by Tim Curran
But maybe you couldn’t really blame the world at large.
They were ignorant and happily so.
Your common men and women of every nation only knew what they were told, what those in power decided they should know. They were never tipped off to the immensity of the horror born of antiquity that was preparing to engulf the planet. The NSF had been one of the key players in watering down the events at Kharkov Station. The truth made for extremely bad PR, so they handed the mess to their spin doctors and perception managers and it was all made palatable for consumption by the masses.
A cover-up.
Hardly the first, but with the way things were going and what was beginning to happen everywhere, probably the last.
They had covered up the Callisto thing, too.
Nobody was saying too much about that around Crary, but you could bet they were thinking it. When that megalithic structure rose from the ancient crust, the feed to McMurdo was cut on purpose. But it would turn up. Because someone in Antarctica at one of the stations must have been burning it. It stood to reason. Give it another week and it would be all over the internet.
But it would be too late by the time people realized.
“YAAAAAHHHHHH!” he suddenly shrieked. “TOO LATE, TOO LATE, TOOOOOO FUCKING LATE! THEY’LL EAT YOUR MINDS! THEY’LL DRAIN YOUR INTELLECTS DRYYYYYYY–”
One of the paras came in, Munse. “Take it easy, man.” He had a syringe with him. “I’m going to give you something that will help you relax.”
The syringe.
The needle.
No, no, no . . . not the NEEDLE . . . not the DRUGS . . . I must be awake . . . THEY can get to you if you’re asleep . . .
Too late. It was already in his veins.
Polchek had tried to warn the others of the Dry Valleys team—Benson, Krieg, Herzog. But they, of course, had turned away from him. So he went directly to Dr. Munse. They had been colleagues for years. More than colleagues. Friends, good friends.
“We can’t sit here and do nothing,” Polchek said to him, whispering in his face. “Those things have been under the ice and down in those lakes beneath the glaciers, just waiting in their dead cities and now they’ll wait no more. Don’t you see?”
“John,” Munse had said in his calmest voice, “there was never any evidence of extraterrestrial intervention at Kharkov. The ruined city Gates said he found could never be located. And that whole insane conspiracy of this ancient race harvesting human populations . . . it was fantasy.”
“Fantasy? Dr. Munse . . . Bob . . . please . . . think about it. You know what Dryden is doing up at the Emperor Cave. You heard same as I what he chopped out of the glacial ice! It’s one of those things! It may be long dead, but its mind is active, diabolical, and dangerous! The living ones use those old ice mummies as conduits for their energies . . . they’re part of some network we can never fully understand!”
“John . . . you need to relax, okay?”
But Polchek could see it in his eyes: the skepticism slowly giving way to belief and the belief becoming fear. Yes, yes, yes, through fear comes truth!
Munse would not admit to it, though. “It’s true that Dryden has found something in the ice. It may very well turn out to be some sort of extraterrestrial creature . . . maybe. But that hardly gives credence to the rest of the wild stuff. C’mon, John, that’s fringe science. We both know it.”
Polchek almost broke down into tears right there. “It comes in my dreams . . . things are channeled to me or maybe I’m more sensitive to the psychic projections . . . but I see those dead cities, I see what lives in them, and I know what’s in store for us.”
Munse rose to escort him from his office, but Polchek trapped him there behind his desk. “For God’s sake don’t turn me away like this! I’m not an idiot! The ancient hive has come out of dormancy! The aliens . . . they’ll turn us into witches! Wiiiitches! Then we’ll be like them—reading minds, moving things with pure thought, divining the future! It’s what they do and what they want us to do. Don’t you see?” Polchek tapped his temples with index fingers that shook badly. “It’s . . . it’s not like in those old movies. They don’t take over our bodies! They don’t possess us! They don’t have to! They engineered . . . imperatives into us millions of years ago . . . genetic imperatives. They will activate those imperatives now . . . we will be witches! They don’t need to possess us, we’ll possess ourselves!
