The Weird Company

Also by Pete Rawlik:

Reanimators

Copyright © 2014 by Pete Rawlik

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Night Shade Books, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

Night Shade books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Night Shade Books, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or
[email protected]
.

Night Shade Books™ is a trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

Visit our website at
www.nightshadebooks.com
.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas

Cover artwork by David Hueso

Print ISBN: 978-1-59780-545-2

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-59780-559-9

Printed in the United States of America

For

Peter

Elena

Tessa

my own

Weird Company

How fare those who come to the attention of the masses?

It makes monsters of men, and then passes stern judgement.

It makes heroes of monsters, and then celebrates their foul acts.

What acts unseen would redeem or damn one or the other?

What truth lies hidden in what men do not see?

—Robert Harrison Blake

THE ATTACHED DOCUMENT CONTAINS

SECRET

INFORMATION

AND AS SUCH IT MUST BE

RECORDED:

On a Classified Document Register with an assigned JAC-K Identification Number.

STORED:

In a steel filing cabinet equipped with a three-position combination dial padlock.

TRANSMITTED:

In a sealed opaque container, with this cover sheet as the first visible page.

The contents of this document are classified

CAMPBELL

CARPENTER

FOSTER

If you do not have sufficient authorization to possess this document you may be subject to court martial.

Do not

FOLD, MUTILATE
or
SPINDLE

MEMORANDUM

JAC-K Identification Number: 627-43

TO:   Bradford Garnet, Chair, Judicial Advisory Committee-K, Department of Justice

RE:    Project Gig, Minority Opinion, Supporting Document

As requested, I have collated several disparate documents into this singular report that serves to support my minority opinion on Project Gig. It is my hope that presentation of these documents will serve to inform and educate the senior committee members, and perhaps allow for a reconsideration of the allocation of resources, particularly in light of the ongoing events in Germany. As previously stated, it is my opinion that the continual occupation of Innsmouth, the imprisonment of its citizens, and the ongoing manhunt for those that have escaped previous actions, are a mistake and the policies that sustain such programs should be reconsidered.

The majority of the following report is comprised of a summary of events seemingly prepared by Robert Martin Olmstead, the same person who initially supplied information on the situation in Innsmouth. Supplementary documents concerning the tragic Miskatonic University Expedition to the Antarctic are also included, one of which was actually found amongst the remains of the lost 1936 Secondary Magnetic Expedition. That Olmstead’s documentation serves to bridge the gap between the two tragedies, and may supply some further explanation of what happened to the latter, is no coincidence. D. A. Stuart’s report on the loss of the 1936 Secondary Magnetic Expedition should be required reading for all members of the Committee.

While I am of the opinion that Project Gig is a mistake, I must also suggest that even if it were not, there are other priorities to which resources should be committed. Recent reports from our agents in Germany suggest that the German Ahnenerbe organization is preparing an expedition to Antarctica. Ostensibly this is to survey locations for a whaling station, but military intelligence opines it is for the purpose of establishing territorial claims and a potential naval station. I once again must dissent from these conclusions and suggest that the real purpose of such an expedition is an attempt to locate and explore the area identified by Pabodie in his account of the Miskatonic Expedition. It is my recommendation that a permanent military presence be established at key locations with the sole purpose of quarantining the continent from those who would seek to exploit its secrets, and to contain the phenomena that originate within.

Signed

Dr. Wingate Peaslee, Senior Scientific Advisor

1 June 1937

PROLOGUE

From the Journal of Thomas Gedney “Miskatonic University Antarctic Expedition”

January 24, 1931
0720

Six months ago I knew the names of eleven men whose lives had been claimed by the frozen hell that we call Antarctica. George Vince died quickly when he slipped off of an ice precipice on Ross Island in 1903. Ten years later and not more than ten miles away Aeneas Mackintosh and Victor Hayward were lost when the sea ice gave way beneath them near McMurdo Sound. Such a death must have been preferable to that of their colleague in the British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, Arnold Spencer-Smith, whose death by scurvy must have been horrendously slow, much like that of Xavier Mertz. Mertz avoided the crevasse that swallowed and instantly killed his colleague Belgrave Ninnis, and he cleverly avoided starvation by slaughtering his sled dogs. But Mertz consumed too much of the dog’s liver, and died in slow lingering agony from an overdose of vitamin A. Even this must have been preferable to the deaths of Robert Scott and his team of Evans, Oates, Wilson and Bowers. They raced to the South Pole in the winter of 1911–1912 only to learn that Amundsen had beaten them there. On the trek back they succumbed slowly to hunger and the cold. The doctors say Ernest Shackleton died in the South Georgia Islands from heart failure. Those who knew him know that it was the desolate ice and freezing winds that ate at the man that slowly wore him down, before taking him completely. It gives me no pleasure to add eleven more names to that list. Eleven good men, men I knew, men with whom I have worked for the last six months. Lake, Atwood, Mills, Boudreau, Fowler, Orrendorf, Watkins, Moulton, Carroll, Daniels and Lowe, more than half of the Miskatonic University Expedition, lost not to the ice, not to the cold or wind or even to hunger, but to something else, something ancient and forgotten, something that waits in the ice and kills without remorse.

