From where does life come
And to where does it flow?
The theses are many
Myths writ in the snow
-"Chaos or Cosmos?" by Waino W. Korpela

"Are you?" giggled Blair. He lapsed back into the bunk contorted with silent laughter.
Connant looked at him blankly. "Huh? Am I what?"
"Are you there?" Blair burst into gales of laughter. "Are you Connant? The beast wanted to be a man—not a dog."
-"Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell

The Night Inside Us
1993

I
Muller's Prism

The path that led up to the tall house was stony and weather worn, crunching noisily beneath Richard Mclintok's hiking boots. The fading sunlight reflected off the Art Deco façade, darkly varnished red oak and gold paint casting frozen bourbon light onto the driveway and the valley beneath it. He inhaled the chilled mountain air and let it out in a relieved sigh, glad to have reached the end of the trek. Once or twice he slipped over the black ice that had begun creeping over the rock in early November, catching himself at the last moment. He had great respect and admiration for his friend and colleague, and though he himself was no stranger to passing through isolated regions of the world, more than once he'd often wished the man had settled somewhere a bit less remote.

He stepped up onto the porch and wiped mucus from his upper lip, aware of the cold that was worming its way through his system. He knocked on the door, something that looked like it had been hewn from a petrified forest, and waited. A Moravian star fashioned with glass the color of strawberry flesh was hung from the awning's rafters, glimmering in the light and spewing its fiery brilliance onto the porch. It bore his tired gaze with indifference, tilting slowly in the wind. It seemed to him as if everything on Karl's property had been constructed to embody a feeling of warmth, a factor which was lost on the country.

The door opened and an elderly man greeted him, dressed in a brown wool sweater and trousers. He had wild Atlantic grey eyes that denounced the age of their owner, and a shock of wispy hair, which had at one time been blonde, stood out beneath his fisherman's cap. A smile showcased Karl Muller's wall-to-wall teeth the color of ivory, pulling up his pale parchment skin. Richard faintly remembered that skin being darkened by an Egyptian sun and scoured by the stinging sand, but retirement and seclusion to the homeland of his Viking ancestors had bleached that skin back to its original hue. "Richard, willkommen! Wie geht es dir?"

Richard fumbled with his memory in an attempt to remember the smattering of German he'd picked up from Karl. "Ich bin…uh, mir geht ist gut. Sprechen zie Englisch, please?"

Karl nodded and held up an apologetic hand. "Ja, ja, I'm sorry. So many things have been happening, many great things, it's difficult to think in a linear fashion. Come in, come in!"

A wave of warm air embraced Richard as he entered the home, fresh dinner smells, meats and fruits, invading his nostrils. It was a nice break from the German autumn outside. He stepped into the foyer and shrugged off his jacket, placing it on one of the pegs set into the wall. As Karl stepped away from the door, Richard noticed that he was walking with a limp, which he compensated with a sturdy diamond willow rod. The older man saw his notice and gave an unashamed shrug. "Gout," he said, and began walking into the open living room. Richard followed him, trying hard and failing to not give away his amazement; this one room on its own seemed larger than his Minneapolis apartment.

Karl Muller's house was what one might expect a retired archeologist's house to look like; a hoarder's delight of antiquities and unique objects that the museums and universities did not want or had to relinquish due to economic concerns. The ceiling rose high to the second floor, the beams of the rafters like the rib bones of a rosewood giant. Expensive and tasteful furniture were scattered around the room in a loose plan, dark silhouettes in the light coming from the great fireplace set into the far wall, which looked like a relic from the eighteenth century. Big windows stared out into the valley. Richard imagined how it would look to someone standing out in the bottom of the valley, two great spheres of witchlight, dragon's eyes in the dark.

"Have a seat," Karl said, and Richard sat down in one of the parallel couches in front of the fireplace, allowing his eyes to roam over every treasure that had been collected from each corner of the earth, pieces of time and human history preserved in solid matter. A series of framed photographs stood upright on the wide black coffee table, along with a short column of books, copies of his collected essays and analyses. Richard leaned forward and grabbed one of the few photographs that was in color, a snapshot of the dig at Giza. He recognized himself off to the far left, half a dozen years younger and less careworn. The man in that photograph was still unaware of his wife's desire for divorce, his daughter's slavery at the cruel grasp of heroin, the identity theft that would strike him like lightning and burn away his trust in his fellow man, all of that looming over him like a monstrous black thunderstorm.

