The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 20

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  “I remember one evening in that October of ’98, standing up on the banks outside my camp and looking out over the dry gulches. Some of the fellows were burning fires at their workings, trying to melt the frost so the digging would go easier. It lit up all that strange and beautiful landscape like the surface of some alien planet, the fires like lanterns shining out in the gloom, and the way the wood-smoke smell drifted up across the bluffs . . . I could have stayed there for the rest of my life, or so I told myself. I sat and watched those fires till it got full dark, anyway, and later on that night I saw the aurora for the first time, the Northern lights, how they flickered green and magical in the moonless sky.

  “The week after, it began to snow for real, and I had to strike camp and head back for Dawson. Some didn’t; some stayed out on the flats, and that’s where the story really begins.

  “I must’ve been back in Dawson a couple of months, because it was nigh on Christmas when we got word from out on the workings that they’d found something strange – not gold, which would have been strange enough by that time, but something weird, something the likes of which nobody had ever seen. At least, that’s what Sam Tibbets told us, when he come in to Dawson for supplies. It was the three Tibbets brothers worked the claim, along with a half-dozen other fellows all hailed from Maine: they were a syndicate, all for one and one for all. They hadn’t found a lot of gold – hardly enough for one man to retire on, let alone nine – but Sam reckoned if the worst came to the worst, they could always go into the exhibition business with this thing they’d dug up out of the frost.

  “‘It’s a new wonder of the world, or maybe the oldest one of all’, I can hear him saying it, hunkered down by the stove in the saloon with the frost melting in his moustache and the steam rising off his coat; ‘I reckon it must ‘a turned up late for last boarding on the ark, or else Noah throwed it overboard on account of its looks.’

  “‘What d’you mean?’ I asked him.

  “‘Aw, Horton, you never saw such a cretur as this,’ he said earnestly – he was straight-ahead and simple, was Sam Tibbets. He was one of the original ice-skaters from back on the lakes in the spring: I liked him a lot. ‘It’s like a plug-ugly dried-up old thing the size of one of them barrels there . . .’ he pointed at a hogshead in the corner ‘ . . . and about that same shape, ’cept maybe it comes to sort of a narrow place up top. It’s got long thin arms, only dozens of ’em, all around, and there’s nippers on the end, same as a lobster? I swear there ain’t never been such a confusion. Wait till we haul it back out of here, come the thaw. They’ll pay a dime a head back in Frisco just to clap eyes on it, I tell you!’

  “It was a plan at that, and if nothing else it made me mighty curious to take a look at this thing, whatever it was. The way Sam told it, they’d been digging through the frozen subsoil when they turned it up: he thought it must have gotten caught in the river away back, stuck in the mud and froze up when the winter came. How deep was it, I asked him, thinking the deeper it lay, the older it must be; ’bout twenty feet, he reckoned.

  “‘So it’s dead, then, this thing?’ That was Cy Perrette, who was not the smartest man in the Yukon territory, not by a long chalk. He was staring at Sam Tibbets like a dog listening to a sermon.

  “‘It better be,’ said Sam. ‘It’s been buried in the earth since Abraham got promoted to his first pair of long pants, ain’t it?’ Men started laughing all through the saloon, and pretty soon Sam had a line of drinks set down before him. Dawson folks appreciated a good tale, see: something to take their minds off the cold and dark outside, and the endless howling winds. I remember the aurora was particularly strong that night; when I staggered out of the saloon and the cold knocked me sober, there it was, fold upon fold, glowing and rippling from horizon to horizon. I remember thinking, that’s what folk mean when they say ‘unearthly’. Something definitively not of this planet, something more to do with the heavens than the earth.

  “Come morning there was quite a little gang of us, all bent on following Sam Tibbets back to his camp for a look-see at the eighth wonder. Sam was agreeable, said he’d waive our admission fees just this once, on account of the circumstances, and we set off towards the workings. It was a cheerful excursion; the sleds were always lighter when you had company along the trail.

