The Dunfield Terror

by William Meikle

  * * *

  “We can bring her in,” Gallagher said. “Salvage the oil. We could be rich men by the morning.”

  I cannot say I wasn’t tempted, if only for a second. Then I saw it in my mind’s eye; the taverns and whorehouses overrun by tentacled beasts, burrowing into drunken flesh, feeding on babes and the old alike, taking the town by storm even before it knew what had happened. I knew in that instant I could never allow it.

  But I could see by the look in Gallagher’s face that he was lost in greed with no thought for the consequences. I did the only thing I could think of. I smacked him in the jaw, twice, as hard as I was able before he saw the punches coming. To my relief he fell, out cold. He was a big lad, but I was able to manhandle him onto the rowboat easily enough.

  I left him there, took up his firebrand and, although every fiber of my being was telling me to flee, made my way back down into the hold to do what needed to be done.

  * * *

  It was dark down there. And once again every sound, every shadow, made me jump. But the fear of what might happen to my town was even stronger, and drove me forward. I kicked over the nearest barrel, then another, and two more before one finally obliged me and split open, spilling oil through the hold, a river running between the rest of the barrels.

  The skittering sounds got louder, but did not approach any closer, and I actually managed a grim smile as I put brand to oil and the deck blazed in flame.

  Once more I fled upward, fire nipping at my heels. A creature threw itself down at me from above but I was in no mood for pleasantries. I caught it by the tentacles, slung it around my head, and tossed it straight down into the flame. It took some layers of skin from my hand as it left, but that was a small price to pay to see it hit the fire and burst in flame.

  The first barrel blew as I reached the main deck, the concussion almost blowing me off my feet. The whole vessel shook and lurched sharply to port. I had a bad couple of seconds when I couldn’t find the winch for the lifeboat, and I only released it just as a second explosion almost tore the whaler in half. We fell, my stomach in my mouth, hitting the water hard and almost overturning before I was able to get an oar in my hand and start to put some distance between us and the now-burning whaler.

  Gallagher woke, groggily, and had anger in his eyes as he saw what I had done. That anger quickly turned to terror as the sea between us and the rapidly sinking vessel started to seethe and roil. A mass of tentacles rose up, as if tasting the air, seeking us out. Scores of the creatures had escaped from the sinking ship…and they were making straight for us.

  * * *

  “Row, you bugger,” I shouted, and Gallagher thankfully did not argue.

  Two more explosions racked the stricken whaler, then a third, huge blast that filled the air with smoke and splinters and ash. When I could see clearly again, there was no sign that the boat had ever been there save for a mass of wreckage bobbing on the waters.

  But we were far from clear of danger. The tentacled beasts swam faster than we could row, and were now mere yards from overrunning us. I gripped the oar, meaning to use it as a club, ready to take some of them to hell with me.

  And that’s when the sound came from out beyond the narrows, a high wail, like the one we had heard from the creatures earlier, but deeper, resonant, like a great church organ being readied for play, high and clear even above the roar of the wind. The swimming beasts stopped in their tracks, their interest in us gone. Scores of mouths opened, the feeding tubes raised high out of the water. As one, they, too, wailed, answering some distant call. The noise from beyond the narrows grew louder, more insistent.

  The swimming beasts started to move again, not toward us, but off toward the narrows.

  I turned back to get our bearings, intending to head at all speed for the safety of the harbor, so I didn’t see what Gallagher saw, but I recognized the shock in his face right enough.

  “Oh my God, it’s huge,” he said.

  * * *

  He wouldn’t speak of it again, not until later, in the warmth and comfort of the tavern.

  “It filled the whole of the narrows,” he said.

  “What did?” I asked, but I was very much afraid that I did not want to hear the answer.

  He replied in a whisper so none but I could hear, chilling me once more to the bone.

  “The singing fog called them home.”

  21

  Present day

  I staggered out of the depot into a snowy morning in Trinity—and that was all it was, just a bit of snow, large fluffy flakes drifting gently from a flat white sky. The wind had died almost completely. It looked like the storm had finally blown itself out.

  But was there anything left to save?

  Normally in the aftermath of a storm there would be sound—the scrape of shovel on ice, the whir and chug of diesel-powered snowblowers or the deep roar of the plows. This morning there was just silence, deep and ominous.

  The snow was so deep I had to push and climb my way out of the depot parking lot and into the main road, which in itself was drifted higher than my head in places. I stood in the middle of the road and yelled at the top of my voice. The echo rang around Gun Hill behind the town, but that was the only answer I got.

  I thought about getting the Skidoo running and doing another tour of the town—but that would mean climbing back over the drift around the depot, and I wasn’t at all sure I had the energy for it. I made my way down the slope toward the church hall, slogging through drifts, almost rolling in places. There was no sign that anyone had been along apart from me. I felt like the last man alive.

  That thought gave me pause.

  What if I’m the only one left?

