Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [111]
The exhaust fan itself rose not to the height of my waist but twenty feet beyond, to the height of the ceiling itself. As the blades swung before us too fast to see, there was only the slightest of breezes to be felt and that came from behind us as the boiling air rushed to exit out of the dome to the great chill beyond. Through the blur of the blades, I could see there was nothing beyond the dome but darkness. Outside, the exhaust tunnel that led into the subterranean ice caves was large enough to park a bus in, and dark enough to hide it there. Although the blue of the ice could be seen beyond, it was far from a welcoming vision. As I looked into the dim abyss, the thought of walking out into it and all the way back to Tekeli-li to enlist our co-workers to do battle seemed the suicide mission that it was.
“Brother, listen to me,” I yelled to Garth over the din. “This plan is crazy. We’re never going to beat those monsters here, even with all of us.” I put a hand on his beefy arm as he reached to open the exit door. Trying to give him a squeeze he could feel even through his padded coat, I leaned in closer. “We should go back. Go back, get that sailboat, drag it with us. Then when we get the others, we all make a break for Tsalal. Tsalal. It’s out there, man, Pym knows where it is. We find him, we find a real way out of here. Black and warm and away from all this beyond the pale bullshit.”
“Dog, I ain’t doing the Karvels like that. Why don’t you just shut your pale ass up and keep an eye out for those snow monkeys? Okay?”
Garth aimed a look of annoyance over his shoulder at me while he pushed the bar on the exit door. For this reason, he didn’t see how prescient his advice had been. Looking beyond Garth out the door, I saw not the expanse of the tunnel but the expanse of a robe draped off of Tekelian shoulders. In that moment, my doom seemed immediate. In horror I looked, because what massive shoulders these were. Though it had been only a few loose weeks since my last close encounter with the breed, I’d already forgotten the improbable size of them. In my mind, I had pushed out their horror. This was the back of a creature that could kill us simply by falling. This was a monster capable of crushing our bones and the meat they held with such speed that we would feel it before we saw it coming. And one was guarding the exit door, ready to perform such an operation. It was only the roar of the engines that distracted the homunculus from immediately spinning around.
Close the door! I mouthed in the most deliberate and precise manner I could, staring straight into Garth’s brown eyes as he faced me, oblivious to our fate.
“Close the …? Man, when are you going to give up? There ain’t no Tsalal, get it? And if you don’t stop with that, I’m going to leave you and your bag of bones out on the—” was as far as he got before that wall of shroud that stood behind him started spinning around. This time it was my opportunity to save Garth from unseen danger, and I jumped to close the metal door. Unable to get past him in time, I was left with only the option of pushing back the big man himself, letting Garth’s startled girth fall into the door to close it. Even still, it wasn’t soon enough. The creature managed to fling his arm into the space between door and jamb, and the pale limb now kept the two from meeting. It wasn’t until Garth saw those gray fingers struggling to reach him that he stopped swinging on me and joined my efforts to reseal the entrance. The only things that kept the monster from knocking it open and flinging both of our bodies with it were a bit of leverage and surprise. For our part, we seemed to be trying the impossible, to slam the door shut and amputate the creature’s appendage at the elbow in doing so; neither one of us was trying to push the arm back out.
“Get the gun off me and shoot it!” Garth motioned with his eyes to his shoulder. There was no way Garth could lift his arms so the strap could be removed, so it was up to me to unhook the rifle with my shaking hands as it bounced around before me.
“Just