The Elder Ice: A Harry Stubbs Adventure

by Hambling, David

  So many other people are living lives beyond me. Even as I write, Frank Mellors is in his antique shop in Chichester, showing an amethyst brooch to a customer. The men speak no special words, but there is a secret understanding between them. Another man in the shop looking at chinaware notices nothing.

  A thousand miles away, Nanook of the North is cutting a hole in the ice to catch fish, a task as ordinary to him as opening a tin of pilchards is to you or me. I used to think such worlds as Nanook’s only existed for as long as we watched them on the cinema screen. Now I realise many other worlds, and others that we have yet to dream of, are going on at the same time as our own, everywhere, even under our noses.

  On the roof slates above my head, the tardigrades push their way through the moss. The little monsters pursue their prey and avoid predators as they have these six hundred million years, heedless of mankind’s existence. Billions and billions of them, on all our roofs and in every park and garden, whole empires of tardigrades, and only a few like Dr Evans know they are even there.

  Ten thousand miles south, the Ancients' tombs are still undisturbed, thousands of feet beneath the elder ice. The Ancients themselves are not dead but passing a few more millennia in dreamless, blank slumber until the world is right for them again. We human beings scurry about, oblivious to their presence.

  We are not the Earth's favoured first-born, the inheritors of the world, as we had always imagined. We are the second-born and here only on the sufferance of our elder brothers. Though to them, we are much less than brothers. We are the tardigrades on the roof, the rats in the walls. We think we own the place, but it is only ours until they wake again. We are pets to them, or else we are vermin. Some time ago, they gave their chosen ones rings, like the collar on a pet dog, so they would not kill them by accident. Because the rest of us are nothing more than pests, a threat to their valuables. And their mousetraps are deadly effective.

  It is not easy to see mankind relegated so low, so that even Harcourt only hoped to trail behind the Ancients. Perhaps that was why Armydale shot himself after coming back from the Endurance expedition. Perhaps he had seen the size of the world compared to us, and it was too much for him.

  As for Harry Stubbs, well, another of his dreams has slipped away like the others. I was never going to be a master butcher like my father. I was never going to face Dempsey in front of a packed house at Madison Square Garden. And now I was never going to be an articled clerk with a respectable job in a solicitor’s office. But if I learned anything from Sir Ernest Shackleton, it was the importance of picking yourself up after each setback. You must change course and start heading for the next dream. It might be only another Fata Morgana, but it keeps you going. And it might be real.

  My reports, written with so much care for Mr Rowe, are no more. But I wish to record my story. Perhaps we will learn the same secrets as the Ancients, and our science will scale the same heights. Perhaps in a hundred years we too will make glowing lamps you can hold in your hand, lamps that can do all the things Mrs Crawford said. Then a man will be able to summon up a whole library with a gesture, and read it all, and make sense of it all at last. And maybe Harry Stubbs' story will be one of the books in that library.

  Editor’s Note: Harry Stubbs’ account is accurate as far as it can be verified, even the unlikely details of Ernest Shackleton’s brother Frank Mellors, a convicted fraudster turned antique dealer.

  Needless to say, no evidence of lost civilisations has ever been found in Antarctica. There are however some curious parallels between Stubbs’ descriptions and a fictionalised account of the ill-fated 1931 Pabodie Expedition published by HP Lovecraft as “At The Mountains of Madness.”

  Harry Stubbs returns in Broken Meats. A bizarre shooting outside a pub sets in motion a chain of events in which Harry reluctantly agrees to help a visitor from China. Mr Yang is an agent of the feared Si Fan Society and possessed of unusual powers. He is seeking information about Rosyln D’Onston, a former journalist, black magician and suspect in the Jack the Ripper killings, now dead for thirteen years. What is Yang’s mission? And just how dead is D’Onston? The answers lie with a cell of renegade Theosophists and an insane alchemical experiment which transcends science.

  Also coming in Summer 2015 from PS Publishing: The Dulwich Horror and Others, a collection of seven stories of mystery and horror by David Hambling

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  Table of Contents

  Title page

  Prologue

  Round One: The Antique Dealer

  Round Two: The Naturalist

  Round Three: The Explorer

  Round Four: The Consignment Man

  Round Five: The Summerhouse

  Round Six: The Irishmen

  Round Seven: The Mastermind

  Round Eight: The Collector

  Round Nine: The Slave of the Lamp

  Epilogue