by Tim Curran
Again, he told them he was speculating wildly. But he reminded them of the aluminum coffin-like box Gwen and Coyle had found abandoned at NOAA Polaris. He believed that it was a containment vessel, something used to transport the creature.
“I think if we go look around out there, poke in enough drifts, we might find a similar container that our creature arrived in.”
“And who brought it here?”
“The aliens. The Old Ones, the Elder Things. Whatever you want to call them. They are taking this world and that thing was one of their weapons.”
Harvey, who had been pretty much silent, decided it was time to be heard. “I’ve been listening to all of you. And it seems to me you’re missing the obvious connection here. You think this beast came here in some box, but maybe there’s a much more obvious explanation.”
“Do tell,” Gwen said.
“Butler. Butler was the monster. All along, it was her.”
“No,” Coyle said. “Trust me. That thing wasn’t Butler.”
“How do you know?” The Beav asked.
“If you’d have seen it,” Frye said, “you wouldn’t ask that question.”
Harvey got a manic look in his eyes. “You know nothing then. The rest of us know what that woman is. We know she’s a–”
“What?” Gwen wanted to know.
He looked around, that look in his eyes becoming a very frightening animal sort of gleam. He clenched his teeth, said, “Witch.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Frye said. “Witch? Now I’ve heard it all, Harv. Man, you’ve been flakier than a box of Post Toasties from day one . . . but this is the last straw. Ed, get me the straight jacket for this boy. A witch. Man oh man. Well, before she tries to fly off on her broom you better throw water on her and melt her ass. Just remember: I got first dibs on them ruby slippers.”
“I don’t care what you say! We’ve all seen what she can do! She’s a witch!” Harvey cried out. “She has to be dealt with!”
Nobody sitting there looked nearly as shocked by it as they should have. That was the disturbing part. Gwen and Coyle looked at each other. Locke was intrigued. Frye did some swearing and Horn looked amused. Special Ed looked like he’d been slapped and Eicke just looked defeated. But the others, and particularly, Gut’s clique, didn’t look surprised in the least. Ida and The Beav just caught one another’s eyes and nodded, as if they’d expected Butler was indeed something like that. Koch looked scared and Hansen simply mouthed “witch” silently, his eyes glazed.
Coyle felt very hollow inside.
Witch.
Yes, that’s what Harvey had said, as in Wicked Witch of the West. Oh boy. Not good. But it fit and he knew it did. He remembered Locke’s book, his own inference of it that told him that certain witches of history were really witches. Members of the human hive, as it were, who were born with their alien-engineered psychic abilities fully activated. He also remembered that morning in the shower room when Locke had discussed this very thing with him. But he hadn’t stopped with the witches of history, he had named a sorceress amongst them here and now: Chelsea Butler.
She’s been with them, Nicky, he’d said. They’ve opened up something in her that they’ll soon open up in the rest of us. I don’t pretend to know how she ended up here or why, but I will tell you she’s dangerous.
Butler is a witch.
“She’s not a witch,” Gwen said.
“Maybe she is,” Frye said, looking at Gut’s clique. “Because she cast a spell over the lot of you, turned you into fucking morons.”
Eicke cleared his throat. “Superstition is something I have no patience for . . . yet, I have seen certain phenomena around that woman. I can’t deny it. Maybe she is . . . something like a witch.”
“All right, all right,” Special Ed said to him. “Witches. That’s totally ridiculous. Dr. Eicke, I’m surprised at you . . . this is going into your file. If ever I’ve seen a case of gross negligence and incompetence on the part of professional, this is it. No, no, I won’t hear any more of this. Let’s concentrate on the here and now.”
“That witch is part of the here and now,” Gut said.
And now that their leader had broached it, they all speculated wildly: witches, aliens . . . they were having a field day. Eicke, maybe taken aback by what Special Ed said, kept telling them there was no hard evidence for alien intervention. Special Ed tried to steer it all into something more practical and Horn kept laughing at all of it. Gwen said nothing and Zoot just buried her face in her hands.
