The Spawning

by Tim Curran

  The Spawning is published by Elder Signs Press, Inc.

  This book is © 2010 Elder Signs Press, Inc.

  All material © 2010 by Tim Curran.

  Cover and interior design © 2010 by Deborah Jones.

  Edited by Charles P. Zaglanis.

  All characters within this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is strictly coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the written persmission of the publisher.

  FIRST EDITION

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Published in July 2010

  ISBN: 1-934501-19-0

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  Published by Elder Signs Press

  P.O. Box 389

  Lake Orion, MI 48361-0389

  www.eldersignspress.com

  For all those lost in the Cold White . . .

  PROLOGUE

  BEHOLD, I STAND AT THE DOOR AND KNOCK

  Evil is of old date

  —Arab proverb

  1

  MOUNT HOBB RESEARCH STATION,

  QUEEN MAUD MOUNTAINS

  JANUARY 13

  ANTARCTICA.

  Austral Summer.

  Butler came awake in the semi-darkness, knowing and not knowing. She instinctively sensed something was wrong. She could feel a disruption, a shattering of the ether around her like spiderwebbing cracks in a broken window pane spreading out, intersecting, connecting until they formed a great ragged chasm that she thought she might just fall into and never, ever find her way back out of again.

  She blinked.

  Took a couple deep breaths.

  The digital clock on the nightstand said it was 11:30 p.m. exactly.

  Looking around her room, she had the oddest sense there had been a subtle transition as she slept. Things had shifted, moved, been handled and placed back in their respective positions just awry enough so only she would notice.

  And it wasn’t just her possessions, but the entire room itself.

  It was out of sync somehow. Even in the darkness, she was certain that everything was closer together or farther apart, disarranged ever so slightly.

  It made her feel claustrophobic, violated almost.

  Outside the main compound, the wind screamed like it was frightened. Snow and fine ice crystals blew around in a whirlwind scraping against the outer walls like a Saharan sandstorm, desperate to get in and steal warmth.

  The wind had not woken her. It was something else.

  Lying there in her joggers and sweatshirt, her tongue brushing over her wind-burned lips, she tried to figure out what it was. She was almost certain her name had been called, a papery and rustling sound that broke into her sleep.

  She sat up, listening, feeling the chill of the room that even the electric heat could not completely chase away.

  Her senses were activated, heightened, keen and sharp.

  She could feel the station around her and, like her room, it did not feel right.

  Something’s wrong here.

  Breathing shallowly, trying to shut out the boom of her own heart, she listened for something. Anything. The sound of snoring from the other rooms. Somebody making a sleepy vigil to the head.

  But there was nothing, nothing at all.

  The station was still as a tomb and that was not right. There was always somebody about. One of the maintenance crew or somebody bumping around down in the kitchen, the distant murmur of a DVD being watched or a CD being listened to. Maybe one of the guys outside firing up the plows. A scientist crossing the station quadrant, making for the meteorology hut or the astronomy dome.

  There was always something.

  There were twenty-five people at Hobb . . . but right then, she was certain it was empty.

  Listen.

  Yes, she was hearing a sound now.

  One that came and went very quickly. An odd sort of sound. A scratching like a fork had been dragged over the wall farther down the corridor.

  She tensed.

  Heard it again. Nearer this time.

  Somebody was out there, walking down the corridor with an odd thumping locomotion that did not sound like feet at all. She could hear them brushing the walls, scratching them as they passed. There was a rubbery, slithery sort of noise out there like snakes coiling over other snakes. And then an acrid, sharp stink like chemicals right outside her door.

  Whoever or whatever was out there paused before her room now, breathing with a low susurration of wind blown through bellows.

  Butler was terrified.

  The fear moved through her in sickening hot waves. She almost felt physically ill with it. She was shaking, a white heat spreading out in her chest.

  There was a scraping at the door, a rustling and busy sound like vines—a forest of them—were brushing against the door, trying to find a way in.

  The doorknob began to shake, it rattled back and forth.

  She always kept it locked. Something you learned to do when you were but one of three women in a camp full of randy men.

  That breathing again, deepening now as if its owner was growing excited.

  Then a whispering voice: “Butler.”

  She nearly screamed at the sound of it.

  As it was, she had to press a fist to her mouth and bite down on her knuckles so she didn’t cry out. That voice. Dear God, reedy and trilling. Like the way an insect might call your name. She wanted to think that it was maybe Cortland or Van Erb out there, both of whom were fond of practical jokes, but she knew it wasn’t them.

  Human vocal cords could not make such a sound.

  Whatever was out there . . . she could not imagine what it might be.

  It’s waiting for you. It knows you’re here.

  The chemical stink was still heavy in the air, horribly pungent.

  Then those padding, thumping steps moved off down the corridor.

  For five minutes, nothing but silence.

  The smell faded, left only a curious after-odor like you might smell in a taxidermist’s workshop. The scent of dehydrated things.

