Hive

10

But the train wasn’t derailed.

And that night, about two in the morning, there was a fierce pounding at Hayes’ door and from the intensity of it, you could be sure it wasn’t a social call. Hayes came awake, shaking off some dream about mountains of black ice, and took a pull from his water bottle.

“Hayes!” a voice called. “Hayes! Would you fucking wake up already!”

It was Cutchen.

Hayes climbed out of bed, hearing the wind moaning through the darkness of the camp, cold and eternal. It sounded like something hungry that wanted in, something looking for warmth to steal.

“Coming,” Hayes said.

He fumbled the lock open — never used to lock his door, but lately he’d gotten in the habit — and pulled the door in. Cutchen was standing out there in the corridor, a small gray-haired man with a matching beard and dark, probing eyes that always seemed to know something you didn’t.

“It’s Lind,” Cutchen said. “Sharkey said to bring you. Lind has really gone over the edge now. C’mon, we better go.”

Shit, shit, and shit.

Hayes climbed into his Kansas State joggers and sweatshirt, brushed his bushy hair back with the flat of his hand and then he was following Cutchen down the gray corridors to the other side of the building where the infirmary was.

Outside the door, in the hallway, St. Ours, Meiner, Rutkowski and a few of the other Glory Boys were gathered, whispering like little old ladies at a funeral, espousing dirty secrets.

“See, Jimmy?” Rutkowski said to Hayes. “I told you he’d do something like this. Crazy bastard.”

“What happened?” Hayes said, his head blown with fuzz from sleep.

“He slit his fucking wrists,” St. Ours said. “Got a knife in there and plans on using it.”

“He won’t let Doc get to him,” Cutchen explained. “He’s lost a lot of blood and if she can’t get to work on him right away, he’s going to be toast. She thought you could talk to him.”

Hayes sucked in a breath and went in there slowly, heavily, like he was dragging a ball and chain behind him. Before he saw the blood, he could smell it: sharp and metallic. It got right down into his guts. He scoped out the situation pretty quickly because the infirmary just wasn’t that big. Lind was sitting in the corner between two cabinets of drugs and instruments, kind of wedged in there like maybe he was stuck. His back was up against the wall and his knees were drawn up to his chin. There was a lot of blood… it was scarfed over his shirt and there was a smeared trail of it running across the tiles to his present position. His left arm looked like he’d stuck it in a barrel of red ink.

And, yeah, he had a knife in his hand. A scalpel.

Sharkey was standing next to an examination table, her usually capable and confident face looking pinched and rubbery like she’d been out in the cold. Her blue eyes were wide and helpless.

“Lind,” she said in a very soft voice. “Hayes is here. I want you to talk to him.”

Lind jerked like maybe he’d been asleep. He held the bloody scalpel out in warning towards Sharkey, droplets of blood dripping from his wrist. “I’m not talking to anyone… you’re all infected and I goddamn well know it. I know what’s going on here… I know what those things want, I know how they got to you.”

Hayes clenched his teeth, unclenched them, willed himself to go loose, to relax. It was not easy. Jesus, Lind looked like shit. And it wasn’t just the blood either. He looked like maybe he’d dropped twenty pounds, his once round face seemed to be sagging under his scraggly beard. Just hanging like the jowls of a hound, slack and sallow. His eyes were bulging from their sockets, discolored and shot through with tiny red veins. They gleamed like wet chrome.

Hayes squatted about four feet away from him. “Lind? Look at me. It’s me, it’s Jimmy. Your old bunkmate… just look at me, tell me about it. Tell me how they get to you.”

Lind jerked again, seemed to be doing so anytime somebody mentioned his name like he was hooked up to a battery. “Jimmy… oh, shit, Jimmy… they… them out in that fucking hut, you know what they do? You know what they want? They come in your dreams, Jimmy. Those mummies… the Old Ones… hee, hee… they come in your dreams, Jimmy, and they start sucking your mind dry because that’s all they want: our minds.”

“Lind, listen to me,” Hayes said. “Those ugly pricks have been dead millions of years—”

“They’re not dead, Jimmy! Maybe they can’t move their bodies no more, but their minds, Jimmy, their minds are not fucking dead! You know they’re not… they’ve been waiting down here in the ice for us, waiting for us all these millions of years to come and set them free! They knew we would because that’s how they planned it!” Lind was breathing real hard, gasping for breath or maybe gasping for something he just couldn’t find. “Jimmy… oh Jesus, Jimmy, I know you think I’m fucking crazy, you all think I’m fucking crazy, but you better listen to me before it’s too late.”

Hayes held his hands out. “Lind, you’re going to bleed to death. Let the Doc patch you up and then we’ll talk.”

“No.” Flat, immovable. “We talk now.”

“Okay, okay.”

Lind was trying to catch his breath. “They been frozen in the ice, Jimmy, but their minds never died. They just waited… waited for us to come. Those minds… oh, Jimmy, those awful fucking minds are so cold and evil and patient… they’ve been dreaming about us, waiting until we came for them. And when we did… when that limpdick Gates went down in that cave… those minds started waking up, reaching out to our own… that’s why everyone’s having nightmares… the Old Ones… those minds of theirs are invading ours, getting into our heads one inch at a time and by spring, by spring there won’t be any men left down here, but things that look like men with poisoned alien minds…”

Lind started laughing then, but it was not good laughter. This was stark and black and cutting, a screech of despair and madness echoing from his skull.

“Have… have they come in your dreams, too, Lind?” Hayes asked him, feeling Sharkey’s eyes burning into him, knowing she did not like him encouraging this delusion. But, fuck it, that’s how it had to be handled and he knew it.

“Dreams,” Lind sobbed, “oh, all the dreams. Out in the hut, you remember out in the hut, Jimmy? It touched my mind then and it hasn’t let go since. Tonight…”

“Yes?”

There were tears rolling down Lind’s face now. “Tonight I woke up… I woke up, Jimmy, and I could feel the cold, oh, the terrible blowing cold… and it was there, one of them things… it was standing there at the end of my cot, thinking about me… all those terrible red eyes looking at me and ice dropping off it in clots…”

Hayes felt gooseflesh run down his arms and up his spine, thinking that he would have went for the knife, too. But it was just a dream, had to be just a dream.

Lind looked like he wanted to say something else, but his eyes slid shut and he slumped over. Hayes moved quick and pulled the scalpel from his fingers, all that blood, but there was no fight left in Lind. With Sharkey’s help they got him on the table and she started swabbing out his slit wrist.

“It’s deep, but he pretty much missed the artery,” she said, cleaning the blood from his wrist and injecting some antibiotics right into it.

Hayes watched as she stitched him close, saying she was going to have to get an IV going, get some whole blood and plasma into him.

“Then you better dope him up, Doc,” Hayes said, “and strap his ass down. Because he might have failed this time, but he’s going to try again and we both know it.”

Then Hayes went out into the corridor, out to the wolves skulking around there, waiting for him to toss them scraps of bloody meat.

“He dead?” St. Ours said.

“No, he’ll be all right.”

“He say… he say why he did it? Why he slit his wrists?” Meiner wanted, had to know.

They were all looking at Hayes now. Even Cutchen was. They were all thinking things, maybe things they’d imagined and maybe things they’d dreamed. You could see it on their faces… unspoken fears, stuff they didn’t even dare admit to themselves.

“Tell us,” Rutkowski said. “Tell us what made him do it.”

Hayes grinned like a skull. He was sick of this place, sick of these people and their ghoulish curiosity. “Oh, come on, boys, you know damn well what made him do it… the nightmares. The things in his head… same things that are going to make you all do it, sooner or later.”

11

Hayes could remember having to do things that scared him.

Could remember how he felt before and how he felt afterwards. He remembered having to call his mother up when he was sixteen from the police station, tell her he’d been busted for selling pot, she had to come and get him. He remembered getting in a car accident when he was nineteen, walking away without a scratch while his best friend, Toby Young, who’d been driving, died in the emergency room. When Toby’s parents got there, asking how Toby was, he’d had to tell them, see that look in their eyes — disbelief, shock, then something like anger because he was alive and their son was dead. And, yes, he remembered when his old man was laying in that hospital bed eaten up with the cancer and his sister was out of her head with religious hysteria. He remembered having to tell the doctor to shut the old man off.

All these things had scared him, had stripped away his innocence and made something rot inside him. These were things you had to do, things which you could not walk away from unchanged, but you did them because it was expected of you. It was the right thing and it had to be done.

But none of them, none of those things, as terrible and necessary as they’d been, had gotten inside him like when he’d gone to Hut #6 to look at those mummies, to prove to himself that they were dead and nothing but dead. The temperature had dipped to a bitter seventy below and the wind was shrieking at sixty miles an hour, flinging snow and pulverized ice crystals across the compound. Antarctica at dead-winter: black and unforgiving, that wind wailing around you like wraiths. Hayes went alone.

He did not ask for the key from LaHune. He took a set of boltcutters, bundled into his ECW — Extreme Cold Weather — gear and started off across the compound, following the guylines through that blasting, sub-zero tempest, knowing that if he let go of the guiding rope and got off the walkway, he’d probably never find his way back. That they’d find him curled up out there come spring, a white and stiffened thing frozen up like meat in a deepfreeze.

The snow was piling up into drifts and he pounded through it with his white bunny boots, gripping the guyline with a wool-mittened hand that was already going numb.

You’re crazy to be doing this, he told himself and, hallelujah, wasn’t that the goddamned truth? For, Christ, it wasn’t as if he really believed what Lind had said. But there was something there… a grain of sanity, an underlying nugget of truth… in what the man had been raving about. Something behind his eyes that was incapable of lying. And Hayes was going to see what that was.

The snow crunched beneath his boots and the wind tried to strip him right out of his Gore-Tex parka. His goggles kept fogging over, but he kept going until he made Hut #6. Outside the door, he just stood there, swaying in the wind like some heavily-swaddled child just learning the fine art of balance.

