Dan Simmons - The Terror

“You could’ve hit Robert Sergeant just as easily,” said Cornelius Hickey. “Maybe he was still alive when you shot.”

Pilkington gave Terror ’s caulker’s mate a look of pure venom.

“Mr. Sergeant wasn’t alive,” said Dunn, not even noticing the exchange of glares between the Marine and Hickey. “ ’E screamed once and the thing crunched ’is skull like a walnut. I seen it. I ’ eard it.”

Others came running up then, including Captain Crozier and Captain Fitzjames, looking wan and insubstantial even in his heavy layers of slops and greatcoat, and Dunn, Bates, and the others all rushed to explain what they had seen.

Corporal Hedges and two other Marines who had run to the commotion returned from the darkness to say there was no sign of Mr. Sergeant, only a thick trail of blood and torn clothing that led off into the thicker ice jumble in the direction of the largest iceberg.

“It wants us to follow,” muttered Bates. “It’ll be waiting for us.”

Crozier showed his teeth in something between a mad grin and a snarl. “Then we won’t disappoint it,” he said. “This is as good a time as any to go after the thing again. We have the men out on the ice already, we have enough lanterns, and the Marines can fetch more muskets and shotguns. And the trail is fresh.”

“Too fresh,” muttered Corporal Hedges.

Crozier barked orders. Some men went back to the two ships to bring the weapons. Others formed up in hunting parties around the Marines, who were already armed. Torches and lanterns were brought from the work sites and assigned to the killing parties. Dr. Stanley and Dr. McDonald were sent for in the low probability that Robert Orme Sergeant might still be alive or the higher probability that someone else might be injured.

After Hickey was handed a musket, he considered shooting Lieutenant Irving by “accident” once out in the dark, but the young officer now seemed wary of both Manson and the caulker’s mate. Hickey caught several concerned glances the toff was throwing toward Magnus before Crozier assigned them to different search parties, and he knew that whether Irving had caught a glimpse of Magnus behind with his arms raised in that second before the shots and shouts were first heard or whether the officer simply sensed something wrong, it wouldn’t be as easy to ambush him the next time.

But they would. Hickey was afraid that John Irving’s suspicions would finally cause him to report to the captain what he’d seen in the hold, and the caulker’s mate could not abide that. It wasn’t so much the punishment for sodomy that bothered him – seamen were rarely hanged anymore, nor flogged around the fleet for that matter – but rather the ignominy. Caulker’s Mate Cornelius Hickey was no mere idiot’s bum-bugger.

He would wait until Irving lowered his guard again and then do the deed himself if he had to. Even if the ships’ surgeons discovered that the man had been murdered, it wouldn’t matter. Things had gone too far on this expedition. Irving would be just another corpse to deal with come the thaw.

In the end, Mr. Sergeant’s body was not found – the blood and strewn clothing trail ended halfway to the towering iceberg – but no one else died in the search. A few men lost toes to the cold and everyone was shaking and frostbitten to some extent when they finally called off the hunt an hour after their supper should have been served. Hickey did not see Lieutenant Irving again that afternoon.

It was Magnus Manson who surprised him as they trudged back to Terror again. The wind was beginning to howl at their backs and the Marines slouched along with rifles and muskets at the ready.

Hickey realized that the idiot giant next to him was weeping. The tears instantly froze to Magnus’s bearded cheeks.

“What is it, man?” demanded Hickey.

“It’s sad, is all, Cornelius.”

“What is sad?”

“Poor Mr. Sergeant.”

Hickey shot a glance at his partner. “I didn’t know you had such tender feelings for them damned officers, Magnus.”

“I don’t, Cornelius. They can all die and be damned for all I care. But Mr. Sergeant died out on the ice.”

“So?”

“His ghost won’t find his way back to the ship. And Captain Crozier passed the word when we was done searchin’ that we’re all having an extra tot o’ rum this evenin’. Makes me sad his ghost won’t be there, is all. Mr. Sergeant always liked his rum, Cornelius.”

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day about HMS Terror were low-key to the point of invisibility, but the Second Grand Venetian Carnivale on New Year’s Eve would soon make up for that.

There had been four days of violent storms keeping the men inside in the days preceding Christmas – the blizzards were so fierce that the watches had to be shortened to one hour – and Christmas Eve and the sacred day itself became exercises in lower-deck gloom. Mr. Diggle had prepared special dinners – cooking up the last of the noncanned salt pork in half a dozen imaginative ways, along with the last of the jugged hares depickled from their briny casks. In addition, the cook had – with the recommendation of the quartermasters, Mr. Kenley, Mr. Rhodes, and Mr. David McDonald, as well as the careful supervision of surgeons Peddie and Alexander McDonald – chosen from some of the better-preserved Goldner tinned goods, including turtle soup, beef à la Flamande, truffled pheasant, and calf’s tongue. For dessert both evenings, Mr. Diggle’s galley slaves had cut and scraped the worst of the mold from the remaining cheeses, and Captain Crozier had contributed the last five bottles of brandy from the Spirit Room’s stores set aside for special occasions.

The mood stayed sepulchral. There were a few attempts to sing by both the officers in the freezing Great Room astern and the common seamen in their slightly warmer berthing space forward – there was not enough coal left in the hold-deck scuttles for extra heating even if it was Christmas – but the songs died after a few rounds. Lamp oil had to be conserved, so the lower deck had all the visual cheer of a Welsh mine illuminated by a few flickering candles. Ice covered the timbers and beams and the men’s blankets and wool clothing were always damp. Rats scuttled everywhere.

The brandy raised spirits some, but not enough to dispel the literal and emotional gloom. Crozier came forward to chat with the men, and a few handed him presents – a tiny pouch of hoarded tobacco, the carving of a white bear running, the exaggerated ursine cartoon face suggesting fear (given in jest, almost certainly, and probably with some trepidation lest the formidable captain punish the man for fetishism), a mended red-wool undershirt from a man’s recently deceased friend, an entire carved chess set from Marine Corporal Robert Hopcraft (one of the quietest and least assuming men on the expedition and the one who had been promoted to corporal after receiving eight broken ribs, a fractured collarbone, and a dislocated arm during the thing’s attack on Sir John’s hunting blind in June). Crozier thanked everyone, pressed hands and shoulders, and went back to the officers’ mess, where the mood was a little more lively thanks to First Lieutenant Little’s surprise donation of two bottles of whiskey he’d kept hidden for almost three years.

The storm stopped on the morning of 26 December. Snow had drifted twelve feet above the level of the bow and six feet higher than the railing along the starboard forward quarter. After digging the ship out and excavating the cairn-lined path between the ships, the men got busy preparing for what they were calling the Second Grand Venetian Carnivale – the first one, Crozier assumed, being the one he’d taken part in as a midshipman on Parry’s botch of a polar voyage in 1824.