Dan Simmons - The Terror

Captain Crozier announced that punishment had been duly meted out according to the Ship’s Articles and Dismissed the Company. Before going aft, I ran up on deck very briefly to watch the departure of the men from Terror. They went down the ice ramp from the ship and began their long walk back to the other ship in the dark – passing the scorched and partially melted area where the Carnivale Conflagration had taken place. Crozier and his primary officer, Lieutenant Little, brought up the rear. None of the more than forty men had said a word by the time they had disappeared beyond the small circle of light radiating from Erebus ’s deck lanterns. Eight men remained as a sort of companion Guard to walk with Hickey and Manson when they were ready to be returned to Terror.

I hurried down and aft to the new Sick Bay to take care of my new charges. Beyond Washing and Bandaging their wounds – the Cat had left a Sickening array of welts and gouges on each man and some Permanent Scars, I would think – there was little else I could do. Manson had ceased his Weeping, and when Hickey abruptly ordered him to stop his Snuffling, the giant did so at once. Hickey suffered my Ministrations in silence and gruffly ordered Manson to get fully dressed and to follow him out of the Sick Bay.

Aylmore, the gunroom steward, had been unmanned by the punishment. From the minute he had regained consciousness, according to young Henry Lloyd, my current Surgeon’s Assistant, Aylmore had moaned and cried aloud. He continued doing so as I Washed and Bandaged him. He was still moaning piteously and seemed unable to walk by himself when some of the other warrant officers – the elderly John Bridgens, the Subordinate Officer’s Steward, Mr. Hoar, the Captain’s Steward, Mr. Bell the Quartermaster, and Samuel Brown, the Boatswain’s Mate – arrived to help him back to his quarters.

I could hear Aylmore moaning and crying out all the way down the Companionway and around the Main Ladderway as the other men half-carried him to the gunroom steward’s cubicle on the starboard side between William Fowler’s empty berth and my own, and I knew that I would probably be listening to Aylmore’s cries through the thin wall all through the night.

Mr. Aylmore reads a lot, said William Fowler from his place on his cot in the Sick Bay. The Purser’s Steward had received serious burns and a Terrible Mauling during the night of the Carnivale Conflagration, but never once during the last four days of stitchings or skin removals had Fowler cried out. With wounds and burns on both his Back and Stomach, Fowler attempted to sleep on his side, but not once had he complained to Lloyd or me .

Men who read a lot have a more sensitive disposition, added Fowler . And if the poor bloke hadn’t read that stupid story by that American, he wouldn’t have suggested the different-coloured compartments for Carnivale – an idea we all thought was Wonderful at the time – and none of this would have happened.

I did not know what to say to this.

Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler . Maybe it’s better for a man to stay inside his own mind.

Amen, I felt like saying, although I do not know why .

As I write this, I am in Dr. Peddie’s former surgeon’s berth on HMS Terror since Captain Crozier has instructed me to spend each Tuesday through Thursday aboard his ship and the Remaining Days of the Week aboard Erebus. Lloyd is watching my six recovering charges in the Erebus sick bay and I was Distressed to discover almost as many seriously ill men here aboard Terror.

For many of them, it is the disease we Arctic Doctors first called Nostalgia and then Debility. The early severe stages of this disease – besides bleeding gums, Confusion of Thought, weakness in the Extremities, bruises everywhere, and bleeding from the Colon – often include a tremendous Sentimental Wish to go home. From Nostalgia the weakness, confusion, Impaired Judgement, bleeding from Anus and Gums, open Sores, and other symptoms worsen until the patient is unable to stand or work.

Another name for Nostalgia and Debility – one which all Surgeons hesitate to say aloud and which I have not yet done – is Scurvy.

Meanwhile, Captain Crozier took to his Private Cabin yesterday and is terribly sick. I can hear his stifled moans since the late Peddie’s compartment borders the captain’s here on the starboard stern side of the ship. I think Captain Crozier is biting down on something hard – perhaps a Strip of Leather – to keep those moans from being heard. But I have always been Blessed (or Cursed) with good hearing.

The Captain turned over the handling of the Ship’s and Expedition’s affairs to Lieutenant Little yesterday – thus quietly but Firmly giving Command to Little rather than to Captain Fitzjames – and explained to me that he, Captain Crozier, was battling a recurrence of Malaria.

This is a lie.

It is not just the symptoms of Malaria which I hear Captain Crozier suffering – and almost certainly will continue to hear through the walls until I head back to Erebus on Friday morning .

Because of my uncle’s and my father’s weaknesses, I know the Demons the Captain is battling tonight.

Captain Crozier is a man addicted to Hard Spirits, and either those Spirits on board have been used up or he has decided to go off them of his own Volition during this Crisis. Either way, he is suffering the Torments of Hell and shall continue to do so for many days more. His sanity may not survive. In the meantime, this ship and this Expedition are without their True Leader. His stifled moans, in a ship descending into Sickness and Despair, are Pitiable to the extreme.

I wish I could help him. I wish I could help the dozens of other Sufferers – all the victims of wounds, maulings, burns, diseases, incipient malnutrition, and melancholic despair – aboard this entrapped ship and her sister ship. I wish I could help myself, for already I am showing the early signs of Nostalgia and Debility.

But there is little that I – or any surgeon in this Year of Our Lord 1848 – can do.

God help us all.

It will not end.

The pain will not end. The nausea will not end. The chills will not end. The terror will not end.

Crozier writhes in the frozen blankets of his bunk and wants to die.

During his lucid moments this week, which are few, Crozier laments the most sane act he had performed before retreating to his demons; he had given his pistol to Lieutenant Little with no explanation other than to tell Edward not to return it unless and until he, the captain, asks for it while on deck and in full uniform again.

Crozier would pay anything now for that charged and loaded weapon. This level of pain is unsupportable. These thoughts are unsupportable.

His grandmother on his late, unlamented father’s side, Memo Moira, had been the outcast, the unmentioned and unmentionable Crozier. In her eighties, when Crozier was not yet a teenager, Memo lived two villages away – an immense, inestimable, and unbridgeable distance for a boy – and his mother’s family neither included her in family events nor mentioned her existence.

She was a Papist. She was a witch.

Crozier began sneaking over to her village, cadging rides on pony carts, when he was ten. Within a year he was going with the old woman to that strange village’s Papist church. His mother and aunt and maternal grandmother would have died if they had known. He would have been renounced and exiled and held in as much scorn by that proper Irish-English Presbyterian side of his family as the Naval Board and Arctic Council had held him in for all these years just for being an Irishman. And a commoner.