It took about twenty minutes of incident-free driving before we reached the 500 meter mark ahead of the Beacon. A twenty-meter high ridge rose in front of us from the bottom of the ocean floor. On the other side was the source of our journey.
I made radio contact with Icebreaker.
“Manta One to Icebreaker. We’re at the final marker. Beginning our run into the target.”
“Roger, Manta One.”
I let the boys in back know what was happening, then powered the engines back up and glided smoothly over the ridgetop.
So unexpected were the readings that I was getting that I didn’t trust them. I triggered the external lights and gazed through the viewscreen myself at the spectacle before me.
There, washed in the illumination from the spotlights mounted on the Mantas’ hull was a vast and silent city.
It was lit by a pale phosphorescence all its own, shining out between the colossal structures. And colossal they were, great lurching towers of crystal and stone, made for creatures whose proportions would put mankind to shame. The building twisted, bulged, and leaned in odd angles and with seemingly endless planes, so that it hurt my eyes to look at them for too long; like a giant optical illusion designed to mess with your mind.
A glance at the instruments confirmed what I was afraid of.
The Beacon was somewhere inside that maze of structures.
I keyed the intercom.
“Ah, Captain Marshall? You might want to come take a look at this.”
The captain and his two squad leaders joined me in the cockpit a few moments later.
“Holy Shit!” he said, as he caught sight of what was beyond the viewscreen.
My feelings exactly.
Several minutes of intense discussion with the Major back aboard the Icebreaker followed and then we had our orders. Advance with the ground team inside the buildings. Locate the source of the Beacon. Search for signs of life and collect any samples of same. Return to the Icebreaker by 1600 hours.
“All right, boys. You heard the Major. Let’s go have a look for ourselves,” Marshall said. He ordered me to stay on station and keep the relay channel open to Icebreaker, in case they made any important discoveries.
I was all too happy to comply.
* * *
“So you didn’t enter the city with them?”
I pulled another cigarette out of the pack, shoved it between my lips, and lit up. “Not that time, no. Like I said, I stayed on station, monitoring their progress over the comm lines and through their suit-mounted vidcams. Everything was fine until they found the temple.”
* * *
Despite the fact that the proportions were all wrong, I knew as soon as I saw it that it was a temple. Something about the way it stood out from all the rest of the buildings around it, how it glistened and shone with a brighter light than those around it, spoke volumes to me. Marshall’s team moved up close and through the vidcams I could see clearly the strange flowery script that was etched across the doors.
Something about it made me nervous.
Before I could say anything, Marshall ordered a couple of his men to try the doors. They’d found nothing of consequence so far, just a variety of empty corridors and abandoned buildings; no furnishings, no artwork, nothing to indicate just who or what had made these structures. With three hours of exploration already behind them, this seemed like their best opportunity.
I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to appear scared to the rest of the troops.
The door swung open easily, almost as if it was on gimbals, and Marshall ordered his squad inside.
As soon as the last man had entered the structure, the door closed smoothly behind them.
I waited for one of them to reappear.
No one did.
To make matters worse, once they passed inside the strange monolith, I lost contact with them. All communication was suddenly cut off. The radio frequency was filled with static. Their individual vital sign monitors went dark on the board in front of me. Even the emergency channel didn’t work. I know; I tried.
Figuring it had something to do with the material from which the city had been erected, I settled down to wait.
A half hour passed without contact.
An hour.
Then two.
I was getting a bit nervous by then.
Still I waited.
No one came out.
I tried contacting them by radio.
No luck.
My instruments suddenly picked up a new signal. It was another ELF wave, mingling and merging with the first one to create an entirely sound.
It made the hair on the back of my arms and neck stand on end.
Four hours had passed and I was now officially worried.
No, it was worse than that. I was freaked out.
I tried reporting in to Icebreaker, only to discover that all of my radio and network connections back to base had been severed. Regardless of the channel I tried, all I got was static.
The strange new signal had begun to pulse with greater frequency. I shut off my connection to the audio sensors through the ship’s hull, but even this had little effect. I could still feel the pressure of the wave pressing against my flesh and bones, could feel its insistent whisper inside my heard. I wondered, not for the first time, why I had a higher resistance to the sound than my brethren.
I paced around the cockpit for another fifteen or twenty minutes, trying to decide on a course of action. In the end, I simply couldn’t leave them out there. There was an extra HADS in back, as well as several supplemental canisters of 02. The lighter gravity would allow me to carry at least two additional canisters strapped to the back of my suit. If I got trapped inside, I’d be good for at least twenty-four hours, maybe more. If I wasn’t back by then, chances were I wasn’t coming back anyway.
