Burnt Black Suns: A Collection of Weird Tales (5 page)

Wendell tried to make sense of Isaacs’s story, but couldn’t wrap his mind around it. He was exhausted, hunger and the elements taking their toll, and could barely think. He looked to Dogan, who appeared just as troubled.

“Did Gauthier say anything?” Dogan asked.

Isaacs shook his head, and it carved pain in his misshapen face. He was worsening, and there was nothing Dogan or Wendell could do. Already his lips had turned a bizarre shade of red, and his eyes could not focus. He coughed violently and spit pink into the snow. Then he lay his head down. “I can’t. I—I don’t want to die.”

Wendell put his hand on Isaacs’s shoulder.

“You aren’t going to die here. We won’t let you.”

Isaacs coughed again.

Dogan and Wendell looked at each other. Dogan shook his head.

“We have to find Dr. Hanson. We need that satellite phone.”

“We can’t leave Isaacs,” Wendell said. “He won’t last without our help. And how are we supposed to find Dr. Hanson? We’ll be dead before we do. We have no idea where he is. I think we’re better off waiting right here.”

They spent the next few hours trying to sleep in their makeshift shelter, the three men huddled to conserve warmth. While Dogan and Isaacs slept, the wind had become a gale, and it again brought with it the overpowering stench of fish and sea, so thick Wendell could hardly keep from gagging. He tucked his face into his coat as best he could to survive it.

The men did not sleep for long, but it was long enough that when they awoke they found Isaacs had crawled away from the safety of the depression and frozen to death. It made no sense, but nothing did any longer. The arctic cold of Melville Island had upended everything. Dogan was upset and wanted to drag Isaacs back, close enough to protect his body should anything come looking for it, but he didn’t have the strength left. Neither of them did. It was then they agreed, for the sake of the fallen Isaacs, that their hunger had become too severe. But when they turned out their pockets, they found them empty. Isaacs, too, had been stripped of all food and supplies. There was nothing left to sustain them. Dogan cried, certain he’d eaten all their shares unwittingly in a somnambulistic frenzy, but Wendell wasn’t convinced. It didn’t explain the hazy footprints that encircled them.

Dogan and Wendell paced in the subzero weather, trudging out a trail while trying to keep themselves warm. Eventually, even the effort of pacing proved beyond Dogan, and he stumbled and toppled to the ground. Wendell knelt down but didn’t have strength to help. All he could do was stay nearby.

“I can’t keep going,” Dogan said. “I can’t.”

“We have to,” Wendell said.

But Wendell knew they would never make it. They started talking then to keep themselves awake and alert, to remind each other not to give up. They talked about how they came to be under Dr. Hanson. They talked about Isaacs, about whether he had crawled away on purpose, or if it was due to some horrible mistake. They talked about Gauthier and what had happened to him. But mostly they talked about themselves, their childhoods, their lives before meeting. They talked until they couldn’t, until Dogan was delirious and stopped making sense. Wendell tried to rouse him, to keep him moving, but he couldn’t. He didn’t have the energy. So tired, he could barely keep his eyes open. They fluttered more and more until they stopped completely. Before they did, the last thing Wendell saw was something in the distance, crouching. Watching them. And then it moved.

A slap that tore off his face woke him from death. He opened his stinging eyes, and only his lethargic malnourishment prevented him from screaming. The shrunken man’s face hung inches from his own. It was dark brown, as though deeply tanned, with lips grey to the point of blue. He did not tremble, though he was dressed in nothing more than a cloth that covered his sex, and he was perilously thin. What startled Wendell most, however, was his eyes. They were larger than any Wendell had ever seen, and spaced so far apart they threatened to slide off his skull. He couldn’t have been more than four feet tall. Wendell was certain it wasn’t a dream, but if it were it was the worst dream he’d ever suffered. He tried to moisten his mouth to get his tongue working, and when he did all he could hazily croak was, “Dogan?”

The half-man grunted, then hobbled away. Wendell wanted to pull himself up, but discovered he had been swaddled with furs. He could turn his head, but only with great difficulty, and only enough to see Dogan similarly wrapped a few meters away. Dogan had two more of the dark half-men at his head, and they were trying to feed him though he was still unconscious. Isaacs lay face down a few feet further in the snow, a fourth shrunken man holding his lifeless arm to his grey lips and sniffing. Wendell nodded at no one in particular, and as the world grew dark once more he felt he was being dragged. In his delirium, the dragging went on and on forever.

