Dan Simmons - The Terror

Without turning, the Ice Master flung his greatcoat and other layers of outer wool backward at the thing, hurling the heavy garments as quickly as he could.

There was a woof of surprise – a gust of sulfurous stench – and then the tearing noise of Blanky’s clothing being ripped apart and tossed far out into the ice maze. But the distraction had bought him five seconds or more.

Again he threw himself forward into the ice hole.

His shoulders only just fit. The toes of his boots flailed, slid, finally found grip. His knees and fingers clawed for purchase.

Blanky was only four feet into the hole when the thing reached in after him. First it tore off his right boot and part of his foot. The Ice Master felt the shocking impact of claws into his flesh and thought – hoped – that it was only his heel that had been torn away. He had no way of knowing. Gasping, fighting a sudden stab of pain that even cut through the numbness of his injured leg, he clawed and wriggled and forced himself deeper into the hole.

The ice tunnel was tightening, growing narrower.

Claws raked ice and tore down his left leg, ripping flesh exactly where Blanky had already injured himself in the fall from the rigging. He smelled his own blood and the thing must also have smelled it because it quit clawing for a second. Then it roared.

The roar was deafening in the ice tunnel. Blanky’s shoulders were jammed, he could go no farther forward, and he knew the rear half of his body was still within reach of the monster. It roared again.

Blanky’s heart and testicles froze at the sound, but it did not frighten him into immobility. Using his few seconds of reprieve, the Ice Master wriggled backward into the less-restrictive space through which he’d just crawled, forced his arms forward, and kicked and kneed ice with the last of his remaining strength, ripping clothing and skin from his shoulders and sides as he tore through an ice aperture never meant for a man of even his moderate size.

Beyond this narrowest point, the ice tunnel widened and dropped lower. Blanky let himself slide forward on his belly, the slide lubricated by his own blood. His remaining clothing was in tatters. He could feel the encroaching cold of the ice against his clenched belly muscles and tightened scrotum.

The thing roared a third time but the horrible noise seemed to be a few feet farther away.

At the last instant, just before he dropped over the edge of the tunnel into an open space, Blanky was sure that all this had been for nothing. The tunnel – most likely made by melting so many months ago – had cut through the edge of the little berg but now had dropped him outside again. Suddenly, he was lying on his back under the stars. He could smell and feel his blood soaking into fresh-fallen snow. He could also hear the thing loping around the berg, first to the left, then to the right, eager to get at him, confident, certain now that it could follow the maddening smell of the human’s blood to its prey. The Ice Master was too injured and too exhausted to crawl any farther. Let whatever was going to happen to him happen now and may a Sailor’s God fuck to Hell this fucking thing that was going to eat him. Blanky’s last prayer was that one of his bones would lodge in the thing’s throat.

It was a full minute more and half a dozen more roars – each growing in volume and frustration, each coming from another point on the dark compass of night around him – before Blanky realized that the thing couldn’t get to him.

He was lying in the open and under the stars here, but in a box of ice no larger than five feet by eight – an enclosure created by at least three of the thick bergs being jostled and tumbled together by the pressure of sea ice. One of the tilted bergs hung over him like a falling wall, but Blanky could still see the stars. He could also see starlight coming from two vertical apertures on opposite sides of his ice coffin – he could see the great mass of the predator blocking the starlight at the end of these cracks, less than fifteen feet from him – but the gaps between bergs were no more than six inches wide. The melt tunnel he’d crawled through was the only real way into this space.

The monster roared and paced for another ten minutes.

Thomas Blanky forced himself to a sitting position and set his lacerated back and shoulders against the ice. His coats and slops were gone, and his trousers, two sweaters, wool and cotton shirts, and wool undershirt were just bloody tatters, so he prepared to freeze to death.

The thing was not leaving. It paced round and round the three-berg box like some restless carnivore in one of London’s trendy new zoological gardens. But it was Blanky who was in a cage.

He knew that even if the thing miraculously left, he had neither energy nor will to crawl out through the narrow tunnel. And if he could somehow make his way through the tunnel, he still might as well be on the moon – the moon which was now coming out from behind the roiling clouds and illuminating the bergs round about in a soft explosion of blue glow. And even if he miraculously crawled out of the bergy field, the three hundred yards to the ship was an impossible distance. He could no longer feel his body or move his legs.

Blanky settled his cold behind and bare feet deeper into the snow – the accumulation was greater here where the wind did not reach – and wondered if his fellow Terrors would ever find him. Why should they even look? He was just another of their party who had been carried off by the thing on the ice. At least his disappearance would not require the captain to haul another corpse – or part of a corpse wastefully wrapped in good ship’s sailcloth – down to the Dead Room.

There came more roars and noises from the far end of the cracks and tunnel, but Blanky ignored them. “Fuck you and the sow or devil who spawned you,” mumbled the Ice Master through numb, frozen lips. Perhaps he did not speak at all. He realized that freezing to death – even while bleeding to death, although some of the blood from his various wounds and lacerations already seemed to have frozen – was not painful at all. In truth, it was peaceful… quite restful. A wonderful way to…

Blanky realized that there was light coming through the cracks and tunnel. The thing was using torches and lanterns to fool him into coming out. But he wouldn’t fall for that old ruse. He would stay silent until the light went away, until he sli pped that last small bit into soft, eternal sleep. He would not give the thing the satisfaction of hearing him speak now after their long, silent duel.

“God- damn it, Mr. Blanky!” boomed Captain Crozier’s bass bellow down the ice tunnel. “If you’re in there, answer , God-damn it, or we’ll just leave you there.”

Blanky blinked. Or rather, he tried to blink. His lashes and eyelids were frozen. Was this some other ruse and stratagem of the demonthing?

“Here,” he croaked. And again, aloud this time, “Here!”

A minute later, the head and shoulders of the caulker’s mate, Cornelius Hickey, one of the smallest men on Terror , poked easily through the hole. He was carrying a lantern. Blanky thought dully that it was like watching a gimlet-faced gnome being born.

In the end, all four surgeons had a go at him.

Blanky came in and out of his pleasant fog from time to time to see how things were progressing. Sometimes it was his own ship’s surgeons working on him – Peddie and McDonald – and sometimes it was Erebus ’s sawbones, Stanley and Goodsir. Sometimes it was just one of the four cutting or sawing or packing or stitching away. Blanky had the urge to tell Goodsir that polar white bears could run much faster than twenty-five miles per hour when they put their mind to it. But then again – had it been a polar white bear? Blanky did not think so. Polar white bears were creatures of this earth, and this thing had come from somewhere else. Ice Master Thomas Blanky had no doubt of that.