by Tim Curran
Coyle tried talking, but it was pointless over the thudding music as some guy sang about pulling tapeworms out of asses. Slim turned it down and invited him in.
“I’m glad you came, Nicky. I gotta talk to you about some shit.”
Coyle sat on the bed and stared at the walls. Slim had photographs of bands and goth prints up, mostly skulls and graveyards and the like. But now they had been covered over by drawings, dozens and dozens of them. Some taped or pinned right over the tops of others. Slim was a good artist and some of the inking on his own body was testament to that.
But what was all this?
All these hurried, weird sketches of things like cities clinging to mountain ranges and bizarre landscapes and nameless monsters?
“You been busy,” was all Coyle said, not sure what he was looking at but beginning to get a very bad feeling about it like a father who’d discovered drawings of eviscerated naked women in his son’s notebook. Like those, these were disturbing. But unlike them, he just couldn’t be exactly sure why. Only that there was something fevered and nightmarish about them. Very abnormal subject matter that made him think the mind that imagined them was equally as abnormal.
“We need to talk, Slim,” he finally said.
Slim nodded, looking at the artwork. “Yeah, we do.”
Coyle ignored that. “Now when we got back from the chopper crash, I had a little talk with you and Horn. You remember that? You remember what I told you guys about forgetting about what you saw? What was under that tarp? You told me you’d keep quiet about it, but now I’m hearing you’re blabbing it all over camp.”
Slim sank into the bed next to him. “I can’t help it, Nicky. I really can’t.” He ran his fingers through his corn-yellow locks and down his face, pausing at the numerous metal studs pierced into his eyebrows and nose and lips. “I didn’t want to do it . . . but I couldn’t stop myself.”
“Yeah, well, you’ve stirred up some shit now.” Coyle sighed. “What have you been saying?”
“What I saw under the tarp. Everything.”
“Well, that was pretty damn stupid.”
“I know. I know it was.”
Coyle just shook his head. Goddamn Slim was like a puppy you couldn’t bear to discipline. Him with those big sad doe eyes. Harmless. Good-hearted, trusting, but terribly naïve. Around Clime a lot of people pretended not to like the kid, him and his piercings and devil-music and the tattoos sleeved over his arms and running up and down his legs and back, the purple or orange or green hair . . . but that was mostly bullshit. Slim was a good kid and you couldn’t not like him. He grew on you. Maybe all the body art and studs and weird hair threw people off, but Coyle knew he was just indicative of his whole generation that saw the world they were going to inherit as a mass-produced, generic cesspool whose individual cultural personality was being eroded away by the information age into a gray, seamless mass, a global community that was the same everywhere. The tats and piercings and extreme music were just a reaction to that, a way of conveying the individuality of youth, of raising your fist at the Man and yelling.
Coyle liked Slim.
He’d liked him the first moment he met him because he was warm and honest and open. The kid was twenty years his junior and sometimes Coyle almost felt like a father figure to him. The idea of that was not unpleasant. They made a very unlikely father and son. Where Coyle was stocky with dark, bushy hair and a closely-trimmed beard and a face ruddy from the weather, Slim was thin and pale and fair. Yet, there was a connection.
Slim sat there next to him for maybe five minutes as Coyle waited for him to open up like an oyster and produce a pearl. Because he would. And then he did.
“I didn’t have a choice, Nicky,” he said. “I . . . nothing’s been the same since I saw that thing. I can’t get it out of my head. I dream about it. I can’t seem to think about anything else.”
“I suppose you told Locke?”
Slim nodded. “Yeah. I did. And he told me things, man, things that explained it all.”
“I bet he did.”
Coyle looked at the drawings on the wall and then at Slim. The anxiety in him was growing by leaps and bounds. “Tell me about it.”
Slim said that he couldn’t help himself. He really couldn’t.
