Sergeant didn’t hesitate, he went right after it, and I followed after the dog. The thing led us across the snow. Every now and then it tried to fly but it couldn’t manage against the wind, so it finally gave up. It was an awkward thing to look at, but it could move across the snow as fast as me, so I couldn’t catch up to it with the axe. The dog kept nipping at its heels, or where its heels should have been, but the thing ignored him.
When it suddenly dropped from view, I realized we was back at the mouth of the cave. The thing had run to ground. Or maybe there was something in the cave it wanted to use as a weapon. The dog jumped in right after it, so I couldn’t stop, now could I? How could I let that dog get killed by himself without trying to help him? I climbed in after Sergeant, and looking back on it, I’m not a bit sorry.
It tried to run between the pillars, but it couldn’t move very quick over the uneven floor of the cave, and it couldn’t fly, so we caught it before it went too far. The close quarters helped us and hindered it. Sergeant went in from one side and I came at it from the other. It picked the dog up and threw him against a pillar. That’s how he come to break his ribs. I found I could cut it if I used the axe on its head and neck, not that it had a neck, but the place that starfish thing joined at the top of its body.
There wasn’t much light, just what seeped in from the entrance, but it was enough to make out moving shadows. Maybe that thing was as blind as me and the dog. Anyway, it was almost dead when I had my slip-up. My boot went out from under me and I fell. The monster put one of its flipper feet on my left leg and I heard the bones crackle like a handful of nettles thrown into a fire. That’s when Sergeant went for its head. His teeth tore into it where it was the softest, and it gave out a kind of whistling scream and fell onto its side. The dog kept ripping into it, even after it stopped moving, growling and snarling like a wild beast, which I suppose is what he was at that moment.
The pain and shock from my broken leg must have knocked me out. I don’t know how long I lay unconscious. A big rumbling noise woke me up. I was dizzy and didn’t know where I was at first. I felt the dog licking my face and gradually started to come around. My left trouser leg was sodden with dried blood, so I guess one of them pieces of bone must have poked right through my skin.
I tried to stand up, but it was comical. My bad leg wouldn’t hold any weight, and the pain of it almost knocked me out. I tried to crawl, but I couldn’t put weight on my knee, either, so I started to pull myself on my belly toward the tiny patch of light that I knew must have been the entrance. It wasn’t near as bright as it should have been. At first I thought something was wrong with my eyes, but when I got to the entrance I realized what had happened.
While I had a nice, long nap, Professor Dyer and the men from Southern Camp had come in the fifth plane and found all the death and destruction around the science tent. Dyer must have decided right then to seal up the entrance to the cave in case it held any more of them monsters that was awake. He did it the quickest and surest way he knew, by dumping all the heavy boring machines and their spare bits and lengths of pipe into the hole, one on top of the other.
I shouted for a long time, but it was no use. There was still a little light seeping through, at that time. Later on, the small opening that let the daylight in got covered over with drifting snow, and it became pitch dark in the cave. Before that happened, I found an electric torch one of the graduate students must have left just inside the entrance.
I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t the dog alert Dyer that someone was in the cave by barking? I can’t explain it, on account of I was unconscious. If you want my guess, the dog did bark, but he wouldn’t leave my side to go to the entrance, and Dyer and the others was too terrified of what might come out of the mouth of the cave to go down and look.
Maybe they heard Sergeant barking and decided not to go in after him because he was only a dog. I can’t say that I blame them too much, given what they must have found at the camp. Those monsters was terrible strong, and tough as boot leather, and there was just too many of them. They took us by surprise, but even if we’d been prepared they still would have beaten us.
We had no weapons other than the axes. I think maybe Professor Lake had a revolver stored away in his trunk—I never saw it, but one of the grads made a joke about it one time while we was on the whaler, how Lake would shoot us if we didn’t mind his orders. The gun wouldn’t have made any difference anyway—bullets couldn’t hurt those things.
