The Terror

by Dan Simmons

  Theoretically.

  “Mr. Thomas,” he called to Robert Thomas, the Second Mate and lead hauler on the first of the five sledges, “lead off when you’re ready.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” called back Thomas and leaned into the harness. Even with seven men straining in harness, the sledge did not budge. The runners had frozen to the ice.

  “Hearty does it, Bob!” said Edwin Lawrence, laughing, one of the seamen in harness with him. The sledge groaned, men groaned, leather creaked, ice tore, and the high-packed sledge moved forward.

  Lieutenant Little gave the order for the second sledge, headed up by Magnus Manson, to start off. With the giant in the lead of the men, the second sledge — although more heavily laden than Thomas’s — immediately started off with only the slightest rasp of ice under the wooden runners.

  And so it went for the forty-six men, thirty-five of them man-hauling for the first stretch, five walking in reserve with shotguns or muskets, waiting to pull, four of the mates from both ships and the two officers — Lieutenant Little and Captain Crozier — walking alongside and occasionally pushing and less frequently slipping into harness themselves.

  The captain remembered that several days earlier, when Second Lieutenant Hodgson and Third Lieutenant Irving were preparing to leave for yet another boat-sledge trip to Camp Terror — both officers then ordered to take men from that camp to hunt and reconnoiter over the next few days — Irving had surprised his captain by requesting that one or the other of two men assigned to his team be left back at Terror. Crozier had been initially surprised because his estimate of young John Irving had been that the junior lieutenant was capable of dealing with seamen and carrying out and enforcing any orders given to him, but then Crozier heard the names involved and understood. Lieutenant Little had put the names of both Magnus Manson and Cornelius Hickey on Irving’s sledge and scouting team rosters, and Irving was respectfully requesting, without giving any reasons, that one or the other man be assigned to another team. Crozier had acceded to the request immediately, reassigning Manson to the last day’s sledge pulls and allowing the small caulker’s mate to go ahead with Lieutenant Irving’s sledge team. Crozier did not trust Hickey either, especially after the near mutiny weeks ago, and he knew that the little man was much more treacherous with the huge idiot Manson by his side.

  Now, walking away from the ship, seeing Manson pulling fifty feet ahead of him, Crozier deliberately kept his face directed forward. He had resolved that he would not look back at Terror for at least the first two hours of the pulling.

  Looking at the men leaning and straining ahead of him, the captain was very aware of those who were absent.

  Fitzjames was absent this day, serving as commanding officer at Camp Terror on King William Land, but the real reason for his absence was tact. No captain wanted to abandon his ship in full view of another captain if at all possible, and all captains were sensitive to this. Crozier, who had visited Erebus almost every day from the beginning of its breakup from ice pressure two days after the fire and invasion of the thing from the ice in early March, had made a point of not being there midday on 31 March when Fitzjames had to abandon ship. Fitzjames had returned the favour this week by volunteering for command duties far from Terror.

  Most of the other men’s absences were for a far more tragic and depressing reason. Crozier brought up their faces as he marched alongside the last sledge.

  Terror had been much luckier than Erebus when it came to loss of its officers and leaders. Of his primary officers, Crozier had lost his first mate, Fred Hornby, to the beast during the Carnivale debacle, Second Master Giles MacBean to the thing during a sledge trip the previous September, and both his surgeons, Peddie and McDonald, also during the New Year’s Eve Carnivale. But his first, second, and third lieutenants were alive and reasonably well, as was his second mate, Thomas; Blanky, his ice master; and the indispensable Mr. Helpman, his primary clerk.

