Dan Simmons - The Terror

Crozier tries to vomit, but his stomach has been empty now for hours or days. He can only curl up and suffer the cramps.

He is in a darkened parlour in a cramped, fussily furnished American farm home in Hydesdale, New York, some twenty miles west of Rochester. Crozier has never heard of either Hydesdale or Rochester, New York. He knows that it is spring of this year, 1848, perhaps only a few weeks in his future. Just visible through a crack in the drawn, thick drapes, a lightning storm surges and flashes. Thunder shakes the house.

“Come, Mother!” cries one of two girls at the table. “We promise you will find this edifying.”

“I will find it terrifying,” says the mother, a drab middle-aged woman with a perpetual frown line bisecting her forehead from her tightly pulled, greying bun to her heavy, frowning eyebrows. “I don’t know why I allow you to talk me into this.”

Crozier can only marvel at the flat ugliness of the American rural dialect. Most of the Americans he has known have been defecting sailors, U.S. Navy captains, or whalers.

“Hurry, Mother!” The girl commanding her mother in such a bossy tone is 15-year-old Margaret Fox. She is modestly dressed and attractive in a simpering and not especially intelligent way that Crozier has noticed is often the case with the few American women he has met socially. The other girl at the table is Margaret’s 11-year-old sister Catherine. The younger girl, her pale face only just visible in the flickering candlelight, more resembles her mother, down to the dark eyebrows, too-tight bun, and incipient frown line.

The lightning flashes in the gap between dusty drapes.

The mother and two girls join hands around the circular oak table. Crozier notices that the lace doily on the table has yellowed with age. All three females have their eyes closed. Thunder shakes the single candle’s flame.

“Is someone there?” asks 15-year-old Margaret.

A crashingly loud rap. Not thunder, but a crack , as if someone has struck wood with a small mallet. Everyone’s hands are in sight.

“Oh my!” cries the mother, obviously ready to throw her hands up over her mouth in fear. Her two daughters hold tight and keep her from breaking the circle. The table rocks from their tugging.

“Are you our Guide tonight?” asks Margaret.

A loud RAP .

“Have you come to hurt us in any way?” asks Katy.

Two even louder RAP s.

“See, Mother?” whispers Maggie. Closing her eyes again, she says in a theatrical whisper, “Guide, are you the gentle Mr. Splitfoot who communicated with us last night?”

RAP.

“Thank you for convincing us last evening that you were real, Mr. Splitfoot,” continues Maggie, speaking almost as if she were in a trance. “Thank you for telling Mother the details about her children, telling all our ages, and for reminding her of the sixth child who died. Will you answer our questions tonight?”

RAP.

“Where is the Franklin Expedition?” asks little Katy.

RAP RAP RAP rap rap rap rap RAP RAP rap RAP RAP … the percusssions go on for half a minute.

“Is this the Spiritual Telegraph you spoke of?” whispers their mother.

Maggie shushes her. The rapping breaks off. Crozier sees, as if he can float through wood and see through wool and cotton, that both girls are double-jointed and are taking turns snapping and popping their big toes against their second toes. It was an amazingly loud rapping sound from such small toes.

“Mr. Splitfoot says that the Sir John Franklin whom the papers say everyone is seeking is well and with his men, who are also all well but very frightened, on their ships and in the ice near an island five days’ sail south of the cold place where they stopped their first year out,” intones Maggie.

“It is very dark where they are,” adds Katy.

There come more rappings.

“Sir John tells his wife, Jane, not to worry,” interprets Maggie. “He says that he shall see her soon – in the next world, if not in this one.”

“Oh my!” Mrs. Fox says again. “We have to call for Mary Redfield and Mr. Redfield, and Leah, of course, and Mr. and Mrs. Duesler, and Mrs. Hyde, and Mr. and Mrs. Jewell…”

“Ssshhhh!” hisses Katy.

RAP, RAP, RAP, rapraprapraprap, RAP.

“The Guide does not want you to speak when He is leading us,” whispers Katy.

Crozier moans and bites his leather strap. The cramps that had begun in his gut now rack his entire body. He shakes from the chill one moment and throws off the blankets the next.

There is a man dressed like an Esquimaux – animal-fur parka, high furry boots, a fur hood like Lady Silence’s. But this man is standing on a wooden stage in front of footlights. It is very hot. Behind the man, a painted backdrop shows ice, icebergs, a wintry sky. Fake white snow litters the stage. There are four overheated dogs of the type used by the Greenland Esquimaux lying on the stage, their tongues lolling.

The bearded man in the heavy parka is talking from the white-speckled podium. “I speak to you today for humanity, not for money,” says the little man. His American accent grates on Crozier’s aching ear as fiercely as had the teenaged girls’. “And I have traveled to England to speak to Lady Franklin herself. She wishes me Godspeed on our next expedition – contingent, of course, on whether we raise the money here in Philadelphia and in New York and in Boston to mount the expedition – and says that she would be honoured if the sons of the United States were to bring home her husband. So today I ask for your generosity, but only for the sake of humanity. I ask for this in Lady Franklin’s name, in her lost husband’s name, and in the secure hopes of bringing glory to the United States of America…”

Crozier sees the man again. The bearded fellow is out of his parka and naked and in bed in the Union Hotel in New York with a very young naked woman. It is a hot night and the bedclothes have been thrown back. There is no sign of the sledge dogs.

“Whatever may be my faults,” the man is saying, speaking softly because the window and transom are open to the New York night, “I have at least loved you. Were you an empress, darling Maggie, instead of a little nameless girl following an obscure and ambiguous profession, it would be the same.”

Crozier realizes that the young naked woman is Maggie Fox – only a few years older. She is still attractive in that simpering American way, even without her clothes on.

Maggie says in a tone much more throaty than the teenager’s imperious command Crozier heard earlier, “Dr. Kane, you know I love you.”

The man shakes his head. He has lifted a pipe from the bedside table and now frees his left arm from behind the girl to tamp in the tobacco and light it. “Maggie, my dear, I hear those words from your little deceitful mouth, feel your hair tumbling onto my chest, and would love to believe them. But you cannot rise above your station, my dear. You have many traits which lift you above your calling, Maggie… you are refined and lovable and, with a different education, would have been innocent and artless. But you are not worthy of a permanent regard from me, Miss Fox.”

“Not worthy,” repeats Maggie. Her eyes, perhaps her prettiest feature now that her plump breasts are covered from Crozier’s view, appear to be brimming with tears.

“I am sold to different destinies, my child,” says Dr. Kane. “Remember that I have my own sad vanities to pursue, even as you and your venial sisters and mother pursue your own. I am as devoted to my calling as you, poor child, can be to yours, if such theatrical spiritualist poppycock can be called a calling. Remember then, as a sort of a dream, that Dr. Kane of the Arctic Seas loved Maggie Fox of the Spirit Rappings.”