Dan Simmons - The Terror

Suddenly Sir John’s gaze turned far to the left, past Lieutenant Le Vesconte’s shoulder, to the burial pit not twenty feet from the south end of the blind. The opening to the black sea had long frozen over and much of the crater itself had filled with blowing snow since the burial day, but even the sight of the depression in the ice made Sir John’s now-sentimental heart hurt in memory of young Gore. But it had been a fine burial service. He had conducted it with dignity and proud military bearing.

Sir John noticed two black objects lying close together in the lowest part of the icy depression – dark stones perhaps? Buttons or coins left behind as remembrance of Lieutenant Gore by some seaman filing by the burial site precisely a week ago? And in the dim, shifting light of the snowstorm the tiny black circles, all but invisible unless one knew exactly where to look, seemed to stare back at Sir John with something like sad reproach. He wondered if by some fluke of climate two tiny openings to the sea itself had remained open during all the intervening freeze and snow, thus revealing these two tiny circles of black water against the grey ice.

The black circles blinked.

“Ah… Sergeant…,” began Sir John.

The entire floor of the burial crater seemed to erupt into motion. Something huge, white and grey and powerful exploded toward them, rising and rushing at the blind and then disappearing on the south side of the canvas, out of sight of the firing slit.

The Marines, obviously not sure of what they had just seen, had no time to react.

A powerful force struck the south side of the blind not three feet from Le Vesconte and Sir John, collapsing the iron and rending the canvas.

The Marines and Sir John leapt to their feet as the canvas ripped above them and behind them and to the side of them, black claws the length of Bowie knives tearing through thick sail. Everyone was shouting at once. There came a terrible carrion reek.

Sergeant Bryant raised his musket – the thing was inside, it was inside , with them, among them, surrounding them with the circumference of inhuman arms – but before he could fire there was a rush of air through the reek of predator breath. The sergeant’s head flew off his shoulders and out through the firing slit and skittered across the ice.

Le Vesconte screamed, someone fired a musket – the ball striking only the Marine next to him. The top of the canvas blind was gone, something huge blocked the opening where the sky should be, and just as Sir John turned to throw himself forward out of the ripping sail canvas, he was struck by a terrible pain just below both knees.

Then things became blurred and absurd. He seemed to be upside down, watching men being scattered like tenpins across the ice, men being thrown from the destroyed blind. Another musket fired but only as the Marine threw the weapon down and tried to scramble away across the ice on all fours. Sir John saw all this – impossibly, absurdly – from an inverted and swinging position. The pain in his legs grew intolerable, there came the sound of saplings snapping, and then he was thrown forward, down into the burial crater, toward the new circle of black awaiting. His head smashed through the thin scrim of ice like a cricket ball through a windowpane.

The water’s cold temporarily stopped Sir John’s wildly pumping heart. He tried to scream but inhaled salt water.

I am in the sea. For the first time in my life, I am in the sea itself. How extraordinary.

Then he was flailing, turning over and over, feeling the torn fragments and rags of his shredded greatcoat peeling away, feeling nothing from his legs now and getting no purchase against the freezing water with his feet. Sir John used his arms and hands to pull and paddle, not knowing in the terrible darkness if he was fighting toward the surface or merely propelling himself deeper into the black water.

I am drowning. Jane, I am drowning. Of all the fates I had considered these long years in the Service, never once, my darling, did I contemplate drowning.

Sir John’s head struck something solid, almost knocking him unconscious, forcing his face beneath the water again, filling his mouth and lungs with salt water again.

And then, my Dears, Providence led me to the surface – or at least to the thin inch of breathable air between the sea and fifteen feet of ice above.

Sir John’s arms flailed wildly as he rotated onto his back, his legs still not working, fingers scrabbling at ice above. He forced himself to calm his heart and limbs, forced discipline so that his nose could find that tiniest fraction of air between ice and freezing cold water. He breathed. Raising his chin, he coughed out seawater and breathed through his mouth.

Thank you, dear Jesus, Lord…

Fighting down the temptation to scream, Sir John scrabbled along the underside of the ice as if he were climbing a wall. The bottom of the pack ice here was irregular, sometimes protruding down into the water and giving him no fraction of an inch of air to breathe, sometimes rising five or six inches or more and almost allowing him to lift his full face out of the water.

Despite the fifteen feet of ice above him, there was a dim glow of light – blue light, the Lord’s light – refracted through the rough facets of ice just inches from his eyes. Some daylight was coming in via the hole – Gore’s burial hole – through which he had just been thrown.

All I had to do, my dear ladies, my darling Jane, was to find my way back to that narrow hole in the ice – get my bearings, as it were – but I knew that I had only minutes…

Not minutes, seconds. Sir John could feel the cold water freezing the life out of him. And there was something terribly wrong with his legs. Not only could he not feel them, but he could feel an absolute absence there. And the seawater tasted of his own blood.

And then, ladies, the Lord God Almighty shewed me the light…

To his left. The opening was some ten yards or less to his left. The ice was high enough above the black water here that Sir John could raise his head, set the top of his bald and freezing pate against rough ice, gasp in air, blink water and blood out of his eyes, and actually see the glow of the Saviour’s light not ten yards away…

Something huge and wet rose between him and the light. The darkness was absolute. His inches of breathable air were suddenly taken away, filled with the rankest of carrion breath against his face.

“Please…,” began Sir John, sputtering and coughing.

Then the moist reek enveloped him and huge teeth closed on either side of his face, crunching through bone and skull just forward of his ears on both sides of his head.

It was five bells, 2:30 a.m., and Captain Crozier was back from Erebus , had inspected the corpses – or half-corpses – of William Strong and Thomas Evans where the thing on the ice had left them propped up near the stern rail on the quarterdeck, had seen to their stowage in the Dead Room below, and now he sat in his cabin contemplating the two objects on his desk – a new bottle of whiskey and a pistol.

Almost half Crozier’s small cabin was taken up by the built-in bunk set against the starboard hull. The bunk looked like a child’s cradle with carved, raised sides, built-in cupboards below, and a lumpy horsehair mattress set almost chest-high. Crozier had never slept well on real beds and often wished for the swinging hammocks he’d spent so many years in as a midshipman, young officer, and when he served before the mast as a boy. Set against the outer hull as this bunk was, it was one of the coldest sleeping places aboard the ship – chillier than the bunks of the warrant officers with their cubbies in the centre of the lower deck aft, and much colder than the sleeping hammocks of the lucky seamen forward, strung as they were on the mess deck near the still-glowing Frazer’s Patent Stove that Mr. Diggle cooked on twenty hours out of the day.