"I have some brandy in the cabinet over here, or have you sworn off drinking entirely?"

Richard turned and saw Karl holding up a crystal decanter swirling with liquid the color of dried blood. "Brandy's fine. As long as you cut it with some ice."

Karl filled a pair of glasses and dropped a few cubes of ice into them. He stepped softly over the ornate rug and offered one to Richard, which he accepted with a polite smile. "Strange that a German wouldn't offer beer instead," he said.

Karl grinned. "Stranger still that a Minnesotan wouldn't accept it."

The old man sat down on the couch opposite him. He rested his birch cane in his lap and sipped at his own glass, turning to look at the fireplace. "Truth be told, we should really be drinking champagne."

"Why's that?"

At this, the old man turned away from the firelight and looked at him, and Richard could see that spark of determination that retirement had done nothing to erase, mingling with the orange light. It shined behind the grey-blue and threatened to consume everything. "I've read your email about the crystals you found in Budapest," the old man said. "I've seen the same things you've seen, the exact same things, all over the world. It is curious what Nature will do when allowed to flourish, is it not? Did the chemical analysis have anything to say?"

Richard shook his head. "Nothing fascinating, really. Straightforward molecular structure, basic carbon chains…they all seem to be normal gemstones."

"And yet they appear to have grown in places where one would not expect such formations to grow."

Richard nodded and sipped at his brandy. He kept his mouth shut, certain that if he responded to that statement he would say something that would grant him a curious and possibly even an incredulous, or in the worst case a worried, expression from his friend. He had tried to convince himself that what he had seen in that forgotten Soviet mine in Budapest was a fake, a reproduction created by the locals to mess around with the outsiders, but seeing the objects, handling them and analyzing the hell out of them, he couldn't even bring himself to say that he was kidding himself. Nature was a strange woman indeed to have created a series of topaz crystals that were otherwise normal, save for the two facts that they did not belong where they were, and that they happened to look like axes. Very big axes.

Karl tipped Richard a sly wink and reached under one of the throw pillows beside him, taking out a black plastic binder and a small wooden box with a brass clasp. He rearranged the frames and set the two objects on the table in front of Richard, then sat back and gave him an expectant look, pleased with his little trick.

Richard took a deeper swig of the brandy and stared at the two objects with measured distrust.

"Why do I get the feeling that both these things are bad news?" he said.

"I'm not sure, Richard. Maybe it's because you're not willing to take a chance because you're afraid it will only create more problems for you. Maybe listening to all of those stuffed shirts at the university and the abfall they spew has left you contented and stripped you of your lust for your work. Perhaps it was wrong of me to call you here; I'm sure you have some pressing matters at home that need to be seen to, some big project the university has sent you on. I am sure I'm wasting your time, although clearly not very much of your time, since you did come here, after all."

Richard alternated his bitter stare between the old man and his two articles, frustration surging through his skin. Frustration that Karl would be able to frankly speak the thoughts that he had been accumulating for months, and frustration in that he was one hundred percent correct.

Without giving Karl the satisfaction of seeing how much he was right, Richard grabbed the little wooden box and undid the clasp. He was about to open the lid, had opened it so that there was a mere sliver of deepest black intruding into the fireplace glow, when a thought struck him hard enough to still his hand. Not so much a thought as a punctuation of his uncertainty. He had a good job now; a clerk might be seen as a step down from working in the field, really just picking through the scraps of what others find, but it was sound and secure work, away from sociopolitical strife, and he was somewhat loathe to risk it. But on the other hand, what else did he have to lose? At thirty-seven he was still young enough, still spry and sharp enough. He was an archeologist; what reason did he have for not stepping to the rabbit hole, if only to skirt its rim and peer down its depths?

