by Tim Curran
And a fourth rising above the others . . . a gnarled, convoluted thing with a face like a grinning Halloween pumpkin and phosphorescent yellow eyes, something like hair atop its head that was not hair but undulant growths like slow-moving deep-sea grasses that were hideously alive and coiling.
Then the Spryte—barreling forward at its top speed of 30 mph—slammed right into it and the thing could not get out of the way. The Spryte hit it and clear slime splashed up over the windshield and the cab rocked as the tracks rolled over it, grinding it into the drift with a moist, pulping sound that went up everyone’s backbone. The thing let out a hollow, maniacal cry that was partly human but mostly the angry roaring of some primeval beast.
Something skittered over the windows like spiders or clutching tendrils.
And then they were free of it and its agonized voice faded into the storm.
Coyle looked back only once and in the rear lights he saw a squashed mass of flesh splashed over the snow, something rising from it like a hundred whipping vines.
Then it was lost from sight.
He sank back into his seat, Gwen doing the same.
For thirty minutes no one spoke. There was only the wind and the snow whispering at the windows and Horn muttering under his voice, “Gonna get us home . . . yes sir . . . gonna fucking get us home . . .”
THREE
BROOMSTICK RIDE
The blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat... have an
origin outside the time and space we comprehend.
—H.P. Lovecraft
1
POLAR CLIME STATION
“THE LIGHTS WENT OFF all over camp, Nicky,” Special Ed was saying, shaking at the memory of it. “We can’t account for it. Frye and Cryderman and Locke have been through every circuit in the place and nothing is damaged or fused. The lights just went out. The back-ups did not kick in. It was black as sin here and when the lights came back on . . . well, when they came back on, Slim was just gone.”
“Just gone,” Coyle said.
“Yes.”
Coyle stood there in his ECWs, water dripping from them. He was filled to bursting with too many rioting emotions and he simply could not get a handle on them. Though he was not a violent person, it all bubbled up inside him and he had a mad desire to punch the HR rep right in the mouth. But he didn’t. And he didn’t because it was not Special Ed’s fault. It was nobody’s fault.
“And you heard nothing and saw nothing unusual?”
“No, not a thing. The lights just went out.”
After what he’d seen at NOAA Polaris, Coyle was not in the mood to come back here and have more mysteries and weirdness shoved in his face. And neither were Horn or Gwen. But that’s exactly what they got as soon as they pulled into camp. Gut was on them out in the Heavy Shop as they parked the Spryte. And after her there was a gauntlet of people—Ida and Danny Shin and The Beav. Even Cryderman who cared about nothing but Cryderman showed up. Harvey crawled out of T-Shack long enough to tell them that he thought the Masons were behind it. Most were concerned about Slim, but they also wanted to know what in the hell had happened at NOAA Polaris.
So he told them.
His first instinct was to not spread fear, but from his first telling to his last there was no way around it. He told the truth and people either were skeptical or alarmed.
Regardless, the crew at Polaris had been slaughtered and Flagg had joined them. And now Slim was gone.
“Jesus Christ, not Flagg, not Flagg,” Special Ed kept saying. “He’s . . . you know his cousin is–”
“Married to a senator, yeah I know, Ed. But, see, that fucking thing that took him, it didn’t much care.”
Coyle, Horn, and Gwen went through the entire story three times for Special Ed and Hopper. When they were done, Hopper looked very weary. So weary, he could not even talk rapid-fire. In fact, he did not seem to know what to do with himself. He sat down, stood up, paced his office, put his hands flat against the wall and breathed like he might hyperventilate. Nothing was “terrific” or “outstanding” today or even “an exceptional example of teamwork and prime productivity.”
“None of this makes any sense,” he finally said. “Nothing does this year.”
He just didn’t understand.
“I . . . I just don’t get it. I don’t know what’s going on. The whole world is coming apart . . . everything’s just going to hell. What’s it all mean, Nicky?”
“Go talk to Locke, he’ll tell you,” Coyle said. “He’ll tell you things you won’t want to hear. All those things the NSF has been denying since Kharkov. Question is, Mr. Hopper: how bad do you want to know? How much sleep do you want to lose?”
Hopper didn’t have much to say about that, so Coyle left him to the broken pieces of his ordered little world, watched him walk off in a daze. After Gwen and Horn went to their rooms, Coyle was still there with Ed, pelting Ed with questions about Slim.
Special Ed, of course, tried to down-play it in the finest HR tradition, but how could you down-play something like that? The lights went out for something like fifteen minutes. All of them. Not the power. The generators were still kicking out and everything was purring along just fine. Only the lights went out. Explain that. And then while you were at it, explain how Slim disappeared from his room when the door was locked from the inside. Of course, Special Ed was quick to down-play that, too. Nobody knew for sure that Slim was actually in there; he probably just locked his door and dropped out of sight somewhere else. And as to the shambles that room was in . . . who could really say?
I can, that’s who, Coyle thought, trying to swallow down his anger and frustration. Things had been going to shit for Slim ever since he saw that thing under the tarp. Something goddamned spooky was going on with that kid and whatever it was, it arranged for the lights to go off so everyone else would be chasing their own shadows while he was snatched away.
