I was talking myself into worry, but the snow really was coming down thick and fast. I locked the tropical house, after switching on the lights, and then ran to the other greenhouses to tell my assistants that they’d better stay for dinner...and maybe overnight.
By the time I got back to the house, though—ten minutes after Oates—Helen and Hollis were already in full swing, getting an action plan ready, just in case.
“Can I go out to play in the snow, Daddy?” Mercy asked. I knew that she must have already asked Helen, and was trying her luck.
“No, love,” I said. “It’s too dark. Tomorrow morning, it’ll be better, if the snow hasn’t melted overnight. You can build a snowman then. Anyway, it’s nearly dinner time.”
It wasn’t a popular judgment, but the brat accepted it.
* * * *
At dinner, it was obvious that something was the matter with Oates. I didn’t understand it. He’d been to the South Pole. He’d probably seen and felt more snow than any human being alive, including Amundsen, who’d got there and back in a faster time.
“What’s the matter, Titus?” I asked him. I thought that it might be something akin to my night terrors—which could explode by day if I happened to be taken by surprise by a loud bang or a motor-bike engine with a hole in its silencer. I thought perhaps the snowfall was taking him back, psychologically, to the terrible days before he’d sacrificed himself to give Scott, Bowers and Wilson a chance.
“They’re not ready,” he whispered.
I got the impression that he wasn’t actually talking to me, but I was trying to help, and I didn’t want to alarm Helen or Mercy—or the girls, who had stayed for dinner, and hadn’t a clue what was going on, having hardly caught a glimpse of Oates since he’d arrived, and never having been formally introduced. “Come on, Titus,” I said. “Cheer up. No shop talk at dinner, remember?”
He looked at me. I hoped to hell that nobody else could see what was in his eyes, as I could—but I, of course, had built up a sympathy with him. Sometimes, I feared that my face my start to blur as his did, and that I’d never get it back to normal again. When he shivered, I shivered.
I knew that his eyes didn’t always see what my eyes saw, that they sometimes looked into another world that was more terrifying than he’d ever been able to communicate to me. Something was definitely wrong, I decided—but not something here: something there. Something was wrong in the dream of which he was somehow a part, the plan that he was following, in which I was a pawn.
Bu he was an officer, and a gentleman, not to mention a hero. He blinked—and I have never seen such a deliberate blink in my entire life. He blinked away the horror that was in his eyes, in order that no one but me should see it.
“Sorry, Lady Anderley,” he said, deliberately addressing Helen instead of me. “I sometimes still get shooting pains. I should be grateful, I suppose—it reminds me how glad I ought to be that I’m alive...and getting better, thanks to you.”
They say that it takes courage to go over the top, to charge the enemy, but it doesn’t—not after the first time, anyhow. What it takes is something else entirely: resignation, desolation, an incapacity to care, a kind of madness. Sanity wouldn’t allow you to do it a second time, but people can and do; they have to go mad, but they can and do. Courage is what it takes to sit at a dinner table in the presence of women and children, and keep a stuff upper lip, when you’re absolutely sane, if not absolutely alive, and something has gone wrong, in a drama of which you’re a part, and are trying with all your might not to be.
I’m not at all sure that I could have ever mustered that sort of courage—certainly not at Eton, or in Africa, and probably not now—but Titus could. He was cut from finer cloth than I was. He sat upright, and moved methodically, with hardly a tremor. He ate dinner—all four courses, because we hadn’t started rationing yet—without turning a hair. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist, mind, and he was careful not to look into my eyes again, but even in doing that he was thinking of others rather than himself.
I talked—babbled a bit, in fact—and my eyes must have been shifting back and forth like nobody’s business, but I managed the far easier task of holding myself together. I had no idea what was wrong, of course, but I had a clue, on which my mind was working overtime.
They weren’t ready.
Tweedledee and Tweedledum, obviously—but ready for what? And what might they, or what might they do, if they weren’t ready, but had to act anyway, had to force the plan that was unfolding according to monad/human time rather than barrel-boy time, at pace to which they weren’t accustomed, and with which they might not be able to cope, no matter how awesomely powerful and awesomely horribly they and their enemies were.
They and their enemies. Was that it?
Were we under attack?
From what? Snow?
Titus didn’t want to stay for coffee. He looked at me again, sending shivers down my spine, and he said: “We have to get back, Linny.”
I couldn’t find it in my heart to thank him for that we, although I could appreciate the necessity. We did have to get back. I hadn’t a clue as to what kind of barrage was going to come down, but I knew that we had to face it. We were in it together, for better or for worse. We didn’t have to understand it, but we did have to do it.
They weren’t ready. But we had to do it anyway. Something wicked was coming our way. Oates didn’t know what it was either, but I was willing to bet that his frostbitten thumbs were pricking like crazy.
While we’d been in the house—no more than two and a half hours—some four inches of snow had fallen. The wind was bitter, and furious. The clusters of flakes seemed to be coming at us horizontally, from the right. I was glad we didn’t have to slog into the teeth of it to get to the palace of golden light that was beckoning to us in the Stygian gloom.