He opened the box's lid and squinted at what it contained. He plucked it from the box and held it in his hand, hefting it and noting just how incredibly cold it was. He looked up at Karl, seeing the old man's studious eyes set in a grin. "Well?" he said.

"Well."

"I don't get it. What's it supposed to be?"

"As I said, Nature is a curious creature. After reading your emails, I was suddenly struck by a memory of a dig I had been part of in the Antarctic, down on the southern shelf. This would be sometime in the late sixties, I should think, around the same time as the Manson trials. Nixon, for all his vanity and paranoia, was a clever man. He knew he had to appease the journalists so as not to make it seem like he was a mere madman with a chessboard, shuffling troops off to wherever he wanted. So he set up a scientific expedition to the Antarctic, with a good supply of media coverage and documentation. It was also a diplomatic feat; foreign scientists were brought in, too."

"That's where you come in?"

Karl nodded and sipped at his brandy. "Mm-hmm. I was working in Canada for the Technische Universität die Essen when I got the call. They had me flown there right from the airport. We set up base camp about ten kilometers north of McMurdo. I've lived through German blizzards, so I thought that I understood what being cold was, but they were nothing. Just bare branches of something colossal. Anyway, we weren't really expected to do anything, just make things look pretty and stay out of the soldiers' way and feed some numbers and facts to the journalists. About three weeks into the pointless mission, I drove the tractor out onto the shelf to replace the perimeter flags. I remember the sun was falling, the sky appearing like a bruised plum, and the wind was like the screaming of children. More brandy?"

Richard nodded without realizing he was doing it. The decanter clinked loudly on his glass, betraying that at least one of them didn't need more brandy but neither cared. Karl turned to look at the fire.

"I was cresting a hill, unaware that I'd been turned around by the mountains. They hemmed in our camp from east to west, you see, and by some damned chance I lost my bearings. No compass, I didn't bring one that time. Once over the hill I saw the storm coming, just a big wall of white, like a pale dragon slowly barreling towards me. Still thinking that I was going in the right direction, I went through it. You'll see nothing like that outside of that desolate, godforsaken place, Richard. Nothing like it. There's no experience you can have that could defend you from a storm of that caliber. The ice was like razor blades, which you could hardly feel anyway. The air was torn from your lungs and taken up into the screaming wind. But I kept going, had to keep going, because if I was going to die it would be under my own circumstances, with my permission. What is a storm to a youthful mind?

"Conversely, what is a youthful mind to a storm? I don't know how far I traveled or for how long, only that I was going somewhere, and surely the storm would give way before the diesel in the tractor. After quite some time, it would seem that Lady Fortune had had enough of me. The tractor struck some object embedded in the snow, ruining the tire and leaving me stranded. Out of desperation and anger, I dismounted and looked at the tire, eager to kick at the rock I had went over. To my surprise, I found that sticking out of the snow."

Karl cast a curious eye at the thing Richard held in his hand. The soft glow from the fireplace shone in the object and split into a billion stars that glinted within, splitting again onto the couch. Richard took another sip of brandy and stared at the lozenge-shaped crystal, vaguely milky white in color but for the most part transparent. It measured nine inches from its two longest points and perhaps five inches at its widest. The prism was hexagonal, with perfectly cut sides, lacking any imperfection. Though there was one inclusion that sent an electrified feeling racing through Richard's spine; an eye. A growth within the prism that had somehow formed into the shape of that of a perfect, unblemished, perpetually staring eye.

The cold was biting into his hand. He set the prism back down on the coffee table and his glass beside it.

Before Karl could say anything, Richard cut him off. "How'd you get out of there?"

The old German was silent for a while, simply stared at the memories he saw in the fireplace before going on. "First, I waited for the storm to be over. Then, half mad from the howling wind, hunger, and thirst, I got off the tractor and started walking. Stupid, I know, but it was a chance, a greater chance than merely standing still and waiting to be buried in a snowdrift. I had that prism tucked in my jacket. Not quite sure why, though, I suppose I thought it would be worth a bit more than the meager paychecks they were giving us. I walked for what felt like hours upon hours, though I'm sure it couldn't have been all that long. After a time, I started hallucinating."

