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EDITED BY STEPHEN JONES

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Acolytes of Cthulhu

THE MADNESS OF
CTHULHU

VOLUME 1

EDITED BY S. T. JOSHI
FOREWORD BY JONATHAN MABERRY

TITAN BOOKS

The Madness of Cthulhu

Print edition ISBN: 9781781164525

E-book edition ISBN: 9781781164532

Published by Titan Books

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First edition: October 2014

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved by the authors. The rights of each contributor to be identified as Author of their Work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Arthur C. Clarke, “At the Mountains of Murkiness,” first published in Satellite (1940). Robert Silverberg, “Diana of the Hundred Beasts,” first published in Realms of Fantasy (February 1996), copyright © 1996 by Agberg, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Agberg, Ltd. and the author. All other stories are original to this volume, and are Copyright © 2014 to the individual authors.

Foreword Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan Maberry

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FOREWORD

JONATHAN MABERRY

I CAN REMEMBER THE VERY FIRST TIME I MET CTHULHU.

Not just the day or the situation, but the actual moment.

Cthulhu attacked me.

Seriously.

Okay, maybe I wasn’t wrapped in the coils of a tentacular monstrosity whose very appearance is too horrific to behold. It wasn’t that kind of attack.

Cthulhu hit me in the head.

I’ll explain.

I went to a dysfunctional middle school in a very poor neighborhood in Philadelphia. I’d been reading voraciously since about age eight—when I discovered the Fantastic Four, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Shakespeare in the same week! So, by the time I got to seventh grade, my reading level was a tad higher than that of most of the other kids. Not sure I was any smarter, but I was well-read. The English class, typical of public schools, was geared toward the lowest reading level, which was roughly a point where those kids thought that the difficulty the pokey little puppy had in rescuing its ball from under the couch constituted deeply challenging literature.

The teachers, being otherwise unsure how to deal with me, simply gave me to the school librarian. That arrangement was somewhere between “take him and teach him” and “hey, here’s a pet.”

The librarian, bless her soul, was a geek. A true literary geek. An acolyte in the church of genre fiction. She knew and loved all aspects of the fantastic in literature, and over the next couple of years she not only encouraged me to read and write reports about the books I devoured, she dragged me along to the meetings of a couple of private clubs for which she served as secretary. Clubs of writers. Some amateur, some professional. At those clubs—in the years 1972 and 1973—I got to meet authors who would later populate the pantheon of my personal cosmology. Writers who are, by today’s standards, the Elder Gods of genre fiction. Writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Robert Sheckley, Harlan Ellison, Lin Carter, and L. Sprague de Camp.

Yeah … I know.

These writers—many of whom I had not heard of when I first met them—were amused to find a kid among them who was both a reader and a wannabe writer. Most of them went out of their way to offer me advice, to share insights into what makes a great story, to encourage me to try authors whose works I hadn’t read, and to prop open all of the doors and windows in my mind.

At one event, a book-release party for his work The Fallible Fiend was held at de Camp’s house in Villanova, Pennsylvania. A few of the authors were in his office, mostly talking shop with me there to fetch drinks and chips and be constantly amazed. While they spoke about the industry I wandered about the room, looking at the editions of de Camp’s books that filled the shelves and at all the strange little pieces of art that he’d collected—statues, carvings, a bat skull, awards, and more. I reached up to take down a copy of a foreign edition of one of the Conan collections (Conan the Usurper, I believe—the Lancer edition with the Frazetta cover), I accidentally knocked down a small metal statue. I dodged too slow and too late, and the figure tonked me on the head. Luckily it landed on the carpet without damage. My head, on the other hand, was growing a nice lump.

De Camp picked up the figure and when the others saw what it was, they all laughed and told me that I must be a hero because I survived an attack by one of the Great Old Ones. I had, it seemed, been attacked by none other than Cthulhu himself.

My response was, “Who—?”

The whole group of them stared at me as if I’d just asked what air was. Or what the color blue looked like. It was a reaction that spoke to an inability on their part to comprehend that anyone at that gathering, no matter how young, could possibly not know who Cthulhu was.

They gaped at me. First time I’d ever seen people genuinely gape.

So I said, “Well, who is Cthulhu?”

They told me.

Now, let’s look at how they told me. Every single one of them pronounced the name differently. Ka-tool-oo, K’thool-ooo, Ka-hul-loo, and on and on. I don’t think any of them actually pronounced it the same way. There were arguments relative to that, but we don’t need to go there.

Then they began a tag-team explanation of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, his life and work, his stories, his general strangeness, his willingness to let other writers craft stories using his characters and themes, and so on. This was not a short conversation. This was a conversation that spilled over into a general decamping to the living room, it chased us through buffet food and dessert, and I don’t think it really reached an ending but was rather terminated by the end of the party.

Somewhere along the way de Camp trotted out a copy of something called The Necronomicon, for which he’d written an introduction to an Owlswick Press edition.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that conversation, as long, convoluted, and layered as it was, barely touched the tip of a very large iceberg. I saw de Camp many times after that, and he always had a bit of an addendum to that conversation. Two years later de Camp’s Lovecraft: A Biography was published in hardcover by Doubleday.

One immediate effect of that first conversation, though, was that when I left de Camp’s house that night I was weighed down with a double-armful of books related in some way to the Cthulhu Mythos. That stack included some valuable reprints of Weird Tales, in which Lovecraft’s first stories appeared. And a great number of collections and anthologies that contained Cthulhu stories by Robert Bloch, Richard F. Searight, Hazel Heald, Clark Ashton Smith, Duane W. Rimel, Robert H. Barlow, Henry Kuttner, Henry Hasse, Manly Wade Wellman, William Lumley, Zealia B. Bishop, August W. Derleth, Will Garth, Charles R. Tanner, Wilfred Owen Morley, Carol Grey, C. Hall Thompson, Vol Molesworth, and Robert E. Howard.

That was the first batch.

Over the years de Camp would frequently suggest tales by other writers. For some of these I had to read them at de Camp’s house in the original magazines—Weird Tales, Stirring Science Stories, Scorpio, The Unique Magazine, Future Fantasy and Science Fiction, Polaris, Strange Stories, Fanciful Tales, Astounding Stories, The Californian, Unusual Stories, and others. Then he directed me to libraries and bookstores to find new stories and reliable collections.

I read more stories than I can remember. I read very good Mythos stories and I read some crap. I read stories that paved new creative ground and expanded the Mythos, and I read stuff that even by today’s standards would be considered bad fan fiction. But overall I found that the Cthulhu Mythos allowed for it all. Good and bad, weird and commonplace, original and trite, terrifying and comical.

It allowed for it in the way that a true genre does. And that’s the thing; the Cthulhu Mythos isn’t, in my estimation, a subgenre. Not of horror, not of fantasy, and not of science fiction. It has become its own genre. Okay, sure, you might argue that it is a subgenre of Lovecraftian fiction, but I don’t think I’ll get many arguments if I say that for most people—even those who are deeply familiar with Lovecraft’s oeuvre—when we think about “Lovecraftian” fiction we’re generally thinking about the Cthulhu Mythos. Right or wrong, there it is.

And what a world it is. Ancient races of gods, beings that cruise the vast emptiness between stars, extra-dimensional monsters, misfired breeding programs, cults of insane worshipers, sights so beyond human comprehension that the slightest glimpse will blast the mind into screaming insanity.

How insanely delicious is that!

And also how logical, in its way, and how fully formed. It also plays into the nebulous cloud of uncertainty that hangs over us all when we contemplate religion (ours and others), infinity, time, and the potential for intergalactic and interdimensional travel. Those concepts are, in real point of fact, beyond human comprehension. They’re also like crack to writers of the fantastic, because in many of us there is an ache, a yearning to try and take that formless madness and contain it with words so that it can be understood. By inviting all writers into his world Lovecraft has made sorcerers of us all.

So that brings me to this anthology.

This is the first volume in The Madness of Cthulhu. It contains many classic stories by some of the greatest genre writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These are stories that show the scope of the genre and eloquently argue to its creative potential. A second volume will follow in 2015, and I am delighted to have a story in it, “A Footnote in the Black Budget.” That will be my very first Lovecraftian tale, and I am more pleased than I can express. I hope de Camp will look down from Valhalla (or from whichever strnage dimension to which his soul has departed) and approve.

Each story in this volume is unique. Few, if any, of the writers actually knew Lovecraft. Most were part of the second or even third wave of post-Lovecraftian writers to dip their toes into the dark waters of this genre.

So … why do they? Why do I?

And why on earth do we have the temerity to think that we can add something to a genre that already has thousands of stories and hundreds of novels in it, not to mention movies, TV shows, comic books, toys, board and video games, and even live-action role-playing.

Well … we were invited here by a guy named Howard.

Lovecraft created a great big, albeit insanely warped, canvas and then let anyone and everyone paint or scribble or splash or draw on that canvas. There has always been a long line of writers just waiting to dip a brush or a palette knife or a finger in the color box and make strange shapes on the canvas.

And here’s the freaky part. Every picture we paint is the right picture.

There isn’t a set of rules or guidelines. The Mythos is so much bigger than that. It’s like telling stories about our world. If one writer tells a tale about a boy going rafting down the mighty Mississippi, then that is as real, as true, as valid as a writer telling about the clash of armies in the dusty Mongolian steppes or a tale told about an old woman trying to draw water from a dry well in West Africa. Infinite variety, same world.

Lovecraft, however, gave us more than one world.

He gave us infinite worlds.

Here, in this volume, are a few wonderful glimpses into those worlds. A few glimpses at the infinite possibilities of a larger and darker world as seen through the eyes and perceptions of the contributors.

I’m now in my middle fifties, and even though I read every Lovecraft-inspired story I can get my hands on, I haven’t scratched the surface. Not even a little. There are so many stories out there about shambling things and elder gods and pulsating protean masses and lost cities that I know I’ll always have something new to read.

What delights me at the moment, though, is the knowledge that you, holding this book, have before you an entirely new batch of original Cthulhu stories. I know what it feels like to turn the page and be drawn back into the Mythos.

And for those who, like a certain thirteen-year-old boy way back when who tottered out of Sprague de Camp’s house with a double-armful of books, are about to experience the madness and magic of Cthulhu for the very first time. Wow! You’re going to see things you never imagined and go places you did not know existed.

Come on, turn that page … let’s go together. The darkness is waiting for us.

INTRODUCTION

S. T. JOSHI

H. P. LOVECRAFT WROTE AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS IN THE first two months of 1931; but his fascination with the great white south was of much longer duration, dating to his boyhood at the turn of the twentieth century. As early as 1902, when he was twelve years old, he had written such treatises as “Voyages of Capt. Ross, R.N.” and “Wilkes’s Explorations”; in 1903 he compiled an “Antarctic Atlas.” None of these juvenile works survives, but the subject-matter of the first two is suggestive: they deal with Antarctic explorations of more than half a century before.

The history of Antarctic exploration can be said to begin with Captain James Cook, who attempted in 1772–74 to reach the South Pole but had to turn back because of the ice fields. Edward Bransfield of England actually sighted the Antarctic continent on January 30, 1820, and Alexander I Island (a large island off the coast of what is now called the Antarctic Peninsula) was discovered by Fabian von Bellingshausen on January 29, 1821.

In the late 1830s several expeditions did much to chart various portions of Antarctica. The American Charles Wilkes went to the Antarctic, bizarrely enough, to test the hollow earth theory proposed in 1818 by John Cleves Symmes (a theory Lovecraft attacked in a letter to the Providence Journal of 1906). Wilkes’s expedition of 1838–40 actually sighted land on January 19, 1840. By January 30 he had seen enough of the landmass to be certain that an actual continent was involved, not merely a series of islands or a huge frozen sea, and he made a momentous pronouncement: “Now that all were convinced of its existence, I gave the land the name of the Antarctic Continent.”

The Englishman James Clark Ross left England on September 25, 1839, for the purpose of exploring the huge ice shelf that now bears his name. In doing so, he discovered the small island at the mouth of the ice shelf now called Ross Island and named the two enormous volcanoes there (Mt. Erebus and Mt. Terror) after his two ships, the Erebus and the Terror. Dr. Joseph Hooker, one of the ship’s doctors, gives a vivid impression of the first sight of Mt. Erebus: “This was a sight so surpassing everything that can be imagined … that it really caused a feeling of awe to steal over us at the consideration of our own comparative insignificance and helplessness, and at the same time, an indescribable feeling of the greatness of the Creator in the works of His hand.” The atheist Lovecraft would certainly have echoed the first half of that utterance, but expressed doubts about the second half.

Lovecraft wrote his little treatises just as new explorations were being undertaken. The Norwegian Carsten Egeberg Borchgrevink launched an expedition of 1898–1900 whose great achievement was to have established the first camp on actual Antarctic soil. In a 1935 letter Lovecraft stated: “I think it was the newspaper accounts of Borchgrevingk’s [sic] second expedition of 1900 … which first captured my attention & interest.” By 1902, Lovecraft reported in another letter, “I had read virtually everything in fact or fiction concerning the Antarctic, & was breathlessly awaiting news of the first Scott expedition.” This latter remark must refer to the expedition by Robert Scott on the Discovery, which left New Zealand in August 1901, the high point of which was an attempt by Scott, Ernest Shackleton, and Edward Wilson to traverse the Ross Ice Shelf beginning on November 2, 1902; the team, ill-equipped for so arduous a journey, was forced to turn back on December 30 and almost died on the return trip.

Lovecraft also admitted to writing “many fanciful tales about the Antarctic Continent” in youth; but none of these survive. He somehow did not find the impetus to write his Antarctic tale until well along in his mature literary career.

At the Mountains of Madness was written at a critical juncture in that career. In 1926, he had written “The Call of Cthulhu”—a tale that not only launched the Cthulhu Mythos but that initiated a remarkable final decade of writing highlighted by such masterworks as “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), and “The Shadow out of Time” (1934–35). By this time, Lovecraft had come to realize that the advance of science had caused the standard motifs of supernatural fiction—the ghost, the vampire, the werewolf, the witch, and so on—to become utterly played out and implausible. An entirely new approach was needed. The tales of the Cthulhu Mythos constituted one such approach: as Fritz Leiber has keenly stated, these stories were revolutionary because they “shifted the focus of supernatural dread from man and his little world and his gods, to the stars and the black and unplumbed gulfs of intergalactic space.” At the Mountains of Madness was a critical work in this process. In a letter written at the very time he was writing the novella, Lovecraft stated:

The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, & matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality—when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible & mensurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural fantastic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt—as well as gratify the cognate sense of curiosity?

It is for this reason that the earlier parts of At the Mountains of Madness are so filled with details about the geology, biology, and botany of the Antarctic continent. Lovecraft’s lifelong studies in science were put to good use, but they also enhance the verisimilitude of the story so that the incursion of the bizarre—first the discovery of the cryogenically frozen Old Ones, then the encounter with an even more alien entity, the shoggoth—can seem plausible.

It was in this novella, too, that Lovecraft definitively “demythologized” the “gods” of his Mythos. In earlier tales (especially “The Dunwich Horror” (1928)), such entities as Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and Shug-Niggurath could be seen as godlike (they certainly have their share of human worshipers), whose doings are recorded in such occult treatises as the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred. But when, in At the Mountains of Madness, the protagonists study the bas-reliefs of the titanic city of the Old Ones, a staggering revelation dawns upon them: the Old Ones “were the makers and enslavers of [earth] life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about. They were the Great Old Ones that had filtered down from the stars when earth was young.” So now, the stories about the “gods” found in the Necronomicon are mere “myths”!

Another remarkable feature of At the Mountains of Madness is the gradual, insidious way in which the entities that first cause such perturbation to the human protagonists, Dr. William Dyer and a graduate student, Danforth—the barrel-shaped Old Ones—are later rehabilitated, from a moral and cultural perspective. It is true that the Old Ones apparently caused the deaths of many men and dogs in the sub-expedition undertaken by Professor Lake; but this is later explained as a natural result of their unexpectedly coming back to life after millions of years and finding themselves besieged by fur-covered bipeds and quadrupeds whose nature and intentions they cannot fathom. As Dyer and Danforth continue to study those bas-reliefs, they come to a momentous conclusion:

Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them … and this was their tragic homecoming…. Scientists to the last—what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!

For, of course, the real horrors of At the Mountains of Madness are the baleful shoggoths—those protoplasmic beasts of burden created by the Old Ones—who later revolted against their masters and apparently overthrew them. The emergence of one surviving shoggoth toward the end of the story constitutes one of the most spectacularly terrifying passages in the history of weird fiction.

At the Mountains of Madness is the pinnacle of Lovecraft’s “cosmic” vision and of his union of traditional supernatural fiction with the burgeoning genre of science fiction. The epic scope of the novella, both in time and in space, is impressive; and there is a further twist in that Lovecraft provides a kind of humiliating “origin of species” courtesy of the Old Ones’ ability to create life. It is bad enough that the Old Ones appear to have created all earth-life as “jest or mistake”; but later we learn that the Old Ones also created a “shambling primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable.” This must be one of the most misanthropic utterances ever made—the degradation of humanity can go no further.

And yet, the fate of the novella in print was not a happy one. Lovecraft apparently devised the tale so that it could be printed as a two-part serial, with a division in its exact middle, after Section VI. But, when he sent the story to Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales in the spring of 1931, Wright sat on it for months before finally rejecting it. Lovecraft bitterly records the reasons Wright gave for the rejection:

Yes—Wright “explained” his rejection of the “Mountains of Madness” in almost the same language as that with which he “explained” other recent rejections to [Frank Belknap] Long & [August] Derleth. It was “too long”, “not easily divisible into parts”, “not convincing”—& so on. Just what he has said of other things of mine (except for length)—some of which he has ultimately accepted after many hesitations.

Lovecraft was devastated. Unusually sensitive to rejection, he refused to submit the tale to any other market. Finally, in late 1935, the young Julius Schwartz, wishing to establish himself as an agent in the science fiction and fantasy field, asked Lovecraft if he had any unpublished manuscript that he could market. Lovecraft gave him At the Mountains of Madness. Seeing that it was a tale that could easily pass for science fiction, Schwartz took it to the offices of Astounding Stories, telling editor F. Orlin Tremaine: “I have here a 40,000-word novella by H. P. Lovecraft.” Tremaine accepted it at once, without reading it. He paid $350 for it; after Schwartz’s 10 percent cut, that left $315 for Lovecraft.

But when Lovecraft saw its appearance as a three-part serial in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Astounding, he was outraged. Many, many editorial alterations had been made, chiefly in matters of punctuation and in chopping down Lovecraft’s long and leisurely paragraphs into shorter ones; toward the end, about a thousand words were simply omitted, to speed up the climax. So incensed was Lovecraft at this butchery that he regarded the story as essentially unpublished.

But the opportunity for the republication of the story in its unadulterated form did not occur until long after his death. August Derleth, when preparing the story for inclusion in the first Arkham House volume, The Outsider and Others (1939), used Lovecraft’s own annotated copy of Astounding, where he had laboriously written in some—but by no means all—the corrections to the text; but this text still contained more than fifteen hundred errors, including such things as the capitalization of “shoggoth,” which Lovecraft was careful to lower-case in his manuscript and typescript, since he regarded it as a species name and not a proper name. Finally, I restored the text, based on Lovecraft’s typescript, in my corrected edition of At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (Arkham House, 1985). This text has now been reprinted in At the Mountains of Madness: The Definitive Text (Modern Library, 2005), although I in fact make no claims that my text is “definitive.”

That Lovecraft’s Antarctic novella, with its cosmic backdrop and its distinctive multi-species cast of humans, Old Ones, and shoggoths (with bit parts played by Cthulhu and other monsters), has been an inspiration to generations of weird and science fiction writers is evident by the tales in this volume. One of the first who was so inspired was John W. Campbell, Jr., celebrated editor of Unknown and of Astounding. His novella “Who Goes There?” appeared in the August 1938 issue of Astounding, under the pseudonym Don A. Stuart. Campbell did not generally approve of Lovecraft’s lush prose style, and this novella is clearly an attempt to utilize the basic plot of the story in a manner that Campbell felt more suitable to the subject-matter. It was adapted as the classic B movie The Thing from Another World (1951). John Carpenter’s remake, The Thing (1982), brings us full circle in that it re-infuses elements from At the Mountains of Madness into the scenario.

In 1940, the young Arthur C. Clarke produced the affectionate parody “At the Mountains of Murkiness.” Science fiction writers have long held ambivalent views of Lovecraft. On the one hand, they have admired his later work, including “The Colour out of Space” (1927) and “The Shadow out of Time,” for its transformation of supernatural horror into cosmic wonder and awe; but they have found his dense, antiquated prose contrary to their spare realism, and his bleak view of a human race as the weak victims of incalculably superior cosmic entities conflicts with their view of the cosmos as a field open to infinite human exploration. Clarke plays upon some of these elements in his parody; but in his autobiography, Astounding Days (1989), he makes no secret of how much he enjoyed both At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow out of Time” when they appeared in 1936 issues of Astounding.

This volume is not restricted to imaginative riffs on Lovecraft’s Antarctic novella; other Lovecraftian themes and tales are used as the springboards for ventures into the weird. But the element unifying all these stories is that they are far more than mere pastiches. Ranging widely in tone and subject-matter from humor and self-parody to plangent domestic conflict to chilling terror, they all reveal how Lovecraftian motifs can be used to generate tales that reflect each individual author’s vision of the world and of our fragile place within it.

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MURKINESS OR, FROM LOVECRAFT TO LEACOCK

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

WITH THE RECENT DEATH OF PROFESSOR NUTTY IN THE SCRAGGEM Mental Hospital I am left the only survivor of the ill-fated expedition he led to the Antarctic barely five years ago. The true history of that expedition has never until now been related, and only the report that another attempt is being made to investigate the unholy mysteries of Mount Morgue has prompted me to write this warning, even at the risk of shattering such sanity as I still possess.

It was in the early summer of 1940 that our expedition, which had been sponsored by the Worshipful Company of Potato Peelers, of Murphy Mansions, in the City of London, arrived at the desolate shores of Limburger Land. We were equipped with planes, radio, motor sleighs, and everything necessary for our work and comfort, and every one of us felt eager to begin our work at once—even Dr. Slump, the Professor of Contagious Neuroses.

I vividly recollect the day we set out toward the mountains. The polar sun was shining low over the ice fields when our line of tractor-sleighs started off inland. Soon we had lost sight of the sea, though we were still in radio communication with our base, and before long were passing over regions which no man had ever visited, nor, I trust, will ever visit again. The coast had seemed desolate and dreary enough, but the wilderness of snow and ice through which we were passing was a nightmare of jagged, frozen spires and bottomless crevasses. As we pressed onward a vague malaise crept over every one of us. A feeling of uneasiness, of strange disquiet, began to make itself felt, apparently radiating from the very rocks and crags that lay buried beneath their immemorial covering of ice. It was such a sensation as one might have felt on entering a deserted building where some all-but-forgotten horror had long ago occurred.

On the fourth day we sighted the mountains, still many miles away. When we pitched our camp at the end of the day there were only twenty miles between us and the nearer summits, and more than once in the night we were awakened by sudden tremors in the ground and the distant thunder of mighty explosions from still-active volcanoes.

It took us two days to cover the remaining twenty miles, for the terrain was contorted into a frightful series of chasms and beetling crags, resembling the more contorted regions of the Moon rather than any portion of this Earth. Presently, however, the ground became less convulsed, and we pushed on with renewed vigor. Before long we found ourselves in a narrow valley running straight toward the mountains, now only four or five miles away. I was hurrying along at the head of the party when suddenly there was a sharp crackling noise together with a violent tremor of the Earth, and the ground just ahead of me dropped out of sight. To my horror, I found myself standing on the edge of a frightful precipice looking down into a chasm thousands of feet deep, filled with the steam and smoke of a hundred geysers and bubbling lava pools. Surely, I thought, the mad Arab, Abdul Hashish, must have had such a spot in mind when he wrote of the hellish valley of Oopadoop in that frightful book the forbidden Pentechnicon.

We did not remain long at the edge of the valley, for at any instant the treacherous ground might subside once more. The next day one of the planes arrived and landed on the snows nearby. A small party was chosen to make the first flight, and we took off toward the mountains. My companions were Dr. Slump, Professor Palsy, and Major McTwirp, who was piloting the machine.

We soon reached the chasm, and flew along its length for many miles. Here and there in the depths were suggestive formations, partly veiled by steam, that puzzled us greatly, but the treacherous winds made it impossible to descend into the valley. I am certain, however, that once I saw something moving down in those hellish depths—something large and black, that disappeared before I could focus my glasses on it.

Shortly afterward we landed on a vast field of snow at the foot of Mount Morgue itself. As we shut off the engines an uncanny silence descended upon us. The only sound was the crashing of avalanches, the hissing of gigantic geysers in the valley, and the distant concussions of erupting volcanoes.

We descended from the plane and surveyed the desolate scene. The mountains towered before us, and a mile further up the slopes the ground was strangely bare of snow. It seemed, moreover, that the tumbled shapes had more than a suggestion of order about them, and suddenly we realized that we were looking at the ruins our expedition had come so many thousands of miles to investigate. In half an hour we had reached the nearest of them, and saw what some of us had already surmised, that this architecture was not the work of any race of men …

We paused for a moment at the all but ruined entrance and the sight of those hideous carvings on the fallen lintel all but drove us back. Low bas-reliefs, they reminded us of some nightmare surrealist creation of Dali or Dobbi—save that they gave the impression that they were not the representations of dreams but of horrible reality.

After a few steps, the feeble Antarctic light had dimmed to absolute darkness, and we switched on our torches hastily. We had gone at least a mile from the entrance when we decided that we had better return. We had taken the precaution of blazing our trail by means of chalk marks on the walls, so that we had no doubt that (if nothing stopped us) we could find our way back to the surface. However, Dr. Slump was adamant.

“I insist,” he cackled, “that we progress at least another mile. After all, we have a plentiful supply of torches, and we have not yet discovered anything of exceptional archaeological importance—though I, personally, am finding your reactions of the greatest interest. Poor McTwirp here has become positively green about the gills in the last ten minutes. Do you mind if I measure your pulse? Oh, well, you needn’t be rude about it. I am also amused by the way Palsy and Firkin keep looking over their shoulders and shining their torches into corners. Really, for a group of distinguished scientists you are behaving in a most primitive manner! Your reactions under these unusual but by no means unprecedented conditions will certainly be included in the appendix to my forthcoming ‘Hysteria and its Pathological Manifestations.’ I wonder what you would do if I were to—”

At this point, Dr. Slump let rip with the most piercing scream it has been my misfortune to hear since the last revival of King Kong. It echoed from wall to wall, left the chamber through the holes in the floor, and wandered for minutes through subterranean passages far below. When it finally returned, with a monstrous progeny of echoes, Professor Palsy was lying in a coma on the floor and Major McTwirp had disguised himself as a bas-relief and was propped up in one corner.

“You blithering idiot!” I cried, when the infernal row had screeched out of the chamber for the second time. But Dr. Slump was too busy taking notes to answer me.

At last silence, and a few bits of ceiling, fell. Slowly the other two revived and with difficulty I restrained them from slaughtering the doctor. Finally, Professor Palsy started the return to the surface, with the rest of us following close behind. We had gone a few hundred yards when from far away came a sound, faint but clear. It was a slimy, slithering noise that froze us to the marrow—and it came from ahead. With a low moan, Dr. Slump sagged to the ground like a desiccated jellyfish.

“Wh-what is it?” whispered McTwirp.

“Ss-sshush!” replied Palsy, giving creditable imitation of the Death of St. Vitus. “It may hear you!”

“Get into a side passage, quickly!” I whispered.

“There isn’t one!” quavered the Major.

Dragging Dr. Slump in after us, for it would have revealed our presence had we left him behind, we crept out of the chamber, extinguishing our torches. The crevice McTwirp had scratched hastily, at the cost of two fingernails, in the solid rock, was rather small for the four of us, but it was our only hope.

Nearer and nearer came the awful sound until at last it reached the chamber. We crouched in the darkness hardly daring to breathe. There was a long silence; then, after an eternity of waiting, we heard the sound of a heavy, sluggish body being dragged across the ground and out into the corridor. For a moment we waited until the horror had passed out of hearing; then we fled.

That we fled the wrong way was, under the circumstances, nobody’s fault. So great had the shock been that we had completely lost our sense of direction, and before we realized what had happened we suddenly found ourselves confronted by the Thing from which we had been trying to escape.

I cannot describe it: featureless, amorphous, and utterly evil, it lay across our path, seeming to watch us balefully. For a moment we stood there in paralyzed fright, unable to move a muscle. Then, out of nothingness, echoed a mournful voice.

“Hello, where did you come from?”

“Lllllllll—,” quavered Palsy.

“Talk sense. There’s no such place.”

“He means London,” I said, taking charge of the conversation, as none of my colleagues seemed capable of dealing with it. “What are you, if it isn’t a rude question? You know you gave us quite a start.”

“Gave you a start! I like that! Who was responsible for that excruciating cacophony that came from this direction five minutes ago? It nearly gave the Elder Ones heart failure and took at least a million years off their lives.”

“Er—I think Dr. Slump can explain that,” I said, indicating the still semicomatose psychologist. “He was trying to sing ‘Softly Awakes My Heart’ but we put a stop to it.”

“It sounded more like Mossolow’s ‘Sabotage in the Steel Foundry,’” said the Thing, sarcastically, “but whatever it was, we don’t like it. You had better come and explain yourselves to their Inscrutable Intelligences, and the Ancient Ones—if they’ve come round yet,” it added, sotto voce. “Step this way.”

With a strange, flowing motion it set off through the passageway, covering what seemed miles until the tunnel opened out into an immense hall, and we were face to face with the rulers of this ancient world. I say face to face, but actually we were the only ones with faces. Even more incredible and appalling than the Thing we had first encountered were the shapes which met our horrified eyes as we entered that vast chamber. The spawn of alien galaxies, outlawed nightmares from worlds beyond space and time, entities that had filtered down from the stars when the Earth was young—all these crowded upon our vision.

At the sight my mind reeled. Dazedly, I found myself answering questions put to me by some vast creature who must have been the leader of that congress of titans.

“How did you get in?” I was asked.

“Through the ruins on the mountain slope,” I answered.

“Ruins! Where is Slog-Wallop?”

“Here,” said a plaintive voice, and a mouselike creature with a walrus mustache drooped into view.

“When did you last inspect the main entrance?” said the Supreme Mind sternly.

“Not more than thirty thousand years ago last pancake Tuesday.”

“Well, have it seen to at once. As Inspector of Outhouses and Public Conveniences it is your duty to see that the premises are kept in good repair. Now that the matter has been brought up, I distinctly recollect that during the last Ice Age but two a distinguished extragalactic visitor was severely damaged by the collapse of the ceiling directly he entered our establishment. Really, this sort of thing will not improve our reputation for hospitality, nor is it at all dignified. Don’t let it happen again.”

“I can’t say I liked the decorations, either,” I ventured.

“The same visitor complained about those, now you mention it. I will see that they are replaced by something more appropriate, such as a few stills from Snow White. Here the Mind gave Slog-Wallop such a glare that the poor little creature was bowled clean out of the hall.

It turned to me again.

“These things will happen in the best ordered communities,” it said apologetically. “Now perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell us how you got here?”

So I described the expedition, from its departure to our arrival in the caverns, omitting such portions of the story as I considered fit.

“Very interesting,” said the Mind when I had finished. “We so seldom get visitors these days. The last one was—let—me—think—oh, yes, that Arab fellow, Abdul Hashish.”

“The author of the Pentechnicon?”

“Yes. We were rather annoyed about that—these reporters always overdo things. Nobody believed a word he wrote, and when we read the review copy he sent us we weren’t surprised. It was very bad publicity and ruined our tourist trade, such as it was. I hope you will show a better sense of proportion.”

“I can assure you that our report will be quite unbiased and entirely scientific,” I said hastily. “But may I ask how it is you seem to know our language so well?”

“Oh, we have many ways of studying the outside world. I myself toured the Middle West of America some years ago in a circus sideshow and it is only very recently that I eradicated the accent I acquired on that occasion. Nowadays, too, radio makes it impossible to avoid you. You would be surprised to know the number of swing fans we have here—though I regret to say that the television revues from Paris have even greater popularity. But the less said about them the better.”

“You amaze me,” I said truthfully. “What surprises me the most, however, is that you have so many outside contacts.”

“That was simply arranged. We started writing stories about ourselves, and later we subsidized authors, particularly in America, to do the same. The result was that everyone read all about us in various magazines such as Weird Tales (of which incidentally I hold 50 percent of the preference shares) and simply didn’t believe a word of it. So we were quite safe.”

“Incredible! The conception of a supermind!”

“Thank you,” said my interlocutor, a smug expression spreading over where its face would have been had it possessed one. “Now, however, we have no objection to everyone knowing that we really exist. In fact, we were planning an extensive publicity campaign, in which your help would be very useful. But I’ll tell you about that later; now perhaps you would like to go and rest in our guest chambers? I’ve had them cleaned—it’s surprising how much dust can accumulate in forty thousand years.”

We were escorted to a vast room—little smaller than the one we had just quitted—where we could recline on oddly shaped but comfortable couches.

“How completely incredible!” gasped Dr. Slump as we settled down to discuss the position.

“Nice chap, wasn’t it?” I said referring to our host.

“I don’t trust it! Something tells me mischief’s brewing. It is our duty to keep this knowledge from the world!”

“What, do you hold the rest of those Weird Tales shares?” asked Palsy sarcastically.

“Not at all, but such a revelation would mean universal madness and I fear that the forces at their command of these Elder Ones would soon enslave mankind.”

“Do you really think—” I began, when McTwirp interrupted me.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to something on the ground. I bent down and picked it up. It was piece of paper, on which some writing was scrawled. With difficulty, I interpreted the curious characters.

“Get Slog-Wallop to see about the drains,” I read. Then underneath, “Duke Ellington, 3:15, Washington.”

Harmless enough—then I turned it over and saw words which sent shudders of fear down my spine.

“Destroy human race by plague of flying jellyfish (?Sent through post in unsealed envelopes?). No good for Unknown—try Gillings.”

“You were right, Slump!” I gasped. “What a hideous plot! I suppose this Gillings must be some poor devil these fiends experimented on. We must escape at once!”

“But how? We don’t know the way!”

“Leave that to me,” I said, going to the door. Outside it was a strange, flabby creature resembling a doormat in the last stage of decomposition.

“Would you mind guiding us to the upper corridors?” I asked politely. “One of my friends has lost a valuable wallet, and if a search party comes along it may be found and sent home to his wife. Incidentally,” I added in an easy, conversational tone, “we should be awfully obliged if someone would make us some cups of tea while we’re gone. Two lumps each.”

This last masterstroke dispelled any suspicions the being might have had.

“Right-ho,” it said. “I hope you like China tea; it’s all we’ve got; Abdul finished off the rest.”

It scuttled away, and shortly returned. “Now follow me.”

Of our journey back through those awful caves I prefer to say as little as possible. In any case, it closely resembled the journey downward. At last, after an eternity, we saw the exit into the outer world far ahead. And none too soon, for our guide was getting suspicious.

“Are you sure you had it with you?” it asked, out of breath. “You may have left it behind.”

“Not likely,” said McTwirp. “I think it was about here.”

So we pressed on, our goal now only a few hundred yards away. Suddenly, to our horror, we heard sounds of pursuit far behind. Pretense was useless. “Run for your lives!” I shouted.

Luckily our guide was so taken by surprise that before it could recover itself we had a considerable start. In a matter of seconds, it seemed, we had reached the exit and were out in the clean light of day. Emboldened by the thought of safety, I glanced back.

The guide was far behind, stupefied still by surprise. But racing toward us at an incredible speed was something so hideous that no words of mine can begin to describe it…. As I turned to flee, I heard it cry out with a gasping, high-pitched voice:

“Do you—puff—mind condensed milk?”

I heard no more, for at that moment the shattered bas-reliefs of the entrance collapsed about me in complete and final ruin. When I recovered, we were already in the air, flying toward safety and civilization, away from the brooding nightmare horrors which had beset us so long and from whose unthinkable clutches we had so narrowly escaped.

THE FILLMORE SHOGGOTH

HARRY TURTLEDOVE

HPL COMES DOWN TO SAN FRANCISCO FROM MARIN COUNTY. They have a gig at the Fillmore tonight, playing with the Loading Zone and Crome Syrcus. Not all the guys in the band have quite come down, but hey, that’s, like, just a sign of the times, man. Pharmaceuticals are your friends. Spring 1968. Signs and portents in the air.

Okay, sure, signs and portents are always in the air, but spring of 1968 is especially bad for them. The Tet Offensive. LBJ saying he won’t run again. Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey fighting for the soul of the Democratic Party (though Hubert wouldn’t know what to do with a soul if he tripped over one in the street). Martin Luther King shot down like a dog in Memphis. Ghettos exploding. The Antarctic iceberg off the Northern California coast. All kinds of weird shit going on.

When things get weird, what do you do? George and Dave, Mike and Tony and Jeff, they go to the zoo. They park their two old station wagons and get out and stretch. Between ’em, the Plymouth and the Chevy hold all the guys in the band and all the gear they’ll need tonight. They go through gas like pigs through swill. It’s only a quarter a gallon, though, so what’s the big deal?

“Wow,” George goes, and then, “Oh, wow.” He plays guitar and sings. If HPL has a leader—always an interesting question—he’s the man. He’s tall and dark and lean, with long hair and longer sideburns. In San Francisco, in spring of ’68, he fits right in.

Mike, the drummer, has long hair, too, but he’s short and kind of chunky. What he says is “Brr!” He buttons up his sweater. It was sunny and warm in Marin. But the San Francisco Zoo is stuck in the southwest corner of the city, right on the ocean. The fog hasn’t even started burning off yet. No better than even money that it will.

Somebody across the parking lot yells, “Fuckin’ hippies!” Not everyone in San Francisco is cool with long hair and funky clothes. But there are five guys in the band, all of them younger than the loudmouthed square. He flips them the bird, but he doesn’t want to meet them up close and personal.

A jet—no, two jets—scream by overhead. The roar almost flattens you to the pavement. It dopplers off toward the west. “Whoa!” Jeff says. He’s the new bass player, blond and handsome. He’s got hotter licks than Jerry did, and a better voice, too.

“Scouting the iceberg—what do you want to bet?” George says.

His bandmates all nod. People have been scouting the iceberg since it broke off the Ross Ice Shelf and headed north more than a year ago. It’s on the other side of the Equator now, but it hasn’t shrunk. If anything, it’s got bigger. That should be impossible. It isn’t, not to the guys in HPL. Once you’ve dropped acid a few times, nothing is impossible.

These days, it often seems as if the whole world has dropped acid. “The Old Ones, or maybe the shoggoths,” Dave says. He’s the keyboard man—everything from a small electric organ to a freakin’ harpsichord. He’s, like, Deep.

Which doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Since the Miskatonic University Expedition, people and the Old Ones have warily tried to live with each other. Shoggoths, on the other hand, don’t want to live with anything else, ancient or modern. There have been some unfortunate incidents—the radioactive hole that used to be Sauk City, for instance, and the one near the South Pole—but nothing lately. Except the iceberg, that is.

Those jets will carry bombs and rockets and guns. All the scouts do. They haven’t used them yet. LBJ has enough other things to worry about without pissing off the creatures from Antarctica. But, in case of trouble, the planes will use what they carry.

HPL can’t do anything about the iceberg. So the guys go on into the zoo. It’s a WPA project, from about the same time as the Miskatonic University Expedition. No cages—concrete enclosures instead, with moats to keep the animals on the outside from mingling with the animals on the inside.

Well, almost no cages. Moated enclosures don’t work real well for birds. So there’s a big old aviary you can wander through and see toucans and cocks-of-the-rock and peafowl and like that. It smells like jungle inside, jungle mixed with chicken coop.

And there’s a sign, a sign with an arrow: THIS WAY TO THE PENGUINS. Penguins are cool. The guys drift THIS WAY. They go down some concrete stairs, to a chilly, dimly lit underground chamber. It smells of ocean and chicken coop. The penguins swimming in the water and toddling around on the concrete shore don’t wear tuxedos. They’re white all over, their eyes mere slits. They’re big birds, as tall as a man.

“They’re funny-looking!” a little boy exclaims. George can’t possibly disagree. A sign in front of the moat says CAVE PENGUINS—Aptenodytes miskatonensis. The little boy has a flat red plastic elephant in his hand. It’s called a Trunkey. He sticks the trunk—the key part—into a Storybook below the sign and turns it. A scratchy recording blares forth: “These rare, dark-adapted penguins were discovered by the Miskatonic University Expedition deep underground in the Old Ones’ city beyond the Antarctic Mountains of Madness. Living specimens were brought back by the later Starkweather-Moore exploration team. This is the only zoo that has bred them in human captivity.”

“Now we know what the iceberg’s all about,” Dave says. “The Old Ones are coming for the baby penguins.”

George looks at him. He says, “I know what you’re on, man, ’cause I’m on it, too. But it doesn’t mess me up that bad.” The rest of the guys in the band laugh, nervously, not sure whether he’s kidding. Well, George isn’t quite sure himself. In the spring of 1968, nobody’s quite sure of anything, even when he isn’t wasted.

It’s warmer once they come out into the fog again, which says a lot about how chilly it is in the penguin enclosure. The zoo has every kind of big cat there is. George admires their deadly elegance. He wonders how the tigers like San Francisco weather. They don’t seem to mind it. One of them is tearing chunks off a slab of raw meat. Except for the size of the chunks, it could be the cat back at the place gobbling Friskies kidneys-and-liver. But that makes a pretty good except.

After a while, George and his buddies get hungry, too. Across the street from the zoo sits the Doggie Diner. It’s topped by a big old dachshund’s head. The dachshund’s wearing a chef’s toque and a bow tie. The head, even the hat, make some kind of sense to George. In California, a donut shop will be crowned by a stucco-and-chicken-wire donut. A fried-chicken place will look like a drumstick, or maybe a whole bird. So why not put a dog and something that means cooking on top of a hotdog stand? No reason at all, not here. Chicago wasn’t like this, not even a little bit.

What’s happening with the bow tie, though? There are several Doggie Diners in San Francisco. George freaks out about the bow tie every time he drives past one. They do dish out good dogs—he has to give them that.

After lunch, he and the rest of HPL slide into the station wagons and drive to the Fillmore. It’s a big square building at the corner of Fillmore—wow! surprise!—and Geary. It’s west of downtown, a little north and east of Haight-Ashbury. Of but not in, George thinks. He nods to himself, liking the notion. Without the freaks from the Haight, and without the people who think like the freaks there, the Fillmore would have no reason for being.

Neither would HPL. Before the band came together, he’d been singing in a hotel lounge in the Windy City. It paid the bills. It put food on the table. This is a hell of a lot more fun.

It is while they’re playing, anyhow, and while they’re enjoying their almost-fame. Getting ready for a gig is a different story. The Fillmore parking lot is the size of a postage stamp. The dressing rooms are even small. They get ventilation strictly by hearsay.

The guys change into their working clothes: embroidered pants, shirts with bellbottom sleeves, jackets halfway between Nehru and Napoleonic cavalry general. George sports ruffles at his throat and wears his jacket open to show them off. While they wait for their turn to have a sound check and work with the lighting guys, they smoke some weed. It makes the time goes by, and they play better when they’re mellow. They’re convinced of it.

When they go up on stage, another odor wars with the sweet smell of pot. It is strange and ancient-seeming: from beyond time and space, you might say. The house isn’t quite empty, even without people in the seats. A couple of winged, barrel-shaped Old Ones stand in the aisle to listen to rehearsals.

“Holy smoke,” Dave breathes. “I heard they liked the noise and the beat, but I didn’t know if I believed it or not.”

“Neither did I,” George says. “But they’re here, so I guess they do.” He feels like Sherlock Holmes for figuring that out. Weed may make you play better. It doesn’t necessarily make you think better.

Sitting next to the Old Ones is a tall, thin, white-haired man with a lantern jaw. His suit and stiff-collared shirt come straight from the 1920s. “Is that—?” Dave begins.

“It is.” Jeff, the new bass man, sounds awed. “It really is. That’s Howard Phillips. I’ve seen photos of him when he was younger. I’ve been reading his books since I was a kid.”

“Who hasn’t?” George puts in. Phillips has to be getting up near eighty now. He knows more about the Old Ones than anybody. He wrote the bestselling chronicle of the Miskatonic University Expedition forty years ago, and he’s studied and worked with mankind’s forerunners ever since. The comfortable-looking old lady with him must be his wife, Sonia.

A lot of the time, rehearsals are half-assed. You just want to get through them and making sure the lighting crew knows what to do when. Not when you’re playing for the Old Ones, though. HPL rocks the joint. The Old Ones spread their wings a little. Jeff gives a thumbs-up—that means they’re digging it.

Whether Howard Phillips is into psychedelic rock may be a different question. “Very … interesting,” he says after they do “At the Mountains of Madness.” He polishes his specs with a silk handkerchief. But if the Old Ones get off on the music, he’s too polite to show he doesn’t.

After the set, the other bands take their turns. HPL goes back to the dressing room. More jet fighters scream by, racing off to the west. There’s a radio in the room. George is about to turn it on and see what’s happening when the guy people call Kid Charlemagne shows up. He cooks the best acid in the world, bar none. No kerosene in the mix. No crap at all. Just pure, clean lysergic acid diethylamide. Next to that, nobody cares about the iceberg in the Pacific … or anything else.

Things get a little strange. If you’ve already dropped acid a few times, or more than a few, you start to get a handle on what’s real and what comes from the drug. When you’ve got to play a gig while you’re flying, you make the music you need to make and you groove on the sounds the rest of the band is making. Automatic pilot, you might say. And while your hands and your voice do pretty much what they’re supposed to do, the rest of you can trip on the things you’re seeing, the things that may or may not be there. If you feel as if God is more your assistant than your copilot, or if you think the whole world is coming after you with sharp sticks, that’s the drug talking, too. You try not to let it bum you out too much. Sooner or later, you’ll come down.

The place fills up. The swelling noise sounds like surf at the coast, or like the tigers roaring at the zoo, or … The more George chases choices, the more they skip away. Going after them seems like too much trouble. A lot of things seem like too much trouble.

Somebody sticks his head into the room. “Five minutes, troops,” he says. He looks a little like Howard Phillips, a little like an Old One. He does to George, anyhow. George doesn’t suppose he really looks that way. Kid Charlemagne’s acid is righteously potent.

There probably isn’t a yawning pit filled with fire between the dressing room and the stage, either. There wasn’t when the band went out for sound and light checks. Nobody but George seems to think there is now. All the same, he’s careful where he puts his feet. He doesn’t fall. He doesn’t burn. Maybe he’s snapping his fingers to keep the elephants away. Or maybe not. You never can tell for sure. You never can tell for sure what for sure is, either, not right after Kid Charlemagne comes around.

House lights are still up. George cases the front rows for cute ones. There are some, so he hopes he’s seeing what he thinks he’s seeing. He takes his place. Damned if Howard Phillips and Sonia and the Old Ones aren’t still there—unless it’s a flashback from this afternoon.

No. Or he doesn’t think so. He can smell the Old Ones, along with pot and cigarettes and perfume and people who could use a shower. Acid doesn’t usually play tricks with—play tricks on—his sense of smell. But doesn’t usually is as much as he can say. Acid does what acid does. You’re just along for the ride. That’s the fun of it. Once in a while—not too often, but once in a while—that’s the terror.

Down go the lights. Scattered whoops and cheers from the crowd. The voice of the Lord (well, actually the voice of the house emcee, amped enough to impersonate Him) booms from the sound system: “Folks, give a warm Fillmore welcome to … HPL!”

More whoops and cheers, still pretty scattered. If they were the Airplane, now, or Big Brother or the Dead, people would be screaming their heads off. That’s what everybody in all the bands wants. Fame. The rush that goes with it. The cash that goes with it.

HPL is opening for two other bands that want it but don’t have it. Don’t have it yet, they’d say. So would George. Everybody starts out opening for somebody else. If you’ve got it, pretty soon some other band is opening for you.

HPL goes into “Wayfaring Stranger.” It’s a good song to jam on, and everybody in the band can play. A lot of groups sound fine in the studio, where they can do as many takes as they need (as many takes as they can afford, anyway) and the recording engineers can fix their flubs. Sounding fine live—doing it right the first time every time—is a whole different ballgame. HPL is in that league, even when everybody’s tripping.

The jam goes where it goes. They let it. On the album, “Wayfaring Stranger” is a two-and-a-half-minute track. Here, it runs four times that long. When it finally winds down, the hand they get is bigger. Next on the set list is “The Drifter,” which also, well, drifts. “It’s About Time” is tighter. Maybe they’re coming down a little.

After that comes “The White Ship,” which has to be the most talked-about track from the album. Then they’ll do “At the Mountains of Madness.” George looks forward to that, as much as the acid lets him look forward to anything. He wants to introduce Howard Phillips and the creatures from the real Mountains of Madness to the Fillmore crowd. It’s not a chance he ever dreamt he’d get.

He doesn’t get it now. HPL is halfway through “The White Ship” when the house lights come on again, all at once. It’s like a bomb going off. The band staggers to a ragged stop, everybody squinting and staring at everybody else.

“May I have your attention, please?” the house emcee thunders. “May I have your attention, please? The Antarctic iceberg has come ashore near the zoo. There are shoggoths loose in the city. I repeat—there are shoggoths loose in the city! All public assemblies have been banned by the San Francisco Civil Defense Command. Please exit and return to your homes in an orderly fashion. Thank you!” He starts to repeat himself.

Faint in the distance, sirens scream. At first, George figures he wouldn’t be hearing them without the acid. Then he realizes they’re part of the warning system against Russian bombs and rockets, the one that gets loudly tested at ten in the morning on the last Friday of every month. But things worse than Russians—older than Russians, anyhow—are loose in San Francisco now.

Down front, Howard Phillips gesticulates at the Old Ones. He looks like a man with ants in his pants, and fire ants at that. The Old Ones, though, created the shoggoths—created them, and then let them get out of hand. Maybe they know what to do about the ones rampaging here now. Or maybe they have no idea. Do not call up that which you cannot put down is a good rule, but it seems to have slipped past them when they got into the shoggoth business.

Also faint in the distance, and then not so faint, comes automatic-weapons fire. What will a .50-caliber machine gun do to a shoggoth? Kill it? Or just piss it off?

Up till now, people leaving the Fillmore have been pretty orderly. The gunfire sets them screaming and running and pushing, though. Right up here on stage seems the safest place the band can stay. Howard Phillips and his wife and the Old Ones don’t go anywhere, either. One of the weird creatures from the Mountains of Madness gestures back at Phillips. He nods thoughtfully, as if he’s learned something interesting he didn’t know before.

But then a shrill, eldritch sound comes from outside—or perhaps from Outside. “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!”: the hideous piping makes George’s long hair try to stand on end in terror. The Old Ones, understanding more, also fear more. They spread their membranous wings and flap up through the smoky air toward the ceiling.

Too late! With resistless force, a shoggoth smashes in through the wall. The lights flicker, then go out. Before they do, George sees enough of the black-slime-coated amorphous monstrosity to haunt his nightmares forevermore. A new stench, fouler than the Old Ones’ odor, fills the Fillmore.

Crashes and thuds declare that the ceiling is not high enough to let the Old Ones escape the fury of the thing whose kind they created to be their slaves. A shriek of mortal terror bursts from Howard Phillips’s throat, and then a shriek of mortal agony. Sonia Phillips also screams, and goes on screaming.

The shoggoth oozes out through the opening it made, leaving behind only its filthy fetor. More gunfire hammers outside. Muzzle flashes spear the night. As if they were bolts of lightning, George tries to use them to see what has happened inside the Fillmore. They are too stroboscopic, too soon gone, to let him learn all he wants, but what little he can make out prints fresh horror on his shuddering brain.

San Francisco’s defenders prove to have more than rifles and machine guns in their arsenal. A good thing, too, for none of those seems to slow the shoggoth. But a fighter plane dives to no more than rooftop height. It drops its load of jellied death on the monstrosity and thunders away.

Flames outside cast steadier light into the ruined hall. Not even the shoggoth’s unnatural integument is proof against napalm. “Burn, baby, burn!” someone out there yells: whether soldier or passerby, George never learns.

And burn the shoggoth does. “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” it pipes one last time, now in tormented despair. As it falls silent, fierce, triumphant human shouts fill the smoky, stinking air.

Yet the vile thing has wreaked at least a measure of revenge against the creators of its kind. The barrel-shaped bodies of both Old Ones sprawl, ungainly in death, across smashed seats. Greenish ichor pools beneath them. Their starfish-like heads have been torn away.

And poor, scholarly Howard Phillips has suffered a like fate. The blood under his lifeless body is of an honest scarlet hue. Sonia Phillips screams on and on, her hands pressed to the sides of her head, and who can blame her?

“Wow!” George hears someone say, as if from very far away. With drugs and terror chasing each other through his veins, he needs two or three heartbeats to realize the voice is his own. “Oh, wow!”

A soldier with a flashlight trots into the Fillmore through the hole the shoggoth made. He slips on its vile slime trail, but stays upright. “Anybody in here?” he shouts. Sonia Phillips’s anguished cries should give him a hint, but no doubt he is following some higher-up’s orders.

“Yes,” George calls from the stage, to make it official.

“Well, get the hell out, then,” the soldier says. “This dump is on fire.”

Did some napalm splash onto the Fillmore? Did the thrashing, burning shoggoth brush against it? George wonders if anyone knows. He also wonders why he cares. He and Dave jump down from the stage together. They bring Sonia Phillips with them when they leave.

“Howard was no Old One!” she sobs, over and over again. The shoggoth either thought otherwise or, animated by some mad viciousness of its own, simply did not care.

Out on Fillmore Street, chaos is compounded. People who escaped from the concert mill in shock and confusion. That most of them are stoned can’t help. Soldiers try to push past them. Fire engines pour streams of water on the blazes the air strikes and other combat started. The air smells of pot and wood smoke and diesel exhaust and shoggoth and charred shoggoth.

“What do we do now?” George wonders out loud.

“Hope we get paid,” Dave answered. “Hope there’s anybody left alive to pay us.” As the Fillmore burns behind the band, those both seem forlorn hopes. Nothing worse than this has happened to San Francisco since the 1906 earthquake. And that, at least, was a natural disaster, not one precipitated by perverted, malevolent intelligence.

“Youse guys! Uh, youse guys and the old lady—c’mon! Over this way!” A corporal gestures with his rifle. HPL and Sonia Phillips numbly go where he points. It’s only too obvious the kid with the stripes on his sleeve will shoot them if they do anything but exactly what he tells them.

More soldiers shepherd them along. A few blocks north of Geary and a couple of blocks east of Fillmore is Lafayette Park. George had no idea it was there. Now he huddles on the grass with his bandmates and the scholar’s widow and hundreds—no, thousands—of other people who, like him, will worry about anything but being alive some other time.

An olive-drab, square-shouldered truck pulls up. It’s full of military ration packs. People line up to get them. George gulps canned ham and eggs. It’s nasty, but he doesn’t care. Been a long time since the Doggie Diner.

He wonders what’s happened to the Doggie Diner, and to the zoo. That’s where the iceberg came ashore. Maybe it beached there by happenstance. But how much does happenstance apply to anything connected with the Mountains of Madness?

“I wish they would’ve let us check our cars,” Dave says. George hasn’t worried about them. Now he does. Probably nothing left of them but shoggoth-smashed, burnt-out sheet metal. Well, one thing at a time. The band can always thumb a ride up to Marin. After that … After that will be time enough to worry about after that.

George slowly parachutes down from the acid high to the mundane, Aristotelian world. More explosions come from the southwest, the direction of the zoo. They don’t seem very far away. They aren’t very far away; San Francisco is a big city crammed into a small space. They don’t come any closer, for which he is more than duly grateful.

He lies back on the grass. It’s cool, but not really cold. San Francisco in May—or August, or November. Next thing he knows, the early-morning sun shining in his face wakes him up. He yawns and stretches and slowly sits up. Jeff is already awake. He nods to George. George nods back. He nods to himself, too: he’s all the way straight, or thinks he is. The rest of the guys in the band go on sleeping. Dave snores. So does Sonia Phillips.

Somebody nearby has a transistor radio tuned to the local news station. George cranes his head toward the thin, tinny sound. He came too close to the local news last night. Coming too close to the local news meant coming much too close to getting killed.

“Casualties are widespread in the city,” a newsman says. “One shoggoth reached the Fillmore, where a rock concert was in progress. Seventeen are confirmed dead there, and other losses may not be known for some time. Also slain were two Old Ones attending the concert. Now let’s go to Ed Rubinstein, in Golden Gate Park.”

“This is Ed Rubinstein, in Golden Gate Park,” a different voice says. “I’m reporting from the De Young Museum, which was gutted by two shoggoths. Until its destruction, the De Young boasted the finest collection of art and artifacts from the Old Ones this side of Miskatonic University in Arkham. Sadly, that appears to be a total loss. Fourteen are known dead near the museum, a figure that surely would have been much higher if the building had been open. Now I’ll pass the broadcast to Karen Holloway, reporting from the zoo.”

“Our prized exhibit of cave penguins is no more,” Karen Holloway announces, presumably from the zoo. “A shoggoth—apparently the first monster off the iceberg—tore through the aviary and into the refrigerated underground exhibit area where the penguins were kept. It seemed indifferent to the other birds, but made a point of destroying the rare white penguins, which have a long association with the Old Ones’ city in Antarctica. Sadly, no penguins are known to have survived.”

Tears fill George’s eyes. Somehow, the shoggoth’s rage against the harmless cave penguins seems sadder than the rest of their attack on the city. He realizes he may not be completely down from the acid after all.

DEVIL’S BATHTUB

LOIS H. GRESH

THE DOG FROZE IN MID-STEP, ONE PAW UP. THREE LAYERS OF FUR, he was built for Antarctica, but Vostok Station was so cold his bones hurt. The glacier trembled like a frightened beast and then lurched, and the dog toppled face first onto the ice. His ears pricked. Something was gurgling, and his nose picked up a scent he didn’t know, and what was it?

The dog was too weak to stand, and so he lay there and whimpered, and the image of a girl roiled in his mind. He was so naughty and so very sorry.

The wind scolded him, All your fault, and what’s she gonna do now? And the ice cracked, and shadows crawled from the crevasses and bled black. Foam burbled on the edges of the black sludge, which peeled off the ice and rose in sheets, fanning the snow, sucking it up, then slamming back to the ice in clouds of rabid froth. From all directions, the sludge wriggled toward the dog. His fur stood on end. He sensed the sludge was alive, and he somehow knew it came from the lake the humans were studying, a lake deep below the glacier.

His tongue hung from his lips and grazed the ice. The smell of the sludge grew closer, blood of a beast, and now he tasted it, and it was sweet. He wanted to sleep, wanted the sun to flicker off and the ice to stop pounding him.

This was the end of his life, and it had been good.

Let it come quickly, and let it be brief.

His body tensed. His muscles strained against his bones. Oh, how it hurt, and he couldn’t stop it. The muscles stretched tightly, ready to snap. He didn’t want to die this way, but he had no choice in the matter, and the wind whirled him around like a spinner in the girl’s games. The ice scraped the fur from his skin, and he smelled his own blood and it scared him.

And that’s when his bones shattered.

The dog was aware that his body was a limp sack filled with mush. He didn’t understand.

He lifted his nose. His face, or what was left of it, pointed south toward the Bialystok Glacier. And then the wind lifted him and ice flew past in whorls, spinning spinning, and his broken bones ratcheted back together but in odd formations, kinked and hinged like a snake, molding his body into something new, something horrible.

