Hive

32

A few hours after Hayes went out on his mission, Cutchen appeared at the door to the infirmary. “Knock, knock,” he said.

“It’s open,” Sharkey said. She was staring into the screen of her laptop, glasses balanced on the end of her nose. “If you want drugs, the answer is no.”

But Cutchen didn’t want that.

He had an almost rakish smile on his face. And his eyes had that typical I-know-something-you-don’t-know gleam in them. “How’s things? Anything going on I should know about?”

Sharkey still hadn’t looked up from her laptop. “Go ahead, Cutchy. I know you want to. You look like a little boy trying to sneak a snake into the schoolhouse. Spill it.”

“It concerns our Mr. Hayes.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, about an hour ago I was coming back from the dome and I saw the craziest damn thing. I saw the camp bulldozer suddenly roar into life, come plowing through the compound and smash through the wall of Hut Six. Now isn’t that astounding?”

Sharkey was still reading off her screen. “Yup. Crazy things happen. Hard to see out there.”

“You know what I saw then? Oh, this is even better. I saw Hayes hop out of the ’dozer and elbow his way through a group of people at Targa House, ignoring their questions as to what the hell he thought he was doing. Those people kept asking and he kept ignoring them and they were all smiling, some were even clapping.”

“Really?” Sharkey was looking up now, smiling herself. “Sounds like Hayes did a pretty careless thing… but it certainly perked up morale, didn’t it?”

“I would say so. Jesus, everyone’s been wandering around here like a bunch of goddamn zombies. All of them afraid of their own shadows… and now this. Yeah, they needed it. It was a real big boost, kicked them out of their shells. Maybe even gave them the sort of hope they’ve been lacking.” Cutchen laughed. “It certainly gave me a charge. Hayes is like our very own rebel leader now, our own Pancho Villa, our Robin Hood. But you already knew about this, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And did you put him up to it?”

Sharkey shrugged. “I suggested it. Our Mr. Hayes is a very impulsive fellow, you know.”

“Oh, I know. Everyone seems to look to him now, like he’s in charge and not LaHune. I would tend to agree. Hayes is now our spiritual leader.” Cutchen sat down across from her. “LaHune didn’t care for any of it, of course.”

Cutchen explained that LaHune came storming into the community room, demanding to know what Hayes thought he was doing and Hayes told him that he was preserving Gates’ specimens before they rotted away completely. That he’d taken down that wall purely out of scientific concern for the mummies.

“LaHune, of course, started threatening Hayes with all sorts of repercussions.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Hayes then told him to go promptly fuck himself.” Cutchen laughed about this. “As you might expect there was more applause.”

“I imagine so.”

Cutchen sat there for a time watching Sharkey who seemed to be pretty enrapt with what was on her laptop. “Tell you the truth, Elaine, I didn’t just come here to tell you about that, though.”

“No?”

“Nope. For some time now, both you and Hayes have been pulling me into this scenario of yours and I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not seeing the big picture in this conspiracy. I know what I’ve been dreaming about and what I’ve been feeling and the things I’ve seen here… and at Vradaz. But you two have yet to feed me more than scraps. So let’s have it. Tell me everything.”

“Funny you should be asking these things, because I think I’m in a position, finally, where I can tell you. What I’ve been studying here on my laptop are Dr. Gates’ files. I hacked into his system because I had a pretty good feeling that everything he hadn’t told us that day in the community room was locked up on his computer and I was right.” Using her mouse, she scrolled through a few pages. “You see, not only was all of it there, but more. Gates has been sending written reports from his laptop up at the excavation to his desktop here. The last one was dated two days ago…”

“You’re a sneaky devil, Madam.”

“Yes, I am.”

“And? What did you find?”

“Where do I begin?” She sat back in her chair. “What we saw at that Russian camp, Cutchy… how would you classify that business?”

He shrugged. “Ghosts, I guess. Memories locked up in those dead husks like Hayes said. Sensitive minds come into contact with them… or maybe any minds at all… and out pop these memories: noises and apparitions and that sort of business. I never believed in any of that bull before, but I don’t have much of a choice now.”

“You’d call them ghosts?”

“Yes.” He leaned forward. “Unless you have a better term… maybe one that would help me sleep better at night.”

Sharkey shook her head. “I don’t. ‘Ghosts’ will have to do. Because, essentially, that’s what they are. Gates wrote in some detail about psychic manifestations occurring in proximity to the Old Ones. People have been seeing spooks down here a long time, having bad dreams and weird experiences… and I guess you can figure out why. Reflections, are what Gates calls these phenomena, projections from those dead husks, from minds that never truly died in the way we understand death… just waited. Maybe not conscious really or sentient, but dreaming. And what we’re picking up are the ethereal projections of those dead minds… intellects, a mass-consciousness that was so very powerful in life that even death couldn’t crush it. Not completely. Gates isn’t certain about a lot of that… just that those minds are active in a way, not really alive but functioning pretty much on auto like a radio station, broadcasting and broadcasting. Our minds come into contact with them and we pick up those signals, then the trouble starts.”

Cutchen nodded. “I’ll buy that. Makes sense. And maybe as they unthaw, those minds become stronger. Maybe that’s what got to Meiner and St. Ours.”

“They may have been more sensitive to it than others. Same way I think Hayes is. Gates had another theory on that. He thought that maybe those dead minds were being energized not only by us, but amplified by that huge and overpowering central consciousness down in the lake. That the living ones might be acting as sort of a generator.”

“He’s guessing, though.”

“Of course he’s guessing. There’s no way to know.” Sharkey scrolled through a few pages on the screen. “Did Hayes tell you about his experiences? Out in the hut and on the tractor?”

“Yeah. Those minds almost did to him what they did to Meiner and St. Ours,” Cutchen said.

“Did he tell you about his telepathic link with Lind after the events in the hut?” She could see that he hadn’t, so she filled him in on it. “Lind was seeing things millions of years old. A city here at the Pole before the glaciers swallowed the continent. And just before he died, well…”

“Possessed.” Cutchen said the word so she didn’t have to. “That’s what everyone’s saying. That Lind was possessed by those things.”

“Yes, at least what we could call diabolical possession. He manifested all the signs you hear about in those cases… telepathy and telekinesis, that sort of thing. He described to us the original colonization of this world and we were able to smell and feel what he was smelling and feeling. The thick poisonous atmosphere of another world, the heat there, then the freezing cold of deep space.”

“Did Gates confirm that they are alien? I mean we’ve all been tossing the word around, but — “

“Yes, he was certain. You see, he unlocked the code of their writings, their glyphs and bas-reliefs. That ancient city he found, it was scrawled with writings which were essentially a written history of who the Old Ones were, where they came from, what they planned to do… and had done.”

“He unlocked all that? In just a month or so?”

Sharkey nodded. “Yes, because he found something akin to the Rosetta Stone, except this one was a key to their language and symbols. He called it the Dyer Stone after Professor Dyer of the Pabodie Expedition. A soapstone about the size of a tabletop… with it, he was able to translate those writings.”

“And… and what did he find out?”

“There are carvings in those ruins, Cutchy. Ancient maps of our solar system and other systems as well. Dozens and dozens of them. Firm evidence, Gates said, of interplanetary and interstellar travel and this probably before our planet was even cool. Dyer mentioned certain ancient books and legends that hinted at Pluto as the Old Ones’ first outpost in this star system, but according to the maps Gates found, they came here from either Uranus or Neptune… but before that, who can say?”

“Uranus? Neptune?” Cutchen shook his head. “Those are dead worlds, Elaine.”

“Sure, now they are… but what about 500 million years ago? A billion? Maybe that’s why they came here, because they knew their world… Uranus or Neptune… was doomed. And maybe they just came seeking our warm oceans. Gates thinks that they are originally marine organisms, but given their durability, they can adapt themselves to just about any environment. Gates thinks that myths and legends concerning winged demons and flying monsters might be race memories of them, impressions from the dawn of our race that survived in the form of folktale and legend. Regardless, they’ve been here since the beginning. Our beginning and the beginning of all life on this world.”

“I was hoping you weren’t going to go there,” Cutchen said.

“I have to. Because that’s what this is all about: life. The creation of it, the continuation of it, the modification of it. When Lind was… well, possessed, he started ranting on about the helix. There was no doubt he was talking about DNA… the plan of all life on this planet. He was uplinked with those dead minds and telling us about the helix, that they were the farmers of the helix. That they created the helix and seeded it, world to world to world.”

“That’s kind of what Hayes was saying,” Cutchen said, looking beaten and cramped from the weight of it all. “That they started life here, they started it and they would harvest it.”

“Yes. It almost sounded like to the Old Ones, the helix was God. Which, I suppose, fits in with what certain evolutionary biologists have been saying. That life, all life, is merely a host, a vessel to ensure the propagation and continuation of the genetic material.”

“That’s pleasant.”

Sharkey nodded. “Remember what Gates told us that day? Lake, the biologist in the Pabodie Expedition, had found fossilized prints in Precambrian rock that had to be at least a billion years old. The prints of the Old Ones. Probably from one of the earliest of their earth colonies. Some time later, Gates wrote, there would have been a mass migration that went on for millions of years. Their original outposts were doomed and unsuitable, so they came here. They came to earth en masse to colonize and found our planet to be dead, so they engineered a highly ambitious blueprint to bring forth not only life on this world, but intelligent life.”

“But that’s insane,” Cutchen said. “I’m sorry, but it is. That the human race is the end result of something they started into motion a billion years ago. That’s crazy.”

“Is it? Think about it. These things have been seeding life on dozens and dozens of planets probably since before our sun was born. And they’ve been doing it with a very specific agenda: to bring forth intelligence. Intelligent minds that they could master, that they could modify and subvert. And since none existed here, they created them. God knows how many colonies they’ve created. Maybe hundreds if not thousands spread across space, outposts on countless alien worlds. Out in our own solar system there are probably ruins of ancient cities much like the ones Gates found. And probably on the planets orbiting a hundred stars, if not a thousand.” She stopped, maybe to catch her own mental breath or to let Cutchen catch his. “It’s fantastic, heady stuff, I know. That city Gates found… it was probably on a plain or in a valley originally that became a mountain millions upon millions of years later. Gates said that, according to ancient legend, there were other cities… in Asia, the Australian desert, a certain sunken continent in the Pacific. Maybe our tales of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu are, again, just ancestral memories of these places…”

Cutchen was looking for a hole in her logic… or Gates’… and Sharkey knew it. He was looking at it from all sides and trying to find the hole in it. Either he couldn’t find one or it was so big he’d already been sucked down into it without knowing. “Okay,” he said. “How is it these things got here? Not in ships as we understand them, I’m guessing.”

“No, they did not possess a material, mechanistic technology, according to Gates. Not in the way we do. He said they would have possessed an organic technology if you can wrap your brain around that one. A living technology maybe supported by a certain level of instrumentation… but not gadgets like we have. Not exactly. They would have been light years beyond us to the point that their minds might have been strong enough to manipulate matter and energy and maybe even time as they saw fit.

“But as to your question, they drifted here. They went into a dormant state, according to Gates, and drifted on what he called the solar winds. I suppose it’s the same way they drifted into this solar system. Gates mentioned them possibly manipulating fourth-dimensional space. You might remember that bit if you ever had any quantum physics… you jump into the fourth dimension at Point A and jump out at Point B. A to B could be ten feet away or ten million miles, it wouldn’t matter. You could transverse incalculable distances easily as a man stepping off his porch. Maybe that’s how they crossed interstellar voids. But if Lind’s memory of them was correct — and I tend to think it was — then, yes, they went into a sort of dormancy and drifted here.”

“Shit, Elaine, that would have taken eons,” Cutchen pointed out.

“So what? It wouldn’t have mattered to things like them. A thousand years or a hundred-thousand would be all the same to something that was essentially immortal and endless. Lind was in contact with that memory, Cutchy, a memory a billion years old and probably even two or three. And he experienced it… the dormancy, the drifting. Even the cold and lack of atmosphere were no deterrent to them. Nothing would be.”

“I’m still having trouble with this,” Cutchen admitted. “I mean, listen to what you’re saying here. Something like this… to put forth a plan, a grand design for this planet that wouldn’t see fruition for hundreds and hundreds of millions of years. It’s just too incredible. That amount of time…”

“You’re looking at this as any being with a finite lifespan would. But time means nothing to them, nothing at all,” Sharkey said, realizing she was using the same arguments on him that Hayes had used on her.

Cutchen sighed. The bigness, the longevity of such an operation, the huge scale it must have been carried out on… all of this was flooring him. Not to mention that everything she said completely dwarfed man’s history, his importance, his very culture. It made the human race no more significant in the greater scheme of things than protozoans on a laboratory slide. It was very… sobering. “All right. So these Old Ones drifted here, started life with some master plan behind it all… then what? Just hoped for the best?”

“Hardly. Our evolutionary development would have been carefully monitored through the ages,” Sharkey told him, glancing back to her screen from time to time. “Remember, they colonized this world and they had no intention of leaving and still haven’t. They would not have left anything to mere chance. Gates wrote that there are great gaps in our own fossil record, times when our evolution jumped eons ahead for no apparent reason. 500,000 years ago, for example, the brains of our ancestors suddenly doubled in size if not tripled. It happened more than once, Gates said. These were the times, Cutchy, when those ancestors of ours were carefully manipulated by the Old Ones. Through selective breeding, genetic engineering, molecular biology, methods we can’t even guess at.”

“And… and they’ve been waiting for us… their children… all this time?”

Sharkey nodded. “Yes, waiting and watching through unimaginable gulfs of time while the continents shifted and the glaciers arrived, while the Paleozoic Era became the Mesozoic and finally the Cenzoic. While our ancestors evolved along lines already laid out for them. And at times, I would think, entire populations would have been taken to their cities and altered, then placed back again with selective mutations installed. They’ve waited and watched and now, if Gates is right, we’re ready for harvesting. Our intellects are sufficiently advanced to be of use to them. Down there in that warm lake, Cutchy, is the last relict population of a race as old as the stars.”

“And now we’ve come,” he said. “Just as they knew we would.”

“Exactly. Men have always been drawn down here to the Pole, haven’t they? And if what Gates is saying is correct, then it’s been more than a sense of exploration. As a race we would be drawn to those places where our memory was strongest.”

Cutchen was sweating now and couldn’t help himself. The idea of it all was terrifying. Like the human race had never, ever been in command of its own destiny. It was shocking. “It’s like we’re… what? A seed planted in a fucking garden? Cultivated, cross-bred, enhanced… until they got the proper strain, the proper hybrid they desired.” He just shook his head. “But what do they want, Elaine? What do they have in mind? To conquer us? What?”

She shrugged. “I’m not sure and neither is Gates. But one thing’s for sure, it’s our minds that they want, our intellects they need. They are of a single mind, a single consciousness, a hive mentality. That is exactly what they intend for us to be. For us to be them but in human form.” She scrolled through a few pages on her laptop. “According to Gates, they’ve bred certain characteristics into us. There are probably latent gifts we all carry in our minds, our carefully engineered minds, that they will now exploit. They’ll reawaken faculties that we’ve long forgotten about, but have been buried in us all along…”

“Like what?”

“Abilities they planted in us long ago. Abilities that would make us like them. Mechanisms seeded in our brains, special adaptations that have been passed on through our genes… wild talents that occasionally make themselves known like telepathy, telekinesis, prophecy… talents that, when the time was right, would make us like them — a single, ominous hive mind. That coupled with an overriding instinct, a blind compulsion to serve them. An all important seed they would have planted in our primitive brains and is still there today.”

Cutchen said, “So everything we are, our entire history and even our destiny… these Old Ones were the architects of it? We’re… synthetic?”

“Yes and no. Our culture, our civilization is our own, I think. Though much of it might be based upon archetypes imprinted upon our brains eons ago. Even our conception of a god, a superior being, a creator… it’s no doubt based upon some aboriginal image of them placed into our subconscious minds. They would have seen themselves as our gods, our masters… then and now… and we, in essence, were designed to be their tools, an extension of their organic technology, to be used for what plans we could never even guess at. But it might be in us, that knowledge, lying dormant in our brains until they decide to wake it up. And when that happens… when that happens, there will be no more human race, Cutchy.”

Cutchen’s face was beaded with sweat, his eyes were wide and tormented. “We have to stop this, Elaine. We have to stop this madness.”

“If we can. If we can,” she said, her voice filled with a bitter hopelessness, a dire inevitability. “Lord knows what they planted in us, what buried imperatives and controls that they might be, right now, getting ready to unlock on a global scale to bring us to our ultimate destiny.”

“Which is?”

But Sharkey could just shake her head. “I don’t know and I don’t think I want to find out.”

“We’re fucked, Elaine. If Gates is right, we’re fucked.” Cutchen kept trying to moisten his weathered lips, but he was all out of spit. “I really hope Gates is a lunatic. I’m really hoping for that.”

“I don’t think he is,” Sharkey told him. “And the scary part is, nobody’s heard from him in over forty-eight hours now.”

33

The way Hayes was seeing it, he’d paid for this dance and LaHune was going to have a cheek-to-cheek waltz with him whether he liked the idea of it or not. And LaHune most certainly did not like the idea. But he knew Hayes. Knew trying to get rid of the guy was like trying to shake a stain out of your shorts.

Hayes was tenacious.

Hayes was relentless.

Hayes would hang like a tattoo on your backside until he got exactly what he wanted. No more. No less. But LaHune, of course, had had his merry fill of Jimmy Hayes and his paranoid bullshit. Had it right up to his left eyeball and this is what he told Hayes, not bothering to spare his feelings one iota. In his opinion, Hayes was the rotten apple in the storied barrel. The bee in the bonnet. And the cat piss in the punch.

“I’ve had my fill of you, Hayes,” LaHune told him. “I’m so sick of you I could spit. Just the sight of you roils my stomach.”

Hayes was sitting in the administrator’s office, his feet up on his desk even though he’d been warned a half dozen times to get his dirty, stinking boots off of there. “Are you trying to tell me something, Mr. LaHune? Because I’m getting this funny feeling in my gut that you just don’t like me. But maybe it’s just gas.”

LaHune sat there, really trying to be patient. Really trying to hang onto his dignity which had been chewed up, swallowed, and shit on by this man from day one. Yes, he was trying to hang onto his dignity and not come right over the desk at Hayes, that smarmy, bearded dirtball.

“No, you’re reading me fine, Hayes. Just fine. And get your goddamn feet off my desk.”

Hayes crossed one boot atop the other. “You saying it’s over between us, then? No more quickies behind the oil tanks in the generator shack?”

“You’re not funny, Hayes.”

“Sure I am. Ask anybody.”

LaHune sat there, sighing heavily. Yes, Hayes had pissed all over his dignity, his authority, and his self-respect. But that would come screaming to an end one way or another. LaHune wasn’t used to dealing with working class hardcases like Hayes. Guys like him buttered their bread on the wrong side and spawned in a different pond. Maybe he was good at his job, but he was also smartassed, disrespectful, and insubordinate.

“I’ll tell you what you are, Hayes,” LaHune finally said. “You’re reckless and childish and paranoid. A man like you has no business down here. You’re not up to it. And when spring comes… and it will come and no aliens, flying saucers, or abominable snowmen will stop it… when it comes, I’ll see to it that you never get another contract down here. And if you think I’m joking, you just fucking try me.”

“Hey, hey, easy with the profanity! Remember my virgin ears, you fucking prick.”

“That’s enough!”

Hayes pulled his feet off the desk. “No, it’s not, LaHune. And it won’t be until you pull your over-inflated head out of your ass and start seeing things as they are. We’re in trouble here and you better start accepting that. You’re in charge of this installation and the lives of these people are in your hands. And until you accept that responsibility, I’ll be riding you like a French whore. Count on it.”

LaHune said nothing. “I don’t what to hear about your paranoid fantasies, Hayes.”

“That’s all it is? Paranoia?”

“What else could it be?”

