by Tim Curran
She ran faster, falling, getting up, falling.
She was out on the ice road near the runway now, calling out to the wind, begging it to show itself. Hypothermia was setting in and her mind was fogged, confused, a whirlwind of fairy tale imagery that spun and danced and cavorted . . . but for all its phantasmagoria and sparkling Technicolor beauty, there were dark spaces and pooling shadows from which red hungry eyes peered out and white, frozen fingers seemed to beckon.
But she could not let the song be broken.
I will die without the song! I will die . . .
Here were warm-up shacks and storage Quonsets. The wind was whipping fiercely. The snow flying. The shadows pushing in. Cassie’s limbs felt numb, sluggish. There was no feeling in her face. She was sheathed in rubber, cold thick rubber.
And then–
Here, my child, here...
She saw a figure come drifting out of the snow and darkness.
A woman.
A woman in a white dress that flapped and flowed around her. Cassie stumbled in her direction, towards her outstretched arms. A woman that looked oh so much like her mother . . . but she had red eyes and those reaching things were not hands and then Cassie went down on her knees, crunching against the granite-hard snowpack and saw what it was that had summoned her.
Oh God not this, not this.
I remember
I remember the touch of them
From long ago
The fear-haunted forest, the swarm brings pain, welcome to the house of pain-Before her: a towering alien shape with fanning leathery wings and fleshy eyestalks and those red, red, burning eyes. It moved towards her.
Cassie felt an absolute wild terror seize hold of her, one that was not remotely refined or cultured or necessarily human. This was animal: pure, savage, feral. Like her mind had sucked into itself, careening madly into some bottomless pit with the trajectory of a bullet.
Before her, the shape reached out to her, to take her, to–
(no no no no keep away get away not touch not touch)
—pull her screaming into itself, into the buzzing dead-end nothingness of itself, the shrieking iron silence of its consciousness-
(no not touch the pain oh oh oh THE PAIN!!!)
—and make her part of the whole, part of the many, part of the hive.
Something broke loose in her brain like a seizure, making her limbs quake and her head thrash violently from side to side.
She threw herself to the ice, growling low in her throat, part-terror and part-rage. She crouched like a wolf readying to spring. She would attack. She would defend herself against the Other–
Then a sudden high-pitched whine opened up in the back of her skull, reverberating through her brain and everything went limp and flaccid within her. Defiance was not allowed and she knew it as she trembled on the ice, limbs shaking, eyes rolled back in her head, teeth biting into her tongue, blood running from her nose, bowels emptying themselves with a not-unpleasant smell of animal scat and glandular excretion.
Disobedience replaced with a warm gush of compliance, she lay there curled up on the ice, whimpering deep in her throat like a whipped puppy as the shape took her away into secret channels of darkness.
23
NOAA FIELD STATION POLARIS
THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG.
Borden knew it the moment the rope jerked in his hands and with enough force that he lost his grip on it and had to dive to the ice to recover it.
And by then it had gone limp.
He knew he was late calling into the habitat but he did not dare let go of it. For some reason this seemed of paramount importance to him. It was all that really connected him to Dr. Bob and, God help him, he would not sever that tie.
He pulled himself to his feet.
No easy thing with that howling wind trying to drive him to his knees, throwing grains of ice and whirling flakes of snow in his face. Steadying himself, leaning into the wind the way Dr. Bob had taught him, he began taking up the slack. He ducked under the guide rope and then it was easier to begin reeling it in.
The slack only meant that Dr. Bob was on his way back.
That’s all it meant.
But as he listened to the scream of that black wind and felt the absolute polar desolation around him, the cold beginning to make his limbs feel numb and heavy, he did not really believe that. He was remembering Andrea standing at the window . . . was that last night? Tonight? How could you tell with the constant darkness? He could see her standing there, somehow forlorn and withered, the youthful bloom to her cheeks replaced by something sallow and wizened.
I like to listen to the wind. It sounds like voices sometimes.
And it really did, didn’t it?
As he took up the slack, Borden was listening to it.
He was hearing something out there, sort of a droning sound like static rising and falling and the more he listened the less it sounded like static but almost like a voice . . . a woman’s voice . . . singing out there in the belly of the storm. A melancholy sort of song borne by the winds, its epicenter being the very black heart of the unearthly devastation which swept the ice.
Death.
That’s really what he was thinking.
It was a song of death sung by the siren which had lured so many to bleak polar tombs beneath the ice. A screaming, malevolent white death that was coming to suck the warmth from him–
Stop it. Concentrate.
He reeled in more slack.
The storm was right upon him now and no longer did the squalls clear enough so that he could see the habitat. He was alone. Marooned in this glacial hell where men did not belong.
The weather is funny out on the plateau, he could hear Dr. Bob saying. Be prepared. Summer, winter, it doesn’t matter. Prepare for the worst. When you go out to the coring sight, keep survival in mind. Because all it takes is one nasty storm to deliver you into the hands of Hell. Stay on the flagged pathways, use the guide ropes. We put them up for a reason. And if you ever start feeling dopy or dreamy, it’s hypothermia settling in, so call for help, follow the guide ropes.
