by Tim Curran
She thought for a moment she saw a shape darting away into the purple shadows.
But no, it must have been her imagination.
There was no one left. No one at all.
Panicking, on the verge of complete hysteria, Butler stood there in the common room amongst the empty tables, trying to think, trying to come up with something that didn’t involve the relic in Shack #3.
She couldn’t seem to move.
She was almost afraid to.
Afraid what she might see or feel next.
Because right then, she was feeling things. Things that saw her that she could not see. A crawling sensation that there were eyes watching, watching.
She thought: Get to the radio room, get out that distress.
Yes. Yes, that’s what she was going to do.
But every direction she started in, everywhere she turned, she could feel something crowding in on her. Something almost palpable, something she could not see but only feel. It filled her brain with tangled shadows and made a cutting dread open up in her belly. Whatever it was, it was close enough to touch and close enough to touch her.
That biting chemical odor wafted in her face, making her nostrils sting.
Something that felt like a twig brushed the back of her neck.
She cried out, whirling around, but there was nothing there.
She could hear a sort of hissing sound like a leaking radiator coming from the dorm corridor. She sensed movement all around her, heard distant scraping and scratching sounds.
Trembling, she went to her knees, breathing so hard now she was hyperventilating. Oh please, oh God, just make it stop, make it all just stop, make it all go away.
There was a sudden sharp shrilling noise that rose up and died off.
Butler clambered to her feet and ran down towards the labs and radio room.
Three feet away, a door slammed.
Then another at the end of the corridor.
Something in the wall thudded.
Her eyes wide and her skin drawn tight over her bones, she saw another set of those wet flipper-like prints. They moved down the hallway and vanished at a solid wall as if whatever had left them had walked right through it.
She turned towards one of the doors that had slammed.
It led to the greenhouse.
She grasped the knob and threw it open. A blast of that chemical odor blew into her face and this time it smelled almost like bleach. It took her breath away and made her eyes water.
In the greenhouse, it was freezing.
Butler saw her breath.
All the plants—tomatoes and beans, carrots and parsnips and assorted other greens—were brown and wilted. She did not know where the cold air came from that killed everything, but her brain told her it could have come from only one possible source: the thing that had come into the station in the dead of night.
She stepped away from the door and saw a creeping shadow thrown against the wall in there and the door slammed shut in her face.
She let out a cry and something very cold passed behind her.
Stumbling, she ran back into the common room.
Right away she saw impossible, nebulous shapes pass by the windows.
She sank to her knees.
The lights flickered as a crackling sound like static electricity rose up.
They flickered again.
The hairs on the back of her neck were standing rigid, gooseflesh sweeping down her spine. The air was getting colder now and this was the first sign of invasion, she knew. That whatever had taken away the others was coming now for her. Coming with a chill and a stink and an eruption of energy.
A dark and freezing shadow fell over her.
She turned slowly to face whatever made it.
But there was nothing.
Nothing.
The lights went out.
The entire station was plunged into a murky half-light alive with half-glimpsed shapes and living sentient shadows that circled her and pressed in from all sides.
Down below, the generator cut out.
But the secondary did not kick in.
There was no sound but the wind howling outside.
The entire station shook.
Security lights had come on now and a warning alarm was ringing, telling her that the generator was dead.
Outside the windows, she could see shapes moving about, floating and dipping and pressing up against the glass. The illumination from one of the security lights outside captured a form and cast its shadow at her feet . . . an insane, abstract shadow, stout and conical with snaking, wavering appendages.
She screamed.
Because it was happening.
She did not know how it was she had slept through what had happened before, but she would not sleep through it this time. Now they were coming for her and she could not escape.
Things began to happen.
The temperature started dropping, but too fast for it to have anything to do with the failed generator. This was too rapid, too sudden, too abrupt. A pall of freezing air enveloped her. The floor beneath her began to vibrate and thrum. There were knockings in the walls, slithering sounds moving around her in the darkness. Awful fetid odors. A fluttering sound as of immense wings.
Her entire body was shaking.
She was numb with the cold and terror that settled into her, so infinite and so black.
Her temples were throbbing, sharp white bolts of pain exploding in her head, making her gasp. Making her teeth clench, her eyes roll back white in her head. Her mind was filled with crazy alien imagery and she knew it was not of her own creation, but something from outside, something that was pushing its way into her head. She saw–
—a flurry of black winged shapes taking flight like flies lighting from a corpse. A great swarm of them. They rose up against a series of towering monoliths, narrow and craggy and machinelike, obelisks and spires and honeycombed pylons that reached right into the boiling sky overhead, became the sky itself, slit open the underbelly of the heavens–
She screamed with a horror that was profound.
The sight of that nameless architectural obscenity filled her with a mindless cosmic fear that reached out to her from the very pit of her being. It was a place she had seen in harrowing childhood nightmares she did not remember until now, a place she associated at the time as the castle of some evil witch. But now she knew, as all knew who looked upon that moldering pile of bones out of space and time, that it was the cradle of mankind and ultimately its tomb.
There was a pounding at the main door, a low hollow booming.
This cleared those awful stygian images and oriented her to a fresh slate of horror. One that was here and now and not half-remembered hereditary memory.