  She swung her feet off the bed, wishing she had a gun. But they were not allowed at the station. Trying to be quiet, she slid open a drawer and pulled out a jackknife. She didn’t know what any of this was about, but she had no doubt she was in danger. Nobody had to tell her that: she could feel it right up her spine and down low in her belly.

  Not knowing if it was a good idea or not, she turned on the lights.

  Everything looked the way she had left it when she went to bed some six hours previously. But still there was that nagging suspicion that someone or something had been in her room, looking through her things and perhaps standing over her as she slept. She did not want to think about what that might have been.

  There were whorls of frost on the walls, crystallized on the ceiling. Already, the coming polar winter was making itself known, exhaling a breath of glacial wind.

  Sighing, Butler pulled on a bulky sweater and slipped her boots on so her feet wouldn’t freeze to the floor.

  That’s when she noticed clots of ice over near her little desk.

  They were melting.

  Like maybe someone had come out of the blowing subzero darkness outside and ice had been dropping from them. Her papers were spread around, crumpled as if they’d been handled roughly. There was something like saliva, wet and ropy, clinging to the papers themselves.

  But it wasn’t saliva.

  Something liquid and wet, yes, but acidic-smelling.

  Whatever the hell it was, it was not water. It was something caustic that had made the letters and figures on her computer printout run. Some of the pages were just a blur, everything smeared together like a child’s finger-painting.

  T
hose papers had been important.

  The first draft of an article on quasar evolution she had been writing for a Canadian astronomy magazine. She still had it on disk, but the idea that someone or some thing had come in here and tampered with her work, not just leafed through it, but poured some astringent chemical on it and ruined her fine, organized thoughts, well . . . it simply pissed her off.

  Butler was no shrinking violet.

  Maybe she was scared right to her core, but she was also angry.

  The daughter of a Welsh fisherman, Butler grew up in the tough fishing port of Skydurst on the Bristol Channel. And nobody came out of a town like that without knowing how to take care of themselves.

  Right then, her work ruined, Butler was less the London University cosmologist and every bit the tough fisherman’s daughter. A woman brought up in a place where if you couldn’t hit harder and swear louder than the majority of the boys, you stood scarce chance of holding onto your virginity past your thirteenth year. And as testament to that, Butler had managed to protect her own until her first year at Cardiff University when she fell in love with a rugby player.

  Breathing hard, she went over to the door and reached for the lock.

  She was going to go out there.

  She was going deal with whoever had done this.

  She grasped the doorknob and it was still locked. Apparently, this person had picked the lock, came in, and locked it before they left.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  There was a sudden loud pounding from the other side of the door.

  Stifling a cry, but refusing to scream, she fell on her ass, bumping her head against the metal bed frame. Scared, confused, too many things to catalog, she said, “Who’s out there? You better damn well answer me or I’m coming out there with my knife! You hear me?”

  There was nothing but silence.

  Enough.

  Butler scrambled to her feet and thumbed the intercom on the wall, bringing up the station-wide channel. “If anybody’s out there, give me a holler! This is Butler! I’m in the dorm! Brighten? Van Erb? Callaway? Is anybody goddamn well out there?”

  There was silence for a moment, her voice echoing through the station.

  Then a peal of static from the speaker.

  And a voice, a shrill and buzzing voice: “Butler,” it said.

  This time she did scream.

  2

  GOING OUT INTO THE corridor took every ounce of strength she’d ever had.

  This was madness. That’s all. Just madness.

  Butler was a cosmologist. She’d come for a winter at Mount Hobb Station because Antarctica was simply the finest place in the world to watch the stars and listen to them. The stars did not set at mid-winter, they blazed on and on, circling slowly overhead in that field of blackness. You could study quasars and pulsars and listen to the teeming radio emissions of the galaxy itself. The voice of the galactic magnetic field. And more importantly, to her own field of study, you could learn about those great clouds of organic molecules that drifted between the stars themselves. Dense molecular clouds, the very stuff of life itself waiting to seed barren worlds.

  No, she had not come here for this . . . whatever this was.

  Out in the corridor, she saw more clots of melting ice.

  And prints . . . at least, she thought they were prints.

  They were wet, moving down the corridor past her room. Even now, in the dry atmosphere of the station, they were beginning to evaporate.

  Breathing in and out slowly to keep herself calm, Butler squatted down and examined them.

  They were triangular, about eight inches long, splayed out at their widest point to maybe five or six inches. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought somebody had walked through here with swim flippers on. The marks were like that, but not exactly. And there were many of them crowded together which made her think maybe two people had been wearing them and walking abreast.

  There’s no pool around here, she thought. Whatever made them was caked with ice and snow. It came in from outside. The same thing that left that sharp stink . . .

  She wasn’t sure what to think or what unknown paths her mind was taking her down. She only knew that her visitor had been most unusual. But what could come out of the night and cold and smell like that and leave such weird prints?

  She rushed down the corridor.