Just fucking do it.

And he knew he had to, for something both ancient and inexplicable had woken deep in the very pit of his being and it was screaming danger! in his head. There was danger here and that half-forgotten sixth sense in him was painfully aware of the fact. And if Hayes didn’t get on with it already, that voice was going to make him turn and run.

LaHune or Gates or both had locked the hut with a chain and a Masterlock and the bolt cutter took care of that pretty damn quick. And, holy oh God, it was time for the show.

The wind almost pulled the door out of his hand and his arm out of socket to boot. After a time, he got it closed and went inside, feeling the heat of the hut melting the ice out of his beard. It was only about fifty degrees in there, but that was positively tropical for East Antarctica in the cruel depths of winter.

In that stark and haunted moment before he turned on the lights, he could’ve almost sworn there was movement in the hut… stealthy, secretive.

Then the light was on and he was alone with the dead.

He saw the mummies right away, trying to shake the feeling that they were seeing him, too.

Crazy thinking.

They were stretched out on the tables like shanks of thawing beef.

The shack shook in the wind and Hayes shook with it.

Two of the specimens were gradually defrosting, water dripping from them into collection buckets. For the most part, they were still ice-sheathed and obscured, unless you wanted to get in real close and peer through that clear blue, acrylic-looking ice and see them up close and personal. But that wasn’t necessary anyway, for the other mummy was completely unthawed.

Unthawed to the point where it was really starting to smell. Gates had thrown a canvas tarp over it and Hayes knew he had to pull that tarp back, had to pull it back and look at the thing in all its hideous splendor. And the very act took all the guts he had or would ever have. For this was one of those godawful defining moments in life that scared the shit right out of you and made you want to fold-up and hide your head.

And that’s exactly how Hayes was feeling… terrified, alone, completely vulnerable, his internals filled with a spreading helix of white ice.

He took off his mittens, let his fingers warm, but they refused. He took hold of the tarp, something clenching inside him, and yanked it free… and it slid off almost of its own volition. He backed up, uttering a slight gasp.

The mummy was unthawed.

It was still ugly as ugly got and maybe even a little bit worse, because now it had a hacked and slit appearance from Gates and his boys taking their samples and cutting into it with knives and saws.

And the smell… terrible, not just rotting fish now, but low tides and decaying seaweed, black mud and something like rotten cabbage. A weird, gassy odor.

Fucking thing is going bad, Hayes was thinking, like spoiled pork… why would Gates want that? Why would he let the find of the ages just rot?

But there were no answers for that. Maybe the thing turned faster than he anticipated.

Regardless, that wasn’t why Hayes had come.

He got in close as he dared to the monstrosity, certain that it was going to move despite that smell. It looked much the same as it had the other day, despite the various incisions: like some bloated, fleshy eggplant. Its shell was a leaden, shiny gray, looked tough like the hide of a crab. Chitinous. Its wings — if that’s what they were and not modified fins — were folded-up against its sides like umbrellas, some sticky fluid like tree sap had oozed from them in puddles and runnels, collected on the table. Those branching tentacles at the center of its body now looked like nothing but tree roots, tangled up and vestigal. And those thick, muscular tentacles at its base had blackened, hung limp like dead snakes.

Yes, it was dead, it was surely dead.

Yet…

Yet the tapering arms of that bizarre starfish-shaped head were erect like an unclenched, reaching hand. Those globular eyes at each tip wide and blazing a neon red, filled with an impossible, unearthly vitality. They were shiny with tiny black pupils, the gray lids shriveled back, something like pink tears running down the stalks.

Hayes had to remember to breathe.

He could see where one eye had been cut away, the black chasm left in its place. He was trying desperately to be rational, to be lucid and realistic, but it was not easy because once you looked at those eyes it was very difficult to look away. They were not human eyes and there was nothing you might even abstractly call a face, still… Hayes was looking at those eyes and thinking they were filled with an absolute, almost stupid hatred, a loathing that made him feel weak inside.

Turn away, don’t look at it.

But he was looking and inside it felt like he’d popped a hole, everything draining out of him. He had to turn away. Like a vampire, you couldn’t stare into its eyes or you were done. But he kept looking, feeling and emoting and sensing and it was there, all right, something in the back of his head. He couldn’t put a name to it at first… just that it was something invasive, something alien that did not belong in his mind. But it had taken root and was spreading out like fingers, a high and sibilant buzzing, a droning whine like that of a cicada. Growing louder and louder until he was having trouble thinking, remembering anything, remembering who and what he was. There was just that buzzing filling his head and it was coming from the thing, it was being directed into him and he knew it.

Hayes wasn’t even aware of how he was shaking or the piss that ran down his leg or the tears that filled his eyes and splashed down his face in warm creeks. There was only the buzzing, stealing him away and… and showing him things.

Yes, the Old Ones.

Not three like there were in the hut or even ten or twenty, but hundreds, thousands of them. A buzzing, trilling swarm of them filling the sky and descending like locusts come to strip a field. They were darting in and out of low places and hollows and over sharp-peaked roofs, rising up into that luminous sky… only, yes, it was not in the sky, but underwater. Thousands of them, a hive of the Old Ones, swimming through and above some geometrically impossible sunken city in a crystalline green sea with those immense membranous wings spread out so they could glide. He saw their bodies bloat up obscenely as they sucked in water and deflate as they expelled it like squids… moving so quickly, so efficiently. There had to be a million of them now, more showing themselves all the time, swimming and leaping and rising and falling -

Hayes went on his ass.

Teetered and fell and it was probably the only thing that indeed saved him, kept his mind from going to sludge. He hit the floor, fell back and cracked his head against a table and that buzzing was gone. Not completely, there was still a suggestion of it there, but its grip had been broken.

And he came to himself and realized that it had taken hold of him, that thing, and nobody would ever make him believe different. He could hear Lind’s voice in his head saying, Can’t you feel it getting inside your head, wanting to steal your mind… wanting to make you something but what you are?

Hayes scrambled to his feet, smelling the thing and hating it and knowing it somehow from some past time and the revulsion he felt was learned and instinctual, something carried by the race from a very distant and ancient time. What he did next was what any savage would have done when a monster, a beast was threatening the tribe, invading it, trying to subvert and steal away all that it was: he looked for a weapon.

Panting and half-out of his mind, he stumbled through Gates’ makeshift laboratory, past the two thawing horrors and amongst tables of instruments and chemicals. He wanted fire. His simplified brain told him the thing had to be burned, so he sought fire, but there was nothing. Acid, maybe. But he was no chemist, he wouldn’t know acid if he saw it.

And in those precious seconds that he stumbled drunkenly through the hut, he could feel that buzzing in his head rising up again and he looked over his shoulder at the Old One, certain now it would be rising up, those bulging red eyes seeking him out with a flat hatred and those branching tentacles reaching out for him -

But no.

It lay there, dreaming meat.

But its mind was alive and he knew that now, could feel it worrying at his will, and that was insane because there was an incision just beneath that starfish-shaped head and he knew without a doubt that Gates had removed its brain. That even now it was sunk in one of those jars around him, a fleshy and alien thing like a pickled monstrosity in a sideshow.

Yet, its mind was alive and vibrant. The idea of that made hysterical laughter bubble up the back of Hayes’ throat and then he saw the axe hanging by the fire extinguisher and then his hands were on it, gripping it with a primitive glee. He raced back at the thing, knocking a table of fossils over in his flight. He was going to chop that motherfucker up, hack it to bits.

And he meant to.

He stood over the thing, axe raised and then the buzzing rose up, felt like a fist taking hold of his brain and squeezing until the agony was white-hot and he cried out.

The axe fell from his fingers and he went down to his knees.

Fight or flight.

He crab-crawled to the door, fumbling it open and falling out into the screaming polar night. He got the door shut, those frozen winds slapping him none too gently back into reality. He found his mittens, put them on and pulled himself along the guylines back to Targa House, the door of Hut #6 wide open, hammering back and forth in the wind.

He looked over his shoulder only once, thinking he saw some lurid alien shape moving through the blowing snow at him…

12

The next morning, before they started their day, the boys were hanging out in the community room, chewing scrambled eggs and bacon, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes, doing a lot of talking.

“I’ll tell you guys something,” Rutkowski said. “LaHune is some kind of fucking nut about all this. No communication, no email… I mean, what the hell? What’s all this James Bond shit about? Because of those dead things that might be aliens? Jesus H. Christ, so what? What if they are? He can’t lock us down here like prisoners. It ain’t right and somebody’s gotta do something about it.”

St. Ours lit another cigarette from the butt of his first, flagrantly ignoring the NO SMOKING sign on the wall and getting hard looks from some of the scientists who were trying to eat. “Yeah, something’s gotta be done. And it’s up to us to do it. You know those fucking eggheads won’t lift a finger. You lock them in a closet with a microscope and they’d be just fine and dandy with it. Now, way I’m seeing this, LaHune has slipped a cog and he’s about six inches from being as crazy as Lind. He’s supposed to be in charge? Well, if we were at sea and the captain was crazy…”

“Mutiny?” Rutkowski said. “Get the hell out of here.”

“You got a better idea?”

If Rutkowski did, he wasn’t admitting it.

Meiner sat there watching them, thinking things. He knew these two. He’d wintered over with them half a dozen times. Rutkowski was full of hot air, liked to talk, but was essentially harmless. St. Ours, however, was a hardcase. He liked to talk, too, but he was a big boy and he wasn’t above using his hands on someone that pissed him off or got in his way. When he drank, he liked to fight and right now there was whiskey on his breath.

“We can’t just go doing shit like that,” Meiner said, though part of him liked the idea. “Come spring they’ll throw us in the clink.”

“Hell we can’t,” St. Ours said. “Let me do it. I’d like to take that little cockmite LaHune outside and pound the snot out of him.”

Meiner didn’t even bother commenting on that. The visual of a couple guys out in that sub-zero blackness in their ECW’s swinging was hilarious.

