The Terror

It was very cold and Hickey’s preternatural vision could see more dark clouds moving in from the north, but for this evening, the world was calm. He saw the sun set in the south and knew that it would be sixteen or eighteen hours until it rose again, also in the south, and that soon it would not rise at all. It would then be the Age of Darkness – ten thousand years of darkness – but that suited Cornelius Hickey’s purposes well.

But this night was cold and gentle. The stars were bright – Hickey had been taught the names of some of the winter constellations now rising, but this night he had trouble even finding the Plow – and He was content to sit in the stern of his boat, his peacoat and watch cap keeping him perfectly warm, his gloved hands on the gunwales, his gaze locked forward in the direction of Terror Camp and even the distant ship He would reach when He chose to bring his dray beasts and consort back to life. He was thinking about months and years past and marveling at the inevitable miracle of his own transcendence.

Cornelius Hickey had no regrets about any part of his former mortal life. He had done what he had to do. He had repaid those arrogant bastards who made the mistake of ever looking down upon him and shown the others a hint of his divine light.

Suddenly, he sensed movement to the west. With some difficulty – it was very cold – Hickey turned his head left to look out to the frozen sea.

Something was moving toward him. Perhaps it had been his hearing – as preternatural and supernatural as all his other fine-tuned and augmented senses now – that had first detected the movement across the broken ice.

Something large was walking toward him on two legs.

Hickey saw the starlight glow on the blue-white fur. He smiled. He welcomed the visit.

The thing from the ice was no longer something to be feared. Hickey knew that it came now not as a predator but as a worshipper. He and the creature were not even equals at this point; Cornelius Hickey could order it into nonexistence or banish it to the farthest reaches of the universe with a sweep of his gloved hand.

It came on, sometimes dropping to lope forward on all fours, more often rising on two huge legs and striding like a man even while moving nothing like a man.

Hickey felt a strange disquiet disturb his deep cosmic peace.

The thing disappeared from his sight when it came very close to the pinnace and sledge. Hickey could hear it moving around by the tarp – under the tarp – worrying the frozen bodies there with its long claws, clicking teeth the size of knives, huffing its breath out from time to time – but he could not see it. He realized that he was afraid to turn his head.

He looked straight forward, meeting only Magnus’s empty-eye-socketed gaze.

Then suddenly the thing was there, looming over the gunwales, the upper body rising six feet and more above a boat that was already raised six feet above the sledge and snow.

Hickey felt his breath catch in his chest.

In the starlight, with Hickey’s new, improved vision, the beast was more terrible than he had ever seen it, more terrible than he could have ever imagined it. Just as He – Cornelius Hickey – had undergone a wonderful and terrible transformation, so had this creature.

It leaned its huge upper body over the gunwales. It huffed a fog of ice crystals into the air between Hickey and the bow and the caulker’s mate inhaled the carrion breath of a thousand centuries of death-dealing.

Hickey would have fallen to his knees and worshipped the creature at that moment if movement had been an option, but he was quite literally frozen in place. Even his head would no longer turn.

The thing sniffed Magnus Manson’s body, the long, impossible snout returning again and again to the icefall of brown blood covering Magnus’s front. Its huge tongue gently licked at the frozen fall of brown blood. Hickey wanted to explain that this was the body of his beloved consort and that it must be preserved so that He – not Hickey the caulker’s mate, but the He he had become – could restore his beloved’s eyes and someday breathe life into him again.

Abruptly, yet almost casually, the thing bit off Magnus’s head.

The crunching was so terrible that Hickey would have covered his ears if he had been able to lift his gloved hands from the gunwales. He could not move them.

The thing swung a white-furred forearm thicker than Magnus’s massive leg had ever been and smashed the dead man’s chest in – rib cage and spine exploding outward in a shower of white bone shards. Hickey realized that the thing had not broken Magnus the way Hickey had seen Magnus break a score of lesser men’s backs and ribs; it had shattered Magnus the way a man would shatter a bottle or porcelain doll.

Looking for a soul to devour, thought Hickey, who had no idea why he had thought it.

Hickey could no longer move his head even an inch, so he had no choice but to watch as the thing from the ice excavated every inner part of Magnus Manson and ate them, crunching the bits in its huge teeth the way Hickey might have once chewed ice cubes. The thing then tore the frozen flesh from Magnus’s frozen bones and scattered the bones throughout the bow of the pinnace, but only after cracking them open and sucking out the marrow. The wind came up and howled around the pinnace and sledge, creating distinct musical notes. Hickey imagined a mad god-thing from Hell in a white fur coat playing a bone flute.

It came for him next.

