Antarctic Calm

A horror short story.

The Chamber

Basalt, granite, satin. The hall was dark. A swaying standard in the window revealed the late rays of sun intermittently in the Antarctic breeze. The furtive clicks of avifauna permeated across wide shadows, which dimmed with the day’s length. Scattered luminescence peeked through worn holes in ancient cloth, alighting eldritch forms; worn petroglyphs, which shimmered weakly in the flagging shine, which retained some emittance briefly. The lithographical forms represented mysterious sonograms and cryptic biologies. The high pitch of mountain wind whistled in labyrinthine chambers, through holes chiseled in distant antiquity.

Hollow joints settled with jittering clacks across the strange structures decorating the darkening space. Graded stone paths sank with smooth wear from the uneven gait of timeless patrons. Descending this hoary mode, the soft clicks of bird beaks haunted the living dark.

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The Excursion

Dr. Jacob Claudio came upon this setting through no small feat. Losing years, colleagues, and the entirety of his inheritance. He arrived via Cessna at the upper limits of these strange outcroppings along a mountainous wall in the deep, frozen Antarctic.

The small team he had contracted for this well-subsidized research mission had dealt with one unfortunate occurrence after another since their arrival. The ship had been delayed, met with storms, arrived upon difficult shore and been missing a significant volume of its intended fuel. After much commiseration on the suspicious frequencies of bad luck on the ‘start’ of their journey, they soon discovered their curses were not limited to the initial leg.

Dead batteries, broken sleds and a missing guide were quick to follow their disembarkation. Dr. Claudio never considered turning back. He hadn’t met a problem he couldn’t hire away. In this new setting, contractors were sparse. He was beginning to experience a new flavor in life. The acidic bitterness of boundaries.

Jacob had commissioned two Cessna planes. Before the first was prepared for flight the next day, half his crew was begging to leave. He had to promise them raises through funds he no longer had. Luckily, the locale was too isolated to for them to check their accounts.

The morning of departure was fraught with arguments and betrayals. His sixteen man crew had dwindled to less than a dozen at the first light of dawn. Given that the land was too treacherous to cross in the deep of night. This late defection caused a wild scene as they were caught by more dedicated crew.

One of the defectors had been physically pinned to the cold ice while the alert was sounded to rouse the rest. Dr. Claudio had to explain to his employees that the legal implications of forcibly holding them were nearly as bad as the sabotage that would be wrought, should they be ‘kept’.

Delayed, the excursion via plane still managed to go on. With more than a few detractors explaining how the lack of crew exacerbated the likelihood of failure of both the plane’s mission and their current endeavor overall. One radio-man down was enough cause for misery.

The second plane turned back early, despite Jacob’s orders. The remaining one, where he resided, crash landed. The primary pilot had passed after a few minutes of gruesome wails and bloodied coughs. Jacob managed to get him out of the plane, as if that helped at all.

The landing had taken place on the precipice of a tall mountain, one in an endless line of titanic peaks. The ground had appeared smooth and clear of obstructions, but as they lowered, a stiff wind combined with an unseen valley, askew of the plane’s balancing mechanisms. Losing altitude too quickly and steering completely, a high speed impact occurred with a nearby jutting stone.

As Dr. Claudio switched focus between the seemingly infinite cliffs surrounding him and the deceased airman, he realized for the first time; there might be nobody coming to solve his predicament. He rushed to the plane to test the radio, he was trained to use it but wholly inexperienced with doing it himself.

A terrible static came from the radio the moment he pressed the mic. Clicks echoed over the snowy plain after a few attempts were made to connect with his fleeing partners. A stuttering message of mostly nonsense finally interrupted the heavy distortion. The moment the garbled sounds started to convey, he was forced to switch off the radio entirely.

He was not alone up here. The clicks became excited and sounded from either side of his plane. Distraught with their encroachment, he fled to the strange valley that had defied their radar. He managed a few steps down it before losing his balance, rolling over and managing the rest of the drop through painful spins.

Dr. Claudio laid on his back for a moment once he arrived at the depths of the snow valley. His joints screamed in noticing of new injuries. He was a victim for a mere moment before the frantic clicking seemed to near the valley’s rim. He stood with great effort and managed a single step, before the snow sank twenty feet straight down. He fell into a stone chamber of polished basalt.

