by Tim Curran
“Just feed the slack out to me,” Dr. Bob said. “And get on the radio, call in. Tell ‘em what we’re doing.”
He ducked under the guide ropes and started off into darkness.
“Be careful!” Borden called out.
Dr. Bob had every intention of that.
Using his helmet lamp, he followed the blood trail, his stomach churning sickly as he saw more and more of it . . . sometimes just a few drops or splotches and other times great frozen puddles. It was a lot of blood and in the wind, the cold, he knew very well that she would not survive a massive loss of blood.
But how had it happened?
Had she slit her wrists?
There seemed to be no other possibility. There was nothing out here that could hurt her, not even a jagged sheet of ice. Everything was flat and smooth.
The snow that was blowing was old snow, he figured, probably scooped up by the wind somewhere in the mountains and driven across the plateau. The way it was coming down, the blood trail would be gone within thirty minutes and probably a lot less.
Time was of the essence.
He stopped.
What the fuck is that?
Something about ten feet away, half-covered in drift. He went over there. He brushed snow from it and what he saw was like an aluminum shell . . . or a casket. It was about eight feet long and it had a lid. He dug his fingers around the lip and pulled the lid open. There was nothing in there. Just some frozen slime or goo. Nothing else.
He couldn’t make sense of it.
Was it an abandoned container from when the team set up Polaris? Maybe. But those boys were real picky about leaving any junk or waste laying around. USAP rules were very strict.
But what else could it have been?
Surely not a coffin. Not out here.
Screw it. You’re not here to play detective.
He moved faster, feeling the tug of the rope around his waist as he plunged forward into the drift-wind. He came to a field of blood. It was everywhere. Icy puddles. Runnels and loops of it and then–
Oh, Jesus.
Andrea.
She had been slaughtered, gutted, ripped open from crotch to chest, her entrails clinging to the ice like flash-frozen snakes. One arm was torn off, the other broken and twisted beneath her. Her left leg beneath the knee was missing. Only a knob of bone protruded.
Dr. Bob tripped over a blood-streaked bunny boot.
Her foot was still in it.
Swallowing down his nausea, he moved closer, shining his light in her face. Beyond the fur-fringe of her parka it looked like it had been split wide by an axe.
Enough.
He moved away, filled with an unreasoning terror of what might have happened to her and if a similar fate awaited him.
As he followed the rope, his brain tried to find some explanation but there was none. There were no vicious animals on the polar plateau. Christ, there weren’t any animals whatsoever. And in his mind that left only one possibility: she had been murdered.
But by who?
And why?
The drift-wind was a solid mass swirling around him. His helmet beam wouldn’t make it more than six or seven feet before reflecting back a solid wall of flying snow. He kept seeing shadows moving at the edge of the light.
Imagination.
It had to be imagination.
Yet, his skin was crawling. The cold. He was probably getting hypothermic. He kept thinking of the ice-axe on his belt. But he had to keep following the rope with both hands.
He stopped dead.
What the hell was that?
The wind. It could make funny noises out on the plateau, whining and shrieking. It could sound very much like voices calling out or whispering and particularly in the teeth of a storm.
But what he heard sounded like laughter.
Cold, hysterical female laughter.
He shined his light this way and that, his heart seizing up painfully in his chest. A shape. A shadow. Moving just out of his field of vision, circling, moving in closer.
“Who’s there?” he called out. “Who the fuck is out there?”
A peal of icy, almost unearthly laughter came out of the storm.
He started running . . . or trying to . . . stumbling along in his bunny boots, following the rope with his light, now and again feeling Borden taking up the slack.
God, it couldn’t be far, couldn’t be very far at all.
Something hit him and pitched him face first to the ice.
In the arcing light of his helmet he saw very well what came out of the storm and descended on him.
He had time to scream only once.
20
POLAR CLIME STATION
C-CORRIDOR.
Cassie Malone was lying on her bed feeling a low dull throb in her head. Every time she tried to sit up the pounding got so bad she nearly passed out from it. Too much booze at the party. That’s all it was. She hadn’t been drunk in months and it hit her really hard.
You were only sleeping for two hours. . . how could you have a hangover already?
No, it didn’t make sense. Maybe the next day but not a couple hours later. She lay there, massaging her temples, remembering something, trying to remember something.
The dream.
Oh God, that awful dream.
It came back in bits and pieces, fragments that sewed themselves back up into a hodgepodge whole cloth of phantasm: black, jagged mountain peaks that reached to dizzying, aery heights . . . rising, rising . . . sharp cones clustered with weird, unnatural structures like barnacles clinging to the masts of sunken ships—oblong cubes and honeycombed pylons, pyramidal towers and stacked disks. All of it crowded, overlapping, and profuse, geometrically complex nightmare cities capped by reaching needle-tipped spires that scratched at the cold stars above.
In the dream, Cassie soared up to the highest pinnacles of that diabolic metropolis and looked down at valleys and plains and narrow troughs of blasted black rock as the first few fingers of glaciation reached in and it was then she realized she was not alone.