  Fitzjames had lost his commanding officer — Sir John — and his first lieutenant, Graham Gore, as well as Lieutenant James Walter Fairholme and First Mate Robert Orme Sergeant, all killed by the creature. He’d also lost his primary surgeon, Mr. Stanley, and Henry Foster Collins, his second master. That left only Lieutenant H. T. D. Le Vesconte, Second Mate Charles Des Voeux, Ice Master Reid, Surgeon Goodsir, and his purser, Charles Hamilton Osmer, as his remaining complement of officers. Instead of the crowded officers’ mess of the first two years — Sir John, Fitzjames, Gore, Le Vesconte, Fairholme, Stanley, Goodsir, and clerk Osmer all dining together — the final weeks had seen only the captain and his sole surviving lieutenant, the surgeon, and clerk dining in the cold of the officers’ wardrooom. And even that in the last days, Crozier knew, had been an absurd sight once the ice had tilted Erebus almost thirty degrees to starboard. The four men had been forced to sit on the deck, their plates on their knees and their feet braced hard against a batten.

  Hoar, Fitzjames’s steward, was still sick with scurvy, so poor old Bridgens had been the steward scurrying like a crab to serve the officers braced on the wildly tilted deck.

  Terror had also been luckier in keeping her warrant officers intact. Crozier’s engineer, chief boatswain, and carpenter were still alive and functioning. Erebus had seen her engineer, John Gregory, and her carpenter, John Weekes, both eviscerated in March when the thing on the ice had come aboard in the night. The ship’s other warrant officer, Boatswain Thomas Terry, had been beheaded by the creature the previous November. Fitzjames had no warrant officers left alive.

  Of Terror’s twenty-one petty officers — mates, quartermasters, fo’c’sle, hold, maintop, and foretop captains, coxswains, stewards, caulkers, and stokers — Crozier had lost only one man: Stoker John Torrington, the first man on the expedition to die, so long ago on 1 January 1846, way back at Beechey Island. And that, Crozier remembered, had been from consumption that young Torrington had brought aboard with him in England.

  Fitzjames had lost another of his petty officers, Stoker Tommy Plater, on the day in March when the thing had gone on its murderous rampage on the lower decks. Only Thomas Watson, the carpenter’s mate, had survived the thing’s attack down on the hold deck that night, and he had lost his left hand.

  Since Thomas Burt, the armourer, had been sent back to England from Greenland even before they’d encountered real ice, that left Erebus with twenty surviving petty officers. Some of these men, such as the ancient sailmaker, John Murray, and Fitzjames’s own steward, Edmund Hoar, were too sick with scurvy to be useful, while others, such as Thomas Watson, were too mauled to be of help, while still others, such as the flogged gunroom steward Richard Aylmore, were too sullen to be of much use.

  Crozier told one of the men who was obviously fagged out to take a break and to walk with the armed guard while he, the captain, took a turn in the harness. Even with six other men pulling, the terrible exertion of hauling more than fifteen hundred pounds of canned food, weapons, and tents was a strain on his weakened system. Even after Crozier fell into the rhythm — he’d joined sledging parties since March, when he first began dispatching boats and gear to King William Land, and well knew the drill of man-hauling — the pain of the straps across his aching chest, the weight of the mass being pulled, and the discomfort from sweat that froze, thawed, and refroze in his clothes were all a shock.

  Crozier wished they had more able-bodied seamen and Marines.

  Terror had lost two of its rated sailors — Billy Strong, torn in half by the creature, and James Walker, the idiot Magnus Manson’s good friend before the giant fell completely under the sway of the little rat-faced caulker’s mate. It had been fear of Jimmy Walker’s ghost in the hold, Crozier remembered, that had brought the hulking Manson to his first point of mutiny so many months ago.

  For once HMS Erebus had been luckier than its counterpart. The only able seaman Fitzjames had lost during this expedition had been John Hartnell, also dead of consumption and buried in the winter of ’46 on Beechey Island.

  C
rozier leaned into the straps and thought about the faces and names — so many officers dead, so few regular sailors — and grunted as he pulled, thinking that the thing on the ice seemed to be deliberately coming after the leaders of this expedition.

  Don’t think that way, Crozier ordered himself. You’re giving the beast powers of reasoning it doesn’t have.

  Doesn’t it? asked another, more fearful part of Crozier’s mind.

