The Spawning

by Tim Curran

  Paralyzed.

  Immobile.

  His legs were cold rubber.

  As his chair slid across the floor, he absolutely lost it, began to scream: “IN HERE! SOMEBODY HELP ME! I’M TRAPPED!”

  Inside his head, he could hear the wailing, piping voices of the ghosts that were invading the station. Like October winds blown through deserted churchyards and funneled down drainage pipes, they moaned and echoed while he shook with terror.

  16

  GWEN STEPPED THROUGH THE door to Butler’s room and right away saw Zoot crouched in the corner, her hand pressed over her mouth and her eyes wild with fear.

  The dome was shaking. A picture of sunflowers on the wall one of the summer crew had left behind fell to the floor. Its glass face shattered . . . the tiny bits of broken glass blew over the floor like a down of drift.

  Oh God, not again . . .

  Butler was laying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Her plate of food was untouched. Her IV of fluids was half-drained. Her eyes were glossy black pits.

  Gwen went over to Zoot, kneeled by her, pulling her to her. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Eyes,” she said, her body rigid with terror.

  “Eyes?”

  “Red eyes. Five red eyes watching me.”

  Gwen swallowed, feeling her sanity fraying now as it had been for some time. Eyes. A delusion? A hallucination? She had spent too much time around Butler now to believe that. For even in her own dreams she had seen red eyes staring out of pockets of shifting blackness at her.

  “These eyes watch you?”

  Zoot nodded. “Ever since I saw the ghost.”

  “The ghost?”

  “The ghost came out of Butler . . . it came out of her and it’s been watching me. It won’t let me leave. Everytime I go to the door, it knocks me back down.” Zoot was breathing very heavily. “Right now . . .”

  “Yes?”

  She looked over at the closet door. “It’s in there. That’s where it watches me from. From inside the closet.”

  Gwen was going to tell her it was nothing, nothing at all, she just needed to get away from Butler, but as she reached out and touched Zoot to reassure her . . . something happened, something that floored her. Something that made her head spin and her teeth chatter and her belly come leapfrogging into her throat–”

  “Gah,” she said and it was a purely mindless animal grunt of violation. “GAAAHHHHH–

  Like electricity.

  Like grabbing a hot line, maybe a 220 sparking with juice.

  Like laying your hands on it and feeling that energy come racing through you in a white-hot barrage, cooking your cells and making your brain flare-up with exploding fireworks . . .

  Zoot.

  Lynn Zutema.

  She was from Iowa, unmarried, and had come to Antarctica because she wanted to get as far away from her family as possible. Her family were Seventh-Day Adventists and she’d been brought up under that restrictive yolk. When she turned eighteen, like a lot of kids who’d never enjoyed the freedoms most take for granted, she ran as fast and far away from the church as she could. The downside of that was that the Adventist elders had forbade her family from ever seeing or speaking to her again because she’d broke with their teachings.

  I haven’t seen or talked to my mom or dad in six years.

  I don’t think I ever will again.

  My mom and dad are so brainwashed that they put the church before me.

  Good riddance, I say.

  Assholes.

  . . . and then Gwen was back in her own head, knowing all the things that Zoot had never told her, all those messy private intimate details that rotted her soul black and made her hurt. Zoot never truly came out of her shell at Clime . . . so Gwen had climbed inside it with her.

  “GWEN!” Zoot was shouting. “GWEN!”

  Gwen blinked and shook and it was over.

  Around her, the whole station was pulsating with some building charge of energy. She could feel it up and down her arms.

  And from the closet, she heard something scratching.

  Something that wanted to get out.

  17

  THE GHOSTS.

  They were everywhere.

  As the station shook and the fluorescents above flickered, Coyle saw them coming right out of the walls. He was crouched there with Locke, both of them looking down at Koch, Ida standing over them . . . and then it started.

  “Shit,” Locke said under his breath.

  The ghosts were shadowy, blurred . . . but not dark, Coyle saw.

