Lord Gerhard rushed through the frozen wasteland toward a distinct patch of brown earth where the snow and ice had been disturbed. Another blast of Antarctic wind nearly tore him from the ground he stood on, but he pushed forward, eyelashes caked with ice. He squinted through the swirling snow, the temperature was at least thirty below and dropping, so the vapor pouring from his mouth seemed to crystallize before it managed to get out of his mouth. He coughed and sputtered as he crouched at the base of the strange crater in the frozen ground.

Shortly after he reached the hole, Stalgato caught up with him, wheezing and panting and bound up so tightly in thick warm clothes he looked like a waddling baked potato.

Originally the 1943 Royal Antarctic team had been sent to the southern pole for geographic surveying. But Gerhard had seen something on the night of their arrival that had made him disobey all orders and Stalgato was the only one who followed. Gerhard usually declined to talk of the horror that had gripped him on that night, when the cruel winds buffeted the little boat and some half-suggested nightmare of the ice revealed itself as Gerhard glanced at it in the darkness. Stalgato could only guess at what it was his superior had seen. The others had taken what camping gear was theirs and set up closer to the shore. But the two men pressed ever inland, searching diligently for what lay in shadow.

"It's another," said Gerhard tracing the hole with his outstretched arm.

It was nearly three feet in diameter, and it went down so far it was extremely difficult to see how far the "tunnel" extended. Stalgato half-believed he had made the wrong choice, and that all this was meaningless drivel sprouted from the imagination of a madman. But something held him back, a grain of truth in the man's raving.

"How wide's this one?" asked Stalgato, his beard now covered in snow flakes that had steadily been accumulating there.

Lord Gerhard produced a tapemeasure and handed one end of it to Stalgato.

The aperture was three feet two inches, which he wrote carefully down in a notebook tied to his neck.

"That's the third one in as many days," said Stalgato.

"We're getting close...." answered Gerhard, wild eyed.

KTHWAKAW! Gunshots echoed across the vast ice-plain, and both turned in the direction of the commotion.

"Whoever it was was a poor shot," remarked Stalgato.

"I think they were warning shots," said Gerhard.

Indeed, the bullet had not even come close. But undeniably someone had been aiming at their general direction. Again the great sound cracked the air, and bullets flew by several more times. Gerhard ran, crouching behind snow crests every now and then, and steadily moved back towards their meager campsite. Several times he made out the dark shape of a man holding a shotgun.

They found it ravaged, but not by animals as Gerhard initially believed.

Several pieces of sophisticated equipment lay shattered on the frigid ground. The tents were slashed with knife blades, and all around lay bits and pieces of debris.

"Mutineers pestering even after I'm gotten rid of," muttered Gerhard.

Stalgato stared blankly.

The gunshots had subsided temporarily. At the sight of the destroyed camp Stalgato nearly felt ready to burst into tears. He was going to die in this god-forbidden place. He was sure of it.

There was no possible way out of this that he could see, and with a somewhat disgruntled air of determination, he swallowed his fear and stared into the severe blue eyes of his companion.

"They've killed us..." he muttered.

"Nonsense," erupted Gerhard.

"How the Hell are we supposed to go home...unless we come crawling back to them on our hands and knees?!"

"We'll be fine...get a hold of yourself."

Stalgato, bleary eyed, picked up a half-broken tent pole of formidable size and shook it at Gerhard, but he quickly abandoned the notion realizing what a fool he was being, and plopped down in the snow sobbing.

Gerhard walked to him, bent down and smacked him extremely hard across the face, causing his brittle nose to bleed profusely. They packed up their belongings and moved further inland, and walked for miles without speaking nor seeing anything in the featureless frozen ground.

Stalgato followed obsequiously behind Lord Gerhard, holding his nose up with a mittened hand and coughing as the snow swirled into his mouth.

He stopped suddenly in his tracks.

"Did-you-" he stuttered, then gave up articulating and pointed.

Another brown smudge had appeared on the horizon. Next to it, seconds later a new one appeared.

The two men bolted across the snow-field, Gerhard ahead as usual, and he stopped at the closest hole and peered in. It was more of a surface breach, he thought, than an actual tunnel. He lay down quickly, and removed his hat to drop his frost-bitten ear to the ground.

The earth below was moving....grinding and churning..he could feel it.

The sensation grew and grew...until he no longer needed his ear pressed to the ground. Stalgato looked on apprehensively, and then in horror as the ground erupted underneath Gerhard's feet and a hideous serpent-like creature with two vestigial forelimbs exploded through the permafrost and grabbed his hapless cohort in its small paws, holding him there and then gouging out a large chunk of flesh with its jaws. Gerhard screamed in surprise and agony, his arm hanging by mere sinews.

The thing was pinkish in color....it had no visible eyes, and the length of its body was covered in folds of skin not unlike an earth worm. Taking the bleeding body in its oversized jaws it tucked its arms to its sides, and pulled itself laterally back under the earth, leaving one of poor Gerhard's arms behind as it did so.

Stalgato froze, not daring to breathe. He remembered reading of a similar looking beast in Mongolia, known as the Algoi-khorkoi, rumored to be a giant amphisbanean, a small subterranean reptile. The Algoi-korkoi was said to have killed at a distance...this simply lunged up from out of the ground.

But then Stalgato revised his assumption. If the Algoi-korkoi was a reptile, as this was...there was no possible way it could survive in the antarctic. Reptiles could never thrive in a frigid place like this...they would not be able to regulate their body temperatures.

Stalgato almost jumped, but suppressed it. A bullet grazed his ear, and he ducked just in time to avoid another that went whizzing over his head.