Coyle watched them go at it and the feeling of hopelessness grew in him until it was a forest that he couldn’t hack his way free of. The teamwork thing wasn’t going to work and he knew it. On the outside, the crew would go through the motions, but inside, where it mattered, they would still be the same divisive nitpickers and backstabbers.
The future did not look bright.
What concerned him most was Gut’s clique. They would be the epicenter of trouble and he knew it.
The gathering broke up gradually and Special Ed told everyone to get some sleep. That was about it.
When they were all gone, Frye said, “We’re pretty well fucked here, Nicky.”
“Don’t I know it.”
8
AS THEY WALKED DOWN B-corridor side by side, Gwen said, “You saw them, Nicky. You saw the way they were thinking. Eicke might be in denial and Special Ed might pretend things are fine and dandy, but Gut’s clique is thinking dangerous thoughts. I saw it. You saw it. The pep talks you and Special Ed gave about brotherly love were sweet and heartfelt, but none of them are buying it. There’s going to be trouble.”
“I know,” he said. “And it’s only a matter of time.”
She stopped, looking at him. “Mama don’t like Butler much either . . . but she don’t want her strung or burnt at the stake. And I think that’s where this is going. Somewhere bad.”
Coyle knew she was right. “I don’t think there’s any talking reason to them. Not while Butler’s here and things keep happening. They’re like a bunch of fucking peasants. It’s crazy.”
“Question is, Nicky: if they try something stupid, how far are we going to go to stop them?”
“Maybe we won’t have to.”
She looked at him.
“I’ve been thinking this over for some time,” he told her. “We have to get Butler out of here. I was thinking of calling Colony. Maybe they’d want her. Maybe they’d take her off our hands. If what I’ve been hearing is true, what’s one more freak for their collection?”
“What if they sent her, Nicky?”
He shrugged. “I’m going to have Ed give them a call. It might be our only way out.”
9
EMPEROR CAVE
AS WARREN EDGED INTO the crevice, Biggs felt something uncurl inside his belly like an insect spreading its legs. When they had moved down the passage to the cavern, he had been scared gutless, every moment wanting to turn and run back to the Hypertat. But then . . . when they’d reached the cavern itself . . . there had been something like euphoria. As deadly as that place was, as haunted as it must be, he felt exhilarated, speechless with a manic joy that was inconceivable. Even to himself. But he could not shake it and something inside him hoped he never would.
But now that had changed.
After shouting into the tunnel and freaking out Warren, he suddenly seemed to realize what he was doing. And the realization made his nerves jump and adrenaline surge hotly in his belly. He was sensing not only danger now, but something as far removed from ordinary peril as a hurricane is removed from a thunderstorm.
It was big and violent and it owned him.
Death was coming now and something inside him instinctively recognized it.
Death.
Closer and closer.
You could turn back, you know, he thought. You know damn well you could care less if Warren thinks you’ve lost your nerve, that you’re a coward. Things like that mean nothing to you.
But h
e couldn’t turn back. For inside him, there actually was curiosity like there’d never before been in his life. It was eating him alive. It wanted to know what this was about and it could not rest until it did.
So like a man who presses the muzzle of a revolver against his temple, wondering grimly what it will feel like to have his brains and consciousness reduced to a bloody pulp of tissue, Biggs entered the crevice.
10
TEN MINUTES INTO IT, they were already leagues deeper into the crevice than Warren had been on his previous visit.
Their flashlight beams danced over walls of that impossibly flawless, opalescent blue ice that almost looked like some kind of thermoformed plastic. They were seeing ancient seams and jagged striations that were hundreds of thousands of years old and quite possibly millions. Now and again, they’d glimpse something deep in the ice, some shadowy shape, that they did not dare comment upon.
And the blood, of course.
Because they were seeing that, too.