  No, they were white and leggy and tentacled, wings spreading out. The only color in them were those red, red eyes. They reminded him of blind, wriggling termites. He saw one, then two, three and four. Hideously bloated, white like corpses pulled from rivers, buzzing and piping, their assorted appendages coiling and uncoiling, reaching out and retracting.

  He closed his eyes.

  But when he opened them, they were still there.

  Koch was screaming, but it seemed to come from a great distance.

  He could feel the ghosts moving around him, reaching their elastic thoughts into his mind and he could not deny them. This was not how he had ever imagined being haunted must be like. Not in the least. This was not just spiritual or psychic, it was physical, organic, devastating.

  The energy they emitted was cold and crawling like electricity, crackling and popping. He could feel it moving over the backs of his hands in flows and ripples. The hairs on his arms and at the back of his neck stood erect.

  And throughout the dome, whatever had been building for so long now simply broke free.

  18

  THE IV BAG TREMBLED.

  The fluid in it bubbled and bubbled, boiling now. As it did so, gases filled the bag. It inflated to the point of bursting and then it did, going with a wet popping and spraying juice in every direction.

  Zoot rolled into a trembling ball.

  Gwen let out a cry and stumbled towards the door.

  Mere inches from it, it slammed shut.

  She reached to grasp the knob and it was so hot it was like trying to grab a burning stove lid. She pulled away her hand with a cry.

  She turned and Butler was sitting up in bed, staring at her.

  The closet door rattled in its frame and exploded off its hinges.

  19

  IN HIS ROOM, HARVEY hid behind the desk when it started.

  The haunting.

  He could hear it all around him now and knew it was caused by that godawful witch they had shut up over in C-corridor.

  Never should have came, I never should have came down here.

  I knew it was a mistake.

  I knew it was trouble.

  I knew it was an ancient Pandora’s Box filled with toxic darkness.

  I knew.

  I knew . . .

  Antarctica was a cemetery.

  A place where buried things routinely resurrected themselves. It was true and the imagery haunted him, made him squeeze his eyes shut and sink his teeth into his lower lip until he tasted blood.

  Nausea boiled in his stomach.

  He began to sweat and shake.

  Butler was externalizing the evil within her and they were all going to pay for it now.

  The air grew thick, frigid, it shivered like cool jelly.

  Harvey closed his eyes, praying, as things flew off his desk in a whirlwind, shattering against the walls. There was a knocking at the frosty window that looked out into the compound. The blankets on his bed began to rustle, rising up in a hooded shape as if there was something beneath them.

  He closed his eyes and remembered . . . remembered–

  A house.

  An empty house on the edge of town.

  Back in Hooksett, New Hampshire, the town of his youth.

  It was October and the air was crisp, tart, leaves blown over the broken walks and overgrown yard, patterns of frost shining in the dead grass. The house towered above him, a shadow cut fro
m darker shadow, tree limbs scraping against the roof. It was just a two-story frame house. Nothing more. It was not some fabled Victorian monstrosity of the sort they used for cardboard Halloween decorations—rambling and boarded, grinning ghosts oozing from the crumbling chimney like vapors, bats circling the high, crooked turrets.

  Just an ordinary house.

  But what crawled through its belly was far from ordinary.

  As a boy of eight, Harvey had braved the house and gone down to the cellar on a dare. One hour. Spend one hour in there.

  And now as a man of sixty, he was there again.

  Not in Antarctica.

  But Hooksett.

  It was absurd that he was shivering down in the dirty, dusty cellar, but he was. As a boy of eight, that hour had been terribly long. The cellar was dark, crowded with the menacing shapes of boxes and crates and old bedsprings. The house had groaned and creaked . . . but other than that, there was nothing.

  No ghosts.

  No disembodied voices.

  The house was just empty and falling apart.

  At least at first.

  Then, then–

  Something was there as he waited in the cellar, paralyzed with fear. Something was in the house just at it had been fifty years before.