Hayes laughed thinly. “Where do they put your batteries, LaHune? I think they’re running low.” He sat back in his chair, totally frustrated, folding his arms over his chest. “Those goddamn mummies are making people go insane. You’ve got three men from the drilling tower, that Deep Drill Project, that are missing. You’ve got three dead men… what more do you need?”

“I’ll need something factual, Hayes. St. Ours, Meiner, and, yes, Lind have died from cerebral hemorrhages. If you don’t believe me, ask Dr. Sharkey. Dammit, man.”

Hayes uttered that laugh again. “Cerebral hemorrhages? No shit? Three of ’em in a row? I didn’t know they were catchy. C’mon, LaHune, don’t you think that three exploded brains pretty much tweaks the tit of chance a little too hard?”

“I’m not a medico here. It’s not my job to engage in forensics.”

Hayes just shook his head. “All right, let me try again. Remember that day we called Nikolai Kolich over at Vostok? Sure you do. Well, old Nikolai, boy, he told us some kind of fucking yarn. You remember that derelict camp Gates and his boys found? Yeah? Well, that there was a Russian camp from the old Soviet red scare days of yore. Joint called the Vradaz Outpost. Yup. Now this part here, boyo, it’s going to sound just whackier than Mother Teresa working the pole in a thong and pasties. But Kolich told us they all went mad at Vradaz. Yup. Crazier’n bugs in bat shit. You know what drove ’em crazy? Spooks. Sure. Now I know this is all going to sound real fantastic to you, real far-out and nutty, because you’ve never heard of nothing like this, but I’m willing to bet you can wrap your spooky little brain right around it, you try hard enough.

“See, how it started at Vradaz was that those scientists up there, they drilled into a chasm, found some things in there. We’ll call ’em mummies, okay? Well, not long after, all those commy scientists started having real weird dreams and before you could say Jesus in drag, they started hearing things. Knockings and poundings. Funny sounds. Then they started seeing apparitions, ghosts that walked through walls and the like. Well, the Soviets said that’s enough of this horseshit, so they sent in a team to take care of those boys, root out the infection so to speak. So, those silly communists, they killed everyone there. Isn’t that a funny story?”

LaHune was unmoved. “That’s some pretty high speculation, isn’t it?”

“Oh, not at all. See, the other day when Sharkey and I went with Cutchen to check his remote weather stations, we went out to Vradaz instead. Took a look around there.”

LaHune just shook his head. “You are so very out of control, Hayes. That installation, abandoned or not, is property of the Russian Federation.”

“No, they disowned it years back, LaHune. Some twenty-odd years back to be exact.” Hayes had him and he knew it. He had LaHune hooked and he was now going to play him for all it was worth. “Okay, so we dug our way in there and, lo and behold, we found bullet holes and blood, crosses cut into the walls to keep the haunts away. Then, down below, we found a pit with bodies in there. All them scientists but the three insane ones the Ruskies took away with ’em. All those bodies, LaHune, they’d been gunned down and then burned. Yeah, you heard me right. We also found one of those alien carcasses down there that had been toasted like a marshmallow at Camp Cockalotta. And Ivan did these things because he realized the very thing that you’re afraid of: that those aliens are dangerous. They get in men’s mind and destroy them, same way they’re doing here. The Russians killed those men and burned them along with My Favorite Martian because those dead, alien minds are a contagion that spreads and devours healthy human minds just as they always have. It was quite a scene there, LaHune. There were even a few Russian soldiers in that pit and you know why? Because those alien minds got them, too.”

LaHune said nothing.

There was nothing he could say.

But Hayes could see that he believed him. Completely believed him. But he wasn’t really shocked or surprised by any of it and Hayes figured that was because their grand NSF administrator knew all about what happened at Vradaz.

“Now, while back, LaHune, you asked me why in the hell I knocked in that wall on Hut Six. Well, I did it to freeze those fucking Martians back up before this entire goddamn station is destroyed. Before we all have our minds sucked out or blown up. See, I don’t think those dead minds are completely unthawed yet, but when that happens… well, you get the picture, don’t you?”

“You’re completely mad, Hayes.”

“Oh, but let me share one more thing with you. We gave old Nikolai a jingle at Vostok and you know what? He denies ever telling us any of that business. His puppet masters have yanked his strings and now he’s dancing to their tune same way you’re dancing to yours.” Hayes stood up. “But that’s okay, LaHune, I’m just shit-tired of arguing with you. What happened to the Russians will happen to us. Those minds will eat us alive. But you just sit there on your shiny white ass and do nothing. That’s fine. Your mind already belongs to some ass-fucking suits back in Washington. But as for me? I’m going to fight this tooth and nail and if you want to get in my way, I’ll fucking step on you. And that, sonny, is a promise.”

With that, Hayes offered him a courtly bow and left LaHune’s office.

34

The next two days passed with a measured, languid slowness… drawn out, elastic, and mordantly unreal. A claustrophobic, evil shadow had fallen over the station, breeding a tension and a fear that was barely concealed like a moldering skull seen through a funeral veil. It was an almost palpable thing, a suffocating sense of malevolence and you could feel it wherever you went… bunching in the shadows, scratching at the frosted windows, oozing from the ice like contaminated bile. You could tell yourself it was imagination and nerves and isolation, but you never believed it, because it was everywhere, hanging over the camp in a frightful pall, patient and waiting and acutely sentient. It was behind you and to either side, giggling and chattering its teeth and reaching out for your throat with cold, white fingers. And like your soul, you could not put a finger on it, but it was there, alive and breathing and namelessly destructive. It was in your blood and bones like a disease germ and just beneath your thoughts like a dire memory. And whatever it was, it was something born to darkness like worms in a grave.

The personnel at Kharkhov did not speak of it.

Like a cluster of little old ladies at a church luncheon who refused to discuss disquieting things like cancer or the boy next door who came back from the war in a body bag, it was a taboo subject, one their minds burdened under, but one that never got past their lips.

Such things did not make for polite company.

They stirred up bad odors and opened dank cellars that were best left bolted and chained. So the scientists carried on with their research and experiments. The contract personnel kept things humming. People gathered in the community room for lunch and dinner and talked sports and current events and went out of their way not to look one another in the eye because it was better that way. And the subject of Gates and the ruined city, the mummies and those down in Lake Vordog, were never brought up.

A psychologist would have called it avoidance and he or she would have been right. When you did not openly discuss things, they seemed all the less real… even if said things did make your skin crawl. But you ingested them, tucked them away into the scarred and secret landscape of your subconscious where you ultimately knew they would boil and fester and one day fill you with a seething poison. Like being touched in a private place by a child molester, you purged it and pretended such things could not have happened.

But later? Well, yes, later it would show its teeth, but that was later.

And this is how it was at Kharkhov Station.

This was how the population kept their sanity… by sheer deception and willpower born of self-preservation and desperation. But it was there, of course, that gnawing and pervasive sense of violation. The feeling that maybe your mind and your thoughts were not entirely your own and maybe never had been. But such ideas were venomous and infective, so the small colony refused them and went about being industrious and ignorant even while that ancient web was spun around them thickly. What they were feeling and how they were dealing with those feelings was exactly how they were supposed to deal with them. Exactly how the architects of their minds had intended it so very long ago.

Hayes, of course, was not among them.

He freely admitted the danger to any and all who would listen. But therein lie the twist: they refused to listen. They nodded when he spoke to them, but not a word of what he said got past their ears. He had put a stop to it by bulldozing down the wall of Hut #6. If there ever was a danger — and they were not certain of this — then it was over now. Back to reality. But Hayes didn’t believe them because he was feeling what they were feeling and was seeing that barely-disguised terror in their eyes.

“You see that’s what kills me,” he said to Sharkey on the evening of that second day while they lay in the warm darkness of her bed. “That’s what really fucking tears me a new asshole, Doc. These people know they’re screwed, but they won’t admit to it now. Not a one of them.”

“It’s herd instinct, Jimmy. That’s all it is. They cope by losing themselves in the mundane politics of day to day living. They submerge themselves into the body of the herd and pretend that there is no tiger hiding in the shadows,” Sharkey told him. “This is how they stay alive, how they stay sane. It’s human nature. If something is so immense and terrible that it threatens to peel your mind bare, you exorcise it and pretend everything is hunky-dory.”

“I suppose,” he said.

“No, really. How do you think people survived those concentration camps? Do you think they dwelled on their imminent deaths or what that smoke coming out of the chimneys was from? The fact that they could be going to the showers next? Of course not. If they had, not a single sane mind would have come out of that horror. But a surprising amount did.”

“There’s a parallel there, Doc, and a good one, but I’m just too pissed-off at them to see it. I hate complacency. I hate people sitting around and pretending the world isn’t falling apart around them. That’s what’s wrong with us Americans as a whole… we’ve gotten too goddamn selfish and too goddamn good at putting our blinders on. Millions are being slaughtered in Rwanda? We just accidentally bombed a schoolhouse in Iraq… oh, that’s just terrible, isn’t it? Well, not my affair. Praise the Lord and pass the gravy, mom.”

Sharkey said, “I never realized you were a political activist at heart.”

He relaxed a bit, chuckled. “I do get on my soapbox now and again.” He lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the darkness. “My old man was a dire-hard conservative republican. Anything the government told him, he believed. He thought they were incapable of lying. The sort of guy politicians thrive on. Salt of the earth, but mindless. I had a teacher in high school… a real 1960s radical who was big on confrontation with those in power… I think a lot of him rubbed off on me. Because he didn’t just sit there and take it. He demanded that our government be held responsible for anything it fucked up or lied about. I agreed then and I agree now. My old man and me had some real rows over our conflicting viewpoints. But to this day, I feel exactly the same. I do not trust people with money and power and I despise the little guy who looks the other way while these fat cats fuck up the world as they always have.”

“And you’re seeing a microcosm of that here, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, definitely. I have to ask myself if those people deserve saving… are they worth it?”

“And?”

“And I’m not honestly sure. Complacency deserves what its gets.”

Sharkey didn’t say anything for a time.

Neither of them did.

Hayes wasn’t sure what she was thinking. Maybe it was something good and maybe it was something bad. Regardless, she just didn’t say. The silence between them was heavy, but not uncomfortable. It seemed perfectly fine, perfectly acceptable, and that’s how Hayes knew this wasn’t what you might call a winter-camp fling. It was something more. Something with weight and volume and substance and he was almost glad that things were too crazy, too spooky for him to sit and think about the absolute truth of their relationship. Because, he figured, it might just have scared the shit out of him and sent him running into a hole like a rabbit with a hawk descending.

“Tell me something, Doc,” he said, pulling off his cigarette. “Be honest here. Do you think I’m losing it? No, don’t answer that too quickly. Ponder it. Do that for me. Because sometimes… I can’t read you. You no doubt know that some of the boys around here see you as some sort of ice-princess, a freezer for a heart and ice cubes for eyes. I think it’s some kind of wall you put up. A sort of protective barrier. I figure a woman like you that spends a lot of time marooned in camps full of men has to distance herself some way. So, really, I’m not judging you or insulting you in any way. But, like I say, I can’t read you sometimes. I wonder if maybe you’re thinking I’m a whacko or something, but are too polite to say so.”

He felt her hand slide into his, felt her long fingers find his own and grip them like they never wanted to let go. But she didn’t say anything. He could hear her breathing, hear the clock ticking on the shelf, the wind moaning through the compound. But nothing else.

So he said, “Sometimes I say things, I start spouting off about things, theories of mine, and you just don’t say anything. And I start to wonder why not. Start to wonder if maybe this all isn’t in my head and I’m having one of those… what do you call them?”

“Hysterical pregnancies?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“No, I don’t think you’re crazy. Not in the least. Sometimes I just don’t say anything because I need time to think things over and other times, well, I’m just amazed by a man like you. You’re so… intuitive, so impulsive, so instinctual. You’re not like other men I’ve known. I think that’s why even when we had no real proof about those aliens, I believed what you said. I didn’t doubt any of it for a moment.”

Hayes was flattered and embarrassed… he’d never realized he was those things. But, shit, she was right. He was a seat-of-the-pants kind of guy. Trusting his heart over his brain every time. Go figure.

“Tell me something, Jimmy,” she said then. “Nothing’s happened really since you plowed in that wall. Nobody’s been coming to me for sedatives, so I’m guessing our contagion of nightmares has dwindled in direct proportion to you freezing those things back up. But what about you? Have you had any dreams?”

“No. Not a one. I shut my eyes and I sleep like I’m drugged. There’s nothing. I don’t think I can remember having such deep sleep… least since I quit smoking dope.”

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Not having dreams? It’s a good indicator?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. My brain tells me we’re in the clear, maybe. But my guts are telling me that this is the calm before the storm. Whenever I try to talk to anybody here, I don’t know, I get a bad feeling from them. Something that goes beyond their avoidance of all this… something worse. I’m getting weird vibes from them that weren’t there before, Elaine. And it makes me feel… kind of freaky inside.”

He was having trouble putting it into words, but the feeling was always there. Like maybe the lot of them had already been assimilated into the communal mind of those things. That they were already lost to him. Whatever it was, it made his guts roll over, made him feel like he could vomit out his liver.

“Good. I’ve been feeling that way all day… like there’s nothing behind their eyes,” she admitted. “And all over camp… well, something’s making my skin crawl and I’m not sure what it is.”

Hayes stubbed out his cigarette. “I’m willing to bet we’re going to find out real soon. Because this isn’t over. I know it isn’t over. And I’m just waiting for the ball to drop.”

35

When the ball did in fact drop the next afternoon, Hayes was lucky enough… or unlucky enough… to have it pretty much drop at his feet. He and Sharkey and Cutchen had decided on a plan of attack which was to do absolutely nothing. Just to go about their jobs and to not even mention what had happened before and what might be happening now.

But to keep their eyes open and their minds, too.

For Hayes, there was always work to be done. The energy supply at the Kharkhov Station was supplied by no less than five diesel generators, two wind-turbine generators, grid reactive boilers, and fuel-fired boilers. All of which were run through a central power station control system. Most days he pretty much sat at his computer in a booth at the power station and studied read-outs, crunched numbers, and made sure everything was operating at peak efficiency. But then there were the other days that demanded physical maintenance. And today was one of those.

He was glad for it.

Glad to climb into his heated coveralls and get some tools in his hands. Get dirty and sweaty and cold, anything to be doing something other than letting his imagination have full reign.

He shut the diesel generators down in sequence, changing their oil and putting in new fuel and air filters. He tested fuel injection nozzles and drained cooling systems. Inspected air cleaners and flame arrestors, checked the governors. When he had the generators back on-line, he went after the boilers. He checked fuel systems and feed pumps, he reconditioned safety valves and inspected mercury switches, recorded gas and oil pressures, checked the cams and limit controls. Then he shut down the wind turbines and made physical inspections of their alternators and regulators. He spent most of the day at it.

It was demanding, time-consuming work.

And when he was done, he was sore and aching and pleased as always after putting in a hard day’s work. There was something about a day of manual labor that steadied something in the human beast. Got it on an even plane. Maybe when the muscles woke up, the intellect shut down and that always wasn’t a bad thing.

Especially at the South Pole.

And especially that winter.

Finally, though, Hayes called it a day and climbed into his ECW’s, which consisted of a polar fleece jacket and wool pants, wool hat and mittens, balaclava and goggles. As soon as he stepped out into the winter darkness, the winds found him. Did their damnedest to either carry him into that black, brooding sky or knock him flat. He took hold of the guylines and never let go.

Cutchen’s prediction of a Condition One storm became a reality. The wind was rumbling and howling and moaning, making the structures of Kharkhov Station shake and creak. The snow came whipping through the compound, obscuring everything, knocking visibility down to less than ten feet at times. Three-foot drifts were blown over the walkways. Snow-devils funneled along the hard-pack.

Hayes struggled along, the wind pulling at him, finely ground ice particles blasting into him. He could see the security lights outside the buildings and huts and the blizzard made them look like searchlights coming through thick fog. They glowed orange and yellow and murky, trembling on their poles.

As he followed the guylines to Targa House, he suddenly became aware that faces were pressed up against the windows. He wasn’t sure at first, but the nearer he got, yeah, those were faces pressed up to the frosty windows.

Was his plight that entertaining?

The wind shifted and he heard what he first took to be the muted growl of some beast echoing across the ice-fields, then he realized it was an engine. He stopped and looked into the wind, snow spraying into his face. He could see the lights of the compound… the far-flung huts and even the meteorology dome… but nothing else. The blizzard hammered into him and nearly knocked him over like a post… and then it died out some, still howling and screeching, but sounding like it was old and tired now and in need of a rest.

And that’s when Hayes saw those other lights, four of them in fact. Two below and two above coming out of the storm, coming down the ice-road past the meteorology dome. He was hearing the engine now, too… noisy, rattling diesel being down-shifted. The roar of the engine, the grinding of gears.

Jesus, it was the Spryte from Gates’ camp. It had to be.

The Spryte was a small, tracked utility vehicle for ferrying men and supplies back and forth. It looked roughly like a bright red box sitting on caterpillar treads.

What in the hell?

The storm was taking a momentary breather, but the wind was still strong, but not strong enough to stay Hayes’ curiosity. They hadn’t heard from Gates in days and now here came the Spryte. Hayes stepped over the guylines and walked out into the compound. The sound of that approaching engine was getting louder, the lights brighter.

People were coming out of Targa House now, wearing goggles and parkas, straining into the wind. They were carrying lanterns and flashlights. Looked like a mob of angry villagers from an old Frankenstein movie.

Rutkowski came up behind Hayes. “What the fuck’s going on, Jimmy?”

“Hell if I know.”

He stood there in the wind, watching the Spryte coming on. The others were circled behind him in a loose knot. It took a lot to get people out on a night like that, but something like this, well, it drew them like metal filings to a magnet.

“Sodermark tried to raise ’em on the radio, but they’re not responding,” Sharkey said as she joined the group out there.

Hayes stared off into the night through his goggles. His beard was already stiff and frozen. His breath and that of the others billowing out in great, frosty clouds that turned on the wind. Cold-pinched faces waited and wondered. A light snow was coming down now, just as fine and white as beach sand.

“Look!” somebody cried out. “You see that?”

Hayes didn’t at first, but now he did.

And seeing it, he had to stop and blink, brush snow from his goggles because he couldn’t really be seeing what he thought he was seeing. His heart caught in his chest, held painfully there for a moment like an animal caught in tar. This can’t be good, a voice in his head was telling him. As far as developments go, this is next door to shitty.

Somebody behind him gasped and somebody else swore under their breath.

What they were looking at was a lone form out there, running and stumbling before the Spryte, managing to keep just ahead of it, but barely. At first Hayes thought the Spryte was chasing the figure to catch up with it, but now it didn’t look like that at all.

It looked like they were trying to run him over.

“Holy shit,” somebody said.

“Rutkowski? Go get me one of those rifles,” Hayes snapped. “And make sure it’s fucking loaded.”

Then he was running, the wind propelling him forward and then doing its damnedest to pitch him sideways. He pounded through drifts, slipping on his ass only once. The others were coming, too, but staying behind him like they wanted him to see it first.

“Hey!” Hayes called out as he got in closer. “Hey! Duck behind that hut! Duck behind that fucking hut… it’s almost on you!”

The figure drunkenly zigged and zagged, went face down in the snow and crab-crawled frantically forward like a kid in gym class doing barrel crawls. But no kid ever had to plow through three- and four-foot drifts, keep his footing on pack-ice while the wind screamed into him at fifty and sixty miles an hour. And no kid ever had to do this in a bulky parka with the wind chill dipping down to seventy below zero.

Hayes was shouting at the lone man and at the driver of the Spryte, but it was doing him no good. With a sickening realization, he knew that the Spryte was going to overtake the man and was going to crush him beneath its treads. The figure got to his feet, moved off to the left and the Spryte compensated, its treads creaking as it came around. The Spryte was bearing down on him and Hayes was just too damn far away to do anything. People were shouting out behind him and he made one last valiant dash, but he lost his footing and went down in a drift, coming back up with his face covered in snow. He frantically pawed it away.