  “Sam broke into a run when we reached the banks of the river bed; wanted to welcome us to the site of their discovery, I suppose, like any showman would. He clambered up a snowdrift; then, when he reached the top, he stopped, and even from down below I thought he looked confused. He let go his sled; it slithered down the bank and I had to look sharp, else it’d have taken me off at the shins. ‘Sam!’ I called him, but he didn’t look round. I scrambled up after him, cussing him for a clumsy oaf and the rest of it; then I saw what he’d seen, and the words got choked off in my throat.

  “Straight away you could see something was wrong. Sam and his partners had built themselves a cabin by the workings, nothing fancy, but solid enough to take whatever the Yukon winter could throw at it, they’d thought. Now, one end of that cabin was shivered all to pieces. The logs were snapped and splintered into matchwood, just exactly as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. Only the cannon would have had to be on the inside of the cabin, not the outside: there was wreckage laying on the ground for a considerable distance, all radiating out and away from the stoved-in part.

  “That wasn’t the worst part, though. In amongst the wreckage you could see the snow stained red, and there was at least one body mixed in with the blown-out timber. I saw it straight away; I know Sam had too, because he turned around and looked at me as I grabbed his arm, and I could hear this high sort of keening noise he was making, like some kind of machine that’s slipped its gears, about to break itself to pieces. It was the purest, most fundamental sound of grief I’d ever heard coming out of a human being. I’ve never forgotten it to this day.

  “My first thought as we began running down the banks was: dynamite. Plenty of the miners used it to start off an excavation, or to clear whatever obstructions they couldn’t dig around. It wasn’t unusual for a camp such as this to have a few sticks laying around in case of emergencies. Now, if you got careless . . .? You understand what I’m saying. That was my first assumption, anyway. It lasted until I got in amongst the wreckage.

  “Dynamite couldn’t account for it, was all. It couldn’t have left cups and bottles standing on the table, and still blown a hole in the cabin wall big enough to drive a piled-up dogsled through. It wouldn’t have left a man’s body intact inside its clothes, and taken his head clean off at the neck. And it couldn’t have done to that head . . . the things I saw done to the head of poor Bob Gendreau. Put it this way: my second assumption was bears; them, or some other wild animal. Bears roused too soon from their hibernation, hungry and enraged, coming on the camp and smashing it all to pieces. But again, when you looked at all the evidence, that didn’t sit right either.

  “There was a side of bacon hanging on the wall still; bears would have taken that. And they wouldn’t have stopped at knocking off the head of Bob Gendreau; that’s not where the sustenance lies, and all a bear ever looks for is sustenance. Whatever took Bob’s head off, then mauled it so his own mother wouldn’t have known it; that thing wasn’t doing what it did out of blind animal instinct, nor yet the need for nourishment. That thing was doing what it did because it wanted to – because it liked it, maybe. Some say man is the lord of all creation because he’s the only creature blessed with reason; others, that he’s set apart from the rest of the beasts because he takes pleasure in killing, and there’s no other animal does that. But up in that cabin I learned different. Now, I believe there’s at least one other creature on this planet that draws satisfaction from its kills, and not just a square meal. I got my first inkling of that when I saw what was left of Harvey Tibbets.

  “He was jammed into an unravaged corner of the cabin. It looked as if he’d been trying to dig clean through the packed-mud floor; there
was a hole in the ground at his feet, and his fingers were all bloodied and torn. You could see that, because of the way he was laying; hunkered down on his haunches, facing out towards the room, for all the world like a Moslem when he prays to Mecca. His forehead was touching the earth, and his arms were stretched out before him. His hands were clenched in the dirt, still clutching two last handfuls of it even in death. There was no mistaking his attitude: he’d been grovelling before whatever had passed through that cabin. Begging it for mercy.

  “And whatever it was had looked down upon him as he crouched there; listened to his screams, I guess. And had it granted him mercy? I don’t know. I can’t speak as to its motivations. What it had done, was sever both his hands, cut ’em clear off at the wrists. Remember before, when I said he appeared to have been digging in the dirt, trying to escape? Both his hands were still there, torn-up and bloody like I said. And he was kneeling down with his arms outstretched; you remember that. But in between the stumps at the end of his forearms and the tattered beginnings of his wrists, there was nothing but a foot of blood-soaked earth. Whatever had killed him had cut off both his hands, and watched him bleed out on the floor while he begged it for leniency. Now what sort of a creature does that sound like to you?

