Дэн Симмонс - The Terror

The remaining gunpowder and shot would feed a dozen large bands of the Real People for twenty years and make them undisputed lords of the arctic.

Silence touched his bare wrist. It was too dark to sign, so she thought-sent. Do you feel it?

Crozier was astonished to hear that — for the first time — her shared thoughts were in English. She had either dreamt his dreams even more deeply than he’d imagined, or she had been very attentive during her months aboard this very ship. It was the first time they’d shared thoughts in words while awake.

Ii , he thought back to her. Yes .

This place was bad. Memories haunted it like a bad smell.

To lighten the tension, he led her forward again, pointed toward the bow, and thought-sent her an image of the forward cable locker on the deck below.

I was always waiting for you , she sent. The words were so clear that he thought they might have been spoken aloud in the darkness, except for the fact that neither of the children awoke.

His body began to shake with emotion at the thought of what she had just told him.

They went up the main ladder to the lower deck.

It was much brighter up here. Crozier realized that — finally — daylight was actually coming through the Preston Patent Illuminators that punctuated the deck above them. The curved glass was opaque with ice, but — for once — not covered with snow or tarps.

The deck looked empty. All of the men’s hammocks had been carefully folded and stowed away, their mess tables cranked up between the beams to the overhead deck, and their sea chests pushed aside and carefully stowed. The huge Frazer’s Patent Stove in the center of the forward berthing area was dark and cold.

Crozier tried to recall if Mr. Diggle was still alive when he, the captain, had been lured onto the ice and shot. It was the first time he’d thought of that name — Mr. Diggle — in a long time.

It’s the first time I’ve thought in my own tongue for a long time .

Crozier had to smile at that. “In my own tongue.” If there really was a goddess like Sedna who ruled the world, her real name was Bitch Irony.

Silence tugged him aft.

The first officers’ cabins and mess rooms they looked into were empty.

Crozier found himself wondering which men could have possibly reached Terror and sailed her south.

Des Voeux and his men from Rescue Camp?

He felt almost certain that Mr. Des Voeux and the others would have continued south in the boats toward Big Fish River.

Hickey and his men?

For Dr. Goodsir’s sake, he hoped so, but he did not believe it. Except for Lieutenant Hodgson, and Crozier suspected he had not lived for very long in that company of cutthroats, there was hardly a man in that pack who could sail, much less navigate, Terror . He doubted if they had been able to sail and navigate the one small boat he’d given them.

That left the three men who had left Rescue Camp to hike overland — Reuben Male, Robert Sinclair, and Samuel Honey. Could a captain of the fo’c’sle, a captain of the foretop, and a blacksmith sail HMS Terror almost two hundred miles south through a maze of leads?

Crozier felt dizzy and a little nauseated from thinking about the men’s names and faces again. He could almost hear their voices. He could hear their voices.

Puhtoorak had been correct: this place was now home to piifixaaq — resentful ghosts that stayed behind to haunt the living.

There was a corpse in Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier’s bunk.

As far as they could tell without lighting lamps and going down into the hold and orlop deck, this was the only dead body on board.

Why did he decide to die in my bunk? wondered Crozier.

He had been a man about Crozier’s height. His clothes — he’d died under blankets in a peacoat and watch cap and wool trousers, which was odd since they must have been sailing in full summer — gave no clue to his identity. Crozier had no wish at all to go through his pockets.

The man’s hands, exposed wrists, and neck were brown and mummified, shriveled, but it was his face that made Crozier wish that the Preston Patent Illuminator overhead was not allowing in as much light as it did.

The dead man’s eyes were brown marbles. His hair and beard were so long and wild that it seemed quite possible that they had continued growing for months after the man’s death. His lips had shriveled away to nothing and been pulled back far from the teeth and gums by tendons stretching and contracting.

It was the teeth that were so upsetting. Rather than having fallen out from scurvy, the front teeth were all there and very broad and an ivory yellow and impossibly long — three inches long, at least — as if they had grown the way a rabbit’s or rat’s teeth continue growing until, unless worn down by gnawing something solid, they curve in and cut the creature’s own throat.

These dead man’s rodent teeth were impossible, but Crozier was looking at them in the clear, grey evening light coming down through the domed skylight of his old cabin. It was not, he realized, the first impossible thing he had seen or experienced in the last few years. He suspected it might not be his last.

Let’s go , he signed to Silence. He did not want to thought-send here where things were listening.

He had to use a fire axe to hack his way up through the sealed and nailed-shut main hatch. Rather than ask himself who had sealed it and why — or if the corpse below had been a living man when the hatch had been sealed so tightly above him — he threw the axe aside, clambered up, and helped Silence up the ladder.

Raven was fussing himself awake, but Silence rocked him and he began to snore softly again.

Wait here , he signed and went below again.

First he brought the heavy theodolite and several of his old manuals up, took a quick reading of the sun, and jotted his bearings in the margin of the salt-stained book. Then he carried theodolite and books below and tossed them aside, knowing that fixing this ship’s position one last time was perhaps the most useless thing he’d ever done in a long life of doing useless things. But he also knew he’d had to do it.

Just as he had to do what he did next.

In the dark Gunner’s Storeroom on the orlop deck he split open three successive kegs of gunpowder — pouring the contents of the first on the orlop deck and down the ladder into the hold deck (he would not go down there), the contents of the second keg everywhere on the lower deck (and especially inside the open door of his own cabin), and the contents of the third keg in black trails along the canted upper deck where Silence waited with his children. Asiajuk and the others on the ice had come around to the port side and now watched from thirty yards away. The dogs continued to howl and strain to get away, but Asiajuk or one of the hunters had staked them to the ice.

Crozier wanted to stay in the open air, even with the afternoon light waning, but he made himself go below to the orlop deck again.

Carrying the last keg of lamp oil left on the ship, he spilled a trail of it on all three decks, taking care to douse the door and bulkhead of his own cabin. His only hesitation was at the entrance to the Great Room where hundreds upon hundreds of spines of books stared back at him.

Dear God, would it hurt if I took just a few of those to help get through the dark winters ahead?

But they now carried the dark inua of the death-ship in them. Almost weeping, he dashed lamp oil across them.

When he was finished pouring the last of the fuel on the upper deck, he flung the empty cask far out over the ice.

One last trip below , he promised Silence with his fingers. Go on to the ice now with the children, my beloved .