The Terror

by Dan Simmons

  There was an anticipatory cough from less than twenty feet above him. Then came a strong jerk and the entire rigging rose another five or eight feet with Blanky on it.

  Not knowing whether he was twenty feet above the deck now or forty-five, caring only about the timing of his outward swing, Blanky twisted the rigging around as he swung outward over the starboard darkness, kicked his boots free, and launched himself into the air.

  The fall seemed interminable.

  His first job was to twist again in midair so as not to land on his head or back or belly. There would be no give to the ice — less, of course, if he struck the railing or deck — but there was no longer anything he could do about that. The Ice Master knew as he fell that his life now depended upon simple Newtonian arithmetic; Thomas Blanky had become a minor problem in ballistics.

  He sensed the starboard rail going past six feet from his head and only just had time to curl and ready his legs and extended arms before his lower body slammed into the slope of snow and ice that dropped away from the pressure-raised Terror like a ramp. The Ice Master had done the best dead reckoning he could on his blind outward swing, trying to place the end of his falling arc just forward of the cement-hard path of ice the men used in climbing to and from the ship, but also to place his point of impact just aft of the snowy heaps where the whaleboats were shrouded and tied down under frozen canvas and three feet of snow.

  He landed on the snowy incline just forward of the ice ramp and just astern the snow-shrouded boats. The impact knocked the wind out of him. Some muscle tore or bone snapped in his left leg — Blanky had time for a prayer to whatever gods were awake this night that it was a muscle and not a bone — and then he was rolling down the long, steep slope, cursing and exclaiming as he went, kicking up his own small flurry of snow and epithets within the larger blizzard blowing around the ship.

  Thirty feet beyond the ship, somewhere out on the snow-covered sea ice, Blanky rolled to a stop on his back.

  He took stock as quickly as he could. His arms were unbroken, although he’d hurt his right wrist. His head seemed intact. His ribs hurt and he was having trouble taking a breath, but he thought this was probably more the result of fear and excitement than of broken ribs. But his left leg hurt like the very Devil.

  Blanky knew that he had to be up and running … now … but he couldn’t obey his own command. He was completely satisfied lying there on his back, spread-eagled on the dark ice, bleeding heat into the ice beneath him and into the air above him, trying to get his breath and wits back.

  Now there were definite human cries and shouts on the foredeck. Spheres of lantern light, none wider than ten feet or so, appeared near the bow, illuminating the hurtling horizontal lines of wind-driven snow. Then Blanky heard the heavy thump and crash as the demonthing slid down the mainmast to the deck. There came more men’s shouts — alarmed now, although they wouldn’t be able to see the creature clearly since it was farther astern within the tumble and jumble of broken spars, fallen rigging, and scattered casks amidships. A shotgun roared.

  Aching, hurting, Thomas Blanky got to all fours on the ice. His undergloves were completely gone now. Both hands were bare. He was also bareheaded, his long grey-streaked hair blowing in the wind, its queue having come unknotted during his contortions. He could not feel his fingers, face, or extremities, but everything in between was giving him one sort of pain or another.

  The creature came hurtling over the starboard railing toward him, the mass of it backlit by lantern-glow, clearing the low barrier with all four huge legs in the air.

  In an instant Blanky was on his feet and running out into the sea ice and serac darkness.

  Only after he’d gotten fifty yards or so from the ship, slipping and falling and rising and running again, did he realize that he may well have just signed his own death warrant.

  He should have stayed close to the ship. He should have run around the snow-heaped boats along the forward starboard length of the hull, clambered over the bowsprit now pressed down deep into the ice, and made for the port side, shouting to the men above for help as he did so.

  No, he realized, he would have been dead before he got through the tangle of bow rigging. The thing would have caught him in ten seconds.

  Why did I run in this direction?

  He’d had a plan before the deliberate fall from the rigging. What the hell had it been?

  Blanky could hear scraping and thudding on the sea ice behind him.