“Just simmer down now,” Rutkowski said. “LaHune is a pushbutton boy, all company. Push button A, he shits. Push button B, he locks us down. He’s just doing what hard-ons like him always do. The mummies is why. He’s towing the NSF line and it’s because of those fucking mummies.”

“That’s Gates’ fault,” St. Ours said.

“Sure, it is. But you can’t blame him, finding something like that. Like a kid first discovering his pecker, he can’t help but take it out and pull on it. Besides, Gates is not a bad sort. You can talk to the guy. Shit, you can even talk pussy with him. He’s all right. Not like some of these other monkeyfucks—” Rutkowski shot a glance over at a few scientists at a nearby table, some of the wonder boys who were drilling down to Lake Vordog “ — he’s okay. See, boys, the problem here is those mummies. If they were gone, LaHune might be willing to pull an inch or two of that steel rod out of his ass and let us join the freaking world again.”

“You plan on stealing ’em?” St. Ours said.

“Well, maybe losing them might be a better word for it. Regardless, it’s something for us to think about.”

“It couldn’t happen soon enough for me,” Meiner said, his hand shaking as he brought his coffee cup to his lips.

“You… you still having those nightmares?”

Meiner nodded weakly. “Every night… crazy shit. Even when I do manage to fall asleep, I wake up with the cold sweats.”

“Those things out there,” St. Ours said, looking a little green around the gills, maybe even blue. “I’m not too big of a man to admit that they’re getting to me, too. No, don’t you fucking look at me like that, Rutkowski. You’re having the dreams, too. We’re all having the dreams. Even those eggheads are.”

“What… what are your dreams about?” Meiner wanted to know.

Rutkowski shifted in his seat, licked his lips. “I can’t remember, but their good ones… something about colors or shapes, things moving that shouldn’t move.”

“I remember some of mine,” St. Ours said. He pulled off his cigarette, let the smoke drift out through his nostrils and past those wide, blank eyes. “A city… I dream of a city… except it ain’t like no city you’ve ever seen before. Towers and pyramids and shafts, honeycombs that lead through stone, don’t come out anywhere but into themselves. I dream I’m flying above the city, moving fast, and there are others flying with me and they all look like those ugly pricks out in the hut. We… we fly and then we dip down, down into those holes and hollow places, then… then I wake up. I don’t want to remember what happens down in those holes.”

“I dream about holes sometimes, too,” Meiner admitted. “Like tunnels going up and down and left and right… lost in those tunnels and hearing a buzzing like wasps, only that buzzing is like words I understand. I’m scared shitless, in the dream. I know those voices want something from me.”

He stopped there. By God, it was enough. He wasn’t going any farther with it, he wasn’t going to pick at the scabs of his nightmares until all that black blood started flowing again. He wasn’t going to tell them about the rest of it. The tunnels and high stone rooms, all those things standing around while Meiner and dozens of others laid on tables. The things… oh Jesus… those things would be inside their heads and touching them, sticking things into them and cutting into them with blades of light, making things happen to them… and the pain, all the pain… needles going into him and knives cutting and tubes stuck in his head and oh dear sweet Jesus the agony, the agony while those trilling voices kept talking and talking, hands that were not hands but things like tree branches or twigs taking him apart and putting him back together again…

Rutkowski looked gray and old suddenly. “I don’t like it, I just don’t like it. Those dreams… they’re so familiar, you know? Like I’ve seen it all before, lived through all that shit years ago. Don’t make no sense.”

And it didn’t. Not on the surface. But they’d all felt it, that sense of familiarity, that déjà vu they couldn’t get out from under. It haunted them. Just like the first time they’d seen the mummies — they had all known implicitly that they had seen them before, very long ago, and the fear those things inspired was inbred and ancient, a wisp of memory from a misty, forgotten past.

“Yeah, I remember those things. Somehow, I do,” St. Ours said. “Fuck me, but Gates sure opened up a Pandora’s box here.”

And, God, how true was that.

Meiner knew it was true, just like he knew he was afraid to close his eyes even for an instant. Because when he did the dreams came and the things swam up out of the darkness, those buzzing voices in his head, filling him, breaking him down. And sometimes, yes, sometimes even when he was awake, when he’d come out of the nightmares at three a.m. sweating and shaking, feeling the pain of what they had done to him or someone like him, he would still be hearing those voices. High and trilling and insectile, outside, carried by the winds, calling him out into the storm and sometimes out to the hut where they were waiting for him.

But he wasn’t about to admit any of that.

13

Of course, Hayes didn’t sleep.

He didn’t do much of anything after his return from Hut #6 except drink a lot of coffee laced with whiskey and take a few hot showers, trying to shake that awful feeling of violation, the sense that his mind had been invaded and subverted by something diabolic and dirty. But it was all in vain, for that feeling of invasion persisted. That his most private and intimate place, his mind, had been defiled. He nodded off for maybe thirty minutes just before dawn —what passed for dawn in a place where the sun never rose, that was —and came awake from the mother of all nightmares in which shapeless things had their fingers in his skull, rooting around and touching things, making him think and feel things that were not part of him but part of something else. Something alien.

No, none of it made any real sense.

But what had happened in Hut #6 didn’t make any either. It had happened, he was certain it had happened. But what proof was there? Minute by minute it was fading in his head like a bad dream, becoming indistinct and surreal… like something viewed through yellowed cellophane.

Hayes knew he had to put it into some kind of perspective, though, had to beat it into submission and stomp it flat. Because if he couldn’t do that, if he couldn’t bronze his balls and inflate his chest… well then, he would start raving like Lind, his mind going to a warm fruiting pulp.

Hut #6, Hut #6, Hut #6.

Jesus, he was starting to think of it as some taboo place, a shunned place like a haunted house filled with evil sprits that oozed from the shattered walls or the cobwebby tomb of some executed witch that had eaten children and called up the dead, was looking for a good reason to rise herself. But that’s how he saw it: a bad place. Not a place that was necessarily physically dangerous, but psychologically toxic and spiritually rotten.

Twice since returning from Hut #6, he had marched over to the infirmary, stood outside Doc Sharkey’s room, wanting to pound on the door, scratch his way through it, throw himself at her feet and scream out the horrors he had suffered. But each time he got there, the strength, the volition to do anything more than listen to his own feeble, crushed voice shrieking in his head was gone.

He wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about Sharkey… a married woman, Christ in Heaven… but he knew, deep down he knew, that he could have gone to her, any time of day or night and she would have helped him, she would have been there for him. Because the bond between them was there, it was real, it was strong, it was strung tight and sure like cable. Yet, for all that, he just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t see him dumping this rotting, smelly mess at her feet.

She would want you to.

But Hayes still couldn’t do it, just couldn’t open up his flank like that. Not yet. That feeling of violation — go ahead and say the word, bucko, rape, because that’s how it made you feel, like you’d been viciously raped — was too real yet and he couldn’t put it into perspective. He would need time.

His second trip to the infirmary, he just stood outside Sharkey’s door with a breathless, silent sobbing knotted in his throat. Before the sobbing became the real thing, he went into the infirmary itself and beyond to the room where there were a few cots set up for sick people.

Lind was on one of them.

He had been restrained now, pumped full of God-knows-what to keep him calm and quiet, Thorazine or something like that. Hayes stood in the doorway looking at the form of his old roommate lying there, looking wasted and old and fragile like if he fell off the cot he might break into pieces. Hayes could see him fine in the nightlight like some little old man shot through with cancer, his life wheezing out of him in rattling breaths.

It was a hell of a thing, wasn’t it? To see him like that?

Hayes felt a lump of something insoluble in his throat that he couldn’t seem to swallow down. Fucking Lind. Dumb sonofabitch, but harmless and funny and even sweet in his own way.

Lind, Jesus, poor Lind.

Lind whose vocabulary was severely challenged and thought gonorrhea was one of those boats they used in the canals of Venice and bullocks were a woman’s breasts. Claimed he had a maiden aunt named Chlamydia and that his sister married a guy named Harry Greenslit. He used to make Hayes laugh all the time, talking about his shrewish wife and how she rode his ass so hard when he was home he couldn’t wait to get back to fucking Antarctica to cool it off. He equated his wife’s tirades and foul mouth with being sodomized, as in, Jesus, Hayes, she banged me for three days straight, soon as I walk in the door, she bends me over and pounds the stuffing out of me. My asshole’s so fucking loose by the time I get back here, I gotta shove a lemon up there to get it to pucker back up.

Lind. Christ.

Hayes walked into the room, over near Lind’s cot and right away Lind started to thrash in his sleep. He began to twitch, his eyelids fluttering. Hayes stepped back in the doorway, a weird thrumming sensation at his temples, and Lind settled back down. What the hell was that about? Hayes walked back over there and the thrumming started again with drumming waves and Lind started jerking again like he could sense Hayes’ presence and maybe he could and maybe it was even more than just that.

A voice in Hayes’ head was saying: It isn’t your mere presence he’s reacting to, you silly bastard, it’s what you’re carrying. That thing in the hut, that pissing Old One, it touched you, it got inside you, it stained something in you that’ll never wash completely clean. That’s what Lind’s reacting to… he can smell it on you same as he can smell it on himself. Violation.

You bear Their touch.

It was crazy, but it made sense. Like they had planted some seed in his head just as they had done with Lind, woke something up inside them that had been sleeping a long time. Something mystic, something ancient, something unspeakable.

But what? What was it?

For as Hayes neared Lind again, he started twitching and moaning, trembling as if he had come into contact with some sort of energy. Hayes backed away again, all the spit in his mouth dried up, a tension headache starting behind his eyes… except it wasn’t that, it was something else completely. For he could -

He was seeing inside of Lind’s head.

