What Wandering Eyes Should Appear

By L. G. Merrick
Illustrated by Steve Morris

I should have known something was wrong the night a clatter arose from the kitchen area. At first I was annoyed at Lois, stumbling around out there for no reason. Then she herself punctured that safe thought by saying from the bunk on the other side of the divider, “What the hell is that?”

I sprang from my bunk and threw back the curtain. Heart already thundering, I could see the whole shelter where I stood. It was lit by the Christmas lights we’d strung all around—right away on December 1, to pretend the place was not a dreary deathtrap only a little bigger than a shipping container. And in the criss-cross of multicolored shadows, the only movement was the sway of steel pots that hung from hooks over the tiny prep island. 

No other movement. No shape of any wild animal. No blast of cold air to indicate some predator, circling our hut, had clawed a hole in the wall to get us. Not even a mouse.

Not that any animals lived up here. Even polar bears stayed a hundred miles south. 

I started to breathe easy. Earthquake, maybe, I thought, wondering if this place got earthquakes.

Then the pots moved again. 

They lifted all at once toward the wall behind the stove, as if someone outside had pulled invisible lines attached to each. They turned, as if that person walked five or six paces holding that handful of lines—and then they dropped. As if the lines were let go. So the pots fell back into mere gravity, swinging and clapping together, and shook as if laughing at me.

• • •

In the morning we didn’t talk about the incident because we couldn’t see how it fit into our magnetism study. We’re both good scientists; we don’t speak until we’ve got real data.

Lois said what she said every few days, her running joke since the early planning stages, back when we were at the university looking over weather charts of the area:

“There’s no way we’re supposed to be here.”

We were outside Tahiti, bundled into thick coats with fur-lined hoods against the December air. We each held a Stanley thermos of coffee. The Stanley was impressive. In real Tahiti, it would have kept coffee steaming hot all day. Here—the frigid north of Ellesmere Island, at the empty top of Canada, where “Tahiti” was the nickname of our accommodation hut—it did the trick for an hour.

“Pretty countryside,” I said. “As long as you value consistency.”

Straight ahead the world was a flat sheet of snow, all the way into darkness. It was 10 a.m. Under the snow, we knew there to be only a plain of rubble. 

“Check in every hour,” I said.

She shrugged almost indiscernibly in the coat. “Yeah.”

All October and November, whenever we were apart, we’d hit the squawk button on our walkies every hour on the hour. To signal I’m still alive, I don’t need help. We felt nervous about our safety, as the only two human beings in a land area the size of Michigan. Lately we were starting to feel confident, or complacent; by New Years, I felt sure we’d be neglecting the squawk.

Then she headed to the hut we called Molokai to repair the sensors I’d brought back from the field yesterday, and I headed to Aruba to get the snowcat and go replace a sensor that had failed last night.

It was perpetually night, of course. I thought about that as the cat shuddered and wheezed across the plain. From about 11:40 a.m. till 3:15 p.m., the sky grayed just enough that we could see the horizon, but stayed dark enough that the major stars still glittered. No sun since October. No supply planes since November and none due until March. We had to ration, plan, pay attention to get through the night. The base was spartan and decrepit, built in 1988 as a weather station, had endured long intervals of disuse. Even the snowcat was forty years old, a cramped little Bombi, cheery yellow and meant for easier duty at a ski resort. As I drove I watched the cloud of each exhale in the cockpit. It was cold inside the Bombi and only felt warm compared to outside, where the temp was -25. 

Occasionally I passed or discerned in the distance a tiny red glow. The light of a sensor in working order. They were out there for miles, distributed in a layout that only made sense if viewed on a map of invisible forces.

It took an hour to get to the spot where the equipment was down. I couldn’t see any red lights from there. This sensor had no nearby friends.

I was used to the crunch of my boots on the snow. I cut the headlights but left the Bombi running as I walked in a spiral out from the concrete pylon, looking for the sensor. Wondering where it had been tossed by a gale. Crunch of boots. Ragged chug of the idling engine. Those were the only sounds. I left the engine idling because I had a fear it wouldn’t restart, and a worse fear of the silence. It was a dense silence, at the north pole. A living silence. A silence that never truly went away, but prowled out there at the edge of the noise I was making. If I let it get closer, it would get me.

Eventually my headlamp landed on what I wanted, flat in the snow. A metal pole five feet long, which had been seated 18 inches into a socket in the pylon. How the hell these things were taking flight, neither Lois nor I had a guess. The instruments atop the pole were sealed into a metal box the size of a half-gallon carton of milk, weighing fifteen pounds. Hardly a potential sail. But lately, ever since real winter had gripped the area, these things were getting yanked out of their pylons, and hurled. In some cases a quarter mile. Some were bent. A few we’d never found.