Something was wriggling in his mouth, trying to crawl down his throat. Wendell struggled awake, gagging, and managed to spit it out. A piece of unrecognizable yellow meat curled on the ice, while a short distance away those small dark half-men from his nightmare danced, their bare feet crunching on the snow. There was no longer anything binding his limbs but weakness, and he’d been left propped up next to Dogan. Both of them were awake and shaking.

Only unrecognizable pieces remained of poor Isaacs.

“I don’t know what’s going on, Wendell. I don’t know where we are, but look.” Dogan nodded his head across the ice and Wendell saw Dr. Hanson. He lay face down in the snow, unmoving, his pack beside him and torn open, equipment scattered. Wendell squinted to see if the satellite phone was still there, and in his concentration missed what Dogan was saying.

“Do you see it?” Dogan repeated.

“I think so. It’s right by his hand.”

“No, you idiot. Do you see
it
?”

Wendell looked up again, past Dr. Hanson and at the group of five near-naked men dancing before a shorn wall of ice. It stretched out further than the end of his sight in either direction; the break no doubt formed when tectonic plates shifted the glacier. What was uncovered was so impossible Wendell would have thought his mind had cracked had Dogan not witnessed it first.

There was a monstrous creature encased halfway in the solid ice. It had large unlidded eyes, milky white; its mouth wide and round, its scaled flesh reflecting light dully. Where its neck might have been was a ring of purplish pustules, circling the fusion of its ichthyic skull to its tendonous body. Chunked squid limbs lay outstretched, uncontrollable in its death. The air was again dominated by the overpowering odor of the sea. The shrunken men before it treated it as a god, and yet it was clear the five could not have been the ones to uncover it—with the sharpened rocks they used as tools it would have taken generations to carve that deep and that much. They peeled strips of its flesh away and ate them raw, and when they looked back at Dogan and Wendell it was suddenly evident why their features had transformed over time, their eyes grown wider, jaws shorter, skin rougher. Their fish faces stared at Wendell, expectantly. It was true he was hungry beyond imagination, but he was not so hungry that he might eat what they presented.

The sour taste and sensation of what they had previously tried to feed him returned, and he looked down. The morsel continued to writhe slowly in the snow.

“Did you—did they make you eat any?” Wendell asked, then realized Dogan had turned the palest shade. They had. Wendell feared for his life, and his sanity.

“How do I look?” Dogan managed through his chattering teeth, and Wendell lied and told him he was fine. Was Wendell imagining the flesh had already changed him, already started prying his eyes apart? Was it even possible after so small a meal? But he realized with horror that he didn’t know how much Dogan had willingly eaten, nor if either of them had been force-fed in their delirium.

“Can you move?” Wendell asked, fleetingly energized by his fear. “We need to get that phone. We need to call for help.”

“How? Even if we manage to get it, we’ll never escape with it. We have no idea where we are. We might not even be on Melville Island anymore.”

“We have to try. Maybe Gauthier has already come back and is waiting for us at the landing strip. What else can we do? End up like Dr. Hanson and bleed out in the snow? Or worse, like Isaacs, torn to pieces?”

“We should escape.”

“And what then?” Wendell whispered. “Die in the snow, waiting for them to find us?”

Dogan paled.

“Did you—did you see that?”

Wendell looked up. The five dark men sat mesmerized before their dead idol.

“It moved,” Dogan said. “Did you see it move?”

“It can’t move. Whatever that thing is, it’s dead.”

“It’s not dead—look, it moved again.”

Wendell looked closer at Dogan’s face and saw the swelling and the subtle distortion. There was no longer time to gather strength. Whatever they fed him, Dogan had eaten more than he thought. It was transforming him. Wendell did not want to suffer the same fate.

“Stay here,” he said, though when he looked over he wasn’t certain he’d been heard. Dogan appeared fascinated by what was trapped in the ice.

