The Terror

by Dan Simmons

  But there is little that I — or any surgeon in this Year of Our Lord 1848 — can do.

  God help us all.

  27

  CROZIER

  Lat. 70°-05′ N., Long. 98°-23′ W.

  11 January, 1848

  It will not end.

  The pain will not end. The nausea will not end. The chills will not end. The terror will not end.

  Crozier writhes in the frozen blankets of his bunk and wants to die.

  During his lucid moments this week, which are few, Crozier laments the most sane act he had performed before retreating to his demons; he had given his pistol to Lieutenant Little with no explanation other than to tell Edward not to return it unless and until he, the captain, asks for it while on deck and in full uniform again.

  Crozier would pay anything now for that charged and loaded weapon. This level of pain is unsupportable. These thoughts are unsupportable.

  His grandmother on his late, unlamented father’s side, Memo Moira, had been the outcast, the unmentioned and unmentionable Crozier. In her eighties, when Crozier was not yet a teenager, Memo lived two villages away — an immense, inestimable, and unbridgeable distance for a boy — and his mother’s family neither included her in family events nor mentioned her existence.

  She was a Papist. She was a witch.

  Crozier began sneaking over to her village, cadging rides on pony carts, when he was ten. Within a year he was going with the old woman to that strange village’s Papist church. His mother and aunt and maternal grandmother would have died if they had known. He would have been renounced and exiled and held in as much scorn by that proper Irish-English Presbyterian side of his family as the Naval Board and Arctic Council had held him in for all these years just for being an Irishman. And a commoner.

  Memo Moira had thought him special. She told him that he had the Second Sight.

  The thought did not frighten young Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier. He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service — the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting. Once, when he was twelve, shortly before he ran away to sea, he told Memo that he wanted to become a priest, and the old woman laughed that wild, husky laugh of hers and told him to put such nonsense out of his mind. “Being a priest is as common and useless as being an Irish drunkard. Use your Gift instead, Young Francis,” she’d said. “Use the Second Sight that has been in my family for a score of generations. It will help you go places and see things that no person on this sad earth has ever seen.”

  Young Francis did not believe in Second Sight. It was about that same time that he realized that he also did not believe in God. He went to sea. He believed in everything he learned and saw there, and some of these sights and lessons were strange indeed.

  Crozier rides on crests of pain rolling in on waves of nausea. He awakens only to vomit into the bucket that Jopson, his steward, has left there and replaces each hour. Crozier hurts to the cavity in the center of his self where he is sure his soul had resided until it floated away on a sea of whiskey over the decades. All through these days and nights of cold sweat on frozen sheets, he knows he would give up his rank, his honours, his mother, his sisters, his father’s name, and the memory of Memo Moira herself for one more glass of whiskey.

  The ship groans as it continues to be squeezed inexorably to fragments by the never-ceasing ice. Crozier groans as his demons continue to squeeze him inexorably to fragments through chills, fever, pain, nausea, and regret. He has cut a six-inch strap from an old belt, and to keep from moaning aloud he bites down on that in the darkness. He moans anyway.

  He imagines it all. He sees it all.

  Lady Jane Franklin is in her element. Now, with two and a half years of no word from her husband, she is in her element. Lady Franklin the Indomitable. Lady Franklin the Widow Who Refused to Be a Widow. Lady Franklin the Patroness and Saint of the Arctic that has killed her husband … Lady Franklin who will never accept such a fact.

  Crozier can see her as clearly as if he does have Second Sight. Lady Franklin has never looked more beautiful than now in her resolve, in her refusal to grieve, in her determination that her husband is alive and that Sir John’s expedition must be found and rescued.

  More than two and a half years have passed. The Navy knows that Sir John had provisioned Erebus and Terror for three years at normal rations but had expected to emerge beyond Alaska in the summer of 1846, certainly no later than August of 1847.

  Lady Jane will have bullied the lethargic Navy and Parliament into action by now. Crozier can see her writing letters to the Admiralty, letters to the Arctic Council, letters to her friends and former suitors in Parliament, letters to the queen, and, of course, letters to her dead husband every day, writing in her perfect, no-nonsense script and telling the dead Sir John that she knows that her darling is still alive and that she looks forward to her inevitable reunion with him. He can see her telling the world that she does this. She will be sending sheaves and folios of letters to him off with the first rescue ships about now … Naval ships, to be sure, but also quite probably private ships hired with either the dwindling money of Lady Jane’s own fortune or by subscriptions from worried and rich friends.

  Crozier, rising from his visions, tries to sit up in his bunk and smile. The chills make him shake like a topgallant in a gale. He vomits into the almost full pail. He falls back onto his sweat-soaked, bile-smelling pillow and closes his eyes to ride the waves of his seeing.

  Whom would they send to save Erebus and Terror? Whom had they already sent?

  Crozier knew that Sir John Ross would be champing at the bit to lead any rescue parties into the ice, but he also sees that Lady Jane Franklin will ignore the old man — she thinks him vulgar — and will choose his nephew, James Clark Ross, with whom Crozier had explored the seas around Antarctica.