Whatever had come for her stood beyond that door now.
It stood out in that blowing white death, something born of shadows and nightmare antiquity.
The knocking came again.
And again.
Voices whispered in her head, shrill and shrieking.
A perverse musical piping that broke her mind like wheat before a scythe, scattering it into shorn grains. And she sat there, crying and shaking and delirious, just waiting for the thing that was coming for her.
Another flurry of pounding and the door blew wide open, snow and wind and subzero air rushing in at her.
It had come for her now.
Backlit by the shuddering security lamps and the weird purple-blue twilight, she saw a tall rigid form, glistening and hung with icicles. A cloud of frost and snow swirled around it, obscuring it.
Coiling limbs reached out for her.
Terrible red eyes looked down upon her with a flat malevolence.
She did not know what it was, only that it was something malignant.
Something shadowy.
Something monstrous.
And whatever it was, it said a single word in that buzzing voice: “Butler.”
ONE
GRAVEYARD OF THE EON
S
Out of whose womb came the ice?
—The Book of Job 38:29
1
POLAR CLIME STATION,
FALLING STAR ICE STREAM,
EAST ANTARCTICA
FEBRUARY 21
A DESERT.
A frozen white desert.
Not a continent exactly, more like a crudely-gutted, rawboned cadaver thrusting from eons-old ice, its hide scraped clean and picked dry, nothing left behind but a meatless architecture of bones that the wind had long ago blown clean.
That was the first thing you thought when you stepped off the plane and onto the frozen crust at Polar Clime. And as you took in the soundless windy desolation around you, the jutting barren peaks of the Transantarctics rising from the snow in the distance like the jagged spines of some long-fossilized saurian, you were even more certain.
The place was lifeless.
An ominous polar desert.
A frozen tomb at the bottom of the world.
To one side towered the mountains that split the continent right in half and to the other, the endless hazy expanse of the polar plateau where the ice cap was three miles thick in places. That was Antarctica. A relic from the Ice Age, simply immense and sterile and just as lifeless as the dark side of the moon. Everywhere, blowing snow and hovering patches of ice-fog, glaciated ridges and horns of sculpted blue ice. The godless repetition was broken only by outcroppings of eroding volcanic rock that were only slighter older than the ice itself. If you stared at them too long, those rocks began to take on hunched quasi-human shapes. And if you didn’t look away, you might hear them speak in a piping dead voice which was the voice of that ancient and mystical continent itself.
At the very edge of the wind-blasted polar plateau itself sat Polar Clime Station.
It looked like some crazy Martian playset a kid had forgotten out in the snow. All the buildings were bright red and flagged, capped by aerials and radar dishes and wind-speed indicators. At the very center sat a low dome with a snapping American flag atop it, boxlike buildings circling around its perimeter and connected by tunnels and drifted walkways.
Clime was a godforsaken place to spend a summer, let alone the long black Antarctic winter where the sun did not truly rise for five months. And when you came for the winter, you were there for good. You and whatever was inside you that might keep you sane while the days became weeks and the weeks became months and boredom set into you with teeth and the wind blew and the snow fell and that white frigid cage held you tight like a berry in a deep freeze.
That was the reality of the eternal darkness at Polar Clime.
The sign on the flagged ice road coming in from the airstrip itself pretty much said it all, all you had to know that year and maybe all you would ever know again:
UNITED STATES ANTARCTIC PROGRAM
NSF POLAR CLIME
WELCOME TO THE END OF THE WORLD
2
WHEN COYLE FIRST HEARD about the disappearance of twenty-five people from Mount Hobb Research Station—the entire summer crew, in fact—he started to get some funny ideas. The sort that made it hard to close his eyes at night and even harder to dismiss some of the crazy stories you heard about down there. Absolutely demented stuff about pre-human cities that were older than the glaciers themselves and things from other worlds supposedly found frozen in the ice.
It was hard to get away from that business and particularly with what had happened down at Kharkov Station five years before.
Not that Coyle really believed any of that, but it was still at the back of his mind like an open sore that refused to heal. Back home, back in the world, all those tales and urban legends were easy enough to laugh off, bored minds with too much time on their hands and too many idiots spinning conspiracy theories on the internet.
But down in the cold wastes . . . well, it wasn’t so easy to dismiss regardless of what common sense told you.
There was something about those ice-clad mountains and deep-cut jagged valleys and snow plains blasted by subzero winds. It got inside of you. Told you things you did not want to know and made you remember things long forgotten.
“Hey, Nicky,” Frye said and maybe he’d said it more than once because he was looking a little irritated. “Hey, fucking Nicky Coyle, you with me here or what? You listening to a word I’m saying?”
Coyle smiled. He hadn’t been paying attention.
Frye just shook his head. “Jee-ZUZ-Christ, a couple weeks into it and you’re already getting the long-eye.”
Coyle was sitting in a little warm-up shack with Frye, catching the rays off a Preway heater. Though Coyle was a cook—and a damned good one—he was helping Frye with the off-load from an Air National Guard C-130 transport.
