The Spawning

by Tim Curran

  Ever since the Kharkov Tragedy there was a lot of bullshit in the wind down here on the Ice.

  He kept his nose clean and concentrated on why he was here and the job he had to do. He walked through the wind to the staging area where the cargo was stacked. It was all here on his inventory list and that’s the way Kephart liked it.

  Everything by the book, every bolt, every 2 x 4, every carton of liquid eggs and every frozen steak accounted for.

  So when he found something that was not accounted for, he was not happy.

  Sitting on wooden pallets were six silver aluminum-skinned boxes that looked very much like coffins, except they were about eight feet long.

  Kephart went over his inventory five times by penlight. Nope, nope, and nope.

  The ANG pilot was standing there, checking his watch, anxious to get in the air. He was smoking a cigarette, back to the wind.

  Kephart went over to him. “Lieutenant,” he said. “What are these silver containers? They are not on my inventory.”

  The lieutenant stared at him through ice goggles, blowing smoke. He pulled out his inventory sheet. “Well, they’re on mine.” He paged through it. “Right here. Six aluminum BCVs. Biological Containment Vessels.”

  “Well, why the hell aren’t they on my list?”

  “I don’t know. You better ask the loadmaster about that. And tell him to move it along, I want to get airborne here.”

  Kephart just stood there. “What the hell are those things for?”

  “Biological specimens,” he said. “We’ve flown ‘em out to Colony before.”

  “Look like coffins,” Kephart said.

  The lieutenant looked off across the ice. “I learned never to ask questions about Colony Station. Things are simpler that way. Maybe they are coffins, but as far as I’m concerned they’re BCVs. That’s good enough for me.”

  “What do you suppose they use them for?”

  But the lieutenant would only smile.

  8

  POLAR CLIME STATION

  WHEN THEY GOT BACK, the first thing Coyle did was to take Horn and Slim aside in the Heavy Shop and put it to them like this: “You guys want trouble, then just go ahead and write up what you saw out there. Write down what you saw or what you think you saw. That’s how to go about it.”

  They both just stared at him.

  He pulled off his hat and slapped it against his leg. “Listen, guys. I don’t know what you saw and I don’t think you really do either. Whatever is was, forget about it, okay? That Dayton guy is bad news. He’s the sort that can make real trouble for both of you. Special Ed will make you write it all up. It’s SOP. Just leave out the business about what was under the tarp. You don’t and Hopper’ll be all over you. You know how he is. He can’t handle things like this. All he knows is teamwork and group effort.”

  “Dude,” Slim said, pulling off his own hat and exposing his brightly dyed yellow spiky locks, “we can’t lie on that report. Man, I need this job. I need the money. I got a kid back home and shit. If I lie on that, I won’t get my bonus and I’ll never get to come back.”

  Horn lapsed into his usual cynicism. “And that’s a bad thing?”

  Coyle ignored him. “If you report some thing under a tarp, you’re screwed. Trust me. The NSF doesn’t want the truth of what goes on down here just like Special Ed doesn’t. They want neat, tidy things in their reports. Things that make sense. Things that they can fit snug in their briefcases when they ask for more funding. That’s how The Program works. That’s how it’s always worked. Bullshit is a way of life. Embrace it.”

  Horn didn’t say a thing.

  With five years Ice Time, he knew Coyle was right. Absolutely right. But Slim kept saying that Special Ed was there. He’d ask questions if they left out the bit about the thing under the tarp. But Coyle assured him that Special Ed would not. What they needed to do was make no mention of that thing and no mention that Dayton was acting like some spook hiding little green men.

  “Okay . . . what do we say then?” Slim asked.

  “Just say that you saw a body. No speculation. You saw a body, but it was burning and you couldn’t get to it. Then the team from Colony arrived, said they could handle it, and we left.”

  “Bet Doc’s not gonna log it like that,” Horn said.