6
T
HE BATTERY IN THE TORCH LASTED LONGER THAN
I
THOUGHT IT
would, given that it was half played out to start with. I kept it switched it off for as long as I could stand it. The dark was so thick, I felt like I was swimming in it, or drowning in it. My heart started to pound and I began to sweat all over, and shiver at the same time. When I thought I couldn’t breathe, I switched the torch back on for a few minutes. I kept doing that for a long time, it seemed—hours, anyway.
Sergeant was always there, sitting quietly, watching me with his ears perked up. The dark didn’t bother him at all. Maybe he could hear echoes off the stone pillars, or maybe he was able to smell the ground well enough that he didn’t need to see.
He didn’t even whine, not that I expected him to. He was never a dog to show weakness. The blood eventually got dry on the right side of his coat. It went from a glistening red to a dull brown in the torch’s glow. Mind you, the torch itself was getting dull by that time. When it finally wouldn’t come on anymore, no matter how much I shook it or banged the side of it, I just sat listening to my heartbeat and the dog’s steady panting breaths.
It wasn’t warm in the cave but it wasn’t severe cold, neither. There must have been heat coming up from somewhere deep down through some kind of chimney or fissure. I never tried to find it in the darkness—that would have been suicide, and I had no mind to kill myself. My leg was broke bad enough that I probably couldn’t have dragged myself very far anyway.
The stink of that dead thing got bad enough that I squirmed and rolled a dozen yards or so away from it, then pushed myself up to sit with my back against a pillar. The dog followed me. He didn’t seem to mind the stench, now that it was dead. He must have been thirsty—the last water was given to the dogs some six hours before the attack. You couldn’t leave water out in the open in the corral, on account of it would freeze solid in ten minutes or so. The ice had to be melted over a stove for the dogs to drink.
Me and Sergeant sat for a long time in the dark. The pain in my leg got worse, but I put it out of my mind. No sense in brooding on it. I found a notebook and pencil in the inner pocket of my coat when I was searching around in the hope that whoever owned it had left some beef jerky or a biscuit there. I opened the notebook and brushed my fingers over the pages. Only the first page felt like it had writing on it, so I tore it out and started to write what you are reading. Why not? What else did I have to do?
It’s not as hard to write in the dark as you might suppose. All that’s needed is to keep the lines of writing nice and straight and even, and take care not to let the pencil run off the edge of the page. My jackknife that I always carried in the pocket of my trousers kept the pencil sharp. It was a way to use up some time.
Who knows? Maybe someday another expedition will blast open the entrance to this cave and find me and the dog. There’s bound to be interest in what happened to us all. Maybe Professor Dyer will lead that one as well. Not that you’d ever catch me coming back to this hellish, godforsaken desert of ice, if I could get off it. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.
I can hear Sergeant over by the dead monster, sniffing around and picking at it with his teeth. I don’t hear any chewing. It’s either too tough for him, or he doesn’t like the taste, even though he must be hungry by this time. We’ve been here days, I think. It must be days at least, but it’s hard to tell. The hours sort of run together in the dark.
Sometimes I must be asleep, but I can’t tell if I’m sleeping or waking unless I write down my thoughts in this here notebook. I’m started to see things in the dark. Pictures, but big as life, like I was in a cinema and sitting in the front row, right near the screen. For some reason they’re mostly things I remember from when I was a boy in England. Street scenes in London, things like Piccadilly and Covent Garden Market and the Strand.
My old Gran lived in a cottage in the countryside, and sometimes I can see her standing at the open front door, waving to me to come along smart, just like she used to do when I was sent to visit with her in the summer. I can smell her roses that grew on the sides of the front walk, and see her gray tomcat Lagger stretched out long on the sill of the open front window.
I don’t see nothing from Arkham or the university. Strange, that is. Maybe it means that what I did at the university wasn’t important enough to be worth remembering. Or maybe the memories we make early on in life return to us when we come near the end.
For a time there I must have fallen asleep. It was Sergeant’s tongue that woke me. He was licking at my broken leg where the seam of the trousers tore open, and the blood seeped out and dried on it. He backed off when he heard me wake up, but he make a kind of low growl deep in his throat. It was more a rumble than a growl.
