by Tim Curran
Battered by their force, Coyle with Locke at his heels threw himself at the door where Butler was being housed.
He could hear Zoot scream.
Gwen shouting.
He kept ramming the door with everything he had until it burst open.
23
GUT THOUGHT: MY SOUL is being eaten by monsters from the mist.
And she did not even know if she had thought that or they had placed it in her mind. But it was there, echoing into silence, and she knew it was true even if she did not completely understand what it meant.
The ghosts pressed in closer, so close that not only could she smell their sharp alien odors, she could actually feel them. Feel those scratching limbs and coiling appendages touching her, stroking her, feeling her.
Dry and gossamer like living cobwebs.
Then all around her, they began to melt into one another until they were nothing but a great oozing patch of fog that hovered about.
And that’s when she knew.
That’s when she realized that they were plugged into Butler like a TV is plugged into a wall socket. Without the socket, the TV is a dead hunk of plastic and metal. And without Butler, these ghosts, these memories, were nothing more than that: memories, potential lacking a catalyst to set them free.
Butler powered them.
Butler was the generator and the amplifier.
And if a machine annoys you or troubles you, you need only disconnect it from its power source. If Butler was dead, then the ghosts would fade into nothingness.
Grinning with lunacy, Gut reached into the top drawer of her desk and pulled out a letter opener with a sharp five-inch blade. She would kill the witch and set the station free.
She charged through the ethereal wall of ghosts and it was like passing through damp, cloying sea-mist.
Then the knife in her hand began to tremble.
It went red hot and flew from her hand.
Gut crawled off like a whipped dog.
24
WHEN COYLE CAME THROUGH the door a wave of force hit him and knocked him to the floor. He found his feet, but he could not get to Gwen. Each time he tried, a great freezing wind hit him in the face with such impact he nearly went down again.
The room stank: hot, spoiled, and mephitic.
The stink was unbearable. It was like Chelsea Butler was not alive, but dead, festering and putrid. She opened her mouth and a spray of black liquid came out, dotting her white face in the wind with tiny dark spots like ink.
And when she spoke, her voice had a wavering, windy sound like a November gust playing around the eaves: “Thee have been named, Nicky Coyle, thee have been named and selected . . .”
“Shut up, witch!” Gwen cried out. “Shut up!”
Two glass cabinets shattered and Butler floated across the floor, the sheets sliding off her like a shroud. She stood there, something trickling from between her legs and the stink of urine was unmistakable.
Locke rushed at her and nearly had hold of her.
Then she looked at him and he flew against the wall.
She licked her gray lips and turned towards Gwen. “Fear, fear, fear me! Your kind fear the truth! By design, my little whore, by design! How easy to manipulate little minds with the added leverage of fear, of terror . . .”
“Get away from her,” Coyle managed to say, standing up and showing her that he was not scared. It was not true, but he would not flinch from what she was: a discarnate, crawling pestilence.
“Fear me,” she said, rising up, towering over him, smelling and fetid, the piss still running from her. Yellow saliva ran from the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were not black now, but red shot through with black metallic specks. And now, now they were bright . . . vivid red, glowing in her pale and seamed face.
He screamed at the sight of them and not because of their awfulness, but because he knew those eyes. He had seen them in a dream. A childhood nightmare. Those eyes drifting in darkness, taking him places he had never wanted to go . . . black cyclopean cities and cosmic voids.
“No, no, no!” Zoot shouted, knowing what he was thinking. “Don’t remember! Don’t remember those eyes and those terrible places! You’re not supposed to remember the coming of the swarm! Where they took us, what they did to us in and out of those black holes–”
25
IN THE GALLEY, CUPBOARDS opened and silverware was ejected from drawers.
The Beav was crouched in a corner, sobbing.
They were coming for her.
Shadows drifting from some cosmic graveyard.
They would take her to the city.
Into the darkness.
The agony, oh, the agony.
The alien ghosts were rising and falling, slinking around her like hungry cats looking for something to chew and worry. And it was not flesh and blood, but minds, minds that they glutted themselves on.
They were here.
Psychic vampires. Mental cannibals.
They stuffed themselves with fear and filled their bellies with the raw, bleeding tissue of insanity. Nausea spread out in her belly as the air around her grew leaden, the atmosphere putrefying and going noxious like milk souring.
Ghosts, everywhere ghosts.
They are not ghosts as such, she thought as they closed in. They are memories. Memories of those things that everyone talks about. Ancient, dire memories that infest Antarctica like maggots infest bad meat. This continent is a cemetery, the world’s oldest cemetery. It’s like some rock you turn over in a field, the underside squirming with insects. Except here it is not insects, the infestation is something much more primeval, something incalculably dangerous and diabolical . . .
They reached out to claim her.
26
CRAWLING ON HIS HANDS and knees down D-corridor after escaping the psychic maelstrom of the CosRay Lab, Eicke trembled and shook, sweat beading his face and running down his cheeks.
D was pitch black. The lights were gone.
Butler.
Butler is the witch.
She has called up ghosts to haunt you.
To haunt everyone.
