Read Online The Spawning by Tim Curran - Free Book Online Page A

of the ice that had swallowed them. Though outlying areas had collapsed to ruins or been ground down into the earth by the glaciers themselves over that unimaginable gulf of time, the majority of the structures still stood. High and imposing and insane, spread over half a mile, they were a geometric anomaly that taxed the human brain just to look upon them.
    From high above, if you were to have seen them from an airplane, you would have noticed not a jumble of stones, but a symmetry that was disturbing. For despite the passage of eons, the megaliths were laid out in precise, almost mathematical order in the form of no less than five intersecting and exaggerated five-pointed stars. A cabalistic pentagram.
    At ground level, however, there seemed to be no cohesion whatsoever.
    Just a cyclopean, debased collection of crumbling cairns and massive pillar-like free-standing trilithons and sarsen stones arranged in concentric, ever-widening circles that were capped and connected by the horizontal shafts of great lintel stones overhead. And amongst this clustered, alien profusion, overlapping monuments and heel-stones, rectangular dolmens and cromlechs rising above deep-hewn barrow tunnels and oblong chambers and tabletop slabs carved with figures and forms unlike any to be seen anywhere on earth. It was all set upon upraised stone platforms of varying height which themselves were cut through by irregular trench systems and linked, yawning ditches.
    All of it was weathered and pitted and standing slightly off-center and leaning as if it might fall at any moment. But it did not fall. It had withstood the turbulence of the ages—extreme climactic change, seismic upheaval, and advanced glaciation—and would stand until its purpose was fulfilled, exactly as it had been designed. And although it was like other megalithic sites in that it was decidedly ritualistic by design, it was not a calendar or an astronomical observatory nor a rudimentary computer as some suggested anymore than was Stonehenge of Salisbury Plain or the Carnac Stones of Brittany.
    Like them, it was a machine.
    A dire machine awaiting to be activated.
    And the time for that was coming very soon.

10
    COLONY STATION,

HORSEHEAD BASIN,

MONOLITH RANGE

FEBRUARY 22nd
    W HEN BUTLER AGAIN WOKE up, she was strapped to a table, fluorescent lights shining so bright in her face she had to squint her eyes.
    Someone was standing there, hovering over her.
    An elderly woman with a wrinkled, dead face, a cruel smile on her lips sharp as a paper cut.
    Doctor... Doctor... Relling... this is Doctor Relling...
    â€œYou’re awake, I see,” the woman said.
    Butler mumbled something, her head aching, every inch of her flesh raw and hurting. Relling was doing something and then she saw what: she was injecting a syringe into her arm.
    â€œThere,” she said. “Now we’ll talk. Calmly. Easily. Like two old friends, eh?”
    Butler fought against the straps, crying out, thrashing this way and that . . . and then the will to do anything was just gone. She was on a cloud. She drifted. She breathed. She blinked. Nothing else.
    Finally, she said, “Please . . . I just want to go home.”
    â€œOf course you do,” Relling told her. “I’ll try and help you with that, but first you have to help me. You do want to help me, don’t you?”
    Something in Butler’s mind screamed
No!,
but her lips parted and she simply said: “Yes.”
    Despite herself, Butler felt relaxed. The pain was distant. She liked the sound of Relling’s voice.
    â€œYou were at Mount Hobb. You were sleeping,” Relling said. “You awoke to find the station empty. Then they came for you.”
    Butler tensed, tears washing down her cheeks. “No, no . . . I was alone . . . I was just alone . . .”
    (the shadow on the wall)
    (the shadow growing and growing . . . the flapping of wings... the slithering of limbs . . . the eyes . . . the red eyes . .