The Spawning (7 page)

He said it was bad.

So bad that he would never, ever come back to Antarctica again. He was out examining some sediments from the Carboniferous Period, he said, in a little valley and an ice-fog trapped him. He couldn't see five feet in any direction. He'd had field survival training, so he didn't panic. He looked for shelter and found it: a little ice cave that was drifted over. He put out a black flag so a search team would know where he was and got out of the elements. He crawled down into the ice cave with his light and right away saw something frozen in the ice above him.

Old ice, he said, crystal blue and clear.

Ice that was 200,000 years old if it was a day.

He didn't know what he was seeing, but it was big and oblong-shaped and it had a head. A head with these stout yellow stalks with red eyes at the end of each. Eyes that were bright red, just staring at him. Monroe said that he lost his mind in that cave. That he was certain those stalks were crawling like worms and those vivid red eyes were watching him. Not dead, but horribly alive, looking at him and
into
him, getting inside his head and making him think things. He had to spend the entire night in that cave with that thing looking at him and it had aged him twenty years.

That's what he told Coyle before he hopped that plane and got out of there like a man that was being hunted. A month later, stateside, Monroe put a gun in his mouth and ended it. Maybe what he had seen—or claimed to have seen—stayed with him, haunted his dreams and waking moments. Regardless, it was enough.

Coyle had never told anyone about that and he didn't intend to now either.

Standing there in the Heavy Shop, he brought Horn and Slim around, telling them how it had to be, how they had to leave it out of their reports and keep their mouths shut about it all. There was no other way.

Slim finally left, but his eyes were very familiar: they looked just like Monroe's.

Horn stayed. “I'm gonna do what you say, Nicky.”

“That swise.”

“Uh-huh. They're up to shit that's no good at Colony, you know? Real bad things and I don't like it. I been hearing things same as you have, Nicky. Now I'm not Locke. I don't believe in ghosties and ghoulies and all that. Mostly, I don't believe in anything. Not even myself. But what Dayton and those other assholes are up to is just plain no good.”

“We don't know what they're up to.”

“No, we don't. Not really.” He shrugged, dismissing it. “Now I like you, Nicky. You're okay. We all think you're okay. But don't pretend with me, man, all right? There's shit going on over at Colony that's dangerous. They're messing with things we ain't got no right fooling with. There. I said it. We don't have no business with those things frozen down in the ice. You can say all that Kharkov bullshit is just that . . .
bullshit,
but you know better and I know better and so do a lot of people down here. We ain't got no business with those things. Maybe coming down here is the worst thing we ever did. We're better off leaving the past in the past because sometimes ghosts bite. And that's all I'm gonna say. Catch you later, Nicky.”

Well, that was a mouthful for Horn.

He was generally moody, silent and watchful. When he did speak, his words were usually couched in cynicism and sarcasm. He had faith in nothing or no one. For him to say what he said was pretty much baring his soul.

Coyle didn't want to think anymore.

He didn't want to think about Kharkov or Mount Hobb or things under tarps. All he wanted was for things to be like normal. Boring and ordinary. That was plenty and this year he had a feeling that it was simply asking for too damn much.

BEACON VALLEY,
SENTINEL MOUNTAINS,
QUEEN MAUD RANGE

A
NECROPOLIS.

A city of the dead.

That's what the megalithic site discovered in the Beacon Valley looked like at first glance: a sprawling tombyard of stark immensity. Intersecting and crossed and fused together, a shadowy and morbid tangle of perverse gigantism, reaching and crumbling.

It was a sepulchral place filled with crawling shadows and disembodied voices from lost epochs.

There was something undeniably ethereal and almost ghostly about the high jagged expanses of the glaciers that towered above it. The black-striated mountain peaks of the Sentinel Group that rose above Beacon Valley in gigantic cones and razor-backed precipices. Poking up through ribbons of coiling mist and suspended ice clouds at the very eastern edge of the Queen Maud Range, some fifteen miles west of Mount Hobb Research Station, they looked like the conical ruins of some lost, nameless civilization. Above the ice and snow, they were stark and ominous and inexplicably forbidding. As if every whispered secret of the planet was locked up in them like some dark chest of unknown wonders.