Borden suddenly seemed to realize what was at stake.
He made sure the guide rope was still at his back and began reeling in the rope with renewed fervor. He looked down at his bunny boots in the beam of his light and realized that, yes, he had been losing it there for a minute because he probably only pulled in maybe fifteen or twenty feet of rope.
Work it, man! Help Dr. Bob out!
He was yanking the rope with everything he had. The exertion warmed him and woke him up, his senses alert and sharpened. He pulled in more line and soon there was a growing spool at his feet. Had to be forty feet now, more likely fifty.
The wind slammed into him, blasting him white with snow. He clawed it away from his balaclava and started pulling again. The rope came easily and then it went taut with incredible force, nearly pulling his arm out of joint.
But he did not let go.
He could not let go.
The rope laid limp for a moment, then it jerked rigid, began whipping from side to side. Borden lost his balance and fell to the ice.
What the hell is going on?
He grabbed the rope again, glad that he had mittens and polar gloves below or it would have peeled the flesh from his palms.
“BOB!” he cried. “BOB! I’M OVER HERE! BOB!”
The rope went crazy, pitching him this way and that and it felt crazily like he had the mother of all trophy swordfish on the other end. It slid through his mittens, snapping and jerking. It took every bit of strength he had to fight against it. He pulled it back, using his strength and weight, and the rope was tight feeding out into the storm as if it was looped around something immoveable like a tree.
It jerked again.
And again.
“BOB!” Borden shouted into the storm. “BOB!”
The rope whipped again with incredible force and he clung to it with steely determination. He was lifted eight
feet in the air and dropped to the ice.
Right away, sitting there on his ass, he pulled the rope in.
It was limp.
He kept reeling and reeling and there was weight on the other end, but not enough to be Dr. Bob. Something had happened. Something terrible. Somehow the rope must have broken loose and left him stranded out there.
Borden pulled the rest in, knowing he would simply tie it around himself and go find Bob. It was secured to the pathway so he had nothing to worry about.
The end of the rope came skidding into view.
It was looped around something.
Borden saw it and screamed.
Just a mitten of the sort Dr. Bob had been wearing and jutting from it, a jagged stump of wrist.
Borden crab-crawled back towards the pathway, pulled himself to his feet, and gripped the guide rope. He began following it back to the station at a frantic pace, trying to shut out everything but survival, and particularly the idea that something was out there, something malefic and loathsome that was closing in on him.
Something so deranged it had taken the time to tie Dr. Bob’s severed hand to the end of the rope.
24
KIM PENNYCOOK WAS ALONE.
It had taken every last bit of strength she had to seal the airlock and crawl back to her corner by the radio where she waited now, trembling, listening to the night which she knew without a doubt was also listening to her.
The wind blew.
The habitat shook, the walls rattled.
And Kim sat there, riding a rising tide of black fear and dementia, no longer certain what was real and what was nightmare fantasy. She had always been a strong, determined, and resilient woman, but all that was gone now.
She was a child.
She was frightened.
She was alone.
There was only the black breath of the storm outside and the white, fragile silence within her own mind now. She had been laid bare, adult logic and reasoning reduced to a simple adolescent level of pure unreasoning superstitious terror. For a child’s mind, unencumbered by adult experience and rationale, was a simple thing. The rustling in the closet was indeed the boogeyman. That scraping beneath the bed was certainly a monster. And the wind howling along the eaves was without a doubt the voices of disembodied spirits.
Kim teetered uneasily between the adult world and that of the child.
Terrified, everything inside her pulled tight, she could only listen.
The lights flickered.
She gasped. Not the dark, oh no, not in the dark–
The radio crackled with static. “Poor Kim . . . all alone,” the voice said, velvety like the whisper of funeral satin. “They’re all dead now and you’re all alone. All . . . alone.”
Kim shook violently. “No . . . no . . . go away.”
There was a breathing silence over the radio, then an odd metallic scraping sound like a shovel against a tomb lid. “I can help you . . . but you have to let me . . . you have to want me to . . . do you want that, Kim?”
Her breath coming in sharp, short inhalations that made her head spin, Kim covered her ears with her hands, her eyes wide and wet and stunned-looking. She felt cold and stiff, her body crawling with gooseflesh . . . every inch of it.
Even through covered ears, the voice was heard.
It sounded less sultry and seductive now.
Less girlschool friendly.
Now it was ancient and scratching, cancerous with vile corruption: “Don’t wait too long, Kim . . . because IT’s out there and IT can come in if it wants to . . . IT can get you like it got Andrea and Dr. Bob and Starnes . . . IT knows where you are and IT can find you, make you scream the way they screamed–”
“Go away! Go away!” Kim sobbed. “Just leave me alone!”
More static punctuated by that weird droning noise that seemed to come from impossible distances and echoing black gulfs. Nothing but the static.
Then the voice: “Let me help you before IT comes for you.”
“No.”
“All you have—”
“Please go away.”
