by Tim Curran
Yeah, Hayes thought, resident ballbuster, bean-counter, and NSF ramrod. That was LaHune. The headmaster lording over this clutch of unruly, free-thinking students as it were. LaHune had more personality than your average window dummy, but not much.
Lind said, “I can’t believe he hasn’t come to see what we have out here. You would think it was his job.”
“C’mon, Lind,” Hayes said. “He’s got more important shit to be doing like counting pencils and making sure we’re not using too many paperclips.”
Gates chuckled.
The water that melted off that irregular block of ice was being collected in buckets, tagged for later study. Drip, drip, drip.
“Gets under your skin, don’t it?” Lind said. “Just like that movie . . . you ever seen that movie, Hayes? Up at the North Pole or maybe it was the South, they got this alien in a block of ice and some dumbfuck throws an electric blanket over it and it unthaws, runs around camp sucking everybody’s blood. Think that guy from Gunsmoke was in it.”
Hayes said, “Yeah, I saw it. Was kind of trying not to think about it.”
Gates smiled, set his digital camera aside. With his big shaggy beard he looked more mountain man than paleontologist. “Oh, we’re unthawing our friend here, boys, but it won’t be by accident. And don’t worry, this creature has been dead a long, long time.”
“Famous last words,” Hayes said and they all had a laugh over that.
Except Lind.
They’d lost him somewhere along the way.
He stood there staring at the thing in the ice, listening to the water dripping and it seemed to have the same effect on him as the call of a siren: his eyes were fixed and wide, his lips moving but no words coming out. He stood there like that for maybe five minutes before anyone seemed to notice and by then it looked much like he was in a trance.
Hayes said, “Lind . . . hey, Lind . . . you okay?”
He just shook his head, his upper lip pulled up into a snarl. “That fucking LaHune . . . thinks he’s in charge, but doesn’t have the balls to come and look at this . . . this monster. Bastard’s probably on the line with NSF McMurdo, bragging about this, telling them all about it. But what does he know about it? Unless you stand here looking at it, feeling it looking back at you, how can you know about it?”
Hayes put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey, chill out here, Lind, it’s just a fossil.”
Lind shrugged off his hand. “Oh, is that all it is? You telling me you don’t feel that thing looking at you? Jesus, those eyes . . . those awful red eyes . . . they get right inside you, make you feel things, make you want to do things. You telling me you can’t feel it up here?” He was rubbing his temples, kneading them roughly like dough. “Can’t you feel what it’s thinking? Can’t you feel it getting inside your head, wanting to steal your mind . . . wanting to make you something but what you are? Oh Christ, Hayes, it’s . . . those eyes . . . those fucking eyes . . . they unlock things in your head, they . . . “
He paused there, breathing very hard now, gasping almost like a fish that was asphyxiating. There was sweat all over his face and his eyes were bulging from his head, cords straining at his neck. He looked to be on the verge of utter hysteria or maybe a good old-fashioned stroke.
“You better get him back to the compound,” Gates said.
They were all staring at Lind, thinking things but not saying them. A clot of ice dropped from the mummy and Hayes stiffened at the sound. It was enough, by God, it was more than enough.
He helped Lind with his parka and led him to the door. As Hayes made to open it, Lind turned and looked at the scientists. “I’m not crazy, I don’t care what you think. But you better listen to me and you better listen good.” He jabbed a shaking finger at the mummy. “Whatever you do, whatever any of you do . . . don’t stay in here alone with it, if you know what’s good for you, don’t stay in here alone with it. . . “
Then they were out the door.
“Well,” Bryer said. “Well.”
The wind clutched the hut like a fist, shook it, made the overhead lights flicker and for barely a second, they were in the dark with the thing.
And by the looks on their faces, they hadn’t cared for it much.
4
There were a lot of camps at the South Pole. Collections of pitted bones scattered over the frozen slopes and lowlands like sores and contusions on the ancient hide of the beast. But only a handful of them were occupied when winter showed its cold, white teeth.
