Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (62 page)

“All across the wide northern sky there was a glow, cold and mysterious, as far removed as you could imagine from the world of men and their paltry little hopes and fears. The aurora was so vivid that night, you might have read a newspaper by it. All the better to see whatever’s coming, we thought; at least it can’t creep up on us and take us unawares, not in this light.

“Somewhere in the very pit of the night, just when the body’s at its weariest and wants only to drop down and sleep, an uncanny sort of stillness fell across the snowed-up river bed. What was left of the wind dropped entirely, and the only sound beneath the frozen far-off stars seemed to come from the creaking of the stove round which we sat, the cracking and spitting of the logs that burned inside it. A few of us looked round at each other; all of us felt it now, the heightened expectation, the heightened fear. Without words, as quietly as we could, we moved away from the stove and took up our places at the barricade.

“I remember—so clearly!—how it felt, crouching behind that mess of planks and packing-cases, waiting to see what might show its head above the snow-banks. A couple of times I thought I saw something, away out beyond the bounds of night vision. Even under the greenish radiance of the aurora I couldn’t be sure:
was
that something moving?
Could
it be? One time Joe McRudd discharged his rifle, and scared us all to hell. ‘Sorry,’ he mouthed, when we’d all regained our senses. He cleared his throat. ‘Thought I saw sump’n creepin’ round out there.’

“‘Save your ammo,’ grunted Sam Tibbets, not even bothering to look at poor Joe. ‘Keep your nerve.’ That was all. Directly after that it was upon us.

“It came from the only direction we hadn’t reckoned on: overhead. There was a thump on the roof of the cabin, and then a splintering as the boards were wrenched off directly above our heads. It caused a general confusion: everyone jumped and panicked, and no-one really knew what was happening. Joe McRudd’s rifle went off again; some of the other fellows shot as well, I don’t know what at. Before I could react, Sam Tibbets was snatched up from alongside me—something had him fast around the head and was dragging him off of his feet, up towards the hole in the roof.

“I grabbed him around the waist, but it was no use: I felt my own feet lifting clear of the floor as Sam was hoisted ever upward. He was trying to call out, but whatever had snatched him was laying tight hold around the whole of his head and neck, and all I could hear was a muffled roar of anger and pain—fear, too, I guess. It was as if he was being lynched, hung off a high bough and left to swing there while he throttled. I called to the rest of them to help, to hang on to us: a couple of them laid ahold of my legs and heaved, and for a moment we thought we had him. Then there came an awful sound, like something out of a butcher’s shop, and suddenly we were all sprawled on the floor of the cabin, with Sam Tibbets’ headless body lying dead weight on top of us.

“I don’t remember exactly how the next few seconds panned out. All I remember was being soaked with Sam’s blood: the heat of it, the force with which it gushed from his truncated neck, the bitter metallic stink. The fellows told me afterwards that I was screaming like a banshee on my hands and knees, but I know I wasn’t the only one. Jake the Indian brought me out of it: he dragged me away from the shambles in the middle of the room and slapped me a couple times till I quit bawling. As if coming round from a dream I goggled at him slack-mouthed; then I came to myself in a dreadful sort of recollection. Before he could stop me, I’d grabbed the big hunting-knife from its scabbard at his waist and pushed him out of the way.

“By climbing up on top of the hot stove, I just about managed to reach the hole in the roof. I had Jake’s knife between my teeth like the last of the Mohicans; I was covered all over in Sam Tibbets’ blood, and I was filled with the urge to vengeance, nothing else. I hoisted myself up so my head and shoulders were through the hole. With my elbows planted on the snow-covered shingles, I looked around.

“It was crouched by the farther end of the roof like a big old sack of guts, mumbling on something. Sam’s head. I made some sort of a noise, and it looked up: I mean, the thick squabby part on top of it suddenly grew long like an elephant’s trunk, and one furious red eye glared out at me from its tip. The noise it made: good God, I never heard the like. It damn near deafened me, even out in the open; it went ringing through my head like the last trump.

