by Tim Curran
He stumbled from the tent, trying to catch his breath.
No, not as bad as last time, but only because he was prepared for it this time. Regardless, he was still struck by the feeling that the thing was not as dead as it should have been.
He moved over the jagged ice where it rose into a sort of low ridge. He climbed up it. There was an incline on the other side that led to the numerous crevices that Dryden and the boys had been exploring. Some of which were taped with yellow streamers because they led to crevasses.
He saw no one.
Steeling himself, he moved down the incline over the glossy surface of the ice, digging his cleats in. What brought him down there was something that had not been there before . . . a perfectly symmetrical round tunnel that angled down into the ice. It was artificial. He was certain of it.
He moved towards the crevice where he knew the creature had been found.
There was blood on the ice at its opening. Not a lot, but enough. A trail of it led into the crevice and, turning on his flashlight, Warren went after it, completely certain that he was making one of the biggest mistakes of his life. The crevice was about four feet wide, the floor glossy blue ice. After being in the cavern, the crevice was close, suffocating, claustrophobic even.
More blood.
A smear.
A speckling of it on the ice wall. It looked black in the bluish glow.
The crevice moved to the left, then the right. Anyone could have been hiding just around the next turn. He stopped. He heard something ahead. A quick furtive shuffling. Moving again, his blood running hot and fast, he was certain he was not alone now. He could sense someone ahead.
Waiting.
Deadly.
He raised the ice-axe, the flashlight shook in his hand. He slid around a corner and a hulking, dark shape moved away from the light.
Warren screamed.
It had been a reflexive action. For that shape was manlike, without necessarily being a man. It moved with a slithering sound. And for one panicked, impossible moment he’d caught a glimpse of a face behind the hood-fringe of a parka . . . something like pink and undulant wax and eyes, red-litten eyes leering at him.
He turned and got out of there, certain it was behind him.
Something inhuman with a face of crawling pulp.
He made it out of the crevice and climbed the incline. And as he made for the Polar Haven and the passage out, he saw that yellow tent was in motion again. Fluttering. The space heater was running again. He made for the passage, expecting that awful thing to come winging out of the tent at any moment.
And when he was in the passage, he heard a squealing, piping voice shrilling in the cavern, echoing and echoing.
29
POLAR CLIME
CRYDERMAN, HIS BELLY WARM with Horn’s whiskey, made his rounds and was happy to do so. God, yes. Because if something needed to be done, some shit job showed up and wiggled its dirty monkey ass in the air, you could bet he was the guy who was going to pull it. Not that he minded understand, but it would have been nice if somebody else could pitch in now and then.
Cryderman, you mind watching the radio in T-Shack awhile? Hopper’s clipped Harvey’s wings. Sure, Ed, No prob. Cryderman, you mind walking watch tonight? I’d feel better if somebody was, you know, keeping an eye on things. Sure, Ed, I live for it. Anything else, you just let me know.
Didn’t matter, he supposed, that he was an electrician. That he was officially part of the FEMC crew and his job was to handle electrical problems. Wasn’t his fault if things were going smoothly and he wasn’t needed in that capacity, didn’t mean Special Ed had to be finding other crap for him to do.
Didn’t mean that at all.
Standing in the Community Room, which at that hour of the morning was just as dead as dead got, he was thinking about Horn’s booze. Because booze was one thing Cryderman lived for. It was the one thing you could count on during the long winters.
Like everyone else, he knew what was going on in the world and he knew about what was supposed to be happening in Antarctica and Clime . . . but he wasn’t honestly sure if he believed in any of it.
He’d been around.
He knew people got funny when they were isolated, started saying some pretty strange things. He didn’t honestly care what had happened at Kharkov Station years back or about Mount Hobb being emptied anymore than he really gave a damn about NOAA Polaris or even Slim or Flagg or Stokes. Sometimes people got careless and when you got careless on the Ice, sometimes you died.
Disappeared.
Whatever.
