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In retrospect, Ari probably should’ve known something was wrong with the Second Expedition to Antarctica, helmed by her PhD advisor Prof. Lyndon Brigham-Payne. To begin with, no one seemed keen on sharing what had happened to the First Expedition. On top of that, Ari felt she should’ve been more suspicious about the offer—joining a research team in Antarctica, conducting real research!—after being rejected from every single one of her first-, second-, and third-choice rounds of grad school applications.
She hadn’t even heard of Miskatonic U before she dug the grad school application up from the depths of the Internet in a late-night fit of desperation and existential angst! Next time, Ari vowed, she’d do a little more research before sending off an application…but then again, the application process was stressful and disappointing enough that maybe it was worth a little cosmic horror just to get a foot in the door. After all, if Dr. Lyndon Brigham-Payne survived this ordeal, she’d get her first named credit on his paper.
“You know what, I want my name way up the list, too,” Ari said, mostly to herself, as she hauled Brigham-Payne’s limp carcass over the snow. Ari had—quite cleverly, she thought—broken down the tent the good Prof. Brigham-Payne was attacked in and used the tent poles and what remained of the canvas to cobble together a makeshift travois. Pulling it was still fucking hard work, though. Her boots crunched over the gritty snow. Her teeth chattered. “No, screw that. Second author, two-author paper. I’m not doing all this to get lumped into an et al. Do you hear me, Lindy?”
A faint groan issued forth from behind her. Good. He was still breathing. Ari had some very pointed opinions about Lyndon’s dragging them all here when he’d known of the danger, or should have known, but she still didn’t want him to die. What was she supposed to do, start applying all over again? Ditch this project and end up slogging through the dread marshes of whatever measuring larval cephalopods from beyond space with the demented Dr. Devereux?
No! To hell with that! She’d worked ages on these Excel sheets!
At least the infernal baying of the creature that had crawled out of the cracks in the ice behind her had finally ceased. It’d kept up with her for a while, dragging itself along on vile and unspeakable pseudopods, its flesh a gelatinous and shifting mass of eyes and teeth that glittered with nacreous iridescence in Antarctica’s eternal summer sunshine. It had bellowed “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” with a thousand voices that emanated from a collection of misshapen throats, continually collapsing and reforming in the rolling beast’s unholy bulk. And the stench! It made Ari’s nose sting even through the numbness.
“Maybe I’ll be the first author,” Ari mumbled. “Just a little farther. I can see the camp!”
Distances were deceptive here, but the tiny cluster of dots on the horizon—hideous safety-orange, in sharp contrast to the natural whites and greys and blacks and eerie, icy blues of the Antarctic icescape—was more than she’d had before. There’d be people there, and supplies, weapons, and most importantly access to the boat that would get her the fuck out of here. Ari’s reserves were thoroughly tapped, but she powered forward out of sheer determined urgency, straining against the burden against her back. Just one step, and then another. Nevermind that her legs felt like leaden pillars of half-frozen meat. Just a little farther. Almost there. Almost safe.
The snow before her erupted, the white crust of ice shattering and spraying as the dark vastness of the shoggoth squeezed its way up and out of some hole it’d burrowed in the snow, or access from some cavern beneath. It wailed, eyes flickering and melting and rolling and many malformed teeth gnashing as it lurched towards her and the helpless Dr. Brigham-Payne.
Ari didn’t even have time to—well, to scream. There wasn’t much else she could’ve done at that point. Happily, she didn’t have to. As the shoggoth lunged, reaching for her with its grasping, tearing pseudopods, a wall of white light slammed into it from the side, sending it rolling and…melting…and scattering, disintegrating into a collection of twitching, gasping, unholy flesh that made Ari’s stomach lurch as violently as the shoggoth had.
As she struggled to digest this sudden turn of events, she realized something else had emerged from the ice. Something that stood quite still, at the corner of her vision, not bubbling and wailing and thrashing as the shoggoth had done. Slowly, unwillingly, Ari turned her head to regard her unlikely savior. Afterimages of that brilliant light still burned in her sight, muddling her vision.
It looked like a cucumber, if a cucumber had a starfish for a head and weird coiling tentacles and dragon wings. Ari, her wonder circuits thoroughly fried, was too dazed by the events of the past twenty-four hours to muster any comment beyond a weary “Oh.”
The dragon wings flared and she saw that the wing membranes were composed of many interlocking panes, flashing and glinting as they caught the light, reflecting glare in a brief and dazzling display. Not quite dragon wings. Then the wings folded, as delicately and completely as tissue paper, and the whole elaborate construction was tucked tightly away into the grooves at the cucumber’s…sides. Whatever.
Its tentacles, sort of octopus-like, sort of vine-like, roiled. The points of the starfish flexed and turned towards her, aiming round eyes like drops of amber towards her. “I apologize. I only had time to collect enough light to disincorporate it, not clean up the mess.”