My face was past numb and into pain as I trudged back to the Bombi, pole in hand. I was annoyed at the thing and didn’t look it over before I tossed it into the cargo bed.

When Lois saw it, she said, “Did you run it over, or what the hell?”

Then I looked. 

It appeared a powerful jaw had bitten a third of the metal box clean off. 

• • •

We agreed it must have hit a rock just right. We enforced the agreement by discussing it no further, and spent the next few days buried in our work.

The work was engrossing, truly. Two years earlier, before we’d ever traveled north of Ann Arbor, we’d written new software and uploaded it to an aging satellite over the north pole. Our upload made the sat tremendously more sensitive, and the sat rewarded us with data about geomagnetic north that was—peculiar, let us say; certainly unexpected, and ground on which we realized our nascent careers might well be built. 

Most people know that the planet has two north poles: one representing the planet’s axis, and a second near it—magnetic north—that our compasses point to. What almost no one knows is that there is a third north pole, on Ellesmere Island, called geomagnetic north. This is where compasses should point, but don’t. That’s due to complexities in the planet’s magnetic core. This north pole does exist though, and not merely as a place where something should be but isn’t. It is, you might say, the bald spot in our planet’s magnetic field—the spot where that force emerges only to be shed, sent streaming away in solar wind to join the magnetic field between the planets.

Additionally, geomagnetic north wanders. You can’t jab a stake in the ground and say “it is here.” Instead it acts as a true field, spanning miles. A compass walked across it will spin in confusion. And our satellite had observed not only the expected, slow, year-by-year shifting of the field’s borders, but rapid, minute swings within the field, the eruption of fleeting concentrations not predicted by any model. That’s why we were up here in the ancient weather station. Planting sensors that could record the nitty gritty, to find out hour by hour how the field waxed and waned. How the strange loci of its magnetic power moved, meter by meter. 

So our study echoed across dimensions of geology, paleomagnetism, chemistry, astronomy, physics, meteorology—back to the origin of the planet and on into future epochs. Some days we felt like the most important researchers alive, gathering data that would leave not a single branch of science untouched. Except biology, of course. This was a lifeless part of the globe.

“Unless,” Lois said over yet another spaghetti dinner at the end of a day.

“Unless?”

“Unless our dataset hints to biologists why it’s lifeless. On Baffin you get wolves and bears at this latitude. Terns. On Greenland. Just not here. Maybe animals avoid the field because they sense something about it.”

“Great,” I said. “That means we’re probably getting tumors, living here for a year.”

“At least we’re avoiding skin cancer.”

It was one of her usual no-sun jokes. Our four small windows were, as always, black squares. A howl of wind clutched the hut just then and rattled the knickknacks that crowded the shelf over the fireplace. It was only a painting of a fireplace, on cardboard, glued to the wall by some long-gone, funny team. The shelf was positioned to be its mantle. A porcelain piglet, a corncob pipe, a ship in a bottle—we’d been advised it was tradition to bring a small item to leave on the shelf. We were the first team to stay through the winter since 2003, so we’d put our heads together to come up with something good. For now though, we had only hung a couple of socks from the edge of the shelf with a little duct tape—more yule spirit. We listened to the howl and the rattle and eyed the pots. The pots did not move.

“Do we want to talk about what we saw that night?” I asked.

Many of the sensors nearest the base had been blown out, that night. All the ones on the side of the base that the pots had been drawn to. Pulled from their pylons and hurled across the plain and shorted out, dead. Providing us no data. So we didn’t talk about it.

But I thought about it. A lot. I suspect we both did. How maybe it was not the wind, doing that. We thought about it silently and hit the starless black wall of the unknown.

• • •

The next time it was eight sensors that went down, all up in the hills. We stared at the computer screen a long time, refreshing the page, hoping they’d come back online. It was almost noon before we accepted the fact that we had to go into the hills.

“Together,” she said, uneasy.

“Like white on rice,” I said.

Shoulder to shoulder in the tiny Bombi we rode south, up a long white slope, until the cliffs loomed out of the dark into the gray, then into the headlights. They were heaps and pillars of white, ribboned black where stone peeked through because the snow had been swept away by gales. Lois didn’t repeat any of the wisecracks she’d made last time we went up here, weeks ago. This time we had a sense that the hills held something worse than the danger of slipping and falling from a height. This time the unspoken had lived too long and grown too big in our heads. 

I turned the Bombi to chug along the base of sheer cliffs, looking for our entryway to the higher points. Found it, about where I remembered it being, and up, up the little machine labored, ascending a crevice, a pass to the first downed sensor. 

“I’ll do it,” she said when I stopped at the pylon.