It was crazyass bullshit, but, yes, he was seeing what Lind dreamed. It could be nothing else. He was connecting with him, their minds touching, sharing thoughts and brainwaves. The thrumming had gone away now and there was just those grainy, distorted pictures like a broadcast coming in on an old black and white Sylvannia tube set. Hayes felt dizzy, disoriented, those images rushing through his brain and making him want to pass cold out. But he saw, he saw…

He saw… a landscape… valleys and low snow-covered hills, hollows in which great beasts wandered listlessly, gnawing at squat vegetation. The beasts were shaggy things like bison or maybe rhinoceros, but with huge archaic horns. It was tundra mostly, the snowline creeping in from all sides, the world turning to winter. There was an immense lake in the distance or maybe it was part of the sea. It was flanked by mounds about which was built some rolling, immense city that looked to be quarried from stone. The image was wavering, fading, but Hayes could still see those towers and weird skeletal spires, arched domes and scalloped discs… an impossible city heaped and clustered and crowded, tangled up in itself like the bones of some gigantic beast…

Then it was gone.

Hayes backed away into the infirmary, wide-eyed and shocked. He had not imagined any of it, he had not hallucinated any of it. He sat at Sharkey’s desk, trying to catch his breath, wiping the sweat from his face. He was thinking things then, thinking terrible, impossible things that he believed nonetheless. That landscape… it was Antarctica as seen maybe in the late Miocene before the glaciers had covered it. When that immense, alien city found first by Pabodie and then later by Gates was not up in the mountains but set atop low mounds that would someday be mountains.

Gates had said the ice sheet was roughly forty-million years old.

Hayes went through all the normal channels trying to make sense of it, but there was no getting around what he had seen or how he had seen it. Lind was maybe like some sort of receiver picking up broadcasts from the dead and dreaming brains of the Old Ones, images of life in Antarctica forty-million years gone. And Hayes had been able to see what he was seeing.

Telepathy.

Parlor tricks. Psychic bullshit.

But he had it now, at least some rudimentary form.

The Old Ones had touched his mind and given him this. No, no, he couldn’t believe that. Maybe it had been in him all along and they just, well, woke it up, brought it to the fore from wherever it had been dreaming away the millennia. Hayes was thinking that maybe all men had it inside them, they’d just forgotten how to use it and now and then somebody would be born with the faculty fully activated and be labeled as a freak… or quietly go mad.

It was too much.

LaHune had to hear this shit.

14

LaHune was looking pretty much like he’d bitten into something sour as Hayes told him what had happened out in Hut #6. You could see that he did not want to be hearing shit like this. Whether he believed in any of it or not was immaterial, the idea of those dead minds still being somehow active and animate was really beyond the scope of things as he saw them. What could you do with information like that? You surely couldn’t crunch it on your laptop or scribble it on your clipboard or slip it in a folder and file it away. This was buggy stuff, now wasn’t it? This kind of thing surely upset the old applecart, threw a wrench into the machine, and put the monkeyshit in the mayo.

But Hayes was going to be heard and that was that. Maybe it was the intensity of his voice or the wild look in his eyes, but LaHune listened, all right. Listened while Hayes went on and on, all of it coming out of him in a tidal flow, running from him like waste.

Hayes hadn’t come straight to LaHune from the infirmary. No, he went back to his room, had a few cigarettes and a few more cups of joe, thought it out, took himself down a notch. Leveled a bit. Organized his thoughts, pressed and folded them into orderly rows. And then, maybe a few hours later, went to see LaHune and promptly started raving like a madman.

“You think I’m nuts, don’t you?” Hayes said when he’d finished, not needing telepathy to reach that shining conclusion. “You think this is just a bad dream or something?”

LaHune licked his lips. “To be honest with you, I don’t know what to make of it. I’ve been out to the hut several times and have suffered no ill effects from close proximity to the… the remains.”

Hayes almost started laughing.

He knew it had been a mistake coming here. But he’d thought it was worth a try. LaHune was the NSF administrator, right? As such, he had to be notified of any impending threat to the installation, right? Isn’t that what it said in the bylaws? Yes, it certainly did. Sure as dogshit drew bluebottle flies.

“I don’t care whether you’ve suffered any effects or not, LaHune. Maybe you need the right sort of mind and maybe they’re not interested in you. Maybe they just go for dumbasses like Lind and me and maybe Peter Pan is hung like a horse, but I don’t think so and it don’t matter, now does it? Those things are dangerous is what I’m saying to you. Can you at least get on the same page with me on that? You know the way they’ve been getting to people around here.”

“Paranoia, isolation… it’ll do funny things to people.”

“It’s more than that and you know it. I’ve spent a lot of years down here, LaHune, and never, ever once have I felt something like this. These people are threatened, their scared… they just aren’t sure of what.”

“And you are?”

Jesus, what a guy LaHune was. Just about everyone at the station was having crazy nightmares and Doc Sharkey admitted she was handing out sleeping pills like candy at Halloween. Dreams weren’t infectious, they didn’t spread. Yet everyone was having some real doozies since those ugly bastards had been brought in. Maybe it was wild, fringe thinking, the sort of crazy horseshit you found out on the Internet, but it was true and Hayes — and quite a few others by that point — felt it right down to his toes.

Not that you could ever convince LaHune of it.

He was an automaton, a brainwashed, officious little conservative company man. Hayes talked and LaHune clipped his nails, arranged the pens in his desk by color, sorted paperclips by size. He sat there in his L.L. Bean’s, perfectly erect in his seat, never slouching, his teeth even and white, his face freshly shaven, his hair perfectly coiffed. Looking either like a mannequin or the latest Republican wonderboy… clean and shiny on the outside and empty as a drum on the inside, just waiting for his puppetmasters to pull his strings.

“I’m telling you they’re a danger to the well-being of our group here, LaHune. I’m not shack-happy and I’m not drunk and I haven’t smoked a joint in fifteen years. You know me, you know how I am. I come from sturdy stock, LaHune, my people and me in general don’t see lights in the sky or read tabloids. What I’m telling you is the truth.”

LaHune was buffing his nails with an emery board. “So what, Hayes? You want me to destroy the single most important find in the history of the race?”

Hayes sighed. “Yeah, and if you can’t do that, then how about we drag the lot of those things about ten miles out and cut ’em a nice little berth in the ice, let Gates worry about ’em come spring.”

“No,” LaHune said. “That is utterly ridiculous and I refuse to entertain it.”

Hayes was beaten and he knew it. Maybe the campaign had been over before it even began. “What’s your thing, LaHune? I mean, c’mon, I know you don’t like being here and you don’t like us as a group. So why the hell are you here? I don’t see you as a team player… at least on any team I’d be rooting for. So what’s your thing? Are you NSF or are you something else?”

A slight blush of color touched LaHune’s cheeks, retreated like a flower deciding it was just too damn frosty to bloom. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do,” Hayes said. “I think you know exactly what I mean. Why are you here? You don’t belong in a place like this and we both know it. You’re not the type. I heard you spent a summer at McMurdo, but other than that, nothing. You know, ever since I got here, I’ve had a bad feeling and when I’m around you it gets worse. What’s this all about?”

LaHune closed his day calendar. “It’s about what you think it’s about or, should I say, what you should be thinking it’s about. Kharkhov Station is a scientific installation running a variety of projects through the winter under the auspices of the National Science Foundation.”

But Hayes didn’t believe it.

He tried to reach into LaHune’s mind, but there was nothing. Maybe the reawakened telepathy had been temporary and maybe there was just nothing inside LaHune to read. He only knew one thing and he knew it deep down in his guts: LaHune had a secret agenda here. He’d suspected it for awhile, but now he was sure of it.

And with that in mind, it was time to go fishing.

“C’mon, LaHune, spill it. Are you really NSF or are you something else? NASA or JPL? Something like that. We all know they got their hands in on that lake drilling project… are you part of that?”

“You’re spinning conspiracies now, Hayes.”

“You’re right, I am. Because I can’t shake the feeling that there’s some subtext here, something under the surface I’m not reading. I was there when Gates told you over the radio about those mummies he found, the ruins… you didn’t look at all surprised. Did you know they’d be there? And does it all tie in with what’s down in that fucking lake? Because, maybe I’m crazy, but this all smells funny. You cutting us off from the world for what you say are security reasons… security of what? Jesus, LaHune, you’re running this like a covert operation.”

“I’m running it the way I’m being told to run it,” LaHune said. “The NSF does not want any crank stories about aliens and pre-human cities leaking out before we know more.”

“Fuck that, LaHune. I don’t care if we found the Ark of the goddamn Covenant or Jesus’ piss-stained underwear, there’s no reason for a clamp-down like this.”

LaHune just stared at him.

His eyes were spooky, Hayes found himself thinking, almost artificial-looking. There was something unnerving about them that made your skin want to crawl. Those eyes were sterile, antiseptic… dead and flat and empty. Whatever mind existed behind them must have been rigidly controlled, brainwashed and inhuman. The mind of an ant or a wasp, incapable of thinking beyond the mind-set of its superiors. Yeah, LaHune would shut off the generators if he was ordered to do so, watch the crew freeze to death and not feel a single twinge of guilt. That’s the kind of guy he was. Like some asshole robotic general ordering men to their death even when he knew it was wrong. Morally and ethically wrong.

Had LaHune always been like this? Or had he only recently sold his soul to the machine? Hayes had to wonder, just like he wondered how much they had paid him to betray the people at Kharkhov. And was it in silver like Judas Iscariot?

“I’m not going to sit here and entertain your paranoid fantasies, Hayes. But let me make myself clear on one point,” he said and seemed to mean it. “You start spreading any of this nonsense around and it’ll go bad for you, real bad.”

Hayes stood up. “What’re you gonna do? Send me to fucking Antarctica?”

LaHune just stared blankly.

15

Maybe mid-afternoon, his guts still tangled in a knot from the whole mess, Hayes stopped by to see Doc Sharkey. He stood in the doorway of the infirmary while she administered a tetanus shot to a welder named Koricki who slit open his palm on a shard of rusty metal.

“There,” Sharkey said. “No lockjaw for you, my friend.”