Wendell lowered himself onto his stomach and crawled toward Dr. Hanson, keeping an eye on the gathering of disciples ahead. He moved elbow-to-knee as slowly as he dared, not willing to risk being seen. The half-men were feral, and as smart as they were, they were still animals, waiting to attack anything that moved. Wendell had only one chance to get the satellite phone and figure out a way of escaping from the nightmare he and Dogan found themselves in. His hunger had not abated, but enough strength had returned that he was able to make it to Dr. Hanson’s body in under ten minutes.

The tribe of half-men had not moved from around their dead idol. They bounced on their haunches, made noises like wild animals, followed imaginary movement before them with precision. What was strange, however, was that each reacted differently to what it saw, as though they did not share the same sight. One stood while another howled, the rest looking in different directions. Wendell couldn’t make sense of it, and reminded himself not to try. He had to focus on that satellite phone and getting back.

He searched the body, doing his best to forget who it had been. Dr. Hanson’s face had been removed—the pale flesh frozen, tiny blood icicles reaching from the pulpy mess to the ground. Wendell turned to keep from panicking and checked the pockets of Hanson’s coat and everywhere he could reach for the satellite phone. But it wasn’t there. Wendell rolled on his side and tried unsuccessfully to flag Dogan for help. Dogan was staring straight ahead at the impossible giant embedded in the ice, eyes open wide and spread far apart.

Dr. Hanson’s pack was ripped open in the blood-soaked snow, the items within trapped in sticky ice. Wendell heard a loud creak and froze. In his mind’s eye he saw himself spotted, then swarmed by ugly bodies and ripped limb from limb. But when he raised his head he found nothing had changed. The five men remained bent in supplication. Almost by accident Wendell spotted the leather pouch Gauthier had given Dr. Hanson pinned beneath the doctor’s torso. Wendell managed to pry it free of the ice, then put it into his own pocket and gently eased his way back the distance to Dogan. Or what was left of Dogan.

“Come on. Let’s go,” Wendell whispered, but Dogan didn’t respond. Wendell grabbed his wrist and tried yanking, but Dogan had become a dead-weight, staring beatifically ahead, his face transformed. Mouth agape, eyes spread apart, staring at the dead thing as though it were alive, Dogan was unblinking as tears streamed down his sweating face. Dogan, Wendell’s enemy, Wendell’s friend, was gone.

There would be time for grief later. Wendell reached over and put his hand on Dogan’s shoulder. “Stay strong. I’ll be back as soon as I can with help.” Then he attempted to stand and discovered he wasn’t able to do so. His legs had given up for good, buckling as Wendell put weight on them. He tried again and again, desperate to escape before it was too late, but he couldn’t get up. After a few minutes, Wendell felt the sensation in his hands going, too, his control slipping away. Everything he saw took on a hazy glow, the edges of his vision crystalizing. The sky jittered, as did the snow.

Dogan wasn’t the only one who’d had his unconscious hunger overfed with flesh. It was no wonder they had been left unbound at the edge of the camp and ignored. The creatures had no worry. All the damage had long been done. They simply needed to wait.

Wendell scrambled the small leather bag he had taken from Dr. Hanson’s body out of his pocket. He prayed the satellite phone would be unharmed, that Gauthier had already returned and was waiting for them. If Wendell could only call him, it might not be too late for rescue. He could still escape the horrible things he was witnessing. That creature in the ice—Wendell thought he saw it move, thought he saw one of its giant milky eyes blink, even though so much of its flesh had already been stripped. It blinked, and the coils that sprouted free from the ice twitched and rolled, and a scream built inside him. But when it escaped it wasn’t a scream at all but laughter. Laughter and joy. That terrified Wendell further, the joy, because it finally turned the five beasts his way. They rolled onto their haunches, staring at Wendell and his catatonic friend.

Wendell took off his glove and reached into the bag slowly to remove the phone, but what he found there was nothing of the sort. It was another kind of escape, the one thing a man like Gauthier would hand over when he was suggesting that someone protect himself. From out of the leather bag Wendell withdrew a handgun, and even in the cold wind he could smell the oiled metal.

Those five men looking agitated and more bestial than ever before. They snarled, while behind them a giant that Wendell refused to believe was alive illuminated like the sun pinned above. It filled the horizon with streaks of light, tendrils dancing from the old one’s gargantuan head. It looked at the five half-men radiating in the glow. It looked at Dogan, kneeling and waiting for it to speak to him. Then it looked at Wendell and all Wendell’s hunger was satiated; he was at one with everything.