  The younger Ross had promised his young bride that he would never go on a sea exploration again, but Crozier sees that he could not refuse this request from Lady Franklin. Ross would choose to go with two ships. Crozier saw them sailing this coming summer of 1848. Crozier saw the two ships sailing north of Baffin Island, west through Lancaster Sound, where Sir John had sailed Terror and Erebus three years ago — he could almost make out the names on the bows of Ross’s ships — but Sir James would encounter the same relentless pack ice beyond Prince Regent Inlet, perhaps beyond Devon Island, that holds Crozier’s ships in thrall now. Next summer there will be no full thaw of the sounds and inlets Ice Masters Reid and Blanky had sailed them south through. Sir James Clark Ross will never get within three hundred miles of Terror and Erebus.

  Crozier saw them turning back to England in the freezing early autumn of 1848.

  He weeps as he moans and bites down hard on his leather strap. His bones are freezing. His flesh is on fire. Ants crawl everywhere on and under his skin.

  His Second Sight sees there would be other ships sent, other rescue expeditions this year of our Lord 1848, some most likely launched at the same time or earlier than Ross’s search party. The Royal Navy was slow to act — a maritime sloth — but once in motion, Crozier knows, it tended to overdo everything it undertook. Wretched excess after interminable stalling was standard procedure for the Navy Francis Crozier has known for four decades.

  In his aching mind, Crozier saw at least one other Naval expedition setting sail for Baffin Bay in search of the lost Franklins this coming summer and most probably even a third Naval squadron sent all the way around Cape Horn to rendezvous, theoretically, with the other search-party ships near the Bering Strait, searching for them in the western arctic, to which Erebus and Terror had never come within a thousand miles. Such ponderous operations would stretch into 1849 and beyond.

  And this is only the beginning of the second week of 1848. Crozier doubts if his men will live to s
ee the summer.

  Would there be an overland party sent up from Canada to follow the Mackenzie River to the arctic coastline, then east to Wollaston Land and Victoria Land in search of their ships stranded somewhere along the elusive North-West Passage? Crozier is sure there will be. The chances of such an overland expedition finding them twenty-five miles out at sea to the northwest of King William Island are nil. Such a party would not even know that King William Island was an island.

  Would the First Lord of the Admiralty announce in the House of Commons a reward for the rescue of Sir John and his men? Crozier thinks he will. But how much? A thousand pounds? Five thousand pounds? Ten thousand? Crozier closes tight his eyes and sees, as if on parchment hanging before him, the sum of twenty thousand pounds offered for anyone who “might render efficient assistance in saving the lives of Sir John Franklin and his squadron.”

  Crozier laughs again, which brings on the vomiting again. He is shaking with cold and pain and the clear absurdity of the images in his head. All around him the ship groans as the ice crushes it. The captain can no longer tell the groaning of the ship from his own moans.

  He sees an image of eight ships — six British, two American — clustered within a few miles of one another in mostly frozen anchorages that look to Crozier like Devon Island, near Beechey, or perhaps Cornwallis Island. It is obviously a late arctic-summer day, perhaps late August, mere days before the sudden freeze that may capture all of them. Crozier has the sense that this image is two or three years in the future of his terrible reality this moment in 1848. Why eight ships sent out for rescue would end up clumped together like this in one location rather than fanning out throughout thousands of square miles of the arctic to hunt for signs of Franklin’s passing makes no sense to Crozier whatsoever. It is the delusion of toxic madness.

  The craft range in size from a small schooner and a yacht-sized craft far too flimsy for such serious ice work to 144-ton and 81-ton American ships strange to Crozier’s eye to an odd little 90-ton English pilot boat crudely fitted out for arctic sailing. There are also several proper British Naval vessels and steam cruisers. In his aching mind’s eye he can see the names of the ships — Advance and Rescue, these under the American flag, and Prince Albert for the former pilot boat, as well as the Lady Franklin at the head of the anchored British squadron. There are also two ships Crozier associates with old John Ross — the undersized schooner Felix and the totally inappropriate little yacht Mary. Finally there are two true Royal Navy vessels, Assistance and Intrepid.

  As if viewing them through the eyes of a high-soaring arctic tern, Crozier can see that all eight of these ships are clustered within forty miles of one another — four of the smaller British craft at Griffith Island above the Barrow Strait, four of the remaining English ships at Assistance Bay on the south tip of Cornwallis, and the two American ships farther north, just around the eastern curve of Cornwallis Island, just across Wellington Channel from Sir John’s first winter anchorage at Beechey Island. None are within two hundred and fifty miles of the spot far to the southwest where Erebus and Terror lie trapped.

  A minute later, a mist or cloud clears, and Crozier sees six of these vessels anchored within a quarter of a mile of one another just off the curve of a small island’s shoreline.

  Crozier sees men running across frozen gravel under a vertical black cliff wall. The men are excited. He can almost hear their voices in the freezing air.

  It is Beechey Island, he is sure. They have found the weathered wooden headboards and graves of Stoker John Torrington, Seaman John Hartnell, and Marine Private William Braine.

