MCMURDO SOUND Read online

  MCMURDO SOUND

  by

  Billie Sue Mosiman

  First published in URBAN NIGHTMARES as "The Hook of Death," Baen Books, edited by Josepha Sherman & Keith DeCandido, 1997

  McMurdo Sound has been slightly changed, revised, and lengthened from "The Hook of Death."

  Copyright Billie Sue Mosiman 2012, All Rights Reserved

  Other works By Billie Sue Mosiman in e-book form for download to your e-reader includes:

  BANISHED

  WIREMAN

  WIDOW

  BAD TRIP SOUTH

  UNIDENTIFIED

  FROM A HIGH WINDOW

  GOLD RUSH DREAM

  HORROR TALES

  HORROR TALES 2

  The Vampire Nations’ Trilogy--LEGIONS OF THE DARK, RISE OF THE LEGEND, HUNTER OF THE DEAD

  SCROLLS OF THE DEAD

  LIFE NEAR THE BONE

  CRYPT TALES

  CREATURES

  DARK REALITY

  THE LONELY WALK

  SPARKLE

  THE SCREAM

  PROSPER BANE

  I DON'T KNOW WHAT SINS I've committed that sent me to the cold wasteland of Antarctica. Brian, the radar tech, and I have often sat mulling over steaming cups of the blackest coffee we could make to figure out how we came to be stationed at McMurdo Sound. Being a government employee means taking a risk on where in the world you might wind up, but two years duty at McMurdo seems the cruelest punishment. And for my friend, Brian, the deadliest.

  He has done something unforgivable, and they have sent a team from the FBI to check us out. Tomorrow the plane should land and they will take Brian away. If I had the strength to argue, I'd beg them to take me too.

  It's the isolation that either makes you mad or kills you. They tell me a few years ago another recruit went insane and had to be locked up in a supply room for months before they could ship him out. If he'd been allowed to run amok, they feared he would have murdered everyone on the base. Another time at a Russian base in this region, two men argued over a sandwich and one buried an ax in the other man's head.

  If only we had locked Brian away...

  It began with stories. The days and nights are interminable here. Once our stations are secure and all the work complete, the hours stretch out before us like years until the next day can begin. Brian came from Alabama. He had a soft drawl and a sunny smile. At least he did back in the beginning. We had struck up a friendship early on. He had been at McMurdo for two years already when I shipped in. Since I was a replacement in Brian's sector and new and raw, he took me under his wing. The first year of my exile we played games to pass the time. Cards, dominoes, chess, darts. Brian nearly always won. He was quick-witted and able to recognize patterns inside of patterns, giving him the edge in most competitions. After a while, when it appeared I'd never improve and he would always be the victor, be suggested that I might like to hear some of the old tales he had heard or experienced as a boy in the rural south.

  "Sure," I said, happy to be freed of the role of loser. "I'd love to hear some stories."

  During those first few months of storytelling after work we'd take our mugs over to the heating vent in the corner of the radar room where it was quiet and warm. Brian told me about watching his grandfather pick cotton on the farm, the ice cream socials on warm summer evenings, many hunting and fishing stories involving detailed descriptions of rifles, shotguns, frog gigs, 'coons run up trees, the proper way to tan hides, and the best bait for catching bass and catfish in country fishing holes. Being from Chicago, a city boy all my life, these stories were of great interest. Picking cotton? The boles with their spiny covers that made the fingers bleed? Gigging frogs with a trident, taking them home to fry the legs for dinner? It was like an entirely new and strange world and Brian made it vivid and real for me so that I could hear the whippoorwills calling in the woods, I could see flocks of yellow butterflies hovering over a field of high green grass, I could smell the scent of wild meat frying in a big black skillet.

  "Damn, you tell good stories," I told Brian. "Makes me wish I had grown up in the South."

  "Oh, the South has dark days too," he said cryptically. "Dark and ugly days." Then he left it at that.

