Raymond Stantz

The events of the night of January the twenty-fourth, 1931, would be graven upon the tables of Lake's memory for the remainder of his mortal days. There was nothing at first that particularly suggested this would be the case. It was true that the winds were pouring down out of the titanic mountains at a rate unlike anything he had ever seen before, and true as well that their dogs, even behind the highest and stoutest wall of snow the men could manage, were in a state of frenzy unlike anything he had ever known of them. But such matters were ordinary concerns, under the circumstances. The question at hand was one of immediate survival. There were snow walls to raise and tent cloth to weight down with the heaviest snow that could be found. Nature was about to do her worst, and under the circumstances he could well have been excused for failing to give thought to his future beyond the moment. In fact, he had but one brief glimmer of perspective as he and the brilliant young Gedney laboured valiantly to turn that terrible climate's own material- the snow- against itself. It occurred to him that the sole survivor of the Scott expedition, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, had referred to his time in Antarctica as 'the worst journey in the world'. That, too, had been in the name of science, and portended great things; perhaps-

But there was no time for perhaps, and no room for further thought. The winds had grown too terrible for thought, and there was nothing to be done but struggle. To stop moving now, even only long enough to think, was madness or death. It was not until Lake felt his eyelids nearly frozen shut that he realized the noise of the dogs, ever-present since the retrieval of the 'Elder Ones' from the cave, had grown so great as to be heard over the wind. In the next moment he caught sight of what remained of the snow wall. The dogs had breached the wall of their enclosure and were pouring out in a stream of terrible furred rage, intent on the annihilation of the samples to the last. With a great shout of his own he started forward, thinking somehow to stop them before they could reach the spare tent.

His thought died a-borning before he could take so much as a third step. For out of the white and terrible wind that cut through everything in its path there arose a great dark shape- no, two, three- "Great God!" he whispered involuntarily. The realization had come upon him in the moment that he completed his count. What he was seeing was the Old Ones themselves, no longer frozen fossils but very much alive and awake. The dreaded things of times so far before the dawning days of Man had revived; and their revival was not a good one, but one of immediate and terrible struggle for existence. The dogs, he knew, meant to tear them apart. By the look of things, not a few of his own men did too- but they should have to wait their turn, if they meant not to harm the dogs. The animals were too eager to defend their camp against those palaeogaean horrors. They surged forward everywhere that Lake could see even as he himself was frozen to the spot with cosmic awe, too simple to know that the wrongness they felt with every fiber of their being was a thing of which to be much afraid.

A particularly awful gust of wind caught Lake at unawares and sent him tumbling to the ground. By the time he propped himself up enough to breathe again, he could see that several of the tents had been torn apart by now, lost to the storm. He struggled to rise, to find some shelter, but a knife of agony seared its way up from his left ankle. Wincing, he subsided to all fours; as he did so, he became aware that greater chaos was having its way with the camp. Not only was the wind ruining every precaution they had taken, but the belling of the dog-pack now sounded horribly thinner, and desperate. As he became aware of the change something furred flew past him, thudding into the remains of a snow embankment with a sickening sound. It was the biggest lead dog, the one Stantz had had to pin down to keep it from leading an attack on the frozen Old Ones. It would not need to be restrained ever again. Neither, he knew with a gut-knotting feeling of dread, would the other dogs. For all that they were only newly awake, the Old Ones had regained much of their strength, and were winning their battle. When they were done with the dogs, Lake knew, they would turn to the men. The dissection had been such a tough bit of business that no lesser knife stood a chance of penetrating their hides. There were no guns in the camp, either, though he doubted they would have done much more good. All these thoughts flashed through his head in an instant; he closed his eyes, frantically willing the storm to kill him before these monsters could.

It was a scream of primal terror wrung from a single human throat that opened Lake's eyes at last- Gedney, perhaps- yes, yes, he could see the younger man even now, hanging in midair at the mercy of one of those barrel-shaped monsters! That was enough to spur him to his feet in spite of his ankle. At the first step his vision fairly went white with pain. Ever after he could never be entirely sure of what he saw next; but-

He confided to Pabodie later that he thought he heard Stantz shouting "Stop! STOP!", and then that the man's words changed to something weirdly high-pitched and musical, though still wild with frantic urgency even in its wordlessness. It almost seemed as if the Old Ones stopped in their tracks, perhaps to answer in kind; but there was a terrible green light between the engineer and the huge, looming things out of times long gone, and so Lake was not so sure he could trust the evidence of his senses. The inhuman musical piping went on and on, seeming to cut through every other sound, even as the blood pulsed and roared in Lake's own ears. He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw against that weird vocalizing, and a wave of blessed darkness rolled over him at last.

When Lake opened his eyes again, it was inside the remains of the sub-expedition's lone remaining tent. The others, he was told, had been wrecked beyond repair. All their dogs were dead, and much of their equipment wrecked, but the men themselves were for the most part better off. There were injuries, some very terrible, but no deaths- save, perhaps, one. It seemed that whatever it was that turned the Old Ones from their intended course had not been entirely successful. Gedney was missing. As for Stantz, he was too busy struggling to raise Dyer on the wireless and shouting at the rig's failures in languages Lake had never before heard spoken aloud outside a Classics department to say anything at all one way or the other.

There are moments when even those without so much as a single psychically active cell remaining in their bodies can know things, and this was one of them. As Ray shivered a little at the sight of poor Gedney's body, its neck frozen stiffly at an unnatural angle, it became abundantly clear: something, he didn't know what, had happened here that was enough to end his obligation to the Old Ones. He gestured to Danforth quickly to pull the tarpaulin back over the corpse. Danforth didn't look right at all- not that anybody could be expected to under the circumstances, but Danforth had the look of a frog about to be pithed. The less he had to deal with, the better; he was only along because he was the only pilot of the three of them, and refused (quite sensibly) to be left all alone with the plane. "Well," Ray said carefully, "unless I'm... really mistaken, it was an accident, at least? I mean, it doesn't look like anything was deliberately-"

"Shut up, Stantz," said Dyer. The old professor's nerves were wound as tight as guitar strings, a side-effect of long listening for the bizarre musical piping mentioned in Lake's report. "We need, I think, to- what was that?"

"What was what?" Ray asked, looking up swiftly; but then he heard it too. Not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response, but a thing too mockingly normal to belong in this subterranean, frozen hell. It was nothing more and nothing less than the perfect, ordinary, everyday raucous squawking of a penguin.

The muffled sound floated from subglacial recesses nearly opposite to the corridor through which they had arrived. Either it led in some way to the surface and the outer world, or some fate too dreadful to believe had led the birds to the subterranean depths in times past; and either way, it was mutually agreed that they had to track it to its source through that world of age-long, uniform lifelessness. The Old Ones seemed unlikely to be of any assistance now. To judge by the art in the caverns above they were too careful, too deliberate, to have abandoned the body without some sign unless there were a very great reason to have done so.

As they picked their way towards what the map and compass seemed to indicate was the basement of a large pyramidal structure, a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of them. Danforth swore and flicked on the second electrical torch. The white, waddling thing was fully six feet high, and for a moment its incalculable appearance clutched at all three men with an unreasoned, primitive dread. Then it turned and sidled off to the left, joining two others of its kind, and all became clear: penguins, the lot of them. Man-sized, and albino and eyeless as many an ancient cave species had come to be, but penguins nonetheless.

Ray lay one arm against the tunnel wall before banging his head on his sleeve. This place was getting to him.