  Something sly.

  Something nocturnal.

  Something born in the black depths of the house and maybe in the blacker depths of a boy’s fervid imagination.

  And although he was in Antarctica and knew it, he could hear leaves falling outside and see pale moonlight coming in through a shattered window. The rafters overhead were hung with cobwebs. Things scratched in the walls. Something skittered over the back of his hand.

  Something was rustling.

  Like a sheet.

  It was coming for him and he could hear the whisper of its shroud dragging down dusty corridors. Now it was at the cellar door. It creaked open. Now he could smell the thing: like motheaten rags locked in an attic trunk, like night and soil and dryrot.

  It was coming for him.

  It was coming to eat his soul.

  20

  A FOULNESS AND A DARKNESS swept out of the closet and permeated the room like a poison mist, filling its spaces with noxious disembodied shades and creeping shapes that swept about in a pall of freezing, howling wind. Zoot screamed and kept screaming.

  Gwen tried to reach the door . . . and something like a hand thrust her back, dragging her over the floor and slamming her up against the wall.

  The air was putrid with a stench of sweet rottenness that grew stronger and stronger, nauseous and warm, until it began to smell like vomit and feces.

  Through dazed eyes, Gwen saw nightmare forms reeling about her like a living, phantasmagorical fog: winged alien shapes and fleshless skulls and shaggy forms that were nearly men. Gradually, the phantoms dissipated . . . but the unreal, evil atmosphere engulfing the room and bleeding from every crevice and corner did not.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Butler said in a scratching, dry voice. “Not until I’m done with you.”

  Zoot was shocked into a morbid silence.

  Gwen stared at Butler.

  Butler’s face fanned out with a series of minute wrinkles like veins of frost settling into a window. Her face was so pallid it was nearly gray, bloodless and cracked-looking with all those intersecting wrinkles and lines. It looked like it would shatter if she smiled. But she did not smile because there was nothing in her capable of smiling. Her eyes were no longer green, they were black and empty and glistening. Pink scars at her temples stood out like blood against her deathly pallor.

  “I know all about you, Gwen. I know what scares you.”

  Gwen crab-crawled across the floor, manic and whimpering.

  The door was locked.

  It was ice-cold.

  She pounded on it.

  She shouted.

  And Butler’s shadow fell across her.

  21

  WHEN THE ELECTRICAL SYSTEM on the big Cat 980 loader went dead while he was clearing drift, Frye knew something had gone to hell. Horn kept all the equipment running at peak efficiency and in all the years Frye had been behind the wheel of heavy equipment, he had never seen the lights on the panel flicker, then flash on and off before going totally dead.

  He climbed down out of the cab and he heard the activity in the dome right away.

  Sonofabitch.

  Feeling the need for a weapon, he grabbed an iron ice chopper near the door, and entered the tunnel leading from D-corridor to CosRay.

  When he got into D, he stopped dead.

  The station was vibrating around him, the air electric with screeching noises and shrill, almost subsonic whining sounds. He saw someone at the end of D.

  They were on their knees, rocking back and forth, clasping hands to the sides of their head as if they were in agony.

  Hansen.

  That’s Hansen.

  Frye raced towards him. When he was within ten feet of him, a blast of frigid air hit him, knocked him airborne, and threw him down the corridor.

  The door to Biolab flew open and he expected to see some horror waiting there for him, but there was nothing, nothing at all. Frye got to his knees, wondering where his ice chopper was and . . .

  . . . and a whipping, whistling wind suddenly came blowing out of Biolab with tornadic intensity. Everything in there was breaking and shattering, pulverized by an intense destructive force of pure kinetic energy . . . all of it getting sucked up in a wild, spinning torrent of debris that came blasting out the door and right at him. He threw himself to the floor as broken glass and bits of metal, cracked plastic and wood shards hit him, peppering him like hail. In his parka and Carhartt overalls he was protected, shielded.