His heart thumped wildly, an aching rose in his chest, his soul keened. He’d let the girl down, and what would she do without him?

Coated in black, he inched like scum across the ice. He was heading toward Bialystok and the South Pole. He slithered one inch, now two. His body flopped up, sucked the snow, and collapsed back down. He had no control, none at all, as his body wriggled and the sludge effervesced around him and permeated his pores.

I didn’t mean to wander out at night. I didn’t mean to sniff by the compost shack. I didn’t mean for the wind to pick me up and carry me to the drilling post. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.

The girl would be lonely. He knew she would cry, and it was all his fault.

And now shadows surged against the sky, and the sun dimmed …

and it dimmed …

until it was only a dot of fire on a sheath of black.

* * *

“He’s alive down by the Devil’s Bathtub.”

Iris didn’t understand. Why would Dad leave Sammy outside in the storm? She tucked her chin beneath the wool blankets, which smelled like wet sheep, or at least, she figured this is what wet sheep would smell like. Dad and old man Farley were both staring at her as if she’d been very bad. Not angry looks—Iris knew what those looked like—but disappointed looks as if she were a naughty girl who had let them down. But what had she done? She tried to remember but failed. “What’s Sammy doing at the Devil’s Bathtub?” she asked.

“The demons got him.” Farley shifted his eyes away from her. He sat on the wooden chair, his cane—the one with the skull knob—tapping the splintered floor. He wore his usual rags. Black parka with holes like bite marks scattered all over it. Matching snow pants frayed at the bottom. He chewed constantly, brown spittle frozen to his lips and halfway to his chin.

Dad’s blue eyes seemed to be the only color in the room. Iris was named for those eyes, for she had them, too. They were the Habberstam eyes, he’d told her long ago, and they ran in the family, those eyes did. Hair the color of dust straggled from under the hood of his parka. Dad was old. “We actually found Sammy near the South Pole. There is a–” He paused and collected his thoughts. “There’s a trail from the Devil’s Bathtub to the Pole. The trail is black, thick like tar, and I’m afraid there’s fur stuck to it. Iris, you must have let Sammy out last night.”

Ice pelted the bunkhouse. The air felt swarthy and leaden. Iris couldn’t breathe, and her throat clenched, and she tried to swallow but couldn’t. Sammy was gone. She’d known it in her heart, but to hear her father tell her out loud, it was almost too much to bear.

“He’s with them now,” said Farley.

“No, he’s not with anybody. He’s dead,” she sobbed, “and I didn’t let him out.”

Dad fidgeted. She knew he was anxious to leave and return to his work. “He must have sneaked out, that’s all. He’s alive, Iris, but not in an ordinary way.”

She wanted her father to comfort her, but as always, it was Farley who hugged her, and she cried until she had no tears left. Her toes were numb, her fingers stiff inside her gloves. She hated it here, hated it so much that she didn’t care if she died. With no friends, no Sammy, what was the point?

It wasn’t fair. She was stuck at this stupid Vostok glacier outpost. Antarctica. It sucked. Mom had died so long ago that Iris didn’t even remember her face, and Iris had to stay here with Dad because this was where he worked. Sammy had been ten years old, just like Iris, and there were no other children here.

She pulled back from Farley. “Dad, can’t we live somewhere else, please?”

Dad’s mouth tightened. “I’ll have Martha bring hot tea and toast. Eat something. You’ll feel better.” As usual, he was ignoring her pleas. “We’ll go see Sammy, and next time a ship comes in, maybe they’ll bring you a new dog.”

“Yes, a new dog,” Farley repeated, as if this would make it happen. But Iris knew her father wouldn’t remember to request another dog from Australia. Dad never remembered anything other than his work. After Mom died, he withdrew from everyone, even Iris. He’d be happier without Iris, she just knew it. He didn’t love her, not really. He just felt responsible for her, and that was something entirely different.

That afternoon, the storm died down, and Dad and Farley took her to see Sammy. Farley rarely left the bunkhouse. He was too old and crippled. He spent all his time at the monitors, peering at strange shapes and numbers and chewing on seal jerky. But today, he insisted on coming with Dad and Iris. “I have to see Sammy for myself,” he said.

They rode a tractor from the Vostok Station to the Devil’s Bathtub. The giant wheels crunched over the ice. The sun boiled overhead like a volcano and streamed down so brightly that Iris could see the veins in her eyes. She also saw circles everywhere: eyeballs blinked in and out of view, pustules of color burst and reformed. The ice plains convulsed.

Her father cursed and maneuvered the tractor around big cracks in the ice. “This might be dangerous, but I was out here earlier and nothing happened, so …” He was muttering as if to himself, then said to Iris, “You notice the black tar and fur? That’s the trail I was talking about.”

She shielded her eyes from the sun’s glare. Yes, she noticed, but she couldn’t believe this was Sammy’s fur. Her brain couldn’t process it.

As far as she could see, white bubbles glistened across pools of black rimming the edges of all the cracks and stretching like protoplasm across the glacier. Iris knew all about protoplasm. She could operate some of Farley’s computer simulations, too. Her father didn’t talk to her about much, but he was always willing to talk about science. Dad had told her many times about the importance of his work. He and Farley drilled through the ice and took samples from Lake Vostok, which was thirteen thousand feet below the surface. “The ice is four hundred and twenty thousand years old,” he’d say, “and deep beneath it is the lake, filled with two thousand two hundred feet of liquid and life we don’t understand yet.” Dad quivered whenever he talked about his work. It was that exciting to him. He lived to discover new life forms while ignoring the ones that already existed around him. Like Iris.

“Is this from the lake, Dad?” she asked.

“Maybe. There’s no way to know yet. The drill at Devil’s Bathtub has extracted what appears to be magnetic bacteria.” He jerked the wheel to the left, and the tractor wheels trod across a long finger of black. Beneath the heavy machine, something squished and moaned. Flaps of black peeled off the ice and slapped back down. Something rumbled deep beneath the surface. It sounded like a thousand waterfalls shot through with the shrieks of dying monkeys. Iris clapped her hands over her ears and pressed. The noise was deafening. And the smell was bad, more pungent than the compost shack.

Dad’s face tightened more than usual. In the sun, his wrinkles looked deeper, his face more pained. Did her father cry himself to sleep at night as she did? Was he unhappy, too? If so, why did he keep refusing to leave?

The noise subsided as they neared the South Pole. Here, black bricks wobbled like jelly on the ice. What was this? The bricks looked like Lego blocks, and they were stacked in various-sized towers around the Pole. A layer of white froth coated the tops of the stacks and dripped down the sides in frozen smears.

Part of Iris thought it was all fascinating, and she wanted to poke the black towers and make them jiggle. But part of her was horrified. The whole plain of ice seemed alive and rose in tangled formations that looked like spiders’ webs, delicate and loosely woven, suspended in winds fierce enough to crack her bones. Black sludge rose in globules from the webs. They bulged and pressed against each other, then split into two, four, then eight globules. They were multiplying.

“Never seen anything like this. Don’t understand. Wasn’t like this earlier.” Dad’s words tumbled out as if he was scared out of his mind. Farley sat behind them, hunched over, chewing jerky. He was trembling.

“Best get the child back,” said Farley. “This isn’t natural, Joe. I don’t see Sammy here. I don’t know what I see here, but it isn’t natural. It’s the demons.”

“There are no demons, Farley,” her father shot back. He was shouting to be heard above the wind.

“Well, these aren’t magnetosomes, not of any sort I’ve studied.”

This is what kept Iris at Vostok Station. Magnetic bacteria fifty nanometers small and organized in chains.

“I tell you, Farley, these are a new form of the bacteria. Magnetosomes always face the Pole because of Earth’s geomagnetic field lines. They’re found in ancient rocks and fossils. So why shouldn’t they be in an ancient subterranean lake? Look at these bricks. They all face the Pole, Farley.”

“No. We’ve never seen bacteria massed into wobbling bricks and walls. Never. This is something else.”

“Sammy’s dead, isn’t he?” interjected Iris.

“If he’s alive, he’s part of this magnetosome structure,” said Dad. “I believe he’s in there, in those blocks, still alive in some weird new form. That’s what I believe.” He glared at Farley.

Why was he arguing with Farley about science? Didn’t it matter more that Sammy was dead?

Her tears welled, then froze. She would find Sammy, even if he was part of this magnetosome thing. Sammy was her only friend, and he was lost.

She jumped out of the tractor.

Dad yelled, “No, it’s too dangerous!” and grabbed her sleeve, but she wrenched free and he leapt after her. Farley stayed behind, too feeble to follow.

She’d swear the wind was hissing her name. She’d swear the wind was bellowing something that sounded like shoggoth. But it had to be her imagination, right?

All around her, globules popped. They spewed black tendrils that suckered to the ice and puffed up like snakes gorged on meat.

No, Iris wasn’t imagining this, definitely not.

A hiss of her name and now a bellow—

shoggoth—

and fists of wind grabbed her hair and yanked her toward the bricks, and her mind filled with a searing shriek. Bullets of ice clattered against her parka and snow pants. She struggled against the storm, but the ice sheet slammed up and down, and she lost her footing and almost fell into a crevasse rimmed in sludge and foam. She gripped the sludge, her left cheek suctioned to the glue of foam, and it was like the fat on a cheap cut of beef. She recoiled, but her feet and ankles hung over the crevasse and she had to hold tight. Her cheek was inflamed as if by fire,

and as her skin ripped off the left side of her head,

and as the wind and the sludge stripped off her hair,

she screamed, “Daddy! Daddy!” but the wind snatched the words and whipped her around in circles. Spinning like a top right over the crevasse, and she could see way down below, the swarm of creatures—some round with horns, some that looked like skeletal fish, some elongated with too many eyes, and all of them, translucent and flickering in colors she didn’t know.

Could these be Farley’s demons? Were Dad’s magnetosomes and Farley’s demons the same?

The storm twirled her until she was dizzy, and still she cried “Daddy! Daddy!” but when she looked for him, he was gone. She lay, crumpled, upon the stack of blocks. The tractor wavered in the distance, outlined in charcoal against the white sheet of sky.

Her bones rattled and crunched, and oh yes, she should be dead, but here she was, a limp sack of skin filled with the debris of bones and organs and muscle.

What had happened to her? What was she?

She should still be scared, but she wasn’t. Instead, a calm settled over her. And still, the storm raged.

Farley couldn’t survive a storm like this, not on his own. He must be gone, and this made her sad.

The black bricks jiggled beneath her and swung her body so her face pointed toward the South Pole. She looked down. Saw bright blue eyes, the whites huge around tiny irises. Stark terror. Dad. But he wasn’t really there. Only his eyes, and they were plugged into the sides of the wall like light bulbs. She sensed him within the wall, and yes, he was alive but he was something different. Bricks, jelly, ooze, the froth of bacteria? Magnetosomes, that’s what she and Dad were now, hinged bricks, millions of magnetic bacteria all pointing south.

Dad had been a very good scientist. He was always right.

But Farley had been right, too. It could be said that these magnetic bacteria were demons of a sort. They infected and took over.

Iris rested gently at the top of the wall, her body composed of a hundred or more black bricks etched with foam. She smelled like rotting meat. It was pleasant. Almost relaxing. But for how long would she be amused? Eventually, this would grow tiresome.

At the bottom of the wall, something whimpered.

Sammy?

Iris struggled and finally wrenched her body from the top of the wall, and her hundred bricks ratcheted together by hinges fell to the ice surrounding the South Pole. As they hit, they instantly swung so all the bricks faced the Pole.

Sammy’s bricks were on the other side of the Pole, also facing it. She and Sammy stared at each other.

His eyes, brown velvet, soft and loving.

His body, hundreds of black bricks, jiggling happily as he saw her.

Did she see a tail wag there in the bricks? Did she?

She looked from Sammy to Dad and back again. They were together now, all three of them, as a family, the way things were supposed to be, right? Dad would have to pay attention to her. What else could he do?

She’d been able to split herself off the top of the wall. Perhaps the three of them could chink off and wander away together across the ice. But no, they always shifted south, didn’t they? They had no choice. They would always move toward the Pole.

Iris was still wondering what they would all do when the glacier lurched. A wide crack yawned in the ice, and now it was an open mouth with icicle teeth. Iris felt herself tumbling, and her bricks fell straight down through the ice sheet leading to Lake Vostok. It was like the crashing of a skyscraper, except all the bricks were alive, and hers were among thousands. She felt nothing, really, other than the grazing of icicles across her bricks and the cool swish of the air.

Iris splashed into the water. And there were creatures here she never could have imagined. It was lovely. And beside her was Sammy, and this was their new home. Her larger bricks split into millions of microscopic ones, hinged and swimming smoothly through the water. Sammy did the same, and together, they swam south.

But over there, a third creature flailed in horror, thrashed against its brethren, and tried desperately to swim north against the pack. It had the Habberstam eyes. Poor Dad, he just wasn’t a family man.

THE WITNESS IN DARKNESS

JOHN SHIRLEY

FROM THE DIVISION OF STEALTH ARCHAEOLOGY TO DR. KYU KIM, Your Eyes Only, Class. Top Secret:

On October 20, 2011, a roughly cylindrical artifact of unknown metal, pentagonally five-sided in cross section, its outer surfaces imprinted with the dot-cluster writing of the Elder Culture, was found by DSA classification team 23, in the Eastern Quadrant Elder Ruins, Antarctica. Retro-analysis hypothesizes that the artifact is an electronic telepathy device, enhanced by sound recording and playback. Attached to the artifact by rubber band was a scribbled note in a handwriting thought to belong to the geologist William Dyer, who returned to the Antarctic on one additional occasion after his second visit to the so-called “Mountains of Madness.”

The legible part of the note reads, “Final return to Antarctic ruins, encounter with Elder One—the creature applied this device from earlier phase of civilization. You’ll hear my voice but it is not, ultimately, I speaking; the Elder One has simply used my mind for telepathic translation so as to [water damage has erased the remainder].”

The artifact, when activated by a flow of electricity, produced sound, a playback that seems to be a recording, transcribed here. The recording gives the listener the distinct impression that William Dyer is telepathically channeling a narrative provided by an Elder Thing, a.k.a. a “Great Old One”:

* * *

I never anticipated being wakened by a blade—by vivisection. Even after my body had been shifted, transported, and exposed to much colder temperatures, I continued my trance. Reluctant to emerge from my trance of suspension, in which I’d been immured for immemorial ages, I slept onward despite the interference of the pink primates—until the blade wielded by the intruder began to saw away at my skin. We evolved to be not only beautiful, but tough as tree bark, our people; still he persisted, and broke through, digging ever deeper into my flesh with his cold, unrelenting knife-edge, gouging and probing. The exquisite agony, the sheer unthinkable intrusion of it, burst the bubble of my dream. When I opened my eyes he made a pathetic squalling noise and backed away. My tentacles lashed about his forelimb, and I snatched the edged probe from him and gave him a taste of his own vivisection. He did not survive it.

If he’d only left me in slumber! Had I awakened in my own good time I would have treated him more kindly. He was descended from some of our creations, after all. Abandoned, the primates developed without guidance, and he knew no better. Tragedy upon tragedy might have been averted if he’d left me to my limitless contemplation in the dark place where I lay rooted, tranced in dormancy, deep under the polar crust of this world….

I know now that this world has circled the sun millions of times since first my people came here. I should explain that I did not come to this world with our pioneers—I was spored here, gestated on this world, after the wars reduced our numbers, the diminution making reproduction necessary. I long to see the homeworld—but it seems unlikely now. The art of traveling between worlds has been lost to those of us who survive on this outpost. It’s true that we can prepare ourselves to travel in the great void; we can increase the density of our inward pockets of hydrogen and helium, so that we rise up and up; we can unfurl our dazzling wings and take the energies of the sky within them and so move on into space. But to open the portals through which we travel the interstellar gulfs—to enter the tunnels through space itself, wending between star systems—that method is lost to us. Nor do any live, to my knowledge, who can locate the homeworld—who know clearly where it lies. Still, the history-murals give hints. Perhaps someday I will try to find that storied paradise….

Hoary eons have I lived already—and re-lived, in my dormancy. The dreams of my people are not the fancies that I perceive yours to be; instead, they are the revisiting of our lives and the lives of our ancestors, an exploration of the genetic wisdom hidden within our birthing spores.

So vast an account kept me amazed, hypnotized with its epic intricacy. It is an inspiring odyssey to contemplate, from the seas to the swamps of that far-away homeworld; to the grand heights of the mountains and then to the skies, as we developed flight—and thence, when instinct told my ancestors it was time to move on to new worlds, to the Great Migration: soaring through intricate tunnels in space, past networks of effulgence, followed by the anticlimactic descent into the primeval seas of the world you now call “Earth.”

Our first residence was in the great, warm oceans of “Earth.” Only the most primitive organisms had developed, in those far-off days—my people took those simple one-celled organisms into engineering-skeins and shaped them, nudging their evolution. Over many millennia, we created a variety of creatures; we then let evolution have its head for a time until, judging that primitive primates would be the best clay from which we might sculpt simple servants, we created the ancestors of mankind. Some we allowed to roam, as part of our sprawling scientific experiment; others were turned to simple tasks. Who knew that one day, one of the descendants of those primitive primates would wrench me from sacred sleep with a cutting blade?

For the great tasks my people created the shoggoths [note: approximate transcription of term]. They were misbegotten, though we didn’t know it then. We made them too facile, too adaptable, and too swift. We used hypnotic suggestion to control them—which was too uncertain. Even so, they served us well for millennia—gorgeous creatures they were, fascinatingly odoriferous, their gelatinous bodies capable of startling speed. A most impressive sight with their splendid display of protoplasmic bubbles, their self-luminosity, their myriad eyes capable of forming and unforming as needed. But even then some of us, gazing in the infrared and ultraviolet, saw the emotional desperation of the shoggoths; we could see the plangent hunger of their desire to pervade, to dominate, to infuse themselves in all they saw.

Radiated in many spectra, our hypnotic beam bent their will to conform to ours. And so they constructed the great undersea galleries at our behest and later emerged from the depths to erect the façades and beetling walls, the soaring towers and ramparts of our city upon the crags at the southern pole of this world; exuding acids, the shoggoths shaped the stone of the mountains themselves, in any contour that pleased us; they lifted great blocks of hollowed-out stone into place on the shoulders of snowy peaks; they dug hallways and chambers, stacked blocks of stone to our specification. We fed them with the abundant creatures feverishly arising within the warm incubator of the nascent world; we praised our servants and perhaps spoiled them, for they forever wanted more—ever more, of everything.

I was there, a part of it all, for the erecting of that Cyclopean splendor, our five-sided metropolis—I myself, though alive for less than a half a million turns about the sun, at the time, was thought gifted enough to design a great deal of it. We called the great colony [name sounds like a dying man’s cough, quite untranscribable] and we took unspeakable pleasure in its creation. I myself insisted on the five-sidedness, in honor of our ancestors, of the city itself, and in praise of the Five-Sided Eye at the center of the cosmos. Fiveness is consciously replicated in many of the city’s structures—and indeed, in other creations, as in our design of a creature you call the “starfish,” and in the five fingers we placed on our primates. This motif does more than echo the five-pointedness of our bodily head and basal forms, the perfect, starlike extremities of our physical beings; it was also a statement about the five-sidedness of our worship of the creative principle emanated by the Five-Sided Eye, the Law of Five in vibratory repetition throughout the universe: Step One, the active vibration pulses forth; Step Two, the passive reflects it back; Step Three, the reconciling force arises from the two—thesis, antithesis, synthesis, as your human philosopher had it—and then the reconciling force spins and splits into the active, the passive; Steps Four and Five … which again generate the third force, which in turn gives birth to the fourth and fifth—and on, ad infinitum, ultimately creating all cosmic phenomena. We hoped to cover much of the surface of this world with five-sided paeans to the Law of Five—but it was not to be.

Still, our capital city, nestled amongst the world’s steepest peaks, was the materialization of our shared inner worlds, a reverberant revisiting of the galleries of our ancestors—and too, it spoke of our response to the world you call “Earth”; the entire city was the hallmark stamp of our collective identity. It sang of our nature, of course, as well as standing for it, for the fluting hollows and tubes we introduced, with exactitude, within the high faces of the mountains, caught the furious perpetual breath of the wind and turned it into the traditional melodies we’d brought with us from the homeworld: the wind itself intoned our time-honored tunes, as if the very atmosphere of this world was chorusing its submission to the greatness of our culture. We often sang along with it, of course, fluting with exquisite harmony; even now the mountains sing, with a melancholic sadness in their voicings … of what might have been.

Now all is crumbled; all has become mere ruins.

It was vanity, and an illusion of invulnerability—these were our undoing. Certainly the shift of the planetary axis, the subsequent coming of the Ice Age, contributed. Yet we’d have adapted well enough to the encroaching cold were it not for the war with the rebellious shoggoths….

Later, we suffered further attrition in the conflict with the Cthulhuites, those ancient competitors from the stars whom at last we trapped in the glaring asymmetry of R’lyeh beneath the polar seas. For a time the spawn of Cthulhu allied itself with the Mi-Go, further eroding our power, until we drove the vicious, buzzing Mi-Go back to their outpost on that icy world at the outer fringe of this solar system; there they doubtless crouch and murmur still, in subzero, fungally furred warrens under the frozen surface.

But damaged as we were, many of us half mad with privation and desperation, with the loss of loved ones to the depredations of rebel shoggoths, we failed to prepare properly for the age of ice. Some of our technology was destroyed in a particularly vicious Cthulhuian battle: technology we had no clear memory of having created, after so many long millennia. We could no longer effectively reproduce it, since much was corroded. Those of us who knew the secret of travel between the stars were among the first killed when the shoggoths overran our city—leaving us no escape. In our own dogged time we defeated the shoggoths, but we made the mistake of keeping several rebels for study, to try to understand how the beasts had gone awry. The captive shoggoths pretended to a simplicity that deceived their keepers—and one of them worked out the combination of its energy-prison. The rebels broke free and went on a rampage. There were few of us left to resist….

The memory of that rampage and massacre remains vividly within me—sometimes it seems to cut me from within as the pink primate cut me from without. I had been meditating on the looping mosaics in the great gallery of remembrance, in the 13th-degree trance, when the breakout happened. I was ecstatically intoxicated by the history panels, seeing them in all five dimensions, including the animated segments hidden from eyes as simple as those of the pink primates, and thus did not hear the first concussions of the latest attack….

And then a shriek of pain penetrated my dreamy musings—and another. I tore myself from my entrancement and turned to the entrance of the great gallery. An overwhelming wave of sheer reek swept in first—the rage of the shoggoths expressing itself in malodorous venting—and then a ragged column of my people scurried into the gallery: refugees from the shoggoths, who fumed through the tunnels in pursuit, eye-sprouts flailing as they hooted their mocking cry, Tekeli-li! First one shoggoth, then another, squeezed its gelatinous bulk through the entrance—extending plasmic tentacles as they entwined their victims, combining acid secretions with ripples of inner force to rip my fellows limb from limb.

The refugees wailed in poignant despair as the shoggoths dismembered them. Once-beautiful eyes bounced after being torn from five-pointed heads, and souls splashed like oceanic ooze, green and sparkling with dying life, oozing across the stone floors….

It was this vision, seared into memory, that drove me into the sleeping trance of hibernation, in the depths of the cavern where, ages later, I was found by the pink primates; for there I fled, a coward but not a fool. Before the shoggoths could reach me I slipped into a narrow side passage and into the depths, slipping away with a few others. We had impregnated the walls of the hibernation cavern with prickly energies to keep the shoggoths away—but they had no overt effect on the insensitive pink primates, ages after.

At first I hunched in the hibernation cavern, trembling in the darkness, shaking with horror at what I’d seen. It was as if the arrogance of my people had taken physical shape, had materialized and come in person to kill us. In memory, I watched the massacre again and again, in excruciating detail, as each elegantly columnar, fluted, five-pointed body of the shoggoth’s victims was torn asunder; I saw the viscous tentacles plucking off wings out of sheer cruelty, before the crunching decapitation … I could not bear it. I writhed at the recollection.

So I extruded my vestigial roots and took hold of the cavern’s fundament, drawing my nutrient—as the most ancient of the ancients did—directly from soil; in this case, from well-aged bat guano. And rooting myself first in loam and then in slumber, I escaped into an endless procession of glorious ancestral memories….

* * *

I might have slumbered there—my body muted to survive in the cold, my pulse so slow it barely pulsed at all—until, perhaps, the bloated sun expanded to engulf this world with fire, a billion years hence.

But my trance was weakened by the invasion of the pink primates; by “men” like you; by their uprooting of me, and by the unbidden transport. My dream was stabbed, slashed by a knife blade. And I took command of the blade, returning slash for slash ten times over, in my mind somehow slashing at shoggoths as well as the pink primate. When the creature lay still, I called out a sub-vocal vibratory alarum to my fellows—for others had been transported to the primate’s camp.

Spurred by my call, those who had survived this atrocity woke. And we might have made our way peacefully back to our cavern. After all, the other pink primates had withdrawn, seeing that I and the others were moving about. One of them carried a weapon and seemed to argue with his companions. There was time to depart….

But then one of us discovered other bodies, the mangled corpses of my people, who’d been sliced open, and who hadn’t survived the vivisection, so weakened were they by the ages. One was sliced into sections. Clearly, our dead had suffered hideously in the process—the contortion of agony was there to see in their twisted limbs as they were vivisected, cut apart while alive and paralyzed, till the loss of emerald-tinted lifeblood set them free at last.

That’s when the shaggy four-legged ones broke loose from their corral of ice: the furred, raucous creatures you call dogs. Driven mad by some primal response to our smell, they came at us snapping and snarling….

The remains of old friends who’d been tortured to death, and the onslaught of the dogs—it was all too much. In fury, and perhaps addled by disorientation, the others went on a rampage. I could not restrain them. They rushed the group of pink primates and dogs, tentacles whipping. A primate used a tubular weapon to fire a lead projectile, injuring one of my fellows, but that was the only damage done, and it was not mortal.

Most of the dogs, then the remaining pink primates—all but one—were torn limb from limb, shrieking and gasping, then left to bleed out their lives upon the snowy ground….

It all seemed a terrible waste to me. Clearly the pink primates had evolved a rudimentary intelligence. They had developed scientific curiosity of a crude sort, the ability to command lower species, some fairly impressive technology—I discovered a device that transmitted radio waves, probably for messages, in one of the structures of cloth you call tents. We should have been able to communicate with them.

After the attack, I did some dissecting of my own and examined many of the instruments in the tent; I experimented with their primitive devices for making fire and created some heat in the operating tent for other investigations.

Then it was discovered that one of the primates had escaped on a sled, with a surviving dog. (Gedney, the creature means Gedney!) [Note: this naming of Gedney is the only expostulation from William Dyer himself in this account, the remainder seems to be the “Elder One” using Dyer’s voice.] But one dog pulling his sled could not get him far, certainly not rapidly—he was forced to help push the sled, piled with his supplies—and we had no difficulty in overtaking him. By this time I was able to persuade the others to allow him to live, for a time. He and the dog were returned to the camp for examination, just as a fierce blizzard commenced. We had to break the dog’s neck—it would not be restrained—but the primate did not die immediately. He made some rather loud noises when we allowed him to personally experience vivisection. We bandaged his remains, to preserve him for later dissection.

The weather cleared, and soon we were able to perform the rituals of burial. Digging through the hard snow with tools left by the primates, we buried our dead companions as well as we could. In keeping with the right afterlife preparation, we buried them with their feet pointed to the center of the world, and their heads pointed toward the stars. Over them we inscribed, in ice and snow, the sacred five-pointed symbol, and their names. Some of us left a few traditional artifacts there, to remember them by.

Then, having eaten of the flesh of the dog creatures, and having tasted the primates—we found them less palatable—we hurried back to the city, drawing the sled with us and carrying a few pink primate artifacts for later examination.

It was an arduous journey. We were glad when we arrived—little did we know what awaited us. We had thought the shoggoths long gone, passed away or departed….

Most have gone. Not all.

We rested in one of the great chambers, and there I examined the primate artifacts. I meant to return to the bodies of the pink primate on the sled, and the dog, and continue my research—I was very curious to see how advanced the primate’s brain might be—but in the event it was not to be.

We attempted an assessment of the city, to see if it might be rebuilt, in the event we chose to spore offspring, but the more we looked at the ruins the more a restoration seemed an unappealing, discouraging task—quite depressing. And of course it had been defiled….

My own plan was to return to the deep sea—for we are more than an amphibious race, our gills can become operative as needed—and there we could spore freely, build up our population, and construct a new city, a homeland to compete with the society of the pink primates. But before we could reach an accord one of us probed the depths under the old city too deeply. For there, in an underground sea, lurked the remaining shoggoth, feeding on the enormous, lumbering, eyeless penguins peculiar to that place.

When I heard the screams and the mocking Tekeli-li!, I thought, at first, it was a traumatic memory resurfacing; then I saw body parts strewn before the furious, oncoming shoggoth—a particularly bloated specimen, its huge gelatinous mass heaving and quivering as it came, its sprouting eyes goggling madly about.

But then I perceived the truth: this was no trauma-spawned memory, but a quivering rebirth of the old horror, a true return of the terror of the rogue shoggoths, as it raked serrated tentacles among us, and came implacably on toward me….

A few of us were able to escape, just as before—

But this time, I vowed I would not hide in the caverns—this time I would have my revenge.

My companions retreated into the hibernation cavern, where, so far, the shoggoth dared not go, but at my urging they taunted it, hissing and vibrating on many levels and calling out, Tekeli-li!

Enraged, the bloated, ancient shoggoth ranged back and forth near the entrance to the hibernation cavern, depositing a great trail of slime—the gleaming muck reeking horribly of its rage. Like a mad sentry it paced, afraid to enter the chamber, kept at bay by the stinging energies we’d impregnated into the rocky walls, restrained by the ancient hypnotic suggestion that made such energies an effective shoggoth repellent.

It continued its stalking, shrugging its heaving body this way and that, slobbering furiously about the entrance—as I busied myself back at the pit it had climbed from.

It was about this time I became aware that two pink primates had found the city, that they were exploring it—I observed them ogling the history displays in the gallery of remembrance—and watched them from the shadows as they probed more deeply.

Meanwhile, the shoggoth was becoming hungry … and at last it put off its vigil and grudgingly returned to the pit for food, seeking after a quick dinner of blind penguins—reaching its den soon before the primates found it. It was not far down in its lair when their muttering and flickering lights caught its attention. It swarmed from the depths and pursued them, doubtless driven to mad rapacity at the thought of pink primates to feast on, a delicious novelty after countless centuries of fish and penguin.

The primates escaped—with a little help from me, of which they were unaware. I had an intuition that I would one day communicate with one of these primates. I had seen their respectful fascination as they viewed the history panels in the gallery of remembrance. I thought that perhaps one of these “men” might be worth speaking to … if a means could be found.

And so it was I who distracted the shoggoth—I called out to it as it pursued them, confusing it, making it turn toward me long enough for the men to find a branching tunnel for escape.

I myself then slipped away, withdrawing up a winding ramp too small for the shoggoth, barely large enough for my own bulk. I had taken the same ramp earlier, preparing certain devices in the maintenance passages over the vast chamber that contained the entrance to the pit.

The frustrated shoggoth returned to its cold, lonely, and dull meal of live eyeless penguins—just as I’d hoped. It descended into its den….

I had no doubt it would be back, if I allowed it. It would eventually work itself up into a fury that might well carry it past the prickling energies of protection in the walls of the hibernation cavern. And it would tear my companions to pieces in its madness.

No. I had vowed it would not happen again.

Thus I activated the simple devices I’d placed around the roof of the chamber. The two primates had long since left the city when I triggered the vibratory cannon I’d brought from our ancient storeroom under the city. The reverberation blasts went off in a carefully placed ring of detonation—to my great relief, for I was afraid the ancient devices would fail to trigger. But as if expressing long-pent-up fury, they roared out on schedule, and stone that had hunched over the pit for more than a million years crackled and buckled, then tumbled, in great slabs, into the pit, with a titanic roar that shook the city, and spurred many a landslide.

The great galleries, the tunnels and passageways rocked and trembled, so that I was afraid the ruins would collapse in their entirety; the very air groaned, choking with dust as boulders fell from above.

But at last the ruins subsided into silence, with the occasional whisper of trickling debris.

I had to pick my way through the wreckage, but proceeded to the entrance to the pit—and confirmed that it was quite choked with stone, as planned. The way was sealed, and the shoggoth was trapped, far below.

Or so I pray! I call out to the Five-Sided Eye to make it so. Will it in time find its way through some unknown subterranean pathway to invade the upper world and wreak vengeance on us? It’s possible.

For it lives down there, still. I can occasionally feel its mind thrumming from the depths….

Those few of us who survive plan to return to the deepest trenches of the sea, to the dark, unfathomable places where warm sulfurous vents create a swarm of primal life for us to feed upon….

There we will root, and ponder, and strengthen, until the time has come at last to spore. Do not seek us there. We have learned to value our privacy—and we will fight for it.

One of the pink primates who viewed our history panels did indeed return to the ruined city—he returned a final time, long after he penned the account I perceive in his mind: his apologia for the invasion of our hibernation cavern, for the murder of my people. I confronted him—and we chose communication over violence.

I had long carried the telepathic translation device with me, in anticipation of this moment. The primate allowed me to apply it to his mind, to delve into his brain, use his language and manner of speaking for this communiqué, this account of myself—this warning:

Do not disturb our city again. The shoggoth lives. It may have learned how to reproduce—despite the inhibition we once placed in it against the process, when it was a prisoner. There may be more of them now.

Disturb them, probe where you are not wanted, and they will arise, and spawn, and spread. And you will suffer as we did.

I have seen that your primate race, descendents of those we created, are perhaps advanced enough now to have stored up a little wisdom. Thus I leave you this device, and its message to your higher selves. May the Five-Sided Eye guide you; may the Law of Five unfold for you.

May you understand when to leave well enough alone.

* * *

There, Dyer’s voice comes to a stop, the recording ends, and we end our transcription of it. As to Dyer, he died in obscurity, in a remote New England village. No other account by him of his final journey to the “Mountains of Madness” has been discovered….

This department can only recommend that the long-maintained suppression of public knowledge of the Antarctic ruins be continued indefinitely; that we take the Elder One’s advice.

And we remember these words by the philosopher Schopenhauer: “The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.”

Perhaps the final learning is this: leave some dark corners of the inexplicable … unexplained.

HOW THE GODS BARGAIN

WILLIAM BROWNING SPENCER

WHEN MARISSA AND I WERE FOURTEEN AND IN THE FRESHMAN class at Filmore High School, we fell under the spell of Harley James. The proximity of a genius can make one feel smarter, more alive, more aware of forces that abound beyond the shadows that most minds cast.

Harley was a junior at Filmore, and it seemed our extremely good fortune that he chose to mentor us, despite our youth and ignorance. At the end … well, it wasn’t the end, was it? That’s why I’m writing this.

Until recently, I hadn’t spent all that much time thinking about Harley. When he did come to mind it was his voice that I heard, disembodied and querulous, usually in the form of a rebuttal. An example: last winter I was watching a famous television evangelist expound on intelligent design, defending it with the usual arguments, including evolution’s inability to account for radical changes or the elaborate nature of such changes, and I could hear Harley’s nasal voice in all its lofty disdain: “Two or three hundred million years is way smarter than you! Time is bigger than your pitiful little bully of a god.”

After the show, I started remembering Harley-anecdotes, all of which were second-or third-hand reports, hall rumors. And the more outrageous these tales, the more apt they were to be true. Like the rumor that Harley had jumped up in class during a discussion of capitalism and shouted, “That’s not a symbiotic relationship, that’s a fucking parasite!” which got him suspended for three days, during which time everyone in school learned what “symbiotic” meant and someone slipped into the gym and painted THAT’S NOT A SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP, THAT’S MY GIRLFRIEND! on the wall.

Harley was Marissa’s friend before he was mine. Her parents lived right next to him, and for whatever reason—perhaps he spotted her beauty, her enthusiasm, her guileless nature—they hit it off. Harley lived in the only big house on Welch Street, and he lived there alone, virtually alone. There was a father, although I had never seen him, and Marissa had only seen him a couple of times. Marissa said the father was a handsome guy—“really good-looking, like he could have been a movie star”—with a thin mustache, and he wore baggy pants with lots of pockets and sleeveless white T-shirts. Harley said his name was Felix, and he worked for the CIA, which might have been true, because Harley never seemed to lie about anything.

He taught Marissa how to play chess. They would sit at the kitchen table in his house and play on a fading black-and-white chessboard with wood-carved pieces whose ravaged condition, Harley explained, was the work of a beagle named Monkey who, as a puppy, teethed on the chessmen.

So Harley taught Marissa chess, and Marissa taught me chess. Later Harley said that chess was for kids, and he taught Marissa the game of Go. Marissa never taught me Go, and if I hadn’t been clueless I might have given that more thought.

* * *

I’m getting away from where I need to begin. I need to begin with my thirty-sixth birthday, which came round last month.

On the day of my birthday, Dan and Ethel Miller and Swan showed up as I was closing the lab, and they insisted on taking me out on the town. I found the prospect daunting; I’d had a long day that ended with my firing two student interns for hopelessly fouling several promising trials, and I’d put myself in a bad mood in which it seemed to me that the entire world had turned its back on integrity and humility, required virtues if one wanted to do good work.

I told my colleagues that I was too weary for anything celebratory, birthday or no birthday, but they were persistent and rowdy, Dan Miller shouting, “Carpe beer!” as though he were already drunk.

Swan was his usual sketchy self, unshaven, wild-eyed, mumbling inaudibly (perhaps a mantra like kill-them-all kill-them-all kill-them-all). Swan was undoubtedly brilliant, and he always arrived for work in a suit and tie, but if you were asked to write his name under one of two columns derived from a Robert Louis Stevenson story, you’d write it under Mr. Hyde, not Dr. Jekyll.

Dan and Ethel, on the other hand, glow with rationality and a heartiness that you occasionally see in long-married progeny-free couples—they have already been married twenty years and neither of them can be much over forty—and they are well-liked by everyone. They are liked, I think, because they don’t inspire envy. No one would wish to be them. They have smooth, smiling faces and, in the asexual lab coats we all don in the morning, they are intelligent androgynous twins with the sex appeal of Silly Putty. They work and publish as a team and are often referred to as “the Millers.” I have also heard them referred to as “the Coneheads,” those happy aliens featured in old Saturday Night Live skits.

I see I have presented portraits of my colleagues that are not entirely flattering. I have a hard time describing anything in a thoroughly positive manner (salient details are, so often, unpleasant), so I should note that I am fond of all three of these people and fortunate to have them for friends.

And their insistence won me over. Even Swan, a man of few outwardly directed words, entreated me to come out. “The Millers said we were celebrating your birthday. If you don’t come, it will be just me and the Millers, who are always an embarrassment when they drink.”

“It’s true,” said Ethel. And she and her spouse laughed like happy Pekingese.

* * *

So I went—on the condition that we didn’t go to Woozy’s, which is a college bar catering to the young women of Legrasse University (Miskatonic University’s sister college). Legrasse was born out of: 1) the recognition that women made excellent scholars and research scientists, and 2) the fear of losing some of Miskatonic’s finest scholars if women were introduced into its monastic walls.

Woozy’s was also a big favorite with the male researchers at Enderson. The lab has a reputation for recruiting the brightest and paying them well, and aspiring young scientists from Legrasse are a little in awe of us. I have seen Lumpy Caldwell, slovenly and troll-like, surrounded by a rapt group of lovely young women, regaling them, no doubt, with exaggerated tales of his bioscience prowess while guzzling beer like Falstaff—a scene that speaks to the power of Enderson’s reputation and not to any charm, physical or intellectual, exuded by poor Lumpy, whose employment is a textbook example of nepotism, his father being The Dr. Elmer Caldwell.

It occurred to me that it would be easy enough to steal Enderson’s most coveted secrets. Drunkenness and the promise of sex would loosen the tongue of any male employee at Enderson. You’d have to be a dedicated spy, though, since you’d have to piece together a lot of disparate bits (i.e., you’d have to kiss a lot of toads).

But I’m digressing….

I wanted something less youthful, less desperately ambitious, than Woozy’s, so we settled on a bar just off Main. I wasn’t familiar with the place, but the Millers said it was “fun for all ages.” It turned out to be big and gaudy, featuring neon cowboy hats and boots and blinking stars. It did have a sizeable middle-aged crowd, which I found reassuring.

I intended to drink no more than three beers and then, having fulfilled my conviviality obligation, slip away, calling a taxi if need be. But I got a second wind after that third beer. There was a warm golden light suffusing the room we were in, and boisterous laughter mingled with jukebox-generated country music. I was thinking that life was good, and it seemed reasonable to try to sustain that ridiculous notion as long as possible.

Later in the evening, I was drunk. I haven’t been drunk many times in my life. I do not, generally, enjoy the absence of control that comes with inebriation, but this time I felt omnipotent. I solved several vexing problems in my head and realized that all the botched trials I’d been lamenting could simply be re-purposed around data that had not been corrupted.

My bladder began to ache. “I need to urinate,” I told my comrades. The Millers were clearly drunk, oddly entangled, their arms linked at the elbows, and drinking from each other’s mugs while bellowing something that was not the song on the jukebox, singing against the tide, as it were. Swan was talking to a woman who had sat down next to him. She wore a cowboy hat and a red-and-white shirt with white fringe. Her makeup was heavy enough to suggest a disguise.

I got up to pursue my quest, and I got lost. This place was bigger than I thought. There were lots of rooms and plenty of people to fill them up. I was trapped in one room where a couple of fat guys with ponytails were good-naturedly wrestling while a crowd stood around them. My bladder chose this moment to become hysterical, and I ran behind a silver counter and into what proved to be the kitchen. Several people with hairnets and white aprons screamed at me, but I raced on, banging through gray swinging doors and into a brick-lined corridor where I instantly spied a door labeled Gentlemen.

My bladder vented violently as I leaned over the urinal, which was an older model, not like the ones at Enderson’s which flushed discreetly when you backed away from them. When my bladder was satisfied, I flushed and zipped up. My peace of mind restored, I looked around me. This restroom was, I realized, for the employees. It wasn’t bright and shiny; there were old crates shoved up against one cinderblock wall, two urinals, a floor of cracked linoleum, two stalls—

Something was making lots of scratching sounds behind the door to one of the stalls. Claws whisked on a hard surface: scritch skitter, skitter scritch. There was another noise, something dragged, swishing along. My heart caught the panicky rhythm. I thought I recognized it. Jeez!

The linoleum was a mottled gray and darker gray embellished with dried brown mud and black tar from the last time the parking lot had seen a new coat of asphalt. I bent down for a closer look and saw the bright red marks: blood in the shape of small, clawed feet. The tracks swirled about before disappearing under the stall door. I guessed four, maybe five of the creatures.

I’ve seen a few rats. I work with them every day. I lift them up and hold them in my cupped hands, and I look them in their vacant little eyes, so why would I let the sight of this rat-spoor rob my legs of strength and knock me back against the urinal where, blindly fumbling for support, I released a new downpour of water and the harsh effluvia of disinfectant? I was scared sick. Recon rats! I thought.

I tore my gaze away from the stall door and fled. In the corridor I stumbled toward an exit and found myself outside in a small enclosed area. Through the chain-link fence, I could see the parking lot. Since I’d last been outside, a wind had arisen, aggressive and chill, winter on its way.

I sat down on the top concrete step and thrust my hands in my pockets. I needed to talk myself out of this … what … misapprehension? But in my mind I could see the flourish of all those tiny paw prints, documentation of some frenzied dance—and I could see the thicker, sinuous lines that suggested fat-bodied snakes, washed in more bright blood, writhing in ecstasy.

I stood up and leaned back to look at the sky, seeking some comfortable alignment of stars, but the lamps that blazed in this gated enclosure rendered the heavens in glaring gray and white, a mist that something malign might hide within.

The thought of returning to the corridor behind me didn’t appeal to me. I’d have to move past the restroom, and I didn’t know … I didn’t know if it knew me, if it was, perhaps, seeking me. Was I being paranoid? I didn’t think I could overestimate the danger, knowing what I knew.

It occurred to me that I could depart via the gate on my left, run to the front of the nightclub, and beseech a bouncer to go get my friends. But then I saw the padlock and chain. Of course: this fence guarded the dumpster from the depredations of the homeless—

The dumpster! More rats were on the dumpster, not overly large rats but deathly aware creatures, and they were connected by what Harley called umbilical cords, although, always precise, Harley admitted that the term was for convenience only and awaited some understanding of their function before a more accurate nomenclature could be applied.

I counted nine rats, sticking to the side of the dumpster like spiders, each of them connected to its fellows by long cables that no one would mistake for cables, segmented tubes that rippled with life. The rats sniffed the air and regarded me with fierce sentience, an intelligence too acute to be their own. Something eager and immense watched me through them, and the scientist within me sought—and not for the first time—some way of defining what manner of creature that might be, but, in fear and its consequent confusion, I retreated to some limbic memory that shouted, “Something evil!”

I stood up with care, never letting the creatures out of my sight. I slowly moved my right hand back, seeking the door’s handle. It didn’t move. I exerted more pressure. It still didn’t move, and my heart revved up as I imagined—or remembered—a slight click as the door had closed behind me.

I turned away from the altered rats and shook the handle, which served only to shake my body. I looked back over my shoulder. One of the rats … it was hideously cold now, an ancient cold that was disorienting … one of the rats moved down the dumpster’s side, its comrades closing around it, the cables that connected them shrinking to accommodate this new condition. More of them had crept over the edge of the dumpster, and there were a dozen, maybe more, teeth and glittering eyes sparkling in this V-shaped rat-platoon.

I did not think to scream, and, in retrospect, had I been in possession of all my faculties, I still would have refrained from screaming. Who would come? Who would come with sufficient speed?

Something boomed on my left, a rattle of metal, a rush of hot air. I jerked my head to the left and saw that the door to the kitchen had banged open and a stout man in an apron was silhouetted in light and steam. He wrestled a heavy trash can down the steps, nodded, scowled at me, and dragged the trash can toward the dumpster.

“Don’t—” I shouted. I turned again to point at the rats. They were gone.

The man emptied the trash can’s contents into the dumpster, turned, and said, “You cannot be here.”

“I got locked out,” I said.

“You cannot be locked out here!” he shouted, flapping his arms like some flightless bird’s ritual of aggression. I nodded, turned, and ran into the kitchen as he shouted after me.

* * *

When I woke up the next morning, I didn’t have a hangover, but I was not at the top of my game. I was halfway to the lab when I realized it was Saturday. I drove home, stared at the phone, went upstairs, and lay in bed but couldn’t sleep. Finally, I called Marissa.

The phone rang a couple of times before it switched to the answering machine. It occurred to me that I didn’t know what to say, and when the machine beeped, I still didn’t know what to say.

Marissa picked up then. “Jerry?”

I hadn’t talked to her in twenty years. “How’d you know it was me?” I asked.

“Caller ID.”

“Oh.”

“What do you want?” she asked. The chill was still there; I hadn’t been forgiven. Fair enough.

“I saw some of those rats. You know, Harley called them recon rats. He felt they were engineered to scope out the territory before … before the Big Event. Whatever he meant by that.”

“It figures. I knew something was happening. It’s back.”

“What’s back?”

“The General Store.”

“Elders?”

“Well, let’s see. How many general stores do we know that go away and come back?”

“I thought it was gone for good.”

Marissa was silent for so long I thought the connection had failed. “Hello?” I said.

She spoke then: “I guess I thought it would come back.”

On the drive out there, I had half an hour to think about the past. Marissa lives less than thirty miles from me, and we haven’t met, we haven’t spoken to each other for the last twenty years. We avoid each other because we share an obsession.

* * *

Harley James liked to go hiking, and he brought us along, his two acolytes. He was tireless, dragging us up and down mountains, through forests, into tick-infested fields and snarls of thorny vegetation. I remember how he lectured us while he waded in a muddy creek: “I’d be a naturalist if it wasn’t such a discouraging career, checking a box each time another species goes belly up, watching habitats disappear, watching humanity infest this world—yes, an infestation of busy, greedy, arrogant apes so completely out of touch with their natures that ‘animal,’ that vibrant word that describes a joyous bounty of extraordinary creatures, means, on humankind’s sour tongue, brutish!” His hand then plunged into the water and retrieved a crayfish that he displayed as though this squirming crustacean were the tangible proof of his words.

He had become more orotund in his rants, some part of which was self-parody, I’m sure. I told Marissa I suspected him of taking amphetamines. I suspected no such thing, but I hoped to dampen her hero worship with whatever reservations I could engender. And, of course, I didn’t make a dent in her adulation. She was falling in love (by which I mean she had already fallen in love, and I was slowly assimilating this new state with shock and dismay).

Symbiosis was one of Harley’s favorite subjects during the time we knew him. For him, the word meant something very specific. Generally, the biological definition defines symbiosis as an association existing between two very different organisms that may or may not benefit both individuals. Harley was only interested in relationships that were, in fact, mutually rewarding, “a bargain for both,” as he put it.

He had no use for the notion that lichen, because it consisted of a fungus and one of several green algae, was a symbiotic organism. “That’s like saying a man’s heart and his liver are engaged in symbiosis.” Indeed, when, in the course of one of our walks, he came upon pale blue lichen decorating a rock and very much resembling one of my grandmother’s doilies, he reviled it at length, as though he considered its existence some personal affront. I was prepared to rush him if he tried to scrape it off with his shoe, but we moved on, and he shifted into his yucca-moth rant, which always restored his spirits.

The yucca moth and its yucca plant were Harley’s heroes. The yucca moth very deliberately pollinates the yucca plant, no honeybee accident about it, so the yucca plants reproduce; they live on and their moths lay their eggs in them. I confess I grew sick of these hymns to the yucca moth.

Harley acted as if he’d discovered symbiosis and had the right to rail against those who applied it wantonly. He would shout: “And a burrowing owl that lives in a tunnel made by a gopher turtle. That’s symbiosis? Come on, that’s simple opportunism.”

I could go on, but why? I was no longer Harley’s doting disciple. When he graduated from Filmore, I assumed that the fall would find him in some elite university where he could surround himself with a new lot of admirers. I wished him well, and I wished him away from Marissa and me.

* * *

I missed the turn onto Griffith Lane and had to pull into the rest stop where a couple of forlorn picnic tables had sunk to their knees waiting for happy families, frolicking children, and Frisbee-chasing dogs. Let’s take our smartphones on a picnic! Maybe not. Forget picnics, Mom and Dad. Your kids have moved into the virtual. Wave goodbye. No, wait, text goodbye; they’ll never see you wave.

I rolled down the window and took some deep breaths. It was still cold, but bright, the sunlight meticulous in its illumination, every blade of grass, every leaf getting its goddamn due, while I was morose, sullen, afraid, and hopeful, a motley bunch of emotions that you’d think would shun one another’s company, but I know they were all there because I took the time to sort them out. Marissa tells me men aren’t very self-aware, and I think maybe we are, but not in a good way. I know I haven’t had much luck with self-awareness.

I turned around and found Griffith Lane and followed the winding road to Marissa’s little faux farmhouse on the edge of the forest and thought—I swear, for the first time—that she had moved into this house to wait for Harley. I hated not being able to tell her that Harley was gone for good. But I couldn’t tell her without telling her how I came by that knowledge, and there’s no way she would have been happy with the truth.

Marissa came out on the porch. She was wearing a backpack, and she held another by one of its straps. That would be mine. I got out of the car and walked up to her, and we both were uncomfortable in a dozen ways, and I said, “You’re looking well,” and she frowned. She was looking better than well. She had been a cute teenager in an all-American way: dark curls stirred by the breeze, brown eyes catching the light of any sun or candle or stadium light. Now—I hadn’t seen her in years—she looked amazing.

We hugged—or rather I hugged her and she endured it. Neither of us knew how to act; we were chaperoned by our miserable pasts.

“Are we going to trek into the forest—” I began, but then I realized there was a more pressing question. “How do you know the store is back?”

“I saw it last night,” she said. She paused, not wishing, I suppose, to diminish the truth of this statement, then added, “In a dream.”

“Okay.”

I didn’t doubt that it was out there. If the recon rats were back, so were their masters. Their spaceship or whatever the hell it was would be resting in the middle of the forest, looking like … well, not a house made out of candy … an old-fashioned general store. That’s right: Elders General Store, a sort of run-down, silvery structure that would have been unremarkable in an earlier America, say 1930. On closer inspection, Harley had noted that the wood had been replaced by quartz and other more exotic materials. “It’s petrified wood … sort of,” he said. “That would require an absence of oxygen and maybe fifty million years, much longer I think.” And when we had entered the store, which was so much bigger on the inside, limitless, perhaps, Harley had said, “Hundreds of millions of years.”

* * *

When Harley graduated from Filmore, he didn’t go on to college. Marissa, who I hadn’t seen much that summer, told me he was still in town.

“I thought he was going to college,” I said. We were sitting in the cafeteria, three days into a new school year, and I was already sick of the months of boredom that lay before me. The hopeless smell of overcooked food, as unforgettable as torture, did battle with the hormonal noise of my fellow scholars.

“Harley said there was no way he was going to spend the next six or seven years defending his mind from the depredations of tired dogma and academic senescence,” Marissa said. She had acquired the irritating habit of tossing Harley-phrases into her conversation, even reproducing the snooty inflections that indicated disdain for the vast, benighted bourgeoisie. “Harley says that if you look at the progress of science in nineteenth-century Britain, it’s the people who didn’t go to school who did all the heavy lifting, all the innovative thinking.”

I didn’t think that was true, but I didn’t say anything. I wanted to get away from Harley-pronouncements, from all things Harley, actually.

But Marissa kept on about Harley. Apparently she and Harley had done lots of hiking and exploring that summer, and no one had thought to ask me along. I pointed that out, and Marissa said, “Harley says you don’t like him.”

I didn’t like him, so what was I going to say? I just sulked some, which is every young male’s strategy in the face of unrequited love.

* * *

That, and I stalked her, although not in a creepy way. I had a used car (a 1985 Dodge Aries purchased from an aunt who no longer drove). My parents bought it for me when I made all As, and I happened to be driving by Marissa’s house when I saw her come out of Harley’s house. Where are your parents, Marissa? I thought, with the righteousness of the unloved.

Harley followed her out, and they tossed backpacks and other stuff into the back of his car (a new Jeep because, I guess, the CIA paid better than my dad’s job, which was selling stuff to restaurants). Without much ado they drove away.

I followed them. I stayed way back, and Marissa didn’t even know I had a car, much less what kind of car, and when they turned off on this little winding road called Barker, I slowed down, pulled over at a farm gate, and sat there for a while. I knew where they were going. They would park beside the old barbed-wire fence, carefully insinuate themselves through its rusty strands, pay no attention to the No Trespassing signs, run across the meadow, and enter the forest. This was Old Man Turnip’s land, and he was still alive then, and sometimes he would chase kids off his land with unintelligible shouts, firing his shotgun in the air and generally filling a folktale niche in the history of any country-born boy.

I waited for about twenty minutes, and then I continued on up Barker and passed Harley’s Jeep about where I expected to find it. And that was all the tailing I did that day. Overzealousness is, I suspect, often a stalker’s undoing.

The next day was a school day, so I cut class. I wasn’t worried about my folks getting a call from school. I was a model student, never missed a day, so everyone would assume I had a good reason for not showing up.

I figured Marissa would be at school, and I wanted to see what I could find in the forest without accidentally running into her or Harley James.

I guess.

I didn’t have a plan. I desperately needed a plan, but I didn’t have one. I just wanted to be doing something. I wanted to save Marissa from the malign influence of Harley James, whose interest in her was not—I was sure of this—remotely intellectual.

I followed their trail, which was marked according to Harley’s ingenious system that utilized nature’s variety to encode a series of instructions far more precise and less destructive than anything achieved by stripping tree trunks of their bark. I was one of the three people who knew these codes, and as their language came back to me, I felt sadly abandoned.

I had brought a sleeping bag and other supplies in case I would have to spend the night. Harley was an intrepid explorer, and, to my credit I think, I was willing to endure some hardship myself. I might not have had a plan, but I was prepared to suffer for the sake of love. That’s what redeems teenagers. Passion trumps stupidity.

It was getting dark, and I told myself I needed to stop and establish camp, but I pushed on, ignoring my good advice. I spied an arrangement of rocks that was not random and approached it, reaching for the flashlight on my belt. Before I could decipher the rocks’ message, my feet leapt out from under me and I found myself upside down, a human pendulum describing ever shorter arcs.

We learn in school that the eye, that marvelous machine, presents an upside-down image that our brain is required to flip upright and does, reflexively and effortlessly. This is always presented as a wondrous accomplishment, but I would be more impressed if this same brain could refrain from that flipping when we find ourselves upside down, since, at such a time, the upside-down image would be just the ticket.

In any event, I recognized the sneakers right away, and then there was a light blinding me, and a voice: “Jerry!”

Harley leaned his face in, illuminating his features by holding the flashlight under his chin. “It’s just me,” he said. “Sorry.”

He got me out of the trap quickly. I waited while he reset the trap, and then we headed back to his campsite.

“No offense, but that was a disappointment,” he said. “Like stringing a line for catfish and getting a snapping turtle.”

I didn’t much like being compared to a snapping turtle (an ugly and belligerent species), but I was feeling too sheepish for a rebuttal, and that’s when Marissa popped her head out of Harley’s tent and smiled shamelessly.

“Excuse me,” Harley said, and he went into the tent with Marissa. I assumed they were discussing me, so I just sat there steaming. In truth, there had been no betrayal. I had never kissed Marissa, never said I loved her.

They took me to see the store that night. “It’s not far … if you’re up for it,” Harley said.

“Sure.”

I didn’t really want to see whatever it was that had them so enraptured. I should have turned and walked away. That was my first impulse, and I should have obeyed it.

* * *

Now Marissa and I stood on her front porch. It’s hard to contemplate millions of years and imagine anything that feels like the truth, but contemplating twenty years isn’t that easy either. It wasn’t that anything much had happened. I’d gone to college, grad school, had a couple of really bad jobs. The jobs frightened me, and I went back to the university, acquired more credits, and contemplated the academic life; then I wound up back at my parents’ after an unfortunate affair with a lap dancer named Dawn—anyone can make a mistake, especially the sexually sheltered—and while I was home my parents said I should apply at Enderson Labs, and, to appease them, I did and was shocked when they hired me.

Marissa had moved away for a few years, but when her mother died of cancer she moved back to look after her father, who had always been a sad man in an ill-fitting suit. He called me “Harry” and seemed to get most of life’s details wrong, maybe lacking the stamina for recalling names and faces and facts. He had inherited a good deal of money, and, too apathetic to spend it, he was still rich on the day he died. He killed himself with an automatic pistol he’d bought at a gun show. He shot himself in the stomach, in the leg (probably an accident, the coroner noted), and finally through the heart. I wasn’t in town for the funeral, but I was surprised when I moved back in with my folks to find that Marissa had bought a small farmhouse out on Griffith Lane.

* * *

Here we were.

“Maybe we should leave it alone,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

I thought that was obvious. “To avoid being killed,” I said. “That’s what comes to mind first.”

Marissa glared at me, and I thought I saw Harley’s disdain in her eyes. “I thought you were a scientist. Isn’t curiosity sacred? Don’t you want to know what happened?”

“We’ll never know what happened.” I think I raised my voice; I was exasperated, but that’s no excuse. Marissa seemed to think that the world was a tidy place. She’d missed quantum physics or something. Hell, she’d missed television and the Internet. “Even your boy genius Harley was stumped.”

