The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 (40 page)

When I walked back to the dog corral, my dog General snapped at my hand when I tried to pat him on the head. He backed away with his ears lowered and his teeth barred and snarled at me. Sergeant straightened him out quick enough with a few barks and snaps of his teeth, but even Sergeant flinched away from me when I called him to come close, so after a few tries at calming them down, I just let them be, figuring that the plane ride had set their nerves jangling.

As Lake made his discoveries in the cave, he sent the grads running back to camp with written notes so that Moulton could dispatch messages about the finds to Southern Camp and the whaler
Arkham
from the wireless on one of the planes. The
Arkham
in turn was able to send the messages back to Miskatonic University using its long antenna. Because of this, I guess the expedition was not a total loss, and maybe the men who died did not die for nothing.

My sled was the dog sled that brought the star stones back to camp. That’s just what I called them when I seen them—they didn’t have a proper name on account of nobody ever saw their like before. They was made of a waxy kind of green stone carved or formed some way in the shape of a starfish six inches or so across from point to point.

I started to pile them onto the sled beside the mouth of the cave before I noticed the dogs acting up. It was the smell of the things that upset them—they had a queer smell, like the smell inside the cave only stronger.

Young Lake tried to load them onto his sled, but his dogs wouldn’t have it. They put up such a fuss, and tangled the leads so bad, I told him to leave off, that I would take all the stones back to camp. My dogs didn’t like it neither, but Sergeant kept them in line. They stood in their harnesses, their legs quivering and tails down, howling and barking, but they didn’t try to break loose, and I was able to get the damned stones back to camp, but only thanks to Sergeant. That dog was a marvel, the way he made them other dogs behave.

4

I
WAS SLEEPING IN MY TENT WHEN THEY FOUND THOSE UGLY, GRAY
plant things. Crinoids, Professor Lake called them. Whatever they was, I’d never seen anything like them, not even in books. I got dressed and went with the rest to the cave entrance. The men had brought three of them through the hole to the surface by the time I got there. They had to chip the things out of the solid rock, because the limestone had dripped down and hardened all around them, trapping them in those pillars I talked about before.

They had bodies like ribbed barrels, and a funny starfish thing for a head with glassy eyes on its points. They stood upright about eight feet tall on five flipper legs. Their arms, if you can call them arms, looked like branches on a tree with all the leaves stripped off, and between the ridges that ran up the sides of their bodies were folded little wings. Professor Lake was able to tug on the wings to open them up a bit, because these fossils was not stone but was made of something bendable and tough, like uncured ox hide.

He was all smiles from ear to ear, talking and laughing to beat the band. When he saw his son he gave him a hug and slapped him on the back.

“We’re made, Henry,” I heard him say. “This is the find of the century. No one in the world has ever seen anything like this, my boy.”

It did my heart good to see that hard old reserve of his come crumbling down. That was the first time since we set sail from Boston that those two acted like father and son. And the last.

We dog handlers went back to camp for the three sleds, but it was no use. Nothing we could do would make the dogs go anywhere near those things. Not even Sergeant wanted to get close to them. He barked along with the rest, the white foam flying in flecks from the corners of his snarling mouth. I thought he was going to break all his teeth, the way he snapped his jaws shut.

Finally, we had to take the dogs back to camp without the sleds. The men pulled the sleds themselves to get the creatures back to camp. There was fourteen in all, although I heard one of the grads say that only eight of them was intact. The other six was damaged and missing parts. Crushed, some of them, by the weight of the rock in the cave.

Professor Lake told us to build another corral for the dogs that was further away from the tents, so that the smell of the things wouldn’t bother the dogs so much. After those things came into camp the dogs never stopped barking and howling. Nothing we handlers could do would quiet them. We staked them to chains on the other side of an ice ridge and built another corral further away from the camp, on the opposite side to the big scientific tent where the laboratory equipment was kept. We put it as far away from the camp as we dared, but it wasn’t far enough. The dogs still wouldn’t stop barking.