  One of the Royal Marines walked by, carrying a musket rather than shotgun in the crook of his arm. The man’s face was completely hidden by caps and wraps, but from the slouched way the man walked, Crozier knew that it was Robert Hopcraft. The Marine private had been seriously injured by the creature on the day a year ago in June when Sir John was killed, but while Hopcraft’s other injuries had healed, his shattered collarbone left him always slouching to his left as if he had trouble maintaining a straight line. Another Marine walking with them was William Pilkington, the private who had been shot through his shoulder in the blind that same day. Crozier noticed that Pilkington didn’t seem to be favouring that shoulder or arm today.

  Sergeant David Bryant, Erebus’s ranking Marine, was decapitated just seconds before Sir John had been carried off under the ice by the beast. With Private William Braine dead on Beechey Island in 1846 and Private William Reed disappeared on the ice on 9 November of last fall while sent to deliver a message to Terror — Crozier remembered the date well since he had walked to Erebus from Terror in the dark himself that first full day of winter darkness — the beast had reduced Fitzjames’s Marine guard to only four: Corporal Alexander Pearson in command, Private Hopcraft with his ruined shoulder, Private Pilkington with his bullet wound, and Private Joseph Healey.

  Crozier’s own Marine detachment had lost only Private William Heather to the thing on the ice, on the night the previous November when the creature had come aboard and bashed the man’s brains out while the private was on watch. But amazingly, shockingly, Heather had refused to die. After lying comatose in the sick bay for weeks, obscenely hovering between life and death, Private Heather had been carried by his Marine mates to his hammock forward in the crew berthing area and they had fed him and cleaned him and carried him to the seat of ease and dressed him every day since. It was as if the staring, drooling man was their pet. He’d been evacuated to Terror Camp just last week, bundled up warmly by the other Marines and set carefully, almost royally, into a special one-man toboggan made for him by Alex “Fat” Wilson, the carpenter’s mate. The seamen had not objected to the extra load and had volunteered to take turns pulling the living corpse’s little sled across the ice and over the pressure ridges to Terror Camp.

  That left Crozier five Marines — Daly, Hammond, Wilkes, Hedges, and thirty-seven-year-old Sergeant Soloman Tozer, an unschooled fool but now commanding officer among the total of nine functional surviving Royal Marines on the Sir John Franklin Expedition.

  After the first hour in harness, the sledge seemed to slide more easily and Crozier had fallen into the rhythm of panting that passed for breathing while hauling such dead weight across such nonslippery ice.

  That was all the categories of men lost that Crozier could think of. Except for the boys, of course, those young volunteers who had signed on to the expedition at the last minute and had been listed on the roster as “Boys” even though three of the four were a full-grown eighteen years old. Robert Golding was nineteen when they sailed.

  Three of the four “boys” survived, although Crozier himself had been forced to carry the unconscious George Chambers from the burning Carnivale compartments on the night of the fire. The only fatality among the boys had been Tom Evans, the youngest in demeanor as well as in age; the thing on the ice had plucked the lad literally from beneath Captain Crozier’s nose as they were out on the ice in the dark hunting for the missing William Strong.

  George Chambers, although recovering consciousness two days after Carnivale, had never been the same. A bright lad before his violent encounter with the thing, the concussion he received reduced him to a level of intelligence even below that of Magnus Manson. George was no living corpse like Private Heather — he could obey simple orders according to Erebus’s bosun’s mate — but he hardly ever spoke after that terrible New Year’s Eve.

  Davey Leys, one of the more experienced men on the expedition, was another man who had physically survived two encounters with the white thing on the ice but who was as useless as the literally brainless Private Heather these days. After the night the white thing encountered Leys and John Handford on watch and then chased Ice Master Thomas Blanky into the darkness, Leys had slipped back into his earlier state of unresponsive staring and had never returned from it. He had been transported to Terror Camp — along with the seriously injured or those too ill to walk, such as Fitzjames’s steward, Hoar — bundled in coats and tucked into one of the boats being dragged atop a sledge. There were too many men now sick with scurvy, wounds, or low morale who were of little use to Crozier or Fitzjames. More mouths to feed and bodies to haul with them when the men were hungry and sick and barely able to walk.

  Weary, realizing that he had not really slept the past two nights, Crozier tried counting the dead.

