Miskatonic Dreams

by H. David Blalock

  "Ah, the magic of kerosene!" Sarah said as she shucked her parka and held her hands out toward the standing heater in the center of the room. Its chimney went straight up to the roof and there were already several parkas hanging from hooks around the pipe. While the wind whistled and whined outside, it was much quieter in here and we could talk at more normal levels.

  A huge man with the bushiest beard I'd ever seen pulled a flap back from the far wall and stepped in with us. A wood-lined hall of sorts extended behind him, lit with hanging electric bulbs. As I looked at this giant of a man, I realized his beard was bejeweled with melting chunks of ice where moisture from his breath had frozen when he was outside.

  The man caught the flap on a hook to keep it open and his voice boomed into our room. "I'm Dr. Hughe. Welcome, my friends, to Camp Zeta, Antarctica!"

  A cheer went up from our eager group.

  "Come, people," Dr Bellingham said, "Thomas...Dr. Hughe...will give us the two cent tour before we head down to the excavation site. The dig has already reached the craft, so there are huge, huge things in store for us. The excitement is really ramping up now!" Dr. Bellingham was practically giddy, as were most of the team, including Sarah who was grinning from ear to ear.

  We formed into our single file again, tramping beneath the canvas flap. The tunnel's walls, floor, and ceiling were lined with wood slats. It looked for all intents like a tunnel from any of the digs I'd been on in Egypt where we excavated under the sand. But with the kerosene heaters blazing and the bare electric bulbs, I think it was warmer than any Egyptian tunnel. The tunnel opened into a central tent which had several flaps leading off the main space.

  "This area will lead off to your sleeping quarters," Thomas said. He pointed to the left. "Women are that a'way." And then pointing to his right, "And the men will be through there. The, uh, facilities are through that flap there." He pointed to a third flap.

  "I hope it's not an outhouse!" someone from the back called.

  Thomas laughed. "No, no. We have an in-house! If you freeze your buns off in Antarctica, it's literal. Since we work underground, there won't be much call for actual outside activity at all.

  "The dining hall is straight ahead here. We've got tea twenty-four seven but meals are strictly timed. Seven to eight for breakfast. Noon to one for lunch, and six to eight for dinner," Thomas shouted back over his shoulder as we moved down the next tunnel. "You can arrange for a sack lunch if you'll be down at the site during any meal time and the cooks will pack one up for you."

  Thomas pushed the canvas flap aside and we stepped into a room with several metal and wood tables with benches pushed next to them. He turned back towards us from the center of the room. "From here you can get to the excavation site or the kitchen. You'll know you're headed toward the excavation site if you enter a tunnel that's slanting downward. You know you've stepped into the kitchen if there's an angry cook yelling at you to get the heck out of his kitchen."

  A few more laughs rolled through the open room.

  "Now, lunch will be ready in about an hour and a half. Shall we go see the reason we're all here?" Thomas pulled the door open.

  "Get the hell out of my kitchen!" came a gruff shout.

  Thomas held up one hand and nodded, "See what I mean?"

  "I heard that, you ivory-tower-bastard!"

  Thomas let the door shut on creaking springs, walked across to the other door and opened it, ushering us all inside. "Just head on down. There's only one way. You'll know you're there when you bump into an alien craft!"

  The wooden-planked floor sloped steadily down. The tunnel was quite wide once we went through the door from the dining area.

  "Why is this tunnel so large?" I asked.

  "Well, the plan is to drive a truck and some equipment down here and haul the craft out. We've just finished freeing it from the ice but we must wait until next year before we can get all the heavy moving equipment here by ship. Although the snows haven't started yet, the sea ice is already building up and soon it will be too thick for safe passage. We have one final equipment shipment of the season which should arrive in the next couple weeks."

  After a twenty-minute hike, the tunnel opened into an even larger cavern. It was very warm. They had bored a straight vent down from the surface to let the heat and fumes from the excavating equipment escape to the surface but it was still at least seventy degrees in the cavern.

