The Spawning

by Tim Curran

  A manic fear suddenly enveloped him that the station was deserted.

  The others were gone and he was alone.

  Alone.

  That was ridiculous. It was only a five minute walk to the dome. He could’ve got on the radio and chatted with Cryderman or Harv at the T-Shack. Yet, he had never felt so isolated . . . or vulnerable . . . before.

  He took a deep breath. The Power Station was a large pre-fab building with the generator room serving as its hub. There were also parts rooms, boilers rooms, a couple offices that were not used in the winter. A circular corridor wound around the entire structure.

  Nothing had changed.

  That sound again.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch.

  “Like rats in the walls,” he said under his breath.

  No, no rats in Antarctica.

  Listen.

  Something was there.

  And it was coming.

  It was coming down the corridor: something huge and coarse and evil. It made a wet, hissing sound as it breathed. Whenever it paused, sniffing for him like an autumn hound anxious for mallard, things dripped from it, splatting and plopping.

  You’re fucking losing it, man.

  He turned on the lights and walked the length of the corridor, circling around the Power Station. Nothing and nobody. He walked into the boiler room, checked displays and gauges, studied the intricate network of ducts and steam piping.

  A thumping noise.

  Up there, it’s up there.

  About twenty feet up, there were walkways so the piping could be maintained. But there couldn’t be anyone up there. Not this time of night.

  Yet, he could hear something up there.

  Something searching about, scratching and scraping, skittering up there with feet that sounded like tapping pencils. Even with the lights on, there were shadows. The piping blocked it from his view.

  Swallowing, knowing he had to get his feet under him, he called out. “Who’s up there?”

  Silence.

  Then . . . yes, a hissing and dripping noise followed by a chitinous sound as of a grasshopper rubbing its spurred forelimbs together.

  (remember)

  And in his mind, Stokes could see it: something black and malefic and bristling, something that oozed with slime and carried itself about on a thousand skittering legs.

  (do you remember?)

  And he did. God, yes, he did remember. When he was a kid there was a deserted house: boxy, windowless, plain. It had been abandoned easily thirty years and was gray, weathered, leaning. When the wind blew it creaked.

  It was not a good place.

  Not at night.

  For when you passed it, you ran. All the children did. You looked straight ahead and you ran. You did not pause, you did not look at it because you might see something looking back. Something hunched and red-eyed and claw-fingered, something that would be on you in the span of heartbeat, something that would drag you across those rotting floors and tuck you in some mildewed room where it could work on you in secret, gorging itself on your boy-blood and boy-flesh, drunk on the sweet milk of your terror.

  All the kids had been afraid of that house.

  Stokes had been more afraid than most.

  And now here . . . at the bottom of the world, the thing had finally tracked him down.

  With a vague dream-sense of reality, he wondered how many children it had eaten through the years. Maybe all those kids they used to put on milk cartons had been its victims.

  Yes, yes . . .

  How many had it lured into that deserted, shadow-riven tomb of a house with a seduction of sweets and fairy-tale spooks, all the while hiding its true face, squatting in darkness, hidden away in mildewy, webby places, waiting to strike? Waiting to show its immense swollen form, its many legs and bleeding mouths and myriad corpse-yellow eyes, finally slithering from some dark crevice or moldering attic breezeway or cellar damp like a midnight spookshow haunt from a magician’s dark trunk . . . and catching its prey.

  Its soft, pink, young prey.

  Holding them down with its slimy, hairy bulk, stinking of marsh gas and rotting leaves, gorging on fear and tinny child-screams, its many mouths filled with gleaming surgical needles and venom-dripping pins.

  And then . . . yes, opening those warm bags of goodies, piercing and impaling, chewing and sucking, leaving nothing but tiny broken Halloween skeletons and flaps of flesh that it would stitch and sew into ragged garments of boy-skin and girl-skin with all those needles sharpened on child-bones–

  Trembling and sweating, Stokes tried to clear his mind.

