Hive

The dorm room was dark, the readout of a digital clock over on the wall casting a grainy green illumination. There were two beds in there. If you fell out of yours, you stood a good chance of falling into your partner’s. They were crowded places, the dorms, but space was limited at the stations. Tonight, the other bed was empty. Lind was sleeping on a cot in the infirmary, shot full of Seconal by Doc Sharkey.

Hayes was alone.

Dreams, just dreams. Nothing to get worked up about.

Maybe it had been what happened to Lind and maybe it was something else, but the dreams had been bad. Real bad. Even now, Hayes was all fuzzy-headed and he couldn’t be sure they were dreams. He couldn’t remember them all, just some tangled skein of nightmares where he was pursued, hiding from terrible shapes with burning eyes.

He could only remember the last one with any clarity.

And that’s the one that had yanked him out of sleep, made him sit right up, teeth chattering. In the dream, some grotesque freezing black shadow had fallen over him, bathing him with the cold of tombs and crypts. It had been standing at the foot of his bed, that seething amorphous shape, looking at him . . . and that had done it. He’d woken up, fighting back a scream.

Nerves.

Jesus, that’s all it was. Too much weird shit happening lately, his imagination had been cranked. And when you lost control of your imagination during the long Antarctic winter, you could be in real trouble.

Hayes settled back in, deciding to lay off the microwave lasagna before bedtime. Because that was probably the real culprit.

Couldn’t be anything else.

6

By the next afternoon, everyone in camp had heard about Lind’s little episode.

At a research station like Kharkhov, there were no secrets. Stories — whether real, imagined, or grossly exaggerated — made the rounds like clap at a convention. Everything was passed around, re-told, re-invented, blown out of proportion until it bore little resemblance to the incident that had inspired it.

In the mess hall, trying to eat his grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup in peace, they were all over Hayes like birds on roadkill, all pecking away to see if there was any good red meat left on the carcass.

“Heard Lind tried to slit his wrists,” Meiner, one of the heavy equipment operators was saying, smelling like diesel fuel and hydraulic grease and not doing much for Hayes’ appetite. “Sumbitch just went crazy, they’re saying, crazier than a red-headed shitbug. Just lost it staring down at that mummy in the ice.”

Hayes sighed, set his sandwich down. “He -”

“It’s true enough,” St. Ours said. “I was there with him for awhile. He was getting a funny look in his eyes the whole time, just staring at the ugly bastard in the ice, that monster just thawing out and that face swimming up clear . . . and it weren’t no sort of face I’d want to see again.”

Rutkowski jumped in at that point, started saying how Lind had gotten a funny gleam in his eyes like a man ready to jump off a bridge. That none of it surprised him because there was something funny about Lind and something even funnier about those dead things Gates had dragged back from the camp in the foothills.

They talked on and on non-stop.

Didn’t let Hayes get a word in edgewise about any of it. Other than Gates, Holm, and Bryer, he’d been the only one to see Lind’s breakdown, if that’s what it had been. Both Rutkowski and St. Ours had left the hut maybe fifteen minutes before. Not that the lack of firsthand experience in the matter was slowing them down any.

Meiner was saying how he’d been at the Palmer Station on Anvers Island one lean winter and that three people had committed suicide one week, slit their wrists to a man, one after the other. It was spooky shit, he said. Got so people at Palmer thought there was some sort of insanity bug making the rounds. But that was the Antarctic winter, sometimes people just couldn’t take the isolation, the desolation, it got under their skins like scabies. And when that happened, when something slipped a cog upstairs, then that left a person wide open to bad “influences.”

“Don’t surprise me, not one cunt-hair,” St. Ours confessed to them. “We had this man and wife team at McMurdo one winter, funny ducks they were, geologists, studying rocks and corings, always looking for something but real vague as to what it was when you put a question to ‘em. Anyway, they were up on Mount Erebus for maybe a week, doing some digging. They come down, come back, and they got this funny look in their eyes . . . kind of a shellshocked look, you know?”

Rutkowski nodded. “Seen it plenty of times.”