The Spawning (19 page)

And that was the primary reason that Coyle did not dismiss the man out of hand. Because as goofy as some people thought he was, he was essentially open-minded and his study group was a forum for intellectual discussion . . . even if people tended to show up just because he had really good dope.

“I don't know what their purpose is, Locke. But I'm beginning to think that they do have one. That's why I came here. I thought you'd have some crazy bugaboo bullshit to explain it.”

“It's good to be needed.”

“I'm serious.”

“So am I, my friend. Just glad you still have faith in me after I threw a fit when NASA cut our Callisto feed.”

“You think they cut it on purpose, don't you?”

“Is there any doubt?”

Nobody at Clime doubted Locke's ability to handle the Power Station or that he was the key man that would keep their white asses rosy and toasted, keep the lights on and the fires burning. He was good at his job. Which is why he was always invited back by the NSF and its support contractors. Maybe he got a little strange with his UFOs and conspiracies, but he was harmless. He just wanted answers and he firmly believed that there were people in power that had them. Sometimes people kidded him, but when he talked, they listened. Even Frye would listen and Frye had little patience or respect for anyone.

Coyle genuinely liked Locke.

He was way out sometimes, but he had a good head on his shoulders for the most part. And he was fun. He really got into the theme parties and made sure everyone else did, too. Last winter at Clime, they had a Holy Grail theme party. They'd watched
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
again and again. Everybody was drunk and rowdy and out of control in their makeshift Medieval robes and cloaks and tinfoil armor, brandishing cardboard swords about. Locke went beyond that, as usual. He had proclaimed himself one of the Knights that Say “Nee” from the movie. Just stoned to the gills in his black robe and towering cardboard headpiece, he went around demanding shrubberies and saying “Nee” when anyone tried to talk to him. It was hilarious.

But theme parties, like laughter, seemed to be a thing of the past now.

“Tell me, Nicky,” Locke said, pulling off his joint and brushing a hand over his buzz cut. “Do you see any other connections here? Other events that seem to be part of greater whole?”

“Sure. I see them everywhere I look. People disappearing from Mount Hobb. The megaliths over in the Sentinel Mountains. The chopper crash. What Slim and Horn saw under that tarp. Colony Station . . . do I need to go on?”

Locke shook his head. “No, you don't. Honestly, Nicky, I don't know what's going on anymore than you do. But I came this year because I knew this was going to happen. After the Kharkov thing, I knew things were ready to escalate out of control.”

“And you think that's happening now?”

“Yes. And so do you or you wouldn't be here, my friend.”

Well, Coyle couldn't argue the logic of that.

Frye liked to call Locke a comic book nerd, but Locke was hardly that. With his buzzcut and team sportswear on, he looked much like the jock he was who played basketball and soccer and tennis in his free time, had pulled a tour with the Marines and lettered in no less than four sports in college. He even had a black belt in Aikido. But for all his impressive physical acumen, Locke's mind was sharp as a tack and it was his fiercest weapon.

“Nicky, you were down here when that business at Kharkov happened, weren't you? I didn't get on the Ice until the next year, but you were here.”

Coyle nodded. “I was at McMurdo that winter. There'd been some strange shit coming in on the radio from Kharkov. We all knew something was brewing there, we just didn't know what. You know what I remember most?”

“What?”

“How tense things got at MacTown. It was spooky.”

Coyle told him about it.

If you'd spent any time on the Ice, then you got to hear a lot of strange stories about ghosts and dead civilizations and all that. Things like that had been floating around since the days of Scott and Amundsen and even the early whalers and seal hunters. But nobody paid much attention to it until the events at Kharkov Station five years previous. It had been a bad winter. Stories were filtering out about Dr. Gates finding the ruins of a pre-human city and alien mummies in the ice and then other stuff about another city beneath Lake Vordog, which Kharkov sat on top of. A team had drilled through the ice and seen things down there in that lake. Things that were
not
mummies.

“Everyone got spooked. And I mean
spooked.
It was scary business,” Coyle told him. “Then we started hearing that Kharkov was in trouble. That people were going mad over there. I remember that there was a team at Pole Station that was ready to go to Kharkov and effect a rescue, but the NSF said absolutely not. Which we thought was outrageous. I didn't take any of it too seriously until word leaked that everyone was dead but Jimmy Hayes, the boiler engineer, and Sharkey, the camp doctor. When I heard what Hayes was saying, I started to take it real serious.”