  Coyle shrugged. “No, he probably won’t. But Doc’s got a cousin who’s married to a fucking congressman from Illinois. They wouldn’t dare mess with him. Special Ed will probably edit Doc’s report. So save him the trouble and edit yours yourself. It’ll save you bullshit. Save your job. And save you from a nasty post-season psych eval with the witch doctors from McMurdo.”

  Slim seemed to be okay with it now.

  Horn, too.

  Sometimes, with his years down here, Coyle felt like he was everyone’s favorite uncle. While other Polies liked to watch Fingees—Fucking New Guys—stumble about and get themselves into all kinds of trouble and took a truly perverse enjoyment from it, Coyle liked to watch over them. Steer them straight. Help them out. Do anything so they wouldn’t become the sort of bitter, fucked-up, neurotic types that infested the stations. The sort that filed grievances because you were drinking too much milk or using too much soap or accused you of pissing in the showers and making obscene gestures behind their backs or went absolutely berserk because somebody ate the last box of Jujyfruits.

  And with what Horn and Slim saw . . . well, it went without saying that you just had to leave that out or you were inviting trouble like nobody’s business. The NSF did not want to be hearing about things under tarps. Not in the least. Not after Kharkov and what may or may not have been brewing with that British station, Mount Hobb.

  “What about that thing, Nicky?” Slim said. “It wasn’t a man.”

  “Looked kind of alien to me,” Horn said.

  Coyle just gave him a look that shut him up.

  After he loaded Horn and Slim into the Sno-Cat and got them away from the crash site, they just kept staring at him. They wanted to tell him. They wanted him to know about what they had seen and he knew it. Maybe it was his years on the Ice or his cool head and easy manner, but Coyle was often the repository of secrets and confessions at the stations. People told him things they did not tell their wives or husbands. They admitted things that the NSF would not approve of and bared their souls to him, purged all the dark things. Maybe he should have been a therapist. Regardless, he never repeated what he heard and he always tried to help whoever did the confessing. That was his way.

  So, a couple miles down the road, he pulled the Sno-Cat to a stop and said, “Go ahead, boys, tell me what was under the tarp.”

  Horn wasn’t sure, not really, just something weird that he could not properly identify. And he admitted as much. Maybe he didn’t want to say.

  Slim had no such compunction. He gripped Coyle’s arm through his parka, said, “Nicky, it was freaky, man. I mean, it was just . . . freaky. I never seen nothing like that before.”

  “Take it easy, kid. Just tell me.”

  So Slim did.

  He said when he yanked the tarp back he got a quick look at something big that was nearly encased in ice. Kind of an oblong gray body with sort of a head attached to it. Something like a head. A drab yellow thing that looked like a frozen starfish with all its legs extended stiffly and at the end of each of those legs, there was a red eye about the size of golf ball. Perfectly round and perfectly red.

  “I saw it,” he maintained. “I saw it and I don’t care what anybody says. I just saw it for a second, but it was there, dude, it was there.”

  “Take it easy,” Horn told him, looking a little pale himself. “We believe you. That’s the kind of thing I saw, too, Nicky. I’m not shitting you.”

  “Okay, okay. I believe you saw it. I don’t know what the hell it could be, but I believe you,” Coyle told them. “Now put it out of your minds.”

  Then they drove back to Clime.

  The whole way no one said a word. There were things Coyle c
ould have said, but why? Why go into all that? Why resurrect those old tales that had been making the rounds on the Ice for years now? Maybe they saw something and maybe they just thought they did.

  Coyle had heard stories like theirs before.

  Six, seven years before he’d been down at McMurdo one autumn as winter was approaching. He’d signed on to winter-over so he was helping load up the planes, pack everyone’s gear up. A deep-field team came in late and they had to hurry them on an outgoing C-130 Win-Fly that was taking everyone back to Christchurch, New Zealand. The whole lot of them, geologists and paleontologists, were acting pretty spooky. One of them, a paleobotanist named Dr. Monroe from the Chicago Field Museum, was acting spookier than the rest.

