by Bill Schutt
“The sounds were born of my own imagination,” Pliny explained.
“The mind is a skilled deceiver,” Severus replied.
“Good line,” said the historian.
“I’ll be honored to have you steal it from me one day,” the centurion joked, but Pliny did not respond. Instead of imaginary sounds, his oxygen-deprived mind had now begun generating imaginary figures—misty and white and vague, gliding within and between the rocky nooks and crannies overhead. The longer he peered into the distant shadows, the less distinct the shapes became, and thus he was able to cast them aside. This is no different from reading animal shapes into cloud formations, he convinced himself.
The ghosts on the massifs were gone and did not manifest again; after sunrise Pliny quickly forgot about them.
According to scraps of legend Pliny had been able to collect before their voyage, the Cerae, despite their secretive nature, had somehow arrived at an understanding with Prince Pandaya and his predecessors. Apparently this had come after his family’s successful defense of the lowlands and their mountain passes from an attack by the Scythians—a tribe of horse-mounted nomads with an appetite for human flesh. But if the prince ever actually met with the Cerae, he had never recorded the encounter. Even the means of trade between the two groups was an enigma, since it did not appear to involve any actual exchange of goods. And while the white-leaved trees from the Ceran homeland yielded medicinal oils and something akin to silk, the Cerae apparently asked for nothing in return for their resources. Instead they deposited their treasures in secret, outside the city. Despite his centurion’s belief that the Cerae might not even exist, Pliny suspected that what the prince had interpreted as a naïve generosity was really a message, a command: Take these gifts but stay away.
Far above the Pandayan ruins, during the last day in which Pliny’s world still made sense, the storm Severus had predicted seemed determined to freeze them all to death. As their leather armor and shields became wet with snow, the remains of Pliny’s regiment ascended to what he believed to be the uppermost reaches of the “trail” and it became possible to hope that soon they would be moving down into more breathable air. Presently, even without the burdens of deep snow and wet, ice-swollen gear, each step seemed to require three times as many breaths.
Though his men were far too exhausted to care about such things, Pliny wondered how high the tallest of the Emodian Mountains stood. At a guess, based upon what he had already seen, the mountain range rose so high that it rendered the earth an imperfect sphere. It was a scientific revelation he would have shared with like minds in Rome over wine and good food, but here and now, philosophy counted for nothing. Nature’s flaws mattered only in the present reality of slippery rock walls and wind-driven snow.
Against his better judgment, Pliny unbuckled the scabbard holding his short sword, then passed both to his personal attendant. Anything to lighten the load, he thought. Anything to help me draw another breath.
“Remain at my side, Antoninus,” he said, between gasps.
“Of course, sir,” replied the dark-haired teen. A storyteller and poet who had been in his service for the past six years, Antoninus somehow managed a smile and a dutiful bow. Pliny, though, could read the plea written in the boy’s eyes. Can we turn around, sir? Can we go home now?
But they did not turn back. Instead, Pliny led them to yet another rocky outcropping, from which sudden, snowy gusts threatened to launch them screaming into the underworld. Pliny decided that they should rest for an hour in the shelter of an icy overhang, consuming light rations of dried meat, taking turns warming their feet against a portable brazier, and melting snow into drinking water. After providing his own body with what he had calculated to be reasonable time to recover, Pliny began to scout the route ahead. Intermittent breaks in the obscuring veils of snow suggested that they had indeed passed the highest and most physically demanding point along the path. Pliny looked back at his men, their wind-chapped faces covered in turbans so that only their eyes were visible. Tugged and battered by the gusts, they had their backs pressed tightly against the cliff face that ran alongside the trail. Pliny shifted his grip on the rock wall as he descended, his own movements labored by exhaustion and the thick hides he wore. Through the worst of it, he allowed himself a moment of optimism. By tonight, breathing will be easier, he reasoned.
The moment passed, as he knew it would. Not very many paces from where he stood, a pair of opposing rock walls converged to form a narrow, V-shaped passage—as if a doorway had been thrown open.
“The lair of your Cerae, I suppose?” Severus grumbled, doing his best to restrain any actual expressions of anger or sarcasm.
“Perhaps,” Pliny responded.
But with nowhere else to go, Pliny and the centurion led their party downhill and through the jagged entranceway.
Although they were still being buffeted by windblown snow, now and again the white veil parted for a moment, allowing tantalizing views of what lay ahead. Collectively, each glimpse built upon the previous one in Pliny’s imagination, helping him to form a picture that could not be real. There appeared to be towers, sharp-edged and cleanly cut.
His men moved with an accelerated pace through the narrows, driven by a combination of foreboding and excitement. They could all see the structures now.
Descending into a mountain valley, Pliny watched the entire curtain of snow draw back for several long seconds, granting them far more than a glimpse this time. His next thought was a revelation, for Pliny knew at once that even after coming to appreciate the strategic significance of the Pandaya-obliterating dam and the trap that had been sprung against his own group, he had vastly underestimated the Cerae. Sunlight striking the towers and domes was too bright and the wrong color to be illuminating mere works of stone. The turrets were composed of gleaming crystal or glass, or perhaps even ice—supported by foundations and ribs of granite.