The man fell.

But he saw Hayes.

He was shaking his head back and forth, shouting something, but Hayes couldn’t hear what it was in the racket of the Spryte’s engine. The lights of the Spryte were glaring and intense, snow swirling in their beams. Hayes could just make out a dim figure in the cab.

Where in the fuck was Rutkowski with that gun?

He heard Sharkey scream his name and then the Spryte rolled right over that lone figure in the snow, those jointed tracks crushing him with a popping, wet sound that was meaty, organic, and brutal. The Spryte lurched as it went over him, leaving nothing but a red and ripped heap in its wake.

And then it was coming at Hayes.

“Oh, shit,” he said under his breath, backing away now, preparing to break into a run.

But the Spryte stopped dead. Downshifted, started in reverse with a jerk as whoever was in that cab worked the stick roughly. There was no doubt what was happening: this crazy bastard was going to roll right over the body again.

The Spryte backed up and did just that and suddenly Rutkowski was there with the rifle in his hands, just standing there, speechless.

“Shoot that motherfucker!” Hayes told him.

But Rutkowski stood there, seeing that spreading red stain in the snow, smelling the blood and macerated flesh and he could not move.

Hayes took the rifle from his hands.

It was just a little bolt-action .22 survival rifle. He brought it up and popped a round through the cab. Worked the bolt and put another through there. He saw the bullet holes in the wide, sloping windshield. Saw the second bullet make the form in there throw its hands up and fall over.

The Spryte stopped.

Right on top of the body.

Hayes scrambled around the side of the cab and brought the rifle up, ready to finish the job and knowing that if anybody even so much as got in his way they were going to get a rifle-butt upside the head.

But nobody did.

They came up, but stayed a good distance away. Cutchen was there with Sharkey. Koricki and Sodermark. Stotts, Biggs, and Rutkowski. A few of the scientists. Nobody was saying a thing. The engine died on the Spryte and the door to the cab swung open and then shut again as the wind took it. Then it slammed open again and whoever was in there stepped out and onto the treads.

It was Holm.

The geologist from Gates’ team. He just stood up on the treads like a politician preparing to make a speech. He wore a parka, but no hat. His white hair rustled in the wind. His face was the color of boiled bone.

“Holm?” Hayes said to him, wondering if he’d really hit him with the .22 or not. For he seemed perfectly healthy. “Holm? Goddammit, Holm, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“Watch it, Jimmy,” Rutkowski said. “There’s something funny here.”

Oh yeah, there definitely was.

Holm hopped off the treads, down into the snow and stepped forward even as Hayes stepped back. Holm was a skinny old guy in his sixties and Hayes could have broke him over his knee without working up a sweat… yet, at that moment it would have been hard to picture a more dangerous man than Holm. There was something cold and remorseless about him.

“Holm…” Hayes said.

Holm was looking at him and his eyes were filled with a chill blankness. There was nothing in them. Nothing human at any rate. He surveyed Hayes with a flat indifference, that pallid face punched with two black eyes that made something go liquid in Hayes’ belly. You didn’t want to spend too much time looking into those eyes. They were like windows looking through into some godless, dead-end of space. You could see yourself there, suffocating in that deranged, airless void.

Hayes swallowed.

Those eyes drilled into him, sucking him dry.

There was power in those eyes, something immense and malignant and ancient. The way Hayes was feeling at that moment was how he felt looking into those glassy red orbs of the aliens in Hut #6. They got inside you, owned you, crushed your free will like a spider under a boot. At some primary level, they consumed and swallowed you. And you could feel all that you were sliding down into some black, soundless gullet.

Hayes made a squeaking sound in his throat, but that was it.

What he was feeling was awful… gut-deep and bone-cold and he was powerless to refuse it. It was like waking up in a coffin and hearing dirt thud against the lid… but having no voice with which to scream.

“Jimmy,” Sharkey said. “Get away from him… get away from him right now.”

Her voice was like a slap across the face. Hayes blinked and stumbled backward, almost fell as his feet skated out in opposite directions. But his mind came back and the world swam into view. And as it did, he was remembering the night they chatted with Gates on the Internet. He could still see those threatening words on the screen:

you are in danger if I or others return watch us close very close something not right with holm I think they have his mind now

This was how Hayes knew the ball had dropped.

He brought the gun up. “All right, Holm, no closer. Next one goes between your eyes. Where’s Gates? Bryer? The others? What have you done with them?”

Holm cocked his head slightly to one side like a puppy, but the effect was hardly cute… it was offensive and loathsome like feeling a spider unfurling its legs in your palm. It gave Hayes the same sense of atavistic revulsion. It actually made him take a step backward. His breath caught in his throat.

“Where’s Gates?” he said again, noticing how weak and puny his voice seemed in the icy blackness of the night.

“Shoot him,” Rutkowski said. “Put that fucking animal down. Look what he did… just look at what he did…”

But Hayes wasn’t going to look.

He did not dare take his eyes away from Holm. Not for an instant. He was not looking at his eyes, but lower where the collar of his parka nestled against his chin. To look in those eyes was to see graveyards and misting hollows choked with bones. To look in those eyes was to feel the sweet poison of death pulling you down to sterile plains.

Holm stepped forward, paused, looked at Hayes with an arcane sort of amusement. The way you might look at a dog that had learned to sit up and beg or one of those cute monkeys that could turn the crank of an organ grinder. It was something like that. No fear or concern about Hayes and the rifle in his hands, but just a profound and boundless amusement at it all.

“Well somebody do something,” another voice said. “Before I lose my fucking mind here.”

The night was bunched around them, huge and black and freezing. The wind was still blowing and that powder of snow was still falling, blowing over those gathered there, dancing in the beams of the lights they held and the dimming beams of the Spryte. Holm was breathing very fast, the sound of it like somebody drawing air through crackling, dry hay. Each time he exhaled a cloud of frost gathered and dissipated.

Hayes could hear that wind moaning around the buildings, the sound of boots rocking uneasily on the hardpack snow.

Holm took another bold step forward, as if daring Hayes to put him down. He moved quickly with an almost fluidic motion, a vitality an old man had no right to possess. Hayes figured that, even though there was six feet separating them, Holm would have been on him before he even pulled the trigger. He was staring at Hayes and his eyes were wet and glistening, horribly dilated so that the iris and sclera of both eyes were swallowed by those fixed and expansive pupils. They were glassy and reflective.

Holm opened his mouth in something like a snarl, showing those even white teeth that were probably dentures. A sibilant hissing came from his throat, gaining volume and scratching up into a voice: “Gates? Gates is dead… we’re all dead…”

Hayes almost shot him right then.

That voice was just too much. It was utterly inhuman, like the echo of subterranean water trying to form words. Holm smiled at what he had said and made a lunge at Hayes. He wasn’t as quick as he seemed at first and Hayes sidestepped him and brought the rifle butt down on his temple. Holm went to his knees immediately, but did not make a sound. Unless the howling wind was his voice, echoing off into the night, sweeping across that lonesome and ancient polar plain.

“All right,” Hayes said. “Somebody get some rope or chain or something. We’ll tie him up and bring him inside.”

“Just kill him, Jimmy,” Stotts said. “Do it, Jimmy… look at those eyes… nothing sane has eyes like that.”

Rutkowski and Biggs came over, as did Sodermark and one of the scientists, a seismologist named Hinks, who spent most of his time out at remote tracking stations and was not privy to the majority of the madness at Kharkhov Station. Carefully then, Hayes handing off his rifle to Sharkey, they surrounded Holm.

“Get up,” Rutkowski told him. “While you still fucking can.”

Holm looked up at them with that same almost insipid blankness. His black eyes like those of a grasshopper considering a stalk of grass. That’s how they looked… unintelligent, completely vacant. At least at that moment. But Hayes knew those eyes and what they could do. One minute they were dead and empty, the next overflowing with all the knowledge of the cosmos.

Rutkowski and Hinks were looking pissed-off.

Looked like what they had here was just some offensive drunk and they were going to pitch him out into the alley, maybe bang his head off a dumpster for good measure. They both reached down and yanked Holm to his feet. Hayes took hold of him, too, as did Biggs. They got him standing and then he started moving, fighting and writhing and twitching almost like he had no bones, was made of liquid rubber. He fought and struck out. He knocked Hinks aside and sent Rutkowski scrambling. Hayes darted in and gave him a quick shot to the jaw that snapped his head back and then something happened.

Hayes felt it coming… an energy, a building momentum like static electricity generating before lightning strikes. And then that thumping vibration started up, seeming to come from the ice below them. They could all feel it coming up through their boots and traveling along their bones in waves. It was the same sound Rutkowski had heard the night St. Ours died and the same sound Hayes, Cutchen, and Sharkey had heard at Vradaz… a rhythmic pulsating that rose up around them, getting louder and louder. Like the humming of some great machine. Then there was that crackling, electric sound that made the hairs stand up on the back of their necks. Thumpings and echoing knocks, a high and weird whistling sound.

Then Biggs and Stotts were suddenly knocked flat.

The window in the door of the Spryte’s cab shattered as did the windshield. Hayes felt a rolling wave of heat pass right before him — so warm in fact that it melted the ice from his beard — and hit Rutkowski and Hinks, lifting them up and throwing them back five or six feet onto their asses.

Somebody screamed.

Somebody shouted.

And Holm stood there, his face almost luminous. The vibrating and crackling sounds grew louder and then there was a piercing, shrieking wail that made everyone cover their ears and grit their teeth. It broke up around them into a shrill piping. An almost musical piping like Hayes had heard the night in Hut #6 when the things had almost gotten his mind. It rose up all around them, strident and keening and Hayes saw forms out in the darkness… oblong shadows coming at them.

And then there was an explosion.

An echoing report and Sharkey was standing there with the .22 in her hands. All the noise suddenly stopped and there were no shadows mulling around them. There was nothing. Just those shocked faces and Holm standing there with a neat hole in his forehead about the size of a dime. Blood had spattered over his face from the impact and it looked like black ink in the semi-darkness. He tottered and fell over, striking his head on the treads of the Spryte.

People started getting out of there right away.

Hayes stood there, watching them leave. They all knew it was over with and they were rushing away.

“No, don’t worry,” Hayes called after them. “I’ll drive the Spryte off this stiff… don’t worry your heads none about it. Let me take care of it.”

Then it was just him and Cutchen and Sharkey standing there, not saying a thing. The wind kept blowing and the snow kept drifting and the polar night wrapped around them like it would never let them go.

Finally, Sharkey dropped the rifle. “I… I guess I just killed a man,” she said, seeming confused as to how she should feel about this.

But Cutchen just shook his head. “I don’t know what it was you killed, Elaine. But it sure as hell was not a man.”

36

Two hours later, they were all in the community room and La-Hune was holding court. For once, he didn’t have to tell everyone to pipe down so he could be heard. Nobody was talking. They were all looking at the floor, their hands, the tables before them. Anything but at each other and LaHune standing up there in front.

“For some time now,” LaHune said, looking oddly uncomfortable up there, “Mr. Hayes has been warning me and most of you, I would imagine, that we are in danger here. That those… relics Dr. Gates and his team brought in are somehow hazardous to us. Mr. Hayes believes… as some of you do, no doubt… that those creatures are not entirely dead. That there is activity in them. A sort of psychic energy, if you will, that they emanate. Up until tonight, I was not ready to accept any of that. But now, after what happened out in the compound, I’m not so sure.”

Hayes sat there with his arms folded, looking indignant. He wasn’t sure what LaHune was up to, but he didn’t care for it. The idea of having the man on his side suddenly was even worse than having him against him. He wasn’t sure why, but it irked him.

“Now, Mr. Hayes has taken care of those creatures out in the hut… put them back to sleep so to speak…”

Somebody tittered at that.

“…but that’s hardly the end of the problem. It’s been five days now since we’ve heard from Dr. Gates’ party. I don’t care for it and neither do any of you. In fact, the only thing we’ve learned about them came in the form of that particularly ugly incident this evening.”

Ugly? Hayes liked that. No, ugly didn’t cut it. That business was a nightmare, a goddamn tragedy.

LaHune went on: “The bottom line is, people, we are very much alone out here. We can’t look for help from the outside world until spring and spring is a long way off. We have to send a party up to Gates’ camp to look for survivors. They may already be dead or worse. I don’t know. But somebody has to go up there, so I’m—”

“I’ll go,” Hayes said. “I think Dr. Sharkey and Cutchen will come with me. Anyone else that wants to tag along, well, I’d welcome your help.”

Hayes stood up and looked around.

Nobody would meet his eyes.

It seemed that for a moment maybe Rutkowski and Hinks were considering it, but they lowered their heads one after the other.

“Didn’t expect any of you would,” Hayes said.

LaHune cleared his throat. “Now, I can’t order you three to go up there.”

“You don’t have to,” Sharkey said.

She stood up with Cutchen and Hayes. The three of them scanned those dour, frightened faces in the room.

“I guess that’s it then,” Hayes said. “We leave in an hour. Any of you happen to grow a pair of balls by then, meet us out at the SnoCat.”

The three of them left and the gathering broke up. Broke up quietly. Nobody had a thing to say. They plodded back to the dark corners of their lives and looked for a convenient pile of sand to stick their heads into.

37

Two or three times on the way up to the tent camp, Hayes found himself wondering what in the hell LaHune was up to. His sudden about-face was worrisome. Troubling. There was no sense of satisfaction attached to it; none whatsoever. No, thank God you’re with us now, Mister LaHune, things is going to be better now, yessum. For LaHune, as far as Hayes was concerned, was a man with an agenda and Hayes had to wonder just how this abrupt turn of face might possibly serve the administrator and his masters.

There had to be something there.

And maybe had he been more awake, not so worn and squeezed dry, he might have seen it. But as things stood, he was having trouble thinking about little else but the storm and the darkness and the incredible danger they were all in.

They had not been able to honestly identify who the body that Holm ran over belonged to. There was no ID on the corpse and its physical state was appalling. Like 150 pounds of bloody meat poured into a parka and thermal wind pants. But they had answered one little question. They’d been wondering what the scenario of all that was. They found it hard to believe their John Doe had made it all the way from Gates’ encampment to Kharkhov on foot and in a Condition One blizzard yet. But about two miles from the station they’d found a Ski-Doo snowmobile abandoned on the ice road. Their John Doe had escaped on the sled and Holm had come after him on the Spryte.

And what would have happened, Hayes wondered, if Holm had gotten him out on the road? What then?

He kept picturing Holm returning and doing the most awful things once they’d invited him amongst them. Because, of course, they would have. Like a disease germ he would have circulated freely and then— “What are we going to do,” Cutchen said then, “if we find no one at the camp? Or worse, what if they’re all dead or… possessed like Holm? What then?”

“We’ll do whatever feels right,” Sharkey said.

“Regardless of what that might be,” Hayes added.

And that was it in a nutshell, wasn’t it? Regardless of what that might be. Because honestly he had no idea what they were going into, only that the idea of it gave him about the same sense of apprehension as sticking his hands into a nest of rattlesnakes sidled up in a desert crevice. The idea of getting bit wasn’t what bothered him, it was the idea of the venom itself. And the sort of venom he might get stuck with in those blasphemous ruins was the sort that could erase who and what he was and birth something invidious and primal implanted in his genes a hundred-thousand millennia before.

You don’t know that, you really don’t.

Yet, he did.

Maybe whatever it was had hid itself in the primal depths of the human psyche, but it was there, all right. Waiting. Biding its time. A ghost, a memory, a revenant hiding in the dank and dripping crypt of the human condition like a pestilence waiting to overtake and infect. A cursed tomb waiting to be violated, waiting to loose some eldritch horror upon the world. An in-bred plague that festered in the wormy charnel depths of the subconscious, waiting to be woken, activated by the discordant piping of alien minds.

Dear Christ, there could be nothing as horrible as this.

Nothing.

He did not and could not know the ultimate aim of awakening the sleeping dragon the Old Ones had planted in the minds of men… but it would be colossal, it would be immense, it would be the end of history as they knew it and the beginning of something else entirely. The continuation of that primordial seeding, the vast outer extremity of that tree, the ultimate objective.

The final fruit.

It made Hayes weak just to think of it, whatever it might be.

So he did not think about it. Not much, anyway.

He kept an eye on what the blazing lights of the SnoCat showed him. Which was just snow and whiteness, ragged ridges of black rock. The terrain was rough and hilly as they plied the foothills of the Dominion Range, moving up frozen slopes and down through rivers of drift, bouncing madly over crests of volcanic rock. Moving ever higher and higher along the ice road.

“Jesus,” Cutchen said as the SnoCat shook like a wet tabby, “this is worse than I thought. We have no business out here… those winds are sweeping down from the mountains and picking up everything in their path, peeling this fucking continent right down to the bare rock.”

“We’ll make it,” Hayes said. “Unless the GPS goes to hell.”

“You can’t trust anything in a blow like this.”

The storm.

Hayes could see it out there in that haunted blackness, the headlights clotted with snow thick as a fall of flower petals, thick as dust blowing through the decayed corridors of a ghost town. It was more than just a Condition One storm with near-zero visibility and winds approaching a hundred miles an hour and snow falling by the bails, pushed into frozen crests and waves. No, this was bigger than that. This was every storm that had ever scraped across the Geomagnetic graveyard of that white, dead continent. Pacific typhoons and Atlantic hurricanes, Midwestern tornadoes and oceanic white squalls, tempests and blizzards and violent gales… all of them converging here, bled dry of their force and suction and devastation, reborn at the South Pole in a screaming glacial white-out that was sculpting the rugged landscape in canopies of frost, leeching warmth, driving blood to freon, and pushing anything alive down into a polar tomb, a necropolis of black, cracking ice.

And, just maybe, it was more than that even.

The winds were cyclonic and whipping, making the SnoCat shake and feel like it was going to be vacuumed right up into that Arctic maelstrom or maybe be entombed beneath a mountain of drifting now. But these were physical things… palpable things you could feel and know, things with limitations despite their intensity.

But there were other things on the storm.

Things funneling and raging in that vortex that you could only feel in your soul, things like pain and insanity and fear. Maybe wraiths and ghosts and all those demented minds lost in storms and whirlwinds, creeping things from beyond death or nameless evils that had never been born… the gathered malignancies and earthbound toxins of that which was human and that which was not, writhing shadows blown from pole to pole since antiquity. Yes, all of that and more, the collected horrors of the race and the sheared veil of the grave, coming together at once, breathing in frost and exhaling blight, a deranged elemental sentience that howled and screeched and cackled in the shrill and broken voices of a million, a million-million lost and tormented souls…

Hayes was feeling them out there on that moaning storm-wind, enclosing the SnoCat in a frozen winding sheet. Death. Unseen, unspeakable, and unstoppable, filling its lungs with a savage whiteness and his head with a scratching black madness. He kept his eyes fixed on the windshield, what the headlights could show him: snow and wind and night, everything all wrapped and twined together, coming at them and drowning them in darkness. He kept blinking his eyes, telling himself he wasn’t seeing death out there. Wasn’t seeing spinning cloven skulls and the blowing, rent shrouds of deathless cadavers flapping like high masts. Boiling storms of sightless eyes and ragged cornhusk figures flitting about. Couldn’t hear them calling his name or scraping at the windows with white skeletal fingers.

It was imagination.

It was stress and terror and fatigue.

Too many things.

He could feel Sharkey next to him, her leg against his own and both separated by inches of fleece and wool and vinyl. He wondered if she saw what he was seeing and if she did… why didn’t she scream? Why didn’t they both scream? What held them together and why were those seams sewn so tightly, so strongly that not even this could tear them?

My God, but Hayes felt alone.

