The Spawning

by Tim Curran

  The lights flickered.

  Flickered again.

  No, it was not unusual. Sometimes there was a momentary surge in the line from the generator. It happened sometimes.

  They flickered again.

  Then not just flickered, but strobed, flashing on and off.

  “What the hell?” Warren said, his voice dry like there was no spit in his mouth.

  A rumbling sound rose up.

  It seemed to be coming from the ice beneath them. There was a crackling of static that was unpleasantly sharp, unpleasantly near. It was followed by a shrill metallic screeching, high pinging noises. And then vibrations that rolled through the Hypertat in a rhythmic booming like the beat of heart.

  Louder.

  Louder.

  The entire Hypertat was shaking.

  The lights were strobing madly.

  Warren cried out and Biggs just clung to his chair as it vibrated across the floor and a squeal of static came from the radio. The lights were flickering madly and he thought he glimpsed swaying twisted, inhuman figures cavorting around him. And then, from outside, a wild and shrieking cacophony of strident piping that was so loud they had to cover their ears. And then–

  Nothing.

  Beeman was sitting up in his bunk, mouth opening and closing in fishlike gulps.

  Warren looked scared white.

  And Biggs was not in much better shape. Like somebody threw a switch, he thought. On and then off. God, his skin felt cool to the touch. It was still creeping from his balls to his throat.

  “What the hell was that?” Warren finally asked.

  Biggs didn’t have an answer. He was too busy staring at the window, expecting to see something looking in at them. Something huge and malefic with the face of an insect.

  “The cavern,” Beeman said and his voice had an eerie, lonesome sound to it. “Down in the cavern. That thing . . . it’s awake now. It’s awake and it knows where we are.”

  26

  POLAR CLIME

  MARCH 15

  IT WAS A LONG day.

  Quiet, but eerie and expectant.

  The crew came and went, tense and helpless, not speaking, just looking angry and frightened and increasingly paranoid as they were burdened under terrible stress and psychological pressure.

  Harvey Smith stayed in his room. He came out for meals, but took his tray back with him because he no longer trusted anyone. He was not sure who was still human. He wrote endless letters to his mother, describing the state of the station.

  Coyle and Gwen, Frye and Locke and Zoot spent a lot of time discussing what was going on in the world and, more importantly to them, what was going on at Clime. They knew that somewhere there was a creature with a savage appetite for human flesh. It was out in the darkness or hiding amongst them, but it was there. And eventually, it was going to show itself.

  Gwen admitted to them that a voice—an ancient, crumbling voice—called to her in the night and it was no dream. Something had been out in the compound, calling her name.

  Not that any of it surprised Zoot. She was having the dreams constantly. And hearing the voices. They got worse, she found, if she spent time with Butler.

  Danny Shin, as scared as the others, sought out Locke and the two of them had many long conversations. “It’s happening,” Locke told him. “It really is. And down here, we’re sitting right on top of the epicenter.”

  Shin tried arguing that no one had actually seen a living Old One. Not at Clime. And Locke said, “No . . . not yet. But it’s coming. And when we do, look out.”

  As it turned out, the first person to see one of the creatures and survive was Shin himself. Coming back from the Power Station and Locke, he came bolting into the Community Room, ranting and raving to all present. He claimed something was up on top of the dome, watching him. He wouldn’t say what until Frye threatened to beat it out of him. Then, calming slowly, he said it was one of the things that Locke had told him about. It had great wings and staring red eyes. And it made a shrill, piping sound as if it were trying to communicate with him.

  Frye and Coyle went out with flashlights for a look, but saw nothing.

  Nothing on top of the dome, that was. But outside, in the fresh drift, there were strange triangular prints in the snow. Many of them clustered beneath the windows . . . as if whatever had made them, had been standing there, looking in.

  Coyle had been expecting these prints, but actually seeing them was almost too much for him. Standing there on the hardpack, Frye next to him, the wind blowing in his face and a few fingers of drift blowing past his boots, he couldn’t seem to catch his breath.