  The stories passed the time--the long, empty time that began to weigh like a row-long sack of cotton on the mind. It was time that was the enemy of all of us in McMurdo Sound. Men on the base used obsessions to get them through the hours. I knew guys who kept mice (shipped to them through the mail from a supplier in South Dakota), cataloged music, put together endless model car kits, wrote daily letters home, or watched old movies until they knew all the dialogue. It was like prison at the radar station, each man to himself, trying to pass the days. Telling stories was just one more way to beat down the loneliness.

  I noticed after several months of swapping stories--because I told a few myself--that just as in the playing of games, Brian was the better storyteller. I had to admit that coming from Chicago, raised by a single mother and having no extended family, my stories were dull and mostly non-eventful. Just to stay alive my Mom and I had to work hard. It's all I remember either of us doing, working and working. Who had time for family stories?

  Then one week a couple of months ago Brian said, "I could tell you strange tales you might not believe."

  "Strange? Like having a watermelon eat-off using no hands isn't strange? Like tracking a bobcat that ends up ripping apart your uncle so he's scarred for life is a tale that isn't strange?" I laughed and slapped my knee the way I thought old people in Alabama might behave when tickled pink. "How strange a story can you get up to anyway, Brian?" I just couldn't stop grinning. He knew I wasn't making fun of him and where he was from. I'd already let him know how I admired him and his background for being so colorful and amazing. Where as I had been a kid growing up in the streets and alleys, frequenting little corner stores and pool halls, Brian had woods and forests, lakes and creeks, wilderness and people who were comfortable with all that Nature-in-the-Wildwood.

  Brian cleared his throat. "Well, I know some ghost stories and I know about a few odd murders that happened back then. But the best of all is the night Betsy Ann and I were out parking and making out when this man..."

  "What man?" Even Brian's tone of voice was different from when he told other stories to me. This one was much more serious.

  "He had been around our little village ever since I could remember. No one had anything to do with him. They said he'd been to Vietnam and lost his arm and it made him crazy. He was always carrying on to anyone who would listen how they sawed off his arm at the elbow in the POW camp to try to break him."

  "Well, shit." I hunched forward in my chair, listening hard now.

  Brian shrugged. "I don't know if it's true. He might have lost it in a fire fight, shrapnel or something, who knows. Most people thought he was so damn nuts that anything he claimed couldn't be true. I used to go to sleep at night and have nightmares about someone sawing off the guy's arm. His name was Folcum. I don't know his first name, I don't know if anyone knew it. He lived alone in a cabin in the woods that had once belonged to his folks--who were dead and gone by then--and he didn't have a lot to do with anybody. They all just called him Folcum as in, 'Here comes that crazy Folcum again.'"

  "So he had just one arm?"

  "No, he had two. I mean, he had one and then he had a hook for the other. They'd fixed his missing limb with one of those mechanized things that had two metal finger-like appendages on the end of it. He could open and close them to pick up things. The two contraptions curved when they were closed so they looked like a hook. He'd wave that at the kids around the country store to scare them."

  "So what happened when you were out parking with your girl?" This sounded more and mor
e like an urban legend to me. I'd heard the story about the man with the hook and the parked lovers. I couldn't quite bring myself to disbelieving Brian's story, though. It hadn't seemed to me he'd ever told me lies before so why would he tell me one now?

  "Well, I was sixteen and Betsy Ann was just fifteen. Her folks wouldn't let her go on dates yet, but they let me drive her to church on Sunday nights. I'd come early and say we were going to stop for an RC at the store before church. We never did, of course. Instead we took that extra half hour or so to turn down a little-used road that led to the old baseball diamond, park under the pines, and make out like bandits. By the time we got to church we'd be so flushed and horny, we'd have to keep our heads down like we were being so pious and hope the high color in our cheeks would go away before anyone noticed and suspected what we'd been up to.

  "One Sunday night in late winter we had the windows rolled up against the cool evening and we're sitting in the front seat with our tongues in one another's mouths and I had Russian hands and roving fingers, as we used to say. I was all over that girl. Betsy Ann was a hot babe with very large tits for such a young girl and I was hoping eventually she'd let me have her, totally, you know?

