by DD Barant
He gets up from the table, leaving his glass of blood half-finished. “The Department of Defense is already on high alert. If we can’t turn this around in the next twenty-four hours, we’re going to have summon Shub-Niggurath. He and Ghatanothoa are supposedly ancient enemies; we think that’s why Stoker chose him.”
“Two alien gods, duking it out for possession of the planet. Yeah, that’s the smart choice. You think there’ll be anyone left alive after that?”
“Maybe not,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean there won’t be survivors.”
I stare at his back as he leaves. Cold, ruthless, practical.
And grieving.
SIXTEEN
I really don’t know what I’m doing on another plane.
I know where I’m going; I just don’t know what I’m going to do when I get there. All I know is I have to do something, and this is what I came up with.
I look around me. I’m on a C-17 Globemaster, a military aircraft used to haul paratroopers and cargo around. It’s a big, noisy, echoing space, the ceiling a good twenty feet above me. The walls are metal, lined with cables and conduits and various pieces of equipment bolted to the superstructure. Seats are flat against the wall facing in, while pallets stacked with wooden crates and webbed with cargo netting sit on rails that run down the middle of the floor. It sort of feels like flying in an industrial Quonset.
Charlie and I are the only passengers. The pilot, co-pilot, and cargomaster are all up front in the cockpit, while we sit back here like two lonely peas in a big empty can. I’m glad he’s with me—right now, it feels like he’s the only one I can trust. Not that my judgment in that area is particularly reliable, but I stubbornly cling to the notion that not everyone is a backstabbing traitor with a secret agenda.
Charlie’s dressed in a bright red parka and matching pants. Where we’re going, his skin can get cold enough to turn brittle and shatter like glass. The parka has internal heating units to mimic body warmth and keep that from happening.
I was surprised how little arguing it took to get Cassius to agree to this. I got the feeling that he’s desperate enough to try anything, that the clock is running down and we’re out of options. One point five million paralyzed worldwide before they finally eliminated all Ghatanothoa footage from the Web. There are still countless copies stored on hard drives of course, but DoD shamans are working on ways to locate and neutralize those.
And I’m about to touch down in Antarctica.
The plane doesn’t have rows of windows like a passenger jet, so I can’t really see what the place looks like from the air—lots of white, I’d imagine. I’m less concerned with sightseeing at this point than I am with coming up with some sort of plan. You know, a save-the-world-from-being-destroyed-by-other-dimensional-gods sort of plan.
Once we land, we’re met by a large vehicle that looks a bit like a trailer on bulldozer treads. The driver is so bundled up I can’t tell their sex, let alone if they’re a pire, a thrope, or a lem. The sun’s up, a hard, bright disk in a blue sky, so they could be any of the above.
The air is bitterly cold, and the snow glare is blinding; the driver lends me a pair of sunglasses. I put them on and we chug our way to the research base.
McMurdo Station is a cluster of small, rectangular buildings around a central Quonset hut. Our driver must be a pire, because all the thropes I see are in half-were form, some of them wearing parkas as well. Even zerkers would throw on some extra clothing in this climate; it can drop to forty below at night, and that’s without the windchill. In the summer.
This is definitely a military base. There’s no fence, no razor wire, but I see more than a few heavily armed soldiers prowling around; one of them escorts us from the vehicle to a building with a sign on the door that simply reads: Research C.
Inside, it’s merely cold as opposed to frigid. Charlie shucks his parka and hangs it up beside the door, but I keep mine on. The guard doesn’t come in with us.
We’re in a lab, I guess, but it’s like no lab I’ve ever seen. Cracked leather-bound manuscripts are lined up neatly on metal shelves. Clusters of shrunken heads dangle from hooks like grotesque fruit. Yellowing parchments are displayed inside hermetically sealed transparent cylinders. A glass cabinet holds jars that seem to be full of living smoke, curling and writhing in their neatly labeled little prisons. Microscopes and autoclaves stand next to three-legged iron braziers and tiny, intricately carved wooden shrines.
