The Terror by Dan Simmons Read Free Book Online Page B

of fresh water when the expedition sailed, the tanks are now armored icebergs and to touch the iron is to lose skin.
    Magnus Manson is waiting at the bottom of the ladder as Private Wilkes had said, but the huge able-bodied seaman is standing, not sitting arse-on-ladder. The big man’s head and shoulders are hunched beneath the low beams. His pale, lumpy face and stubbled jowls remind Crozier of a rotten white peeled potato stuffed under a Welsh wig. He will not meet his captain’s stare in the harsh lantern glow.
    “What is this, Manson?” Crozier’s voice does not hold the bark he unleashed on his lookout and lieutenant. His tone is flat, calm, certain, with the power of flogging and hanging behind every syllable.
    “It’s them ghosts, Cap’n.” For a huge man, Magnus Manson has the high, soft voice of a child. When
Terror
and
Erebus
had paused at Disko Bay on the west coast of Greenland in July of 1845, Captain Sir John Franklin had seen fit to dismiss two men from the expedition —a Marine private and a sailmaker from
Terror.
Crozier had made the recommendation that seaman John Brown and Private Aitken from his ship also be released — they were little better than invalids and never should have been signed on for such a voyage — but on occasion since, he wished he’d sent Manson home with those four. If the big man was not feebleminded, he was so close to it that it was impossible to tell the difference.
    “You know there are no ghosts on
Terror,
Manson.”
    “Yes, Cap’n.”
    “
Look
at me.”
    Manson raises his face but does not meet Crozier’s gaze. The captain marvels at how tiny the man’s pale eyes are in that white lump of a face.
    “Did you disobey Mr. Thompson’s orders to carry sacks of coal to the boiler room, Seaman Manson?”
    “No, sir. Yes, sir.”
    “Do you know the consequences of disobeying any order on this ship?” Crozier feels like he’s talking to a boy, although Manson must be at least thirty years old.
    The big sailor’s face brightens as he is presented with a question he can answer correctly. “Oh, yes, Cap’n. Flogging, sir. Twenty lashes. A ’undred lashes if I disobeys more than once. ’Anging if I disobey a real officer rather’n jus’ Mr. Thompson.”
    “That’s correct,” says Crozier, “but did you know that the captain can also inflict any punishment he finds appropriate to the transgression?”
    Manson peers down at him, his pale eyes confused. He has not understood the question.
    “I’m saying I can punish you any way I see fit, Seaman Manson,” says the captain.
    A flood of relief flows over the lumpy face. “Oh, yes, right, Cap’n.”
    “Instead of twenty lashes,” says Francis Crozier, “I could have you locked up in the Dead Room for twenty hours with no light.”
    Manson’s already pale, frozen features lose so much blood that Crozier prepares to get out of the way if the big man faints.
    “You… wouldn’t… .” The child-man’s voice quavers toward a vibrato.
    Crozier says nothing for a long, cold, lantern-hissing moment. He lets the sailor read his expression. Finally he says, “What do you think you hear, Manson? Has someone been telling you ghost stories?”
    Manson opens his mouth but seems to have trouble deciding which question to answer first. Ice forms on his fat lower lip. “Walker,” he says at last.
    “You’re afraid of Walker?”
    James Walker, a friend of Manson’s who had been about the same age as the idiot and not much brighter, was the last man to die on the ice, just a week earlier. Ship’s rules required that the crew keep small holes drilled in the ice near the ship, even when the ice was ten or fifteen feet thick as it was now, so that they could get at water to fight a fire should one break out aboard. Walker and two of his mates were on just such a drilling party in the dark, reopening an old hole that would freeze in less than an hour unless rammed with metal spikes. The white terror had come out