Top Malo, or Top Malo House, is an isolated house in the peat of the Malvinas, about thirty kilometers from the town, where the 1966 gesta (campaign-cycle) keeps its worst night. Under it lie a mine, tunnels and a black lake of the Deep Ones.
| Type | Place |
| Era | 1966 |
| Spanish entry | Top Malo — la casa que esperaba |
Description
The men of Operativo Cóndor take some of the newcomers there on the pretext of “Adventure Tourism,” one of the ways the Esoteric Order of Dagon removes those it came to study. The island records use the English farm name, Top Malo House; the Argentines say Top Malo.
The name carries its omen: Top Malo… Top Malo, Bottom también malo (“Top bad… Top bad, Bottom bad too”), with no way out above or below.
History
The threshold
On their first arrival the newcomers reach only the threshold, with a borrowed shotgun and the feeling that the house was waiting for them.
The worst night
Here the contact occurs that breaks Antonio, the split sailor also called Alex: what sleeps beneath the islands gets inside him. His breakdown, his commitment to the Borda, his madness and the sanity he later barely recovers through therapy and an axe all begin at Top Malo. The record ties the zirconium stone (zirconio), the blue stone the Order later awakened at the lighthouse, to this breakdown.
Below
Beneath the house was a mine; it became tunnels no longer made by men, ending in a cavern with a black lake. The Deep Ones rose from the water. In the slaughter that followed, which no one fully remembers, the group was dashed against the rocks and won, if barely a victory. Thomas fled through the water. They took the blue stone from a niche carved at the back. They came out maddened and attacked one another; Irene, going at everyone with a knife, had to be subdued. At the mine’s mouth the widow gave them the stone they already had (“you will know what to do with this”), kept the book and blessed them.