The Madness of Cthulhu Volume 2

by Joshi, S. T

  But see he somehow did, and he guided us down to the hazy twin lines of lights that outlined the runway. We thudded down, and the plane sledded to a long, hissing stop. McCracken was already up before half of us had unbuckled our seatbelts.

  “Keep your seats, ladies and gents,” he said, motioning us back down. “No rush until the Hägglund gets here.” His smile had returned, but the eyes he turned to peer out the windows showed a little too much white.

  “What’s happening, Sergeant?” asked an academic-looking Indian man up front.

  “Nothing to worry about, nothing at all,” McCracken responded. I started to worry.

  I saw the lights of the Hägglund roll up past the plane. We all pulled the hoods of our parkas up over our heads, rose, and began shuffling for the exit of the plane. The driver had brought the Hägglund close to the airplane staircase, and we were soon all crowded inside. I had barely gotten seated when the driver engaged the tracks and swung us around toward Lake City. He seemed to be driving pretty fast for the near-blind conditions, but I didn’t feel it was my place to criticize.

  McCracken was sitting up front beside the driver, and he leaned over to speak with him. I’m sure he thought they were inaudible to the rest of us, but I caught enough to start the alarm bells ringing in my heart.

  “How many are there, Davis?”

  “… know, Sergeant, but they’ve taken Pabodie.”

  “Shit. Where’s …”

  “… last time we heard … radioed Code Black, all personnel …”

  An explosion sounded in the blizzard—more a vibration in the gut than a sound.

  “What was that, Sergeant?” came a querulous voice from the back.

  “Just routine,” McCracken said. “Probably just setting some cauldron to rights.”

  I leaned forward and peered around McCracken’s broad back. All was a dizzying race of snow past the windshields. I was never as relieved as when I descried the lights of Lake Central glowing like unearthly chrysanthemums in the blue blizzard ahead. McCracken turned to address us.

  “All right,” he bawled. “We are approaching the main building. When we get there we go straight into the building; we do not, I repeat, do not dawdle. Captain Urquart and Doctor Dubchenko will be on hand to—”

  There was a loud crack, and the whole front car of the vehicle lurched forward and down. The four of us sitting in back were tossed forward onto the others. A man screamed. Snow rattled against the tractor’s windows.

  “What’s happening, Private?” McCracken boomed, heaving himself upright.

  “Crevasse more than likely, Sergeant. I’ll see what I can do to get us out.”

  “See that you do, Private.”

  The driver hooked his right arm over the back of his seat and turned his face toward us. Blood ran down from his nose in a wide, red stripe to his chin, but aside from this he had the casual attitude of someone trying to back into a parking place. We heard the tracks under the floorboards whizzing over the snow, but it was no good. The Hägglund was stuck.

  McCracken threw open the front hatch and leapt out into the blast. A puff of snow blew in past him like diamond dust. We could see him limned starkly in the lights of the tractor, first looking over the damage, then grasping the front fender and trying to heave the vehicle out. Tom and I were about to join him when he came back in. He was breathing hard.

  “No use,” he gasped. “Got … try another way.”

  He opened a locker by the dashboard and pulled out a coil of rope.

  “Take this, all of you,” he said, feeding it out to each of us. “Stay in line and don’t let go of the rope. The last one passes it on to the lot from the back car. If you get separated from the rest of us, make for those lights.” And he pointed at the lights of Lake Central.

  The sergeant gave us a minute to secure our clothing, then led us out of the wrecked tractor and into the storm. It was roaring, freight-training down off the mountains as if it would clear away the whole surface of the planet. Even through our protective clothing we could feel the wind-driven snow pummeling us, pelting us as if to pierce us in its fury. One or two of our smaller companions were blown off their feet, and the rest of us had to lean far into the wind, making as small a target for its violence as we could.