I watched her drop a new sensor into place and turn it on. Then she began to walk in a spiral out from that point, eyes on the ground, looking for the bad one. Stupidly, we had forgotten our headlamps, so I turned the Bombi in place to keep its headlights on her. A few flakes of snow tumbled down and I worried the hills hid a storm—but the stars were crystal-sharp, so it was only powder swirling in a wind off the higher hills. I wished for a horn to honk, to warn her, when my light bounced up in a glare—ice—which she appeared not to see. I imagined her sliding away, off the precipice, out of sight, out of the world. It was panic I felt. For her. And for myself, at being left alone.

She tossed the broken sensor into the bed with a clang, and then along with a blast of -35, she got back in beside me.

“Popsicle Christ,” she said. 

“I’ll do the next one so you can warm up,” I said. It was 20 Fahrenheit in the cockpit. “We can alternate.”

The next one was a hundred meters up. I hoped the tracks of the Bombi were digging in good, because our path narrowed and slanted to the right, toward a drop. I went slow, gloved hands numb on the vibrating sticks, stopping for a pylon every hundred meters, following the trail that curved in the shape of a capital J as it rose sometimes acutely, roughly. Three sensors we could not find. Probably hurled off the ridge to the rocks below. The seventh, Lois got back in dazed.

“Cold’s too much,” I said.

“That’s not it,” she said. “No. It’s…”

Her eyes dialed in and out of focus. Hypothermia. We had to get back to base. Then—as if suddenly waking up—she pressed her face to the windshield, to her side window, wide-eyed, searching for something that might stand just outside our little pool of lit snow.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Something—bit this one too. Clean in half.”

She held up a mitten, closed into a fist.

I put out my gloved hand, and she dropped what she held into it.

“Lodged in the bite mark,” she said.

It was a rock. Black, shot with silver-white streaks. Heavy like a dense crystal, and given the coloration it almost definitely had to be tourmaline, but—tourmaline, like all crystal, breaks in specific patterns. A natural piece resembles a geometric lump of coal. I didn’t think there was even a way to laser-cut tourmaline into the shape of this piece. Triangular. An inch per side. Thick along one edge, gently curved, increasingly knife-thin along the other two sides as they approached their point—which leaned almost into a hook, or the tip of a wave. The shape reminded me of—

“A tooth,” Lois said.

She looked ill. Yes. A shark’s tooth. 

“That liquid.” She pointed. “What’s your scientific guess?”

Along the base was a red frost. As if the tooth had bled when it snapped out of the gums, as it bit our metal case. I examined it—no, hell; I just stared at it—in growing alarm.

I got out of the Bombi, placed the object in the bed so that the comparative heat of the cockpit would not compromise it as a sample, got back in.

“We’ve got one more sensor to replace,” I said, trying to feel bravely purposeful.

She said nothing. Watched all windows, turning her head incessantly as we trundled up the steepest grade yet—then I brought us to a stop at its peak. We were pointed up at such an angle, the headlights pointed at stars. Past this point the grade reversed, hard. Fell down at about sixty degrees. The Bombi could not handle that, up or down. 

“It’s not a tooth,” I said. 

I got out. Hooked the rope to the front winch, hooked the other half around my waist, gave Lois a thumbs-up, then picked up the sensor-on-a-stick and began to pay myself down one-handed. I went slowly, as though lowering myself into a giant mouth. It really wouldn’t be a tooth, when we got back to the warmth and light of the base. No way. More likely it was an artifact. A carving. Dropped on some trek five thousand years ago. Lois had discovered an unknown culture. We were the world’s greatest scientists.

But I felt the mouth closing around me. The headlights above, jabbing the sky, looked so distant. So useless to me, when at last I came to rest thirty meters below. It was a cul-de-sac in the hills, a flat spot twenty meters wide and a hundred long—or so I remembered from October, when we installed this pylon. Too dark now to see the far end. Almost too dark to see the pylon, just ten meters away. Cliffs rose on two sides, and on another side a funnel led down, away. It would be icy here. Snow melting above, refreezing down here. Even in July the sun did not touch this ground directly. There was the pylon. A piece of concrete shaped like a distorted traffic cone—same height, double the width.

It lay on its side.  

And there were tracks around it. 

Down here, where the wind had a harder time pushing the snow around, smoothing it out—there were prints. Strange, left by some pacing animal with—it seemed—three clawed toes in front. And then I saw it was not pacing, but had two opposed clawed toes in back. Separated by an arch as long as two and a half of my feet.

No. Impossible.

I set the sensor down and knelt and heaved the pylon upright. The winds down here must be excessive. That would explain it. Knocking over the concrete, sending down a rockfall that dented the snow in a shape easily misinterpreted by a nervous imagination—the rocks then bouncing on down the funnel.

