The Spawning (27 page)

His office. They had tied him up in his
own
office. His books, his papers . . . it all seemed so meaningless now.

Just as meaningless as all the works of men would soon be if something wasn't done about the threat,
the threat beneath the ice.

Now he could watch and wait and warn.

But they don't believe me, none of them do. They think I'm crazy.

“Ssshhhh,” he cautioned himself. “You are not crazy. You are the only sane one left.”

Once upon a time, long before he had attacked another scientist with a knife, Polchek had been a microbial ecologist from Ohio State University's Department of Environmental Microbiology. He had come to Antarctica on an NSF grant as part of a multi-disciplinary team that was studying the geochemical and microbiological conditions of glacial and accretion ice core samples from the Dry Valleys of McMurdo Sound.

A dream job in the beginning.

And now a nightmare as he saw the truth of what the ice concealed at the bottom of the world. He had lost complete interest in paleo-organisms and bacterial phylotypes, electron microscopy and epifluorescence, DNA extraction and molecular analysis.

That was who and what he had been.

Before the dreams came to him.

Before he began putting things together.

Before he saw the truth.

Soon, very soon now, they would all know what he knew.

They didn't pay attention when it happened at Kharkov Station,
he thought as he wringed his hands, bunching them into fists.
They swept it under the rug and went back to the same bullshit. The fighting and political games and corporate swindling. The hating and wars and intolerance. They didn't take the hint that the Kharkov Tragedy was the only warning this world was going to get . . .

But maybe you couldn't really blame the world at large.

They were ignorant and happily so.

Your common men and women of every nation only knew what they were told, what those in power decided they should know. They were never tipped off to the immensity of the horror born of antiquity that was preparing to engulf the planet. The NSF had been one of the key players in watering down the events at Kharkov Station. The truth made for extremely bad PR, so they handed the mess to their spin doctors and perception managers and it was all made palatable for consumption by the masses.

A cover-up.

Hardly the first, but with the way things were going and what was beginning to happen everywhere, probably the last.

They had covered up the Callisto thing, too.

Nobody was saying too much about that around Crary, but you could bet they were thinking it. When that megalithic structure rose from the ancient crust, the feed to McMurdo was cut on purpose. But it would turn up. Because someone in Antarctica at one of the stations must have been burning it. It stood to reason. Give it another week and it would be all over the internet.

But it would be too late by the time people realized.

“YAAAAAHHHHHH!”
he suddenly shrieked.
“TOO LATE, TOO LATE, TOOOOOO FUCKING LATE! THEY'LL EAT YOUR MINDS! THEY'LL DRAIN YOUR INTELLECTS DRYYYYYYY
–
”

One of the paras came in, Munse. “Take it easy, man.” He had a syringe with him. “I'm going to give you something that will help you relax.”

The syringe.

The needle.

No, no, no . . . not the NEEDLE . . . not the DRUGS . . . I must be awake . . . THEY can get to you if you're asleep . . .

Too late. It was already in his veins.

Polchek had tried to warn the others of the Dry Valleys team—Benson, Krieg, Herzog. But they, of course, had turned away from him. So he went directly to Dr. Munse. They had been colleagues for years. More than colleagues. Friends, good friends.

“We can't sit here and do nothing,” Polchek said to him, whispering in his face. “Those things have been under the ice and down in those lakes beneath the glaciers, just waiting in their dead cities and now they'll wait no more. Don't you see?”

“John,” Munse had said in his calmest voice, “there was never any evidence of extraterrestrial intervention at Kharkov. The ruined city Gates said he found could never be located. And that whole insane conspiracy of this ancient race harvesting human populations . . . it was fantasy.”

“Fantasy? Dr. Munse . . .
Bob
. . . please . . . think about it. You know what Dryden is doing up at the Emperor Cave. You heard same as I what he chopped out of the glacial ice! It's one of those things! It may be long dead, but its mind is active, diabolical, and dangerous! The living ones use those old ice mummies as conduits for their energies . . . they're part of some network we can never fully understand!”

“John . . . you need to relax, okay?”

But Polchek could see it in his eyes: the skepticism slowly giving way to belief and the belief becoming fear.
Yes, yes, yes, through fear comes truth!

Munse would not admit to it, though. “It's true that Dryden has found something in the ice. It may very well turn out to be some sort of extraterrestrial creature . . .
maybe.
But that hardly gives credence to the rest of the wild stuff. C'mon, John, that's fringe science. We both know it.”

Polchek almost broke down into tears right there. “It comes in my dreams . . . things are channeled to me or maybe I'm more sensitive to the psychic projections . . . but I see those dead cities, I see what lives in them, and I know what's in store for us.”

Munse rose to escort him from his office, but Polchek trapped him there behind his desk. “For God's sake don't turn me away like this! I'm not an idiot! The ancient hive has come out of dormancy! The aliens . . . they'll turn us into witches!
Wiiiitches!
Then we'll be like them—reading minds, moving things with pure thought, divining the future! It's what they do and what they want
us
to do. Don't you see?” Polchek tapped his temples with index fingers that shook badly. “It's . . . it's not like in those old movies. They don't take over our bodies! They don't possess us! They don't have to! They engineered . . .
imperatives
into us millions of years ago . . . genetic imperatives. They will activate those imperatives now . . . we will be witches!
They don't need to possess us, we'll possess ourselves!

“No, no, Bob . . . please listen . . . in every population there will be a . . . an overseer, an overlord, call it what you want . . . one whose ancient alien faculties are fully developed,” he explained, panting and sweating by that point as if what he was birthing to his old friend took an exertion that exhausted him. “One that will call the others together maybe . . . amplify what's already in them . . . turn a select population into a great psychic battery that can be culled, drained by the aliens themselves! Don't you see? We have one here amongst us now–”

“That's enough, John, you're overwrought.”