  We were trudging along like this for I don’t know how long—time itself seemed to have been carried away on the demon wind—when I bumped up against the person in front of me. I had been so intent on just keeping my feet that I hadn’t seen that the others had stopped. I looked up now and saw we were all backed up in a crouched mass behind the slightly taller form of Sergeant McCracken. He appeared to be looking hard ahead of us; his left hand was cupped around the side of his face to block the snow. Following his gaze I saw the great, dim bulk of Lake Central on its stubby pillars, perhaps not twenty meters away. Even as I looked a prolonged metallic groaning came to us through the wind; and to my horror I saw the Silo on the end of the building tip, lean, and carried by the wind plummet to the ground. It blew up a vast cloud of powder that the storm tore away, and we felt the concussion through the soles of our boots.

  Then the lights went out.

  Lake Central shifted on its foundations. It leaned away from us, poised at a twisted angle like a huge insect considering its next step. This was too much for some of my companions. Several broke from the line and careened windmilling and slipping and falling into the snow until they vanished. McCracken tried to grab them, but they scattered like chaff in the wind. The rest of us clung to the rope like men overboard, huddled into the hurricane with no clear idea what to do and no way to communicate it to each other.

  Then I noticed the army. They passed singly and in groups, on fast machine-gun-mounted snowmobiles stitching the air with yellow fire and in hulking armored vehicles. They were hurrying past the ruined main building toward Pabodie Depth 2 (“… they’ve taken Pabodie …”). I felt another explosion rumble through the air and this time saw an orange-yellow glow swell off in that same direction.

  McCracken seemed to have made a decision and was pulling us forward again. We hadn’t gone ten arduous steps, though, when the earth some thirty meters to our left—toward the unseen mountains—burst up in a flying spray of rock and dirt and ice. We cowered lower and put our arms over our heads to shield us from the wind-blown debris. When I looked up again I thought I was hallucinating. Something like a giant black hand with three long fingers had risen up out of the hole the blast had created. Across the gleaming surface of this devil’s claw, lights of blue and yellow and green blinked on and off and branching patterns of light ran like lightning. Several soldiers who had been running past now stopped and raised their rifles toward it. We could see the star-flashes as they fired away at it, and we saw the thing arch like a black wave and crash down upon them, obliterating them entirely.

  That was the last straw for McCracken. He threw down his end of the rope (the driver, behind him, reached out a pleading hand) and ran into the teeth of the storm. I had always regarded the sergeant as an affable, slightly goofy figure; but anyone who could run into that insanity of wind commanded my complete respect. My respect grew further as I watched him unlimber the rifle slung over his back, crouch to a shooting stance, and carefully and with deadly, unerring effect fire into the rising monster. Pop pop pop—each shot destroyed one of the proto-eyes on the thing’s swelling front. McCracken was now near one of the massive Kharkovchanka vehicles, and as he pushed toward it he continued his lethal marksmanship. “Like sticking pins in Jello”? Maybe. But Sergeant McCracken knew just where to stick those pins. I hunched with my fellows as the snow drifted up around our legs and the wind screamed about our ears, and in my heart I cheered that intrepid Aussie onward. The thing—shoggoth, blob, AUE—hesitated in its assault on the world. And in that moment McCracken reached the Kharkovchanka, tossed away his rifle, and swung himself up to the hatch. In a second he was in; in a trice he had it running; and in a moment twin geysers of snow fanned out from the b
ack of the treads as he pushed it into full-throttle. The shoggoth again gathered itself like a wave; new eyes appeared to replace those shot out. The big tractor gathered speed and plowed straight into it, catching it just as it rose, the thing’s sudden tentacles and feelers and flaps wrapping around it, enveloping it. I saw one tentacle punch through a window of the tractor, and I’m sure others did as well. But the machine bullied on. It swept the thing off the snow, back, back, and in its impetus over the edge and into the hole whence it had come. The last we saw of the Kharkovchanka was its tail-lights tipping to the sky as it bore its awful burden down to hell. Then it was gone.