“He would never have stopped seeking the truth!” Marissa said. “Oh!” I was getting really worked up—I supposed guilt had something to do with that—and knew I would say something hurtful. “What good is the truth if you’re dead? If you fling yourself into the abyss you won’t come back whole. Would you seek the truth if you knew your mind couldn’t contain it; if you knew it would shatter all the convenient objects of your reality as though they were china; if you knew knowing would bring madness?”

I realized in that instant that Harley understood this—that I was one of his disciples. It was another one of his symbiosis-inspired rants. Like all his rants, it came out of nowhere, a long non sequitur (because Harley’s conversation was almost entirely internal—and divisive). He’d been speaking of ants he called amazon ants (I can’t remember the genus, but they weren’t uncommon; there were species in Europe, in America).

Harley said, “So these ants enslave other ants, in this case ants of the genus Formica. The amazon ants go into the nests of the Formica, kill any ant that opposes them, and steal the cocoon-encased pupae. The amazon ants are great warriors with large mandibles. But these warrior ants have no other castes. The amazon ant is essentially helpless without its slaves; it can hardly feed itself, much less attend to the complex needs of the colony. All it can do is enslave other ants, but what does that anthropomorphic verb ‘enslave’ mean to the ants it captures? Nothing. Business as usual. You now have a Formica colony that nurtures some ants with long, killing mandibles. That’s it. And the Formica will seek out other colonies of Formica and lead the amazon ants to that nest. So are these Formica evil collaborators? Of course not. This is all just ant-life in the ant-world. Where did these amazon ants come from in the first place, these helpless warrior ants? You’ve got me.”

Harley hesitated. It was a rare thing to see him confused, but there it was. “It’s as though nature, whatever you want to call it, cannot avoid going down these paths; it doesn’t, in fact, resolve into simplicity. Nature perseverates. It’s neurotic, insane really …”

He didn’t finish the sentence. It was the first time I can remember Harley being at a loss for words, and (I confess) I was pleased.

* * *

I had no idea how or what I felt as we drove up Barker. I was worn out and resigned to whatever bad thing happened. An apathy born of defeat: the closest I’ve ever come to a Zen state. Small talk was in order: “Does this property still belong to the Turnips?”

“It never belonged to the Turnips,” Marissa said. “That was kidspeak. It belonged to the Turners, and as far as I know it still belongs to them. They are probably sitting on it until the rich real-estate developers come along, which is a ways off.”

“Way beyond the horizon,” I agreed.

We chatted as we had always chatted, and I enjoyed this strange displacement in time. The mood changed when Marissa parked the car—not, it seemed to me, where we used to park it. We got our gear and crossed over the dying meadow and into a forest guarded by evergreens that opened into the first scatterings of fall color: yellows and browns and reds, curled leaves that crackled under our feet.

By the time we got to the store, it was dark, and I sensed it before I saw it, and I was afraid and assaulted by images from twenty years ago and time hadn’t improved the vibe.

“We’ll go in,” Marissa whispered in my ear, and the words hummed as though read in a ritual.

“Yes,” I said.

Although it looked like wood, it was cold and hard as stone, silver-blue and luminous. The door was halfway open (as always: it could not be opened or closed, it couldn’t be budged), and we slipped inside to where the blue light was brighter and the weirdness weirder. I could hear Harley’s whispered voice: “Everything has been replaced: some exotic substances, although common quartz seems to predominate.”

I stood in the center and turned slowly in a circle, as I had the first time I came here, as anyone would. Everything had leapt up and pressed itself into the walls: an old oil stove, counter-tops, signs advertising soap and elixirs for health, cans of beans and carrots, a bag of potatoes that had burst open and set its contents free so they now resembled the backs of great bloated beetles burrowing into the plaster, a tall, ornate cash register from which coins tumbled, each stuck to another. Whatever had pasted everything to the walls had also robbed everything of color—the jelly beans were either white, black, or gray—and it was this absence of color that had made the man stuck to the wall seem—surely—a manikin. But where the flesh flared raggedly on the left side of his jaw, the teeth and dusty-black tongue were difficult to explain, as was the single skeletal foot (the other encased in an elaborately decorated boot). “He was,” Harley had whispered, “no doubt the proprietor until … well, perhaps he still is. Maybe he’s old man ELDERS like it says on the sign outside. Retired. Under new management.”

“Same as ever,” I said, wishing to sound at ease but discovering a voice that was thin and lacking in conviction.

Marissa must have heard it. “Let’s get on with it,” she said.

I hastened to follow her as she crossed the room and slipped through another half-opened door. We walked down a flight of wooden steps (real wooden steps) and entered what was an underground storeroom that had succumbed to the usual laws of entropy. This room existed in a sort of eternal twilight, and I could never ascertain where this light came from, but, surrounded by bigger mysteries, I was content to let that one lie. This is where I first encountered what Harley called recon rats. “I think their masters send these out to look around. But these masters don’t have much love for their servants. They are ill-used. When they come under any light, you’ll notice they are red. Their little metabolisms have been pushed to the max, and they are sweating blood.”

Across the room, Marissa opened another door. I raced after her, descended stone steps, and encountered, as though for the first time, the hall of the warlords.

That is what Harley called the place; he found it, he gets to name it.

But naming it doesn’t describe it. I don’t know how these giant, grisly murals and carvings were created, although I think they might have been created in some malleable material and later subjected to the process that turned the store to stone.

* * *

I have never traveled the miles of this underground labyrinth, and I don’t intend to, and not because the undertaking would be too physically arduous. No, what I fear is eventually understanding this catalogue of what must be eons of war. There isn’t any single artist, or any single species. It’s nondiscriminatory interspecies carnage.

As a teenager, seeing all the images, feeling the outrage that younger generations bestow upon the previous generation, I despised the very impulse that generated life. What I saw—and what I was still seeing twenty years later—was one generation of monsters recounting its triumphs only to be overwritten—no, defiantly written beside— the next race of extraterrestrial barbarians. This was the universe’s graffiti wall where the boasts and venom of cosmic gangs could share a moment of art.

Every kind of monster, every atrocity, every dark, festering need is depicted on these walls. To see it is to despair.

* * *

Marissa called my name, and I saw her further down the hall. I started walking toward her and hesitated when I thought I saw a shadow behind her.

“Jerry,” she said. “He came back.”

It was, in fact, Harley, or the image of him. He seemed immediately at her side.

“My old friend, Jerry,” he said.

“What are you?” I asked.

“And why would you ask that? Don’t you believe your own eyes?”

“You aren’t Harley.”

Harley turned toward Marissa, lifted a hand to her cheek, and said, “Jerry thinks I’m dead. He thinks that because he remembers killing me. But he didn’t kill me; he only wanted to.” Harley looked at me. “How did you kill me, Jerry?”

I couldn’t speak.

“With a rock hammer, my Estwing Supreme rock hammer, in fact. Couldn’t even bring your own murder weapon. And why? Because Marissa loved me, not you.”

“No.”

“The Elder Gods still live here, although this here isn’t in a forest on Old Man Turnip’s land. They are not gods, of course, but they might as well be. They are, however, more complicated than earth-made gods. They are in alliance with us because—and this is true symbiosis as I never understood it—they want our defiance, our hatred, and then they make us love them!”

Harley threw his arms around Marissa, who returned the embrace silently and looked past him to me with an expression beyond my dark-hearted understanding. And there was a noise, like the unfurling of a huge sail in violent weather, and something like vast black wings rose up behind them, and they disappeared in a rush of darkness that rolled out and toward me too fast for me to flee.

And it was gone. I was in a clearing in the forest, and I pushed myself to my knees and rose up and thought, It’s gone for good.

And I have thought about it and thought about it and haven’t grown any wiser. I still go to my job, and it is no better or worse than it ever was.

And at night when I am trying to sleep, it is not a cosmic question that troubles me. It is what I saw in Marissa’s eyes. Sometimes I think it was simple fear. More often I think it was pride. But most of the time I think it was pity.

A MOUNTAIN WALKED

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

EXCERPTS FROM THE FIELD JOURNAL OF ARTHUR LAKES DURING His Explorations for Saurians and Fossil Remains in the Wyoming Territory (June 1879):

May 25th: I spent the morning in sketching bones in [Quarry] No. 3 and the locality of the Ichthyosaurus quarry. Being alone in the tent I had the usual company of the spermophiles. In the evening I walked along RR track to meet men returning in the handcar. Stationmaster Carlin [William Edward] had shot an elk and they were bringing back the hams. Following supper, the tale of the hunt was recounted which set [William Hallow] Reed to the cheerful spinning of many yarns of their hunting misadventures.

May 27th: Reed discovered portion of saurian jaw poßeßed of herbivorous teeth in it at Quarry No. 3. So we went up on the handcar to see it. Was about six inches of jaw, but rather weathered and portions of skull in exceedingly friable condition attached. Saw couple of deer and fawn near the quarry. Most of the day spent shovelling out dirt.

Had elk meat for our supper which was tender and nice. We fashioned a cabinet for geological specimens from dry goods box. Caught axolotl [tiger salamander, Ambystoma mexicanum] in water tank. Reed related story of how he once found a broken fiddle in the old deserted camp of some party in North Park. Broken, the fiddle, but of expert craftsmanship. Also found blankets. Campers supposed, then, to have been wealthy people, likely of a sudden run down by Indians and forced either to beat a hasty retreat, else were maßacred and never heard of thereafter. He also told of finding skeleton of a man and also his gun in a fißure. He believed the man must have frozen to death.

May 28th: Paßed morning sketching bluffs fr. north shore of the lake [Como]. Great clouds of cliff swallows whirling darting about on ledges or rock forming the bank of the lake or resting basking on sand near to the water. Strata to north belong to same geological horizons and groups as those forming bluffs at the station, viz. Juraßic & Cretaceous.

Reed returned from Quarry No. 3 with report of find of a very large humerus bone. Men discovered enormous claw of carnivorous Dinosaur much curved, sharp and long. Walked out by shore of lake near to sunset and saw muskrat cavorting in the rushes. Couple of ducks flew close in under the bank unconscious of my presence, the female quacking lustily. Could have dropped a stone on them! A wild scene with flaming glare of the sunset so distant and solitary on the desolate Wyoming prairie. As we turned to head back to camp, a most peculiar booming was heard sounding acroß the lake followed by complete silence. Gave us a right start. Reed speculates may be meteorological phenomenon as yet unknown though it sounded to me nothing like thunder. We did not speak of it to the others.

May 29th: Went to Quarry No. 3 in company of Reed. Uncovered respectable portions of two fused vertebrae [Allosaurus sacral] lying beneath humerus. While digging, Reed had misfortune to tap into a small spring which at once flooded part of the diggings. Water foul and oily, owing poßibly to mineral composition of enclosing strata. A most noisome odor as if from decaying vegetation and it is hoped we shall not be forced to abandon quarry on its account. Reed also found three small and somewhat constricted vertebrae roughly one yard from humerus. In the evening arranged Reed’s cabinet of foßils.

May 30th: Spent in shovelling earth at No. 3. All signs of flood have drained away, leaving only hole from which it sprung and which I filled in post haste lest we have a repeat of that deluge. Odd sunset.

May 31st: Spotted antelope herd as we made our way back to camp. Reed the hunter started in pursuit whilst I continued on to the quarry. Soon I heard the report of his rifle, and looking up saw him lying on the prairie firing shot after shot. But not at the herd which had vanished. Puff after puff of white smoke came from his rifle’s barrel, and I could see nothing of his target. I saw dust rise where the bullets struck ground. After twenty shots he remained for a bit lying there in the graß.

On the way home on the handcar asked Reed what had become of the antelope and what he might have been shooting at in their stead. But he was uncharacteristically taciturn and refused to speak on the subject. Minutes later though he did point out to me a distinct trail several feet wide and a half mile long which he said was made by jackrabbits. I saw no sign of their feet but the graß grew up in a defined line as distinct from the prairie turf.

June 1st: In tent read to Reed from Vestiges of Creation. He has spoken little since yesterday and starts at smallest of sounds. Have not asked again about the antelopes.

June 2nd: Hired another man. Watched coyote creeping along through sage until Reed shot it. Later found small saurian bones 500 yds. west of No. 3. They were small vertebrae hollow but filled with carbonate of lime. Also curved sabre tooth about one inch in length from a carnivorous Dinosaur. In the afternoon I sketched our camp. The last discovery Reed calls Quarry No. 6. He is not so anxious as on yesterday—to my relief.

June 4th: Profeßor [Othniel Charles] Marsh whom we had been expecting arrived and breakfasted with hands at sectionhouse. Quickly made himself to home with all the men. After breakfast we set forth on the handcar, a large party of us, the “rubbed car” being attached to it for Marsh and my benefit. A lovely morning & Profeßor Marsh much amused by innumerable spermophiles, hares, and rabbits leaping from RR track as we did speed along. Stopped first at Quarry No. 3 only to find worse flooding from Reed’s spring, as if I had not filled in the source! A great disappoint all round, and the odour was many times worse it seemed than previously. Profeßor Marsh dismayed and visibly angered that ilium and caudals of carnivorous dinosaur lost, even after I explained all were too rotten for excavation. In addition to iridescent oily sheen on water’s surface witneßed a yellow form about the periphery of the submerged quarry.

Thence we proceeded to our latest discovery No. 6, in hopes of lifting Profeßor Marsh’s spirits somewhat. After close and careful examination of bones Profeßor M. devolved many of them to destruction as much too imperfect or rotten for preservation and lest Cope’s men come upon them and conclude otherwise. But bones we had taken to be those of a crocodile with scutes of armour deeply pitted proved just so. Profeßor M. thinks one bone to be that of a pterodactyl, a small half-inch jaw to belong to early mammal. The loose teeth were also those of a crocodile of a species long vanished from the globe.

From there again by handcar to Quarry No. 4, which is situated on the slope of a deep ravine washed out by Rock Creek, some four or five miles east of Como. Quarry has been well worked by Reed previous to my arrival at Como. Many large bones plainly were visible. Near this quarry Profeßor Marsh found exceedingly unusual Indian stone fetish or lithic artefact which could be, at a casual glance, taken for the effigy of some winged demon as from the illustrations of Gustave Doré. Reed straightaway grew troubled again and advised the Profeßor to leave it be, as its removal could anger Sioux or Cheyenne with whom we have had no trouble heretofore. But Profeßor Marsh insisted the piece would be a valuable addition to the Peabody collection back in New Haven and all Reed’s effort could not dißuade him. Profeßor M. carried the artefact away in his coat pocket. Also found a foßil snail or helix in concretion between quarry and overlying Dakota sandstone (Cretaceous).

From a nearby ravine a doe elk suddenly sprang from the bushes and dashed up to the top of the ravine. Reed who happened to be on ahead did not see it at first till the Profeßor shouted at him. Hearing us he wheeled round and fired directly. Beast struck him near the hip but wound insufficient to stop him, and Reed got off another shot but without succeß. The elk was lost to sight over the ridge. Reed followed and tracked him [sic] for an hour by drips of blood which later he insisted were “not right,” being of a darker hue than proper for any elk and stinking of sulphur. Profeßor Marsh suggests doe may have drunk from befouled pool at No. 6 [sic], resulting in contamination of its fluids, but this rational explanation did little if anything to soothe Reed’s nerves. Again, he implored Profeßor M. to leave behind the artefact and again without result, except to set him in an ill humour. He wondered aloud at having employed a superstitious collector given to fear of Indian relics, and this did nothing to settle Reed.

Turning his attention back to the quarry, Profeßor Marsh determined the bones there—a sacrum—to belong to a great sauropod. We returned to the handcar for lunch. Railroad hands and our party made quite a fine picnic arranged around the viands which were spread out upon the rubber car. Afterwards, went to Quarry No. 1 and prospecting on our stomachs or on hands and knees all hunted for small bones in a microscopic manner and were well rewarded finding what Marsh thought might be toe bone of either pterodactyl or bird. Still this did not improve Reed’s disposition I am sad to say.

After supper, Profeßor M. regaled us with stories of his exploits searching for Tertiary bones near to Fort Bridger. Reed, however, did remain in the tent.

June 5th: Profeßor M. has resolved to stay on another day with us. Immediately upon finishing breakfast we started for the lake and when we had arrived he brought to our attention the small crustaceans [amphipods] to be found amongst the waterweed which grows in such profusion on the lakebed. We stopped at the old quarry situated on the lake’s north shore, and Marsh was much interested in the medium-sized sacrum we have exposed there. He believes it belongs to the Allosauridae, and he wishes to see this quarry expanded further in hopes of additional discoveries of a similar merit. From the lake we walked the RR tracks west to the bridge acroß Rock Creek where desperadoes had last August purposed wrecking the train by the removal of a rail (along with its spikes).

Our party croßed excellent outcroppings of tawny and yellow strata of the Cretaceous and Juraßic group as we climbed down into the selfsame hollow where those desperadoes encamped, and I remarked it was certainly a spot well adapted to their ends. In the shade of the identical cottonwoods that sheltered the thwarted bandits, we sat—Marsh, Reed, [Edward G.] Ashley, and I. As mourning doves, which had nested above, flew about to and fro, I managed a quick sketch of the pastoral scene. We lunched below the trees, and discußion soon turned from the brigand gang’s plot to wreck the Union Pacific Westbound Expreß No. 3 to the jaw of a little mammal (Dryolestes) Reed had found at the base of a nearby cliff, about which Profeßor M. is very excited. Soon though Reed steered the conversation back to the matter of the Indian artefact found the previous day at Quarry No. 4. He remains most unaccountably agitated on the subject and insists we are inviting calamity of one sort or another by not returning it.

Unexpectedly he spoke also, but briefly, of that queer episode with the antelope on the last day of May yet refused to provide any details, saying only that there are many perils of the prairie we do not understand and would be wise not to be so reckleß. Profeßor M. listened and asked him what he believed he was shooting at that day but Reed grew tight-lipped and wouldn’t say. Now here is a respected man, a seasoned hunter and guide and RR employee, former infantryman in the Union Army, and always have I held him in high esteem, certainly not regarding him as the sort given to the wild and frankly credulous attitude he seems to have adopted in the past few days. It was he and the stationmaster who first alerted Marsh to the presence of giant saurian bones at Como. It was impoßible not to detect an apprehensive look in the Profeßor’s eyes. In any case it is clear he will do no such thing as part with the curious relic, which I will admit is not a pleasant object to look upon as is the case with many of the redskin’s fetishes, but hardly is it either cause for such behaviour as Reed’s.

We visited a couple of other promising outcrops, one of which turned up a jaw with diminutive crenated teeth reminiscent of the Iguanodon.

After our supper Ashley drew our attention to an unusual halo about the moon (three nights past full) which shone almost red as blood and which greatly piqued Profeßor M.’s curiosity who suggested it might portend a coming dust storm. Reed would not look upon or speak of it.

June 6th: I am pleased to report Marsh has decided to remain with us a few days more before returning to the eastern states. We returned to the new discovery which is probably of a Laosaurus. Three fir trees grow in an isolated clump near to the site and so we have christened the spot “Three Trees Quarry.” The wind was blowing hard—seeming to confirm the Profeßor’s suspicions—and with every blow of the pick the gusts blinded up with dust and grit. But we managed to unearth a fine femur and some other bones before returning to camp. Reed’s demeanour is beginning to gnaw at my nerves and I daresay those of all of us.

June 7th: Weather windy as yesterday. It blew so hard and the dust was so intolerable we were forced to make a short day of it, much to Profeßor M.’s disappointment. Men washed their clothes back at camp. News has come to us of a great strike and attendant excitement at the North Park Mines and Reed has spoken of travelling there rather than staying on with us, talk which rightfully has angered Marsh.

June 9th: Reed’s thirty-first birthday. I did a small coloured sketch of the lake and its surrounding painted bluffs to place above his cabinet of foßils back in Nebraska honouring his finds, the hardships he has faced, and his diligence. I will be the first to say Bill Reed is as fine an instance of the fact that education is hardly confined to those who have attended university but much is learnt by sharp wits put to the service of keen observation.

Which makes all the odder his continuing insistence that Marsh’s artefact from Quarry No. 4 poses some unspoken threat to our party. He has actually gone as far as offering to purchase it that it might be returned by his hand to the spot where it was discovered. He talks increasingly in riddles that I find unsettling and Profeßor M. is adopting a decidedly belligerent attitude toward him for which I cannot fault our employer.

We returned to the diggings containing the curious little Laosaurus dinosaur. Its bones are hollow, and its appearance in life must have been akin to a kangaroo though with a disproportionately small and lizard-like skull. Its claws measure a good inch, and Marsh thinks it to have been ten feet in length.

Our labours were once more very unpleasant, as the gale of wind was blowing, blowing dust in blinding clouds as quickly as we exposed the bones. It lifted airborne also particles of dry clay besides our papers, books, and packing materials, all being constantly spirited away so that we wasted much time in chasing them about the sandstone bluffs. Notwithstanding we stubbornly persisted tooth and nail and were rewarded by exposing a lot of bones. I sketched the bones in situ, but only with great difficulty, the wind nearly ripping my [sketch]book from my hands and constantly blinding me with dust. Left early for camp, finally having had enough. Reed worked hard but muttered inceßantly about both North Park and the artefact and the storm’s being a portent of some sort. I fear for his sanity, and perhaps it would be best if he moved on.

June 10th: Despite continuing dust storm, returned to Three Trees and found more bones. Reed returned to camp in advance of the rest of us. When I suggested he might attempt to steal the Profeßor’s artefact, Marsh took it from his pocket, aßuring me that was quite unlikely.

We all returned to camp about noon as heavy clouds loomed up over the south. The clouds loosed hailstones the size of bantam eggs, and yet through it all the dust blew. The heavy clouds rang with thunder and there were constant flashes of lightning in the sky, but no rain. The thunder and rushy noise of the hail brought with them an even greater sense of deep solitude than we have become accustomed to. I found Reed in the tent quite near tears, and he received a smart upbraiding from Profeßor M. They argued after I removed myself to the shelter of one of the wagons.

At sunset the storm at last abated taking with it the dust (finally!). Before supper I killed a large jackrabbit with a stone but it was stunted and somehow disquieting to look upon. I wisely did not allow Reed to see it, as its eyes had the same oily sheen as the water flooding the now abandoned No. 3. I did not dreß it, for we immediately judged it unfit for eating. Even with this grim event, I was greatly relieved at the storm’s departure and a peaceful night free of the howling wind.

June 11th: An extraordinary and uncanny occurrence was last evening visited upon the camp—seeming to bear out in the worst poßible ways Reed’s anxieties—and has left the party in a state of disarray. Profeßor M. has departed for Como station and vowed never to speak on this matter. Also asked the same of us, and I am certain he would not be pleased were he to learn I am setting the event down, though I do so only for the purposes of my own memory. What was witneßed, for all its horror, I cannot wish to forget as it hints at a world even more distant and ultimately impervious to our understanding than the bygone ages and their fauna hinted at by our diggings.

As the weather grew leß inclement, we departed in the early morning at half past five o’clock for the Laosaurus site. Reed did not accompany us, complaining of a headache and begging off. But Marsh and Ashley and I paßed the morning excavating and were rewarded with an ilium and most of the beast’s tail. The sun was bright and the sky clear without any clouds in view. After our lunch however there came a clamour from the direction of the lake almost identical to that cacophony heard at Como by Reed and me on the afternoon of the 27th. We had only just returned to work removing a layer of hard clay we hoped would reveal additional bones of the Dinosaur, when the booming cry split the air and I would say almost seemed to rend it apart. We all stopped our work and sat stock still, listening should the sound recur. I will confeß there were goose bumps on my arms and the small hairs upon the nape of my neck had stood up at the booming. Marsh stared easterly, the direction from which the sound had seemed to emanate and Ashley sat staring at his boots. After some minutes Marsh turned toward me and he was clearly unsettled. He asked if I knew the source of the booming, and at once I told him I did not but reported we had heard it on the one other occasion. He sat rubbing his beard muttering to himself for several minutes before we got back to work—though we no longer were poßeßed of our former enthusiasm and returned to camp quite early, having exposed no more bones of the Iguanodon-like creature.

In camp we found Reed engaged in an argument with Carlin and the cook. The latter we learned had been plucking several sage hens [Centrocercus urophasianus] for our supper, fine cock birds. I have mentioned already that some in the camp are not fond of the fowl partly from prejudice and partly on account of its strong sage-like flavor. However Reed was all in a rage not over those early objections but was raving all the while swinging one of the partially plucked birds about by its broken neck. It was a sight. All the while—though Carlin tried his best to calm him—Reed shouted that all the game hereabouts has become poisonous and how we must confine our meals only to dry goods and canned foodstuffs. As we joined Carlin in attempting to urge Reed to simmer down the head of the sage hen parted company with its body and the corpse went sailing away into one of the tents. I saw then that indeed the bird’s blood was afflicted with the same unwholesome sheen I’d noticed in the eyes of the jackrabbit. Straightaway we agreed with Reed and this at last eased his distreß to a degree, though not entirely. Profeßor M. instructed the cook to dispose of the sage hens and to bury them well away from camp. Reed disappeared and spent the next hour or so alone in his tent while Carlin, Ashley, Marsh, and I mulled over the poßible source of the contamination, at last agreeing it must originate from some mineral impregnating the local water table, first witneßed when Reed struck the spring that flooded Quarry No. 3 more than two weeks ago now. It was resolved that we must unfortunately—as Reed had advised—cease relying on the plentiful elk, black-tailed deer, grouse, &c. and send a man post haste to Medicine Bow for extra supplies. Here it was that Marsh announced his plans to leave us the next day, and I can hardly say I was surprised.

I spoke of the events which followed sunset as extraordinary and uncanny, but it would be more truthful to refer to them as inexplicable as I cannot imagine science shall ever discover an explanation for them.

After sunset and our supper we were sitting about the fire having a second cup of coffee. We did not resign ourselves to the disagreeable prospect of a dry meal, in spite of our misgivings about the water though perhaps we should have. No one detected any unusual flavour. Reed had joined us, but sat a little ways apart with his rifle acroß his knee as the rest of us talked (he had refused the coffee). Our conversation was largely of the Profeßor’s imminent return to the East, but also on the Laosaurus as well as the prospects of finding more remains of primitive mammals. Also talk of cavalry movements and Indian troubles. It should be said Profeßor M. has a great sympathy for the natives regardleß of the dangers they have posed to his collectors.

Our second pot of coffee finished, Ashley retired to bed. Carlin produced his Jew’s harp which has so often provided us with a small measure of entertainment and he played a number of tunes as the silence of night stole over the camp. Reed was first to note the absence of the usual nocturnal noise from coyotes & owls & such other nocturnal birds as we have become accustomed to. Carlin stopped playing and it was plain that Reed was in fact correct. There was not even a breath of wind to stir the graß or the canvas of our tents and wagons. It was an eerie silence and disconcerting after the strangeneß of the day.

I think none were in the least surprised when Reed again pleaded with Marsh to divest himself of the artefact and they argued over the thing. The Profeßor remained adamant in his determination to see the admittedly hideous object safe in the Yale collections. I could not fault him over his insistence that so peculiar a find ought be studied and conserved. But Reed cursed and spat into the fire, which I think we all understood as good as his spitting on Marsh himself, and then Reed went to stand muttering at the furthermost reach of the firelight.

At this point Carlin pointed to the sky but before he could tell us why and before we could ask him, Reed raised his gun and fired two shots into the darkneß, hollering loudly at something he had apparently seen but which still remained hidden to the rest of us. In an instant we were all on our feet and I had drawn my Colt revolver in anticipation of what I aßumed was an imminent attack on the camp either by an animal or by redskins or bandits.

This is when the woman stepped out of the darkneß, or it seemed more that the night parted like a theatre curtain to reveal her. Reed lowered his rifle and stepped back, putting distance between her and him. I call her a woman but in truth I readily acknowledge this to be only an approximation, the best word I know to describe what stood before us. Certainly no other description would come any closer to the truth of it. So I will say “her” and “she” and “the woman” and be satisfied with that as I may be. She stepped out of the darkneß, taking only one step toward us. Her movement was as slow and smooth and graceful as a lion bracing itself to pounce upon its prey, which is not to say she struck me as poised to attack, because this was certainly not the impreßion I had. There were in that moment and surrounding her many contradictory impreßions and I am at a loß to explain many of the feelings she inspired in me. Afterwards—though we did not talk a great deal about her or the events that were about to unfold—I got the notion my companions felt very much the same.

There she stood before us, and her skin and hair were as white as a fresh snowfall. No blemish sullied that whiteneß and I swear it almost burned my eyes to gaze upon. Her own eyes were a bright blue and shone as if imbued with an inner light, as though perhaps an inferno had been stoked within her skull. She was obviously no Indian, not even an albino individual of that race. Her arms and legs were disproportionately long, relative to her body, so that she must have stood a good seven and a half or even eight feet tall, much taller than any of us. Indeed the lankineß of her arms and legs gave her a faintly insectile semblance. She was both grotesque and unspeakably beautiful, wraithlike as anything ever dreamt up by Mr. Poe and still glorious as an Olympian goddeß, as are so many aspects of Nature. Yet nothing I’d ever seen in all my explorations and studies had prepared me for the sight of her. She wore not a stitch of clothing, and was hairleß save that on her scalp. Still I will say that I felt not the least bit of carnal excitement, for the sight of her was far to [sic] strange to permit such arousal.

Profeßor Marsh called out to her, his voice quavering somewhat. I had never before heard him shaken, but it was clearly the case that he was now shaken. The woman tilted her face to one side as if regarding him with an intense curiosity. He called out to her again, but she made no reply and I suspected she either did not speak English or might be a mute, even deaf and dumb.

And then I happened to glance upwards, recalling how Carlin had pointed heavenward immediately prior to her arrival (though I wondered if poßibly she’d been standing just out of reach of the firelight for sometime). I saw what he had seen, and by God I do wish I had not. Towering above her, even as a cottonwood tree will tower above a pebble—such was the scale—was some indistinct shadow that blotted out any evidence of the stars. She had approached from the south, and in that direction it was as if—I dare write this down only because I mean these pages never to be read by any man—as if a titanic form stood, blotting out both the stars and moon. It was not clouds, as only seconds before I am sure the stars had shone brightly in a clear summer sky. Later, in our hasty discußion, we did all reluctantly agree on this fact. It was one of the very few we did agree upon. The enormity of that eclipsing shape was almost beyond comprehension and as I stared at it, I could discern the faintest of silhouettes, and also saw that it shifted the slightest bit to and fro, not unlike a man shifting from one foot to the other. Before my eyes were drawn back to the woman, I wondered how such an abomination could move without drawing from the very earth beneath our feet temblor waves to shame even the most terrible ocean tempest.

Reed was the next to speak, and he told Profeßor M. that we all knew what she had come for, and that we would all be damned were it not returned without hesitation. Marsh replied, almost whispering, by admonishing Reed with the harshest words ever I have heard him speak, but Reed would not waver from his conviction. He had raised his voice and it had taken on a tone of genuine hysteria. He once more lifted his rifle and this time it was aimed squarely at Profeßor M.

The woman stretched out her left hand as if to confirm the rightneß of Reed’s demands. She blinked several times, and I was reminded of the flashing of a lighthouse beacon.

Reed cocked his Winchester, and this is when I raised my revolver and took aim at the woman. I had no hope of killing her, understanding on some level that such a singular entity as this visitor was beyond destruction by a mere bullet, just as the shadow behind her, that vast and mountainous thing, existed untold leagues beyond the ken of man. I cannot say now why I aimed my Colt at her except it is ever the way of humanity to run from or endeavour to drive back that which means us harm. And it was clear any attempt to flee would be futile.

Carlin did not move. Ashley emerged from his tent, and several of the men had also joined us. None of them uttered a sound. Wrapped about us was a silence so profound it might dwarf that which must have existed in the ages before Creation. The woman lowered her head, keeping her startling blue eyes on us, and I realised on Profeßor M. in particular. Reed said that he would not ask again but that it would be his gun that spoke next. He ordered Marsh to produce the artefact and return it forthwith to her.

Marsh cursed Reed and he cursed the impoßibly pale woman. I think he had not noticed the shadow looming above her, which surely was for the best. He cursed them both to Perdition and swore he would see Reed in prison, but he also reached into his coat pocket and produced the figurine. In the firelight it struck me as much more hideous than it had previously. I lowered my pistol and realised I must not have drawn a breath for almost a full minute.

Marsh cursed her again, spitting words with spiteful vehemence, the earlier tremble gone now from his voice. He held out the artefact and the woman smiled. I will not here make any effort to describe that smile. Better it be forgotten though I know it will haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.

Profeßor Marsh told the woman to go on ahead and take it, and if ever I meant to speak to another soul of that night I would swear before a court of law, hand on Holy Bible, to the veracity of what next occurred. That carved image that had so reminded me of one of Doré’s fallen angels vanished from Marsh’s hand and reappeared in hers. Not the smallest fraction of a second could have paßed in between. Marsh cried out and gripped the hand that had held the heathen idol (for now this is how I thought of it, as something the woman who could not be a woman surely worshipped). In the morning, I learned that a circular portion of Marsh’s palm no larger than a gold Indian-head dollar was badly frostbitten.

The woman folded her fingers about the object of her desire, and she almost seemed to flow back into the darkneß at her back. I looked up at the southern sky again, and that damnable silhouette remained. It lingered for I cannot say how long, long enough that all would bear witneß to it (save Marsh, who was too busy with his frostbit hand). And then it withdrew, making no sound at all. How its footfalls failed to shake the earth, as the Profeßor has proposed the stride of the mighty sauropod Dinosaurs must surely have, I do not know. The unnatural eclipse almost seemed to blow away, leaving no vestige behind. The stars and the waning moon were restored, and soon the night was once more alive with all the usual nighttime noises—a coyote, the hooting of owls, wind blowing through the prairie graß, the chirruping of crickets. I understood then that it truly had only been a shadow, as of the shadow cast by a mountain when the sun sets behind it, and I dared not contemplate what being could cast so prodigious a shadow.

Reed sat down on the ground, the Winchester slipping from his fingers, and he cried. Carlin went off to check on the horses, which had remained oddly quiet throughout the duration of the woman’s appearance. It was long after midnight before any of us went to our bedrolls, and I did not sleep. I cannot speak for the others. Never have I been so grateful for a dawn.

June 15th: Following Profeßor M.’s departure, Reed went away to North Park to seek what fortune or misfortune there as might await him. He says his days as a “bone sharp” are over. But all the rest have decided, to my surprise, to stay on, and we resumed work at Three Trees, exposing more of the Laosaurus. Not a one of us has spoken of the events of the evening of the 12th. I imagine none of us ever shall. Yet I catch myself every night now fighting back an undeniable dread and glancing repeatedly toward the stars, ever expecting to find they have been obscured, by what I will not ever be able to say.

DIANA OF THE HUNDRED BREASTS

ROBERT SILVERBERG

THE TWO FAMOUS MARBLE STATUES STAND FACING EACH OTHER IN a front room of the little museum in the scruffy Turkish town of Seljuk, which lies just north of the ruins of the once-great Greek and Roman city of Ephesus. There was a photograph of the bigger one in my guidebook, of course. But it hadn’t prepared me—photos never really do—for the full bizarre impact of the actuality. The larger of the statues is about nine feet tall, the other one about six. Archaeologists found both of them in the courtyard of a building of this ancient city where the goddess Diana was revered. They show—you must have seen a picture of one, some time or other—a serene, slender woman wearing an ornamental headdress that is all that remains of a huge, intricate crown. Her arms are outstretched and the lower half of her body is swathed in a tight cylindrical gown. From waist to ankles, that gown is decorated with rows of vividly carved images of bees and of cattle. But that’s not where your eyes travel first, because the entire midsection of Diana of Ephesus is festooned with a grotesque triple ring of bulging pendulous breasts. Dozens of them, or several dozens. A great many.

“Perhaps they’re actually eggs,” said my brother Charlie the professor, standing just behind me. For the past eighteen months Charlie had been one of the leaders of the team of University of Pennsylvania archaeologists that has been digging lately at Ephesus. “Or fruits of some kind, apples, pears. Nobody’s really sure. Globular fertility symbols, that’s all we can say. But I think they’re tits, myself. The tits of the Great Mother, with an abundance of milk for all. Enough tits to satisfy anybody’s oral cravings, and then some.”

“An abomination before the Lord,” murmured our new companion Mr. Gladstone, the diligent Christian tourist, just about when I was expecting him to say something like that.

“Tits?” Charlie asked.

“These statues. They should be smashed in a thousand pieces and buried in the earth whence they came.” He said it mildly, but he meant it.

“What a great loss to art that would be,” said Charlie in his most pious way. “Anyway, the original statue from which these were copied fell from heaven. That’s what the Bible says, right? Book of Acts. The image that Jupiter tossed down from the sky. It could be argued that Jupiter is simply one manifestation of Jehovah. Therefore this is a holy image. Wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Gladstone?”

There was a cruel edge on Charlie’s voice; but, then, Charlie is cruel. Charming, of course, and ferociously bright, but above all else a smart-ass. He’s three years older than I am, and three times as intelligent. You can imagine what my childhood was like. If I had ever taken his cruelties seriously, I suspect I would hate him; but the best defense against Charlie is never to take him seriously. I never have, nor anything much else, either. In that way Charlie and I are similar, I suppose. But only in that way.

Mr. Gladstone refused to be drawn into Charlie’s bantering defense of idolatry. Maybe he too had figured out how to handle Charlie, a lot quicker than I ever did.

“You are a cynic and a sophist, Dr. Walker,” is all that he said. “There is no profit in disputing these matters with cynics. Or with sophists. Especially with sophists.” And to me, five minutes later, as we rambled through a room full of mosaics and frescoes and little bronze statuettes: “Your brother is a sly and very clever man. But there’s a hollowness about him that saddens me. I wish I could help him. I feel a great deal of pity for him, you know.”

* * *

That anyone would want to feel pity for Charlie was a new concept to me. Envy, yes. Resentment, disapproval, animosity, even fear, perhaps. But pity? For the six-foot-three genius with the blond hair and blue eyes, the movie-star face, the seven-figure trust fund, the four-digit I.Q.? I am tall too, and when I reached twenty-one I came into money also, and I am neither stupid nor ugly; but it was always Charlie who got the archery trophy, the prom queen, the honor-roll scroll, the Phi Beta Kappa key. It was Charlie who always got anything and everything he wanted, effortlessly, sometimes bestowing his leftovers on me, but always in a patronizing way that thoroughly tainted them. I have sensed people pitying me, sometimes, because they look upon me as Charlie-minus, an inadequate simulacrum of the genuine article, a pallid secondary version of the extraordinary Charlie. In truth I think their compassion for me, if that’s what it is, is misplaced: I don’t see myself as all that goddamned pitiful. But Charlie? Pitying Charlie?

I was touring Greece and Turkey that spring, mostly the usual Aegean resorts, Mykonos and Corfu and Crete, Rhodes and Bodrum and Marmaris. I wander up and down the Mediterranean about half the year, generally, and, though I’m scarcely a scholar, I do of course look in on the various famous classical sites along my way. By now, I suppose, I’ve seen every ruined Roman and Greek temple and triumphal arch and ancient theater there is, from Volubilis and Thuburbo Majus in North Africa up through Sicily and Pompeii, and out to Spain and France on one side and Syria and Lebanon on the other. They all blur and run together in my mind, becoming a single generic site—fallen marble columns, weatherbeaten foundations, sand, little skittering lizards, blazing sun, swarthy men selling picture-postcards—but I keep on prowling them anyway. I don’t quite know why.

There are no hotels remotely worthy of the name in or around the Ephesus ruins. But Charlie had tipped me off that I would find, about six miles down the road, a lavish new deluxe place high up on a lonely point overlooking the serene Aegean that catered mostly to groups of sun-worshipping Germans. It had an immense lobby with marble floors and panoramic windows, an enormous swimming pool, and an assortment of dining rooms that resounded day and night with the whoops and hollers of the beefy Deutschers, who never seemed to leave the hotel. Charlie drove out there to have dinner with me the night I arrived, and that was when we met Mr. Gladstone.

“Excuse me,” he said, hovering beside our table, “but I couldn’t help hearing you speaking in English. I don’t speak German at all and, well, frankly, among all these foreigners I’ve been getting a little homesick for the mother tongue. Do you mind if I join you?”

“Well—” I said, not really eager for his company, because tonight was the first time I had seen my brother in a couple of years. But Charlie grandly waved him to a seat. He was a grayish, cheerful man of about sixty, a small-town pastor from Ohio or Indiana or maybe Iowa, and he had been saving for something like twenty years to take an extensive tour of the Christian holy places of the Middle East. For the past three months he had been traveling with a little group of—pilgrims, I guess one could call them, six weeks bussing through Israel from Jerusalem to Beersheba, down to Mount Sinai, back up through the Galilee to Lebanon to see Sidon and Tyre, then out to Damascus, and so on and so on, the full Two-Testament Special. His traveling companions all had flown home by now, but Mr. Gladstone had bravely arranged a special side trip just for himself to Turkey—to poky little Seljuk in particular—because his late wife had had a special interest in an important Christian site here. He had never traveled anywhere by himself before, not even in the States, and going it alone in Turkey was a bit of a stretch for him. But he felt he owed it to his wife’s memory to make the trip, and so he was resolutely plugging along on his own here, having flown from Beirut to Izmir and then hired a car and driver to bring him down to Seljuk. He had arrived earlier this day.

“I didn’t realize there was anything of special Christian interest around here,” I said.

“The Cave of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,” Mr. Gladstone explained. “My wife once wrote a little book for children about the Seven Sleepers. It was always her great hope to see their actual cave.”

“The Seven Sleepers?”

He sketched the story for me quickly: the seven devout Christian boys who took refuge in a cave rather than offer sacrifices in the temple of the Roman gods, and who fell into a deep sleep and came forth two hundred years later to discover that Christianity had miraculously become the official religion of Rome while they were doing their Rip Van Winkle act. What was supposedly their cave may still be seen just beyond the Roman stadium of Ephesus.

“There’s also the Meryemana,” Charlie said.

Mr. Gladstone gave him a polite blank smile. “Beg your pardon?”

“The house where the Virgin Mary lived in the last years of her life. Jesus told St. John the Apostle to look after her, and he brought her to Ephesus, so it’s said. About a hundred years ago some Eastern Orthodox priests went looking for her house and found it, sure enough, about three miles outside town.”

“Indeed.”

“More likely it’s sixth-century Byzantine,” said Charlie. “But the foundations are much older. The Orthodox Christians go there on pilgrimage every summer. You really ought to see it.” He smiled his warmest, most savage smile. “Ephesus has always been a center of mother-goddess worship, you know, and apparently it has continued to be one even in post-pagan times.”

Mr. Gladstone’s lips quirked ever so slightly. Though I assumed—correctly—that he was Protestant, even a Presbyterian was bound to be annoyed at hearing someone call the Virgin Mary a mother-goddess. But all he said was, “It would be interesting to see, yes.”

Charlie wouldn’t let up. “You will, of course, look in at the Seljuk Museum to see the predecessor goddess’s statue, won’t you? Diana, I mean. Diana of the Hundred Breasts. It’s best to visit the museum before you begin your tour of the ruins, anyway. And the statues—there are two, actually—sum up the whole concept of the sacred female principle in a really spectacular way. The primordial mother, the great archetype. The celestial cow that nourishes the world. You need to see it, if you want truly to understand the bipolar sexual nature of the divine, eh, Mr. G.?” He glanced toward me. “You too, Tim. The two of you, meet me in front of the museum at nine tomorrow, okay? Basic orientation lecture by Dr. Walker. Followed by a visit to ancient Ephesus, including the Cave of the Seven Sleepers. Perhaps the Meryemana afterward.” Charlie flashed a dazzling grin. “Will you have some wine, Mr. Gladstone?”

“No, thank you,” Mr. Gladstone said, quickly putting his hand over the empty glass in front of him.

* * *

After the museum, the next morning, we doubled back to the ruins of Ephesus proper. Mobs of tour groups were already there, milling around befuddledly as tour groups will do, but Charlie zipped right around them to the best stuff. The ruins are in a marvelous state of preservation—a nearly intact Roman city of the first century A.D., the usual forum and temples and stadium and gymnasium and such, and of course the famous two-story library that the Turks feature on all those tourist posters.

We had the best of all possible guides. Charlie has a genuine passion for archaeology—it’s the only thing, I suspect, that he really cares for, other than himself—and he pointed out a million details that we would otherwise have missed. With special relish he dwelt on the grotesqueries of the cult of Diana, telling us not only about the metaphorical significance of the goddess’s multiplicity of breasts, but about the high priest who was always a eunuch—“His title,” said Charlie, “meant ‘He who has been set free by God’”—and the staff of virgins who assisted him, and the special priests known as the Acrobatae, or “walkers on tip-toe,” et cetera, et cetera. Mr. Gladstone showed signs of definite distaste as Charlie went on to speculate on some of the more flamboyant erotic aspects of pagan worship hereabouts, but he wouldn’t stop. He never does, when he has a chance to display his erudition and simultaneously offend and unsettle someone.

Eventually it was mid-afternoon and the day had become really hot and we were only halfway through our tour of the ancient city, with the Cave of the Seven Sleepers still a mile or two in the distance. And clearly Mr. Gladstone was wilting. We decided to call it a day and had a late lunch of kebabs and stewed eggplant at one of the innumerable and interchangeable little bistros in town. “We can go to the cave first thing tomorrow morning, when it’s still cool,” Charlie offered.

“Thank you. But I think I would prefer to visit it alone, if you don’t mind. A private pilgrimage—for my late wife’s sake, do you see? Something of a ceremonial observance.”

“Certainly,” Charlie intoned reverently. “I quite understand.”

I asked him if he would be coming out to the hotel again that evening for dinner with me. No, he said, he would be busy at the dig—the cool of the evening was a good time to work, without the distraction of gawking tourists—but we arranged to meet in the morning for breakfast and a little brotherly catching up on family news. I left him in town and drove back to the hotel with Mr. Gladstone.

“Your brother isn’t a religious man, is he?” he said.

“I’m afraid that neither of us is, especially. It’s the way we were raised.”

“But he really isn’t. You’re merely indifferent; he is hostile.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because,” he said, “he was trying so hard to provoke me with those things he was saying about Diana of Ephesus. He makes no distinction between Christianity and paganism. All religions must be the same to him, mere silly cults. And so he thinks he can get at my beliefs somehow by portraying pagan worship as absurd and bizarre.”

“He looks upon them all as cults, yes. But silly, no. In fact, Charlie takes religion very seriously, though not exactly in the same way you do. He regards it as a conspiracy by the power elite to remain on top at the expense of the masses. And holy scriptures are just works of fiction dreamed up to perpetuate the authority of the priests and their bosses.”

“He sees all religions that way, does he, without making distinctions?”

“Every one of them, yes. Always the same thing, throughout the whole of human history.”

“The poor man,” said Mr. Gladstone. “The poor empty-souled man. If only I could set him straight, somehow!”

There it was again: the compassion, the pity. For Charlie, of all people! Fascinating. Fascinating.

“I doubt that you’d succeed,” I told him. “He’s inherently a skeptical person. He’s never been anything else. And he’s a scientist, remember, a man who lives or dies by rational explanations. If it can’t be explained, then it probably isn’t real. He doesn’t have a smidgeon of belief in anything he can’t see and touch and measure.”

“He is incapable of giving credence to the evidence of things not seen?”

“Excuse me?”

“‘The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ Book of Hebrews, 11:1. It’s St. Paul’s definition of faith.”

“Ah.”

“St. Paul was here, you know. In this town, in Ephesus, on a missionary journey. Gods that are fashioned by human hands are no gods at all, he told the populace. Whereupon a certain Demetrius, a silversmith who earned his living making statuettes of the many-breasted goddess whose images we saw today in the museum, called his colleagues together and said, If this man has his way, the temple of the great goddess Diana will be destroyed and we will lose our livelihoods. ‘And when they heard these sayings, they were full of wrath, and cried out, saying, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” And the whole city was filled with confusion.’ That’s the Book of Acts, 19:28. And there was such a huge uproar in town over the things that Paul was preaching that he found it prudent to depart very quickly for Macedonia.”

“I see.”

“But the temple of the goddess was destroyed anyway, eventually. And her statues were cast down and buried in the earth, and now are seen only in museums.”

“And the people of Ephesus became Christians,” I said. “And Moslems after that, it would seem.”

He looked startled. My gratuitous little dig had clearly stung him. But then he smiled.

“I see that you are your brother’s brother,” he said.

* * *

I was up late reading, and thinking about Charlie, and staring at the moonlight shimmering on the bay. About half past eleven I hit the sack. Almost immediately my phone rang.

Charlie. “Are you alone, bro?”

“No,” I said. “As a matter of fact, Mr. Gladstone and I are hunkering down getting ready to commit abominations before the Lord.”

“I thought maybe one of those horny Kraut ladies—”

“Cut it out. I’m alone, Charlie. And pretty sleepy. What is it?”

“Can you come down to the ruins? There’s something I want to show you.”

“Right now?”

“Now is a good time for this.”

“I told you I was sleepy.”

“It’s something big, Tim. I need to show it to somebody, and you’re the only person on this planet I even halfway trust.”

“Something you discovered tonight?”

“Get in your car and come on down. I’ll meet you by the Magnesian Gate. That’s the back entrance. Go past the museum and turn right at the crossroads in town.”

“Charlie—”

“Move your ass, bro. Please.”

That “please,” from Charlie, was something very unusual. In twenty minutes I was at the gate. He was waiting there, swinging a huge flashlight. A tool-sack was slung over one shoulder. He looked wound up tight, as tense as I had ever seen him.

Selecting a key from a chain that held at least thirty of them, he unlocked the gate and led me down a long straight avenue paved with worn blocks of stone. The moon was practically full and the ancient city was bathed in cool silvery light. He pointed out the buildings as we went by them: “The baths of Varius. The basilica. The necropolis. The temple of Isis.” He droned the names in a singsong tone as though this were just one more guided tour. We turned to the right, onto another street that I recognized as the main one, where earlier that day I had seen the gate of Hercules, the temple of Hadrian, the library. “Here we are. Back of the brothel and the latrine.”

We scrambled uphill perhaps fifty yards through gnarled scrubby underbrush until we came to a padlocked metal grate set in the ground in an otherwise empty area. Charlie produced the proper key and pulled back the grate. His flashlight beam revealed a rough earthen-walled tunnel, maybe five feet high, leading into the hillside. The air inside was hot and stale, with a sweet heavy odor of dry soil. After about twenty feet the tunnel forked. Crouching, we followed the right-hand fork, pushing our way through some bundles of dried leaves that seemed to have been put there to block its entrance.

“Look there,” he said.

He shot the beam off to the left, and I found myself staring at a place where the tunnel wall had been very carefully smoothed. An upright circular slab of rough-hewn marble perhaps a yard across was set into it there.

“What is it?” I asked him. “A gravestone? A commemorative plaque?”

“Some sort of door, more likely. Covering a funeral chamber, I would suspect. You see these?” He indicated three smaller circles of what looked like baked clay, mounted in a symmetrical way over the marble slab, arranged to form the angles of an equilateral triangle. They overlapped the edges of the slab as though sealing it into the wall. I went closer and saw inscriptions carved into the clay circles, an array of mysterious symbols and letters.

“What language is this? Not Greek. Hebrew, maybe?”

“No. I don’t actually know what it is. Some unknown Anatolian script, or some peculiar form of Aramaic or Phoenician—I just can’t say, Timmo. Maybe it’s a nonsense script, even. Purely decorative sacred scribbles conveying spells to keep intruders away, maybe. You know, some kind of magical mumbo-jumbo. It might be anything.”

“You found this tonight?”

“Three weeks ago. We’ve known this tunnel was here for a long time, but it was thought to be empty. I happened to be doing some sonar scanning overhead and I got an echo back from a previously uncharted branch, so I came down and took a look around. Nobody knows about it but me. And you.”

Gingerly I ran my hand over the face of the marble slab. It was extraordinarily smooth, cool to the touch. I had the peculiar illusion that my fingertips were tingling, as though from a mild electrical charge.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Open it.”

“Now?”

“Now, bro. You and me.”

“You can’t do that!”

“I can’t?”

“You’re part of an expedition, Charlie. You can’t just bust into a tomb, or whatever this is, on your own. It isn’t proper procedure, is it? You need to have the other scientists here. And the Turkish antiquities officials—they’ll string you up by the balls if they find out you’ve done a bit of secret freelance excavating without notifying any local authorities.”

“We break the seals. We look inside. If there’s anything important in there, we check it out just to gratify our own curiosity and then we go away, and in the morning I discover it all over again and raise a big hullaballoo and we go through all the proper procedure then. Listen, bro, there could be something big in there, don’t you see? The grave of a high priest. The grave of some prehistoric king. The lost treasure of the Temple of Diana. The Ark of the Covenant. Anything. Anything. Whatever it is, I want to know. And I want to see it before anybody else does.”

He was lit up with a passion so great that I could scarcely recognize him as my cool brother Charlie.

“How are you going to explain the broken seals?”

“Broken by some tomb-robber in antiquity,” he said. “Who got frightened away before he could finish the job.”

He had always been a law unto himself, my brother Charlie. I argued with him a little more, but I knew it would do no good. He had never been much of a team player. He wasn’t going to have five or six wimpy colleagues and a bunch of Turkish antiquities officials staring over his shoulder while that sealed chamber was opened for the first time in two thousand years.

He drew a small battery-powered lamp from his sack and set it on the ground. Then he began to pull the implements of his trade out of the sack, the little chisels, the camel’s-hair brushes, the diamond-bladed hacksaw.

“Why did you wait until I got here before you opened it?” I asked.

“Because I thought I might need help pulling that slab out of the wall, and who could I trust except you? Besides, I wanted an audience for the grand event.”

“Of course.”

“You know me, Timmo.”

“So I do, bro. So I do.”

He began very carefully to chisel off one of the clay seals.

It came away in two chunks. Setting it to one side, he went to work on the second one, and then the third. Then he dug his fingertips into the earthen wall at the edge of the slab and gave it an experimental tug.

“I do need you,” he said. “Put your shoulder against the slab and steady it as I pry it with this crowbar. I don’t want it just toppling out.”

Bit by bit he wiggled it free. As it started to pivot and fall forward I leaned all my weight into it, and Charlie reached across me and caught it too, and together we were able to brace it as it left its aperture and guide it down carefully to the ground.

We stared into the blackest of black holes. Ancient musty air came roaring forth in a long dry whoosh. Charlie leaned forward and started to poke the flashlight into the opening.

But then he pulled back sharply and turned away, gasping as though he had inhaled a wisp of something noxious.

“Charlie?”

“Just a second.” He waved his hand near his head a couple of times, the way you might do when brushing away a cobweb. “Just—a goddamn—second, Tim!” A convulsive shiver ran through him. Automatically I moved toward him to see what the matter was and as I came up beside him in front of that dark opening I felt a sudden weird sensation, a jolt, a jab, and my head began to spin. And for a moment—just a moment—I seemed to hear a strange music, an eerie high-pitched wailing sound like the keening of elevator cables far, far away. In that crazy incomprehensible moment I imagined that I was standing at the rim of a deep ancient well, the oldest well of all, the well from which all creation flows, with strange shadowy things churning and throbbing down below, and from its depths rose a wild rush of perfumed air that dizzied and intoxicated me.

Then the moment passed and I was in my right mind again and I looked at Charlie and he looked at me.

“You felt it too, didn’t you?” I said.

“Felt what?” he demanded fiercely. He seemed almost angry.

I searched for the words. But it was all fading, fading fast, and there was only Charlie with his face jammed into mine, angry Charlie, terrifying Charlie, practically daring me to claim that anything peculiar had happened.

“It was very odd, bro,” I said finally. “Like a drug thing, almost.”

“Oxygen deprivation, is all. A blast of old stale air.”

“You think?”

“I know.”

But he seemed uncharacteristically hesitant, even a little befuddled. He stood at an angle to the opening, head turned away, shoulders slumping, the flashlight dangling from his hand.

“Aren’t you going to look inside?” I asked, after a bit.

“Give me a moment, Timmo.”

“Charlie, are you all right?”

“Christ, yes! I breathed in a little dust, that’s all.” He knelt, rummaged in the tool sack, pulled out a canteen, took a deep drink. “Better,” he said hoarsely. “Want some?” I took the canteen from him and he leaned into the opening again, flashing the beam around.

“What do you see?”

“Nothing. Not a fucking thing.”

“They put up a marble slab and plaster it with inscribed seals and there’s nothing at all behind it?”

“A hole,” he said. “Maybe five feet deep, five feet high. A storage chamber of some kind, I would guess. Nothing in it. Absolutely fucking nothing, bro.”

“Let me see.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

In fact I didn’t, not very much. But I just shrugged; and he handed me the flashlight, and I peered into the hole. Charlie was right. The interior of the chamber was smooth and regular, but it was empty, not the slightest trace of anything.

“Shit,” Charlie said. He shook his head somberly. “My very own Tut-ankh-amen tomb, only nothing’s in it. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Are you going to report this?”

“What for? I come in after hours, conduct illicit explorations, and all I have to show for my sins is an empty hole? What’s the good of telling anybody that? Just for the sake of making myself look like an unethical son of a bitch? No, bro. None of this ever happened.”

“But the seals—the inscriptions in an unknown script—”

“Not important. Let’s go, Tim.”

He still sounded angry, and not, I think, just because the little chamber behind the marble slab had been empty. Something had gotten to him just now, and gotten to him deeply. Had he heard the weird music too? Had he looked into that fathomless well? He hated all mystery, everything inexplicable. I think that was why he had become an archaeologist. Mysteries had a way of unhinging him. When I was maybe ten and he was thirteen, we had spent a rainy evening telling each other ghost stories, and finally we made one up together, something about spooks from another world who were haunting our attic, and our own story scared me so much that I began to cry. I imagined I heard strange creaks overhead. Charlie mocked me mercilessly, but it seemed to me that for a time he had looked a little nervous too, and when I said so he got very annoyed indeed; and then, bluffing all the way, I invited him to come up to the attic with me right then and there to see that it was safe, and he punched me in the chest and knocked me down. Later he denied the whole episode.

“I’m sorry I wasted your time tonight, keed,” he said, as we hiked back up to our cars.

“That’s okay. It just might have been something special.”

“Just might have been, yeah.” He grinned and winked. He was himself again, old devil-may-care Charlie. “Sleep tight, bro. See you in the morning.”

But I didn’t sleep tight at all. I kept waking and hearing the wailing sound of far-off elevator cables, and my dreams were full of blurry strangenesses.

* * *

The next day I hung out at the hotel all day, breakfasting with Charlie—he didn’t refer to the events of the night before at all—and lounging by the pool the rest of the time. I had some vague thought of hooking up with one of the German tourist ladies, I suppose, but no openings presented themselves, and I contented myself with watching the show. Even in puritanical Turkey, where the conservative politicians are trying to put women back into veils and ankle-length skirts, European women of all ages go casually topless at coastal resorts like this, and it was remarkable to see how much savoir faire the Turkish poolside waiters displayed while taking bar orders from saftig bare-breasted grandmothers from Hamburg or Munich and their stunning topless granddaughters.

Mr. Gladstone, who hadn’t been around in the morning, turned up in late afternoon. I was in the lobby bar by then, working on my third or fourth post-lunch raki. He looked sweaty and tired and sunburned. I ordered a Coke for him.

“Busy day?”

“Very. The Cave of the Seven Sleepers was my first stop. A highly emotional experience, I have to say, not because of the cave itself, you understand, although the ancient ruined church there is quite interesting, but because—the associations—the memories of my dear wife that it summoned—”

“Of course.”