  In the middle sat a silver disk-shaped object. It rested at its impact angle, still supported underneath by a thick pillar of ice.

  "Smaller than I expected," I whispered, leaning over towards Sarah.

  "Maybe it had a small crew?" she said.

  "You mean like leprechauns?"

  "Laugh it up, Chuckles."

  We all milled around for a few minutes before someone said, "How do you get inside?"

  "That, my friends, is the thousand-dollar question! We have no idea. The object is seamless as far as we can tell."

  I wandered around the whole thing, working my way back to Sarah who stood, mouth sort of agape, one hand on her cheek. I peered at her. Her eyes sparkled wetly in the electric light.

  "Sarah?" I said, putting my arm around her shoulders. "Are you okay?"

  She coughed, cleared her throat and dabbed at her eyes. "I'm sorry." She smiled. "I didn't know it would affect me so."

  "Huh?"

  She glanced over at me with a slightly startled expression. "It’s one thing to see the drawings Dr. Xavier made, it’s quite another to be standing here in front of the craft!"

  "Oh, of course. It is beautiful, isn't it? Look at how there is no damage to the ship at all. Even after crashing through so much ice. Incredible!"

  ***

  We'd been there about a week and I was down with the spacecraft. Sarah was in the cavern as well. She could be found there most of the time. If not there, then she was walking the tunnel, taking measurements and making notes in a book. Checking to see how much clearance they would have for a truck carrying the craft, she told me when I asked.

  I was walking a circuit, letting my hands trail along the smooth metal. It wasn't as cold as conduction deemed it should be considering it was still connected to the ice via its pillar.

  Sarah waved and walked over to where I stood when the generator suddenly went out. All the electric lights shut off, their coiled filaments cooling from a bright orange toward black. In the growing dark, she took my hand. The metal beneath my other hand warmed and I pulled it away from the metal ship in surprise. My breath caught in my throat.

  In the very dim light, symbols appeared where my hand had been.

  "Sarah, your notebook, quickly!"

  She handed me her book and pencil and I quickly sketched the symbols.

  "Oh my god, Sarah." I struck a match and held it above the book. The symbols on the craft itself had faded already, but my drawings were fairly accurate. "These are similar to a Babylonian script we found on a tablet in Persia six years ago."

  Sarah stifled a choke behind her hand. "Can you understand it?"

  "Well, assuming it’s similar, it means 'this which can be entered through'."

  "A door?"

  "Hmm, that would make sense except there are no seams or anything to indicate a door at all. Why would it...?" I shook the match out as it burned my fingers. I lit another. "Why would it appear when the lights went out?"

  "Good question."

  After several minutes and several matches, someone must have revived the generator because the lights jumped back to life.

  "Sarah, I've got to get this up to Dr. Bellingham right away. You coming?" I asked as I headed toward the upward sloping tunnel.

  "No. I will stay down here and take another walk around the ship to see if anything else has appeared."

  I tore the page with my sketches out and took her book back to her. "Ok. If you see anything else, draw the symbols you see. This is all very exciting. Most exciting, indeed!"

  "Yes, it is, Horatio. I'll see you for dinne
r if I'm not up sooner." She leaned over and kissed me.

  Yes, my heart fluttered. Sue me.

  ***

  That night I awoke to Sarah's warm and gentle palm on my cheek. She leaned over and kissed my mouth and I felt tears drop on my face. I sat up, my cot springs creaking in the warm silence of snores and shifting blankets as my bunkmates rolled over and readjusted on their own cots.

  "Sarah?" I breathed. "What's wrong?"

  "I've got to talk to you, Horatio. Can you get dressed and follow me?"

  "Of course, anything. But why?"

  "Shhh. We need to be quiet. We can't wake anyone, but I'll explain soon."

  I pulled on my clothes and followed her from the men's dormitory. Once we were out of the sleeping area and in the corridor heading to the mess hall, I tugged at her arm. "What is it, Sarah? Why are you crying?"

  "We can't stop here. We need to go down to the site. I can explain everything there. Otherwise it just beggar’s belief. Trust me, Horatio."

