The Spawning (14 page)

But tonight, it
really
did have a voice.

She listened to what it said. Listened to it sing a dirge, a saga of primeval memory of this land before the ice came, of things so distant that no human eyes would ever look upon them. It knew things, it sang truths. It peered right into the dark and diseased heart of her trauma and fear and sang of peace and ages unfolding.

It told her that fear was only a survival mechanism implanted in the human psyche and that it was also a control, something that could drain the human mind at the first sign of defiance. But it also told her that there was nothing to fear if she did as it said.

If she answered the ancient summoning.

And she believed it, for this night the wind had a voice and that voice was for her alone.

It was so lonely and old and wise. Listening to it was like mainlining something pure and fierce and forever.

Outside . . . come outside and know us,
said that windy, melodic voice.
Come unto us and we will give unto thee a seamless beauty beyond imagining.

So Cassie, knowing it was right, did what it said.

Hurry . . . you must be quick before they see you. They cannot know. This is a secret.

Escaping was simple.

Cassie followed the voice through the wall where the angles met and jumped through fourth-dimensional space and then . . . and then . . .

Outside: In the security lights, snow-devils twisted through the compound and the wind pushed drift into the lights.

Oh, the wind was biting, cold, cold, cold.

She was wearing only slippers, jogging pants, and a hoodie.

It was twenty below zero out there.

She did not know where she was going.

She was only following the voice.

Follow me, follow me, follow follow follow me.

And under her cold-cracking breath, a tiny and childlike voice asked: “Are . . . are you a ghost?”

We are something much older than ghosts.

Shivering, disoriented, knowing only the voice, Cassie jogged out past the Fuel Depot, slipping and sliding on the ice, and the wind kept trying to push her back, but she would not be pushed back for the song on the wind was like tinkling silver bells now rising into a sweet and resonant crescendo.

She ran faster, falling, getting up, falling.

She was out on the ice road near the runway now, calling out to the wind, begging it to show itself. Hypothermia was setting in and her mind was fogged, confused, a whirlwind of fairy tale imagery that spun and danced and cavorted . . . but for all its phantasmagoria and sparkling Technicolor beauty, there were dark spaces and pooling shadows from which red hungry eyes peered out and white, frozen fingers seemed to beckon.

But she could not let the song be broken.

I will die without the song! I will die . . .

Here were warm-up shacks and storage Quonsets. The wind was whipping fiercely. The snow flying. The shadows pushing in. Cassie's limbs felt numb, sluggish. There was no feeling in her face. She was sheathed in rubber, cold thick rubber.

And then–

Here, my child, here...

She saw a figure come drifting out of the snow and darkness.

A woman.

A woman in a white dress that flapped and flowed around her. Cassie stumbled in her direction, towards her outstretched arms. A woman that looked oh so much like her mother . . . but she had red eyes and those reaching things were not hands and then Cassie went down on her knees, crunching against the granite-hard snowpack and saw what it was that had summoned her.

Oh God not this, not this.

I remember

I remember the touch of them

From long ago

The fear-haunted forest, the swarm brings pain, welcome to the house of pain-Before
her: a towering alien shape with fanning leathery wings and fleshy eyestalks and those red, red, burning eyes. It moved towards her.

Cassie felt an absolute wild terror seize hold of her, one that was not remotely refined or cultured or necessarily human. This was animal: pure, savage, feral. Like her mind had sucked into itself, careening madly into some bottomless pit with the trajectory of a bullet.

Before her, the shape reached out to her, to take her, to–

(no no no no keep away get away not touch not touch)

—pull her screaming into itself, into the buzzing dead-end nothingness of itself, the shrieking iron silence of its consciousness-

(no not touch the pain oh oh oh THE PAIN!!!)

—and make her part of the whole, part of the many, part of the hive.

Something broke loose in her brain like a seizure, making her limbs quake and her head thrash violently from side to side.

She threw herself to the ice, growling low in her throat, part-terror and part-rage. She crouched like a wolf readying to spring. She would attack. She would defend herself against the Other–

Then
a sudden high-pitched whine opened up in the back of her skull, reverberating through her brain and everything went limp and flaccid within her. Defiance was not allowed and she knew it as she trembled on the ice, limbs shaking, eyes rolled back in her head, teeth biting into her tongue, blood running from her nose, bowels emptying themselves with a not-unpleasant smell of animal scat and glandular excretion.

Disobedience replaced with a warm gush of compliance, she lay there curled up on the ice, whimpering deep in her throat like a whipped puppy as the shape took her away into secret channels of darkness.

NOAA FIELD STATION POLARIS

T
HERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG.

Borden knew it the moment the rope jerked in his hands and with enough force that he lost his grip on it and had to dive to the ice to recover it.

And by then it had gone limp.

He knew he was late calling into the habitat but he did not dare let go of it. For some reason this seemed of paramount importance to him. It was all that really connected him to Dr. Bob and, God help him, he would not sever that tie.

He pulled himself to his feet.

No easy thing with that howling wind trying to drive him to his knees, throwing grains of ice and whirling flakes of snow in his face. Steadying himself, leaning into the wind the way Dr. Bob had taught him, he began taking up the slack. He ducked under the guide rope and then it was easier to begin reeling it in.

The slack only meant that Dr. Bob was on his way back.

That's all it meant.

But as he listened to the scream of that black wind and felt the absolute polar desolation around him, the cold beginning to make his limbs feel numb and heavy, he did not really believe that. He was remembering Andrea standing at the window . . . was that last night? Tonight? How could you tell with the constant darkness? He could see her standing there, somehow forlorn and withered, the youthful bloom to her cheeks replaced by something sallow and wizened.

I like to listen to the wind. It sounds like voices sometimes.

And it really did, didn't it?