They could smell the blood, if you can call it blood, that oozed out of one of the things that Professor Lake took inside the tent to thaw out and dissect. I could smell it, too, when I got downwind of the tent. It didn’t smell bad, exactly, just unnatural, like nothing I’d ever smelled before. It made my stomach roll, but more than that, it made me feel fearful. I think that’s what the dogs was all feeling—fear of the unknown.

Lake ordered that the other creatures pulled out from the cave be lined up on the snow outside the science tent. They made a strange sight, leaning together like a field of upright giant melons with starfish flowers blooming on their tops. It was cold enough with that fiendish wind that there were no danger of them thawing out, but the sunlight slanting across the glacier to the south lit them starfish tops up with all kinds of colors. I reckon it was the first time they’d seen sunlight in millions of years.

Nobody had much time to stare at the ugly things, on account of the wind wouldn’t let up, but kept blowing stronger and stronger. It made building that second dog corral terrible hard work. We had to take the dogs into it two at a time, they was so crazed to get at them monsters on the ice. When they caught sight of them, they almost broke their chains. Young Lake and me had to use clubs to get them to mind us and go into the new corral, and that’s something I never use on a dog.

I didn’t need one on Sergeant. He kept his head somehow, but I could see he was just as keen to get at them things as the other dogs. But I talked to him in that way I’ve got of talking to him, low and slow, and he listened to me. Good thing, too, because I doubt we could have held him if he’d taken a mind to break loose.

Anyway, we got the corral finished and the dogs fed and watered. The other assistants and the mechanics was busy making taller windbreaks to shelter the planes and the tents. That gale that blew down from those mountains was like the breath from the mouth of hell. Most people think hell is hot and burning, but my old dad used to read the Greek classics—he was college educated, my dad—and he told me that hell is really a place of ice and cold, only he always called it Hades. I used to laugh at him, God forgive me, but now I know that he was right. I’ve been to hell, and it’s a bitter-cold place, colder than death.

When I was done with the dogs, I walked over to the big tent to ask the professor if there was anything else he wanted. The tent was so crowded, I could hardly squeeze in through the flap. Everyone not working outside had come to have a look at that monster Lake was cutting up on the specimen table. He had it all laid open in the chest by the time I got there. I had to hold my hand over my nose and breathe through my mouth, the smell was that bad. Even when I did that I could still taste the stink of it.

From what I overheard, Lake and the grads had managed to hack it open with ice axes along those seams that ran up and down its body. It was already partly split from being crushed in the cave when the limestone built up over it, so it wouldn’t have been too hard. I had a look over the shoulders of them that stood in front of me, but I could make nothing out of it. All I saw was a mass of lumpy gray and brown things that might have been organs, and some long white fibers that could have been veins or tendons or even nerves for all I knew.

I slid on out of the tent into the cold and turned my fur collar up against the wind. It was blowing in sharp little gusts that made me stagger when they hit me and kept me off balance. I walked past them things lined up on the snow on my way back to my tent. They was waving and bobbing back and forth in the wind, and them tree branch things they had for arms was weaving around in the air just as if they had come to life. They gave me the willies to look at them, so I kept my distance and never turned my back until I was well past them.

5

I
T WAS THE SCREAMS THAT WOKE ME
. I
SAT UP ON MY COT IN THAT
darkened tent, listening to the howl of the wind and the flap-flap-flap of the canvas. At first I thought I was still asleep, and that a woman had screamed in my dream, but when the screams came again, but louder this time, and I heard shouts and the howling of the dogs, I knew I was awake and that something awful was going on.

The tent was dim inside. We kept it dark during sleep periods to make it seem more like night-time, even though the sun never sets in Antarctica during the months of its summer. There was enough light for me to see that all the cots was empty except for young Lake’s. The boy was just waking up, same as me. He stared at me wide-eyed.

“What’s going on, Hobbs?” he said, and his voice shook.

I looked out the open flap of the tent, which snapped back and forth in the gale. All I could see was driving snow that blew straight across from right to left, like grapeshot fired from a gun.