Splotches. Stains. Smears that were crystallized red. Something had happened down here and maybe it was a monster like Beeman said and maybe it was something else. And for Warren, everything inside him cold and trembling, he could almost feel the agony, the horror, the savagery of death down here.
Suddenly, Beeman stopped and Biggs nearly walked into him.
“What?” Biggs said. “What the hell is it?”
“Nothing,” Beeman said.
But something had stopped him, some force no one else could feel had stayed him, stopped him dead and Warren did not believe for a moment it was nothing. He shined his light around. The crevice continued deeper into the meat of the glacier. To the left, there was a small ell that ended in a seam you couldn’t have slipped a sheet of paper into and off to the right . . .
What was that?
A fissure that went on for about ten feet, the ice walls pressing in quite close, and then ending at a sheer face that was very smooth, very unlined. Warren went over to it. It was not old ice. It looked recent. And when he put his light up against it, he could see it was only a few inches thick. A space behind it.
And on the ice floor, he could see the telltale marks of cleats. They led right to the wall and stopped.
Beeman knew, Warren thought. He knew there was something here. That’s why he stopped.
“What’re you doing?” Biggs asked.
But Warren didn’t answer. He took his ice-axe and swung it at the face. Kept swinging it until cracks appeared and ice chips were flying in every direction. Finally, the axe burst through and Warren frantically broke more of the face out until he could get his arm and flashlight in there.
Right away, he saw something.
“Come on, Warren,” Biggs said, looking around nervously. “Let’s get this shit done with.”
“There’s something back here,” Warren said.
He knocked the rest of the ice free and stepped into the space beyond which was like a dome-shaped room, a pocket in the glacier. The floor sloped downwards to an ice pit and in it–
Corpses.
Mummified things.
“Shit,” Biggs said, swallowing. “Old . . . they look old.”
And they did.
For down in that pit, there were six or seven bodies, shriveled things with faces like corrugated and seamed driftwood. Dead men, yes, but not men that had died recently but a long time ago. They were tangled together in a heap, legs splayed out, hands reaching skyward as if they were either reaching out to something or warding it off. And they all wore the standard kit of the early explorers: dog-fur mitts and woolen mufflers, wool pants and reindeer-fur finnesko boots, fur parkas and Burberry suits.
Whoever they were, they’d been down here a long time.
Using his cleats and ice-axe, Warren went down there until he crouched next to the bodies. They were mummies, really, leathery things dried and preserved by the cold, the moisture leeched from them by the impossibly dry climate of the Beardmore Glacier. Warren figured they had been down here at least eighty years, but probably much longer. Their clothing was iced, immovable, as were their reaching limbs. Like deadwood sculptures rather than anything that had once been alive.
“Their faces,” Biggs said from above.
But Warren was seeing them. It could have been the cold, the contraction of muscles at death . . . but he didn’t believe it. The faces were gunmetal gray or black, but each and everyone he could see had died with their mouths peeled open in a scream, faces contorted, eye sockets wide. He wasn’t going to come right out and say they died of fright, but whatever had happened, it must have been horrible beyond belief.
“Maybe they fell into a crevasse,” Biggs said, but from his tone it was obvious he did not believe it.
It could have happened that way, Warren figured. Countless men, dogs, and pony teams had fallen into crevasses in the old days. But he didn’t think that happened here. They were all on their backs, frozen together, except one that was lying face down. Using his ice-axe, Warren scraped the ice away from the man’s back. His Burberry suit had been peeled away. His back was bare, blackened and fissured, and there was something between his shoulder blades rising from the desiccated flesh.
Biggs was on his knees now at the rim of the pit, shining his light down. Crystals of ice danced in the beam. “Looks . . . looks like a spider.”
“Can’t be,” Warren said.
But it did look like a spider.