  Here was the smoking gun.

  Frye said, “That our creature, Nicky?”

  But Coyle shook his head. “No, not the creature . . . whatever left these was its master.”

  Hopper’s mental condition was deteriorating by the day. He made the mistake of looking in on Butler in the dead of night.

  Though she was unconscious, the phenomena began . . . rapping in the walls, vibrations and distant piping noises. Shaking and sweating, just shot through with horror, he watched as steam issued from her pores. Not steam exactly, but a swirling, boiling mist that gathered above her in fine threads of ectoplasm, forming itself into an inhuman shape with outstretched wings and coiling limbs and bright red eyes set atop fleshy stalks . . .

  Hopper screamed and threw himself into the corridor which was empty and thick with shadows. He looked back once and that misty shape was coming out of Medical, re-forming in the corridor. Then dissipating, dissolving until there was only those red eyes following him, five red eyes set with tiny black pupils that watched and watched.

  As he ran, they drifted along behind him.

  And when he found his own office and slammed the door shut, locking it, the lights went out and then there was just him and those disembodied red eyes floating and peering into him. Making him know things and remember things.

  Somewhere during the process, he went out cold.

  Horn was not remotely surprised by anything that happened or would happen; he always expected the worst. When he wasn’t fine-tuning the vehicles in the garage or Heavy Shop, he was devising weapons. A long time video game addict who’d fought his share of alien horrors on the screen, he planned on being ready. He’d told Coyle that he could easily fashion flamethrowers and electric prods that would fry alien ass. And he wasn’t kidding.

  The two remaining members of the FEMC crew—Koch and Hansen—had fashioned themselves machetes on the lathe and, like Horn, were ready to fight. It was not a good idea to sneak up behind them. It might cost you a limb.

  Ida was hearing a lot of the same stuff as the others and she was not immune to the positively morose atmosphere of the station, but she refused to believe. She refused to even discuss it. She hid out in her room and drank.

  The Beav, maybe having once been part of the counterculture herself, accepted it. She, too, stayed in her room when she could, listening to The Doors and Sly and the Family Stone, thinking it might all blow over.

  Eicke holed himself up in Atmospherics with canned food and would not come out. Cryderman was on his own out in T-Shack. Hopper still didn’t want Harvey anywhere near the radio, so Cryderman manned it alone. He even hooked up an alarm that would sound when something came in. Although, sometimes he was so drunk he didn’t hear it.

  Gut did not want to believe in Locke’s stories, but slowly, like Shin, she came around. And when she did, being the sort of person she was, she wanted to take action. She didn’t honestly believe some of the things being said, but that there was a monster among them—or one bloodthirsty psychopath—she did not doubt. And in her mind, Butler was the cause of it. She was some kind of witch and she needed to be sorted out . . . one way or another.

  Special Ed found Hopper in his room, cowering in the corner. He clasped his hands together, wringing them, interlocking his fingers, the knuckles popping white with the exertion of it all. He was very near to a nervous
breakdown.

  “They’ve been following me around and they won’t let me go,” he said, bunching his hands into fists and pounding them on the floor. “Ever since I went to see Butler . . . that monster . . . ever since, they follow me. They won’t let me alone. They’ll never leave me alone. They watch and watch and watch. They look at me from the walls and peer from under my bed. I feel them looking through my closet door. Oh . . . oh, God, this sounds mad, I know it sounds mad . . . but they even follow me in my sleep. I see them looking at me, always looking at me.”

  “Who watches you?” Special Ed asked him.

  “Ghosts,” Hopper said. “Ghosts.”

  Frye stopped by Coyle’s room just before supper and said, “Funny how it is now. How you can link all these things together. Things that are happening now. Things that happened at Kharkov. Things that happened years ago. There has always been a pattern, but we were too dumb to see it.”

  “Or we didn’t want to see it.”

  Frye stared off into space. “Ever been to the Dry Valleys?”