"Oh?"

"Hmm. What I saw, Richard, was a structure."

Karl paused, showman's break to increase the suspense. Knowing that he wouldn't continue until the break was acknowledged, Richard asked him what he meant.

"It was a cubical building, designed much like our own base, though much, much larger and quite a bit older. I went to it, looking for a way in, but there was none. There were doors and windows but they had all been barred from the inside. I circled around, swearing about as much as my grandfather had after a few beers. Imagine my surprise when I see the west side of the structure was missing, seemingly blown outward by some internal explosion, and what it exposed was a pyramid."

Richard looked at his friend, hoping the confused look he had on his face would merit some explanation.

"Yes, my friend, a pyramid. An octagonal pyramid, showing through the outer structure like a compound fracture, the most disgusting shade of yellow one could imagine. There was an array of outer crystals encircling the structure, like the tops of glaciers. Quite so; surely this thing was set into the ice, ingrained so deeply, that all I was seeing was the bare surface of something grand. In my madness, I studied the prisms, then knowing little at all to do with mineralogy anyway. I stepped over the crumbled shell of the metal-and-wooden walls and examined everything, making mental notes that would not stay with me. Then I found the door."

"The door?"

Karl nodded solemnly, no smile or grin to give away a lie. "Yes, the door. A circular affair leading down and into the pyramid. And, carved above the door, with a skill surpassing any of that I've ever seen, was a statue. Richard…"

Karl suddenly looked at the younger man, a light of age and attentive memory flooding through his blue-grey eyes. There was a zeal in them barely peeking through an expression of fear. It infected Richard and made his skin grow cold and his heart pound loudly in his chest.

"Richard, the statue was that of a woman, a giant woman. Tall and imposing, with an expression devoid of any interest or emotion. I found that strange, very strange. In almost all ancient cultures, one finds works of art depicting women with a maternal expression, even those warrior goddesses, Freya and Artemis for examples, have a motherly nature to them; protectors and defenders. None today can disagree that even the Venus of Willendorf statuettes project a power from within, the power of Motherhood, which is to say the power of Life itself. But there was none of that about this statue, Richard. Absolutely none of it. She merely stared ahead at whatever lay there on the horizon, uncaring for it or anything else. And the detail! Such craftsmanship and attention to every minute facet! Odd, eh?"

"It was your hallucination," Richard reminded him. At this Karl looked as if he had been slapped, which softened into something different. Facial alchemy taking place, and Karl gave him that clever grin that he was always known for, that expression that said I know something you don't know.

"Anyway," Karl continued, "I stayed there awhile out of the wind, but the statue concerned me. I am not ashamed today to admit that it even horrified me, and never mind the open door leading to darkness. I left the yellow pyramid and the outer shell that contained it and went back out into the storm. Foolish, I know, but at least the storm was familiar. I don't know when I passed out, but when I next awoke I was in the camp's infirmary, getting a talking to by the army captain. Nobody found the prism I kept, kept safe in the confines of my coat. Wasn't even aware that it was still in my possession.

"As you can imagine, when Nixon's administration fell through and the Watergate scandal had reached its peak, the next man wanted to undo everything with the previous regime, particularly unnecessary expenditures, so there was no more reason for us to be there. We packed up and went back home. We were given a final paycheck and papers to sign saying we didn't know anything about anything, and we surely were not about to tell anybody about that nothing. After that, I took up courses in mineralogy in addition to anthropology and history. That would continue into the decades, but no matter where I went, no matter to what corners of the earth they would send me and what wonders I would unearth, my mind was still lost in an Antarctic storm, somewhere with the pyramid and its yellow guardian. Until your email."

Karl leaned forward and refilled his glass with more brandy. Then, he pushed the black binder toward Richard, who felt an instant and inexplicable revulsion to the article. He regarded it as a parakeet would an overly inquisitive tom cat. Feeling as though he was already standing at a cliff and may as well peer down, he reached for it and opened it up.

