What Neither Star nor Sun Shall Waken: A Sci-Fi Horror Story Read online

  And it was. He didn’t even realize what he was checking for until he was already doing it, and it was. He remembered his dream.

  “…it’s getting closer. The time between ping and response is getting shorter. It must be moving up the trench somehow.”

  He realized he was speaking in whisper, and swallowed hard past a suddenly dry throat.

  “It…it must be a massive chunk of ice breaking free and floating to the surface. It must be.”

  He knew he couldn’t fall asleep again. He turned the sonar full on the trench, a constant scan. A constant countdown till it reached the top. The calculations couldn’t be exact, but he was sure it would pass close to the ship. A mile away, maybe less. Maybe much less. He couldn’t miss it. He took an injection of stimulants from the medical kit, only a few molecules different from the methamphetamines they would put in the first aid kits of British World War Two soldiers in case they got caught behind enemy lines. The shot kicked like a mule and he involuntarily sucked in a breath of air. All fatigue was burned out of his veins by the acid of the stimulant, and replaced by tension. His fear now had hot adrenaline to feed it.

  But not panic. He would never allow himself panic. He watched the sonar. The object was moving steadily and even rapidly, but it had a long way to go and would be at least two hours until it reached his depth of the ocean.

  He had nothing to do while he waited, not really, but he found things to do anyway. Anything to avoid concentrating on the sounds from the radio, which were constant now. There was no sense to it. It wasn’t regular like the pulses of sonar, nor was it random. At some times he almost felt he could get a sense of a rhythm, at others it just seemed to be horrible gibbering. He busied himself with an inventory of equipment, a diagnostic of the probe, the ship's systems. Even said a few words now and then to Jack. Closer and closer it came. More and more he dreaded it. Wished it away, wished himself away. He wanted to go back to being alone in the dark, to slowly dying in an empty sea.

  “You as worried as I am Jack? No?”

  BEEP BEEP, BEEP BEEP!

  The proximity alarm. The one that had proved so useless in space somehow continued to work underwater. The object was only moments away from coming over the ridge of the trench. It had tumbled in its climb until its new trajectory would take it surely less than half a mile from him, allowing the probe to record it in incredible detail. It would be right in front of him, and he wouldn’t see a thing. He strapped himself into the pilots chair, thinking the turbulence might send the ship spinning.

  He felt a tremendous tension. He recognized it. The first time he had sat on the top of a roller coaster hill before dropping, the first time he had flown a jet, the first time he had gone into space. That feeling where he just wanted to stop, to turn back, but knew it was too late. Things had gone beyond his control. He tried to tell himself this tension was excitement, that it was the stimulant. But the truth was, it was terror. Plain and simple and all consuming.

  A moment more and it was there. He felt the waves of its movement hit the ship, pushing it back. If there was light, he’d be able to see the thing right out the front viewing port. He watched it on the sonar instead. No small block of ice, more like an iceberg. And yet still more of it came. Larger, much larger. It was huge, seemingly endless. It rose and rose…

  And stopped.

  It didn’t keep going on to the surface ice. It just stopped, incredibly. Impossibly. Stopped rising, but did not stop moving. The whole mountainous thing was moving, reshaping itself. Gibson fought to think clearly past the fear and the noise of the radio, now screaming its terrible song.

  Magma? But how can a whole mountain be made of magma? How is it moving like that? How the hell can something that big move like that?

  It was beyond the ability of the sonar. It was too chaotic, to unrecognizable to the computer. He had to see it. He couldn’t just sit in the dark with it. He had to see it with his own eyes.

  The ships remaining thruster would never work underwater, but he could still use the batteries to pump the fuel out of the ship. Even while underwater the rocket fuel would burn, and the probe’s nuclear engine was hot enough to ignite it. Hot enough to ignite anything, even while freezing. Pumping out the fuel would take all the remaining battery power, leaving none for oxygen or heat, but he didn’t hesitate. He was activating the pumps even as he thought of it, sending the signal to tell the probe it was on the surface and time to burn baby burn.