There’s only one person in the room, a short, wide figure dressed in garish polyester orange pants and a white lab coat stained with brown and purple splotches. I can’t figure out if it’s a man or woman at first; despite the obvious breasts, she also has long, shaggy whiskers sprouting from either side of her jawline like sideburns making a break for freedom. Her hair is pulled into two absurd pigtails that are actually shorter than her facial hair.
“Ah,” she says. Her voice is marginally more feminine, so I guess she’s just an especially hirsute thrope. “You are Agent Valchek. I am Dr. Antoinette Simard.”
“Nice to meet you. This is Charlie Al—”
“You should not be here.” Her voice is blunt and doesn’t sound at all French—more German, I think. “You are wasting your time, and more important, mine.”
She’s probably right. But I don’t like being barked at, so I snap, “Oh? You have something more important to do? Maybe you’re working on adding a few more alien gods to the mix, turn this into a party. Of course, they’ll have to settle for the measly million or so human souls left on the planet.”
Her eyes narrow. “I am aware of the seriousness of the situation. All my energies have been focused on the scroll of Undying Release, said to be the only way to reverse the Ghatanothoa paralysis. If we can accomplish that, the trapped souls will no longer feed him; he will withdraw. What I fail to see is how someone with no occult or scientific training thinks she can possibly do what some of the finest minds—”
“Yeah, well, like it or not, that’s what I’m here for. So show me the damned thing already.”
She glowers at me, then turns on her heel and stalks over to a table with a tattered piece of parchment under a pane of glass. It’s covered in some kind of glyphs or runes, all of which look completely alien. If I was hoping for some kind of picture or symbol that I could point to and say, Aha! Clearly the answer is to spin around three times and spit north by northwest while speaking Albanian, I’m out of luck.
I stare at the parchment. I reach out, put the tip of one finger against the glass, trying to will some kind of inspiration to come.
“You have come a long way for nothing,” Dr. Simard says. “Now, if you don’t mind—”
I’m peering at the frame that holds the glass in place. “How is this held on? Ah, little screws . . .”
“What do you think you’re doing? That parchment is ancient—you can’t just manhandle it like yesterday’s newspaper!”
She tries to stop me, and is suddenly five feet farther away than she was a second ago. Charlie smiles at her before he puts her down.
I lift the glass up and set it aside. I reach out and gently put both my hands on the actual scroll itself, knowing that I may just be destroying our only hope.
For a second, nothing happens.
And then the alien scribblings on the page rearrange themselves, flow like ink spilled in water, into somewhat archaic but perfectly readable English. I let out the breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding in.
“What did you hope to accomplish by that?” Dr. Simard demands. “All you are doing is damaging an invaluable artifact—”
“Please be quiet,” I say. “I’m reading.”
She shuts up.
Cassius picks up on the first ring—he must be in-between meetings. “Jace?”
“Yeah. I’ve read the scroll, and I know how to reverse the Ghatanothoa effect.”
Stunned silence for all of two seconds. I’d gladly give half a year’s pay to be able to see the look on his
face right now. “How?”
“Turns out it was mystically encrypted against supernatural creatures—only a human being can read it. Now here’s the bad news: the scroll has to be read, out loud, in the presence of the Big G himself. By a human. That’ll push him back into his own dimension and reverse the effects on all his victims.”
“I’ll arrange for a volunteer. Get the scroll to Mu as fast as you can—”
“No. I’m the volunteer, Cassius. We don’t have time to argue about this, and for all we know I’m the only one who’ll even be able to read the scroll. We can’t risk screwing around.”
He hesitates. David Cassius, centuries-old vampire used to sacrificing his own troops like pawns on a chessboard, actually hesitates when it comes to putting me in harm’s way.
“Yes, you’re absolutely right. Get on the plane. I’ll see what I can do in terms of support.” He hangs up.
I turn to Charlie. “You know, I really should have insisted on something about frequent-flier miles in my contract. . . .”
