The Terror

59 HICKEY

Sometime in the last few days or weeks, Cornelius Hickey realized, he had ceased being a king.

He was now a god.

In fact – he suspected, was not yet certain, but suspected strongly and was close to certain – Cornelius Hickey had become God.

Others died around him yet he lived. He no longer felt the cold. He no longer felt hunger or thirst, much less the need to slake those former appetites. He could see in the encroaching dark as the nights lengthened toward the absolute, nor did the blowing snow and howling wind hinder his senses.

The mere mortal men had required a rigging of a tarp from the boat and sledge when their tents ripped and blew away and they huddled there like sheep with their woolen asses turned to the wind until they died, but Hickey was comfortable high on his throne in the stern of the pinnace.

When, after more than three weeks of being unable to move because of the blizzards, winds, and plummeting temperatures, his dray beasts had whined and begged for food, Hickey had descended among them like a god and provided them with their loaves and fishes.

He had shot Strickland to feed Seeley.

He had shot Dunn to feed Brown.

He had shot Gibson to feed Jerry.

He had shot Best to feed Smith.

He had shot Morfin to feed Orren… or perhaps it was all the other way around. Hickey’s memory could no longer be bothered with trivial matters.

But now those he’d so generously fed were dead, frozen hard into their blanket sleeping bags or contorted into the terrible claw shapes of their final throes. Perhaps he had become bored with them and shot them as well. He did vaguely remember carving up the choice parts of more men than he had shot to feed the others in the past week or two, back when he still needed to eat. Or perhaps it had just been on a whim. He could not recall the details. It was not important.

When the storms ended – and Hickey now knew that He could command them to cease at any time if it pleased Him to do so – he would probably bring several of the men back from the dead so that they could finish hauling Magnus and Him to Terror Camp.

The damned surgeon was dead – poisoned and frozen in his own little tarp tent some yards from the pinnace and the common graveyard tarp – but Hickey chose to ignore that unpleasant development – it was but a mild irritation. Even gods have phobias, and Cornelius Hickey had always held a deep fear of poison or contamination. After one glance – and after firing a single bullet into the corpse from the entrance to the tarp tent to make sure the damned surgeon was not feigning death – the new god Hickey had backed away and left the poisoned thing and its contaminated shroud-tarp alone.

Magnus had been mewling and complaining for weeks from his favored place in the bow but had been strangely quiet the last day or two. His last movement, during a lull in the blizzards when a dull winter light had illuminated the pinnace and the snow-buried tarp next to it and the low hill they were on and the frozen beach to the west and endless ice fields beyond, had been to open his mouth as if to make a request of his lover and God.

But instead of words issuing forth, or even another complaint, hot blood had first filled and then geysered from Magnus’s open mouth, flowed down his bearded chin, and covered the big man’s belly and gently folded hands, ending in a pool on the bottom of the boat near his boots. The blood was still there, but frozen now into waves and ripples, looking like nothing so much as some Biblical Prophet’s flowing (but ice-covered) brown beard. Magnus had not spoken again since.

His partner’s brief Death Nap did not disturb Hickey – he knew that He could bring Magnus back whenever He chose to – but the open eyes endlessly staring over that gaping mouth and frozen icefall of blood began to get on the god’s nerves after a day or two. It was especially hard to wake up to. Especially after the eyes frosted over and became two white, icy, never-blinking orbs.

Hickey had stirred from his throne in the stern then, crawling forward past the propped shotgun and bag of powder-shot cartridges, over the centre thwarts past the heaps of wrapped chocolate (which He might deign to eat if hunger ever returned) and past the saws and nails and rolls of sheet lead, stepping over the towels and silk handkerchiefs stacked so neatly near Magnus’s bloodied feet, finally kicking aside some of the Bibles that his friend had pulled close to him in the last days, stacking them like a little wall between Hickey and himself.

But Magnus’s mouth would not shut – Hickey could not even snap off or chip away the thick river of frozen blood – nor would the white eyes close.

“I’m sorry, love,” he whispered. “But you know how I hate being stared at.”

He had used his ship’s knife to pry out the frozen eyeballs and throw them far out into the howling darkness. He would fix that later when He brought Magnus back.

Finally, upon His command, the storm lessened and then died away. The howling ceased. The snow was piled five feet high on the westward, windward side of the pinnace high atop its sledge and had filled in much of the space under the death tarp on the leeward side.

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.