Dan Simmons - The Terror

He crept through the blue-lit maze of ice boulders and tall seracs. Whenever he became disoriented, he would look up at the full moon. The yellow orb looked more like another full-sized planet suddenly looming in the starlit sky than like any moon Irving remembered from his years ashore or brief assignments at sea. The air around it seemed to quake with the cold, as if the atmosphere itself were on the verge of freezing solid. Ice crystals in the upper air had created a huge double halo encircling the moon, the lower bands of both circles invisible behind the pressure ridge and icebergs round about. Set around the outer halo, like diamonds on a silver ring, were three bright, glowing crosses.

The lieutenant had seen this phenomenon several times before this during their night-winters up here near the north pole. Ice Master Blanky had explained that it was just the moonlight refracting off ice crystals the way a light would through a diamond, but it added to Irving’s sense of religious awe and wonder here in the blue-glowing ice field as that odd instrument began hooting and moaning again – just yards away behind the ice now – its tempo again hurrying to an almost ecstatic pace before suddenly breaking off.

Irving tried to imagine Lady Silence playing some hitherto unseen Esquimaux instrument – some caribou-antler variation on a Bavarian flügelhorn, say – but he rejected the idea as silly. First of all, she and the man who had died had arrived with no such instrument. And second, Irving had the strangest feeling that it was not Lady Silence who was playing this unseen instrument.

Crawling over the last low pressure ridge between him and the seracs from whence the sound was coming, Irving continued forward on all fours, not wanting the crunch of his lug-soled boots to be heard on the hard ice or soft snow.

The hooting – seemingly just behind the next blue-glowing serac, this one carved by wind into something like a thick flag – had begun again, rising quickly to the loudest, fastest, deepest, and most frenzied noise Irving had heard so far. To his amazement, he found that he had an erection. Something about this instrument’s deep, booming, reed-fluttering sound was so… primal … that it quite literally stirred his loins even as he shivered.

He peered around the last serac.

Lady Silence was about twenty feet away across a smooth blue-ice space. Seracs and ice boulders circled the spot, making Irving feel as if he’d suddenly found himself amid a Stonehenge circle in the ice-haloed and star-crossed moonlight. Even the shadows here were blue.

She was naked, kneeling on thick furs that must be her parka. Her back was in three-quarters profile to Irving and while he could see the curve of her right breast, he could also see the bright moonlight illuminating her long, straight, black hair and setting silver highlights on the hillocked flesh of her firm backside. Irving’s heart was pounding so hard that he was afraid she might hear it.

Silence was not alone. Something else filled the dark gap between Druidic ice boulders on the opposite side of the clearing, just beyond the Esquimaux woman.

Irving knew it was the thing from the ice. White bear or white demon, it was here with them – almost atop the young woman, looming over her. As much as the lieutenant strained his eyes, it was hard to make out the shape – white-blue fur against white-blue ice, heavy muscles against heavy ridges of snow and ice, black eyes that might or might not be separate from the absolute blackness behind the thing.

The triangular head on the strangely long bear neck was weaving and bobbing like a snake, he saw now, six feet above and beyond the kneeling woman. Irving tried to estimate the size of the creature’s head – for future reference in terms of killing it – but it was impossible to isolate the precise shape or size of the triangular mass with its coal-black eyes because of its odd and constant movement.

But the thing was looming over the girl. Its head was almost directly above her now.

Irving knew that he should cry out – rush forward with the pry bar in his mittened hand since he had brought no other weapon except for his resheathed ship’s knife – and try to save the woman, but his muscles would not have obeyed such a command at that moment. It was everything he could do to keep watching in a sort of sexually excited horror.

Lady Silence had extended her arms, palms up, like a popish priest saying Mass and inviting the miracle of the Eucharist. Irving had a cousin in Ireland who was popish, and he’d actually gone to a Catholic service with him once during a visit. The same sense of strange magical ceremony was being played out here in the blue moonlight. Silence, without a tongue, made no noise, but her arms were thrown wide, her eyes were closed, her head was thrown back – Irving had crawled far enough forward that he could see her face now – and her mouth was open and wide, like a supplicant awaiting Communion.

The creature’s neck thrust forward and down as quickly as a cobra’s strike and the thing’s jaws opened wide and seemed to snap shut on Lady Silence’s lower face, devouring half her head.

Irving almost screamed then. Only the ceremonial heaviness of the moment and his own incapacitating fear kept him silent.

The thing had not devoured her. Irving realized that he was looking at the top of the monster’s blue-white head – a head at least three times larger than the woman’s – as it had closed, but not snapped shut, its giant jaws fitting over her open mouth and upthrust jaw. Her arms were still flung wide to the night, almost as if ready to embrace the gigantic mass of hair and muscle enfolding her.

The music began then.

Irving saw the bobbing of both heads – creature’s and Esquimaux’s – but it took him half a minute before he realized that the orgiastic bass hootings and erotic bagpipe-flute notes were emanating from… the woman .

The monstrous thing looming as large as the ice boulders beside it, white bear or demon, was blowing down into her open mouth, playing her vocal cords as if her human throat were a reed instrument. The trills and low notes and bass resonances came louder, faster, more urgently – he saw Lady Silence raise her head and bend her neck one way while the serpentine-necked, triangular-headed bear-thing above her bent its head and neck in the opposite direction, the two looking like nothing so much as lovers straining to plunge deeper while seeking to find the best and deepest angle for a passionate open-mouthed kiss.

The musical notes pounded faster and faster – Irving was sure that the rhythm must be heard on the ship now, must be giving every man on the ship as powerful and permanent an erection as he was suffering at this second – and then suddenly, without warning, the noise cut off with the suddenness of the climax of wild lovemaking.

The thing’s head reared up and back. The white neck bobbed and coiled.

Lady Silence’s arms dropped to her naked sides as if she was too exhausted or transported to hold them out any longer. Her head lolled forward over her moon-silvered breasts.

It will devour her now , thought Irving through all the insulating layers of numbness and disbelief at what he had just seen. It will rend and eat her now .

It did not. For a second the bobbing white mass was gone, shuffled swiftly away on all fours through the blue Stonehenge of ice pillars, and then it was back, bowing its head low before Lady Silence, dropping something onto the ice in front of her. Irving could hear the noise of something organic hitting the ice and the smack had a familiar ring to it, but right now nothing was in context – Irving could make sense of nothing he saw or heard.

The white thing ambled away again; Irving could feel the impact of its huge feet through the solid sea ice. In a minute it was back, dropping something else in front of the Esquimaux girl. Then a third time.