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                      Part One: Out of the Ice

                 “…there was one part of the ancient land…which had come to be
shunned as vaguely and namelessly evil.”

                                 --H.P. Lovecraft

                                                     1

    Antarctica was a graveyard, of course.
    A subzero cemetery of high frozen monoliths and leaning
tombstones of exposed, ancient rock. A burial ground of sunless
wastes and biting cold, snow plains and ragged mountains. Gale-force
blizzards sucked the warmth from a man and tucked him down deep
in frozen tombs and covered his tracks with shrieking windstorms of
ice crystals that blew just as fine and white as crematory ash. Like the
snow and the cold and the enveloping darkness of winter, the winds
were a constant. Night after night, they screamed and wailed with the
voices of lost souls. A communal death-rattle of all those interred in
mass graves of coveting blue ice and sculpted into leering, frosted
death angels.
    Antarctica was dead and had been for millions of years.
    A wasteland, some said, where God had buried those things he no
longer wished to look upon. Nightmares and abominations of flesh
and spirit. And if that were true, then whatever was entombed
beneath the permafrost, locked-down cold and sightless in that
eternal deep-freeze, was never meant to be exhumed.

                                                           2

    Nothing stays buried forever at the Pole.
    It was one of those sayings they tossed around down there.
Sometimes you weren’t sure what it meant and other times you weren’
t sure you wanted to. But it was true, nonetheless: nothing stays
buried forever at the South Pole. The glaciers are in constant motion,
grinding and tearing at the primordial bedrock far below, and what
they don’t dig up, sooner or later the blizzard winds will blow clean
like bones in the desert. So if Antarctica was a graveyard then, it was
one in a process of perpetual resurrection, vomiting out those awful
bits of its past it could no longer hold down in its belly.
    This is how Hayes saw it on his darker days at Kharkhov Station
when his poetic turn of mind began devouring itself one bite at a time.
But he knew it to be true. He just tried not to think about it, was all.
    “I can see ‘em now,” Lind said, his face pressed up to the frosted
glass of Targa House, the place where all the personnel of the station
ate, slept, and lived. “It’s Gates, all right, coming in with the SnoCat.
Must be bringing those mummies in from the high ridges.”
    Hayes set down his cup of coffee, scratched his beard, and went up
to the window. What he saw out there was winter at the South
Geomagnetic Pole…sheets of snow whipping and swirling and
engulfing. The steeple of the drilling tower, the dome of the
meteorology station, the power Quonset, half dozen other structures
limned by electric lights and shrouded beneath blankets of white.
    Kharkhov Station sat near the edge of East Antarctica on the Polar
Plateau--right in the shadows of the Transantarctic Mountains, in
fact--some 3500 meters above sea level in what had once been the
Soviet sector of the continent. A desolate, godless place that was
completely cut off from the world from March until October when
spring finally returned. During the long, dark winter, only a small
crew of contractors and technicians remained, the others got out
before the planes stopped coming and winter set its teeth into that
ancient continent.
    A burial ground.
    That’s what it was.
    The wind howled and the huts shook and day by day that immense
bleak nothingness chewed a hole through your soul and blew through
your numbed mind like an October gust through a deserted house. It
was the third week of winter and you knew the sun would not rise and
break that womb of blackness for another three months. Three long,
bitter months that would eat at your belly and your brain, freezing
something up inside you that wouldn’t thaw until you saw civilization
again in the spring. And until then, you waited and you listened and
you were never really sure what for.
    A graveyard indeed, Hayes thought.
    The visibility returned for a few fleeting moments and he could see
the lights of the SnoCat bobbing through the dimness. Yeah, it was
Gates, all right. Gates and his cargo of goodies that had the entire
station on edge. He had radioed in three days before from the tent
camp about what he had found up there, what he was cutting from the
ice.
    And now just about everyone was beside themselves with