Maybe there were people in the cab with him and maybe he had only willed them to be there so he didn’t go stark, screaming insane. That viscid, living blackness was pressing down upon the SnoCat, inhuming it beneath layers of frozen graveyard soil. And he could feel it happening. Could sense the weight and pressure, the eternal suffocation of that oblong box. His throat was scratchy. The air thin and dusty. His breath was being sucked away and his brain was dissolving into a firmament of rot. Nothing but worms and time and clotted soil. Oh, dear God, he could really feel it now, that claustrophobic sense of entombment, of burial, of moist darkness. He could really hear the sounds of rats pawing at his box and the scratching requiem of a tuneless violin, time filtering out into dusty eternity. And his own voice, frantic and terrified: Who did you think you were to flex your muscle against this land? To raise your fist in defiance against those who created you and everything else? The dark lords of organic profusion? What worming disobedience made you think for one shivering instant you could fight against those minds that already own you and have owned your kind since you first crawled from the protoplasmic slime?

Oh, dear Christ, what had he been thinking? What had he -

“Are you all right?” Sharkey suddenly asked him.

And the answer to that was something he did not know.

He’d been thinking about what the Old Ones had buried at the core of humanity. He’d been talking about the weather with Cutchen and then… and then he wasn’t sure. Hallucinations. Fears. Insecurities. Everything coming at him at once. But none of it had been real. None of it.

He swallowed. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Really fine?” she said.

“Hell no,” he said honestly.

“We’re close,” Cutchen suddenly said. His voice was calm, yet full of the apprehension a doctor might use when he told you your belly was full of cancer. “According to the GPS, we’re practically there.”

But Hayes knew that without looking. He could feel it in his balls, his guts, along the back of his spine. It was an ancient sensory network and in the worst of times, it was rarely wrong.

Hayes slowed the SnoCat, downshifted, said, “Yippy-fucking-skippy.”

38

When Hayes stepped out of the SnoCat, first thing he became aware of was that silence. The wind was still blowing and the snow was still falling, but they were protected here in the lower ranges of the Transantarctic Mountains. You could hear the wind howling still, but it was distant now. Here, in the little valley where Gates had set up his tent camp, it was silent and lonely and forever. All he could hear around them was an odd sighing sound like respiration. Like something was breathing. Some weird atmospheric condition produced by the rocky peaks around them, no doubt.

The sky above was pink and you could see fairly-well in the semi-darkness. Here the glacial sheet had been stopped by the Dominion Range, had piled up into breathtaking bluffs of crystal blue ice like sheets of broken glass several hundred feet in height. The snow had been stripped down to the glossy black volcanic rock beneath, a terrain full of sudden dips and craggy draws. And above, standing sentinel were those rolling Archaean hills and the high towers of the mountains themselves, like the cones of witch hats rising grimly up into the polar wastes. Rolling clouds of ice-fog blew down from them in a breath of mist.

Standing there, taking in that primeval vista all around him and feeling its haunted aura, Hayes was struck how the landscape looked like something plucked from some dead, alien world light years distant. High and jagged and surreal, a phantasmal netherworld of sharp and spiky summits that reminded him of monuments, of obelisks, of menhirs… as if they were not merely geological features, but the craggy and towering steeples of ancient, weathered tombstones. That what he saw was nothing so simple as a mountain range, but the narrow and leaning masonry of the world’s oldest cemetery.

Yes, this is where the gods came to bury their own… here in this polar mortuary at the bottom of the world. A shunned place like a graveyard of alien witches.

And, Jesus, hadn’t he seen these mountains in his dreams? In dozens of nightmares since earliest childhood? Weren’t they imprinted on the mind and soul of every man and woman? That deranged geography of sharp-peaked cones, that unwavering line of warning beacons?

Hayes stood there, his beard frosted white, shaking, seeing those mountains and feeling certain that they were seeing him, too. They inspired a terror so pure, so infinite, so aged, that he literally could not move. Those peaks and pinnacles were somehow very wrong. They were desolate and godless and spiritually toxic, a perverse geometry that reached inside the human mind and squeezed the blood out of what they found there. Literally wrung out the human soul like a sponge, draining it, leeching it. Yes, there was something ethereal and spatially demented about those aboriginal hills and they were like a siren song of destruction to the human mind. Geometrically grotesque, here was the place where time and space, dimension and madness came together, mating into something that fractured the human mind.

So Hayes stood there, letting it fill him as he knew it must.

The cones had an uncanny hypnotic effect on him, a morphic pull that made him want to do nothing but stare. Just stand there and watch them, trace them with his eyes, feel their soaring height and antiquity. And he would have stood there for an hour or five, mesmerized by them, until he froze up and fell over. Because the more you watched them, the more you wanted to. And the more you began to see almost a funny sort of light arcing off the crests and narrow tips, a jumping and glowing emission like electricity or stolen moonlight. It made Hayes’ heart pound and his head reel, made his fingertips tingle and filled the black pot of his belly with a spreading heat like coals being fanned up into a blaze. He had felt nothing like it in years, maybe never: an exhilaration, a vitality, a preternatural sense of awe that just emptied his mind of anything but those rising, primal cones.

Pabodie had called them the “Mountains of Madness” and, dear God, how very apt that was.

For Hayes felt practically hysterical looking upon them.

But more than that he felt a budding, burgeoning sense of wonder and purpose and necessity. The import and magnitude of this place… yes, it was enough to drive any man insane. Insane with a knowledge of exactly who and what he was. Destiny. The sense that he had come full circle.

“Jimmy?” Sharkey said and it almost sounded like she was calling to him from one of those conic apexes. “Jimmy? Jimmy, are you all right?”

“Yeah,” he said.

He looked away from those peaks that had snagged his mind. Looked at Sharkey and then at Cutchen. In the glow of Cutchen’s lantern their faces were drawn with concern. With fright and apprehension and too goddamn many things to catalog.

“I’m okay,” he said. “Really.”

He had only felt something like that once in his life. Just after high school he’d worked at a transformer substation where the juice traveling down high-tension wires was stepped down, dampened, for household and industrial consumption. He’d quit after three weeks. Those transformers had been pissing out an energy that only he seemed to be aware of. When he got too close to them, his teeth ached and his spine crawled like it was covered with hundreds of ants. But there was a mental effect, too. It amped him up. Made him feel nervous and antsy and wired like he was full of caffeine or coked-up. Later on, one of the engineers told him that the high-tension lines and their attendant transformers put out moderate alternating electrical and magnetic fields and some people were just more susceptible to them.

Those high peaks were doing that to him, he knew. Creating a negative charge of energy that maybe only he was feeling.

Sharkey put her gloved hand on his arm. “You can feel it, can’t you?” she said, touching her chest and her head. “In here and here… an attraction to this place, a magnetism or something. The secret life of these mountains and what they hide.”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s strong.”

Even turned away from those spires and cones he was feeling it right down to his marrow. A dizzy sense of deja-vu, deja-vu squared. A dark and misty recognition of something long-forgotten and rediscovered. But it was more that, it was much more. He was feeling something else, too, something huge that seemed to blot out his rational mind. He was in touch with some ancient network and he could feel the legacy of his race, the twisted and shadowy ancestral heritage that had been passed down from impossibly ancient and forgotten days. The race memory of this place and others like it, the creatures who occupied them… all of it was rushing up at him, sinking him in a mire of atavism and primal terror. These things had been written and remembered, he knew, in the form of folktale and legend and myth. Channeled through the ages into tales of winged demons and devils, night-haunts and the Wild Hunt itself.

But if those were just tales, then what inspired them was bleak and real.

“Okay, let’s go take a peak before I start beating my sacrificial drum and chanting about the Old Ones,” he said.

They both looked at him.

“Never mind.”

“I suppose we might see things,” Cutchen said, maybe just to himself. “I suppose we might hear things.”

As they climbed down away from the SnoCat and deeper into the valley towards Gates’ camp, Hayes concentrated only on each step. He pressed one boot down into the snow and followed it with another. Kept doing this, disconnecting himself from the aura of this place and what it could do to him. He saw nothing and he heard nothing and that was just fine.

When they reached the periphery of Gates’ encampment, they just stopped like they met a wall. They stopped and panned their lights around. Everything was quiet and still like sleeping marble. It could have been a midnight cemetery they were in and the atmosphere felt about the same… hush, breathless, uninviting. The camp was grim and cold and bleak, crawling with black, hooded shadows. It had all the atmosphere of a mausoleum. Just the gentle moan of the wind, tent flaps rustling in the breeze.

Hayes knew it was empty long before he entered.

Not so much as a single light was lit and the place just felt dead, deserted.

They could see a couple Ski-Doo snowmobiles dusted with white, the hulk of Gates’ SnoCat. A wall of snow blocks surrounded the actual camp as a wind-shelter, with secondary walls to protect the cooking area and give some privacy to the latrine. There were a series of rugged Scott tents and bright red mountaineering tents that were anchored down with nylon lines and ice-screws, dead man bolts. Snow had been heaped around them to guard against the fierce Antarctic gusts. A couple fish huts had been set up and there was a Polar Haven for storage.

Just a typical research camp.

Except it was completely lifeless.

Lifeless, yes, but far from unoccupied.

Hayes led the way into one of the fish huts. It was being used as sort of a community living area. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Cots and sleepmats, sleeping bags and vinyl duffels of personal items. Some boots and ECW’s hanging along the wall. A couple MSR stoves near the wall. Boxes of canned and dehydrated foods, propane stoves, water jugs. A field radio and INMARSAT system for voice and data transmission and retrieval. A corkboard was hanging above it with notes and telnet numbers. Somebody had tacked a photo of Godzilla up and pencilled in a smile on his face

Cutchen swallowed. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Except everything’s down,” Sharkey said. “Generator’s quit, Ethernet is off. Like it was abandoned.”

“C’mon,” Hayes said.

He went into the other fish hut. It was being used as a field lab by Gates and his people. A table was heaped with fossil specimens, others were bagged and tagged in crates and boxes. There were a pair of portable Nikon binocular microscopes, a few boxes of slides and trays of instruments. Hand-drills and chippers. Some bottles of chemicals and acids, piles of cribbed notes with an ammonite fossil used as a paperweight. A curtain separated a cramped dark room with cameras and a photomacroscope.

Sharkey paged through the notes. “Nothing interesting,” she said. “Geologic and paleontologic stuff… measurements and classifications, sketches and stratigraphy and the like. Stuff about brachiopods, crinoids… fossil-bearing stratas.”

“Geo one-oh-one,” Cutchen said.

Sharkey kept looking.

There were squat shelves crowded with spiral-bound notebooks, rolled-up maps, ledgers, boxes of writeable CDs. A few odd books. Down on her hands and knees, Sharkey checked it all out with her flashlight. She pulled out manila folders, hand-written field logs.

“Are you doing inventory?” Cutchen finally said.

“Yes, I am,” she said, still searching. “I just have to find out how many rolls of toilet paper they’ve used up.”

Hayes giggled.

Cutchen flipped her off.

Hayes didn’t interfere because she wasn’t just wasting their time. If she was bothering to look through those heaping stacks then she was hot on the trail of something. Something relevant.

Hayes leaned against the doorway, thinking about the cold.

They were each wearing an easy thirty-odd pounds of cold weather gear: long underwear, sweaters, wool socks, insulated nylon overalls, Gore Tex down parkas, mittens, ski gloves, and bunny boots… those big white moon boots that were inflated with air to provide insulation. But even so, prolonged exposure to the Antarctic winter night was not recommended. The trough of glacial air was sweeping over the top of the valley and screaming across the ice-plain at an easy seventy miles an hour… driving a temperature of eighty below zero somewhere into the range of 120 below. They were protected from that here, but it was still damnably cold. The sooner they could wind this up the better. Hayes was keeping an eye on both Cutchen and Sharkey, as well as himself. Looking for the signs that they needed to get out of the cold right away… stupor, fatigue, disorientation. So far, so good.

But it would happen out here.

Sooner or later.

“Nothing,” Sharkey said. “Nothing at all.”

“What were you looking for?” Cutchen asked her.

“I don’t know… something belonging to Gates. A personal journal or something. Maybe it’s in the ’Cat.”

Outside again, the cold seemed worse… bitter, unrelenting. They could hear the distant sounds of the glaciers cracking and snapping, the crackling sound their own breath made as the moisture in it froze and drifted down as they walked.

They stopped by the Polar Haven and there wasn’t much of interest in there either. Just the usual: shovels and ice-axes, sledge hammers and ice drills, spare parts for the coring rig, cots and tarps. Sharkey steered them back towards Gates’ SnoCat. There was nothing in it either. Nothing resembling a journal, at any rate.

Sharkey found something beneath the seat, though. It looked like a TV remote. “What’s this?”

“Detonator,” Cutchen said.

Hayes took it away from her, studied it in his light. “Yeah… it’s armed, too.”

They were all looking around now. The proximity of high explosives was the sort of immediate threat that could make you forget very quickly about aliens that could suck your mind away. Hayes set the detonator on the seat.

“Are we in danger here?” Sharkey asked him.

“No… I don’t think so.” Hayes looked around. “My guess is somebody has a charge rigged around here somewhere, maybe doing some seismic echo work. Maybe.”

But that wasn’t what he was thinking at all. Given what must have happened here, Hayes would not have been surprised to learn that the entire camp was rigged to blow-up.

They moved back down beyond the snow-block walls, away from the structures and to a wall of black sandstone that rose up maybe two-hundred feet. Situated at the base of it was Gates’ corer, a portable shot-hole drilling system. The drill tripod, compressor, and hose spool were sled-mounted and had been pulled away from a yawning black fissure that led down into the earth. It was roughly elliptical in shape, maybe twenty feet at its widest point. A winch was set up near it so supplies could be lowered and specimens could be brought up and swung out.

“The famous chasm,” Cutchen said. You could hear the bitterness in his voice and nobody blamed him for it. “If they would have drilled somewhere else, we might not be in this fix now.”

“Oh, yes we would,” Hayes said. “What’s happening down here has been meant to happen.”

39

Gates’ team had set up an emergency ladder for people to climb down with. Using his light, Hayes saw that the drop was maybe twenty feet. But it was just as black as a mineshaft down there and the idea of descending made something seize up in his chest. But there was no real choice. He went down first and it was no easy bit in his ballooned-out bunny boots, like walking a tight rope in hip waders. He went down slowly, while Sharkey kept her flashlight beam on him. Tiny crystals of ice floated in it, clouds of his steaming breath.

Finally, he made it.

The floor was uneven, rocky, veined with frost and ice. Hayes played his light around and saw that he was in a passage that gradually sloped deeper into that frozen earth. “Okay,” he called out. “Next.”

Sharkey’s turn. She moved fairly quickly down the ladder. Cutchen followed, bitching the entire way that the last time he’d followed them down into a hole he’d had to squeeze out his long johns when they’d gotten back to the station. But, finally, he was down, too.

“Looks like the set from an old B-movie,” he said, holding his lantern high. “A natural cavern, I’d say. I don’t see any signs of chipping or toolwork on the walls.”

Hayes didn’t either. “Limestone,” he said, studying the striations, the layers pressing down upon one another.

“Sure, a natural limestone cavern. Probably hollowed out by ground water over millions of years,” Cutchen said.

Sharkey chortled. “Now who’s talking Geo one-oh-one?”

The passage was about eight or nine feet in height, maybe five in width. Hayes leading, they started down its sloping path. It would angle to the left, then to the right, had more twists and turns to it than a water snake. And they were going deeper into the mountain with each step. Ten minutes into it, Hayes began to notice that things were warming up. It still wasn’t time for a bikini wax and a thong, but it was certainly warmer. Cutchen noticed it, too, saying that it had to be due to a volcanic vent or geothermal action.

“Least we won’t freeze down here,” Sharkey said.

Cutchen nodded. “You know, I was wondering how Gates and the boys were handling this so well. Being down here hour after hour. If it wasn’t for the warmth they would have froze their balls off—”

Sharkey put a gloved finger to her lips. “Quiet.”

“What?”

“Shut the hell up,” she whispered.

Hayes was listening with her now, too.

He didn’t know what for and part of him honestly did not want to know, but he listened nonetheless. Then he heard an echo from somewhere below… just a quick, furtive scratching sound that disappeared so quickly he wasn’t sure he had heard it at all. Then he heard it again not five seconds later… like a stick being scratched along a subterranean wall.

And down there in that underworld, going to a place that was as storied and terrible in their imaginations as some vampire’s castle, it was probably the worse possible thing to be hearing. For a scratching implied motion and motion implied something alive…

Hayes was thinking: Could be a man, could be one of the team… and it could be something else entirely.

They stood there, looking at each other and at those limestone walls, an ice-mist tangling through their legs like groundfog. In the glow of Cutchen’s lantern, there was only their frosting breath, suspended ice crystals and drifting motes of dust. And shadows. Because down in that creeping murk, the lights were casting huge and distorted shadows.

Hayes took a few more steps, his belly feeling hollow and feathery. He played his light farther down into the stygian depths of that channel which, from where he was sitting, might as well have led right down to the lower regions of Hell itself.

He heard the sound again and started.

A distant scraping that seemed to be moving up the passage at them and then a few seconds later, sounded impossibly far-off. It would pause for a moment or two, then start up again… closer then farther, that same scratching, dragging sound. Hayes felt a trickle of sweat run down his spine. Something in his bowels tensed. He could hear his own breathing in his ears and it seemed impossibly loud. Then, suddenly, the scratching was much closer, so very close in fact that Hayes almost turned and ran. Because it seemed that whatever was making it would show itself at any moment, something spidery with scraping twigs for fingers.

Then it abruptly ceased.

“What in Christ was that?” Sharkey said behind him, edging closer to him now.

And he was going to tell her that it was probably nothing. Sound would carry funny down in the hollowed earth. That’s all it was. Nothing to get excited about. But he never did say that, for less than a minute after the scratching stopped, something else took its place… a strident, squeaky piping like an out-of-tune recording of a church organ played on an old Victrola. It rose up high and shrieking, gaining volume and insistence. No wind blowing through no underground passage could have created something like that. The sound of it was eerie and disturbing, the auditory equivalent of a knife blade pressed against your spine and slowly drawn upwards.

Hayes suddenly felt very numb, rubbery and uncoordinated.

So much so that if he moved, he figured he would have fallen flat on his face. So he didn’t move. He stood there like a statue in a park waiting for a pigeon to shit on him. That still, that motionless. His tongue felt like it was glued to the roof of his mouth. The sound died out for maybe a second or two. But then it came again, shrill and piercing and somehow malevolent. It was reedy and cacophonous and something about it made you want to scream. But what really was bothering Hayes about it was that it was not neutral in the least… it sounded almost hysterical or demented.

And then it died out for good, ending it mid-squeal, shattering into a dozen resounding and tinny echoes that bounced around through caves and hollows and openings. But the memory of it was still there.

And what Hayes was thinking was something he did not dare say: That’s what they sound like… I heard it that night on the tractor and I heard it out in the hut… that was a voice of a living Old One…

But he kept that to himself.

He stood there, teetering from foot to foot, feeling like something had evaporated inside of him. Maybe it was courage and maybe it was just common sense.

“Okay,” Cutchen said, his voice barely audible. He cleared his throat. “I’m for getting the hell out right now.”

“I’m for that,” Sharkey said.

Which dumped the whole stinking mess at Hayes’ doorstep. He shook his head. “We want answers? We want to know what happened to Gates and the others? Then those answers are down there.”

Cutchen looked at him with anger that slowly subsided. “All right, Jimmy, if that’s what you want. But this is the last fucking date I go on with you.”

It was a pale attempt at humor, but it made them all smile. Hayes knew it was not intended to be funny, however, it was just how Cutchen responded to terror and uncertainty: with funny lines born out of contempt.

They started down again.

