Free The Terror by Dan Simmons Page A

line between day and night any longer since the sun has disappeared this very day, not to reappear until February. But even before he lights the small lantern in his berth to check his watch, he knows that it is
late.
The ship is as quiet as it ever gets; silent except for the creak of tortured wood and frozen metal within; silent except for the snores, the mumbles, and the farts from the sleeping men, and curses from Mr. Diggle the cook; silent save for the incessant groaning, banging, cracking, and surging of the ice outside; and, added to those exceptions to silence this night, silent but for the banshee screech of a high wind.
    But this is no sound of ice or wind that wakes Crozier. It is a gunshot. A shotgun — muffled through the layers of oak planks and overlaying snow and ice, but a shotgun blast without doubt.
    Crozier was sleeping with most of his clothes on and now has pulled on most of the other layers and is ready for his cold-weather slops when Thomas Jopson, his steward, knocks on the door with his distinctive soft triple rap. The captain slides it open.
    “Trouble on deck, sir.”
    Crozier nods. “Who’s on watch tonight, Thomas?” His pocket watch shows him that it is almost 3:00 a.m., civilian time. His memory of the month’s and day’s watch schedule gives him the names an instant before Jopson speaks them aloud.
    “Billy Strong and Private Heather, sir.”
    Crozier nods again, lifts a pistol from his cupboard, checks the priming, sets it in his belt, and squeezes past the steward, out through the officers’ dining cubicle that borders the captain’s tiny cabin on the starboard side, and then quickly forward through another door to the main ladderway. The lower deck is mostly dark at this time in the morning — the glow around Mr. Diggle’s stove the primary exception — but lamps are being lit in several of the officers’, mates’, and stewards’ quarters as Crozier pauses at the base of the ladder to pull his heavy slops from the hook and struggle into them.
    Doors slide open. First Mate Hornby walks aft to stand next to Crozier by the ladder. First Lieutenant Little hurries forward down the companionway, carrying three muskets and a saber. He’s followed by Lieutenants Hodgson and Irving, who are also carrying weapons.
    Forward of the ladder, seamen are grumbling from deep in their hammocks, but a second mate is already turning out a work party — literally tumbling sleeping men from their hammocks and shoving them aft toward their slops and the waiting weapons.
    “Has anyone been up top yet to check out the shot?” Crozier asks his first mate.
    “Mr. Male had the duty, sir,” says Hornby. “He went up as soon as he sent your steward to fetch you.”
    Reuben Male is captain of the fo’c’sle. A steady man. Billy Strong, the seaman on port watch up there, has been to sea before, Crozier knows, on HMS
Belvidera.
He wouldn’t have shot at phantoms. The other man on watch was the oldest — and in Crozier’s estimation, the stupidest — of the surviving Marines, William Heather. At age 35 and still a private, frequently sick, too often drunk, and most frequently useless, Heather had almost been sent home from Disko Island two years before when his best friend Billy Aitken was discharged and sent back on HMS
Rattler.
    Crozier slips the pistol into the oversized pocket of his heavy woolen outer coat, accepts a lantern from Jopson, wraps a comforter around his face, and leads the way up the tilted ladder.
    Crozier sees that it is as black as the inside of an eel’s belly outside, no stars, no aurora, no moon, and
cold;
the temperature on deck registered sixty-three degrees below zero six hours earlier when young Irving had been sent up to take measurements, and now a wild wind howls past the stubs of masts and across the canted, icy deck, driving heavy snow before it. Stepping out from beneath the frozen canvas enclosure above the main hatch, Crozier holds his mittened hand alongside