And I ain’t buying that shit about that Butler woman either, he thought then. Psychic phenomena and ghosts and spooks. Jesus, like the whole bunch down here are kids around a campfire trying to scare the hell out of one another.
“Aliens,” he said aloud, “of all things.”
He even told Horn that very thing and Horn just laughed, said it was tough to be stupid and not know it. Hell of a thing. Goddamn Horn. If the guy didn’t have three or four cases of Jim Beam stashed somewhere, Cryderman wouldn’t have had anything to do with him. He liked Horn like he liked the rest of these idiots.
The clock said it was just after four.
Three more hours of this shit.
He went into the Galley and opened one of the big stainless steel refrigerators, see what kind of Midrats The Beav laid out.
Same old, same old. Pickles, cheese, cold cuts. He snatched a slice of roast beef, then one of turkey. He grabbed some ham and walked out into the Community Room, still chewing. Standing at the entrance to A-corridor, he brought the ham to his mouth . . . and instantly recoiled.
Hell is that stink?
He sniffed the meat, but it smelled fine. And what he was smelling wasn’t exactly a meat smell. It was bad, revolting even, but he couldn’t say exactly what it was or was not. Just sharp, ripe, unnatural. It sort of reminded him of compost heaps at high summer, a vegetable odor of decay, moist plant matter rotting into humus and mold.
And an odor like that, so impossibly strong, was just plain abnormal.
As nauseating as it was—like sticking your face into grass clippings that had moldered for weeks in a warm, wet, secret place—he had to know what was making it.
He walked out into the Community Room.
The smell was stronger.
Moments before out here it had not been evident. He swallowed, unnerved by that stench that did not belong. The station was quiet. Outside, the wind moaned along the dome with a hollow, lonesome sound.
Tensing, Cryderman walked over to the entrance to A-corridor.
The stink was much more pronounced, like the odor of rotting hay mixed with graying entrails blowing out hot and nasty from a shuttered barn.
Whiskey churned in his stomach, acid bubbled up his throat.
Down the corridor, something fell. Something shattered.
It was coming from one of the rooms.
All Cryderman had for a weapon was the long-barreled cop flashlight Special Ed had given him. He wasn’t sure why he thought he might need a weapon, but the feeling was there. That something odd was happening and by intervening in whatever it might be, there would be danger. He looked at the intercom on the wall, considered it. One touch of a button and he had backup . . . Coyle, Frye, anybody.
He hesitated.
“Sure,” he whispered to himself, “wake ‘em all up because a jar fell off a shelf.”
He started down A, not really knowing where he was going. At the end there was a door that led outside, led to a flagged pathway that would bring him to the garage and Horn. The corridor was shadowy, only a few sparse lights lit. On the right side were doors leading into the various offices: Hopper’s, Special Ed’s, a few that were not in use. On the left were the firefighting gear closet and Emergency Supplies Room. At the end was Medical.
That’s where Hopper was being kept.
The HR office was open, of course. And Special Ed prided himself on that: My office is
open day or night, people. Sure, it might be open, but it didn’t mean he’d be in there. Hopper’s was locked. Emergency Supplies was always locked. Okay . . . what now?
Medical.
As he walked down there, that offensive stink decided to get a little bit more offensive until Cryderman thought he was actually going to throw up. He heard something else crash.
It was coming from Medical.
Very tense now, he went down there, holding the flashlight like a club. The only person in there was Hopper and he was crazy now. Outside the door, he heard something move in there with a squishing, watery sound.
It stopped him.
Stopped him cold wondering what could make that sort of noise. At Clime. At night.
His guts felt loose and hot, his stomach weak.
He gripped the doorknob quickly, knowing he had to do this and do it now or he would chicken right out. The need to turn and run was very great.
He threw the door open and reached for the light as a blast of fetid green air blew into his face. Inside, it was very quiet . . . though there seemed to be a distant, secretive dripping. It was coming from the infirmary beyond. He stepped over there, heard a sound in there like a man trying to pull a pair of oily rubber gloves on. He threw the light switch on the wall and went through the doorway fast.