Kharkhov was one of the few.
Just another rawboned research station, its numerous buildings like meatless skeletons rising from the black ice, shivering beneath shrouds of blowing white. A desolate and godforsaken place where the sun never rose and the wind never stopped screaming. The sort of place that made you pull into yourself, roll up like a pillbug and hold on tight, waiting for the night to end and spring to begin. But until that time, there was nothing to do but wait and languish through the days that were nights and keep your mind occupied.
What you didn’t want to do was to think about ancient, hideous things that had been exhumed from polar tombs. Things that pre-dated humanity by God knew how many millions of years. Things that would drive you mad if you saw them walk. Things with glaring red eyes that seemed to get inside you and whisper with malevolent voices, filling your mind with reaching, alien shadows.
5
Although he drank a pint of Jim Beam Rye before lights out, Hayes didn’t sleep worth a damn that night. He had weird dreams from the moment he closed his eyes to the moment they snapped back open at four a.m. In the darkness he lay there, sweat beading his face.
The dorm room was dark, the readout of a digital clock over on the wall casting a grainy green illumination. There were two beds in there. If you fell out of yours, you stood a good chance of falling into your partner’s. They were crowded places, the dorms, but space was limited at the stations. Tonight, the other bed was empty. Lind was sleeping on a cot in the infirmary, shot full of Seconal by Doc Sharkey.
Hayes was alone.
Dreams, just dreams. Nothing to get worked up about.
Maybe it had been what happened to Lind and maybe it was something else, but the dreams had been bad. Real bad. Even now, Hayes was all fuzzy-headed and he couldn’t be sure they were dreams. He couldn’t remember them all, just some tangled skein of nightmares where he was pursued, hiding from terrible shapes with burning eyes.
He could only remember the last one with any clarity.
And that’s the one that had yanked him out of sleep, made him sit right up, teeth chattering. In the dream, some grotesque freezing black shadow had fallen over him, bathing him with the cold of tombs and crypts. It had been standing at the foot of his bed, that seething amorphous shape, looking at him . . . and that had done it. He’d woken up, fighting back a scream.
Nerves.
Jesus, that’s all it was. Too much weird shit happening lately, his imagination had been cranked. And when you lost control of your imagination during the long Antarctic winter, you could be in real trouble.
Hayes settled back in, deciding to lay off the microwave lasagna before bedtime. Because that was probably the real culprit.
Couldn’t be anything else.
6
By the next afternoon, everyone in camp had heard about Lind’s little episode.
At a research station like Kharkhov, there were no secrets. Stories — whether real, imagined, or grossly exaggerated — made the rounds like clap at a convention. Everything was passed around, re-told, re-invented, blown out of proportion until it bore little resemblance to the incident that had inspired it.
In the mess hall, trying to eat his grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup in peace, they were all over Hayes like birds on roadkill, all pecking away to see if there was any good red meat left on the carcass.
“Heard Lind tried to slit his wrists,” Meiner, one of the heavy equipment operators was saying, smelling like diesel fuel and hydraulic
grease and not doing much for Hayes’ appetite. “Sumbitch just went crazy, they’re saying, crazier than a red-headed shitbug. Just lost it staring down at that mummy in the ice.”
Hayes sighed, set his sandwich down. “He -”
“It’s true enough,” St. Ours said. “I was there with him for awhile. He was getting a funny look in his eyes the whole time, just staring at the ugly bastard in the ice, that monster just thawing out and that face swimming up clear . . . and it weren’t no sort of face I’d want to see again.”
Rutkowski jumped in at that point, started saying how Lind had gotten a funny gleam in his eyes like a man ready to jump off a bridge. That none of it surprised him because there was something funny about Lind and something even funnier about those dead things Gates had dragged back from the camp in the foothills.
They talked on and on non-stop.