Oddly, Pliny’s next emotion was jealousy over an undeniable realization: Rome’s greatest architects could never have—
A movement along the nearest rock wall drew his attention. Ghostlike, and so exquisitely camouflaged that the Ceran must surely have been standing only a few arm-lengths in front of his face all along, it—they moved as if they had been part of the snow and ice itself, summoned suddenly alive. Pliny instinctively reached for his sword then felt a flutter in the pit of his stomach as he realized he had given it to his young aide. He turned to Antoninus, who was still carrying the weapon, but in the next moment his view of the boy was obscured by a warm mist accompanied by the metallic scent of blood in the air.
In the space of five heartbeats, and in a silent whirlwind of arterial spray, the Cerae burst upon the Romans.
Metropolitan Museum of Natural History
Fifth Floor
An hour after Major Hendry’s departure, Knight looked up from his work, stretched and yawned, realizing only now that the officer had gone. “Not the best writer, this Pliny guy,” he said, removing his glasses to rub his eyes. “Not by a long shot,” Knight emphasized. “Now his nephew, he could write.”
There was no response from Patricia.
Squinting, Knight replaced his spectacles and turned around. He could see that Patricia had cleared a new space on a nearby lab bench and was using a desktop magnifier to examine the codex photos.
“He was confiding to Socrates in this section,” she said, holding up a photo and without a hint of mockery. She wrote something down on a yellow legal pad.
“That’s nice,” Knight said. They both knew that by Pliny’s time, the old Greek had himself been dead for nearly five centuries.
There was no further comment from the pair, and unaccustomed as the researchers were to small talk, they went silent and they went back to work.
“I don’t know what’s more disturbing,” Knight said at last, “this little dilly about what can happen to anyone bearing weapons, or this new stuff about worms?”
“I vote for the worms,” Patri
cia replied, morosely.
“Well, either way, I’m starting to see why they sent Mac in there. I mean, if there’s even the possibility that this world we’re unraveling was real and that some of it could still exist—”
“Agreed,” the black-clad woman replied, not bothering to look up from her own sample of codex photographs. “And Charles, about those worms—I think we need to bring in an expert on invertebrates.”
Knight gave a mirthless laugh. “Yeah, that’s gonna go over real well with Major Disaster. Let’s just invite everyone we know.”
“Speaking of invitations,” Patricia said, “don’t forget the concert Friday night and the tour afterwards with that movie guy.”
Knight glanced over at the strange, cabinet-like instrument that had arrived two days before—a gift from its inventor. “Right, right,” he said. “Remind me again. What’s that movie guy’s name?”
“Hitchcock,” Patricia said.
Knight gave a brief nod. “That’s it,” he said. Then the pair returned their full attention to the codex.
I may truly say Socrates, that no one is meant to understand what I have seen. When you gaze upon the kingdom of which I speak, even wisps of snow gaze back at you, and into you. My soul has become a strange and dark companion. In the course of our journey, I seem to record my discourses more for the ancients than in memory of those among whom I travel. I suppose, in essence, I have my dialogues with the dust. Then listen, dust. Listen to a tale which, though difficult to comprehend and more difficult to relate, is a fact and not a fiction. And we know, we who have seen. We know, we for whom the tale began in a white blur, and gushes of scarlet, and the whole of existence ceasing.
—Pliny the Elder (as translated by Patricia Wynters, MMNH)
South Tibet
May, a.d. 67
Pliny remembered struggling to regain consciousness in air that was too agonizingly rarefied and cold. Until the awareness of pain set in, he wondered if in fact he had perished during the attack—wondered if he had become part of the whirlwinds of red mist. The sudden confusing slaughter occupied the same instant of realization of The Cerae have us, and This is the end of me. Then, stillness and nonexistence, without ice or sky, darkness or light.
In the next moment, a breath was drawn in pain, fear, and anguish—for he had caught a glimpse of the short but exceedingly muscular creature dragging him by one foot. Having nearly believed himself dead, Pliny had a new realization: I have not been that lucky.
Dropped at the base of a wind-sculpted snow dune, Pliny feigned death on ground that seemed unnaturally warm. A loud thud and a sickening crack forced him to give up the pretense. Opening one crusted eye, he found most of the view blocked by several pairs of legs, vaguely human yet covered with thick white fur. Here and there burlap-like strands of fabric had been braided into the fleece, camouflaging them against darker splotches of rock amid snow and ice. He also saw that Severus had been correct on one detail: there were at least three kinds of them among the dozen creatures present.
Grotesqueries. The Cerae are monsters.
With his senses beginning to clear, Pliny had a pair of simultaneous revelations: First, he had been discarded in a pool of coagulating blood—the blood of my own men. Second, the Cerae were building two orderly piles: the bodies of men whose heads appeared to be missing, and the weapons that had been taken from them.
A moan drew his attention elsewhere and Pliny realized that he was not the sole human survivor. A soldier whose name he could not presently recall was crawling toward a half-buried sword and, though already missing an arm, he was still determined to fight. In a flash of movement, one of the nearly man-sized monsters grabbed the Roman by a foot and swung him headfirst into a pillar of ice, crushing the crown of his skull down to the level of his eyes.
