Dan Simmons - The Terror

Crozier comes awake in the dark. He does not know where or when he is. His cubicle is dark. The ship seems dark. The timbers moan – or is that an echo of his own moans of the last hours and days? It is very cold. The warm blanket he seems to remember Jopson and Goodsir setting on him is now as damp and frozen as the other bedsheets. The ice moans against the ship. The ship continues its answering groans from pressured oak and cold-strained iron.

Crozier wants to get up but finds that he is too weak and hollow to stir. He can barely move his arms. The pain and visions roll over him like a breaking wave.

Faces of men he has known or met or seen in the Service.

There is Robert McClure, one of the most guileful and ambitious men Francis Crozier has ever known – another Irishman intent on making good in an English world. McClure is on the deck of a ship in the ice. Cliffs of ice and rock rise all around, some six or seven hundred feet high. Crozier has never seen anything like it.

There is old John Ross on the stern deck of a little ship – a sort of yacht – heading eastward. Heading home.

There is James Clark Ross, older and fatter and less happy than Crozier has ever seen him. The rising sun shines through ice-rimmed jib lines as his ship leaves the ice for the open sea. He is heading home.

There is Francis Leopold M’Clintock – someone Crozier somehow knows has searched for Franklin under James Ross and then come back on his own again in later years. What later years? How long from now? How far in our future?

Crozier can see images flit by as if from a magic lantern, but he does not hear answers to his questions.

There is M’Clintock sledging, man-hauling, moving more quickly and efficiently than Lieutenant Gore or any of Sir John’s or Crozier’s men ever have.

There is M’Clintock standing at a cairn and reading a note just pulled from a brass cylinder. Is it the note that Gore left on King William Land seven months ago? Crozier wonders. The frozen gravel and grey skies behind M’Clintock look the same.

Suddenly there is M’Clintock, alone on the ice and gravel, his sledging party visible coming up several hundred yards behind him in the blowing snow. He is standing in front of a horror – a large boat tied and lashed atop of a huge cobbled-together sledge made of iron and oak.

The sledge looks like something Crozier’s carpenter, Mr. Honey, would build. It has been assembled as if it was meant to last for a century. Every join shows care. The thing is massive – it must weigh at least 650 pounds. Atop it is a boat that weighs another 800 pounds.

Crozier recognizes the boat. It is one of Terror ’s 28-footers – one of the pinnaces. He sees that it has been extensively rigged for river travel. The sails are furled and tied and shrouded and iced over.

Climbing onto a rock and looking into the open boat as if over M’Clintock’s shoulder, Crozier sees two skeletons. The teeth in the two skulls seem to gleam at M’Clintock and Crozier. One skeleton is little more than a heap of visibly chewed and heavily gnawed and partially devoured bones tumbled into a rough pile in the bow. Snow has drifted over the bones.

The other skeleton is intact, undisturbed, and still clothed in the tatters of what looks to be an officer’s greatcoat and layers of other warm clothing. The skull still has remnants of a cap on it. This corpse is sprawled on the after-thwarts, its skeletal hands extended along the gunwales toward two double-barreled shotguns propped there. At the body’s booted feet lie stacks of wool blankets and canvas clothing and a partially snow-covered burlap bag filled with powder-shot cartridges. Set on the bottom of the pinnace midway between the dead man’s boots, like a pirate’s booty about to be counted and gloated over, are five gold watches and what looks to be thirty or forty pounds of individually wrapped chunks of chocolate. Also nearby are 26 pieces of silverware – Crozier can see, and knows that M’Clintock can see, the personal crests of Sir John Franklin’s, Captain Fitzjames’s, six other officers’, and his – Crozier’s – on the various knives, spoons, and forks. He sees similarly engraved dishes and two silver serving plates sticking up out of the ice and snow.

Along the 25 feet of pinnace bottom separating the two skeletons lies a dizzying array of bric-a-brac protruding from the few inches of snow that have accumulated: two rolls of sheet metal, a full canvas boat cover, eight pairs of boots, two saws, four files, a stack of nails, and two boat knives next to the bag of powder-shot cartridges near the skeleton in the stern.

Crozier also sees paddles, folded sails, and rolls of twine near the clothed skeleton. Closer to the pile of partially devoured bones in the bow are a stack of towels, bars of soap, several combs and a toothbrush, a pair of handworked slippers just inches from scattered white toe bones and metatarsals, and six books – five Bibles and The Vicar of Wakefield , which now sits on a shelf in the Great Cabin of HMS Terror .

Crozier wants to close his eyes but cannot. He wants to fly away from this vision – all these visions – but has no control over them.

Suddenly Francis Leopold M’Clintock’s vaguely familiar face seems to melt, sag, then reform itself into the visage of a younger man, someone Francis Crozier does not know. Everything else stays the same. The younger man – a certain Lieutenant William Hobson, whom Crozier now knows without knowing how he knows – is standing in the same spot that M’Clintock had and is peering into the open boat with the same expression of sickened incredulity that Crozier had seen on M’Clintock’s face a moment earlier.

Without warning, the open boat and the skeletons are gone and Crozier is lying in a cave of ice next to a naked Sophia Cracroft.

No, it is not Sophia. Crozier blinks, feeling Memo Moira’s Second Sight burning through and from his aching brain like a fist of fever, and now he sees that he is lying naked next to a naked Lady Silence. They are surrounded by furs, and they are lying on some sort of snow or ice shelf. Their space is illuminated by a flickering oil lamp. The curved ceiling is made from blocks of ice. Silence’s breasts are brown, and her hair is long and very black. She is leaning on one elbow amid the furs and looking at Crozier with some earnestness.

Do you dream my dreams ? she asks without moving her lips or opening her mouth. She has not spoken in English. Am I dreaming yours ?

Crozier feels her inside his mind and heart. It feels like a jolt of the best whiskey he has ever swallowed.

And then the most terrible nightmare of all comes.

This stranger, this blend of M’Clintock and someone named Hobson, is not looking down at the open boat with two skeletons in it but is watching young Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier secretly attending Catholic Mass with his witch-Papist Memo Moira.

It was one of the deepest secrets of Crozier’s life that he had done this thing – not only gone to the forbidden service with Memo Moira but partaken of the heresy of the Catholic Eucharist, the much-derided and forbidden Holy Communion.

But this form of M’Clintock-Hobson stands like an altar boy as a trembling Crozier – now a child, now a scarred man in his fifties – approaches the altar rail, kneels, puts his head back, opens his mouth, and extends his tongue for the Forbidden Wafer – the Body of Christ – pure transubstantiated cannibalism to all the other adults in Crozier’s village and family and life.

But something is strange. The grey-haired priest looming over him in his white robes is dripping water on the floor and altar rail and onto Crozier himself. And the priest is too large even for a child’s point of view – huge, wet, muscled, lumbering, throwing a shadow over the kneeling communicant. He is not human.