Fading Light: An Anthology of the Monstrous: Tim Marquitz (25 page)

It just does not care.

I had music turned up loud for most of the next few hours. It seemed
to help, to stop the oppressive sky from beating me down into the ice
that lay everywhere below me. I almost didn’t hear the
beep
as the probe announced a finding.

I checked the coordinates, and my heart sank. It was a four hour
flight away. I wasn’t sure my mind could take so much open
space, so much desolation. Then I remembered.

Ten short years
.
And twelve points short of my breeding
merit.

I set my eyes on the brightest star, and told the probe to go.

I tried to let my mind wander, to think of happier times in the
warren, of solid walls and enough light to keep the dark at bay
permanently. But my eye kept drawing me back to that star, a bright
pinpoint. At first I thought it might be one of the planets, before I
remembered that, without a star to light them, they too had gone
mostly dark. I realized that I was looking at Sol itself … or
what was left of her after the dimming.

You’ve all seen the history vids, you all know of the great
golden ball that some days seemed to fill the sky. And I know that
some of you harbor thoughts that it’s still up there, hanging
above, and that we will walk underneath its heat again.

I wish I could show you that sad little point of light that is all
that remains; I wish I could make you see just how far the dark has
encroached since we went under. I flew over the desolation for hours.
We know from our lessons that we went to ground where we hoped to be
hottest. Iceland they used to call it, a place of hot springs and
abundant thermal energy. Or so we thought. The dimming changed all of
that; not quickly, but three hundred years without heat is a long
time. And Iceland now lives up to its name.

There is no sea.

I’ll repeat that, for it is something we have forgotten. We see
the pictures, of waves crashing on sandy shores, and smiling people
walking hand in hand under open sky. Never again. There is ice, pack
ice, and rock. Nothing else.

I headed south and west. Again the history tells of cities, tall
mighty monuments to our past. They are all gone. The ice has eaten
everything. The history of mankind has gone cold. More than halfway
into my journey I crossed what had been the Equator, what had been
lush greenery. All gone. The whole planet has gone cold.

That was my thought and I saw nothing to make me change my mind.

Until I reached my destination.

And here I must take more care over my words. There are no histories
that mention what I must tell, no pictures I can show you. Only what
I have seen with my own eyes, and if I am to impress you with
urgency, I must be clear in my intent.

The flyer told me I was somewhere in the South Pacific. It looked
little different to the spot where I had come upside, but as I
descended I saw that the ice here was less compacted. Several darker
patches showed. As I got closer, I could see there were stretches of
broken ice and slush. I started to think there might even be open
water available. The probe beeped a proximity alert warning as the
flyer hovered ten feet above an island of rock, black against the ice
all around.

There was ore here, and a lot of it. The scan showed a seam, some one
hundred feet deep in the rock. I quickly spotted that I would have to
land and drill to get proof, for if the deposit was as large as it
seemed to be, then more flyers would be needed to carry it back below
to where it was needed.

I put the flyer down on the flattest spot I could find. I did not
need to get out to supervise the drilling; the on-board bot handled
that. But I could not come all this way to merely sit in a bubble.
Even despite the glowering stars overhead, my curiosity won over my
fear. I put on a helmet and ventured outside, aware even as I did so
that I was probably the first human to walk above ground for three
centuries.

I had to turn up the suit heater after just two steps. The helmet
told me I had two hours of power left, but I wasn’t worried. I
just wanted a short walk, just enough to be able to brag about it
back in the warren.

The only sound was the steady grinding of drill on rock. My heads-up
told me that the strata being drilled was sedimentary on top of
schist, the drill currently penetrating rock that was over two
hundred million years old, and going through a million years of
sediment a second.

All of which was secondary to the fact that I had just found a cave.

The heads up told me that drilling would take another thirty minutes.
And with the heater turned up full, I was cozy enough, despite the
outside temperature of minus 65, a figure which meant nothing to me.
Besides, I could always rationalize my decision to enter the cave
mouth by telling myself I needed some respite from the lowering stars
in the sky above.

I stepped into the darkness, and got a sudden fright when my helmet
switched on a bright light to show me the way. I felt my heart pound
in my ears and had to steady myself to quell the impulse to flee. But
two more steps took me in to the cave proper, and I almost felt at
home. The walls were smooth, some weathering process over the
millennia was my assumption, and the light from the helmet was bright
enough to light my way for twenty yards ahead. The cave floor sloped
downwards, and as I proceeded the temperature rose. It was when it
reached minus four that I was given pause for thought.

I might have discovered much more than just a source of ore. There
was obviously heat here. And plenty of it.

I went in further.

Fifty yards in I had to turn off the suit heater. I also got the
first indication that this was more than a simple cave. I found a
number imprinted on the wall. It read:

SUB LEVEL 25.

The passageway was man made.

As you can imagine, my heart rate was elevated as I went in further.
We know from our history that we were not the only ones to go under;
indeed we were communicating with some of the others for the best
part of a century. But there has been no contact for more than two
hundred years. The thought I might be close to meeting another human
being made me descend even faster.

There was still no sound beyond the increasingly distant grind of the
drill searching for ore. Neither was there any light beyond what my
helmet provided. But it kept getting warmer. The heads-up told me
there was only the thinnest of atmosphere beyond my visor, but it
felt almost as if I walked a corridor in the warren.

I came to a junction and chose the right hand fork, heading deeper
into the system.

I found the first corpse seconds later.

We are inured against death by our merit procedures. That, and the
walk to the chamber when our time has come, means I have lived my
whole life in the warren without seeing a dead person.