* * *
“Now you went out after them?”
I stubbed out my cigarette, rose from the table and began to pace. Just thinking about what I’d seen caused me to break out into a cold sweat and I knew there was no way I could calmly sit there and go through it all again.
“Yeah, I went out after them.”
* * *
I spent hours wandering around that strange city. Streets shifted. Buildings changed. It was as if the city itself understood what I was doing and actively worked against me. I spent hours wandering that place, knowing with every step that time was running out for the rest of the squad.
Finally, I was forced to switch over to one of the reserve oxygen tanks and knew as I did so that I’d failed. The squad had long since run out their own air, which meant the mission had now changed from a rescue to a retrieval.
It took another hour after that to find the temple. The doors opened easily at my touch. I used the empty air canister as a door stop, assuring my exit would not be cut off as had the others, then advanced into the interior.
I wandered around inside, following a twisted series of hallways, until at last I emerged into a giant amphitheater.
That’s where I found the rest of the squad.
They stood at the base of a huge dias, the throne on top filled with some imperfectly glimpsed thing. To this day I can’t picture it clearly, though my dreams are haunted by quick images of something large and tentacled, with a pale glistening eye that seemed to watch over everything at once.
Their positions did not suggest the agony of suffocation, so for an instant I felt a small surge of hope. I bounded over to where Marshall stood at the head of the group and put his faceplate close to mine, so that we could see each other’s expression.
He stared at me with the flat, empty face of the dead, his eyes barren and bereft of hope.
Yet he was not dead, that much was clear. He stood there, his arms raised in silent supplication toward the slumbering thing on the throne before him, somehow caught between this world and the next.
He was not breathing, but he was aware.
I stumbled over to Grearson.
Sullivan.
Masamori.
Little.
All of them, every single one. The same blank stare. The same listless expression. The same unlife that wrapped them up in its passionate embrace.
There was nothing I could do.
I think it was the fear of it all that saved me. I could feel the waves of pressure pushing against my mind as the horror on the throne above attempted to snare me in its grasp just like my comrades. But the sheer horror and loathsome nature of what had been done to them helped me to keep my focus, helped me drown out the rising wail in my head.
I turned and stumbled away.
I don’t remember much about my retreat from the temple nor of my passage through the city. I don’t remember returning to the Manta One, nor my frantic drive back through the ocean’s depths.
I do remember returning to the interior of the Icebreaker, only to find it deserted. Manta Two’s cradle was empty.
I stumbled through the deserted ship until I reached command and control. It was as empty as the rest of the ship, but the vidcams showed me what I was afraid to see. The crew of the Manta Two was just entering the city, the lights from their HADS illuminating the enormous structures ahead of them. I tried to reach them over the comm, but failed. All I could do was sit back and watch it happen all over again.
I guess I lost consciousness after that. It was several hours later that I stirred and stared at the screens once more. The figures were gone now; all that remained was the edge of Manta Two’s wing and the open gate of that giant city, beckoning.
Radio calls to the Vengeance went unanswered as well.
The launch sequence took much longer with only one person carrying out the various tasks, but I managed. Just before dawn I jacked into the controls of the Icebreaker and took her up away from the ice, back out of the atmosphere to the Vengeance.
* * *
“You abandoned your comrades?”
I felt anger for the first time since the interview started. “I didn’t abandon anybody! They were dead!”
The “doctor” cocked his head. “How do you explain your own survival?
I sighed, the anger gone as swiftly as it had come. I’d heard all the accusations; there wasn’t any sense in getting upset anymore. “I don’t know. I think it had something to do with the induction ports in my skull. Somehow they disrupted the effect of the thing’s commands, allowed me to continue to think and act rationally when everyone else fell under their control.”
“And the skeleton crew left behind on the Vengeance?”
I knew where he was going, knew the tapes of the “discussion” would be used at my trial, but still I felt a need to answer it all fully, to get my story on the record, if only to help those who would be left behind to deal with His arrival.
“They were all dead when I docked the Icebreaker. I’m not a trained investigator, but it looked like the ELF waves from the Beacon had caused them all to become violent. I found their bodies all over the ship, each one the victim of violence.”
He stared at me for a long moment and then said, “So that’s your story?”
I didn’t bother to answer.
He got up from the table, left the room for a moment, and then returned with something in his hands. As he got closer, I could see it was a book. He tossed it onto the tabletop.