  This was insane. He was still dreaming. None of this was real.

  Yet . . . it was.

  Get a grip. It’s only in your head. This is only dangerous if you believe in it, if you let yourself believe.

  But did the beast really require his belief any more than a hatchet required belief to chop off a head or a bullet to punch through a skull? Yes . . . no . . . maybe.

  The more you believe, the ten-year old inside told him, the stronger it is.

  All children knew that and all adults pretended it wasn’t so. The more he feared, the more dangerous it was. His belief sharpened the blade of the hatchet that chopped off his head and his belief was the gunpowder that expelled the bullet that drilled through his skull.

  But he was afraid.

  And it was real.

  And it knew where he was.

  It waited up there, hissing and dripping, its stomachs—because, yes, it had many of them—growling at the idea of what it would soon devour. Like a hungry man awaiting a savory meal, it relished each moment, grinding its teeth and stroking its swollen belly, its yellow eyes bright and malignant. It was coming down the stairs now, its many legs bicycling and scratching against the iron steps.

  Sweating and shivering, hot and cold and lukewarm, Stokes opened his mouth to scream but all that came out was a squeaky rasp. He was paralyzed. He fought to get some feeling into his limbs, some blood into his muscles, but was rewarded only with a dull tingling in his extremities.

  The thing would have him.

  He could see it now.

  It was black and shaggy and leggy as it came for him. Not a spider, really, but a spider-thing, a spider-horror whose body was not that of an arachnid, but only looked like one. It was huge, its bloated body made of the bony husks of dozens and dozens of dead, leeched children. Its legs were the narrow bone lattices of child-skeletons wound in dirty silk and glued together with spider-spit; its underbelly composed of fleshless faces that chattered their teeth and screamed.

  Poised above him, all those mouths open and chattering, needle-teeth ready for the undoing of him, he could smell the green, dank tidal rot of its breath.

  “Stokes,” a voice said.

  He looked and saw someone standing in the doorway to the boiler room. At first he thought it was Gwen Curie . . . then he was certain it was Zoot and then maybe Cassie Malone. But it was not them. It was another woman . . . her image almost filmy, face grave-pale, eyes a luminous yellow.

  “Quick, Stokes! Before it gets you!” she said and there was something strange about her voice . . . it sounded so desperate, almost hungry. “Come on! We’ll hide! It won’t find us!”

  Though he knew it was wrong, as everything was wrong, he ran to her and she took his hand in her own which was flabby and warm. She pulled him down the corridor, into a supply room. Shut the door.

  “What–” he began.

  “Sssshhh! It’ll hear you . . .”

  He crouched in the darkness, the woman huddled behind him. A high, disturbing smell wafted from her . . . fermenting, hot . . . like a basket of plums left to rot in some dark, moist place.

  “It’s going to be okay now,” she promised him in a throaty whisper. “Just you and me . . .”

  He could not hear the beast.

  He could only hear the wet smacking sound of the woman licking her lips.

  The ragged, phlegmy noise of her b
reathing.

  Only a nightlight dispelled the darkness. Stokes could see his shadow on the wall and that of the woman behind him . . . he watched as it rose up into some twisted, grotesque shape, hair slithering like snakes.

  That’s when he realized he’d been fooled.

  The woman laughed with secret mirth.

  And Stokes screamed for no more than a second before her teeth ripped out his throat and she bathed in his blood.

  16

  MARCH 14

  MORNING.

  You could call it that all you wanted, of course, but morning was a conceptual term at best once winter began.

  The wind had come in the night, at times little more than a mournful whisper and at others, the bellow of a typhoon, blowing snow in four- and five-foot drifts, packing it in a white, seamless barrier around the dome of Polar Clime, inundating outbuildings and Jamesways and turning little fish huts and warm-up shacks to sand dunes whose black flags flapped in the breeze.