“No, no, Bob . . . please listen . . . in every population there will be a . . . an overseer, an overlord, call it what you want . . . one whose ancient alien faculties are fully developed,” he explained, panting and sweating by that point as if what he was birthing to his old friend took an exertion that exhausted him. “One that will call the others together maybe . . . amplify what’s already in them . . . turn a select population into a great psychic battery that can be culled, drained by the aliens themselves! Don’t you see? We have one here amongst us now–”
“That’s enough, John, you’re overwrought.”
“Matheson! Matheson is the one! I’ve been watching him for some time! He’s the one! He’s the witch!”
But all that got him in the end was that Munse told him to go back to the dorm and lay down. He needed rest and quiet. He was working too hard. And that was not a request from Munse but an order as team leader.
That was four days ago.
Since then . . . Munse had not allowed him at the lab.
They were all unified against him and he could see the looks on their faces. In fact, he could practically hear their thoughts.
Look at Polchek! Jesus, he’s petrified! He’s acting like he’s trapped in some existentialist version of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Except this time it’s not aliens or Cold War political/social allegory, but fucking space witches jumping out of seed pods. Good God!
None of them wanted to be around him now.
He was a diseased cell in their midst.
Every time he went into the lab—ignoring Munse’s orders—they cringed. All of them sweating bullets, just terrified of being in such close physical proximity with the crazy man. Way they were acting, you would have thought he was going to sink his fangs right into their necks.
Idiots.
They did not realize the threat Matheson was to them. Maybe Matheson had been the pride of the Glaciology Department at Montana State . . . but that Matheson was dead.
This Matheson was a monster.
They’ll never let you roam free, not after today.
Polchek told himself he must remain calm. Do not rave and act like a crazy man. Do not play into their hands. Let them see how sane you are. How balanced your mind is.
Across the room. His desk drawer. There was a knife with a shiny seven-inch blade. Just one more chance to kill the witch, one more chance.
I’ll show you for what you are, witch.
I get free and I’ll fucking gut you! I’ll pull your witch-guts out and spill your witch-blood and burn you, burn you, burn you . . .
The paras took him out through “the spine” which was the corridor that connected the labs of Crary—Phase I: Biology, Phase 2: Earth Sciences, etc. None of them knew or could know just how late it was, but soon . . . soon . . .
Polchek closed his eyes as the sedative took hold.
7
POLAR CLIME STATION
WHEN COYLE GOT BACK to his room from the Galley there was a package outside the door from Locke.
Wrapped up in plain brown paper and held together with a lot of packing tape, it could have been just about anything. Hell, maybe even a birthday present or a very late Christmas gift. Somehow, though, Coyle figured it was none of those. Whatever Locke had deposited outside his door would be nothing festive or cheery, but something of a darker variety.
He took it inside with him and sat at his little desk, just staring at it, thinking, this is going to ruin my day, isn’t it?
Sighing, he slit the package open and found himself staring at a large hardcover book ca
lled A Gathering of Witches: Witchcraft, Devil-Worship, and Witch-Lore Through the Ages. On the cover there was a reproduction of a woodcut featuring a bent-over old woman holding court with a goatish man with horns. Around them, human limbs were hung from tree branches and sprouting from a cauldron the woman was stirring.
Coyle just shook his head. “What the hell is this about?” he said under his breath.
There was a note from Locke:
Nicky,
Haven’t been able to hook up with you lately. Too busy. I found some interesting things in this book. Check out the pages I marked. We’ll talk later.
He just sat there a moment.
Locke had the pages marked with sticky notes and the first such page showed another woodcut of a woman who was hanged from a tree with a fire burning beneath her. The Caption read: “Suffolk 1667, Margaret Haritay, executed by witchfinders. She claimed that a great ‘antient wing’d Beaste of many eyes and colours’ taught her the secret of flight in Twelve-Acre Wood and that she ‘dide take anighted flight with witches and divells and the Beaste itself on Midsummer’s Eve.’ Haritay was hanged, then burned for the ‘Willfule Bewitch’g of the village of Pyecutte which she dide at the Beaste’s request.’
