The Way You Came In May Not Be the Best Way Out

Chapter 4

I was a kid full of dreams, looking for bigger ones. My job? Covering the crime beat for the Boston Globe. It was the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, 1933.

I had the news room to myself. My feckless co-workers had decamped en masse for early festivities, leaving me in charge. I had my dog Baxter for company. He was asleep on the floor by my desk.

My phone rang. Baxter stood up and stretched. Flapped his ears. Gave a conversational bark and wagged his feathery tail. A noble hound, half collie and half spaniel, with white legs and a brown map of some unknown island on his back. I patted him and picked up the receiver.

“Doug Patchen?” said the caller’s blunt voice. “Stan Gorski here.”

I remembered this guy. An ex-pilot with a big mouth. “You got a fresh story for me?” I asked. “A second act? Something in the aviation line to wow the rubes.”

“I appreciated how you wrote up my trial, Doug. Didn’t make me look too—you know.”

“Too criminal?”

“I was mixing with the hard guys. I was drunk all the time.”

“Who wouldn’t have been?” I said. “You were using a Coast Guard rescue plane to smuggle in cases of VSOP cognac.”

“And now all of a sudden booze is legal,” said Gorski. “But do I get my commission back? My chance to fly? Not on your life. Not in this burg. Never mind that I’m supporting a wife and three kids.”

“I remember them,” I said. “Human interest. Where are you working?”

“I’m a mechanic for Colonial Air out at Jeffrey Field. I can fix any plane ever made, Dougie. Better believe it. Not that I need the job anymore. I’m in the chips.”

“I’m sure you are,” I said, doubting him. “You’re—still drinking?”

“I went dry the day they repealed Prohibition,” said Gorski, cackling as if proud of his reverse. “So, no, I’m not phoning you whacked outta my skull. I’ve got a straight-up business proposition for you. The biggest story since the Starkweather-Moore fiasco.”

The Starkweather-Moore Antarctic expedition of 1931. Every member of the party had met a lurid and horrific end. The scouts who’d ventured into the lost city of Leng—consumed by a foul slug the size of a railway train. The men in the base camp—incinerated by the purposeful zaps of a malignant storm. The crews of the expedition’s ships—lost in the depths of an anomalous maelstrom.

A series of live radio broadcasts, relayed from one ground station to the next, had etched the ghastly chain of events deep into the public’s mind. First came the anguished screams of the scouts being smothered in slimy flesh. Then the desperate shrieks of the men in the base camp as the slyly purposeful lightning strokes picked them off. Then came the sailors’ cries amid the snapping of ship timbers and the maelstrom’s whistling roar. And then—silence.

The explorers had been warned in advance. A survivor of the Pabodie party of 1930, had published a passionate screed in the Arkham Advertiser, inveighing passionately against any further expeditions to Leng. But within a year, the thirst for glory had drawn Starkweather and Moore to their destruction.

Arkham AdvertiserTwo years had elapsed since then. As yet, so far as I knew, nobody had been mad enough to propose a third expedition. But now...

I felt a sickly-sweet hollowness in my stomach. “You’re going to Leng,” I said to Gorski, my voice flat. “You want me to come.” And, god help me, I knew I was going say yes.

“Quick on the uptake,” said Gorski. “I like that. A secret mission. You quit your job at the Globe, you write up our trip, and we sell our story when we get back. Hunky dory.”

Globe“We?” I said, stepping into the abyss. “Who’s we?”

“You and me and Leon Bagger and Vivi Nordström. Leon’s an assistant professor at Harvard. Looking to get a permanent job. Vivi’s a double-dome too. Plus we’ll have this, uh, friend of Vivi’s, name of Urxula. The trip is Vivi and Urxula’s idea. We’d like to get going tonight on account of it’s New Year’s Eve, and the guards will be blotto. We’ve been loading stuff onto the plane all week. We’ll fly to Leng in three big hops. Boston, Lima, Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica. You’ll be a co-pilot. Piece of cake, Dougie. And Vivi pilots too. The weather’s great in Antarctica this time of year. Sunny all night long. Be a nice vacation for all of us.”

I had picked up a pilot’s license while doing a feature on the Flying Falangas, a family of barnstormers. But I’d never flown more than a hundred miles at any one go. Not that the problems I might encounter up in the air could hold a candle to those we’d face in the lost wastes of the south pole.

“What about the man-eating slugs? And the intelligent lightning? And those—those hibernating sea cucumber things?” I’d seen the Pabodie expedition photos of seven-foot-tall creatures with starfish heads and snaky arms.

“Leon teaches an introductory marine biology course at Harvard, Doug. He can handle those cukes. And Vivi’s a visiting intern. Lives with Leon. Not his wife. She’s knows science too. Something about ultrasonics. Claims she has an angle on those giant slugs. Plus that, we’ve got our native guide. I’m talking about that Urxula. She’s—well, you’ll see.” Gorski broke off with a raspy chuckle. “Come on downstairs to the street. I’m parked right by the phone booth. Driving a red Duesenberg, my man. Twenty feet long. The ride of your life.”