Didn’t let Hayes get a word in edgewise about any of it. Other than Gates, Holm, and Bryer, he’d been the only one to see Lind’s breakdown, if that’s what it had been. Both Rutkowski and St. Ours had left the hut maybe fifteen minutes before. Not that the lack of firsthand experience in the matter was slowing them down any.
Meiner was saying how he’d been at the Palmer Station on Anvers Island one lean winter and that three people had committed suicide one week, slit their wrists to a man, one after the other. It was spooky shit, he said. Got so people at Palmer thought there was some sort of insanity bug making the rounds. But that was the Antarctic winter, sometimes people just couldn’t take the isolation, the desolation, it got under their skins like scabies. And when that happened, when something slipped a cog upstairs, then that left a person wide open to bad “influences.”
“Don’t surprise me, not one cunt-hair,” St. Ours confessed to them. “We had this man and wife team at McMurdo one winter, funny ducks they were, geologists, studying rocks and corings, always looking for something but real vague as to what it was when you put a question to ‘em. Anyway, they were up on Mount Erebus for maybe a week, doing some digging. They come down, come back, and they got this funny look in their eyes . . . kind of a shellshocked look, you know?”
Rutkowski nodded. “Seen it plenty of times.”
“Sure enough,” St. Ours said. “Sure enough. Only this time it was worse, savvy? They had all these rocks they found up there, but real flat with weird carvings on ‘em like hieroglyphics or some of that Egyptian gobbledegook. They was acting damn freaky, hoarding those rocks, getting really scary about ‘em. So one day, I was over at their shack and I says to ‘em, I ast ‘em what in Christ were those rocks about? They said they were artifacts from some ancient civilization, wouldn’t let me touch ‘em. Said once you touched ‘em, your mind went one drop at a time and something else filled it. What? I ast ‘em. But they wouldn’t say, just grinning and staring like a couple pitch-and-throw carnie dolls. Two days later, yessir, two days later, hand in hand they wandered off into a blizzard, left a note that they was following the ‘old voices from under the mountain.’ Jesus Christ. But that just goes to show you the kind of horseshitty things that happen down here.”
“I believe it,” Meiner said.
Hayes pushed his plate away, wondering why they had to choose him as their totem pole to dance around. “Listen, you guys, I was there when Lind dropped his deck. None of you were, only me. He didn’t try to slit his wrists or anything like that, he just had a bad time of it is all.”
They listened intently, nodded, then Rutkowski got that conspiratorial look in his eyes and said, “Slit both his wrists, that’s what they’re saying. Probably would’ve made a go of his throat if there were time.”
“I don’t like it,” St. Ours said.
“Listen - “ Hayes attempted, but they shut him off like a leaky tap.
“I don’t like the idea of three more months up here with a crazy man,” Rutkowski said. “They better lock his ass up. That’s all I gotta say on the matter.”
Meiner said, “It ain’t that crazy shit you got to worry about, it’s what Gates brought back here. Jesus and Mary, go out there and look at that one he’s defrosting . . . it’ll make you want to piss down your leg. Looks like some kind of crazy gray cucumber with these yellow worms growing out of the top of its head and big, staring red eyes at the end of each one . . . nothing that looks like that thing can be up to any good. Believe you me.”
Gradually, as the shit got deeper and it got difficult to find leg room or draw a breath with the stink, they moved off and Lind was pretty much forgotten. Now it was just the mummies and how word had it they weren’t even from this planet. Ghost stories and campfire tales and those three big, seasoned men trying to out-do one another, scaring the shit out of each other in the process.
Hayes ignored it all and sipped his soup, listened to the wind trying to strip Targa House off the frozen tundra as it did day after day, reaching and clawing and howling like something hungry come down out of the mountains to the west.
“Join you?” a voice said.
Hayes looked up and it was Doc Sharkey, the station’s physician, a short pretty redhead with bright blue eyes. She was the only woman in camp and all the men were saying how she was too heavy for their liking, but by spring they’d all be trying to get into her pants.