Koricki pulled his sleeve down, examined the bandage on his palm. “Shit, I won’t be able to use my hand for a week… damn, there goes half my love life right down the toilet. Anything you can prescribe for that, Doc?”

She managed a grin. “On your way.”

Koricki passed Hayes, dropped him a wink. “Can’t blame a guy for trying, eh, Jimmy?”

Hayes stood there for some time, smiling at what Koricki had said and unable to stop. The smile was pretty much skin deep and the muscles refused to pull out of it.

“Well? Are you going to come in or stand there and hold up the door frame?” Sharkey wanted to know.

Hayes went in there and sat across from her at her little desk. He did not say anything.

“You look like hell, Jimmy.”

“Thanks.”

But it wasn’t some offhand smartassed comment like one of the boys would drop at him and neither was it a medical opinion… it was something else, maybe something like real concern. Regardless, Hayes knew she was right… his face was a fright mask. Eyes bloodshot, skin sallow and loose, a tic in the corner of his lips. His hands were shaking and his heart kept speeding up and slowing like it couldn’t find its rhythm. And, oh yeah, he hadn’t slept more than an hour in the last twenty-four.

“You were up all night?”

Hayes nodded. “You could say that, all right.”

“Why didn’t you come see me?” she asked, leaving the suggestion of that maybe lay a little too long. “I… I could have given you something… I mean, heh, something to help you sleep.”

But the thinly-concealed innuendo and numerous Freudian slips were completely lost on Hayes and that was pretty much obvious.

“How’s Lind?” he asked.

“He’s sleeping. He was up a few hours ago, had breakfast, went back out again. He seemed pretty lucid, though. I’m hopeful.”

“Me, too.”

She studied him with those flashing blue eyes. “I’m ready to listen anytime you’re ready to talk.”

And she was and he knew it. But was he ready? That was the question. In all those paperback novels that got passed around the station during the winter the characters always seemed to feel some awful story they had to relate got easier with the re-telling, but Hayes wasn’t so sure about that. He’d already told LaHune a good piece of it and as he thought about what he had to say, it only sounded loonier to him. But he did it. He marched straight through it like Sherman through Georgia and even clued her into the telepathy bit, seeing Lind’s dreams.

“Okay,” he said when he was done, his hands bunched into fists. “Should I just go take the cot next to Lind or what?”

She looked at him for a long time and there was nothing critical in that look, concern, yes, but nothing negative. “Two weeks ago I would have put you under medication.”

“But now?”

“Now I’m not sure what to do,” she admitted. “Something’s happening here and we both know it.”

“But do you believe me?”

She sighed, looked unhappy. “Yes… yes, I suppose I do.”

And maybe it would have been easier if she hadn’t. Things like this were so much easier when you could simply dismiss them. You got abducted by an alien and they stuck something up your ass? Yeah, okay. Your house is haunted? Uh-huh, I bet it is. Casual, thoughtless dismissal saved you from a world of hurt. But that was how the human mind worked… it was skeptical because it had to be skeptical, it saved itself a lot of fear and torment that way, a lot of sleepless nights. Because when you believed, you honestly believed… well, that meant you had to do something about it, right?

“You believe,” Hayes said, “but you’d rather not? Is that it?”

“That’s it exactly.” She drummed her fingers on the desktop, looked like she needed to be doing something with them. “Because in my position, I just can’t sit on something like this. The health of the entire crew here is my responsibility. I have to do something, except there really is nothing I can do.”

“How right you are. I already tried our lord and master, but that was pointless.”

“I could go to him, too, but I would need something concrete… even then… well, you know how LaHune is.” She opened her desk and took out a little microcassette recorder. “I wonder if you would go through it all again so we have a record? It might be important to have some documentation and your admission, on tape, that LaHune totally blew you off.”

Hayes did not want to do that, but he did. He cleared his throat, brought it all back in his head and said what had to be said. It took about fifteen minutes to get all the facts straight.

“I’m glad you left out the conspiracy bit,” Sharkey said. Then she held up a hand to him. “Please don’t take that the wrong way, but it just wouldn’t sound right on the tape. Maybe LaHune does have some secret agenda. If he does and he’s involved in something way over our heads, we’ll never get him to admit as such. All we can do is sit back and wait.”

It made sense. Hayes believed it, though. He didn’t know how he knew it to be fact, but he did and nobody could tell him otherwise.

“Are you still… still experiencing the telepathy?”

Hayes shook his head. “No, I think it was a brief surge. But I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if other people around here start getting it, too.”

“Lind’s in there,” Sharkey said, pointing to the door that led into the little sick bay. “Do you think if you—”

“I’m not up to it.”

They heard someone come hurrying up the corridor and Cutchen appeared, looking somewhat tense, maybe a little out of breath. “You two seen Meiner?” he asked.

They both shook their heads.

“Why? What’s up?” Sharkey said.

“He’s missing.”

“Missing?”

Cutchen nodded. “Last anyone saw him was early this morning, maybe around seven. He had breakfast with Rutkowski and the boys and nobody’s seen him since. He never showed for lunch and he isn’t the sort to miss a meal.”

Hayes felt a little tenseness himself now. “You tell LaHune?”

“I sent St. Ours over there with a couple others,” Cutchen said. “We’ve been looking all over the compound for him.”

About that time, LaHune came over the PA that was linked to every building and hut at the station, calling for Meiner to report in immediately. There was silence after that, maybe for two or three minutes while they looked helplessly at one another, then LaHune came back on again. Same message.

“He’s gotta be somewhere,” Sharkey said.

But Cutchen didn’t comment on that. They followed him back down the corridor to the community room where maybe a dozen others were gathered in small groups, speculating on Meiner’s fate.

“Anyone look down in the shafts?” Hayes said, referring to the maintenance shafts that ran beneath the station where all the lines and pipes were run from the power station and pumping shacks.

“Rutkowski and some of the contractors are down there now.”

Hayes looked over at Sharkey and she was spearing him with those blue eyes of hers and they seemed to be saying to him, this is probably unrelated. But already Hayes was thinking otherwise.

He walked over to one of the east windows, peering out into the claustrophobic darkness of an Antarctica winter’s day. Sheets of snow lifted, blowing through the compound in whirlwinds and torrents, engulfing the buildings and then retreating, backlit by pole lights and security lights whose illumination trembled and shook, casting wild shadows over the white. As the latest deluge played out, Hayes could see Hut #6 out there all by its lonesome, a tomb shrouded in ice.

“Anybody check the hut?” he said to Cutchen. “Gates’ hut?” Cutchen shook his head. “Why the hell would he be out there?” But Hayes didn’t say.

All he knew for sure was that he had left the door wide open when he left last night and now it looked to be closed.

16

Anybody could have closed it, Hayes was telling himself as they followed the guylines and drifted walkway out to Hut #6. Somebody could have passed, maybe one of the maintenance guys or somebody doing a little plowing early this morning.

Could have happened.

Yet, he didn’t believe it for a minute. The weather was bad… it hadn’t stopped snowing and gusting for three days now and the temperature was hanging low at a near-constant seventy below with wind chills pushing it down near a 100 below. In that kind of weather, you didn’t go out of your way looking for extra outside work. And just about everyone was steering clear of Hut #6 and what it contained now. Maybe if it was summer and there was light, but in this perpetual screaming blackness… no way. Even if someone saw the door swinging wide they would not have gone over there anymore than you would go into a graveyard at midnight because a vault door was left open and creaking.

Superstitious or not, there were limits to what you’d do.

Hayes was leading the charge, battened down in ECW’s, eyes wide behind his plastic goggles. Cutchen and Sharkey were behind him. All of them were gripping the guylines, feeling that wind trying to knock them down and sometimes lift them up, up, and away into the frozen night.

Hayes paused outside the door to the hut.

Yes, it was closed, all right. And he had a pretty good idea that the wind had had nothing to do with it. There was no point in looking in the snow for tracks because the wind erased them every ten minutes. Right now, there was a three-foot drift pushed up against the door and Hayes had to kick it away with his boots so they could get it open.

Then he undid the latch, grinned secretly at the length of chain and Masterlock dangling from it, and pulled it open, feeling that warmth coming out at them.

You step in there and they’ll eat your mind down to the bone.

But Hayes stepped in and clicked on the lights and the others came in with him, Cutchen shutting the door behind them. They pulled off their mittens and goggles, smelling that room right away. After the ultra-fresh air on the walk over, the stench in the hut was offensive and roiling. It was a thick and vaporous green odor of rotting marshes and sun-bloated fish.

“God… what a smell,” Cutchen said. “Why in the hell would Gates let these things decay like this? They’re priceless.”

“Look,” Sharkey said.

Neither Hayes nor Cutchen had seen it, the angle of the wall blocking most of the lab except for that decaying, meaty mass on the table. But now they got a look.

“Meiner,” Cutchen said.

Yeah, it was Meiner, all right, missing no more. They would never know exactly what got into his head or what he’d been thinking and that was probably a good thing. For Meiner had decided to pull himself up a chair about four feet away from the thawed—and decaying—specimen and stare at it in the dark. Hayes had some ideas as to why, but he did not voice them. He just looked down at Meiner as the wind blew and the shack trembled and an uneasy silence hung thickly in the air.

“What… Jesus, what in the hell happened to him?” Cutchen wondered out loud, the color drained from his face.

Sharkey didn’t need to get very close to make her diagnosis. “Dead,” she said. “Probably four or five hours, I’d guess.”

“Dead,” Cutchen said as if it were some surprise. “Oh, Christ, he’s dead.”

And he was.

Just sitting there in that chair, reclined back in his parka, mittens still on. His big white boots were crossed over each other and his mittened hands laid primly in his lap. He looked rather peaceful until you saw his face, saw the way his mouth was contorted in a silent scream, dried blood running from his lips and nostrils like old wine stains. And his eyes… just hollow purple cavities with clots of trailing gelatinous pulp splashed down his cheeks like slimy egg whites.

