by Tim Curran
They enjoyed how men arrived at the truth.
But since that day, Slim had not really been Slim. He was not part of the hive, though he had been touched by it and immersed in it and you could never be whole again after that happened. The Old Ones revolted him . . . yet, he understood them as an imprisoned man understood his jailers. They did what they did because it was part of their blueprint for the world.
But Relling?
Relling was worse.
Relling was human and she was the first to betray her own race. To Slim that made her even more revolting, something unpleasant and squirming that needed to be crushed.
Now Slim was alone in the dark cell where Relling kept him.
There was no light, no sound. Even the floor and walls were seamless and untextured. There was absolutely no sensory stimuli. Relling called this sensory deprivation. When you are not distracted by what is outside, you will embrace what is inside and set it free.
Yes, he was alone in the cell.
The others were near, the Old Ones, but they preferred to watch and keep silent. So without them crowding his mind and unlocking things in there, Slim was remembering things. Maybe they were dreams and maybe they were reality. There seemed little difference between the two now.
He could see a woman, a pretty young woman with spiky bright red hair. She was holding hands with a little girl. Slim knew he was with them. They were walking through the forest and the little girl had a stick she said was her wand. She could wave the wand, she said, and make magic stars fall from the sky... one, two, three. The woman laughed and Slim laughed and the little girl said she wanted to go with him to the cold place, to the North Pole, but he told her it wasn’t the North Pole, it was the South Pole and–
Oh my God–
(rachel?)
Is that you?
(rachel . . . rachel???)
I remember, I remember–
No . . . NO . . . DON’T TAKE THEM TAKE THEM AWAY FROM MEEEE–
A fluidic, warm gush filled his mind, blotting it all out and he knew it was the Old Ones not wanting him to think about these things. But just before it was blotted out—washed away, it seemed, like an eraser wiping away something scribbled on a blackboard—there had been something there, something strong and real and it brought joy and pain and . . . and he wasn’t sure what, only that it was a seamless purity that they had taken from him.
They were coming closer now.
Oh, please don’t touch me, don’t touch me, not again, not again.
He knew it was not the ghosts, not the undead ones, but the living Old Ones.
They were getting close to him now.
His brain flared with pain and he cried out. They could touch you gently, harmlessly . . . but sometimes they could give you an electric shock or their tendrils would be so hot or so cold they would burn you.
He could hear the rustling of their wings and the rubbery sound of their triangular footpads on the floor, the slithering of their limbs. And that sharp, gagging odor that oozed from them.
They began to speak to him in those buzzing voices that hurt just to hear. Yes, yes, yes, he would do what they wanted. He would kill himself if they asked it, just please, please–
Not the pain, not the pain, not the pain . . .
They were shadows around him.
Shadows that walked through the walls, became solid once they passed through, but were still shadows. Clustering, alien, eldritch shadows that were alive and viscid and breathing. He could hear the leathery fluttering of their wings, the scraping sound of their limbs. Yes, they were moving around him in a shadow-show of shapes and distortion, a whirling dry-hot wind, a howling vortex of wings and eyes and reaching tendrils and Slim began to shriek in his mind, I haven’t said anything to anyone. . . they want to know, Relling and the others want to know, but I . . . WON’T . . . TELL . . . THEM . . .
He was standing now and he did not remember standing up, but he was. They had circled around him, pressing in from all sides, things that brought a darkness much darker than that of the cell. It was a darkness you could feel and know and shrink from.
They were touching him.
Coiling tendril-fingers.
The touch of snakes.
Crawling snakes . . . burning, oily, constricting.
And the eyes . . . those red, red eyes looking at him and into him, alive and electric and disembodied, peeling back the layers of his psyche and his soul as carefully as scalpels, exposing the red, moist meat beneath. They were feeding on his memories, unwrapping the layers of his soul’s onion skin wrapping and feeding on what was beneath, touching it, sorting through it, filling it with themselves, creeping through his intimate and secret places like worms tunneling through meat–
And then they pulled back as he fainted, fell into one of them and those smooth, cold-hot limbs stood him back up. He was shaking and moaning, divorced now of anything he had been before, his memories chewed away and swallowed by them.