“Why?”

Coyle swallowed. “Because I knew Hayes. I'd wintered with him at Palmer Station and summered with him at Pole. Hayes was a tough, capable sonofabitch, Locke. He was sturdy stuff. If anybody else had been saying stuff about aliens, I wouldn't have believed it. But Jimmy Hayes? No, he was the real thing.”

“Nobody knows where Hayes and that doctor are now, do they?”

“Nope. Word has it they went into hiding to avoid all the newspaper people and weirdos that wanted their story. I heard they went to Mexico, but who knows?”

Locke pulled off his joint, roached it when Coyle said he'd had enough. “Now you know, of course, what Hayes and Dr. Sharkey were saying?”

“Yeah, I remember their original statement. They said they found everyone dead at Kharkov. They didn't know why.” Coyle laughed. “Nobody bought it, of course. With all those wild emails and radio transmissions coming out of there, it all seemed too pat. Nobody was buying it.”

“Then, Hayes and Sharkey retracted that and wrote a statement,” Locke said. “And that statement landed like a bomb. You remember what it said?”

How could he forget?

It was heady enough stuff for the rest of the world and absolute nectar for the conspiracists, but for the people who lived and worked in Antarctica it was dynamite. And especially those who knew Hayes and Sharkey. Knew they were solid and practical people. That's what was so damn hard about it. Their statement confirmed that Dr. Gates and his team had indeed found a gigantic series of ruins in a massive subterranean chamber. That those ruins were not of human origin. That there were alien beings there. Some of them were mummies and some of them were very much alive.

That, of course, was enough to kick the legs out from everyone, but then Hayes and Sharkey said they'd found evidence that Antarctica was the cradle of all life on Earth. That these aliens had engineered life in the primeval oceans of Earth during the Archeozoic Era, some three-to four-billion years ago. And more startling, that they created life and seeded the planet with the sole purpose of bringing forth
intelligent
life.

Intelligent life that they could exploit or harvest. Crazy shit.

And what was the aftermath?

Well, on a worldwide scale it went from panic to outright dismissal. There was no evidence, so Hayes and Sharkey were written off as cranks. Hayes said he had blown up the cavern leading to the ruins. If there had been an opening, it was now under a mountain of rock and ice. And the NSF stated clearly that there was nothing at the bottom of Lake Vordog but some simple life forms, all very terrestrial in origin, but certainly nothing from another world. After that, investigators of every stripe swarmed to Antarctica and found nothing that would support the claims of Hayes and Sharkey.

“When it all came out, you told people you worked down here, they made alien jokes and said take me to your leader. All that fun stuff,” Coyle admitted.

“People believe what they want to believe, don't they? As you may recall, Nicky, organized religion refuted all of this outright. And why not? It destroyed the very basis of a superior being, a god-like creator. Politicians didn't care for it much either. Nor did your average Joe on the street. And you couldn't blame them really. Who wants to think that everything we are has been engineered? That even our culture and gods are just based on archetypes those aliens imprinted in our minds? I don't care for it much myself and neither would any other rational person.”

Coyle just sat there, staring at the UFO and megalith posters on the walls, the books on the shelves:
Arktos: The Polar Myth,
Bernard's
The Hollow Earth,
Kafton-Minkel's
Subterranean Worlds,
and Farrell's
Reich of the Black Sun.
All of these and more sandwiched in-between books on alien abduction, extraterrestrial intelligence, life on Mars, and UFO studies.

Usually, he got a big kick out of Locke, but today he found him depressing. Science fiction and scary stories and weird urban legends were all fun, but when they started becoming real the fun definitely ended. Locke liked to talk about offbeat Antarctic myths and tales and theories: alternate civilizations beneath the ice caps, the Nazis building fortresses under the ice, hollow earth theories, or even Admiral Byrd's supposed claim of seeing an ice-free land peopled by primitive humans and huge shaggy prehistoric mammals during a solo flight over the Pole.

“But the megaliths . . .” Coyle said, not wanting to really proceed with any of it.