“We’ve organized three searches and found nothing,” Special Ed admitted. “But I’m certainly hopeful that things will turn out well–”
“Shut up,” Coyle told him.
“Nicky, I’m just saying–”
“You’re talking shit, Ed. I know it. You know it. I swear to God if you start reciting the NSF line on company liability and missing persons procedure, I’m going to slap you right across the face.”
Special Ed opened his mouth, then closed it again.
Coyle just stared at him for a long time. “There’s nothing to be hopeful about, Ed. Things are happening at this station. They’re happening at all the stations down here. Crazy shit I don’t like to think about. But unlike five years ago when Kharkov went bad, it’s not localized: it’s spreading to the rest of the world now. We can pretend all we want that things are fine and dandy, Ed, but we both know better.”
“Nicky . . .”
“Cassie’s missing, Ed. So is Slim. That’s two people in one fucking week. The whole crew at Polaris were slaughtered and what got them got Doc Flagg, too. I saw it. I saw what did it. We all did. I wish you had seen it, Ed. If you had you wouldn’t be talking shit like this. You’d be scared. Just like I am.”
Special Ed blinked his eyes rapidly as he did when you put him in a corner, but he did not dare argue the point. He knew things were happening and the omens were just plain ugly, but he could not say so. Not as a good company man.
But he was fragmenting. All around the edges he was beginning to come apart and even the NSF, The Program, and all they stood for could not keep him together.
“Oh . . . Jesus Christ, Nicky . . . what are we supposed to do?”
But Coyle didn’t have a clue.
2
SLIM’S ROOM.
He had heard again and again what it looked like in there, but you really had to see it to believe it. Yes, it was a shambles. Looked like old Slim had had the mother of all drunken, violent parties in there. And when he was done, a tornado danced through. Now Slim wasn’t the neatest guy in the world, granted, but this was not just messy, i
t was sheer wreckage.
When Coyle opened the door, he gasped.
The room wasn’t big and from one end to the other there was nothing but papers that had been torn and shredded and discolored. Some of them were actually a brownish-yellow in color and very brittle as if they had been exposed to great heat, but not enough to actually set them ablaze. The plasterboard walls were still stuck with tacks and bits of tape and over the bed there was a huge crack in the plaster like it had taken some enormous impact. But pushed out like the impact had come from within.
Coyle stepped around, sorting through the papers which were the remains of drawings and song lyrics and you name it. Whatever had happened here was devastating, completely devastating. The sheets and blankets had been yanked from the bed and drawers pulled open, clothes and books and letters strewn about. And on the wall opposite Slim’s little desk there was a great stain on the white wall, a dark stain that was amorphous in shape, but very large. It almost looked like it was burned there.
That was unusual, perplexing. But what was on the wall next to it was positively spooky. In letters that looked burned like the image itself, it said:
GOD WILL NOT BE THE ONE THAT CALLS OF THEE FOR THEE IS THRICE NAMED BY THE DIVELLS OF OLD GATHER
There had apparently been more, but a great chunk of plasterboard had been broken out and reduced to powder. Coyle just stood there staring at it, silently forming the words with his mouth and wondering what in the hell Slim had been up to with this. Was it something from his dreams? Or was it something worse? Something which had been in his dreams that physically reached out for him?
“ ‘God will not be the one that calls of thee,’ “ Coyle said out loud, seeing if maybe those words would make sense with volume. “‘For thee is thrice named by the divells of old–’”
“Divells,” a voice behind him said. “Plural of devill. An archaic spelling of ‘devil.’”
He turned around and Locke was standing there.
“I gathered that much,” he said.
Locke smiled thinly. Very thinly. “How would you interpret that, Nicky?”
“How would you?”
Locke shrugged. “The spelling is archaic, as I said. If I had to identify it, I would say the usage might be colonial American, possibly seventeenth century. Could be colloquial British of the same period. That established, the next question would be why would Slim write something like that? Was he a student of the Colonial Period or Colonial witchcraft? No, not Slim. I spent a lot of time with him and to that kid witches were something that begged for candy on Halloween.”
Coyle sat on the bed. “So where does that leave us?”
Locke just stared at the words. “Maybe this is a case of something as exotic as automatic writing, wherein the afflicted are under the influence of their own unconscious mind or that of another mind independent of their own? Or, perhaps, he saw this in his dreams and was driven to write it?”
“Except it wasn’t written.”
“No?”
“Put your hand on the wall. Feel the letters,” he said. “Those aren’t written, they’re lightly etched. Burned in there, maybe.”
Locke nodded. “Very good, Nicky. That means you’ve noticed something Hopper and all the others missed . . . or wanted to miss.”
“They’re scared, Locke. We’re all fucking scared.”
Locke simply raised an eyebrow at that. “Tell me, Nicky. Tell me everything you saw at NOAA Polaris.”
So he did. He went into detail, telling him everything he had seen from that transparent slime frozen in the lab to the bodies out in the snow. And he did not forget to mention Flagg or what they ran over with the Spryte.
Locke thought it over for a long time. “What do you make of it, Nicky?” he finally said.
