The Weird Company Read Free Page B

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