excitement, just waiting for Gates’s return like he was Jesus or Santa
Claus.
    But it was infectious.
    Hayes had been seeing it for days now, that look of raw
exhilaration and wonder on those usually dour, bored faces. The faces
of children who were on the verge of some great discovery…wonder,
awe, and something just beneath it akin to superstitious terror.
Because it didn’t take too much to get the imagination rolling in that
awful place and particularly when Gates promised he’d be rolling in
with mummies from a pre-human civilization.
    Jesus, the very idea was overwhelming.
    “He’s bringing the ‘Cat over to Six,” Lind said, fists clenched at his
sides, something in his throat bobbing up and down. “Shit, Hayes, we’
re gonna be in the history books over this one. I was talking to
Cutchen and Cutchen was saying that, come spring when they pull our
asses out of here, we’re all going to be famous, you know? Famous for
discovering those mummies…he said this discovery will shake the
world to its knees.”
    Hayes could just imagine Cutchen saying something like that.
Cutchen’s only pastimes seemed to be sarcasm and toying with lesser
minds.
    “Cutchen’s full of shit,” Hayes said.
    "I thought you two were friends?”
    “We are. That’s why I know he’s full of shit.”
    “Sure, but he’s right about us being famous.”
    “Christ, Lind…listen to yourself. Gates is going to be famous. He’s
the man who found all that stuff up there. And maybe a couple of the
other eggheads like Holm and Bryer who helped him…but you? Or
me? Hell no, we’re just contractors, were support personnel.”
    But Lind just shook his head. “No, what they found up there…we’re
part of it.”
    “Jesus Christ, Lind, you’re a plumber. When the Discovery Channel
or National Geographic start making their documentaries, they’re not
going to want to know how you bravely handled the Station’s shit or
heat-taped two-hundred feet of piss-pipe. They’ll be talking to the
scientists, the techs, even that NSF hard-on LaHune. But not us. They’
ll tell you to keep the water running and me to run a couple extra two-
twenty lines for all their equipment.”
    Of course, it was all lost on Lind.
    He was so excited by it all he could barely contain himself. He was
like a little kid waiting for trick-or-treating to start, tense and shaking,
having a hell of a time just keeping his feet on the floor and not
jumping for joy. And it was pretty funny to see, Hayes had to admit
that. You took a guy like Lind--barely 5’5, just as round as a medicine
ball and not much lighter, bad teeth, scraggly beard--and watched him
hopping around like he was waiting for the candy store to open, it was
absolutely priceless.
    Damn, where was the camcorder when you needed it?
    If Gates’ mummies had been female, they would’ve wanted to keep
their legs crossed in Lind’s presence because he was that excited and
that in love. Course, those mummies weren’t male or female from
what Gates said over the set. In fact, he was having a hell of a time
deciding whether they were animal or vegetable.
    Lind said, “They’re unloading the sled now…must be bringing those
mummies into the hut.” He shook his head. “And here I thought this
winter was going to be a waste of time. How old he say those
mummies were?”
    “He’s guessing two- to three-hundred million years. Back when
dinosaurs ruled the earth.”
    Lind clucked his tongue. “Imagine that. I didn’t even know there
were mummies back then.”
    Hayes just looked at him, shook his head. It was a good thing Lind
was some kind of plumber, because when you came down to it, he
wasn't much smarter that most dingleballs hanging off a camel’s ass. A
real natural with pipes and venting, but anything else? Forget it.
    As Hayes watched, Lind began pulling on his fleece jacket and
thermal pants, parka, boots, and wool mittens. “Well aren’t you
coming, Hayes?”
    But Hayes just shook his head. Already he could see people spilling
out of shacks and buildings, some of them still pulling on their ECW’s
even though the wind was shrieking and it was pushing seventy below
out there.
    “I’ll wait until the groupies thin,” he told Lind.
    But Lind was already going out the door, the frigid breath of
Antarctica blowing in until the heaters swallowed it.
    Hayes sat down, lit a cigarette and sipped coffee, staring at the
game of solitaire on his laptop. Yeah, it was going to be a long
goddamn winter. The thought of that set on him wrong for reasons
even he wasn’t sure of, made him feel like he was bleeding inside.
    Outside the compound, the wind rose up, showing its teeth.