  Someone, perhaps the assistant surgeon from Erebus, Goodsir, had once told him and some other seamen how fast a white bear could charge across sea ice toward its prey — twenty-five miles per hour? Yes, at least that. Blanky had never been a fast runner. And now he had to dodge seracs and ice ridges and cracks in the ice that he couldn’t see until he was a few feet from them.

  That’s why I ran this way. That was the plan.

  The creature was loping along behind him, dodging the same jagged seracs and pressure-ridge slabs that Blanky was clumsily slaloming around in the dark. But the Ice Master was panting and wheezing like a torn bellows, while the huge shape behind him was grunting only slightly — with amusement? anticipation? — as its forepaws thudded down onto the ice with each stride that was the equal to four or five of Blanky’s.

  Blanky was in the ice field about two hundred yards from the ship now. Bouncing off an ice boulder he hadn’t seen until it was too late to dodge, taking the impact on his right shoulder and feeling that shoulder instantly go numb to join other numb parts of him, the Ice Master realized that he’d been blind as a bat the entire time he’d been running for his life. The lanterns on Terror’s deck were far, far behind him now — an impossible distance away — and he didn’t have time or reason to turn and look for them. They could give no illumination this far away from the ship, and they could only distract him from what he was doing.

  What he was doing, Blanky realized, was running and dodging and swerving through his mental map of the ice fields and crevasses and small bergs that surrounded HMS Terror to the horizon. Blanky had had more than a year to stare out at this frozen sea with all its disturbances and ridges and bergs and upthrustings, and for a few months of that time he’d had the thin arctic daylight to see by. Even in winter, there were hours on watch in moonlight and starlight and in the glow of the dancing aurora when he’d studied this circle of ice around the trapped ship with an Ice Master’s professional eye.

  About two hundred yards out here in the ice jumble, beyond a last pressure ridge he’d just stumbled and clambered over — he could hear the thing leaping it less than ten yards behind him — he remembered a maze of former bergy bits, small icebergs calved from their larger brethren, upended into a tiny mountain range of cottage-sized ice boulders.

  As if realizing where its doomed prey was headed, the unseen shape behind him grunted and picked up speed.

  Too late. Dodging the last of the tall seracs, Blanky was into the bergy labyrinth. Here his mental map failed him — he’d only seen the miniature berg field from afar or through a telescope — and he bounced off one ice wall in the dark, fell on his arse, and was scrambling forward on all fours in the snow with the creature closing to within a few yards before Blanky regained his breath and wits.

  The crevice between two carriage-sized bergs was less than three feet wide. Blanky scurried into this — still on all fours, his bare hands as unfeeling and remote as the black ice under them — just as the thing reached the crack and swept a giant forepaw in after him.

  The Ice Master rejected all images of mice and cats as impossibly huge claws tossed up ice chips not ten inches from his boot soles. He stood in the narrow gap, fell, got to his feet again, and stumbled forward in near absolute blackness.

  This was no good. The ice alley was too short — less than eight feet — and it had dumped Blanky into an open gap beyond it. He could already hear the thing loping and grunting its way around the block of ice to his right. He might as well be on a clear cricket pitch as
try to stay here — and even the crevice, its walls more snow than ice, would be only a temporary hiding place. It was a place to wait for only a minute or so in the darkness until the thing enlarged the opening and clawed its way in. It was only a place in which to die.

  The wind-sculpted little bergs he remembered from looking through his glass were … which way? To his left, he thought.

  He staggered left, bounced off ice pinnacles and seracs that would do him no good, stumbled over a crevasse that dropped only two feet or so, scrambled up a low ridge of serrated ice, slid back, scrambled up again, and heard the thing hurtle around the ice block and slide to a stop not ten feet behind him.

  The larger bergs began just beyond this ice boulder. The one with the hole he’d observed through the glass would be …

  … these things move every day, every night of every day …

  … they collapse, regrow, and reshape themselves as pressure shoves them willy-nilly …

  … the thing is clawing its way up the ice slope behind him onto this flat but dead-end plateau of ice where Blanky now teeters …

  Shadows. Crevices. Cracks. Dead-end alleys of ice. None large enough for him to slide into. Wait.

