New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird (26 page)

“So you can bet we jumped at the chance to go prospecting, away up in the frozen wastes. That was a new frontier, sure enough: maybe the last frontier, and we weren’t about to miss it. And we piled on to those coffin-ships out of Frisco and Seattle, hundreds of us at a time; stampeders, we called ourselves. There was about as much thinking went into it as goes into a stampede.

“The Canucks wouldn’t let you into the country totally unprepared, though. You had to have a ton of goods, supplies and suchlike, else they’d stop you at the docks. And that took some getting together; eleven hundred pounds of food, plus clothing and equipment, horses to carry it with, that sort of thing. I was travelling light—reckoned to hire sled-dogs up in Canada—but even so, my goods took some lugging at the wharf.

“So we sailed North. A thousand miles out of Seattle we made the Lynn Canal, which was where every one of us bold prospectors had to make his first big decision. Where was he going to disembark? ’Cause there were two trails, see, up to Dawson and the goldfields, six hundred miles due north. You could take the easy route, avoiding all the big mountains—that was Skagway and the White Pass. The other route started in Dyea, and it took in the Chilkoot Pass, leading on to the lakes. Even us greenhorns knew about the Chilkoot by that time.

“A lot of folk chose Skagway, but I never heard anything good about that town. In Indian it’s “the place where a fair wind never blows”, which pretty much sums it up, I guess. Leave it to the Indians to know which way the wind blows. Soapy Smith’s gang ran the town—he was an old-time con artist out of Georgia, and he knew a hundred ways to pick the pockets of every rube that staggered down the gangplank. Twenty-five cents a day wharf rates on each separate piece of goods. Lodging-houses where they fleeced you on the way in and the way out. Saloons and whorehouses; casinos with rigged wheels and marked cards. Portage fees. Tolls all the way along the trail—and bandits too, armed gangs and desperadoes, hand in glove with the ‘official escorts,’ like as not. No sir: I chose Dyea, which was not a hell of a lot more salubrious, but at least you didn’t have Soapy’s hand in your britches all the while.

There was ice all over the boat as it hove into Dyea. It looked like a ghost ship, and I guess we were a sorry-enough looking bunch of ghosts as we stumbled off. The mountains came right down to the outskirts of town; took us two weeks of hard going to climb as far as Sheep Camp, at the base of the Chilkoot. I tell you: there were lots of men took one look at that mountainside and gave it up on the spot, stayed on in camp and made a living for themselves as best they could. You couldn’t call them the stupid ones, not really. A thousand feet from base to summit, sheer up and down, straight as a beggar can spit? Any sane man would have tuned round and said ’scuse me, my mistake, beg your pardon.

“We were obliged to stay in Sheep Camp for the best part of March, till the pass came navigable. Bad weather, and the worst kind of terrain; even the Indian guides wouldn’t touch it in those conditions. It was just before spring thaw, and the weather was ornery in the extreme. Minus sixty-five one night, by the thermometer in Lobelski’s General Store. It stayed light from nine-thirty in the morning to just before four in the afternoon. The rest of it was pitch dark and endless cold.

“They were building some sort of a hoisting-gear up the Chilkoot, the tramway they called it, but I never saw it finished. I hauled my goods up there, the old fashioned way. I could have paid the Indians to do it for me, a dollar a pound, but I didn’t have two thousand dollars to spare. That was why I was bound for the Yukon in the first place. So I hauled every last case up that mountain side, forty trips in all. I was raw from the chafing of the ropes on my shoulders, and I was nigh on crippled by the exhaustion and the cold—but I managed it. Somehow. Don’t ask me how. It’d kill me now if I tried it.

“Truth is, I don’t know how it didn’t kill me back then. Fifteen hundred toeholds in the ice, up a trail no more than two feet wide. Take a step to left and right, and you were in the powder stuff, loose and treacherous. If a man slipped, it was all up with him; you never saw him again. That pass was filled with the bodies of good men.

“Anyway! Come April I was over the Chilkoot and heading toward Dawson, a mere five hundred and fifty miles off. The trail led along Lake Lindeman and Lake Bennett: if you waited for the thaw, the sheer volume of melt coming down off the mountains turned the rivers into rapids. If you went early, like I did, it was just a question of praying the ice wouldn’t break. You put it out of your mind, till it came time to camp at night and you’d hear the ice creaking and groaning below you. We rigged up the sleds with sails, and the wind used to push us along at a fine clip. All we had to do was trust in the Lord and watch out for the cracks.