  However far in the future this fever-dream discovery is, Crozier knows, it will do him and the other men of Erebus and Terror no good whatsoever. Sir John had left Beechey Island in a mindless hurry, sailing and steaming the first day the ice relented enough to allow the ships to leave their anchorage. After nine months frozen there, the Franklin Expedition had left not so much as a note saying which direction they were sailing.

  Crozier had understood at the time that Sir John did not feel it necessary to inform the Admiralty that he was obeying their orders by sailing south. Sir John Franklin always obeyed orders. Sir John assumed that the Admiralty would trust that he had done so again. But after nine months on the island — and after building the proper cairn and even leaving a cairn of pebble-filled Goldner food cans behind as a sort of joke — the fact remained that the message cairn at Beechey Island was left empty contrary to Franklin’s orders.

  The Admiralty and Discovery Service had outfitted the Franklin Expedition with two hundred airtight brass cylinders for the express purpose of leaving behind messages of their whereabouts and destination along the entire course of their search for the North-West Passage, and Sir John had used … one: the useless one sent to King William Land twenty-five miles to the southeast of their present position, cached a few days before Sir John was killed in 1847.

  On Beechey Island, nothing.

  On Devon Island, which they had passed and explored, nothing.

  On Griffith Island, where they had searched for harbours, nothing.

  On Cornwallis Island, which they had circumnavigated, nothing.

  Down the entire length of Somerset Island and Prince of Wales Island and Victoria Island along which they had sailed south for the entire summer of 1846, nothing.

  And now, in his dream, the rescuers in the six ships — now all on the verge of being frozen in themselves — were looking north to what open sea remained up the Wellington Channel toward the North Pole. Beechey Island revealed no clues whatsoever. And Crozier could see from his magical arctic tern’s high viewpoint that Peel Sound to the south — down which Erebus and Terror had found their way a year and a half ago during that brief summer thaw — was now, in this future summer, a solid sheet of white as far as the men on Beechey Island and sailing Barrow Strait could see.

  They never even consider that Franklin could have gone that way … that he could have obeyed orders. Their attention — for the coming years, since Crozier sees that they are frozen in solid now in Lancaster Sound — is to search to the north. Sir John’s secondary orders had been that if he could not continue his way south to force the Passage, he should turn north to sail through the theoretical rim of ice into the even more theoretical Open Polar Sea.

  Crozier knows in his sinking heart that the captains and men of these eight rescue ships have all come to the conclusion that Franklin had gone north — precisely the opposite direction he had in fact sailed.

  He wakes in the night. His own moaning has awakened him. There is light, but his eyes cannot stand the light so he tries to understand what is happening just through the burning of touch and the crash of sound. Two men — his steward, Jopson, and the surgeon, Goodsir — are stripping him of his filthy and sweat-soaked nightshirt, bathing him with miraculously warm water, and carefully dressing him in a clean nightshirt and socks. One of them tries to feed him soup with a spoon. Crozier vomits up the thin gruel, but the contents of his full-to-the-brim vomit pail are frozen solid and he is vaguely aware of the two men cleaning the deck. They make him drink some water and he falls back into his cold sheets. One of them spreads a warm blanket over him — a warm, dry, unfrozen blanket — and he wants to weep with gratitude. He also wants to speak but is slipping back into the maelstrom of his visions and cannot find or frame the words before all words are lost to him again.

  He sees a boy with black hair and greenish skin curled in a fetal position against a brick-tile wall the colour of urine. Crozier knows that the boy is an epileptic in an asylum, in some bedlam somewhere. The boy shows no movement except for his dark eyes, which constantly flicker back and forth like a reptile’s. That shape am I.

  As soon as he thinks this, Crozier knows that this is not his fear. It is some other man’s nightmare. He was briefly in some other mind.

  Sophia Cracroft enters him. Crozier moans around the biting strap.

  He sees her naked and straining agai
nst him at the Platypus Pond. He sees her distant and dismissive on the stone bench at Government House. He sees her standing and waving — not at him — in her blue silk dress on the dock at Greenhithe on the May day that Erebus and Terror sailed. Now he sees her as he has never seen her before — a future-present Sophia Cracroft, proud, grieving, secretly happy to be grieving, renewed and reborn as her aunt Lady Jane Franklin’s full-time assistant and companion and amanuensis. She travels everywhere with Lady Jane — two indomitable women, the press will call them — Sophia, almost as much as her aunt, always visibly earnest and hopeful and strident and feminine and eccentric and bent to the task of cajoling the world to rescue Sir John Franklin. She will never mention Francis Crozier, not even in private. It is, he sees at once, a perfect role for Sophia: brave, imperious, entitled, able to play the coquette for decades with the perfect excuse for avoiding commitment or real love. She will never marry. She will travel the world with Lady Jane, Crozier sees, never publicly giving up hope that the missing Sir John will be found, but — long after real hope is surrendered — still enjoying the entitlement, sympathy, power, and position that this once-removed widowhood affords her.

  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.”