Things were moving around her, rustling and sweeping, touching her, prodding her, pulling at her hair and brushing her spine. Night shapes with great fanning vampiric wings filling the empty spaces of the dead city in a dense and suffocating black cloud of whirring animation.
Cassie could not escape them.
Nor could she ignore the invasion of their voices
(cassie)
(cassieeeeeee)
which were buzzing and echoing
(give unto)
(give unto us that which we)
(gave unto you)
and surreal, filling her head with insane imagery until it pounded with a dire susurration of pain which blossomed into agony until she thought her skull would fly apart into gleaming white-polished fragments of bone.
And then she woke up, the headache throbbing.
She swallowed Motrin, aspirins . . . nothing touched it. And in some dim back room of her mind she knew she needed to get down to Medical, but even lifting herself up a few inches made her head pound like a big old bass drum.
A white-hot jolt of cutting pain ripped through her brain and she cried out, falling from the bed to the cold floor. Oh, dear God, make it end mama make it stop oh please mama it hurts so bad it really hurts so bad I can’t take it make it stop mama mama mama–
Everything around her was moving, thrumming, losing solidity. The walls were dripping, the door running like water. Nothing was holding its shape, everything liquid and melting.
The corner.
She crawled towards the corner because it was here that the angles met and deliverance could be had. Listen to the wind, listen to the voices of the wind. Bathed in sweat, shaking and sobbing, Cassie found the corner and reached out and through the wall into a sucking, vortexual blackness that drew her in.
21
NOAA FIELD LAB POLARIS
“WE SHOULD CALL THIS in,” Kim Pennycook told Starnes back in the
habitat. “Call Clime and tell them what’s going on.”
Starnes shook his head. “Not yet.”
“I don’t like this . . . there’s something funny about it.”
Starnes sat before the radio, staring at it, waiting for Dr. Bob and Borden to call in. They were due anytime now. He could feel the tension threading through him. He was in charge of Polaris. If things went to hell, if Andrea died out there, he’d be blamed.
C’mon, c’mon, call me with some good news.
“Dr. Bob is about as experienced as you’re going to get,” he said. “If anybody can find her, he can.”
“But blood . . . Borden said there was blood.”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions here.”
“I can’t help it.” Kim shook her head, pacing back and forth. “What got into her? What made her go out there?”
Starnes knew, whatever happened here, good or bad, that was one of the very questions he would be asked by the NSF brass in McMurdo. You saw that Miss Mack was exhibiting signs of withdrawal, depression, isolation anxiety... and you did nothing?
Shit.
He thumbed the keypad. “This is Polaris calling. Dr. Bob? Professor Borden? Please respond. Over.”
Nothing but static came over the receiver. There was a curious sort of droning sound buried in it, rising and falling. Just atmospheric noise, background clatter, yet Starnes found himself listening to it.
“Where are they?” Kim asked, dread filling her now.
“I don’t know.”
Starnes tried again and got nothing.
Here was a judgment call. The sort of thing he’d been trained for and the very thing that left him reeling when faced with it. But he had to keep calm, keep his head. Pennycook was ready to jump out of her skin and he had to do everything in his power to alleviate that before she did something stupid like trying to go after them.
“Well, we just can’t sit here and do nothing,” she said, getting wired now on all the coffee she’d been pouring in herself.
“That’s exactly what we’re going to do–”
Kim screamed.
Screamed and stumbled backwards, tripping over her own feet, her coffee cup hitting the floor.
“What?” Starnes said, helping her up. “What is it?”
She was staring past him towards the window, her eyes huge and glassy, her mouth contorted like it was ready to scream again. She looked like she was in shock or darn near to it. Gradually, by degrees, she snapped out of it. “I saw . . . I saw something move past the window.”
Starnes looked over at it. Nothing there but the cold Antarctic night pressing up against the glass. He went over to it and peered out. Still nothing.
Kim was shivering, hugging herself. Her face was bloodless, a tic in the corner of her lips. She was having trouble regulating her breathing. “I saw it . . . it moved past the window . . . then it looked in, it looked right at me . . . it was seeing me . . .”
“What was seeing you?”
She shook her head. “It was a face . . . something like a face.”
Something like a face?
Starnes was feeling the dread now, too.
His training was failing in every conceivable way as something primal and haunted rose up from the cellar of his mind. He thumbed the keypad. “Professor Borden? Dr. Bob? This is Polaris. Please respond. Over.” He waited, feeling the steady tap-tapping of his pulse at his temples. “Borden? Dr. Bob? This is Polaris! Respond immediately! Goddammit, do you hear me? I said to respond immediately!”
Something thumped against the side of the habitat.
It was not from the freezing temperatures or expansion. They both knew that as they stared at each other wordlessly. Something hit it again and with enough force that the habitat trembled. Starnes’s cup of coffee spilled and rolled off the desk.
“What the hell was that?” Kim whispered.