He felt sickened.
Violated.
Filled with a psychic horror and a physical aversion for them.
He closed his eyes, telling himself they were not there, but those tentacle-like limbs grabbed him and held him, icy cold and dripping with vile, acrid secretions. Their minds would not be denied and although all was darkness, their eyes were lit brightly, a cutting incandescent red that burned away Slim’s vision and freewill. Those minds were coming back again, like sharks that bit into a swimmer, letting the blood flow sweet and hot, returning later for a feast of meat and fat and limb—
—slithering in through his own eyes like fat-bodied, undulantserpents, musky and repellent. Wriggling in his brain, biting and chewing, nesting in the shadowy places of his stillborn psyche, laying their steaming eggs and infesting him with their young that even now hatched in hot, writhing loops, infecting and contaminating, breeding noxious life and filling him with themselves until he was submerged in them.
Sunk in a green, viscous sea, drowning in the pestilent immensity of the hive itself–
And as everything in his mind was clear-cut, poisoned, and ripped out in juicy, bloody handfuls, he could hear his voice screaming, screaming against the droning central mind of them all: My name is Slim, my name is Slim . . . Glen, Glen, Glen Ardozio! I’m not part of you! I’m not part of what you are! You can’t have me! You can’t own me! I am! I am! I am! I AM ME AND YOU CANNOT DO THIS YOU CANNOT OWN WHAT I AM AM AM–
And then later, when Slim broke the surface of that particularly stagnant and polluted pond, he opened his eyes and he was alone. He did not reel from what a sane mind might have considered psychic gang-rape, he just sat there in the dark.
And slowly, slowly, a rather grotesque and obscene grin spread over his lips, rising to the surface of what he now was . . . a white, gas-filled cadaver breaking the surface of a black lake.
14
POLAR CLIME STATION
WHEN COYLE OPENED THE door, rubbing sleep from his eyes, Gwen was standing there. But it was not the usual Gwen showing up with a bottle of wine and a sultry look in her eye. This Gwen was stressed and scared and balancing precariously on the edge. “C’mon, Nicky! Get your ass over to the CosRay Lab right now,” she said, nearly out of breath, something beneath her words scratching like rusted iron. “There’s something weird going on!”
“What?”
But she had already run off.
He pulled on his clothes and flattened down his hair with his hand, pulling on his boots and parka. He hit the corridor running, something going tight inside him.
The CosRay Lab was officially the Neutrino/Cosmic Ray Observatory and you got there by following a tunnel from the dome that ran nearly a hundred feet. Cryderman and Danny Shin were playing a board game in the Community Room as he ran by, Battleship, and he breezed right past them.
“Hey, Nicky?” Cryderman called out. “Where’s the fire, man?”
Coyle jogged down D-corridor that housed the Biolab and Geolab and Coring Lab, all the assorted te
ch rooms where the beakers played. Then he was through the door and into the tunnel itself which was not heated and it was like jumping into a mountain lake in January when the cold hit him and wrapped him up. At the end of the tunnel, leaning against electrical conduits that led from the dome, Gwen was waiting.
“C’mon, Nicky,” she said. “This is weird shit.”
He followed her retreating form through the door and felt something pass through him right away, like some weird static charge that made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. A wave of terror and despair rolled through him and it nearly flattened him with its impact. It was there and then gone. But what it left was an anxiety that was crushing.
The CosRay building was sectioned off into a half dozen smaller rooms that surrounded the observatory room itself, most of them filled with spare parts and assorted junk. The observatory equipment was automated and the only person that ever went there was Eicke to download the data onto disk.
