Operation Antarctica

by William Meikle

  I was proved right minutes later when the darkness gathered again in the forward corridor. As if it was aware of my presence now, it crept much more slowly than before. And as it was aware of me, so too, I was aware of it. It was less menacing this time, now that I knew it was there.

  As before, the blackness gathered around the edges of my defensive circles, testing the boundaries of the valves; first the yellow one then the green flared and dimmed, flared and dimmed. Once again, cold seeped into my lower limbs and damp air washed against me.

  I knew what was coming next. This time, when the darkness sent out its dark probe to my mind, I grabbed hold of it and followed it back to the source, a mental projection trick that let me glimpse, however briefly, some of the thing’s innate nature and intent. Fragments of what passed for its thoughts came to me, like images in my mind.

  It was old, old and cold, and lost. It had slept for aeons in a deep place in the sea, undisturbed by storm or ice, lying, slumbering in the weed and stone, having been imprisoned even before the sea washed over it for the first time. Men had caught it, men wearing animal furs and wielding stone axes, wooden shields, and long-forgotten ways of dealing with visitors from the Outer Darkness.

  And so, it had slept, and dreamed for the longest time. And then, after an age of cold, dank, dark, an iron thing came swimming in the waters above, breaking ancient bonds that the German submariners never even knew existed, allowing the darkness to surge and flow and fill them up.

  I felt those poor German lads die, as if I had been the dark thing in the dark, and sudden, unbidden tears filled my eyes, and guilt hit me, hard. That broke my concentration, and alerted the dark to my presence.

  It pushed against me hard, the shock almost sending me reeling outside the circles. The green valve flared and I thought I saw, for an instant, an even darker mass of blackness in the shadows, an amorphous, shifting, thing that spoke a word in a language that I did not know but guessed the intent. There was only one thing this darkness wanted.

  Home.

  *

  I spoke the Gaelic words again, and as before the blackness faded away, retreating down the corridors to wherever it was hiding itself in the bowels. This time, I did not delay. I stepped out of the circles, left the pentacle on the deck, and made my way quickly up the turret ladder, out to the boat shed above, then, almost running, down the gangway and into the foreman’s office, where I headed straight for the scotch.

  Churchill was sipping at a glass of his own and puffing on another cigar. He raised an eyebrow and smiled thinly.

  “I gather from your rather startled demeanor that you have had some success?”

  I downed a couple of fingers and waited until it hit my stomach and spread its heat before answering.

  “I had some failure, and some of what you might regard as success. Although I am not convinced that success is the proper word for what I have experienced.”

  He sat me down and joined me in another drink. He tried to ply me with another of his, frankly, enormous cigars, but I preferred the pipe. I puffed hard at it as I spoke, and he listened to my tale, without even the slightest hint of incredulity. He went quiet and thought for a few seconds before he spoke softly.

  “So this thing in the dark that you saw? You believe it is what killed the Hun crew?”

  “I believe so,” I replied. “In fact, I am sure of it.”

  “I would like to see it for myself,” he said.

  I protested long and hard at that, but his final answer was what persuaded me.

  “I will not ask my men to do something I would not do myself,” he said, and by Jove, I think he meant it.

  *

  I went back with him as far as the deck of the submarine, but he bade me stand outside.

  “As you did yourself, I will face this thing alone, in the same way as the men will have to face it to perform the task I must set for them.”

  I warned him to step over the circles into the inside of the pentacle, and not to break the protection once he was inside, no matter what might happen. I also gave him the last two words of the Gaelic chant, as a last resort should they be needed.

  “Wish me luck, old chap,” he said as he turned away. “I have faced many battles, but I do believe this short walk might be among the hardest things I shall be called to do for my country.”

  I agreed with him on that, but he went anyway. He was still chewing down hard on that infernal cigar as he climbed up and over, into the turret and down into the bowels of the sub.

  I stood there for long minutes, straining to hear, waiting for a cry for help and ready to go to his aid if needed. For the longest time, there was no sound save my own breathing and the slight hiss of burning tobacco in my pipe. Then, as if from a great distance, I heard it, a voice raised in a shout, the old Gaelic phrase repeated twice. It sounded as if the second time contained more than a trace of fear.

  Dhumna Ort! Dhumna Ort!

  I had started climbing up the turret when I heard scrambling sounds above me, and had to retreat as Churchill descended out of the sub with some haste. He did not stop to acknowledge me, but marched, almost running, away along the deck and down the gangway. By the time I reached the foreman’s office, he was already making impressive headway down the scotch, gulping it down unceremoniously straight from the neck of the decanter.

  He only spoke when he came up for air. His cheeks were now ruddy, but he was pale around the lips, with dark shadows under his eyes, and his hands shook badly as he lit a fresh cigar.

  “That dashed thing killed the Huns,” he said, and this time it wasn’t a question.

  But if I thought his experience might mean a change in course for his plan of action and a softening of his resolve, I was to be proved wrong with his next sentence.