"Mommy!!" he yelped as the earth began to move again.

Terrified, he ran. This thing probably eats polar bears he thought, as he dashed wildly across the tundra. He felt the earth move beneath his feet ever so often, and he began to weep pathetically as he frantically ran away from whizzing bullets and an indefatigable serpent.

Oddly enough, this time the shots had come from the east, and he was headed west, back toward the shore. He ran furiously. Behind him, he felt the thing rise up behind him, he even turned back at one point to see it loop up out of the ground as if some bizarre terrestrial sea serpent.

Panting and wheezing, he knew he could not keep it up much longer, and terrified, he continued pressing himself, now in sight of the opposing campground...the rest of the 1943 Royal Antarctic team.

Perhaps he figured, they would shoot him after they saved him from the serpent. But just as the camp loomed a few hundred feet away, the earth movement ceased, and he looked behind him. The iced ground had cracked in long spiderweb like patterns, and apparently the thing had given up, sliding back into the underworld from whence it had come.

Three dark figures rushed toward him..he recognized them as mutineers instantly...but they were carrying no weapons that he could see. Much to Stalgato's surprise, they helped him, carrying him to their camp as he wildly tried to explain what had happened to Gerhard. His nose was still gushing blood, and he had a crazed look in his eyes.

When they were safely nestled in a tent, he calmed a little, but seemed very conscious of the ground, always keeping one palm flat against it.

He told them all about the events of the past few hours, and did not bother to omit the part about the very inconvenient campsite sabotage.

The three men looked genuinely surprised.

"We had nothing to do with it....and we have only one or two measly little pistols...nothing like what you were describing. We have no shotguns....although now I certainly wish we did. If that thing you say is out there actually exists, then we may very well need one," said the tallest one of them, an austere black-haired man with a pronounced widow's peak.

"In fact, someone broke some of our equipment too, now that you mention it..but we thought it might've been wolverines," said one of the others.

Stalgato shook his head...but it didn't seem like he was listening. He had his palm to the ground, and it was shaking violently. The three men looked at each other questioningly, but stared dumbfounded as Stalgato leaped from the tent and rolled into the snow outside.

The worm creature exploded again in its typical ambush attack pattern and nabbed the yellow tent in its jaws. It was clearly confused by the tent, knowing it housed living things, but it was unsure of how to get at them...it very quickly gave up and receded under ground again.

Now the men believed. But it was too late. The moment the black-haired Peter stepped dazedly out of the tent, a bullet pierced his temple and exited the other side. He dropped lifelessly to the ground, and the remaining three ran for cover, although there was none other than the skipper they arrived in. Stalgato peered toward the pathetic boat, and then back at Peter's body. The snow had already stained deep crimson.

Now a jarring question presented itself to Stalgato, who again felt the urge to whimper. Who the hell was shooting at them, and why?

He turned around to see a black figure running toward them with a shotgun.

With a look of uplifting relief Stalgato observed the man slip on a patch of ice, and fall flat on his face. He rushed toward him in an uncharacteristic act of bravery and wrestling the gun from him pointed it at the strange character's head.

"Who in hell are you you psychotic bastard!" he screamed.

Then he realized he was staring into the face of an old man.

"My name," he replied, "Is Phinneas Kleismann."

"O.K..." said Stalgato wiping the snot from his face.

He poked the butt of the rifle into the old man's chin.

"Why in God's name were you trying to kill us?"

The old man began to shake violently.

"Get up! Let me up! It's coming back!" he shouted.

"Wha...."

But Stalgato's voice was drowned out by the rush of soil that sprayed everywhere. The beast lunged for them, but Stalgato took Phinneas Kleismann by the scruff of the neck and ran to the boat. Everyone got in, and closed the cabin doors behind them. Robert, a stalwart man, rushed to the other side of the vessel to turn it on, and began to pilot it, plotting a course to Tierra del Fuego.

"Now...Phinneas...explain again why you were trying to kill us," said Stalgato, now fully composed and with an air of pretension.

"ŚCause the snake's my quarry....and you and that idiot boy that got himself keeled out there were getting a little too close for comfort....all of you were. ŚS why I broke up your stuff so you'd take the hint and leave."

No one spoke for some time.

"How long have you been hunting...that thing," asked one of the men, whose name was Brian.

Phinneas did not reply for a minute, and Stalgato assumed he wouldn't say another word till he saw his beloved shoreline.

But he was wrong, when he finally spoke up.

"Why, I think its been near fifty years!" he said at last.

"And you know what...I know things about that monster....God..I seen its burrows from the inside. Its a type a lizard...sort of...ya see, it only surfaces for seconds at a time to get air....they have these tunnels..mostly below the permafrost that go down where the earth's warm....near the molten stuff I guess. It charges em up, and they come back up to eat anything from penguins to polarbears." The old man sighed.

"I guess it's better it ended like this...rather than him getting the best of me if you know what I mean. Blasted things can't stand the color yellow...s'why I have this," he said pulling off a yellow cap he had been wearing.

"It didn't even have eyes..how could it not like the color yellow?" asked Stalgato.

"It has eyes...they're just real small."

"Oh," he said.

In a couple of days the boat landed at Tierra Del Fuego, and docked.

Stalgato actually struck up a friendship with Kleismann, and they talked constantly about the Antarctic worm, or Psuedoannelida kleismanni as Phinneas wanted to call it.

As the two got off the boat and walked the streets of the tiny outpost town there, Stalgato turned when he heard a commotion at the docks. His face paled as he watched the tale end of an enormous amphisbanean disappear into the earth.

Phinneas laughed under his breath, and Stalgato shed a tear.