  There was a single hole about four feet high on the face of a little upended berg on his right. The clouds parted ever so slightly and five seconds of starlight gave Blanky just enough illumination to see the irregular circle in the wall of dark ice.

  He lunged forward and threw himself into it, not knowing if the ice tunnel was ten yards or ten inches deep. He didn’t fit.

  The outer layers of his clothing — cold-weather slops and greatcoat — made him too bulky.

  Blanky ripped at his clothing. The thing had clawed its way up the final slope and was behind him, rearing onto its hind legs. The Ice Master could not see it — he did not take time even to turn to look — but he could feel it rearing.

  Without turning, the Ice Master flung his greatcoat and other layers of outer wool backward at the thing, hurling the heavy garments as quickly as he could.

  There was a woof of surprise — a gust of sulfurous stench — and then the tearing noise of Blanky’s clothing being ripped apart and tossed far out into the ice maze. But the distraction had bought him five seconds or more.

  Again he threw himself forward into the ice hole.

  His shoulders only just fit. The toes of his boots flailed, slid, finally found grip. His knees and fingers clawed for purchase.

  Blanky was only four feet into the hole when the thing reached in after him. First it tore off his right boot and part of his foot. The Ice Master felt the shocking impact of claws into his flesh and thought — hoped — that it was only his heel that had been torn away. He had no way of knowing. Gasping, fighting a sudden stab of pain that even cut through the numbness of his injured leg, he clawed and wriggled and forced himself deeper into the hole.

  The ice tunnel was tightening, growing narrower.

  Claws raked ice and tore down his left leg, ripping flesh exactly where Blanky had already injured himself in the fall from the rigging. He smelled his own blood and the thing must also have smelled it because it quit clawing for a second. Then it roared.

  The roar was deafening in the ice tunnel. Blanky’s shoulders were jammed, he could go no farther forward, and he knew the rear half of his body was still within reach of the monster. It roared again.

  Blanky’s heart and testicles froze at the sound, but it did not frighten him into immobility. Using his few seconds of reprieve, the Ice Master wriggled backward into the less-restrictive space through which he’d just crawled, forced his arms forward, and kicked and kneed ice with the last of his remaining strength, ripping clothing and skin from his shoulders and sides as he tore through an ice aperture never meant for a man of even his moderate size.

  Beyond this narrowest point, the ice tunnel widened and dropped lower. Blanky let himself slide forward on his belly, the slide lubricated by his own blood. His remaining clothing was in tatters. He could feel the encroaching cold of the ice against his clenched belly muscles and tightened scrotum.

  The thing roared a third time but the horrible noise seemed to be a few feet farther away.

  At the last instant, just before he dropped over the edge of the tunnel into an open space, Blanky was sure that all this had been for nothing. The tunnel — most likely made by melting so many months ago — had cut through the edge of the little berg but now had dropped him outside again. Suddenly, he was lying on his back under the stars. He could smell and feel his blood soaking into fresh-fallen snow. He could also hear the thing loping around the berg, first to the left, then to the right, eager to get at him, confident, certain now that it could follow the maddening smell of the human’s blood to its prey. The Ice Master was too injured and too exhausted to crawl any farther. Let whatever was going to happen to him happen now and may a Sailor’s God fuck to Hell this fucking thing that was going to eat him. Blanky’s last prayer was that one of his bones would lodge in the thing’s throat.

  It was a full minute more and half a dozen more roars — each growing in volume and frustration, each coming from another point on the dark compass of night around him — before Blanky realized that the thing couldn’t get to him.

  He was lying in the open and under the stars here, but in a box of ice no larger than five feet by eight — an enclosure created by at least three of the thick bergs being jostled and tumbled together by the pressure of sea ice. One of the tilted bergs hung over him like a falling wall, but Blanky could still see the stars. He could also see starlight coming from two vertical apertures on opposite sides of his ice coffin — he could see the great mass of the predator blocking the starlight at the end of these cracks, less than fifteen feet from him — but the gaps between bergs were no more than six inches wide. The melt tunnel he’d crawled through was the only real way into this space.