“Some part of its belly opened itself up, and Sam Tibbets’ head was gone with a terrible sucking crunch. Then all those tentacles that fringed the trunk suddenly came to life, writhing and flailing like a stinging jellyfish. One of them caught in my clothing—I slashed out at it with Jake’s knife, but I might as well have tried to cut a steel hawser. It had me fast; it was like being caught in a death-hold. The thing let rip a revolting sort of belch, and started to haul me in, and I had just enough time to feel the entire sum of my courage vanish in a wink as fear, total and absolute, rushed in to fill up every inch of my being. It’s a hell of a thing, to lose all self-respect that way: to know that the last thing you’ll feel before death is nothing but abject, craven panic. God, let me die like a man, I prayed, as the thing dragged me up out of the hole towards its gulping maw—that glaring gorgon’s eye—

“It was Jake down below contrived to save my life. He grabbed me by the ankles and swung on them like a church bell, and there came a sharp rip as my coat came to pieces at the seams. It didn’t have proper hold of me, only by the fabric, you see: that was what saved me, that and the Chinee tailor back in San Francisco who’d scrimped on the thread when he put that old pea-coat together. I went sliding back through the hole on the roof, while the thing struggled to regain its balance on the icy shingles. It let out another of those blood-freezing hollers, and then I was laying on top of Jake, in amidst all of the blood and the panic down below.

“All of the breath had gotten knocked out of me by the fall, and the same for Jake, who was underneath me, remember. The two of us were pretty much hors de combat for a while; plus, I dare say I wouldn’t have been much use even with breath in my lungs, not after the jolt I’d took up on the roof. I was aware that the rest of the fellows were running round like crazy, firing into the rafters and yelling fit to raise Cain. For myself, right then, I figured old Harvey Tibbets’d had the best idea, digging himself a hole—or trying to. I knew if it wanted to come down and try conclusions, we none of us stood a chance in hell, guns or no guns. I thought it was all up with us still, and to this day I don’t know why it wasn’t.

“Because after a while, in amongst all the raving and the letting-off of guns and the war-whoops and hollers and what have you, it gradually dawned on the fellows that there was no movement from up on the roof. Nothing coming through the hole at us, no fresh attack; no sound of creaking timbers, even—though I doubt we’d have heard it, we were making so much noise ourselves. In the end a couple of men ran outside to look up on the roof: nothing there, they yelled, and I thought to myself, no, of course not. It won’t show itself so easy. I figured it had only gone to earth for a while, that it would pick us off one by one when we weren’t expecting it.

“Then one of them happened to look upwards—I mean straight up, towards the sky. What he saw up there made him let out such a shout, it brought us all out of that broke-up shambles of a cabin. We joined him out in the snow: I remember us all standing there, staring up into the heavens as if God in all his glory was coming down and the final judgement was upon us.

“Silhouetted against the wraithlike flux of the aurora, the thing was ascending into the night sky. It had wings, but they didn’t seem to be lifting it, or even bearing its weight; it was as if it simply rose through the air the way a jellyfish rises through the water. That sound—that eldritch piercing howl—echoed all across the wide expanse of the landscape, from mountain to lakeshore, through all the sleeping trees, and I swear every beast that heard it must have trembled in its lair; must have whined and cowered and crept to the back of its cave and prayed to whatever rough gods had made it,
Lord, let this danger pass
.

“Up it rose, till we could hardly make it out against the green-wreathed stars. Then, there came one last throb of phosphorescence, bright as day—and it was as if a circuit burned out, somewhere in the sky. The aurora vanished, simple as that; and in the brief interval while our eyes adjusted to the paler starlight, I believe we all screamed, like children pitched headlong into the dark.

“As soon as we could see what we were doing again, we lost no time in getting out of that hateful place. Without waiting to bury our dead—poor Sam Tibbets—we beat a retreat back to Dawson, and there was never a band of pilgrims more relieved to see the sun come up. It shone off the frozen river in bright clean rainbows of ice; it showed us the dirty old log cabins we called home, and we wept with joy at the sight. Exhausted as I was, and scared too, and bewildered at all I’d seen, I believed we might be safe at last. Until the night came; that first night, and all the other nights that followed through that long Canadian winter.