He was fixated with that thing under the tarp. He had to tell people. He couldn’t lock it up in his mind or he’d go crazy. The dreams started that first night, only they were unlike any dreams he’d ever had before. He saw that thing—that horror with the barrel-shaped body and red leering eyes set upon stalks—and others like it. He saw them swimming in deep green oceans and flying over weird jagged rooftops that he thought were part of some Medieval city like you see on TV. He saw them buzzing around megaliths like those in Beacon Valley and Callisto like wasps or hornets, gathering and swarming. And sometimes he dreamed of standing stones other places, in forests and deserts and hollows, and those things were there and people were gathered around them, chanting in languages he’d never heard before but sometimes seemed familiar.
“And that city, Nicky,” Slim said, trying to wet his lips, “I see it just about every night. It’s really tall and freaky. It’s like those megaliths, only bigger. It’s made out of towers and pyramids and pipes and cubes . . . God, I don’t know what. Only it’s black and scary and leaning like it might fall over. I see it in the mountains and underwater and other places . . . like other planets or something where the sky is purple or brown or sometimes red. Those things are always there. Sometimes they’re under the ice and they call to me. They want, oh Jesus Christ, Nicky, they want me to–”
“To what?”
“They want me to come to them.” He buried his face in his hands and just trembled. “I think I’m losing my fucking mind, dude.”
He began to sob and Coyle put an arm around him.
He sat there with the kid, wondering what he could say to make this better. Because those dreams were like the old stories that circulated through the camps of Antarctica and had for as long as men had been there. Alien things frozen in the ice and gigantic cities that had not been built by men. Those old yarns had been around a long time, but had gotten a real jumpstart after what happened at Kharkov Station five years before. Coyle didn’t like to think about any of that nonsense . . . but he’d been thinking more and more about it all the time with all the strange things going on.
He left Slim on the bed and stood up, examining the drawings.
The sight of them made something inside him sink without a trace. Not good. Not good at all. The city was the subject of at least a dozen drawings if not more. It was seen from different perspectives, at a distance and close-up and even from far overhead. It clung to the mountain ranges—which looked suspiciously like the Transantarctics with their rising cones of black rock and snow belts—like some kind of growth: columns and cubes and oblongs and rectangles, spheres and branching spires. Not like a city men would build, but like some fantastic insect hive. Something about it filled Coyle with an uncanny sense of deja-vu like maybe he’d dreamed of places like this and more than once.
The monsters, then.
Yes, they were barrel-shaped like Slim said, both ends of which tapered. There were long tentacle-like arms at their bases and those bloated starfish heads with the brilliant red eyes at their apexes. They had limbs of some sort coming from their bodies, only they looked like tendrils or the tentacles of deep-sea squids that branched and then branched again into something like boneless fingers. Slim had drawn them in great profusion. They were flying over his nightmare city in the mountains and rising from great hollows and holes, spreading their huge wings.
The drawings that bothered Coyle the most were the ones that were supposed to be inside the city. Here the things were accompanied by people. Except the people looked almost like apes. They were crowded in cages and hung from wires in bunches; they were heaped in pits and floating in great vessels of fluid. And in one, a woman was strapped to a table and was being apparently d
issected by the things.
Enough.
“Is this what you dream about?” he finally said.
Slim nodded.
“And you have ever since that day at the crash?”
“Ever since I saw that thing, Nicky. It won’t get out of my head.” He rubbed his tired, red-rimmed eyes. “You don’t know what it’s like. You can’t know. When I saw that thing . . . man, it was like it saw me, too. Like it was looking at me, looking right into me. Like it knew me or something. And maybe I knew it. And I think it did. I think it knows all about every one of us.”
He was breathing very hard, practically hyperventilating. Coyle stood him up and calmed him inch by inch. Christ, he was thinner than thin, pale and trembling, his eyes like red open sores. If ever Coyle had seen someone that was haunted, it was Slim.
“I got on the radio with my wife, Nicky.”
“And?”
“And I told her about it. I told her all about what had happened, about the crash and that thing under the tarp.”