“After that my driver took me out to the so-called House of the Virgin. Perhaps it’s genuine, perhaps not, but either way it’s a moving thing to see. The invisible presence of thousands of pilgrims hovers over it, the aura of centuries of faith.” He smiled gently. “Do you know what I mean, Mr. Walker?”

“I think I do, yes.”

“And in the afternoon I saw the Basilica of St. John, on Ayasuluk Hill.”

I didn’t know anything about that. He explained that it was the acropolis of the old Byzantine city—the steep hill just across the main highway from the center of the town of Seljuk. Legend had it that St. John the Apostle had been buried up there, and centuries later the Emperor Justinian built an enormous church on the site, which was, of course, a ruin now, but an impressive one.

“And you?” he said. “You visited with your brother?”

“In the morning, yes.”

“A brilliant man, your brother. If only he could be happier, eh?”

“Oh, I think Charlie’s happy, all right. He’s had his own way every step of his life.”

“Is that your definition of happiness? Having your own way?”

“It can be very helpful.”

“And you haven’t had your own way, is that it, Mr. Walker?”

“My life has been reasonably easy by most people’s standards, I have to admit. I was smart enough to pick a wealthy great-grandfather. But compared with Charlie—he has an extraordinary mind, he’s had a splendid scientific career, he’s admired by all the members of his profession. I don’t even have a profession, Mr. Gladstone. I just float around.”

“You’re young, Mr. Walker. You’ll find something to do and someone to share your life with, and you’ll settle down. But your brother—I wonder, Mr. Walker. Something vital is missing from his life. But he will never find it, because he is not willing to admit that it’s missing.”

“Religion, do you mean?”

“Not specifically, no. Belief, perhaps. Not religion, but belief. Do you follow me, Mr. Walker? One must believe in something, do you see? And your brother will not permit himself to do that.” He gave me the gentle smile again. “Would you excuse me, now? I’ve had a rather strenuous day. I think a little nap, before supper—”

Since we were the only two Americans in the place, I invited him to join me again for dinner that night. He did most of the talking, reminiscing about his wife, telling me about his children—he had three, in their thirties—and describing some of the things he had seen in his tour of the biblical places. I had never spent much time with anyone of his sort. A kindly man, an earnest man; and, I suspect, not quite as simple a man as a casual observer might think.

He went upstairs about half past eight. I returned to the bar and had a couple of raw Turkish brandies and thought hopeful thoughts about the stunning German granddaughters. Somewhere about ten, as I was considering going to bed, a waiter appeared and said, “You are Mr. Timothy Walker?”

“Yes.”

“Your brother Charles is at the security gate and asks that you come out to meet him.”

Mystified, I went rushing out into the courtyard. The hotel grounds are locked down every night and nobody is admitted except guests and the guests of guests. I saw the glare of headlights just beyond the gate. Charlie’s car.

“What’s up, bro?”

His eyes were wild. He gestured at me with furious impatience.

“In. In!” Almost before I closed the door he spun the car around and was zooming down the narrow, winding road back to Seljuk. He was hunched over the wheel in the most peculiar rigid way.

“Charlie?”

“Exactly what did you experience,” he said tightly, “when we pulled that marble slab out of the wall?”

My reply was carefully vague.

“Tell me,” he said. “Be very precise.”

“I don’t want you to laugh at me, Charlie.”

“Just tell me.”

I took a deep breath. “Well, then. I imagined that I heard far-off music. I had a kind of vision of—well, someplace weird and mysterious. I thought I smelled perfume. The whole thing lasted maybe half a second and then it was over.”

He was silent a moment.

Then he said, in a strange little quiet way, “It was the same for me, bro.”

“You denied it. I asked you, and you said no, Charlie.”

“Well, I lied. It was the same for me.” His voice had become very odd—thin, tight, quavering. Everything about him right now was tight. Something had to pop. The car was traveling at maybe eighty miles an hour on that little road, and I feared for my life. After a very long time he said, “Do you think there’s any possibility, Tim, that we might have let something out of that hole in the ground when we broke those seals and pulled that slab out?”

I stared at him. “That’s crazy, Charlie.”

“I know it is. Just answer me: do you think we felt something moving past us as we opened that chamber?”

“Hey, we’re too old to be telling each other spook stories, bro.”

“I’m being serious.”

“Bullshit you are,” I said. “I hate it when you play with me like this.”

“I’m not playing,” Charlie said, and he turned around so that he was practically facing me for a moment. His face was twisted with strain. “Timmo, some goddamned thing that looks awfully much like Diana of Ephesus has been walking around in the ruins since sundown. Three people I know of have seen her. Three very reliable people.”

I couldn’t believe that he was saying stuff like this. Not Charlie.

“Keep your eyes on the road, will you?” I told him. “You’ll get us killed driving like that.”

“Do you know how much it costs me to say these things? Do you know how lunatic it sounds to me? But she’s real. She’s there. She was sealed up in that hole, and we let her out. The foreman of the excavations has seen her, and Judy, the staff artist, and Mike Dornan, the ceramics guy.”

“They’re fucking with your head, Charlie. Or you’re fucking with mine.”

“No. No. No. No.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To look for her. To find out what the hell it is that those people think they saw. I’ve got to know, Tim. This time, I’ve absolutely got to know.”

The desperation in Charlie’s voice was something new in my experience of him. I’ve absolutely got to know. Why? Why? It was all too crazy. And dragging me out like this: why? To bear witness? To help him prove to himself that he actually was seeing the thing that he was seeing, if indeed he saw it? Or, maybe, to help him convince himself that there was nothing there to see? But he wasn’t going to see anything. I was sure of that.

“Charlie,” I said. “Oh, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, this isn’t happening, is it? Not really.”

* * *

We pulled up outside the main gate of the ruins. A watchman was posted there, a Turk. He stepped quickly aside as Charlie went storming through into the site. I saw flashlights glowing in the distance, and then four or five American-looking people. Charlie’s colleagues, the archaeologists.

“Well?” Charlie yelled. He sounded out of control.

A frizzy-haired woman of about forty came up from somewhere to our left. She looked as wild-eyed and agitated as Charlie. For the first time I began to think this might not be just some goofy practical joke.

“Heading east,” the woman blurted. “Toward the stadium or maybe all the way out to the goddess sanctuary. Dick saw it too. And Edward thinks he did.”

“Anybody get a photo?”

“Not that I know of,” the woman said.

“Come on,” Charlie said to me, and went running off at an angle to the direction we had just come. Frantically I chased after him. He was chugging uphill, into the thorny scrub covering the unexcavated areas of the city. By moonlight I saw isolated shattered pillars rising from the ground like broken teeth, and tumbledown columns that had been tossed around like so many toothpicks. As I came alongside him he said, “There’s a little sanctuary of the mother-goddess back there. Wouldn’t that be the logical place that she’d want to go to?”

“For shit’s sake, Charlie! What are you saying?”

He kept on running, giving me no answer. I fought my way up the hill through a tangle of brambles and canes that slashed at me like daggers, all the while wondering what the hell we were going to find on top. We were halfway up when shouts came to us from down the hill, people behind us waving and pointing. Charlie halted and listened, frowning. Then he swung around and started sprinting back down the hill. “She’s gone outside the ruins,” he called to me over his shoulder. “Through the fence, heading into town! Come on, Tim!”

I went running after him, scrambling downhill, then onward along the main entrance road and onto the main highway. I’m in good running shape, but Charlie was moving with a maniacal zeal that left me hard pressed to keep up with him. Twenty feet apart, we came pounding down the road past the museum and into town. All the dinky restaurants were open, even this late, and little knots of Turks had emerged from them to gather in the crossroads. Some were kneeling in prayer, hammering their heads against the pavement, and others were wildly gesticulating at one other in obvious shock and bewilderment. Charlie, without breaking stride, called out to them in guttural Turkish and got a whole babble of replies.

“Ayasuluk Hill,” he said to me. “That’s the direction she’s going in.”

We crossed the broad boulevard that divides the town in half. As we passed the bus station half a dozen men came running out of a side street in front of us, screaming as though they had just been disemboweled. You don’t expect to hear adult male Turks screaming. They are a nation of tough people, by and large. These fellows went flying past us without halting, big men with thick black mustaches. Their eyes were wide and gleaming like beacons, their faces rigid and distended with shock and horror, as though twenty devils were coming after them.

“Charlie—”

“Look there,” he said, in an utterly flat voice, and pointed into the darkness.

Something—something—was moving away from us down that side street, something very tall and very strange. I saw a tapering conical body, a hint of weird appendages, a crackling blue-white aura. It seemed to be floating rather than walking, carried along by a serene but inexorable drifting motion almost as if its feet were several inches off the ground. Maybe they were. As we watched, the thing halted and peered into the open window of a house. There was a flash of blinding light, intense but short-lived. Then the front door popped open and a bunch of frantic Turks came boiling out like a pack of Keystone Cops, running in sixty directions at once, yelling and flinging their arms about as though trying to surrender.

One of them tripped and went sprawling down right at the creature’s feet. He seemed unable to get up; he knelt there all bunched up, moaning and babbling, shielding his face with outspread hands. The thing paused and looked down, and seemed to reach its arms out in fluid gestures, and the blue-white glow spread for a moment like a mantle over the man. Then the light withdrew from him and the creature, gliding smoothly past the trembling fallen man, continued on its serene silent way toward the dark hill that loomed above the town.

“Come,” Charlie said to me.

We went forward. The creature had disappeared up ahead, though we caught occasional glimpses of the blue-white light as it passed between the low little buildings of the town. We reached the man who had tripped; he had not arisen, but lay face down, shivering, covering his head with his hands. A low rumbling moan of fear came steadily from him. From in front of us, hoarse cries of terror drifted to us from here and there as this villager or that encountered the thing that was passing through their town, and now and again we could see that cool bright light, rising steadily above us until finally it was shining down from the upper levels of Ayasuluk Hill.

“You really want to go up there?” I asked him.

He didn’t offer me an answer, nor did he stop moving forward. I wasn’t about to turn back either, I realized. Willy-nilly I followed him to the end of the street, around a half-ruined mosque at the base of the hill, and up to a lofty metal gate tipped with spikes. Stoned on our own adrenaline, we swarmed up that gate like Crusaders attacking a Saracen fortress, went over the top, dropped down in the bushes on the far side. I was able to see, by the brilliant gleam of the full moon, the low walls of the destroyed Basilica of St. John just beyond, and, behind it, the massive Byzantine fortification that crowned the hill. Together we scrambled toward the summit.

“You go this way, Tim. I’ll go the other and we’ll meet on the far side.”

“Right.”

I didn’t know what I was looking for. I just ran, leftward around the hill. Along the ramparts, into the church, down the empty aisles, out the gaping window-frames.

Suddenly I caught a glimpse of something up ahead. Light, cool white light, an unearthly light very much like moonlight, only concentrated into a fiercely gleaming point hovering a couple of yards above the ground, thirty or forty feet in front of me.

“Charlie?” I called. My voice was no more than a hoarse gasp. I edged forward. The light was so intense now that I was afraid it might damage my eyes. But I continued to stare, as if the thing would disappear if I were to blink for even a millionth of a second.

I heard the wailing music again.

Soft, distant, eerie. Cables rubbing together in a dark shaft. This time it seemed to be turned outward, rising far beyond me, reaching into distant space or perhaps some even more distant dimension. Something calling, announcing its regained freedom, summoning—whom? What?

“Charlie?” I said. It was a barely audible croak. “Charlie?” I noticed him now, edging up from the other side. I pointed at the source of the light. He nodded.

I moved closer. The light seemed to change, to grow momentarily less fierce. And then I was able to see her.

She wasn’t exactly identical to the statues in the museum. Her face wasn’t really a face, at least not a human one. She had beady eyes, faceted the way an insect’s are. She had an extra set of arms, little dangling ones, coming out at her hips. And, though the famous breasts were there, at least fifty of them and maybe the hundred of legend, I don’t think they were actual breasts because I don’t think this creature was a mammal. More of a reptile, I would guess: leathery skin, more or less scaly the way a snake’s is, and tiny dots of nostrils, and a black slithery tongue, jagged like a lightning bolt, that came shooting quickly out between her slitted lips again and again and again, as though checking on the humidity or the ambient temperature or some such thing.

I saw, and Charlie saw. For a fraction of a second I wanted to drop down on my knees and rub my forehead in the ground and give worship. And then I just wanted to run.

I said, “Charlie, I definitely think we ought to get the hell out of—”

“Cool it, bro,” he said. He stepped forward. Walked right up to her, stared her in the face. I was terrified for him, seeing him get that close. She dwarfed him. He was like a doll in front of her. How had a thing this big managed to fit in that opening in the tunnel wall? How had those ancient Greeks ever managed to get her in there in the first place?

That dazzling light crackled and hissed around her like some sort of electrical discharge. And yet Charlie stood his ground, unflinching, rock-solid. The expression on my brother’s face was a nearly incomprehensible mixture of anger and fear.

He jabbed his forefinger through the air at her.

“You,” he said to her. It was almost a snarl. “Tell me what the hell you are.”

They were maybe ten feet apart, the man and the—what? The goddess? The monster?

Charlie had to know.

“You speak English?” he demanded. “Turkish? Tell me. I’m the one who let you out of that hole. Tell me what you are. I want to know.” Eye to eye, face to face. “Something from another planet, are you, maybe? Another dimension? An ancient race that used to live on the Earth before humans did?”

“Charlie,” I whispered.

But he wouldn’t let up. “Or maybe you’re an actual and literal goddess,” he said. His tone had turned softer, a mocking croon now. “Diana of Ephesus, is that who you are? Stepping right out of the pages of mythology in all your fantastic beauty? Well, do me some magic, goddess, if that’s who you are. Do a miracle for me, just a little one.” The angry edge was back in his voice. “Turn that tree into an elephant. Turn me into a sheep, if you can. What’s the matter, Diana, you no spikka da English? All right. Why the hell should you? But how about Greek, then? Surely you can understand Greek.”

“For Christ’s sake, Charlie—”

He ignored me. It was as if I wasn’t there. He was talking to her in Greek, now. I suppose it was Greek. It was harsh, thick-sounding, jaggedly rhythmic. His eyes were wild and his face was flushed with fury. I was afraid that she would hurl a thunderbolt of blue-white light at him, but no, no, she just stood there through his whole harangue, as motionless as those statues of her in the little museum, listening patiently as my furious brother went on and on and on at her in the language of Homer and Sophocles.

He stopped, finally. Waited as if expecting her to respond.

No response came. I could hear the whistling sound of her slow steady breathing; occasionally there was some slight movement of her body; but that was all.

“Well, Diana?” Charlie said. “What do you have to say for yourself, Diana?”

Silence.

“You fraud!” Charlie cried, in a great and terrible voice. “You fake! Some goddess you are! You aren’t real at all, and that’s God’s own truth. You aren’t even here. You’re nothing but a fucking hallucination. A projection of some kind. I bet I could walk up to you and put my hand right through you.”

Still no reaction. Nothing. She just stood there, those faceted eyes glittering, that little tongue flickering. Saying nothing, offering him no help.

That was when he flipped out. Charlie seemed to puff up as if about to explode with rage, and went rushing toward her, arms upraised, fists clenched in a wild gesture of attack. I wanted desperately to stop him, but my feet were frozen in place. I was certain that he was going to die. We both were.

“Damn you!” he roared, with something like a sob behind the fury. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!”

But before he could strike her, her aura flared up around her like a sheath, and for a moment the air was full of brilliant flares of cold flame that went whirling and whirling around her in a way that was too painful to watch. I caught a glimpse of Charlie staggering back from her, and I backed away myself, covering my face with my forearm, but even so the whirling lights came stabbing into my brain, forcing me to the ground. It seemed then that they all coalesced into a single searing point of white light, which rose like a dagger into the sky, climbing, climbing, becoming something almost like a comet, and—then—

Vanishing.

And then I blacked out.

It was just before dawn when I awakened. My eyes fluttered open almost hesitantly. The moon was gone, the first pink streaks of light beginning to appear. Charlie sat beside me. He was already awake.

“Where is it?” I asked immediately.

“Gone, bro.”

“Gone?”

He nodded. “Without a trace. If it ever was up here with us at all.”

“What do you mean, if?”

“If, that’s what I mean. Who the hell knows what was going on up here last night? Do you?”

“No.”

“Well, neither do I. All I know is that it isn’t going on anymore. There’s nobody around but me and thee.”

He was trying to sound like the old casual Charlie I knew, the man who had been everywhere and done everything and took it all in his stride. But there was a quality in his voice that I had never heard in it before, something entirely new.

“Gone?” I said, stupidly. “Really gone?”

“Really gone, yes. Vanished. You hear how quiet everything is?” Indeed the town, spread out below us, was silent except for the crowing of the first roosters and the far-off sound of a farm tractor starting up somewhere.

“Are you all right?” I asked him.

“Fine,” he said. “Absolutely fine.”

But he said it through clenched teeth. I couldn’t bear to look at him. A thing had happened here that badly needed explanation, and no explanations were available, and I knew what that must be doing to him. I kept staring at the place where that eerie being had been, and I remembered that single shaft of light that had taken its place, and I felt a crushing sense of profound and terrible loss. Something strange and weirdly beautiful and utterly fantastic and inexplicable had been loose in the world for a little while, after centuries of—what? imprisonment? hibernation?—and now it was gone, and it would never return. It had known at once, I was sure, that this was no era for goddesses. Or whatever it was.

We sat side by side in silence for a minute or two. “I think we ought to go back down now,” I said finally.

“Right. Let’s go back down,” Charlie said. And without saying another word as we descended, we made our way down the hill of Ayasuluk, the hill of St. John the Apostle, who was the man who wrote the Book of Revelation.

* * *

Mr. Gladstone was having breakfast in the hotel coffee shop when Charlie and I came in. He saw at once that something was wrong and asked if he could help in any way, and after some hesitation we told him something of what had happened, and then we told him more, and then we told him the whole story right to the end. He didn’t laugh and he didn’t make any sarcastic skeptical comments. He took it all quite seriously.

“Perhaps the Seal of Solomon was what was on that marble slab,” he suggested. “The Turks would say some such thing, at any rate. King Solomon had power over the evil jinn and locked them away in flasks and caves and tombs, and put his seal on them to keep them locked up. It’s in the Koran.”

“You’ve read the Koran?” I asked, surprised.

“I’ve read a lot of things,” said Mr. Gladstone.

“The Seal of Solomon,” Charlie said, scowling. He was trying hard to be his old self again, and almost succeeding. Almost. “Evil spirits. Magic. Oh, Jesus Christ!”

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Gladstone.

“What?” Charlie said.

The little man from Ohio or Indiana or Iowa put his hand over Charlie’s. “If only I could help you,” he said. “But you’ve been undone, haven’t you, by the evidence of things seen.”

“You have the quote wrong,” said Charlie. “‘The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ Book of Hebrews, 11:1.”

Mr. Gladstone was impressed. So was I.

“But this is different,” he said to Charlie. “This time, you actually saw. You were, I think, a man who prided himself on believing in nothing at all. But now you can no longer even believe in your own disbelief.”

Charlie reddened. “Saw what? A goddess? Jesus! You think I believe that that was a goddess? A genuine immortal supernatural being of a higher order of existence? Or—what?—some kind of actual alien creature? You want me to believe it was an alien that had been locked up in there all that time? An alien from where? Mars? And who locked it up? Or was it one of King Solomon’s jinn, maybe?”

“Does it really matter which it was?” Mr. Gladstone asked softly. Charlie started to say something; but he choked it back. After a moment he stood. “Listen, I need to go now,” he said. “Mr. Gladstone—Timmo—I’ll catch up with you later, is that all right?” And then he turned and stalked away. But before he left, I saw the look in his eyes.

His eyes. Oh, Charlie. Oh, those eyes. Those frightened, empty eyes.

UNDER THE SHELF

MICHAEL SHEA

WHEN AT LAST THEY DREW NEAR THE WALL OF THE ROSS ICE Shelf, the cloud-ceiling’s vast, gray fleece had begun to shred in the wind, opening ragged islands of pale blue sky whose light lent sharper definition to the towering rampart of its rim.

Perched in the little freighter’s prow, Belinda studied the titan. She mentally hefted the dimensions of this exploit. To confront the Shelf was to stand in awe. To go beneath it, as she was soon to do, would be to enter the utterly unknown.

If a couple hundred feet of that ice shelf rose above the waves, its main bulk plunged another thousand beneath them, while the sheet as a whole roofed a vast and undiscovered tract of sea floor that was nearly the size of France. And the depth of that sea floor beneath it? It was believed the bottom lay between thirteen and sixteen thousand feet down.

Not that their mission here—hers and her sister’s—lay nearly so deep. Their two submersibles would explore only the upper reaches of the under-sea—perhaps as deep as three hundred fathoms below the ice. There, they would hang (as it were) merely in the stratosphere of that ice-capped abyss.

If the rest of Earth’s oceans were an analogue, this would be the zone thickest with life. But part of her doubted. Could anything at all inhabit that freezing darkness?

“Hey Melody,” she called back to her sister, a little aft of her, “so what do ya think we’ll meet down under there?”

“Whoa, I dunno! I just can’t believe we’re actually here!” Melody crowed.

“What did you think?” old Earl rumbled. “We couldn’t find fuckin’ Antarctica?”

The sea, black-and-jade, was littered with minor ice, a kind of loose-knit galaxy of jostling floes and fragments that gonged dully against their steel hull. The ice titan, ten times the height of their conning tower, stretched past sight to either side.

“What’s that?” Melody posed this question just as Belinda was thinking it. Off their bow, perhaps three hundred yards out, something dark and bulky bobbed in the swell—mostly submerged, but breaking surface here and there.

“Isn’t it … a carcass?” In asking, Belinda grew sure it was—something really big, nearly thirty feet long, its mottled hide feebly flashing black and silver in the wan sun.

“Reversing engine,” Earl called. “I wanna get closer. I think that’s a goddam orca. Look at the size of ’im! But hell, he oughta sink if he’s not movin’!”

They all watched it as it slowly rose and fell with the ocean’s pulse, while Earl coaxed the little ship nearer. “I just don’t understand why it’s floatin’,” he complained. “Thing’s dead, it should sink like a rock!”

As they hove nearer, Melody said, “See that? See it? There’s, like, something shiny all over it, an’ all around it too! See it?”

And they did. The dead brute presented something more than the wet sheen of whale-hide: a thin, glossy fabric seemed to envelop the huge carnivore, and the semi-transparent skirts of this fabric billowed on the water’s surface.

“Damn!”

“Whoa!” both women cried at once as Earl, backing engines, began bringing them around its other side. They saw a gaping hole in the orca’s flank, a meaty chasm some fifteen feet across.

As it slid past below their starboard rail, the carnage of that awful wound held them staring.

“What coulda done that?” Earl sounded angry, as if his sense of the possible had been outraged. “A sperm whale? That sucker’s near bit in half. Nothin’ attacks orcas, far as I know. A buncha big sharks maybe?”

All three of them stood gazing.

“I dunno,” Melody said. “Buncha sharks big enough and hungry enough to attack him in the first place, why is there so much left of him?”

Earl snorted. “Is there?” He’d reduced their speed but kept them under way, and as the carcass fell astern, their wake set it rocking, and its great wound tilted up more fully into the light.

“Jesus!”

“Jeez Louise!”

“Holy shit!”

The dead giant showed itself to be all but hollowed out, emptied clear up to the spine.

A silence fell on them as the corpse receded, till Melody said, “What a way to go! Gotta make you nervous, right, sis? That killer’s a lot bigger’n our pods. Let’s hope at least he took the edge off its appetite, whatever hit him.”

The huge corpse kept drawing their eyes back as it fell astern, until the Shelf, towering nearer and nearer, commanded their attention. Its wall was becoming their world, occluding half the sky and stretching past sight to either side, with an icy breath coming off it like an invisible tidal wave. Scanning it was giving Belinda a crick in the neck.

“Okay, my dears!” Earl called them back to the wheel. “I’m gonna hang out here outside this loose stuff shoulderin’ around. You stay online all the way down, all the way under, an’ all the way back. All the way you keep talkin’ to me. An’ soon as you come back topside, you fire your flare-gun down, even if you got me in sight. Don’t be stingy—hang a bunch up there where we can’t miss ’em. And—main point here!—don’t go down more’n a hundred meters beneath the shelf! I’m not kiddin’ here!”

“Lighten up!”—touchy young Melody.

“Hey! This cold water’s full of microlife, kid! There’s a big food-base here! I mean, whaddya gotta see besides a hollowed-out orca to make ya pay attention? Far as I’m concerned, we don’ know what-all’s down under this shelf!”

Melody didn’t like old men sermonizing. “What’s your problem? So it had to be sharks or another killer! Of course we’re gonna pay attention, but it doesn’t mean we gotta freak out.”

Earl looked hard at her, and then at Belinda. “Okay. Fine. From this point on, we’re all assumin’ that all your strong lights’ll drive off anything big enough to threaten ya.”

The women gazed back at him stoically.

“All right,” Earl sighed. “Jest humor an old man an’ pleeze keep in mind that you, in point of fact, like I said, don’t fuckin’ know what-all lives down there.”

“Thanks, Earl,” Belinda blurted, anxious to forestall further blowback from her kid sister. “You’re right. There’s a lot of plankton in these waters, and that’s a huge food-base. We don’t know what we might find, and we will stay alert.”

“Yeah yeah,” said the old man, refusing reassurance. “Hey, don’ mind me! Mount up an’ dive.”

Their little subs were steel-and-glass bullets sixteen feet long, with bubble-cabs and every kind of camera God ever made mounted on the hulls. The women strapped in and sealed their hatches, switched on their blazing coronas, and dove.

The black sea surged through their shells of light, a silt of algae and microlife streaming up like smoke all around them as they plunged.

Down and down the Shelf’s wall they dove: it was a vast, fissured bulwark, a colossal rampart thrust out against the Deep. Both women were rapt as they sank, filled with an identical wonder to see the wide spill of their own radiance plunging down the craggy rim of the titan….

Until, seven hundred feet down, the flood of their light suddenly and awesomely blossomed out into the perfect blackness under the ice-sheet’s floor, and they beheld the awesome ceiling that—endless above them from here on in—would roof their explorations like the lid of a colossal tomb.

They turned in under-shelf and leveled off beneath her.

* * *

The Shelf’s underside was, on the grand scale, roughly evened by its endless belly-slide off the Antarctic slope, but was also colossally trenched and scored by the cruel terrain it had crossed.

The women had each other’s cockpits on display, and Earl shared both at his own screen topside. They all traded a look—an identical ecstasy of discovery. It bound them into a single awareness for that moment, as the two women moved untethered—free as thought—beneath the icy ceiling of a wholly undiscovered under-sea.

“It’s like flying upside down,” Belinda said. “Across a continent of solid ice!”

Those cracks, chasms, and valleys in the under-sheet made giant shadows of their floodlights, and the darkness in them seemed to seethe. Within its murk—far too deep for their lights to touch—it seemed that huge things hovered, gazing, brooding on the passage of their tiny, radiant vessels.

A triangular silence had fallen between them, the women below and the man above. A long silence while, as one, they watched the glacial terrain slide past overhead.

Melody found her voice. “We’re fifty clicks in and two hundred meters beneath its belly. It’s just … stupendous …”

Endlessly their light-spheres swept the scarred terrain above them. It seemed to both the pilots and their friend up in the freighter that they all saw what Melody was the first to articulate: “Up in those dark canyons don’t you see, like, things moving? I mean, like big things?”

“Yes.” Belinda and Earl said it almost together.

The three of them fell silent. The silty dark they moved through had a smoky, granular texture, sluggishly billowing around them. As they advanced, their lights woke a furtive sparkle throughout that vast turbidity—pyrites, perhaps, in the sediment that the ice titan had ground down off the continent.

“What’s that?” asked Melody. “Belinda—come alongside me up here!”

The sisters’ subs hung together under … what exactly was it? Affixed to the ice above them was a long shape, a shape bigger than both their craft combined. Even in the wash of their lights there was a vagueness to it, created, they realized, by a kind of taut, shiny bandage that bound it to the shelf’s underside.

Melody’s voice sounded hushed to her sister: “Stuff’s half transparent. It’s like … webbing. It’s like that stuff on the orca.”

“Yeah … I see it. Let’s check it out.”

“Roger that.”

”Holy shit. Is that …?”

“Another whale …”

“A fuckin’ sperm whale, full grown! Thing’s sixty feet long! You readin’ this, Earl?”

“Fuckin-A I am!” A hoarseness to his voice. “Pull back outta there now!”

The women traded a glance. “Just a bit longer,” Belinda said.

The women hung below it, edging along the giant’s flank. Though the webbing reflected much of their light, its translucence confirmed, mummied within it, the blunt, squared-off head of a sperm whale.

Hanging some fifty fathoms apart, each sister could see the other’s craft nosing its light-beam up against that giant pinioned to its icy tomb. In their beams’ convergence, it seemed some colossal spider’s prey. It struck them both that whatever had bound this brute could take both their craft at once.

Then, within its milky bindings, the whale stirred. Were they really seeing this? Yes. Tremors, faint but distinct, rippled across its bulk.

It couldn’t be the whale itself moving. The great buttress of its head was shrunken, corded tight against its mighty skull. Even through its gauzy sarcophagus they could see the huge beast was dead. This movement was the stirring of something inside it.

“We gotta look closer,” said Melody. “This is just too incredible! Imagine the predator that did this!”

“I am! I am!” Belinda barked, her urgency crackling in Melody’s headphones. “And we gotta fall way back from this, right now! I mean it, Mel!”

But neither of them made the least motion to retreat. The whale, enshrouded as it was, exerted an eerie magnetism. The bulge and tremor of its underside riveted them with awe.

“Goddamn you crazy broads! Pull way back and head topside, right now! Right the fuck back topside now!”

Earl was screeching a little there at the end, but neither one of the women seemed to hear him. And as he saw them onscreen gazing upward through their convergent light-beams, Earl himself had to agree that those tremors in the corpse were enthralling.

And then the huge carcass’s underside erupted: two great crooked branchlike legs covered with cruel thorns thrust out of the belly, fiercely flexing, and began to tear the carcass asunder in such a smoky storm of exploded tissue that the water around it became a cloud of blindness that enveloped both their vessels. In this murk, the shock waves of some mighty motion seized and shook both craft, and they never clearly saw what it was that erupted from the exploded giant and sped away, to leave them rocking in the blood-smoky deeps.

It seemed a long time they hung there in that fog of torn tissue, beyond awe. When they found one another’s faces on their screens, they saw identical astonishment. And in their shared disbelief they realized that a new amazement lay not very far ahead of them.

It was a great column of much paler water, of water through which light fell. It meant that just ahead of them there was, had to be, a fracture in the Shelf that roofed them.

Steeling themselves, they approached it: a fissure of light that clove the murky deep.

They entered it, this fissure, full two hundred meters wide, and began a slow ascent into the growing brightness. And at length, they surfaced under a pallid, frost-white sky. Floating on that surface side by side, Belinda said, “Talk topside?”

“Roger that.”

They pulled on their furs, raised the hatches, and stepped up into the little conning towers. Stood there in the raw air looking up in awe, looking up that ice-walled shaft at a strip of pallid Antarctic sky more than two hundred feet above their deep entombment.

Cruising half-speed side by side, they watched this icy grandeur unfold. Belinda asked, her voice sounding small and uncertain between these colossal ramparts, “What are those things? Those … like lumps up there on the walls?”

The gusts of sleet and snow variably veiled the cliffs so that they came in and out of focus, as if at a constant readjustment of the atmospheric lens. The women struggled to interpret what was clinging here and there to those prodigious walls, both white cliffs studded with sizeable, irregularly shaped nodes of a darker hue than the ice.

“Look at them,” Melody muttered. “What the …?”

“My God!” Belinda said. “See those, like, tusks on that one? See there? It’s a goddamn walrus.”

As if the word brought it into focus, the huge mummified shape was unmistakable within its glossy bonds.

And, now that their eyes had been instructed, they began discerning other shapes webbed to those high walls: a very big shark, a cephalopod even bigger whose gathered tentacles bulged like coils of suckered cable, and near that, something four-legged and almost as big … a polar bear, mummified with its jaws agape, and its fore-claws lifted for attack.

Belinda said, “Whatever this predator is, it must be huge!” They were armed. Knowing that arctic realms bred bigger fauna, they both had Thompson sub-machine guns aboard. Belinda lifted hers from its rack on her dash and held it up tentatively before her. It had seemed such a beast when she’d test-fired it, but here between these high walls, to which such giants clung entombed, it seemed a comical, slight thing.

Their boats advanced. The sheer walls began to fall away from them, lying back in more gradual slopes from the channel they cruised, until soon it was not a chasm, but a white river valley.

“Listen,” said Belinda, her eyes locked on her sister’s as they rode thirty feet apart. Her unforced voice seemed to ricochet sharply over the icy spaces. “Do you see what I see ahead there? Am I crazy? Hasn’t all that been … built?”

Coming abreast of what she meant, they both stood staring up that slope. Melody nodded in a dazed way. Half that whole frozen hillside seemed one vast, stepped hive, tier upon receding tier of crudely faceted cells. The cells were of a giant scale, sized to house larvae big as skiffs, and wrought of a hard-sheened substance almost as pale as the ice, but nuanced with faint color here and there like mother-of-pearl.

The cells were not so precisely shaped as those of wasp combs are. An irregularity in their faceting seemed to express a cruder instinctual energy. The sprawling structure declared a rude, Cyclopean power abroad in this white waste.

“My God,” Belinda said.

“Shit!” barked Melody, seeing then what her sister did—a colossally agile crustacean bigger than both their boats combined, a kind of huge crab of a streamlined make, narrow-thoraxed, running on six legs while holding aloft two forelegs prodigiously clawed and hinged like a mantid’s. Arcing back up from the stern of its thorax was a jointed tail tipped with the stinger-bulb of a scorpion, but the size of a wrecking-ball.

Huge and swift, it came down the great comb, its legs rippling like pistons in their smooth succession. Its great weight glided across the faceted cells, leapt down onto the ice-slope, and launched from a hundred meters. Hanging on the white air above the channel with its barbed arms outreached, it landed in an explosion of brine, seized Belinda’s sub by stern and prow—and hoisted it aloft.

The giant seemed to triumph over its prey for a moment, brandishing the little sub while Belinda whiplashed in her cockpit seat, the monster flourishing near a ton of steel at the leaden sky. Then the colossal crustacean spun around and ran with it straight back up the slope, and into the vast comb of its hive.

“Stay on com!” Melody shouted into her sister’s stunned face on her screen. “Dog your hatch down—I’ll take that fucker apart!”

“Just don’t take me apart, okay?” Belinda’s voice was oddly absent, more amazed than galvanized. “I’ll signal if—”

Her transmission was cut off, even as Melody was grounding her prow on the glacier. She flung back her bubble and jumped out, seizing up her Tommy-gun and bag of extra magazines.

The giant had a seventy-yard lead when Melody came sprinting up after. Seeing how swiftly it ran even with its seventeen-foot burden, she dreaded losing Belinda entirely and cut loose a burst of .45 slugs—amazing recoil!—that by wild chance took off the bottom joint of the rearmost of the brute’s four left legs while her slugs sparked away on up the icy slope. The predator faltered slightly, but then ran on, Melody running up after it.

She dared not fall behind and fail to see where the thing installed Belinda in the colossal comb—indeed, her sister must not be installed. If this seeming arthropod was at all wasplike, it would paralyze its prey when sealing it in a cell.

She fired again as she ran, not daring to send anything high enough to hit the pod, but desperately trying to catch another of its legs to slow it down.

Unhit, the thing danced nimble as a nightmare, holding her sister in her boat above it like a trophy.

And now, they were running up across the comb itself, whose amber gloss and hexagonal patterning made it seem some colossal insect’s compound eye that she crossed, her soles drumming on the waxy caps that roofed each cell, whose translucence showed the dim shape of prey within them.

Furious though her pursuit was, she kept glancing at those shapes beneath her as she ran, and some of those prisoners seemed to stir.

Or … if they were paralyzed, perhaps they were being stirred by the larvae devouring them.

Desperately Melody sprinted across this vast, waxen pavement, still firing bursts of the Tommy and stumbling and scrambling higher and higher. If—oh please!—she got the boat back and Melinda was unharmed, how was she going to get it back down to the channel, which was already five hundred meters below and behind her, and dropping fast as she climbed?

She could see the boat aloft in the giant’s pincers; its bottom had just enough of a keel on it to cut into this snow-crowned ice. It just might run back down this glacier like a big sled. Its tough little rudder might even help to guide its plunge through the deeper snow on its way down to the channel. But how could you steer it at the speed you’d be going?

The predator was fast and untiring. Melody’s legs pumped up the slope at the excruciating limit of her strength. If the thing weren’t carrying the weight of that boat, she could never have hoped to keep up with its machinelike power.

Her heart was hammering at breaking point, but now here it came, the opening she’d hoped for: they reached the crest of the ice-slope just where its sharp rim had crumbled along a stretch of a few hundred meters, creating a ribbon of negotiable footing.

She was a toiling shape of sinew and bone, all flesh burnt off her. And there, the huge crustacean laid that boat upon the ice-rim and wheeled to meet her, two pairs of its jointed legs scissoring the air to take her.

Melody was no longer praying. She had become a prayer, her every nerve a single plea for luck.

She leapt, arms wide, in a half-blind plunge to embrace the boat, to seize their stolen survival, and she felt an instant of surprised delight at how well-aimed her lunge was. Here was her grateful body crashing against the little sub’s hard hull, hugging its bubble with her every sinew and driving hard with her legs to shove both her and the boat and her sister at its wheel inside—all at once straight back down the slope, and into almost-freefall, this shrieking, racketing, rocketing plunge straight down the ice wall.

“Damn you!” she screeched to the vessel she clung to. “Turn!” Melody’s every cell screamed it. She had to angle down, toward where the channel broadened to an embayment, with enough open water to receive them if she plunged slantwise toward it.

How fragile at this speed was the vehicle’s grip on the ice! To force a turn in such a plunge seemed madness, meant tumbling death, the shattering of neck and spine. But what would it do to her to go straight down and hit the water at maximum acceleration?

Clenching her jaws and bidding her body a terrified goodbye, she twisted her frame’s whole length powerfully rightwards.

It torqued the whistling hull crossways so that the slight keel caught and cut a slanting course down the steep wall on a branching path, descending down the steeps at perhaps forty-five degrees off the vertical.

And now they were aimed at a further, much broader part of the channel with room to maneuver after their high-speed impact with the water. Their destination had improved, but not their chances of surviving such an impact, for after just a few seconds of descent they were rocketing again, shrieking down at a speed that would break their bodies upon entry.

Melody pressed her boots’ toes against the ice behind her, trying to brake their plunge. But, hugging the cockpit bubble with her whole body, she couldn’t exert any leverage against the glacier speeding under them.

Clinging thus, she could not see her sister’s face, but she felt her presence right beneath her, riding this long plunge with her, the pair of them in touching distance, but powerless to touch before the impact killed them.

Melody lifted her head, letting the icy spume streaming up from the runners sting her face, fixing her eyes on the wall they plunged down, to perceive any feature that offered some natural channel to guide their plunge. The shriek of their keel seemed terror itself.

Please God, Belinda might, just might—braced inside—survive the impact, but when the boat slammed into the water that impact would tear her own grip right off the bubble and she’d hammer that water head-first. Even if it didn’t break her neck, it would surely stun her stone-cold as she knifed deep down in that freezing channel. Deep-sunk and stunned, the sudden killing weight of her drenched clothes would drag her to her death.

The boat’s keel shrieked. The sleety air flayed her ears. The corner of her eye caught big movement on the slope ahead.

The huge crustacean was racing down the steepness, impossibly swift. Its nightmare agility was an enlargement of the familiar little miracle of a spider rushing with equal ease straight up or down a wall. But this bug was big as a truck, and its descent was going to intersect with theirs.

Melody had no hope of survival if she did not jump clear of this hurtling boat, without jumping short and landing on the boulders below. She had to do it in the next six or seven seconds to stay on the ice shelf.

Belinda down inside the boat was screaming something up at her.

Was she saying hold on?

The thought caused a tightening of Melody’s embrace of the bubble, just as the boat’s actual pilot re-took command and wrenched their prow toward their huge predator.

The spidery giant, its glossy black eyes on their stalks bent toward them, veered more sharply to intercept and seize them. Beneath its hideous eyes its chelicera—the largest of its mouthparts—scissored like jointed scythes with its greed to take them.

“Oh shit!” shouted Melody, seeing their intersection not fifty meters off. And at that, Belinda wrenched the wheel, and they were shrieking dead for the brute.

Its crooked legs danced hard to turn and meet them, but their suddenness had thrown it off-balance. Melody, from her rooftop vantage, watched the huge legs tilting and faltering, the monster outmaneuvered. As the mighty tail with its stingered bulb struck down on the ice behind her, they shot past its forelegs straight under it. She watched a huge pincer arc down at her two seconds too late and shatter only the air with the snap of its closing.

“No!” she screamed, for instantly here came Belinda’s target looming at them: one of the brute’s back legs. Caught with its weight on that leg, it could not dodge the dead-on impact of the hurtling boat.

Collision, in the next nanosecond, proved to be deliverance. The leg shattered with a tree-snapping report, and their boat leapt through.

Still Belinda steered them slantwise to the killer slope and then brought them around into a counter-slant. She was switchbacking, yes! Melody glanced back upslope and saw that their impact had cost the brute half of another leg on the same side as the first amputation. Again, the machinelike predator was pistoning downslope after them, though now there was a wobble to its gait.

It came crookedly dancing down. But though at first it veered left and right, echoing its quarry, it suddenly got smart and began to make a beeline that transected their zigzags. Even damaged, it was far more stable on this steepness than its prey. Melody craned her neck back and saw with horror how quickly it gained on them.

The vast speeding slope below her, the channel still so far, the predator huge and tireless and hungry—the physics of their situation struck Melody’s heart like a sledge.

They swung into another giddy switchback, and as they streaked slantwise down again, the relentless arthropod came down in a leap, the cage of its crooked legs striking the ice in a spray of fragments that echoed on their hull even above the roar of their keel and the wind.

The huge predator on its straight plunge would surely intersect them on the next switchback. Melody screamed, “Break another leg when it jumps us!” Through the dark polarized bubble she could just see Belinda’s head nod.

The shriek of their hull was a demon’s song, while the wild winds flung swarms of sleet and snow, drenching them with a light now pallid and now blazing white. A surge of wind came booming down the channel that they plunged into. They could see where this chasm in the Shelf narrowed back to the slender but ample channel they had entered by.

Another switchback, shrieking leftward down it, and below this, the last long plunge cross-slope to the wider stretch of water where their other boat waited.

Could this boat survive impact? Would it break up? Would it ship too much water and go straight down?

Belinda threw her last switchback, and there was their final plunge ahead of them, five hundred meters down the ice-face to the embayment she had targeted. Melody embraced the bubble passionately.

A huge mass overleapt them. She felt the atmospheric bow-wave of a soaring giant, and then—as Belinda veered their boat and Melody held on for dear life, every joint crackling—the legs came down like jointed trees of some skeleton forest sudden-planted dead ahead.

Through the wind-shriek Melody heard a dull boom from the cockpit under her—two beats. She took that muffled bellow to be Belinda telling her to hold on. What else could she do up here? They plunged like a bomb straight for that thicket of crooked huge legs.

Belinda had decided to dodge past those legs, right? But in an instant she knew otherwise. They thrust right into them, missing a front leg by a hair but plunging at a hind one.

The whole bottom joint of that leg blew to splinters as their boat burst through it. One piece slammed down on Melody’s shoulders as it streaked past her, knocking out her breath, but she held on. She looked back at the huge bug.

Though some of its legs were out of commission, it was still moving, turning around and springing down after them, but its pursuit was more staggery. They could beat it to the bottom.

Below them the channel looked like a band of steel. The smooth sweep of the ice down to its shore was broken by frosty black rocks jutting up through it for the last hundred meters of its descent. If they couldn’t slow down …

And then she shrieked a question, knowing Belinda couldn’t hear it. “What the fuck is that?”

For all their switchbacking, the channel was much closer now—they could see the texture of the water, see the sculpting of the ice walls, seamed and graven by the sea.

And see something else. Something big, moving just under the water, creating a turgid zone out in the channel.

In a ceaseless wail of metal-torn ice, Melody and Belinda under her plunged down the steeps, Melody a limpet on the shrieking vehicle.

She screamed—at what was erupting from the channel they plunged toward. A big knot of unrest began to roil the water. A sinewy disturbance grew, the cold sea writhing in a boil of greenish-black tentacles.

Even in the adrenalized distress of their plunge, the size of that stir crackled up and down Melody’s spine, and then she saw the body of what thrust those tentacles up toward them.

This huge, mossy fuselage had, near its crown, a colossal eye like an eerie, pallid target. Both women could see this orb, half submerged in the channel, turn its hugeness fractionally and focus precisely on them.

A pair of the tentacles came snaking up the slope to meet their rocketing plunge. Evasion seemed as impossible as in nightmares—the tentacles’ tips broadened into suckered pads of a size to seize their sub right off the ice.

But suddenly, it seemed that it was their huge pursuer that had captured that titan’s attention. Those benthic arms thrust past them and gripped their crook-legged pursuer while, down in the channel, the snake-limbed titan regarded them with so huge an eye: a colossus of alien sentience.

It raised the captured beast aloft and snatched it down, while all the crab’s remaining legs clawed the air for the traction they’d lost. The tentacle crushed the crab and conveyed it down to its own kraken’s beak, which engulfed it whole.

But throughout, it seemed to Belinda that the monstrous eye was focused on them.

As they hurtled down, the size of its eye seemed to grow like a planet. The immense pupils seemed a gulf of worlds where millennial visions seethed.

And what both Melody and Belinda perceived in that colossal eye, what they afterwards reported to each other in awe and solemn wonder, was a consciousness, a recognition of their own brief being…. Was it more? A glint of sly derision, of irony? The titan, old past reckoning, looked out at them from its millennial eye and knew them for the mayflies that they were.

As they dove toward that colossal eye, both sisters saw themselves known. For the rest of their lives (neither one short) they spoke of it together, again and again through the years.

They saw in that vast eye a flood of their own memories, so minutely etched and poignant, felt themselves plucked back through years and seasons of their deeds and days, felt warm rain and hot winds on their skin, felt epiphanies of heart and spine on hillsides and freeways, on subways and beaches, saw their own tears in their most secret pain and saw again the starwheels they’d seen blazing through a thousand summer nights gone by.

Within the suckered pads of its two seizing limbs the titan captured their prow, cradled its plunge. Its hugeness began to slide back beneath the waters of the sound as it slowed them gently to a standstill at the channel’s brink.

So slowly it submerged, and last of all its eye sank just beneath the surface and hovered there … how many heartbeats?

And in the course of those heartbeats they absolutely knew the brevity of their own lives before the long endurance of this titan.

And knew as well, incommensurate though they were with this colossus, that it saluted their sentience and their brevity. Performed for them this cosmic courtesy—salvation—and withdrew to the benthos that housed its huger life.

The sisters spoke of it together long, long afterwards. Did not that colossus seem amused?

They agreed that immense sly eye saw all of them—somehow saw their cluttered world far away and their seething confusion within it, and was frostily lit with an irony.

Surely, inwardly, the titan smiled?

CANTATA

MELANIE TEM

DR. BLYTHE ANDRADE FOUGHT THE RESTRAINTS SHE HERSELF HAD helped to design and construct, the self-protection she’d fled here into the lab to find. Her throat contorted with the terrible itch to sing and the desperate need to scratch it out. Deep and fierce in her brain, musical passages and unattached notes itched, itched. Above her right ear another place where she’d scraped through her scalp had just begun to scab over and was itching again.

The decoder was going crazy. In English Maheen breathed, “Holy shit.”

Hry scratched himself, briefly and lightly. His itch was superficial, if it was itch at all, and if it was music he wouldn’t know it.

His paltry scratching intensified Blythe’s need to scratch. When her own itching was at its worst, and then incrementally worse again, this whole valley seeped and crackled with incipient music only she, apparently, was aware of. A nasty transposition of how she’d lived her life.

Blythe scratched, scratched, dug, could not reach the itch but could not stop trying. A bald spot spread raw and bleeding under any shield anyone including her had come up with, under the decoder itself. A choker of deep gouges grew and tangled under the high, tight energy collar devised specifically for her with her input and yet penetrable if she put her mind to it, which she did without conscious will.

Melodies, riffs, scales, tones, and half-tones swarmed through her. She couldn’t escape them, couldn’t get them away from her, couldn’t get them out of her head or off the decoder screen Maheen was monitoring. Voices and some kind of low horn fluttered in her brain. Music dripped from the air, bulged up out of the ground through the floor and the soles of her shoes, invaded her body in food and drink and breath.

“I wish I could do something for you.” Maheen patted her shoulder.

Blythe flinched and moved her head back and forth against the chair, meaning, “That’s ridiculous, we both know you can’t,” and, “Shut up,” and just general existential protest.

Hry was fascinated by the images on the decoder screen. “What is that?” In the limited Droyan language, he asked that question more often and more intently than the scientists and explorers whose job was asking questions.

“That’s itching,” Maheen explained again, again incompletely because music could not be mentioned.

“Itch, yes.” Hry’s humanoid appendages scrabbled over his dappled skin, demonstrating that he understood itch. For Droyans as for humans, just thinking about pain didn’t cause pain, but just thinking about itching caused itch. He wasn’t satisfied, though. He knew there was more. “What is that?”

Maheen pointed out half a dozen pulses on the screen. “This is a real-time representation of Blythe’s brain. All that brain activity is intense itching,” she repeated, as if she were giving more information but in fact assiduously following the long, dense corporate protocol that boiled down to: No Music. You could be fined for singing in the shower, confined to quarters for whistling on a blade of grass, taken off the project for speaking in a chanting or singsong voice, fired and sent home at your own expense—no small threat, given the remoteness of this site—if caught with external or internal musical contraband devices or for talking about music to the indigenes. When the itch subsided enough that Blythe could think of other things, she sometimes wondered whether self-harm for the purpose of rooting out music would lead to a promotion or get her sent home—where there was nothing, but at least there had not been this itch.

Hry scratched again. “Hry,” she gasped. Her lazier co-workers called him Henry or Harry or Herr or a phoneme in Portuguese or Bantu. He would answer to any of it, but Blythe tried to respect the pronunciation of names in this culture; xenoanthropological evidence suggested that, in addition to ancestors not yet identified, the Droyans were likely descended from forebears common with modern humans, so the physical and mental apparatus to produce the correct sounds ought to be there. His name was all she could say right now, but it was enough to get him to stop scratching, and she groaned it again in thanks that he might or might not understand.

The itch swelled. Between Blythe moaning on the table and the explosive image of Blythe’s brain on the screen, Hry had twisted himself into the Droyan attitude of extreme attentiveness.

Then it stopped. The frenzied struggle to scratch persisted autonomically until Blythe could realize she wasn’t itching anymore. She collapsed in the restraints, wanting only to rest, wanting only for the music not to come back.

Maheen murmured a reverent exclamation like “Wow!” in Farsi. She checked the displays, pressed keys, patted Blythe’s knee. “Two hours forty-seven minutes level 8 or above. This was a bad one.”

Blythe exhaled, “Yeah.”

“We gathered many interesting data, though.”

The only data-cruncher in the minimally funded expedition, Blythe would be analyzing the record of this episode as soon as her mind cleared enough, usually within the hour. She didn’t need Maheen to thank her or flatter her about what a contribution she was making, how she was rising above her own adversity for the greater good of two species, how brave she was not to seek medical intervention or administrative transfer, etc., etc. But Maheen did anyway, while Blythe tried to concentrate on smoothing the insides of her mind and body so she could get out of the lab and away from Maheen’s kindness and Hry’s excessive interest.

Blythe had never liked music. Any form of music, in any genre, produced by any instrument. At first she’d simply been unaware of it. As an infant unsoothed by lullaby, she’d been wrongly suspected of deafness. As a child she’d never sung and had not required accompaniment for expressive and interpretive body movement. That particular adolescent obsession had spared her. Adulthood had finally allowed her to identify what was commonly referred to as music and so to avoid it—if not altogether, at least in her own living spaces where she spent as much of her time alone as possible.

Her aberration had given her the grim pleasure that was the only kind she allowed herself, until as a randomly studious teenager she’d learned there was actually a clinical term for it—meaning that, to her displeasure, she was not the only one. She’d never had any interest in trying to find compatriots.

Discovery that the Droyans had no music of any sort, no word for it, had initially appalled her as much as the others in the expedition, but for different reasons. She’d been insulted that an entire culture, albeit a decimated and shallow one, would presume to share her amusica, while her colleagues regarded the Droyans as if they were defective because of it.

Religion, still full of trappings, had one less here. Birds and cricket noises were not mimicked. Parents rocked their children to sleep without feeling the need to vocalize. Nowhere were there sly references to symphony or harmony or dissonance or rhythm, for the Droyans perceived none of that and so Blythe hadn’t had to, either.

After all this time among them, Blythe wouldn’t say she was anything like charmed, a descriptor that might have been from a defunct language for all it had to do with her. But, having long been scornful of the supposed relationship between the masses and music, she had come to approve of this ancient, isolated, remnant society in this long-lost and now-found deep valley where there was no such symbiosis.

Blythe had also been struck, also for reasons different from those of her more pedestrian colleagues, by subsequent evidence that music had once been strong—she wouldn’t use the popular term “rich”—in the Droyan culture. Computer logarithms from afar and from recent on-site digs and models showed that this civilization had once made music, sung and played and composed and recorded it, spoken of it and represented it in art forms.

Then, somewhere between five and ten thousand years ago, invaders still referred to only as the Sky People had destroyed everything, including all music and, eventually, all cultural memory of it. The tiny band of Droyans’ tinier band of forebears had escaped to this hidden place and gone about creating life from scratch until enough generations had passed that no one remembered it hadn’t always been this way—simple, hemmed in, half-buried, amusical, and without need for music.

That such a cleansing was possible would never have occurred to Blythe. Maybe she was a descendant of the Sky People.

She didn’t waste much time wondering about that. She just did her job analyzing, annotating, and archiving the data given her. Interacting only as much as she had to with human or Droyan, she’d been starting to relax. At moments she’d thought she might almost be feeling at home.

Then the music had invaded her. Off guard in this music-free place, she hadn’t heard it coming. One morning on a mapping trek through the labyrinthine passages underneath the cliffs, staying well behind the others so their vapid chatter wouldn’t interfere with her instruments, she’d become aware of sounds she could only label as music—complicated, rhythmic, irritating. It had seemed to be exuding from the interior surfaces of the tunnel, the rocks and water, the cracks and stalactites and stalagmites.

No one else had reacted. Finally Blythe had been forced to inquire if anyone else was hearing it. No one was.

Surely she was the most inhospitable of hosts, so it seemed to her there must be some intentionality about it, some purpose, if only to be cruel. The itching response had soon developed, and her need to root it out. By now, she found herself in a bizarre sort of mortal danger from it.

Maheen was still watching the decoder. “Things are looking calmer.”

“Yeah. Time to go.” Blythe moved against the restraints again, less frantically but with no less determination.

“Are you certain, Blythe? Sometimes there has been recurrence—”

She was by no means certain, but she said she was.

“I must examine—” Palpating Blythe’s scalp, scanning her skin under the disheveled uniform, Maheen apparently found no new wounds. Blythe hadn’t thought she’d hurt herself this time, but sometimes she wasn’t aware of it until later. Maheen’s fingers paused at the deepest gouge on Blythe’s throat, which burned to the touch but had begun to heal. Blythe forced herself not to jerk away or slap Mheen’s hand aside. Neither of them commented on it.

Blythe left the lab while Maheen was still recording and Hry was still scratching in his frivolous way. As she stepped outside, where late-afternoon shadows curtained the landscape and the cliffs towered in the low light, it was easy to understand how this place had stayed secret for so long, even to imagine that it was not now being contaminated by the outside world of which she herself was a scout.

Shaky, hungry, exhausted, head and throat hurting, Blythe headed back to her quarters through the rapid mountain twilight.

She detected no music inside her now, and no itch, but she knew she was moving through poison. The music was coming from the site itself. She could feel it crawling down from the night sky, founting up from the river. Maybe it had lain dormant these five or ten thousand years, waiting for her. Just thinking about it made the itch stir.

She clenched her fists and pressed her arms over them. She lost the familiar path and didn’t know where she was for a while. The trail roughened and sharply descended. Her feet scrabbled and her balance was uncertain. The density of the ambient energy increased as something solid rose on either side of her—rock, rock embedded with music. Without stopping she stepped sideways and leaned so that her shoulder and flank scraped along the rough wall, assuaging the itch nearest the surface but exacerbating its more profound layers. Then she stumbled into an open space and recognized it as the rock field where insubstantial legend suggested the Sky People had burned and buried and sacrificed. She was digging at her throat.

In the long dark mountain-bound space between sunset and moonrise, she didn’t know Hry was there until the humming was interrupted by “What is that?” and then resumed. Her throat was bleeding. Hry was humming. Hry was making music.

“Music!” The itch spurted blood but didn’t ease.

Hry approximated the word “music” and hummed.

“Stop!” Hry knew the word but maybe didn’t associate it with the sound he was creating or channeling, or maybe his pleasure was more compelling than her pain. He didn’t stop. Something like a chant was exuding from him now, between his bulbous lips or through his pores. The itch was beyond her reach. She had to reach it. She drove her fingers into the wound in her neck. Then Hry’s music dimmed.

Later Maheen told her, “You nicked the carotid artery. I would not have thought it possible to do that to oneself.”

Though the sounds Blythe made in an attempt to ask about extent of damage and prognosis only approximated language, Maheen answered, “We have done our best with the tools we have and are cautiously hopeful, if you do not injure yourself again. You must stop this, Blythe. It has gone too far.”

“Itch,” Blythe rasped. “Itch. Itch!”

Maheen leaned close to whisper, “Did you tell him about music? He knows about music.”

Blythe tried to say, “He already knew.”

During her recuperation, Hry was a frequent visitor to the clinic. He might have been helping to take care of her. In and out of consciousness, she was at the mercy of the music that came with him, humming and tapping and whistling and jangling and dancing. No one else seemed aware of it. She itched. She’d wake up to find herself scratching, or restrained. She’d order him out and he would leave, but then he’d be back in a cloud of music. “Keep him away from me!”

Now the music had gone too far, the itch too wide and wild and deep. Even her wails sounded like music. Even her breathing itched, and her thoughts. It hardly seemed possible that the images riffing through the room from her decoder screen could be generated by a human brain.

“Let it go, Blythe.” Maheen came every day to download the data. Blythe wondered who was analyzing and recording, what would be lost and forgotten. “Let them give you something to ease you. You have done enough.”

Instead, she disconnected herself from the tubes, meters, and decoder and stumbled out into the midday. Her feet two-stepped and waltzed. Her throat buzzed with unorganized song. Her hands scratched, damp at her scalp, clumps of hair like a trail of eighth-notes.

The whole place might have been a cave. The cliffs narrowed bright sky and ground, focused and guided the invasion. The whole place might have been music. Even her moans and curses were musical, even the sounds inside her head from her frantic scratching at her skull. The whole place might have been itch.

Hry was beside her, touching her in the silent Droyan greeting. Denying her human instinct to fight or flee, she kept moving to the agonizing and useless scat of both hands digging at pocked planes of her scalp.

Hry’s soprano fluted, “What is that?”

“Music,” she cried. “Music, music.” Naming it called it out. Her fingertips were sticky and her hair matted. She bowed and pirouetted. “Music music music.”

The name of it didn’t seem to be what Hry was after. His alto crooned, “Music,” but then, “What is that?”

“Itch!”