The neutron detectors themselves were originally developed to monitor radiation at nuclear power plants, but here they served as cosmic ray monitors. Cosmic rays hit the Earth’s upper atmosphere at roughly the speed of light and were broken down into subatomic particles. The CosRay detectors were sensitive only to the neutrons and by counting the neutron saturation, solar activity could be monitored. Not all the cosmic rays came from our sun; some were from distant supernovas and superjets in the centers of faraway galaxies. The computers could track their trajectories with amazing precision.
Coyle made his way through the maze of rooms and stopped in a short hallway outside the observatory room. Eicke was standing there in his red parka, his eyes magnified by his thick-lensed glasses. Though he was round and white-bearded, he was hardly jolly.
Gwen was with him.
Though it was against regulations, she was smoking a cigarette and nobody was telling her not to.
“I don’t know about this business,” Eicke said, seeming confused. “I don’t know about it at all.”
Coyle was about to ask what the hell this was about yet again, but then that sense of terror spread through him again and gooseflesh raced down his arms.
A vibration, or a series of them, rose up and the observatory shook, actually shook. It was like standing inside some idling machine. The vibrations came and went, some so violent that he did not think he would be able to stay on his feet.
Eicke flattened himself against the wall like he might get thrown and Gwen just tensed up. Coyle felt a slow and drumming headache spiraling to life in the back of his head. He could smell a sharp, acrid stink and the air around him began to crackle with electricity. Sounds began echoing: metallic squeals and screeching, shrill piping and low pings. The lights flickered.
And then it just ended.
Breathing hard, his entire body shaking, Coyle said, “What the fuck was that?”
Eicke just shook his head, his eyes squeezed tight and drool ran from his mouth.
Gwen used both hands to steady her cigarette, pulled off it. “In there,” she said. “There’s a woman in there . . . at least I think it’s a woman.”
An icy wind circling his heart, Coyle stepped into the observatory room.
It was fairly large with its banks of neutron detectors and data acquisition systems and boron gas tubing. Papers and files and flow charts had been scattered around like a good wind had raged through there. He was immediately reminded of the state of Slim’s room. He stepped around workstations and equipment, the air fouled with an unpleasant chemical odor. Curled up against the wall, knees pulled up to chin, was a woman that was rocking back and forth with a slow cadence. She was naked.
Coyle was speechless.
He figured she was in her mid-thirties. She was thin and long-limbed, small-breasted, her hair dark and mussed hanging over her face, but other than that he really couldn’t say. Her entire body was glistening with some transparent slime like afterbirth. When he took a step forward, she flinched and a slight vibration oscillated through the floor.
He stepped back.
That chemical odor was coming off of her, hot and caustic.
It made his eyes water.
The temperature in the observatory was a mean fifty degrees and she should have been shaking, but she was not. On the contrary a feverish heat rolled off her in waves.
Her legs were pulled up, arms encircling them, her face buried in the valley between her knees. She had not looked up as yet.
Gwen entered the room, but stayed in the doorway.
Instantly, the vibrations rose up and Coyle felt everything inside him clamp down tight. The floor vibrated and the walls shook. The lights flickered. There was a nauseating stench of ozone permeating the air. He heard . . . wild, screeching sounds and scratching noises coming from behind him, overhead, everywhere. Then they died away.
“What the hell’s going on, Nicky?” Gwen asked him.
“I don’t know.” Breathing in and out, he let himself relax. He noticed with some unease that there were puncture marks in the woman’s arms and legs, a network of pale pink scars at her temples.
“Miss? Miss? Can you hear me? My name’s Coyle, Nicky Coyle. I work here at Polar Clime Station–”
She lifted her head and he saw her face.
He had a mad impulse to scream. Her face was contorted with deep-set lines, her eyes bleached completely white, so huge they looked like colorless egg yolks, oozing and slimy. Her mouth was hooked in a waxen grin of defilement. When she spoke, her voice was deep and ruined and lost: “God will not be the one that calls of thee. For thee is thrice named by the devils of old. Gather in their name and give unto them that which is theirs . . . and theirs alone . . .”