Like a hunted animal, the station thrumming around him, Eicke pulled himself to his feet, running, stumbling. He put out a hand to the wall to steady himself and received a jarring static shock that put him back to the floor.
Ghosts.
He saw ghosts.
Malignant, alien ghosts coming up the corridor.
Eicke squeezed his eyes shut. He would not see them. He refused to see them.
This was an avoidance technique, he knew, that often helped those afflicted by grotesque hallucinations. He closed his eyes, breathed in and out, counted slowly in his mind, telling himself that no, no, there were not specters in the corridor with him, squirming and drifting, white alien insects with baleful red eyes. Antarctica was just like you saw it on the Discovery Channel or National Geographic Explorer: a pristine wilderness of frozen white wastes. It was not a graveyard, not some looming ice-clotted haunted house whose shattered walls spilled nefarious spirits and the diseased blood of nightmares.
He opened his eyes and the ghosts were upon him.
He curled into a ball and they passed right through him with a blast of freezing air.
Butler!
She is a witch and you know she is a witch. A monster. An absolute monster that has called up demons from the ravening pits and ice-sealed tombs of this ancient land to torment you. To torment everyone.
We’re all going to die.
To die . . .
Die . . .
27
THE PIPING VOICES . . . THE SCREAMS . . . THE screeching noises . . . the buzzing and thrumming sounds. They all heard them gathering strength and felt them amping up to some nameless crescendo. They were sharp and hot and cutting as they sheared through brains, trampling down things like defiance and refusal to answer the siren call of the hive, the mighty and ancient hive.
They were powerless before its intensity.
&nbs
p; It owned minds and sapped the strength from bodies.
It was taking them, converting them, powering up ancient imperatives and controls using Butler as a conduit, a living wire through which the song of the hive was transmitted.
They were being crushed.
Drained.
Destroyed.
But there is a limit to human endurance and just as the energy neared its apex, Butler seized her own head in her hands and began to contort wildly, limbs quaking, head snapping back and forth on her neck. She hit the floor and crawled out into the corridor, her body trembling with what looked like epileptic seizures.
Then she fell forward face-first and did not move.
28
THE PHENOMENA STOPPED.
Like flicking a light switch, it ceased.
From beginning to end, no more than fifteen minutes.
Coyle got Gwen and Zoot to their feet and led them out of the room. Locke followed. Everyone was shocked and confused, their heads thrumming with aches and pains. People wandered in from the Community Room. Some came running. One of them was Horn who’d been out in the Heavy Shop for most of it.
“What the hell’s going on?”
“Get some rope,” Coyle said. “Hurry.”
“What are we going to do? Tie her up?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Then we’re going to throw her ass out in the snow and let her freeze to death. There’s no other way.”
Frye and Horn came back with a couple coils of rope.
Within five minutes, they had Butler trussed up. It was a pathetic spectacle but there seemed to be no other alternative. By that time, the entire crew had gathered.
“We’re just going to let her die?” Zoot said.
“It’s her or us, honey,” Gut said.
Nobody could argue with such flat logic.
Butler was naked, roped-up like a steer. Ropes crisscrossed her chest and waist and throat and were tied off to a loop that noosed her wrists together. Her legs had been left free so she could walk, but that was about it. She was weak and pale, practically emaciated, her eyes rolling in their sockets like glazed marbles. She was breathing very hard like she couldn’t catch her breath.
Coyle felt sick to his stomach. It was pathetic.
“Maybe freezing her ain’t enough,” Gut said.
“It’s more than enough,” Special Ed said. “Maybe more than we dare do.”
But Gut had that gleam in her eye. “We ought to burn her.”
“That’s sick,” Gwen said.
Coyle shook his head. “Burn her for chrissake? What is this? The Middle Ages? Offer her up to Jehovah and Porky the Pig and the others gods of protection?”
“Fuck you, Nicky,” Gut said.
“Let’s go,” Frye said. “Sooner we get this bitch on ice, the better.”
They half-carried and half-dragged her down the corridor. She fell to her knees about six feet before she reached the archway leading into the Community Room.
“Get that witch on her feet!” Gut snapped.
Coyle was beginning to have second thoughts about it all. She was deadly, yes. She was dangerous, yes. Yet . . . she was a woman no matter what had taken hold of her. To leave her out in the snow, Jesus, that amounted to cold-blooded murder. He didn’t know if he could be part of that and judging from the looks in the eyes of the others, he didn’t think they liked the idea so much either.
Butler fell again.
Coyle felt a chill race through his entire body.
Too late, too late, he thought. We lost our window.
Butler stood up and everyone fell back and away from her . . . and that’s when things really started to happen.
She had been kneeling on the floor like a girl at church saying her prayers . . . and now she rose up, inflating, growing larger, a change coming over her that everyone felt. The electricity in the air was fluid and arcing suddenly. Moments ago, it had been charged with a static, potential negativity and now Butler had drained it dry and filled herself with it. Gorging on that negative voltage like a leech on blood.
The hag was back.
And she was pissed.