He scratched himself in syncopation and echoed, “Itch,” but then in booming growling bass repeated, “What is that? What is that?” as her fingers broke through a layer and then another near her right temple where there was a gap in the bone.

Hry was pressing against her, veering her onto rougher ground. Blythe knew this was not aggression. In this hermetic culture, where aggression would have been disastrous, spoken language had evolved nearly as free of words for force as for music, body language persuasive and suggestive rather than hostile. All she would have had to do was pause, or angle in another direction, and he’d probably have acquiesced or gone on his way. But what was the point?

They were all but underground. Her feet were wet with oozing music. The substance on her fingers didn’t feel or smell like blood, and in the indirect moonlight it didn’t look red. The hole in her scalp seemed to be deeper than thin scalp. She tried to reach the itch inside.

Horns played, strings, plinking instruments; Blythe had never been able to tell one from another. Drums. Voices made noise and other voices made noise. Were Droyans down here, singing and playing music? Some sort of secret society? She saw no one, no identifiable source except the hidden place itself inside the hidden place. More and more music stored for millennia deeper and deeper underground.

Itch.

Hry burst into exuberant, worshipful music.

Blythe drove her fingers into her brain.

CTHULHU RISING

HEATHER GRAHAM

“LAST NIGHT, I HEARD IT. I HEARD A SHARP SCREAM—AND THEN the moaning sound that the engineers reported when the Guinevere was at the shipyard!”

The young woman speaking leaned forward across the cocktail table where she sat in the lounge of the historic mystery ship. Her name was Devon Adair; she was American, and simply beautiful. Finn McCormick had barely had a chance to talk with her as yet—this was just their second night aboard the ship. Her eyes were as blue as a summer sky in Montana, and her hair was nearly jet black. At about five-seven, she was slim yet shapely, filled with energy and had a smile for anyone she met.

“Yes!” the man sitting opposite from her in the ship’s promenade lounge said, leaning forward with excitement as well. He was Michael Corona, and, apparently, her longtime friend and associate. “I heard it, too. I was half asleep and I thought I was imagining things. But I heard it—oh, the moaning! It was tragic—and so clear. Just wonderful.”

Tragically wonderful? Finn thought.

Devon sat with her own group—the Ghosties—as Finn’s fellows referred to them.

And, oddly enough, the two small groups of passengers had arrived in the lounge to await the dinner hour at about the same time, after a day of roaming the ship—or the Promenade Deck, the only one allowed to them—individually, in pairs or smaller groups.

They had, however, gathered at separate tables.

There were no bartenders in the lounge. The only staff members aboard, other than those needed to manage the great ship on which they sailed, were two stewards and a kitchen staff of three. And their paths hadn’t crossed with any of the staff since lunchtime. They’d known this was the way it would be, of course. Matt Barringer, the attorney for the owners, had explained the entire set-up to all of them at his London offices. Discovered by British researchers, the ship been brought in to London where basic work had been done on her that would allow engineering experts to deem her seaworthy. There, she’d been checked from stem to stern to determine her condition, which had proven to be remarkably good. But after months of legal wrangling, it had been determined that she still belonged to the East-West Luxury Sail company, now called Sun-Moon Vacations.

The CEO of Sun-Moon Vacations was apparently something of a romantic—or something of a shrewd businessman—or both. Because of the strange circumstances of her disappearance, he had determined that the ship would sail the Atlantic with “researchers” aboard. The ship would find a permanent dock at the Port of Miami where, Finn was sure, the company planned to make a great deal of money on her, opening her as a hotel and a tourist attraction.

Thus the Ghosties and the scientists had been called in. According to Barringer, the attorney, the CEO and the board were interested in what each group had to say about the voyage across the Atlantic—even if it was entirely uneventful, which, he said, he rather suspected that it would be.

Maybe not. With the Ghosties on board, and the end result that the ship would be a tourist attraction, there was bound to be some drama.

“I heard the cries—I know I heard them,” Devon said with conviction. “And though we’ve set up some cameras and recorders on the ship, tonight, before I go to bed, I’m going to set up a recorder in my room. I didn’t see anything—I haven’t seen anything unusual as of yet. But I heard those sounds.”

She’d heard the squeaks and groans of the old ship passing through the North Atlantic at night, Finn thought. But he didn’t rise to argue with anyone in her group.

There were four in Devon Adair’s group. Four Ghosties. They were Devon Adair, Michael Corona, Hampton Jones, and Brigitte Sloan. They were formally and legally—Finn understood that they were incorporated—known as the Mystic City Ghost Trackers. Finn had been told that Michael Corona, who started the group, was from Mystic, Connecticut.

Corona was thirtyish, tall, dark, and handsome. Brigitte Sloan was very pretty, too—Top Model pretty. Only Hampton Jones had a studious look about him. In fact, he could have been at the top of the pile when it came to looking like a nerd—which meant he should have been part of Finn’s group.

The members of Finn’s group were the scientists and intellectuals. Finn was an anthropologist; Marnie Silver, forty-three and dedicated, was a physicist; Anita Clare was a biologist; Granger Whitby, married, balding, and a close second to the character ‘Beeker’ from the Muppet crew, was a historian; and Suzie Brandt, pretty, fit, and sweet, was a marine biologist.

The new owners of the Guinevere wanted to cover a number of bases as they brought the great ship to her new dock, though Suzie really wondered why she’d been called. “What creatures I’ll discover while decks up on an ocean liner, I have no idea.” But the concept of being part of the historic voyage had been great—whether she’d be useful in any way or not.

While they’d made a big point of bringing on scientists, the owners really wanted the paranormal crew, Finn was convinced. No matter what Barringer had said, because of course, the owners wanted the ship to be haunted. The more haunted the ship, the better the tourist trade. Or so they believed.

“Sad, so sad, really,” Anita said. She was sitting near Finn and watching the Ghosties. “Because science has yet to understand a physical situation, they must make it paranormal.”

Anita reminded Finn of a fox terrier. She was slim and hyper. She might have been an attractive woman herself if she weren’t in perpetual motion. She had curly blond hair, bright eyes, and gold-rimmed specs that he often wondered if she really needed. She considered herself to be no-nonsense and practical in all things.

“In their defense, science has a lot of explaining to do as far as this ship is concerned,” Finn said.

The circumstances regarding the Guinevere were truly unusual. She’d been commissioned before the Great Depression, not to be the biggest ship on the transatlantic trail, but the finest. Built in Belfast, she had been a marvel of her day. Designed to carry no more than six hundred passengers and three hundred crew members, she had the largest and most luxurious cabins of any ship, a magnificent ballroom with chandeliers and windows by Tiffany’s, a “cathedral” restaurant designed with elements from the ruins of a medieval church, and a bridge that offered every possible navigational and steering mechanism known in her day.

Despite all this, she had disappeared on her maiden voyage, taking nine hundred lives with her. She’d been traveling the North Atlantic—much like the ill-fated Titanic—when she had simply disappeared. She’d never called for help; to the best of anyone’s knowledge back then, she hadn’t struck an iceberg—she hadn’t struck anything.

She had disappeared. There had been no radio communications from her, and certainly, no sightings of her.

Then, just six months ago, when a group of British scientists had been monitoring climate change and the rate an ice cap was melting, the ship had just appeared. Granted, great chunks of glacial ice had fallen in the area—the entire geography of the Pole had changed. Global warming—whether enhanced by the careless practices of man or not—was as real as every change that had already taken place through the millennia. Mini–ice ages had hit medieval Europe, and the earth’s climate was really an ever-altering system.

But thus far, no one had figured out how the ship hadn’t been crushed by the pressure of the ice all around it. Why hadn’t it suffered more damage through time and the elements? Where had it been? Some argued that massive prehistoric creatures had been preserved in ice—why not a ship? Finn’s perspective was that none of those “massive” creatures came near the size of the ship, nor had they been found in such pristine condition, but the ship being found—weathered but in full condition—was a fact; an unexplained fact. So how much could they really knock the Ghosties?

Anita waved a hand in the air. “The thing is, Finn, science will show us how she was preserved—eventually. She might have been caught in some kind of a shelter by ice blocks that rose around her, keeping her protected. The temperature of the water might have preserved her organic and inorganic structure. Science will find the truth.”

“Anita, what do you think happened to her passengers and crew?” Finn asked. There had been no sign of bodies on board—which, according to her reasoning, should have been preserved by the severe cold as well.

“That’s simple,” Anita said.

“Oh?”

“They abandoned the ship and tried to escape.”

“The lifeboats remain on board.”

“Another ship must have come by.”

“There’s no record of such a thing.”

“Not everything was recorded back then!” Anita said with exasperation. “You’re just defending them—because of that silly girl. Oh, Finn, don’t look at me like that. Anyone can see that you practically drool over her. You really need to get your tongue off the ground before you trip on it. It’s quite embarrassing, really.”

Finn was startled. He’d been polite to all the Ghosties—born and raised in Lafayette, Louisiana, he’d have his mouth washed out with soap if he hadn’t learned common courtesy. But he’d never imagined he’d given away the fact that he found Devon enchanting.

Then again, whether he did or didn’t was really no concern to Anita.

So he smiled. “I’m so sorry. I’ve got no scientific explanation for the fact I find her extremely attractive.”

Anita stood impatiently. “Men. Educate them to the nines, and they’re still nothing but walking penises.” She walked away. He assumed she was leaving the lounge to spend some time in her favorite company—her own.

Granger Whitby, who had been sitting next to Anita, cleared his throat. “Um, if it makes you feel any better, Finn, I believe that Miss Adair seems to find you quite attractive as well.”

Finn felt his face break into a sincere grin. Granger was a good guy; he loved history because he loved people, and he explained history by explaining people. Good, bad, or indifferent, people altered history with their behavior, and Granger could explain why those who looked bad through the eyes of time were often not so evil. He knew dates like the back of his hand, but his expertise was people. He and Finn had worked together often before—Finn liked people, too. He liked the physical differences, the way climate had affected the growth in people, how diet had formed their bones, how society had sometimes brought about their demise.

He and Granger were both tenured professors; they’d been sent on East Asian and African expeditions together. Anita had come on a few, and he had also worked with both Suzie and Marnie before. They weren’t, however, as close-knit as the Ghosties—which was now making them feel, of course, in their own minds, that they needed to pretend that they were.

“Thanks, Granger,” Finn said.

“You’re really a handsome guy,” Marnie put in sweetly. “I mean, especially for a …”

The “Science Guys”—as his crew called themselves—now minus Anita since she had walked off, all looked at her curiously.

“A scientist,” Marnie said, blushing. “Hey, now, we’re not known for being cover models, you know.”

Finn grinned at that. “I don’t think it’s a requirement that we be ugly, either, Marnie, and you’re the cutest little thing in the world, yourself.”

Marnie flushed. She did have a really pretty face. At twenty she might have been a real beauty. She was just tiny, with a figure like a boy’s.

“Other than that I feel like Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz—if I only had some boobs!”

They all laughed at that—scientific types weren’t really that different at all, Finn decided.

The Ghosties looked over at them. Maybe scientific types weren’t known for laughing.

Michael Corona looked suspicious, frowning at them. Hampton Jones and Brigitte Sloan just looked confused.

Devon Adair smiled brightly, as if glad to see that they were having fun.

“What are you up to over there?” Devon asked. “Solving the mystery of the Guinevere?”

“No, I’m afraid we haven’t managed that!” Marnie said.

“There are possibilities out there,” Granger said.

Finn looked at him curiously. Suzie Brandt—a marine biologist and really one of their own—groaned. “He’s about to tell you that H. P. Lovecraft had it all right in his novels—the aliens landed millennia ago and kept the ship in decent shape.”

“Aliens!” Michael Corona scoffed.

“If ghosts exist, why not aliens?” Granger asked.

“Well—hell! You’re the scientist,” Michael told him. “Time, for one. Where did these aliens come from—how did they travel quickly enough to get here in a lifetime. If they were here, why have we never known? Why haven’t we found alien corpses?”

“If ghosts exist, why don’t the murdered just tell the cops who killed them?” Granger asked in return. “It’s been proven—right, Suzie?—that animals we thought were extinct have suddenly appeared from the depths of the ocean—or that they’ve been discovered deep in an Amazonian rainforest. We don’t know everything. And time can be elusive. What if their lifespan was thousands of years rather than decades or a bit over a century at best?”

“H. P. Lovecraft was a novelist!” Brigitte Sloan said. She was a truly attractive young woman. Maybe ghost-hunters—or ghost-hunting women—came that way. They might have gotten together hoping to be the next crew to be on a ghost-hunting show.

“Novels are often based on what was real; novelists base their stories on information they pick up speaking with other people in bars—or bowling, maybe,” Granger said. There was anger in his voice.

Michael Corona chortled. “Oh, yeah! Let’s see, we’ll have all kinds of alien monsters aboard. Oh, yeah, I get it. Ship stuck up at the Pole. At the Mountains of Madness. Cthulhu rising!”

Granger sat very straight. “Though the ‘spawn’ of Cthulhu is mentioned, the Mountains of Madness actually features Elder Things and shoggoths and the Evil Beyond,” he said.

“Uh, yeah. Fictional shit!” Michael said.

“Fictional, if you will. But if you’re going into fiction, my friend, you might want to actually read the fiction you intend to reference,” Granger told him.

“Well, here’s something cheerful—our ship was caught up at the North Pole,” Suzie said cheerfully. “At the Mountains of Madness was about an expedition to the South Pole—Antarctica—where the giant blind penguins were kept as fodder for the shoggoth—oooh! Giant sluglike or blob creatures with eyes all over that were like blob-slaves until they arose. We’re so far north—we should be just fine.” She offered everyone a giant smile, trying to ease the tension that had risen between Michael and Granger, the Ghosties and the Scientists.

Finn knew that Granger believed that there was something they didn’t know about that lay behind the ship’s survival in the ice, and that Granger did believe there might be a species of man or beast that had caused the survival—scientifically possible.

He didn’t quite understand Michael Corona’s conviction that ghosts could exist—but not aliens. Certainly, there were beasts upon the earth they had yet to discover or assumed to be extinct, but most probably nothing that could preserve a ship throughout a multitude of decades.

Finn didn’t really believe in ghosts, or aliens either. He did, though, love a good ghost story—or a good sci-fi story.

As if she, too, wanted to break the tension in the room, Devon Adair rose and stretched. “I think I’m going for some air before dinner. Anyone want to join me?”

“Not I,” Brigitte said, shivering. “It’s freezing out there.”

“Really, Devon,” Michael said. “You’ll catch your death of a cold!”

“I’m going to live dangerously,” Devon said dryly.

“I’ll join you,” Finn said, surprising himself. He wasn’t a coward—but he also wasn’t known for being bold. Especially with women.

But Devon smiled. They looked at each other across the several lounge tables that separated them.

For a moment, meeting her eyes, Finn imagined what it must have been like when the ship had departed for her maiden voyage, years before. Handsome men in formal attire would have flirted with beautiful women in sequins and diamonds. He almost pictured—in his mind’s eye—the two of them meeting that way. Guests all around chatted, music played, and they saw each other across a crowded room.

But, of course, the room wasn’t crowded.

There were only nine passengers aboard the Guinevere—the Ghosties and his own crew of science geeks. Only their staterooms, the lounge, and the dining room were open, but they were free to wander the decks—that is, when they chose. They were following the North Atlantic route and it was bitterly cold outside.

“Come on!” Devon said enthusiastically.

As they left, Finn could hear Granger continuing along in his vein. He wasn’t talking about Lovecraft anymore, though—he was on to mentioning various symbols cut into the earth and only seen from the air, ancient societies with building abilities unknown to man, and the very real scientific theory that wormholes might exist.

It was crisp and cold outside; frost clung to the rail. Devon didn’t seem to care. She walked to it. The wind caught her hair, and she looked out on the vastness of the sea with enthusiasm written beautifully on her features.

She glanced over at him as he joined her. “Haunted or not, the ship is beautiful and it’s incredible to be on it and be part of this voyage,” she told him.

He had to say something, though he was feeling extremely tongue-tied.

“Definitely fascinating—it’s like being a part of history,” he said. He leaned back against the rail, his leather jacket protecting him somewhat from the cold. “So—have you seen or spoken with a ghost?” he asked her.

She smiled. “Like a ghost—a full person—just stepping into the light and saying ‘Hi!’? No, I can’t say that’s happened. But I have heard plenty of unusual sounds…. I’ve really felt cold spots! And, yes, Mr. Science, I do believe that there is more out there than we know.”

“I believe that, too,” he said earnestly.

She gave him a wry smile. “Science as yet undiscovered,” she said.

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you’re an anthropologist,” she said.

“I am that, yes. I am fascinated, studying ancient people.”

“That’s cool,” she told him.

Cool? Was she mocking him?

“Well, I do something that I really do love for a living,” he said.

“I meant that it really is cool. Definitely better than being a bartender.”

“You’re a bartender?”

“You really don’t make money chasing ghost expeditions,” she said. “Unless—and this could help, maybe—we were picked up as ghost hunters for a TV series.”

“Well,” he said awkwardly. “I—um—hope that you are.”

“I do, too.” She smiled at him and smoothed back a lock of dark hair that the wind had taken. “I wish … oh, well, I wish I’d been a better student, that I’d gone on to college, that I’d been interested in more than clubs and football games when I was in high school. It’s all fun then—but you grow up and the nerdy kids have jobs and incomes and we gossip girls wind up being … bartenders.” She frowned suddenly and then laughed. “I was about to say that I don’t even remember those books you were talking about—or that Michael and Granger were talking about. I mean, I’ve heard of H. P. Lovecraft and I’ve seen some creepy horror movies based on his work, but … so, what are Elder Things?”

“Ah, Elder Things,” Finn said. “Basically, ancient aliens, large, intelligent beings. They raised what they called the shoggoths to be their slaves, but then the slaves revolted. They’re both from a novella called At the Mountains of Madness. The novella is about an expedition to Antarctica and another expedition to Antarctica, but the second time around the narrator knows that everything will go to hell.”

“So the shoggoths revolted, eh?” she teased.

“Double-entendre there, my dear. They were revolting creatures. I don’t remember the exact description Lovecraft gave them, but Suzie had it down pretty pat. They were slithering, bloblike creatures with eyes all over, and they more or less ate up or absorbed everything they touched. They were amorphous—they could take on any shape, they didn’t have minds of their own—or so the Elder Things must have believed—but over millions of years they developed thought. Before then, of course, they’d built the underwater cities of their masters, and when they did develop their own minds they were easily able to imitate their masters.” He stopped speaking, thinking that he must be boring her to tears.

But she was watching him with fascination, smiling. “Thank God this ship was stuck up in the Arctic—and not the Antarctic,” she said. She was teasing, of course. But he was surprised to note there seemed to be a little tic of real fear behind her words.

“There you go. Wrong pole,” he said. “We’re safe.”

She frowned. “What about Cthulhu?” she asked. “He’s an H. P. Lovecraft creature, right?”

“Ah, Cthulhu,” Finn said. “He first made his appearance in a short story in 1928—Weird Tales. He is mentioned, in a way, in At the Mountains of Madness. Creatures are referred to as ‘the spawn of Cthulhu.’ Lovecraft described him with humanoid arms and legs, tiny, rudimentary wings, and a head like a giant squid.’ But he was kind of like the shoggoths—he could take on different shapes and forms and his tentacles could come in and out—pretty creepy dude, all right. That was one of the things I love about Lovecraft—so many scientists give their aliens—life from other planets, not countries!—human characteristics. Lovecraft realized life from alien planets could be nothing like us, that intelligence might exist in beings that were nothing like we’d ever seen and that even aliens might have a hierarchy and that one kind of creature might enslave another. Cthulhu—oh, wait. I’m sorry. I’m over-explaining. You know about Cthulhu—I mean, you asked me a question, so you know something.”

She grinned looking out at the water. “I know about Cthulhu because I bought the cutest little stuffed Cthulhu at a flea market in London,” she said. “I knew he was Cthulhu—everyone around me was excited by the little toy, and I pretended I knew exactly what he was.”

He thought that she looked sad. He wondered if he had really shown her what a total loser he was. She must have thought that he had spent his entire life reading and that it was only thanks to decent genetics that he was tall and decently built—traveling to third-world countries to study at ancient gravesites had kept him in fairly muscular shape.

Otherwise, he might have been almost as much a blob as the shoggoths.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to bore you.”

She turned to look at him. “You’re not boring me at all!” she assured him. “I love hearing about the stories that I should have read.”

“No one can read everything,” he assured her. “And … well, I guess a lot of people prone to the sciences have a tendency to fall in love with H. P. Lovecraft. Because of his thinking—perhaps. I mean, people have a tendency to think that the aliens will come and they’ll speak a human language—English, of course, because it’s the American language—and that they’ll have an intelligence like ours and do what we do biologically, but Lovecraft had a more scientific view, perhaps. He loved astronomy, too, and had a true scientific bent, so perhaps that was why he gained such a following. Poor dude—not until he was dead, sadly enough. Only one of his novels was actually published in book form during his lifetime and … wow, sorry. I’m going on and on, I’ll stop. But … I happen to have a copy of the collected works of H. P. Lovecraft with me—you’re welcome to it.”

“You’re a fan?” she asked.

He shrugged ruefully. “I read a lot … I guess my group does.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that!”

“Take my book.”

“I couldn’t take your book. And I could listen to you forever.”

He laughed. “You could easily take a book—and please do.” And God help me, if only you’d listen to me for a few minutes at some other time, any other time, again! “I can buy another at any bookstore when I feel the need. It’s not a first printing or anything like that.”

“A first printing?” she asked.

“You really have to be a book geek to cherish a first printing,” he assured her. “Or be in it for the money, and I’m not. But it’s a new copy, available anywhere, and you’re welcome to it.”

The door that led back to the lounge suddenly opened; a gust of cold wind caught it and slammed it hard against the wall. Michael stood there looking disgruntled. “Hey, come on—everyone is going down to dinner.”

“That’s great! I’m famished,” Devon said.

She went in; Finn followed. Michael held the door open for him, eyes shooting fire as Finn passed him. Finn was really glad of his height; he could actually look down an inch at Michael.

Devon moved ahead, laughing as she joined the others. Finn’s own group was in the lead; Michael Corona held him back.

“Quit dreaming, you stupid geek,” Michael said.

“Pardon?”

“Can’t you tell when an attractive woman is secretly making fun of you, jerk? Leave her alone; we’re here to do a job. We have a lot riding on this, while you science guys are just along for whatever. I mean, really? What the hell kind of life forms are you going to find on this ship? We have a chance at the big time—leave Devon alone. Let her concentrate.”

He’d met bullies all his life. A few times, he’d tried to use reason. A few times, when he’d been little, he’d just been beaten to a pulp. His work had made him bulk up, so it wasn’t that often anymore that someone wanted to get in his face and it was almost never that he did anything more than stare someone down and walk away.

“We were talking. Devon has all the rights of any American citizen—she can talk to whomever she chooses.”

“You watch your step, geek,” Michael said, striding by him.

Had Michael expected his threat to work?

The dining room was on the promenade deck as well. They walked past empty shop fronts to reach it. Years and years ago, the deck here had offered a haberdashery and a shop called “Lucky Ladies.”

Mannequins watched them from the store fronts. Finn could almost imagine that they moved; if he were alone here now, he might begin to believe in ghosts himself.

When they arrived at the dining room, it was empty. There should have been three waiters/kitchen staff moving around, getting their salads down.

“Wow, this is weird,” Brigitte said.

“Maybe we’re off on the time. We’re on real time and we should be on ship’s time?” Hampton Jones asked.

Anita breezed into the dining room from the kitchen prep area. “No, we’re not on wrong time—we all set our clocks on ship’s time, which we decided would be Eastern Standard Time since that’s the time zone in which we’re due to make port. This is very odd indeed.” She turned and stared at Michael Corona. “It’s probably some ridiculous thing they’re doing to test you all out as ghost hunters!” she declared.

“Barringer. Matt Barringer. He’s an attorney—he’s probably doing this—whatever this is!”

“Oh, come on, we’re legitimate and they know it,” Michael said angrily. “This has nothing to do with us. What’s going on in the kitchen?” he demanded.

“Come see for yourselves,” Anita said.

Curious, Finn followed Anita into the prep area. Plates were arranged on a shiny table—the garnish already in place.

“How curious,” Suzie said. “It looks as if they were getting ready for dinner.”

“Maybe there’s an emergency on board; maybe the captain put out a call—and somehow we didn’t hear it,” Brigitte said.

Granger shook his head, not even commenting that only an idiot ghost hunter would say such a thing. “If there were an emergency, the captain would have put the info through the speaker system—we’d have heard it, too.”

“What if they didn’t care about us? What if they only cared about the crew?” Brigitte asked, and she sounded as if she were getting a little hysterical.

Finn walked on into the giant kitchen. Only one of the ovens and one of the stoves had been in use. On the cooktop, something boiled away. A covered pot remained on medium heat.

He looked into the boiling pot: soup. He opened the oven. Overcooked fowl, burning more with every passing second.

He turned off the stove and the oven. No reason to burn anything down.

“Where did they go?” Michael Corona demanded angrily.

“Well, I hardly think anyone was intentionally trying to burn down the kitchen!” Anita said, the sound of her voice aggravated.

“It’s a trick; it has to be. Some kind of a trick,” Michael said. “Maybe it’s to get you scientists to figure out what’s going on.”

Anita and Granger argued about that. Finn noticed something black on the floor. He walked over to hunker down and study the spot. It looked like a little pool of oil or tar.

He was there when Devon Adair bent down across from him, also looking at the floor, and then anxiously into his face.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It’s some kind of black—goop,” he said.

“All those science degrees and you come up with black goop?” Michael demanded.

“I would need a lab to determine its exact qualities,” Finn said, not even bothering to look up. It did look like tar.

He touched it; Brigitte gasped. “Don’t touch it—you could turn into something!”

He looked up at her, arching a brow and concealing a smile. “Honestly, I don’t think so,” he said.

“How about giving us its not quite exact qualities?” Michael demanded.

Finn looked over at him. “Inexact—black goop. Probably tar.”

“Where could they have gone?” Hampton Jones asked. Finn looked over at him. His eyes seemed huge behind his Coke-bottle glasses.

“I’m telling you, it’s a trick. We’re supposed to be unnerved,” Anita said.

“And scientists are supposed to figure it out,” Brigitte said.

“Or we’re on hidden camera and they’re waiting for you ghost-busters to say you feel the cold spots and see shadows or hear voices,” Suzie suggested.

Finn rose. “Hey, let’s face it—whatever is going on, neither group is involved. Who knows—maybe someone is playing a trick, maybe even trying to get us to fight with each other. I say we head to the bridge and find out.”

“I agree!” Brigitte said. She looked around. “It’s totally unproductive for all of us to get mad at each other over something someone else has done.”

“Yeah!” Devon agreed, standing. “Let’s storm the bridge!” she said with a smile. Her smile became rueful. “Um—where is the bridge?”

“One deck up and forward,” Michael said. “Let’s go.”

“It’s not going to help,” Granger said.

They all stared at him, waiting for him to explain.

“It’s not going to help. They’re gone,” he said. “The kitchen staff is gone—there’s something on this ship.”

“What do you mean, gone?” Hampton asked angrily. “Dead? You mean gone as in dead? If so, where are the bodies?”

“Eaten,” Granger told them.

“Oh, bull!” Suzie said. “Trust me—I’m a marine biologist. There’s no creature that got on this ship from the sea and ate people!”

Granger turned to her. “I didn’t say it came from the sea—though, most likely, it did.”

Michael Corona laughed suddenly. “Great! Now the scientists are fighting.”

“Maybe there was something already on board!” Marnie said nervously. “I mean, it was on board the ship when we boarded it.”

“There were engineers running all over this ship,” Anita reminded them.

“Maybe it was hiding,” Brigitte said. “Hiding—because it knew that the ship was at dock. But now, we’re back on the open sea.”

“And maybe, most likely, this is some kind of a stupid trick!” Anita snapped. “Seriously—why else would you put a bunch of ghost hunters and scientists on a ship for a simple voyage across the Atlantic? These people want ghosts, they want monsters—they want something with which to create a real tourist trap when this old ship is docked.”

“It’s all simple; Finn had it right,” Michael said. “Let’s head to the bridge.”

The others started to move out. Finn looked around and noted that there was another dot of black goop a few feet away. He walked to it and looked further. There was another drop and another. The drops led to the huge ship’s freezer.

He walked to the freezer, hesitated, and then threw the door open.

Bits of the black goop covered the steel shelving and ice dusted walls.

There wasn’t a bit of food to be seen in the freezer.

“What the hell …?”

He was so unnerved by what he saw that he nearly jumped out of his skin as he heard the question, whispered almost at his ear.

He spun around. Devon had followed him. Wide-eyed, she stood right behind him, shivering.

“Ohhhh!” Brigitte had followed her and stood right behind her. “What is going on?” she demanded, her voice thick. “More tar?” she asked.

No, this wasn’t tar. It wasn’t as mucuslike as the tar had been; it didn’t have the same scent. As he watched the stuff, it almost seemed to undulate before him.

He blinked; his eyes were playing tricks.

“I don’t know,” Finn said. “Let’s join the others. We’ll head to the bridge.”

With the two women following him, Finn left the freezer—locking it behind him—and returned to the dining room. He saw that Suzie was at the tail end of the group heading out; she was on the heels of Hampton Jones.

He used long strides to catch up, but by the time they left the dining room, returned to the long hall with the empty shops, and reached the elevator bank, only Suzie and Hampton were waiting.

“We missed the elevator,” Suzie said nervously. “I saw Granger hitting the buttons, but the door closed on us anyway.”

“It’s okay,” Finn assured her. “We’ll reach the deck and head forward; we’ll catch up with them.”

The second elevator in the bank arrived. Finn could see why they hadn’t been able to stop it easily; the elevators were old. They were in working order, but they didn’t have modern sensors. He hit the button and heard the crank of metal as the little box began to move slowly.

They alighted on the next deck. “Bridge is this way,” Finn said. He led the way. But as he headed down a long hallway of lounges, smoke shops, and coffee bars, he felt an eerie sensation as if some primal sense were warning him not to go further.

They came to double doors that led to the pool area. Only a few wooden lounge chairs remained around the empty pool. A towel cabana seemed eerie and empty.

Finn looked up; the sun had set. There was barely a moon to guide them.

He moved faster, making a mental note to remind them all that they needed to stay together as soon as they caught up with the others.

Finn stepped on something that stuck to his shoe. He paused.

Devon had been following him so closely that she slammed into his back.

“Sorry,” he muttered. He looked down.

There was more black goop.

“What is it?” Hampton asked.

“Nothing,” Finn lied.

“How far is the bridge?” Brigitte asked.

“Forward,” Finn said.

“Well, yes, forward,” Brigitte muttered.

“Silly,” Devon teased her. “At the front of the boat.”

“Technically, it’s a ship,” Hampton said.

“Whatever—let’s move,” Suzie suggested.

They kept walking and reached the bridge beyond the social area of the deck. Finn opened the door on the port side and walked in.

There was no one there.

“Oh, God, oh, God, oh God!” Brigitte gasped.

“There’s no crew—we’re running in the middle of the night, and there’s no crew!” Suzie gasped.

“Screw the crew. Where are our friends?” Hampton whispered.

“Michael!” Devon shouted. “Where are you? Oh, my God—where did they go?” she demanded.

“The crew!” Brigitte said. “We could hit an iceberg—we could … oh, my God! We’re going to die out here,” she said hysterically.

“We won’t hit an iceberg; we’re not far enough north,” Hampton told her.

“Granger?” Finn called. “Anita? Marnie?”

“That stuff is all over,” Brigitte whispered.

“What stuff?” Hampton demanded.

“The black goop,” Brigitte said.

For a moment, Finn closed his eyes and steeled himself. This had to be some kind of a really bad joke. The crew was gone—the dining staff was gone. Black goop everywhere. And he was here with only Suzie from his own group—and three of the Ghosties.

All right; he was letting it get to him.

He walked over to look at the goop; he touched it. Back to the first kind of black goop he had touched. And it was tar.

It was a trick; a game. It had to be. Someone had been reading way too many H. P. Lovecraft stories.

“This is bull,” he said. “And no one can disappear that quickly.” He pictured the maps he had seen of the ship’s construction. He didn’t have a photographic memory, but his eye for detail was usually decent.

Seriously? Though small compared to current cruise vessels, the ship was huge. They had covered the one deck and now they were at the bridge. There were dozens of places where people could be, even in large numbers.

“The crew stairwell,” he said. “Down to the officer’s duty lounge.”

“What?” Brigitte looked at him hopefully.

He turned and walked to the rear of the bridge. A latticed door was there and might have just been a cover for controls, but it wasn’t. He threw it open. Stairs wound down to the deck below. He started down. The others followed.

Suzie let out a gasp.

“What?” Finn paused. Devon was almost on his back; in other circumstances, he’d have been thrilled.

“Ugh! The walls. It isn’t just goop, I don’t think, Finn. It seems to … move.”

“Don’t touch the wall, then,” Finn said.

He came to the bottom of the stairs. Suddenly—blindingly—lights shone into face and he heard the sound of delighted laughter and applause.

He lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the lights that blazed at him. There, sitting a chair before him, looking all the world like a wannabe Cecil B. DeMille, was Matt Barringer. At his side was a man with a microphone on a pole and on his other side was a fellow working a camera.

“All right, Mr. McCormick!” Barringer said. “Congratulations! You found us—you led the way. You’ve won a seven-day cruise for two with all expenses paid on the Sun-Moon experience of your choice and a five-thousand-dollar prize! You found us—science does win out!”

Behind him, Devon let out some kind of a sigh and nearly crashed into his back in a dead faint.

He turned to catch her; Brigitte was tumbling, too. He was a strong man, but catching the cascade of women behind him was no easy task—it rendered him silent for several minutes.

There was still sound.

Michael Corona was berating Matt Barringer. “If you’re playing games, you asshole, they weren’t fair games. You came and got us while they were still down there. To say that Finn McCormick figured it out and won is a ridiculous and unjust way of playing your game.”

Finn settled Suzie and Brigitte and went for Devon. Hampton had been struggling to keep her up. Finn swept her over his shoulder. Something damp clung to his shirt, but she’d been touching the wall and he knew it. He carried Devon down and set her in Barringer’s lap.

“Fuck you, Mr. Barringer, and your reality show, or whatever the hell it is you’re doing here. I’m going to pray you have a real medic on board. You could have hurt or killed someone.”

“Hey, come on, now! If you read your contract, you signed on for filming!” Barringer said.

Devon was coming to, but Finn seemed to be seeing red now. Not goop, but he was so angry that a red haze seemed to hang over everything.

“Hey,” Granger said suddenly, blinking and looked around the officer’s lounge. “Where’s Anita? Anita isn’t here.”

Barringer stood up and turned around, looking at the group around him. Finn looked, too. He saw Granger, Michael Corona, and Marnie. Suzie, Hampton, and Devon had been with him.

It was true; Anita wasn’t there.

“Where the hell is Anita?” Granger demanded, his tone growing thin.

“She’s somewhere close, don’t worry,” Matt Barringer said. He looked at his cameraman and grinned. “We had her, didn’t we? Maybe she’s trying to change the game and make it be on us?”

“It’s just another fucking trick he’s playing on us,” Finn said angrily. And yet, something in the back of his mind told him that what was fueling his anger was more than just annoyance with a man who was a true ass.

Some of the goop had been tar. Some of it hadn’t been. What the hell was it?

Some other substance Barringer had created? Well, fuck his contract, too.

“Sue me,” he said, looking at Barringer. “Keep playing his game if you want,” he told the others. “I’m through.”

Finn retraced his steps, returned to the promenade deck, and went to the hallway that led aft toward his cabin. He walked in, slammed the door, and lay back on his bunk. He felt as if he was seething inside like the black goop. He lay there for several minutes, trying to get his temper to cool.

When it did, he discovered that he was still disturbed.

Some of the black goop had been tar. Some of it hadn’t.

He stood up and ripped off his shirt, looking at the shoulder where whatever Suzie had gotten on her from the wall was now on his shirt. It wasn’t really black goop; it was of a more watery substance on his shirt. He smelled it—the stuff had a foul odor, and it was something that he should have recognized, he thought. Whatever it was, whatever it reminded him of, remained at the back of his mind and he couldn’t quite pull it forward.

Oh, for a lab! he thought.

Finn walked to the little desk in the cabin where he had his computer set up. He thought about going on to one of his various social network groups and raging against the near-criminal practices of the ship’s company. But instead, he found himself keying in the words, “How to kill a shoggoth.”

Naturally, the replies that popped up were from Lovecraft enthusiasts or horror fiction writers.

He didn’t have access to any nuclear weapons, nor was there the possibility of shooting a shoggoth into a black hole.

He spun away from the computer. He hadn’t found shoggoths anyway; they were massive—not goop on the walls. Not to mention—they weren’t real!

But what if …?

What if Lovecraft had changed the details and written up a story a drunk had told him in a bar?

Lovecraft was a teetotaler—the poor man would probably cry if he knew about the number of drinks and bars that had been named in his honor.

Okay, so he didn’t drink. But he still might have talked to friends or strangers while sipping water or coffee or tea at a bar.

Or wherever.

Ridiculous! What is the matter with me?

Where could black goop creatures have come from? They would have heard or felt something if a large thing had come aboard. Of course, it didn’t have to be large. And it didn’t have to be an it. There could be many things …

Or, perhaps, the shoggoths were real; they could take on any form if they felt they were outnumbered, pretend to be part of the ship. They could have lain in wait … and when the ship had moved out to open sea now …

So they’d been on the ship all those years? Wouldn’t they have starved?

Perhaps they had a period of lying dormant—like locusts. Only with shoggoths, they could remain for decades in a state of hibernation rather than seven years. Or, perhaps, all that time they’d been dining on sea creatures.

Ridiculous. All they had seen was black goop—not massive bloblike forms terrorizing the ship. The only terror on board was Matt Barringer.

As Finn sat there pondering, there was a fierce pounding on his cabin door. “Let me in, oh, God, let me in, please!”

It was Devon’s voice. He leapt up, his heart pounding, and threw open the door.

Devon threw herself into his arms.

“I ran here. I ran here with my eyes closed. I’m terrified, Finn. We started to break up; Michael was furious—you cheated, they cheated, he didn’t get a chance to win—and Granger was crazy that Anita had disappeared. Suzie was trying to calm him down. Hampton was all weird—he walked back up the stairs and Brigitte went after him. I kind of realized where I was with all that going on and—Finn! How could you! You probably saved me from an awful fall, but you put me in that awful man’s lap—I just up and ran, but that didn’t matter. Barringer was angry, saying he was going to have to get the crew back up to man the ship. I ran as fast as I could and I figured you’d come here because you were afraid you’d beat someone up or … Finn, I’m terrified!”

“It was a hoax,” he said. But even as he spoke, he turned back to his computer. He was worried.

A hoax gone awry? A reality show that was becoming real?

Or was this all just making him crazy, too?

“The black goop, this ship,” Devon murmured. “It’s all a Lovecraft novel, isn’t it?”

“Story,” he murmured, and then felt like an ass. “It’s not a Lovecraft novel, Devon. There wasn’t goop in his story; there were shoggoths and Elder Things and something else in the mountains but not—goop.”

She still stood there, just shaking. She had come to him and thrown herself into his arms. He should have been on top of the world.

“Cthulhu,” she murmured.

“No Cthulhu,” Finn reminded her. “Cthulhu is massive, with teensy-tiny wings, arms and legs, and a head with squid- or octopus-like tentacles,” he said, trying to grin.

“Finn, yes, Matt Barringer is an ass, he was trying to do some kind of a sensationalist thing—we were idiots for wanting a TV show so badly—but, beyond all that, something is wrong,” she said determinedly. She looked a little stronger.

He stood and put his hands on her shoulders. He smiled and couldn’t help but touch her beautiful face. “We’re going to be all right,” he assured her.

Just as he did so, there was another pounding at his door; this time, he didn’t have to open it. Granger burst in. “We’ve got to get together; we’ve got to meet back down in the lounge. This is for real—the crew is gone.”

“What do you mean, gone? Ask Barringer where they are—tell him to quit playing his stupid game and get the crew back,” Finn said.

“Look, I hate the ridiculous bastard as much as you do,” Granger said. “But I honestly think this is serious—real—Finn. Barringer is in the lounge breaking out bottles of alcohol—in tears. Please, come … please!”

Was everyone on the ship in on this? Was he the butt of the joke?

Or was there something to the black goop?

“We should stick together, yes, we should all stick together,” Devon said nervously.

“All right, what the hell, let’s go to the lounge,” Finn said. “But …” He looked at them sternly and pulled out his cell phone, never more grateful that he had sprung for the best international deal and equipment he’d been able to find.

“Who are you calling?” Granger asked him. “There are no local cops!” he said, his tone somewhat desperate.

“Emergency,” Finn said.

But Granger was right. He dialed 911 and the phone rang and rang. He dialed the international operator and she hung up on him. He dialed again.

“My sister in Daytona,” he said.

Deirdre came on after the third ring.

She was his big sister. He tried to explain; she gave him a furious, high-powered lecture. She asked him if he’d been drinking.

But, in the end, she believed him and promised to find someone who could help them.

“Isn’t there a radio on the ship?” Devon asked, looking at him hopefully.

“Yes,” he said, summoning his memory of the ship’s plan again. “But its two decks down and I don’t know how to use it,” he said when he hung up. “Deirdre can be like a bull in a china shop. She’ll get the navy out looking for us, I promise you,” he told her.

Devon smiled at him. “Oh, thank you! I’m never going to want to be on TV again, I promise you!”

“Let’s meet the others,” Granger said.

They left his cabin and walked down the aisles until they reached the lounge.

Matt Barringer was behind the bar with an open bottle of tequila. He hadn’t bothered with a glass. His cameraman was next to him—swilling from a bottle of whiskey.

Hampton and Suzie were in chairs across from the bar, staring at the two men with glazed eyes while Michael Corona paced.

“Where are the others?” Finn demanded. “Okay, so Anita is on her high-horse and off somewhere, but where are Brigitte and Suzie?”

“We don’t know,” Hampton said dully.

“You idiots were all pissed off and running around like two-year-olds,” Matt Barringer said. “How the hell would anyone know?”

“Fine. Where’s the crew?” Finn demanded of Barringer. Barringer slammed the tequila down. “Don’t you get it yet? I don’t know. They’re gone; just gone. Like the damned waiters … maids, stewards, whatever the hell you call them. Don’t you get it? This is real. Do you see my sound guy anywhere? Somehow he’s gone, too. Do you see me filming anything?”

“Barringer, there could be cameras anywhere,” Finn said.

“There could be. But if there are, I don’t know a damned thing about it—and I would!” Barringer snapped.

“We’re being eaten,” Hampton said.

Finn went and hunkered down before him. “Hampton, come on, now. We have to get it together and find out what is going on.”

“But he’s right,” Granger said. “I mean, scientifically, that would explain it.”

Devon let out a strangled little sob.

“So what’s your plan?” Finn demanded of Barringer. “We’re going to just sit out in the ocean and drift? Have you called for help—do you know how to use the radio?”

Granger seemed to brighten up. “The radio—I could figure out the radio.”

“Go do it,” Barringer said. “Go, quickly!”

“What?” Granger demanded. “Oh, no! I’m not going off anywhere alone.”

“Fine. Take your muscle-man with you,” Barringer said.

Barringer meant him, Finn realized.

He walked to the bar and took the bottle of tequila from Barringer’s hands and stared at the man. “We all go. We all go together. We stay together so that no one pulls out more cameras and no one else disappears.”

“Hell, no—there’s nothing in here so far,” Barringer said. “And I … I have an international cell phone. I called the head office. They’ve already got someone coming for us.”

Frankly, Finn had more faith in his sister than in any help Barringer’s “company” might send for them.

“No. We need help now,” Finn said. “Help from a ship in the area. If Granger can work the radio, we need to get on it. So, move. Or,” he said, glancing at the cameraman, “we all go—and leave you here alone.”

“Fine!” Barringer snapped.

Devon stayed close to Finn. The others followed. They trekked down toward the elevators again. The shop windows seemed eerier than ever.

As they reached the elevators, they saw that there was now much more black goop in the floor there. They stood gathered together just staring at the foreign substance as they waited for the elevator.

Behind him he heard Barringer demand, “What the hell?”

“Yuck! Shit!” The cameraman said. “What the hell is this crap I’m stepping in?”

Finn knelt down to study the stuff again. He smelled the unpleasant odor and it struck him—he knew why it was a familiar odor. For a moment, a wall of black seemed to loom before him—hell, he was ready to pass out himself!

Because that was it—exactly it. The black goop was—shit.

The crew was gone, the kitchen staff was gone, and the stewards were gone. Anita, Marnie, and Suzie were gone.

And they might be stepping on any of them.

“Forget the radio,” Finn said. It was impossible. There was nothing that could be on the ship and eating people and leaving this … shit everywhere.

It wasn’t possible.

But neither, really, was the ship’s existence in its almost pristine shape … “We have to get off the ship—now. We have to get to the lifeboats.”

“What?” Barringer demanded. “Off the ship? We’re in the middle of the North Atlantic!”

It wasn’t possible—and yet it seemed that it was so. In fact, it never should have taken him so long. He had studied anthropology, humans, sub-humans, and if there was one thing he should know …

It was shit.

“All right, Mr. Barringer, you do what you want. I’m getting off the ship. Anyone who wants to join me, I’m heading out to the deck.”

“We don’t know how to lower the lifeboats,” Granger said.

“We’re scientists—we’ll figure it out!” Finn said.

“I’m with you!” Michael Corona told him.

Granger, Hampton, and Devon nodded enthusiastically.

“You didn’t tell us what the shit is,” the cameraman said.

“You don’t want to know,” Finn told him.

“Fine—I’m with you. Let’s get off this sucker!” the cameraman said.

Finn turned and started walking; Devon was at his heels. He hurried along the hallway until he reached the doors that led out to the deck. Moving quickly, he opened the door and paused as he felt the sharp cold of the night sear into him.

Screw the cold.

His intellectual mind—the part of him that made it through his doctorate at Yale—screamed that he was foolish. That there was no known creature that could consume living creatures such as human beings and break them down so completely that there was nothing left but black goop shit.

But another voice inside him was screaming. It came from deep in the pit of his being, deep in his soul. It was primal fear and, perhaps, the human desperation for survival.

As he reached the door, he heard a strangled scream. A frantic, piercing, desperate scream.

He turned back. The cameraman had been bringing up the rear as they left the hall that stretched before the row of cabin doors. As Finn looked, he saw the thing rising behind him.

It was huge and gelatinous. It had eyes that seemed to be haphazardly thrown over the black and green and disgusting mass of the bloblike body.

Shoggoth. Except that such a thing did not exist.

As the cameraman screamed, the thing formed over him, consuming him as if it digested him bit by bit, inch by inch, even as it formed over him, as if its digestive fluids were part of the mass, as if …

They had all frozen, horrified, disbelieving—watching.

Then Devon gasped and shoved him. “Out! Get us out—get us off of this boat!”

“Ship!” Granger croaked.

“Get us the hell off it!” Hampton roared.

Finn went on out into the cold, no longer aware of it. He raced down the deck to where he found a lifeboat. He stared up at the mechanism keeping it in place. There were ropes and winches and he thanked God that it was an old ship and he could probably move the thing manually. His fingers were frozen as he went to work on the sailor’s knots holding the rope in place. It somehow sunk in that the thing would fall and torpedo in the water if someone didn’t take the other side.

He looked back. Granger was across from him, working on the other end of the ropes and levers.

“Get Devon into it!” he cried. “Hampton … get in. Michael, Barringer—”

But he heard another horrified gasp. He turned back.

The door was open; Barringer had been caught trying to run out—he’d been the one now bringing up the rear.

Finn saw his face. Saw the horror, the absolute disbelief in his eyes. And he heard the scream, deep and primal and terrible, that ripped from his body, so loudly that it seemed to tear apart the heavens and the dark night sky. His eyes … they were so huge, so filled with horror—and then they weren’t because the black and green gelatinous mass of the thing was sliding over his forehead and then he was blinded, and his scream was choked off because the oozing thing filled his mouth …

And Barringer was no more.

Frantically he worked at the ropes. He found the winch, and he began to lower the boat. Devon was in it; Hampton tried to crawl in it with her. Michael Corona ran over and pushed Hampton.

“Stop, stop!” Devon pleaded. “Slowly, balance—!”

Her words of warning were too late. Michael Corona’s mad shove to get on the lifeboat sent both him and Hampton screaming and plunging off the lifeboat together, cascading in an elongated howl of terror as they both crashed down into the inky darkness of the sea.

“We’ll find them!” Finn lied as he saw Devon’s face. The boat was lowering; it was now far down and he turned to Granger. “Hop—hop now!”

“What about you?”

“I’ll get her another twenty feet … and take a dive. You’ll get me.”

Bull—what the hell was he doing, what was he saying? He was too far; he was going to die. He was no kind of a hero. He was a geek, a nerd—a scientist. And he was surely suffering some kind of a neuro-break because this couldn’t be happening.

There was a sudden sound; a fierce banging sound. He turned. The thing was coming. It had thrown open the doors to the deck with a fury and a hunger.

Finn stared. There it was, eyes all over … like a giant bowl of extremely ugly and miscolored Jello. It was hideously black and green and yet …

Somehow see-thru.

And thus he could see Barringer. See the man in his half-digested state. Eyes, soft tissue, all dissolved within while the acids in the thing’s stomach continued to work and gnaw away at bone, at the skeleton of the man, at the skull that still looked frozen in a scream …

He dropped the winch. He heard the plop as the lifeboat hit the water. He looked back.

It had a thousand eyes, so it seemed now, but it was looking at him. And Finn knew that he’d rather freeze to death. He hiked himself up to the rail and tried to judge the distance in the night. He saw only the blackness of the water, but he made his best attempt at a high dive …

He plunged deep. So deep into the water that he didn’t think he’d make it up again. His lungs burned. That might have been because he could no longer hold his breath … it might have been because of the fierce, icy cold that enveloped him, almost as if the freezing waters were alive themselves, eating him as the thing had intended to do.

With his last strength, his last will, his last, desperate human longing to survive, he kicked hard against the water.

And he shot to the surface, gasping, tasting salt, barely cognizant.

“Finn!”

He heard Devon’s voice. He was almost by the lifeboat. He couldn’t feel his muscles, couldn’t feel his body at all. Something in the human involuntary system designed to help with life kicked in. He was moving; he was at the boat. And Devon and Granger were reaching for him, drawing him into the lifeboat. He fell inside it; Devon had found the blankets and one came around him and still he shivered, still, his body remained numb.

He heard a splash. Granger was rowing. They were moving away from the horrid ship Guinevere.

In the night, he heard the sound of its anger. The thing. The heinous, despicable thing.

The—dare he say it, dare he think it?—shoggoth.

“Shoggoth!”

Granger said it aloud.

It screeched; it screamed. Its fury was complete—they still existed, and the thing wanted them. But it didn’t plunge into the sea. Somehow, Finn made his muscles work and he grabbed a set of oars, and he didn’t know how long or how furiously they moved, but the lifeboat moved far from the Guinevere. Finally, when the sound of the thing’s fury faded into the night and all they could hear was the lap of the oars, he fell back, exhausted.

Warmth invaded him. It was Devon, crawling over him, trying to share her body warmth with him. She’d gotten the tarp from the stowage compartment and more blankets, and she had him and Granger covered and warm and …

She didn’t scream and she didn’t fail. She looked at him with her beautiful eyes. There was strength in her voice. “We’re going to make it,” she told him. “You got us this far; we will make it.”

* * *

Somehow, somewhere in the nightmare darkness, he must have dozed. Because he woke and there was sunlight all around him.

Devon was still curled against him. Granger was awake, drinking from an emergency thermos, staring up at the sky.

“Listen!” Granger said. Finn listened. He heard a whirr.

“It’s a helicopter,” Devon said.

They all stared. Yes, it was a helicopter.

Granger stood up. “Hey, hey!” He jumped up and down, rocking the rowboat precariously.

“Granger, stop!” Finn warned.

The boat teetered.

“Granger!” he cried.

He reached for the man, but Granger went toppling over. Finn swore, crawling to the edge of the hull, trying to find Granger and get the lifeboat back to stability at the same time.

Granger had disappeared into the inky depths of the sea.

He half rose to crawl over the hull and get into the water. He had to save the man, but he couldn’t capsize the lifeboat with Devon still in it.

“Finn, no!” she cried with horror. “I have the flare—they’ll come, rescue will come!”

To prove her point, she fired the flare gun. The helicopter would see them; rescue would come.

“I have to—have to try to save Granger!” he told her.

Their eyes met. It was the story he would have loved for his life; it was the beautiful woman staring at him. It was him—a most unlikely hero.

He fell into the water.

It was still freezing, even more bitterly cold by day. But he looked. He dove and he rose and he dove and he rose until he could no more.

Then he was back at the lifeboat, not so much of a hero, but Devon was there, helping him, desperately tugging at his weight to get him back on.

And the helicopter was nearly there. Seated, freezing, huddled on their knees in the middle of the lifeboat, he and Devon waved.

Then it happened.

The sea seemed to explode about two hundred yards from them. Water spewed everywhere, as if a geyser had erupted from the ocean bed. Something began to rise …

It was massive. It stood, Finn knew, on two legs, because the tips of its thighs were visible just at the water’s surface. It had two arms … weblike fingers. There were tiny wing structures folded at its back. It was horrible, black and green, nearly opalescent …

Ten-foot-long tentacles seemed to emerge from a ten-foot face that had massive eyes and a mouth with a hooklike beak.

The helicopter tried to bank …

One tentacle shot out. It wrapped around the helicopter.

Finn could hear the men aboard it screaming …

He could look no more. He fell back in the boat and closed his eyes. He opened them when he heard the explosion. It was the chopper. The gas … something … somehow, it had exploded and it lit up the sky.

Next to him, Devon sobbed softly. He tried to smooth back her damp hair with numb fingers. There was nowhere else to go; nothing to do. He watched as bits and pieces of the helicopter rained down around them.

And he waited.

And Devon waited, sobbing and curled in his arms.

And then …

Nothing.

They probably lay so for hours. Or perhaps it was minutes. Eventually, he felt the fact that he was freezing and stirred to gather blankets and the tarp again. And finally, he looked out at the sea.

There was no sign of the creature that had risen from the sea. Cthulhu.

Impossible, of course.

They drifted for he didn’t know how long. He couldn’t see the Guinevere anywhere on the horizon.

They stirred enough to find emergency rations. They drank water and ate dried food and energy bars. He didn’t taste the food, didn’t know what it was—or care.

How much time they spent on that boat Finn would never know. He’d lost all sense of it. But as they sat together, huddled together, Devon stirred.

“A ship,” she said.

And it was. It was a huge United States Navy vessel, and it was headed their way.

“They’ll never believe us,” Devon murmured.

And they never would. As the vessel approached, Finn wondered what he would say. What truth could he possibly give them?

They would try—and they would probably be locked away. Maybe they’d even be suspected of having gone mad and killed their fellow passengers and the crew.

“What do we say?” she whispered.

He didn’t know. Maybe he’d figure it out by the time the ship reached them. Maybe he’d think of a plausible lie.

And maybe, one day, he’d sit in a bar, and he’d start talking to the fellow next to him. He’d find out the guy was a writer and he’d tell him, “Well, huh. Have I got a story for you.”

And maybe the guy would listen …

THE WARM

DARRELL SCHWEITZER

NAME. PERHAPS I WAS THE ONLY ONE OF MY KIND WHO STILL HAD a name. I could not say it, not at first. I could not say much of anything, for my mouth no longer formed the old speech I once spoke—in the before time, before I was transformed, such as I had been transformed, however inadequately, however minimally. As for that new speech of gibbering and of howls, which we speak directly into the earth, pressing our faces into the mud, so that the very stones and the fires beneath it all tremble with our rages, our curses, and our jests—well, I was not very good at that either.

But I could think my name. I knew it. I remembered it, for all it stuck in my throat, like something I could neither swallow nor vomit up. If the others called me anything at all beyond mere insults, it was “Little,” because I had not grown great as they, because I remained one of the immature or deviant few who still looked back at the world from which we all had come. I was still one of those who made sport, for instance, by glaring out of ancient, iron-barred crypts on cloudy days, and if by chance my sickly, greenish gaze met the wide-eyed blue or brown or hazel of one of them and I was rewarded with an indescribable shriek, then—joy, a paroxysm of merriment, followed by bitterness beyond words, as I howled and pounded my head in sorrow against the walls and door of the tomb, smashing coffins in my rage, as I longed to recall something that, like my name, I could not articulate.

Sometimes I just stood there and reached out through the bars, trying to grasp the moon.

Being as I was, then, a rather pathetic excuse for my kind, I continued to burrow beneath the great city, lurking in cellars, and even—ecstasy upon ecstasy—emerging into the open air on certain moonless nights, to caper among the half-tumbled stones.

That was how I met the Warm. I felt a lightening of the air, down there in the dark, as the heavy wooden cover of a shaft was lifted off. I climbed toward the distant opening. I heard a sound, which might have been a summons, a kind of chanting, maybe even an incantation, and I followed it, until I emerged into an ancient and decayed cellar, deep underground still, but for me a place of almost unbearable brightness.

A lantern hung from a rafter. There, in that room, he was waiting for me.

The Warm. That is what we call them. Warm blood still circulating through fresh meat. Too fresh for taste, really, but if he had shown the slightest trace of fear, I would have tasted that and gone into a frenzy, and my own underdeveloped claws, however otherwise unimpressive, would have sufficed to tear him to shreds.

But he was not afraid. I tasted wonder, amazement, even a kind of dark joy—in the air, on his odor and his breath perhaps—but, no, he was not afraid.

He spoke some words gently in his own speech, almost as if, absurdly, he were trying to put me at ease. I could almost make them out, almost remember what those words meant, because they were words I had once known.

He motioned me away from the aperture from which I had emerged. I shuffled across the stone floor, almost upright, a mocking caricature of what I once was; for it came to me then, by the slow turnings of my thought, that I, too, had been a Warm, before the contagion within my own blood began to manifest itself.

I might have raged. I might have sorrowed. But I perceived that he had supplied that on which my kind feasts, and the frenzy overwhelmed me, and I forgot all else.

While I was thus occupied, there was a sudden, blinding flash of light. I yelped and leapt back, letting go of the morsel. I slammed against the cellar wall. Dust and bits of stone rained down on me. I turned on him, snarling, shaking my head, claws manifest, black fangs, however puny, bared, but he was not afraid. There was no fear in him.

The thing he held in his hand. I knew the word. I remembered it, from my former existence. I spoke it.

“Camera.”

He started at that. He almost dropped the object I had named. I shuffled toward him. He stepped back, but not afraid. I could taste his heart racing, his mind turning, as he said, in the language of the Warm, “My God! It’s true then! This is incredible! More than I had hoped for, more than I dreamed!”

Not afraid.

He was chattering excitedly, more to himself than to me. “We shall be friends. Yes. You will tell you all your secrets, and I will tell you mine. A fair exchange, no? Yes! Yes!”

I knew that word, too, friends, and it hurt me. But I said nothing.

I watched in fascination as he arranged certain items. He lit another lamp. I cringed, but he soothingly repeated that word friend over and over. After a while I sat down and turned my attention once more to that which he had provided.

He set up his easel. He got out his pencils and brushes. Much later, when he had taught me to understand these things, when I knew much about his life and his world and how the other Warms turned away with shrieks and loathing from the results of this evening’s project, I understood that he had gloatingly entitled the painting he began that night Ghoul Feeding. It’s famous.