Coyle sighed yet again. That was a bonehead move. A big one. The NSF monitored all communications coming out of the camps. There was no secret or spooky business to it, it was just one of their rules. Slim had just opened one smelly can of worms.
“There’s gonna be trouble, Slim. The NSF will probably not invite you back.”
“You think I give a shit about that, Nicky? I’d never come down here again for a fucking million bucks. I’d rather flip burgers or dig ditches. This whole continent is haunted or something.” He breathed in and out very fast, his eyes wide and glassy. “You know what my wife told me? She told me she’d been dreaming of the city, too! And you know what’s worse? You know what’s even fucking worse?”
“Slim, take it easy, man. It’s cool.”
But it wasn’t cool.
Slim was half out of his mind, his eyes blazing and his lips pulled away from his teeth like a dog that was ready to bite. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on. I don’t know how my wife is dreaming about that city. It’s crazy. But what’s worse is that my daughter, my four-year old daughter, brought drawings home from school. No, not the city. But those things. She’s dreaming about them and drawing them! Now what the hell am I supposed to do? I’m stuck down here and shit is happening that shouldn’t happen . . . what the fuck am I supposed to do?”
Coyle didn’t know.
But the first place to start was at Medical, so that’s exactly where he took Slim. To Doc Flagg for a shot of something to calm him down. And the really scary part was that all the way over there Slim was ranting and raving and not a single person asked why or offered to help. They just looked away like maybe they’d been expecting this and they were just glad it wasn’t them.
7
AFTER THE CRAZY THINGS Slim had been saying, Coyle had a very nasty feeling that the entire world was suddenly on a roller coaster that was about to derail. He had been feeling that negative momentum at Clime and now, apparently, it had spread to the four corners of the globe. The question was: what could be done about it?
He didn’t know, so he went to see Locke.
Locke loved it, of course. He loved it so much he broke out a joint and fired it up, despite the no smoking rules in the rooms. But Locke didn’t care. He cared about very little that did not involve his generators or boilers or PUFON, his UFO/conspiracy study group which up until now had counted only The Beav, Ida, Lynn Zutema, and Slim among its members. The Beav loved anything counter-culture. Ida was a member because Locke served drinks at the meeting. Zoot supposedly had something going with Locke and Slim just liked anything weird or outlandish.
Coyle had a funny feeling that there were going to be more members real soon.
“So, you’re starting to smell the shit cooking on the back burner, eh, Nicky? Decided you come see me? Crazy fucker like me is bound to have a few ideas. That what you were thinking?”
Coyle thought about being considerate of the man’s feelings, decided there was no time for it. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought. If it’s crazy or fringe, I figured you’d know about it.” He dropped into a recliner next to Locke’s bed, took the joint that was offered. “Those megaliths are bothering me. The ones here and the ones on Callisto and the others all over the world. I’m seeing a connection between them and I don’t care for it much.”
Locke nodded. “Sure, sure, Nicky. The megaliths are a network. They have a purpose . . . only what might that purpose be?”
That was pure Locke.
Coyle had been to one of his meetings the winter before at Clime and Locke pretty much gave a lecture on how the Soviets had shot down alien spacecraft and were in possession of alien technology and a bunch of dead extraterrestrials to boot. Sort of the Communist Block version of Roswell and that business. After said lecture was completed, Locke let the others at the meeting speculate openly, very often becoming the Devil’s advocate and stomping all over their theories mercilessly. For a guy that seemed convinced that we were not alone and that there were faces on Mars and ancient civilizations beneath the polar ice cap, he was damn skeptical.
And that was the primary reason that Coyle did not dismiss the man out of hand. Because as goofy as some people thought he was, he was essentially open-minded and his study group was a forum for intellectual discussion . . . even if people tended to show up just because he had really good dope.
“I don’t know what their purpose is, Locke. But I’m beginning to think that they do have one. That’s why I came here. I thought you’d have some crazy bugaboo bullshit to explain it.”
