Dan Simmons - The Terror

I cleared my throat . As you know, Captain, the men’s summer diet included a daily ration of one and a quarter pounds of salt meat with vegetables consisting of only one pint of peas and three-quarters pound of barley a week. But they received their daily bread and biscuits. When we went into winter quarters, the flour ration was cut back twenty-five percent on the baking of bread so as to conserve coal. If we could just begin cooking the remaining canned food rations longer and renewing the baking of bread, it would help not only in preventing the fouled meats in the canned goods from threatening our health but also help in the prevention of scurvy.

Impossible, snapped Crozier . We barely have enough coal left to heat both ships until April as it is. If you doubt me, ask Engineer Gregory or Engineer Thompson here on Terror .

I don’t doubt you, Captain, I said sadly . I’ve spoken to both engineers. But without a resumption of extended cooking of the remaining canned goods, our chances of being poisoned are very high. All we can do is throw out the obviously ruined canned foods and avoid the many poorly soldered cans. This cuts down on our remaining stores most dramatically.

What about the ether stoves? asked Fitzjames, brightening a bit . We could use the camping stoves to heat the tinned soups and other doubtful provisions.

It was McDonald who shook his head . We tested that, Commander. Dr. Goodsir and I experimented with heating some of the canned so-called Beef Stew on the patented Cooking Apparatus spirit stoves. The pint-sized bottles of ether do not last long enough to thoroughly heat the food and the temperatures are low. Also, our sledge parties – or all of us, should we be forced to Abandon Ship – will be dependent upon the spirit stoves to melt snow and ice for drinking water once we are on the ice. We should preserve the ether spirits.

I was with Lieutenant Gore on our first sledge party to King William Land – and we used the spirit stoves daily, I added softly . The men used just enough ether and flame to get the canned soups to bubble a bit before digging in ravenously. The food was barely tepid.

There was a long silence.

You report that over half the canned food we had been counting on to get through the next year or two – if necessary – is ruined, Crozier said at last . We don’t have the coal to recook this food on either Erebus ’s or Terror ’ s large Frazer’s Patent Stoves, nor on the smaller whaleboat iron stoves, and you tell me that there is insufficient fuel to use the ether spirit stoves. What can we do?

All five of us – the Four Surgeons and Captain Fitzjames – remained Silent. The only answer was to Abandon Ship and seek out a more hospitable clime, preferably Ashore somewhere south, where we might shoot fresh game.

As if reading our collective minds, Crozier smiled – it was a uniquely mad Irish smile, I thought at the time – and said , The problem, gentlemen, is that there’s not a man aboard either ship, not even one of our venerable Marines, who knows how to catch or kill a seal or walrus – should those creatures ever grace us with their presence again – nor with the experience of shooting large game such as caribou, of which we have seen none.

The Rest of Us remained silent.

Thank you for your diligence, effort at doing the Inventory, and excellent report, Mr. Peddie, Mr. Goodsir, Mr. McDonald, and Mr. Stanley. We shall continue separating the cans you consider fully soldered and safe from those insufficiently soldered or bloated, distended, or otherwise visibly Putrid. We shall stay on the current Two-Thirds Rations until after Christmas Day, at which time I shall instigate a more draconian rationing plan.

Dr. Stanley and I pulled on our many layers of winter slops and went up to the deck to watch Dr. Peddie, Dr. McDonald, Captain Crozier, and an honor guard of four seamen armed with shotguns begin their long trek back to Terror in the dark. As their lanterns and torches disappeared in the blowing snow and the wind howled in the rigging, the roar mixing with the constant grind and groan of the ice working against Erebus ’s hull, Stanley leaned close and shouted into my mufflered ear : It would be a blessing if they missed the cairns and got lost on the way back. Or if the Thing on the ice got them tonight.

I could only turn and stare in horror at the chief surgeon.

Death by starvation is a terrible thing, Goodsir, continued Stanley . Trust me. I’ve seen it in London and I’ve seen it with shipwreck. Death by scurvy is worse. It would be better if the Thing took us all tonight.

And with that we went below to the flame-flickering Darkness of the lower deck and to a cold almost the equal of the Dante-esque Ninth Circle Arctic Night without.

On a Tuesday dogwatch in the third week of November, the thing from the ice came aboard Erebus and took the well-liked bosun, Mr. Thomas Terry, snatching him from his post near the stern, leaving only the man’s head on the railing. There had been no blood at Terry’s stern watch post: no blood on the ice-covered deck or on the hull. The conclusion was that the thing had taken Terry, carried him hundreds of yards out into the darkness where the seracs rose like trees of ice in a thick white forest, murdered and dismembered him – perhaps eaten him, although the men were growing increasingly doubtful that the white thing killing their crewmates and officers was actually doing so for food – and then it returned Mr. Terry’s head before the starboard or port watchmen noticed that the bosun had gone missing.

The men who found the bosun’s head at the end of that watch spent the week telling and retelling the others about poor Mr. Terry’s visage – jaws open wide as if frozen in the middle of a scream, lips pulled back from his teeth, eyes protruding. There was not a tooth wound or claw mark on his face or head, only the ragged tearing at the neck, the thin pipe of his esophagus protruding like a rat’s grey tail, and the stump of white spinal cord showing.

Suddenly the more than one hundred surviving seamen found religion. Most of the men aboard Erebus had grumbled for two years about Sir John Franklin’s endless Divine Services, but now even the men who wouldn’t have recognized a Bible if they’d wakened next to one after a three-day drunk found a deep need for some sort of spiritual reassurance. As word of Thomas Terry’s beheading spread – Captain Fitzjames had put the sail-wrapped bundle in Erebus ’s own sealed Dead Room down on the hold deck – the men began requesting a single Sunday service for both crews. It was ferret-faced Cornelius Hickey who came to Crozier late on Friday night with the request. Hickey had been on a torchlight work party repairing ice cairns between the ships and had spoken to the men from Erebus .

“It’s unanimous, sir,” said the caulker’s mate as he stood in the doorway of Captain Crozier’s tiny cabin. “All the men would like a combined Divine Service. Both ships, Captain.”

“You speak for every man on both ships?” Crozier asked.

“Aye, sir, I do,” said Hickey, flashing a once-winning smile that now showed only four of his remaining six teeth. The little caulker’s mate was nothing if not confident.

“I doubt it,” said Crozier. “But I’ll talk to Captain Fitzjames and let you know about the service. Whatever we decide, you can be our appointed courier to tell all the men.” Crozier had been drinking when Hickey rapped on his door. And he’d never liked the officious little man. Every ship had sea lawyers – like rats, they were a fact of Naval life – and Hickey, despite his bad grammar and total lack of formal education, struck Crozier as the kind of sea lawyer that, on a difficult voyage, soon began fomenting actual mutiny.