“No!” Pliny cried out.
The murderous Ceran ignored him, focusing instead on the precise arrangement of the soldier’s body on the pile of similarly “headless” men.
“Save your voice,” came a weak call. It was Severus. “And your life.”
South Tibet
July 9, 1946
Sensing that Jerry was about to withdraw his pistol, and in what seemed to Mac to be a single continuous move, Yanni blocked the man’s right arm, grabbed the weapon, and flung it as far away as she could into the snow.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jerry cried, having acted just fast enough to stop a reflex to strike the person who had suddenly disarmed him. “Are you nuts?”
Yanni remained calm, exhibiting what Mac thought to be an equally extreme degree of self-control, considering there were four towering humanoids standing before them—their bodies covered from head to toe in long, translucent hair.
“Did you hear those shrieks when they saw that heater?” she replied quietly.
As MacCready watched the creatures closing in, he saw that any argument between Yanni and Jerry had ended as quickly as it began. He could tell that Jerry’s anger had already been circumvented by the fight-or-flight portion of his autonomic nervous system.
“What on earth are they?” Jerry muttered.
“Morlocks,” Mac said, under his breath, reminded of H. G. Wells’s fictional subterraneans.
“Pliny forgot to mention these big ones, huh?”
Mac did not respond. Instead he watched as the two figures to his far left and right shifted position—moving to encircle them. Incredibly graceful, he thought, noting that despite their size (which he estimated to be somewhere north of five hundred pounds), there was no wasted motion. They seemed to glide across the ground, and within seconds a pair of giants stood between the trio and their shattered helicopter—effectively cutting off any possibility of retreat. Smart, too, Mac thought. Shit.
R. J. MacCready slowly raised his hands, watching out of the corner of an eye as Yanni and Jerry followed suit. “Bom dia!” Mac said cheerfully in Portuguese, missing the brief incredulous look he’d gotten from his Brazilian friend.
The “Morlocks,” whose faces and palms were apparently the only body parts not covered in thick, whitish fur, ignored him. Instead one of the creatures approached Jerry, who responded with a reflexive step backward.
“Do . . . not . . . move,” Yanni said, through teeth clenched in what Mac thought was a rather scary-looking grin.
The man froze and closed his eyes. He never saw the blur of movement as the giant brushed past him. Reaching into a snowdrift, it gingerly picked up the .45 and, without hesitation, flipped it off the side of the cliff. Then it gave a short whistle. Each of his hirsute colleagues responded by taking up positions behind one of the three humans. Then, simultaneously, the newly captive humans each felt what Bob Thorne would have considered a “somewhat less-than-gentle” poke in the back. All three obeyed the finger prods in exactly the same way.
They shuffled forward.
Chapter 4
First Impressions
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
—Carl Sagan
The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.
—John F. Kennedy
Metropolitan Museum of Natural History
Fifth Floor
July 9, 1946
“Well this isn’t very cheery,” Patricia Wynters said, having just translated another section of the Pliny codex.
Charles Knight never looked away from the desktop magnifier. He was using a pair of rubber-tipped forceps to examine a tattered one-inch square of papyrus. “I never said we were going to be reading the funny papers.”
“I’m terribly worried about Mac and Yanni,” she said. “Aren’t you?”
“Of course I’m worried,” he replied. “I read about that attack on Pliny, too. But we’ve got a job to do here and the quicker we can—goddammit!” Knight’s progress translating a fragment from a later section of the codex had been stymied by the fact that the second half of what looked like an important page was in tatters and mostly missing.
“For the first two paragraphs he goes on and on about worms again. Then there’s a big hole in the next section. All that’s left is something about ‘molding life as if it were—’ Then there’s another hole.”
“Oh, dear,” Patricia said, quietly.
“I’m sure Hendry caused some of this damage himself,” Knight muttered, before glancing over at his friend. “The codex spends two thousand years intact and in another week the Army would have turned it into powder.”
Patricia kept quiet, knowing better than to interrupt Knight when he was on a roll. Not for the first time, though, she wondered if it would have been better for all of them if Pliny’s work had been completely destroyed, long ago.
South Tibet
“You got a German cousin named Sergeant Schrödinger?” MacCready asked his towering Morlock shadow. There was no response (aside from another annoying finger prod) and no alternative, except to continue along the rocky trail that led them farther and farther away from the downed helicopter and, more disquietingly—farther away from their supplies.
Mac took the opportunity to retreat into zoology mode, mentally tweaking the standard mammalian field measurements for primates: They were all adult males (“Penis—pendulous; scrotum—primate-like,” he would have written had he been filling out a field notebook). Arguably, their second most obvious trait was the long, dense hair that covered their bodies. This “pelage” ranged in color from pure white to a sort of cream, but remarkably, the creatures seemed to darken and lighten depending on their background. Mac noted that they looked almost slate gray when standing beside a rocky wall but within seconds of stepping onto the snow, the Morlocks blurred and changed before his eyes.