by Tim Curran
“If somebody came through here,” he said, “then they were damn peculiar.”
Frye grunted. “I’m thinking so.”
“Why is the duct unconnected?”
“Locke. He’s doing some work on it.”
Coyle played his light inside the duct. It was just an aluminum tunnel that led off straight for about ten or twelve feet, then angled upwards toward the roof. If the EmerGen was running, the ductwork would have been connected right to the back of the generator itself. The light gleamed off the metal in there, but it also gleamed off something else: streaks and gobs of some transparent material. It could have been some type of plastic caulk like urethane that they heat-sealed the ductwork with, but just seeing it, Coyle got other ideas.
“Look at this shit,” he said.
Frye got down there, looked into the duct. “Hell is that . . . some kind of sealer?”
“I don’t think so. That looks like that same slime we found at NOAA Polaris . . . and in the Power Station around Stokes’s body.”
“So our beasty got Stokes and needed dessert, so it took your chickens?” Frye said, a pained look on his face. “That means it’s running around in here at night, Nicky. While we’re sleeping.”
Coyle closed the grill. “Yeah. That’s exactly what it means.”
23
AROUND TEN, COYLE WENT back over to Medical.
As he opened the door, he got a funny sort of electrical feeling in his belly. Like a static charge in a blanket.
Gwen pulled him through the door and shut it behind him.
“Are things still . . . happening?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s getting worse.”
Zoot was sitting there and her wide, frightened eyes confirmed that.
Locke considered Butler to be dangerous. That what was in her could be very deadly. Looking at her—so pale and drawn, semi-lucid, just staring at the wall—it was hard to believe any of that. What did worry him was that things could be fanned up into some ridiculous, but very frightening, sort of modern day witch-hunt when the crew had reached the breaking point and needed a scapegoat.
“Witch,” he said.
Gwen looked at him. As did Zoot.
“That’s what Locke pretty much thinks,” he said to Butler.
He explained to them the witchcraft book, Locke’s theories on the human hive, various “gifted” individuals throughout history actually being born with certain dormant psychic faculties fully-activated.
“What she is, if Locke is right, we’ll all be sooner or later. That’s what those megaliths in Beacon Valley are for and others all across the world. Part of a system that will be activated by the one on Callisto to make us . . . like her.”
Gwen got in real close to him. “Nicky, things have been happening. When she sleeps . . . well, things move around in here. There are sounds, smells, all kinds of freaky shit you’d acquaint with demonic possession. It’s scary. Very scary.” Gwen tried to frame her thoughts: “Listen, Nicky. This . . . other . . . inside her. Me and Zoot have only seen a fraction of it like you did in CosRay that night. I’m afraid what will happen if people get crazy and come after her. I’m afraid of what’s inside this woman fully externalizing itself and unleashing its power full blast . . .”
“She could kill us all,” Zoot said. “And maybe wreck this whole station.”
Coyle understood their fears. If the crew went berserk, deciding a witch-hunt was the thing to do they might accidentally unleash the raw, limitless power of the human psyche. Maybe this is what the Old Ones wanted. No doubt they could have swooped down here, he figured, and taken the lot of them or invaded their minds, activated those ancient controls. But maybe this was a big mind-fuck. Why do anything so obvious and crude when they could use Butler to terrify and weaken the lot of them while their other pet, the thing that had slaughtered Stokes, spread horror from one end of Clime to the other?
This would undermine the strength of the station.
Weaken every mind to such a point that taking them would be child’s play.
Or maybe Clime was simply another experiment to them.
More minds to toy with, to test their controls.
A trial run for humanity at large.
Zoot said, “We stayed with her last night, watching her, Nicky. And it’s scary. It’s really scary. I don’t know if I can do it again.”
Gwen told him that it all sounded crazy . . . at least, until you saw it. And she had seen it and it was there in her eyes, like some traumatic memory worrying away at the edge of her reason, her stability. “Last night, Nicky,” she said. “I was with her and I must have fallen asleep. I woke up and she was sitting there in bed, staring at me. Only it wasn’t her, you know? It wasn’t her . . .”
He swallowed. “What was it?”
Gwen blinked a few times rapidly, chewed at her lower lip. “I could hear sounds . . . vibrations, squeals, shrieking noises. It smelled weird . . . burnt and gagging. And she’s sitting there, all blackened and smoking . . . it looked like her neck was broken, her head bent off to the side. Like she’d been hanged and then burned. Then she opened her eyes . . . they were red. They looked right at me.” Gwen was having trouble now. She was shaking, her eyes filling with tears. And she was no crier; it took a lot to wring the emotion out of her like this. “She sat there, smiling, burnt pieces of her falling off. She told me . . . she told me how I was going to die. She told me exactly how I would die.”
“Gwen . . .”
She brushed his hands aside, wiped away her tears. “I’m okay. Just headgames, that’s all it was. But . . . I just don’t know, Nicky. This thing in her. It’s nasty. I’m afraid for all of us.”
There was something spooky about it all and not in the obvious sense.
Gwen’s memory of that thing . . . neck-snapped by the noose, smoldering and falling apart . . . he supposed that’s how she’d look if she were burned like a traditional witch. And realizing that, he wondered if there wasn’t something unspeakably prophetic about what Gwen had seen.