“It’s good to be needed.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I, my friend. Just glad you still have faith in me after I threw a fit when NASA cut our Callisto feed.”
“You think they cut it on purpose, don’t you?”
“Is there any doubt?”
Nobody at Clime doubted Locke’s ability to handle the Power Station or that he was the key man that would keep their white asses rosy and toasted, keep the lights on and the fires burning. He was good at his job. Which is why he was always invited back by the NSF and its support contractors. Maybe he got a little strange with his UFOs and conspiracies, but he was harmless. He just wanted answers and he firmly believed that there were people in power that had them. Sometimes people kidded him, but when he talked, they listened. Even Frye would listen and Frye had little patience or respect for anyone.
Coyle genuinely liked Locke.
He was way out sometimes, but he had a good head on his shoulders for the most part. And he was fun. He really got into the theme parties and made sure everyone else did, too. Last winter at Clime, they had a Holy Grail theme party. They’d watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail again and again. Everybody was drunk and rowdy and out of control in their makeshift Medieval robes and cloaks and tinfoil armor, brandishing cardboard swords about. Locke went beyond that, as usual. He had proclaimed himself one of the Knights that Say “Nee” from the movie. Just stoned to the gills in his black robe and towering cardboard headpiece, he went around demanding shrubberies and saying “Nee” when anyone tried to talk to him. It was hilarious.
But theme parties, like laughter, seemed to be a thing of the past now.
“Tell me, Nicky,” Locke said, pulling off his joint and brushing a hand over his buzz cut. “Do you see any other connections here? Other events that seem to be part of greater whole?”
“Sure. I see them everywhere I look. People disappearing from Mount Hobb. The megaliths over in the Sentinel Mountains. The chopper crash. What Slim and Horn saw under that tarp. Colony Station . . . do I need to go on?”
Locke shook his head. “No, you don’t. Honestly, Nicky, I don’t know what’s going on anymore than you do. But I came this year because I knew this was going to happen. After the Kharkov thing, I knew things were ready to escalate out of control.”
“And you think that’s happening now?”
“Yes. And so do you or you wouldn
’t be here, my friend.”
Well, Coyle couldn’t argue the logic of that.
Frye liked to call Locke a comic book nerd, but Locke was hardly that. With his buzzcut and team sportswear on, he looked much like the jock he was who played basketball and soccer and tennis in his free time, had pulled a tour with the Marines and lettered in no less than four sports in college. He even had a black belt in Aikido. But for all his impressive physical acumen, Locke’s mind was sharp as a tack and it was his fiercest weapon.
“Nicky, you were down here when that business at Kharkov happened, weren’t you? I didn’t get on the Ice until the next year, but you were here.”
Coyle nodded. “I was at McMurdo that winter. There’d been some strange shit coming in on the radio from Kharkov. We all knew something was brewing there, we just didn’t know what. You know what I remember most?”
“What?”
“How tense things got at MacTown. It was spooky.”
Coyle told him about it.
If you’d spent any time on the Ice, then you got to hear a lot of strange stories about ghosts and dead civilizations and all that. Things like that had been floating around since the days of Scott and Amundsen and even the early whalers and seal hunters. But nobody paid much attention to it until the events at Kharkov Station five years previous. It had been a bad winter. Stories were filtering out about Dr. Gates finding the ruins of a pre-human city and alien mummies in the ice and then other stuff about another city beneath Lake Vordog, which Kharkov sat on top of. A team had drilled through the ice and seen things down there in that lake. Things that were not mummies.
“Everyone got spooked. And I mean spooked. It was scary business,” Coyle told him. “Then we started hearing that Kharkov was in trouble. That people were going mad over there. I remember that there was a team at Pole Station that was ready to go to Kharkov and effect a rescue, but the NSF said absolutely not. Which we thought was outrageous. I didn’t take any of it too seriously until word leaked that everyone was dead but Jimmy Hayes, the boiler engineer, and Sharkey, the camp doctor. When I heard what Hayes was saying, I started to take it real serious.”