It is not pretty.

Pieces of dried skin hung in flaps from white bone. I was so appalled
that it took me seconds to spot the important fact. The dead man had
not been wearing a suit. He had died while there was still an
atmosphere in the cave system.

Not being an expert, I had no way of telling how long ago that might
have been, but judging by the decomposition of the clothing, I
guessed that many years had passed.

I kept going, but I was no longer convinced I would meet anyone yet
alive.

The corridor opened into a wider chamber, an eating area of sorts.

Bodies lay strewn everywhere, lying on mounds or pairs. Skeletal arms
were wrapped around broken necks, skulls showed signs of having been
bashed in against tables and floor. They had all killed each other in
a frenzied melee.

As I bent to inspect the closest, I saw the cause.

The darkness danced in their eye-sockets, a deeper shadow. It was
full of stars where the sky had fallen in and got them.

The more I looked, the more I saw it; there in the shadow where a
body hung over an overturned chair, there in the corner under the
food processors, but mostly in the eyes, dancing and twinkling,
mocking my horror.

I stumbled past more bodies than I could count, searching for a
reason, an answer as to what had happened. The empty eyes followed me
everywhere I went. There was a door opposite me, and I went through,
hoping for some small escape from the terror.

I recognized where I was. The corridor structure almost exactly
mirrored the structure of the warren here. Indeed, I began to fear
for my sanity, thinking I had inadvertently returned home to find you
all dead, all taken. There were no bodies in this part of the system,
just long empty corridors, but that somehow only made matters worse.

I went deeper.

Although I was still safe inside the suit, the air seemed somehow
thicker here, more oppressive; a faint trace of blue mist hanging in
the air. If I were home, I knew I would be approaching the bionic
plant. Despite the terrors of the eating area above, I was almost
eager to visit the working parts of the site, as there may even be
something salvageable there, something that would further prolong our
own time here in the warren.

I descended a stairwell and walked out into their bionics plant.

Scores of eyes turned and looked at me, reflecting like twinkling
stars in my helmet light.

They had once been human, that much was obvious. What was equally
obvious was that they had not been so for some time. The skin was
pale, almost translucent, their eyes large, like saucers in heads too
small to hold them. They scrambled, on all fours, amid a pile of
slurry that seemed thicker in places.

I gagged when I saw the first rib cage, the first thighbone.

They started to crawl towards me, piteously mewling like hungry
kittens. Stars danced in their eyes.

I fled.

I will not tell of my flight from that place, save to say that I have
deleted the coordinates from the systems. If you want the ore, you
will have to send out another flyer.

But I would advise against it, for the darkness will come back with
them. The sky will fall, and your eyes will fill with stars. The
darkness will get inside, and it will consume you, as it did to those
poor things in the bionics lab … as it has started to do to
me.

It is vast, it is empty, and it does not care.

It just does not care.

“The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have
become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild beyond good and evil,
with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing
and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new
ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the
earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.”

“The Call of Cthulu”

-H. P. Lovecraft

It could be said that it is an unfortunate turn of events that would
lead anyone to the community of Dunwich, and it was my unfortunate
luck to do just that. Looking at it you would think it a peaceful
place, beautiful in a small homely way, though up until recently few
would have wanted to call it home. Nestled in the quiet Massachusetts
countryside, Dunwich is the kind of town one could easily overlook,
passing by the unnamed road that led into the small nestled valley it
lay in, or that used to be the case.

Until recently the entire Dunwich area had been abandoned, and even
the neighboring towns of Aylesbury and Deans Corners had been nothing
more than a few ramshackle shacks. It is amazing that Dunwich has
survived at all since its near destruction during the great
depression in the late 20’s , though some blamed it on
something more supernatural making obscure references to a particular
event they dubbed “The Horror of 28” which is still kept
alive in Dunwich folklore, but in the summer of ‘68, when I
visited Dunwich for the first time, it was quickly becoming the
fastest growing community in Massachusetts thanks to the work of
Thomas Chifford, its newly elected mayor.

Taking advantage of a racially divided America, Chifford took out
advertisements within major newspapers from Chicago to New York
advertising Dunwich as the new model American town, completely
integrated and dedicated to the ideals of equality for all. It was
while reading an article in the
Arkham Advertiser
that I first
heard about Mayor Chifford’s efforts to revitalize Dunwich, and
it was a general call for teachers who strongly believe in a new
racially integrated America that drew me, and when a personal
invitation to teach at Dunwich academy arrived, I jumped at the
chance. As a recent graduate of Miskatonic University, this was just
the break I had been looking for.

It was mid-August when I first drove the 30 odd miles through the
deep Miskatonic pass, a drive I would only repeat twice more. On
either side steep rising ridges surrounded the lone winding roadway
sheltering the valley. Evidence of former rockslides dotted the side
of the road, and above future rockslides menacingly loomed over the
pass below.

On driving into the valley below one needs stop at a lone gas station
sitting on a small mountain pass near Harsen’s Peak. Owned and
serviced by one of the old denizens of Dunwich, this small station
offered a picturesque view of Dunwich in the valley below nestled
between the Miskatonic River and the base of Round Mountain with a
nest of gabled houses nestled within the misted copse of trees.

The planning had been meticulous. Where only two decades before there
had been a handful of ramshackle burned out shells of lone
farmhouses, a dead town struggling to survive, new houses were now
sprouting out of the ruins below, and new paved roads replaced the
dirt trails of ages past. This was the Dunwich I would come to know
in the next few months, one that for a brief time I called home.