Butler began to shift in her sleep.
Zoot suddenly looked panic-stricken, like some rabbit hearing the approach of a hunter. She looked like she wanted to bolt. Gwen didn’t look much better. Her entire body was minutely trembling. She sat on the bed by Zoot and held her hand.
Coyle looked over at Butler, thinking, I don’t wanna see this, I don’t wanna see this at all . . .
The temperature in the room suddenly dipped uncomfortably.
That was the first thing that happened.
He caught a trace of a coppery odor like fresh blood that steadily became something else, something very sharp and acidic-smelling that made his eyes begin to water. Gwen was looking at him, her eyes saying, see, it’s happening, it’s really happening. And it was. The temperature continued to plummet and he saw his breath coming out in frosty clouds. He heard that same crackling, electrical sound he’d heard in CosRay that night. There was a thumping from under the bed Gwen and Zoot sat on. A water bottle on the desk began to move, vibrating across the surface until it fell to the floor.
Butler was thrashing her head from side to side on the pillow.
A steam was rising from her and it stank heady and bitter like tannin. And that’s what it was, Coyle knew, the stench of preservatives and chemicals, hides tanned to leather. He heard scratching and scraping noises, sudden peals of shrill piping that made him start. Freezing air blew off Butler in waves and–
She had changed.
Hell, yes, and so quickly it had literally taken him by surprise.
Once pretty despite signs of emaciation, Butler had grown ugly and crone-like, a lopsided grimace twisting her mouth into a sardonic grin. Her face was mordantly disfigured, shriveled and set with wrinkles and ruts like cedar bark. And it was darkening, going the burnished brown of tanned leather and then a shiny black. It was the face of a mummy, just shrunken and skeletal and ancient. But more so, the face of one of those bog bodies you saw o
n TV like the Tollund Man of Denmark or the Old Croghan Man of Ireland. Something yanked from a cold peat bog.
Coyle was shocked, but he did not doubt his eyes.
He had seen a physical change overcome Butler in CosRay that night. This was maybe worse, but he did not doubt its physical veracity. The thing before him was a living mummy and to prove this, it opened its eyes, only there was nothing but seamed black sockets behind the lids. Yet, that head turned in his direction with a puppet-like slowness and those empty sockets looked at him and maybe it was imagination, but he could feel something like a raw and nefarious evil directed at him that made him want to fold up.
The lips parted with a wet, leathery sound, and the thing spoke, “Thee have been named, Nicky Coyle, thee have been named and selected . . .”
Coyle just sat there, shocked into complete immobility.
He heard his breath wheeze from his lungs with a choking sound as a stark terror rolled through him and faded. He swallowed, gasped for breath.
“Shit,” he said.
Butler was changing back to Butler with amazing speed. He felt if he’d blinked, he would have missed it. Like the Old Ones themselves, what had taken hold of her, externalized itself, was not just a psychic evil but an absolute organic evil.
Gwen came over to him. She held his face in her hands. “Nicky . . . are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m okay.” He breathed. “I think what’s in her is . . . I don’t know . . . a memory of something, of someone, some witch that’s being channeled through her.”
Butler was sleeping peacefully.
Zoot was shaking in the aftermath of it. “What . . . what are we going to do?” she asked him.
But he honestly did not know. “Tonight . . . tonight, what with Stokes and all, I don’t want you girls staying in here with her. Lock yourself in your rooms. Better yet, double up and stay put.”
They both stared at him with wide eyes, but said nothing.
24
THAT NIGHT, COYLE HAD nightmares of winged horrors gathering above the dome at Clime.
He wasn’t the only one, for the same dream visited every sleeping head: dead cities and alien things and the skies above Clime filled with a swarm of buzzing, winged creatures. Many of the crew woke from these dreams, shaking and sweating, suffering from awful headaches that came and went.
And when they listened to the wind howling through the compound, they detected a piping tone buried in it that filled them with the most awful sense of déjà vu.
Just as people back in the real world could feel a strange and forbidding electricity building around them, dampening the old and powering the new, so could the crew at Clime feel it. Only there, near to the beating black heart of the beast itself, it was more than a kinetic storm boiling at the horizon, it was the sharp and acrid stink of ozone that presages a direct strike of lightning. Critical mass had been reached and it was only a matter of waiting for the catalyst that would set it free.
25
EMPEROR ICE CAVE
“SHUT THAT DAMN DOOR!”
Biggs stepped into the Hypertat and Warren, old easy-come easy-go Warren, looked like he was ready to tear his head off. Sitting there at the transmitter, there was nothing easy about him at all anymore. Everything about him was nervous, fidgety, and pained like his belly was filled with nails and every time he moved, they sank in just a bit deeper.
“Chill, baby, chill,” Biggs said, shutting the door and pulling his mittens off. “Just out there doing my bit for polar research, making sure the generator is clicking along.”
“Sure, that’s great. But in the future how about you don’t stand there with the door open so I freeze my ass off?”
“Aye, aye, skipper.”
