The Weird Company Page 2

  Early in the morning Lake reported that our rouse was in jeopardy. A talk with Douglas and Dyer had led to the conclusion that Pabodie, Danforth and the rest of the staff would be joining us at our new camp as soon as possible, and that any future transportation to and from Ross Island would be over Lake’s newly discovered mountain range. Sensing that his ability to direct his own research was about to cease, he, Atwood and Carroll quickly prepared one of the aircraft and took off in a desperate search for another, perhaps more productive, site and the strange magnetic anomaly. In doing so Lake made it clear to me that if the next three hours of test borings did not produce I should be prepared to move to another site.

  Given such a short timeframe I quickly reset the drill team to an area about a quarter of a mile away from the camp in an outcropping of soft sandstone. The drilling was easy, and much progress was made with little supplemental blasting. Approximately one hour after we had begun, the rock being brought up suddenly changed. We had apparently run into a vein of Comanchian limestone and almost instantly we were rewarded with the most magnificent of specimens including minute fossils of cephalopods, corals, and other marine invertebrates as well as the occasional suggestion of bones which I recognized as being from sharks, teliosts and ganoid fish. As I marveled at such finds, for these were the first vertebrate fossils we had found during the entire expedition, my attention wavered from the drill and was only brought back when Mills and Orrendorf suddenly began yelling. The drill mechanism had begun oscillating wildly back and forth, kicking up large chunks of rock which were being launched at terrific speeds in all directions. A rock the size of a golf ball flew past and imbedded itself in the ice beside me. Other pieces ricocheted off the drill itself leaving dents and gashes in the casing. Orrendorf had taken refuge behind a case of drill bits, while Mills had taken to cowering behind the spoil mound. Knowing that I was responsible for not only the drill but what also appeared to be an extraordinary fossil bed, I foolishly ran headlong for the motor engine all the time being pelted by a torrent of rock and ice. I flinched once as something hard caught me in the fleshy part of my cheek, but carried through with my resolve, reached the gas engine and quickly turned it off.

  Without power, the drill slowed down and there arose the most horrendous of sounds. It was a cracking noise, a great cacophony of something ancient shattering, fragmenting into shards and dust as we stood beside it unable to act. A great cloud arose and the drill, suddenly denied of support, tilted forward, swung wildly and then settled slowly onto its side. When the dust and ice had cleared we emerged from our various shelters and beheld the most spectacular of sights. A portion of the limestone vein had caved in, creating an opening about five feet across that opened into a shallow hollow. Fearing another cave-in, the three of us cautiously crawled across the ice to the edge of the newly opened cavern and peered down into what had until recently been a stygian darkness. The hollow was no more than eight feet deep but extended off in all directions. The roof and floor were abundant with stalactites and stalagmites, some of which met to form the most spectacular of crystalline columns. But most importantly, what set me rushing back to greet Lake’s plane was the vast wash of shells and bones that seemed to cover the entire floor of the cavern.

  It was just after 1400 when we finished securing the winch and our team carefully lowered down into the cavern. Within minutes all of us had realized that we had discovered what was possibly the greatest cache of paleontological samples ever discovered. We quickly identified the most amazing diversity of samples I had ever seen including mollusks, crustaceans, primitive sharks, placoderms, thecodonts, mosasaur skulls, pterodactyls, archeopteryx, primitive horses, and titanotheres. There were however no Pleistocene samples, no mastodons, camels or deer, and thus we concluded that the cavern had not received any new materials for at least thirty million years. There was however a curious abundance of primitive life generally found in the Silurian and the Ordovician, which seemed a tremendous contradiction to the latter more evolved species and the rock in which they were imbedded which was without a doubt Oligocene in origin. The fantastical conclusion that we drew from such information was that in some manner the life of more than three hundred million years ago had continued unabated and uninterrupted, mixing with the species that we knew had come into existence only about fifty million years ago.

  It was at this point that Lake scribbled a hasty note and handed it to Moulton for dispatch over the wireless. The young engineering student had not been gone for more than five minutes before Fowler began calling for Lake and I to come and examine a large section of sandstone. For there in the relatively young sedimentary rock were several distinct triangular striated prints nearly identical to those we had found in the slate samples at other sites. There were some minor differences, the new samples were smaller and the markings bore a slight curvature at the end, Lake postulated that these markings indicated that the species might be undergoing a reversion, returning to a more primitive or decadent form, although I disagreed on drawing such conclusions based on limited data. Regardless I concurred with the note he quickly jotted and handed to Mills suggesting that our discoveries would be as important to biology as Einstein was to physics, as they would seem to indicate a remnant species surviving from a previous cycle of life prior to that currently in dominance perhaps a billion years old.

  Lake had barely finished dispatching another radio message when Atwood brought our attention to several of the large vertebrate fossils, which showed strange wounds. These injuries seemed to fall into two categories, first there were the skulls of which we found more than a dozen, all showing a straight strangely smooth penetrating bore into the brain cavity. The other markings were on the long bones of the legs and consisted of straight lines perpendicular to the bone itself, which effectively bisected the bones in a single cut, though we found several examples in which the final cut was apparently preceded by multiple false starts. Neither Lake nor I could conceive of a predatory species to which we could attribute such marks.