I have no doubts that some of the expedition survived to carry out the majority of our story. Captains Douglas and Thorfinnssen were supposed to have remained in the harbor at Ross Island. We left one of the Dornier airplanes on Ross as well, with young Sherman, who came to study the glacial squid Psychroteuthius, with two of the more astute of the ship’s men, Gunnarson and Larsen, acting as his assistants. Of the nineteen men who went into the interior of that windswept continent, we left seven at the base camp including the expedition leaders Pabodie and Dyer, three students Danforth, Ropes and Williamson, and two mechanics McTighe and Van Wall. All good men, I have faith that some survived to tell the world what happened. But none of these men were with us on that strange plateau, none of them saw what we brought up out of the stygian darkness, and none heard the strange keening that shattered the droning silence of the Antarctic and preceded the horrors that would come. They were not there, but I was, and so it falls to me to lay down some record of those events. To hopefully tell the world of the fate of those eleven brave men, and the dangers that await mankind as we delve into the forgotten and unknown past of our own small world.

The seeds for what happened, the rift that developed between Pabodie and Lake, and Lake’s near maniacal desire to pursue his own avenues of research; these were planted long before the expedition even arrived at Ross Island. As nominal founders of the expedition, Lake and Pabodie were supposed to come to mutual agreement on staffing issues, but they disagreed on which physicist and geologist to invite along. Lake wanted the more progressive and younger team of McReady and Garry, while Pabodie leaned toward Atwood and Dyer. The impasse was broken when Pabodie used his influence with the Pickman Foundation to set the team leadership, as he wanted it. Outraged, Lake threatened to resign completely, until a last-minute negotiation mediated by Atwood, putting Lake in charge of selection of the seven graduate students that would join the team as junior partners, defused the issue. Lake’s selection of three biologists, two physicists/meteorologists, who were both protégés of McReady, one engineer and only one geologist, only served to strengthen the feud. Thus when those first mid-December borings at Mount Nansen brought up slate fragments containing queer triangular imprints, imprints which Lake claimed were unprecedented in the fossil record, it was inevitable that he would demand further investigation.

Pabodie ignored such requests; as an engineer he was more interested in proving the worth of his newly designed drilling apparatus, and solving the various electro-mechanical problems that arose from the extremes of cold and ice, than in furthering such esoteric research into things long dead. But as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into a month, Pabodie ran out of problems to solve, and the two student physicists Carroll and Moulton, as well as the geologist Daniels, suddenly joined Lake in pressing for a reconnaissance into the northwestward direction. Sensitive instruments had picked up a fluctuation or variation in the local magnetic field, indicating that in addition to the southern magnetic pole, there was a smaller secondary influence, perhaps a large deposit of iron ore. The discovery of this magnetic source, which they jokingly termed the Little Magnet, would be a significant scientific achievement. That the Little Magnet lay in the same direction as the origin of Lake’s interesting slate formation, argued Daniels, may not have been entirely coincidental. The same geological activity that had transformed the shale into slate may also have been responsible for the ore deposit. Or, both could be the result of the impact of an immense pallasite, a meteorite rich in iron and nickel.

Under pressure from multiple sources Pabodie agreed that both he and Lake would carry out a short reconnaissance using minimal resources, and then evaluate the findings. Thus on January 11
th
the two seasoned researchers accompanied by the students Carroll, Moulton and Daniels, as well as the two mechanics Mills and Watkins, set out on six sledges with forty-two dogs. They returned on the 18
th
with the physicists confident in the presence and general direction of their magnetic source and Lake displaying a number of slate samples containing more of the unusual triangular impressions. Of Pabodie’s sprained ankle, Lake’s bruised face and the two missing dogs none would speak, but after ordering that all four planes be made ready under the command of Lake and Atwood, Pabodie retired to his tent and was not seen for most of the next day.