  She knocked on doors, calling out the names of scientists and techies and contract personnel.

  But there was no answer.

  Just silence.

  A silence that was big and overwhelming. One that made her want to crawl under a bed and hide.

  Relax, just relax.

  Yes, that was how you handled problems like this.

  You didn’t climb walls and scream and have nervous breakdowns, you simply took care of business. As frightened as you were, you simply erased the human factor and applied the scientific method. If some creature had come into camp, then you figured out what. If everyone was gone, then you found out where they’d gone to.

  Oh, and didn’t that sound perfectly simple?

  But it was not so simple with the compound lying around her, silent and waiting and somehow deadly. You could tell yourself by the light of day that a mausoleum was just a mausoleum, but try spending the night there.

  She tried the door to Sandley’s room first.

  Sandley was a botanist and one of the other female residents. It was open. Clicking on the light, Butler looked around in there, maybe expecting to see something horrible like a hacked and bloody corpse, but seeing absolutely nothing.

  The room was just empty.

  The bedcovers were tossed aside as if Sandley had gotten up in the middle of the night to get a drink and never returned.

  “Sandy,” Butler said under her breath. “Where are you? What happened here?”

  Whoever had come for her—and by that point, Butler was sure that someone or something had—they had not messed up the papers on her desk or dropped ice. The floor was damp in spots, but that meant nothing. If the heat got cranked up enough, water started dripping everywhere in the dorm rooms.

  She went over to the bed.

  The blankets felt cold and . . . Jesus, there was more of that saliva threaded onto the pillow and dangling from the sheet like snot. And in the air, that same chemical odor. Old . . . but persistent.

  Butler frantically checked the other rooms in the dorm. Van Erb. Johnson. Elder. Brighten. Lee. Huptmann. Callaway. O’Toole.

  Empty.

  Empty.

  Empty.

  Empty.

  Even the ones of the contract workers who ran the place. All the rooms were empty. All the beds looked slept in. There was more of that slime . . . on the beds, on the walls, on the doorknobs.

  The floors were damp.

  But no people anywhere.

  Butler raced to the end of the corridor and went into Gillian’s room.

  Gillian was the station manager. He ran the whole show and if anybody was on top of things, it would have been him.

  His room was not quite like the others. The bed was slept in, yes, but everything was in disarray as if there’d been a struggle. The desk was tipped over. Files and papers scattered about. On the walls there were ragged scratches like knife blades had been dragged over them. On the floor, there was a rosary as if he’d been praying when it . . . whatever it was . . . had happened.

  And whatever it had been, it had not taken him completely by surprise.

  Not like the others.

  Butler knew she had to formulate a plan.

  The rest of the station had to be checked, even the lower levels. And when that was done, she would have to go outside and look in the garages and outbuildings, the warm-up shacks. Then she would get on the radio, send out a distress call on the emergency channel. Contact Rothera Station on Adelaide Island. Send her voice loud and clear so they would hear it everywhere, Pole Station and Vostok, Polar Clime and McMurdo . . . hear it all over th
e goddamn continent.

  Yes, that’s what she’d do.

  Out in the corridor, breathing hard, she knew none of that would change one unpleasant little fact: she was alone. She was alone at Mount Hobb.

  Trapped on the bottom of the world.

  An easy hundred miles from the nearest occupied camp. And with the way the weather was kicking up outside, nobody would be able to get to her.

  Just her.

  And the wind.

  The cold.

  The emptiness.

  And whatever had left those tracks and abducted everyone.

  3

  SHE TRIED TO RELAX, tried to figure it out.

  But all her mind kept coming back to was the very thing she did not want to think about: what was out in Shack #3. The relic that Huptmann and Dr. Elder had collected somewhere in the vicinity of the abandoned American installation, Kharkov Station. They kept it under lock and key out in Shack #3 and refused to say what it was.

  But there were rumors.

  With what had happened at Kharkov years back, there were plenty of rumors.

  But you don’t believe that nonsense. Those wild tales that came out of Kharkov. That down in the ice they found–

  No, no. Huptmann and Elder were paleobiologists.

  Surely what they had found was old, but it was certainly terrestrial.

  She kept telling herself this.

  Making herself believe.

  4

  SHE WAS IN FULL-BLOWN panic mode now.

  Her science and her reasoning brain had abandoned her. She was overcome and stomped down by the oldest of emotions: primal fear, superstitious terror.

  She ran out of the dorms and into the common room where everyone ate and lounged.

  She checked the Galley and the workshops.

  The labs and storage rooms.

  No one anywhere.

  The funny thing was that every light was burning bright. The dorm rooms were the only ones with the lights off.

  In the common room, she peered out the windows into the Antarctic twilight. It lasted about two hours that time of year before the sun came up again at one a.m. A storm was brewing out there. The wind was blowing, throwing sheets of snow around. The garages were even lit up. She could see the vehicles out there, Deltas and Sno-Cats and big plows with bubble tires.