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We love MacReady, we love him very much.
He is sitting at the fire that the old MacReady started, when he tried to drive us out into the cold. All around him the world shimmers red and orange, it flickers and the molecules in the air vibrate. The heat of the fire excites the blood in his face, giving a healthy red sheen to his cheeks. He has taken off his gloves and is rubbing his hands as he warms them over the fire, and we sit inside of him cradled in his wet, warm nucleoplasm.
A clump of dying cells lies in a heap on the other side of the fire, blood curling out of it in thick, muddy rivers. Where the blood touches the fire, it sizzles and boils, where it touches the ice it freezes solid and pink roses sprout from its soil. Even in death Childs is beautiful. We would have loved Childs too if had allowed us, but he chose to terminate himself before we could draw him into our arms.
He is still holding the bottle of whiskey in his hand. MacReady gets up and pries it from his stiff fingers. He sits down next to him and takes another sip from the bottle. Our tendrils reach for Childs’s cooling flesh and feast on it. We are all alone now and the fire is dwindling, but there is warmth still within us.
There was a time when we didn’t understand what love is, we thought it was a virus, a disease, a parasite, but we understand now.
We heard about love in their songs. In the kitchen, in the living room, the bedrooms, wherever there were songs in the air, on the lips and crackling out of transistors, we heard about love. Love is all they ever sing about, love and procreation. And carefully studying their songs, we started to piece it together.
Love is inside you. Love fills you. Love makes your heart beat faster, love makes it skip a beat. Love is like butterflies in your stomach. Love grows wings, love makes you fly. Love is oxygen, water, poison. Love is like a fire that burns. Love keeps you warm. Love makes you cry. Love hurts and love scars. We can do that.
The fire has died, only embers remain, weakly glowing in the carcass of the research station. Darkness stretches all the way from here to the stars. We are alone out here and we should find a place to hide. The old MacReady thought he could smoke us out, but we’ve been frozen in the ice for 112,304 years – had he forgotten about that? Oh, but we do admire his bravery, we love him for it.
MacReady rises to his feet and starts wandering the smouldering remains of the station, searching the near-dark for something. He won’t tell us what it is, and we won’t probe. We trust him, because we are bubbling in every cell of him, and because we love him.
When we were still a dog, we saw a film on the TV where a man gave a woman a box of chocolates wrapped in paper as a sign of his love. She seemed to like the aspect of surprise. Maybe MacReady wants to surprise us too.
Eventually, he finds a flare, but this is not our present.
Old MacReady would have tried to set himself on fire with it, because he didn’t like us very much. Now he uses it to find our surprise present. Holding it in his hand, he keeps looking around, until finally, in a charred spot that used to be the kitchen, he lays down the dwindling flare, crouches between blown-apart cupboards, scrunched-up pots and twisted cutlery, and starts sifting through the rubble.
The flare has almost died by the time he finds what he’s been looking for, and his mouth pulls into a smile, breaking the frostbitten skin. From under a wooden board, he yanks out a beaten-up metal box. It’s a portable cassette player. We know all its songs.
It’s a little dented, but MacReady seems convinced that it might still work. He presses the play button, clumsy with his gloved hand, but nothing happens. He presses it again and again but the box remains silent. But then, when he gives the player a shake and angrily punches the side of it, it suddenly jolts to life, playing that audible silence at the beginning of a tape.
MacReady presses the fast forward button, listens a second, presses it again, listens, presses, until he reaches the part of the tape that he seeks.
I know your eyes in the mornin’ sun
I feel you touch me in the pourin’ rain
And the moment that you wander far from me
I wanna feel you in my arms again
MacReady is bleeding where his smile has torn the skin of his cheeks open. His beard is frozen white and his eyelashes are frosted over but he does not seem to care. He puts down the cassette player, rises to his feet and starts dancing in the rhythm of the music with slow and sensual movements. His hips sway, his arms are like tendrils, and so he spins in circles, his boots scratching over the frozen ground. He is crying and the tears freeze on his cheeks. He is dancing to the song, and we are dancing together. Hand in hand and heart in heart. We love him very much.
How deep is your love?
When we caught and cornered and proposed to him, we ripped MacReady open from neck to genitals, split him like a ripe fruit and then pushed as deep as we could into his hot and amenable flesh. He twitched and moaned, as we filled every part of him, punctured every membrane, flayed every muscle, squeezed into every vein, penetrated him all the way to the bone marrow. His flesh pulsed around us, it oozed and throbbed, and yet it kept suckling us in. And he screamed. Oh, how he screamed. But love hurts.
There are many words in MacReady’s neural sponge for that which we did to him, but none capture the true essence of it. Yes, we invaded, we penetrated, we permeated and inseminated, we conquered and infected. We overcame, we breached, we copulated, we made love to him.
His frantically beating heart was ours too. Tenderly we opened it up and then peered into it. There was nothing there but blood and meat, so we pushed that aside and nestled inside of it. Is this not love?
The tape stops with a click and it’s quiet again. Antarctica is the most silent place on earth, the most empty and desolate, the most lonely. The wind has stopped howling, the fire is dead, there is no sound left except for MacReady. He breathes, his blood pounds, his nerves twitter. We are all alone but I know there are many more of his kind out there far away beyond the ocean that sing the same songs and dance to them too.
MacReady and us, we will go into hiding now, dig a hole in the ground to lie in and be frozen over, until one month or one year or one thousand years from now someone will come to dig us out of our icy grave and kiss us awake again.
We have so much love yet to give.