  I found a crumpled pack of smokes in my pocket, and managed to get one straightened up and lit, the taste serving to remind me that I was running on fumes and in need of food—and coffee, lots of coffee.

  I stood still for as long as it took me to finish the smoke, hoping to hear a sign of another living soul. The power lines hummed quietly overhead, but apart from that, there was only my own breathing and the thud of my heartbeat in my ears.

  I flipped the butt away—the hiss it made as it hit the drift was the loudest noise around—and forced my way through the snowbank in search of company.

  My first stop was at the church hall. It lay as empty as it had before, with no sign that anyone had been there since my last visit in the dark. The power was on though, and I was able to find the makings for a pot of coffee. Along with most of a packet of cookies, the brew did much to warm me up and make me feel a bit more human. I washed up after myself, more from a need to keep busy and stop myself from thinking than from any innate tidiness.

  As I saw it, I had two options—make a run for it in the Skidoo, or use the same machine to do another tour of the town checking for survivors. I know what I wanted to do—but I also knew my duty. Too many had died on my watch already—there was only a life of booze and smokes ahead for me if I let them down again.

  I left the hall, intending to make my way back up to the depot. That’s when I heard it—I realized I’d been hearing it for a couple of seconds, it just hadn’t registered. Somewhere close by a heavy engine—maybe more than one—was running.

  And it was getting closer, fast.

  The cavalry finally came over the crest of the hill above me.

  * * *

  There were three long silver trailer trucks, lined up behind the biggest plow I’ve ever seen. It cleared the church parking lot in only a few minutes, and seconds later the three trailers were lined up side by side on the gravel.

  Everything was a frenzy of frantic activity for a while after that. The first two people I saw pointed guns at me, and the third shouted at me, so the cavalry weren’t quite what I expected. They seemed more intent on setting up equipment than they were in either talking to me or searching the town, and when I tried to protest, I had a gun pointed at me again, so I decided to keep my peace for a while and observe.
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br />   They took over the church hall and within minutes had trestles, tables and chairs laden with high-tech laptops, oscilloscopes and a variety of pieces of hardware that I didn’t understand. It was only when they had everything set up to their satisfaction that they deigned to talk to me, and by then I wasn’t in the best of moods.

  “What bloody kind of rescue is this?” I said as a tall, stocky man left one of the tables and came over to me.

  He put out a hand for me to shake.

  “Colonel Breem,” he said. “I’m in charge here.”

  “I doubt that,” I replied.

  He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes, and there was something about the way he carried himself that told me that maybe I shouldn’t push too hard. But I was dog-tired, angry and ready to pop. So I pushed when I didn’t get a reply to my first question.

  “I said—”

  “I heard you the first time,” the man replied, and I got that smile again. “And I believe you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. This isn’t a rescue. It’s a research mission.”

  That took the wind out of my sails completely. I sat down and fumbled a smoke out of the packet. The man didn’t join me. He stood over me, and I was all too aware of his height and his bearing.

  “We need to debrief you,” he said. “We need to know what you’ve seen.”

  I stifled a laugh—once I started, I might not be able to stop.

  “You came in past the campsite, didn’t you? You saw what happened there?” The man nodded, but didn’t speak. For the first time I saw what might be a spark of humanity in him, but he was keeping it down. I recognized the look. He had a job to do, and he meant to get it done.

  “Is it the same all over?” he asked.

  It was my turn to nod.

  “Can you stop it?” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “We’re not even sure what it is—that’s why we’re here. To get a handle on it, and try to figure it out. All we have is an old journal from the experiments in the fifties, and some heresay evidence from what might be some unreliable narrators. As I said—we need to know what you know. And we need to know it fast.”

  I told him what I knew. It took a while in the telling—he kept interrupting me to ask questions that I had no way of answering. Along the way I learned some of what they knew too, although it didn’t help me much—talk of harmonic and magnetic resonance, plasma fields and parallel universes was the sort of stuff I normally switched off in favor of hockey when it turned up on the television.

  After an hour he was frustrated, and so was I. We declared a mutual draw and decamped to the coffee pot, at which point he lightened up—just enough that I noticed.

  “At least the storm has passed,” he said as he dropped three heaped spoonfuls of sugar into his cup and stirred vigorously.

  “Don’t worry—there’ll be another along soon enough. Welcome to The Rock in winter.”

  He waved a hand in the general direction of the door.

  “The thing at the campsite—it’s like that all over?”

  I shook my head.

  “As I said, we never got round to checking everybody—but that’s what I’m worried about. If you would only—”

  He put up a hand again.

  “We’ve been over that already. My orders are to investigate and contain. And the investigation bit comes first. I’m not about to let my men go running about out there without protection.”

  “There is no protection from that thing.”

  That got me another grim smile.

  “Maybe there is—the boffins have been working on something for years, and this is their chance to see if they’ve got it right. Come on—let me introduce you to the folks with the brains.”

