The Terror

by Dan Simmons

  A more practical captain, he knew, might remind himself that there were the not-insignificant liquid remnants of four thousand five hundred gallons — gallons — of concentrated West Indian rum in the Spirit Room below, and that each jug was rated between 130 and 140 proof. The rum was doled out each day to the men in units of gills, one fourth of a pint cut with three-quarters pint of water, and there were enough gills and gallons left to swim in. A less finicky and more predatory drunkard-captain might consider the men’s rum his reserve. But Francis Crozier did not like rum. He never had. Whiskey was his drink, and when it was gone, so would be he.

  Seeing young Tommy Evans’s body severed at the waist, the trousered legs sticking out in an almost comical Y, the boots still firmly laced over the dead feet, had reminded Crozier of the day he’d been summoned to the shattered bear blind a quarter of a mile from Erebus. In less than twenty-four hours, he realized, it would be the fifth-month anniversary of that eleventh of June debacle. At first Crozier and the other officers who had come running could make little sense of the havoc at the blind. The structure itself had been torn to shreds, the very iron bars of its frame bent and battered. The plank seat had been smashed to splinters and amid those splinters lay the headless body of Marine Sergeant Bryant, the ranking Marine on the expedition. His head — not yet recovered when Crozier arrived — had been batted almost thirty yards across the ice until it stopped next to a skinned bear cub’s carcass.

  Lieutenant Le Vesconte had suffered a broken arm — not from the bear-monster, it turned out, but from falling out onto the ice — and Private William Pilkington had been shot through the upper left shoulder by the Marine next to him, Private Robert Hopcraft. The private had received eight broken ribs, a pulverized collarbone, and a dislocated left arm from what he later described as a glancing blow from a monster’s huge paw. Privates Healey and Reed had survived without serious injury but with the ignominy of having fled the melee in panic, tumbling and screaming and scrambling on all fours across the ice. Reed had broken three fingers in his flight.

  But it had been the two trousered and boot-buckled legs and feet of Sir John Franklin — intact below the knees but separated, one lying in the blind, another having been dropped somewhere near the hole through the ice in the burial crater — which had commanded Francis Crozier’s attention.

  What kind of malevolent intelligence, he wondered while drinking whiskey from his glass, severs a man at the knees and then carries the still-living prey to a hole in the ice and drops him in, to follow a second later? Crozier had tried not to imagine what may have happened next under the ice, although some nights after a few drinks and while trying to fall asleep, he could see the horror there. He also thought for a certainty that Lieutenant Graham Gore’s burial service one week earlier to the hour had been nothing more than an elaborate banquet unwittingly offered up to a creature already waiting and watching from beneath the ice.

  Crozier had not been overly devastated by Lieutenant Graham Gore’s death. Gore was precisely that kind of well-bred, well-educated, C of E, public school, war-hero Royal Navy officer, come natural to command, at ease with superiors and inferiors, modest in all things but destined for great things, well-mannered British kind-even-to-Irishmen, upper-class fucking toff twit whom Francis Crozier had watched being promoted over him for more than forty years.

  He took another drink.

  What kind of malevolent intelligence kills but does not eat all its prey in such a winter of no game as this but rather returns the upper half of the corpse of Able-Bodied Seaman William Strong and the lower part of the corpse of young Tom Evans? Evans had been one of the “ship’s boys” who had beat muffled drums in Gore’s funeral procession five months earlier. What kind of creature plucks that young man from Crozier’s side in the dark but leaves the captain standing three yards away … then returns half the corpse?

  The men knew. Crozier knew what they knew. They knew it was the Devil out there on the ice, not some overgrown arctic bear.

  Captain Francis Crozier did not disagree with the men’s assessment — for all his pish-posh talk earlier that night over brandy with Captain Fitzjames — but he knew something that the men did not; namely that the Devil trying to kill them up here in the Devil’s Kingdom was not just the white-furred thing killing and eating them one by one, but everything here — the unrelenting cold, the squeezing ice, the electrical storms, the uncanny lack of seals and whales and birds and walruses and land animals, the endless encroachment of the pack ice, the bergs that plowed their way through the solid white sea not even leaving a single ship’s length lee of open water behind them, the sudden white-earthquake up-eruption of pressure ridges, the dancing stars, the shoddily tinned cans of food now turned to poison, the summers that did not come, the leads that did not open — everything. The monster on the ice was just another manifestation of a Devil that wanted them dead. And that wanted them to suffer.

  Crozier took another drink.

  He understood the arctic’s motivation better than his own. The ancient Greeks had been right, thought Crozier, when they stated that there were five bands of climate on this disk of an earth, four of them equal, opposite, and symmetrical like so many things Greek, wrapped around the world like bands on a snake. Two were temperate and made for human beings. The central band, the equatorial region, was not meant for intelligent life — although the Greeks had been wrong in assuming that no humans could live there. Just no civilized humans, thought Crozier, who’d had his glimpse of Africa and the other equatorial areas and was sure nothing of value would ever come from any of them. The two polar regions, the Greeks had reasoned long before the arctic and antarctic wastes were reached by explorers, were inhuman in every sense — unfit even to travel through, much less to reside in for any length of time.

