Elizabeth had fallen victim to the greatest cosmic prank of all time, the flu that had swept across the world in the spring and summer of 1918, as if the bloody abattoir in the trenches hadn’t been evidence enough of humanity’s divine disfavor. That’s what Elizabeth had called it in the last letter he’d ever had from her: God’s judgment on a world gone mad. Garner had given up on God by then: he’d packed away the Bible Elizabeth had pressed upon him after a week in the field hospital, knowing that its paltry lies could bring him no comfort in the face of such horror, and it hadn’t. Not then, and not later, when he’d come home to face Elizabeth’s mute and barren grave. Garner had taken McReady’s offer to accompany the expedition soon after, and though he’d stowed the Bible in his gear before he left, he hadn’t opened it since and he wouldn’t open it here, either, lying sleepless beside a man who might yet die because he’d had to take a piss – yet another grand cosmic joke – in a place so hellish and forsaken that even Elizabeth’s God could find no purchase here.
There could be no God in such a place.
Just the relentless shriek of the wind tearing at the flimsy canvas, and the death-howl agony of the dog. Just emptiness, and the unyielding porcelain dome of the polar sky.
Garner sat up, breathing heavily.
Faber muttered under his breath. Garner leaned over the injured man, the stench of fever hot in his nostrils. He smoothed Faber’s hair back from his forehead and studied the leg, swollen tight as a sausage inside the sealskin legging. Garner didn’t like to think what he might see if he slit open that sausage to reveal the leg underneath: the viscous pit of the wound itself, crimson lines of sepsis twining around Faber’s thigh like a malevolent vine as they climbed inexorably toward his heart.
Atka howled, a long rising cry that broke into pitiful yelps, died away, and renewed itself, like the shriek of sirens on the French front.
“Jesus,” Garner whispered.
He fished a flask out of his pack and allowed himself a single swallow of whiskey. Then he sat in the dark, listening to the mournful lament of the dog, his mind filling with hospital images: the red splash of tissue in a steel tray, the enflamed wound of an amputation, the hand folding itself into an outraged fist as the arm fell away. He thought of Elizabeth, too, Elizabeth most all, buried months before Garner had gotten back from Europe. And he thought of Connelly, that aggrieved look as he turned away to deal with the injured swing dog.
Don’t worry, I won’t ask you to do it.
Crouching in the low tent, Garner dressed. He shoved a flashlight into his jacket, shouldered aside the tent flap, and leaned into the wind tearing across the waste. The crevasse lay before him, rope still trailing through the pitons to dangle into the pit below.
Garner felt the pull of darkness. And Atka, screaming.
“Okay,” he muttered. “All right, I’m coming.”
Once again he lashed the rope around his waist. This time he didn’t hesitate as he backed out onto the ledge of creaking ice. Hand over hand he went, backward and down, boots scuffing until he stepped into space and hung suspended in a well of shadow.
Panic seized him, the black certainty that nothing lay beneath him. The crevasse yawned under his feet, like a wedge of vacuum driven into the heart of the planet. Then, below him – ten feet? twenty? – Atka mewled, piteous as a freshly whelped pup, eyes squeezed shut against the light. Garner thought of the dog, curled in agony upon some shelf of subterranean ice, and began to lower himself into the pit, darkness rising to envelop him.
One heartbeat, then another and another and another, his breath diaphanous in the gloom, his boots scrabbling for solid ground. Scrabbling and finding it. Garner clung to the rope, testing the surface with his weight.
It held.
Garner took the flashlight from his jacket, and switched it on. Atka peered up at him, brown eyes iridescent with pain. The dog’s legs twisted underneath it, and its tail wagged feebly. Blood glistened at its muzzle. As he moved closer, Garner saw that a dagger of bone had pierced its torso, unveiling the slick yellow gleam of subcutaneous fat and deeper still, half visible through tufts of coarse fur, the bloody pulse of viscera. And it had shat itself – Garner could smell it – a thin gruel congealing on the dank stone.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, Atka.”
Kneeling, Garner caressed the dog. It growled and subsided, surrendering to his ministrations.