  His colleagues actively avoided him.

  Coyle learned that they were coming back in late because Monroe had gotten lost overnight. Coyle had been pretty friendly with him, so he asked him what that had been like, lost up on the mountain alone.

  Monroe looked at him with eyes like open wounds.

  He said it was bad.

  So bad that he would never, ever come back to Antarctica again. He was out examining some sediments from the Carboniferous Period, he said, in a little valley and an ice-fog trapped him. He couldn’t see five feet in any direction. He’d had field survival training, so he didn’t panic. He looked for shelter and found it: a little ice cave that was drifted over. He put out a black flag so a search team would know where he was and got out of the elements. He crawled down into the ice cave with his light and right away saw something frozen in the ice above him.

  Old ice, he said, crystal blue and clear.

  Ice that was 200,000 years old if it was a day.

  He didn’t know what he was seeing, but it was big and oblong-shaped and it had a head. A head with these stout yellow stalks with red eyes at the end of each. Eyes that were bright red, just staring at him. Monroe said that he lost his mind in that cave. That he was certain those stalks were crawling like worms and those vivid red eyes were watching him. Not dead, but horribly alive, looking at him and into him, getting inside his head and making him think things. He had to spend the entire night in that cave with that thing looking at him and it had aged him twenty years.

  That’s what he told Coyle before he hopped that plane and got out of there like a man that was being hunted. A month later, stateside, Monroe put a gun in his mouth and ended it. Maybe what he had seen—or claimed to have seen—stayed with him, haunted his dreams and waking moments. Regardless, it was enough.

  Coyle had never told anyone about that and he didn’t intend to now either.

  Standing there in the Heavy Shop, he brought Horn and Slim around, telling them how it had to be, how they had to leave it out of their reports and keep their mouths shut about it all. There was no other way.

  Slim finally left, but his eyes were very familiar: they looked just like Monroe’s.

  Horn stayed. “I’m gonna do what you say, Nicky.”

  “That swise.”

  “Uh-huh. They’re up to shit that’s no good at Colony, you know? Real bad things and I don’t like it. I been hearing things same as you have, Nicky. Now I’m not Locke. I don’t believe in ghosties and ghoulies and all that. Mostly, I don’t believe in anything. Not even myself. But what Dayton and those other assholes are up to is just plain no good.”

  “We don’t know what they’re up to.”

  “No, we don’t. Not really.” He shrugged, dismissing it. “Now I like you, Nicky. You’re okay. We all think you’re okay. But don’t pretend with me, man, all right? There’s shit going on over at Colony that’s dangerous. They’re messing with things we ain’t got no right fooling with. There. I said it. We don’t have no business with those things frozen down in the ice. You can say all that Kharkov bullshit is just that . . . bullshit, but you know better and I know better and so do a lot of people down here. We ain’t got no business with those things. Maybe coming down here is the worst thing we ever did. We’re better off leaving the past in the past because sometimes ghosts bite. And that’s all I’m gonna say. Catch you later, Nicky.”

  Well, that was a mouthful for Horn.

  He was generally moody, silent and watchful. When he did speak, his words were usually couched in cynicism and sarcasm. He had faith in nothing or no one. For him to say what he said was pretty much baring his soul.

  Coyle didn’t want to think anymore.

  He didn’t want to think about Kharkov or Mount Hobb or things under tarps. All he wanted was for things to be like normal. Boring and ordinary. That was plenty and this year he had a feeling that it was simply asking for too damn much.

  9

  BEACON VALLEY,

  SENTINEL MOUNTAINS,

  QUEEN MAUD RANGE

  ANECROPOLIS.

  A city of the dead.

  That’s what the megalithic site discovered in the Beacon Valley looked like at first glance: a sprawling tombyard of stark immensity. Intersecting and crossed and fused together, a shadowy and morbid tangle of perverse gigantism, reaching and crumbling.

  It was a sepulchral place filled with crawling shadows and disembodied voices from lost epochs.