                                                       3

    You had to love Lind, Hayes thought later as he got a look at the
mummies over in Hut #6. He was really something, positively good to
the last drop. Hayes was standing there with him and two other
contractors that knew about as much about evolutionary biology as
they did about menstrual cramps…and Lind? Oh, he was just going on
and on while Gates and Bryer and Holm took notes and photographs,
made measurements and scraped ice from one of the mummies.
    “Yeah, that’s one ugly prick, Professor,” Lind was saying, hovering
around them, taking up their light while they continually, and politely,
told him to step back. “Damn, look at that thing…enough to give you
the cold sweats. I bet I have nightmares until spring just looking at it.
But, you know, more I look at it, more I’m thinking that what you got
there is one of those animals without a spine, you know, an un-
vertebrate like a starfish or a jellyfish. Something like that.”
    “You mean invertebrate,” Bryer, the paleoclimatologist corrected
him.
    “Isn’t that what I said?”
    Bryer chuckled, as did a few of the others.
    Outside, the wind pelted the walls with snow just as fine as blown
sand. And inside, the air was greasy, warm, close. A funny, acrid stink
beginning to make itself known as the thing continued to melt.
    “We really made a find here, eh, Professor?” Lind said to Gates.
    He looked up over his spectacles, a pencil hanging from his lips.
“Yes, we certainly did. The find of the ages, Lind. What we have here
is entirely new to science. I’m guessing its neither animal nor plant,
but a sort of chimera.”
    “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” Lind said. “Boy, this is gonna
make us famous.”
    Hayes laughed low in his throat. “Sure, I can already see your
picture on the cover of Newsweek and Scientific American. There’s a
picture of Professor Gates, too, but it’s kind of small, stuck down in
the corner.”
    There were a few laughs over that.
    Lind scowled. “You don’t have to be a smartass, Hayes. Jesus
Christ.”
    But Hayes figured he did. Here these guys were trying to figure out
what this was all about while Lind circled them on his unicycle,
pumping his red horn and shaking a rubber chicken at them.
    So, yes, he had to be a smartass.
    Same way Lind had to talk…even about things he knew nothing of.
These were traits they both practiced month by dark month during
the long, grim South Pole winters. But in the hut…with that defrosting
mummy laid out like something spilled from a freakshow jar…well,
maybe they were doing it because they had to do something. Had to
say something. Make some noise, anything to disrupt the malign
sound of that nightmare melting, dripping and dripping like blood
from a slit throat. Hayes couldn’t stand it…it made his scalp feel like it
wanted to crawl off the back of his head.
    And he kept thinking: What the hell’s with you? It’s a goddamn
fossil, it can’t do nothing but wait.
    Wait. Yeah, maybe that wasn’t what he’d meant to think, but had
thought it all the same. And the more you stared at that goddamn
thing, more you started thinking it wasn’t a fossil at all, just something
ancient…waiting.
    Christ, of all crazy things to be thinking.
    The wind shook the hut and that was enough for the other two
onlookers--a couple contractors named Rutkowski and St. Ours. They
went out the door like something was biting their asses. And maybe
something was.
    “I’m starting to get the feeling that our friends here don’t like what
you’ve found,” Holm said, running a hand through his white hair. “I
think it’s giving them the creeps.”
    Gates laughed thinly. “Is our pet here bothering you, Hayes?”
    “Hell, no, I like it, big ugly sonofabitch,” he said. “Got all I can do
not to hug it and get it alone somewhere.”
    They all started laughing at that. But it didn’t last long. Not very
long at all. Like laughter in a mortuary, good cheer just did not belong
in this place. Not now. Not with what was berthed in there.
    Hayes did not envy Gates and his people.
    Sure, they were scientists. Gates was a paleobiologist and Holm a
geologist, but the very idea of touching that monstrosity in the melting
ice, well, it made something in his stomach roll over and then roll over
again. He was trying desperately to catalog what it was he was feeling,
but it was just beyond him. All he could say for sure is that that