  So why, wondered Crozier, did a nation like England, blessed to be placed by God in one of the most gentle and verdant of the two temperate bands where mankind was meant to live, keep throwing its ships and its men into the ice of the northern and southern polar extremes where even fur-wearing savages refuse to go?

  And more pertinent to the central question, why did one Francis Crozier keep returning to these terrible places time after time, serving a nation and its officers that have never recognized his abilities and worth as a man, even while he knew in his heart that someday he would die in the arctic cold and dark?

  The captain remembered that even when he was a small boy — before he went to sea at age thirteen — he had carried his deep mood of melancholy within him like a cold secret. This melancholic nature had manifested itself in his pleasure at standing outside the village on a winter night watching the lamplights fade, by finding small places in which to hide — claustrophobia had never been a problem for Francis Crozier — and by being so afraid of the dark, seeing it as the avatar of the death that had claimed his mother and grandmother in such a stealthy way, that he had perversely sought it out, hiding in the root cellar while other boys played in the sunlight. Crozier remembered that cellar — the grave chill of it, the smell of cold and mold, the darkness and inward-pressing which left one alone with dark thoughts.

  He filled his small glass and took another drink. Suddenly the ice groaned louder, and the ship groaned back in response — trying to shift its place in the frozen sea but having no place to go. In recompense it squeezed itself tighter and moaned. Metal brackets in the hold deck contracted, the sudden cracks sounding like pistol shots. The seamen forward and the officers aft snored on, used to the night noises of the ice trying to crush them. On deck above, the officer on watch in the seventy-below night stomped his feet to renew circulation, the four sharp stamps sounding to the captain like a weary parent telling the ship to hush its protestations.

  It was hard for Crozier to believe that Sophia Cracroft had visited this ship, stood in this very cabin, exclaimed how neat it was, how tidy, how cozy, how very learned with its row of books, and how pleasant the austral light pouring down from the Illumina
tor.

  It had been seven years ago almost to the week, the Southern-Hemispheric spring month of November of 1840, when Crozier had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land south of Australia in these very ships — Erebus and Terror — on the way to Antarctica. The expedition had been under the command of Crozier’s friend, although always his social superior, Captain James Ross. They had stopped at Hobart Town to finish their provisioning before heading into antarctic waters, and the governor of that penal island, Sir John Franklin, insisted that the two younger officers — Captain Ross and Commander Crozier — stay at Government House during their visit.

  It had been an enchanting time and — to Crozier — a romantically fatal one.

  The inspection of the expedition’s ships had occurred on the second day of the visit — the ships were clean, refitted, almost fully provisioned, their young crews not yet bearded or made haggard by the two winters in the antarctic ice to come — and while Captain Ross personally hosted Governor Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin, Crozier had found himself escorting the governor’s niece, the dark-haired and bright-eyed young Sophia Cracroft. He had fallen in love on that day and had carried that blossoming love into the darkness of the next two southern winters, where it had bloomed into an obsession.

  The long dinners under the servant-turned fans of the governor’s house were filled with lively conversation. Governor Franklin was a worn-out man in his midfifties, dispirited by the lack of recognition of his accomplishments and dispirited further by the opposition of the local press, wealthy landowners, and bureaucrats during his third year in Van Diemen’s Land, but both he and his wife, Lady Jane, had come alive during this visit by their Discovery Service countrymen and, as Sir John liked to address them, his “fellow explorers.”

  Sophia Cracroft, on the other hand, showed no signs of unhappiness. She was witty, alive, vivacious, sometimes shocking in her comments and boldness — even more so than her controversial aunt, the Lady Jane — and young and beautiful and seemingly interested in every aspect of the forty-four-year-old bachelor Commander Francis Crozier’s opinions, life, and sundry thoughts. She laughed at all of Crozier’s initially hesitant jokes — he was not used to this level of society and strived to be on his best behaviour, drinking less than he had in years and that only wine — and she always answered his tentative bon mots with increasingly higher levels of wit. To Crozier, it was like learning tennis from a far better player. By the eighth and final day of their extended visit, Crozier felt the equal of any proper Englishman — a gentleman born in Ireland, yes, but one who had made his own way and had also lived an interesting and exciting life, the equal of any man — and the superior of most men in Miss Cracroft’s amazing blue eyes.

  When HMSs Erebus and Terror left the Hobart Town harbour, Crozier was still calling Sophia “Miss Cracroft,” but there was no denying the secret connections they had made: the secret glances, the companionable silences, the shared jokes and private moments alone. Crozier knew that he was in love for the first time in a life whose “romance” had consisted of dockyard doxies’ cribs, back-alley knee-wobblers, some native girls doing the deed for trinkets, and a few overpriced nights out in gentlemen’s whorehouses in London. All that was behind him now.

  Francis Crozier now understood that the most desirable and erotic thing a woman could wear were the many modest layers such as Sophia Cracroft wore to dinner in the governor’s house, enough silken fabric to conceal the lines of her body, allowing a man to concentrate on the exciting loveliness of her wit.

