The Spawning (32 page)

“I don't know.” Breathing in and out, he let himself relax. He noticed with some unease that there were puncture marks in the woman's arms and legs, a network of pale pink scars at her temples.

“Miss? Miss? Can you hear me? My name's Coyle, Nicky Coyle. I work here at Polar Clime Station–”

She lifted her head and he saw her face.

He had a mad impulse to scream. Her face was contorted with deep-set lines, her eyes bleached completely white, so huge they looked like colorless egg yolks, oozing and slimy. Her mouth was hooked in a waxen grin of defilement. When she spoke, her voice was deep and ruined and lost:
“God will not be the one that calls of thee. For thee is thrice named by the devils of old. Gather in their name and give unto them that which is theirs . . . and theirs alone . . .”

Coyle just stared, knowing he had heard her speak those words, those same words that had been scrawled or burned into the wall of Slim's room, but doubting it because it could not be. Not only saying those words, but
finishing
them, knowing the parts that were missing.

She couldn't have said that, you idiot. There's no way she could know that.

He thought he was hallucinating.

He felt like he was tripping out on some really good acid.

Reality had pulled back and folded-up, everything seemed incredibly vivid and lucid and all he could do was look at that malefic grinning face and those sightless, blanched eyes. Every inch of his body was creeping. He thought he would pass clean out.

“What the hell did you say?”

She grinned and electricity again crackled in the air.

The vibrations rolled through the room, those distant noises echoed and bounced around. He was hearing things in them . . . things that he could not place . . . weird strident piping sounds and buzzing noises and a hollow, pained wailing that he thought was the sound a grasshopper might make if it screamed.

Gwen cried out and Eicke began to pray out in the corridor.

Papers flew around and charts fell off the walls and a window on the other side of the room fanned out with a silent spiderwebbing of cracks and then shattered, spraying glass and freezing air into the room.

And then it stopped.

All of it.

Gwen was standing there, breathing fast like she was hyperventilating. “What kind of fucking bullshit is this?” she said. “Who the hell is that woman?”

“Her name is Chelsea Butler, I think,” Special Ed said from the doorway. “She was a cosmologist from Mount Hobb Research Station. She is one of the missing.”

The woman looked up at Coyle again and that evil demeanor was gone. Her lips were trembling, her eyes not colorless but a pale shade of green. She was sobbing, her speech breaking up, “I . . . I don't know what's . . . happening to me,” she managed. “I don't know where I've been . . . I don't know who I am . . .”

The air in the observatory was getting practically polar.

Gwen got an emergency thermal blanket and wrapped the woman's shaking form in it. Cryderman and Shin showed up, gawking. Gwen disappeared and came back with a sheet of plywood. With Coyle and Cryderman's help, they nailed it up over the broken window.

Hopper showed up next. “My God! What's going on here? Who's this woman? Where did she come from? What happened to this place? I want some answers right now! Does anybody have any answers for me?”

“Not a one,” Gwen said. “Eicke found her. I was the first one he found so he brought me in on it. Beyond that I don't know. But I'm guessing that maybe you should ask your friends at Colony.”

Hopper just looked around like he was searching for some posted protocol that would tell him how you handled things like this.

Coyle had Butler on her feet. “Better get her to Medical,” he said.

She could barely walk, so Coyle scooped her up in the blanket and carried her through the door. She was unconscious. Her head lolled on her neck like it was broken.

“Maybe you're right,” he said to Gwen. “Maybe we ought to give Colony a call. They might have a few answers to this because I'm thinking Butler did not walk all the way from Mount Hobb.”

O
UT AT THE POWER Station, Stokes came awake.

He was pulling his shift, making sure the generators and boilers were purring along. As usual, he'd dozed off in the control booth.

But something had woken him.

A scratching noise.

For reasons even he poorly understood, Stokes did not move. He had the feeling that he was not alone. Somebody was there with him, watching him.

He stepped out of the booth.

#3 Generator was running, rumbling in the background. There were four Caterpillar diesel generators in the Power Station. They ran alternately. While one was running, maintenance could be performed on the others. And if one died, there were three back-ups and an emergency generator in the dome itself.

He moved past the row of generators and into the corridor beyond. Closing the door behind him, shutting off the noise of the generator room, he listened. He could feel the dull beat of his heart.

The station was very, very quiet.

Even outside, the wind did not blow and the walls did not creak. Just an utter black, silent pall that consumed Polar Clime both inside and outside. He kept listening for the sounds, but there were nothing.

A manic fear suddenly enveloped him that the station was deserted.

The others were gone and he was alone.

Alone.

That was ridiculous. It was only a five minute walk to the dome. He could've got on the radio and chatted with Cryderman or Harv at the T-Shack. Yet, he had never felt so isolated . . . or vulnerable . . . before.

He took a deep breath. The Power Station was a large pre-fab building with the generator room serving as its hub. There were also parts rooms, boilers rooms, a couple offices that were not used in the winter. A circular corridor wound around the entire structure.

Nothing had changed.

That sound again.

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

“Like rats in the walls,” he said under his breath.

No, no rats in Antarctica.

Listen.

Something was there.

And it was coming.

It was coming down the corridor: something huge and coarse and evil. It made a wet, hissing sound as it breathed. Whenever it paused, sniffing for him like an autumn hound anxious for mallard, things dripped from it, splatting and plopping.

You're fucking losing it, man.

He turned on the lights and walked the length of the corridor, circling around the Power Station. Nothing and nobody. He walked into the boiler room, checked displays and gauges, studied the intricate network of ducts and steam piping.

A thumping noise.

Up there, it's up there.

About twenty feet up, there were walkways so the piping could be maintained. But there couldn't be anyone up there. Not this time of night.

Yet, he could hear something up there.