“Good boy, Atka,” he whispered. “Settle down, boy.”
Garner slid his knife free of its sheath, bent forward, and brought the blade to the dog’s throat. Atka whimpered – “Shhh,” Garner whispered – as he bore down with the edge, steeling himself against the thing he was about to do –
Something moved in the darkness beneath him: a leathery rasp, the echoing clatter of stone on stone, of loose pebbles tumbling into darkness. Atka whimpered again, legs twitching as he tried to shove himself back against the wall. Garner, startled, shoved the blade forward. Atka’s neck unseamed itself in a welter of black arterial blood. The dog stiffened, shuddered once, and died – Garner watched its eyes dim in the space of a single heartbeat – and once again something shifted in the darkness at Garner’s back. Garner scuttled backward, slamming his shoulders into the wall by Atka’s corpse. He froze there, probing the darkness.
Then, when nothing came – had he imagined it? He must have imagined it – Garner aimed the flashlight light into the gloom. His breath caught in his throat. He shoved himself erect in amazement, the rope pooling at his feet.
Vast.
The place was vast: walls of naked stone climbing in cathedral arcs to the undersurface of the polar plain and a floor worn smooth as glass over long ages, stretching out before him until it dropped away into an abyss of darkness. Struck dumb with terror – or was it wonder? – Garner stumbled forward, the rope unspooling behind him until he drew up at the precipice, pointed the light into the shadows before him, and saw what it was that he had discovered.
A stairwell, cut seamlessly into the stone itself, and no human stairwell either: each riser fell away three feet or more, the stair itself winding endlessly into fathomless depths of earth, down and down and down until it curved away beyond the reach of his frail human light, and further still toward some awful destination he scarcely dared imagine. Garner felt the lure and hunger of the place singing in his bones. Something deep inside him, some mute inarticulate longing, cried out in response, and before he knew it he found himself scrambling down the first riser and then another, the flashlight carving slices out of the darkness to reveal a bas relief of inhuman creatures lunging at him in glimpses: taloned feet and clawed hands and sinuous Medusa coils that seemed to writhe about one another in the fitful and imperfect glare. And through it all the terrible summons of the place, drawing him down into the dark.
“Elizabeth –” he gasped, stumbling down another riser and another, until the rope, forgotten, jerked taut about his waist. He looked up at the pale circle of Connelly’s face far above him.
“What the hell are you doing down there, Doc,” Connelly shouted, his voice thick with rage, and then, almost against his will, Garner found himself ascending once again into the light.
No sooner had he gained his footing than Connelly grabbed him by the collar and swung him to the ground. Garner scrabbled for purchase in the snow but Connelly kicked him back down again, his blonde, bearded face contorted in rage.
“You stupid son of a bitch! Do you care if we all die out here?”
“Get off me!”
“For a dog? For a goddamned dog?” Connelly tried to kick him again, but Garner grabbed his foot and rolled, bringing the other man down on top of him. The two of them grappled in the snow, their heavy coats and gloves making any real damage all but impossible.
The flaps to one of the tents opened and Bishop limped out, his face a caricature of alarm. He was buttoning his coat even as he approached. “Stop! Stop it right now!”
Garner clambered to his feet, staggering bac
kward a few steps. Connelly rose to one knee, leaning over and panting. He pointed at Garner. “I found him in the crevasse! He went down alone!”
Garner leaned against one of the packed sledges. He could feel Bishop watching him as tugged free a glove to poke at a tender spot on his face, but he didn’t look up.
“Is this true?”
“Of course it’s true!” Connelly said, but Bishop waved him into silence.
Garner looked up at him, breath heaving in his lungs. “You’ve got to see it,” he said. “My God, Bishop.”
Bishop turned his gaze to the crevasse, where he saw the pitons and the rope spilling into the darkness. “Oh, Doc,” he said quietly.
“It’s not a crevasse, Bishop. It’s a stairwell.”
Connelly strode toward Garner, jabbing his finger at him. “What? You lost your goddamned mind.”
“Look for yourself!”
Bishop interposed himself between the two men. “Enough!” He turned to face Connelly. “Back off.”
