Dan Simmons - The Terror

Books set into built-in shelves along the rising, inward-sloping hull helped insulate Crozier’s sleeping area a little but not much. More books ran under the ceiling for the five-foot width of the cabin, filling a shelf that hung under curving ship’s timbers three feet above the foldout desk connecting Crozier’s bunk to the hall partition. Directly overhead was the black circle of the Preston Patent Illuminator, its convex opaque glass piercing a deck now dark beneath three feet of snow and protective canvas. Cold air constantly flowed down from the Illuminator like the freezing exhalations of something long dead but still labouring to breathe.

Opposite Crozier’s desk was a narrow shelf holding his bathing basin. No water was kept in the basin since it would freeze; Crozier’s steward, Jopson, brought his captain hot water from the stove each morning. The space between desk and basin left just enough room in the tiny cabin for Crozier to stand, or – as now – sit at his desk on a backless stool that slid under the basin shelf when not in use.

He continued staring at the pistol and bottle of whiskey.

The captain of HMS Terror often thought that he knew nothing about the future – other than that his ship and Erebus would never again steam or sail – but then he reminded himself of one certainty: when his store of whiskey was gone, Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier was going to blow his brains out.

The late Sir John Franklin had filled his storeroom with expensive china – all bearing Sir John’s initials and family crest, of course – as well as cut crystal, forty-eight beef tongues, fancy silver also engraved with his crest, barrels of smoked Westphalia hams, towers of double Gloucestershire cheeses, bag upon bag of specially imported tea from a relative’s plantation in Darjeeling, and crocks of his favorite raspberry jam.

And while Crozier had packed some special foods for the occasional officers’ dinners he had to host, most of his money and allocated hold space had been dedicated to three hundred and twenty-four bottles of whiskey. It was not fine Scotch whiskey, but it would suffice. Crozier knew that he had long since reached that point of being the kind of drunkard where quantity always trumped quality. Sometimes here, as in the summer when he was especially busy, a bottle might last him two weeks or more. Other times – as during this past week – he might go through a bottle a night. The truth was, he had quit counting the empty bottles when he passed two hundred the previous winter, but he knew that he must be nearing the end of his supply. On the night he drinks the last of the last and his steward tells him there are no more – Crozier knew it would be at night – he firmly planned to cock the pistol, set the muzzle to his temple, and pull the trigger.

A more practical captain, he knew, might remind himself that there were the not-insignificant liquid remnants of four thousand five hundred gallons – gallons – of concentrated West Indian rum in the Spirit Room below, and that each jug was rated between 130 and 140 proof. The rum was doled out each day to the men in units of gills, one fourth of a pint cut with three-quarters pint of water, and there were enough gills and gallons left to swim in. A less finicky and more predatory drunkard-captain might consider the men’s rum his reserve. But Francis Crozier did not like rum. He never had. Whiskey was his drink, and when it was gone, so would be he.

Seeing young Tommy Evans’s body severed at the waist, the trousered legs sticking out in an almost comical Y, the boots still firmly laced over the dead feet, had reminded Crozier of the day he’d been summoned to the shattered bear blind a quarter of a mile from Erebus . In less than twenty-four hours, he realized, it would be the fifth-month anniversary of that eleventh of June debacle. At first Crozier and the other officers who had come running could make little sense of the havoc at the blind. The structure itself had been torn to shreds, the very iron bars of its frame bent and battered. The plank seat had been smashed to splinters and amid those splinters lay the headless body of Marine Sergeant Bryant, the ranking Marine on the expedition. His head – not yet recovered when Crozier arrived – had been batted almost thirty yards across the ice until it stopped next to a skinned bear cub’s carcass.

Lieutenant Le Vesconte had suffered a broken arm – not from the bear-monster, it turned out, but from falling out onto the ice – and Private William Pilkington had been shot through the upper left shoulder by the Marine next to him, Private Robert Hopcraft. The private had received eight broken ribs, a pulverized collarbone, and a dislocated left arm from what he later described as a glancing blow from a monster’s huge paw. Privates Healey and Reed had survived without serious injury but with the ignominy of having fled the melee in panic, tumbling and screaming and scrambling on all fours across the ice. Reed had broken three fingers in his flight.

But it had been the two trousered and boot-buckled legs and feet of Sir John Franklin – intact below the knees but separated, one lying in the blind, another having been dropped somewhere near the hole through the ice in the burial crater – which had commanded Francis Crozier’s attention.

What kind of malevolent intelligence, he wondered while drinking whiskey from his glass, severs a man at the knees and then carries the still-living prey to a hole in the ice and drops him in, to follow a second later? Crozier had tried not to imagine what may have happened next under the ice, although some nights after a few drinks and while trying to fall asleep, he could see the horror there. He also thought for a certainty that Lieutenant Graham Gore’s burial service one week earlier to the hour had been nothing more than an elaborate banquet unwittingly offered up to a creature already waiting and watching from beneath the ice.

Crozier had not been overly devastated by Lieutenant Graham Gore’s death. Gore was precisely that kind of well-bred, well-educated, C of E, public school, war-hero Royal Navy officer, come natural to command, at ease with superiors and inferiors, modest in all things but destined for great things, well-mannered British kind-even-to-Irishmen, upper-class fucking toff twit whom Francis Crozier had watched being promoted over him for more than forty years.

He took another drink.

What kind of malevolent intelligence kills but does not eat all its prey in such a winter of no game as this but rather returns the upper half of the corpse of Able-Bodied Seaman William Strong and the lower part of the corpse of young Tom Evans? Evans had been one of the “ship’s boys” who had beat muffled drums in Gore’s funeral procession five months earlier. What kind of creature plucks that young man from Crozier’s side in the dark but leaves the captain standing three yards away… then returns half the corpse?

The men knew. Crozier knew what they knew. They knew it was the Devil out there on the ice, not some overgrown arctic bear.

Captain Francis Crozier did not disagree with the men’s assessment – for all his pish-posh talk earlier that night over brandy with Captain Fitzjames – but he knew something that the men did not; namely that the Devil trying to kill them up here in the Devil’s Kingdom was not just the white-furred thing killing and eating them one by one, but everything here – the unrelenting cold, the squeezing ice, the electrical storms, the uncanny lack of seals and whales and birds and walruses and land animals, the endless encroachment of the pack ice, the bergs that plowed their way through the solid white sea not even leaving a single ship’s length lee of open water behind them, the sudden white-earthquake up-eruption of pressure ridges, the dancing stars, the shoddily tinned cans of food now turned to poison, the summers that did not come, the leads that did not open – everything . The monster on the ice was just another manifestation of a Devil that wanted them dead. And that wanted them to suffer.