  Coyle was up early because when you were a cook that’s just the way it was. When others relaxed, you worked. He rolled out of bed, listening to the perpetual hum of his humidifier. He stared at the tapestry of frost that lay over the walls, just thinking, thinking. Letting it all come back to him, all the bad stuff that had become a reality this year. And when it did, he was thankful for those first few groggy moments when he remembered none of it.

  He stood up, feeling the chill coming through the walls. He looked out his icy square of window, rubbed the frost away with his sleeve. The compound was black and drifted, the security lights out there trembling in the wind.

  As he made his way to the showers, he could hear the plows out there. Gut and Frye cleaning the night’s mess as they did every morning. He could hear people starting to move around in their rooms, grumbling and swearing, ready for another day of living the dream. All seemed pretty ordinary.

  But it wasn’t.

  And he could feel that from the top of his head to the balls of his feet. You worked in stations like Clime long enough, winter or summer, you got used to their particular feel. Summer stations had a crowded, hurried feel like a mall back home. Winters, they were more relaxed, plenty of space, a laid-back feel to it all. And that’s how Clime had felt last winter and at the beginning of this season.

  But now that had changed.

  The atmosphere had been disrupted. And it had been disrupted ever since Mount Hobb lost its people and never had it regained its balance. Now it just felt disjointed, tense, out of sorts as if it did not know how to feel. Its muscles were not loose and relaxed, they were tight, expectant, ready for anything, like the station was an animal backed into a corner and ready to leap and draw blood at any moment.

  Coyle could feel it in his belly and down his spine . . . that sense of nervous anticipation and barely-concealed dread. It was thick, heavy, almost suffocating.

  When he stepped out of the shower and pulled his joggers on, Locke was waiting for him.

  “Hey, Nicky,” he said, standing there in his Charlotte Hornets windsuit. He was breathing hard. He usually got up before everyone else and jogged the corridors of the dome before starting his day. “I hear we have a stowaway.”

  “Yeah. She showed up in CosRay last night.”

  “I hear there was some . . . phenomena happening around her.”

  “Yeah, you could say that.” The gossip had already made the rounds, so there was no point in rehashing it.

  “Funny, isn’t it? She disappears for two months and shows up here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you read that witchcraft book I sent you?”

  “Yes. It didn’t exactly reassure me.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to.”

  Locke went on listing all the weird things that had happened starting with Mount Hobb and ending with the mysterious appearance of the woman thought to be Chelsea Butler. And then touching on the phenomena that was now being openly associated with her . . . telepathy, telekinesis. “She’s been with them, Nicky. They’ve opened up something in her that they’ll soon open up in the rest of us. I don’t pretend to know how she ended up here or why, but I will tell you she’s dangerous. Remember those people in the book? The ones who were called witches? Keziah Mason of the Arkham Devil-Cult comes to mind. She was not a witch really, yet she was. Something had been opened up in her. She was part of the hive. Butler is a witch, too, my friend. I went over there. She gives me the creeps . . . just staring and staring. She doesn’t remember who she is. She might have been Chelsea Butler once, but now she’s something else. Does this make sense to you?”

  It did, of course. Because that book had pointed him in the same direction. No, those people weren’t fairy-tale witches, yet that’s exactly what they were. Something even worse.

  “She’s part of the hive now, Nicky. We’re all in danger. That phenomena . . . it will get worse. She wasn’t sent here for no reason.”

  Coyle could not argue any of it because it was true. He knew it. Locke knew it. But even armed with this knowledge . . . what could they possibly do? Drag Butler out into the snow and burn her at the stake? Jesus, regardless of what had happened to her, she was still a human being.

  Or was she?