“Someone’s getting killed,” I told him.

I don’t know why I said that. I couldn’t see nothing, and didn’t know what was going on. It was just the sound of them screams, so high and drawn-out, like the screams of women, only there weren’t no women to make them.

We slept in our clothes on account of the cold, so I only had to put my boots and mitts on. I grabbed the first coat on the rack that came under my hand. It was only later that I realized it wasn’t mine, but belonged to someone else—one of the mechanics, probably. Before I went through the flap, I picked up an axe. We had axes with big, broad blades for chopping through the snow and ice.

Lake followed me out. We stood for a second or two, not knowing what to do, and then heard shouts coming from the direction of the science tent. We couldn’t see more than a dozen feet or so in front of us on account of the driving snow picked up by the wind. It turned everything into a fuzzy white haze. From time to time the wind would drop off, and the way in front of us would open up long enough for us to get our bearings.

What we saw when we got near the science tent was enough to freeze my blood. One of them great, tall monsters from the cave had a man in its branchy arms. It lifted him high in the air and sort of just dashed him down onto the icy snow. I heard his bones break when he hit. He was dead before his body stopped moving—broke his back, I think. The monster half turned as if it was looking at us, and it made this weird piping noise, like a child trying to play the flute without knowing which holes to cover with his fingers. The same sounds came from somewhere behind the tent. Then the wind lifted the snow and made the thing disappear.

I grabbed Lake by the shoulder and kind of shook him to get his attention.

“Come on,” I shouted over the wind. “We have to get to your father.”

That got him moving. I went in front with the axe raised. That thing must have moved off somewhere else, because we didn’t meet up with it.

What we saw in front of the big tent reminded me of one of those old church paintings of demons. There was dead bodies on the snow, red blood splashed over the white, throats tore out, heads gone, arms gone. One poor beggar I didn’t recognize on account of his face was all bashed in was tore into two parts across the middle.

Two of them monsters was fighting with Professor Lake and the grad student Watkins, who both had axes in their hands. One of the things lay on the ice behind them. It wasn’t dead but it couldn’t seem to get upright. Parts of it was missing. Them axes was kept real sharp, and we all had a lot of practice using them.

“Father!” young Lake yelled out and ran forward.

Professor Lake turned his head at the sound of his son’s voice. The creature he was fighting dashed down one of its arms and cut through his skull as if it was no harder than a ripe pumpkin. The professor fell backward. Young Henry Lake threw himself at the thing and managed to get his hands around part of its top, where its eyes was. I yelled for him to get away from that thing and started hacking at its side, whenever I could reach it without cutting the boy. It no more seemed to mind the axe then a bull would notice a feather duster. The side of that barrel body was tough.

The thing wrapped two of its arms around poor Henry and pulled him close. I heard his bones breaking one by one. Where the other one got to while this was going on, I don’t know, because it was lost in the blizzard picked up by the wind. There was sounds of fighting and screams coming from inside the tent, but I had no mind for anything except to kill the devil that had killed Lake and his son.

Suddenly there was dogs everywhere, barking and howling like demons. They must have broken out of the corral when they heard all the fighting. Sergeant threw himself on the monster, and it let the Lake boy drop to the ice as it tried to grab up the dog, but Sergeant was too quick for it. He started to worry one of its legs, grabbing on when he could get close, then letting go when it tried to smash him with those tree-branch arms.

“Get it, Sergeant, get it,” I yelled.

My blood was up. They talk about seeing red and it must be true, because there was this red haze in front of my eyes. I don’t think it was blood, I wasn’t cut. I just went out of my mind with killing hate. Something deep inside of me told me that this thing didn’t belong in my world, that it was alien and had to be destroyed. The dogs felt the same way. Their fear had changed to killing rage.

The monster made a kind of buzzing noise, and all around its body those little wings popped out and started to vibrate. I think there was five of them, although I was in no mind to count. They beat fast like a dragonfly’s wings and it lifted into the air, but it didn’t get far. The wind turned it over and it fell on its side about twenty yards away.