Coyle scanned through the text, looking for more references to the winged devil, but finding none. Just mention of a plague of sorts sweeping Pyecutte that caused dozens of people to go stark raving mad. Haritay was found guilty, of course, but refused to name the members of her coven even under torture. Physical examination of her person discovered the “Divell’s Mark” in the form, oddly enough, of a V-shaped incision on the back of her neck just beneath the base of the skull.
Haritay mentioned that the beast had given her a familiar which she named “Griddengyre.” The familiar had “no definite shape, was a creep’g awfulness as of entrails which tooke shape of which was nearest.” Whatever that meant. Apparently the familiar enjoyed the blood of children. Whether it could be believed or not, after Griddengyre had devoured and bled dozens of sheep it was trapped in a cave in Twelve-Acre Wood and burned to ashes. This, apparently, after it had nearly destroyed the village of Pyecutte.
The “wing’d Beaste” was interesting, of course, though it really meant nothing. These demons and what not were probably archetypes. Locke had mentioned this. Not meant to represent anything living, but a memory of something long-forgotten in the mists of the past.
Coyle flipped pages until he found the next sticky note.
Another woodcut which showed a devil of sorts in the forest. It almost looked like some sort of tree with its furrowed, trunk-like body and sticklike appendages, a crown of horny branches atop its head. The most interesting thing was the huge bat wings extending from its body. The caption read: The Devil of Hogenhaus Forest, the Hartz Mountains 1333. Coyle stared at it for some time. No, it was not an exact illustration of an Old One or Elder Thing, but a pretty damn close approximation. Like something somebody might have seen before running away or a composite creature drawn by an artist from several eyewitness accounts or folktales.
“Don’t read too much into this,” he said to himself.
He scanned the text until he found mention of the Hogenhaus Devil, as it was known. Apparently, it was worshipped by a coven of German witches who were greatly feared in the region because the creature had taught them a technique known as the “migration of minds” in which they could, by reciting certain words and concentrating on a wooden image of their victim, force their mind into his or her body and take them over for a period of time. The witches had done so with a local magistrate and a minister who were interfering with their activities. They made the magistrate commit suicide and the minister attempt to rape a local girl in full view of dozens of witnesses.
Coyle started thinking about those psychic gifts Locke had talked about that were in us all supposedly, put there by the Old Ones to make us like them.
The author went on, mentioning how the descriptions of the Hogenhaus Devil were very similar to those that had come out of Siberia in the 17th century and the Pyrenees in the 15th, Prague in the 13th century and Egypt in the 5th. Comparable devils were known to Aborigine tribes of the Australian outback and the Bushmen of the Kalahari in Botswana.
In 1099, during the Crusades, a mummified creature of this type was discovered in a subterranean temple in Jerusalem during the bloody siege of that city and destroyed . . . along with its worshippers.
This same devil was known in Sumer in the 25th century BC and was worshipped in the 11th by a fervent Chaldean cult in Babylonia. And there was a very intriguing tale handed down orally generation to generation among the Inuit of the Baffin Bay region that told of the sky being black with a swarm of such creatures, that the buzzing of their wings was louder than storm winds. According to this legend, an Inuit village on what is now known as Ellesmere Island was emptied by the swarm, that the inhabitants were carried off into the sky. That peculiar legend was thought by anthropologists to be many thousands of years old, handed down father to son and mother to daughter. And in a subsurface cave system in Belgium, badly worn Neanderthal cave paintings approximately 60,000 years old seemed to show a large tribe being taken up into the air by winged creatures that bore a remarkable resemblance to “modern” accounts of the Hogenhaus Devil.
Coyle wanted to toss the book in the corner and forget about it all, but he couldn’t. It was all there and it always had been. It was only a matter of looking and connecting disparate geographical areas and time periods. Regardless, it was there.
He paged through the book and there were other historical and folkloric references ranging from Assyrian temples to Scandinavian sagas. Locke had been very thorough in his research as had the author, a professor of classical archaeology out of Cambridge. Here were Celtic myths of wind demons called the “Dawn Reapers” and blasphemous statues of such devils in Ireland and Wales to which blood offerings were made as recorded by Roman scholars; Nigerian folk tales of winged devils carrying entire villages up to heaven; and the whispered tales of Germanic barbarian tribes.