The smell was terrible.
Drug cabinets had been torn open, things scattered about. Blood was sprayed over the clean white sheets of one of the beds and right up onto the wall. There was more of it on the floor amongst shattered glass, instruments, and empty bags of blood tossed around that had been taken from the blood cabinet . . . the door of which had been twisted off its hinges.
Then he saw Hopper’s corpse.
It was hanging by the feet—flayed, skinless, body punctured as if somebody had used a hammer drill on it. A swaying man-sized husk that had not only been disemboweled but vacuumed clean so that not so much as a drop of blood or a yellow seam of fat glistened within the yawning torso, just rib bones sucked white and pink connective tissue licked cleanly.
Cryderman backed up until he hit the wall.
And it wasn’t the corpse, but what stood next to it.
He saw a face coming at him . . . wicked, agonized, inhuman . . . malevolent yellow eyes and a jagged mouth burning bright with toxic, hissing steam. A triangular, totemic head of wiry, slithering night-black tendrils that coiled over the ceiling, scraping and scratching.
He might have screamed then.
Its body was corded and corrugated with a profusion of undulating ropes like the twisted trunk of some gnarled, ancient banyan tree . . . not wood but a rubbery blue-black flesh that seemed almost hot and liquid.
It came right at him in a whirlwind mist of tissue: snaking limbs and flashing onyx talons and needle-sharp black teeth.
He could smell the hot secretions of its glands.
The stink of what it had been chewing on.
He saw a grotesque distortion of melting faces and clutching limbs from a funhouse mirror creeping forward on a tangle of spidery black roots.
He screamed.
He screamed so loud and with such fury that it even startled him. He shook his head, his heart banging in his chest, took two drunken steps towards the door and promptly fell right on his ass. He didn’t trip or slip on anything; it was the horror of what he was seeing. It made his limbs go weak and rubbery, his head reel with dizziness.
He found his feet and dove for the door, but there was no escape.
Just a voice, crystal and cutting, echoing in his head.
(take me hand)
(and let your heart explode with sweet fear)
Cryderman swung the flashlight at it and one of the faces exploded in a spray of clear jelly.
Ropy tendrils slid out of the thing’s belly and looped in the air. They were smooth and glistening. Cryderman shouted for help with everything he had and swung the flashlight at the fire alarm pull and broke the glass.
The creature was not fast enough to stop him from pulling the lever.
The alarm shrilled all over camp.
Before he could do anything else, a clutch of pink wormy things grasped his hand and smashed it to a bleeding pulp. But the pain did not even register and the scream of agony did not even come as the thing’s mouth opened like a black manhole and a writhing cluster of translucent tentacles erupted forth and engulfed his face, sliding down his throat and up his nose, pushing into his eyes and piercing his flesh like burrowing worms, penetrating deeper and deeper into him, filling him and infesting him.
And by that point, there was nothing left to scream with.
FOUR
THE WITCHING
And who can say what underlies
broomstick rides in the night?
—H.P. Lovecraft
1
COYLE HEARD THE ALARM sound like everyone else.
It went right through him and tore him from Gwen’s arms, whining and echoing like an air raid siren. And the moment his eyes snapped open, that feeling of impending dread that had been intensifying in him all day simply exploded and a weak voice in his head said, Here it comes, Nicky, get ready because here it comes–
“What the hell’s going on?” Gwen said, sitting up. “Fire?”
Outside in the corridor, Coyle could hear people running. He pulled his thermals on, his wool pants, boots, and insulated sweatshirt. Put his polar-fleece vest over the top. Goddamn place was burning down, he planned on keeping warm.
He grabbed Hopper’s gun and went out into the corridor. Gwen was right behind him, wanting to know what was going on and he only wished he could tell her. He could smell no smoke, but other than that he just didn’t know.
“It’s not fire,” he finally said as they made for the Community Room. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not fire.”
