The Spawning

by Tim Curran

  Special Ed looked as pale as the plasterboard walls. His Adam’s apple kept bobbing as he tried to swallow it down.

  Frye put a hand on his shoulder. “You have to stand tough now, Ed. It’s never been so important. The NSF has abandoned us.”

  “But why . . . why would they do that?”

  “I’m guessing they have bigger worries. Now go see about Hopper. And keep your mouth shut, okay? People here don’t need to know he’s losing it until it’s absolutely necessary. No need to panic them.”

  And that’s what he said, but what he was thinking was: How long? How long before the news spreads? How long before everyone realizes this ship no longer has a captain or even a figurehead? And how long before they do something really stupid?

  Later, Coyle found The Beav in the Galley, clicking away on her laptop. “Inventory never ends, Nicky.” She looked up from her printouts. “Heard about Hopper,” she said.

  “Yeah,” was all he could say. “He didn’t leave us much of a choice.”

  “They never do.”

  Special Ed hadn’t been able to talk sense to him, so Coyle, Frye, and Locke had taken the door off the hinges and went in after him. And to his dying day, Coyle would never forget the look of horror on the station manager’s grizzled face when they rushed in there and took hold of him. He did not fight. He just trembled and sobbed when Gwen shot him up with a hypo, his face sallow and corded with strain.

  “It won’t leave me alone, Nicky,” he gasped like he was asphyxiating. “It’ll never leave me alone. I don’t know what it is . . . a devil, a demon . . . but she put it on to me! She set it on me so it would haunt me to my death!” He breathed in and out, trying to catch his breath. He ran a hand through his hair. “I lock my door and it . . . the ghost . . . always opens it. I wake up and it’s standing there, that dark ghostly shape with the burning red eyes . . . just watching me! A hallucination . . . it must be, yet, yet, it’s not just visual! I can smell that thing and it stinks like ammonia, sharp and acrid! I can hear it breathing and sometimes it says things with that fluting, piping voice! I shut the door, I lock it and bolt it and it does no good! It opens it and . . . and sometimes it walks right through the door or right through the walls! Sometimes I don’t see it, but I hear it! It has many arms and I hear them moving, swishing and slithering like snakes! It has claws . . . something like claws because it drags them over the walls while I sleep!”

  “Take it easy,” Coyle told him. “Just take it easy.”

  “Fuck you!” Hopper screamed at him in a childish treble. “You don’t know what it’s like! I’m hunted, haunted . . . oh Jesus Christ, why doesn’t it stop? I . . . I woke up and it was there, standing over me as I slept . . . I could see its shape, smell the ammonia seeping from it . . . it’s very cold, frozen, ice drops off it . . . it was standing there, watching me, getting into my fucking dreams and taking me to that place with the towers... the black city . . . everything rising and narrow and twisted! It won’t let me go! It’ll never let me go . . .”

  It had been an ugly, disturbing scene.

  They found a 9mm automatic on the table near his bed. God only knew how he had gotten his hands on it. Bottom line was, he didn’t attempt to use it on them. He never even reached for it. And that was because he planned on using it on himself, Coyle figured. He was strapped down and medicated now in Medical. They put Butler in an unused room in C-corridor where Gwen and Zoot could keep an eye on her.

  “Who’s in charge now, Nicky?” The Beav wanted to know.

  “Special Ed, I guess.”

  She laughed. “Oh yeah, far out. He’s the guy you want.”

  Coyle just said, “It’s out of my hands.”

  “You should, you know, take over. You’re the only one who can. Maybe Frye, but Frye’s an asshole.”

  “I’ve been walking around the station talking to people,” he told her, “about

  Butler.”

  “She’s a witch, Nicky.”

  “A witch?”

  “Sure. Things happen around her. Supernatural things.”

  And that was the general feeling he was getting from most concerning Chelsea Butler . . . a possessed witch. “Like I said, I been talking to people. Trying to get a feel for all this. What’s happening.”