I looked down at the book, already knowing what I would see. It was an ancient, battered copy of a lurid tale that had been popular almost a century ago. I’d pulled the electronic text from the Vengeance’s library during my long trip back, had scoured it for any clue regarding what to do now that the sleeper had been awakened. In the end it had proved useless. Mr. Lovecraft, whoever he had been, hadn’t known any more than I.
The investigator grinned. It wasn’t a nice grin, but rather more the kind of savage expression a hunter gets when finding his prey trapped and unable to escape.
“The records onboard the Vengeance show that you accessed this story forty-seven times while en-route from Europa. If one were a suspicious man, which I am, one could almost imagine that you were trying to memorize the details, to use them to flush out your own ridiculous story, so that you’d have some kind of defense when you returned without the other thirty-nine members of your crew.” He paused and looked at me with disdain. “Well? What do you think about that?”
I shrugged and reached out for another cigarette. I took my time lighting it and then got around to answering his question. “What do I think? I think Mr. Lovecraft had it all right. I think he knew exactly what was sleeping out there beneath the ice, in the depths of the sea. He just got the location wrong, that’s all.”
The investigator laughed in my face. For the first time since entering the room he let his true feelings show. “You’re a nutcase, Daniels. No doubt about it. And I’m going to enjoy watching you hang.”
He moved to the door, opened it, and turned back to say one last, final comment.
That was when the ELF wave struck the station. The one that had been propagating across space ever since I’d taken Vengeance out of orbit around Europa.
I felt it pulse against my mind and watched as he stopped in mid-sentence, his face going slack and his eyes glazing over.
Behind him, the open door beckoned.
I sat down at the table and reached for another cigarette.
There was no sense running.
There was nowhere to go.
About the Author
Joseph Nassise is the author of more than a twenty novels, including the internationally bestselling Templar Chronicles trilogy, the Jeremiah Hunt series, and the Great Undead War series. He has also written several installments in the Rogue Angel action-adventure series from Harlequin/Gold Eagle.
He’s a former president of the Horror Writers Association, the world’s largest organization of professional horror writers, a two time Bram Stoker Award and International Horror Guild Award nominee, and a writing coach with an interesting in helping other writers achieve their dreams.
Connect with him online at: www.josephnassise.com
Other Books by Joseph Nassise
EYES TO SEE
Book one of the Jeremiah Hunt Chronicles
In an urban fantasy that charts daring new territory in the field, Jeremiah Hunt has been broken by a malevolent force that has taken his young daughter and everything else of value in his life: his marriage, his career, his reputation. Desperate to reclaim what he has lost, Hunt finally turns to the supernatural for justice.
Abandoning all hope for a normal life, he enters the world of ghosts and even more dangerous entities from beyond the grave. Sacrificing his normal sight so that he can see the souls of the dead and the powers that stalk his worst nightmares, Hunt embarks upon a strange new career - a pariah among the living; a scourge among the dead; doomed to walk between the light of day and the deepest darkness beyond night.
His love for his departed daughter sustains him when all is most hopeless, but Hunt is cursed by something more evil than he can possibly imagine. As he descends into the maelstrom of his terrifying quest, he discovers that even his deepest fears are but prelude to yet darker deeds by a powerful entity from beyond the grave - that will not let him go until it has used him for its own nefarious purposes.
EYES TO SEE is now available in print, audio, and ebook editions:
Amazon
BY THE BLOOD OF HEROES
Book one of the Great Undead War
At the tail end of 1917, the Germans introduced a new type of gas to the battlefield, T-Leiche, or "corpse gas," and changed the face of the war by resurrecting the bodies of the dead, giving the enemy an almost unlimited source of fresh troops.
When the American ace Major Jack Freeman--poster boy for the war against the Kaiser's undead army of shamblers--is downed over enemy lines and taken captive, veteran Captain Michael "Madman" Burke is the only man brave and foolish enough to accept the mission to recover Freeman. Burke assem
bles a team of disparate members, from his right-hand man, Sergeant Moore, to big-game-hunter-turned-soldier Clayton Manning, who funds the mission for an opportunity to confront this most dangerous zombie game, to professor Dan Graves, one of Tesla's top men and the resident authority on all things supernatural. With the help of a highly advanced British dirigible war machine to infiltrate enemy territory, the team faces incredible danger as it struggles to reach the prison camp and strike at the heart of the enemy.
But they are pitted against the most deadly enemy of all: Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron. Having risen from the dead with his abilities enhanced but his mind on the brink of madness, Richthofen has plans for victory that give no quarter to soldiers or civilians.
BY THE BLOOD OF HEROES is now available in print, audio, and ebook editions.
Amazon
Table of Contents
Siren Call
About the Author
Other Books by Joseph Nassise
Siren Call Page 2