And maybe there was some truth to that.

For it was in the ice-sculpted, wind-blown glacial valley below that the mysterious megaliths were first discovered by British geologists the autumn before.

An unprecedented trough of warm air had kissed Beacon Valley, melting several hundred feet of ancient ice and exposing the pinnacles of the megaliths themselves. At first, the scientists thought they were looking at the flattened, sheered-off tops of some petrified prehistoric forest, much like the fossilized Permian stands found at the Beardmore Glacier area some years before.

But these were artificial in origin and the impact of that was said to have put more than one of the team down on their knees. For this was Antarctica, not Europe. And the ice that covered these particular standing stones dated from the Miocene at the very least and the implications of that, they knew, threatened not only the culture of mankind, but accepted history itself. These were not Neolithic or Paleolithic in origin, but from a time so distant that man's earliest ancestors had yet to evolve from the stew of creation.

And what did that say?

What did that conceivably hint at?

Over the next month, using hot-water drills and suction pumps, the megaliths were slowly exposed for the first time in over twenty-million years. They towered above at least a hundred feet and using ice-penetrating sonar, it was discovered that there was at least another hundred feet of them encased in the ice.

As winter came on and the temperature dipped and the winds screamed through the Sentinels, all work was abandoned until the following spring.

And there was more than one of the scientists that were only too happy to be away from that awful place. Maybe it was the way the wind howled at night around their tents or the strange almost musical piping that drifted down from the high peaks like Pan's flute across a grim harvest field or the terrible dreams the standing stones inspired.

Dreams that no one would dare confess by daylight.

Perhaps it was all these things and perhaps something more. For there was no denying that those primal-hewed stones had a certain magnetism to them. That they made you want to stare at them. To touch them and feel them under your fingertips, feel the arcane and primordial energy thrumming through them. To go down on your knees before them like a mindless savage at the altar of his god.

They were hypnotic, morphic.

To look upon them was to remember dreadful things long forgotten. To touch them was to be owned by them and those that had erected them.

And the one thing that no one would dare admit was that the megaliths looked oddly
familiar.
As if they had seen them in dreams or half-glimpsed memories, the aberrant architecture of some surreal nightscape that haunted their every waking moment. You could not look upon those structures without feeling something, a certain
awareness
in the back of your mind, a primeval blackness rising up from the base of your skull that threatened to drown all that you were and ever would be.

For there was memory in those stones.

Bleak, anti-human, and unpleasantly vital.

So the site was abandoned amidst much fervor in the popular press, much recrimination and denial in organized religious circles, and much more revelation and soul-searching amongst the world population in general.

About the same time that Mount Hobb Station was emptied of human life, something incredible was happening there: the ice was continuing to melt. Though the temperatures had dropped to ten below zero and the winds screamed down from the high elevations in tempests of raging snow, the megaliths continued to rise from the retreating ice.

No one was there to see it.

No one human, at any rate.

Some unknown heat was directed at the site and the megaliths slowly revealed their superannuated secrets. It took but six days.

Beacon Valley was melted right down to the ancient volcanic rock below. Though no one knew it yet, the site had once sat upon a hilltop during the Cretaceous, but molten lava beds forced up from below under unbelievable pressure—creating the Sentinel Mountains themselves—had drawn the megalith site down into the valley in which it now sat.

By the time of the chopper crash near Polar Clime, the megaliths were completely free of the ice that had swallowed them. Though outlying areas had collapsed to ruins or been ground down into the earth by the glaciers themselves over that unimaginable gulf of time, the majority of the structures still stood. High and imposing and insane, spread over half a mile, they were a geometric anomaly that taxed the human brain just to look upon them.