  “Can you show someone how to make that pentacle of yours? We will need one for each of the men. I shudder to think what might have happened had I not been inside it.”

  *

  I spent the night sitting in that cramped little room, drinking and smoking with Churchill. Every so often, he would call for one or another of his men and bark an order at them. But mostly we talked, of inconsequential matters; he spoke with some elegance, and not a little sense of regret, of his time as a journalist, and I regaled him with some of the tales that my friend Dodgson has already detailed in his journals. At some point I slept, and when I woke, Churchill was gone and about his business for King and Country.

  As for myself, I never set foot inside the sub again after I retrieved my box of defenses the next morning. I spent two more days at the boat shed instructing Churchill’s men in the art of pentacle defense, and showed some Naval engineers the trick of the valves and wires needed for their construction.

  *

  I heard no more for a week, then out of the blue, I received another summons to the dockyard late of a Sunday evening.

  The river was as quiet as it gets, and there was no ceremony. Firstly, they loaded the dead Germans. I did not watch that part, for I was reminded all too vividly of the impressions I had received of their passing from the thing in the cold wet dark. I stood in the shed doorway, smoking a pipe until that part of the job was done.

  Then fifteen of Churchill’s men went on board, each carrying a small bag of luggage and a box that closely resembled my own box of defenses. Churchill had a word and a handshake for every one of them, but if he had any qualms about what he was doing, they did not show.

  Churchill and I retired to the hut at the rear again, where we shared more of his fine scotch until, almost an hour later, the big shed doors were opened, the timber wedges were knocked away and the sub slid, almost silently into the river.

  We went out onto the dock to watch it head off out toward the Estuary, a great dark shark cruising on the still waters.

  “I don’t know about the Germans,” I said, “but it certainly scares me.”

  “They will take her out into the North Sea and leave her floating as near to where we found h
er as they can manage,” Churchill said. “Hopefully, the Huns will find her before the sea claims her again.”

  “And your men? How will they return?”

  Churchill looked at me, and now, for the first time, I saw how deeply he had been affected. He had fresh tears in his eyes.

  “They have their orders,” he said, turned his back on me, and walked away.

  I never heard of the fate of the submarine, or Churchill’s men, and although I have met Churchill twice since, he has never spoken of it.

  But some nights, when the fog rolls in from the river and I smell salt in the air, I dream of them cruising along in the deep dark, all dead at their posts while the cold blackness swirls around them.

  I hope it was worth it.

  *

  Banks closed the journal softly this time, lost in thought, feeling the pieces of the jigsaw click together as he processed the information he’d just read.

  The Germans had indeed found the sub after Churchill had it returned. But far from it scaring them, or perhaps despite it scaring them, they had turned it back to their advantage, somehow taming the thing Carnacki had found in the sub, and molding it to their own devices. It was no great surprise, given their corruption of everything they ever touched, and it seemed impossibly outlandish, but Banks had seen all the evidence now, and could come to no other conclusion.

  They got the idea from Winston bloody Churchill.

  They used a fucking demon to power a UFO.

  - 6 -

  He thought it was a bombshell that would cause a ruction back in Whitehall and was prepared for a sense of urgency, or even official denial and an immediate cover-up. But when he went back to the dinghy for his checkpoint call after four hours, the voice at the other end listened to his report and answered only in the same calm, measured, voice.

  “Secure and sanitize the base,” the man said after Banks had told him everything. “We’re sending a team down to relieve you, but it might be a day until we can round them all up and deliver them. In the meantime, find out everything you can that you think might be relevant. Hold out there and keep your heads down.”

  Secure and sanitize. The squad’s not going to like that.

  *

  “What do you mean, they flew it?” Wiggins said. Banks had the team assembled, standing in a line in the hut, and had just brought them up to speed on his reading. “Surely somebody would have spotted a big shiny bugger of a thing like that in orbit?”

  “It was 1942, lad,” Banks replied. “Everybody was a wee bit busy either shooting or getting shot at.”

  “It’s not that big a stretch though,” Hynd added. “Von Braun was a fucking genius by all accounts. And there’s long been rumors about other stuff the Yanks have hidden away in their desert bunkers.”

  “Aye,” McCally said. “But yon was wee green alien buddies from Roswell. Not fucking demons from the North Sea.”

  Banks put a hand up to stop the conjecture.

  “We’ve got our orders, and that’s all we need to know. Secure and sanitize.”

  “Aye, about that, Cap,” Wiggins said. “You mean moving the bodies, don’t you? Do we get time and a half for that shite?”

  “You get a skelp on the arse for cheek,” Hynd butted in, but Banks just smiled.

  “I’ll stand for a couple of rounds once we get back to the boat. But for now, we’ve got our orders. It’s cleaning up time, so let’s get to it.”

  *

  Wiggins took point going up the slope toward the concealed base entrance.

  “We’ll drag them all up into the open and stack them in the huts,” Banks said. “I’d prefer to burn them, but the team that’s coming in will want to see them close up. We’ll start with the one in the stairwell to clear the passageway. Parker, you’re with Wiggins. The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can get back for a heat and a brew.”