  * * *

  The brains were four people hunched over a table in the corner of the hall, and they were obviously far too busy to be interrupted just then. They seemed very excited about something on a large monitor.

  “There it is,” one of them said. “Just like we thought—a rolling ball of electromagnetic flux. This is awesome.”

  “Awesome isn’t a word I normally use in the face of death and destruction,” I said, suddenly angry again. All four turned to look at me as if I’d just arrived from another planet. “This thing has royally fucked my town—for all I know, everybody else is dead. It’s far from fucking awesome.”

  The original speaker at least had the good grace to look embarrassed, but all too quickly they were all crowded round the monitor again, babbling in incomprehensible—to me anyway—jargon.

  “I need another smoke,” I said, turning away.

  Breem surprised me.

  “I’ll join you—let’s stand by the door.”

  My remaining cigarettes were too bashed up, but he had a new packet that he opened with the practiced ease of a seasoned smoker. He passed me one, and lit us both with a flick of an old battered Zippo, the sound immediately reminding me of old Pat, who’d used one similar all the years I’d known him.

  I looked out over my town—there was no smoke from any chimney, no sound but the hum of electrical equipment in the hall behind me. I was alone. And as quickly as that, I had tears running down my face and a cold pit in my heart.

  “What can I do to help?” I said.

  Breem sucked smoke before replying.

  “You’ve done a bit already—there’s two places we need to see—both feature heavily in all the stories—the wreck site in Dunfield Bay…”

  “Good luck with that,” I replied. “The bay will be mostly iced over for weeks to come now after this storm. You won’t get a boat out, and it’s too treacherous to try walking over. But let me guess the other—I’ve heard the stories too—you’ll want to see what’s what in the Village Inn garden?”

  Breem nodded.

  “As soon as the brains are ready, that’s our first stop.”

  “Then I’ll take you there,” I replied. “And we’ll see whether they’re as smart as they think they are.”

  * * *

  It took a good quarter of an hour to get the big plow and the three trailers down to the Village Inn and clear the small parking area enough for everything to fit in. It was a tight squeeze and the trailers and crew made enough noise to wake the whole town if anyone was listening.

  Nobody came out to see what the commotion was about, and that in itself told me everything I needed to know—either survivors were too afraid to venture out, or the fog had got them all. Whether or not these new arrivals knew what they were doing, they were my only points of human contact—and I found that, this morning at least—I needed them.

  I watched as they set up around the inn’s garden. They had four tall stacks, each nearly six feet tall, almost like expensive audio speakers, placed in the corners of the space. Each of the stacks was then hooked by thick cabling to a heavy-duty generator in one of the trailers. When they switched it on, the air filled with a throb and hum that sounded far too loud in the quiet of the morning after the storm. It was still snowing, but when I looked up, I saw that the flakes melted some three feet above our heads, and no precipitation was reaching the ground.

  Breem saw me looking.

  “I told you,” he said. “Containment. That’s why we’re here.”

  The four that Breem had called the brains went to sit inside one of the trailers—I caught a glimpse inside—more monitors, oscilloscopes and machines I couldn’t fathom. I stayed out in the parking space, looking in to the garden with half a dozen armed men and Breem, all of us waiting, wondering what was coming next.

  22

  From the journal of Duncan Campbell, 25th July 1955

  Muir had planned to wait for the light of day to make his attempt at healing both his body and the breach in reality we had caused, but over the course of the evening his state deteriorated markedly. By eight o’ clock, I was starting to wonder whether he was even still human.

  We had a light supper brought up to my room—if the innkeeper had seen what was sitti
ng on the bed, we might have had to suffer far worse than being turfed out on our ears. Muir, as I have said, was going fast. Both his arms were now rather longer than they had been—almost serpentine and sinuous as they moved. His hands were still hands—but there was a definite web forming between each of his fingers, and Muir had been forced to remove his shoes as his feet had grown too long—stretched to almost comic proportions, and flattened—like flippers.

  “For pity’s sake, man, let’s get you to a doctor,” I said.

  Muir laughed bitterly.

  “And what do you think they’d do about this?” He lifted his shirt. Suckers covered his whole torso from neck to waist, moist red mouths gasping as if struggling for air. “And that’s not the worst, Duncan.”

  “What in blazes could be worse?”

  Muir tapped at his head.

  “In here—I hear singing; I hear high, beautiful singing. It’s calling to me, constantly. I don’t know how long I can hold out against it. I must go to that wreck again, Duncan. And it must be now—if we wait until morning, there might be nothing left of me and…”

  He broke down and sobbed. I could have done something, I suppose—made some attempt at comfort. But I stayed in my chair, smoking a pipe and wondering whether it was too late to save myself.

  I was so disgusted at having harbored the thought that when Muir announced it was now or never, I put on my outdoor clothes and accompanied him down to the jetty.