  Another note hastily dispatched, and another call of amazement. One of the men, I cannot remember who, had found a peculiar fragment of green soapstone about six inches across and an inch and a half thick shaped like a five-pointed star. The thing was curiously smooth and the angles were cleaved inwards. Carroll and I brought the thing up and into the light and placed it beneath his magnifying glass and he swore he could make out tiny dots grouped into regular patterns. As he twisted it back and forth in the light of the polar sun there arose from behind him the most peculiar of sounds; the dogs that were still harnessed to the sledge with which we had brought up the equipment had suddenly begun whining in the most distressing of manners. The whining of the dogs turned to yelps and then growls as Carroll came in to calm them, only to be snapped at as he came too close. As he drew suddenly back the stone slipped from Carroll’s hand and onto the ice beside the sledge. The dogs reared up from the thing in panic, growling in terror and fear as the sledge went over on its side the dogs retreated behind it with only their whimpering yelps to betray them.

  Lake was dispatching missives as fast as he could write them and I soon had lost count of how many we had sent. We had been in the cavern for only five hours and in that time a new world had been created. Everything we knew, everything we believed we understood about life, and time, and our world was about to change, and I was to be one of the agents of that change. My name would go down amongst those great minds of the past Newton, Galileo, Agassiz, Van Leeuwenhoek, and Darwin. My life, my career, my reputation as a scientist was, for that brief and glorious instant, set amongst the stars, and brighter than I could have ever dreamed. How strange, that such things can change from one instant to the next. For it was in that moment that yet another cry of discovery and wonder came up out of the cave and all of the fantastic discoveries we had made up until that point suddenly became meaningless.

  Orrendorf and Watkins, working with the electric torches, had ventured into one of the many
tunnels that radiated out from the main chamber in innumerable directions. There, amidst the detritus of the ages they had found something totally unexpected, but not without precedent. The preservation in amber of insects and other small animals, some millions of years old, is well documented. Similarly, it is an established fact that in the area near Yakutsk the locals have on numerous occasions recovered from the Siberian permafrost the frozen bodies of the extinct wooly mammoth. I can only imagine that some similar process led to the preservation of the three specimens that Watkins and Orrendorf had unearthed and winched to the surface. They were barrel-shaped things not unlike some of the echinoderms but massively larger, six feet long and three to four feet at the central diameter with five ridges and significant amounts of damage to each end, enough such that the actual organic structures that were located there were completely unknown to us.

  No sooner had the things reached the surface than the dogs began to act up, pulling at the harness and dragging the sledge forward snarling and barking. Fearing that the dogs would damage the specimens, Lake ordered Carroll and me to take the dogs back to camp and properly secure them. I almost protested but instead grabbed the harness and spent the next twenty minutes forcing the team back to the camp, avoiding their snapping jaws and gnashing teeth all the way. Back at camp I read Lake’s latest note as Moulton transmitted it and I was greatly disturbed by his references to the Elder Things mentioned in the Necronomicon. I had taken Professor Wilmarth’s class at Miskatonic, the one he taught on the shadowy things hinted at by Alhazard and Prinn. I knew what the legends told, of the things that seeped out of the dark spaces between the stars and came to the Earth in the primordial past. That Lake linked these things with such demon-haunted lore made me shudder, and I retreated to my tent in order to find and review the notes that I had taken during Wilmarth’s lectures.

  I found my notes readily, but any attempt to review them was interrupted by yet another flourish of discovery and a summons to return to the cave. I shoved the sheaf of notes inside my parka and returned to the cavern. This time it was Mills, Boudreau and Fowler's turn in the spotlight. The three working deeper into the cavern had found a cluster of thirteen more of the same barrel-shaped growths mixed with dozens of the strange soapstone stars. Eight of these specimens were completely intact and one showed only minimal damage, the others all showed the same curious kind of damage, the removal or near removal of the organic structures at either end. Lake sent an expansive and detailed description along with some speculation concerning their origin with reference once more to the Necronomicon, Cthulhu and Professor Wilmarth.

  I pause here in my relation of events to once more reveal that our team was perpetrating a deception on Pabodie and Dyer. For no sooner had Lake finished his cursory description of the creatures was Dyer clamoring for a plane to reunite the expedition at the cave site. Lake responded that a rising gale had come down off the mountains grounding the four planes in his possession. Dyer and Pabodie would have to use the plane left with Sherman on Ross Island. Of course there was no such storm, but Lake had just bought us more time to establish our sole propriety over these amazing samples.

  Without the dogs, it took us more than an hour to move the specimens back to camp but the nine students and mechanics accomplished it without incident. We laid out the specimens on the hard ice next to the tent in which Lake had laid out a table and tools to carry out a more detailed examination. Half the team gathered into this tent while the other half set about tenting the planes and building a corral to contain the dogs that had grown increasingly distressed over the biological samples and could not be trusted in the confines of the camp. Unwilling to sacrifice one of the intact specimens, we chose the one that was less damaged toward both ends and slightly crushed in the main body, allowing us easy access to the interior cavity. Our examination was detailed and we took copious notes and made regular transmissions of our findings on the specimen. None of which I have access to at the moment, but I will do my best to recall what details I can and relate them here.