Danny Shin came running down B-corridor towards them. “Get a move on, Nicky! There’s something in Medical! It almost tore Locke’s fucking arm off!”
The fire alarm continued to shrill. From all over the station, people were running and shouting. It was sheer chaos and Coyle had a pretty good idea that it wasn’t going to end anytime soon.
Frye came stumbling out of his room, still pulling his woolies on. “Fucking Nora, what now?”
“It’s in Medical,” Coyle told him.
“What is?”
Coyle never answered that. By the time he got to the Community Room, most of the crew was there. All of them were talking at once, some shouting above the volume of the fire alarm while Frye cried out for someone to turn the damn thing off.
It was sheer confusion.
Special Ed was walking around in loose circles like he couldn’t find his bearings. Ida and The Beav were hanging back by the doorway to the Galley. Gwen got a medical kit out and crouched on the floor by Locke. He was sitting there, back up against the wall, looking positively shell-shocked. His face was white, eyes staring wetly.
Coyle saw that his left arm was bloody, the sleeve of his windsuit hanging in tatters. There was blood on the floor. Red droplets led to A-corridor where more of the stuff was smeared on the walls.
“We got us a visitor, Nicky,” Gut said. She was standing before the archway to A with a long-handled fire axe in her hands like some barbarian poised to charge into battle. “And whatever the fuck it is, it’s still in there.”
The fire alarm was squelched in mid-shrill and everyone was talking and demanding answers, but no one, absolutely no one, was volunteering to go down the corridor to Medical. Not after they got a look at Locke sitting there.
“What the hell happened?” Coyle said.
Shin, looking this way and that, breathing very hard, said, “Cryderman. Ed had him on guard duty—”
“Well somebody had to be,” Special Ed said over his shoulder.
“—he had him on guard duty and something got him. He pulled the fire alarm . . . I mean, I think he did . . . and Locke was just coming in. He heard him scream and ran to M
edical . . . holy Jesus, Nicky, it almost took his fucking arm off.”
“What did?” Frye said, returning from shutting down the alarm.
“A monster or something.”
Frye pushed past Zoot. “A monster? What the fuck you mean, a monster?”
“He’s gonna need stitches,” Special Ed said to Coyle. “He’s lost a lot of blood.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Gwen said. “But I need to get into Medical.”
Coyle kneeled down by Locke. Gwen was still wrapping his arm. “What happened, Locke? What was in there?”
He blinked his eyes rapidly for a moment or two, swallowed a couple times. Then his eyes focused and he looked up. “Heard him scream . . . that fucking alarm, Nicky . . . then I went in there.” He began trembling now, shaking his head back and forth. “Something was in there . . . something had Cryderman. It was eating him . . . I think it was eating him. I . . . it growled or something and swatted me . . . I don’t know what it was . . . it . . . it had claws . . .”
Coyle could figure out the rest. “You’re going to be all right, man,” he said.
Locke managed a dopey/confused smile, grimacing as Gwen shot antibiotics into him.
Horn arrived and he brought the heavy artillery with him. Strapped to his back with a harness were what looked like a couple scuba-sized acetylene tanks in a welded frame. A high-pressure PVC hose came off them and fed into a metal bracket in his hands which was set with handgrips and a trigger, a nasty-looking spout at the end. A propane torch was attached to the frame at his back. Copper hosing came from it, was clamped to the hand-bracket or gun assembly. The tubing terminated about two inches in front of the spout, a flame flickering there.
“Fucking Buck Rogers,” Frye said.
“What is that supposed to be?” Shin asked.
Horn just grinned. “Flamethrower. Homemade. Got me three more of ‘em out in the Heavy Shop.”
“You’re gonna blow us all up.”
“Nope,” Horn said.
Coyle got it. Dangerous as hell, probably, but he figured it would work. One squeeze of the trigger on the gun assembly and flammable liquid would rush from the tank and out of the spout at high pressure where it would make contact with the propane flame . . . whoosh! A hand-held incendiary weapon.