creature made his guts roll up like a dirty carpet, made something
inside him run both hot and cold. Whatever that thing was, it revolted
him on some unknown inner level and he just couldn’t get a handle on
it.
    It was dead.
    That’s what Gates said, but looking at it, Christ and the saints, you
really had to wonder. For the blue ice was getting very clear now and
it was like looking through thick glass. It distorted things, but nowhere
near enough for Hayes’ liking.
    The mummy was big. Probably an easy seven feet from end to end,
shaped like some great fleshy barrel that tapered at each end and was
set with high vertical ridges that ran up and down its length. Its skin
was an oily gunmetal gray like that of a shark, set with tiny fissures
and minute scars. Midline, there was a pair of appendages that
branched out like tree limbs and then branched out again into fine
tapering tendrils. At the bottom of the torso, there were five muscular
tentacles, each an easy four feet in length. They looked oddly like the
trunks of elephants…though not wrinkled, but smooth and firm and
powerful.      They ended in flat triangular spades that might have
been called feet on another world.
    And the ice kept melting and the water kept dripping and that
weird rotten fish-stink began to come off the thing.
    “What’s that there?” Lind said. “That…that a head?”
    “Yes,” Gates said. “It would seem to meet the criteria.”
    Maybe for a biologist, but not for Hayes or Lind. They stood around
like mourners, just wanting to throw dirt over it. At the top of the
thing’s torso was a flabby, blunt neck that almost looked like a
wrinkled-up scarf or foreskin. On top of it was something like a great
five-pointed starfish, dirty yellow in color. The radial arms of the star
were made of tapering, saggy tubes and at the end of each, a bulbous
red eye.
    Hayes thought that it looked like the creature had been frozen very
quickly, flash-frozen like one of those mammoths up in Siberia you
read about. Because it looked…well, almost startled like it had been
caught by surprise. At least that’s what he had been thinking, but the
more the ice melted and the more of that head and those five leering
red eyes he saw, the more he was thinking it looked pissed-off,
arrogant, superior, something. And whatever that look was, it sure as
hell was not friendly.
    You wouldn’t want to meet this fellah on a good day, Hayes
thought, let alone with that evil look about it.
    And thinking that, he just couldn’t imagine how something like it
could have walked. For it was debased and degenerate, the sort of
thing made to crawl, not walk upright like a man. But according to
what Gates told Bryer, it stood and walked, all right.
    “That’s some sort of wing there I’d bet,” Holm said, indicating an
arched tubular network like bones on the thing’s left side that were
folded-in on themselves like an oriental fan. Even folded, you could
see the fine webbing of mesh between the tubes. “And another over
here. Certainly.”
    “Jesus, you mean it could fly?” Lind said.
    Gates scribbled something in his notebook. “Well, at this point we’
re opting for some sort of marine adaptation…maybe not wings, but
possibly fins…though until we can actually examine them, I’m only
guessing.”
    In his mind, Hayes could see that thing flying around like some sort
of cylindrical gargoyle, dipping down over sharp-peaked roofs. That
was the image he had and it was very clear in his mind for some
reason as if it was something he had seen once or maybe dreamed
about.
    “Has LaHune see it yet?”
    Gates said he hadn’t, but that he was very excited about the
prospects of the discovery. And Hayes could almost hear LaHune
saying just that, Gentlemen, I am most excited about the prospects of
this monumental discovery. Yeah, that’s exactly how he would have
said it. Hayes shook his head. LaHune, he was some kind of guy.
Dennis LaHune was the NSF administrator who ran Kharkhov Station,
summer and winter. It was his job to keep things running, make
certain resources were not wasted, keep everything on the straight
and narrow.
    Yeah, Hayes thought, resident ballbuster, bean-counter, and NSF
ramrod. That was LaHune. The headmaster lording over this clutch of
unruly, free-thinking students as it were. LaHune had more
personality than your average window dummy, but not much.
    Lind said, “I can’t believe he hasn’t come to see what we have out
here. You would think it was his job.”
