooth, easy moves, cut both their throats with a knife that had suddenly appeared in his hand.

“Not now they ain’t alive, Mr. High-and-Mighty Crozier,” said the caulker’s mate.

The blood pouring out onto the ice looked black in the moonlight.

“Is that the technique you used to slaughter John Irving?” asked Crozier, his voice shaking with fury.

“Fuck you,” said Hickey.

Crozier glared at Robert Golding. “I hope you got your thirty pieces of silver.”

Golding snickered.

“George,” said the caulker’s mate to Thompson, standing behind the captain, “Crozier carries a pistol in his right greatcoat pocket. Pull it out. Dickie, you bring the pistol back to me. If Crozier moves, kill him.”

Thompson removed the pistol while Aylmore kept his purloined shotgun aimed. Then Aylmore walked over, took the pistol and the box of cartridges Thompson had found, and backed away, shotgun raised again. He crossed the short moonlit space and handed the pistol to Hickey.

“All this natural misery,” Dr. Goodsir said suddenly. “Why do you men have to add to it? Why does our species always have to take our full measure of God-given misery and terror and mortality and then make it worse? Can you answer me that, Mr. Hickey?”

The caulker’s mate, Manson, Aylmore, Thompson, and Golding stared at the surgeon as if he had begun speaking Aramaic.

So did the only other living man there, Francis Crozier.

“What do you want, Hickey?” asked Crozier. “Other than more good men dead as meat for your trip?”