The Spawning (15 page)

“Go away! Go away!” Kim sobbed. “Just leave me alone!”

More static punctuated by that weird droning noise that seemed to come from impossible distances and echoing black gulfs. Nothing but the static.

Then the voice: “Let me help you before IT comes for you.”

“No.”

“All you have—”

“Please go away.”

“—to do, Kim, is—”

“Stop it, stop it!” she said as tears rolled down her face.

“Ask.”

B
ORDEN PULLED HIMSELF FORWARD, hand over hand with the guide ropes, the black flags flapping in the wind like aerial pennants. The closer he got to the habitat—and he could not see it, not yet—the wilder the storm became until it seemed a raging, hateful tempest that existed only to defeat him, to stop him dead in his tracks so the snow could lay a silent and deathly shroud over his remains.

He knew he was not alone out there.

Now and again, deep in the roaring blackness of the storm, he could hear that voice calling to him, singing that melancholy song that sounded to him like windy churchyards and echoing subterranean charnel depths.

He fought forward.

As he got closer to the habitat, the storm continued, howling in his face, almost determined that he would not escape its grasp.

Though he was a scientist, his science had abandoned him now and he fully believed that the storm was not some freak occurrence, but something engineered for his benefit.

He pulled himself on.

He would not give in.

He could not afford to give in.

All around him, shapes were moving, trying to draw his attention. But it wasn't far now. Not far at all.

T
HE AIRLOCK HISSED.

Kim stood there in her ECWs, her eyes glazed, her mouth hanging slack.

“That's it, Kim. I'm out here. Waiting. I'll help you.”

Kim opened the outer door and the wind yanked it from her mittened fingers, letting it pound against the outside of the habitat. The wind pulled her out into the storm. It filled the habitat, knocking books from shelves and creating a tornado of papers and plastic coffee cups and anything that wasn't tied down.

Stepping across the hardpack, Kim could feel her heart pounding like a drum. Inside her ECWs, she was sweating. Perspiration rolled down her spine and dampened her thighs and ran trickling between her breasts.

“You're so close now, Kim, you're so very close.”

Kim circled around the habitat, snow and ice particles swirling around her as fierce gusts tried to drive her back.

She smelled a stink like rotting fish heaped on a dead beach. It made no sense. Even though her mind had spiraled into some bottomless abyss within, it still knew that such an odor in the glacial air of the South Pole made no earthly sense.

“You're so close I can almost touch you,”
the voice said inside the drum of her head and she knew that's where it had been speaking from all along.

Kim moved forward.

A shadow passed by her, vanished into the storm.

She thought she heard a peal of cold laughter.

But it was the wind. It had to be the wind.

“Just a little farther, Kim . . . a . . . little . . . farther . . .”

She had passed the habitat now, stepping out onto the polar plateau where the winds found her, enshrouding her in snow, owning her, and cutting off any chance of retreat.

Something brushed against her.

She whirled around, her mind a flat and lifeless thing in her head.

Then the voice, scratching and horrible:
“I'm right behind you, Kim.”

She turned and something leaped out of the darkness at her.

She saw eyes that were a luminous yellow and a blurred liquid face like something grotesquely distorted in a funhouse mirror and then hands like gnarled gray roots took hold of her.

Kim's last sight was her own blood steaming hotly on the ice.

B
ORDEN SAW THE LIGHTS.

A strangled cry of hope came from his throat. He was going to win this one. He was going to survive this and lock the habitat door and, so sorry, but fuck Andrea and fuck Dr. Bob. That door would not be opened until a relief team from Polar Clime arrived.

Oh, Borden could already see them. Tough, burly, foul-mouthed Antarctic vets who would know what to do.

He pulled himself along the guide ropes.

The voices died out.

That's how he knew he had won.

He stumbled across the ice, a few more feet, that's all. He fell, slipped and fell again, pulling himself up, banged and bruised but making for the door.

It was wide open.

As was the airlock.

He fell through it.

The common room was a maelstrom of blowing wind and spinning debris, snow blown over the floor and sculpted in runnels along the walls.

He smelled a hot, toxic dead fish odor.

But only part of his brain recognized this for the rest was too busy taking in what stood there, seven feet tall if it was an inch. It looked like a twisted dead tree that had grown up through the floor, its base a mass of coiling roots that were moving with a slow and fleshy undulation. It was blue-black in color, convoluted, made of some striated material like muscle fibers woven tightly together. It had a head with what looked like hundreds of writhing black tendrils like the snakes of Medusa rising up, brushing the ceiling, reaching out stiffly like hair charged with static electricity.

And it had a face.

An abomination with upturned yellow eyes and a jagged, sawtoothed Jack-o-lantern mouth filled with black spikes.

Borden made a whimpering sound and fell to his knees.

It hissed at him and reached out with all four of its wiry, rawboned hands that ended in black stick-like hooks. He thought it would kill him for not only did that hot stench of dead fish blow off it but it gave off a psychic emanation of pure festering evil. It would gut him. It would swim in his blood.

But it did not touch him.

It reached down and yanked up that which it had been feeding on.

The corpse of Kim Pennycook.

It held her up like some obscene marionette. She had been disemboweled, her throat gnawed to ligament and red-stained vertebrae. She was gored and ripped, her ECWs hanging in crusty, slimed threads. As it hoisted her up, her left leg fell off where it had been bitten through.

The thing hissed again and sank its teeth into her face, peeling it from the skull beneath with a horribly moist and juicy sound.

Borden crawled from the airlock.

He ran drunkenly from the habitat, only vaguely aware that he had pissed himself. He didn't bother with the guide ropes. He ran until he tripped on the ice and then he crawled, a mad and yammering scream coming from his mouth.