After another five or ten minutes in that passage, it narrowed to a hole that was perfectly circular like the shaft of a sewer. Its circumference was about ten feet, but so perfectly symmetrical it could not possibly have been cut by ancient floodwaters. Hayes stepped through first and found himself in a room that was again uniform, but rectangular in shape. At the far end, another passage dropped away into darkness. He examined it with his light and saw a set of carved stone steps dropping away into the blackness. They were long, low steps, more like slabs, each large enough, it seemed, to set a dining table and chairs on.

Whatever walked them, Hayes got to thinking, did not have the same tread as a man.

It took time to navigate them because each was about five feet wide. They were set with faults and cracks, the edges falling away. There were lots of tiny pebbles and bits of rock strewn over them as if some ancient subterranean river had deposited them there. Now and again, Hayes saw little protrusions like bumps or knobs that had been almost completely worn away. So maybe they weren’t steps at all.

On they went, their lights bobbing and their footfalls loud and scraping.

As they descended, Hayes was filled with an exhilaration much like Gates and his people must have felt originally coming down there. A sense of discovery, of anticipation, of great revelations laying ahead. As he moved ever downward, some smartass voice in his head kept saying things like, who do you suppose built all this? Is there life on Mars and in outer space? But it was not funny. It left a bad taste in his mouth like he’d been chewing on spiders.

Finally, he paused. “Everyone okay?”

Cutchen just grunted.

Sharkey said, “Peachy.”

Down they went and by the time they hit bottom, Hayes figured they had descended at least a hundred feet if not more. And now they entered a grotto that was absolutely immense. The floor was littered with fallen shelves of sedimentary rock, loose stones, the pillars of gigantic stalagmites that had been smoothed into near-perfect cones probably by those same long-gone floodwaters.

“Christ,” Sharkey said and her voice echoed out, breaking up and pulled away into fantastic heights above them.

They stepped farther into the grotto.

It was so huge that their lights literally would not penetrate up to the roof or the surrounding walls. Everything echoed. Somewhere, water was dripping. Faint, distant, but dripping all the same. They spread out in a rough circle, trying to find something in there. Overhead, what had to be at least a hundred feet straight up they could see the tips of stalactites. They kept in sight because it would have been just too easy to get lost in there and never find your way out again. The flashlight and lantern beams picked out a cloistered haze in the air, motes of dust. It smelled dirty and dry in there like relics pulled from an Egyptian tomb.

“You’d need a spotlight in here to see anything,” Cutchen said.

They kept fanning out, stepping over rock outcroppings, the occasional vein of ice. There were crevices cut into the floor. Some were no more than a few feet deep and a few inches wide, but others were big enough to swallow a car and had no bottom that the lights could find. They moved on, trying to follow what they thought was a path through that colossal underworld. Everything echoed and bounced around them. It was like an amphitheater in there… one exaggerated to a tremendous scope. Now and again, a light rain of ice crystals would fall on them. The air was oddly rarefied like they were on a mountaintop and not far below the surface.

Then suddenly, maybe a full city block into the grotto, they stopped.

Before them was a gigantic gully about as wide as a football field choked with debris… much of it was nothing but huge boulders, some of them as big as two-story houses, lots of loose rocks and stacked wedges of sandstone. But not all of it was of natural origin, for there were other shapes down there, ovals and pillars, assorted masonry that had been cut into those shapes.

And there was no doubting where it had come from.

For to either side of the gully, they could see the remains of the ancient city climbing up sharp slopes into the murk above. It was enormous, what they could see of it, for it climbed much higher than their lights could reach. A sleeping fossil, a mammoth city from nightmare antiquity.

Looking upon it, Hayes was instantly reminded of Ansazi cliff-dwellings and pit houses… but those were primitive and pedestrian compared to this. For the city they were seeing had been a metropolis carved from solid rock—clusters of rising cubes and crumbling arches, cones and pyramids and immense rectangular towers honeycombed with passages. At one time, both halves of the city must have been joined together until that deep chasm opened up and the center collapsed beneath into that grave of bones.

“Oh my God,” Sharkey said and that pretty much summed it up.

Cutchen was too busy ooing and ahhing to feel the atavistic terror that was thrumming through Hayes. Part of it was that he had seen this before, except that it was at the bottom of Lake Vordog… and part of it was that just the sight of that cyclopean prehistoric city made something inside him recoil.

He finally had to look away.

It was just too much.

Like everything about the Old Ones, this city… it lived in the race memories of all men. And there was nothing remotely good associated with it. Just horror and pain and madness.

“C’mon,” Hayes said, a little harsher than he had intended. “You can sightsee later.”

He edged around the gully to the right until he was at the foot of the city itself. He could feel its height and weight towering over him. There was a flat table of stone to walk on and then a haphazard collection of trenches and deep-hewn vaults, megaliths and conical monuments, the city itself set some distance back. It had been the same beneath the lake, that irregular borderland of bizarre masonry, only now Hayes was walking amongst that jutting profusion. There seemed to be no plan, no blueprint, just a crazy-quilt of shattered domes and rising menhirs, narrow obelisk and great flat slabs, a twisting and confused lane cut through it all like the path through a maze. There were patches of frozen lichen growing on some of the shapes, arteries of blue ice.

“What is all this?” Cutchen said, panning his lantern around, throwing wild and creeping shadows. “Did all this fall from up there? Parts of the city?”

But Hayes didn’t think so.

He wasn’t certain what he was thinking, but all of this was no accident. He knew that much. They climbed over low walls and edged around towering monoliths, ever aware of those vault-like trenches cut here and there without any plan. It was positively claustrophobic, monuments towering above and to either side, long and low, high and narrow. Everywhere it was rising and falling, busy and confusing, uprisings of stone clustered like toadstools. They had to turn sideways to pass between some of them.

Sharkey suddenly stopped.

She leaned against a squat stone chamber with a multi-peaked roof. She swept her light around, taking in those broken domes like fossilized craniums, the crumbling and pitted columns rising above them, those squared off vaults below… many of which were clogged with pools of black ice. She squatted down, peering into one of those chasms. “Have you guys ever been to Paris?” she asked them. “To Pere Lachaise? It’s like this there… just a crowded tangle of marble… stones and markers and crypts with very little egress.”

Cutchen said, “But Pere Lachaise… that’s a cemetery.”

“And so is this,” she said.

Hayes stood there, something like madness scratching at the pan of his brain. An alien graveyard. Well, yes, certainly. A necropolis. That’s what this was… a network of graves and tombs, headstones and sepulchers. A funerary grounds as envisioned by those cold and insectile minds of the Old Ones. The disorientating geometry was apparent in everything they built.

Cutchen turned and looked at him and it was hard to say what he was thinking. There was a vacancy in that look, an emptiness threatening to fill up with something impossibly bad. His face was blotchy, maybe from the cold and maybe from something else. He kept looking at Hayes like he was looking for a denial, looking for Hayes to reassure him that, yes, Sharkey was fucking crazy, so just relax. Nothing to worry about here.

But Sharkey wasn’t crazy and she certainly wasn’t wrong, so he said nothing and Cutchen just looked at him, his eyes moist and rubbery like eggs floating in dirty brine.

Sharkey was leading now, the other two slowly deflating behind her. Maybe the idea of an alien graveyard was setting on them wrong, but she found it all simply incredible and you could see it. She led them in circles, paying little to no attention to Hayes telling her that they had to move this along and Cutchen telling her he was leaving. With or without them, he was leaving.

Finally, she crouched down. “Hand me that lantern, Cutchy,” she said.

He grumbled under his breath, but did so.

She was crouching before one of those vault-like chambers cut into the stone. She got down on her belly and lowered the lantern down. She didn’t need to alert them to what she had found. About twelve feet down, maybe fifteen, they could see the shriveled conical tops of alien corpses protruding from a pool of ice. They were corrugated, dehydrated-looking. Those starfish-shaped heads and attendant eyes were terribly withered, looking much like flaccid clusters of shriveled grapes.

“Well, they bury their dead,” Cutchen said. “And vertically. So what?”

His scientific interest had waned considerably, been replaced pretty much by an I-don’t-give-a high-hairy-shit sort of attitude.

“Why not vertically?” Sharkey said. “We bury our dead at rest, laying down. These things rest upright, so it’s perfectly natural, isn’t it?”

Cutchen grunted. “Yeah, this whole place is perfectly fucking natural.”

Sharkey led them away, peering here and peering there. Nodding her head at things that interested her, speculating freely under her breath. Finally she came to one of those rectangular buildings and paused. This one had a long horizontal opening that you could look through. And, of course, she did just that.

“Look,” she said. “Just look at this.”

Cutchen refused, but Hayes did and mainly because he respected this woman and maybe even loved her. Otherwise he would have told her that enough was enough. His nerves were wearing thin as was his patience.

What he was looking into was a mausoleum of sorts. Arranged against the walls in there like Mexican mummies in a catacomb, were maybe a dozen or so Old Ones. Their oblong bodies were leaning against each other, many badly decomposed and rotted into hollowed husks like blackened cucumbers falling into themselves. Their appendages and eyestalks were nothing but dead, drooping worms. Many of the bodies had disintegrated down to wiry barrel frames that might have been some sort of primitive skeleton, but looked more like leathery networks of sinew and tendon.

Like some dead alien forest, is what Hayes found himself thinking. Some dead, mutated forest of distorted and cadaverous tree trunks that had grown into one another, sprouting narrow skeletal pipes and branching twigs, looping desiccated root systems and downs of snaking vines like threads of moonflax.

It was hard to get over the idea that they were lifeless things, ancient mummies far older than the ones Gates had brought in. These had decayed and mummified before the glaciers arrived making them positive relics. They were hideous in life, but maybe more so in death… shrunken and wrinkled and leathery, tangled in their own limbs. Alien zombies.

And they were not powerless, Hayes thought.

Not in the least.

Maybe their great age had something to do with it, but those pruned eyes dangling from corded stalks still seemed to glimmer and shine with a blasphemous vitality.

Enough.

They started again, moving as quickly as they could through that labyrinth that probably made perfect sense from above, but at ground level was positively insane. Sharkey kept pausing to look at things, growing increasingly agitated at the other two for their lack of scientific curiosity. The graveyard alone, she told them, would have kept legions of archaeologists and anthropologists busy for years and years. The Old Ones had reverence for their dead, they had no doubt developed complex funerary rites and death customs.

“So what?” Cutchen said.

She looked like she was going to either call his mother an unflattering name or kick his ass, but she just sighed and stalked off with Hayes in tow. At least until they were nearly out of that charnel grounds and then something else caught her interest. On an elevated platform there was a huge sarcophagus cut from some unknown black stone and highly-ornamented with carven vines and bizarre squid-like creatures, things like clusters of bubbles and countless staring eyes. At the head, there was a lavish five-pointed mound of some tarnished metal like platinum. Inside, there was an Old One held in a rippling shroud of ice. Though blackened with immense age, it had not rotted like the others.

“This one’s important,” Sharkey said. She tapped the mummy with her ice-axe. “I’ll bet it’s some kind of chief or maybe even one of the original colonists. Who can say? But I’ll bet it was preserved somehow for future generations.”

“Why is it laying flat?” Cutchen asked.

“Looks like it fell over,” Hayes said.

He was staring down at that regal monstrosity and hating it instinctively as he hated them all. Maybe this one was a king or a chief or one of the first to make the journey and just maybe it was the very architect of all life on earth, but he could not respect it. You could wrap a bloated, vile spider in gold ribbons and fancy lace and it still repulsed you. Still made you want to step on it. And a spider, when you came down to it, was much more attractive to the human mind than what was laying in that stylized box.

Hayes thought: Christ, look at that old ice and what it holds. Like every dark and nameless secret of antiquity is locked up in that frozen sarcophagus. All of mankind’s primal fears, cabalistic myths, and evil sorceries given flesh. The archetype that inspired every nightmare and twisted racial memory, every witch-tale and every legend of winged demons. All the awful, unthinkable things the race had bred and purged from the black cauldron of collective memory, all the obscene things it could not acknowledge nor dare admit to… it was here. This horror. The engineer of the race and of all races. And it had been waiting down here in the eon-old ice. Waiting and waiting, dead but dreaming, consciously forgotten but grimly remembered in the subconscious and dark lore of humankind. But all along, they were dreaming of us just as we dreamed of them… because they were us and we were them and now, dear God, millions upon millions of years later, they were waking up, they were rising to claim their children and their childrens’ intellect…

Thinking this and wanting to believe it was utter fantasy, but knowing it was dire and inescapable truth, Hayes felt like some savage standing before the grave of a fallen and cruel god. He had a mad desire to whip out his dick and piss on this thing. To show it his defiance that was innate and human and something he knew they had not foreseen developing in their carefully-manipulated progeny.

Enough.

They were stalling with all this and he knew it.

“Let’s go,” he said and meant it. “We’re not here for this and we all know it.”

So he took the lead and clambered over slabs and low walls, ignoring everything but that dead city rising above them. He got no arguments on this. Sharkey and Cutchen followed him and he figured they would have followed him just about anywhere at that moment.

“Oh, look,” Sharkey said, panning her light at the foot of some crumbled masonry.

It was Gates.

He was pressed into an alcove between shattered blocks of stone that had no doubt fallen from above. He was curled up in sort of a fetal position, knees to chin, his face white as new snow and contorted into a grimace of absolute horror. Blood had trickled from the rictus of his mouth. His eyes were spilled down his cheeks in gelatinous trails like squashed jellyfish.

It was horrible. Just like all the others.

But worse somehow, because you could almost feel the agonal convulsions that Gates had suffered before he died. There was no getting around the fact that he looked like he’d been literally scared to death. And that death had been a dark matter, mindless and perverse and ghastly. No man should have had to go like Gates did… alone and mad in that suffocating darkness, dying a crazy and hopeless death like a rat stuck in a drainpipe. Screaming as his eyes boiled to soup and splashed down his face. As his brain went to sauce and his soul was burnt to ash.

Gates had paid the final price for his curiosity.

But Hayes knew it was more than just scientific interest… Gates had been trying to unravel the mystery of the ages. He had been trying to put it all together so he could maybe save his own race. He was a hero. He was one of the greatest of great men.

Sharkey kneeled before him. She dug into his coat and found his field journal. “There’s a funny odor about him… not a death smell, something else. Sharp, acidic.”

Hayes had smelled it, too: a caustic, acrid stench like monkey urine.

The tenseness feeding between the three of them was electric and cutting. It lay in each of their bellies, a twisted knot of nausea.

“All right, all right, goddammit,” Hayes said, starting up into the city. “Let’s go see what did this, let’s go see what scared Gates to death.”

40

“No,” Cutchen said then, holding his lantern up. “Wait a minute now… what’s that over there?”

Hayes stepped down off some broken stones.

Sharkey was already over there, checking it out. Collapsible tables had been set out, half a dozen of them upon which were stone artifacts taken from the city, hammers and drills, cases of instruments, lanterns. There were piles of notebooks and a couple digital cameras. Microscopes. There was a crate full of rolled-up maps that turned out to be rubbings made from the walls inside… figures, glyphs, strange characters.

Cutchen grabbed a folding chair and sat down. There was a thermometer on the table. “It’s almost ten degrees in here. Balmy.”

Sharkey and Hayes looked around, found a flare pistol which she took and a twelve-gauge Remington pump that he took. They did not comment on these things. The men who had brought them down here had had their reasons and nobody dared question what those might have been.

Bottom line was, they felt better being armed.

“Look,” Hayes said. “A generator.”

It was. A Honda industrial job on a rolling cart. A spiderweb of power cords ran off of it, all of them leading up into the city itself. As Hayes followed them with his light he could see that there were cords hanging from the face of the city. There were several five-gallon cans of gasoline. He went to the generator. It had a 3800 watt capacity, so it could’ve lit up most of the entire city if you had enough light bulbs and judging from what he had seen, Gates and the boys certainly had enough of those.

“Will it work?” Sharkey asked.

“I think so.” Hayes checked the tank. It held ten gallons and was about half full. He took one of the cans and filled it up. Then he threw the circuit breaker and hit the electronic ignition. It roared to life immediately, finding a happy idle and sticking with it.

“Where’s the light?” Cutchen said.

“Just a minute. Let it warm up.” Hayes stood there, lighting a cigarette and waiting for the engine to push the coldness from itself. It didn’t take long. He turned the circuit breaker back on and suddenly, the cavern was bright.

“Damn,” Cutchen said. “That’s better.”

With all those bulbs netting the first thirty or so feet of the city, Hayes finally got a good look at that ancient structure. It was simply incredible. The sight of it literally sucked the breath from his lungs and the blood from his veins. That old, ugly familiarity was there, of course, the sense that these aged ruins were something long-hidden in the depths of all men’s minds. But looking up at it, canceled all that out. On TV, ancient cities always looked too neat, too tidy, too planned in their obsolescence, but not this one. It rose up incredibly high, yet sagging and leaning and crumbling away in too many places. Hayes could see that it went up at least two-hundred feet until it met the grotto’s domed roof… and even then, it simply disappeared into solid rock. As if the mountain had grown up around it and engulfed it through the ages. Such incredible antiquity was mind-boggling. But Gates had reiterated what Professor Dyer of the Pabodie Expedition had said: the ruins were at least 350 million years old and that was a conservative estimate.

These ruins were from an amazingly advanced pre-human civilization.

Hayes knew that, but the words had meant little to him until now.

Pre-human city. Pre-human intelligence.

“God, look at that will you?” Cutchen finally said. “You can… you can almost feel how ancient it is… right up your spine.”

Ancient? No, the sphinx and the Acropolis were ancient, this was primordial. This predated man’s oldest works by hundreds of millions of years. It was a dawn city. A nightmare exercise in diverging geometrical association, a relic from some depraved and evil elder world. It did not look so much like a city, but like some immense and derelict machine, some dreadful mechanism from a Medieval torture chamber. A profoundly synergistic and yet nonsensical device made of pistons and pipes, wires and cylinders, vents and cogs. Something rising and leaning, squat yet narrow and tall, diverging at impossible right angles to itself. The human mind was not prepared to look upon such a thing… it automatically sought an overall structural plan, a uniformity, and found nothing it could pull in and make sense of. This was a perverse and godless architecture born of minds reared in some multi-dimensional reality.

“Christ, it gives me a headache,” Sharkey said.

And that was very apt, for it did tax the brain… it was too busy, too profuse, too multitudinous in design. It was formed of arches and cubes, rectangular slabs set on their ends, a lunatic labyrinth of cones and pyramids, octagons and hexagons, spheres and towers, radiating spirals and bifurcating masts. Like the forking, tangled skeleton of some primal beast, some sideshow sea serpent tacked together out of dozens of unrelated skeletons into a single gangly whole, a mad bone sculpture. An insane and precarious armature that should have fallen, but didn’t. It balanced upon itself like some surreal experiment in abstract geometry and unearthly symmetry.

Hayes thought it looked impossibly random like something formed by nature, the hollowed remains of deep-sea organisms heaped upon one another… corals and sponges, anemones and sea cucumbers, crab carapaces and ghost pipes. Just an odd and conflicting collection of dead things that had boiled and rotted into a single mass, grown into one another and out of each other until there was no beginning and no true end. Standing back and taking it in, he was envisioning it as the black and glossy endoskeleton of some massive alien insect rising from the earth… a deranged biomechanical hybrid of girders and ribs, vertebrae and pelvic disks, conduits and hollow tubes held together by spiraling ladders of ligament. A chitinous and scaly ossuary, a jutting cyclopean honeycomb capped by rising narrow protrusions like the chimneys of a foundry or the smoker vents of hydrothermal ovens.

But even that wasn’t right, for as haphazard and conflicting as the city was, you could not get by the disturbing feeling that there was a purpose here, that the structure was highly mechanistic and practical to its owners, a symbiotic union of steel and flesh, rock and bone. It had an odd industrial look to it. Even the stone it was cut from was not smooth nor polished, but ribbed and knobby and oddly crystalline, set with saw-toothed ridges and jutting teeth and the threads of screws. Almost like there was some dire machinery inside attempting to burst through those bowing, scalloped walls.