I no longer know who I was rooting for. Were Tweedledum and Tweedledee still the potential enemy, or was the other even worse? Was it one of those situations where the enemy of my enemy might be my friend, or one of those situations in which anyone in the crossfire was likely to be ripped apart no matter how the real contest worked out?
I staggered into the greenhouse about five yards ahead of Oates, who was struggling. I didn’t hold the door, because my eyes had immediately gone to the troughs where the starfish were supposed to be, half-buried in bloody soil, peeping out at this world or another.
They weren’t.
They didn’t look much like starfish any more, either.
They were hanging from the branches of the poor male banana tree, like vast spiders’ webs in an orchard, brought into temporary visibility by morning dew.
They had stretched...no, not stretched...they had unraveled—partially, at least. The tightly-wound fibers of which they were composed had loosened up and expanded, but without becoming in the least labyrinthine. They were more intricate now than anything I had ever seen or imagined, as if their folds extended into at least four dimensions, and perhaps many more.
The tree was visibly dying. It was perhaps the only male banana tree in England, and it was dying from contact with the aliens, or perhaps with the dimension into which they were reaching.
However absurd the sensation might have been, I felt angry on the tree’s behalf. I could have taken it more easily if it had been one of the pineapples, or even one of the female bananas.
I looked back at Oates, intending to ask for an explanation—but I didn’t say a word. He was trying to brush the snow off is clothing. At least, he was trying to try. He gave every indication of being a man in desperate conflict with himself, fighting for control of his own limbs—and his own face.
Something was trying to make his features blur again, but this time he was fighting back. Something was trying to make him do something else, too, but he was fighting that as well.
I wanted to help him, but I didn’t know what to do, and he couldn’t give me a hint. The snow was falling off his jacket, though, and the fla
kes that weren’t falling were melting in the heat. I felt a chill run down my own spine. I was pretty sure that I hadn’t been biologically contaminated by the starfish, and it was a long time since I had shaken Oates’ hand, but I had developed a sympathy with him nevertheless, and for the first time, I felt that something was reaching out to me too, trying hard to get some sort of grip. I felt my toes and fingers going numb.
I had to do something. Even though I had no idea what to do, I had to react, because it was obvious that some kind of climax was developing, and I wanted to be able to take a hand in it.
I was still a soldier, in spite of everything. I reached for my gun.
Even as I did it, though, I realized how utterly absurd that reflex was. Was I going to shoot two monstrous cobwebs? How on Earth—or even in the Other Antarctica—could I expect to have any effect?
I had turned away from Oates, though, in order to pick up the gun, and I was looking at the poor dead banana tree again, still angry on behalf of my cherished specimen.
I raised the revolver, but I knew that it might just as well have been a crucifix: a symbol absurdly out of context, not very meaningful to me, and not at all meaningful to them.
I was helpless, and knew it.
And that was when things really started to go bad.
I turned my head again to look at Oates, perhaps hoping for some inspiration, some guidance, some spark of understanding—but what I got was night terror, and then some.
Oates’ face was tortured out of all recognition—not longer a face at all, but a shadow: a window to another world. I looked at where his eyes should have been, but all I could see was alien darkness, with the suggestion of cyclopean buildings in the distance. It seemed that I was looking into the heart of mountainous madness itself, made hideously incarnate.
Has still fighting, with every fiber of his flesh, but his arms were no longer flailing at the snow on his jacket. Indeed, he’d ripped the jacket open, popping the buttons, and he was clawing at the shirt underneath, ripping the cotton, and tearing at the skin underneath with his fingernails, drawing blood.
I felt sure that he was trying to stop, but that he couldn’t. I didn’t understand, but I knew that he’d never be able to dig a hole through his ribs with his fingernails.
He didn’t have to. While he was working away from one side, impotently, something else was working from the other, more effectively, not cutting through the bone but somehow dissolving it. A hole appeared in Oates’ bare and bloody chest, and expanded, like a dilating pupil, to reveal that same crazed darkness inside him, that same suggestion of distant architecture, lost in time and space.
Then something pulled itself out of the impossible void, through the gap in his ribs.
He didn’t collapse. Prudent parasites, I reminded myself, don’t kill their prey, even when the time comes to decamp.
Titus just stood there, as his face returned to what I still thought of as normal: his own face, as I remembered it from long ago. The craziness was leaving, and the void in his chest as no longer a void. I could see his beating heart through the hole. Oates could see it too, as he looked down at his ruined clothes, his spurting blood, and the thing that was crawling out of him, having been patiently incubated to a state of maturity not far short of its companions.
It looked something like a starfish, with long, long arms and hairy fists, and little eye-stalks peering curiously, perhaps into another world. It was wet with bright, rich blood and didn’t know exactly where to go or how to get there, but it knew that it needed to go somewhere. It dangled, and let itself down on to the floor. There, it began to squirm.
Oates watched it go, standing very still, as if he dared not move while he had that gaping hole in his chest, in case his heart fell out.