One of those hideous side-to-side scuttling crab spiders they had in the desert or jungle. Except this one was lodged in the corpse’s back, mounded like it was trying to pull itself free. It was just as blackened and seamed as the man himself, splitting open from the cold and dryness, but Warren could see its segmented, hairless body where it broke free of the skin, the jointed legs which were the thickness of pencils. The way it was connected, not like it was a separate entity, but like–
It was riding him. Riding him like some kind of leggy parasite.
Right then, as Warren climbed from the pit, not wanting to be down there any longer with the frozen dead and that spidery thing, he realized that Dryden and the others must have found the pit, too. But somehow, someway, a sheet of ice had formed over the entrance to hide the opening.
And he didn’t believe that was accidental.
Biggs’s eyes looked like they wanted to come right out of his head. “What the hell was that?” he wanted to know. “Why was it growing from him like that?”
But Warren didn’t know and part of him was grateful for that.
Maybe fifteen minutes later, after navigating one blind turn after the other, they found the cavity in the ice where Dryden had chopped out the creature. And just beyond that, a little grotto in the ice and in it, the bodies.
“Holy shit,” Biggs said.
Dryden, Stone, Kenneger . . . God, jumbled together and slaughtered, faces peeled down to skulls and bellies split open, entrails snaking over the ice like frozen worms. And everywhere, pooled and sprayed, blood freeze-dried into red ice that sparkled in the lights.
Biggs turned away from them. “Okay, now we’ve seen ‘em. Beeman’s right. Now let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Warren thought that was sound advice . . . but like the bodies in the pit, these demanded that he examine them closer. Because if he wanted answers or intimations of the same, he would find them amongst the grisly remains before him.
“Please, Warren,” Biggs said.
“Just a minute. I have to see something.”
Beeman who had barely spoken a word in the past hour began to get a little skittish. “Biggs is right,” he said. “We should get out of here before that thing comes back.”
“Yeah,” Biggs said. “Come on.”
Beeman just stood there, his face unreadable beyond the fur fringe of his zipped-up parka hood. Biggs was scared. Scared like Warren had never seen him scared before. And Warren knew it was this place, at least part of it was. The noxious atmosphere of this tomb in the ice.
He had to know even as fingers of fear spread through his belly and into his chest, he had to see. To understand.
For the bodies were all wrong somehow.
Good God! Get the fuck out of here! Get out!
But he couldn’t.
Up close, wreathed in frozen blood, the bodies had been savagely mauled. Their ECWs had been torn free, the flesh beneath bitten, chewed, gnawed. Teeth marks in raw red meat were evident, claw-marks, scrapes, gouges and furrows. Like something with immense claws and huge teeth had been at them. Warren could clearly see the bite mark in one throat where something had bitten out a mouthful of flesh.
Yes, the feeding was evident.
But the bodies themselves . . . then he knew.
They weren’t just jumbled together. No. They were pressed together, melted together like they had grown that way. Even with his ice-axe, he could not pry them apart . . . quilts of flesh grew into quilts of flesh, muscles were linked with other muscles, bones growing right through other bones. Not three men, but one single entity like some protoplasmic thing that had been splitting. Dryden, Stone, Kenneger, they had been fused into a single gory, fleshy whole, a webbing of tissue.
You don’t need to know more than that. You don’t need to.
Beeman was beginning to make a throaty wailing sound like an Indian warrior singing his death-song. In the close confines of the ice grotto, his voice echoed out with a ghostly, eerie sound.
“Goddammit, Warren!” Biggs said. “We have to get out of here! Beeman’s fucking losing it!”
But Warren was fixated with what he was seeing.
Grown together.
And their bodies, not just fused, but channeled. Some of the wounds he had thought were punctures were not punctures at all, but holes that had been tunneled through flesh. Something had been burrowing into them. With his ice-axe, he pulled something free of one of these holes and it dropped to the ice . . . a curled up, spidery thing with legs folded under it. Yes, just like the thing on the back of that mummy in the pit, only a juvenile form. Dead. Warren, a dry giggling building in his throat, began tearing at the burrows and more of those little horrors fell free, leggy and perverse.