Coyle felt an ominous wave of evil pass through him. An evil that was immense and cosmic. It blew through him like a shade, sucking the vitality from his organs and making him want to wilt and curl-up like a dead flower.
Right away, the walls began to vibrate and shake.
The beams overhead groaned as if an immense weight had settled onto them. The air was filled with those piping and squealing noises, peals of crackling energy that made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. As he heard and felt these things, he was instantly overwhelmed by a crazy feeling of exhilaration which had nothing to do with excitement or anticipation and everything to do with Butler and the raw kinetic energy coming off of her in waves.
Coyle was plugged right into it and it made his heart leap and pound with a crazy booming rhythm.
Ida screamed.
Locke dropped to his knees.
Frye and Horn just stood there, shocked into inaction. Which was pretty much what Harvey and The Beav were doing. As for the others, there really wasn’t much they could do. Save watch the show and it was turning out to be a real dandy.
Butler’s body was shriveled and gray, a skeleton stretched with skin. The ropes that enclosed it frayed and burst open and she drifted up five, six inches off the floor like a party balloon. Her eyes were huge and blankly white, lacking pupils. Her lips shrank away, revealing blackened gums and those narrow yellow teeth which chattered incessantly.
The air was not just cold, it was glacial.
Coyle could feel his limbs numbing, feel the wind that came off her biting into his face like frozen needles. But it was not crisp or clean, but oddly heavy and suffocating as if the oxygen had been sucked from it. She hovered there, turning in a slow lethargic circle like a corpse on a gallows, the wind blowing from her in icy sheets, frayed ribbons of rope snapping around her. The wind stank like spilled bleach and leaking tanks of formaldehyde. The odor was violently sharp and nauseating.
Coyle’s eyes were watering as his lungs gasped for air.
Special Ed and Ida hit the floor. Harvey and The Beav followed like dominoes, as if they were miners that had just inhaled poison gas. They hit the floor, gagging and whimpering. Koch let out a high, hysterical scream and dropped down to his knees. His fingers were blistered and smoldering. The stink of cremated flesh was unbearable. He’d been brandishing an ice-axe that suddenly glowed red hot in his hands . . . it hit the floor and melted into a bubbling pool of metal.
You could feel the energy in the air cycling up, thrumming and crackling, as blue eddies of juice ran up and down Butler’s body with a stink of fused electrical wiring.
“Somebody do something!” Gut cried out, trying to get to her feet, and something invisible hit her right in the midsection with such force she folded-up, the breath knocked from her.
She’s going to kill us all, Coyle thought while he still could think. She’s going to turn up the volume all the way this time and level the fucking station . . .
Both Frye and Horn collapsed.
The energy coming off Butler was wild, but undirected. It went in every direction in waves of force and heat and vibration. Several people were knocked around. Locke was thrown into Special Ed. The lights flickered overhead and a pipe burst, spraying water that froze almost instantly in the sub-zero gale coming from Butler. A cyclone started in Gwen’s room and everything in there that wasn’t tied down— clothing and blankets, water bottles and papers and trash from the can—came spinning out the door and spilled into the corridor like the room had just thrown up. The door slammed with such force that it was nearly split in two. The paint on the walls steamed and superheated, curdling and bubbling. Nails were ejected from studs and the plasterboard fanned out with huge, gaping cracks.
There was nothing anyone could do.
Frye and Horn were blown into the Community Room, tumbling like kids down
a park hill, knocking aside Eicke like a nine pin, and that’s when the corridor became a wind tunnel of roaring, vacuuming noise that hit with the force of a hurricane. The cacophony was deafening. Everything was flying and spinning in a tornado of screeching wind.
Coyle hunkered down the best he could, squinting his eyes against the blow. The lights were strobing on and off, the air a tempest of dust and ice crystals, nails and flakes of paint, papers and chips of wood. The corridor was not just flying apart, but flaking away, eroding.
He saw Locke get sucked into the storm and get thrown thirty feet down the corridor. Special Ed and Ida followed in his wake. The Beav was lifted five feet into the air and bounced off the walls. Coyle himself was blown down the hallway, striking Gwen, then both of them rolled right into Zoot.
They ended up in a merry little heap.
The three of them were twined together, knotted up and compressed into one another like a jumble of pilots who had been smashed together by too many G’s. Just a living hodgepodge of legs and arms and bodies. And Coyle had never, ever thought for one moment in his life that he would find it unpleasant to be married to two attractive women in such a way, but it was unpleasant. Unpleasant because that force was still on them and he could not move. And unpleasant because he figured he was about to die and the worst part of that was he would have to hear Gwen and Zoot dying with him. And that was more than he could take.
The station was coming apart.
The ceiling was falling around them, the walls rupturing. Things were falling and flying, cutting them and bruising them and banging into them and all the while they were sandblasted with debris and dirt, papers and plaster dust and fine scathing paint chips.
And through that violent rushing storm of deafening noise and flying clutter, he could hear those rhythmic pulsating noises that rattled the entire station and threatened to bring it down around them. And buried in it, those shrill piping cries which were the shrieking voices of the Old Ones and a manic buzzing which must have been their wings, the sound of the swarm itself.