* * *

But I am ahead of myself. How could I, who am a monstrosity in the night, a thing that wriggles with the worms in the earth, a devourer of the dead, have a friend?

Yet I had a name.

He drew me to him, night after night, unafraid. He lifted up the heavy lid from the aperture and summoned me with something like a whistle, like a cough, almost as if he knew the speech of my own kind. He drew me up, out of the dreaming beneath the world, into that cellar, and our fair exchange continued.

There was always a gift for me, obtained I cared not how, to keep me occupied while he painted, or sketched, or drew. Several times, without warning, he used the infernal camera, in order, I think, to catch me in expressions of surprise or menace, which he particularly prized.

When the painting Ghoul Feeding was finished, he showed it to me, and spoke laughingly.

“Whaddya think? Ya like it? It’s you.”

I sniffed the canvas. I sniffed him. There was no fear.

I said nothing then, but he required of me speech. He demanded words. In exchange, he gave me words. He spoke to me more and more, as if I understood his words, and in time I did begin to understand them, as he stirred memories within me.

In time I was able to tell him something of my world. I tasted his excitement, the thrill he felt, but no fear. I told him how the whole city was honeycombed with tunnels such as the one from which he had called me, some of them made by Warms in ancient days for whatever purpose, but most of them dug by us with our sharp claws. I gave him the perspective from which he produced the picture called Subway Accident, for I had known many who were there and heard them tell the story over and over again, with much hilarity.

For there are indeed others like myself, who linger near to the surface, on the borderlands of the Great Darkness, and who engage in such pranks.

There are those among us who laugh, whose laughter can drive one such as him mad.

But I did not laugh.

Instead I begged him to tell me about the world of houses and streetcars and of reading the newspaper before a comfortable fire.

And he described such things to me, at first fascinated that one such as I would care about them, but finally, quite obviously, impatient. I don’t think he understood that each precious word was reconstructing a world I had once known, like a shattered mosaic being reassembled piece by piece.

I wanted more. I was greedy for more.

But he was greedy for the darkness. I told him how the great ones of my kind are utterly transformed and swim like whales far down, deep into the Dream, having turned away from the living world entirely. They no longer defile graves. They no longer devour rotting flesh. They sink deep into the uttermost depths, where the world of men and even the world of ghouls is but a thin scum floating on the surface of some tenuous black bubble that may burst at any moment. They who pass mystically through the membrane of this bubble, into the chaotic center of all things, behold and worship Azathoth, who is Chaos, whose mad, dancing, mindless flute players shriek out the music of death into all the universe.

He was not afraid. He was filled with amazed, hideous joy. “It is like in the books,” he said, exalting, and he spoke of the Necronomicon and others. He told of dark secrets he laughingly said would shock even me.

I told him a story about a common guidebook to the city, and three ghouls who found it very funny indeed. From that he painted his famous Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mt. Auburn.

But he was not afraid.

* * *

He was the one who wanted to go with me, and he did go, clambering down the shaft he had opened. First I covered him with my scent, so that when we met with others of my kind, as we soon did, they would take him for one of our number, because he was not afraid.

So he accompanied me on nocturnal adventures, participated in our delvings, our rites, even our obscene feastings as if he were one of us; and he learned much, so very much, which made him so famous in his day, which let him relish the terror he aroused in the other Warms when he showed them the images he had made of the unimaginable, blasphemous world that lay just beneath their feet, which was itself only the beginning of the further horrors that lay beyond the reach of merely human senses.

Once, in the impossible depths of some cavern at the Earth’s center, when the mud and stone beneath our feet seemed no more substantial than a mist and we looked down through the stars in the direction of the ultimate chaos, he threw back his head and howled.

* * *

But it was supposed to be an exchange. I wanted my part in return.

I don’t know how much time had passed, weeks, months, years, for we of the dark dreamlands do not reckon time as does the waking world.

But I dreamed another kind of dream, of streetcars and houses and reading the newspaper by a cozy fire. Once I even seemed to find myself there, by the fire, in my dressing gown, with the newspaper spread over my lap. I felt the gentle warmth of the flames. The paper rustled in my hands. For a very long time I could not determine which was real and which was nightmare, whether I was a man, awakening from the awful delusion that he was a ghoul, or a ghoul dreaming that he was a man.

Meanwhile my friend painted his pictures and gorged himself on such secrets as I might reveal to him. He found my own “progress” to be intriguing at first. He remarked that I was changing in a manner he had formerly thought impossible. I walked upright now. I spoke his language with increasing fluency. I could even read, not the Necronomicon or anything like that, but simple books for children which he brought me, and then newspapers, all of which told me about the world I so distantly and imperfectly remembered.

But I was remembering. And changing. Even I could see that my skin was no longer the mottled gray it had once been, covered with spiky tufts of hair. My snout was receding, becoming less a malformation. My claws and teeth had receded too. I began to express the desire to wear clothing. He laughed at that at first, then finally tossed me an old coat.

I think he was almost disappointed. He painted no more pictures of me, at least not from life. He referred instead to photographs taken earlier. Still, he listened to the tales I told him and accompanied me a few more times on our excursions, but not very far, because it was I, I think, who was starting to forget the way.

Nevertheless, it was to be a fair exchange. He had promised that. He longed for the darkness and I had given him the darkness, yielding up as many of its secrets as I could.

I longed for the light. In that, he betrayed me vilely.

* * *

The betrayal happened like this:

I said, “I want to go out,” meaning I wanted to walk with him on the streets of the city, among the houses and streetcars, in the light.

He merely said, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

But I had brooded over it for a long time. I knew what I wanted and where I wanted to go. I had made preparations. Increasing what otherwise might have been prankish activities, I had haunted more iron-barred crypts on cloudy days and reached out to snatch what I could from passing funerals, a top hat, a handkerchief, a wristwatch, even a walking stick. Yes, there were shrieks when I did that, and yes, I should have found them delicious, but I was preoccupied with my future intent. Yes, you can read in the newspapers about how vandals and pranksters and thugs had created disturbances in the cemeteries, though you may not necessarily learn how certain tombs were smashed open, examined with growing disgust and horror on the part of the investigators, then sealed off entirely with newly-poured cement.

So there I was, clad in a black suit I had pilfered from a fresh corpse, handkerchief stuffed into the pocket. I wore the wristwatch, and the smashed top hat I had hauled in through the bars. It is true that the trousers had shredded as I pulled them on, and I wasn’t wearing shoes because no shoes were ever made for feet such as mine, but still I stood upright, and I even squinted through a stolen monocle.

I stepped toward him, walking stick in hand, and said, “What do you think?”

And he said again, nervously, yes, on the edge of fear, but still not afraid. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

But I insisted, most urgently. I told him that I was a man and that I had a name and I actually spoke that name aloud.

This time he was so astonished he actually did drop his camera. He sat down in a chair, limply.

“That’s incredible. You remember who you once were. That not possible, but it has happened. So many things are impossible, but they have happened. I don’t know where to begin.”

“I want to go out.”

“No.”

I picked up a bouquet of flowers I had stolen from a grave. I said my name again. I said another name too, that of someone with whom the first name had once been in love.

This almost put him into a kind of rage. “You think you remember who you were! But I knew that man.”

“I know I was in love,” I said. “I am in love.”

For a moment this seemed so preposterous that he simply could not grasp it. He gaped at me in silence, his mind struggling to formulate a reply. He almost seemed to laugh, but didn’t. Then he spoke, in a rapid-fire, low-voiced staccato.

“A random memory, like a page fallen from a book, out of order. What you don’t seem to know, my friend, is that the man in question, you, when he was very young, was indeed in love, but that ended badly. Perhaps she saw in him, already, a certain contagion. After that contagion had corrupted his soul sufficiently, he was transformed. I think you recall the rest—no, no, you clearly don’t. What you don’t seem quite able to bring to mind is that after your transformation had progressed a considerable ways, you came a-calling on the gentle lady. You burst in on her, stinking of the grave, and she died shrieking in a madhouse within weeks. It was a great scandal at the time. Now it is the stuff of fantastic legend. Sorry, old chap. I have done you a disservice. I have reminded you of too much. I have awakened too much. But don’t delude yourself. There is no going back. Sometimes oblivion is a mercy. Try to embrace it if you can.”

Demonstrating a mastery of newly regained vocabulary and concepts I said, “You are lying.”

“Would I make a story like that up? Would I have to?” He snatched up a mirror that he sometimes used to gain different perspectives in his painting, and held it up to my face. “Just look at yourself. Don’t be ridiculous.”

I grabbed the mirror out of his hand and held it up to his face.

“Just look,” I said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

There was a split second of fear then. I tasted it on the air. The mirror crashed to the floor. I slashed at him with my claws, unimpressive though they might be. That was when he jerked back, then drew his pistol and shot me in the chest.

Of course a bullet cannot kill one such as I, but the blow staggered me back.

Yes, he was afraid.

He was afraid of what he had seen, in that mirror, that his features were subtly beginning to change, as if he and I had quested in opposite directions, met midway, and had become quite startlingly alike.

I don’t think he was ready for that yet. Even he could delude himself.

I heard a noise in the room beyond us. There was someone else in the building. He had brought in another Warm, no doubt to show off his paintings and relish that other person’s fear.

I could taste it on the air. A swirling mass of fear. Ravishing. Exquisite.

I lunged forward, and he shot me again and again and again.

He was able to make his way out the door and bolt it behind him.

For the moment I so overwhelmed by the betrayal, by the realization that our friendship was at an end, that it had never existed, that everything had been a lie and all hopes were false hopes. In my very last truly human gesture, I stood there in stunned silence, weeping softly.

That gave him time to usher his visitor away.

It was only later that I howled and clawed at the door and at the floor, that I went to the mouth of the tunnel-shaft in the floor and screamed down into the darkness, until the dark world beneath reverberated with my cries and several of my larger and more capable fellows emerged to join me and to sniff the air.

Together we forced our way into the adjoining chamber, where a large canvas was on the easel. We smashed everything. We tasted fear in the air, thick as smoke, though the house was, for the moment, empty.

When he came back, we were lurking in every corner, and we fell on him in a mass, but I was the one who was afraid now, because my fellows did not rend him, even as they carried him down the shaft and through many tunnels. I scurried after them on all fours. I slashed the remnants of my clothing away with my claws. I howled with the rest and followed until we came to that vast, black, inner space where the elders of our race swim like leviathans before the throne of Azathoth. There we brought him, to be judged.

But they did not rend him.

And I was afraid, because I knew that one day he would be our king.

LAST RITES

K. M. TONSO

DR. PAUL DYER WAS ALWAYS SOMETHING OF AN OUTSIDER AMONG the Miskatonic faculty. A Geppetto-like figure with a slight build, shoulders seemingly stooped since childhood, and a prematurely graying toothbrush of a mustache, Paul was innately “old school,” a pipe-smoking dinosaur of tweed suits and bow ties; and even when the university began supplying teacher and student alike with tablet computers and digital textbooks, and the dully reflecting slate of classroom blackboards and the squeak of humdrum chalk were giving way to spacious white panels, erasable markers, and LCD displays, Paul Dyer was much more likely to be seen with real books, pen, and paper before him, polishing—slowly and thoughtfully—his bifocal glasses with a pocket handkerchief while he considered, variously, his lectures, his students, and his own research … this last so apparently unremarkable in its nature yet diligent in execution as to have secured for him his tenure and, eventually, chairmanship of the geology department.

I first met him when I was an undergraduate frantically juggling three jobs, studies, and homework with one of the primitive spreadsheet programs available in those halcyon days when a Pentium III with a hundred-megabyte hard drive was considered fine style indeed and professors would still entertain term papers banged out on an IBM Selectric. I think what first endeared the old man (though at that time he had in truth barely passed his half century) to me was the time my typewriter broke down and he graciously accepted my final report for my science requirement in the form of a fifty-page handwritten manuscript.

“Just so it is legible, Mr. Marsh,” he told me in his soft Swiss accent as he took the proffered sheaf of papers. “I cannot bear chicken scratches.” A wink. “Old eyes, you know.”

Fortunately, I had by then deliberately cultivated a fine, round hand, and the paper was not only legible but, as it turned out, worthy of high marks, for it was handed back with an A and a superscripted “Not bad, young man. Not bad at all.”

I assumed the superscript was mere politeness, but I realized later that he shared an interest in my paper’s subject: the anomalous hydrothermal vents that occasionally crop up on the abyssal plains of the oceans, far away from subduction zones or magma plumes.

At that time, I had not given much thought to my life’s longterm course. Too much of the aforesaid juggling, not to mention the additional (but rather pleasant) complication of a young lady. But the simple graciousness of Paul Dyer had demonstrated to me that there was more to college than preparation for a lucrative corporate position, and I turned my efforts toward geology, emulating the man who eventually became both mentor and colleague.

“Perilous work, Mr. Marsh,” he said when I informed him of my decision. “You might recall what it did to my father.”

In truth, that was the first time I had ever heard of his father, the late William Dyer, and perhaps the son’s words were indeed meant as a warning. But I possessed the enthusiasm of youth (not to mention a profound ignorance that nameless secrets exist … and that they lurk in dark and uncharted corners of the same world that harbors such terrors as reality TV and video games) and was therefore prompted to paw my way through the resources of the university library in order to find out why something as absurdly mundane as the study of rocks might be considered perilous (leaving aside the question of particularly large specimens falling upon one’s head) and what, in fact, it had done to William Dyer himself.

The usual references told me nothing beyond the bare fact of William’s professorship at Miskatonic University, with a vague mention of his leadership of the school’s Antarctic expedition of 1930–31. And when, finally, one of the older librarians, with an air of distaste, muttered something about “theuse people down in Special Collections” perhaps knowing about it, I at last found myself down in the basement of the library near what was usually termed “the Vault”—a section of library holdings deemed either too valuable or too controversial for normal academic perusal, and normally quite off-limits to undergraduates. I, however, appeared to have acquired permission … from Paul Dyer himself.

It was there that I read through a yellowing typescript report and learned of the university’s ill-fated venture to the polar continent over sixty years before, when that ice-shrouded landmass was yet unprobed by satellite images or radar scans, but was instead explored and mapped, at great risk, by prop-driven airplanes, dogsleds, and the dependable simplicity of rock drills, dynamite, and geological hammers.

Great risk indeed, for after a promising beginning, which included the discovery of some peculiarly well-developed Comanchean Era radiata and a previously unmapped but extremely high mountain range, Dyer’s expedition met with disaster. Ice storms and terrible austral winds resulted in the complete obliteration of a group of the Miskatonic explorers that had, at the urging of a biologist named Lake, unwisely separated from the main body. The devastation was total. Every one of Lake’s party, including the sled dogs, died, and so complete was the loss of life and equipment—the latter including custom ice-melting devices and a newly designed drilling rig created by Frank Pabodie of the MU engineering department (whose grandson was now a faculty member in the same field)—that there was nothing to do but terminate the operation and bring the survivors home.

Seated in the dim reading room just outside the steel door leading to the vault, I could not but blink in bafflement when I finished the slim report held loose-leaf in a crumbling manila folder. It made no sense. If Lake and his party had perished in an ice storm, that was an explanation sufficient unto itself. Why secrete this document in Special Collections when any newspaper of the period would have told much the same story?

A shadow at the door of the reading room proved to be the somewhat furtive figure of the Special Collections librarian, who apologized to me in hushed tones for having been required—library policy, of course—to place a telephone call to Dr. Dyer for confirmation of his permission, and while I pondered his words, he punched in the combination to the vault, swung the door wide, and in a minute returned from its depths with a thick, three-ring notebook, explaining that since what he was now putting before me was but one of two extant copies of this particular manuscript, I would be required to provide a signature.

“It’s volume two, you see,” he said.

Bewildered, I signed the proffered card, affirming I was now responsible for the contents of “Dyer Manuscript: Volume Two,” and noting as I did so the paucity of other signatures. There was Dyer’s, of course, and one or two others that I recognized from the faculty directory, and one that stood out because of its obviously foreign origins.

The librarian bobbed his head at me and departed. Leaving me alone. With volume two.

But those two simple words—volume two—could not begin to convey the strangeness of the revelations set down by William Dyer in an attempt to prevent the Starkweather-Moore Expedition, a privately funded group, from exploring the same region as had produced the strange radiata and the mountain range. Warnings of dangerous conditions would have been perfectly understandable, but Dyer instead spun a fantastic tale of a pre-human—and decidedly non-human—civilization whose age could be measured only on the scale of geologic time and whose origins seemed to lie more in the realm of religion and flying saucers than in science; and despite the remarkably lucid exposition of his narrative, the evidence of the collapse of one of the great minds of the twentieth century left me shaking my head. But then I came upon the photographs. The sketches. The pages torn from books and curiously marked not only with drawings, but with what seemed an unintelligible, dot-based script.

The photos … faked, of course. If two English schoolgirls had found the means to dumbfound photographic experts from all across England with the Cottingley pictures, then what heights of deception might be attained by a university professor with full access to specialized equipment? No, the photographs of the barrel-shaped monstrosities—starfish-headed and equipped with a multiplicity of eyes and mouths and tentacular appendages—could have been done up in any theater department or motion-picture studio worth its salt, and in that sense were laughably absurd. The sketches, however …

I had friends in the university’s art department at that time, many of whose names had become something of a byword for the consumption of various recreational drugs, and as might be expected, their works reflected their reputations. But nothing they had ever produced, even when in the grip of life-threatening overdose, came even remotely close to the alien inhumanity of the strange cartouches recorded by Dyer’s flash camera or the sketches and dot-script left on the pages of the torn-up books. Regardless of deformity, futurism, style, or evidence of mental instability, a work of art made by a human being demonstrates by its very nature the axiomatic groundwork of our consciousness and psychology. But those photographed carvings and ink sketches showed, even to my inexperienced eye, a controlling consciousness that had not the faintest shred of commonality with Homo sapiens.

True, then? Dyer’s fantastic tale? His hints of strange beings filtering down from interstellar voids to populate the nascent earth with their biological experiments … of which we, all of us—people, animals, trees and fish and paramecia alike—were the eventual products? Pre-human civilizations fighting unimaginable wars against unimaginable, equally star-born entities with unimaginable weapons?

The appendix broke the butterfly. The Starkweather-Moore Expedition, spurred on by expectations of discovery and possible mineral exploitation, had sailed for Antarctica in the late 1930s and hauled and flown its equipment across the Ross Ice Shelf and the snowy wastes. By December, it had reached the charted locations of Dyer’s peaks.

And it had found nothing.

No fantastically high mountains. No mountains, in fact, at all. No city. No second range of even higher peaks hiding unnamable horrors. Only endless, windswept ice and snow.

The final entries told of William Dyer’s disgrace. His chairmanship terminated. His tenure revoked; even threats of fraud charges leveled at him and those of his expedition rash enough to support the less outrageous parts of his story. But the university’s reputation was at stake, and so the matter was suppressed. Far from appearing in any official university publication, Dyer’s document went into Special Collections, to molder alongside the equally hysterical delusions of d’Erlette and Prinn. He was allowed to resign, and he eventually emigrated to Switzerland, where, at the advanced age of sixty, he taught school, married a Swiss girl, and raised a son: Paul.

Paul Dyer. Dr. Paul Dyer. Who, bearing his gentle accent, eventually returned to the United States, accepted a position at Miskatonic, and supplied the final chapters of his father’s tragic story.

But the sketches.

But the Starkweather-Moore findings.

But … the sketches. The technique was so assured, so unaffected. One might as well dispute the authenticity of one’s own handwriting.

I understood now why Paul Dyer had pointed me toward the macaronic report: my discussion of hydrothermal vents dovetailed neatly with his father’s insistence that the creatures he (rather shortsightedly) called Old Ones—an unfortunate reference to the Necronomicon of Alhazred, whose lunatic ravings he was known to have read—had, at the beginning of the Antarctic freeze, taken refuge in deeper caverns where subcrustal heat still lingered. Unfortunately for them, one of their more outré biological creations—the half-sentient conglomerations of hypnotically controlled cells which he (equally shortsightedly) insisted upon calling shoggoths—had wildcatted and, at least according to Dyer’s manuscript, wreaked genocide on the whole, impossibly long-lived species.

Which was, of course, patently impossible, because of what the Starkweather-Moore Expedition had found. Or, rather, not found.

I left the library late that evening, my mind caught firmly and painfully between the utter conviction of William Dyer and the incontrovertible evidence of Starkweather and Moore. I therefore decided against the late lecture on Sumerian antiquities I had planned to attend and instead went directly home. Alas, when I arrived unexpectedly at the apartment I shared with my fiancée, I found it occupied by an assortment of half-clad art students and a few disreputable derelicts from the town where I was born.

It took less than a minute to discover that my lady love was holding court in the bedroom, in the throes of a drug-fueled orgy.

My thoughts, already fevered, impelled me to immediate action. Flushed with betrayal, frustrated, angry, I packed my bags, my books, my notes, and my typewriter, and left the apartment, abandoning that part of my life forever.

Where to go? I would have turned to friends of whom I could have begged a night’s lodging, but I had just seen those very friends participating in the apartment’s festivities. Owing to my parents’ premature loss at sea in a boating accident, I had no resources, monetary or otherwise, save my own. Standing, then, in the middle of the large university quadrangle, with the autumn’s evening chill beginning to bite through my light jacket, my suitcase and books growing ever heavier in my hands, and my bereft, betrayed heart turning all my efforts at research—hydrothermal vents and geological anomalies alike—to dust, I all but fell to my knees and wept.

But thoughts of my research put me in mind of one source of aid that might possibly remain to me, and a short while later I was ringing the doorbell of a house in one of Arkham’s quieter neighborhoods.

Clad in sweatshirt and sweatpants and puffing a little from his exertions with a set of free weights, Paul Dyer opened the door, and it took him but a moment to realize my obvious distress. “Why, Alf!” he said. “What a pleasant surprise! Come in, my boy, come in!”

* * *

Paul Dyer was childless, unmarried, without stateside relatives, and his house was his alone, its furnishings settled in like brown smoke, its curtained windows rarely opened, the only utilized rooms being his study, his bedroom, and the kitchen; but as he was much too gracious a host to consign me to the living-room sofa, I found myself directly possessed of an initially musty but easily aired and quite reasonable guestroom. And thereby began a residency that proved to be not expedient and temporary, but comfortable and longterm, a professional relationship with a congenial colleague whose scientific interests dovetailed neatly with my own, our serenity interrupted only occasionally by the local Gay and Lesbian Coalition’s clumsy attempts to profit from our celibate Castalia.

But though I followed in my mentor’s footsteps, eventually taking a doctorate and a faculty position at Miskatonic, and we grew old together—two confirmed bachelors with too much teaching, research, and study to bother about marriage and families—I never mentioned the notebook, and Paul referenced its contents only indirectly. But it was obvious that his father’s disgrace weighed heavily upon him, so much so as to manifest itself occasionally in bursts of anger or, alternately, depression, the underlying cause of which I could never be precisely sure. His father’s squandering of a brilliant career? Starkweather and Moore’s insistence upon prosecuting their expedition? Those strange, vegetable entities that first appeared and then vanished, leaving a reputation in shambles?

I confess that I myself could not reconcile William Dyer and his deception any more than could the son. And so, as Paul’s progress toward a solution seemed immobilized by the profound and inherent contradiction of father and fantasy, I turned my own extracurricular efforts toward the conundrum.

I used my faculty status to gain access to the minutiae of the original Miskatonic expedition and compared the reports Lake transmitted—the mountains, the caves, the soapstone fragments with the inhuman dot-script, the strange radiates—with the sanitized versions relayed to the world, wondering again and again at the depth of the hoax. Not just William Dyer but the entire Miskatonic expedition must have been involved in a deception so colossal it made the Piltdown chicanery seem the merest trifle.

Which led me back to the enigma that so enmeshed the man with whom I had been living for the last fifteen years. Why? Why, why, why?

And finally, in the pre-dawn darkness of an Arkham winter, with the wind singing Siren-like through the archaic eaves and peaked roofs of the surrounding town, I made my decision to break free of the ever-moving, ever-stationary möbius that had so ensnared my mentor. A simple assumption, really: there had been mountains. Lake had seen them. Dyer had seen them … and flown beyond them. Radiates? Star-spawn? Shoggoths? I put such questions aside and dealt only with the comparatively simple problem of the disappearance of billions of tons of Archaean slate.

Which brought me back to Special Collections … and to that strange name on the list of those who had perused the Dyer manuscript:

Hugo Kalpaxia.

Neither faculty nor student. And without ever having been given access permission. Yet there his name was, floridly limned by an obviously expensive fountain pen … itself a wild luxury at a time when most of the civilized world was in the stern grasp of the Great Depression. But perhaps that explained all, for in those dark days twenty dollars slipped to a sub-librarian would have guaranteed access to anything.

It took but a little search-engine and hacking help from an acquaintance in the computer science department to ferret out the saga of the Kalpaxia Mining Company, a Greek concern that had weathered the worst of the Depression without so much as a blink, prospering from sheer, daredevil ruthlessness combined with the ready availability of a massive pool of cheap, desperate labor. And the mining expedition to Antarctica during the austral summer of 1933 to 1934, fueled by the Miskatonic expedition’s hints of mineral wealth, and involving countless vehicles and aircraft and thousands of men and sled dogs, proved to be the pinnacle of the company’s cruel exploitation. And the mechanism of its downfall.

Cross-references and late-night hyperlinks eventually led me to a locked ward less than an hour’s drive from Arkham, where a very old man was spending his last days lashed down in emphysemic and urine-soaked squalor, his skin scabbed with age, his nights fitful and rife with screaming nightmares that even the most potent antipsychotics could not suppress. But as the nurse on call explained after I slipped her a hundred dollars, he would talk to anyone.

“He dan’t make much sense, though,” she added in her flat, New England accent as she swung his door open and left me engulfed in a miasma of neglect and human waste.

A common navvy, he had been present, at a much younger age, when Kalpaxia, broad-shouldered and swaggering in its corporate arrogance, had, with the intention of removing the useless slate overburden hiding what was expected to be several fortunes’ worth of iron, copper, and heavy metals, blasted Dyer’s mountains with thousands of tons of explosives tamped down into the basal strata of the range.

“Went the wrong way, tho’,” he yammered at me in a spray of odiferous sputum. “All o’ it slid down inta what was behind, instead of comin’ forward. An’ it filled that valley straight up. An’ there was more mountains a ways away, an’ the blow bounced off’t and made that tumble in, too. Happens satimes in minin’, if yer not careful, an’ they weren’t careful, ’cause they rushed it. In an hour there wan’t anything left.”

And thus, I thought, ended the existence of the two mountain ranges, and thus the perfectly understandable reason Starkweather and Moore found nothing more than a snowy, high-altitude plateau. Archaean slate. Of course. Slate by nature cleaves almost effortlessly into flat sheets. An unfortunate arrangement of strata had precipitated an immense orographic collapse.

But the old man was not finished. And the nurse was wrong: he made perfect sense. Albeit not the kind I wanted to hear.

“An’ when the dust settled, we saw it. Comin’ from where the second range’d been. Flowing like a river. With eyes. A-and mouths. And places … things … that din’t belong. And other things … comin’ up from the rubble t’ meet it. And they all came t’gether there in the rubble, bubbling an’ crawlin’ on each other like a pot o’ greasy eels. And then the ground collapsed an’ buried ’em all. And the wind brought snow t’ bury ’em deeper.”

But when I asked what they were, he ranged off into incoherency, his voice fading into a whisper so soft I had to lean forward to catch his words—a nearly inaudible “tek … li … tek … li … tek … li …”—before his manner abruptly changed and, blind eyes wide, he began screaming. Stunned, deafened, I fell back as orderlies crowded into the room. But it was too late for either restraints or sedatives. He was well into his eighties, and the recounting of the tale to one who knew what questions to ask had proven too much for his heart.

But I knew the rest of the story already. The mining endeavor was a complete failure. Of several thousand men who had approached the mountains, perhaps a dozen had returned to the waiting ships, half-mad from cold, hunger, and frostbite. They had scrambled aboard, babbling half-sentences and lapsing into periodic catatonia, the silence of which was broken only by the same spasmodic syllables I had heard from the final survivor’s lips.

The rest … lost. Crushed. Frozen. Driven mad. Kalpaxia collapsed, all traces of its grandiose adventure buried, like the mountains, under ice and snow. Only chance had allowed me words with an eyewitness before death silenced him forever.

Brooding, I drove home … to be met at the door by Paul, who seemed utterly lighthearted. “Alf!” he exclaimed. “Core samples just in from that smoker in that new Peabody-Gustaf Deep! Amazing! Soapstone fragments … with dots! We are going down to have a look: young Pabodie has a submersible and some suits that will keep us in the pink even at ten thousand meters! All the Young Turks in oceanography got cold feet, so we old fogies will be taking the plunge. We will be breathing water, of course, though that should be second nature to you, coming from up Innsmouth way and all.” He paused, noticing my expression. “Why, what is wrong, Alf? You look like you have seen a ghost.”

* * *

The door of possibility had swung wide, but I found myself less than enthusiastic about crossing its threshold. Though I could hardly give complete credence to the ravings of a senile derelict, neither could I ignore the sense of conviction with which he had spoken … nor put down to simple physical law the madness and destruction of several thousand men.

I told Paul of my methods, my discoveries, and my concerns as preparations for the second Miskatonic University expedition to Antarctic waters went forward, and he, in turn, explained his own efforts. Far from being frozen into helpless inaction by inescapable contradictions, he had made his inquiries subtly, reading papers published in scientific journals and examining those sent to him for peer review, searching for signs that might point toward the lingering presence of his father’s discoveries. For where I had broken my möbius on the mountains, Paul had, rather, started off by assuming the reality of the Old Ones and their civilization, focusing on the part of their chronicles, as explicated by the cartouches documented by his father, that pointed to their continued existence amid scattered instances of geothermal warmth in the deep oceans.

Before and during our southward voyage on the research vessel Okeanos Explorer, graciously lent to us by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, we compared our notes and, for the first time, openly discussed William Dyer’s manuscript; doing so, however, in silence for the most part, not only for the sake of privacy, but also because Pabodie’s bathysuits, designed as they were around the breathing of oxygenated perfluorocarbons—the only practicable way to keep the human body alive at the immense depths we contemplated—would not allow for speech, and therefore, so as to be able to dispense with slates and keypads and other clumsy methods of communication, we trained ourselves in lip-reading, using our conversations as practice.

Pabodie’s microprocessor-controlled pumps worked admirably, taking upon themselves the unaccustomed effort of moving fluid in and out of our lungs in perfect synchronization with our diaphragms (though I confess that the initial liquid “breath” usually precipitated a certain panicked thrashing about), and our test dives, performed first in the safety of Boston harbor, and then again once our ship had reached the chill waters hiding the belching, hydrothermal vent located in the Peabody-Gustaf Deep a few hundred miles off the icebound coast of Antarctica, were a complete success. There seemed to be nothing that might impede our ten-thousand-meter descent for a firsthand look at the source of the warm water plume that, confined as it was by the narrowness of the deep, accounted for a rise in temperature of nearly three degrees centigrade at the ocean’s surface.

Ostensibly, our expedition was meant to “put Miskatonic back on the map” as a vibrant center of scientific research, not to mention going some way toward expunging the stain left by that very inconvenient episode of the 1930s. And publicly, at least, Paul Dyer was in this matter an enthusiastic supporter and participant. Privately, however, he had another agenda … as did I. But where mine was simple—proof or disproof—Paul’s was, I was certain, more complex, and possibly not one to be easily explicated. Was he intent upon clearing his father’s name? Did anybody even care about his father’s name anymore? After all, it had been almost eight decades by now: we all lived in a different world, and though Dyer père’s scandal might have shaken Miskatonic’s reputation down to the bedrock in the years before the Second World War, the twenty-first century had much more pressing concerns.

Paul could easily have let the matter go, dismissing, as had other scientists, the soapstone fragments with their curiously arranged dot patterns as mere chance juxtapositions of mineral debris and random pitting. But he had not let it go, and he, quite obviously, had pressing reasons for not letting it go. Reasons that (I realized as we prepared the deep-diving submersible and bathysuits for their first real trial at extreme depths) led to the addition, to the hull’s external equipment, of two high-explosive devices.

Paul followed my gaze to the mines. “I think they are down there,” was all he said.

They again. What they? The star-headed monstrosities that had first tantalized and then disgraced his father? Perhaps. But my thoughts continually returned to what the old man in the locked ward had said about what had appeared when the mountains had fallen. Delusion, perhaps. The effect of combined shock and hypoxia … maybe.

Though we were packed into the tiny pilots’ sphere like a pair of potted shrimp, our descent proceeded uneventfully, and our navigation, following the upwelling plume of warm water, proved effortless. Within half an hour, the darkness outside the viewing ports was complete, and since we left our external lights switched off to conserve battery power, we could easily note the presence and at times disconcerting appearance of the more phosphorescent Abyssal Zone inhabitants.

Somewhat more disturbing, despite our absolute confidence in Pabodie’s designs, were the occasional creaks and groans as the syntactic-foam hull of the submersible adjusted to the steadily increasing pressure, responding to the growing stress by becoming all the stronger. The same adaptive material comprised much of the bathysuits as well, but I confess I still had qualms about venturing into the vast darkness and unimaginable pressures of ten thousand meters in what I could only consider to be a glorified set of fishing waders.

As we neared the halfway point of our dive, however, the creaks became, to say the least, quite alarming, and Paul used the controls to bring our vertical motion to a halt. But it was not the sounds that had prompted his action, for after he had extinguished the cabin lights, leaving us suspended above the abyss, floating, untethered, without anything more than technology and our faith in physical law keeping us alive, he put a hand on my shoulder and turned me toward the left view port, showing me what he had noticed: a dim glow off in the distance that, unlike the deep-dwelling fish that lit the blackness only fitfully, was continuous, faint, unmoving.

Lateral thrusters took us slowly toward it, and after some minutes we turned on the floodlights and were rewarded with a view of a rock wall. No plants. No algae. The abyssal fish, startled by our starburst of light in their stygian domain, had fled.

But there was a cave.

We maneuvered our way to the entrance, which, though markedly smaller than our little craft, looked large enough to admit the bathysuits.

Despite my reluctance to embrace the depths so personally and intimately, we set the ship’s autopilot and entered the suits, sealing ourselves into humanoid, articulated motility. We flooded, gritted our teeth, and thrashed as the oxygenated perfluorocarbons filled our lungs, but thanks to our previous experience, the sense of drowning was short-lived, and we detached from the submersible, solemnly shook hands—or, rather, touched articulated claws—and floated toward the beckoning aperture.

Its glow was lost in the glare of the floodlights, but beyond the entrance the presence of an internal, yellowish-green illumination was obvious, and we supplemented it with our plentiful supply of glow sticks.

The small entrance belied what lay beyond: no simple, cramped cave here, but rather a cavern; and as we trod where human beings had never trod before, the walls widened and the ceiling, thick with stalactites that hung down like the inverted columns of some impossible Gothic cathedral, rose quickly, forming a vast grotto whose ultimate length and breadth, though obviously enormous, were hidden both by distance and by a strange, half-haze of yellowish particles that floated and danced in the fluid twilight.

Moving clumsily in the bathysuit, I swept a small net through the haze and brought the catch up to one of the magnifiers ground into my faceplate. Organic, I estimated, but not alive. Shed particles: cells, bits of membranous tissue, strands of cilia. I mouthed this information to Paul, who examined the specimens with his own magnifier before nodding and motioning me to follow him further in.

Now we were really, to outward appearances, lost: hemmed in alike by depth, pressure, and miles of rock, entombed in a Hades of peril in which the slightest miscalculation or malfunction would be fatal. Stalagmites rose from the floor, joining with the columns dropped from the ceiling, and the sense of an enormous cathedral was complete. Our steps took us deeper and deeper into a vast, silent sanctuary illuminated by what we now saw were some kind of phosphorescent organisms, half-algae, half-animal, their patchwork colonies blending into a yellow-green chiaroscuro that left some areas in profound darkness while contributing to others a sense of the sacred, of veiled, hidden mysteries that lifted a finger of profound warning while simultaneously beckoning us forward.

Forward we went, and a sense of mingled wonder and curiosity had almost—almost—eclipsed my feeling of dread when a faint, nearly subliminal current of what I can only describe as pure thought began to make itself felt even through the whine of my bathysuit’s servos and the faint rushing of the perfluorocarbons. Its import—skillfully manipulated and focused beyond anything I could conceive of as human—was unmistakable.

You shall not come … you shall not come …

And yet, the thoughts were not directed at us, for Paul and I both, after a hurried, silent conversation, elected to continue forward into the sanctuary.

Sanctuary? No.

It was a crypt.

A final turning around an immense column that stretched up toward a ceiling so lofty that even the glow from the luminous organisms was lost in the distance, and we found a clear space of white sand. But scattered around it were huddled forms whose postures, though inhuman and as impossible as their very existence, spoke all too eloquently of the triumph of eternal lifelessness in this place.

I could not deny it to myself anymore: here were William Dyer’s star-headed monstrosities—five staved, barrel-shaped bodies surmounted by starfish heads that mirrored the tough pentad of antipodal limbs. Membranous wings. Tubes, eyes, mouths … and a branching assemblage of tentacles sprouting from the center of each linear body segment.

The Old Ones. And whether they had filtered down from the endless void before our planet had scarcely cooled or had arisen of their own in some teeming, Paleozoic sea, building their stone cities and constructing for themselves—much like the Native American tribes that hotly insist upon their descent from the buffalo or the raven—a mythology of lofty stellar origins; whether they had created the life that eventually became human or merely stood in mute witness to its halting evolution; whether they used our distant ancestors for food or for entertainment, they were, without a doubt, here.

And they were dead.

Rotting wings. Limp tentacles. Bodies patchy and eroded—eroding even as we watched—by a motley collection of corrosive green and yellow slimes. Blankets of once-sensitive cilia reduced to a sparse, threadbare mat.

Worst of all were the red-irised eyes. Glazed now, their supporting protuberances turned limp, undulating softly in the faint currents of the cavern.

But the atmosphere of forbidding thought continued—You shall not come—and some vestigial sense allowed us both to recognize that it was emanating from some place nearby, almost at our feet. It was a terrible twist of chance and happenstance that had both of us holding our glow tubes over the same body—one of the least affected by the encompassing rot—when it suddenly stirred.

I am sure that I cried out at the sight, but my voice was, fortunately, lost in the perfluorocarbons, and in any case the creature’s ability to offer even the slightest threat was long past, for it could do no more than lift one or two half-blind eyes toward us, and one branching stalk of manipulative tentacles managed a faint writhing.

Paul was always a compassionate man. I had seen and felt that in him from the day he accepted that longhand paper from me, and so it did not surprise me when he did not hesitate to approach the dying creature. What the Old One’s thoughts were when it saw the helmeted form hovering over it I cannot imagine, but when Paul knelt beside it and took one of its manipulative stalks in his gauntleted hands, it seemed to understand, and the tension in its eye-stalks relaxed, though their gaze remained fixed on his face.

And still that thought, resonating in the vast chamber, but growing fainter with the ebbing of life in the creature. You shall not come.

What should not come? What was the telepathy of this ageless entity holding back?

I could not help but think of the old man’s words: They came. Something had come over that second range of mountains, and something else had wormed its way out of the rubble-strewn ground to meet it, and together they had writhed and debauched until the wind and snow had buried all beneath a mantle of innocent white.

The other things the Old Ones had created. Their servants. Their servants who had turned on them and slaughtered them without mercy.

Paul remained with the Old One. I bent to inform him of what I intended, met, for one chilling moment, the gaze of those red-irised eyes, then pulled myself away and continued into the cavern, the ground rising now, turning upward in a slope that would have been daunting were it not for the servo-assisted movement provided by my suit.

I climbed, painfully conscious of the idiocy of my actions at this depth and in these alien waters. But I felt I knew what the Old One’s thoughts meant, and what they were holding back; and when I reached the wall of fallen rock and debris completely sealing the passage ahead and felt the hot wave of stubborn hate that glowed from behind it like the blaze of some huge, half-sentient furnace, my uncertainties fled.

The Old Ones had, as per William Dyer’s manuscript, descended into the earth and possibly kept their civilization alive in the dark warmth to be found there. And as their nemesis had been buried and sealed in from above by Kalpaxia’s arrogance, so the Old Ones themselves had safeguarded their abyssal redoubt by sealing this passage from below, blocking the escape of those terrible things. Perhaps, laved in the warmth of the hydrothermal vent, a city flourished at unimaginable depths in the impenetrable blackness of the sea floor. Perhaps these half dozen or so Old Ones—all dead save one—were guards set upon the one egress from the Antarctic. Or perhaps they were the last of their kind, bravely facing the ravages brought on by pollution, parasites, and fungus even as they continued their task of holding back the terror.

And when the last Old One died? What then?

The hate glowing at my back, I returned to Paul and the Old One and mouthed to my colleague what I had discovered.

He nodded and bent over the Old One, bringing his face into full view of the blearing, unhuman eyes. I do not know if the creature could read his expression, but I remain convinced to this day that it understood his thoughts … and his intent.

I saw the tentacles tighten for a moment on his gauntlets, and then the whole being of the Old One shuddered, the eyes clouding, falling back.

I saw Paul’s lips move in a final parting grace, but the cavern floor was already rumbling, vibrating. Deep within the cave, the blocked passage was now being attacked with sledgehammer blows, and my mind rang with alien screams of vengeance and a thirst for blood.

Paul stood, then, took my hand, and with that terrible heat of uncorked fury rioting behind us, we made our way back toward the entrance, and so great was my relief at seeing our brightly lit submersible that I all but wept. But when we reached the craft, Paul did not embark. Indeed, he instead began releasing the explosive devices from the outer hull.

Faceplate to faceplate, I confronted him, but, “I brought these for the shoggoths,” he silently confessed. “From what you told me, I thought it prudent. The pressure has broken the timers, though. I will set them off manually. You go.”

He must have seen in my eyes my unspoken question, and he patted me on the shoulder, articulated metal tinking on syntactic foam as his lips moved. “I did not do this to prove anything to the world, Alf. I did it to prove it to myself. And so my work is done. Why should I wait for senility and bedpans?”

And then, trailing the tethered explosives, he was propelling himself toward the mouth of the cave.

He would detonate the devices when the shoggoths broke through, and my course of action was therefore so constrained as to be inescapable: I had to put as much distance as possible between the craft and the eventual concussion. After frantically docking with the submersible, then, I set the thrusters for lateral motion away from the cave and dropped all ballast for a speedy ascent. After that, there was nothing to do but wait … and trust in Pabodie’s engineering.

The helicopters eventually found me bobbing some distance from the expected rendezvous point, but that was easily put down to random ocean currents. More difficult to explain was Paul’s absence. Fortunately, deep-sea exploration is a hazardous enough undertaking that my story of a bathysuit excursion and equipment failure—combined with my careful editing of the high-definition videos recorded by the cameras on the submersible and my suit—were taken at face value, all the more so because of the university’s unwillingness to read anything unusual into yet another Antarctic venture … particularly one involving the surname Dyer.

In mourning, I returned to Arkham to find that Paul, stripped of family by the passing years, had made me his heir, leaving the entirety of his house and finances, his library, his laboratory and researches, to me. But it seems now that I have once more followed in my mentor’s footsteps, for the house is again empty and still, furniture settled in like brown smoke, curtains drawn, the kitchen, the study, the laboratory, and my bedroom the only areas that see use.

I think often of Paul and of his sacrifice, but my thoughts drift also in a more disturbing direction, toward what now lies caught fast between millions of tons of snow-covered rock and the vast blockage of a collapsed cavern. Are those protoplasmic horrors, free of their telepathic guardians, even now patiently working their way free of their stony prison? And what else might lie entombed under the tons of slate set loose by the greed of Kalpaxia Mining? Sometimes I lie awake at night, considering the unwitting Russian scientists who recently drilled down into the subglacial Lake Vostok—which lies directly between the vanished, once-miles-high ridges—and what might have happened to them during that curious five-day radio blackout that occurred just after their boring reached the strangely unfrozen waters.

But let that be. The Old Ones’ time has passed, and we ourselves have grown up. Rather pathetic successors to their magnificent and long-lived civilization we might be, but monkeys, whether arising from a warm pool of Pre-Cambrian slime or drawn out of some fabulous Archaean test-tube, are clever things, and we will, one way or another, manage to hold on to our comparatively wretched lives.

And that we can succeed in doing so, I have no doubt. For though we wage our useless wars and indulge ourselves in petty hate and bigotry, I remember Paul’s final valediction, uttered over the impossible body of an impossible being in a well-nigh impossible place; uttered for the sake of those upon whose existence, like a ship upon the jagged rocks of a lee shore, his father had driven himself, rending his life, his career, and his reputation; given freely, given in spite of their speaker’s hardships, his search, his imminent death; and spoken as one creature to another, hands clasped with tentacles in what I have no doubt was an effort to bring comfort during those final moments of fading consciousness: three simple words, words whose obdurate impossibility of vocalization did not in the slightest detract from their message of profound peace and reconciliation:

“I forgive you.”

LITTLE LADY

J. C. KOCH

BIG WILLIE SURVEYED THE DAMAGE. “NICE WORK, BOYS. AND A big thank you to the little lady, here.”

The girl didn’t say anything. She wasn’t even crying. Jim was somewhat impressed. He’d gotten over being surprised she’d helped them a while ago now.

Big Willie grinned. “C’mon, darlin’. You didn’t love those boys, now, did you?”

She shrugged. “Maybe I did.”

Hefé laughed. “You didn’t, señorita. Not as much as you love us.”

She didn’t answer, just gave Hefé a small, odd smile.

Shooter shook the hair out of his eyes and then pulled his hat back on. “Look, we got the loot that was rightly ours and we took all these half-breeds had. It’s been a good haul, better than we expected. Now, let’s get out of here before the law or the cavalry comes.”

“They won’t come,” the girl said with conviction. “They never come here. Not even for our women.”

“Not even for you, huh?” Big Willie shook his head. “We got nothing against half-breeds when they’re as pretty as you. That’s why we’re taking you with us.”

“I feel so lucky,” she said. But she didn’t try to pull away from Jim, and he didn’t mind.

“So what Indian you mixed with?” Big Willie asked her, as he motioned for the others to finish up.

The girl watched the rest of the boys light what was left of her little town on fire. Jim felt kind of bad for her, but not all that bad. She was prettier than most half-breeds he’d seen, her skin was lighter than Hefé’s though it sure wasn’t white, and she had odd green eyes. Her long black hair was curly, not straight. He was glad to be taking her with them. Big Willie usually let him go second, since he was the leader’s favorite.

“Apache,” she said finally. “Chiricahua Apache.”

“And what was your mother?” Big Willie asked, almost politely. Jim figured he must have thought she was pretty, too. Not that he was going to fight Big Willie for her. Not and expect to live.

“Apache.”

“Ah, your father a soldier?”

Jim wasn’t used to Big Willie asking questions almost like a gentleman, and no one else was, either.

“Who the hell cares who her daddy was?” Shooter asked, the exasperation clear. “Let’s just get the rest of the stuff and get the hell out of here.”

Big Willie gave him an evil look. Then he looked back at the girl and put a nicer smile on his face. “Don’t mind Shooter there. He thinks ’cause he had an education it makes him better than other folks.”

“No, I don’t,” Shooter snarled through gritted teeth. “I just want to get out of here before someone we don’t want to run into comes by.”

Big Willie laughed. “Bat Masterson’s got better things to do than track us. He won’t be coming. And neither will any of his friends. Like our little lady said, no law comes here.” He seemed to remember something. “What’s your name?”

She was quiet for a few moments. “Cochalla. But I go by Halla, mostly.”

“That’s very pretty.” Big Willie looked at her intently for a couple of moments. “So, Halla, who was your father?”

“My father is still alive,” Halla replied. “My mother died when I was born. That’s why I was here. This is the village for all our children whose mothers have died.”

“Why aren’t you with your father?” Big Willie pressed.

“He has an important job. I would have been a distraction he couldn’t afford when I was younger. After that, well, I stayed here because of …” Her voice trailed off and it seemed she was listening to something. Halla looked up and pointed to the sky. “Crows. If you mean to leave, you should do it now. Law doesn’t come here, but as you well know, others do.”

“See?” Hefé asked with a wide grin. “She does care about us. You want her to ride alone or with one of us, patron?”

Big Willie seemed to consider this, but Jim knew what he’d answer. “Nope.” He clapped Jim on the shoulder. “She can ride with Jimbo. He’ll take care of her, won’t you?” Jim nodded and Big Willie looked back at the girl. “Now, anything of yours you want to grab before we leave?”

She shook her head. “There is nothing left here for me.” She seemed to be struggling with herself. “I need to go to my father now.”

Big Willie chuckled. “Sorry, but I don’t think your father’d be happy to see us.”

“Oh, you’d be wrong. He would like you very much, I think.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?” The words came out before Jim could think about it.

Halla looked up at him. “He can speak. I was wondering. I saw my father a few months ago. He needed … supplies.”

There was something about the way she looked—so unlike what he expected any woman to look after all they’d just done—the words came out again without Jim meaning to let them. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Since when do you give the patron orders?” Hefé asked in a low voice.

“He doesn’t. Jimbo’s just thinking,” Big Willie said with a grin. “You know, some of you boys could try that. Once in a while.” He shook his head. “We’ll decide where we’re really headed once we get away from here. What’s the best place to hide that’s nearby?” he asked Halla.

“The mountains,” she said, as if it were obvious.

They were close to them, but none of their gang had been in the Arizona Territory much, so they didn’t know the range well enough not to get lost. Jim looked at the mountains, all brown and somewhat hazy because of the smoke rising up, and felt a chill run up his spine.

“Well, sure,” Big Willie said, and Jim knew he didn’t want any of them letting on to the girl that they weren’t familiar with the lay of the land. “But where in the mountains? It’s a pretty big range.”

“It’s my range. I was born inside it. I can lead you, if you want.”

She offered it so casually, it took them all aback. All but Big Willie. He just smiled. “I like you, Halla. I really do.”

“I think I might like you,” Halla said slowly. “But time will tell.”

* * *

Halla watched the men finish looting and destroying. She was already up on a horse, but she wasn’t willing to try for escape. She needed them to get safely to where she had to go.

The leader was as large as his name would indicate. He was broad and muscular, and looked to her to be the oldest of the gang. He wasn’t an ugly man, rather attractive in a rugged way—unless you could see his soul.

The Mexican she gave little attention to—her mother’s people didn’t credit any of his race with much other than being convenient to steal from. He was small and fairly dark-skinned, with hair she knew he slicked down with spit, not pomade. He reminded her of a weasel. She had nothing against weasels; every animal had its place. But he repulsed her anyway.

Shooter, the one Big Willie had said was educated, was tall and somewhat thin. He didn’t seem all that smart, but like the others he certainly could shoot. He’d shot two of the men with her, right between the eyes. They’d been on either side of her, but no bullet had come near her. Big Willie had wanted her alive.

Jimbo was the youngest and the best looking. Since she was going to be riding with him, Halla chose to focus on his blond hair and blue eyes, how he looked handsome and rather sweet. She knew he wasn’t—no one riding in this gang was a nice person who’d just somehow gone wrong. They’d all gone wrong willingly and with great enthusiasm.

There were seven of them in total. Two of these were brothers, Jed and Ted. They’d been drovers before they hooked up with Big Willie. Neither were overly bright, but they made up for it by being very good at mayhem. She’d watched them tear down three buildings with their bare hands, whooping and hollering the whole time.

The last was a Chinaman, called Lee. She didn’t think it was his real name, just what Big Willie had chosen to call him. At first she’d thought that Lee had been forced into servitude, but after she’d seen him slice three women in half, she knew better. He’d laughed and smiled when he slashed those women in two and then had laughed when he’d lopped off their crying children’s heads. And he’d enjoyed it all.

They all enjoyed it, the violence. More than the money or the power, they just enjoyed destroying things.

They were perfect.

* * *

They rode into the foothills at a trot. Jim had the girl in front of him, in part because it was smarter, in case she tried to escape, but mostly because he could wrap his arm around her waist.

She didn’t resist him, but she didn’t really lean into him either. But then, it wasn’t going to be her choice, but Big Willie’s, as to when she became a different kind of hostage.

But, Jim tried to make conversation anyway. “What were you doing with the Dawson Gang?”

“Helping them.”

“Do what?”

She shifted in the saddle, but Jim didn’t mind—it moved her closer into him. She was dressed in light brown pants and a loose-fitting blue shirt, so she was riding facing front, not to the side. Some of her hair flew into his face; it smelled of sage and smoke. “They always hide out … hid out,” she corrected, “with us. Lots of gangs used our town as a safe place. No one else destroyed it.”

“Big Willie don’t like to leave tracks.”

She snorted. “How can killing every person and burning a place to the ground not leave a track?”

“You said it yourself. No law’s going there. It tells the other gangs that they gotta find someplace new.”

“Why? Why not leave it so you all could use it again, too?” Halla didn’t sound angry, just curious.

Jim shrugged. “Don’t know. Ask Big Willie.”

“Maybe I will.”

Big Willie pulled up and turned his horse, to look back the way they’d come. “Everyone can dismount for a few minutes, give the horses a rest. Take a look, though, Shooter, just in case.”

Jim got off and offered to help the girl down. She gave him that odd smile of hers and then jumped off the horse’s back to land lightly on her feet. Her leather boots went up to her knees but for a moment, while she was in the air, Jim thought they looked more like animal’s hooves. He shook his head and Halla smiled again. Jim realized she was making him nervous.

Shooter pulled his rifle out of the sling and looked through the sight. He took his time. “Something’s coming, far off, but enough to make dust.”

“Cavalry?” Big Willie asked.

“Can’t say, too far away. It’s not to that town yet.” Shooter lowered the rifle. “But it’ll be there soon enough. Gotta figure they’ll follow us. And we didn’t take care with our tracks.”

“They can’t follow us if we’re going into the mountains,” Halla said.

Big Willie gave her another long look. “You’re sure keen to get us up in there. What, you got an Apache tribe waitin’ to take us?”

Halla laughed. “No, though there are many tribes within the mountains. I want to get to my father. He will give you shelter, for bringing me to him. And because of what he guards, the path to him is very tricky. I and a few others know it. But if you don’t travel with one of us as your guide, you will not find the way.”

“What’s he guarding?” Big Willie asked.

“I will tell you when we are within the mountains.”

“You’re not in a position to bargain, girl,” Big Willie reminded her.

“True, but neither are you. You have something coming after you.” Her eyes got glassy and almost seemed to glow. Jim felt the chill go up his spine again. “The hounds of hell are coming.”

“What the hell is she talking about?” Jed muttered.

“No such things as hellhounds,” Shooter said dismissively. But he was looking at Halla’s eyes, and his looked worried.

“Just an Apache way of saying cavalry,” Big Willie said with what almost sounded like cheer. “Fine. We’ll go into your mountains. Jimbo, you and our little lady lead the way.”

Jim wasn’t used to Big Willie treating anyone, particularly a woman, with this much chivalry. It made him almost as uneasy as Halla’s eyes.

She mounted up without help. Jim watched, but her boots looked normal. “The two brothers should bring up the rear,” she suggested, looking at Big Willie.

He gave her a long look. “Why so?”

“It’s where they belong,” she replied.

Jim’s eyes flicked back and forth between hers and Big Willie’s. They seemed to be talking to each other without words. He wondered if Big Willie was maybe falling for this girl.

“Fine,” Big Willie said finally. “You’re the guide, now.”

* * *

They moved into the mountains proper faster than Jim had thought they would. Big Willie was behind them, with Shooter, Hefé, and Lee behind him, and Jed and Ted bringing up the rear, as requested. Jim didn’t like it, didn’t like that Big Willie was doing what the girl wanted, but it wasn’t his place to argue.

They couldn’t move too quickly—most of what Halla called a trail was rocky, and steeper than Jim thought right, and it was difficult for the horses. It got dark fast, too. They’d sacked the town that morning and had hit the foothills by mid-afternoon. It was dusk by the time they were getting onto Halla’s trail.

“You want to stop soon?” Big Willie called up to her.

“No. It’s the full moon tonight. We’ll have light. Besides, the horses can see even if you all cannot.” Her voice bounced off the rocks and sounded eerie to Jim.

They rode on for another hour and then came to what Jim could admit was a fork in the trail. The right fork seemed like a clearer trail, wider, too. The left one was worse than what they’d just gone over.

“We go left,” Halla told him.

“I knew you were gonna say that,” Jim sighed. “Look, what’s wrong with the better path?”

“It does not lead where we need to go,” she replied. “It will take us to some tribes who will not welcome you as my father will.”

“She’s the guide,” Big Willie said, his voice annoyed. “Jimbo, stop arguing about a few rocks.”

Jim shut up, but his throat felt dry. He clucked to his horse and they started off, more slowly than before.

They followed this so-called path for another quarter of an hour, and then came to what appeared to be sheer rock. “Trail’s dead,” Jim called back.

“No, it’s not,” Halla said, sounding amused.

“It’s a wall of rock,” Jim argued. “There’s nowhere to go but back, not that I think we can.”

Halla sighed and kicked at the horse. It went forward without a fuss. When they were almost right at the wall of rock, Halla sang, a wordless tune, but it was high-pitched and eerie.

“That’s pretty,” Big Willie called. “What’s it for?”

“Entry,” she called back. “Keep the horses moving forward.” She looked over her shoulder at Jim. “Especially you.”

He gritted his teeth, but kicked at the horse. It didn’t buck or shy away, it just plodded through the rock. It felt thick, but not hard, as if they were moving through molasses. The air smelled different—less like sage and mesquite and dust and more like water and mold and damp earth. As they passed through, Jim thought he heard Halla mutter under her breath, but all he could catch was something that sounded like “first to.”

“Yeah, we’re the first to go through a wall of rock,” he muttered back.

“No, we’re not. It’s an illusion,” she added. “We need to move forward so the others can pass through as well.”

Jim didn’t argue, just moved further down the path. It was wider and far less rocky now. They got far enough in that the others would all be able to join them, and then he stopped the horse and waited.

* * *

The others came through the wall of rock. Everyone seemed a little spooked, but the horses were calm.

While they were waiting, Jim took the time to look around. The path was not only wider, it no longer seemed as if they were outdoors. The walls of rock on either side went far up. He looked to see if he could tell where they ended, but all he saw after a few feet was inky darkness.

“Where’s the moon?” he muttered.

“Still out,” Halla replied. “However, this portion of the path will hide it from us.”

“So how come I can still see?”

Halla chuckled. “There is a form of mold that grows on the walls. It glows.”

Jim looked more closely at the walls. He could see the mold now. It seemed to grow in straight lines, though these crisscrossed in different patterns. As he looked at the images, he felt the chill go up his spine again, though he couldn’t say why. “These mean anything?”

Halla didn’t answer his question. “The others are through, let’s keep going.”

Big Willie moved his horse next to them. “We’ll go double for a while.”

“As you wish,” Halla said.

Jed and Ted were complaining about something; Jim could hear their voices echoing strangely in this area. Big Willie could as well. “What’re you two whining about now?” he called back.

“I don’t like it in here,” Jed complained. “We wanna go back.”

“I heard something when I was coming through, patron,” Hefé added. “Sounded like hooves.”

“I’m going back,” Ted said. Jim turned to see Ted spin his horse around. But the animal wouldn’t go forward. Ted kept on kicking at the horse, but it wouldn’t budge. Finally, he dismounted and tried to lead the horse through. “Damn it!” Ted shouted, as he slammed his face into what was now solid rock. He started kicking the rock.

“The door is closed,” Halla said to Big Willie. “And you should be grateful. There are enemies out there. The tribes who we could reach on the other path, they guard this area and they do not allow trespassers to leave alive.”