“What do I think? I think some kind of thing or monster, call it what you want, came into that camp and killed them, tore them part, pissed slime over everything, then dragged them out into the snow and maybe fed on them. I think whatever it was came in an aluminum coffin. I think it was delivered there on purpose to do just what it did: kill.”
“Who would have delivered it?”
Coyle sighed. He hated this Devil’s Advocate shit. “I don’t know, Locke. Why are you asking me? You’re the guy with the crazy ideas. Maybe you should tell me.” He studied the floor. “Honestly? I don’t know . . . but I think it has something to do with that Kharkov business. I think it has everything to do with what we were talking about the other day. I think those things, those aliens, are active and they snatched away those people at Mount Hobb. They took Cassie and now Slim. And what we saw at Polaris is one of their pets, a weapon they’re gonna use against us.” He shrugged. “Of course, I’m just the cook . . . what do I know?”
Locke laughed. “Oh, Nicky, you’re so much more here and you know it. You’re probably the only mind here—other than my own, of course—that can or is willing to see the big picture.”
Coyle just studied his boots. He was dead tired. He needed to sleep, but he was beginning to wonder if he’d ever close his eyes again.
“I don’t wanna see the big picture,” he finally said.
“You don’t have a choice. None of us do. We need to accept what’s happening and take some kind of action before it’s too late. You know what’s happening down here. You’ve seen enough now to know that skepticism is the province of frightened minds. You’ve seen what’s happening worldwide. It’s not going away.” Locke was dead serious now. More than that he looked scared. “All around us the fruition of an ancient conspiracy is coming to pass. We’ve been invaded, man, only this invasion started two or three billion years ago when this planet was barren of life and they came here to seed it with this very moment in mind.”
Despite himself, Coyle said: “I believe it. But will the others? Will the rest of the world? And what happens if they don’t?”
Locke started walking from the room, paused in the doorway, and turned around. “If they don’t, Nicky, this entire fucking world will be nothing but an immense alien hive with six months.”
3
THE PERSONNEL OF THE station did not handle Flagg’s death and Slim’s disappearance very well.
Once Coyle, Horn, and Gwen had informed Hopper and Special Ed, it seemed that everyone knew within minutes. Like some mystical form of osmosis, the information was diffused through the cell membranes of the station, selectively flooding the crew and allowing each and every one of them to reach the worst possible conclusions about their future. The information passed body to body like a plague on a hot, dry wind, picking up speed and dark intent, slowly inflating with half-truths and out-right lies until it was more monster than plague. Something running loose among them that, figuratively at any rate, would not be satisfied until it had stacked all their blood-stained bones in tidy gnawed heaps.
What it left in its wake was a station crewed by people whose veins were clogged with the night-black juice of fear and whose brains were clouded by an infectious paranoia.
These people were not only frightened, but broken now.
Bled dry, ruptured, and disenfranchised by the very system that they openly reviled but secretly worshipped. For the system was the machine that kept them alive down there in the barren polar wastes. It kept them fed and safe and warm and once that machine malfunctioned and the wheels of The Program seized, there could only be chaos.
Horn hid out in the Heavy Shop. Coyle and Gwen hid away in her room and drank with Zoot. And that was how they avoided the chaos.
Meanwhile, Hopper’s office was stormed by the troops which were led by Gut.
They all wanted answers and they intended on having them.
And to see them gathered like that, the station manager saw that he was bare inches from open revolt, for their eyes burned like the eyes of manic political dissidents and revolutionaries who were giving their government, their command structure, one last chance to set things right before they grabbed the reigns and rode roughshod over the
m.
Gut was right at the front of the pack in her overalls, her face twisted in a perpetual grimace, the acid of working class intolerance bleeding from her pores. Ida was standing there confused and The Beav was scared shitless remembering those hot San Franciscan Nights of ‘68. Frye was in the back of the pack with Danny Shin and Locke, but mostly for the entertainment value of seeing Hopper and Special Ed get roasted on the same spit. Cryderman showed, smelling of Jim Beam and suggesting they all get good and fucking plowed because it might be their last chance. The FEMC crew didn’t bother showing up and Eicke never left Atmospherics these days. Harvey was on duty at T-Shack.
So, except for a handful, they all showed, angry and tribal and demanding a blood sacrifice. And right away, the accusations were flying.
Cryderman said, “Flagg is dead! Cassie and Slim are missing! How many more have to drop out of sight before something’s done?”
“How about three or four or five?” Danny Shin put in.
“Please, this is being blown out of proportion,” Special Ed assured them. “You people are acting like children!”
Which went over like a hairy turd in the fondue pot.
“You hear that?” Frye said, stirring that pot. “Our fearless HR boy says we’re acting like children! Hey, news flash, Ed, we ain’t addressing you! We’re talking to Hopper!”
“Please,” Special Ed said once again, trying in vain to protect Hopper who was simply not up to it anymore. And as he did so, he was seeing the crew as not a collection of people he worked and lived with, but a single voracious entity that was about to chew up his ass in large bites. “We’re doing everything we can. Please don’t listen to gossip. This situation is not that drastic.”
“No, two missing people is par for the course,” The Beav said.