The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 (6 page)

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.

T
HE DOG FROZE IN MID-STEP, ONE PAW UP.
T
HREE 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.