“But –”
“I said back off!”
Connelly peeled his lips back, then turned and stalked back toward the crevasse. He knelt by its edge and started hauling up the rope.
Bishop turned to Garner. “Explain yourself.”
All at once, Garner’s passion drained from him. He felt a wash of exhaustion. His muscles ached. How could he explain this to him? How could he explain this so that they’d understand? “Atka,” he said simply, imploringly. “I could hear him.”
A look of deep regret fell over Bishop’s face. “Doc . . . Atka was a just a dog. We have to get Faber to the depot.”
“I could still hear him.”
“You have to pull yourself together. There are real lives at stake here, do you get that? Me and Connelly, we aren’t doctors. Faber needs you.”
“But –”
“Do you get that?”
“I . . . yeah. Yeah, I know.”
“When you go down into places like that, especially by yourself, you’re putting us all at risk. What are we gonna do without Doc, huh?”
This was not an argument Garner would win. Not this way. So he grabbed Bishop by the arm and led him toward the crevasse. “Look,” he said.
Bishop wrenched his arm free, his face darkening. Connelly straightened, watching this exchange. “Don’t put your hands on me, Doc,” Bishop said.
Garner released him. “Bishop,” he said. “Please.”
Bishop paused a moment, then walked toward the opening. “All right.”
Connelly exploded. “Oh for Christ’s sake!”
“We’re not going inside it,” Bishop said, looking at them both. “I’m going to look, okay Doc? That’s all you get.”
Garner nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
The two of them approached the edge of the crevasse. Closer, Garner felt it like a hook in his liver, tugging him down. It took an act of will to stop at the edge, to remain still and unshaken and look at these other two men as if his whole life did not hinge upon this moment.
“It’s a stairwell,” he said. His voice did not shake. His body did not move. “It’s carved into the rock. It’s got . . . designs of some kind.”
Bishop peered down into the darkness for a long moment. “I don’t see anything,” he said at last.
“I’m telling you, it’s there!” Garner stopped and gathered himself. He tried another tack. “This, this could be the scientific discovery of the century. You want to stick it to McReady? Let him plant his little flag. This is evidence of, of . . .” He trailed off. He didn’t know what it was evidence of.
“We’ll mark the location,” Bishop said. “We’ll come back. If what you say is true it’s not going anywhere.”
Garner switched on his flashlight. “Look,” he said, and he threw it down.
The flashlight arced end over end, its white beam slicing through the darkness with a scalpel’s clean efficiency, illuminating flashes of hewn rock and what might have been carvings or just natural irregularities. It clattered to a landing beside the corpse of the dog, casting in bright relief its open jaw and lolling tongue, and the black pool of blood beneath it.
Bishop looked for a moment, and shook his head. “God damn it, Doc,” he said. “You’re really straining my patience. Come on.”
Bishop was about to turn away when Atka’s body jerked once – Garner saw it –and then again, almost imperceptibly. Reaching out, Garner seized Bishop’s sleeve. “What now, for Christ’s – ” the other man started to say, his voice harsh with annoyance. Then the body was yanked into the surrounding darkness so quickly it seemed as though it had vanished into thin air. Only its blood, a smeared trail into shadow, testified to its ever having been there at all. That, and the jostled flashlight, which rolled in a lazy half circle, its unobstructed light spearing first into empty darkness and then into smooth cold stone before settling at last on what might have been a carven, clawed foot. The beam flickered and went out.
“What the fuck . . .” Bishop said.
A scream erupted from the tent behind them.
Faber.
Garner broke into a clumsy run, high-stepping through the piled snow. The other men shouted behind him but their words were lost in the wind and in his own hard breathing. His body was moving according to its training but his mind was pinned like a writhing insect in the hole behind him, in the stark, burning image of what he had just seen. He was transported by fear and adrenaline and by something else, by some other emotion he had not felt in many years or perhaps ever in his life, some heart-filling glorious exaltation that threatened to snuff him out like a dying cinder.