To call it a city was an oversimplification.

For this was not a city as humans understood a city. No human mind could have dreamed of this and no human brain had the engineering skill to make it stand and not fall into itself. This was not a city as such, a place of homes and lives, this was harsh and hostile, utilitarian and machined, something brought forth by hopelessly cold and automated minds. An anthill.

A hive.

Hayes felt that just seeing it, just letting his eyes roam that obscene geometrical matrix, made him somehow less than human. It evaporated the sweet and fine milk of the human condition drop by drop. It was evil and unholy and sacrilegious. Words engendered by a weak, superstitious mind, but Hayes was proud of that mind. Because it made him human. He was warm and emotional, not a machine like the things that had reared this awful place.

“Just like Gates said, it seems to go for miles,” Cutchen pointed out.

There was no way to know just how far into the belly of the mountains the city reached. For as Gates said, it went on as far as the eye could see and as far as their lights could reach, though in the distance you could see that parts of it were covered by cave-ins and swallowed in frozen rivers of glacial ice.

A paleozoic megalopolis.

The sort of place that might have inspired the wild tales of mythical places like Thule and Hyperborea, Lemuria and the Mountains of the Moon. Mystical Commoriom and veiled Atlantis. This was the prototype of countless prehuman blasphemies such as the Nameless City and eldritch Kadath in the Cold Wastes beyond Leng. You could see plainly how it had been scarred and scraped by the movement of the glaciers, carried up and pressed down, ground between massive ice flows like corn meal.

“You don’t honestly expect us to go into that bone pile, do you?” Cutchen said in a dry, cracking voice. “I mean… c’mon, Jimmy, it doesn’t look safe. And, Jesus Christ, I’m not afraid to admit that it scares the shit out of me just looking at it.”

It scared Hayes, too.

Scared him in fundamental ways he was not even aware of. It offended him as it offended all men, whether savage or rational, and he had an overwhelming compulsion to come back here with all the dynamite he could fit in the SnoCat and bring that fucking mountain down right on top of it.

“It’s safe enough,” he said. “Gates and the others were crawling through it, so can we.”

“Bullshit. I don’t care what those fucking labcoat Johnnies were doing, I’m not going in there. That’s it. That’s all there goddamn well is to it.” He stood there, breathing hard, looking like he wanted to scream or cry. “C’mon, Jimmy, don’t do this to me… lookit that fucking thing, will ya? I’m having bad dreams just seeing it. But going in there… it’s like a tomb, like a big rotting casket with the lid thrown open… I… I’m sorry, Jimmy… I’m just not up to it.”

Hayes went over to him, clapped him on the shoulder. “Just wait out here for us. We shouldn’t be long. Keep an eye on that generator.”

“Hell, I can’t even change the oil in my goddamn car,” Cutchen said.

He stood there, hands on his hips, watching them scramble up shattered stone columns and through an oval opening, one of hundreds if not thousands set into the weathered face of that city.

“You two would really leave me alone out here, wouldn’t you?” they heard him call. “Boy, isn’t that just great? Assholes. Your both assholes.”

They were barely inside and Cutchen came stumbling in after them, calling them every name he could think of and some that made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Maybe the city did look like a casket, but at least inside it, he wouldn’t be alone with the bleak, antehuman memory of the place.

41

Inside, the city was no less amazing.

No less insane.

There were endless hexagonal mazes of corridors that seemed to lead into nothing but other corridors that branched to either side, above and below like jungle gym tangles of hollow pipes that had been welded at right angles to one another. Some were quadrilateral and others were triangularly obtuse. Circular passages began and ended with solid walls or sphere-shaped apartments. Rooms simply opened into other rooms like dozens of narrow cubes strung together or stacked atop one another. They were either massive and vault-like or cramped like the cells of monks or honeybees. Arched doorways were set halfway up fifteen foot walls. Sometimes they led into cylindrical channels that went on for hundreds of feet before narrowing to tiny, cubelike alcoves or sometimes they opened into gargantuan amphitheaters with madly curving walls that were set, sloping floor to fifty-foot ceiling, with ovoid cells. Some rooms had no ceilings, just immense shafts that led into a grainy fathomless blackness above and others had no floors, just narrow walkways spanning the great depths below. There was nothing that might have been called stairways, but now and again ribbed helixes rose to the floors above or far below.

The building plan was chaotic at the very least.

The floors were not necessarily distinct nor differentiated from one another. There was no first floor, second floor, third floor etc. The stories converged into one another, rooms and chambers dropping from above or rising up from below, tangled in lattices like diamond crystals.

Five minutes into it, the three of them were sweating and shaking and having trouble catching their breath. The marrow of that damnable city was claustrophobic, profuse, and intersecting. The angles were wildly exaggerated, roofs becoming floors and floors arching up into roofs that were walls. Chambers were never perfectly square but slightly off-kilter and set off-center. Corridors were never exactly linear, but convoluted and sloping, tall then squat and then enormous. There was something geometrically perverse about any brain that could make sense of such a thing without backing itself into some jagged, narrow corner and screaming itself insane. Moving through there was like navigating through the tangled, surreal gutters of a lunatic’s mind, looking for reason that did not exist… for reason here was swallowed by amorphous shadows, the shattered wreckage of paranoia as imagined by German expressionists.

They followed the electrical cords that had been attached to walls and strung over black depths below. Even so, it was not long before they had to rest. This place was not engineered for the ease of mobility of the human race. And moving through it was not only psychologically exhausting, it was physically fatiguing as well. Constantly climbing through those tomblike hollows, scuttling down threaded tunnels, and crawling over the litter and debris of collapsed partitions.

They finally paused amidst a line of rooms that were not rooms at all, but sunken chambers with translucent concave floors made of some transparent glass or plastic. If you rubbed very hard, you could clean the grit off the material just enough to make out structures lying far beneath.

“This is a fucking madhouse,” Cutchen said. “What the hell was wrong with Gates? This should have been pulled down. You know? Just fucking pulled down.”

Sharkey said, “It seems mad, but I think it’s all very carefully systematic if you happen to have a brain that can understand the system. I’m afraid our simple mammalian brains are not up to the task… maybe not for another couple million years anyway.”

“Can we just get out?” Cutchen said. “Christ, I’ve never felt like this before… half the time I’m so nervous and depressed I want to slit my wrists, the other half I feel like I could vomit my intestines out.”

“Just a little while longer, then we’ll call it quits,” Hayes said.

Cutchen rested his head on his knees, squeezing his eyes very tightly shut.

Hayes felt for the guy, for he knew exactly how he felt.

The way this place opened up a can of something creeping and ugly inside of you and shook it around. Tied your belly in knots and made your head ache and your eyes bulge. The human mind was designed to consider regularities, straight lines and simple angles, forms and shapes that were consistent with themselves. But this place… it was mathematically distorted, a fourth-dimensional madness. Like being inside some alien wasp hive. It was just too much.

After a brief rest, they moved on and suddenly discovered themselves in an immense courtyard set between rising blocks of that nightmare city. They moved between colossal seventy-foot walls and around towering spires that seemed to serve no earthly purpose. The courtyard was tiled and roofless, nothing above but empty blackness reaching to dizzying heights. Now and again there were domes like buildings set about, but the only way of getting into them was scaling the smooth walls and entering from apertures at the top. There were also high blank facades lacking egress that were set with jutting rectangles fifty and sixty feet above that looked like nothing but perches for rooks or hawks.

They had left the strings of lights behind and were moving with flashlight and lantern again. They came to another of those crazy domes and this one was honeycombed with oval passages that seemed to lead down.

“Give me the lantern, Cutchy,” Hayes said. “I’m going in there.”

Sharkey shook her head. “No, Jimmy… it’s too dangerous.”

He took the lantern. “I’m going. I’ll be careful.”

He chose a passage and entered it.

It was about five feet in diameter at the opening and he had to move downwards at a crouch. It was like being inside a funhouse twisty slide, just a hollowed tube that moved this way, then that, ever downward. But the walls and floor were set with tiny bumps so there was no chance of losing your footing or sliding away into darkness. Hayes kept going, his throat constricting and sweat beading his face. Finally, the passage opened into a series of massive rooms with hooded ceilings.

He stood there in that shrouded darkness, panning the lantern around. He instantly did not like the place. That terrible sense of deja-vu was haunting him again, clawing and worming at the pit of his mind.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “I remember this place, too, but why?”

He moved on, passing beneath archways and steering himself around accumulated heaps of detritus. He came into a room that seemed to be nothing but an ossuary, a collection of aged bones… skulls set into little cells in the walls, the skeletons of men and extinct animals fully articulated, great birds dangling from above with nothing seeming to hold them. The floor was a litter of bones as if most of the displays here — and there must have been thousands at one time — had collapsed through the ages, maybe from their own weight or seismic activity shaking them loose. It was tough going climbing over those heaped bones, the lantern casting flying and grotesque shadows, the air swimming with clots of dust. But it was necessary. For as much as this place disturbed him, he knew it was no simple natural history collection.

This was much more.

At the far end, there were cylindrical plastic cases that he had to scrape the grit off. Inside were more human skeletons… but most were small and hunched, not quite erect, the craniums set with great brow ridges that sloped ever backward to braincases much smaller than those of modern men. Some of those skulls had exaggerated canines and incisors, heavy jaws. None of them were anatomically the same. These were the skeletons of manlike apes and quasi-human types — Afropithecus and Australopithecus — and their proto-primate ancestors and primitive forms of anthropoids, homo erectus and Neanderthal man, and something like an archaic form of homo sapien.

Hayes scraped the gunk from a dozen of those cylinders, but there must have been hundreds.

You know what this is, don’t you? he thought. You know what kind of awful, gruesome place this.

And he did.

The very idea of what he was seeing and feeling and thinking and remembering made the sap of his race run cold and poisoned.

In the next room, more skulls and more bones.

They were all carefully arranged on tables and hung from the walls, set into recesses… they were all human or proto-human and they had to span millions of years. A paleoanthropologist’s wonderland. But as Hayes examined many of the skulls, they fell apart like delicate crockery, but he did notice that a great many of them had what appeared to be holes in their craniums that had either been drilled into them or burned through. There were several tables upon which the articulated skeletons of prehistoric men had been strapped down with what appeared to be some sort of plastic wire… and the fact that they had been bound so, made Hayes think that they had not been skeletons when they were brought in here.

The next of those gigantic vaults was piled floor to ceiling with more plastic tubes, but these were much smaller like laboratory vats. Once he’d used his knife to scrape them clean, Hayes could see pale, fleshy things floating in solidified serum like flies trapped in amber. They were all anatomical specimens… glands and muscles, ligaments and spinal columns, brains and sexual organs, eyes drifting like olives in ancient plasma and hundreds of things Hayes simply could not identify.

The next room held more tables made of some unknown quartz-like mineral, perhaps fifty or sixty of them. There were weird spirals of discolored plastic tubing and spidery nets of hoses and conduits leading from spheres overhead that must have been some sort of biomedical machinery. There were racks of instruments… at least what he thought were instruments… some were made of a transparent glassy material that might have been some alien mineral. There were great assemblages of these things… hooks and blades and probes and others that were flat and hollow like magician’s wands. Hundreds of varieties and everywhere, those spiraling tubes and things sprouting from the walls like fiber optic threads. Great convex mirrors and plate-like lenses set upon tripods. There were other things that had gone to dust and wreckage and a great part of the room had been buried in a cave-in.

Another massive chamber led off from it, but debris blocked the doorway. Hayes climbed up it and could see through a three-inch slit at the top of the door that it was cavernous inside and set with dusty helixes of alien machinery, things that looked like black, fibrous skeletons with thousands of appendages and reaching whip-like protrusions. Other things like giant gray oblong blocks, the faces of which were profuse with biomechanical knobs and ribs and scaled ridges, fluted poles and serpentine coils and interlocking disks. All of them were set with recesses that were shaped like human beings into which subjects could be placed. There were other tables and the framework of some huge glass wheel that seemed to be made of mirrors and dusty lenses. And coming from overhead was a triple cylinder like that of a compound microscope, except where the optical mechanisms would have been there were a protruding series of glass blades… some short and serrated, others long and forked like snake tongues, and still others composed of thousands of tiny shards each of a different shape and texture. There were other machines in there that left Hayes cold and gasping, but he could look no more.

This entire place was some arcane biomedical laboratory and he knew it.

The sort of place and the level of specialized technology that man would not be able to guess at for ten-thousand generations.

Hayes slid down the heap of debris, pressing his hands to his head, trying to shut out the memories of this place… the torment and the torture, the cutting and burning and severing, the draining of fluids and the samples of blood, marrow, and brain tissue extracted. The graftings and injections and metabolic manipulation.

Yes, this is where it all happened.

This was where the true origin of species was to be found.

This was the factory of the helix and the primal white jelly Lind had raved about. This was where the evolution of terrestrial life was studied and cataloged by extraterrestrial minds. This was the place that man was born and modified. This is where Hayes’ own ancestors were bagged and tagged and classified, stuck on pins like rare insects, bottled and dissected. Yes, throughout prehistory, possibly every fifty thousand years or so, populations of men and the anthropoids that would become men, were scooped up, brought down into this hideous catacomb and altered, enhanced via microsurgery and vivisection, eugenics and genetic engineering, forced mutation and special adaptation, careful and meticulous modification at the atomic and molecular levels. And all with one ultimate ambition: to bring forth an intelligence that the Old Ones could harvest.

Hayes laid there, at the bottom of that debris heap, his mind racing in a thousand different directions leaving him confused and numb and maybe even slightly insane. There was too much coming at him, way too much. Seeing his origins and knowing it all to be horribly true, he felt… artificial, synthetic. Not a man at all, but cold plastic protoplasm squeezed and worked into the shape of a man. He felt that his soul had withered, crumbled, gone to ash. He lay there, staring, in that tenebrous, diabolic workshop, feeling the ghosts of his ancestors haunting him, invading his mind and screaming in his face.

He was emptied out now. Used up and gutted, nothing inside but bones and blood and a heart that beat with a hollow cadence. And outside, just a reflection of a man, a grim set of mouth and eyes dead as grimy pennies staring up at you from a dirty gutter.

All those voices and shrill cries, misty race memory and screeching long-dead minds finally boiled down into a flux of gray, running mud. And a single voice spoke from the bottom of his mind: Isn’t revelation something, Jimmy? All these years people were wondering who they were and what they were and where they came from and what their destiny might be and you were one of them… but now you know the truth and there’s no joy in knowing, is there? There’s only madness and horror. The collective consciousness of the human race is not ready for any of this. Men and women are still primarily savages, superstitious gourd-rattling, spell-casting yahoos… and the knowledge of this will utterly destroy them, won’t it? That all that we are and ever can be can be reduced to an equation, a test tube, chemicals and atoms worked by forbidding alien hands, an ambitious experiment in molecular biology. This will kill the race. This will crush our simple, pagan minds and leave nothing behind. All those years creationists and evolutionists have been battling it out and now, it turns, they’re both wrong and they’re both right… life can arise just about anywhere from a fixed set of variables and there is such a thing as the Creator. Only those variables were manipulated by cold and noxious minds and the Creator is something alien and grisly from some invidious, cosmic gutter out of space and out of time.

Kind of funny, ain’t it?

Life probably would have happened here without them, but men probably wouldn’t have. Not as we understand them. And what a serene and peaceful place this would have been. Eden. Only, Jimmy, you know who that slithering serpent was and what it brought to being: your race.

Hayes scrambled to his feet, started running, half out of his mind. He was whimpering and shaking and his heart was palpitating. His mind was strewn with cobwebs. He fled drunkenly from room to room, falling and getting up, tipping over skeletons and rawboned machinery and things that were both and neither. Finally vaulting over a table heaped with a pyramid of subhuman skulls and picking his way through those ancient remains like a rat through a bone pile.

And then there was the tunnel and he was climbing, breathing hard and crying out, feeling those dire and primal memories scratching their way up behind him. Then he fell out at Sharkey’s feet.

She went to him, holding him in her arms, tears in her eyes as she soothed him and calmed him and slowly, that contorted grimace left his face and his eyes stopped staring sightlessly.

“Christ, Jimmy,” Cutchen said. “What did you see down there? What in Christ did you see?”

So he told them.

42

Thirty minutes later, Hayes came to accept a very disturbing truth: they were lost. Oh, the generator was still running out there and the lights were still glowing, but regardless of what path they took, they couldn’t seem to get near them. There was a passage somewhere that would lead them back into the city proper and out of these primeval relics. Problem was, they couldn’t find it.

“You know what,” Cutchen said when Hayes admitted he was lost, “I’ve put up with a lot of shit. I’ve helped you two do things I should never have fucking gotten involved in. And now here we are… this is bullshit. You two do whatever in the fuck you want, but I’m getting out. I’m not waiting for you, Jimmy, to get us more lost. I’ve had it.”

If they had an argument to stay him, they couldn’t remember what is was.

They stood there stupidly with their flashlights as Cutchen stomped away, his lantern light bobbing and weaving, shining off ice crystals set into the masonry.

“We can’t let him go, Jimmy,” Sharkey said.

“No, just give him a minute or two. He’ll settle down. If not, I’ll cold-cock him and drag him behind us.”

It was meant as a joke, but humor was lost in this place and particularly with what they had seen and experienced thus far. Hayes tucked his flashlight into the pocket of his parka and kissed Sharkey hard. She responded, their tongues tasting each other and remembering each other and wanting this to last.

Finally Sharkey broke it off. “What’s this all about?”

“Just an urge.”

“An urge?”

“Yeah… I guess I needed to remind myself I was still human.”

She smiled. “We’ll discuss it later. What about Cutchy?”

“We better go get him—”

There was a sudden rending cry that they first took to be a scream. But it wasn’t a scream, it was just Cutchen yelling to them, angry and hysterical and just plain pissed-off.

They ran along behind the wall he’d disappeared around, sighting his light in the distance. They dodged around some towering rectangles and a broken dome, some piled debris. Cutchen was there, standing in a great open courtyard that must have been easily two hundred yards in circumference, flanked on all sides by the city itself which rose up above, overhanging and gradually coming together somewhere overhead. With his flashlight, Hayes could see a narrow passage up there maybe fifty feet across. But right before Cutchen, there was circular hole cut into the stone that was three times that big.

Cutchen held the lantern over the rim and the light was gradually swallowed up by dusty darkness.

“We didn’t come this way,” Hayes said. “I never saw this before.”

“Let’s backtrack,” Sharkey suggested. “Make for those lights.”

Hayes could see them back there. They backlit the honeycombed openings set in that terraced architectural monstrosity like ghost lights, made the city look even more eerie and haunted than it already was.

They turned and Hayes thought he heard something… that scratching sound again, but it was gone before anyone else picked up on it. He didn’t bother mentioning it.

Because right then, the lights from the generator dimmed and went out completely.

The blackness was absolute. Like being nailed shut in a casket.

“Oh, shit,” Sharkey said, bumping right into Hayes.

And then the ground beneath them began to shudder with a weird rhythmic vibration that they could feel coming right up through their boots. There was a deep and jarring reverberation that seemed to come from the bowels of the city itself as if some titanic alien machine had been switched on and was gearing up with pounding cycles and thrumming vibrations. Hayes had felt this before and always just before or during one of those hauntings… but this was bigger, this was huge and loud and violent. The vibrations almost knocked them off their feet. They had trouble standing or staying in one place. Flashlight beams were bobbing madly. The city was shaking like it was riding a seismic wave… parts of it falling and crashing, flaking away like dead skin.

Cutchen’s lantern light framed three white and desperate faces, three sets of staring, terror-filled eyes.

The city was in motion, thumping and rattling and cracking apart. Sharp crackling sounds and metallic grinding noises were echoing up out of the pit, getting louder and louder. The air seemed heavy and busy, whipped into a whirlwind by the intrusion of surging energy. Bits of rock and crystals of ice were pelting into Hayes and the others as they clung to one another. There was a low humming coming up out of the pit now, weird squealing noises and thumps, mad scratchings and the sound of radio static rising and falling in waves.