He wasn't sure at first what he was looking at until he slid one out of its plastic holder and looked at it more closely. A series of aerial surveillance photographs, perhaps two dozen altogether, were packed into the binder. A series of numbers were placed in the lower right corner of each photo, displaying what he imagined was a date, time, and elevation of the plane. The objects featured were for the part blurry, but each seemed to depict a structure or construct in the snow, little more than a shoebox in some, though others were taken much closer. Richard could make out a crumbling box of corrugated steel and thick wooden beams, preserved by the dry cold air and almost entirely encased by years of wind and snow. It surrounded what looked like a circus tent, octagonal and bright, which rose up to a point at the center.

With a particularly large icicle forming in his stomach, he stared at a point on one of the photographs, trying hard to convince himself that what he was seeing was not a large face on one side of the object.

Karl cleared his throat, sounding like an old Brigadegeneral about to reprimand his troops. "Were madness merely an impairment of cognitive function and hallucinations merely disordered fantasies, I would say that these photos do not exist. That they were forgeries, someone else's idea of a joke at my expense, but they are not. I had an old friend of mine stationed in McMurdo take these photographs. I had to pay far too much to keep his mouth shut about it…he wanted to speak out to the authorities, wanted to make a political thing out of it. Technically, Norway owns the land there, though they don't seem to remember it's theirs.

"Richard, I've asked you to come up here for several reasons. The first, to tell you my tale. The second was to show you those photographs, and the prism. And the third, is to ask you if you would want to join me on my new expedition to the bottom of the world."

Richard pulled his eyes away from the staring face in the photograph to look up at Karl, who regarded him as an owl would an intriguing sound. "What?" was all he could say.

"I'm taking a crew down to Antarctica, to take a genuine look at this object of ours. I have a dozen good members already picked out, hardliners from the scientific community who know what they're doing and who won't be burdened by meaningless red tape. We will be well equipped to deal with whatever trouble should come up, and all will be paid, handsomely, I might add, at the end. I want you to join us, Richard."

"Why? What do you hope to uncover at this place?"

His friend let out a sigh and leaned forward on his knees, owl eyes fixing hard on him. "The same thing you want to understand, Richard. The thing that terrifies you and keeps you penned in your little office. You want as much as I do to understand why all these crystals are scattered across the earth, why some have been formed into objects and structures, why they feature so prominently in ancient human artwork. The Mashriq Glass, for God's sake, Richard! Do you think that was coincidental? No, you know that there is something deeper to all of this. You just have to jump in. And for all your worrying, Richard, you know that you want to understand."

Richard shook his head and wiped the cold sweat that had been collecting on his brow, running it up through his short mud-brown hair. He didn't want to ruin what he had, what he had been trying to build back up to before the troubles began. Still, that lingering urge to know, to get to the answers to the questions that he had been accruing for months, was like a niggling sliver embedded deep in his skin. He thought of Bilbo Baggins in Tolkien's The Hobbit, of the mad adventure he secretly lusted for but didn't want, not at the beginning, because it meant the ruination of security, sanity, and social standing. But Mr. Baggins did go, he went and he suffered for it, but he came out alright in the end, didn't he?

Dragons and magic rings notwithstanding, that is. Richard bit the inside of his cheek and swore loudly in his head. "When do we head out?" he said in a sigh.

Karl's smile lifted his cheeks so high that his eyes were mere beads of slate grey and dancing firelight. He nodded and immediately proceeded to refill his glass with more brandy. When he offered the same of Richard's glass, Richard did not try to dissuade him.

[]

Notes for Chapter 1/ Muller's Prism:

The introductory chapter to my attempt at putting my absolute favorite horror entity, the creature I revere in fiction and film, in a Steven Universe setting. It should be noted that this is NOT a crossover, and I will argue for the reasoning when the entity [or my version of it] appears in a later chapter.

I have a great love for techno-thrillers, having gone through high school reading H.G. Wells and Tom Clancy, and I sometimes find myself spouting long-winded matter-of-fact prose in the same manner. I sought to fuse that techno-thriller facet with my infatuation with Caitlin R. Kiernan's flowing, moody artistic language. Whether that works or not I'll leave up to The Reader.