“Stop it!” Big Willie thundered, as Jed got off his horse and started banging on the rock with his brother. “Both of you, mount up, shut up, and keep on moving.” He shook his head. “Don’t know what’s gotten into them.”

“Weak men frighten easily,” Halla said.

“True enough,” Big Willie said with disgust. “Let’s get a move on.”

They started forward, Jed and Ted bringing up the rear, riding together. Hefé, Shooter, and Lee were in front of them, but still riding single file.

The horses’ hooves sounded odd in here, as if they were hitting on metal instead of rock. Jim thought he heard other sounds, too. Sounds almost like laughter, but not real, human laughter. High-pitched, so high he didn’t think anyone else would notice. Big Willie always said Jim had a dog’s hearing.

“What’s that noise?” he asked Halla quietly.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she replied calmly.

Jim decided not to press her; if he tried, he could just manage to ignore the sounds of the eerie non-human laughter and metallic clang of the horses’ hooves. To help himself not listen, he looked at the walls of rock on either side of them. The lines of moss were definitely regular, and as he concentrated on them, he could make out a pattern. He didn’t understand the symbols, but they made his stomach clench. As he looked at them, they seemed to move, almost as if they were alive. Jim forced his eyes forward.

They moved along the trail, still going up, but now winding in an odd way, not a natural way water or animals moved. “What made this trail?” Jim asked her, still keeping his voice low. “I know it wasn’t natural.”

“My father’s people.” Halla looked up over her shoulder at him. “Are you afraid?” She was amused, he could tell.

“No,” he lied. “Not at all. It’s just different.”

She gave him her odd smile. “Very true.”

They rounded a sharp corner. Jim heard new sounds, still high-pitched and seeming to come from up above. It sounded like claws being dragged across rock. He looked up, but all he could see was the inky darkness punctuated by the glowing moss lines.

Jim looked behind them. Hefé and Shooter were still on the trail, then Lee rounded the corner. As they moved on, Jim was still looking, but neither Jed nor Ted came around the bend.

“We got a problem,” he told Big Willie. “Jed and Ted must have turned back.”

Big Willie pulled his horse up with a disgusted sigh. “Well, someone needs to go bring those boys back.”

Before anyone could reply to this, a man’s shriek, loud and terrified, echoed along the trail. It was cut short, and then there was no other noise. They all froze.

“What the hell was that?” Big Willie asked.

“Sounded like Ted,” Shooter said, his voice shaking.

“Should … should we go look for them?” Jim asked.

Big Willie opened his mouth to answer, but before the words came out, Jed and Ted’s horses came trotting along the path. Halla slipped out of the saddle before Jim could stop her, moving through their ragged line and to the back. Both riderless horses trotted right to her. She stroked their heads and picked up their reins. Then she mounted one and, leading the other, moved up to where Jim and Big Willie were.

“The trail is more treacherous than you realize,” she said crisply. “As it was with the entryway, there are points here where it appears to be solid rock along the sides but it is not, and one of those points is just before the last bend in the trail. The other two must have been careless making the turn and fallen out of their saddles. There are many sharp rocks below—I’m sure we can do nothing to help them.”

It was a ridiculous explanation; Jim knew it. But Big Willie didn’t argue at all. “Sure enough, I think you’re right. Those boys always were careless.” He looked to the others. “Make sure you’re stepping carefully, and don’t get any funny ideas about turning around and heading back. We go on.”

Halla gave Big Willie a smile Jim felt was quite friendly. “I can see why you are the leader. Shall we?” She nodded her head toward the trail.

“Lead on, little lady,” Big Willie said with a grin.

Halla moved her horse up to the front. The spare horse’s reins were hooked loosely over the pommel of her saddle. This effectively prevented anyone from riding next to her, so Jim and Big Willie were side by side. Jim looked back to check—Hefé and Shooter were riding together and Lee was bringing up the rear, and not looking happy about it. Jim couldn’t blame him.

* * *

They rode on for another hour with nothing much happening, other than that they continued to go up. The glowing moss lines on the rocks kept on getting more plentiful, and Jim was now prepared to swear they were a language of some kind. The noises hadn’t stopped—in fact, Jim had added chittering and what sounded like snapping beaks to the eerie laughter, scratching claws, and metallic clanging of horse hooves. No one else seemed to be hearing anything out of the ordinary, though. Or if they were, they weren’t saying anything about it, just like Jim.

As they went, Jim started hearing what sounded like rushing water. He didn’t want to mention it, but Hefé spoke up. “Patron, do you hear the river?”

“I hear something,” Big Willie acknowledged. Jim was relieved the others heard this noise, though he still didn’t want to mention the other sounds he’d been hearing. But the rushing water was drowning them out for a bit, and he welcomed the respite.

“No river,” Halla said as trail rounded a corner and they were faced with a waterfall. Its top was a good fifty feet above them, and as Jim looked down, he couldn’t see an end to where the water fell. “How in the hell is there a waterfall here?” he asked, noting his voice didn’t sound exactly calm.

“And how the hell do we get past it?” Shooter added as he moved up closer to those in the front. “The trail ends here.”

Halla shook her head. “Another illusion. Just follow me.” With that she clucked to her horse and the one she was leading, and they plodded forward. The horses seemed unconcerned again. Somehow, the beasts’ calm made Jim more nervous.

Halla hooked her reins over the pommel of the saddle, swung her arms over her head in a circular motion, and then left them straight out at shoulder length. As she did so, the waters parted and they could all see that the trail continued.

“Onward, boys,” Big Willie ordered. “Don’t want to lose our little lady.” He kicked at his horse and trotted after Halla. Jim did the same, as Shooter moved up next to him. Jim glanced over his shoulder to see that Lee and Hefé were right behind them, riding side by side.

They all passed through. Jim steeled himself for someone to disappear, but no one did. As soon as Lee and Hefé were through the water fell back down, looking just like a normal waterfall again. Jim saw the other men all relax a bit, just as he did. Big Willie, though, hadn’t looked spooked at all—he seemed almost cheerful.

It looked lighter where they were now, but Jim realized it was because there was so much more of the glowing moss here. It covered every surface now, the straight, crisscrossing lines screaming at him in a language he didn’t understand. There was nowhere he could look where he couldn’t see the moss, other than down at his saddle. But he didn’t want to betray the fear, so he looked ahead and tried to pretend everything was normal.

The trail started to wind even more, going counter-clockwise around what Jim thought might be a smaller mountain within the larger range. As they circled, he looked down and could see the waterfall, seeming much further away than it should be for the slope of the trail, the size of the rock they were circling, and the time spent.

They made seven turnings in total; Jim used the waterfall as his marker. Then the trail leveled off and they came to a double-doorway of stone, at least twice Big Willie’s height and able to let four horses walk through side by side. No moss grew on it, but Jim could make out carvings that looked as though they were written in what he now thought of as the moss language. There were also drawings, high up near the top of the door. He couldn’t make out what they were, but the overall impression made his stomach churn.

“This another illusion?” Big Willie asked Halla, as he moved his horse up next to hers. The rest of them fanned out behind them, with Jim on the far right.

“No, this is a real door.” She slipped off her horse and put her palms flat against each of the doors. She stood there like this, head bowed a bit, silently waiting for something.

Nothing much seemed to happen. Jim was watching her when he heard what sounded like a whirring of wings, as if a whole hornet’s nest were behind him. He quickly looked around, but he couldn’t see anything. Halla was still standing as she had been, and everyone else was watching her. No one else seemed to have heard the buzzing.

Jim was about to ask what Halla was doing, if only to break the silence, when he heard the buzzing again, this time sounding louder and like the whole place was filled with hornets.

He turned to Shooter, to ask him if he heard anything, but the tall man was gone. His horse was still standing next to Jim’s, but there was no man sitting on its back.

Jim bit back a scream. “Shooter? Why’d you get off your horse?” he called out instead. His voice sounded high and squeaky; he barely recognized it.

No reply came back.

Jim looked to see if Hefé or Lee were still on their horses. They were looking around now, as he was. Hefé caught Jim’s eye and shook his head. “No sign of him.”

Before they could say anything else, the doors opened. Jim couldn’t see anything, even though he was trying to. There was just inky blackness in front of them.

Halla made a clucking sound, and the riderless horses, including Shooter’s, all walked forward. She gathered up their reins and led them in.

“Let’s go, boys,” Big Willie said, not acknowledging that anything had happened or that Shooter was now among the missing.

The rest of them moved up next to Big Willie, putting Jim into the place Shooter had been only a minute earlier. The four of them rode toward the doorway. Jim flashed back to when he was young and the revival preacher who had passed through their little town had spoken about Armageddon and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. He wanted to believe they were like that, the bringers of destruction. They certainly had been before. But now Jim didn’t feel powerful or dangerous—he felt terrified beyond belief.

Halla disappeared as she and the horses passed through the doorway. Then the rest of them crossed through. For a few long moments it was darker than anything Jim had ever experienced or imagined. Then he could tell they were fully across the threshold, down to the last bit of the horses’ tails, and suddenly he could see clearly.

They were in a huge, circular cavern. The walls went up further than he could see, but Jim could just make out the full moon above them, centered directly within the only opening to the night sky. Jim wanted to fly to the moon, to get back to something, anything, that seemed real.

But since he knew that was impossible, he forced himself to look around more carefully. There was a gaping hole in the middle of this room, and he could see reddish-golden light within it. Halla was over to his right, next to the wall. She seemed to be tying the horses off, and Jim realized there was food and water for them.

Big Willie headed over to where she was and the rest of them followed. They all dismounted, tied their horses off as Halla had done, and then she fed and watered their horses, too.

“Now we go on foot,” she said calmly. “The horses cannot manage the steps.”

As she said this, Jim looked back toward the hole in the middle of the room and could just spot the start of what looked like a circular stairway cut into the sides of the glowing hole.

“We’re going down that?” he asked, his voice squeaking again.

“Of course we are,” Big Willie said angrily. “What, you think we came all this way to stay up here? We have to meet Halla’s father.”

Jim wanted to suggest leaving, but he looked at Big Willie’s eyes. They looked strange—opened wider than normal, the pupils so large he couldn’t have said what color Big Willie’s eyes were if he hadn’t already known.

Hefé and Lee exchanged worried looks with Jim, but the three of them didn’t argue. They all just moved closer to Big Willie.

“Follow,” Halla said, as she turned and walked quickly to the edge of the hole. She stepped down and kept on moving, so fast they had to hurry to catch up and keep up with her. Big Willie went first, then Jim, Lee, and Hefé. Lee had only just managed to jump in front of Hefé, and Jim was sure the Mexican wasn’t happy to be bringing up the rear. Jim made sure to stay close to Big Willie.

As they went down Jim tried to look to see where they were headed. But the stairs were steep and not too wide, and there was nothing to hold on to. The few times he looked down toward where he was sure the light was coming from he lost his balance immediately, and each time, if Lee hadn’t grabbed him, he would have gone down. So he stopped trying to look anywhere but right to the front.

However, he could see the walls as they wound their way downward, and though they were smooth, Jim saw the same lines here as he’d seen on the way in. These weren’t glowing, though. They were blood red and either painted or carved into the rock. He couldn’t bring himself to touch them to find out for sure.

“How much longer?” Big Willie asked Halla after they had walked for what Jim estimated to be at least a half an hour.

“It’s still a ways from here,” she replied calmly. “Don’t worry. My father will welcome you with open arms.”

They kept on moving downwards, it seemed for hours. But every time Jim or one of the others asked, Halla replied they had only been traveling a short time and they would need to go on a bit longer.

The writing on the walls was so dense Jim couldn’t tell where one mark stopped and another started. But he still knew in his gut it was real writing, and while part of him wanted to know what was being said, most of him was glad he had no idea.

Jim was tired, thirsty and so scared there was just a dull ache all through his body now. He wondered if he’d have the energy to run if he had to, and found himself doubting it. Just when he thought he’d have to ask to stop and rest they came to a landing.

Jim risked a look up and wasn’t too surprised when he couldn’t see anything but stairs and darkness above them. Though the hole continued on down, there were no more stairs, just another set of large double-doors. They’d reached whatever the next point in their journey was.

It was hot here, much hotter than it should have been, even for the territory and time of year. It smelled familiar, though—just as Halla’s town had after they’d finished with it. Burning wood combined with sweat and blood and the stench of fear all humans gave off when they were faced with something horrible. But there was one scent added in. It took Jim a few moments to place it—sulfur.

He risked a look into the hole, but all he could see was the same reddish-golden light. If he squinted he could just make out what looked almost like waves of something molten. He pulled his gaze away and back to the door, where Halla was standing as she had at the doors before, hands against them flat, head bowed.

As he did so, he heard a new sound. It was also familiar and normal—women crying. The other men didn’t seem to notice, though. At least, Big Willie and Lee didn’t, since they were both standing right behind Halla and watching her. Jim looked around for Hefé, but the Mexican was nowhere in sight. Jim looked up the stairs, but no one was on them. He moved back to the hole and looked in again. He saw what he thought might have been a man, traveling downward, wrapped up in what could have been thick, glowing rope. Or something worse.

Jim leapt away from the edge and moved right next to Big Willie. “Hefé’s gone,” he said as quietly as he could. But he still couldn’t stop his voice from shaking.

“He’ll be back,” Big Willie said with a shrug, never taking his eyes off Halla.

“I think he fell down the hole,” Jim said, not adding that he figured if this was true, Hefé had had help losing his balance.

“Then he was clumsy and should not be mourned,” Halla said, not looking around. “My father only wants the best.”

“And he’ll get that with us,” Big Willie said heartily.

Jim couldn’t stop himself. “What does he want us for?”

The doors began to open inward and Halla turned now and looked right at him. Her eyes were glowing, and Jim was sure it was from inside, not a reflection of the other light. “To ensure our kind continues.” She gestured with her hand. “Please, enter.”

* * *

The room should have been visible, but all Jim could see when the doors fully opened was murky darkness. Not as black as what they’d been through before, more like dense, black fog or smoke. It seemed to be moving, but with purpose, as if it were something tangible, and possibly alive. The light from the landing didn’t penetrate it.

Jim couldn’t move, couldn’t force himself forward or manage to turn and flee. He just stood there. Halla was still standing outside of the room. Jim thought she looked amused, and he knew she must be aware of how terrified he was by the way she smirked at him.

Big Willie took a step forward and seemed to realize the others weren’t with him. He looked around and shook his head with disgust. “What’s wrong with you two?” He grabbed Jim and Lee, who also hadn’t moved, and dragged them with him.

They moved into the darkness, and Jim felt it moving around and over him. He was sure it was a real thing now, not his imagination. The doors slammed shut behind them, but Big Willie still had Jim’s arm held tight in his hand, so Jim had no way to run. Not that he had any idea of where to run to.

“Where’re we headed, Halla?” Big Willie asked, sounding completely normal and unperturbed. Jim realized Big Willie wouldn’t be able or willing to save them from whatever they were headed toward.

“Just keep walking straight ahead,” Halla replied, her voice seeming both right behind them and somehow very far away at the same time.

Big Willie complied, still dragging Jim and, from what Jim could tell from the sounds, Lee as well. As Jim listened for any clue as to what they were heading into, all the horrible noises from the earlier part of the journey started up again. The sounds started low, but quickly surged louder to become a cacophony of pure horror. Jim lost control of his bladder and couldn’t even feel embarrassed by it.

Nothing impeded them as they walked through the living darkness, but Jim could feel it winding over his body, going into his mouth, ears, and nostrils, sliding under his clothes to cover his skin. The darkness stroked his body inside and out; he could feel it working its way through his lungs and stomach, moving into his groin, flowing with his blood.

Jim wanted to scream or cry, do something, anything, to make this stop. But he had no will now. Big Willie let go of his arm, but Jim kept moving forward, propelled by the darkness that had wrapped itself around him.

His vision became clearer. He could see shapes now, some of them human, some of them looking like animals he’d never seen before. Jim used all his will and turned his head to look at Big Willie and Lee. They looked the way they always had to him, until Lee turned his head and looked at Jim as well.

Jim was glad he couldn’t scream. Lee’s face was gone, replaced by a mass of writhing, black tentacles, each with what looked like an eye at the end of them. Jim couldn’t count how many tentacles there were, but as he forced his eyes down he could see that Lee’s body wasn’t right, didn’t look normal under his clothes. It was undulating in ways impossible to humans, and as he watched in horror, Lee’s body ripped through the cloth and Jim saw odd beaks, flailing limbs that had more in common with a grasshopper than a man, and slime, what seemed like a trough-full of slime, oozing from all parts of what had been Lee.

He didn’t know how he got the courage to look at Big Willie, but he managed it somehow. Big Willie looked the same as he always had. Jim felt so thankful he almost cried.

Then his hearing started to shift like his vision had. The sounds he hadn’t been able to recognize became comprehensible. He could hear women screaming and crying again, much louder and closer than before. The laughter was still there, but it sounded normal and right. The chittering became words. At first, Jim was so relieved he forgot about whatever Lee had turned into and just rejoiced that things were heading back to normal.

But his joy faded quickly as he began to understand what was being said. We bring you a sacrifice, Great Nez-testen, father of us all. We will go forth and multiply and spread your desecration to the world. Your corruption will multiply across the land, until all the world belongs to you.

Jim’s vision cleared fully, and he saw they were in a room bigger than any he could have imagined. At the far end from them sat a throne, larger than the biggest building he’d ever seen. In front of it was an altar wider than the Mississippi. He could see bodies on it and realized this was where the women were. He saw whites, Indians, Mexicans, Chinese, even some Negresses. All the women were naked, all tied down with their legs spread as wide as possible. A day before Jim would have thought he’d found paradise. But now he felt no pleasure watching them, just pure fear.

Halla was suddenly with them again, and she pointed to what had once been Lee. “You. Go find the others and join them.”

The monstrosity shuffled off to the right and, as Jim’s eyes followed it, he saw it go to a bubbling pool at least ten feet in diameter. The liquid in it was a viscous green, and there were odd and horrible shapes bobbing in it. The thing that had been Lee slipped into the liquid without hesitation. It gave an unearthly scream—of pain, Jim was sure—and as he watched it sank as the liquid burped and boiled around it.

Jim saw something come up to the surface. It was a man’s torso, burned from acid. What was left of the face was a caricature of pain and terror. Jim turned away quickly. It had reminded him of Hefé, and he knew in his gut that all the others had ended up in that pot.

Jim heard a crashing boom, as if someone had dropped a locomotive. He looked toward the sound as a huge creature moved out of the shadows behind the throne. At first all he could see were the legs, brown and goatlike, if a goat were fifty feet tall, with huge cloven hooves. The creature sat down, and Jim could see that its torso was made up of what looked like thousands of large maggots, all moving so that the body was never truly still. In place of arms it had eight masses of tentacles, four on each side.

Worst of all was the head. It swayed on a thick, long neck and looked for all the world like a giant rattlesnake, complete with long fangs that dripped a loathsome green ichor. But it was the thing’s eyes that were the most horrible. They looked like a human’s, only they gleamed with more intelligence and malice than any human had ever managed. And they were looking right at Jim. Jim knew without asking that this was Nez-testen.

Halla leapt up onto the altar, and now Jim could see that her boots had become goat-legs, just like the giant creature’s. She bowed to it and then spoke. “Father, I bring you the last ingredients for your next batch.”

The monster that was her father nodded its head. “Which one will do the honors?” he asked, his voice a thundering, garbled hiss.

Halla turned around and looked at Jim and Big Willie. She smiled her odd smile, and Jim realized she was more terrifying to him than even her father. She jumped back down, landing on her goat legs, her eyes glowing orange.

“This one,” she said, pointing to Jim. “The other one is stronger and more necessary as an ingredient.”

With that, Nez-testen reached out a tentacled limb and grabbed Big Willie. Jim took one last look at his former leader. Big Willie was smiling. “Thank you, master, for this honor,” he said, just before Nez-testen plunged his head into the boiling pool. Big Willie’s limbs and body thrashed for a few moments and then went still. Nez-testen let go and the last of Big Willie sank under as the liquid boiled around him.

Nez-testen made a swirling movement with this set of tentacles and the liquid began to spin, just as if it were being stirred.

“What happens to me?” Jim managed to whisper, as he dragged his eyes away from the horrible brew and looked back at Halla.

She gave him her same odd smile again. “Now you will receive my thanks. You will become the vessel through which my father will create my next batch of siblings. You will enjoy all your willing women,” she said with an evil chuckle as she gestured to the altar. “At least, the part of you that will remain will do so. After all, my father must be represented to your world with outward beauty. And,” she added, “your essence will stay with me, forever, to help me find more just like you.”

She leaned forward and kissed him, her tongue becoming long and snake-like as it entered his mouth. He could feel it moving down his throat, pulling his insides out until his body was just a shell. Then her tongue moved upwards. The last thing Jim saw was her glowing eyes and he knew there was a worse place than Hell, and that he would dwell in it forever.

* * *

Halla took the shell of Jim’s body and had it drink from the stew the other members of his gang had created. When it was full she led it to the altar and had it start its important work. When it emptied, she led it back to the stewpot, over and over again.

It was tedious, particularly because the women couldn’t be shut up. They had to remain physically unharmed until they were each properly impregnated. Then they would be silenced quickly, as their bodies exploded into seven new fully-formed adult beings, beautiful and enticing new sisters for Halla to teach and train and lead. New sisters to find the evil men of this world and bring their essences back to Great Nez-testen.

She could feel Jim’s brain inside her, nestled next to the others’. She enjoyed the way they moved, just the way the ones inside her father moved, frantically trying to escape, forever unable to do so. One day Halla knew she would have claimed so many that her torso would look just like her father’s. Then she would be ready to sit next to him, on her own throne, as his equal.

But not just now. Just now she had to finish this latest batch and then trade seven horses to the local Apache tribes in exchange for whatever women they had kidnapped for her in the last few months.

Then she would go out and see who else wanted to earn her thanks.

WHITE FIRE

JOSEPH S. PULVER, SR.

(FOR JACK LONDON AND LAIRD BARRON)

A MAN WHO IS ABOUT TO DIE IS NOT LIKELY TO BE VERY ELEGANT in his last words: being in a hurry to sum up his whole life, he tends to make them rigorously concise.

—Jean Ray, “The Mainz Psalter”

All my treasures …

On his knees. Ice-muzzled.

Shivering cracked lips struggling with the word. “Lost.”

Acute white snow. Shapeless, shifting.

A day with no sun or cloud. White, crushing light with its glaring fire. No fissure to there or free in this funeral. No pattern of charity.

COLD. Thicker than granite under zero, or New England winter.

The experiments of explorers uprooting history, over. Shattered by the wolf, by greed. Running from the cascade of devils.

No way back. No out. This or there, the same blindfold of pure WHITE.

Two sled dogs, good dogs, dead. Two more that would not dominate distance with faithful resolution. Petrified.

Didn’t even remember their names.

Not much longer for the other eight.

His canvas saturated, too.

Ice.

Cold—curved, rough. Snarling.

Thaw a myth no exertion could break.

Not another step. Cold, hard as iron and steel, sank its fangs into panting, closed the circle. Trotting a behavior of instincts that won’t spread over the ground again.

A country without inches or light, or a map that held transit to reason.

Snow falls.

Snow drifts.

What is blown swirls, blinds.

Snow, a great beast, a concrete bulk, comes and keeps coming.

The whiteness. Conqueror flag. Its teeth shred sure as the hard end of an .8-gauge. WHITENESS. Windowless. No Christmas lawn spread before him. A dance of madness all around.

Dream scenes. The vase empty of forget-me-nots in the mirror … Heaven handwritten on a map of the city … 2 a.m. small talk and Girl Scout cookies … Rubbing his chest with his good hand, trying to make moments and miles imaginable.

Had there been stars, the soft vocabulary of believing? A moon that enlarged evening as it emerged from ink-stained clouds? Weather that had cleared and allowed you to see morning after the tramp of your offending huff? Other men, talking over coffee—tucking in small complaints, and laughing? Was there still a painting of a waterfall robed in gold over the fireplace in his father’s study back home?

“Lost.” Nothing else will fit into his mouth.

Home.

Memories he used to live in: Little white house with its little white porch and windows recounting framed pleasures to the flower beds—late September, the compelling treat of orange, the new king of colors. On the porch, on his elbows and knees, knowing harvest was coming, tossing peanuts to the squirrels. Grinning at the fat one he called Bozo, the one who was happy to bounce from peanut to peanut.

Was there—

Order? Something in the oven? Intentions that paid off?

In another universe perhaps. The one that was not swept clean by this broadside, something with appeal and crafted with habits and landings that didn’t plant you in misery, where luck and laughter were pals. Some other place, a stable harbor where you remembered to take your umbrella and didn’t sell yourself down the river. A place with a quiet sunset …

If he could step away could he find the strength to still yearn?

Those times; experiments and collisions, cutting the weeds and grass, discarding the growth in the mirror, the aftershave, the kiss of her picture, surveying mouths for lies or comforts, the magic of a gift accepted, bourbon, playing cards, blue on the other side of the kitchen window—

Plucked away from the velocity of his dreams by the soft firm voice coming from the window. “Edward, it’s time for dinner.” Warm rolls with dinner and her eyes …

Nic’s too. He’d lost her picture in the pull of impossible weather, gust and gone. Lost sight of Nicolette’s genteel angel song.

He should have remained in that place, should have stopped and thought things out. Thought it stricken and dulled. Thought the mundane foolish, iron that struck down amusements. Might have anchored his bones to being there if Nic stayed. Might? But aim lost its territory … Got ready to go, display his nature for investigations. Decided he’d had enough of his own cross-examinations, brushed troubled ends off his shoulders, set out for joining.

Went to school—lit and history, and geology, they’d told him it was the easiest science. Didn’t fit, didn’t get afire. Yawned, took the Cs. Left quickly. Didn’t turn to see the doors close on the myths he no longer carried. Went to sea. Lay in his bunk, rocked and rocked, and read Moby-Dick as a joke. Thought of Grandpa’s chatty fish stories, dreamed of Nantucket sleighrides, sea ivory and terrible monsters. Sang with his mates. Found surprises and memories.

Sailed.

Astonished by flawless stars the first weeks. Stared in the depths for exhibitions of grandeur. Saw the sea. Day after day. Vast. Endless … No Tuesdays no Fridays. No harbor.

Toil with the nets. Rock in his bunk. Expectations trimmed. Laughter too.

Felt small in the wide.

Drank some, no cure pushed back the cold revelation.

Felt lost and bewildered.

Wide grew.

Locked in another day.

Saw the sea.

The sea did not change.

Ran away again.

Home, thankful for the miles of dark green forest between him and the sea. Settled back into his studies. Didn’t throw up a hallelujah, but he worked at it, a little. Met Jeanrenaud in a campus coffee shop. Followed it with pizza and Jeanrenaud’s fascination with old Antarctic accounts. Waving his cigarette about like a conductor’s baton, John-Claude spoke of Danforth and the two Poe letters from 1849, which he’d discovered in his grandfather’s papers, and spun a narrative about the allusions and assertions of something Other that waited beyond the Lighthouse at the End of the World. “Tarnished accounts of a lost land. Alien things.” The songs on the jukebox faded in space and time as the chest of destruction was opened.

Mysteries. The clash of natures and destinies.

As a kid he was never big on sci-fi books or books in general. Movies, sure, but not books. Yet he’d loved Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and some Edgar Rice Burroughs and, for a heartbeat, Erich von Däniken. Thoughts of something akin to Pellucidar took flight.

Call of the wild, sure. Back across the ferocious sea … “A spectral land of ghosts and desolation, a wild untamed place, but it may present the opportunity for an achievement like no other—I want to look into the abyss and see if there’s anything tangible there.

“Glory, my friend. If we find it. If we bring back proof.”

Got sucked in and signed on.

Sailed away, some laughed, into menace. South.

Felt the cold come, grow, it challenged the blue right out of the sky.

Pure white. Majestic blue. Mountains immortal when the Romans held slaves, when humans first rigged hopes on the light of the moon. Picturesque. For a time.

In the caverns below the discoveries came—

Surroundings lost order, new time came out of its burrows in the cold ground. Silent salted afraid with wild. Abundant was burnt out of future …

And he ran. Soiled by weakly and imprudent, carrying puniness and little else, he fled. Panic his route.

No more mystery. Just strangeness and wind. Wind. A saraband of dissonance, of devil-music. Wind. The vigor of its bristling speech presses its muscle to shoulder, to neck, presses—slashes, threatens ribbons savagely wrought. Finds its way in, gives winter. An epidemic of wind.

Weakened by terrors, not moving. Going under. No satin-lined box to put terrible in. No undertaker. Every breath slower than the last.

“Nobody’s … here.

“No—”

Nic. The luster of her California laugh when she asked if he had a penny to have his fortune told. Nic. The new existence, built with fever arrows, he discovered as she danced to “I Feel Love” in that black slip.

He thought it was silk. If soft moonlight was black …

Nic. Primal, free.

By anyone’s standards she was pretty, alluring. The right nose, right cheeks, just high enough. Perfect lips, jawline a statue in a museum would kill for, but her eyes, dig through the glimmer of a pirate’s treasure chest and you would not find better.

Beautiful.

Pieces of home. The sleepy village, the histories of soft, the casual flowers along Wilson Creek Road … Fourteen, staying up all night under a full July moon listening to an owl who was not rooted to branches and the pull of the stars …

The middle years of infatuations, pushing off capacious branches to see if its wings could explain the horizon, inhaling theories, new spells some of which held, and small successes …

Ransacking sixteen and carting away whatever true he could find …

Socks on the rail, coffee on the back-porch with the ripe conference of yellow-tinted finches at the feeder while the smaller dark birds sat in branches waiting …

WHITE hatching another exclamation of WHITE.

Fun. Skiing the white majestic at Gore two days after Christmas with Mike and Lena. Eight, making snow angels with Suzy, giggling wildly the whole time. Twelve, the snowman snowball fights with Dom and shoveling the driveway and the two-story snow-fort next to Jimmy Cammarere’s pigeon coop. The cozy table by the window in Petta’s Italian restaurant on New Year’s Eve with Nic and the velvet doe standing on the frozen creek.

Cold took it all. Every disguise and accent of memorial in the barracks of his memory. Leeched without a word, burned the layers of past in its blasting NOW. Dates. Learned. Her blue silk blouse. The words of apology that weren’t suited for the bed. There was no ledger or birthday that remained hidden or intact.

White fire and no clock. No undo.

They’d stood at the doors. Leveled their electric torches. Opened, the eruption of an existence that changed every man. The smell that was not friendly.

Jeanrenaud, “This changes everything … everything.”

Engel’s quick “Follow me.” A command burning along the slope of coveting.

Step by step and further they climbed right into it. Chambers and passages that detailed an alien prehistory, blazing architecture—Stonehenge and the pyramids kid’s toys, carvings of both art and science, corridors and bridges and rooms it would take years to survey and penetrate. Step, standing in grim, brushed and imprinted by facts that compromised, commandeered, all that had been formalized by human understanding. Chambers that capsized the grids and structure of fact, the hammer that swept aside every model of geologic, biologic, and astronomical. They opened it and the harsh enemy targeted lives.

Black fire raged.

Engel screamed, “Shoggoths!” He was the first to be absorbed by violence.

Impossible wrote.

Forces with no middle ground whirled and hysterics encountered zero.

And he ran—ignored the blunt of cold to be free of finished.

Now he sat. A thing that did not flap. A thing in a land with nothing to burn. No sky in the grave of apart.

Apart. Struck. Trapped.

Mouse to cat’s cold, warm left. An hour ago? A day? With so many pieces missing he couldn’t tell.

He stopped, maybe it was was stopped, stumbled. Fell and his adrenaline-fueled fight-or-flight response didn’t raise a “Get up!” Every signal of difference he had—his steps, his bowls, the speed and acts of his nerves, his tell—was pinned to this nation of WHITE. Barely had his idiot left. Lost a mitten and followed it by dropping his goggles, got spun around and couldn’t find them.

He wasn’t supposed to be out in this inhuman shit. Not in this vast blistering of WHITE influenced only by unsympathetic COLD. No one was. Not alone.

Coyne, former Marine hard-stripe sergeant and still a major-league hardass laid down the rules for everyone: “No one, man or dog, goes out in Condition 5 weather. On your own, you die out there.”

He’d heard it. Knew it.

Wished he’d remembered it.

Asshole.

Stupid … How many times did he tell everyone?

“Other side of that door is fucked all the way to dead. Shitload of pain before you get there too.”

Alone, bent and small, whatever grit he ever possessed weathered out of him, with no acceleration to movement and no ship to turn from DEATH everywhere toward a map of places.

Being terrified after Ancient was jarred awake hadn’t helped. Maybe a few seconds of cautious sense and he’d have taken the SnowTrac, not the dogs. Would have sealed him off from the wind and it had a heater. Instead he shot himself into a death-struggle with raw snow and exposure, from there his spirit hadn’t been enough to interfere with or challenge the solid radiation of cold.

Tired. No climb to summer on his tongue. No wings to force into labor in this grave of WHITE FIRE.

Tied down. Crushed.

Dead man.

Fleeing into a Condition 5 weather situation without proper supplies. “Asshole.”

Asshole.

Split.

Leviathan-shattered.

Dead man. Winter-sculpted.

The white-tomb swells. His eyes cry out no name. His face froze, no longer a carpet of features.

Sure wasn’t like this when they got past the stalactites and opened the doors and leapt past and ran with their upside-down imaginations. The air was blissful, stank, but it was warm. It was here, their lamps shone on gold’s delirium. Really here.

“We … Christ, we found it!”

“Glory, my friend.”

Proof.

Smiles, brio that needed no translation. Shaking hands.

Behind him Herbie’s foreign accent summed things up. “Wow.”

He heard Professor Roosevelt drop his Ph.D. “You ain’t shittin’.”

He agreed. All that and more. This discovery would free him. It would bring money, maybe some fame, and there’d be interviews and features in the press, and, he was willing to bet, down the road documentaries and movies. If he let it, this could release him from the past where Nic took the full measure and killed herself. He might be able to get some of himself back, or maybe avenues he’d never considered would greet him with some kind of guiltless redemption. No vague to the mind-bending impressions they stood admiring; it was all right in front of him waiting to pull him from anger and grief. Eyesight for the blind.

Jeanrenaud slapped him on the back. John-Claude was glowing, as if he was eight and it was Christmas.

Didn’t hear the dogs growling.

None of them did. Too busy bringing out instruments to assist their intensity—spot to spot, artifact to artifact—“If we sequentially connect the complex growth shown in panel one, any analysis would lead to a discussion of heightened—” abandoning philosophy with physical fact—they wouldn’t let them break the spell.

Didn’t. For hours they guarded the brilliance of their new flame, let it nurture them. Until the harsh blows of long-forgotten hunted—

Understanding, enthusiasms, deeds, impetuous pride, gone in an aggressive gesture …

BLACK FIRE.

He ran to survive.

Ran from bestial … From the corpses scrawled on the calendar of death …

Pushed the dogs.

Screamed.

Begged for fast and miles.

Then he lost a mitten.

And the first dog died …

No camp. No biscuits. No cigars with Connelly and Jeanrenaud.

No New York.

No steaks and quiet laughs in O’Reilly’s with Fred and Derrick …

Strolling the Park …

Pleasantly arguing with Tom after the Yankees game over which Ray’s was Ray’s, then off to try slices in both to, maybe, determine a winner … or just have another cold one and laugh …

He would never see Grandpa Charlie’s little white porch in Danbury again—the flowers, the clover, the rocking chair on the deck of the whaler where fish stories sailed …

Absent. Warm in a ditch with no ramp to the road of attaining.

Fingers numb freeze the sentence of cold’s law.

Nose. Frozen.

Cheeks frozen.

Feet beyond the acid throbbing, cold marble forever closed on the cream of warmth’s hospitable.

Skin chilled beyond any desperate command to reach or move in the cutthroat stronghold of clenching COLD.

Blood couldn’t get to the heart of the matter.

Looks at his fingers. Imagines warm. Tries to. But there’s no lust in it.

Looks again. Fails to grasp the myth.

All of him shivering, stammering, and paying dearly for the unstructured and unprepared flight—you better run his only thought.

Took the empty sled. Less weight, faster his only reaction to the absolute at his heels.

“Asshole.” More heat leaving.

He wanted a cigarette. Wanted a fire—wildfire or inferno, size mattered to his momentary lust.

“Grandmother Spider.” The myth of fire. There and gone from the page of desire. There were no spiders in this frigid waste. Hadn’t seen a clay pot either. Another myth with no basis.

Wanted a weapon that could repair the landscape. But the cold that was eating him told him those doors were locked.

Wanted his mind back. Wake up. Home. In bed. Bare feet on the hardwood floor to the bathroom mirror. Yawn. Mutter. Stare. Looking at days of little town blues.

Coffee. “Stayin’ Alive” on the kitchen radio.

Nowhere.

Nobody would come and help.

Nobody was left.

Chained.

Out of growing. Load bigger. Colder.

One hundred years ago. That expedition. Ridicule and disbelief dropped, true, no madman fantasy. Even the horrors.

Out of the storm of screams and viscera into this white hell. Screamed insane. Screamed fuck. Fuck!

White fire. Monster. Biting, burning. Unrelenting.

No God.

Why? Would it have hurt to have one? Or a dozen? Savior—vessel, passage—compass—easing with bells and psalm. Just one rooted in light to grant beginning and Earth as a house of warmth. Someone to take the words of mouth and footsteps of pray and build a firmament and vineyard of soft and secure above the alone carved by the worm in this enormous illusion.

Why not?

He’d give up temptations and misfortune and heathen soul for just one.

Would have …

Would.

Cracked lips forced into existence. “Sun goddamnit.”

No sun.

No God. Wind. With no mend, pushing white with its current of suffering. Wind stretching, etching grieve, condemning head and hand.

Cold the true devil.

The white fire burns. Burns slave, passed shuddering and whimpering with swift horrors, besieges dazed with lost.

Wants a god to summon up and kill the devil with Bible. Wants a god to grant Icarus wings and fly away Home. Away from the white world.

One hundred years ago. The white fire. That black fire. That tore off their clothes. That tore up their souls. Tightrope. Ice. Fire. No saving net of soft landing in Heaven.

Was true—terror, despair, knife-edge severing all. No hiding place.

Make it gone.

No keep on truckin’—out of chants. Out of weeping. Lost the word Mom. Others too. Almost, almost had a lock on meadow. No need to recall bleak. It’s there, uprooting him. So few fragments of communication to embrace.

Sits. Silent. He’s drifting, beyond sorrow, beyond hopes. An animal lost in the wilds of now.

Now. Succumbing to the bludgeon of cold.

No sailor. No adventurer. No one along to survive. No one could there be.

Silent.

Now.

Degraded, every nerve, every instinct. Sleepy depths beyond half-mad, stripped of sensibilities, and can’t hang on to the touch of human.

Now.

Only the cold white fire.

Alone.

One hundred degrees below zero. Wind that left no whisker of a trail.

“Wind.”

Whip with no thrift. Blowing all bare … and dumb.

“Cold.”

Greater than any god. Blind to pleas for once, or curses to circumstance. COLD. Burns cheeks. Closes the pages of hands. Cultivating nothing. Pressing on. Sledgehammer. Fangs in the cloister of flesh and within. Cold that reads no crucifix or scripture. No pity. No melt. Tide that paralyzes rhyme and fact, nulls accuracy.

Loose gone.

Breast hollow of need. Parts of him, no more take it to pour over tortured, stiff after the negative of give up, barred from the dance of sensation.

Dreamlike in this grave, his few starts and shapes and all worth gone from his tongue. Nothing resonant, nothing to depend on.

Cracked, but didn’t surrender. Tried to press on until his heels couldn’t release him from hobbled, from the blinding white construction.

Bombarded and denied. He never endorsed this with syllables, or thought. Frenzy, fear, and grieve as the thief left no room for next. As it took.

A little at first. Lips and toes—got in and under, the prowler moved block to block. Increments. Thighs. Inner, deeper, the cannonball warlord leapt. Took away wings. Took sense. Wasted. Froze nature’s order. Grew.

Coming apart. His streets, once round as sacred sun-choir calling, now quiet of even halfheartedly, some now dead, the others dying, but not quick enough.

The white fire burns.

White blinds.

Melted from the external world he can’t see the sled. Can’t tell if the dogs are still there.

Cold holds. Takes skill from the hand. Takes little plans from the mind. Replaces got with slavery.

No next. No possible.

Whirlwind pulled awareness’ oars from the water.

“Fucking … cold.”

Mom believed in a Loving God. Eternal love too. Compassion. Gently …

Her cherry pies. Oozing. Still warm … Wasn’t even stern when I brought the bees in the kitchen … Butter … Make your tongue soar on songs of bliss.

America.

There was a sundial in Nic’s dad’s yard.

Big yellow moon too. That wasn’t a mirage … Was a masterpiece.

I. I … “like tomatoes.”

Little salt … mayo. On toasted rye.

Put your feet up and climb into sleep in front of the TV.

Fifty trillion cells in this shell and each feels like a crystal of ice.

Ice.

WHITE. Pure white.

No strength for desperate. Nothing out loud.

Knew he’d never survive without shelter.

Nothing left to concede.

blurry

blinking

Doesn’t change the throttling WHITENESS.

pain

curling up

End this.

Called them shoggoths. They came out of the door. Rushed—no snarling. Took. Took Sinclair and Dickey. Both. Panic. Seized. Yelped. Screamed, started to, as their consciousness was gnawed by madness … Lost toes, desire—They all screamed as they died …

Shoggoths.

One of the few things they knew from the documentation.

So little they understood. Fragments, not the magnitude, no time to take it all in. Barely enough time to begin to calculate. Jammed—they shot—ran—dropped every rule mother and science and church had instilled—scattered—tried to retreat—shot and shot and cursed chance and risk, the mistake that spilled blood, at the terrible fury that did not growl as things were shred—ran—dropped the guns that had no strength left in them—ran—but not fast enough—lost their heads—

Died.

Connelly … And Jeanrenaud—John-Claude’s broad shoulders—his equations and procedures—”Glory, my friend”—no face …

Shoggoths—

Pitiless wind stops. Dead hush.

Still snowing too hard to allow sky.

Drowned in the stampede of cold and ice-blind he does not notice the absolute silence. Thrown far from the nest of sober reason sees no chance.

Drowsy.

Can’t—the burn violently ending another thought before it becomes whole.

Sputtering.

Disabled. Running out of things for yearning to reach for. One hand dead. Useless after losing its mitten.

Cold. Empty and it will not change the mountain that barred any escape.

Head down. Beyond madness, wrecked by a thing with no philosophy. Explain with no place to stand. Body out of hill and breath, fields that cannot paint color as they shrink under bitter. Horse standing in the rain, waiting for it to pass, but he knows cold and its inferno will not pass. Not while his shell—a crumb of error, numb—and all it contained burns to rubble.

Caught in finished. Over soon, then he won’t have to care, won’t be torn by fool. Will never stare at ruin again.

Ruin. Blackened prison reducing all to rubbish.

Looks at the brittle hand of an inmate, never hold a cigarette again … Just a thing now. An appendage.

Frozen meat in a land where meat was scarce.

“Do they eat?”

Dark power from the deep crypts. Dark forever—

Black. Things.

Shapeless.

Unrelenting—

Coming.

One shot left in the rifle. His fingers, like his eyes and the corners of his mouth, are thick with ice. Can’t position it to finish things.

“Call them.”

Let them come.

Silence the white fire. Put an end to the irrevocable.

Worn out. Snowblind. One scream would call them.

Opens his mouth—

Let the BLACK FIRE consume him

(after Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”)

A QUIRK OF THE MISTRAL

JONATHAN THOMAS

HERE’S HOW SECLUDED THE PROFESSOR WAS. FROM THE AIRPORT outside Marseille I took a taxi to the mid-city train station, and there I bought a ticket for Arles, where I boarded the Avignon-bound bus, from which I disembarked on two-lane blacktop between parched alfalfa fields. The driver, who had a postcard of a cicada taped to his dashboard, was adamant that Domaine St. Jude was two or three kilometers down the unpromising byway before me. I never did resolve whether the road was paved or not, because nothing but rounded tips of tawny stones broke the monotony of pale impacted dust. Let the record moreover state, I had to negotiate this trying geography under the handicap of stupefying jetlag, after eight-hour flight from JFK.

Before I’d trudged the first kilometer, I was pleased as ever I’d been with my dedication to traveling light. A backpack tidily under the weight limit for carry-on was it for these two weeks abroad. All the same, the straps were chafing my shoulders raw, and sweat had fused the flimsy cotton shirt to my back. Sycamores and pines and a smattering of palms flanked my route, though arid drainage gullies on both sides kept shade at a maddening remove. And the August sun was merciless, like a scouring pad abrading my scalp. Worse yet, mean, sporadic gusts whipped road grit into my oily face, like drafts from a cindery furnace.

The cicadas, at least, liked the climate, to judge by the welter of buzzing that waxed and waned in the foliage like phantom power tools sawing through one phantom branch after another. It made a fitting soundtrack to my fatigue and dehydration, and on the verge of cursing the heat aloud and deliriously, I plodded into a crossroad and found my second wind. Ahead on the right was a rusty wrought-iron crucifix atop a truncated brick pyramid, just as the fax had described. This ordeal was near its end! A scant hundred yards would bring me to the dilapidated gaggle of several farmsteads dignified as Domaine St. Jude, a name absent from Rand McNally atlas and highway signage. The closest village on Institut Géographique National maps was Boulbon, where the épicerie must have put a fax machine at the professor’s disposal.

In the year since his retirement and retreat to native precincts, he’d forsworn phone and e-mail and even pen and paper, so when the secretary at the department called about his message for me, I was elated, although his excited mélange of French and English also mystified and worried me a little.

Someone he claimed I had to meet was “à la maison,” and he beseeched me to come “vite! Aussitôt que possible!” This someone he then referred to as “quelque chose incroyable,” and with me alone was he comfortable sharing this incredible something. Henceforth he would be incommunicado, but guaranteed he’d always be home to welcome me, and “don’t fail to catch the soonest plane you can. Une farce cosmique! The dogma has exploded.” He signed off, as was his custom, “Take care. Do not hope too much. I’m sure it will be all right.”

And here I was, silently mouthing those words at the head of his bramble-lined driveway, drawn by friendship and concern and, yes, some twinge of obligation. Thanks to his influence at the Life Sciences Department I’d stepped into his tenured shoes, and couldn’t very well repay him now by ignoring his urgent summons.

I was punchy to the point of mistaking an oversized shed for the main house, understandably insofar as it boasted a residential-looking tile roof and mortared walls and green louvered door. I knocked twice before noticing a more substantial candidate for a home up ahead; and unlike the shed, it had windows, from one of which a pair of goggle eyes, distinctly not the professor’s, was studying me. A querulous voice, also not the professor’s, loosed a babel of syllables toward the interior of the house.

I hadn’t marshaled the strength to move when Hervé Bayard bounded outside, in cool vanilla linen shirt and trousers, sensibly seasonal but almost alarmingly loose, as if he’d shed too many pounds. With his perennial vitality he shook my hand and hugged me and thanked me profusely for indulging an old coot. I was still hemming and hawing a semicoherent reply in French as he staggered backward and turned aside to expel a slew of wracking coughs. He waved away my concerns for his health, which only grew upon observing twin inflamed swaths, of a finely granular texture, along his ocular orbits.

I was in no shape to comment on these tactfully, and anyway the professor was escorting me to a side yard and a rickety square table, with a hole drilled into it for a parasol. He put up the parasol, of the same buttery yellow as the table, and bid me sit while he disappeared into the house and dispensed instructions about readying dinner and guestroom, to which he received the somber Provençal assent, “Très bieng.” He reappeared with a tray containing a bowl of reddish olives, a liter of pastis, a pitcher of water, and a pair of shot glasses.

“Relax and be refreshed,” he prescribed, and though hard liquor after roughly twenty-four hours on the go sounded counterproductive, what the hell. I was running on fumes already. Adding distilled fumes might even help. Hervé clucked in mock reprimand as I raised the drink to my lips without remembering to add water. Then he quizzed me on my arduous journey and stateside current events and a year’s worth of campus gossip. Baffling how my explosive reason for crossing the Atlantic had apparently slipped his mind, but I was tired beyond bringing that up, and the pastis hadn’t even begun to hit me yet.

Presently the sturdy owner of the goggling eyes addressed the professor from the doorstep. She was dressed in modest, stifling black woolens, and a black Spanish comb clenched thin gray hair away from coarse-grained face. I garnered from the decipherable snatches of her idiom that dinner was served. To me she remarked, in plainer French, “It is always better the second night.” She ducked back inside.

“That is Clairette,” Hervé explained as he set our half-empty glasses beside the untouched olives on the tray, and picked up the tray. “She was here when I signed the lease. I cannot find a way to dismiss her.” He shrugged resignedly. “And why should I, really?”

We ate cold pork roast and stewed apricots with reheated ratatouille at a worn oak table in the kitchen. It was sweltering, and I wished in vain for the wherewithal to ask politely if this house didn’t have a better-ventilated dining room.

Clairette leaned against the gaping iron crevasse of a sink and occasionally swabbed her craggy brow with a dishrag. During a lull in our small talk, she made a rapid-fire announcement, which the professor rendered in English. “Clairette says you are in luck. No doubt you were annoyed by the marin, the hot wind, as you walked from the bus, but her bones tell her the mistral is due tonight, and that brings the fresher weather.” I thanked Clairette for the encouraging forecast. She regarded me blankly as if my French were gibberish. Then she prepared us a cutting board of bread and cheeses and a platter of peaches and pears and bananas.

I finally contrived an opening to say what needed saying. “Where is this incredible houseguest you were dying for me to meet? Why isn’t he eating with us? Is he all right?”

“He is taken care of.” The professor wasn’t normally evasive, and that dismayed me as much as his recurrent coughing spells and the pebbly rash beneath his eyes. “In good time,” he amended more affably. “Soon, if you are not too weary from your long trip.” He smiled hospitably and poured us more pastis.

With the heels of his hands against the tabletop, Hervé laboriously boosted himself from his chair after we’d finished our third glass, or was it our fourth? “Let us get you situated before anything else,” he advised.

I needed a second to figure out what he meant. “Right. I stupidly left my stuff out in the yard. Sorry.”

“No, no, it is good.” He gestured toward the door. “I will go too.” Damn, I’d furnished him yet another delaying tactic on the path to introducing his “houseguest.” He commended Clairette for an excellent meal, at which I nodded in hearty but unacknowledged agreement, and he assured her we would be fine now on our own. In the softening nine o’clock light, while I grabbed my backpack, he looked around at nothing in particular and stretched and rocked on his heels. I had the sneaking impression he was steeling himself, limbering up to propose a contentious thesis. This I read as a sign of progress. The din of cicadas was unabating.

He nodded on eventually realizing I had backpack in hand, and I followed him through front hall, past a room blocked off by hefty sliding door, and up a dim stone stairwell. He was out of sight around the bend, and I heard but didn’t see him stomping something. As he climbed, he defined the chitin bits in ugly smudge upon a step, “Sometimes in the south you find a scorpion.” He glanced behind to appraise my reaction. I must have gone pretty waxy. “Please, it is no big deal. If one stings, you just go to the hospital for six months and you are fine. Then you come home, and the other one stings and you just go to the hospital again for six months. They travel in pairs, you know.”

Hervé, I surmised, had reverted to the rustic humor of his youth while readjusting to home turf. I was feigning an appreciative grin in case he checked for therapeutic effects of his jest, but he intrepidly clambered onward.

Mine was one of two chambers off the cramped landing. The professor pulled a cord on a pole lamp inside the doorway and conducted what I inwardly disparaged as a spotty search for the other scorpion. In the casement above the bedstead, twin panes swung in, and green shutters swung out. He set the latches to allow an inch-wide stream of air to enter. “It will stop only the most idiotic of mosquitoes, but you will have air to breathe.”

I dropped my backpack onto the bed. The only other item of furniture was a straight-backed wooden chair. The professor bowed dramatically to peek under the bed and proclaimed, “You are safe for now.” Without more ado he ambled out and I trailed after. His bonhomie had withered to a husk before he reached the bottom step.

To initiate me into this mystery, this “cosmic joke” of his, had evidently been a much less fraught proposition from four thousand miles away. He dawdled outside the sliding door till I caught up. He had two fingers in lozenge-shaped brass indentation to pull the door aside, but first he whispered, “Clairette has been forbidden to go inside. She should be in her quarters, elsewhere on the property.”

He retracted the door by slow centimeters. Milking the moment for maximal suspense? No, on his face was a safecracker’s degree of concentration, as if he feared triggering any disturbance within, or perhaps destabilizing some cherished illusion. He poked his head through as soon as space permitted and murmured, “C’est bon.”

At that instant a smell lunged out at me, a potent meld of unclean fish tank, fermenting hot sauce, and dead lilies, and something more was wrong with it, a dissociation from the natural world, like a square peg in the round hole of my experience. Hervé went ahead as if perceiving nothing amiss or offensive.

He nudged a dimmer switch on the wall, and a glass chandelier suffused the stuffy, shuttered room with twilight. Here was his salle à manger cum personal museum, cluttered with the Cambrian hagfish skulls, beetles in amber, ammonite shells, and jumbo shale dragonflies of a career teaching invertebrate paleontology. The casement windows were all gaping open, though the green shutters were fastened together, permitting air to circulate through gaps a mere few centimeters wide. Eight brocade chairs, as if they’d wantonly obstructed him, were scattered at a distance impractical for dining from a marble-topped table whose dimensions could accommodate a billiards game. Dozens of hardbound volumes, many of them by Hervé, had migrated from built-in wall shelves to secure a perimeter around the edge of the table, like a corral of dominoes.

With a detachment that rang patently false, he indicated the polished white surface rife with black veins and said simply, “Voilà.”

At first I couldn’t fathom what was so significant. My aching, unsteady eyes veered haplessly from a blue enamel basin of water to the evenly split halves of a derby-sized hunk of coal. Nothing else leapt out at me. I stole a glance at Hervé. He was observing me keenly, in plain expectation I should be astounded. I blinked and re-examined the tabletop. In a reprise of my student days with him, the pressure to react appropriately was on.

Wait a minute. Something so subtle I almost blamed it on imagination or bleary vision was moving across the mineral expanse, gaining definition under my focus. And the sharper its outline, the more willing I was to shift that blame to the power of suggestion or the double whammy of pastis and exhaustion. Or had Hervé plied me with liquor and exploited my jetlag to soften up my incredulity, my common sense?

The thing was no bigger than a child’s fist and had eluded my haphazard survey because it for the most part wore the white and striated black of its surroundings, camouflaged like an octopus or chameleon. That, however, was the extent of its connection to conventional zoology. Its top-heavy, wedgelike head most resembled a trilobite’s, except for the curtain of feelers depending from it like baleen, and its hunched and banded body loosely mimicked that of a shrimp. Transparent legs like jointed straws, maybe ten, maybe more, held it aloft, in the posture of a daddy longlegs on tiptoe. It indecisively tottered around as if in perpetual daze at its circumscribed parcel of our alien world, conceivably suffering as much confusion as it inflicted. I hoped my gawking astonishment was up to the professor’s standards. “What the hell is it?”

“What indeed?”

“Where did it come from?”

“You see that broken block of coal?”

“No. That’s as impossible as the thing itself.”

Yet there it is, his arching eyebrows challenged. “In the cellar is a bin full of coal not used up by some ancien régime,” he recounted. “On rainy days for amusement I would fetch the bigger lumps and chisel at their seams to hunt for fossils. This I regarded as an idle pastime, with only poor chance to uncover anything. So when I pried open a crack in that block on the table and met my little friend snug in a cavity, my expression must have been like yours just now. And when he began almost at once to awake, my head was spinning, believe me.”

An eruption of coughing interrupted him, leading me to wonder if that vertigo might have resulted from inhaling some virulence that had survived along with its chimeric host. Which was as good as saying I’d already bought into Hervé’s outlandish claims at face value, hadn’t I? But I hadn’t, damn it. “A live animal trapped in stone? Can you name me one reputable scientist who wouldn’t laugh outright at that old wives’ tale?”

He raised a coy index finger and essayed a mordant smile. “I am back on my native soil to be reborn as an old wife, then.” Very funny, professor, and not getting us anywhere, and me wobbling on the brink of collapse.

“You alone have I called upon because I trust you most to accept the truth in front of your eyes. Nor do I guess you will reject the lesson this has forced on me, after decades spent defending my house of orthodox cards, for that is how I see it now.”

“Fine, but aren’t you maybe throwing out the whole deck because there’s one joker in it?” I had just enough starch left to feel smug about winging a passable comeback.

“If you like to say so, you may.” Hervé always had dealt patiently with sales resistance. “But these anecdotes of living toads encased in rock date to the twelfth century and recur independently of one another, in all corners of Europe.” He shrugged diffidently. “I would only suggest reopening the book on these many cases, that was shut too soon for lack of understanding.” He peered solemnly at his “farce cosmique,” which had meandered to the phalanx of volumes bordering the head of the table and was butting sluggishly against it, to no effect. “I might also submit that these prisoners freed from stone were not in actuality toads, but in spite of outward similarities may have been more akin to our present specimen.”

“Before you go reopening any books, though, let’s be clear on the kind of reception you can look forward to. Unless you can somehow safely transport your fragile pet from point A to point B, you couldn’t offer any meaningful proof it existed. Any photographs would be denounced as a Photoshop hoax. And if you brought over a hundred eyewitnesses, it would only amount to a hundred instances of hearsay.”

“Well, to counter you item by item, my miraculous pet cannot be as fragile as you suppose, or it would not have persevered through the terrible upheavals of many eons. However, I do not care to exhibit it to the public. I am showing it to you and not to Le Monde or the Smithsonian.”

“But to play devil’s advocate a minute, were you to ditch the academic integrity for a more P. T. Barnum approach, you might parlay your pet into a much more comfortable retirement than you’ll enjoy in a rented farmhouse with Madame Clairette.”

“Mademoiselle Clairette.” He declined to dignify my mercenary pitch any further. Good man, as I well knew. “Besides, I would not dare inform our colleagues of my orphan from the coal, because I have not yet learned the most basic facts about it. Please, ask me anything, you will see my problem.”

I sighed, hard-pressed to hide my petulance after running on vapors too long, but to begrudge my dear mentor a round of Twenty Questions would be the nadir of bad form, wouldn’t it? “Okay then, what is that thing?”

“Ah, the second time you ask that. Of course, what more natural starting place for curiosity? I unfortunately remain ignorant after weeks of watching. Our guest is unlike anything alive today or in the fossil record. Dissection might be informative, but what a cruel end for this sleeping beauty, to be awakened after ages only to be butchered. I would also lose forever everything its behavior might teach me.” Hervé’s “guest” had refrained from breaking through the stockade of books and was torpidly patrolling the paper bounds of its exercise yard. It had yet to perform any actions I’d qualify as behavior, and perhaps it couldn’t in this totally foreign context. I’d never have dreamed the thing knew we were talking about it, and had my doubts it even knew we were there.

“That incompatibility with the rest of the fossil record would damage your credibility even further, wouldn’t it?”

“For some, yes.” The professor unpocketed a handkerchief to muffle another barrage of coughing. “I might have been one of those martinets myself, not long ago. Sneering when somebody said, ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’ Now my paradigms have necessarily shifted, better late than never. Uppermost for me finally is the truism that only a limited percentage of species had the luck to join the fossil record, and of those, how many will be discovered? I find myself aligned now with the partisans of yetis.”

“I think you’re a giant step ahead of them in terms of hard evidence, and you must have collected some specific findings by now. Any idea how old we’re talking?”