  She nodded. “People are losing it. A couple . . . I won’t say who . . . have this crazy idea about stealing a ‘Cat or a Spryte, you know? Making a run for Pole Station or something. And I’m like, why? All the stations down here are going through the same shit we are if the rumors are true. But people want out, Nicky. They want to run. I don’t blame ‘em. They all want to get back home. But I’m like, why? World’s going to hell, it’s shitting its own pants. Why go back there? Wait it out here. We got food and heat and all the good stuff. Why risk it for that . . . that insanity, you know?”

  “That’s sound thinking, Beav.”

  She stared at him for a time, said, “When I was eighteen, Nicky, me and these friends of mine, we get a vial of LSD Twenty-Five, the good shit. Make you see God, right? We go up to Monterey, rent this beach house in Big Sur and we trip our brains out for like six days straight. Out of sight. Last day there, this friend of mine, Darlene—her old man was a cop, dig it—goes on this bad trip. I mean, really bad. Heavy stuff. I spent like five hours on the beach with her, holding her and telling her it would be okay. She was out of it, right? It was summer and it was hot, but she’s shivering, telling me that she’s in the snow, she’s up in the mountains in some big empty city and it’s cold, freezing cold. She’s lost in it, can’t find her way out. She described that city to me. How it was, what it looked like inside. She said men didn’t build it, it was real, real old, been abandoned a long time. Like I said, heavy stuff. Just a bad trip? Just a hallucination? She was scared shitless, man. Maybe I was, too. I never thought there was such a place until I heard about that dead city they found under the mountain. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, you know?”

  “She had a vision of an alien city down here,” he said.

  “Yeah, without a doubt. We’ve all dreamed about those places, haven’t we? And now I guess we all know why.”

  There was nothing he could say to that. Nothing at all.

  “I heard Hopper had a gun, Nicky.”

  “He did. I have it.”

  The Beav just stood there, staring at her screen, her eyes filling with tears. “When . . . when they come for us . . .”

  “Beav.”

  “. . . when they come for us, Nicky, do me a favor and use the gun on me. Don’t let them get me. Don’t let them take me to one of those cities. Please, Nicky. Please.”

  So all in all, Clime was a bad place to be that day. The silence was too thick, too ominous, too charged with something that just did not belong.

  In bed that night with Gwen, she said to him, “Do you believe in ghosts, Nicky?”

  “I’m not sure. Hopper does.”

  “We all will soon enough. Because this fucking station is haunted and it will be as long as Butler is here. As long as she’s here, we’re all in danger and I think you know that. If we don’t get rid of her, she’ll contaminate this whole place. At least, so says Locke. Those things have been reaching out to us in our dreams ever since we started this winter and it’s about to get a lot worse.”

  As it turned out, she was absolutely right.

  27

  EMPEROR CAVE

  MARCH 16

  “BEEMAN’S GONE.”

  Biggs opened his eyes, looked around in confusion. The digital said it was getting on 1:30 A.M. “Hell you say?”

  “I said, Beeman’s gone.”

  “Maybe he went for a walk,” Biggs said, trying to keep his crusty lids open. “Why are you bothering me about that asshole?”

  Warren figured he was a patient guy. He’d never liked confrontations, had never gone out of his way for a fight. The idea of striking another had never held any thrill for him. But right now, oh yeah, he wanted to punch Biggs right in
the face and maybe not just once either. He took a deep breath, then he shook Biggs like he was trying to shake the skin off his bones. “Listen to me, you goddamn idiot. Beeman’s gone. He must’ve wandered off. We have to do something.”

  “It was on your shift, baby. You were minding the store. Not me.”

  Warren thought: Good God, how did I get stuck down here in the middle of this . . . this . . . shit with a guy like Biggs? No contact with Dryden’s team from below in well over thirty-six hours. Some godawful horror down there they chopped from the ice. Beeman crazy. Now gone. And this fucking idiot compounding it all.

  He released Biggs.

  Figured he better before he hurt him.

  “We have to go after him,” was all he said. “Now are you coming with me?”

  “Somebody has to mind the radio.”

