Dan Simmons - The Terror

Sometime around 2:00 a.m. – he had actually checked his pocket watch by the light filtering in through the bag opening – Harry D. S. Goodsir had begun drifting off into a state of semiconsciousness vaguely resembling sleep when he was pounded awake by two deafening explosions.

Struggling with his sweat-frozen bag like a newborn trying to chew through its caul, Goodsir managed to free his head and shoulders. The freezing night air hit his face with enough cold force to make his heart stutter. The sky was already brighter with sunlight.

“What?” he cried. “What has happened?”

Second Mate Des Voeux and three of the seamen were standing on their sleeping bags, long knives they must have slept with in their gloved hands. Lieutenant Gore had burst from the Holland tent. He was fully dressed with a pistol in his bare – bare ! – hand.

“Report!” Gore snapped at one of the two sentries, Charlie Best.

“It was the bears, Lieutenant,” said Best. “Two of them. Big bastards. They’ve been snooping around all night – you remember we saw them about half a mile out before we stopped to make camp – but they kept coming closer and closer, circling like, until finally John and me had to shoot at them to drive them away.”

“John” was twenty-seven-year-old John Morfin, Goodsir knew, the other sentry this night.

“You both fired?” asked Gore. The lieutenant had climbed to the highest point of nearby heaped snow and ice and was searching the area with his brass telescope. Goodsir wondered why the man’s bare hands hadn’t already frozen to the metal.

“Aye, sir,” said Morfin. He was reloading his breech-loading shotgun, his wool gloves fumbling with the shells.

“Did you hit them?” asked Des Voeux.

“Aye,” said Best.

“Didn’t do no good,” said Morfin. “Just with shotguns over about thirty paces. Them bears have thick hides and thicker skulls. Hurt ’em enough though that they went away.”

“I don’t see them,” said Lieutenant Gore from ten feet up on his ice hill above the tent.

“We think they come out of those little open holes in the ice,” said Best. “The bigger one was running that way when John fired. We thought it went down, but we went out on the ice far enough to see there weren’t no carcass there. It’s gone.”

The sledge-hauling team had noticed those soft areas in the ice – not quite round, about four feet across, too large for the tiny breathing holes ring seals made, seemingly too small and too far separated for the white bears, and always crusted over with several inches of soft ice. At first, the holes had raised hopes for open water, but in the end they were so few and far between that they were only treacherous. Seaman Ferrier, walking ahead of the sledge late in the afternoon, had almost fallen through one, his left leg going in to above the knee, and they’d all had to stop long enough for the shivering sailor to change into different boots, woollies, socks, and trousers.

“It’s time for Ferrier and Pilkington to take the watch anyway,” said Lieutenant Gore. “Bobby, fetch the musket from my tent.”

“I’m better with shotgun, sir,” said Ferrier.

“I’m comfortable with the musket, Lieutenant,” said the big Marine.

“Get the musket then, Pilkington. Peppering those things with shotgun pellets is just going to get them angry.”

“Aye, sir.”

Best and Morfin, obviously shaking from their cold two hours on watch rather than from any tension, sleepily pulled off their boots and crawled into their waiting bags. Private Pilkington and Bobby Ferrier forced their swollen feet into boots retrieved from their bags and slouched off to the nearby ice ridges to keep watch.

Shaking worse than ever, his nose and cheeks now joining his fingers and toes in feeling numb, Goodsir curled up deep in his bag and prayed for sleep.

It did not come. A little more than two hours later, Second Mate Des Voeux began ordering everyone up and out of their bags.

“We have a long day ahead of us, boys,” cried the mate in jovial tones.

They were still more than twenty-two miles from the shore of King William Land.

You’re frozen through, Francis,” says Commander Fitzjames. “Come aft to the Common Room for brandy.”

Crozier would prefer whiskey, but brandy will have to serve. He precedes Erebus ’s captain down the long, narrow companionway toward what had been Captain Sir John Franklin’s personal cabin and which is now the equivalent of Terror ’s Great Room – a library and off-duty gathering place for officers and a meeting room when necessary. Crozier thinks that it says good things about Fitzjames that the commander kept his own tiny cubicle after Sir John’s death, refitting the spacious aft chamber into a common area and sometimes sick bay for surgery.

The companionway is totally dark except for the glow from the Common Room and the deck is canted more steeply in the opposite direction from Terror , listing to port rather than starboard, down by the stern rather than bow. And although the ships are almost identical in design, Crozier always notices other differences as well. HMS Erebus smells different somehow – beyond the identical stench of lamp oil, dirty men, filthy clothes, months of cooking, coal dust, pails of urine, and the men’s breath hanging in the cold, dank air, there is something else. For some reason, Erebus stinks more of fear and hopelessness.

There are two officers smoking their pipes in the Common Room, Lieutenant Le Vesconte and Lieutenant Fairholme, but both stand, nod toward the two captains, and withdraw, pulling the sliding door shut behind them.

Fitzjames unlocks a heavy cabinet and pulls out a bottle of brandy, pouring a large measure into one of Sir John’s crystal water glasses for Crozier, a smaller amount for himself. For all of the fine china and crystal their late expedition leader loaded aboard for his and his officers’ own use, there are no brandy snifters. Franklin was a devout teetotaler.

Crozier does no snifting. He drinks the brandy down in three gulps and allows Fitzjames to replenish it.

“Thank you for responding so quickly,” says Fitzjames. “I expected a message in response, not for you to come in person.”

Crozier frowns. “Message? I haven’t received a message from you in over a week, James.”

Fitzjames stares a moment. “You didn’t receive a message this evening? I sent Private Reed to your ship with one about five hours ago. I presumed he was spending the night there.”

Crozier shakes his head slowly.

“Oh… damn,” says Fitzjames.

Crozier pulls the woolen stocking from his pocket and sets it on the table. In the brighter light from the bulkhead lamp here there are still no signs of violence. “I found it during my walk over. Closer to your ship than mine.”

Fitzjames takes the stocking and studies it sadly. “I’ll ask the men if they recognize it,” he says.

“It could belong to one of mine,” Crozier says softly. He succinctly tells Fitzjames about the attack, the mortal wounding of Private Heather, and the disappearance of William Strong and young Tom Evans.

“Four in one day,” says Fitzjames. He pours more brandy for both of them.

“Yes. What is it you were sending me a message about?”

Fitzjames explains there had been sightings of something large moving through the ice jumbles, just beyond the lanterns’ glow, all that day. The men had fired repeatedly but parties going onto the ice had found no blood nor other sign. “So I apologize, Francis, for that idiot Bobby Johns firing at you a few minutes ago. The men’s nerves are stretched very tightly.”