“—to do, Kim, is—”
“Stop it, stop it!” she said as tears rolled down her face.
“Ask.”
25
BORDEN PULLED HIMSELF FORWARD, hand over hand with the guide ropes, the black flags flapping in the wind like aerial pennants. The closer he got to the habitat—and he could not see it, not yet—the wilder the storm became until it seemed a raging, hateful tempest that existed only to defeat him, to stop him dead in his tracks so the snow could lay a silent and deathly shroud over his remains.
He knew he was not alone out there.
Now and again, deep in the roaring blackness of the storm, he could hear that voice calling to him, singing that melancholy song that sounded to him like windy churchyards and echoing subterranean charnel depths.
He fought forward.
As he got closer to the habitat, the storm continued, howling in his face, almost determined that he would not escape its grasp.
Though he was a scientist, his science had abandoned him now and he fully believed that the storm was not some freak occurrence, but something engineered for his benefit.
He pulled himself on.
He would not give in.
He could not afford to give in.
All around him, shapes were moving, trying to draw his attention. But it wasn’t far now. Not far at all.
26
THE AIRLOCK HISSED.
Kim stood there in her ECWs, her eyes glazed, her mouth hanging slack.
“That’s it, Kim. I’m out here. Waiting. I’ll help you.”
Kim opened the outer door and the wind yanked it from her mittened fingers, letting it pound against the outside of the habitat. The wind pulled her out into the storm. It filled the habitat, knocking books from shelves and creating a tornado of papers and plastic coffee cups and anything that wasn’t tied down.
Stepping across the hardpack, Kim could feel her heart pounding like a drum. Inside her ECWs, she was sweating. Perspiration rolled down her spine and dampened her thighs and ran trickling between her breasts.
“You’re so close now, Kim, you’re so very close.”
Kim circled around the habitat, snow and ice particles swirling around her as fierce gusts tried to drive her back.
She smelled a stink like rotting fish heaped on a dead beach. It made no sense. Even though her mind had spiraled into some bottomless abyss within, it still knew that such an odor in the glacial air of the South Pole made no earthly sense.
“You’re so close I can almost touch you,” the voice said inside the drum of her head and she knew that’s where it had been speaking from all along.
Kim moved forward.
A shadow passed by her, vanished into the storm.
She thought she heard a peal of cold laughter.
But it was the wind. It had to be the wind.
“Just a little farther, Kim . . . a . . . little . . . farther . . .”
She had passed the habitat now, stepping out onto the polar plateau where the winds found her, enshrouding her in snow, owning her, and cutting off any chance of retreat.
Something brushed against her.
She whirled around, her mind a flat and lifeless thing in her head.
Then the voice, scratching and horrible: “I’m right behind you, Kim.”
She turned and something leaped out of the darkness at her.
She saw eyes that were a luminous yellow and a blurred liquid face like something grotesquely distorted in a funhouse mirror and then hands like gnarled gray roots took hold of her.
Kim’s last sight was her own blood steaming hotly on the ice.
27
BORDEN SAW THE LIGHTS.
A strangled cry of hope came from his throat. He was going to win this one. He was going to survive this and lock the habitat door and, so sorry, but fuck Andrea and fuck Dr. Bob. That door would not be opened until a rel
ief team from Polar Clime arrived.
Oh, Borden could already see them. Tough, burly, foul-mouthed Antarctic vets who would know what to do.
He pulled himself along the guide ropes.
The voices died out.
That’s how he knew he had won.
He stumbled across the ice, a few more feet, that’s all. He fell, slipped and fell again, pulling himself up, banged and bruised but making for the door.
It was wide open.
As was the airlock.
He fell through it.
The common room was a maelstrom of blowing wind and spinning debris, snow blown over the floor and sculpted in runnels along the walls.
He smelled a hot, toxic dead fish odor.
But only part of his brain recognized this for the rest was too busy taking in what stood there, seven feet tall if it was an inch. It looked like a twisted dead tree that had grown up through the floor, its base a mass of coiling roots that were moving with a slow and fleshy undulation. It was blue-black in color, convoluted, made of some striated material like muscle fibers woven tightly together. It had a head with what looked like hundreds of writhing black tendrils like the snakes of Medusa rising up, brushing the ceiling, reaching out stiffly like hair charged with static electricity.
And it had a face.
An abomination with upturned yellow eyes and a jagged, sawtoothed Jack-o-lantern mouth filled with black spikes.
Borden made a whimpering sound and fell to his knees.
It hissed at him and reached out with all four of its wiry, rawboned hands that ended in black stick-like hooks. He thought it would kill him for not only did that hot stench of dead fish blow off it but it gave off a psychic emanation of pure festering evil. It would gut him. It would swim in his blood.
But it did not touch him.
It reached down and yanked up that which it had been feeding on.
The corpse of Kim Pennycook.
It held her up like some obscene marionette. She had been disemboweled, her throat gnawed to ligament and red-stained vertebrae. She was gored and ripped, her ECWs hanging in crusty, slimed threads. As it hoisted her up, her left leg fell off where it had been bitten through.