SEVENTEEN
Twelve more hours in the air. Twelve more hours of being able to do absolutely nothing while the end of the world gets closer. Except, of course, reflect on the fact that I’m the one whose shoulders everything rests on.
So we play cards.
Me, Charlie, the cargomaster, and occasionally the pilot or co-pilot. The cargomaster is a cheerful thrope sergeant named Wilma, who efficiently relieves me of several paychecks. The pilot and co-pilot, both pires, are James and Enrico. Charlie does a pretty good job at cleaning them out, one at a time.
It’s funny. An imminent apocalypse is rushing straight at us—well, actually, we’re rushing at it—but somehow, I have a really good time. I’d happily have these guys over for a few beers and do it all over again; we eat crappy junk food and make bad jokes and get to know each other, all the while locked in a big metal barrel in the sky hurtling toward our doom. It’s actually the most normal, social thing I’ve done since I got to this bizarre world, and I’m thankful for it. I even get in an hour or so of sleep.
Then it’s time to jump out of the plane.
There’s no runway, and a C-17 can’t land on water. Charlie and I strap on parachutes, wave good-bye, and step out into empty air.
I won’t make a big thing out of it. I’ve gone skydiving before, so it wasn’t like I was terrified—well, okay, I was, but not for the reasons most people would be. I had other things on my mind.
There’s somebody waiting for us on the beach.
I don’t know how he got here ahead of us—maybe Cassius pulled in some favors from NASA and had a rocket strapped to his ass. However he got there, Dr. Pete waves at us as we drift down from the sky.
I touch down lightly, get out of my harness quickly. Charlie makes landfall with an audible thump, but his body language is as graceful as a large jungle cat leaping from a tree.
“Jace,” Dr. Pete says. “How are you?”
I give the question careful thought. “Broke, stranded, possibly premenstrual. Let’s go kick some ass.”
I’m already striding up the beach. Dr. Pete reaches out and snags my arm. “Hold up a sec, okay? I want to take a quick look at you.”
“Appreciate the concern, but this isn’t the time for a checkup.”
“It is, actually.” He’s studying my face with a professional focus. “Have you had any more hallucinatory episodes? Any unusual smells, tastes, or somatic sensations?”
“I’ve been taking my Urthbone like a good girl, Doc. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get going before my nerve completely evaporates—”
“This isn’t about your RDT, Jace. It’s about your exposure to the scroll.”
I sigh. “I only read it once, okay? Then it went into this little mystically shielded poster tube”—I pat the cylinder I have strapped to my thigh—“and I haven’t looked at it since.”
“HPLC isn’t just powerful; it’s insidious,” he says. “Often, the first exposure is completely harmless—except for a subtle compulsion to reexamine the original artifact, site, or being. Have you had any urges to read the scroll again in the last twelve hours?”
“Well . . . maybe, just a little. But I haven’t.”
He frowns. “I see. Let me test your reflexes.”
He puts me through a series of tests, some mundane, some odd—at one point he asks me if I’ve had any unusual thoughts concerning fish. “No,” I tell him, “but I did have an erotic dream featuring Mayor McCheese once.”
“Who hasn’t?” he replies, and I’m suddenly glad he’s here.
When he’s done, he tells me he’s coming with me.
“What? You have to be kidding. What could you possibly do—”
“I can keep you alive, Jace.” He stares at me levelly. “Your blood pressure is low, your heartbeat is elevated. Your reflexes are erratic. You’re somewhere around a seven point nine on the Derleth reaction scale. Even if you’re not aware of it, reading that scroll once has affected you on a profound physiological and psychological level. Reading it again—out loud—will put your body through tremendous stresses. People exposed to high levels of HPLC have been known to age years in a moment, to go blind and deaf, to drop dead from fear. If I’m there, I may be able to buffer or counteract some of the effects.”
I pause. “You have a helluva beachside manner, you know that? Okay, it’s your funeral. But do me a favor, will you?”
“What’s that?”
“If it looks like I’m about to die, or go irretrievably insane—give me some of the fun drugs, okay?”