“Wuh,” said Ari. Where had that voice come from? The thing didn’t seem to have a mouth, or…anything. The words seemed to chime in her head, not quite matching the actual sound the creature made, but Ari couldn’t for the life of her tell where that sound was coming from. On second thought, perhaps it was best that she didn’t examine it too closely. She’d seen quite enough unspeakable anatomy in the last day.
“Oh, dear,” said the cucumber. “Another unintelligent species. At least the penguins were cute.”
This drew Ari out of it. “Excuse me! Unintelligent?”
Tentacles fluttered and eyes gleamed with baleful golden light. “Ah! You speak! How delightful! It’s been untold aeons since I had someone to speak to!”
“Okay,” said Ari, resolving to set aside the matter of an apology—and figuring out what the fuck was going on—for now and focus on the essentials. “Look, I’d be happy to talk with you, Mister Cucumber, but I need to get the Professor back to camp before he croaks.”
If he hadn’t already. The shriek the shoggoth made when it burst out of the snow had nearly done her in, and she hadn’t even been mauled by the thing. She took a step forward, edging around the crater the thing had left in the snow, silently cursing the extra steps it cost her. Her feet were going to fall off. She welcomed it.
“A Professor?” the cucumber asked, accompanying her with the aid of a strange collection of five lower limbs, all of them tentacle-like but not as limber as the upper arms. Vines. Whatever. Pentagonal symmetry. It’d be fascinating if she wasn’t so unbearably exhausted. “An even more intelligent version of your species? Even better to talk to?”
“No,” Ari said, sharply. “He was stupid enough to go camping at the edge of the pit we found your pet in, so I wouldn’t say that.”
“I take your point,” said the cucumber. It rolled those golden eyes towards the limp form of the professor, snug in his tent travois. “You are clearly the superior specimen.”
“Thanks,” said Ari. “Look, could you help me with this?”
“Oh!” said the cucumber. “Yes, of course. I apologize again.” And it reached for the travois, plucking the tent poles deftly from beneath Ari’s arms, and set forward, dragging the professor’s dead weight with no sign of strain at all.
The bastard, thought Ari.
Even with the cucumber’s help, it took some time to reach the collection of tents. At Ari’s advice, the cucumber waited behind a convenient craggy pile of black rocks frosted with snow and let her take the professor in on her own. Its appearance would cause too much excitement, possibly distracting those with more medical expertise than Ari from the professor’s plight. Ari, still keen on getting a publication out of this fiasco, was not keen on that. The cucumber appeared to understand.
By the time she’d scrubbed the stinking remains of the splattered shoggoth from her boots—blegh—and washed her face and had a shot of strong, hot coffee with a dash of vodka from a very sensible and generous Russian colleague, Ari felt ready to face an eldritch talking cucumber, if it hadn’t just been a hallucination spurred by exhaustion and fear.
To her surprise, the cucumber was still there, waiting where she’d left it. It looked exactly as she remembered it, too, and appeared engaged in twirling its delicate tentacle-tendrils into odd lacey spirals, perhaps composing some silent alien poetry.
“Hi,” said Ari, feeling somehow awkward now. She really didn’t know how to approach the…thing…with proper awe and reverence. She was too damn tired. “Well, the professor’s going to be okay, maybe. He’s still alive, anyways, and hasn’t lost any critical bits.”
“Ah,” said the cucumber, turning a starfish-stalk to regard her with one golden eye. “And now you will speak with me.”
“Sure,” said Ari. “But I need to sleep for a while first. I’m still not sure I’m not hallucinating you.”
The tentacles bobbed gently in the air, putting her in mind of the swaying of kelp. “You’re not. Your mind sounds very healthy.”
“Uh-huh,” said Ari, filing the questions that statement roused into the growing to-be-discussed-later file. “Well…I guess I can stay for a bit. My name’s Ari, by the way.”
“You have offered me your designation,” the cucumber said. “An act of friendship?”
“Maybe?” Ari hazarded. “What’s yours?”
Tendrils fluttered, weaving a fractal picture in the air that collapsed. “Oh—I don’t know how to condense it, for your language. The shape a plume of solar wind takes when it streams and spirals towards the accretion disk of a neutron star.”
“Okay,” said Ari. “How about—Cuke.”
“Alright,” said Cuke, fluttering its tentacles hesitantly towards her.
Ari hesitated a moment, and then reached out to take one. It felt…warm. Cool. Soft. Smooth without being slippery. It wrapped around her palm companionably, and she felt a startling tingle of warmth that had nothing to do with her parka.
“Thanks,” she said again.
“And thank you,” said Cuke, “for waking me up.” Golden eyes twinkled.
Hm. Maybe the expedition hadn’t been a total loss. Maybe getting to know Cuke would make up for whatever the hell that episode with the shoggoth had been. Maybe that nap could wait for a bit after all.