Lost in the storm, hiding in its folds, he curled up on the ice, his heart hammering and his breath coming in ragged gasps. The storm died out incrementally and by then it was clear and cold, auroras flashing blue and vibrant yellow-green high overhead.

And it was then that he became aware that he was no longer alone.

He lifted his head and looked upon what stood there.

Through squinting eyes he saw something tall and shadowy with a chambered oblong barrel-like body and night-black wings fanning out to either side like sails filled with wind. It stood upon a system of thick muscular tentacles. Its head was like a fleshy, puckering starfish, each one of the five arms lying at a horizontal plane to the head itself and each ending in a globular red eye that was translucent.

Despite the state of his mind, Borden knew exactly what it was.

It was one of those things from Kharkov Station.

The creatures the NSF said did not exist.

It was looking at him with an intensity that made his skull ache.

“Oh . . . God,” he uttered.

And the thing stepped forward with a slick, rubbery sound as Borden's mind went first black then entirely blank as a wave of agony sheared his thoughts, hot and cutting.

I believe they have seeded hundreds of worlds

in the galaxy with life and directed the evolution

of that life. They have an agenda and I believe it is the

subjugation of the races they developed.

—Dr. Robert Gates

POLAR CLIME STATION
MARCH 3

H
IS FIRST WINTER-OVER ON the Ice, Coyle watched a heavy equipment mechanic named Creed go slowly mad because he claimed there was a ghost in his room. The ghost was a female and Creed said she had fallen through sea ice and drowned. He knew this because his bed was wet every night from the ghost woman laying in it. At night she would climb on top of Creed and try to suck his breath away like a cat licking the milk from a baby's mouth. Creed refused to sleep in that bed after this went on a couple weeks. And when the station manager refused to assign him a different room Creed stabbed him with a fork.

Creed was crazy, of course.

Everybody knew that.

Somewhere along the line he had developed something of a volatile and unsavory co-dependency with a rubber love doll named Maddie. What they did behind closed doors nobody really wanted to know, because what they did out in the open was bad enough.

Creed would bring Maddie into the dining area for supper and sit her at his table. During the meal, they would argue and Creed would get crazy mad and jealous, accusing his doll of flirting with other men. In a final dramatic climax to their relationship, Creed stabbed her with a steak knife and then surrendered himself to the NSF rep, saying that he was a murderer.

So when he stuck the fork in the station manager, there was no doubt that Creed was insane. Killing a love doll was bad enough, but stabbing the manager was something else again.

But sometimes things got a little weird during the long winters.

Minds that were not exactly balanced to begin with swung far to the right or left and sometimes, they just fell right off the beam and shattered into a million pieces. Maybe it was the solitude and isolation and the knowledge that you were trapped in that cold white cage for months and there was no key to be had. Because once the planes stopped flying in March, you were there to stay.

Antarctica had a long history of madness.

And that stretched right back to the days of the early explorers when men just lost their minds and wandered out onto the ice never to be seen again and continued on in an unbroken lineage to the days of Byrd and Little America when overindulgence in medicinal alcohol turned parties to violent purges. And maybe all of that could have been attributed to the hardships of the early days, for death was always knocking on the door. Maybe this and the stress of living with it day in and day out. Maybe pent-up hostilities boiling over or simple manic despondency. A lot of things, really.

Except for the fact that it continued right to the present day, unabated.

People lost it on the Ice frequently and there was just no way around that. The NSF tried to sweep that kind of thing under the rug, but they could never make it go away. Whatever psychological aberrations people brought down there with them seemed to get amplified to a disturbing degree. And maybe that was because the Ice itself was like some great mirror that reflected the very dark truth of who and what you really were.

You had to look yourself in the face.

No more bullshit.

No more trifling civilization with its twelve-step programs, infantile support groups, or its I'm-okay-you're-okay half-assed Dr. Phil cult of self-denial, read my book and write me a check, honey, you'll be just fine. Down on the Ice, your strengths and weaknesses were on full display. And particularly during the winter when people didn't really have much else to do but scrutinize one another. They saw what you were about and, worse, so did you.

The blinders were off.

And sometimes when that happened, people just went crazy when they got a good look at the crawly things inside them while others simply accepted what they were and felt liberated finally, ultimately. Both workers
and
scientists. That's why you'd get doctors down there that would get addicted to their own painkillers and relaxants or turn some cash trafficking the same. That's why women either spread their legs for free or turned a profit at it. That's why you'd get workers who developed complex, self-destructive dependencies with rubber love dolls or administrators that suffered persecution disorders and thought their rooms were bugged and the workers were united in their downfall. And that's why you got scientists that became inexplicably frightened of the dark or of Antarctica itself, convinced that there were disembodied intelligences out there trying to steal their minds.

Winter at the stations was a recipe for compulsion and obsession and plain old mental degeneration. When you packed people together in a box for five months in the utter blackness of the world's most unforgiving environment, you were asking for trouble.

Coyle had seen it before firsthand and he knew he was about to see it again.

Too many weird things were piling up. From the disappearances at Mount Hobb to the chopper crash to the megaliths in Beacon Valley and the others on Callisto. After the Callisto Party and what the crew saw on that NASA feed, anxiety levels went right through the roof and there was no going back.

Which was too bad, because Coyle had been hoping that this winter would be a smooth one. Oh, he had strong feelings to the contrary, but he had still
hoped.
Sure, Mount Hobb and the chopper crash and Slim's wild tales of something under that tarp and those damned megaliths in Beacon Valley . . . all of that was bad enough. But when the ice of Callisto vomited out those alien structures, there was no turning back. That little episode was a catalyst that got everything going.

The morning after, it was all people were talking about.