    “C’mon, Lind,” Hayes said. “He’s got more important shit to be
doing like counting pencils and making sure we’re not using too many
paperclips.”
    Gates chuckled.
    The water that melted off that irregular block of ice was being
collected in buckets, tagged for later study. Drip, drip, drip.
    “Gets under your skin, don’t it?” Lind said. “Just like that
movie…you ever seen that movie, Hayes? Up at the North Pole or
maybe it was the South, they got this alien in a block of ice and some
dumbfuck throws an electric blanket over it and it unthaws, runs
around camp sucking everybody’s blood. Think that guy from
Gunsmoke was in it.”
    Hayes said, “Yeah, I saw it. Was kind of trying not to think about it.”
    Gates smiled, set his digital camera aside. With his big shaggy beard
he looked more mountain man than paleontologist. “Oh, we’re
unthawing our friend here, boys, but it won’t be by accident. And don’t
worry, this creature has been dead a long, long time.”
    “Famous last words,” Hayes said and they all had a laugh over that.
    Except Lind.
    They’d lost him somewhere along the way.
    He stood there staring at the thing in the ice, listening to the water
dripping and it seemed to have the same effect on him as the call of a
siren: his eyes were fixed and wide, his lips moving but no words
coming out. He stood there like that for maybe five minutes before
anyone seemed to notice and by then it looked much like he was in a
trance.
    Hayes said, “Lind…hey, Lind…you okay?”
    He just shook his head, his upper lip pulled up into a snarl. “That
fucking LaHune…thinks he’s in charge, but doesn’t have the balls to
come and look at this…this monster. Bastard’s probably on the line
with NSF McMurdo, bragging about this, telling them all about it. But
what does he know about it? Unless you stand here looking at it,
feeling it looking back at you, how can you know about it?”
    Hayes put a hand on his shoulder. “Hey, chill out here, Lind, it’s
just a fossil.”
    Lind shrugged off his hand. “Oh, is that all it is? You telling me you
don’t feel that thing looking at you? Jesus, those eyes…those awful
red eyes…they get right inside you, make you feel things, make you
want to do things. You telling me you can’t feel it up here?” He was
rubbing his temples, kneading them roughly like dough. “Can’t you
feel what it’s thinking? Can’t you feel it getting inside your head,
wanting to steal your mind…wanting to make you something but what
you are? Oh Christ, Hayes, it’s…those eyes…those fucking eyes…they
unlock things in your head, they…”
    He paused there, breathing very hard now, gasping almost like a
fish that was asphyxiating. There was sweat all over his face and his
eyes were bulging from his head, cords straining at his neck. He
looked to be on the verge of utter hysteria or maybe a good old-
fashioned stroke.
    “You better get him back to the compound,” Gates said.
    They were all staring at Lind, thinking things but not saying them.
A clot of ice dropped from the mummy and Hayes stiffened at the
sound. It was enough, by God, it was more than enough.
    He helped Lind with his parka and led him to the door. As Hayes
made to open it, Lind turned and looked at the scientists. “I’m not
crazy, I don’t care what you think. But you better listen to me and you
better listen good.” He jabbed a shaking finger at the mummy.
“Whatever you do, whatever any of you do…don’t stay in here alone
with it, if you know what’s good for you, don’t stay in here alone with
it…”
    Then they were out the door.
    “Well,” Bryer said. “Well.”
    The wind clutched the hut like a fist, shook it, made the overhead
lights flicker and for barely a second, they were in the dark with the
thing.
    And by the looks on their faces, they didn’t care for it much.

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Beneath the ice caps of Antarctica, an alien horror has been
waiting to rise. Billions of years ago, they engineered all life on
Earth and were the architects of evolution and human
intelligence. And now as a team of paleontologists explores
subterranean alien ruins countless millions of years old and an
ancient extraterrestrial city is located on the bed of a fathomless
sub-glacial lake by a NASA research team, what has been
waiting in the permafrost is now waking up. Waking up to feed
on the raw power of the human psyche. Waking up to claim what
it seeded so many eons ago. The human race is about to be
harvested...