“How old is coal?” he countered. “It began forming in the Carboniferous, three hundred million years ago. But how long had our little iconoclast’s species existed already?” I tried not to fixate on the sheer, staggering impossibility of that timeframe. “Moreover, if we incline toward that maximal age, we have a clue to our friend’s lethargic movements. The air was a good deal richer then, and therefore I am not surprised at signs of oxygen deprivation. It may not be as stupid as its aimlessness leads you to suppose.”

Was Hervé’s tone a bit defensive, as if I’d unwittingly disparaged a favorite dog or cat? “At least it’s still ambulatory, so you must be feeding it right.” Did that sound vaguely conciliatory?

Hervé spread his hands to encompass frustration. “Again we touch on the dilemma of what to tell our colleagues. It does not eat, it does not defecate, not in ways I can detect. I provided raw meat of all kinds, in every combination of tough or tender, fresh or spoiled, including insects, and the broadest variety of fruit and vegetable material. Nothing won a flicker of its attention. It dips its head into the basin of water or climbs in sometimes, and perhaps on those occasions fulfills some alimentary functions. But in those as in other respects, it guards its mysteries impeccably.”

I desperately wanted to sit in one of the brocade chairs and conserve my failing resources, but couldn’t take my eyes off our Paleozoic foundling. “You haven’t tried handling it, have you? Have you any idea if it’s dangerous?”

“I am more wary about the harm my handling might do to it.”

“I’m wary as well, but for your sake. How long have you had that nasty cough? Have you seen a doctor?”

“When would I find the leisure to do that? I am always monitoring the situation here.”

“You went out long enough to send me that fax.”

“Clairette drove to the village with my message. Besides, I often cough from dust and allergies. It is nothing.” Another bronchial fit badly undercut his nonchalance.

“But would our genes still confer resistance to diseases dormant for three hundred million years? You must have asked yourself that once in the last couple of weeks.”

Hectoring my mentor—and my distinct better in scholarship, in eloquence, in the art of living—made me profoundly uncomfortable. Probing his features for signs I was getting through to him made matters worse, for then I discerned new redness encircling his nostrils, with tiny burgeoning granulations.

My gaze seemed to make him no less profoundly uncomfortable. He reapplied handkerchief to lower face, dabbing self-consciously as if at a runny nose, and then masking himself for the balance of our discussion. “What you said earlier, about misusing my discovery to procure wealth? I fully appreciate you endorse no such crass plan. Therefore you may appreciate why I keep this difficult discovery of mine to myself, as a lesson in humility after enforcing dogma upon too many generations. To you, however, I hope to impart a short cut to that lesson.” By this indirect route he’d also exiled the topic of his health beyond the conversational pale.

Hervé’s archaic plague dog had meanwhile slipped into the basin, where it floated apparently inert and prudently enamel blue. Hammerhead and glassy stilts and all, it had contracted to a seamless ovoid, an imitation cobble on the beach. The professor took this change in stride. Nothing new to him, I gathered, whereas I had to grimace at the lowbrow output of my guttering brain, which rudely likened Hervé’s monumental find to a turd in the punchbowl. And no excuse for my vulgarity in being right, for how else would his animate relic be received by any mainstream biochemist or biologist or paleontologist? I couldn’t altogether blame the professor if at heart he’d quarantined his “pet” to ensure a peaceful retirement, as opposed to endless controversy.

“Your eyelids have begun to droop, have they not?” he noted. Had he really been stone blind to my progressive deterioration since I’d arrived? Was this a case of that selective vision, a less endearing trait of his I’d forgotten in the past year? “Unless you object, let us retire. Mine is the room up the stairs, adjacent to yours. To access the bathroom, you go outside and to the right, and it is the first door around the corner. And tomorrow, who can tell? Our cosmic joker may have another trick or two for us.”

Prospects of grossly overdue bed rest lent my feet rickety wings to help me fetch my toothbrush and otherwise perform ablutions around the corner. After I’d doused my doorway lamp and flopped upon the extra firm mattress, I wondered if I’d be too wound-up and full of revelations to fall asleep, and how perversely unjust would that be? In fact, I promptly shorted out, without a volt of energy for worrying about the vengeful mate of extirpated scorpion. I awoke more than once to the banging of shutters, but never for longer than it took to reflect that Clairette’s bones had correctly forecast the winds in flux.

Then the sun was glaring through the slit between the shutters, goading me like an external conscience for sleeping in when Hervé must have been champing at the bit for further dialogue. I checked my Swatch at bedside. It told me 10 A.M., but adjusting for my normal longitude, it was scarely dawn really. From that perspective, I wasn’t so disgraceful a slouch.

Anyway, most pressing things first. I made a blinkered rush for the bathroom and gave no thought to seeing Hervé nowhere en route. Clairette was fixing my breakfast when I re-entered the kitchen. She gestured for me to sit and brought a bowl of café au lait and half a baguette smeared with Brie. I asked when the professor had eaten. As best I could decode her idiom, he hadn’t eaten but had bolted outdoors on some unstated errand soon after she’d come in. “The mistral is always accused of fanning passions and rash actions.” She threw up her hands at the inevitable. “Some people go crazy. It is capricious like a spirit.” Her freighted language in regard to her employer running an errand puzzled me, and I’m open to the charge of mistranslating it and much of what she said thereafter.

Clairette had also sagely forecast the less oppressive temperature, though upstart breezes barging in through open door and tousling my hair were already becoming oppressive in their own right. But that was no real issue, was it? I’d be out of here in two or three days tops, loath to push my luck with Hervé’s hospitality, and on to other scenic regions of France.

She accepted my thanks for the meal with an all-purpose “Très bieng” and commenced washing dishes. I excused myself and tossed a figurative coin. Heads meant a likely wild goose chase for the professor somewhere between here and Boulbon. Tails meant a second gander at his captive miracle. Tails won.

The dining-room door was partway open. I could tiptoe in with an inch of clearance for my shoulders. But where was the distasteful, mucky smell? Clean air should have tipped me off that I was wading into grief. A temperate draft was coursing from the entrance to the pair of windows in the opposite wall. The inward-facing panes hadn’t been disturbed, but the green shutters were fastened straight outward, letting in broad shafts of daylight. I wouldn’t need a glowing chandelier to find my fellow houseguest on the table. There was the bisected block of coal, and there was the blue basin of water, and then I went weak-kneed at apprehending why Hervé had rushed outside. I squinted frantically at every square centimeter of marble till I was sure.

A vagrant surge of air must have scooped featherweight specimen up and out of a window. Hervé had clearly assumed the same, since he’d dashed off to comb the grounds without first overturning skulls and books and furniture for hideaways.

Panic may have blinded him to something new upon the marble. I could now account for the second scorpion. It was the length of my index finger, not a strapping example of its biological order, and it was dead, literally belly up, stiff legs and tail askew. In its brown flank was an inflamed hole, like an inverted pimple, rimmed by tiny granulations that had radiated in a sunburst pattern. Nocturnal prowler may have easily scaled the palisade of printed matter, but then the feast on the table had proven far from defenseless. And Hervé, already ailing thanks to days of proximity to his “pet” and ignorant of its “new trick,” was incautiously chasing it among weeds and bushes. Was he slated to end up as captor or victim? I wasn’t wildly optimistic.

Meanwhile, I had to award Clairette yet more points for aptly comparing invasive wind to a “capricious spirit.” It made as good an explanation as any for the quirk of the mistral that had freed the rarest of prisoners while sidestepping a defunct scorpion.

On the other hand, how many demerits should I assign her for aiding in the fugitive’s escape? The professor would hardly have run the risk of parting the shutters on this blustery day. That leveled the blame at Clairette, who after unreckoned years here must have learned the secret to working the shutters from outside.

I hustled into the kitchen, fretting that she may have withdrawn to the undisclosed location of her apartment. No, not quite. She was draping damp dishtowel over refrigerator handle. I put it to her, aiming for a non-confrontational tone, “Were you aware of anything different about Professor Bayard’s private study before he ran off this morning?”

She reacted as if I’d scalded her or, worse, charged her with heresy. She swore by a flock of strictly Languedoc saints how she would never disobey monsieur’s instructions, and especially would never cross the threshold into “that chamber.” But yes, when she passed the dining-room door and the churning wind carried that “evil smell” to her, she had to open the door “un petit peu seulement” and go out to unlatch the shutters and start a draft to dispel the rottenness, because “you cannot eat in a place like that. You will fall sick just to breathe in there.” She fiercely added that not one toe, not one finger of hers had entered forbidden territory.

When had she last seen “monsieur”? She pouted as if volunteering such information was not her job. “A couple of hours.” Her rugged face contained no inkling that her conduct had influenced Hervé’s. I couldn’t marshal the French to insinuate it had. Nor could I picture what good that would do.

I conveyed my intent to canvass the Domaine for sightings of the errant professor. Clairette was none too encouraging. Everyone was on holiday except the nearest neighbor, but beware of her. She was a deranged old countess who kenneled a pack of half-wild foxhounds, “tout méchants,” and Clairette was surprised their usual dawn rampage through the woods hadn’t wakened me. I took her warning to heart, though as it turned out she needn’t have bothered, because I hadn’t finished searching the home acreage as of lunchtime.

In fact, I made my first and only relevant observation, if it were indeed relevant, the second the sun hit my eyes. The cicadas, strident as buzzsaws yesterday, were mute today. The weather, the hour, any number of stimuli peculiar to cicadas may have shushed them. Or had scent or more esoteric signals from Hervé’s stray anachronism startled modern insects into instinctive silence, according to mechanisms latent for eons? What did their hardwiring know about relict organism that the professor and I didn’t?

For whatever reason, the morning continued unnervingly quiet while I scoured the landscape, shouting Hervé’s name and poking into the underbrush. I watched my step lest I tread on the “cosmic joke” that had backfired so horribly. I had no desire ever to see it again. By noon, I’d arguably earned a break to rehydrate and refuel myself and reconsider how to proceed. I was disappointed but not at all shocked that Hervé hadn’t meanwhile sauntered home under his own steam.

Had Clairette seen me coming? She dished out a fairly greasy croque monsieur as soon as I walked in, but hadn’t prepared two servings. From this I inferred she took for granted I’d be lunching alone. I couldn’t shake the premature dread he’d permanently disappeared, and did Clairette feel any differently? In any case, my plans to gallivant across France were null and void. I’d stay and search till Hervé resurfaced or I had to fly back for the fall semester. I owed him that much and more. It further dawned on me that to beat the bushes for him by myself was a fool’s errand.

The black phone on the counter was a clunky rotary model, and I barely suppressed a patronizing double-take when a dial tone affirmed it worked. Clairette’s advice on reaching the police consisted of a laconic “Seventeen,” which also worked.

The Domaine fell under Boulbon’s jurisdiction. I reported an elderly resident was missing. Gone for six hours, I reluctantly admitted, leery the authorities wouldn’t step in till he’d been AWOL overnight or longer. So when the French equivalent of a desk sergeant asked if this were someone suffering from dementia, I shamelessly said yes. Might as well play the dumb foreigner card for maximum worth and later claim, if necessary, I hadn’t understood the question. Forgive me, professor, wherever you are.

I ended up joining the constabulary and their volunteer deputies on a daily sweep of the area. These were likable homegrown sons, good-humored and stolid, who preferred the sporadic excitement of law enforcement to cultivating alfalfa. The countess and her dogs were not as deranged and wild, respectively, as Clairette had warned, at least not in front of uniformed officers. The chorus of cicadas had gradually reconvened that first afternoon, and the mistral always tagged along. Of the professor, though, we recovered no trace, as I’d bleakly anticipated. His “cosmic joke” had also vanished like a mirage, whether it had holed up somewhere or met an ignominious demise.

If her employer’s possible demise tapped any emotions, Clairette scrupulously bottled them up. Out of professionalism, I conjectured, or habitual reserve. Or else what? I’ve been coming to grips with that ever since. She was manifestly able-bodied but never made herself available for search parties. Could be she was avoiding me, or did my peregrinations from breakfast till supper have something to do with avoiding her? As if magically, meals were always ready on the stove when I tromped in. And her dealings were perfunctory but with good graces, as if cooking for me were an extension of her duties to Hervé. All told, she really owed me nothing, and her gruff exterior, I theorized, must have hid a genuinely nice core for her to feed and put up with me those two weeks.

Typically, sometime while casting about in fields and glades and family plots and ravines, I realized how I should have contested Hervé’s presumptions about his captive chimera, that first logy, jetlagged night. Say the creature had been born into a much more oxygen-rich environment, wouldn’t sealing it in rock have made its chances of long- or short-term survival all the more infinitesimal? Sealed its fate, so to speak? Why not posit instead a microorganism that wriggled through a seam of coal into a cavity, thriving in isolation to fill its stygian house? Did it even have to be ancient or the beneficiary of suspended animation? If Hervé had released a Guinness-record specimen of amphibious plankton, a supersized mite, would that be any less extraordinary, freakish, or provocative than a Carboniferous holdover?

I wished with all my soul I could dispute these points with the professor, but I had the morose hunch he’d stumbled on his “pet,” and in the aftermath of that reunion, I shouldn’t even count on recognizing his remains. Nor was it consoling to reflect that his first breath upon sundering the coal may have fatally infected him.

Hervé must have apprised Clairette of my departure date, for on my last evening, over a plate of coq au vin and frites, she announced that she would drop me at the airport. Maybe she’d been such a good sport all along because she’d always had the end in sight.

We had to get an early start, before the milky overcast burnt off. She drove the archetypal “bagnole,” a sputtering Citroën that might have left the factory in 1948 or 1988. For fetching groceries it was fine, but illegal on high-speed auto routes, obliging her to navigate tortuous back roads.

Half an hour along I’d heard nothing from her except the wheezing of her majestic nose. Content, was she, to wrap up our acquaintance in silence? Not I. Not in my now-or-never position to solve a nagging mystery or two. Should worse come to worst, I could live with alienating her for twenty-odd minutes. “Did you have any idea what the professor had confined in the dining room?”

Her answer spent a good while percolating. “Did he have something in the dining room? I thought to have experienced that evil smell once earlier. But it was many years ago, when other people were in the house. They found an ugly little animal in the coal bin, and that one vanished also, as God required. It was unclean, profane. It could not be permitted in a decent home.”

As always, my running translation might have been prone to error, though I’d hazard my ear for the dialect had markedly improved during this stay. And from the nuances, the implications of her statement sprang such a host of questions that I rode dumbstruck for the duration, which may or may not have been her intention. When the chugging engine ceased, so did my useless ruminations: what had Clairette done accidentally or deliberately, what were her motives, how attached was she to the truth? Hoisting the backpack from between my feet, I bumbled out the door and mustered the composure to thank her lavishly for everything and wish her the best. She restricted her valediction to “Très bieng.”

Maybe jetlag’s impact on my IQ, both coming and going, had been more chronic than I’d realized, or maybe I’m not as smart as I’ve been led to believe. After being home for days, the connotations of Clairette’s reminiscence, as oracular as it was pithy, were still sinking in.

From blocks of furnace coal had emerged not one but two “profane” specimens. Why not premise a dormant third or more, waiting for the chisel? At the cost of another trip to Marseille, the honor of discovering “quelque chose incroyable” could be mine, with Hervé sharing in rightful credit, to be sure. Or else, like scorpions, the chimeras had traveled exclusively in pairs, and I’d have wasted weeks and self-respect pulverizing coal.

I did contact Clairette twice a month for any news of Hervé, then once a month, then bimonthly, and desisted once the effort of placing me seemed to annoy her. Neither a stitch nor hair of her old employer ever came to light, and about his “ugly little animal” I dared not inquire. So much for the elusive, essentially mythical beast of “closure.”

I also never dared bring up revisiting the coal bin. The possibility of courting Hervé’s kind of doom did stifle my initiative, and the landlord may already have packed his possessions off to next of kin and signed new tenants. And how would I justify all that hammering in the cellar to those newcomers?

No, I’d missed my opportunity, wasn’t even aware of it till weeks afterward, and could never have exploited it unless I’d added two and two while en route to the airport, and had I done so, Clairette would probably have refused to turn around, particularly for the business I had in mind.

I’d wager, though, that nobody has ousted her from the property, or ever could. She’s taciturnly cleaning and cooking for the occupants, whether they like it or not, and poised vigilant for a resurgent whiff of “profane animals.” Even if her new employers are as Provençal as Clairette, I’d also bet they find her no less insular and enigmatic than I did, as if she herself were some anomaly hatched from a lump of coal.

THE DOG HANDLER’S TALE

DONALD TYSON

IT WAS THE FINDING OF THEM FUNNY STAR-SHAPED STONES THAT started the whole thing off. Up till then everything had gone swimmingly, as my missus used to say, God rest her. There was that accident on the pressure ridge—bad one, it was, we lost two dogs—but that was natural-like trouble, not like what happened later.

But I see that I’m getting ahead of myself. I never could tell a good story. Let me start again.

My name’s Jack Hobbs. I was born and raised near London, but for the past fourteen years I’ve been living in Arkham, Massachusetts, working at Miskatonic University. My job is listed as carpenter, but I mend the wiring, clear the drains when they get stopped up, fix the automobiles, and do just about anything that needs to get done to keep the university working smooth-like.

When word got around in the spring of 1930 that Professor Dyer and Professor Pabodie and some others was planning this here Miskatonic Expedition to Antarctica, and was looking for volunteers, I put my name in for an assistant. I can do just about any work I turn my hand to, but Dyer ended up making me one of the dog handlers, on account of I told him that I used to handle hounds back in England. I like all dogs—big, small, fierce, tame—and most all dogs like me.

About four months before we left Boston Harbor aboard them two old wooden whalers renamed Arkham and Miskatonic, the university bought fifty-five sled dogs from Alaska. They came by train from the West Coast, mostly Alaskan Malamutes and huskies, with a few mix breeds. They was good pups all of them, and they had already been taught to pull, so all we handlers had to do was split them up into teams and get them working together. We had the whole summer to work them, so we did pretty well getting them to tolerate each other.

Here’s something you may not know about sled dogs. They ain’t quite like the dogs you keep for your house pets. They still got a lot of wolf left in them, and are wild beasts what will kill each other if there ain’t a well-established pack order among them.

I had a fine time training my dogs. They was the best of the lot, on account of I sort of got there first when they came off the train at North Station and picked out the best for my seven-dog team. The very best of them all is my lead dog, Sergeant, a hulking big Malamute with a white mask and a thick black bar down the top of his muzzle. The little husky bitch named Private is almost as good a lead, but not near so strong.

All the dogs in my team are named after ranks in the military. Foolishness, you may call it, but it was just a bit of fun I used to set my team apart from the other dogs. The main team is Sergeant in the lead, Private behind him, then Corporal, General, Colonel, Brigadier, and Major. It’s not proper military rank order, I know, but it’s the order my dogs pull best, so there it is.

There’s not much to write about the voyage from Massachusetts to Antarctica. All the dogs was put together in the barque Miskatonic, and the bulk of the other cargo for the expedition such as the drilling machines went in the hold of the brig Arkham. Naturally me and the other handlers went with the dogs. We left Boston Harbor the second day of September so that we could reach McMurdo Sound for the warm weather—I should mention for those who might not know that when it’s winter in New England, it’s summer down here in Antarctica.

What a fine morning it was when we pulled up the gangway and started away from Long Wharf! The mayor and his wife were there to see us off, along with the personal assistant to Congressman William J. Granfield. The students at the university came down by train with the marching band. I can still hear the sound of the trombones and the drums, and the cheers from the glee club, that rose above the thud-thud-thud of the steam engine.

We only used steam to get away from the docks and the crowded mouth of the harbor. Once we passed Deer Island the crews of both ships raised sails and the engines was shut off to conserve our coal. The winds favored us most of the way down the Atlantic coast. I got seasick for a time, but was better when we passed through the Panama Canal to the Pacific.

The dogs did better than me, although a few felt the rocking of the old wooden whaler for the first week or so and had trouble keeping their meat down. We fed the dogs mostly meat to keep them strong, good dried beef jerky and corned beef and canned salmon for the fish oil. Truth of it was, they ate better than we handlers did, but I never begrudged them a meal, because I knew we would need them fit when we hit the ice.

We spent most of our ship time down in the overcrowded hold of the Miskatonic with the dogs, me and Zack Evens and Stew Zulinski and Bill Mooney and young Henry Lake, who was Professor Lake’s son and only seventeen years old—he turned eighteen south of the Beardmore Glacier, and we joked that he didn’t have no beard yet to shave, may he rest in peace. The great oak beams that was set into place in the hold to reinforce the sides of the ship against the pack ice left precious little room for us to hang our hammocks among the dog crates.

We had all cut our own teams out and trained them back at Arkham, using sleds with wheels to roll along the dusty summer roads, but there were other dogs along for insurance, you might say, in case one of the team dogs got sick or came up lame or got tore up in a fight so bad it couldn’t pull.

There was still a lot of fights, even though by this time each dog knew its place in the pack. Sergeant put most of them down for us. He was top dog and when he bared his teeth and gave that rumbling snarl of his, the other dogs minded him, but we handlers still had to keep a sharp eye out for trouble. Them dogs was only half domestic and sometimes the wolf came out strong in them.

They had to be exercised regular on the deck of the ship every day or they would of gone raving mad in that dark hold. That’s when the fights happened—while we was taking them out of their crates and letting them stretch their legs. I’ve got a nasty scar on the back of my left hand as a reminder not to get careless. It’s almost healed now, just a crooked white line on my skin.

I was happy when the wind across the Pacific started to get cold and we saw our first iceberg. Big, flat table of ice, it was. My constitution is made for winter—I can’t stand the heat of July and August. What I wouldn’t give for some of that warmth now! Sometimes I can’t even remember what heat feels like.

That first view we had of the Great Barrier as we sailed into McMurdo Sound almost makes everything that happened later worthwhile. It was a sight worth dying for, and that’s the truth. The noon sun was low in a cloudless sky at our backs, and the barrier, all two hundred vertical feet of it, was lit up and glowing the most astonishing blues and greens and pinks you never did see in Massachusetts, not even in the middle of winter.

The ice was all transparent-like, so that the sunlight seemed to shine deep into it and light it up from the inside. The ice glowed mostly pale blue, and the clear water of the cold sea glowed a shade of green, and the sky such a clear deep blue without a puff of cloud. I could see birds soar above the towering ice, so small they looked like the specks of soot that came out of the stack when the steam engine was running.

On the horizon rose a huge mountain like a big, dark cone. I asked Captain Thorfinnssen what the name of it was, and he called it the Erebus. A trail of black smoke came up out of the crown of it. It’s a volcano, if you can believe such a thing—a volcano amid all that ice. There was another big mountain in the background that Thorfinnssen called the Terror. Nice name for a mountain, but it ain’t near as impressive as the Erebus to my way of thinking, even if it is taller.

The dogs could smell the land. You should have heard them bark to get out of that hold. We handlers were no less eager to set foot on land, or I should say on ice, because you couldn’t see no land except for a few ridges of rock. The leader of the expedition, Professor William Dyer, didn’t waste any time. He held a conference with Douglas, who was captain of the Arkham, and along with Thorfinnssen they decided how they was to get all the dogs and machines and food and other supplies from the ships up on the top of the ice.

First they unloaded everything onto Ross Island and took an inventory of how well the drills and planes and dogs had made it through the voyage. When all the men and cargo was out of the whalers, they set about getting it up on top of the Great Barrier.

There’s no equal to Yankee seamen for moving cargo, even if it is an Englishman what says it. They did the work with ropes and pulleys, and it was almost like magic to see crate after crate winched up to the top of that greenly glowing cliff. The dogs howled in their harnesses like damned souls as they hung near two hundred feet, all four legs dangling and kicking in the frozen air, but we didn’t lose even one of them.

The biggest challenge was the parts for the five planes that had to be fitted together once they was on top of the Barrier. Some of those, such as the engines, weighed tons. Without the planes we could never have pressed so far south so quick—the dog sleds was for what you might call local transportation, but it was the planes that took us from camp to camp.

The organization of the Barrier Camp, as it came to be called, would have done the army proud. The mechanics put them planes together so neat, you’d never have knowed they was ever in pieces. Huge things they was, each with four great engines and props taller than a man.

They was rigged with special heaters to keep the engines and fuel lines from freezing. As Professor Pabodie said to me, it was more important to keep the engines from freezing than to keep the members of the expedition from freezing. He was always joking to try and keep up everyone’s spirits, but he didn’t even smile when he said it. I’m sorry I won’t never see him again, he was a good man.

I found time to walk some way apart from the camp and look around. There was nothing but ice as far as the eye could see to east and west, and here and there a few black ridges of rock, and in the distance to the south the mountains we had to fly across to get to the interior of the continent.

The wind cut me to the bone. It wasn’t the chill of it—the temperature was no lower than twenty degrees or so, and we was all dressed in these Eskimo rigs what were made of sealskins—it was where it come from, and what it crossed to get there. Not a tree, not a plant, not a blade of grass, not a patch of moss, nothing but ice and more ice, and some puny bits of rock that looked as though they was drowning in ice.

And don’t think the ice was like the ice on the surface of a frozen lake back in Arkham. Nothing of it—the ice was all broken and slanted and tumbled together. Some patches was covered with drifted snow, and they was flat enough for the sleds to run on, even if they was treacherous with voids underneath, but some of it was so rough it was all we could do to drag the steel runners of the sleds over it by hand even with the dogs straining along with us.

We had them in harness and practicing that first day to get them into shape after their long sea voyage. How they loved pulling across that ice! They didn’t care that it was Antarctica, they only knew that they was free to run again, and did they ever run.

When I put Sergeant into harness for the first time, he was so excited and happy, his entire body shook with it. He turned back his brown eyes to me in gratitude and let out a long howl that was enough to chill your blood, and all the other dogs took it up after him, so that they sounded like a pack of wolves. Maybe it was childish of us, but we handlers let out hoots and howls ourselves, we was so glad to be off that ship.

The greater part of the expedition set up tents on top of the Barrier, and the crews of the whalers stayed with the ships, which was anchored at the base of the ice. Professor Lake, who taught biology back at Miskatonic, had a wireless set up in the camp, and there was another on each of the planes. The Arkham had a great antenna strung from its mainmast that was big enough to send messages all the way back to the university. In this way the expedition was never out of contact with New England, though scant good that did us when the trouble started.

2

AT FIRST, EVERYTHING WENT NICE AND SMOOTH. THAT SHOULD have made me nervous, but I let myself get lulled into smugness by all those experts. Nearly everyone on this expedition was an expert. Most of the graduate students could fly the planes and work the wirelesses. The mechanics kept the planes and boring machines running like Swiss clocks. The dogs was well behaved and didn’t get sick. I should have seen that everything was too good to be true, but I wanted it to go well so I didn’t listen to that little whisper of warning at the back of my mind that told me to watch out.

On the twenty-first of November, we loaded four of the big planes with forty-five dogs and all but one of the five sleds, the drills, crates of dynamite, tents and other supplies, and flew south for near seven hundred miles. We left one plane and one dog sled at Barrier Camp for emergency use, on the old principle that it tempts fate to carry all your eggs in one basket.

Mooney was the dogman who stayed behind with his team. At the time I pitied him, but now I wish I could trade places with him—no, that’s not true, I wouldn’t wish what I’ve got on anyone. Mooney is a good man, he deserved to be the one to stay behind. Only I wish it had been Henry Lake on account of he was so young, with all his life ahead of him.

Professor Dyer stayed behind until we had Southern Camp established. Even then, we could all see that there was storm clouds gathering between Professor Dyer and Professor Lake. Dyer might have been the official leader of the expedition, but Lake wanted to go his own way and wouldn’t be told what to do. There was more than a few short words between them, even before we left Dyer behind at Barrier Camp.

My own thinking is that Dyer wasn’t the right man to lead the expedition. He had the knowledge to lead, that’s true enough, but he didn’t have the will to set his foot down when somebody challenged his orders. He was always saying, “Well, well, let’s put our heads together and work it out then,” in that quiet voice of his. That may be fine for the university, but it won’t do for the Antarctic, and it didn’t.

There was no room in the planes for regular seats, so we sat on benches along the sides, with the cargo piled up under nets wherever there was a place for it. It was funny to watch young Lake and his father, sitting side by side, as we flew across those endless miles of broken ice and jagged outcroppings of black rock. They acted like they barely knew each other, they was so formal and polite, as if they’d just met a week ago. Lake didn’t want to show favoritism toward his son, and young Henry didn’t want to seem like he was asking for any favors, so they just nodded and mumbled at each other with their eyes turned away.

Weather was good. We set up a permanent camp just south of the Beardmore Glacier, not too far from Mt. Nansen. There was a lot of larking about in those early days. In mid-December Professor Pabodie, who was an amateur mountaineer as well as an engineer, climbed Mt. Nansen with two graduate students, Gedney and Carroll, and planted an American flag at the summit.

A few weeks later Professor Dyer, who came up from Barrier Camp by plane with some of the supplies, decided to take two of the planes and fly over the South Pole. Lake and Pabodie went with him, along with all seven graduate students. I didn’t go, because I wasn’t asked. Glory and fame are for the leaders, not for carpenters who handle sled dogs. Young Henry Lake went with them, though. Dyer made up some reason why he should be on the plane, and Professor Lake didn’t object to it, but you could tell it made him uneasy. I think for his part, Henry would have been happy to stay with the dogs, but he had no say in the matter.

All this time, Professor Lake was in a giddy state over the fossils he was finding when he used his heaters to melt the ice and Pabodie’s boring machines to drill into the ridges of rock beneath. He could only drill in a few spots where the rock thrust up in peaks near the surface of the ice—the ice was just too thick to bore all the way to the bottom. Even so, he found some things that stood his hair straight on end. I admit, that wasn’t hard to do—if you’ve seen photographs of Professor Lake, you know that his hair stands almost straight up even after it’s been combed—but you know what I mean.

The professors kept us on the hop with the sleds, running back and forth with specimens of fern fossils and funny little shellfish. I brought back the flat rocks that got Lake all wound up and keen on going westward, instead of east like Dyer had planned. It was in pieces from the dynamite blast, but Lake put it together like a jigsaw puzzle. I didn’t know, then, why he was so excited about it—it was just some lines, like the markings you might get if you presses a palm leaf down in the mud. Professor Dyer didn’t think much of it, either, but Lake was almost out of his head with excitement.

Lake started pushing our sleds further and further into the northwest all through the middle part of January. He was like a wild man and wouldn’t listen to words of caution. It was treacherous going over that snow. The ice under it had these wide cracks what Professor Pabodie called crevasses that went down forever, but the snow drifted over them on the wind, which blew a gale every day, so that we couldn’t tell where them crevasses was until we was on top of them and heard the snow begin to crunch and fall in under our feet.

Funny thing though, when the accident happened it wasn’t a crevasse but one of those ridges where the ice is pushed up that caused it. Me and Henry Lake was racing from the camp to where Pabodie and two of the grads had a hole dug in the rock. They wanted us to get the fossils gathered up so they could move on, so it was rush-rush. I should have known better, it was me that was at fault. Henry was just a boy and should not be held to account for it.

He was trying to get ahead of my team by cutting across some rough ice sheets that was tilted up and uneven where the edges met. I had the sense to go around and thought he did as well. He couldn’t have beat Sergeant and my other dogs in a fair race and he knew it. Well, he hit a huge slab of ice about half the size of a football field and couldn’t see that there was a drop on the other side.

His sled went over the edge. Young Henry jumped off and away at the last moment and didn’t go with them. Two of the dogs was badly hurt in the fall onto the sharp edges of ice below. One died after about ten minutes, but I had to cut the throat of the other, a sweet blue-eyed husky bitch, to put her out of her misery. Henry couldn’t do it—he started to shed tears and they froze to his cheeks and eyelashes in the wind, so that he couldn’t see.

We was able to get on to the dig site with his five remaining dogs, but it was a nasty business. Looking back on it, I see it as an omen of what was to come, but at the time I wasn’t worried about the future, only about whether Henry would buck up and do his duty like a man. When you’re on an expedition like that, there’s no such thing as calling it quits in the middle—you have to see it through to the end, no matter what.

Professor Dyer and Professor Lake barely said anything about the loss of the two dogs. I guess they expected to lose dogs, which is why they had brought along replacements. When Henry and me got back to camp, they were head to head arguing about whether to go east or west. Dyer wanted to go east, but Lake wouldn’t hear of it. He demanded that the planes be flown west, into a part of Antarctica that had never been mapped or explored. Lake claimed that the fossils was leading him west and that he had to follow their trail.

Professor Lake had a will of iron when he wanted something. Dyer couldn’t stand up to him. They argued for hours, but in the end it was agreed that Lake should take the four planes westward with the drilling machines and most of the dogs and men. Lake asked Dyer to come with him, on account of Dyer was the geologist, but Dyer refused. We could all see that his feelings was bruised. He decided to stay in Southern Camp with Professor Pabodie and five men. One of the men was Zulinski—Dyer wanted a dog sled with him, in case he was cut off from the planes by the weather or mechanical problems.

We left Southern Camp, flying westward over the mountains, on the twenty-second of January. Lake was in high spirits. He had got his own way, and he was convinced that we would find fossils that would make us all famous for life. Maybe he was right, but I’ll never know about that. It was the last time I saw Professor Dyer and the others.

3

AFTER A FEW HOURS IN THE AIR, WE LANDED SO THAT LAKE COULD drill and blast for samples. We found more of those queer palm-leaf kind of fossils that got Professor Lake so excited. After about eight hours, we took off again. There was no reason to stop and set up a camp—the sun was above the horizon all day and all night. It never got very high in the sky and it never quite set, unless it was behind a nearby mountain. The sky never got dark.

It was funny, trying to sleep when there was no night. I found myself staying awake for twenty, twenty-two, sometimes more than twenty-four hours at a time, and then sleeping for ten or eleven. I was tired all the time. Everyone else was the same. We got on each other’s nerves and stopped talking except when we had something that needed to be said.

After flying another seven hours or so, we came into sight of a great mountain range not marked on any maps. We’d never seen such mountains before. No one had. They say the Himalayas is the highest mountains in the world, but I know better now.

The Lord alone can guess what Professor Lake might have done if fate hadn’t taken a hand in things. He talked to the graduate student, Danforth, who was flying our plane. They had their heads close together—none of us in the back could hear what they was saying, but I think Lake was trying to convince Danforth to fly over the mountains. That would have been madness. Them jagged black peaks was like a sheer fence of stone clear up to the sky. They was so high, there was no snow on them. But as I say, fate took a hand.

The plane flown by the graduate student Moulton developed a misfire in one of her cylinders, and Moulton decided to land and sort out the problem. He set down on a flat expanse of ice and snow just below the foothills of the mountains. Lake decided to build our camp there, since we had to land. We set up the tents and made a temporary snow corral for the dogs.

The wind was kicking up something fierce. I’ve never felt such cold in my life. If you left the scarf off your face for ten seconds, your nose and cheeks was froze, that’s how bad it was. We had goggles, but they kept getting fogged up and iced over so that we could hardly see to work.

There was a kind of weird whistling noise in the wind that the dogs didn’t like at all. My lead dog, Sergeant, took to standing with his head into the wind and his ears perked up, his eyes narrowed and his lips drawn back from his teeth in a kind of snarl. When I went over to talk to him and give him a pat or two to comfort him, he’d whine and look at me kind of in apology like, wagging his bushy tail like a dust mop, but when I went back to work, he’d do the same thing all over again.

It was an eerie sound. Me and Henry Lake looked at each other more than once, listening to it, but we didn’t say anything about it. There was no good came from talking about things like that. It was just the wind. We couldn’t make it stop, so we pretended not to hear it.

The wind drove the snow horizontal-like across the plain, so that at times we couldn’t see more than a dozen yards. We stayed close to the planes and the tents. Lake realized that the tents would never hold on their own and ordered us to build snow barricades out of cut blocks to act as a windbreak. We put them on the windward side of the tents and in front of the planes, which were all pointed into the teeth of the wind and tied down by dozens of steel anchor lines driven with long steel pegs into the ice.

Lake was as restless as a bride on her wedding day. He couldn’t wait for us to finish building camp, but put a crew of men and one of the drilling machines on a ridge of rock that he found nearly exposed not far from camp. After a while the wind started to die back a bit, and that made work easier, but it never stopped blowing. It was always there, whistling from the mountains, whatever we did, wherever we went. There was no escape.

I was just done feeding my dogs when Gedney brought back word that the drill crew under his direction had found a cave. They drilled into the rock and set a charge of dynamite, and the blast opened a hole in the rock that gave access to the cave. We all left what we was doing and walked over to have a look.

The hole was not much bigger than a doorway, but easy enough to crawl through. It opened down into a cave with a roof high enough to stand up under that went on in all directions into darkness between these rippled rock pillars that looked like the kind of columns you see in a church, only rougher.

I went down into the opening after the others. Lake had an electric torch and used it to explore the shadows. As far as I could tell, there was no end to that cave. I heard Lake tell Gedney that it was a limestone cave and that it had been carved out by the action of water. If so, the water was long gone, because it was dry as chalk down there.

The entire surface of the cave floor was covered in loose shells and bones, so thick you couldn’t walk without crunching them under your boots. They rolled and slid around under me feet with every step, and made a kind of grinding noise as they rubbed together. The air was filled with it because about a dozen men had decided to take a look around. Their boots raised a white dust that got caught in the back of my throat.

Lake told Gedney that the cave must have been open at one time to let in all these bones, but that it had been sealed up from the outside world for at least thirty million years. I think he knew I was listening to him. He sort of looked over at me as he talked, and he had a little smile at the corners of his lips. He didn’t seem to mind my eavesdropping.

I’d never been in a cave like that before. The caves in New England are small affairs. The colors in the limestone pillars—”stalagmites” Lake called them—was something wonderful to see, all blues and greens and rosy reds. I don’t know what made the colors, maybe something in the water that carved out the cave. I was glad to get out of there, as interesting as it all was, because the grinding of the bones reminded me of grinding teeth, and there was this queer smell that made my stomach flip.

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

IT 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.

Sergeant didn’t hesitate, he went right after it, and I followed after the dog. The thing led us across the snow. Every now and then it tried to fly but it couldn’t manage against the wind, so it finally gave up. It was an awkward thing to look at, but it could move across the snow as fast as me, so I couldn’t catch up to it with the axe. The dog kept nipping at its heels, or where its heels should have been, but the thing ignored him.

When it suddenly dropped from view, I realized we was back at the mouth of the cave. The thing had run to ground. Or maybe there was something in the cave it wanted to use as a weapon. The dog jumped in right after it, so I couldn’t stop, now could I? How could I let that dog get killed by himself without trying to help him? I climbed in after Sergeant, and looking back on it, I’m not a bit sorry.

It tried to run between the pillars, but it couldn’t move very quick over the uneven floor of the cave, and it couldn’t fly, so we caught it before it went too far. The close quarters helped us and hindered it. Sergeant went in from one side and I came at it from the other. It picked the dog up and threw him against a pillar. That’s how he come to break his ribs. I found I could cut it if I used the axe on its head and neck, not that it had a neck, but the place that starfish thing joined at the top of its body.

There wasn’t much light, just what seeped in from the entrance, but it was enough to make out moving shadows. Maybe that thing was as blind as me and the dog. Anyway, it was almost dead when I had my slip-up. My boot went out from under me and I fell. The monster put one of its flipper feet on my left leg and I heard the bones crackle like a handful of nettles thrown into a fire. That’s when Sergeant went for its head. His teeth tore into it where it was the softest, and it gave out a kind of whistling scream and fell onto its side. The dog kept ripping into it, even after it stopped moving, growling and snarling like a wild beast, which I suppose is what he was at that moment.

The pain and shock from my broken leg must have knocked me out. I don’t know how long I lay unconscious. A big rumbling noise woke me up. I was dizzy and didn’t know where I was at first. I felt the dog licking my face and gradually started to come around. My left trouser leg was sodden with dried blood, so I guess one of them pieces of bone must have poked right through my skin.

I tried to stand up, but it was comical. My bad leg wouldn’t hold any weight, and the pain of it almost knocked me out. I tried to crawl, but I couldn’t put weight on my knee, either, so I started to pull myself on my belly toward the tiny patch of light that I knew must have been the entrance. It wasn’t near as bright as it should have been. At first I thought something was wrong with my eyes, but when I got to the entrance I realized what had happened.

While I had a nice, long nap, Professor Dyer and the men from Southern Camp had come in the fifth plane and found all the death and destruction around the science tent. Dyer must have decided right then to seal up the entrance to the cave in case it held any more of them monsters that was awake. He did it the quickest and surest way he knew, by dumping all the heavy boring machines and their spare bits and lengths of pipe into the hole, one on top of the other.

I shouted for a long time, but it was no use. There was still a little light seeping through, at that time. Later on, the small opening that let the daylight in got covered over with drifting snow, and it became pitch dark in the cave. Before that happened, I found an electric torch one of the graduate students must have left just inside the entrance.

I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t the dog alert Dyer that someone was in the cave by barking? I can’t explain it, on account of I was unconscious. If you want my guess, the dog did bark, but he wouldn’t leave my side to go to the entrance, and Dyer and the others was too terrified of what might come out of the mouth of the cave to go down and look.

Maybe they heard Sergeant barking and decided not to go in after him because he was only a dog. I can’t say that I blame them too much, given what they must have found at the camp. Those monsters was terrible strong, and tough as boot leather, and there was just too many of them. They took us by surprise, but even if we’d been prepared they still would have beaten us.

We had no weapons other than the axes. I think maybe Professor Lake had a revolver stored away in his trunk—I never saw it, but one of the grads made a joke about it one time while we was on the whaler, how Lake would shoot us if we didn’t mind his orders. The gun wouldn’t have made any difference anyway—bullets couldn’t hurt those things.

6

THE BATTERY IN THE TORCH LASTED LONGER THAN I THOUGHT IT would, given that it was half played out to start with. I kept it switched it off for as long as I could stand it. The dark was so thick, I felt like I was swimming in it, or drowning in it. My heart started to pound and I began to sweat all over, and shiver at the same time. When I thought I couldn’t breathe, I switched the torch back on for a few minutes. I kept doing that for a long time, it seemed—hours, anyway.

Sergeant was always there, sitting quietly, watching me with his ears perked up. The dark didn’t bother him at all. Maybe he could hear echoes off the stone pillars, or maybe he was able to smell the ground well enough that he didn’t need to see.

He didn’t even whine, not that I expected him to. He was never a dog to show weakness. The blood eventually got dry on the right side of his coat. It went from a glistening red to a dull brown in the torch’s glow. Mind you, the torch itself was getting dull by that time. When it finally wouldn’t come on anymore, no matter how much I shook it or banged the side of it, I just sat listening to my heartbeat and the dog’s steady panting breaths.

It wasn’t warm in the cave but it wasn’t severe cold, neither. There must have been heat coming up from somewhere deep down through some kind of chimney or fissure. I never tried to find it in the darkness—that would have been suicide, and I had no mind to kill myself. My leg was broke bad enough that I probably couldn’t have dragged myself very far anyway.

The stink of that dead thing got bad enough that I squirmed and rolled a dozen yards or so away from it, then pushed myself up to sit with my back against a pillar. The dog followed me. He didn’t seem to mind the stench, now that it was dead. He must have been thirsty—the last water was given to the dogs some six hours before the attack. You couldn’t leave water out in the open in the corral, on account of it would freeze solid in ten minutes or so. The ice had to be melted over a stove for the dogs to drink.

Me and Sergeant sat for a long time in the dark. The pain in my leg got worse, but I put it out of my mind. No sense in brooding on it. I found a notebook and pencil in the inner pocket of my coat when I was searching around in the hope that whoever owned it had left some beef jerky or a biscuit there. I opened the notebook and brushed my fingers over the pages. Only the first page felt like it had writing on it, so I tore it out and started to write what you are reading. Why not? What else did I have to do?

It’s not as hard to write in the dark as you might suppose. All that’s needed is to keep the lines of writing nice and straight and even, and take care not to let the pencil run off the edge of the page. My jackknife that I always carried in the pocket of my trousers kept the pencil sharp. It was a way to use up some time.

Who knows? Maybe someday another expedition will blast open the entrance to this cave and find me and the dog. There’s bound to be interest in what happened to us all. Maybe Professor Dyer will lead that one as well. Not that you’d ever catch me coming back to this hellish, godforsaken desert of ice, if I could get off it. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

I can hear Sergeant over by the dead monster, sniffing around and picking at it with his teeth. I don’t hear any chewing. It’s either too tough for him, or he doesn’t like the taste, even though he must be hungry by this time. We’ve been here days, I think. It must be days at least, but it’s hard to tell. The hours sort of run together in the dark.

Sometimes I must be asleep, but I can’t tell if I’m sleeping or waking unless I write down my thoughts in this here notebook. I’m started to see things in the dark. Pictures, but big as life, like I was in a cinema and sitting in the front row, right near the screen. For some reason they’re mostly things I remember from when I was a boy in England. Street scenes in London, things like Piccadilly and Covent Garden Market and the Strand.

My old Gran lived in a cottage in the countryside, and sometimes I can see her standing at the open front door, waving to me to come along smart, just like she used to do when I was sent to visit with her in the summer. I can smell her roses that grew on the sides of the front walk, and see her gray tomcat Lagger stretched out long on the sill of the open front window.

I don’t see nothing from Arkham or the university. Strange, that is. Maybe it means that what I did at the university wasn’t important enough to be worth remembering. Or maybe the memories we make early on in life return to us when we come near the end.

For a time there I must have fallen asleep. It was Sergeant’s tongue that woke me. He was licking at my broken leg where the seam of the trousers tore open, and the blood seeped out and dried on it. He backed off when he heard me wake up, but he make a kind of low growl deep in his throat. It was more a rumble than a growl.

I told him not to mind and said that he was a good dog over and over, until at last he came up to me and let me pat the side of his neck, the way I used to do when we was training with the wheeled sled back in New England on them dusty summer roads. He licked my hand and kind of nuzzled his snout into it. His nose didn’t feel quite right. It was hot, not cool and wet the way it should be.

He’s a good dog, but he must be getting fierce hungry by now. Like I told you near the start of this here journal, sled dogs isn’t quite like the dogs you have as your house pets. There’s a wildness in them that never gets tamed. Somewhere deep inside they’re part wolf, and no wolf can stand the smell of blood and meat when it’s starving to death.

I don’t want you to blame Sergeant for anything. He’s a good dog, the best dog I ever had. I just wish he was my dog, but somehow with my duties at the university and living as I did in a rooming house by myself after my Mary died, it never seemed sensible to get a dog of my own. But what he is going to do, it’s not his fault, just remember that.

He’s growling now, way down deep in his throat. It won’t be much longer, I don’t expect. Leastwise I won’t need to smell that rotting thing from hell. Maybe when Sergeant eats, he’ll get strong enough to search this here cave and find an opening out to the ice. Maybe there will still be someone at the camp to take him home. I hope so. He didn’t deserve what happened to him. None of us did, but at least we men knew what we was getting into. The dogs just came out of trust for us.

I’m sorry I let you down, old boy. You’re a good dog, Sergeant, yes you are, you’re a good dog …

* * *

Additional note by Professor Starkweather, leader of the 1935 Starkweather-Moore Antarctic expedition out of Miskatonic University, Arkham, Massachusetts:

The account transcribed above was found written in pencil with the body of Jack Hobbs, a forty-three-year-old carpenter employed by Miskatonic University who accompanied the 1930 Miskatonic Expedition in the capacity of dog handler. He was a widower with no surviving children.

Hobbs held the notebook in his left hand, and a pencil stub no more than two inches long in his right hand. There was an open pocket knife beside him, and cedar chips on his outstretched legs indicated that he had sharpened the pencil numerous times. He appears to have died from an infection of the blood, caused by a compound-fractured left tibia and fibula.

Lying dead across his legs was a large Malamute sled dog. The cause of the dog’s death was starvation. The condition of the dog’s body indicates that somehow it managed to stay alive for several weeks, perhaps for as long as two months, after the death of Hobbs. I can only speculate that it managed to find some source of water deeper in the cave, but there was no food. The corpse of Hobbs was not in any way molested by the dog.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

THE EDITOR

S. T. Joshi is the author of such critical studies as The Weird Tale (University of Texas Press, 1990), The Modern Weird Tale (McFarland, 2001), and Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction (PS Publishing, 2012). He has prepared corrected and annotated editions of H. P. Lovecraft’s collected fiction, poetry, revisions, and essays; with David E. Schultz, he is editing Lovecraft’s collected letters. His biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (Necronomicon Press, 1996), won the Bram Stoker Award and the British Fantasy Award; it was published in an expanded and updated edition as I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft (Hippocampus Press, 2010). Joshi has twice won the World Fantasy Award and the International Horror Guild Award.

THE CONTRIBUTORS

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) was a pioneering science fiction writer and author of Childhood’s End (1953), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968; with Stanley Kubrick), and many other works. His account of his early readings in science fiction is found in Astounding Days (1989). He received a CBE in 1989 and was knighted in 2000.

Heather Graham is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than a hundred novels including suspense, paranormal, historical, and mainstream Christmas fare. She lives in Miami, Florida, her home, and an easy shot down to the Keys where she can indulge in her passion for diving. Travel, research, and ballroom dancing also help keep her sane; she is the mother of five and also resides with two dogs and two cats. She is CEO of Slush Pile Productions, a recording company and production house for various charity events.

Lois H. Gresh is the New York Times bestselling author of twenty-seven books and sixty short stories. She has a million books in print in twenty-two languages. Current books include Eldritch Revolutions (Chaosium, 2011), The Divergent Companion (St. Martin’s Press, 2014), and the anthologies Dark Fusions (PS Publishing, 2013) and Innsmouth Nightmares (PS Publishing, 2015). Gresh has received nominations for the Bram Stoker Award, the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the International Horror Guild Award for her work.

Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of several novels, including The Red Tree (Roc, 2010) and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (Roc, 2012). Her short fiction has been collected in several volumes, including A Is for Alien (2009), The Ammonite Violin and Others (2010), Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan, Volume 1 (2011), Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (2012), and the forthcoming The Ape’s Wife and Others (all from Subterranean Press). She is currently scripting a critically acclaimed series for Dark Horse Presents, Alabaster, based on her Darcy Flammarion character, and working on her next novel. She was recently hailed by the New York Times as “one of our essential writers of dark fiction.”

J. C. Koch is scared by horror stories but writes them anyway. They’ve appeared in Arkham Tales, Necrotic Tissue, Penumbra, Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters, and A Dark Phantasique. Koch also likes to do scary things like pay attention to politics, keep up with the Kardashians, and play the stock market. However, she tends to stay hidden under the bed, letting more of the terrors of the mind bleed onto the page, metaphorically and literally.

Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling author, multiple Bram Stoker Award winner, and freelancer for Marvel Comics. His novels include Patient Zero (Gollancz, 2009), Extinction Machine (St. Martin’s Press, 2013), Fire and Ash (Simon & Schuster, 2013), and many others. His award-winning teen novel, Rot & Ruin (Simon & Schuster, 2010), is now in development for film. Since 1978 he has sold more than twelve hundred magazine feature articles and three thousand columns, plays, greeting cards, song lyrics, and poetry. He is the founder of the Writers Coffeehouse and co-founder of The Liars Club. Maberry lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Sara.

Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. is the author of three collections, Blood Will Have Its Season (2009), SIN & ashes (2010), and Portraits of Ruin (2012), all published by Hippocampus Press, and the novel The Orphan Palace (Chomu Press, 2011). He has written many short stories that have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year and S. T. Joshi’s Black Wings. He edited A Season in Carcosa (2012) and The Grimscribe’s Puppets (2013) for Miskatonic River Press.

Darrell Schweitzer is the author of The Shattered Goddess (Donning/Starblaze, 1983), The White Isle (Owlswick Press, 1989), and The Mask of the Sorcerer (New English Library, 1995), in addition to about three hundred published short stories, many of which, of late, have taken a decidedly Lovecraftian turn. He appears in the first three Black Wings volumes (PS Publishing and Titan). He is a four-time World Fantasy Award nominee and one-time winner, and was for nineteen years an editor of Weird Tales. He has edited two anthologies of Lovecraftian fiction, Cthulhu’s Reign (DAW, 2010) and That Is Not Dead (PS, 2014).

Michael Shea was born in Culver City, California, directly across the street from the colossal wall of the MGM Studios. In a flophouse in Juneau, Alaska, at the age of twenty-two he discovered the world of heroic fantasy in a battered copy of Jack Vance’s The Eyes of the Overworld, and he devoted himself to SF and fantasy to the end of his life. He was a multiple World Fantasy Award winner and nominee, as well as a British Fantasy Society and Hugo nominee. He died on February 16, 2014, at his home in northern California and is survived by his wife, the artist Linda Cecere Shea, and their children, Jake and Della.

John Shirley is the author of the Bram Stoker Award–winning story collection Black Butterflies (Ziesing, 1998). He was co-screenwriter of the hit film The Crow (1994) and recently wrote The Crow: Death and Rebirth (2013) for IDW comics. He is also a lyricist for the Blue Öyster Cult, with an album of his own recordings, Broken Mirror Glass, now out from Black October Records. His newest novel is Everything Is Broken (Prime, 2012), and his new story collection is In Extremis: The Most Extreme Stories of John Shirley (Underland Press, 2011).

Robert Silverberg has been a professional writer since 1955. He has written more than a hundred novels and an uncountable number of short stories. Among his best-known books are Nightwings (Avon, 1969), The Book of Skulls (Scribner’s, 1971), Dying Inside (Scribner’s, 1972), and Lord Valentine’s Castle (Harper & Row, 1980), and his shorter works include “Passengers” (1968), “Born with the Dead” (1974), “Sailing to Byzantium” (1985) and numerous others. He is a many-time winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, and in 2004 the Science Fiction Writers of America named him a Grand Master. He and his wife, Karen Haber, live in the San Francisco area.

William Browning Spencer is the author of the innovative Lovecraftian novel Résumé with Monsters (White Wolf, 1995) as well as the novels Maybe I’ll Call Anna (Permanent Press, 1990), Zod Wollop (St. Martin’s Press, 1995), and Irrational Fears (White Wolf, 1998) and the short-story collections The Return of Count Electric and Other Stories (Permanent Press, 1993) and The Ocean and All Its Devices (Subterranean Press, 2006).

Melanie Tem’s work has received the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards and a nomination for the Shirley Jackson Award. She has published numerous short stories, eleven solo novels, two collaborative novels with Nancy Holder, and two with her husband, Steve Rasnic Tem. She is also a published poet, an oral storyteller, and a playwright. Her stories have recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and the anthologies Supernatural Noir, Shivers VI, Portents, Blood and Other Cravings, and Werewolves and Shapeshifters. The Tems live in Denver. They have four children and four granddaughters.

Jonathan Thomas was born in Providence, R.I., and has been married since 1991 to artist and country singer Angel Dean. His books include Stories from the Big Black House (Radio Void, 1992), The Color over Occam (Arcane Wisdom, 2012), and from Hippocampus Press, Midnight Call (2008), Tempting Providence (2010), and Thirteen Conjurations (2013). Since 2010, his short fiction has appeared in Black Wings I–III (PS Publishing and Titan), A Mountain Walked (Centipede Press), Nameless, and Weird Fiction Review.

K. M. Tonso grew up in a small town on the coast of Oregon and probably should have stayed there, but did not. Currently living in the much drier Southwest, the author produces novels and short stories in a variety of genres and lengths, and occasionally finds them well-received. A significant other and two dogs round out the family.

Harry Turtledove is an escaped Byzantine historian who writes science fiction (most often, alternate history), fantasy, and historical fiction. His books include The Guns of the South (Ballantine, 1992), Ruled Britannia (New American Library, 2002), and In the Presence of Mine Enemies (New American Library, 2003). He has won a Hugo and two Sidewise Awards. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, fellow writer Laura Frankos. They have three daughters.

Donald Tyson is a Canadian writer of fiction and nonfiction dealing with all aspects of the Western esoteric tradition. He is the author of Necronomicon: The Wanderings of Alhazred (2004), Grimoire of the Necronomicon (2008), The Necronomicon Tarot (2007), and The 13 Gates of the Necronomicon (2010), as well as a biography of Lovecraft titled The Dreamworld of H. P. Lovecraft (2010) and the novel Alhazred (2006), all of which were published by Llewellyn Publications.

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

BLACK WINGS OF CTHULHU

TWENTY-ONE TALES OF LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR

EDITED BY S. T. JOSHI

S. T. Joshi—the twenty-first century’s preeminent expert on all things Lovecraftian—gathers twenty-one of the master’s greatest modern acolytes, including Caitlín R. Kiernan, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Shea, Brian Stableford, Nicholas Royle, Darrell Schweitzer and W. H. Pugmire, each of whom serves up a new masterpiece of cosmic terror that delves deep into the human psyche to horrify and disturb.

“[An] exceptional set of original horror tales … [Black Wings] will delight even horror fans completely unfamiliar with Lovecraft.”
Booklist

“Cumulatively creepy studies of Lovecraft-style locales where inexplicable supernatural phenomena suggest an otherworldly dimension intersecting our own.”
Publishers Weekly

“Joshi’s tribute proves there’s still plenty of life in the Elder Gods yet—and plenty of highly talented writers penning dark fiction these days.”
Fantasy Magazine

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BLACK WINGS OF CTHULHU 2

EIGHTEEN TALES OF LOVECRAFTIAN HORROR

EDITED BY S. T. JOSHI

In the second volume of the critically acclaimed Black Wings series, S. T. Joshi—the world’s foremost Lovecraft scholar—has assembled eighteen more brand-new and imaginative horror tales, inspired by the twentieth century’s greatest writer of the supernatural, H. P. Lovecraft. Delivering this feast of horror are John Shirley, Tom Fletcher, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Jonathan Thomas, Nick Mamatas, Richard Gavin, Melanie Tem, John Langan, Jason C. Eckhardt, Don Webb, Darrell Schweitzer, Nicholas Royle, Steve Rasnic Tem, Brian Evenson, Rick Dakan, Donald Tyson, Jason V. Brock, and Chet Williamson.

“[A] rich feast of terror inspired by the twentieth century’s greatest writer of the supernatural.” SF Signal

“[E]very story in this collection is outstanding … This is a superb anthology not only for Lovecraft fans, but those appreciate true Gothic horror.” Horror Novel Reviews

“All of the stories are very well-written and lovingly steeped in Lovecraft lore.” Geeks of Doom

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SHADOWS OVER INNSMOUTH

EDITED BY STEPHEN JONES

Under the unblinking eye of World Fantasy Award-winning editor Stephen Jones, sixteen of the finest modern authors, including Neil Gaiman, Kim Newman, Ramsey Campbell and Brian Lumley contribute stories to the canon of Cthulhu. Also featuring the story that started it all, by the master of horror, H. P. Lovecraft.

“A fine assembly of talented writers… A superb anthology for Lovecraft fans.”
Science Fiction Chronicle

“Horror abounds in Shadows Over Innsmouth.”
Publishers Weekly

“Good, slimy fun… There are a number of genuinely frightening pieces here.”
San Francisco Chronicle

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WEIRD SHADOWS OVER INNSMOUTH

EDITED BY STEPHEN JONES

Including the unpublished early draft of ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth,’ by H. P. Lovecraft, this extraordinary volume features twelve stories by some of the world’s most prominent Lovecraftian authors, including Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman, Michael Marshall Smith, John Glasby, Paul McAuley, Steve Rasnic Tem, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Brian Lumley, Basil Copper, Hugh B. Cave, and Richard Lupoff.

“H. P. Lovecraft fans will revel in this fine follow-up to Jones’ Shadows Over Innsmouth, a World Fantasy finalist.”
Publishers Weekly

“Jones has brought together some of the industry’s top-notch authors… strongly recommended for Mythos fans.” Hellnotes

“Fascinating and recommended.”
All Hallows

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