Thing was, she wasn’t heavy, not in Hayes’ worldview. She was wide in the hips, nicely rounded in that way he’d always found blatantly sexual. No, the men kept their distance (at least for the time being) because she intimidated them. It wasn’t anything she actually said or did, but her face more than anything. Those upturned Nordic eyes of hers gave her a cold, detached look that was enhanced by her mouth which had a sort of cruel lilt to it.
Hayes liked her right away when he met her and the reason for that was downright silly and he didn’t even like to admit it to himself: she reminded him of Carla Jean Rasper from the third grade, his first serious crush. Same hair, same eyes, same mouth. When he’d first caught sight of Sharkey, he’d been instantly transported back to grade school, speechless and stupid just like he’d been around Carla Jean. Good Morning, little schoolgirl . . .
“Earth to Jimmy Hayes . . . what’s your frequency?”
“Huh? Oh yeah, Doc, sit down. Please do,” Hayes said.
What’s your frequency? He liked that. Hadn’t that nut who attacked Dan Rather on his way to CBS that time said something like that? Sure. What’s your frequency, Kenneth? REM had done a song by the same name.
Sharkey sat down and Hayes found himself staring into her eyes a little too long. He wasn’t married, but she was. Her husband was an anthropologist on a grant somewhere in Borneo studying monkey semen or something like that.
“How goes it?” Sharkey asked, pouring some dressing on her salad.
Hayes laughed without meaning to do so. “Well, I been thinking that they better take a chance and send a plane down here before all these people go completely mad.”
She smiled. “We won’t see a plane until September at the earliest and mid-October wouldn’t surprise me. Sorry, Jimmy, what we got is what we got and we’ll have to live with it.”
“They’re talking some pretty crazy shit, Doc,” Hayes told her. “And not just the contractors either, if what I’m hearing is correct.”
The building shook and the lights dimmed momentarily.
Sharkey sighed. “No, it’s not just the contractors, it’s the scientists, too. I think this is going to be a long winter. Should make for an interesting psychological profile by spring.”
“Sure, I don’t doubt it a bit. Maybe Gates ought to ship his mummies back up to those caves.”
“That won’t happen,” she laughed.
“I’m serious, Doc. Those goddamn things are like catalysts. These people are already acting goddamn loony and I hate to see what another month will bring.”
“I’ve spent three winters at the Pole, Jimmy, and most of them are just lonely and quiet and boring. But I don’t think we’ll see that this year. What Gates found has everyone wo
rked up. I’m hoping it’ll die down in a week or so, but I have to wonder. Even I have to wonder.”
“Why’s that?”
She looked at him, her eyes sparkling. “You saw those mummies, Jimmy, and you can’t deny that there’s something . . . peculiar about them. Don’t look at me like that, you felt it same as I did. They have to be the most alien-looking creatures I’ve ever seen, but I don’t know if that’s what’s eating people around here. I’m only going to say, from a very safe medical pedestal, that those . . . remains seem to be having a very unusual psychological impact on whoever looks at them.”
Hayes didn’t doubt that a bit. He’d felt it right away when he’d been in Hut #6 with Lind and the others. He hadn’t been able to put a finger on what it was about the thing and still really couldn’t, other than to say that there was something extremely unsettling about it. Something that got inside you, dug in deep like a burrowing worm looking for a hot, moist place to lay its eggs.
And what had Lind said?
Can’t you feel it getting inside your head, wanting to steal your mind...?
Hayes swallowed, something caught in his throat. “There’s something . . . bad about those things, Doc. We’re all feeling it. Maybe not Gates and those other eggheads, but the rest of us are feeling it just fine, thank you. I don’t know what to make of it.”
“Lind seemed to think it was trying to steal his mind or something?”
Hayes nodded. “That’s what he said. It was getting inside his head, unlocking things. You want to take a stab at that?”