“Holy fuck,” Cutchen said as if he was just now getting it. “That snot… those are his eyes.”

He turned away and Hayes followed suit.

Sharkey didn’t care much for what she was seeing either, but medical curiosity and the upcoming post she would have to perform made it mandatory that she belly up to the bar and drink her fill.

Cutchen looked like he was going to be sick, but had changed his mind. He was looking at the mummy on the table, scowling, not liking it very much. Those glaring red eyes at the ends of the fleshy yellow stalks were still extended and wide open.

“I wouldn’t stare at it too long,” Hayes warned him. “Give you bad dreams.”

Cutchen barked a short laugh and looked away. “Crazy goddamn thing. Looks like it was thrown together by some Hollywood special effects people, you know? Reminds me of those bug-eyed monsters Gary Larson draws.”

Hayes was thinking more along the lines of Bernie Wrightson, but he kept that to himself. He was getting good at keeping things to himself. While Sharkey gave Meiner the once over, he stood there trying to fill his head with nonsense so the thing would not try and get at his mind again. Finally, he gave up, opened himself up, but there was nothing. The thing was dead and he had to wonder if he wasn’t going insane. There was nothing in his head but the neutral humming of his neurons at low ebb. Nothing else, praise God.

The door opened and LaHune came in with St. Ours and a couple of contractors. He looked from the mummy to Hayes, wrinkled his nose at the stink and stripped his goggles off. As yet, he hadn’t seen the body.

He shook a finger at Hayes, casting him a feral look. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing out here? This hut was locked and chained, it’s off-limits to anyone but myself and Dr. Gates’ team. You don’t have the authorization to be out here.”

St. Ours flashed Hayes a little smile as if saying, yeah, good old La-Hune, ain’t he just the King Shit himself?

Sharkey looked like she was about to say something, but Hayes stepped forward, something in him beginning to boil, to seethe. “I made my own fucking authorization, LaHune. They’re called boltcutters. But I’m glad you showed up, because I want your high and mighty white ass to see something.”

“Jimmy…” Sharkey began.

But Hayes wasn’t listening. His eyes were locked with those of La-Hune and neither man was breaking the staring contest. They faced off like a couple male rattlesnakes ready to go at it over a juicy female.

“I want you out of here,” LaHune said. “Now.”

“Kiss my ass, chief,” Hayes told him and before anyone could stop him or really even think of doing so, Hayes took two quick steps and grabbed LaHune by the arm. And hard enough to almost yank that arm right off. He took hold of him and yanked him further into the hut until he could see Meiner plain as day.

LaHune shook himself free… or tried to. “Meiner… good God.”

Hayes let out a tortured laugh, pulling LaHune over closer to the corpse and its empty eye sockets. “No, God don’t have shit to do with this party, LaHune. See, this is what Gates’ pets have done. This is what happens when they get inside your head and overload you. You like it? You like how that looks?” he said, shaking the man. “Maybe what we need to do is lock you in here in the dark for a few hours, see if you suffer any ill fucking effects from close proximity to the remains. You want that, LaHune? That what you want? Feel that fucking monster getting inside your mind and bleeding you dry, your fucking brains running out your ears?”

LaHune did get away now. “I want everyone out of here and right goddamn now.”

But St. Ours and the other boys were too busy looking from the putrefying husk on the table to Meiner, a guy they’d lived with and drank with, played cards with and laughed with. This was one of their own and when the shock started fading, they put their eyes on LaHune.

“Fuck you gonna do about this, boss?” St. Ours said. “Or should I fucking well guess?”

“Nothing,” another said. “He won’t do a goddamn thing.”

St. Ours was big and he could’ve smeared a guy like LaHune all over the walls, used what was left to wipe his ass with. “Tell you what, boss. I’ll give you a day or two to take care of this business here. You don’t get rid of these butt-ugly motherfuckers, we’ll dump about two-hundred gallons of hi-test in here and have ourselves a fucking wienie roast.”

He meant it and there was no doubt about it.

Hayes and Cutchen followed St. Ours and the others out, leaving Sharkey looking helpess and LaHune trying to find his balls, trying to figure out how he was going to crunch this one on his laptop.

17

It was the dinner hour and the scientists and contractors began to arrive at the community room in twos and threes, bringing with them the smell of machine oil and sweat and exhaustion. A smell that mixed in with the stink of old beer and older cooking odors, smoke and garbage and musty tarps drying along the wall. It was a hermetic, contained sort of stink that was purely Antarctica.

The room wasn’t too big to begin with and it quickly filled, people grumbling and complaining, joking and laughing, dragging in snow and ice that melted into dirty pools on the floor.

“You got any good ideas, Doc, on what can boil a man’s eyes right out of his head?” Cutchen was saying, watching the room fill.

Sharkey shrugged. She’d completed the post on Meiner and had listed his death, far as she could tell, due to a massive cerebral hemorrhage. What that had to do with the man’s eyes going to jelly and exploding out of their sockets was anyone’s guess.

Hayes was watching St. Ours, Rutkowski, and the boys at their usual table near the north wall. They were a grim lot with set faces and weary eyes, in mourning of a sort for Meiner. Other contractors threaded past them, said a word or two and kept right on going.

They looked, Hayes decided, like a bunch of roughnecks looking for a fight.

You could almost smell it building over there, that raw stink of hatred and fear that was smoldering and consuming. It was a big odor that rose above everything else, feeding upon itself and growing geometrically out of control. And if something didn’t give at the station pretty goddamn soon, it was going to vent itself and Hayes didn’t think he wanted to see that.

But it had to happen, sooner or later.

It had been a bullshit winter so far and it showed no signs of getting any better. The entire place had lost its sense of camaraderie and brotherhood that you usually got from living practically on top of each other, depending on each other and knowing there was no one to turn to but the guy or girl sitting next to you. That was all fading fast and in another week or two, you could probably bury it proper and throw dirt in its face. The entire station was starting to feel like some sort of immense dry cell battery storing up fear and negativity, all that potential energy just looking for a catalyst to set it free. And when that happened, when it finally arced out of control, it was going to have claws and teeth and dark intent.

“It’s going to be trouble, Doc,” Hayes said, “when that happens.”

“When what happens?”

Hayes looked at her and Cutchen. “When these people feel like their necks have been strung as tight as they can go and they decide they’ve had enough. Because you know it’s going to happen, you can feel it in the air.”

“They’re afraid,” Sharkey said.

“I am, too. But I’m thinking at least so far, I can see reason… but some of them? I don’t know. You keep an eye on St. Ours. He’s dangerous. There’s murder in his eyes and if I was LaHune I’d be sleeping real lightly.”

“You think it’ll go that far?” Cutchen said.

“Yeah, I do. Look at them over there. They’re all having crazy fucking nightmares and they’re scared and they’re not thinking right. It’s coming off of them like poison.”

And maybe it was.

Because already it seemed like the crew was forming along class lines… the scientists were keeping to themselves, the contractors staying with their own. There was no mixing up like you generally saw most winters. Maybe it was a temporary thing, but maybe it hinted at worse things waiting. Waiting to spring.

“LaHune could stop it or slow it down at least,” Hayes said. “Give these people their Internet, radio, and satellite back, let them reach outside of this place to the real world. It would work wonders.”

“I don’t see that happening anytime soon,” Sharkey said.

“No, neither do I. And that’s what’s so fucked up about all of this. Morale has gone right into the pisser and LaHune doesn’t seem to give a shit. He’s clamping down, playing it close to the vest and spooky and that isn’t helping a thing.”

“He’s the cloak-and-dagger type,” Cutchen added, something behind his eyes pretty much saying that he could elaborate on that, but wasn’t about to.

Sharkey sighed. “He… well, he just doesn’t understand people, I’m afraid. What they need and what they want and what makes them happy.”

“See, that’s what bugs me about the guy, the fact that he could care less, that he doesn’t give a shit about the state of mind at his own goddamn station, the one he’s supposed to be running. That just rubs me wrong. But, then again, LaHune has been rubbing me wrong since I got here. He has no business running a place like this.” Hayes paused, studying a few contractors leaning against the wall and smoking cigarettes, looking bitter, their eyes dead. “Most of the people down here are vets, they’ve wintered through before. I know all three of us have and many times. Normally, the NSF picks an administrator with people skills, not a fucking mannequin like LaHune. A guy who’s equally at home with the techies and the support personnel. A guy who can talk ice cores and sedimentation, turn around and talk beer and baseball and overhauling a Hemi. The sort of guy who can play both ends, keep people happy and keep the place running, make sure the work gets done and people have what they need, when they need it. That’s why I don’t get LaHune. He has no business down here.”

“Well, somebody thought he did,” Sharkey said.

“Yeah, and I’m starting to wonder who that might be.”

Nobody bit on that one and Hayes was okay with that. He’d already reeled off his conspiracy theories for Sharkey and she had warned him to be careful talking like that. That such things would just feed the blaze that was already smoldering at Kharkhov.

Cutchen wasn’t stupid, though. He could read between the lines and the way he looked over at Hayes told him that he was doing just that.

“What I don’t get,” he said after a time, “is why Gates would leave his mummies in there to decay like that. It just doesn’t wash with me. If they’re what he’s saying… or not saying… then I can’t see this opportunity coming his way again.”

Sharkey tensed a bit because she knew what Hayes was going to say.

“Maybe he didn’t realize what he was doing,” Hayes said, true to form. “Maybe he wasn’t in his right mind anymore than Meiner was in his when he decided to keep those things company in the dark. Yeah, maybe, like Meiner, Gates didn’t have a choice. Maybe he was doing what those things wanted him to do… letting them thaw, letting their minds wake up all the way.”

Cutchen just sat there. He grinned at first thinking it was a gag, but the grin disappeared quickly enough. He looked over at Sharkey, his eyes seeming to say, what in the hell is this guy talking about?