“Matheson! Matheson is the one! I've been watching him for some time!
He's the one! He's the witch!”

But all that got him in the end was that Munse told him to go back to the dorm and lay down. He needed rest and quiet. He was working too hard. And that was not a request from Munse but an
order
as team leader.

That was four days ago.

Since then . . . Munse had not allowed him at the lab.

They were all unified against him and he could see the looks on their faces. In fact, he could practically hear their thoughts.

Look at Polchek! Jesus, he's petrified! He's acting like he's trapped in some existentialist version of
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Except this time it's not aliens or Cold War political/social allegory, but fucking space witches jumping out of seed pods. Good God!

None of them wanted to be around him now.

He was a diseased cell in their midst.

Every time he went into the lab—ignoring Munse's orders—they cringed. All of them sweating bullets, just terrified of being in such close physical proximity with the crazy man. Way they were acting, you would have thought he was going to sink his fangs right into their necks.

Idiots.

They did not realize the threat Matheson was to them. Maybe Matheson had been the pride of the Glaciology Department at Montana State . . . but
that
Matheson was dead.

This
Matheson was a monster.

They'll never let you roam free, not after today.

Polchek told himself he must remain calm.
Do not rave and act like a crazy man. Do not play into their hands. Let them see how sane you are. How balanced your mind is.

Across the room. His desk drawer. There was a knife with a shiny seven-inch blade. Just one more chance to kill the witch, one more chance.

I'll show you for what you are, witch.

I get free and I'll fucking gut you! I'll pull your witch-guts out and spill your witch-blood and burn you, burn you, burn you . . .

The paras took him out through “the spine” which was the corridor that connected the labs of Crary—Phase I: Biology, Phase 2: Earth Sciences, etc. None of them knew or could know just how late it was, but soon . . . soon . . .

Polchek closed his eyes as the sedative took hold.

W
HEN COYLE GOT BACK to his room from the Galley there was a package outside the door from Locke.

Wrapped up in plain brown paper and held together with a lot of packing tape, it could have been just about anything. Hell, maybe even a birthday present or a very late Christmas gift. Somehow, though, Coyle figured it was none of those. Whatever Locke had deposited outside his door would be nothing festive or cheery, but something of a darker variety.

He took it inside with him and sat at his little desk, just staring at it, thinking,
this is going to ruin my day, isn't it?

Sighing, he slit the package open and found himself staring at a large hardcover book called
A Gathering of Witches: Witchcraft, Devil-Worship, and Witch-Lore Through the Ages.
On the cover there was a reproduction of a woodcut featuring a bent-over old woman holding court with a goatish man with horns. Around them, human limbs were hung from tree branches and sprouting from a cauldron the woman was stirring.

Coyle just shook his head. “What the hell is this about?” he said under his breath.

There was a note from Locke:

Nicky,

Haven't been able to hook up with you lately. Too busy. I found some interesting things in this book. Check out the pages I marked. We'll talk later.

He just sat there a moment.

Locke had the pages marked with sticky notes and the first such page showed another woodcut of a woman who was hanged from a tree with a fire burning beneath her. The Caption read:
“Suffolk 1667, Margaret Haritay, executed by witchfinders. She claimed that a great ‘antient wing'd Beaste of many eyes and colours' taught her the secret of flight in Twelve-Acre Wood and that she ‘dide take anighted flight with witches and divells and the Beaste itself on Midsummer's Eve.' Haritay was hanged, then burned for the ‘Willfule Bewitch'g of the village of Pyecutte which she dide at the Beaste's request.'

Coyle scanned through the text, looking for more references to the winged devil, but finding none. Just mention of a plague of sorts sweeping Pyecutte that caused dozens of people to go stark raving mad. Haritay was found guilty, of course, but refused to name the members of her coven even under torture. Physical examination of her person discovered the
“Divell's Mark”
in the form, oddly enough, of a V-shaped incision on the back of her neck just beneath the base of the skull.

Haritay mentioned that the beast had given her a familiar which she named “Griddengyre.” The familiar had
“no definite shape, was a creep'g awfulness as of entrails which tooke shape of which was nearest.”
Whatever that meant. Apparently the familiar enjoyed the blood of children. Whether it could be believed or not, after Griddengyre had devoured and bled dozens of sheep it was trapped in a cave in Twelve-Acre Wood and burned to ashes. This, apparently, after it had nearly destroyed the village of Pyecutte.

The “wing'd Beaste” was interesting, of course, though it really meant nothing. These demons and what not were probably archetypes. Locke had mentioned this. Not meant to represent anything living, but a memory of something long-forgotten in the mists of the past.

Coyle flipped pages until he found the next sticky note.

Another woodcut which showed a devil of sorts in the forest. It almost looked like some sort of tree with its furrowed, trunk-like body and sticklike appendages, a crown of horny branches atop its head. The most interesting thing was the huge bat wings extending from its body. The caption read:
The Devil of Hogenhaus Forest, the Hartz Mountains 1333.
Coyle stared at it for some time. No, it was not an exact illustration of an Old One or Elder Thing, but a pretty damn close approximation. Like something somebody might have seen before running away or a composite creature drawn by an artist from several eyewitness accounts or folktales.

“Don't read too much into this,” he said to himself.

He scanned the text until he found mention of the Hogenhaus Devil, as it was known. Apparently, it was worshipped by a coven of German witches who were greatly feared in the region because the creature had taught them a technique known as the “migration of minds” in which they could, by reciting certain words and concentrating on a wooden image of their victim, force their mind into his or her body and take them over for a period of time. The witches had done so with a local magistrate and a minister who were interfering with their activities. They made the magistrate commit suicide and the minister attempt to rape a local girl in full view of dozens of witnesses.