  Ten seconds, twenty he waited while the probe split its atoms into a barely controlled nuclear chain reaction. Watching the sonar, trying to make sense of the impossible things it was showing him. And then, finally, the fuel caught fire. The scream of vaporizing water was loud enough to hear even through the hull of the ship, which was no doubt sizzling with the heat. The ocean was lit up for miles.

  And he saw it. He’d have given anything not to, to have undone the consequence of his terrible curiosity, but it was too late. It was indeed a mountain, but not of rock. A mountain of flesh. A thing beyond all understanding of the size flesh could be. Its appendages, nightmare things not quite tentacle and not quite claw, dwarfed sky scrapers. Its flesh crawled and broiled, in constant movement. Its shape was incomprehensible, his mind could make no sense of it. No creature dwelling in the darkest holes of Earth would recognize kinship with this form. No Gods of Earth’s womb creation had ever had such nightmares as this.

  Its mouth, if mouth it was, opened and opened forever. Teeth that dwarfed redwoods unfolded for miles from inside it. Thousands of them, tens of thousands. Gibson thought he would go insane, he wanted to go insane to escape from it somehow. He couldn’t even close his eyes. He just kept seeing it.

  And then the fuel was gone and it was dark again. The fire had burnt out the probe, leaving the sonar blind. The energy drain had left even the console lights dead. He was in perfect darkness.

  But not alone. It was out there with him. If it had no eyes to see the light, then surely it could feel the heat. Surely it could hear the noise. As it had heard the sonar. As it had spoken back to him over the radio before coming to find him.

  Is it coming for me now? Is it reaching out for me in the dark? How close? How close now?

  *...*...*

  About the author:

  Ryan Notch lives in Centralia, Pennsylvania, a town evacuated by the Federal government due to a coal mine fire burning beneath it since 1962. The only town in America ever to have its zip code revoked. During the day he wanders the empty streets and houses as if in a dream, looking for something he lost but can't remember where or what it was. At night he writes his horror stories by lying down next to a burning fissure along main street and placing his ear to the ground, transcribing what he hears coming up from below.

  Discover other titles by Ryan Notch at just about every ebook retailer online.

  Or look at his photography at www.areographers.com/

  Or see a trailer for his feature length horror movie at www.lastnightofapril.com/

  Or read his comics at www.themsgoodcomics.com/

  *...*...*

  Check out these other terrifying titles available from Ryan Notch!

  From master of dark fantasy and sci-fi horror Ryan Notch comes all his best published stories, in one place for the first time ever. 

  A collection of stories that swim through the liquid darkness hiding within each of us.

  Wherein...

  A beautiful scientist plagued by social phobias builds a machine to separate her fear from her body and imprison it, leaving her free to live her life.  But her fear given form grows ever more ravenous...

  A decayed corpse more massive than the largest animal possible is found washed up on the shore.  An oceanographer sets to the seas to follow its trail, finding remorseless monstrosities in its wake...

  A group of boys play the same game every night, a treasure hunt through the dark and deserted urban streets of their neighborhood.  Until one night they find a path th
at shouldn't exist, to a place between here and there. A place where the world twists itself into knots of agony, and horror abounds...

  The last man in the world looks out his window to see he is no longer alone in the night, though soon wishes he was...

  And the never before released novella Its Shadow Afire in Infrared, where a fire breaks out on a space station far from help.  With the nearest rescue a million miles away and the devouring flames inching ever closer, three crew members will risk everything on a desperate gambit...

  Praise for Ryan Notch:

  "I've come to believe that mystery is the greatest driving force of

  fiction...and it's clear that Ryan Notch gets it."

  -Albert Berg's Unsanity Files

  "I don't usually pick up a horror book unless it has Stephen King on front

  page but this author could give Stephen King a run for his money!"

  -Bridget H, Goodreads

  Pick up your copy today!