  “Indians, was what some of the men thought; Indians touched with the windigo madness. But how could any man, crazy or sane, have knocked an entire gable end out of the cabin that way? There was an Indian with us, one of the portageurs, a quiet, dark-complected fellow named Jake: he wouldn’t come within ten yards of the devastation, but he told me it wasn’t any of his kin. ‘Not yours either,’ he said after a pause, and I asked him what he meant by it.

  “He took me aside and pointed in the snow. There was a mess of our prints, converging on the cabin so that the ground outside the blasted-out place was practically trampled bare. All around the snow was practically virgin still, and Jake showed me the only thing that sullied it. A single set of tracks, leading from the cabin and headed away north, down along the gulch. I say leading from the cabin, mostly because there wasn’t anything in the cabin could have made those prints, living or dead. If it wasn’t for that, then I don’t know that I could have told you what direction whatever made the prints was travelling in. They weren’t regular footmarks, you see, and they were all wrong in their shape, in their arrangement – in their number, even. And the weirdest thing about them? They stopped dead about fifty yards out. A step, then another, then nothing but the undisturbed snow, as far as the eye could see.

  “Later on, once the shock of it had passed, I asked Jake what could have made those prints, and he told me an old legend of his people, about the time before men walked these northern wastes, when it was just gods and trolls and ogres.

  “Back then, he said, there were beings come down from the sky, and they laid claim to the Earth for a long season of destruction. They were like pariahs between the stars, these beings: not even the Old Ones, the gods without a worshipper, could bear to have them near. They were cast out in the end, as well as the Old Ones could manage it: but the story goes that some of them escaped exile by burrowing down into the earth and waiting their time, till some cataclysm of the planet might uncover them. They could wait: nothing on Earth could kill them, you see. They couldn’t die in this dimension. They would only sleep, through geologic ages of the planet, till something disturbed them and they came to light once more.

  “That was the legend: I got it out of Jake later that same day, when the party had split up and we were searching all the low land around the arroyo. The mood of the party was shocked and unforgiving: something had done this to our friends, and we were bound to avenge them the best we could. The trail of footprints had given some of the fellows pause for thought, but I think most of them just took the prints as simple evidence of something they could go after, some critter they could corner and shoot. They didn’t reflect too much on what could have made them. If they’d stopped and thought it through, I doubt whether any one of them would have been prepared to do what we ended up doing that night: lying in ambush and waiting for the culprit to come back to the cabin.

  “The reasoning – so far as it went – was, if it’s an animal, it’ll come back where there’s food. If it’s a man, it’ll come back because that’s what murderers do: revisit the scene of the crime. Pretty shaky logic, I know, but the blood of the party was up. We were really just looking for trouble, and we damn near found it, too.

  “As night fell we set up an ambuscade in the ruins of the cabin. We’d buried the bodies by then, of course, but inside the cabin still felt bad; stank, too, like something had lain dead in there all through the summer, and not just a few hours in the bitter icy cold. We had the stove going: we had to, else we’d have froze to death. We had guards at all the windows, and a barricade at the wrecked end of the cabin. It didn’t matter what direction trouble might be coming at us from, we had it covered. Or so we thought.

  “God, we were so cold! The wind died down soon after dark, and that probably saved us all from the hypothermia. Still it was like a knife going through you, that chill, and you had to get up and move around every so often, just to prove to yourself you were still alive. We passed around a bottle of whiskey we found among the untouched provisions, and waited.

  “All across the wide northern sky there was a glow, cold and mysterious, as far removed as you could imagine from the world of men and their paltry little hopes and fears. The aurora was so vivid that night, you might have read a newspaper by it. All the better to see whatever’s coming, we thought; at least it can’t creep up on us and take us unawares, not in this light.

  “Somewhere in the very pit of the night, just when the body’s at its weariest and wants only to drop down and sleep, an uncanny sort of stillness fell across the snowed-up river bed. What was left of the wind dropped entirely, and the only sound beneath the frozen far-off stars seemed to come from the creaking of the stove round which we sat, the cracking and spitting of the logs that burned inside it. A few of us looked round at each other; all of us felt it now, the heightened expectation, the heightened fear. Without words, as quietly as we could, we moved away from the stove and took up our places at the barricade.