I stood—reached for the pole—and stopped. In the snow lay red triangles, rectangles. Where the pylon had laid. The pylon itself was—I now saw—caked on one side, the side that had faced down, in a sheet of frozen red liquid. Which had cracked and flaked off, when I got my gloved around it. 

For a long minute I stared. I wished I could hear the Bombi. I wished it could aim its lights down here. It hung above on that edge as radiant and distant as an angel. I was down here in a pit. I had the unavoidable sense I was not down here alone. I held my breath to listen. To hear breathing not mine. To hear a growl, or a whisper. I did not want to hear anything. For once I wanted silence. Silence would mean I was alone, would mean nothing inexplicable had revealed itself; would mean whatever it was, it could never be spoken of. Therefore it did not exist. I wanted there to be only things I already believed in down here.

I picked up the sensor and dropped it into the pylon. Turned it on. The red light lit. I stared at the glow as if it meant I was safe. Then looked past it, toward the dark end of the cul-de-sac. Dark as a cave. I should walk down there, find the broken sensor. We were running out of spares. I could just walk over—attached by rope the whole way, perfectly safe. Get to the end, the cliff base, walk back. Maybe carrying a sensor we could repair.

The sensation had mounted, though, of eyes on me—eyes as hard as rock—black eyes, staring at me from the night end of this little platform under the mountains. Eyes I could never see until too late, which would watch me creep the whole way, watch me shaking—the eyes of some hulking thing never seen by any living human, with teeth. With rows of those teeth—

Don’t be stupid. Just walk across, turn around, come back. Done in two minutes. 

I forced myself to sigh, loudly. To dismiss the fear.

It was then that I was hit in the back of the head, and thrown flat on my face by the blow. I rolled over in panic—expecting to see a bear—something like a bear—but instead saw only that the pole was gone from the pylon. And I realized it was the pole that had hit me. Pulled from its seating toward an outrageous magnet, down there in the dark end. Some magnet that had turned its attention this way—

I stood and ran for the slope, waving my arms.

“Up! Up!” I yelled. 

After a pause Lois leaned into the glare of the headlights, reaching between them to start the winch. It began to whirr. Then she disappeared completely, and faintly I heard the click of the door as she got back inside the cockpit. 

The slack of the rope lay pooled at my feet, and stretched out in a loop five meters behind me.

And now there was no silence from the dark. There came behind me the crunch of heavy feet through the snow, one and two, strides careful and firm, three and four, this thing pausing to assess what it saw—in dread I wanted to scream. I could not turn to face what came. Five steps, and six—it was out of the dark now. It would be close, surely, if I turned.

I grabbed the rope with both hands and started to pull myself up. I scrambled. The Bombi bobbed at the precipice with my effort. Sank lower into the snow. I wanted to yell to Lois but had no idea what to say. She was out of view, inside. Not paying attention, or paralyzed in fright by whatever she saw behind me. I wrapped my legs around the rope so I couldn’t fall and I closed my eyes and I waited for the thing to reach up and pluck me from the steep hillside. I could feel it pulling at my neck, some thin strangling finger—until I realized that was the dogtag I wore on a steel chain, straining to fly back into its mouth.

• • •

We sat on the floor of Tahiti under blankets. Trying to get warm. And waiting.

It had followed us down from the hills. 

The Bombi had strained to get away from it. We saw the red lights of the seven sensors we’d just planted wink out as it passed each one. It followed a hundred meters behind, just far enough away that we could see how it walked, usually on two legs, but sometimes bent to all four limbs; could see that on two legs it was easily twelve feet tall, maybe fifteen; that it glinted, glossy. And if it had been any closer, it might have sucked the Bombi to it—and we would have gotten a clear look at something we wanted never to see at all. 

When we parked and ran into the hut, it watched us do so, from the edge of the night. 

It was still out there. We had the lights off inside, except for the bathroom nightlight, and we had drawn the curtains. We did not want it seeing inside.

“It’ll go away in the morning,” I said. “Then we can get to the radio in Molokai and call for rescue. For a plane.”

Lois nodded. She went to her bunk and got the gift we’d decided to leave on the mantel. A compass. With a silvery aluminum flip top. Glow-in-the-dark pointer doomed to confusion. We’d engraved it There’s No Way I’m Supposed to Be Here.

She kissed it, put it on the mantel.

Then she got back under her blankets. Neither of us spoke again. We only listened to the thing destroy the Bombi, and Aruba, where the generator was. After a few seconds of pitch dark, we heard the loud click of the switchover to battery power, and the nightlight faded back up. But that wasn’t a relief. It meant we could watch the pots lift and point to exactly where the monster was as it began to circle our hut.

The end