  “Flew over ‘em,” Coyle said. “Years back.”

  The Dry Valleys region was inland from Ross Island in the Transantarctics. It was free from snow and ice all year long because the land there was rising faster than the glaciers could impede. The Valleys were like some weird sunken world that sat below the level of the polar plateau surrounded on all sides by ice and snow. A series of valleys of exposed rock and sand that were notorious for the howling dry winds that buffeted them and blew them clean of drift. Geologists went there to study the rocks and microbiologists to study the microbes. It was one of those rare places in Antarctica where you could actually see the landmass instead of just pieces of it jutting up from the ice cap.

  “It’s a strange place in my book,” Frye told him. “I was there my second year down here, rigging camp for a bunch of beakers from Yale. You got those sandy valleys, walls and towers of stone rising in-between. The rocks are purple and white and red . . . real pretty, I guess, if you can get used to the desolation and that wind moaning all night long. You don’t expect a place like that down here. Looks like you’re not in Antarctica anymore, but crawling around on Mars or one of them alien places. Weird. There’s big shelves of rock called ventifacts that have been eroded by the wind. They rise up hundreds of feet, some of ‘em, and look like . . . I don’t know . . . faces and figures. Gives you the creeps in late summer when the shadows play over ‘em. Rivers of ice-melt run through there and there’s sand dunes that rise up thirty, forty feet like in the Sahara, only bigger. A wild place.

  “That year I was down there, I was out hiking about with this biologist named Best. Okay guy. Shitty poker player. We got our asses lost, truth be told. Those valleys go on and on, just a maze, and they all look kind of the same with the dunes and rocky bluffs. Mid-afternoon, we come into this valley. We hike up and down dunes and find ourselves looking down into this hidden hollow about the size of a football field. It’s full of pebbles and this fine sand that’s frozen hard as ice. Down there, sticking up from that sand were these shapes . . . real odd looking, they were. I called Best’s attention to them, suggested we crawl on down and have a look see. Because even up at the edge of that hollow, I can see the damn things are animals of some type. Best checks ‘em out with his binoculars . . . then he gets real pale, real nervous. Says we have to head back. What about them things? says I. But he don’t want to no part of ‘em. Seals, he tells me. They ain’t nothing’ but seal carcasses. Seals, my white ass. Those weren’t no seals.”

  “What were they?” Coyle said.

  Frye shrugged. “Who can say? I was only there for about ten minutes before Best took off like something was about to take a bite out of him. But they weren’t seals. Kind of big, barrel-shaped, you know? Things like spokes coming off ‘em that might have limbs and shriveled wormy things on top of their heads. The wind and blowing sand had eroded them down to skeletons or frameworks on one side, the other was all black and shiny. It was kind of eerie seeing them in that place with the wind moaning around you, all those dunes and towers of funny-looking rocks. Had to be thirty or forty of those mummies, some standing up, others kind of leaning, some eroded to nothing but withered frames and others just breaking the sand.

  “But they weren’t goddamn seals.

  “Mummies of something, but not seals. No way. I’m thinking they were the same things that team found at Kharkov that year and what Slim saw under that tarp and what Shin saw on top of the dome. I figure what we found was sort of a graveyard of those things that the wind had peeled from the ground over centuries probably. Those things had probably been there millions of years . . . wouldn’t you say? No matter. Best wanted no part of it.

  “Anyway, about ten years ago this ANG pilot at McMurdo was into me for a couple grand on account he was no card player. I let him square up by taking me on a sight-seeing tour in his helicopter. We flew over the Dry Valleys. Took us about an hour to find the one that Best and I had visited. I knew it was the one because of this funny prong-shaped rock rising up at the eastern edge. Well, that hollow was gone. Dunes had drifted back over it. But those mummies are still down there, just waiting.” Frye cleared his throat like something was lodged in it. “I tell you this tale because through the years there’s been lots of things that people didn’t want to connect into the greater whole. Best knew what those things were, but he was afraid of ‘em. Same way we’re all afraid of ‘em, some more than others. And pretending that there wasn’t something strange down here all these years because it didn’t fit in with our science and our sense of history was a big mistake. One we’re all going to be paying blood for. And that’s my bedtime story for the night.”