Something searching about, scratching and scraping, skittering up there with feet that sounded like tapping pencils. Even with the lights on, there were shadows. The piping blocked it from his view.

Swallowing, knowing he had to get his feet under him, he called out. “Who's up there?”

Silence.

Then . . . yes, a hissing and dripping noise followed by a chitinous sound as of a grasshopper rubbing its spurred forelimbs together.

(remember)

And in his mind, Stokes could see it: something black and malefic and bristling, something that oozed with slime and carried itself about on a thousand skittering legs.

(do you remember?)

And he did. God, yes, he
did
remember. When he was a kid there was a deserted house: boxy, windowless, plain. It had been abandoned easily thirty years and was gray, weathered, leaning. When the wind blew it creaked.

It was not a good place.

Not at night.

For when you passed it, you ran. All the children did. You looked straight ahead and you ran. You did not pause, you did not look at it because you might see something looking back. Something hunched and red-eyed and claw-fingered, something that would be on you in the span of heartbeat, something that would drag you across those rotting floors and tuck you in some mildewed room where it could work on you in secret, gorging itself on your boy-blood and boy-flesh, drunk on the sweet milk of your terror.

All the kids had been afraid of that house.

Stokes had been more afraid than most.

And now here . . . at the bottom of the world, the thing had finally tracked him down.

With a vague dream-sense of reality, he wondered how many children it had eaten through the years. Maybe all those kids they used to put on milk cartons had been its victims.

Yes, yes . . .

How many had it lured into that deserted, shadow-riven tomb of a house with a seduction of sweets and fairy-tale spooks, all the while hiding its true face, squatting in darkness, hidden away in mildewy, webby places, waiting to strike? Waiting to show its immense swollen form, its many legs and bleeding mouths and myriad corpse-yellow eyes, finally slithering from some dark crevice or moldering attic breezeway or cellar damp like a midnight spookshow haunt from a magician's dark trunk . . . and catching its prey.

Its soft, pink, young prey.

Holding them down with its slimy, hairy bulk, stinking of marsh gas and rotting leaves, gorging on fear and tinny child-screams, its many mouths filled with gleaming surgical needles and venom-dripping pins.

And then . . . yes, opening those warm bags of goodies, piercing and impaling, chewing and sucking, leaving nothing but tiny broken Halloween skeletons and flaps of flesh that it would stitch and sew into ragged garments of boy-skin and girl-skin with all those needles sharpened on child-bones–

Trembling and sweating, Stokes tried to clear his mind.

This was insane. He was still dreaming. None of this was real.

Yet . . . it was.

Get a grip. It's only in your head. This is only dangerous if you believe in it, if you let yourself believe.

But did the beast really require his belief any more than a hatchet required belief to chop off a head or a bullet to punch through a skull? Yes . . . no . . . maybe.

The more you believe,
the ten-year old inside told him,
the stronger it is.

All children knew that and all adults pretended it wasn't so. The more he feared, the more dangerous it was. His belief sharpened the blade of the hatchet that chopped off his head and his belief was the gunpowder that expelled the bullet that drilled through his skull.

But he was afraid.

And it was real.

And it knew where he was.

It waited up there, hissing and dripping, its stomachs—because, yes, it had many of them—growling at the idea of what it would soon devour. Like a hungry man awaiting a savory meal, it relished each moment, grinding its teeth and stroking its swollen belly, its yellow eyes bright and malignant. It was coming down the stairs now, its many legs bicycling and scratching against the iron steps.

Sweating and shivering, hot and cold and lukewarm, Stokes opened his mouth to scream but all that came out was a squeaky rasp. He was paralyzed. He fought to get some feeling into his limbs, some blood into his muscles, but was rewarded only with a dull tingling in his extremities.

The thing would have him.

He could see it now.

It was black and shaggy and leggy as it came for him. Not a spider, really, but a spider-thing, a spider-horror whose body was not that of an arachnid, but only looked like one. It was huge, its bloated body made of the bony husks of dozens and dozens of dead, leeched children. Its legs were the narrow bone lattices of child-skeletons wound in dirty silk and glued together with spider-spit; its underbelly composed of fleshless faces that chattered their teeth and screamed.

Poised above him, all those mouths open and chattering, needle-teeth ready for the undoing of him, he could smell the green, dank tidal rot of its breath.

“Stokes,”
a voice said.

He looked and saw someone standing in the doorway to the boiler room. At first he thought it was Gwen Curie . . . then he was certain it was Zoot and then maybe Cassie Malone. But it was not them. It was another woman . . . her image almost filmy, face grave-pale, eyes a luminous yellow.

“Quick, Stokes! Before it gets you!”
she said and there was something strange about her voice . . . it sounded so desperate, almost hungry.
“Come on! We'll hide! It won't find us!”

Though he knew it was wrong, as everything was wrong, he ran to her and she took his hand in her own which was flabby and warm. She pulled him down the corridor, into a supply room. Shut the door.

“What–” he began.

“Sssshhh! It'll hear you . . .”

He crouched in the darkness, the woman huddled behind him. A high, disturbing smell wafted from her . . . fermenting, hot . . . like a basket of plums left to rot in some dark, moist place.

“It's going to be okay now,”
she promised him in a throaty whisper.
“Just you and me . . .”

He could not hear the beast.

He could only hear the wet smacking sound of the woman licking her lips.

The ragged, phlegmy noise of her breathing.

Only a nightlight dispelled the darkness. Stokes could see his shadow on the wall and that of the woman behind him . . . he watched as it rose up into some twisted, grotesque shape, hair slithering like snakes.

That's when he realized he'd been fooled.

The woman laughed with secret mirth.

And Stokes screamed for no more than a second before her teeth ripped out his throat and she bathed in his blood.

MARCH 14

M
ORNING.