  “I remember – so clearly! – how it felt, crouching behind that mess of planks and packing-cases, waiting to see what might show its head above the snow-banks. A couple of times I thought I saw something, away out beyond the bounds of night vision. Even under the greenish radiance of the aurora I couldn’t be sure: was that something moving? Could it be? One time Joe McRudd discharged his rifle, and scared us all to hell. ‘Sorry,’ he mouthed, when we’d all regained our senses. He cleared his throat. ‘Thought I saw sump’n creepin’ round out there.’

  “‘Save your ammo,’ grunted Sam Tibbets, not even bothering to look at poor Joe. ‘Keep your nerve.’ That was all. Directly after that it was upon us.

  “It came from the only direction we hadn’t reckoned on: overhead. There was a thump on the roof of the cabin, and then a splintering as the boards were wrenched off directly above our heads. It caused a general confusion: everyone jumped and panicked, and no one really knew what was happening. Joe McRudd’s rifle went off again; some of the other fellows shot as well, I don’t know what at. Before I could react, Sam Tibbets was snatched up from alongside me – something had him fast around the head and was dragging him off of his feet, up towards the hole in the roof.

  “I grabbed him around the waist, but it was no use: I felt my own feet lifting clear of the floor as Sam was hoisted ever upward. He was trying to call out, but whatever had snatched him was laying tight hold around the whole of his head and neck, and all I could hear was a muffled roar of anger and pain – fear, too, I guess. It was as if he was being lynched, hung off a high bough and left to swing there while he throttled. I called to the rest of them to help, to hang on to us: a couple of them laid ahold of my legs and heaved, and for a moment we thought we had him. Then there came an awful sound, like somet
hing out of a butcher’s shop, and suddenly we were all sprawled on the floor of the cabin, with Sam Tibbets’ headless body lying dead weight on top of us.

  “I don’t remember exactly how the next few seconds panned out. All I remember was being soaked with Sam’s blood: the heat of it, the force with which it gushed from his truncated neck, the bitter metallic stink. The fellows told me afterwards that I was screaming like a banshee on my hands and knees, but I know I wasn’t the only one. Jake the Indian brought me out of it: he dragged me away from the shambles in the middle of the room and slapped me a couple times till I quit bawling. As if coming round from a dream I goggled at him slack-mouthed; then I came to myself in a dreadful sort of recollection. Before he could stop me, I’d grabbed the big hunting-knife from its sheath at his waist and pushed him out of the way.

  “By climbing up on top of the hot stove, I just about managed to reach the hole in the roof. I had Jake’s knife between my teeth like the last of the Mohicans; I was covered all over in Sam Tibbets’ blood, and I was filled with the urge to vengeance, nothing else. I hoisted myself up so my head and shoulders were through the hole. With my elbows planted on the snow-covered shingles, I looked around.

  “It was crouched by the farther end of the roof like a big old sack of guts, mumbling on something. Sam’s head. I made some sort of a noise, and it looked up: I mean, the thick squabby part on top of it suddenly grew long like an elephant’s trunk, and one furious red eye glared out at me from its tip. The noise it made: good God, I never heard the like. It damn near deafened me, even out in the open; it went ringing through my head like the last trump.

  “Some part of its belly opened itself up, and Sam Tibbets’ head was gone with a terrible sucking crunch. Then all those tentacles that fringed the trunk suddenly came to life, writhing and flailing like a stinging jellyfish. One of them caught in my clothing – I slashed out at it with Jake’s knife, but I might as well have tried to cut a steel hawser. It had me fast; it was like being caught in a death-hold. The thing let rip a revolting sort of belch, and started to haul me in, and I had just enough time to feel the entire sum of my courage vanish in a wink as fear, total and absolute, rushed in to fill up every inch of my being. It’s a hell of a thing, to lose all self-respect that way: to know that the last thing you’ll feel before death is nothing but abject, craven panic. God, let me die like a man, I prayed, as the thing dragged me up out of the hole towards its gulping maw – that glaring gorgon’s eye—