From high above, if you were to have seen them from an airplane, you would have noticed not a jumble of stones, but a symmetry that was disturbing. For despite the passage of eons, the megaliths were laid out in precise, almost mathematical order in the form of no less than five intersecting and exaggerated five-pointed stars. A cabalistic pentagram.

At ground level, however, there seemed to be no cohesion whatsoever.

Just a cyclopean, debased collection of crumbling cairns and massive pillar-like free-standing trilithons and sarsen stones arranged in concentric, ever-widening circles that were capped and connected by the horizontal shafts of great lintel stones overhead. And amongst this clustered, alien profusion, overlapping monuments and heel-stones, rectangular dolmens and cromlechs rising above deep-hewn barrow tunnels and oblong chambers and tabletop slabs carved with figures and forms unlike any to be seen anywhere on earth. It was all set upon upraised stone platforms of varying height which themselves were cut through by irregular trench systems and linked, yawning ditches.

All of it was weathered and pitted and standing slightly off-center and leaning as if it might fall at any moment. But it did not fall. It had withstood the turbulence of the ages—extreme climactic change, seismic upheaval, and advanced glaciation—and would stand until its purpose was fulfilled, exactly as it had been designed. And although it was like other megalithic sites in that it was decidedly ritualistic by design, it was not a calendar or an astronomical observatory nor a rudimentary computer as some suggested anymore than was Stonehenge of Salisbury Plain or the Carnac Stones of Brittany.

Like them, it was a machine.

A dire machine awaiting to be activated.

And the time for that was coming very soon.

COLONY STATION,
HORSEHEAD BASIN,
MONOLITH RANGE
FEBRUARY 22nd

W
HEN BUTLER AGAIN WOKE up, she was strapped to a table, fluorescent lights shining so bright in her face she had to squint her eyes.

Someone was standing there, hovering over her.

An elderly woman with a wrinkled, dead face, a cruel smile on her lips sharp as a paper cut.

Doctor... Doctor... Relling... this is Doctor Relling...

“You're awake, I see,” the woman said.

Butler mumbled something, her head aching, every inch of her flesh raw and hurting. Relling was doing something and then she saw what: she was injecting a syringe into her arm.

“There,” she said. “Now we'll talk. Calmly. Easily. Like two old friends, eh?”

Butler fought against the straps, crying out, thrashing this way and that . . . and then the will to do anything was just gone. She was on a cloud. She drifted. She breathed. She blinked. Nothing else.

Finally, she said, “Please . . . I just want to go home.”

“Of course you do,” Relling told her. “I'll try and help you with that, but first you have to help me. You do want to help me, don't you?”

Something in Butler's mind screamed
No!,
but her lips parted and she simply said: “Yes.”

Despite herself, Butler felt relaxed. The pain was distant. She liked the sound of Relling's voice.

“You were at Mount Hobb. You were sleeping,” Relling said. “You awoke to find the station empty. Then they came for you.”

Butler tensed, tears washing down her cheeks. “No, no . . . I was alone . . . I was just alone . . .”

(the shadow on the wall)

(the shadow growing and growing . . . the flapping of wings... the slithering of limbs . . . the eyes . . . the red eyes . . . )

“It came for you. The creature took you.”

Butler shook her head, but once again her lips betrayed her: “It touched me . . . oh God . . . it
touched me . . .”

(not a shadow . . . it had form, thickness, solidity)

(it stank of ammonia and cold, airless wastes . . . its touch was like ice)

(the buzzing . . . the buzzing of its voice)

(butler . . . butler)

“It touched you. Then it took you somewhere.”

Butler's breath came very fast. “I couldn't fight it. I tried to fight it . . . but it looked at me and I couldn't move.”

“Where did it take you?”

Butler stared off into space. “Through the wall. Where the angles meet. It took me through the wall.”

(through the wall . . . darkness and space, black gutters of time and filth and nonentity . . . the great white space and the black corridor . . . the primal emptiness . . . the spheres of shadow . . . the anti-world)