  "Anyway, we both hear the scrape of metal against metal and it came from the back door driver's side door handle. I was driving my dad's old four-door Galaxy.

  "It's real dark under the pines, can't even see the stars and there was no moonrise yet that night. We stop in the middle of a kiss, our lips frozen fast as Popsicles to one another and when Betsy Ann pulled away, we heard it again.

  "'What's that?' she said, and for the life of me I couldn't imagine. All I knew was suddenly I was too afraid to turn around in the seat to look back there. 'It's nothing,' I said, trying to believe it myself.

  "Betsy Ann was looking back now so I forced myself, I couldn't be a wuss, could I? I didn't see anything, but it occurred to me the sound we'd heard could have been made by Folcum's weird ass metal hooked hand grabbing hold of the door handle. I put the thought right out of my head as fast as I thought it. It scared the hell out of me.

  "I told Betsy Ann she could see for herself it was nothing. Time was running out for us to be at church, so I pulled her over to me for one more kiss, had just gotten my hand on her breast when the sound, louder, came again. I flinched, jerked around in the seat to look back, and saw...nothing."

  "That's damn creepy," I told Brian. "Was it Folcum, you think?"

  "It sure was. I don't know what he was trying to do, scare us, play a trick, or get in the car with us, but I started up the car quick and took off. I saw his silhouette behind us in the rearview. Him and his awful arm."

  "So what happened then?" I was perched all the way to the edge of my chair. Brian had me now, Brian had me in the clutches of his storytelling so hard that I wasn't even in McMurdo Sound anymore, freezing my ass off in a cavernous radar room, drinking mud coffee. I was in an Alabama night with a strange, deformed man stalking a pair of young lovers. I believed every single word of it.

  Brian hung his head and contemplated his coffee mug, swirling the liquid there, watching the small well of darkness slosh. He had aged in the dim light. He looked to be struggling with bad memories and might be about to change the subject when he quietly said, "When spring came, Folcum killed little Betsy Ann."

  Shocked, I sat back in my chair with a thud. "He didn't. He didn't really."

  Brian looked up from his cup. I saw the truth written in his eyes. His girl, Betsy Ann, had been murdered. It was true. All of it was true. This was a story Brian never really wanted to tell and because it haunted him, because it rose up like a creature of the night in his dreams, he had let it out and he had told someone. Now I carried the story as if it were a bucket and the handle was welded to my hand. I owned the story the same as Brian did. Betsy Ann was my girl, too, and I grieved for her as if she had been a real girl in my own life.

  Brian continued, "Folcum caught her walking home from a girlfriend's house one late afternoon toward the end of May. School had just ended and summer stretched before us like a dream. He dragged her into the woods at the edge of the road and...and..."

  My imagination was way ahead of the story. I knew what Folcum had done and what life had been lost. I resisted the urge to stand up abruptly and leave the radar room before he could say any more.

  "They found her three days later. She'd been strangled and mutilated. She'd managed to tear off a snippet of shirt Folcum had been wearing. It was clutched in her hand. When they went to pick him up, they found him without his mechanical arm. He always wore that thing so they went searching for it in the house and found it had been bent all to hell. It wouldn't work anymore. And there was some of Betsy Ann's blond hair caught in the pincers like he'd tried to hold her head down by her hair."

  "Jesus, that's awful, Brian. It must have shocked your whole community."

  Brian looked up and a sly, ferret look came into his dark eyes. "While Folcum was out on bail, he disappeared." Brian smiled and a shiver of apprehension ran up my spine.

  "He left the state or something?" Brain just stared at me. "You don't mean...you're not saying..."

  "No, he didn't leave the state, he left the planet. I caught him out behind his house and dragged the bastard down to the creek and held his head under until he stopped fighting. He only had one arm. He couldn't fight me off. I threw his stupid metal hook arm into the deepest part of a fishing hole and I guess it's still there today."