  “See, Nicky, all my life I’ve been seeing patterns and underlying causes to things other people consider either outlandish or simply coincidental. I’ve learned to believe that if anything seems too coincidental, it’s no coincidence. That makes me a conspiracist. So be it. I gave that book to you to further illustrate my point that this stuff has been going on a long time and not just down here, though certainly it’s more concentrated in Antarctica. I think others have seen the patterns to this and still others have mostly refused to see them. But you and I and everyone down here this year do not have the luxury of self-denial. No more than the people at Kharkov had. It’s real, Nicky. It’s happening. The epicenter is down here, but the shockwaves are spreading across the world. Are we together on this?”

  Coyle had a manic desire to laugh, but he couldn’t. “Yeah, we’re together. Same page. Same chapter. Same book. And just so you know, I hate the plot.”

  “So do I, Nicky, and mainly because I already know the ending.” Locke quieted a moment as Harvey came in with his duffel bag, the usual ugly and unhappy look on his face. He grumbled something in passing and Locke did not speak again until the shower was running. “The only question that remains right now, for you and I, is: what in the hell are we going to do about it?”

  “I’m wondering that myself.”

  Locke shrugged. “Think about it. People are talking crazy here . . . the crew is on its last nerve. If something isn’t done, I think they’ll take matters into their own hands. I think they’ll go after Butler.” With that, he jogged off.

  Coyle just stood there, feeling very weak and hopeless.

  Yeah, what were they going to do about it?

  Now Coyle understood a few things about hysteria and mob violence. Fear could make people do crazy, irrational, and violent things. It could kick up a crazy firestorm of superstition and intolerance. It seemed like an absolutely ridiculous concept that something as barbaric as witch-hysteria could be fanned into being at a modern Antarctic station . . . but he honestly believed that it could happen.

  Because it was there.

  In everyone.

  That seed of bigotry and savagery looking for the dire nourishment that would give it full flower. Nobody at Clime was particularly violent or superstitious, but they were isolated and they were frightened and they were paranoid. The raw materials were certainly there. And when you took Butler and everything else and mixed them up in one big, foul-smelling stew then people would stop thinking rationally and start getting ideas. They would see her as the root of all evil and she would be the first scapegoat. And when that happened, when the fire was lit, the Old Ones would be inconsequential . . . for the crew would be their own worst enemies.

  With that in mind, he wondered if the aliens had planned
it that way as they had planned everything else. But, no, he didn’t think so. Wanton, random purges would defeat their purpose. A farmer couldn’t have his own livestock deciding which cow would live and which pig would die. No, if what Locke said was true and the world was about to be harvested, there would certainly be purges. But controlled, methodical purges designed to rid the hive of unruly, aberrant minds. For surely there would be some. Not a lot, but enough to cause trouble. Individuals who would essentially be freaks to the Old Ones: independent, free-thinking, those controls planted in their ancestors malfunctioning in them. People who would refuse the siren call of the hive and survive to fight. Dangerous elements that would have to be purged to maintain the fixed identity and global purity of the hive itself. Maybe he was one or Gwen or–

  Dear God, enough.

  Time to get to work.

  17

  IN MEDICAL, BOTH GWEN and Zoot were shivering.

  The temperature had not just dropped, it had plummeted. The air felt thicker, activated, like it was loaded with charged particles.

  And it stank.

  Stank with a foul sweetness of decay.

  As Gwen sat there, holding Zoot’s trembling hand, she was afraid. But more so, she was fascinated because she was seeing something that should have been physically impossible. She wished she had a camcorder right then. Because you could see something like this, but no one would ever believe you. At least, not back in the real world.

  With the physical change coming over Butler, the phenomena began.

  Things rattled on shelves. There were thumping sounds in the walls. That crackling noise again. Weird pipings and squeals. An odd thrumming vibration in the floor that Gwen could feel right through the balls of her feet. A wind rushed from absolutely nowhere and blew papers from Flagg’s desk, only it wasn’t cold like the air itself, but hot and gritty like a breath from a crematory oven.

  On the bed, Butler sat up.

  But she was no longer Butler, but a thing. A hag.