Dan Simmons - The Terror

“Then keep your scalpel close, Mr. Peddie,” says Crozier and goes out through the curtain into the odd silence of the crewmen’s mess area.

Jopson is waiting in the galley glow with a kerchief of hot biscuits.

Crozier enjoys his walk in spite of the creeping cold that has made his face, fingers, legs, and feet feel like they are on fire. He knows that this is preferable to them being numb. And he enjoys the walk in spite of the fact that between the slow moanings and sudden shrieks of the ice moving under and around him in the dark and the constant moan of the wind, he is certain that he is being stalked.

Twenty minutes into his two-hour walk – more a climb, scuttle, and ass-sliding descent, up, over, and down pressure ridges for much of the way tonight than a walk – the clouds part and a three-quarters moon appears and illuminates the phantasmagoric landscape. The moon is bright enough to have an ice-crystalled lunar halo around it, actually two concentric halos, he notices, the diameter of the larger one sufficient to cover a third of the eastern night sky. There are no stars. Crozier dims his lamp to save oil and walks on, using the boat pike he’s brought along to test every fold of black ahead of him to make sure it’s a shadow and not a crack or crevasse. He has reached the area on the east side of the iceberg now where the moon is blocked, the berg throwing a black and twisted shadow for a quarter of a mile of ice. Jopson and Little insisted he take a shotgun, but he told them he did not want to carry the weight on the walk. More to the point, he doesn’t really believe a shotgun will be of any use against the foe they had in mind.

In a particular moment of rare calm, everything strangely quiet except for his laboured breathing, Crozier suddenly recalls a resonant instance from when he was a young boy returning home late one winter evening from an afternoon in the wintry hills with his friends. At first he rushed headlong alone across the frost-rimed heather, but then he paused half a mile or so from his house. He remembers standing there watching the lighted windows in the village as the last of the winter twilight faded from the sky and the surrounding hills became vague, black, featureless shapes, unfamiliar to a boy so young, until even his own house, visible at the edge of town, lost all definition and three-dimensionality in the dying light. Crozier remembers the snow beginning to fall and himself standing there alone in the darkness beyond the stone sheep pens, knowing that he would be cuffed for his tardiness, knowing that arriving later would only make the cuffing worse, but having no will nor want to walk toward the light of home yet. He enjoyed the soft sound of night wind and the knowledge that he was the only boy – perhaps the only human being – out there in the dark on the windy, frozen-grass meadows on this night that smelled of coming snow, alienated from the lighted windows and the warm hearths, very aware that he was of the village but not part of it at that moment. It was a thrilling, almost erotic feeling – an illicit discovery of self separated from everyone and everything else in the cold and dark – and he feels it again now, as he has more than a few times during his years of arctic service at opposite poles of the earth.

Something is coming down the high ridge behind him.

Crozier turns the oil lantern up and sets it on the ice. The circle of golden light reaches barely fifteen feet and makes the darkness beyond all the worse. Using his teeth, he pulls off his heavy mitten, lets it drop to the ice, leaving only a thin glove on that hand, shifts the boat pike to his left hand, and pulls his pistol from his coat pocket. Crozier cocks the weapon as the rustle of sliding ice and snow on the pressure ridge becomes louder. The line of shadow from the iceberg blocks the moonlight here and the captain can make out only the huge shapes of ice blocks seeming to move and shift in the flickering light.

Then something furry and indistinct moves along the ice ledge he has just descended, some ten feet above him and less than fifteen feet to the west, well within leaping distance.

“Halt,” Crozier says, extending the heavy pistol. “Identify yourself.”

The shape makes no sound. It moves again.

Crozier holds his fire. Dropping the long boat pike, he grabs up the lantern and thrusts it forward.

He sees the rippling fur moving and almost fires, but checks himself at the last instant. The shape slides lower, moving quickly and surely down onto the ice. Crozier lowers the hammer on his pistol and sets it back in his pocket, crouching to retrieve his mitten even while keeping the lantern extended.

Lady Silence walks into the light, her fur parka and sealskin pants making her look like some short, rounded beast. The hood is pulled forward against the wind and Crozier cannot see her face.

“God-damn it, woman,” he says softly. “You came a horny seaman’s second from being shot. Where the hell have you been, anyway?”

She steps closer, almost within reaching distance, but her face remains veiled by darkness within the hood.

Feeling a sudden chill along the back of his neck and down his spine – Crozier is remembering his grandmother Moira’s description of a banshee’s transparent skull face within the folds of its black hood – he raises the lantern between them.

The young woman’s face is human, not banshee, the dark eyes wide as they reflect the light. She has no expression. Crozier realizes that he has never seen an expression on her face, other than perhaps a mildly inquisitive look. Not even on the day they shot and killed her husband or brother or father and she watched the man choke to death on his own blood.

“No wonder the men think you’re a witch and a Jonah,” says Crozier. On the ship, in front of the men, he is always polite and formal to this Esquimaux wench, but he is not on the ship or in front of the men now. It is the first and only time he and the damned woman have been away from the ship at the same time. And he is very cold and very tired.

Lady Silence stares at him. Then she extends a mittened hand, Crozier lowers the lamp toward it, and he sees that she is offering him something – a limp grey offering, like a fish that has been gutted and boned, leaving only the skin.

He realizes that it is a crewman’s woolen stocking.

Crozier takes it, feels the lump at the toe of the sock, and for a second is sure that the lump will be part of a man’s foot, probably the ball of the foot and the toes, still pink and warm.

Crozier has been to France and known men posted to India. He has heard the story of werewolves and were-tigers. In Van Diemen’s Land, where he met Sophia Cracroft, she told him of the locals’ tales of natives who could turn into a monstrous creature there they called the Tasmanian devil – a creature capable of tearing a man limb from limb.

Shaking the stocking, Crozier looks into Lady Silence’s eyes. They are as black as the holes in the ice through which the Terrors lowered their dead until even those holes froze solid.

It is a lump of ice, not part of a foot. But the stocking itself is not frozen hard. The wool has not been out here for long in −60-degree cold. Logic suggests that this woman has brought it with her from the ship, but for some reason Crozier does not think so.

“Strong?” says the captain. “Evans?”

Silence shows no reaction to the names.

Crozier sighs, stuffs the stocking in his coat pocket, and lifts the boat pike. “We’re closer to Erebus than Terror ,” he says. “You’ll just have to come with me.”

Crozier turns his back on her, feeling the chill along his neck and spine again in doing so, and crunches off through the rising wind toward the now-visible outline of the Terror ’s sister ship. A minute later he can hear her soft footsteps on the ice behind him.