As he took up the slack, Borden was listening to it.

He was hearing something out there, sort of a droning sound like static rising and falling and the more he listened the less it sounded like static but almost like a voice . . . a woman's voice . . . singing out there in the belly of the storm. A melancholy sort of song borne by the winds, its epicenter being the very black heart of the unearthly devastation which swept the ice.

Death.

That's really what he was thinking.

It was a song of death sung by the siren which had lured so many to bleak polar tombs beneath the ice. A screaming, malevolent white death that was coming to suck the warmth from him–

Stop it. Concentrate.

He reeled in more slack.

The storm was right upon him now and no longer did the squalls clear enough so that he could see the habitat. He was alone. Marooned in this glacial hell where men did not belong.

The weather is funny out on the plateau,
he could hear Dr. Bob saying.
Be prepared. Summer, winter, it doesn't matter. Prepare for the worst. When you go out to the coring sight, keep survival in mind. Because all it takes is one nasty storm to deliver you into the hands of Hell. Stay on the flagged pathways, use the guide ropes. We put them up for a reason. And if you ever start feeling dopy or dreamy, it's hypothermia settling in, so call for help, follow the guide ropes.

Borden suddenly seemed to realize what was at stake.

He made sure the guide rope was still at his back and began reeling in the rope with renewed fervor. He looked down at his bunny boots in the beam of his light and realized that, yes, he had been losing it there for a minute because he probably only pulled in maybe fifteen or twenty feet of rope.

Work it, man! Help Dr. Bob out!

He was yanking the rope with everything he had. The exertion warmed him and woke him up, his senses alert and sharpened. He pulled in more line and soon there was a growing spool at his feet. Had to be forty feet now, more likely fifty.

The wind slammed into him, blasting him white with snow. He clawed it away from his balaclava and started pulling again. The rope came easily and then it went taut with incredible force, nearly pulling his arm out of joint.

But he did not let go.

He could not let go.

The rope laid limp for a moment, then it jerked rigid, began whipping from side to side. Borden lost his balance and fell to the ice.

What the hell is going on?

He grabbed the rope again, glad that he had mittens and polar gloves below or it would have peeled the flesh from his palms.

“BOB!” he cried. “BOB! I'M OVER HERE! BOB!”

The rope went crazy, pitching him this way and that and it felt crazily like he had the mother of all trophy swordfish on the other end. It slid through his mittens, snapping and jerking. It took every bit of strength he had to fight against it. He pulled it back, using his strength and weight, and the rope was tight feeding out into the storm as if it was looped around something immoveable like a tree.

It jerked again.

And again.

“BOB!” Borden shouted into the storm.
“BOB!”

The rope whipped again with incredible force and he clung to it with steely determination. He was lifted eight feet in the air and dropped to the ice.

Right away, sitting there on his ass, he pulled the rope in.

It was limp.

He kept reeling and reeling and there was weight on the other end, but not enough to be Dr. Bob. Something had happened. Something terrible. Somehow the rope must have broken loose and left him stranded out there.

Borden pulled the rest in, knowing he would simply tie it around himself and go find Bob. It was secured to the pathway so he had nothing to worry about.

The end of the rope came skidding into view.

It was looped around something.

Borden saw it and screamed.

Just a mitten of the sort Dr. Bob had been wearing and jutting from it, a jagged stump of wrist.

Borden crab-crawled back towards the pathway, pulled himself to his feet, and gripped the guide rope. He began following it back to the station at a frantic pace, trying to shut out everything but survival, and particularly the idea that something was out there, something malefic and loathsome that was closing in on him.

Something so deranged it had taken the time to tie Dr. Bob's severed hand to the end of the rope.

K
IM PENNYCOOK WAS ALONE.

It had taken every last bit of strength she had to seal the airlock and crawl back to her corner by the radio where she waited now, trembling, listening to the night which she knew without a doubt was also listening to
her.

The wind blew.

The habitat shook, the walls rattled.

And Kim sat there, riding a rising tide of black fear and dementia, no longer certain what was real and what was nightmare fantasy. She had always been a strong, determined, and resilient woman, but all that was gone now.

She was a child.

She was frightened.

She was alone.

There was only the black breath of the storm outside and the white, fragile silence within her own mind now. She had been laid bare, adult logic and reasoning reduced to a simple adolescent level of pure unreasoning superstitious terror. For a child's mind, unencumbered by adult experience and rationale, was a simple thing. The rustling in the closet was indeed the boogeyman. That scraping beneath the bed was certainly a monster. And the wind howling along the eaves was without a doubt the voices of disembodied spirits.

Kim teetered uneasily between the adult world and that of the child.

Terrified, everything inside her pulled tight, she could only listen.

The lights flickered.

She gasped. Not the dark, oh no, not in the dark–

The radio crackled with static. “Poor Kim . . . all alone,” the voice said, velvety like the whisper of funeral satin. “They're all dead now and you're all alone. All . . . alone.”

Kim shook violently. “No . . . no . . . go away.”

There was a breathing silence over the radio, then an odd metallic scraping sound like a shovel against a tomb lid. “I can help you . . . but you have to let me . . . you have to want me to . . . do you want that, Kim?”

Her breath coming in sharp, short inhalations that made her head spin, Kim covered her ears with her hands, her eyes wide and wet and stunned-looking. She felt cold and stiff, her body crawling with gooseflesh . . . every inch of it.

Even through covered ears, the voice was heard.

It sounded less sultry and seductive now.

Less girlschool friendly.

Now it was ancient and scratching, cancerous with vile corruption: “Don't wait too long, Kim . . . because IT's out there and IT can come in if it wants to . . . IT can get you like it got Andrea and Dr. Bob and Starnes . . . IT knows where you are and IT can find you, make you scream the way they screamed–”