Cutchen screamed and broke away, dropping his lantern. His face in Hayes’ light was rigid and set, lips pulled back from bared and clenched teeth. Drool was hanging from his mouth. His eyes were wide and savage. He looked like he suddenly had gone insane. “Coming, coming, coming,” he cried over the volume of the city. “They’re coming, they’re all coming… the swarm is coming out of the sky… no hide there, no hide there… seek you out… they find you… they find your mind and they find your thoughts… they come… oh, the buzzing, the buzzing, the buzzing, the coming of the swarm… the ancient hive… the swarm that fills the sky…”

He let out another scream, hands pressed to his ears. He was drooling and delusional and mad, running this way and then that, falling to his hands and knees and creeping like a mouse. Then rising up and hopping along, spinning around, arms swinging limp at his sides like an ape. He made growling sounds, then grunts and weird keening noises.

Hayes was on his ass from the palpitations of the city, cracks fanning out under his legs. But he was seeing Cutchen and knowing what he was feeling, catching momentary glimpses of what he was seeing. Dear God, he’s living it, he’s living the terror of it, Hayes was thinking, trying to hold onto Sharkey. This place has soaked up so much terror and pain and madness in its existence from so many manic, fevered minds that it can no longer hold it all.

And that’s what was happening to Cutchen.

Those memories… not the memories of aliens, but the memories of humans… were bleeding out and filling him and he was remembering what they remembered, living through them as them. Yes, he was recalling an ancient ritual practiced by the Old Ones when they filled the skies in swarms of winged devils and collected specimens and sometimes entire populations to be brought here for experimentation and modification. He was a primitive man and then an ape and then something between and something not even remotely human, knowing the terror of all species for the swarm, the invading swarm of aliens.

Hopping about madly and gnashing his teeth, Cutchen threw himself over the edge of the pit.

Somebody screamed.

Maybe it was Hayes and maybe it was Sharkey and maybe it was both of them. But then as if it had received a sacrifice, the pit seemed to come alive with a flurry of vibrations and squeals and electric cracklings. And then it began to glow with a rising luminous mist. Whatever it was, a field of phosphorescent energy or just electrified mist, it was boiling up out of the pit like steam from a witch’s cauldron. Snaking tendrils and white ropes of it overflowed the lip of the pit and spread over the floor in a shimmering ground mist. Hayes could feel it moving over his legs and arms, swirling and consuming, making his skin crawl like he’d been dipped into an anthill. It was alive and vital and kinetic, like some sentient lifeforce that had come to devour them.

He couldn’t seem to move and neither could Sharkey.

And then from far below, but getting closer, rising on that plexus of supercharged mist, there came the sound they had heard earlier: the mad and discordant piping, the frenzied voices of the Old Ones echoing up from the pit. It billowed up, unfolding, becoming a cacophonous shrill whining that sounded more like thousands of droning cicadas than the melodic piping he could remember. It grew louder and louder, a screeching reedy fluting of perhaps hundreds of those things, the rising swarm. They were coming up from beneath, bleating and whistling with squeaking off-key stridulations, a lunatic susurration that rose to an ear-splitting volume like having your head stuck in a hive of hornets.

They were coming, Hayes knew.

The swarm.

Yes, from deep below through nighted and moldering passageways they were coming, just as they had come in those ancient days to reap and collect, to gather specimens for their morbid experiments. But this time they were not coming from the sky, but moving along subterranean networks that probably connected with Lake Vordog under the ice cap.

The spell was broken.

Hayes and Sharkey fought to their feet and that weird fog came up to their waists, perfectly white and shining. And just behind them there came a sound, a single high-pitched squeal of that macabre piping like bellows and pan flutes blown with hurricane winds. They saw one of the things there, one of the Old Ones, those red eyes high and wide on their fleshy stalks, its wings spread and its appendages scratching together.

Then there was another and another.

But they were not real… they were ghosts.

Reflections.

Memories loosed from that tombyard below by the influx of human psychic energy and maybe the minds of those coming from below. They dipped and drifted, piping and flapping their wings, trailing wisps of white vapor, ethereal things, insubstantial but lurid and frightening, those eyestalks writhing like flaccid white worms. They bled from the hollows of the city like glowing serpents from burrows, passing through each other and through Hayes and Sharkey in cold breaths. Harmless now as will-of-the-wisps.

Hayes refused to be scared of them, scared of things dead millions of years.

He took Sharkey by the hand and she grabbed Cutchen’s lantern and they began moving away from the pit and its attendant phantoms. The city was haunted, it was rife with spirits and drifting spectral intelligences that were only dangerous if you made them so, if you let those bleak minds touch your own, power themselves on your fears and aimless psychic energy. But if that happened, there was enough undirected, potential energy lying in wait to rip a hole in your mind and gut the world.

Hayes and Sharkey would not empower those decayed intellects. They simply refused.

But then there was something coming. Something else.

And it was no ghost.

Hayes felt something heavy glide over his head, felt the wind it created and the evil that exuded from it in a toxic sap.

An Old One. An elder thing.

Not dead and transparent, but tall and full and resilient. In the lantern light, its flesh was a bright, oily gray and its eyes were like shining rubies. Its wings were spread, great membranous kites seeking wind and it flapped them in a blur of motion, creating a high, horrible buzzing sound that rose up and mated with the whining drone of its piping, becoming a solid wall of noise that stripped your nerves raw. It stood atop a shattered pillar, clinging with those coiling and tentacular legs. The branching appendages at its breast scraped against each other like roofing nails.

Yes, it was alive, maybe eight feet in height, grotesque and alien and oddly regal as it towered over Hayes. Its piping fell to a series of chirping squeaks and squeals like it was speaking and it probably was. There was something questioning about those noises, but Hayes could only stand there like a mindless savage staring up at his messiah. A revolting, chemical stink of formalin wafted off it, a stench of pickled things and things white and puckered floating in laboratory jars.

Hayes felt its mind touch his own in a cold invasion.

The flashlight fell from his hands, then the shotgun.

The way it looked at him was devastating… it seemed to take him apart at some basal level. Things like defiance and free will writhed briefly in the glaring crimson suns of its eyes, then curled up brown and withered to fragments. There was an unquestioning superiority about the creature. No anger or rage or simple hatred, for such things were by-products of humanity and not within its natural rhythms. It looked down upon Hayes with a neutral passivity, maybe slightly amused even or playfully annoyed the way an owner will look down upon a beloved puppy that has shit on the carpet. Yes, I’ve come now, master is here, little one. You’ve made a mess of things, haven’t you? No matter, I’ll sweep it up, you precocious and empty-headed little beast. Maybe that’s how it was seeing him. As something stupid and messy and foolish that needed a higher guidance, a taste of discipline to set it right. That’s what Hayes was feeling in his head, the sense that this thing thought he and his kind had shit all over the world, but that was at an end now for daddy was here and he would soon set things to right. We made you what you are and as we made you, little one, we can un-make you.

And that was it.

Those were the thoughts that blossomed in the whistling vacuum of Hayes’ mind. That this horror saw itself as a parent looking down at a child… not hate there, just a touch of disappointment.

It was in his head now, easily mastering his thoughts, picking through his memories and emotions and subconscious urges almost by accident. Their minds were so dominating and supreme, they did this almost as an afterthought. Like everything else with them, a mind, a psyche, was just something else to be dissected and rendered down to its base anatomy.

Hayes felt something building in him.

Maybe the creature truly did not dislike him, but it also held no warm thoughts for him or his race, either. It was alien and cold and arrogant. Hayes was warm and weak and idiotic. But there was something in him they had not counted on and that something bubbled up from his core and he charged the Old One with murder in his eyes.

He surprised the old master.

It could not comprehend such out and out rebellion, for revolt against their makers was not something they programmed into the human animal. And as such, it was taken by surprise. Shouting a rebel yell, Hayes dove at it, actually grabbed its wavering stick-like appendages in his gloved hands and it was like touching a high-power line or a white-hot bar of smoldering steel. He was instantly knocked on his ass, his gloves melted and smoking.

But the creature had recoiled from him, maybe out of shock or fear. Yes, just like old Doc Frankenstein had recoiled from that shambling monstrosity he created. This thing was appalled by Hayes. He was white and bloated, a hairy and gas-filled fungus… symmetrically and anatomically obscene, a disgusting lower order. He had no love for Hayes no more than a scientist has a love for a large spider he toys with… but when that spider revolts, it must be crushed as a lesson.

Hayes felt all his hatred drain away.

The Old One was in charge again as must be. Its brilliant and globular red eyes stood stiffly erect at the end of their stalks. The prismatic cilia atop its starfish-shaped head glowed a feral purple, then orange, and then the same color as its eyes. It was pissed. It reached out and took Hayes, a wave of irresistible force slamming into his mind. His eyes went wide and his mouth ripped open in a scream as it took his brain, twisted it in its hands and began to squeeze the juice from it.

And then there was an explosion.

A gout of sparks and fire burst just below the thing’s head and it fell back, flapping its wings, making a high and keening sound that was either pain or terror. Sharkey had fired her flare gun at it point blank.

It was enough.

Hayes found the shotgun and brought it up.

And just as he felt a hot wave of searing energy come barreling from the thing’s mind, he pulled the trigger and the gun boomed. The buckshot struck the thing right in the head, shattering its eyestalks and eyeballs into a splatter of mucilage. It screamed and it squealed, rising up on those fanning wings and disappearing into the darkness, wailing in torment.

Yes, this is how the dog bites the hand that feeds, you prick, Hayes thought at it. You may have owned us once. You may have held our squirming destiny in your paws, but no more. Not now.

As if in answer to the creature’s agony, the swarm from below began to shrill with a screeching decibel that almost blew Hayes’ eardrums out.

Or was it from below?

Because standing there, leaning against Sharkey, he could see that high above the pit, up in that unfathomed blackness there were dozens of Old Ones drifting about, but looking distorted as if through a bad TV monitor.

“It’s not real, Jimmy!” Sharkey shouted. “It’s not at all real!”

And it wasn’t.

What they were seeing up there was a transmission of sorts. Like looking through a window into a distant room or peering through the looking glass into the crawling madness on the other side. Up there, those images were blurred and fluttering, a vision of some unknown and nameless dead-end of space that was populated by the Old Ones, maybe their home system and maybe some anti-world caught in-between. Another dimension, another reality, some pestilent graveyard beyond the bleeding rim of the universe. Only a glistening and transparent bubble separated the material of this dimension from that godless other.

But it must have been more than a bubble, for it was clear that they were not coming through. Just hanging there, circling that window like moths attracted by light. And Hayes knew they could see him, feel him there. Just as he knew they wanted through, that they needed through, but they were trapped, unable to swing open the door.

There were thousands of them there, hundreds of thousands, millions. They filled that vaporous window and the charnel depths beyond, a raging and droning hive trying to force their way through to consume and devour, to drain the minds of men dry, to turn the green hills into one immense alien hive. Hayes could feel them, even across those infinite distances, those trans-galactic gulfs of limitless space… he could feel their chewing, voracious appetites needing to gorge themselves on the latent psychic energies of mankind. For they needed what the human race had. But the barrier held them at bay and even those withering, ravenous minds could not tear through it… at least not by themselves.

So they gathered in a writhing, industrious mass, a living and boiling incarnate cloud of sibilance, an alien infestation. A million piping voices built up, a clangorous explosion of noise like scratching metal and broken glass and scraping forks.

If they got through, they’d leech the collective mind of humanity dry in a matter of days. Such a thing could not be allowed. It would be hideous beyond imagination.

And just as Hayes thought that this, the horde waiting on the other side, was the most horrible thing the human mind could conceive of, it got suddenly worse. For that hive began to part and something came oozing and worming from out of that entombed, cryptic blackness… a roiling atomic putrescence, a living nuclear chaos, a surging and verminous plasma that was gigantic and alive and crystalline. Yes, an extra-dimensional polychromatic abomination that filled space and filled the mind and sucked the marrow from the souls of men even as it burned their flesh to cinders. It was surging forward, its crystal anatomy flickering and pulsing with colors and brilliance and liquid fire.

Seeing it made Hayes’ stomach roll in queasy, peristaltic waves. If such loathsome and wicked beings as the Old Ones could possibly have a god, this was it. The ultimate horror. Hayes had to look away because this thing was burning a hole through his head. It was malignant and noxious and sinister, the enemy of all living things with any purity in their souls. Its mind was a smoldering reactor and its flesh was not flesh but light and smoke and melting crystals of filth, a crawling fourth-dimensional helix of radioactive plasma. This was the crystallized devil, the incandescent pestilence that crept in the dark and twisted corridors between the spaces men understood, the deranged color out of space that Lind had raved about.

This was it.

The Color Out of Space.

And if the Old Ones ever got through in numbers, that wasting cancer would come with them and it wouldn’t be just the earth in jeopardy and the minds of men, because that thing, that sentient cosmic virus, would chew a hole through time and space and matter, yanking the guts out of the universe in moist, noisome coils and feeding on them.

Hayes was understanding a lot of things finally.

He took hold of Sharkey’s hand and together they ran from it all, because human eyes were never intended to look upon these things. And as they ran, as their minds got out of range of that dimensional window or mirror or whatever in Christ it was, the image of that terrible place faded and went to static and then darkness. They both saw it go blank like a TV that had been shut off and they both knew that it had been powered by their minds and that made them think things they did not have time to properly consider.

For even though that cosmic TV had been shut off, that insane piping was still rising, reaching fever-pitch, a jarring and disharmonic storm of noise that was like hot needles puncturing their ears. And there was no doubt why, because the Old Ones, the hive from down in the lake were rising up out of the mouth of the pit in a chirring, buzzing cloud like giant palmetto bugs with great whirring wings, that dissonant and vociferous piping sharp as razors. They were gliding and dipping, gathering and dispersing, filling the city as they had millions of years before. The hive. The colony. Like a swarm of locusts they were coming to strip and rend and eat, coming to collect two more minds.

This is the swarm, Hayes thought, the memory of this is what reverted Cutchen to a frightened beast. The sound, the sight, the smell of them flocking like nightmare birds.

But there was no more time to think.

They were running, trying to find their way by flashlight and instinct and it seemed an impossible thing. There was no time to consider where they were going or what they would do when they got there. They passed between those cyclopean walls and dozens of the Old Ones gathered atop them like raptors readying to feed. Each time those things got close, Hayes and Sharkey put their lights on them and they scattered. At first Hayes thought it was some rhythmic pattern of flight they were employing, collecting in profuse throngs then scattering away in buzzing pairs. But that wasn’t it at all.

The Old One Sharkey had pegged with the flare gun was not afraid of the heat so much, but the light. Maybe their ancestors had walked by the light of day, but these evolved versions were strictly nocturnal and had been for countless millions of years. Even when the swarm came to collect specimens in those ancient days, it came in the dead of night filtering up from holes in the earth and the sleeping tangles of their cities, probably up through the ice cap, too. And this particular swarm had been living down in that dark lake for eons.

As Hayes and Sharkey entered the city proper, the Old Ones were done playing, they descended in a droning mob, piping and squealing. Hayes took the flare gun from Sharkey, loaded it, and fired a flare into those seething masses. It exploded into a blazing red ball, throwing orange and red plumes of flame. And the Old Ones scattered immediately.

Then Hayes knew what had to be done.

He and Sharkey moved through the city at a breakneck pace, letting their instinct guide them through those cubes and cylinders and tubes and within twenty minutes they came to one of the honeycombed openings. They were ten feet off the ground and much farther down than where they entered. But close enough. They jumped down, panting and sweating, their lungs aching. They scrambled over to the generator and Hayes kicked into life. The face of the city erupted with light and brilliance that sent the Old Ones scurrying and buzzing back into the shadows.

This was it.

This was their chance.

With the grotto lit… or their part of it… it was easy enough to make a run back to the archway. They did so, vaulting debris and slipping around stalagmites and climbing over rocks. When they got inside the archway, Hayes tripped and went flat on his face. And if he hadn’t, they would not have seen. His light went spinning, revealing the dark corners of the arch they had not originally noticed.

“What is that stuff?” Sharkey asked.

Hayes didn’t answer, not right away. What he was seeing were a series of thin plastic tubes wrapped around rocks and the frame of the arch itself. It was detcord hooked to electric blasting caps and their had to be seventy or eighty feet of it. Enough to cause a massive explosion.

That’s why the remote control detonator was up in the SnoCat. Somebody was planning on sealing this place off for an eternity. Gates. Must have been Gates.

“Don’t touch it,” Hayes warned Sharkey. “That’s detcord… C-8 plastic explosive shaped into a cord.”

“The detonator…”

“You got it.”

The lights were holding the swarm at bay, but they wouldn’t for long. Already Hayes could feel those minds out there collecting themselves, gathering their energies, charging their batteries as it were. And when they turned that force at the generator…

Hayes and Sharkey started up the steps.

They moved as fast as they could, running and climbing, falling down and getting back up again until they found the original passage. Behind them, echoing and reverberating, came that piping. It was building now. Angry and resolute and directed.

Hayes and Sharkey found the rope ladder, climbed up out of the chasm into the subzero polar night. The storm had passed and there were stars out above. Auroras were flickering and expanding in swaths of cold white light over the mountain peaks.

“Get that ’Cat warmed up!” Hayes called to Sharkey as he ran through Gates’ deserted encampment.

He ran one way and she ran the other.

He palmed the detonator from Gates’ SnoCat and climbed the slope to his own. Sharkey had it running. He climbed into the warming cab and brought the ’Cat around so its nose was pointing back down the drifted ice road. Then he hit the firing button on the detonator.

At first there was nothing and he thought it hadn’t worked or they were out of range, but then it came: a great rumbling from below that set-up a chain reaction of destruction down there. The ground shook and the hills trembled and Gates’ camp suddenly disappeared into a smoking crevice.

That’s all there was to it.

“Drive,” Sharkey said.

Hayes did.

43

On the way back, Sharkey read Gates’ field journal, breezing through things she knew. She said nothing for a long time and Hayes just drove. He couldn’t think of a single intelligent thing to say after what they’d been through. Nothing. He couldn’t even work up the strength to mourn Cutchen. Poor, goddamn Cutchen.

Finally, thirty minutes later, Sharkey said, “Gates had some interesting theories here concerning what this is all about. You up to hearing them?”

He reached over and held her hand. “I’m up to it.”

“According to Gates, there’s a method to the madness of the Old Ones. They’re harvesting minds in a very selective pattern. Some will be harvested to be used, but most… most of us will be culled, drained dry, and purged.” She clicked off her flashlight and closed Gates’ notebook. “They’ve waited a long time, Jimmy, for their seeds to bear fruit. Again, according to Gates, they’ll seek minds much like their own —cold, militaristic intellects that they can easily take hold of, brains that are ready to be awakened and, in some ways, are already awake, receptive. These will be the cells by which they’ll contaminate and conquer the entire race… reaching out and infecting us mind by mind by mind, spreading out like a plague and waking up those buried imperatives they planted in us so very long ago until we’re essentially a hive of bees or wasps, a colony with a single relentless inhuman intelligence, one that can be bent to their will, harvested, and used for their grand plan.”

Hayes lit a cigarette. “Which is?”

“Gates is a little vague on that.”

“So they don’t really want all our minds, just certain ones?”

“Yes. They will infect us all, then purge off those that are what they might consider mutants… defiant wills, individualistic minds. They cannot allow such disease germs in the greater whole. But even those that are purged, killed off… their psychic energies will be reaped.”

“Jesus,” Hayes said. “They develop us only to harvest. Like farmers. We’re nothing but a crop for them.”