  There was something undeniably ethereal and almost ghostly about the high jagged expanses of the glaciers that towered above it. The black-striated mountain peaks of the Sentinel Group that rose above Beacon Valley in gigantic cones and razor-backed precipices. Poking up through ribbons of coiling mist and suspended ice clouds at the very eastern edge of the Queen Maud Range, some fifteen miles west of Mount Hobb Research Station, they looked like the conical ruins of some lost, nameless civilization. Above the ice and snow, they were stark and ominous and inexplicably forbidding. As if every whispered secret of the planet was locked up in them like some dark chest of unknown wonders.

  And maybe there was some truth to that.

  For it was in the ice-sculpted, wind-blown glacial valley below that the mysterious megaliths were first discovered by British geologists the autumn before.

  An unprecedented trough of warm air had kissed Beacon Valley, melting several hundred feet of ancient ice and exposing the pinnacles of the megaliths themselves. At first, the scientists thought they were looking at the flattened, sheered-off tops of some petrified prehistoric forest, much like the fossilized Permian stands found at the Beardmore Glacier area some years before.

  But these were artificial in origin and the impact of that was said to have put more than one of the team down on their knees. For this was Antarctica, not Europe. And the ice that covered these particular standing stones dated from the Miocene at the very least and the implications of that, they knew, threatened not only the culture of mankind, but accepted history itself. These were not Neolithic or Paleolithic in origin, but from a time so distant that man’s earliest ancestors had yet to evolve from the stew of creation.

  And what did that say?

  What did that conceivably hint at?

  Over the next month, using hot-water drills and suction pumps, the megaliths were slowly exposed for the first time in over twenty-million years. They towered above at least a hundred feet and using ice-penetrating sonar, it was discovered that there was at least another hundred feet of them encased in the ice.

  As winter came on and the temperature dipped and the winds screamed through the Sentinels, all work was abandoned until the following spring.

  And there was more than one of the scientists that were only too happy to be away from that awful place. Maybe it was the way the wind howled at night around their tents or the strange almost musical piping that drifted down from the high peaks like Pan’s flute across a grim harvest field or the terrible dreams the standing stones inspired.

  Dreams that no one would dare confess by daylight.

  Perhaps it was all these things and perhaps something more. For there was no denying that those primal-hewed stones had a certain magnetism to them. That they made you want to stare at them. To touch them and feel them under your fingert
ips, feel the arcane and primordial energy thrumming through them. To go down on your knees before them like a mindless savage at the altar of his god.

  They were hypnotic, morphic.

  To look upon them was to remember dreadful things long forgotten. To touch them was to be owned by them and those that had erected them.

  And the one thing that no one would dare admit was that the megaliths looked oddly familiar. As if they had seen them in dreams or half-glimpsed memories, the aberrant architecture of some surreal nightscape that haunted their every waking moment. You could not look upon those structures without feeling something, a certain awareness in the back of your mind, a primeval blackness rising up from the base of your skull that threatened to drown all that you were and ever would be.

  For there was memory in those stones.

  Bleak, anti-human, and unpleasantly vital.

  So the site was abandoned amidst much fervor in the popular press, much recrimination and denial in organized religious circles, and much more revelation and soul-searching amongst the world population in general.

  About the same time that Mount Hobb Station was emptied of human life, something incredible was happening there: the ice was continuing to melt. Though the temperatures had dropped to ten below zero and the winds screamed down from the high elevations in tempests of raging snow, the megaliths continued to rise from the retreating ice.

  No one was there to see it.

  No one human, at any rate.

  Some unknown heat was directed at the site and the megaliths slowly revealed their superannuated secrets. It took but six days.

  Beacon Valley was melted right down to the ancient volcanic rock below. Though no one knew it yet, the site had once sat upon a hilltop during the Cretaceous, but molten lava beds forced up from below under unbelievable pressure—creating the Sentinel Mountains themselves—had drawn the megalith site down into the valley in which it now sat.