“The nights were bad, you see. I took to sleeping in the daytime, when I could, and once it got dark I’d sit with Jake and the rest of the men in a private room at the back of one of the saloons, playing cards and drinking through to sun-up, very deliberately not talking about what we’d been through that evening. I was never really any good after that; not till I made it out of Dawson with the first thaw. Another season of that, and I’d have ended up a rummy in the streets of Skagway, telling tall tales for the price of a pint of hooch. Some of the men had heard of a fresh strike in Alaska, up on the shale banks at Nome—me, I’d lost heart, and could only think of getting home to San Francisco, where such things as we’d seen up on the roof of the cabin couldn’t be. Or that’s what I thought back then. What do
you
think, Mr. Fenwick?”

∇

For a second I thought he just wanted me to pass judgement on his tale—to say
yes, I believe you
, or
hang on a minute, are you sure about that
? Then I realised the import of his words. “You mean that thing down in the basement, don’t you?” I said, slowly, almost reluctantly, and he nodded. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out, and after a moment or two I shut it again.

“It looks every inch a match,” Keith said, through his hands. He sighed, and leaned back in his chair, staring up at the nicotine-yellow ceiling. “It was like some sort of damnable optical illusion—didn’t you get that?—the longer you looked at that black void, the more it seemed as if the creature was projected into the empty space.” With hands that trembled hardly at all, he lit up another cigar.

“A thing can’t come to life after so long,” I asserted, without a fraction of the confidence that had illuminated Keith’s entire narrative. “Nothing of this earth—” and there I stopped, remembering what the Indian had had to say on that subject.

“—Could last so long trapped inside a layer of coal,” finished Keith, helpfully. “It’s bituminous coal hereabouts; laid down during the Carboniferous age. That’s, what? Three hundred million years ago, give or take a few million. Imagine the world back then, Fenwick: the way it looked, the way things were all across the land. Dense humid forests; sodden bogs and peat swamps. The stink of rot, of decomposition; of new life forming, down amongst the muck and the decay. The first creatures had just crawled up out of the warm slimy seas, lizards and snails and molluscs, is all. Trilobites and dragonflies. Nothing much bigger than a crawdad. God, they would have been lords of the earth, Fenwick! They could still be now, if—” He broke off, and his hands went once more to his thin eager face. “If enough of them got turned up.” His voice was muffled somewhat, but in another way it was remarkably clear—clear-headed, at least.

“Three hundred million years.” I was having trouble with the concept—you could say that. Yes, you could certainly say that the concept was troubling me. “You’re saying that a thing—a thing—”

“Not of this earth,” put in Keith helpfully.

“Whatever—could keep alive for so long, under such incredible pressure; no air, no sustenance… why, it’s fantastic.”

“It’s fantastic, all right,” said Keith, and for the first time there was a hint of impatience in his deep even voice. “I thought I made it clear this wasn’t a tale you’d hear every day. But look at the facts. These miners here—they didn’t find a fossil, a chunk of rock! No more than the Tibbets found a fossil up there in the Klondike. Set aside your preconceptions, Fenwick. I had to. Look at the facts.”

“That’s just what I aim to do,” I said. “Tomorrow, when we get a look at this damn stupid whoosit of theirs.”

And on that note, though with a deal more talk thereafter, we agreed to leave it; and I went up to bed with a head full of questions and misgivings. The brandy helped me get off to sleep, in the end. If I dreamed, I’m glad to say I don’t remember it. And in any case—

There are many less-than-pleasant ways to be woken from even the most fitful of slumbers, I guess: but let the voice of experience assure you that there’s no more absolute way of rousing a fellow than the sound of a monstrous siren going off in what sounds like the next room down the corridor. I was practically thrown out of bed and into the corridor, where I bumped into Keith. He was already dressed; or more probably hadn’t been to bed yet.

“Accident at the mine,” I croaked. By this time I’d managed to remember where the hell I was, or just about.

“Maybe,” was all Keith would say. “Get your pants on, newspaperman.”

By the time we made it out into the street people were milling around in their nightshirts, asking each other was there trouble up to the mine. For a while no-one seemed to know, and everyone expected the worst; then, we saw the Mayor’s Ford barrelling down main street, and Keith practically flung himself in the way of it. Before Kronke or any of his stooges could complain, we were scrambling into the rumble seat and pumping them for information.