  The monster roared and paced for another ten minutes.

  Thomas Blanky forced himself to a sitting position and set his lacerated back and shoulders against the ice. His coats and slops were gone, and his trousers, two sweaters, wool and cotton shirts, and wool undershirt were just bloody tatters, so he prepared to freeze to death.

  The thing was not leaving. It paced round and round the three-berg box like some restless carnivore in one of London’s trendy new zoological gardens. But it was Blanky who was in a cage.

  He knew that even if the thing miraculously left, he had neither energy nor will to crawl out through the narrow tunnel. And if he could somehow make his way through the tunnel, he still might as well be on the moon — the moon which was now coming out from behind the roiling clouds and illuminating the bergs round about in a soft explosion of blue glow. And even if he miraculously crawled out of the bergy field, the three hundred yards to the ship was an impossible distance. He could no longer feel his body or move his legs.

  Blanky settled his cold behind and bare feet deeper into the snow — the accumulation was greater here where the wind did not reach — and wondered if his fellow Terrors would ever find him. Why should they even look? He was just another of their party who had been carried off by the thing on the ice. At least his disappearance would not require the captain to haul another corpse — or part of a corpse wastefully wrapped in good ship’s sailcloth — down to the Dead Room.

  There came more roars and noises from the far end of the cracks and tunnel, but Blanky ignored them. “Fuck you and the sow or devil who spawned you,” mumbled the Ice Master through numb, frozen lips. Perhaps he did not speak at all. He realized that freezing to death — even while bleeding to death, although some of the blood from his various wounds and lacerations already seemed to have frozen — was not painful at all. In truth, it was peaceful … quite restful. A wonderful way to …

  Blanky realized that there was light coming through the cracks and tunnel. The thing was using torches and lanterns to fool him into coming out. But he wouldn’t fall for that old ruse. He would stay silent u
ntil the light went away, until he slipped that last small bit into soft, eternal sleep. He would not give the thing the satisfaction of hearing him speak now after their long, silent duel.

  “God-damn it, Mr. Blanky!” boomed Captain Crozier’s bass bellow down the ice tunnel. “If you’re in there, answer, God-damn it, or we’ll just leave you there.”

  Blanky blinked. Or rather, he tried to blink. His lashes and eyelids were frozen. Was this some other ruse and stratagem of the demonthing?

  “Here,” he croaked. And again, aloud this time, “Here!”

  A minute later, the head and shoulders of the caulker’s mate, Cornelius Hickey, one of the smallest men on Terror, poked easily through the hole. He was carrying a lantern. Blanky thought dully that it was like watching a gimlet-faced gnome being born.

  In the end, all four surgeons had a go at him.

  Blanky came in and out of his pleasant fog from time to time to see how things were progressing. Sometimes it was his own ship’s surgeons working on him — Peddie and McDonald — and sometimes it was Erebus’s sawbones, Stanley and Goodsir. Sometimes it was just one of the four cutting or sawing or packing or stitching away. Blanky had the urge to tell Goodsir that polar white bears could run much faster than twenty-five miles per hour when they put their mind to it. But then again — had it been a polar white bear? Blanky did not think so. Polar white bears were creatures of this earth, and this thing had come from somewhere else. Ice Master Thomas Blanky had no doubt of that.

  In the end, the butcher’s bill was not so bad. Not bad at all, really.

  John Handford, it turned out, had not been touched. After Blanky had left him with the lantern, the man on starboard watch had doused this light and fled the ship, running around to the port side to hide while the creature was climbing up to get to the Ice Master.

  Alexander Berry, whom Blanky had presumed dead, had been found under the fallen canvas and scattered kegs right where he’d been standing port watch when the thing had first appeared there and then shattered the fore and aft ridgepole spar. Berry had hit his head seriously enough to have no memory of anything that happened that night, but Crozier told Blanky that they’d found the man’s shotgun and it had been fired. The Ice Master also had fired his, of course, from point-blank range at a shape that was looming over him like a pub wall, but there had been no trace of the thing’s blood anywhere on the deck at either site.