  “Fuck the radio.”

  “Damn, you do mean business, my friend. But so sorry. I’m not going down there and you couldn’t fucking make me if you tried. So have a safe trip.”

  Warren wanted to shout and stamp his feet . . . but what was the point? He pulled on his ECWs before he lost his nerve. Because, given time, he knew that he would. Biggs just laid there watching him with that cocky grin on his face as he pulled on his polar fleece, wool pants, Gore Tex parka, bunny boots and mittens.

  “Hey, I’d go, Warren, but that place down there scares the shit out of me.”

  “It scares the shit out of me, too. But somebody has to go,” he said, pulling on a balaclava and wool hat, strapping his Stabilicers onto the bottom of his boots. He grabbed a tungsten flashlight and his ice-axe off the wall. “I don’t come back, Biggs, you better get on the horn with McMurdo. Tell ‘em the truth this time. We’re in trouble.”

  That cocky grin slid from Biggs’s face as he went to the door. “C’mon, Warren. Jesus. Don’t do this. We can survive together.”

  “You just make that call when I don’t come back.”

  Then he opened the door and the cold found him and pulled him outside into the wicked, frozen world of the Emperor. He slammed the door shut and made his way for the passage like a man going to his death.

  28

  WHAT HE WAS DOING was crazy.

  But circumstances had gone beyond the point where such things as simple human fear and anxiety could stay him. Beeman gone now. Dryden and the boys not answering radio calls. No, he could not honestly think of anything, a blanket explanation, that would cover it all.

  They were in trouble. Possibly dead.

  And maybe something worse.

  The idea of going down there terrified him . . . but how could he hope to face himself if he did not attempt to help them? What kind of man would that make him?

  A living man, maybe.

  A living, cowardly man who is afraid of the boogeyman.

  A few minutes into it, the Hypertats and everything else were gone as the passage twisted and turned. Warren was alone. Just him and that tunnel of glowing blue ice. The incandescents strung out reflected back light that was indigo and aquamarine, phosphorescent and unsettling. He was very aware of the flashlight in his pocket and how dark it would be if the generator and its back-ups suddenly puked out.

  Easy. Just take it easy.

  God, he’d been so afraid of losing his nerve, he hadn’t even taken an emergency radio with him. Then he laughed at the idea. His voice echoed out with a hollow, disembodied sound in the ice cave. Radio? What for?

  Even if you get in trouble, Biggs won’t come after you.

  He’s a goddamn coward.

  And Warren knew that he was, too, waiting so long to come down here. But . . . well, it was nearly impossible to put into words the effect that specimen had upon him. How do you wrap a nightmare into a cohesive thought? How do you frame a child’s instinctive fear of the dark with anything so empty as words? The horror that thing inspired was not just psychological, but spiritual, racial, and physical. Looking at it was like peering at the accumulated traumas and terrors of your race crawling forth at you out of formless, supernal blackness.

  Unspeakable.

  When he saw it that first time, it made him sick to his stomach. Made his head scream with alien noise. Flooded his soul with primal, abhorrent memory. Filled his brain with disjointed images of people, things like people, stampeding in pure infectious terror while creatures like that one in the ice filled the skies, swarming and winging and buzzing and–

  God in heaven, stop it! Just stop it!

  Warren leaned there against the ice wall, making himself breathe, making himself forget. And all the while a voice that was primarily concerned with preserving his own feeble life cried out in his head for him to turn and run before it was too late.

  He went on.

  Around him, the glacier cracked with sharp reports and muted grindings. His boots echoed out with odd, almost musical reverberations like steel drums as his cleats bit into the ice. His breath came out in white clouds. A skim of white ice frosted his mustache even beneath the balaclava.

  “Close now,” he whispered under his breath. “Real close.”

  He studied the walls as he moved ever downward. The ice was irregular, but shining pure like flawless crystals, sapphires and blue emeralds. He was beginning to feel that same hideous magnetism of what lie below. Already it was getting inside of him, crawling like worms looking for warm meat to nest in.