First it dropped to all fours, out of sight – which was somehow more terrifying than his being able to see it – and then, with a vertical motion like a pressure ridge rising, it loomed up and over the side of the gunwale and filled all of Hickey’s vision. Its black, unblinking, inhuman, totally unfeeling eyes were inches from the caulker’s mate’s own staring eyes. Its hot breath enveloped him.

“Oh,” said Cornelius Hickey.

It was the last word that Hickey ever spoke, but it was not so much a word as a single, long, terrified, speechless exhalation. Hickey felt his own last warm breath flowing out of him, out from his chest, up his throat, out through his open and straining mouth, hissing away between his shattered teeth, but instantly he realized it was not his breath leaving him forever, but his spirit, his soul.

The thing breathed it in.

But then the creature huffed, snorted, backed away, shook its huge head as if it had been befouled. It dropped to all fours and left Cornelius Hickey’s field of vision forever.

Everything had left Cornelius Hickey’s field of vision forever. The stars came down from the sky and attached themselves to his staring eyes as ice crystals. The Raven descended as a darkness upon him and devoured what the Tuunbaq would not deign to touch. Eventually Hickey’s blind eyes shattered from the cold, but he did not blink.

His body remained sitting rigidly upright in the stern, legs splayed, boots firmly planted near the heap of gold watches he had plundered and the stack of clothing he had taken from the dead men, his gloved hands frozen to the gunwales, the frozen fingers of his right hand only inches from the loaded shotgun’s barrels.

Late the next morning, before dawn, the storm front arrived and the sky began to howl again, and all that next day and all the next night the snow piled up in the caulker’s mate’s straining, open mouth and covered his dark blue peacoat and watch cap and terror-frozen face and shattered, staring eyes with a thin shroud-layer of white.

60 CROZIER

The beauty of being dead, he knows now, is that there is no pain and no sense of self.

The unhappy news about being dead, he knows now, is – just as he had feared many times when considering self-murder and rejecting it for just this reason – there are dreams.

The happy news about this unhappy news is that the dreams are not one’s own.

Crozier floats in this warm, buoyant sea of nonself and listens to dreams that are not his own.

If any of his living, mortal-self’s analytical powers had survived the transition to this pleasant floating-after-death, the old Francis Crozier might have wondered at his thought of “listening to” dreams, but it is true that these dreams are more like listening to another person’s chant – although there is no language involved, no words, no music, no chant – than “seeing” dreams the way he always had when he was alive. Although there are most definitely visual images involved in this dream-listening, the shapes and colors are like nothing Francis Crozier ever encountered on the other side of Death’s veil and it is this nonvoice, nonchant narrative that fills his death dreams.

There is a beautiful Esquimaux girl named Sedna. She lives alone with her father in a snow-house far north of the regular Esquimaux villages. Word of the girl’s beauty spreads and various young men make the long trek across ice floes and barren lands to pay homage to the grey-haired father and to woo Sedna.

The girl’s heart is not touched by any of the suitors’ words or faces or forms, and in the late spring of the year, when the ice is breaking up, she goes out alone among the floes to avoid yet another year’s fresh crop of moonfaced suitors.

Since this happened in the time when animals still had voices which the People understood, a bird flies over the opening ice and woos Sedna with its song. “Come with me to the land of the birds where all things are as beautiful as my song,” sings the bird. “Come with me to the land of the birds where there is no hunger, where your tent will always be made of the most beautiful caribou skins, where you shall lie on only the finest and softest bearskins and caribou skins, and where your lamp will always be filled with oil. My friends and I will bring you anything your heart may desire, and you shall be clothed from that day forth in our finest and brightest feathers.”

Sedna believes the bird-suitor, weds him in the tradition of the Real People, and travels with him many leagues over sea and ice to the land of the bird people.

But the bird had lied.

Their home is not made of the finest caribou skins but is a patched, sad place thrown together with rotting fish skins. The cold wind blows in freely and laughs at her for her gullible innocence.

She sleeps not on the finest bearskins but on miserable walrus hides. There is no oil for her lamp. The other bird people ignore her and she has to wear the same clothes she was wed in. Her new husband brings her only cold fish for her meals.

Sedna keeps insisting to her indifferent bird-husband that she misses her father, so finally the bird allows her father to come visit. To do so, the old man has to travel for many weeks in his frail boat.

When her father arrives, Sedna feigns joy until they are alone in the dark, fish-stinking tent, and then she weeps and tells her father of how her husband abuses her and of all she has lost – youth, beauty, happiness – by marrying the bird rather than one of the young males of the Real People.

The father is horrified to hear this story and helps Sedna devise a plan to kill her husband. That next morning, when the bird-husband returns with Sedna’s cold fish for breakfast, the father and the girl fall upon the bird with the harpoon and paddle from the father’s kayak and kill him. Then the father and daughter flee the land of the