  As I have said, the main body was about six feet in length and capped on both ends with similar but significantly different structures not unlike those of several species of starfish. The torso was barrel shaped and comprised of a dark grey material that reminded me of the exocarp of some citrus fruits, very tough but at the same time very flexible. The torso was radially symmetric, specifically pentaradial and consisted of five vertically oriented segments joined together by five sets of ridged furrows. Hidden within each of the furrows with an apex near the equator was a complex framework of tubular rods arranged not unlike a folding fan and supporting a highly vascularized membrane with a serrated edge. The suggestion that these five structures were some sort of wings and that the creature either flew in the air or swam under water was obvious, although when I suggested that the structure was similar to that of some leaves, particularly those of palm trees, the use of these structures in something akin to photosynthesis was raised as a distinct possibility. Also around the equator of the barrel, but this time in the center of each segment, was a single stalk approximately three inches in diameter at the base. After six inches the stalk split into five branches, each of which continued on for about eight inches before splitting once more into five tapering tendrils, giving each stalk twenty-five tendrils with a reach of about three feet.

  On the top of the torso was a bulging ring with five sets of heavy plates covering a series of fleshy flaps and diaphragms joined together in an accordion-like structure which we all readily agreed was analogous to the respiration structures used by spiders known as book lungs. Seated on top of this were five yellowish wedged-shaped organs arranged not unlike a massive inverted starfish more than five feet across. The upper surface of this head was covered with numerous three-inch-long wiry bristles or setae of a variety of colors. At the end of each wedge was a flexible yellow tube crowned with a sphere covered in a yellowish membrane which rolled back to reveal a glassy globular eye with a deep red iris. Between each of the eyed wedges, another slightly longer type of organ sprouted. Red in color, these five fleshy tubes were about two inches in diameter and ended in a sack-like swelling divided into five equal sections. Pressure on the neck of this structure forced the sack to open into a bell-shaped orifice lined with sharp white chelae that probably functioned as teeth in this mouth analogue. In the center, where all the various components of the head originated, was a five-lobed slit or diaphragm that was most probably some sort of entry point for some sort of secondary respiratory system. Manipulation of the various components revealed a high degree of flexibility; in fact it was quite easy to fold the five mouths and eyes up onto the setae and then close the five arms over them, forming what was likely an impenetrable mass.

  Below the torso there were analogous counterparts to the components of the head, but their function was dissimilar. While the bulging ring was present there was no suggestion of any gills, and the short stout eye-tipped wedges were replaced with four-foot-long muscular legs devoid of the prismatic setae but tipped with a fleshy triangle approximately eight inches long and six inches wide at the far end. This fin or foot was quickly recognized as the source of the strange triangular impressions we had been collecting throughout the expedition. As with the head, between each leg was a red-colored fleshy tube, but when these were opened the dangerously sharp chelae were missing. In the center of this lower arrangement were five closely packed muscular tubes that were somewhat reminiscent of an anemone or sea squirt, that these were the terminal end of the secondary respiratory system that began at the other end I had no doubt.

  Following our external assessment we began what could only be described as a crude dissection, as none of the tools in our possession were adequate to the task of cutting the leathery integument that prevailed throughout the body. Initial explorations were hampered by the still-frozen state of the thing, but as the heat of the tent penetrated the body there was a thaw and an organic fluid possessed of a pungent and o
ffensive odor began to flow from the various wounds. It was not blood as we know it for it was thick and bright green, almost luminescent, perhaps based around hemocyanin as in some invertebrates, rather than hemoglobin, but there was no doubt that it served the same purpose. As the stench escaped from the tent, the dogs, far off in their corral, caught wind of it and began howling and barking in the most savage of manners.

  The radial symmetry of the external components was continued with the internal organs to such an extent that one could almost say that the five divisions of the creature created a sort of multiple redundancy for it was rare that any of the systems from one division interacted directly with the other. The five mouths led to five distinct stomachs and then down to the five fleshy tubes found between the lower appendages. The five-lobed diaphragm in the head led to five distinct vascularized and muscular chambers and then to the cluster of tubules hidden in the base of the thing, that the creature maintained both these strange lungs and the book lungs suggested that the creature was amphibious. That both lungs and gills were linked to the wings in a manner that seemed excessive only supported the theory that the wings served some other purpose than flight. In the respiratory system, near the head there were five distinct organs that seemed to be comprised of a complex labyrinth of tubes and valves. Atwood suggested that it was similar in construct to some musical instruments such as the trumpet or the organ, and may have been associated with vocalizations. That a form of syllable-based articulation could be derived from such a construct seemed unlikely, but rather of clicks, whistles and notes, not unlike the sounds made by dolphins and whales, seemed more likely. The musculature of the creature was a hybrid, with vast thick bundles of fibers attached to the rigid structures of the leathery skeleton, but also present were bladders and compartments similar to those creatures in possession of a hydrostatic skeleton like the ones found in echinoderms and annelids.