Hayes was remembering what Gates had said when they chatted with him. He could see it in his mind now: I believe they have seeded hundreds of worlds in the galaxy with life and directed the evolution of that life they have an agenda and I believe it is the subjugation of the races they developed…

Sure, the great cosmic farmers spreading out star by star, selecting suitable worlds to be colonized and seeded. Waiting millions of years means nothing to them. For in the end, they always possess the races they engineer and the limitless power of their intellects.

“Gates believed that in every population there were what he refers to as Type-A personalities… dutiful, methodical, more machine than man. Minds much like their own. People who place duty and allegiance to a higher cause above all else. And particularly such trifling, human things as love, family, individuality—”

“LaHune,” Hayes said, his heart sinking like a brick.

“Yes, exactly. Minds like his may be accidental, but probably not. A small minority the Old Ones engineered in advance to be used like viruses with which to contaminate us all. The end result will be… well, I think you can guess.”

“A world filled with LaHunes.” Hayes looked like he needed to be sick. He pulled off his cigarette, feeling angry and nauseated. “None of us human… just cold and brainwashed. Worker ants, drones.”

Sharkey nodded. “Yes, but far, far worse, Jimmy. LaHune times ten, LaHune squared. LaHune sucked dry of even his most basal human characteristics… automatons with a single directed mind that those aliens can lord over.” She paused, slapping the notebook against her knee. “But to what end? I don’t know.”

But Hayes thought he did.

At least one or two of the reasons, though he suspected there were many of them. They had set a blueprint into motion on this planet as they had probably done on hundreds of others. They sent out colonists that would drift from star to star, planet to planet, seeding them for future harvest just as Gates thought. This would take billions of years but, ultimately, that wouldn’t matter to creatures like them that were potentially immortal anyway. And the end result was to establish thousands of outposts, a network of dominance. Using those minds they had engineered, they would have unlimited psychic energy to wield. The sort of energy that was far beyond such simple things as nuclear fusion, it was the very electricity and milk of creation itself.

Oh, it was very simple when you thought about it.

They had known it would work because they had been doing it for trillions of years. They knew how it would happen. All along, they’d known the human race would multiply and spread over the earth. That our engineered neurophysiology would make that quite simple, that we would reason our way out of darkness just as they had. They knew we would over-populate into the billions and that when our numbers reached critical mass we would find them again and they would be waiting, waiting to harness what we had… the limitless, pure kinetic psychic force of the human mind. They would harvest it. They would unite us into a single devastating mind. A new mind, a fresh hive, not ancient and jaded like theirs, but fresh and unborn and indestructible, eternal and infinite and immortal. They would direct the cosmic purity of our thoughts and those thoughts would be energy and matter and focus. They would punch a hole through the dark spaces between the stars and bring their race here, the legions, the swarms that would fill the seas and cover the lands and darken the skies and in doing so, would suck humanity dry.

Organic technology. A pure and unmechanistic science.

Yes, we were the ultimate tool, the technology that would summon them and destroy us. And that’s what it was all about. Those colonists spreading out, seeding and manipulating, bringing forth a great intelligence that could be absorbed and directed to open doorways between distant gulfs of space. When their plan reached fruition, there would be no million-year migrations, but a simple jump through wormholes tunneled with pure psychic force. They would have the universe, star by star.

It would take forever, but they were patient.

But when they brought the real swarm through, they would also bring that cremating atomic pestilence, the Color Out of Space. That extradimensional horror which curved space and dissolved matter as it slithered along, subverting time and reality and suckling the blood of the cosmos itself. Hayes couldn’t pretend to know what it really was, but if the Old Ones could conceivably have a devil, then this was it.

And they were devil-worshippers.

Hayes told Sharkey about this and she agreed with him.

“Doesn’t this fucking thing go any faster?” she finally said.

44

Kharkhov Station.

It came at you out of the whipping, black polar night like some football stadium in the dead center of that glacial white nothingness… a sudden oasis of lights and machinery and civilization. Targa House and the meteorology dome. The power station and the drilling tower. Observatories and storage garages. Most of it connected by a webbing of conduits and flagged pathways and security lights. All of it capped by antennas and wind turbines and radar dishes. Outbuildings and huts scattered in all directions. And, off to the far left, the drifted-over runway that would bring the planes come spring. A self-contained community locked down in this eternal deep freeze. And as far as outside help went, it might as well have been sitting dead center of the Martian desert. Because if you were thinking evacuation or rescue, you’d get it about as fast as you would have on the red planet.

He brought the SnoCat in slow, happy to have made it back and, yet, haunted by what he was seeing before him as if it wasn’t an Antarctic research station, but some forbidden burial ground, a glacial cemetery that had risen from the ancient ice field, gates swung wide open. Just the sight of it made dread rise in him like flood waters, drowning him in his own sweet-hot fear. By that point in the game he wasn’t bothering to talk himself out of such feelings. His guts were telling him that he was going into something bad here and he did not doubt, he accepted that prophecy.

Hayes brought the ’Cat to a stop before Targa House and did not move, feeling the station and letting it tell him things. He couldn’t get past the idea that Kharkhov Station had the same atmosphere shrouded over it as the ruined city of the Old Ones now… toxic and spiritually rancid.

Sharkey and Hayes stepped from the ’Cat and, although they did not admit it to one another, they could sense the fear and agony and paranoia of the place gathering up into a single venting primal scream that they could hear only in their minds.

But it was real. It was raw. It was palpable.

They could hear it on the wind and feel it in their souls. So they were prepared for the worst when they entered Targa House. What came first was the stink… of blood and meat and voided bowels. Death. A stench of death so thick and so complete it nearly emptied their minds just smelling it.

“No,” Sharkey said. “Oh, dear God no…”

But there was no god at the South Pole. Only the cold and the wind and the whiteness, a ravening ancient intelligence that was always hungry, whose belly was never full.

And here, in the community room, it had feasted.

Everyone was sitting at tables like they’d been called in for a group meeting. And maybe they had been. All of them had their eyes blown from their sockets, their brains boiled to stew. Their white faces were spattered with blood and fluid, carved into shrieking masks of pain and terror. All of them. Like a single diabolic mind had seized them at once and drained their minds in one communal swoop. They were all there in that morgue lit by electric lights: Rutkowski and Koricki, Sodermark and Stotts, even Parks and Campbell from the drilling tower, a dozen others, scientists and contractors alike.

Yes, everyone was there but LaHune.

“We… we have to find him,” Sharkey said, swallowing, then swallowing again. “We have to get him before he gets out of here. He’ll make for another station… maybe Vostok or Amundsen. He won’t stop until he does and they won’t let him.”

She came into Hayes’ arms and he came into hers and they joined together there in that stinking, ghastly mortuary. Needing to touch and be held, needing to remind one another that they were still alive and still human. There was strength in that. Strength in who and what they were, not in what those fucking Old Ones wanted them to be. They had each other and they had feelings and those feelings were real and strong, had greased their skids and fed their engines and got them through all this badness up until now. They figured they could squeeze a few more hours out of them.

“LaHune sent us away on purpose, Elaine,” Hayes said. “He wanted us out of the way when he did this, when he made his run. He may have been contaminated for days or a week or who in the hell knows?”

“He didn’t think we’d come out of the city alive.” She looked around, studying the night pressing up against the windows and frosting the panes with its subzero breath. “They haven’t been dead long… he might still be here.”

Hayes was counting on it.

If LaHune had already made his run, it would mean they would have to go after him. Out onto the polar plateau, racing after him, trying to catch him before he reached the Amundsen-Scott Station or Vostok, the Russian camp. Both were hundreds and hundreds of miles distant. If they caught him, it would be dangerous and if they didn’t catch him? Even worse. A break down out there in temperatures dipping down towards a hundred below meant death in two hours regardless of how you were dressed or how hot your little hands were.

It was a simple fact.

So they either stopped him now or let the race begin. Hayes had this mental image of them arriving just behind him at Amundsen, shooting at him, trying to kill him like those Norwegians in The Thing, trying to kill that infected dog. He had a pretty good idea that what had happened to the supposed attackers in the movie would play out pretty much the same in real life: LaHune would be rescued and Hayes and Sharkey would be cut down like mad dogs.

So they started searching the station and until you did, you forgot just how big and how spread out Kharkhov was. How many of those orange-striped buildings there were. How many goddamn places there were to hide. You just didn’t have your main buildings like the power station or Targa House or the meteorology dome, you had dozens and dozens of little fish huts and storage sheds and warm-up shacks. You had the fuel depo and the garage and the service Quonsets, the man-sized conduits that connected them like arteries beneath the ice. In the summer with twenty men you could have done it in an hour. In the middle of that endless polar night, it would have taken all day.

Particularly if your quarry didn’t want to be found.

So they checked the most obvious places first. They went through Targa House top to bottom, even looking in closets and under beds, in showers and even cupboards in the kitchen. They took no chances. They checked the power station and even the drilling tower. Only good thing they found there was that the hole leading down to Lake Vordog had frozen back up. Hayes made sure of that by turning off the heat and breaking open the windows. Then he opened the drill reservoirs and flooded the hole. Wouldn’t take long before it was an ice rink. They also found Gundry…he’d blown his brains out.

He had balls, Hayes got to thinking, covering him with a parka and a tarp. He wasn’t going to let them fucking things have his mind. He went to his grave, middle-finger extended to the Old Ones. God bless you, Gundry. You were the real thing.

Back on the trail, Hayes and Sharkey huffed it out to the observatory and meteorology dome. Both were empty. The garage was pretty much snowed shut, so they went in the back way and checked everything out, every dark corner and vestibule. They made sure no vehicles were absent. There weren’t. They checked the cabs of the Spryte and D-6 Cat, a few four-wheel drive trucks with balloon tires that were used mainly in the summer. Nothing.

“I wonder if he’s here at all,” Sharkey said, thinking out loud. “I know it’s wishful thinking, Jimmy, but what if his mind went, too, and he just wandered out into the night. Got covered by the blizzard.”

“If that’s true, then sooner or later the wind will dig him back out,” Hayes said, knowing the old Antarctic saying was true: Nothing stays buried forever at the pole.

“Do you think it’s possible?”

“Sure, Doc, just not probable. For all we know, that crazy fuck is dogging us, staying behind us all the time or ahead of us, just out of sight. We could play tag like this for weeks.”

Sharkey brushed a strand of red hair from her forehead. “Is he here, Jimmy? Can you feel him?”

Hayes stood there, leaning up against the Cat dozer and pulling from his cigarette. He thought over her question and when he answered it was not his mind talking, but his heart. “Yeah, he’s here. I can feel that bastard out there…”

The fuel depo.

If there was any place on the station you could hide, it was here. It was basically a reinforced sheet metal tunnel with tanks of fuel to each side, predominately diesel which ran most of the vehicles and the generators which fired the boilers and kept the lights lit and the systems working and the people warm and fed and the wheels on the bus go ’round and ’round. Even though it was lit by a string of lights, it was shadowy and dank, stinking of oil and diesel fuel.

Carefully then, the Remington pump in his hands, Hayes led the way down the steel catwalk that ran the length of the building. Their footsteps echoed off the steel drums and their hearts pounded, that ominous feeling of expectancy was almost physically sickening. It would have been so easy to hide behind one of the giant drums, springing out and taking them by surprise. But they walked the entire length, peered behind every drum and there was nothing. They walked back towards the doorway.

Hayes suddenly froze.

“What?” Sharkey whispered, sounding like a petrified little girl.

“Well,” Hayes said in a blatantly loud voice. “He ain’t here.” Then he dragged her over near the doorway. “I know where he is. He’s down under our feet. He’s hiding in the conduit that runs from here to the garage.”

Sharkey did not argue with him.

She could see that almost electric look of certainty in his eyes and knew it was fed not by a hunch, but by a deeper knowledge that was inescapably right. If Hayes said he was down there, then LaHune was down there, all right. Hiding like a rat snake in a rabbit hole. And somebody was going to have to flush him out.

He racked the pump on the Remington and put it in Sharkey’s hands. “Run over to the garage. Just behind the dozer there’s an access panel, a grating set into the floor. He’ll try and come up through it when I flush him out. When he comes up… blast him. You’ve got three rounds in there.”

“And you?”

Hayes took her ice-axe. He stepped outside with her. “Go, Elaine. Run over there. I won’t go down until I see that you made it.”

She shook her head, sighed, then ran off into the night, her bunny boots crunching through the crust of snow. The garage was about a hundred feet away. He saw her pause near the back door to it, standing under the light and waving. He waved back.

As quiet as could be, Hayes tip-toed back in… if you could realistically tip-toe in those big, cumbersome boots. But he did it quietly. As quietly as he could. By the time he got to the grating, his heart was hammering so hard his fingertips were throbbing. He crouched near the grating.

Elaine should be in place now, let’s do the dirty deed and get this done with.

There was no way to be quiet lifting off the metal grating, so he didn’t bother. He flipped it off there, letting it clang onto the catwalk. He made a big show of it, talking out loud like he was carrying on a conversation with someone so that LaHune would think he wasn’t coming down alone.

Then he dropped down into the conduit.

It was like an escape tunnel from some old war movie, except it was cut through the ice and squared-off perfectly. You could stand upright in there if you were an elf or a pixie, but other than that you had to stoop. Hayes tucked his flashlight into his parka and popped an emergency flare. It threw just as much light if not more and unlike a flashlight, somebody came at you, you could always jam the burning end into their face.

Okay.

Hayes started creeping his way down the length of the conduit.

Fuel lines ran overhead and to either side. The flare was hissing and the smoke was gagging, but bright. Great, slinking shadows mocked his movements. He could hear the flare hissing and just about everything else… ice cracking, water dripping as the flare heated the ice overhead, his bones growing, his eyes watering. Yeah, he could hear just about everything, but what might be lurking just ahead of him. His gloved hand was gripping the ice-axe so tightly, he thought he might snap the metal shaft.

C’mon, you asshole, show yourself, daddy wants to cut your fucking head open.

But LaHune did not show himself and Hayes was already half way down the conduit. He was starting to get nervous. Real nervous that LaHune had led him on a merry chase, trapping him down here, getting him out of the way so he could get Sharkey. Yet… he still had that feeling itching at the back of his brain that LaHune was down here. Somewhere.

And then, two thirds of the way down, it came to him in a flash.

Was down here, you idiot. Past tense. Now he’s up in the garage and -

He heard the grating clang open and somebody scramble up and out. Then he heard the shotgun go off. Just once. Sharkey screamed and there rose an instantaneous shrill piping of feral rage and pain. There was a crash and somebody cried out. Hayes started moving as fast as he could, just seconds behind LaHune… or the thing he now was. The conduit began to tremble as that deep, thrumming vibration started, rattling down chunks of ice on Hayes.

And then there was the grating.

It was shut, but he hit it like a rocket, swinging it up and open and the first thing he saw as he rolled across the snowy floor was blood. It was splattered everywhere in translucent whorls that looked purple under those sodium lights. Hayes thought madly that it looked like somebody had been shaking a sprinkler can of red ink around in there.

Then he saw Elaine.

She was spread-eagled near the Spryte, face down. The shotgun was a few feet from her and you could smell the smoke and cordite from the blast. Hayes started going to her, but then felt motion behind him and then off to the side.

LaHune.

He hopped off one of the truck hoods and landed very gracefully as if he were held aloft by invisible wings. He kept his knees bent and his hands open like claws against his breast. He was imitating the Old Ones, because he was them now. Anything human in him had been squeezed out now. He was just a sponge that was saturated with their minds and powered by the psychic energies of those dead men in Targa House.

He looked hideous.

Being the avatar, the disease cell, of the aliens had not only warped him psychologically, but physically. His head looked unnaturally huge, great patches of hair missing from it. His balding cranium was bulging from what was inside, set with a blue tracery of veins that seemed to throb and wiggle… as if there were fat indigo worms just beneath his skin. His face was convoluted and terribly wrinkled, mummified, hollow-cheeked, gray as corpse-flesh. His lips had withered back and his gums were jutting and mottled, the teeth pushed out like fangs.

Hayes brought up the ice-axe, his guts tangled in knots.

LaHune just stood there, his eyes just as red as spilled blood. He glared at Hayes with an almost insane hatred, a blind and consuming wrath. And that was all bad enough. Bad enough to make Hayes take one stumbling step backwards, but what was worse was that Sharkey had not missed.

She had hit LaHune with the twelve-gauge.

It was a glancing shot that had blasted away most of the side of his head, ear included. The flesh around that grisly crater was blackened and burnt from contact burns and inside that jagged chasm of shattered skull, you could see LaHune’s brain… how it was swollen and fleshy pink, the convolutions rising like bread dough, arteries as thick and loathsome as red pond leeches clutching the gray matter like fingers.

He could not be alive.

And maybe he wasn’t. But the parasites living in his head most certainly were.

“Stay back, LaHune,” Hayes said, inching his way over to that shotgun.

The administrator was possessed… biologically and spiritually. He was not a man any longer. He was like some living monolith, a flesh and blood tombstone erected to the dark memory of those noxious things. They were in him like maggots in rancid meat and no physiology could withstand such an invasion without mutating, becoming a horror itself.

“Just stay back, LaHune, or I swear to God I’ll split your fucking head open and piss on what runs out.”

But could he? Could he really swing the ice-axe at that hulking alien malignance? Yes, he knew he could. Same as he could step on a juicy spider bloated on blood. Yet, the idea of that ice-axe sinking into that brain and it popping like a water blister or a fleshy balloon and spraying him with filth, it was almost more than he could bear to take.

LaHune came forward in a perverse hopping motion.

He cocked that bulbous head to the side and pink intercranial fluid ran from his gaping wound. His lips were distended and puckered like he wanted a goodnight kiss. The skin there was wrinkled like that of an eighty year-old woman. He made a hollow whistling sound that steadily rose up to that keening, lunatic piping that was loud and piercing and beyond the volume of human lungs to produce.

Hayes felt those blazing red eyes spear into him, but he was already in motion. Be the time LaHune’s possessed mind knocked him flat the ice-axe was already in motion. It caught him right between the eyes, the blade splitting his face open lengthwise. Something like blood came squirting out, but this was bluish-green like the juice of a crushed grasshopper and muddy.

Still, LaHune did not die.

He let out a wailing, tormented squealing and fell back and at that very moment the windshields of every vehicle in the garage shattered. A great wind swept through there, knocking Hayes down and then rolling him away. Then LaHune was coming at him, those eyes filled with arcing electricity… bleeding red tears and filled with an unearthly fury.

Hayes knew he was done.

This was how cheaters died, this is how revolutionaries were executed by those violating, demented alien minds. Already they were entering his head and crushing his will and sending white-hot jolts of pain through his nerve endings.

But in their arrogance, they forgot Sharkey.

And they didn’t remember her until she sat up with the shotgun in her hands. LaHune’s huge, grotesque head pivoted on his neck, those eyes smoldered crimson, and those fissured lips came together in a shrill, piping scream of intense malevolence.

Then the shotgun went off, splashing that lewd face from the bone beneath and tossing LaHune up against the dozer. The last round of buckshot nearly tore him in half. And then Hayes was on that writhing, repulsive thing, swinging the ice-axe down on it again and again, sectioning it like a worm. Those vibrations rose up, followed by the crackling of energy, but it was pathetic and weak and soon faded. Yet, he kept bringing the axe down, feeling those invidious minds still trying to worm into his own. The LaHune-thing crawled and inched and slithered, pissing that blue-green mud. It howled and twisted with boneless gyrations.

Hayes jumped up into the Cat dozer and it roared to life.

The LaHune-thing screeching and bleeding and hissing and steaming, the dozer rolled over it, those caterpillar tracks grinding up what was left like bad meat. When it stopped moving, Hayes scraped up what was left with the dozer’s blade and pushed it out the door.

And that’s when those minds really died.

For they vented themselves with a final cacophonous tornado wind that shattered the windows in the garage and blew all the doors off.

But that was it.

The infection had been stopped.

Hayes stumbled out of the cab and Sharkey was there waiting for him. Leaning against each other, they walked back through the blowing polar night to Targa House.