“The lakes weren’t properly clear of ice till the end of May, and by that time we bold sled-skaters were already in Dawson, just six months after we’d first set out to strike it rich. Dawson was a stumpy, scroungy kind of town at the bend of the river, set on mudflats and made of nothing much but mud, or so it seemed. Five hundred people lived there as a rule: gold fever pushed that up to twelve thousand by the start of the year, thirty thousand by that summer’s end. It was a breeding ground for typhoid—I stayed clear of the place, except when I made my victualling run once a week.

“I was working my claim south-east of Dawson city, out among the dried-up river beds. That was where I got my crash-course in mining—a year earlier, I’d have thought you just scuffed around in the dirt with the toe of your boot till you turned up some nuggets. Not in Yukon territory. You had to dig your way down to the pastry, we called it, the layers where the gold lay, through forty, fifty feet of rock and frost-hard river muck; tough going? Yes, sir. You broke your back on nothing more than a hunch and a hope. Besides that, all you had was the comradeship of your fellows and the one chance in a hundred thousand your claim would pay out big. I almost came to value the one more than the other, because when the chips were down you could rely on the comradeship at least. Money ain’t everything, not in those latitudes. Maybe not in these.

“All through that summer I dug away in the dried-up beds, till it came autumn, and time to make another big decision. The last boat out of Dawson sailed on September the sixteenth, and a lot of fellows I knew were on it, the ones who’d struck it rich and the ones who’d simply had enough. I didn’t fall into either camp: I waved that boat away from the landing, and made my plans to stay on through the winter. Plenty did: the proud and foolish ones like me, who couldn’t quite bring themselves to admit defeat and go home with only a few grains of gold in their pokes; the optimists, who couldn’t believe that the best was over, that the juicy lodes were already worked out and the rest only dry holes; and worst of all the hard core, the ones who’d caught it worst of all, who had no place left for them back in the real world. Quite a bunch.

“I remember one evening in that October of ’98, standing up on the banks outside my camp and looking out over the dry gulches. Some of the fellows were burning fires at their workings, trying to melt the frost so the digging would go easier. It lit up all that strange and beautiful landscape like the surface of some alien planet, the fires like lanterns shining out in the gloom, and the way the wood smoke smell drifted up across the bluffs . . . I could have stayed there for the rest of my life, or so I told myself. I sat and watched those fires till it got full dark, anyway, and later on that night I saw the aurora for the first time, the Northern lights, how they flickered green and magical in the moonless sky.

“The week after, it began to snow for real, and I had to strike camp and head back for Dawson. Some didn’t; some stayed out on the flats, and that’s where the story really begins.

“I must’ve been back in Dawson a couple of months, because it was nigh on Christmas when we got word from out on the workings that they’d found something strange—not gold, which would have been strange enough by that time, but something weird, something the likes of which nobody had ever seen. At least, that’s what Sam Tibbets told us, when he come in to Dawson for supplies. It was the three Tibbets brothers worked the claim, along with a half-dozen other fellows all hailed from Maine: they were a syndicate, all for one and one for all. They hadn’t found a lot of gold—hardly enough for one man to retire on, let alone nine—but Sam reckoned if the worst came to the worst, they could always go into the exhibition business with this thing they’d dug up out of the frost. ‘It’s a new wonder of the world, or maybe the oldest one of all,’ I can hear him saying it, hunkered down by the stove in the saloon with the frost melting in his mustache and the steam rising off his coat; ‘I reckon it must ‘a turned up late for last boarding on the ark, or else Noah throwed it overboard on account of its looks.’

“ ‘What d’you mean?’ I asked him.

“ ‘Aw, Horton, you never saw such a cretur as this,’ he said earnestly—he was straight-ahead and simple, was Sam Tibbets. He was one of the original ice-skaters from back on the lakes in the spring: I liked him a lot. ‘It’s like a plug-ugly dried-up old thing the size of one of them barrels there—’ he pointed at a hogshead in the corner—‘and about that same shape, ’cept maybe it comes to sort of a narrow place up top. It’s got long thin arms, only dozens of ’em, all around, and there’s nippers on the end, same as a lobster? I swear there ain’t never been such a confusion. Wait till we haul it back out of here, come the thaw. They’ll pay a dime a head back in Frisco just to clap eyes on it, I tell you!’

“It was a plan at that, and if nothing else it made me mighty curious to take a look at this thing, whatever it was. The way Sam told it, they’d been digging through the frozen subsoil when they turned it up: he thought it must have gotten caught in the river away back, stuck in the mud and froze up when the winter came. How deep was it, I asked him, thinking the deeper it lay, the older it must be; ’bout twenty feet, he reckoned.