  "You killed him?" I whispered.

  Brian stood up and stretched. "Bedtime," he announced. "I've told enough stories for tonight."

  I couldn't sleep for thinking about Brian being a killer. I understood the grief and pain his girlfriend's death must have cost him, but he took the law into his own hands. Is that what they always did in the South? Was that idyllic picture I had of it as twisted as a corkscrew? What Brian had confessed to was one cold business.

  But then he called all these tales "stories" and maybe he just made them up.

  It wasn't until he really lost it and went berserk at the outpost that I truly believed he was capable of murder and had probably killed Folcum, just as he claimed.

  #

  It was weeks after he'd told me about the man with the hooked arm and the death of Betsy Ann that Brian started acting weird. He stopped telling me stories and clammed up tight. He didn't want to play cards or watch video or throw darts. He started keeping to himself in his quarters and when I went to see about him, he was gruff and unfriendly. I asked him, "What's gotten into you? What's wrong?"

  He claimed to have headaches, they were killing him. The McMurdo Sound medic wouldn't prescribe anything stronger than aspirin. Radar techs have to be careful about what medications they take. No one wanted them seeing flying saucers or incoming missiles on the screens.

  I left him alone and started reading an Edgar Allan Poe collection of stories I found in the station library. I worried about Brian, but if he didn't want my company, I was not about to force it on him.

  The shift radar techs started coming to me and asking if I knew what was wrong with Brian. I was his friend, I should know what was up. He'd been saying he heard things and couldn't keep his mind on the radar blips. Couldn't they hear it, he asked them over and over, that terrible scraping sound like someone outside the hut dragging something metallic along the corrugated metal sides?

  They couldn't hear anything, they claimed. They were afraid Brian was losing it and might have to be shipped out on the next available transport. "See about him," they said. "Do something."

  I stood in the rec room, staring at the coffee pot, thinking whether I wanted to pour a cup or not. It looked like black poison. I decided not. I went to the nearest window and stared outside into the dark. Security lights spread a white light over white snow; the world was white and silent and so empty. I knew the guys were probably right--Brian was in real big trouble. He shouldn't have talked about Folcum and that May night of murder. He shouldn't have told me a
bout the creek and the drowning. It was hard on me keeping that kind of secret. You shouldn't have to know about a murder--no matter how deserved--and care so much for the murderer.

  Snow began to fall, the light winking and speckling outside the ice-rimmed window, the night drawing nearer as if slithering softly toward the compound, the emptiness beyond the night growing into galactic proportions.

  I hurried to brace Brian in his quarters. If I was chosen to save him from himself, then I would do the best I could. The entire base was constructed of Quonset huts made of corrugated metal and fully insulated on the inside. Nevertheless you could still hear the rising of the wind wailing out there and once in a while the creak of shifting ice or the thunder of a far off avalanche falling into the Sound, but I knew that's not what Brian thought he was hearing. He'd become obsessed with a mechanical hooked arm.

  "Brian, the other guys in radar are threatening to go to the C.O. about you. It's serious. We have to do something."

  He looked up at me from where he lay on his bunk and said, "They don't hear it, or they pretend they don't. Did they admit to you they heard it?"

  "It's that story you told me, Brian. About Betsy Ann. It's like you let it take over your mind or something. You're imagining those sounds."

  He jerked up in bed, sitting rigid, his head cocked to one side. He glanced over at the small square of dark window. "You heard that, right? Didn't you?! Don't lie about it."

  I shook my head slowly. "Wind, that's all it is. It's snowing and the north wind is up. It's the damn wind, Brian."

  "Wind can't thunk against the side of the building and then rumble down the side, slapping those corrugated valleys. You're lying, just like the others. You hear it, you know he's there, but you just won't admit it."

  I walked over and took him by the shoulders and shook him hard. "Snap out of it! You've been here in McMurdo too damn long, that's all. Your mind is starting to play tricks on you, it happens to a lot of guys. Folcum's dead. You told me so yourself, you killed him, he's dead."