I told him not to mind and said that he was a good dog over and over, until at last he came up to me and let me pat the side of his neck, the way I used to do when we was training with the wheeled sled back in New England on them dusty summer roads. He licked my hand and kind of nuzzled his snout into it. His nose didn’t feel quite right. It was hot, not cool and wet the way it should be.
He’s a good dog, but he must be getting fierce hungry by now. Like I told you near the start of this here journal, sled dogs isn’t quite like the dogs you have as your house pets. There’s a wildness in them that never gets tamed. Somewhere deep inside they’re part wolf, and no wolf can stand the smell of blood and meat when it’s starving to death.
I don’t want you to blame Sergeant for anything. He’s a good dog, the best dog I ever had. I just wish he was my dog, but somehow with my duties at the university and living as I did in a rooming house by myself after my Mary died, it never seemed sensible to get a dog of my own. But what he is going to do, it’s not his fault, just remember that.
He’s growling now, way down deep in his throat. It won’t be much longer, I don’t expect. Leastwise I won’t need to smell that rotting thing from hell. Maybe when Sergeant eats, he’ll get strong enough to search this here cave and find an opening out to the ice. Maybe there will still be someone at the camp to take him home. I hope so. He didn’t deserve what happened to him. None of us did, but at least we men knew what we was getting into. The dogs just came out of trust for us.
I’m sorry I let you down, old boy. You’re a good dog, Sergeant, yes you are, you’re a good dog …
* * *
Additional note by Professor Starkweather, leader of the 1935 Starkweather-Moore Antarctic expedition out of Miskatonic University, Arkham, Massachusetts:
The account transcribed above was found written in pencil with the body of Jack Hobbs, a forty-three-year-old carpenter employed by Miskatonic University who accompanied the 1930 Miskatonic Expedition in the capacity of dog handler. He was a widower with no surviving children.
Hobbs held the notebook in his left hand, and a pencil stub no more than two inches long in his right hand. There was an open pocket knife beside him, and cedar chips on his outstretched legs indicated that he had sharpened the pencil numerous times. He appears to have died from an infection of the blood, caused by a compound-fractured left tibia and fibula.
Lying dead across his legs was a large Malamute sled dog. The cause of the dog’s death was starvation. The condition of the dog’s body indicates that somehow it managed to stay alive for several weeks, perhaps for as long as two months, after the death of Hobbs. I can only speculate that it managed to find some source of water deeper in the cave, but there was no food. The corpse of Hobbs was not in any way molested by the dog.
S. T. Joshi
is the author of such critical studies as
The Weird Tale
(University of Texas Press, 1990),
The Modern Weird Tale
(McFarland, 2001), and
Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction
(PS Publishing, 2012). He has prepared corrected and annotated editions of H. P. Lovecraft’s collected fiction, poetry, revisions, and essays; with David E. Schultz, he is editing Lovecraft’s collected letters. His biography,
H. P. Lovecraft: A Life
(Necronomicon Press, 1996), won the Bram Stoker Award and the British Fantasy Award; it was published in an expanded and updated edition as
I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H. P. Lovecraft
(Hippocampus Press, 2010). Joshi has twice won the World Fantasy Award and the International Horror Guild Award.
Arthur C. Clarke
(1917–2008) was a pioneering science fiction writer and author of
Childhood’s End
(1953),
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968; with Stanley Kubrick), and many other works. His account of his early readings in science fiction is found in
Astounding Days
(1989). He received a CBE in 1989 and was knighted in 2000.
Heather Graham
is the
New York Times
and
USA Today
bestselling author of more than a hundred novels including suspense, paranormal, historical, and mainstream Christmas fare. She lives in Miami, Florida, her home, and an easy shot down to the Keys where she can indulge in her passion for diving. Travel, research, and ballroom dancing also help keep her sane; she is the mother of five and also resides with two dogs and two cats. She is CEO of Slush Pile Productions, a recording company and production house for various charity events.