“ ‘So it’s dead, then, this thing?’ That was Cy Perrette, who was not the smartest man in the Yukon territory, not by a long chalk. He was staring at Sam Tibbets like a dog listening to a sermon.

“ ‘It better be,’ said Sam. ‘It’s been buried in the earth since Abraham got promoted to his first pair of long pants, ain’t it?’ Men started laughing all through the saloon, and pretty soon Sam had a line of drinks set down before him. Dawson folks appreciated a good tale, see: something to take their minds off the cold and dark outside, and the endless howling winds. I remember the aurora was particularly strong that night; when I staggered out of the saloon and the cold knocked me sober, there it was, fold upon fold, glowing and rippling from horizon to horizon. I remember thinking, that’s what folk mean when they say ‘unearthly.’ Something definitively not of this planet, something more to do with the heavens than the earth.

“Come morning there was quite a little gang of us, all bent on following Sam Tibbets back to his camp for a look-see at the eighth wonder. Sam was agreeable, said he’d waive our admission fees just this once, on account of the circumstances, and we set off towards the workings. It was a cheerful excursion; the sleds were always lighter when you had company along the trail.

“Sam broke into a run when we reached the banks of the river bed; wanted to welcome us to the site of their discovery, I suppose, like any showman would. He clambered up a snowdrift; then, when he reached the top, he stopped, and even from down below I thought he looked confused. He let go his sled; it slithered down the bank and I had to look sharp, else it’d have taken me off at the shins. ‘Sam!’ I called him, but he didn’t look round. I scrambled up after him, cussing him for a clumsy oaf and the rest of it; then I saw what he’d seen, and the words got choked off in my throat.

“Straight away you could see something was wrong. Sam and his partners had built themselves a cabin by the workings, nothing fancy, but solid enough to take whatever the Yukon winter could throw at it, they’d thought. Now, one end of that cabin was shivered all to pieces. The logs were snapped and splintered into matchwood, just exactly as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. Only the cannon would have had to be on the inside of the cabin, not the outside: there was wreckage laying on the ground for a considerable distance, all radiating out and away from the stoved-in part.

“That wasn’t the worst part, though. In amongst the wreckage you could see the snow stained red, and there was at least one body mixed in with the blown-out timber. I saw it straight away; I know Sam had too, because he turned around and looked at me as I grabbed his arm, and I could hear this high sort of keening noise he was making, like some kind of machine that’s slipped its gears, about to break itself to pieces. It was the purest, most fundamental sound of grief I’d ever heard coming out of a human being. I’ve never forgotten it to this day.

“My first thought as we began running down the banks was: dynamite. Plenty of the miners used it to start off an excavation, or to clear whatever obstructions they couldn’t dig around. It wasn’t unusual for a camp such as this to have a few sticks laying around in case of emergencies. Now, if you got careless . . . ? You understand what I’m saying. That was my first assumption, anyway. It lasted until I got in amongst the wreckage.

“Dynamite couldn’t account for it, was all. It couldn’t have left cups and bottles standing on the table, and still blown a hole in the cabin wall big enough to drive a piled-up dogsled through. It wouldn’t have left a man’s body intact inside its clothes, and taken his head clean off at the neck. And it couldn’t have done to that head . . . the things I saw done to the head of poor Bob Gendreau. Put it this way: my second assumption was bears; them, or some other wild animal. Bears roused too soon from their hibernation, hungry and enraged, coming on the camp and smashing it all to pieces. But again, when you looked at all the evidence, that didn’t sit right either.

“There was a side of bacon hanging on the wall still; bears would have taken that. And they wouldn’t have stopped at knocking off the head of Bob Gendreau; that’s not where the sustenance lies, and all a bear ever looks for is sustenance. Whatever took Bob’s head off, then mauled it so his own mother wouldn’t have known it; that thing wasn’t doing what it did out of blind animal instinct, nor yet the need for nourishment. That thing was doing what it did because it wanted to—because it liked it, maybe. Some say man is the lord of all creation because he’s the only creature blessed with reason; others, that he’s set apart from the rest of the beasts because he takes pleasure in killing, and there’s no other animal does that. But up in that cabin I learned different. Now, I believe there’s at least one other creature on this planet that draws satisfaction from its kills, and not just a square meal. I got my first inkling of that when I saw what was left of Harvey Tibbets.