  "I trust you, Sarah. I'll go." I noticed she had her valise case, but I didn't comment on it.

  There was no one about and the clock in the dining hall read 2:48. It was electric and with the generator going in and out, you couldn't be sure of the exact time, but it was close enough. Middle of the night. Sarah hurried us down the long tunnel to the cavern. The electric lights were on, illuminating the smooth metal of the craft. I looked at Sarah and was a little surprised to see her beautiful green irises floating on sparkling pools of unshed tears.

  She took my hands in hers. "I have a confession. I have not been honest the last few months. I'm not supposed to be honest. My mission was subterfuge, but the feelings you engendered in me were unexpected. Horatio, I'm not who you think I am."

  I stared at her, not know knowing what in the world she could be talking about. "You're not Dr. Sarah Landis, astrophysicist and visiting professor at Miskatonic University? I find that hard to swallow, Sarah. You can't just pretend to be an astrophysicist!"

  "No, I'm not Sarah Landis, but I am an astrophysicist. And a exolinguist and exobiologist with a specialty in human history and customs."

  "Human history? As opposed to what?"

  "Horatio, your specialty is dealing in texts and translations dealing in magic and ancient gods. You've got an open and inquisitive mind and I need you to make full use of it."

  I pushed my fingers through my hair. Sarah wasn't making sense and I wondered if it might be some kind of stress-related medical condition. "Sarah, I'm not understanding. What exactly are you trying to say?"

  "I'm trying to say... Well, let me show you something."

  Sarah stood closer to the ship's metal edge and held her hand over the surface. Even in the bright light, the symbols glowed under her palm.

  I felt my eyes bulge like my lids were suddenly too small to contain them. "How are you doing that?" I peered under and around her hand as I leaned over the metal.

  "Horatio, you were correct. A little stilted in the translation, but truly impressive given the fact that you've never seen our language before."

  "Well, the similarities to Babylonian and Sumerian cuneiform were enough to infer..." I looked up from the symbols, eyes still wide. "Wait. What? Your language? Just what is your real name?"

  She touched the side of my face and a string of syllables and images streamed across my consciousness. It was phenomenal. A language built of symbolic auditory stimuli and direct visual imaging. Reality bending. Jaw dropping. Like a door was suddenly opened to something unknown to human understanding.

  Not just a new language, an entirely new form of communication! My head was spinning. I realized my jaw hung slack and snapped it back shut again. It was very much like when I translated the first chapter of the Necronomicon and my mind strained with the unleashed possibilities.

  "I must learn that! Thank you for sharing your real name, though I will still call you Sarah until I can learn how to do that myself. You came in this ship, didn't you? How did you survive the crash?"

  "I didn't. I mean I wasn't in the ship when it crashed. I was in a... hmmm... sort of like a small boat you might take to shore if your large ship was out in a harbor? Does that make sense? A close translation would be 'drop ship,' and I had been dropped already. Sent down to do my job on the Earth's surface. The ship was to fly back up and remain in orbit around your planet until I had completed my mission."

  "You look so human. Feel so human." Sarah smiled and I continued, "Do we share common ancestry, is that why your symbols look like one of our most ancient forms of writing?"

  "No, we're a very different species, but we've been coming to Earth for a very long time. Our writing looks like yours because my people taught your progenitors written language."

  The implications were staggering. "I've got to sit down. Come over to the benches, Sarah." I moved toward where the work benches sat at the edge of the cavern. I sat down and tried to scrub the sleep from my eyes and brain. I rubbed my palms on the legs of my pants and tried to calm my breathing. First contact with a true alien language! The implications were astounding.

  Sarah followed me over but did not sit down. She said, "My people are called the Mi-go. I am something of an experiment. On my home planet, before the mission, my thought centers were genetically altered and augmented with a kind of technology that allows me to create not just the image you know as Sarah, but as you know, you can feel, hear, and smell me. You've even tasted my mouth with yours." She giggled and my heart melted.