Too much. It went on and on.
Coyle would have tossed the book aside at that point, but he found something a little closer to home.
It concerned the infamous “Arkham Devil-Cult” in Massachusetts of the 17th century, a hard time for witches in Colonial New England. The Arkham Devil-Cult, or Witch-Cult, apparently held Sabbat in some shunned, dark ravine beyond a place called Meadow Hill during the dark nights of the four major witches’ holidays: Candlemas, May-Eve, Lammas, and Halloween. Here, they worshipped at some ancient white stone which sat in the ravine where vegetation refused to grow. This ravine had long been a place avoided by both colonists and Indians alike due to its unpleasant history of apparitions, unexplainable noises and high-pitched sounds. Early colonists claimed that staring into the ravine would give you a terrible headache and that those that dared visit it often saw ghostly, monstrous figures and objects—tree branches and heavy stones and leaves—that blew about and flew through the air when there was no wind. The local Narragansett tribe claimed that it was haunted by a large winged creature with a dozen burning red eyes, that was sometimes ghostly and ethereal and sometimes fleshy and solid. It often exuded a pale phosphorescence that could burn your flesh. To look upon this thing would empty your mind. Tribal shaman often went there and had nightmarish visions that stayed with them throughout their lives. The stone itself was apparently hewn from some form of meteoric quartz by a banished sect of the Narragansett centuries and centuries before.
During the nights of the witches’ holidays were times of great terror in Arkham, for children often went missing and noises were heard from the sky and the earth trembled and shook.
The Arkham Devil-Cult was greatly feared because of its power. Witches from the cult that had been brought to trial admitted, under duress, that a great hideous winged devil had shown them the secrets of the outer spheres, how to physically vanish and move through solid matter, and to jump from p
lace to place over great distances via the manipulation of certain esoteric figures, formula, and the distortion of unknown angles. Modern conspiracists claimed that this was evidence that this creature, probably of extraterrestrial origin, had taught the Witch-Cult the primal, unguessable secrets of quantum physics and space/time distortion. Although others claimed it meant nothing, that these same conspiracists were linking black magic and Einsteinian physics into some impossible proto-science that could not possibly exist.
Essentially, they said, it was all randy bullshit.
On May-Eve, 1691, a Congregational minister named Daniel Hooper, incited by the works of Cotton Mather, hid himself in the ravine to learn the identity of the witches. He was found four days later on a hilltop seven miles away, naked and badly bruised and scratched, his eyes struck mad with fear. After nearly a month of convalescing, he claimed (in writing) that he, “Dide wytnesse a divers covven of wytches number’g thyrteen upon ye Fryday E’en and dide heare great shriekes and fryghtfull noisess inn that spirit’d ravin beyond Meddowe Hille whereof I speak, whereon I was badly terrifyed and affear’d: anon, I duly descried an awfull discoverye of these wytches hold’g congress with a darke and diabolicall figure of extreame foulnesse, himm being of corruptnesse and filthe rais’d upp frome Hell, the adversarye lykenesse to the Divell as writ in ye Bible: wing’d and of greate size with many eyes that burn’d lyke redde as of bloode and possess’d of a voice as of pyp’g cycada. Such things descried bye others at yr Hallow’en and Candelmas rites. This Divell dide bestowe crawl’ng spyders or such vermin unto the wytches as gifts for foul magick and conjur’g. I owne that thiss statemente I tell of woulde be true.”
Hooper didn’t have much of a life after that.
He was shunned and lived by himself, was considered mad. He claimed that the Devil walked through the walls of his house and called him by name. No one would have anything to do with him whatsoever, claiming that he was “hex’d and oft visit’d bye spirits” and tales sprung up like weeds around the poor man. Several people claimed to have seen a winged hobgoblin lighting off the roof of his house at Midsummer and others claimed to see several such creatures buzzing about like corpse flies. Hooper rarely went into the city for he was known to all and had been beaten on several occasions and publicly stoned on yet another. Horses would not go near his house. They reacted the same as they did when they neared the old ravine, whinnying and racing about in circles and had broken free of their harnesses on several occasions.