5
Although he drank a pint of Jim Beam Rye before lights out, Hayes didn’t sleep worth a damn that night. He had weird dreams from the moment he closed his eyes to the moment they snapped back open at four a.m. In the darkness he lay there, sweat beading his face.
The dorm room was dark, the readout of a digital clock over on the wall casting a grainy green illumination. There were two beds in there. If you fell out of yours, you stood a good chance of falling into your partner’s. They were crowded places, the dorms, but space was limited at the stations. Tonight, the other bed was empty. Lind was sleeping on a cot in the infirmary, shot full of Seconal by Doc Sharkey.
Hayes was alone.
Dreams, just dreams. Nothing to get worked up about.
Maybe it had been what happened to Lind and maybe it was something else, but the dreams had been bad. Real bad. Even now, Hayes was all fuzzy-headed and he couldn’t be sure they were dreams. He couldn’t remember them all, just some tangled skein of nightmares where he was pursued, hiding from terrible shapes with burning eyes.
He could only remember the last one with any clarity.
And that’s the one that had yanked him out of sleep, made him sit right up, teeth chattering. In the dream, some grotesque freezing black shadow had fallen over him, bathing him with the cold of tombs and crypts. It had been standing at the foot of his bed, that seething amorphous shape, looking at him… and that had done it. He’d woken up, fighting back a scream.
Nerves.
Jesus, that’s all it was. Too much weird shit happening lately, his imagination had been cranked. And when you lost control of your imagination during the long Antarctic winter, you could be in real trouble.
Hayes settled back in, deciding to lay off the microwave lasagna before bedtime. Because that was probably the real culprit.
Couldn’t be anything else.
6
By the next afternoon, everyone in camp had heard about Lind’s little episode.
At a research station like Kharkhov, there were no secrets. Stories — whether real, imagined, or grossly exaggerated — made the rounds like clap at a convention. Everything was passed around, re-told, re-invented, blown out of proportion until it bore little resemblance to the incident that had inspired it.
In the mess hall, trying to eat his grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup in peace, they were all over Hayes like birds on roadkill, all pecking away to see if there was any good red meat left on the carcass.
“Heard Lind tried to slit his wrists,” Meiner, one of the heavy equipment operators was saying, smelling like diesel fuel and hydraulic grease and not doing much for Hayes’ appetite. “Sumbitch just went crazy, they’re saying, crazier than a red-headed shitbug. Just lost it staring down at that mummy in the ice.”
Hayes sighed, set his sandwich down. “He—”
“It’s true enough,” St. Ours said. “I was there with him for awhile. He was getting a funny look in his eyes the whole time, just staring at the ugly bastard in the ice, that monster just thawing out and that face swimming up clear… and it weren’t no sort of face I’d want to see again.”
Rutkowski jumped in at that point, started saying how Lind had gotten a funny gleam in his eyes like a man ready to jump off a bridge. That none of it surprised him because there was something funny about Lind and something even funnier about those dead things Gates had dragged back from the camp in the foothills.
They talked on and on non-stop.
Didn’t let Hayes get a word in edgewise about any of it. Other than Gates, Holm, and Bryer, he’d been the only one to see Lind’s breakdown, if that’s what it had been. Both Rutkowski and St. Ours had left the hut maybe fifteen minutes before. Not that the lack of firsthand experience in the matter was slowing them down any.
Meiner was saying how he’d been at the Palmer Station on Anvers Island one lean winter and that three people had committed suicide one week, slit their wrists to a man, one after the other. It was spooky shit, he said. Got so people at Palmer thought there was some sort of insanity bug making the rounds. But that was the Antarctic winter, sometimes people just couldn’t take the isolation, the desolation, it got under their skins like scabies. And when that happened, when something slipped a cog upstairs, then that left a person wide open to bad “influences.”
“Don’t surprise me, not one cunt-hair,” St. Ours confessed to them. “We had this man and wife team at McMurdo one winter, funny ducks they were, geologists, studying rocks and corings, always looking for something but real vague as to what it was when you put a question to ’em. Anyway, they were up on Mount Erebus for maybe a week, doing some digging. They come down, come back, and they got this funny look in their eyes… kind of a shellshocked look, you know?”
Rutkowski nodded. “Seen it plenty of times.”
“Sure enough,” St. Ours said. “Sure enough. Only this time it was worse, savvy? They had all these rocks they found up there, but real flat with weird carvings on ’em like hieroglyphics or some of that Egyptian gobbledegook. They was acting damn freaky, hoarding those rocks, getting really scary about ’em. So one day, I was over at their shack and I says to ’em, I ast ’em what in Christ were those rocks about? They said they were artifacts from some ancient civilization, wouldn’t let me touch ’em. Said once you touched ’em, your mind went one drop at a time and something else filled it. What? I ast ’em. But they wouldn’t say, just grinning and staring like a couple pitch-and-throw carnie dolls. Two days later, yessir, two days later, hand in hand they wandered off into a blizzard, left a note that they was following the ‘old voices from under the mountain.’ Jesus Christ. But that just goes to show you the kind of horseshitty things that happen down here.”
“I believe it,” Meiner said.
Hayes pushed his plate away, wondering why they had to choose him as their totem pole to dance around. “Listen, you guys, I was there when Lind dropped his deck. None of you were, only me. He didn’t try to slit his wrists or anything like that, he just had a bad time of it is all.”
They listened intently, nodded, then Rutkowski got that conspiratorial look in his eyes and said, “Slit both his wrists, that’s what they’re saying. Probably would’ve made a go of his throat if there were time.”
“I don’t like it,” St. Ours said.
“Listen—” Hayes attempted, but they shut him off like a leaky tap.
“I don’t like the idea of three more months up here with a crazy man,” Rutkowski said. “They better lock his ass up. That’s all I gotta say on the matter.”
Meiner said, “It ain’t that crazy shit you got to worry about, it’s what Gates brought back here. Jesus and Mary, go out there and look at that one he’s defrosting… it’ll make you want to piss down your leg. Looks like some kind of crazy gray cucumber with these yellow worms growing out of the top of its head and big, staring red eyes at the end of each one… nothing that looks like that thing can be up to any good. Believe you me.”
Gradually, as the shit got deeper and it got difficult to find leg room or draw a breath with the stink, they moved off and Lind was pretty much forgotten. Now it was just the mummies and how word had it they weren’t even from this planet. Ghost stories and campfire tales and those three big, seasoned men trying to out-do one another, scaring the shit out of each other in the process.
Hayes ignored it all and sipped his soup, listened to the wind trying to strip Targa House off the frozen tundra as it did day after day, reaching and clawing and howling like something hungry come down out of the mountains to the west.