The hole was closing again, though; the dissolved ribs were regenerating. He was holding his breath, waiting, perhaps knowing that he would have to wait for the pleural cavity to seal itself up before he could breathe again. His parasite was very prudent, it seemed—perhaps even generous. Or perhaps Oates was still needed, for further duties.
In the meantime, the third starfish—the only one that still looked like a starfish—was squirming on. It was definitely heading for its companions, but it had to get past me to get to the banana tree. I had the distinct impression—because rather than in spite of the chill within me that was trying to take control of my heart and limbs—that I ought to try to stop it. I had been nurturing the alien organisms for weeks, but I was convinced now that they were too dangerous to nurture any longer, no matter what the cost to poor Oates might be.
With my left hand, I reached out to twist the tap controlling the gas supply. The hand suddenly felt very cold indeed, but I completed the action. The fires under the floor went out. The door was still open, because Titus hadn’t closed it, and I knew that the temperature would drop fairly swiftly, but the doorway was shielded from the wind, and I knew that “fairly swiftly” wouldn’t be rapid enough.
I lowered the hand holding the gun, and took aim at the squirming thing. I couldn’t help noticing that it wasn’t identical to Tweeledum and Tweedledee. It was the same species, but a different morph. The aliens did have sex: just two of them... but two was enough. They had only had one suitable host available: Oates. To pair off the one they’d planted in him when he fell into their trap, they needed another way to grow it a counterpart. Titus had talked me up, without knowing what he was doing. He had given them a possible means. Now, there were male and female aliens abroad in our world, not the Other.
They weren’t ready, apparently, but they were going for it anyway, perhaps in circumstances that were far from ideal, but allowing some chance of success. Maybe, from their point of view, it was one of those million-to-one shots so common in popular fiction, which just might work. I couldn’t tell—but one thing I was sure of was that I was still in the way.
I fired the gun.
At least, I tried to fire it. I couldn’t. It was as if the temperature of my hand had suddenly dropped two hundred degrees. It was incapable of movement, stuck hard to the butt of the gun, but incapable of pulling the trigger. The gun itself must have been locked solid, thanks to all the humidity in the atmosphere that had abruptly condensed into ice. It couldn’t fire any longer. It was useless. So was I.
I raised my foot, intending to stamp on the squirming thing—which was by no means lightning fast, even though it had to be going as fast as it possibly could.
I couldn’t do that, either. I was frozen to the spot, like a statue—probably not literally, or I’d have been dead, but psychologically.
The squirming thing began to climb up me—not because it was going to dig a hole in my chest and take up residence in the pleural cavity, next to my heart, but because it was going to use me as a ladder to get to its inamorata-to-be. I knew that when it got to my arm—the one that was clutching the useless gun, that I’d be unfrozen, at least partially. I’d be able to turn around, and pass the parasite that had crawled out of Oates’ body on to its eager lovers...and that it probably wouldn’t let me turn away again thereafter, for modesty’s sake.
And what would happen afterwards....
They hadn’t been able to reach any of us physically, as yet, apart from Oates. They hadn’t been able to get into us, psychologically or physically, except to send a few secondary shivers down my spine, until that desperate burst of cold had chilled my hand and shocked me into stillness.
But afterwards—once the aliens were in our world, and capable of reproduction—who could tell what they might be able to do?
Mercy! I thought.
And suddenly, as if it were a word of power, there she was, in the doorway of the golden palace—with a snowball in her hand.
She threw it, without an instant’s delay.
She threw it at me—or, to be strictly accurate, at the thing that was climbing me.
She was seven years old. She threw like a little girl—but a little girl who had played ball on the law
n with wounded soldiers: a little girl who had done her best.
It couldn’t have hurt the monster, no matter how hot the monster liked its environment to be—not if it had really been a snowball, or just a snowball. But that, I realized, was what Oates’ passenger had been worried about when he first looked up at the roof. It hadn’t been worried about the snow being snow; it had been worried about the possibility that some of the snowflakes weren’t snowflakes, that there was something else riding the snow.
There was.
Mercy must have found it by accident, when she’d slipped out to play regardless of parental orders, but once she’d had it in her hand it must have been able to guide her, or nudge her in the right direction. It hadn’t been able to get inside her, but it must have helped her make up her mind what she was going to do with the snowball.
Perhaps she had always intended to throw it at me, and perhaps she thought that the thing on my body as just a target, conveniently placed by chance.
Either way, when the snowball hit the squirming thing that was squirming up my abdomen, fair and square, it suddenly found the capacity to squirm much more urgently than before.
It lost its grip. It fell—and it went on writhing. It wasn’t dead—not by a long way. And the two that were hanging on the banana tree weren’t injured at all.
My hand was unfrozen now, though, and my limbs too. I was fully myself again. I was a soldier. I was an officer. I had not merely to do but to know what I was doing—and I did. I had presence of mind.
I fired—not at the webs hanging on the banana tree but at the glass panes of the roof above them. In the two and a half hours that we’d been at dinner, the outer surface of the glass had cooled drastically, and the snow had begun to pile up there in spite of the wind, from which the relevant panes were sheltered by a flue-stack.
The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Page 21