Fuck that horse, there was something there. I know something was there.
But whatever it had been, it was gone now.
Hayes sat there for a few more minutes and then started throwing snow again. A storm was on them and the snow was flying thick as goose down, filling the shaking security lights of the compound with white clots that seemed busy as static on a TV screen. Snow was drifting and whipping, powdering the cab of the tractor like sand. The wind and blackness were sculpting it into huge, flying shapes that danced through the night.
Hayes stopped the tractor again.
That wind was funny, the way it howled and screamed and then dropped off to a steady buzzing whisper. You listened long enough, you started not only seeing things, but hearing voices… sweet, seductive voices that were pulled out long and hollow by the wind. The voices of women and lovers lost to time. Voices that wanted you to run off out into those bleak, frozen plains where you could lose yourself forever and maybe, just maybe, you wouldn’t mind being lost, those blizzard winds wrapping you up tight and cooing in your ear until it was just too late. And by then, you would recognize the voice of the wind for what it was: death. Lonely, hungry death and maybe something else, maybe something diabolic and secret that was older than death.
Stop it for the life of Pete, Hayes warned himself.
But it could get to you, the wind and the snow and perpetual night. So many men had gone glaring mad with it that the medicos had coined a term to explain something that was perhaps not explainable at alclass="underline" Dementia Antarctica. They saw it as a disease born of loneliness and isolation and maybe they were half right, but the ugly and bitter truth was that it was also a condition of the soul and its dark, destructive poetry that seemed to cry in your head: I am your soul and I am beautiful, I am a lover’s sonnet and silver rain, now destroy me… if you love me, destroy me and yourself, too.
Hayes figured if he kept up like this, he would run off into the silent devastation of the polar night. So he put his mind on other things, things he could get his hands on and wrap his brain around, make work for him. And what he started to think about was not something you could really touch or ever know: the city. That great sunken, cyclopean city which lay dreaming on the bottom of Lake Vordog. Sheathed in weeds and morbid aquatic growths, time and madness, it was like some grotesque and moss-covered alien skeleton down there.
Remembering it now, it seemed like seeing it had been some nightmare, but Hayes had seen it all right and it had seen him. At the time he had not been able to truly understand the way it made him feel, it was just too shocking and overwhelming, but now he thought he understood: that city was taboo, shunned. He… and all men, he supposed… retained a vestigal memory of the place. It was some awful archetype electroplated onto the human soul from the race’s infancy that would later re-channel itself as haunted houses and cursed castles and the like. Evil places. Places of malignancy and disembodied horror. Maybe something about the angles and the sense of desertion, but it had persisted and it always would, that memory. The first true dream of supernal terror humankind had known.
Here again, Hayes was thinking things he had no right to think. Maybe it was like Cutchen said, maybe part of it was Gates’ disturbing little talk coupled with all the badness those mummies emanated. But he honestly thought it was something more. He truly believed that the Old Ones and their phantasmal, eldritch city were locked down in the minds of all men in the form of primal memory.
We interacted with those things, he found himself thinking, in our distant past. We must have. And probably not out of choice. That’s the only thing that can explain our instinctual terror of them and that nameless city…
Without realizing it, Hayes had stopped the tractor.
Most of the job was done, but with that blizzard pounding down on them, he could pretty much start again for already the walkways were drifting over. But the thing was, he had stopped the tractor on its way to Hut #6 and he did not know why. He just sat there, feeling cold and hot, looking around desperately for the reason and not coming up with a thing. The night was alive with viscid shadows and creeping shapes and the wind was full of voices. He could hear them calling to him through that blowing white death: There’s no hurry, Jimmy. You just sit tight and wait and all will be revealed to you. Because you’re waiting for something as you’ve been waiting from day one and maybe all your life and that something is coming, Jimmy. It’s coming out of the darkness of the polar graveyard and, like a chameleon, it’s about to show itself…
And then it did.
About the time he was ready to call himself a fucking lunatic, it did.
But before he saw it, he heard it.
Heard that weird, high musical piping that he knew was a voice. Heard it in his head and outside the cab, and in the pit of his mind he remembered that voice as one of authority, as the voice of a master and such was its dominance, he did not dare try to get away from it. He could feel the ice of Antarctica breathing in his belly, sending out breaths of frost that shut him down and made him watch.
Then he saw it.
It came drifting out of the shadows, a ghostly alien form with outspread wings and trembling tentacles and leering red eyes that opened up his brain like a tin can and reached in there with cold fingers. He screamed, he supposed he screamed, for something came ripping out of him that slapped him sure and hard across the face.
The thing came closer and Hayes pressed down on the accelerator of the tractor, those chained balloon tires catching and vaulting Hayes forward and right at the thing. And he felt something snap in his brain like a tree branch and the pain was immense. But then the tractor rammed into that thing and it broke apart into a thousand luminous fragments.
Then he was alone.
And the wind was just the wind and the snow was just the snow. But in his mind, there were shadows. Ancient shadows that called him by name.
27
There were things in life that could destroy you an inch at a time.
Booze, drugs, depression, tobacco. Hayes knew all about the tobacco-thing, because he’d been smoking for nearly thirty years now. So he knew that one and understood it and realized like anyone else that you lost a minute or five or whatever it was every time you lit up.
But he never saw it that way.
He looked on it by the months and years. That he was buying himself a plot of cemetery earth, shovelful by shovelful. But it didn’t stop him and it didn’t slow him down. The nicotine had him and it was a pure and senseless thing that was more than just a simple physical addiction, but something destructive in the soul that saw its own end and welcomed it.
So, he understood there were things that took your life slowly. But there were also things that ate away your life in big chunks, in heaping spoonfuls. And what was laying on the cot in the sick bay the next morning was definitely one of them.
Lind.
Or maybe not Lind at all.
Sharkey had him strapped down and he was sweating and feverish and his skin was bubbling like hot fat. Actually bubbling. You could say in your mind that they were blood blisters or water blisters, but that didn’t cut it and you knew it. Just as Hayes knew it. What he was looking at, what Lind had become, was something akin to the little girl in that old scary movie. The one who puked up green slime and had the Devil in her.
“What the hell’s wrong with him?” Hayes asked.
“You tell me,” Sharkey said. “I can’t explain the lesions any more than I can really explain his state of mind. I would guess this is something psychosomatic, but—”