Faber was sitting upright in the tent – it stank of sweat and urine and kerosene, eye-watering and sharp – his thick hair a dark corona around his head, his skin as pale as a cavefish. He was still trying to scream, but his voice had broken, and his utmost effort could now produce only a long, cracked wheeze, which seemed forced through his throat like steel wool. His leg stuck out of the blanket, still grossly swollen.
The warmth from the Nansen cooker was almost oppressive.
Garner dropped to his knees beside him and tried to ease him back down into his sleeping bag, but Faber resisted. He fixed his eyes on Garner, his painful wheeze trailing into silence. Hooking his fingers in Garner’s collar, he pulled him close, so close that Garner could smell the sour taint of his breath.
“Faber, relax, relax!”
“It –” Faber’s voice locked. He swallowed and tried again. “It laid an egg in me.”
Bishop and Connelly crowded through the tent flap, and Garner felt suddenly hemmed in, overwhelmed by the heat and the stink and the steam rising in wisps from their clothes as they pushed closer, staring down at Faber.
“What’s going on?” Bishop asked. “Is he all right?”
Faber eyed them wildly. Ignoring them, Garner placed his hands on Faber’s cheeks and turned his head toward him. “Look at me, Faber. Look at me. What do you mean?”
Faber found a way to smile. “In my dream. It put my head inside its body, and it laid an egg in me.”
Connelly said, “He’s delirious. See what happens when you leave him alone?”
Garner fished an ampule of morphine out of his bag. Faber saw what he was doing and his body bucked.
“No!” he screamed, summoning his voice again. “No!” His leg thrashed out, knocking over the Nansen cooker. Cursing, Connelly dove at the overturned stove, but it was already too late. Kerosene splashed over the blankets and supplies, engulfing the tent in flames. The men moved in a sudden tangle of panic. Bishop stumbled back out of the tent and Connelly shoved Garner aside – Garner rolled over on his back and came to rest there – as he lunged for Faber’s legs, dragging him backward. Screaming, Faber clutched at the ground to resist, but Connelly was too strong. A moment later, Faber was gone, dragging a smoldering rucksack with him.
Still inside the tent, Garner lay back, watching as the fire spread hungrily along the roof
, dropping tongues of flame onto the ground, onto his own body. Garner closed his eyes as the heat gathered him up like a furnace-hearted lover.
What he felt, though, was not the fire’s heat, but the cool breath of underground earth, the silence of the deep tomb buried beneath the ice shelf. The stairs descended before him, and at the bottom he heard a noise again: A woman’s voice, calling for him. Wondering where he was.
Elizabeth, he called, his voice echoing off the stone. Are you there?
If only he’d gotten to see her, he thought. If only he’d gotten to bury her. To fill those beautiful eyes with dirt. To cover her in darkness.
Elizabeth, can you hear me?
Then Connelly’s big arms enveloped him, and he felt the heat again, searing bands of pain around his legs and chest. It was like being wrapped in a star. “I ought to let you burn, you stupid son of a bitch,” Connelly hissed, but he didn’t. He lugged Garner outside – Garner opened his eyes in time to see the canvas part in front of him, like fiery curtains – and dumped him in the snow instead. The pain went away, briefly, and Garner mourned its passing. He rolled over and lifted his head. Connelly stood over him, his face twisted in disgust. Behind him the tent flickered and burned like a dropped torch.
Faber’s quavering voice hung over it all, rising and falling like the wind.
Connelly tossed an ampule and a syringe onto the ground by Garner. “Faber’s leg’s opened up again,” he said. “Go and do your job.”
Garner climbed slowly to his feet, feeling the skin on his chest and legs tighten. He’d been burned; he’d have to wait until he’d tended to Faber to find out how badly.
“And then help us pack up,” Bishop called as he led the dogs to their harnesses, his voice harsh and strained. “We’re getting the hell out of here.”
By the time they reached the depot, Faber was dead. Connelly spat into the snow and turned away to unhitch the dogs, while Garner and Bishop went inside and started a fire. Bishop started water boiling for coffee. Garner unpacked their bedclothes and dressed the cots, moving gingerly. Once the place was warm enough he undressed and surveyed the burn damage. It would leave scars.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2013 Page 43