Coyle just stared, knowing he had heard her speak those words, those same words that had been scrawled or burned into the wall of Slim’s room, but doubting it because it could not be. Not only saying those words, but finishing them, knowing the parts that were missing.
She couldn’t have said that, you idiot. There’s no way she could know that.
He thought he was hallucinating.
He felt like he was tripping out on some really good acid.
Reality had pulled back and folded-up, everything seemed incredibly vivid and lucid and all he could do was look at that malefic grinning face and those sightless, blanched eyes. Every inch of his body was creeping. He thought he would pass clean out.
“What the hell did you say?”
She grinned and electricity again crackled in the air.
The vibrations rolled through the room, those distant noises echoed and bounced around. He was hearing things in them . . . things that he could not place . . . weird strident piping sounds and buzzing noises and a hollow, pained wailing that he thought was the sound a grasshopper might make if it screamed.
Gwen cried out and Eicke began to pray out in the corridor.
Papers flew around and charts fell off the walls and a window on the other side of the room fanned out with a silent spiderwebbing of cracks and then shattered, spraying glass and freezing air into the room.
And then it stopped.
All of it.
Gwen was standing there, breathing fast like she was hyperventilating. “What kind of fucking bullshit is this?” she said. “Who the hell is that woman?”
“Her name is Chelsea Butler, I think,” Special Ed said from the doorway. “She was a cosmologist from Mount Hobb Research Station. She is one of the missing.”
The woman looked up at Coyle again and that evil demeanor was gone. Her lips were trembling, her eyes not colorless but a pale shade of green. She was sobbing, her speech breaking up, “I . . . I don’t know what’s . . . happening to me,” she managed. “I don’t know where I’ve been . . . I don’t know who I am . . .”
The air in the observatory was getting practically polar.
Gwen got an emergency thermal blanket and wrapped the woman’s shaking form in it. Cryderman and Shin showed up, gawking. Gwen disappeared and came back with
a sheet of plywood. With Coyle and Cryderman’s help, they nailed it up over the broken window.
Hopper showed up next. “My God! What’s going on here? Who’s this woman? Where did she come from? What happened to this place? I want some answers right now! Does anybody have any answers for me?”
“Not a one,” Gwen said. “Eicke found her. I was the first one he found so he brought me in on it. Beyond that I don’t know. But I’m guessing that maybe you should ask your friends at Colony.”
Hopper just looked around like he was searching for some posted protocol that would tell him how you handled things like this.
Coyle had Butler on her feet. “Better get her to Medical,” he said.
She could barely walk, so Coyle scooped her up in the blanket and carried her through the door. She was unconscious. Her head lolled on her neck like it was broken.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said to Gwen. “Maybe we ought to give Colony a call. They might have a few answers to this because I’m thinking Butler did not walk all the way from Mount Hobb.”
15
OUT AT THE POWER Station, Stokes came awake.
He was pulling his shift, making sure the generators and boilers were purring along. As usual, he’d dozed off in the control booth.
But something had woken him.
A scratching noise.
For reasons even he poorly understood, Stokes did not move. He had the feeling that he was not alone. Somebody was there with him, watching him.
He stepped out of the booth.
#3 Generator was running, rumbling in the background. There were four Caterpillar diesel generators in the Power Station. They ran alternately. While one was running, maintenance could be performed on the others. And if one died, there were three back-ups and an emergency generator in the dome itself.
He moved past the row of generators and into the corridor beyond. Closing the door behind him, shutting off the noise of the generator room, he listened. He could feel the dull beat of his heart.
The station was very, very quiet.
Even outside, the wind did not blow and the walls did not creak. Just an utter black, silent pall that consumed Polar Clime both inside and outside. He kept listening for the sounds, but there were nothing.