  The two men opened up the metal hatch, sending a shrieking squeal across the bay, then went down into the darkness. Banks expected them to return with a body, but Wiggins came back alone, and only had his rifle in his hands.

  “You need to see this, Cap,”

  “Is there a problem with the body?”

  “You could say that,” Wiggins replied. “The bastard thing has buggered off.”

  Banks went down into the dark. The first thing he saw was Parker’s too-pale face staring back up at him. The man stood on the landing where they’d found the first body, but the private was the only person now in sight. The floor underfoot was too messed with the squad’s footprints to make anything out in the frost – the only thing that was obvious was that the body no long lay there.

  “Okay, lads, you’ve had your fun. Where the fuck’s the Jerry?”

  But he knew as soon as he said it that this was no joke – he saw the confusion in Parker’s face, and not a little fear.

  “Well, the fucker didn’t get up and walk,” Banks said. “He was about the stiffest stiff I’ve ever seen. And he didn’t get brought out the hatch – we’d have heard the squeal, even above Wiggins’ bloody snoring. So he has to be down there in the hole somewhere. Somebody’s yanking our chains here, lads. Let’s go and sort them out.”

  *

  Banks led the team back into the bowels of the base. He didn’t have to reach the foot of the stairwell to the first chamber to know that something had changed. He felt it, a subtle feeling that someone had been moving around in their absence. What had been dead and empty before was now somehow alive, and the feeling of being watched, measured, was impossible to ignore. It became even more so when they stepped off the bottom rung into the central living chamber of the base.

  “What the fuck, Cap?” Hynd said at his side.

  The chamber was empty. Where before there had been bodies lying everywhere, now there was only open floor space. It was still impossible to tell anything from the mass of footprints and scrapes they’d left in the frost earlier, but Banks thought there were more prints now, as if the dead had got up and walked away.

  Away to where?

  The squad assembled at the foot of the stairs, none of them wanting to venture any farther into the large empty chamber.

  Get them moving. Get yourself moving.

  “Same teams as before,” he said, and was pleased there was no tremor in his voice. “Cally, take your lads right, we’ll go left, and meet at the double doors. Any trouble, shoot first and we’ll sort it out later. Any questions?”

  Of course there were questions, but the squad kept them all to themselves. All banter was forgotten now; without needing to be told they’d, as one, gone to battle readiness. Banks felt the same steel firm inside him. He’d faced trouble before and was ready for anything that came his way.

  He led Hynd, Parker, and Wiggins to the leftward semi-circle of rooms and sleeping quarters.

  *

  The rooms were now empty and devoid even of the corpses of the frozen dead. And now it really was noticeable that they’d moved, or been moved, for there were two rooms they hadn’t bothered entering on their last visit, and both now had fresh footprints on the floor, leading from the bunk beds to the door and out into the chamber.

  “I don’t like this shite, Cap,” Wiggins said.

  “Nor me, lad. But we’ve still got a job to do here. And I’m not ready to believe they got up and walked, not unless we’ve missed the Second Coming. They’re around here somewhere. They have to be.”

  But there were no bodies to be found in any of the rooms, nor in the kitchen and mess area, which was as quiet as the first time they’d looked inside. The generator room was likewise empty, but when Banks put a hand on the metal cube of the generator itself he thought, just for a moment, that he felt a faint vibration. He couldn’t repeat it though – the next time he put out a hand, he felt only cold metal. In the oberst’s office, the chair in which the man had sat was overturned, as if the occupant had stood too hastily to leave.

  They met McCally and the other team at the double doors. McCally
spoke first.

  “Nothing doing, Cap. It looks like they all just got up and walked away.”

  “Aye, same over here,” Banks replied. “This is some fucked up shite right enough. If it’s a joke, I’m not laughing.”

  He looked at the double door ahead of them.

  “There’s only one place they can be. Heads up, lads, we’re going in hard and fast.”

  - 7 -

  They all felt it as soon as they opened the double door, a breath of air, warm air, coming from up the corridor. There was no accompanying smell, no hint of either fresh air or of death, but Banks’ gut had started to grumble at him again, and he knew the cause of it this time.

  Whatever’s happening, that bloody saucer is at the center of it.

  The squad moved forward as one. Banks sensed their alertness, their readiness to face anything that put itself in their path. It’s what they trained for, why they had been selected for this unit; to a man, they had the ability to face down danger without fear and fight back until they couldn’t fight any longer. He’d trust any one of them with his life.

  But what if there’s nothing here for us to fight?

  He pushed the thought away, focusing only on the here and now as they went quickly along the corridor. It got noticeably warmer the farther they went. Light showed in the windows of the door leading to the saucer hangar, and Banks judged that it was now brighter inside than on their last visit.

  “Steady, lads,” he whispered, and they made the next ten steps in silence. He stopped the squad at the door. He didn’t speak, but motioned to Hynd that he should take McCally and the three others to the left, while he, Wiggins, and Parker went right.