He smiles, but it’s a little forced. “You got it.”
And then the three of us begin our climb.
It’s eerily quiet—no more spiral of circling birds overhead. The reason is all around us; the ground is littered with white and gray feathered shapes, dead gulls and other seabirds lying sprawled or crumpled on the rocky terrain. I have the overpowering conviction that they simply circled overhead until they fell out of the air, too exhausted or starved to stay aloft, but unable to leave, hypnotized by some subliminal call pulsing from deep underground. The stench from the dead sea life is even worse than before.
We clamber our way upslope. I have better boots this time and thick gloves for gripping mollusk-armored rocks. The black mouth of the temple gets larger and larger, gaping at us like a hungry airplane hangar, until we’re standing before it. Dr. Pete, like Tanaka, has chosen to remain in his human form.
We enter. We wrestle the stone plug out of the way and put on helmets with headlamps. Charlie uncoils a thick length of rope, and runs one end back to the entrance, where he ties it around a boulder.
The other goes down the hole, and then so do we.
At the first deep lungful of air I want to turn back. That terrible sense of alienness returns, like the air I’m breathing has had the oxygen replaced by something just similar enough to fool my lungs but not my brain. I begin to hyperventilate, and Dr. Pete notices immediately and calms me down with a few words. His voice sounds strained but under control.
We descend about thirty feet before reaching the floor. It’s simply an antechamber, maybe fifteen feet in diameter, crudely carved out of the rock. At the far end, a stone arch outlines the mouth of a tunnel.
Charlie takes point; Dr. Pete brings up the rear. The tunnel slopes downward at a fairly steep angle, and it goes for a long, long way, first curving left, then right, always heading down. My head is starting to pulse with some kind of internal pressure—I can’t tell if it’s an HPLC effect or just the increasing depth.
Maybe the strangest thing about the tunnel is that it’s bone-dry—dusty, even. I can clearly see the treadmarks of the robot probe that preceded us at my feet. I don’t know how deep we are, but we’re definitely way below the waterline—and before Stoker dragged it topside, the whole mountain was at the bottom of the sea.
The tunnel finally levels and straightens out. I think I see something at the far end, and get everyone to swi
tch off their headlamps for a moment.
There’s a faint, bluish glow in the distance, pulsing in time to the throb in the back of my skull. It makes me feel hungry and nauseous at the same time.
We turn our headlamps back on and proceed. The farther down the tunnel we get, the stranger I feel. Everything’s contradictory. My body’s made of lead; my head’s a balloon. I’m exhausted and charged with nervous energy. I feel like I’m heading for the most terrible place in the universe and like I’m going home.
The tunnel seems to go on forever, yet we reach the end of it almost instantly. “Whoa,” I say. My own voice sounds weird, like I’m speaking a language I don’t understand. “This . . . this is intense.” The tunnel bends abruptly, the blue glow pulsating just around the corner.
“How . . . how are you doing, Jace?” Dr. Pete manages.
“Holding on. Just barely. Charlie?”
Charlie’s tone is almost conversational. “Kind of getting the urge to kill both of you. Think I’m gonna head back.”
“Sure, okay, no problem.”
“Yeah, yeah, good idea. You do that.”
Charlie turns and trudges away. It’s just Dr. Pete and me now.
I unseal the tube with hands that don’t feel like my own. Ever notice how hands look like spiders? Tiny legs made of bone and skin, scuttling around, crawling over things with their little fingernails going tic tic tic—
“Jace. The manuscript.”
I’m standing there, clutching the tube with both hands. I force myself to upend the tube and slide the rolled-up parchment out. The pulsing in my head instantly subsides to a bearable level, clearing some of the murk from my thoughts. “I’m okay. Thanks.”
“All right. This . . . this is how we’re going to do this. We’re going to back in there. We have to be close. You’re going to read the scroll with your back to the thing, and I’m going to be between you and it. That way, I can see how you’re doing and help you if you need it.” His voice is ragged but sure. Dr. Pete is a lot tougher than I thought.