“Yes, the megaliths.”

“Give me your take on them. Did these aliens build them?”

Locke considered it a moment. “Yes and no. The ones on Callisto, surely, and the ones in the Beacon Valley without a doubt. But Stonehenge and the others? No, I don't think so.
We
built them. But I think we built them because they
wanted
us to. They implanted something in our minds that came to the fore at a particular moment in our intellectual development, roughly ten-thousand years ago. The megaliths were erected by Neolithic peoples who no doubt thought they were building them for religious reasons. And, in a way, they probably were.”

“But what
is
their purpose?”

“I don't know.” Locke was silent a moment and unlike other times when he talked about these things, he didn't seem to be enjoying himself at all. “Remember what Hayes and Sharkey said? That some of what they knew came from firsthand experience, but the majority was from Dr. Gates's laptop? The NSF confiscated that. If there was anything on it, it was never made public. But according to them, Gates believed that there were things these aliens—which he called the ‘Old Ones' or the ‘Elder Things'—buried in the human race, controls or mechanisms, that would awaken at the proper stages of our mental evolution. Some of these would have been to build the megaliths. Another, Gates believed, was that we would be drawn to Antarctica, drawn to our makers, drawn to the last surviving colony of those things. And we have been. He believed none of it was accidental, all was design. That when our populations achieved a suitable size and complexity and intellectual level, they would awaken other imperatives within us. Imperatives they would unlock on a global scale. Imperatives that would make us like them, psychic brothers, and allow them to harvest us.”

“And?”

Locke licked his lips, looked Coyle dead in the eye. “I think it's beginning now. We saw a stirring of it at Kharkov five years ago. The beginning of it. A trial run, so to speak. But now it'll be the real thing. A global awakening. You can think that's hoodoo bullshit if you want, but what's happening at megalith sites around the world confirms this. Something is about to happen, Nicky, something immense and ugly. And when it happens, the human race as an independent body will cease to exist. The Old Ones will own us. We'll be pulled into the greater whole of them and I don't honestly believe there's a fucking thing we can do about it.”

Coyle didn't speak for a moment because his breath didn't want to come. It was like the world was unraveling around him. “You know what, Locke? You sure know how to ruin a good buzz.”

“Enjoy your buzz while you can,” he said with all due seriousness, “because by this time next year, human things like getting high and screwing for pleasure rather than stock and even freewill itself will be a thing of the past.”

MARCH 5

C
OYLE DID NOT SLEEP well that night.

Every time he closed his eyes he had images of those aliens. He'd never actually seen one, but he'd heard enough descriptions and had seen Slim's drawings so the images of those hideous things leaped into his mind quite easily. And he had to wonder, with what Locke told him, if those images had not been there all along . . . just waiting to surface.

Regardless, they haunted what little sleep he did get.

Gwen showed up around midnight, but even spending the night with her did little to ease his mind.

The next morning the temperature was a balmy 30 below with a shrieking wind that made the windows rattle. Nothing special there. As he made breakfast for the crew—fried bacon and stirred a cauldron of hash browns and whisked pancake batter—he watched them come in, wondering if they were feeling any of what he was feeling.

But it didn't seem so.

The Beav was doing her weekly inventory in the freezers, singing along to “Groovin'” by The Young Rascals which she had playing on the CD player, reminding one and all of those carefree days of ‘67. Ida was still lazy. She was only cutting up fruit because The Beav was there making her do it. Gut came in from her morning snow removal duties bitching about her daughter who had apparently gotten back together with her carny-ex. Hopper breezed through, exclaiming how he loved the smell of bacon in the morning. Special Ed sat by himself in the corner, eating toast and drinking coffee and going over his reports. Horn didn't show at all for breakfast, but that wasn't unusual. He was probably out in the Heavy Shop or garage working on the Sno-Cats or the Sprytes. He never showed until lunch. Likewise for Locke. As winter advanced, Locke became more obsessive about his generators, nursing them like an overprotective mother. Stokes, Hansen, and Koch, the FEMC crew, had been up all night running piping for the boilers so they were sleeping in. Gwen came in with Zoot, and Cryderman was too hung-over most mornings to do anything. Same went for Doc Flagg. And Eicke rarely left Atmospherics.