The Terror by Dan Simmons Page B

sentence for his ship, but not necessarily for the men of both ships.
    There is a sound out in the darkened corridor.
    “Thank you, Mr. Thompson.” The captain lifts his lantern off an iron hook, leaves the glow of the boiler room, and heads forward in the slush and darkness.
    Thomas Honey is waiting in the corridor, his candle lantern sputtering in the bad air. He is holding the iron pry bar in front of him like a musket, clutched in thick gloves, and hasn’t opened the bolted door of the Dead Room.
    “Thank you for coming, Mr. Honey,” Crozier says to his carpenter.
    Without explanation, the captain throws back the bolts and enters the freezing-cold storage room.
    Crozier can not resist lifting his lantern toward the aft bulkhead where the six men’s bodies have been stacked in their common canvas shroud.
    The heap is writhing. Crozier expected that — expected to see the movement of rats under the tarp — but he realizes that he’s looking at a solid mass of rats
above
the shroud-canvas as well. There is a solid cube of rats, extending more than four feet above the deck, as hundreds of them jostle for position to get at the frozen dead men. The squealing is very loud in here. More rats are underfoot, scuttling between his and the carpenter’s legs.
Rushing to the banquet,
thinks Crozier. And showing no fear of the lantern light.
    Crozier turns the lantern back to the hull, walks up the slight incline caused by the ship’s cant to port and begins pacing along the curved, tilted wall.
    There.
    He holds the lantern closer.
    “Well, I’ll be God-damned to hell and hanged for a heathen,” says Honey. “Pardon me, Captain, but I didn’t think the ice would do this so soon.”
    Crozier doesn’t answer. He crouches to investigate the bent and extended wood of the hull more closely.
    Hull planks have been bent inward here, bulging almost a foot from the graceful curve elsewhere along the hull’s side. The innermost layers of wood have splintered and at least two planks are hanging free.
    “Jesus God Christ Almighty,” says the carpenter, who has crouched next to the captain. “That ice is a fucking monster, begging the Captain’s pardon, sir.”
    “Mr. Honey,” says Crozier, his breath adding crystals to the ice already on the planks and reflecting the lantern light, “could anything but the ice have done this damage?”
    The carpenter barks a laugh but stops abruptly as he realizes his captain is not making a joke. Honey’s eyes widen, then squint. “Begging your pardon again, Captain, but if you mean… that’s impossible.”
    Crozier says nothing.
    “I mean, Captain, this hull was three inches of the finest English oak as it was, sir. And for this trip — for the ice, I mean, sir — it was doubled with two layers of African oak, Captain, each one and a half inches thick. And them African oak panels was wrought on the diagonal, sir, givin’ it even more strength than if it were just doubled straight-like.”
    Crozier is inspecting the loose planks, trying to ignore the river of rats behind them and around them as well as the chewing sounds from the direction of the aft bulkhead.
    “And, sir,” continues Honey, his voice hoarse in the cold, his rum-tainted breath freezing in the air, “on top of the three inches of English oak and the three inches of diagonal-laid African oak, they laid on two layers of Canadian elm, sir, each two inches thick. That’s four more inches of hull, Captain, and that wrought diagonal against the African oak. That’s five belts of serious timber, sir… ten inches of the strongest wood on earth between us and the sea.”
    The carpenter shuts up, realizing that he’s lecturing his captain on details of the shipyard’s work that Crozier had personally overseen in the months before departure.
    The captain stands and sets his mittened hand against the innermost planks where they have come free. There’s more than an inch of open space there. “Set your lantern down,