  Six officers from Erebus. Four dead from Terror.

  All three warrant officers from Erebus. Zero from Terror.

  One petty officer from Erebus. One from Terror.

  Just one seaman from Erebus. Four from Terror.

  That was twenty dead, not counting the three Marines and the boy Evans. Twenty-four men lost on the expedition already. A frightful loss — greater than Crozier could remember from any arctic expedition in Naval history.

  But there was a more important number, and one that Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier tried to focus on: 105 living souls remaining under his care.

  One hundred and five men alive, including himself, on this day he had been forced to abandon HMS Terror and cross the ice.

  Crozier put his head down and leaned more into the harness. The wind had come up and was blowing snow around them, obscuring the sledge ahead, hiding the walking Marines from sight.

  Was he sure in the count? Twenty dead not counting the three Marines and one boy? Yes, he was certain that he and Lieutenant Little had checked the muster that morning and confirmed 105 men spread out between the sledging parties, Terror Camp, and HMS Terror that morning … but was he certain? Had he forgotten anyone? Was his addition and subtraction correct? Crozier was very, very tired.

  Francis Crozier might get muddled in the count for a short while — he had not slept at all in two, no, three nights — but he had not forgotten a single man’s face or name. Nor would he ever.

  “Captain!”

  Crozier came out of the trance that he fell into when he was man-hauling sledges. He could not have told anyone at this moment whether he had been in harness an hour or six hours. The world had become the glare of the cold sun in the southeastern sky, the blowing ice crystals, the rack of his breath, the pain of his body, the shared weight behind him, the resistance of the sea ice and new snow, and most of all the oddly blue sky with wisps of white clouds curling around on all sides as if they were all walking in a blue-and-white-rimmed bowl.

  “Captain!” It was Lieutenant Little shouting.

  Crozier realized that his fellow pullers had come to a halt. All of the sledges were stopped on the ice.

  Ahead of them to the southeast, perhaps a mile beyond the next heaped-ice pressure ridge, a three-masted ship was moving north to south. Its sails were furled and shrouded, its yards rigged for anchorage, but it moved anyway, as if on a strong current, gliding slowly and majestically on what must be a wide avenue of open water just beyond the next high ridge.

  Rescue. Salvation.

  The steady blue flame of hope in Crozier’s aching chest flared brighter for a few exhilarating seconds.

  Ice Master Thomas Blanky, his peg leg set into something rather like a wooden boot that Carpenter Honey had devised, stepped up to Crozie
r and said, “A mirage.”

  “Of course,” said the captain.

  He’d recognized the distinctive bomb-ship masts and rigging of HMS Terror almost immediately, even through the shimmering, shifting air, and for a few seconds of confusion bordering on vertigo, Crozier had wondered if somehow they had managed to get lost, turned around, and were actually heading back to the northwest toward the ship they’d abandoned hours earlier.

  No. There were the old sledge tracks, drifted over in spots but deeply worn into the ice by more than a month’s repeated passage back and forth, heading straight for the tall pressure ridge with its narrow passes hacked out with picks and shovels. And the sun was still ahead of them and to their right, deep in the south. Beyond the pressure ridge, the three masts shimmered, dissolved briefly, and then returned more solidly than ever, only upside down, with the hull of the ice-entombed Terror blending into a white-cirrus sky.

  Crozier and Blanky and so many of the others had seen this phenomenon many times before — false things in the sky. Years ago, on a fine winter morning frozen in off the coast of the landmass they were calling Antarctica, Crozier had seen a smoking volcano — the very one named after this ship — rising upside down from solid sea to the north. Another time on this very expedition, in the spring of 1847, Crozier had come on deck to find black spheres floating in the southern sky. The spheres turned into solid figure eights, then divided again into what looked like a symmetrical progression of ebony balloons and then, within the course of a quarter hour, evaporated completely.

  Two seamen on the third sledge had literally dropped in their traces and were on their knees in the rutted snow. One man was weeping loudly and the other had unleashed a string of the most imaginative sailor curses Crozier had ever heard — and the captain had heard his fill over the decades.