18

“What we’re doing here,” Dr. Gundry was saying to Hayes inside the drilling tower the next morning, “is to drill down nearly a mile to Lake Vordog. We’ll stop drilling about a hundred feet above it and let the cryobot melt its way down the rest of the way. Why? Why not just drill all the way through? Simple. We don’t want to contaminate that lake in any way, shape, or form. Remember, Mr. Hayes—”

“Jimmy’s fine, just Jimmy.”

“Right. Anyway, Jimmy, Vordog is a pristine body of water, un-contaminated by microorganisms from above and has been for nearly forty-million years. Last thing we want is for some of our bugs to get into that water. The ecosystem down there may be radically different from any other on earth and we can’t take the chance of contaminating something like that.”

Gundry was pretty excited about the entire thing and particularly since he and his team had high hopes of getting down to the lake by the end of the day. They were damn close now. Hayes was trying to share the enthusiasm, but he was getting that bad feeling in his gut again that was telling him maybe that lake should be left alone.

But there would be no leaving it alone.

These guys would not stop until the lid was kicked off Pandora’s Box and all the badness had seeped out. Because it was more than the biology, geology, and chemistry of Lake Vordog these guys were interested in. There was something else, something inexplicable and therefore intriguing: a magnetic anomaly. Using magnetic imaging, the anomaly was discovered by a SOAR (Support Office for Aerogeophysical Research) fly-over the year before. Although at the South Geomagnetic pole, of course, there was a manifested flux in the earth’s electromagnetic field and from time to time small, temporary magnetic anomalies were detected, none of it explained what they were seeing roughly dead center of the lake: a self-perpetuating source of intense magnetic energy.

And there simply was no explanation for it.

At least, none that the scientists were ready to share.

Gundry, a CalTech glaciologist, was the project manager. He had six people working under him and the lot of them barely left the drilling tower. Usually sleeping and taking their meals there as well. Gundry had laid it all out for Hayes, best he could. The project was underwritten by NASA as part of the groundwork for the Europa Ice Clipper and Mars cryobot missions. Known as the ATP, the Active Thermal Probe, the cryobot would melt down through the northern ice cap of Mars… and eventually, through the frozen crust of Europa. The cryobot being used for the Lake Vordog probe, Project Deep Drill, would be similar to the ones they’d use on Mars and Jupiter’s frozen moons. Basically, it was something of a robotic submersible, a cylindrical probe about ten feet long and six inches in diameter with a heated nose cone designed to melt frozen ground and drill hyperthermally.

“It’s, essentially, like a high-tech… very high-tech… self-propelled drill, Jimmy,” Gundry explained. “Melting its way through the ice and passing down through the resulting liquid takes a lot less power than conventional augering. The nose cone melts the ice to liquid and the cryobot is drawn downward via gravity.”

Hayes nodded. “But on Mars or Europa, you’re not going to have a big drill like you have here to get the cryobot started.”

“No, good point. But the cryobot doesn’t need any pre-drilling, we’ve just done that to speed things along, you see. In our latest test — and trust me, Jimmy, there have been lots of tests — the cryobot melted its way though two-hundred feet of ice without any problem.”

Gundry explained that from the back of the probe there was a self-unspooling umbilical connecting it to the surface carrying power and fibre-optic video and data cables. What would happen was, after the cryobot began melting its way through the cap above Vordog, the hole would freeze up behind it and that would be perfectly fine in that it would seal Vordog from the outside world.

“So, the probe will melt through the cap and then drop down to the lake itself. It’s not solid ice above the lake. There’s an arched dome up to half a mile high above it,” Gundry said. “So the cryobot will have a splash-down of sorts and then go under where it then will split in two. The mother portion will stay just under the surface, analyzing the water and searching for signs of life. The other portion will descend to the bottom on a cable where it, too, will search for life and examine currents and temperatures, which will then give us a good idea what’s keeping that lake warm… we’re guessing hydrothermal vents, smoker vents.”

Hayes just shook his head. “The level of technology you guys come up with is amazing.”

“Oh, but we’re not done yet,” Campbell, the microbiologist, said, looking up from his monitor. “Once the lower portion hits the sediment, it will release the hydrobot… a tiny submarine of sorts equipped with sonar and a camera. It’ll bounce around down there like a soap bubble, showing us what’s above and below.”

Jesus, it was incredible.

No wonder these guys never came up for air. Project Deep Drill had begun the summer before, bringing in the equipment and setting it up, getting everything on-line and ready for the drilling. It hadn’t been until winter that everything was a go.

Hayes had wintered at other stations and usually the drilling towers were involved in core sampling for the NSF’s Antarctic Core Repository project. They drilled down, brought up cores for geochemical anaylsis and paleoclimatology studies. The cores could tell them the history of the world’s climate, the chemical composition of its water and air, things like that.

But, this year, it was a little more exciting.

Hayes stepped out of the control booth and stood there in the main room of the drilling tower which was cavernous and loud. The massive EHWD (Enhanced Hot-Water Drill) was channeling deep into the ice beneath the tower, making the floor vibrate. Compressors were thrumming and pumps hissing, hoses snaking every which way. The drill, he knew, pumped jets of ultra-hot water from a heating plant down a hose at high pressure to the drill head far below. The melted water was sucked up from the borehole, reheated up in the tower, and pumped back down in a cyclical process.

Hayes walked around, staying out of the way of the three technicians who were actually running the drill, monitoring its progress and keeping an eye on all that expensive machinery. The cryobot itself was over near the wall, looking like a missile suspended from an immense iron tripod and connected to huge spools of cable. The probe itself was sealed in a sterile vinyl bag that it would melt through once it reached its destination nearly a mile below.

Hayes was just staring at it, that feeling in his guts again like somebody had dug a pit in his belly. He couldn’t get beyond it now. It wasn’t a momentary thing he could laugh off, accost himself for being silly. No, this feeling was deep and ancient and intense. Staring up at the suspended cryobot he figured he was feeling roughly what Rabi, Oppenheimer, and the boys must have been feeling when they tested the atomic bomb for the first time: that the door had been thrown open and there was no going back.

The noise of the machinery clattering in his ears, Hayes slipped away, making for the far side of the drill room and into the core sampling room. Gundry had turned it into an office of sorts.

He was going through reams of computer printouts, mostly graphs. “Something on your mind, Jimmy?”

Hayes chewed his lip. “You were there when Gates made his announcement, right?”

“Sure. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

Hayes took a deep breath, considered his words carefully. “What do you think of the mummies? That prehistoric city? I mean, not scientifically, but as a person, a human being, what do you think of them?”

Gundry was a small, almost bird-like man who moved with quick, jerky motions. His face was weathered and craggy like all those who spent too much time in the harshest climate on earth. He looked, if anything, like some hard-rock miner who’d lived a hard, demanding life and probably he had. The only thing that off-set this was his full head of almost luxurious silver hair. But for all his nervous energy, he now relaxed, intertwined his fingers behind his head and leaned back. “Well, I’ll tell you, Jimmy. I’ll tell you what I think,” he said in his smooth Southern drawl. “I grew up in the Bible Belt and though religion and I have had a parting of the ways, I think this could be big trouble for the faith. What Bob Gates has found down here just might throw organized religion on its ass. When Gates said that he has something there that might make us re-think who and what we are, I wouldn’t take that lightly. I know the man. He doesn’t say squat until he’s got something and, son, I’m thinking he’s got something here that’s going to shake our culture to its roots.”

“Do you think… do you think those are aliens he has there?”

Gundry winced, then shrugged. “All I’m going to say is that it’s probably a pretty good possibility.”

“I know you boys have been busy over here,” Hayes said. “But I imagine you’ve heard what’s going on.”

“I have.”

“And as an educated man, what do you make of it? All those dreams everyone’s having, all of ’em pretty much along the same line.”

“As an educated man and a guy who’s spent half his lifetime at the Pole, I’d say isolation can lead to paranoia and paranoia can lead to all manner of terrible things. Particularly when you’ve got those Old Ones as inspiration.” Gundry paused, shrugged again. “That’s what I’d say as an educated man.”

Hayes licked his windburned lips. “And as just a man?”

Gundry shifted uncomfortably. “I’d say I don’t particularly care for what those things are going to tell us about ourselves and the history of our little world. I’d say they seem to have a bad influence on our kind in general. And, like you, I’m hoping that influence is not truly still active.”

“Do you think we’re in trouble here, Doc?”

“No, at least, I hope not. But as to our culture? Our society? Yeah, I’d say that’s in jeopardy… because after what Gates has found, well, let’s face it, Jimmy, you just can’t go home again. You can’t go back to the way things were.”

Gundry was saying a lot of things without actually saying them. Hayes had spent a lot of time around scientists and knew they got very good at that. Had to, if they wanted to survive in the fiercely competitive, cutthroat world of government grants and college departmental politics. Scientists like Gundry did not go out on a limb until it had been shored-up by others. At least, not publicly.

Hayes turned to leave, then stopped. “What about that magnetic energy down in the lake? What do you make of that?”

But Gundry would only shrug, blinking his eyes in rapid succession. “What do you make of it, Jimmy?”

Hayes looked at him for a moment. “I’m no scientist, Doc, but I’m not stupid either. I trust my instincts on things like this.”

“And what do your instincts tell you?”

“Same thing they’re telling you, Dr. Gundry, that whatever’s down there kicking up its heels… it sure as fuck isn’t by accident.”

19

“Well, you missed all the excitement,” Sharkey said to Hayes that afternoon in the community room as he sat down with his tray of food.

Hayes felt something wither in him. “God, do I even want to hear this?”

“I think you will. LaHune has put us back online… Internet, satellite, the works. He made the announcement about an hour ago and you could almost hear the sigh of relief around here.”

Hayes wasn’t really surprised.

LaHune had to pacify the collective beast before it took a bite out of him. Looking around the community room which was barely half full, Hayes could almost feel that the tensions of the past week had subsided somewhat. Like a chiropractor with a good set of hands had worked out the kinks and bunched muscles of the station.