  Now it was my turn to panic. Without the fascination of the battle before me anymore, something snapped. I don’t remember dropping the rope, only a headlong rush out into the polar dusk. The wind was at my back and carried me pelting onward. Sometimes I felt as if I were flying—perhaps I was. A high keening sounded in my ears, and after several seconds I identified it as my own voice as the panic exploded in my mind. I had no idea where I was going, only that I had to get away from what I had seen. But night was falling, it was fifty below zero and dropping, and I was alone in a blizzard in the most desolate place on earth. In reality I was running toward certain death.

  My keening had died away as I tried to screech the air into my overworked lungs. Still my legs hammered on into the twilight. Then my right foot punched down through the ice. My left knee banged painfully down, too, and broke through. Suddenly I was thrown flat on the ice, my legs pedaling madly in nothingness. I had hit a crevasse. Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, I thought, and wheezed out a laugh.

  Then things did get worse. I had no purchase at all on the ice and began sliding back into the hole my legs had made. At last I was left hanging by my mittened fingers, and that is when the ice snapped from under them.

  In truth, it was this slow slide down that saved me. Because I was stretched my full length—and the length of my arms—when I fell, I reduced the distance I fell by a good seven feet. For a breathless second I dropped—then my feet struck ice. I crumpled to reduce the shock of the fall, then picked myself up to see what new predicament I had gotten into.

  I had been wrong—it was not a crevasse. Crevasses were not this regular. I was in a tunnel, a very long, straight tunnel about fifteen feet in diameter hollowed out of the ice. In the twilight it glowed a luminous royal blue; snow sifted silently down from the hole. Out of the storm, which I could hear howling above me at having been cheated of its prey, it was even a beautiful place. The tunnel was an almost perfectly round cylinder with just a slight, rounded ribbing. I wondered what kind of machine could excavate such a structure. Then I knew, and started looking for a way out.

  I briefly considered following the tunnel to either of its termini, but thought better of it. I had no idea where they went, nor what I might meet before I found a way out. But climbing back out the hole I had made, which beckoned only fifteen feet above, seemed impossible. The walls of the tunnel swept up in smooth arcs, barren of any handholds. At least it’s warmer, I thought. A mild air was moving from the left, from that dark hint of earth. Far, far away down there, in the heart of the blackness the tunnel dwindled into, something glinted, and suddenly it was far more urgent that I find a way out.

  Desperately I looked around me and noticed a couple places where the tunnel had intersected smaller gaps in the ice. None of these was big enough to admit me, but some four feet up one side was a dark oval in the ice that seemed to indicate a closed space. I reached back and unclipped the entrenching tool from my belt; folded the blade to its pickaxe position and locked it; and laid into the ice.

  I was in luck: the axe bit through into space on the first swing. Hurriedly I hacked at the ice, the chips and splinters flashing around me. Down the tunnel was a growing rumor like that of a crowd. I swung harder, faster. The moving air had increased to a breeze, a wind. Lights flashed in the distant darkness. The ice flew—just a little more … a fluting, a high whistling like “tekeli-li!” echoed down the icy tube. The next few seconds saw me through the ice and into a smooth bubble just big enough for me to wedge myself into.

  None too soon. The onrushing air, pushed by a body I scarce dared think about, became a gale, and fast on its heels came the shoggoth. And like Lot’s wife, like Orpheus—like Dyer and Danforth and every other doomed, curious soul in history—I had to look. I only had a second to peep as it shot from one unholy errand to another, but in that second I saw the evolving eyes, the inchoate organs and gaping mouths; the pseudopods and pseudolimbs reaching for definition. And across the whole, bulging, rushing surface, the blue lighting of synapses of a mind we cannot even begin to comprehend.

  And I had one more impression before I thrust my face deep into my arms. It was the cacophony of sounds coming from it. From Dyer’s report I had been warned to listen for the eerie “tekeli-li!” But as the thing swept past, so close, so close that a twitch of my shoulder would have put me in contact with it, I heard a multitude of voices. Human voices, the voices of today and the voices of the past; English, French, Russian, Chinese, and I don’t know how many more; the legacy of a century of explorers and radio messages. The shoggoths had found new “masters” to imitate.