  "Why didn't you take what you came here for and leave when you knew where the ship went down? It doesn't even look damaged."

  "I'm telling you this because...well, I love you, Horatio. Something about the way my brain is altered and wired to be as human as possible has made me susceptible to human emotions. An unforeseen fault I would not trade for anything. Every time I thought of leaving you here, my heart ached. A real physical pain… a tactile manifestation of emotional duress. I’ve never felt emotions as strongly as when I’m in human form. Never as strongly as when I am with you."

  "I was...am... in love with you too, Sarah. But what you're telling me is just crazy. Are you asking me to come with you? I admit, I wouldn't hesitate to go. An unbelievable scientific opportunity and an adventure with the woman I've fallen in love with?"

  "Mi-go."

  "The 'Mi-go' I've fallen in love with." I rubbed my chin. "But why would the Mi-go ever accept me if I go with you? I'd be a freak, an oddity to be studied." I shuddered. "Or dissected."

  Sarah wouldn't sit down on the bench with me. She stood there in front of me with her hand on her cheek. A very human gesture of uncertainty. She started gently crying again, soft tears rolling down her cheeks. I waited for her to continue.

  "The next part is what I fear most, Horatio. I fear you will abhor me. That I will disgust you."

  "You could never disgust me. Although I am confused by your subterfuge. On the other hand, it is also understandable if you did not expect to fall in love. You had a mission after all. A mission of science, yes?"

  Sarah nodded.

  "Scientific investigation is a powerful mistress." I frowned in thought. "Powerful indeed. What an opportunity. If I could meet and learn to speak with a truly alien species...."

  "The Mi-go would accept you, after a fashion. But first I must show you who I am."

  Sarah stepped back and her profile went hazy, like trying to see someone standing apart from you in the desert and the heat waves rise from the sand to distort their image. Her true visage took shape before me. She hunched on squat powerful legs with knees bent backwards like a chicken's. The skin was leathery and a sickly pink. An insect-like abdomen separated the legs with the back half resting on the ground and the upper section connecting with something like a thorax. Four arms protruded from balled-sockets. The lower two were long and bent downward, with claw-like appendages pressing on the ground, a cross between an arm and a leg. The upper arms were shorter and had digits like a human hand. From
the shoulders rose a long neck bent in a half circle so the head was hanging down in my direction. There were no eyes I could see, although there were bits of metal that could have been the technology she spoke of thrusting out from various portions of what looked like gooey exposed brain tissue. The thought of my lips on that slick brain-thing made my stomach roil.

  I cleared my throat. "Ahem. The Mi-go do not look much like us at all." But the draw of new knowledge was undeniable. The same pull that drove me to read and study texts which I fully understood to have the power to drive men mad, tugged inexorably at my brain. I looked down as a string of viscous fluid dripped off of the brain tissue. It stretched almost down to the floor before it snapped and plopped wetly to the cavern floor. "Uh. Can you bring Sarah back, please?"

  "Oh, I can, Horatio! I want to. The things I have felt with these human emotions are addicting. I want to be Sarah. I want nothing so much as to be your Sarah!" Her image shifted and wavered as she stepped forward and touched my cheek again.

  I inferred the syllable-imaged truth of what she spoke through that touch.

  "I have not looked inside the spacecraft," Sarah said looking back over her shoulder at the ship. "And, I am afraid of what I will find of my friends. Of course, they are long dead. However, our travel is difficult. Our home is a very long distance from Earth. To survive the trip, we use Enhanced Sleep, a suspended animation. We travel in a kind of horizontal bed, immersed in a fluid that nearly halts our biological functions. The acceleration and deceleration forces are so severe that our bodies would be torn apart if not held in the stasis-fluid. It cushions those forces, and the long sleep keeps our minds sane since we do not experience the decades of isolation while we travel."

  "Decades of isolation?"

  "Even at the tremendous speeds our spacecraft can attain, the trip takes almost twenty-three years in Earth's temporal perspective."

  Twenty-three years? "I see."