“No shit?” he said. “You telling me our fine and randy Mr. LaHune isn’t worrying about word of our mummies leaking out? That city?”

Sharkey took a bite of stew, chewed it carefully. “Oh, he covered that base. He directed it at our wallets. Told us it’s okay to mention that fossils and artifacts had been found, just not to be perpetuating any of the wild rumors circulating through camp. Said that, if crazy stories like that got out, those who sent them would not be invited back by the NSF… meaning they can kiss Antarctica good-bye, along with those juicy contracts and exclusive grants.”

Though he didn’t care for LaHune anymore than he cared for a woodtick fastened to his left nut, Hayes had to agree that it was the right way to handle things. People didn’t pay much attention to threats until you put their livelihood and careers on the chopping block. If LaHune had any sense, he would have done it in the first place.

“Honestly though, Jimmy, I don’t think people here are going to talk about any of that. They’re barely talking about it amongst themselves. It seems that most of them have accepted my post on Meiner as an embolism.”

Hayes studied his food, set his fork down. “Yeah, but do you accept it?”

Sharkey looked indifferent. “Down here, with the very limited pathological facilities, it’ll have to do. I examined Meiner’s brain pretty thoroughly. It was a massive hemorrhage, all right… blood vessels popped like ripe grapes just about everywhere. So I accept that. As to cause… well, that’s a different bag of chips, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is at that.”

“Gates radioed us this morning on the HF,” Sharkey said. “I was in the radio shack when it came in.”

“And?”

“A few items of interest. Gates and his team are still finding the things up there. He was saying fossils, but I guess by this point we can read through the lines pretty much. More fossils, more artifacts. According to what he said, they’ve been spending a lot of time in that subterranean city. I got on the horn and asked him what he was making of the ruins, but he was almost… evasive, I guess, about what he’s seeing.”

Hayes thought about that, was thinking that Gates should have dynamited that chasm close while he still could. But maybe it was already too late for that. The cage was open, now wasn’t it? And the beast had gotten loose after millions of years. He swallowed. “Did you mention that state of his mummies?”

“I did.”

“And his reply?”

She shook her head. “He seemed a little confused about it all… like it was some gray area in his head.”

“I’ll just bet it is.”

Sharkey said he managed to cover for himself okay, though, saying that letting his specimens thaw and maybe decompose was part of some experiment he was running. And maybe it was, though she didn’t believe it. She said Gates alluded to the fact that he had uncovered a great deal more specimens in some kind of cemetery up there… or down there… and he wasn’t too concerned about the ones in the hut.

“He just said to make sure the hut stayed locked and people stayed out of there.” Sharkey was looking into Hayes’ eyes now. “I suppose he could be worried about us contaminating something he has going in there, but — “

“But you don’t believe it?”

“No, I don’t.” She took another bite of stew and washed it down with coffee. “There was… well, almost an undercurrent to his voice, Jimmy. Maybe it was my imagination, but I don’t think so. He was almost guarded, unnecessarily formal. At times it almost seemed like he was speaking really low like he didn’t want to be overheard and other times he muttered nonsensical things. But when I asked him to repeat, he changed the subject.”

“He’s in trouble, Doc. I’m willing to bet they all are.”

“Maybe. Thing is, LaHune showed for the last half of our convo and, true to form, he didn’t seem to think there was anything out of the ordinary. I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“Gates? Well… he said that they found an abandoned Russian camp up there, about ten miles from their location. He said it was pretty much buried in snow, but he was really intrigued by it. I could hear the excitement in his voice, Jimmy. It may mean nothing, but…”

“Maybe everything?”

Sharkey didn’t bother with her food anymore. “I know Gates as well as anyone, Jimmy. He’s completely self-involved and dedicated. He pays no attention to that which doesn’t directly concern his project. And I tell you right now that his interest in that camp isn’t simple curiosity. He asked me to call my Russian friends down at Vostok, see what they had to say about it.”

Sharkey corresponded with a Russian physician at the Vostok Station and was pretty friendly with him. The guy’s name was Nikolai Kolich and he had been part of the Russian program since the Soviet days in the 1960s. He knew all the scuttlebutt on just about everything. As it so happened, there was another huge warm-water lake beneath the Vostok Station and plans were in place to drill down to it after Vordog.

“LaHune okay with that? You calling him?”

“He suggested it.”

“Anything else?”

Sharkey told him that Gates seemed very interested in the progress that Dr. Gundry’s drilling operation was making. He seemed, she said, very excited about what might be found down there. Either excited or scared, it was hard to say.

“What do you think’s down there, Jimmy?”

He told her about his convo with Dr. Gundry. “He won’t say much, but he’s thinking things, Doc. Lots of things. I got a good idea that me and him are pissing in the same bucket here, that we’re on the same page. There’s something down there creating that magnetic flux and I think it worries him.”

20

Hayes was there in the radio shack when Sodermark, the communications tech, established contact with the Vostok Station. Another old Soviet installation, Vostok had existed now for some forty-odd years and was staffed by Russians, Americans, and the French, all of whom were involved in joint projects and independent research. Once Sodermark had them on the HF set, he told Sharkey that it was all hers, he was going to grab a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

The connection wasn’t bad, despite the weather, though now and then there was a funny whining sound that would rise and fall. Hayes listened while Sharkey and Nikolai Kolich talked shop for a time.

Finally, Sharkey said, “Nikolai? That excavation I mentioned to you… yes, I imagine you’ve heard about it by now… Dr. Gates is up there again. No, I don’t know, I don’t know… lots of strange stories flying around that’s for sure.”

Sharkey smiled and rolled her eyes while Kolich talked non-stop about what Gates had found. If it was all over the Vostok Station, then it was surely all over McMurdo and Palmer, too.

When Kolich stopped for a breath, Sharkey jumped in: “I have a question for you, Nicky. Dr. Gates needs to know something only you can answer, I think. There’s a camp up near him, an abandoned Russian camp up there. Do you know of it?”

The usually gregarious Kolich went silent for a moment or two. That whine rose and fell from the set. They waited a minute, two, three, nothing.

“Nikolai? Nikolai? Are you there?” Sharkey asked. “Vostok? Can you hear me, Vostok?”

“Yes… we hear you, Elaine. I’ve… I’ve been getting properly chastised by the radio officer here… he says that I am not following proper procedure. I should be saying ‘over’ and that nonsense. There. There, he is gone and now we can talk.”

“The abandoned camp… do you know of it?”

“Yes, Elaine, yes. You speak of the Vradaz Outpost, a coring site. It was abandoned back in 1979 or ’80, as I recall. There was a lot of noise about it at the time, lots of wild stories…”

“Do you remember what happened?”

Silence, static. “Yes, but it’s hardly worth going into. Just crazy talk. There was… well how do I say this… something of a ghost scare up there. Talk of a haunting of all things. Crazy business. Vradaz was a summer post and they were coring, struck into a cave or chasm or something. Yes. Then… I remember things got funny after that.”

He paused and Hayes looked at Sharkey, but she wouldn’t look at him. She was thinking what he was thinking. He knew it.

“Do you remember the details, Nicky?” she asked.

“Details? Yes. Yes, yes, I was here at Vostok when they brought the last three men in. They were all mad, hopelessly mad. The man in charge here then… you know of the sort I speak, Elaine? The political officer was a big Ukranian whom no one liked. He placed those three men in segregation, had me shoot them full of sedatives so they would not disturb the others.”

“You said three men? I thought there were ten?”

“There was said, I recall, to be a rash of insanity up there. Men killing each other and committing suicide. We had been getting some very odd communications from Vradaz and then, nothing. Three weeks and nothing. A security force went up there, came back with the three and said the others were all dead. I was one of the few, being a medico, that was allowed to see these men. They were only here for three days, I think, then they were flown out. It was a sad, tragic business. Isolation… it can do terrible things to men.”

“Those communications… do you remember them?”

“Yes.” Another long pause and Hayes could almost imagine him mopping sweat from his brow. “Crazy business… the men up there, they wanted to get out, said they could not stay up there. These were scientists, Elaine, and they were scared like schoolchildren, yes? Talking rubbish… noises and bumps, knocks and tappings, shapes seen flitting about at night… madness, that’s all it was.”

Sharkey chewed her lower lip. “Dr. Gates will find this all interesting.”

“It was rubbish, Elaine, make sure you tell him that I did not believe these things!”

“Oh, of course not, Nicky.” Sharkey stared at the dials and LEDs on the radio, thumbed the mic again. “Did those three men… did they say anything?”

The silence dragged on longer this time, much longer. “Yes, even sedated, they would not stop talking. It was all nonsense, Elaine. Silly stories, all of it. They were raving. Sounds in the night, noises in the walls and on the roofs… knocks at the door, scratching at the windows. Things of that nature. There was a ruined house when I was a child and… but, no matter. These men were raving about nightmares and voices in their heads… weird figures wandering through the compound that were not men… ghosts, bogies, I think. They spoke of devils and monsters, figures that walked through walls. It was a terrible business.”

Kolich signed off soon after this and seemed to be in a hurry to do so. Maybe he was being overheard or maybe the memory of all that wasn’t sitting on him right. Regardless, he had something that needed doing and he went to do it.

“What do you make of that?” Hayes asked.

Sharkey kept staring at the set. She shook her head. “Nikolai is a man who likes to talk, Jimmy. But he was very abrupt about all this. Any other time I would have been on here an hour hearing about his take on that business. It’s not like him.”

“I got the feeling that maybe he was talking about something he wasn’t supposed to be saying.”

“Me, too.”

“But you saw the familiar pattern there, I take it?”

She nodded. “It’s like what we have… but worse.” She was looking in his eyes now and Hayes saw something like fear in them. “Is this what’s going to happen here, Jimmy? Are we all going to go mad and kill each other?”

“I don’t know, but I think we better do something here before this gets out of hand.”

“Like what?”

He smiled thinly. “Oh, I was thinking about asking you to take a little Sunday drive with me. Up to a place called Vradaz.”