  When it stopped, he sat up, glass falling from him.

  He saw Hansen.

  And he saw something else.

  A form came right through the wall with crackling static electricity, a gray and ghost-white form that was phosphorescent and flickering, advancing on Hansen. It was more mist than solid and Frye could see the archway leading into the Community Room right through it.

  He looked frantically for a weapon, anything . . . but how did you slay a ghost? How did you hurt something that seemed to have no true physical reality? He scrambled around on his hands and knees as a fierce wind blew down the corridor, scattering dust and detritus like a desert sandstorm.

  . . . and the wraith came towards Hansen and Hansen screamed, but made no attempt to escape it. It was a human form that floated six inches off the floor, fingers reaching out like burning white wires, snapping and popping, a shocking white ectoplasmic mass that drifted in his direction, reaching for him, anxious to make contact . . .

  . . . and that was when Frye saw who it was or who it had once been: Slim. There was no mistaking it. He was no longer human, no longer truly living in the accepted sense of the term . . . just some pulsating energized ghost that had left its tomb in a storm of agitated, burning particles. He was luminous and oscillating, caught in the churning maelstrom of his own unstable electromagnetic field, an ionized ghost . . . his eyes sunken hollow wormholes and his mouth nothing but a puckered, lipless, black sucking hole . . .

  . . . then he took Hansen, not so much grabbing him but introducing him into his field which for Hansen was like taking hold of live current, seizing a high voltage line in his bare fists. The result was instantaneous: he lit up like a Christmas bulb as if he were introduced to a massive charge of x-rays . . . for one second he guttered with blinding light and his skeleton was visible through the flesh . . . then he seemed to shrink, to curl up like a dead worm, to fold in on himself and blacken . . .

  . . . he hit the floor, breaking apart like dry soot that was scooped up and scattered by the wind . . .

  . . . and the wraith turned towards Frye, moving in his direction with blue-white pulsations of arcing energy. Frye watched it come, floating towards him. Those eyes deeper, the mouth wider, a howling noise comi
ng from it as it created a vortex of suction, pulling everything towards it in a raging tempest . . .

  . . . Frye saw that it had more substance now, that it had gained a measure of physical solidity from feeding and draining Hansen, maybe tapping right into his lifeforce and sucking him dry like a leech. And now it wanted more . . .

  . . . and Frye knew that the only thing he could do was die with a measure of defiance and that’s what he planned on doing. He found his ice chopper, clutching the iron shaft in his hand, and stood his ground. The vacuuming force from the wraith was immense and irresistible . . .

  . . . as it grew nearer and his flesh crawled with minute static charges, he saw the face of Slim had become a twisted, seamed root, a malevolent vulpine mask of absolute wrath, absolute pain, and absolute hunger . . .

  . . . Frye staggered towards it because he really didn’t have a choice . . . it pulled him in and he went, raising the ice chopper over his head like a primitive preparing to kill a mastodon, shielding his eyes with one hand, gasping a final breath, and throwing his makeshift weapon right at it.

  He thought it would go cleanly through him.

  But it did not.

  It impaled him, punching a hole through him and connecting with the floor and there was a resounding boom, a flash of light, churning smoke, and a surge of force that put Frye right on his ass . . . an easy fifteen feet from where he’d last been standing.

  Every light in the corridor blew out.

  Slim was gone.

  There were only a few burning fragments drifting in the air and a sharp stink of burnt wiring.

  That was it.

  Frye just sat there, dazed.

  The iron . . . the iron ice chopper.

  Iron conducts electricity.

  Yes, it connected Slim to the floor and ground him out like a high voltage line, discharging him, bleeding the power right out of him.

  22

  THE GHOSTS GATHERED AROUND him, circling, circling, pale shades and demonic memories parading around him like magic lantern spooks cast against walls.

  Not just spirits, but fleshy-white things that he could feel and smell. They stank of ammonia, of caustic chemicals.