The walls of it that were not covered in freshly fallen snow were curved gently upward, narrowing at the bottom where he currently lay in new pain. The clicks continued to resound in the fair heights. After a few minutes of crawling, his knees relented and allowed him to stand again. He stumbled on numb feet. He wandered stealthily through an enormous archway carved into the west side of the room. There he found the chamber of ill-shaped platforms and flags.

He was hiding underneath a large four legged slab, etched in layers and perfectly even. A rotted cloth hung over it, a mimicry of a tablecloth, if the table were crafted for something obscenely tall. As Jacob watched the sun fall under the horizon, he settled in underneath the giant’s counter. The stench of moldy leather and fresh fish were his only companions.

The light faded beyond his ability to compensate. The clicking that had been coming from both the peak and the depths of corridors unseen finally petered out to a halt. Whatever had been stalking him was thankfully diurnal. The sigh of relief he let out was a timid whisper. Dr. Claudio was paralyzed underneath that rotted cloth. Every scratch of cloth against stone, even from his own readjusting caused a spike of painful heartbeats, induced by his grotesque imaginings. He considered that he might die here.

Each misstep and omen before had been met with the same conscious stubbornness. He considered every mishap the final in a coincidental series. Immune to overcoming this conceit, Jacob once again was flabbergasted at a new sound. Just as he found relief in the sleepy nature of his pursuers, something worse seemed to rise.

Slithering married to thick sloughing scrapes, began to haunt the night. No calls occurred that might assimilate these creatures with the comforts of the known world. Instead clicking beaks and the whines of bird-call, only that silent, sliding fuzz traversed the pitch dark halls.

Dr. Jacob Claudio gripped his fanny pack tightly with knuckles worn, beaten and nearly numb. It contained: a single flare, a fire starter with no tender, a walkie with a corpse on the other end and a complex multi-tool made of cheap steel. In a room carved from dense stones.

As the shwump, shwump, shwump of something nearby ascended the stairway just outside of his chamber, he could make out the odd notes of feathers, dragged against stone. He unbuttoned his pack and ran blind fingers over the components therein. He debated the knife of the multi-tool against the flare and back again.

Jacob’s heart flitted dangerously with stresses too heavy and alien to be reasoned with. He relented the concept of combat with anything in his current state and grabbed the flare. He held the shaft of it in both hands, imagining the two-step motion of activating it. He debated and lamented how and when he might use it.

His breathing started to fray so distinctly, stealth became impossible. Between hitched inhales, he noticed he was letting out half-numb sobs. The slithering stopped in notice of the subtle noises. It’s heavy slide doubled in speed. It crossed the threshold, feathers sliding against both sides of the portal’s archway.

“You’re just a wild creature, nothing more.” He whispered to it. Claiming it as truth to himself with a last pathetic shred of hope.

The creature took further notice. It rushed toward the table. Jacob released the flare cap, causing it to project a torrent of bright red and yellow sparks. Fumes began to choke the under-table immediately. Through those smokey strands, he saw it struggling toward him, only feet away.

Dr. Claudio dropped the flare in disgust at the hell of his witness. The slithering, shuffling creature was terror beyond comprehension. A slick scaled belly warbled against the stone floor, filthy and yellow. A head beyond description, wide and reptilian seemed to guide its momentum. The nightmare that crawled was only half of its burdensome form. Laying flat and limp above that body was a feathered creature; sparse white feathers, gaping beak and too many beady eyes in places they didn’t belong on Earthly fowl.

The eldritch mutant was at least nine feet long, its latter half disappearing in the dark beyond the flare’s reach. Though it seemed to travel horizontally, adding to the encumbrance of its gait, it still towered over his hunched form underneath the platform. The bird half was a sick amalgam of pre-logical evolution akin to an albino penguin, if grotesquely stretched in proportion. A small black eye squelched and widened, noticing him. As it did, the beak became tense again and shuttered rapidly to cause the horrid clicking he had previously only heard from afar.

The whole structure seemed to come alive with the exertions of other sounds. Clicks deafened him as they began in the hundreds. Hissing, slithering, slapping noises started to harmonize with the calls. The creature refrained from assaulting him, though its lower face warped into an intelligent scowl. As the last sparks of light emitted from the flare’s end, Jacob’s heart finally seized in terror as standing and crawling creatures rushed into the chamber.

Arent van Bolten (1573-1633), From the “Grotesques”