  He knew he had to fight it.

  He could not lock-up down there.

  Ten minutes later, the passage opened up into the mammoth ice cavern in the belly of the glacier. Everywhere, delicate crystalwork on the walls, towers and flows and rivers of ice. All of it that startling blue that took your breath away. The lights were still strung on their poles, lighting up the underworld, the illumination gleaming and sparkling and glittering.

  Other than the glacier itself, he heard no sounds.

  Just that silence that was bigger than anything he’d ever known in his life, a thrumming and immense sound of absolute . . . emptiness.

  Now’s a good time to get the hell out of here, he told himself one last time. Forget this. If they were down here, you’d hear them. If they were even alive, God, you could hear them breathing. Just turn around and walk away.

  But it was too late for that and he knew it.

  Sucking frozen air into his lungs, Warren called out: “Dryden! Stone! Kenneger!” And when that got no response: “Paxton! Reese! Are you there?”

  The sound of his own voice was so loud in the emptiness something clutched tight in his belly. His voice echoed through the cavern, bouncing off that ancient ice and through the network of icicles hanging high above, coming right back at him with a dry, mocking assurance that no one was alive down there.

  He heard a sudden peal of shrill noise like squeaking.

  He spun around, dizzy, shocked, breathless . . . but there was nothing there.

  But he had heard something.

  A chitinous sort of squeaking.

  He knew there was nothing down there that could make such a sound . . . like a crab moving over the bodies of other crabs, shells grinding against shells.

  The Polar Haven.

  The lights were on.

  The Polar Haven was where the scientists ate, worked, and even slept sometimes. It was a red, tent-walled, barrel-shaped structure. Cramped, but efficient. He stepped carefully over the numerous electrical cables snaking over the ice. Gripping the door latch, he threw it open.

  Empty.

  He stepped in there, closed the door behind him. The space heater was going and it was warm in there. He pulled off his mittens and warmed his hands. The bunks looked slept in. Laptop computers on tables. He found a couple coffee cups and the coffee in them was cold. It had been poured many, many hours ago. Notebooks. Graphs. Books. A portable drill. Ice saw.

  The radio.

  Warren went over to it and saw that it was perfectly operational. He picked up the mic. “Emperor One, this is Emperor Two. Do you copy?”

  �
�I copy,” Biggs said. “Anyone around?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “Warren, listen to me. Get your ass out of there. Now.”

  Warren could hear the fear in his voice. At least he wasn’t alone. “Emperor One? Kiss my ass.”

  “I’m serious, Warren.”

  “Why don’t you come down here? Why don’t–”

  Warren almost fell on his ass. A shape passed by the window in his peripheral vision. And as warm as it was in the Haven, his skin went cold. He could hear Biggs calling to him over the speaker.

  Screw Biggs.

  He threw open the door and jumped out on the ice, almost went on his ass. There was no one out there. He looked all around the Polar Haven, but there was no one. Nothing.

  He could’ve turned back then, but he didn’t.

  For a yellow tent had been erected in the distance. If anyone was hiding from him, it would be in there. Gripping his ice-axe very tightly, he went over there. The tent flaps were blowing around soundlessly. He could hear a space heater running. A cord led over to the tent.

  That’s where it would be.

  Dryden’s specimen.

  He went over there and ducked inside, his ice-axe raised to strike. There was no in there. No one or nothing alive . . . just the thing. He couldn’t say how long it had been thawing, but long enough. Most of the ice was gone and here and there you could see the creature’s flesh which was gray and rubbery-looking. A single wing was beginning to unfold. Water dripped from it, going to slush on the ice beneath. He jabbed it with his ice-axe and the exposed flesh gave a bit. Ice fell away in a sheet.

  Warren fell back, that terror filling him.

  He heard something like a low, almost musical whistling in the back of his head.

  Very aware of just how bright the thing’s red eyes were, he reached down and unplugged the heater. Right away, the cold rushed in. For one feverish moment, he thought the cilia-like growths on the creature’s head were moving.