Warren gave him the hard look which was about all he had these days. “You know what, Biggs? I’m not in the mood for that shit. Beeman didn’t like it and I like it even less.”
Biggs pulled up a chair. “This must be what they mean by environmentally-induced stress. Heard that guy in Christchurch talking about it during training.” He looked over at where Beeman was snoozing on his bunk. “How’s the Big Kahuna doing?”
“He’s sleeping.”
“No shit?”
Biggs looked over at him and despite himself, well, he almost felt sorry for the old hardass. He hadn’t been the same since Dryden let him peek at his bugaboo down there under the tarp. Couldn’t blame the guy really. That was the rumor about those things . . . you looked at them and you were never the same. And that’s exactly why Biggs had not gone down there with Warren and Beeman the other day when Beeman had his breakdown. No sense in looking at something that would give you the cold sweats for the rest of your life.
Beneath his blanket, Beeman’s chest was rising and falling. His face looked shrunken, like the experience had aged him. Not the same guy he had been before. Just a shell.
And Warren wasn’t much better.
“What’s the temp out there?” Biggs asked him.
“Still hovering around minus forty, wind chill’s kicking it down to minus fifty.”
“Fucking tropical.”
Warren said nothing for a time, then he looked at Biggs. “Why did you come down here? To Antarctica?”
“For the money.”
“That’s all.”
“What else is there?”
Before coming to Antarctica, Biggs had only seen a few nature documentaries about the place. They left him woefully unprepared for life on the Ice. The documentaries were just shit about penguins and seals and that sort of stuff, concerns about melting glaciers, the necessity of protecting the pristine environment from contamination. Things about the scientists down there who not only studied nature, but bonded with it.
Personally, Biggs found nature creepy.
And he found people who wanted to bond with it disturbing.
“When I was in McMurdo,” Biggs said, “I was drinking with these people over at the Erebus Club. One of them was this woman, some fucking lesbo. She was an artist and had been invited down by the NSF for the summer. She was going on and on about the natural beauty and how you could find yourself down here, commune with Mother Earth and become aware of your humanity, your spirituality as you lived amongst the penguin colonies. Artsy-fartsy eco-fantasy bullshit. And I told her as much. She said I didn’t understand. But I told her that I understood only too well. That I hated to be the fly in her pie, but Antarctica was not a poem and it wasn’t a painting and it wasn’t a church. It was dark and cold and bitter and ate human lives by the handful. It was raw nature and raw nature was simply ugly and brutal. There was nothing beautiful about it. You didn’t commune with it, you fought it. You kept it down or it would take your life.”
“What’d she say to that?”
“She said it would change me. I would not come out of here the same and she was right. Because I won’t come out of here the same and neither will you. We’ll either be fucking crazy or they’ll take us out in body bags.”
A week ago, Biggs knew, Warren would have told him he was cynical and pessimistic and a general asshole . . . but he didn’t say that now. Because he knew he was right. This place was a graveyard and you could pretend otherwise all you wanted, but it was still a fucking graveyard.
Warren rubbed his tired eyes. “I don’t know what the hell to do.”
“About what?”
“About what’s happening here.”
“Nothing you can do but ride it out,” Biggs told him. “It’s like herpes: you just have to live with it.” Then he saw how desperate Warren was and he almost felt sorry for him. But just for a moment. Then he felt angry at the man’s naiveté. “I told you not to go down there. I told you not to go look at that monster. So if your head is all messed-up, don’t blame me.”
Warren kept rubbing his eyes. “We have to do something, Biggs. We haven’t heard from Dryden or the others in like twelve hours.”
“Try sixteen,” Biggs said, checking his watch.
&n
bsp; “I don’t suppose you wanna go down there and check on ‘em?”
“Nope. But I’ll put it on my To-Do list right after eating snails, fire-walking, and a gender reassignment.”
“Somebody’s gotta go.”
“Why not you?”
Warren pursed his lips, the blood drained from his face. “I can’t . . . I just can’t go back down there.”
“That’s sensible.”
“Jesus Christ, Biggs. We’re late checking in with MacOps as it is.”
“So call ‘em.”
“And tell them what exactly? That things are okay up here, but we don’t know about below? You don’t think they might want us to go check? You don’t think they might ask us to go ascertain if those guys are even alive down there?”
Biggs didn’t know and he didn’t care. He only knew one thing for sure: he wasn’t going down into that tomb and that was that. “You think they’re dead down there?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been calling and calling them.”
“Maybe they’re just away from the radio. You know how beakers are.”
But that didn’t hold water and he knew it. At Emperor, you had to sign out and take an emergency radio with you when you went outside the Hypertats or to the Polar Haven below. SOP. The radios fit in your pocket. There was no reason not to take one.
Biggs opened his mouth, probably to say something smart-assed . . . then closed it just as quick. He was suddenly seized by that expectant, crawling feeling in his belly as he had been just before Dryden called him up from the Polar Haven and told him to send that message to McMurdo, that they’d found something.
It was there again. Just like that.
A building apprehension, a creeping dread, something rising from the pit of his belly and making his skin feel tight, his scalp tingle. Weird. Electrical. Like the polarity of the air around him had just changed and he was changing with it.