  Then followed almost two years of pack ice, glimpsing Antarctica, the stink of penguin rookeries, naming two distant, smoking volcanoes after their tired ships, darkness, spring, the threat of being frozen in, finding and fighting their way out by sail only through a sea now named after James Ross, and finally the rough Southern Sea passage and the return to Hobart Town on the island of eighteen thousand prisoners and one very unhappy governor. This time there was no inspection of Erebus and Terror; they stank too much of grease and cooking and sweat and fatigue. The boys who had sailed south were now mostly hollow-eyed and bearded men who would not sign up for future Discovery Service expeditions. Everyone except HMS Terror’s commander was eager to return to England.

  Francis Crozier was eager only to see Sophia Cracroft again.

  He took another drink of whiskey. Above him, barely audible through the deck and snow, the ship’s bell rang six bells. Three a.m.

  The men were sorry when Sir John had been killed five months ago — most of them because they knew that the promise of ten sovereigns per man and a second advance-pay bonus had died with the paunchy, bald old man — but little actually changed after Franklin’s death. Commander Fitzjames was now acknowledged as the captain of Erebus that he’d always been in reality. Lieutenant Le Vesconte, gold tooth flashing when he smiled, his arm in a sling, took Graham Gore’s place in the hierarchy of command with no visible ripple of disruption. Captain Francis Crozier now assumed the rank of expedition commander, but with the expedition frozen in the ice, there was little he could do differently now from what Franklin would have done.

  One thing Crozier did almost immediately was ship more than five tons of supplies across the ice to a point not far from the Ross cairn on King William Land. They were now fairly certain it was an island because Crozier had sent out sledge parties — monster bear be damned — to scout the area. Crozier himself went along on half a dozen of these early sledge parties, helping to smash easier, or at least less impossible, paths through the pressure ridges and iceberg barrier along the shore. They brought extra winter slops, tents, lumber for future cabins, casks of dried foods and hundreds of cans of the tinned foods, as well as lightning rods — even brass bed rods from Sir John’s appropriated cabin to be fashioned into lightning rods — and the essentials of what both crews would need if the ships had to be abandoned suddenly in the midst of the next winter.

  Four men had been lost to the creature on the ice before winter returned, two from one tent during one of Crozier’s trips, but what stopped the transfer sledge trips in mid-August was a return of the severe lightning and thick fog. For more than three weeks both ships sat in the midst of the fog, suffered the lightning to strike them, and only the briefest ice outings — hunting parties mostly, a few fire-hole teams — were allowed. By the time the freakish fog and lightning had passed, it was early September, and the cold and snow had begun again.

  Crozier then resumed sending cache-supply sledge parties to King William Land despite the terrible weather, but when Second Master Giles MacBean and a seaman were killed just a few yards ahead of the three sledges — the deaths unseen because of the blowing snow but their last screams all too audible to the other men and to their officer, Second Lieutenant Hodgson — Crozier “temporarily” suspended the supply trips. The suspension had now lasted two months, and by the first of November no sane crewman wanted to volunteer for an eight- to ten-day sledge trip in the dark.

  The captain knew that he should have cached at least ten tons of supplies on the shore rather than the five tons he’d hauled there. The problem was — as he and a sledge party had learned the night the creature had ripped through a tent near the captain’s and would have carried off seaman George Kinnaird and John Bates if they had not run for their lives — any campsite on that low, windswept gravel-and-ice spit of land was not defensible. Aboard the ships, as long as they lasted, the hulls and raised deck acted as a wall of sorts, turning each ship into a kind of fort. Out on the gravel and in tents, no matter how tightly clustered, it would take at least twenty armed men watching day and night to guard the perimeter, and even then the thing could be among them before guards could react. Everyone who had sledged to King William Land and camped out there on the ice knew this. And as the nights grew longer, the fear of those unprotected hours in the tents — like the arctic cold itself — seeped deeper into the men.

  Crozier drank some more whiskey.

  It had been April of 1843 — early autumn i
n the Southern Hemisphere, although the days were still long and warm — when Erebus and Terror returned to Van Diemen’s Land.

  Ross and Crozier were once again guests at the governor’s house — officially called Government House by the old-time inhabitants of Hobart Town — but this time it was obvious that a shadow lay over both Franklins. Crozier was willing to be oblivious to this, his joy at being near Sophia Cracroft was so great, but even the irrepressible Sophia had been subdued by the mood, events, conspiracies, betrayals, revelations, and crises that had been brooding in Hobart during the two years Erebus and Terror had been in the southern ice, so in the course of his first two days in Government House, he’d heard enough to piece together the reasons for the Franklins’ depression.

  It seemed that local and venial landed interests, personified in one undercutting, backstabbing Judas of a colonial secretary named Captain John Montagu, had decided early on in Sir John’s six years as governor that he simply would not do, nor would his wife, the outspoken and unorthodox Lady Jane. All Crozier heard from Sir John himself — overheard, actually, as the despondent Sir John spoke to Captain Ross while the three men took brandy and cigars in the booklined study in the mansion — was that the locals had “a certain lack of neighbourly feelings and a deplorable deficiency in public spirit.”