  Coyle didn’t say anything, he just thought about how Slim had looked the day he had seen the thing under the tarp at the crash site and how, years before, that paleobotanist named Monroe had looked when he told him about that thing he’d found frozen in the ice cave. The thing he’d had to spend the night with. Alone.

  Denial was a luxury they could no longer afford, as Locke had said.

  After Frye told his tale of the Dry Valleys to Coyle, he had been making his way through the Community Room, feeling the oppression and riven silence of the station, and the HR rep had come running up behind him.

  “Frye,” he said. “It’s important.”

  And it always was, wasn’t it? For a moment or two he did not even turn around. He just sighed and felt his shoulders bunch, a tightness spread out in his extremities. He could see Ida and The Beav in the Galley door, whispering to one another and looking in his direction.

  Yes, ladies, we are indeed up to something. Rest assured.

  Finally, he turned. “What now?”

  Special Ed looked like he hadn’t slept in days. His eyes were so red they looked like they were full of blood. “It’s Hopper. He’s locked himself in his room and he won’t come out. I . . . I’m not sure what to do. I didn’t know who to bring this to.”

  “So you brought it to me? The Waste Supervisor?”

  “No sarcasm, okay? I’m just not up to it.” He drew Frye over to one of the tables, made him sit with him. “Hopper’s the station manager. He’s in charge. What are we supposed to do without him? I mean, God.”

  What were they supposed to do without him?

  Was that a trick question?

  Because the way Frye was seeing things, whether Hopper was in the driver’s seat or not, it made little difference. He hadn’t exactly been a leader to begin with. The big boys at the NSF put guys like Hopper in charge because he had what some of the old timers on the Ice called Monkey Syndrome: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Didn’t matter what happened, guys like Hopper toed the company line and did what they were told and never, ever would they question the very questionable practices of said company or blame them when the shit hit the fan.

  Frye didn’t know where they got people like Hopper, but The Program was infested with them same way Frye’s maiden aunt
Alma’s guest room mattress was infested with bed bugs when he was a kid and had been forced to spend nights there. Maybe the NSF bred them or grew them in fish bowls like Sea Monkeys, but there was never a shortage.

  “If Hopper’s that messed up, then the torch is passed to you, Ed.”

  But he shook his head. “Frye, c’mon, don’t say that. I’m a good administrator . . . at least, I always thought I was a good administrator . . . but I can’t handle running a station. It’s not in me.”

  “Well, if Hopper’s lost it, you have to take charge, Ed. You’re company, you’re NSF, the rest of us are contract people. The beakers are here on grants. You have the helm. You know the rules same as I do.”

  He shook his head again. “I just can’t. I was thinking of someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes! You have the most experience down here. People listen to you, they trust you.”

  “People think I’m an asshole.” He looked at Special Ed and the man just looked beaten, like a rag that had been squeezed out and hung on the line to dry. “All right, this is what you do. You go try and talk to Hopper again. You can’t get him to open that door, I’ll get a few of the boys together and we’ll break it down. Horn and Gwen both have medical training. Either of them can give him a shot of something. That’s what you do first.”

  “Okay, Frye.”

  “We’ll strap him down and keep him drugged if we have to. If it comes to that, you need to get on the wire with NSF, tell ‘em what’s going on, tell ‘em they have to risk getting a flight in here.”

  “It’s not that simple. Hopper already told them that until he was blue in the face. We’re stuck. They want us to stick it out. There will be absolutely no rescue team coming in here.”

  Frye barked a laugh. “I just love how The Program looks after its own. Listen to me, Ed, do not tell anyone about that. You do, you’ll have a full-blown fucking riot on your hands. You hear me? I don’t think these people have completely given up hope yet, but when they do . . .”