  And crowded amongst all that jumble of voices, did I hear the Down Under accents of Sergeant Abel McCracken? I like to think I did; I like to think that, in some terrible, ironic, yet fitting way, his words live on somewhere under the Ice he fought so hard to defend.

  I waited a good two minutes in my hideaway before I came out. Even then it was only because I heard another voice—Tom Spratt’s voice.

  “Vic! Vic! For Christ’s sake, Vic, are you there?”

  I unfolded myself from the hole and hobbled, stiff in every limb, to the spot where I had fallen. Looking up, I was greeted by the sight of Tom Spratt leaning down like some maned gargoyle in his parka hood.

  “Hullo, Tom,” I said.

  “Hullo your own mad self. What’re you doing down there—waiting for the Tube?”

  “Just missed it,” I shrugged.

  Tom had seen me bolt from the guide-rope and with the four remaining others had followed. I had been moving pretty fast, he later told me, and they lost sight of me at first. My footprints were swept away almost as quickly as I made them, but they found the hole—and they had had the presence of mind to bring the rope.

  Once they had hoisted me out of the tunnel, we worked our way back toward Lake City. The lights in the buildings were all out, of course, but those lining the runway still burned. There was also the occasional explosion to help guide us, but by the time we reached the runway those had all ceased. The storm screeched over a vastness terribly still.

  Stumbling to the runway ended up being the best of all possible fates. The plane we had taken across the mountains was not yet completely cold; and Tom had flying experience from his days with the BAS. I sat up front with him and watched the runway lights click by faster and faster—and suddenly wink out.

  “Bollocks,” Tom muttered, but by then our skis were off the ice. We had a generous tail-wind, too, and soon we were climbing into the dim sky.

  6

  THE REST IS QUICKLY TOLD. WE AIMED FOR RUSSIA’S VOSTOK Station, three hundred miles south. It was a toss-up whether that or some of the coastal stations were closer, but the coastal stations would have required us crossing those Mountains of Madness again, and not one of us was willing to do that.

  In the event it was a near thing. Tom had just made out Vostok’s red metal drilling tower, its most obvious landmark, when the engines sputtered and died. We had run completely out of fuel and coasted down in silence to the featureless ice dome. Tom had already contacted Vostok by radio, though, and we didn’t have long to wait before they rolled up in a tractor to rescue us.

  The Vostochniki were hospitality itself. There was some initial tension when we told them what had happened and where we had come from. They thought it was a problem in translation when
it was simply that they knew nothing about Lake City, the mountains, or any of it. At last one fellow with a stupendous black beard came in, patted the translator on the shoulder, and sent him away. He turned a chair around and sat backwards on it, leaning on the back, staring at us silently for a minute. Then he said, “Gone.”

  We nodded.

  “And Dubchenko?”

  We shook our heads. He bowed his own head in silence. Then, “You are welcome to all we have. As soon as we can, we will get plane in to take you home.” And they did.

  It is hard to write of these things and believe them, when the young leaves are out and flitting dizzy shadows across this page as I write. Sometimes I take out my “souvenirs” of that time—a bit of fossil coral given me by “Del Rio, San Anton’” (I hope she went quickly—she was not on the plane); a paper cup lettered “Crinoid Arms” in ballpoint, with Tom’s cartoon of a smiling Old One; the entrenching tool that saved my life—and hold them and remind myself that it all really happened. Then I get on the phone or on the computer and beg, urge, plead, and demand that government agencies take action against something that threatens not some, not most, but all of us. And then I wait for responses from people who are “unacquainted” with any polar station at Latitude 76°, 15´ South, Longitude 113°, 10´ East. The great secret has been kept too well.

  And as often as I can I call and e-mail Tom Spratt. He too saved my life, but it is painful speaking to him. He drinks a lot now. Can’t say as I blame him. But I keep calling and keep hoping that somehow it will keep him from descending further into that deep tunnel of his own he has fallen into; that tunnel where things gibber and things race on missions known only to themselves.

  THE LAST ONES

  MARK HOWARD JONES