Starnes looked frantically around, trying to get his reasoning mind working again and having severe difficulty. He tried breathing in and breathing out, relaxation techniques. Good God, why was he letting it eat into him like this? He was in charge, he was in command. He was supposed to be the one with the cool head.
Kim kept staring at him, seeming to gauge her own nerves by what she was seeing of his. She listened to the static coming over the radio. Was it her imagination or did it seem louder?
She cocked her head, intent on hearing it.
What she heard then was a woman’s voice, clear, crisp, the tones throaty and almost seductive: “I’m coming now... wait for me . . .”
Kim screamed again.
She had never been a hysterical female. She had worked remote camps and unforgiving environments, wintering in the Artic and Greenland with tough all-male teams. Never once had she shrank away from any of it. But the scream that came out of her was purely involuntary: absolute animal fright.
Starnes grabbed her now. “Kim! Get a hold of yourself.”
She trembled in his grip. “Didn’t you hear it? That voice on the radio?”
“There was no voice. Do you hear me? There was no voice.”
She pulled away from him. She was losing it. After all these years, she was actually losing it. Hallucinating. But that voice . . . it had sounded so real, so completely evil.
There was a pounding at the outer door.
It went on and on with an almost mechanical cadence.
Kim and Starnes just stared at each other. There was no disguising the fear in their eyes, the absolute regression from reason to superstition. It was there: wild, electric, unbridled.
Starnes ignored the need to cling to her. It was strong, but he would not allow terror to rule him. “They’re back,” he said like he wanted to believe it himself. “Thank God, they’re back.” But even as the words came from his mouth you could hear the tone of his voice sliding from relief to something of a much darker variety.
He moved towards the door.
“No!” Kim said. “Don’t open that door! Do you hear me? Don’t open that fucking door . . . it’s out there . . .”
Starnes stared at her a moment, trying to think of something reasonable and reassuring to say and failing. He opened his mouth, then shut it again. This was silly. Like a couple kids shivering after a good ghost story, afraid of what might drag itself from the closet, yellow-eyed and red-toothed.
“Don’t!” Kim shouted, beyond herself with fear.
And on the radio the static rose up as did that droning, rising and falling in eerie, wavering cycles. And then something else: “Let him go, Kim... we don’t need him . . .”
Kim backed away, shaking uncontrollably. “No, no, no–”
“Soon it’ll be just you . . . and me . . .”
Starnes marched over to the entrance, knowing that this was an acid test of his ability to command and maybe something more: his ability to be a man and do what had to be done in a crisis situation.
He popped the airlock.
He heard Kim make a whiny, pleading sound behind him.
He opened the outer door and peered out into the gusting, howling blackness of the Antarctic night and saw . . . nothing.
There was no one out there.
Kim backed away further, feeling it coming, feeling it building in the air like some unknown charge of potential energy was about to go kinetic. That whatever was out there was about to show itself and be heard in some colossal deafening eruption like a sonic boom–
Starnes cried out and was . . . gone.
She saw it happen.
It was not the wind that got him, it was something else.
He had been pulled away into the darkness.
22
POLAR CLIME STATION
THE WIND WAS TALKING, whispering, drawing her out.
Cassie Malone knew that the wind did not have a voice, even though down on the Ice sometimes it sounded like it . . . like it was moaning out there, calling your name, and on especially windy nights, screaming like a woman.
But
tonight, it really did have a voice.
She listened to what it said. Listened to it sing a dirge, a saga of primeval memory of this land before the ice came, of things so distant that no human eyes would ever look upon them. It knew things, it sang truths. It peered right into the dark and diseased heart of her trauma and fear and sang of peace and ages unfolding.
It told her that fear was only a survival mechanism implanted in the human psyche and that it was also a control, something that could drain the human mind at the first sign of defiance. But it also told her that there was nothing to fear if she did as it said.
If she answered the ancient summoning.
And she believed it, for this night the wind had a voice and that voice was for her alone.
It was so lonely and old and wise. Listening to it was like mainlining something pure and fierce and forever.
Outside . . . come outside and know us, said that windy, melodic voice. Come unto us and we will give unto thee a seamless beauty beyond imagining.
So Cassie, knowing it was right, did what it said.
Hurry . . . you must be quick before they see you. They cannot know. This is a secret.
Escaping was simple.
Cassie followed the voice through the wall where the angles met and jumped through fourth-dimensional space and then . . . and then . . .
Outside: In the security lights, snow-devils twisted through the compound and the wind pushed drift into the lights.
Oh, the wind was biting, cold, cold, cold.
She was wearing only slippers, jogging pants, and a hoodie.
It was twenty below zero out there.
She did not know where she was going.
She was only following the voice.
Follow me, follow me, follow follow follow me.
And under her cold-cracking breath, a tiny and childlike voice asked: “Are . . . are you a ghost?”
We are something much older than ghosts.
Shivering, disoriented, knowing only the voice, Cassie jogged out past the Fuel Depot, slipping and sliding on the ice, and the wind kept trying to push her back, but she would not be pushed back for the song on the wind was like tinkling silver bells now rising into a sweet and resonant crescendo.