The Terror by Dan Simmons Read Free Book Online Page A

which Mr. Helpman, the ship’s clerk, issues their outdoor clothing.
    Behind the Spirit Room and the Gunner’s Storeroom is the Captain’s Storeroom, holding Francis Crozier’s private — and personally paid for — hams, cheeses, and other luxuries. It is still the custom for the ship’s captain to set the table from time to time for his officers, and while the victuals in Crozier’s storeroom pale in comparison to the luxurious foodstuffs crammed into the late Captain Sir John Franklin’s private store on
Erebus,
Crozier’s pantry — almost empty now — has held out for two summers and two winters in the ice. Also, he thinks with a smile, it has the benefit of containing a decent wine cellar from which the officers still benefit. And many bottles of whiskey upon which he, the captain, depends. The poor commander, lieutenants, and civilian officers aboard
Erebus
had done without spirits for two years. Sir John Franklin was a teetotaler and so, when he was alive, had been his officers’ mess.
    A lantern bobs toward Crozier down the narrow aisle leading back from the bow. The captain turns in time to see something like a hairy black bear squeezing its bulk between the coal sleeves and the Bread Room bulkhead.
    “Mr. Wilson,” says Crozier, recognizing the carpenter’s mate from his rotundity and from the sealskin gloves and deerskin trousers which had been offered to all the men before departure but which only a few had chosen over their flannel and woolen slops. Sometime during the voyage out, the mate had sewn wolf skins they’d picked up at the Danish whaling station at Disko Bay into a bulky — but warm, he insisted — outer garment.
    “Captain.” Wilson, one of the fattest men aboard, is carrying the lantern in one hand and has several boxes of carpenter’s tools tucked under his other arm.
    “Mr. Wilson, my compliments to Mr. Honey and would you ask him to join me on the hold deck.”
    “Aye, sir. Where on the hold deck, sir?”
    “The Dead Room, Mr. Wilson.”
    “Aye, sir.” The lantern light reflects on Wilson’s eyes as the mate keeps his curious gaze up just a second too long.
    “And ask Mr. Honey to bring a pry bar, Mr. Wilson.”
    “Aye, sir.”
    Crozier stands aside, squeezing between two kegs to let the larger man pass up the ladder to the lower deck. The captain knows he might be rousing his carpenter for nothing — making the man go to the trouble of getting into his cold-weather slops right before lights-out for no good reason — but he has a hunch and he’d rather disturb the man now than later.
    When Wilson has squeezed his bulk up through the upper hatch, Captain Crozier lifts the lower hatch and descends to the hold deck.
    Because the entire deck-space lies beneath the level of outside ice, the hold deck is almost as cold as the alien world beyond the hull. And darker, with no aurora, stars, or moon to relieve the ever-present blackness. The air is thick with coal dust and coal smoke — Crozier watches the black particles curl around his hissing lantern like a banshee’s claw — and it stinks of sewage and bilge. A scraping, sliding, scuttling noise comes from the darkness aft, but Crozier knows it’s just the coal being shoveled in the boiler room. Only the residual heat from that boiler keeps the three inches of filthy water sloshing at the foot of the ladder from turning to ice. Forward, where the bow dips deeper into the ice, there is almost a foot of icy water, despite men working the pumps six hours and more a day. The
Terror,
like any living thing, breathes out moisture through a score of vital functions, including Mr. Diggle’s ever-working stove, and while the lower deck is always damp and rimed with ice and the orlop deck frozen, the hold is a dungeon with ice hanging from every beam and meltwater sloshing above one’s ankles. The flat black sides of the twenty-one iron water tanks lining the hull on either side add to the chill. Filled with thirty-eight tons