Winter crews were small and you had to help out wherever needed. There were nearly a hundred people at Clime in the summer and just eighteen or nineteen come winter. Mostly the maintenance crew, contract personnel, a few scientists conducting experiments on grants from the NSF. The ANG C-130 idling on the strip was the last they’d see this year.
This was winter off-load: crates and skids and barrels. Machinery parts and medicine, construction materials and laboratory supplies. Food and cold-weather gear and tanks of fuel. Not to mention more important things like DVDs and liquor, tobacco and skin magazines. All the stuff that made the bleak winter livable.
Frye pulled off his cigarette. “Like I was saying, first Kharkov five years ago and now Mount Hobb. Twenty-five Brits missing. Ain’t no fish-and-chips out here, baby, so I’m thinking they didn’t step out for a bite. You know what that makes me think, man? Makes me think I should say screw this and hop on that One-Thirty, get the hell out of Dodge.” He winked at Coyle. “That is, if I was the superstitious type.”
“Which you are not.”
“Perish the thought. Takes a lot to rattle a guy like me, Nicky. Hell, this’ll be my twenty-third year down here. Only the glaciers have been here longer than my wind-burned white ass.”
Frye was the Waste Supervisor, but given his experience there wasn’t much he couldn’t do. He knew the ropes so well he could identify the individual fibers. He was there for off-load because nobody knew better than Frye where everything should be stored. And once the bird was empty, then it would be time to load up the last of the spring waste: flattened cardboard and pure garbage, scrap metal and lab waste, barrels of sewage and contaminated radioactive debris that the scientists produced.
The ice from his beard was melting and Coyle was squeezing it out, droplets of water dropping onto his heated Carhartt overalls and blue parka. “It’s all gossip. All we have is gossip about Hobb. Just chatter coming in from McMurdo. Who knows what the hell happened there?”
“That’s it, that’s it exactly.” Frye pulled off his cigarette, a flake of ash falling and blending right in with his steel-gray beard. “Now you’re talking sense, Nicky. You get the rest of these wet-ends around here to believe it and we’ll have ourselves a real crew. They got a bee in their bonnet ever since that Kharkov business.”
And they did, Nicky knew. A real big one.
Something the NSF wasn’t real happy about.
3
The NSF ran Polar Clime just as it ran all the other U.S. stations in Antarctica. If you were a scientist and you wanted to keep your funding or a blue collar individual who wanted to keep your very lucrative contracts, you kept your mouth shut. Because ever since the Kharkov thing, nothing could get your ticket down there cancelled quicker than talk of lost cities and extraterrestrials.
If you wanted to keep your job, winter or summer, you had to keep your mouth shut . . . in mixed company, that was.
The U.S. Antarctic Program was managed by the National Science Foundation which itself was an immense bureaucracy. Under NSF auspices, the USAP—or “The Program” as it was known to veteran Polies—ran the whole show. They got the scientists their grants and kept the stations running, some just in the summer and others right through the year. The USAP hired support contr
actors like Raytheon and ITT to staff its stations, which provided the blue collar muscle that kept the stations going and supported the scientists. Most of the people on the Ice were grunts: mechanics and cooks, heavy equipment operators and electricians, boiler jockeys and pipefitters. Same as in the real world. The pay was good as were the benefits, but the bureaucracy ranged from being trivial and ridiculous to downright intrusive and controlling. The winters were less so, but it was always there.
The great company eye kept watch over everything and everyone.
An unwieldy giant tripping over its own lumbering bureaucratic feet and the reams of requisition forms and safety postings and half-assed psychological profiling that were its lifeblood. People came for the adventure and found a microcosm of the land they had left behind replete with whiners and paperwork, tattling and lying and ruthless self-promotion. A place where your pet rock or incense burner might be confiscated because they were in direct violation of company policy and self-appointed neo-Nazis reported you for smoking in unauthorized areas or taking too long in the showers or spitting your gum into the snow.
This was modern Antarctica.
Forget about Mawson and Scott and their daring deeds in that pristine wilderness and worry more about using too many staples or not flushing the toilet or not kissing ass on the right people. Social Darwinism at its lowest ebb.
And this, all of this, was the reason why Coyle found it hard to believe that the USAP or NSF could really, effectively, cover-up something of the magnitude of an alien city or a race of beings from beyond the stars. The Program was bloated with bullshit and political maneuvering, poisoned by corporate swindling and overseen by a lumbering, swollen Mickey Mouse bureaucracy that could barely contain the seams of its own pants.
But you never really knew.
Coyle had spent some twelve years on the Ice—proper noun to veteran Polies—and he knew how things worked. Or he liked to think he did. Mostly he worked winters because the crews were smaller and the NSF stranglehold was lighter. Frye and he had wintered-over together the past four years straight, three of them at Clime and the other at Amundsen-Scott Station, which was known to vets as “Pole Station” and never anything else. Before that, they had pulled winters and summers at McMurdo and Palmer and even a couple stretches at East Camp, which was across the runway from the Russian camp at Vostok. They’d spent a lot of time together and were pretty tight, like brothers or father and son. Same blood running through their veins. That’s how Coyle knew that Frye was asking him what he thought about all that Mount Hobb business without actually asking him.