Hive

by Tim Curran

  “Getting something,” Sharkey said.

  Her laptop beeped, letting her know she had incoming.

  Paleodoc: gates here you there elaine?

  Sharkey: I’m here. How goes it up there?

  Paleodoc: we’re making progress finding out about things that maybe we’d be better off not knowing about but don’t mind me I’m tired

  Hayes could just bet that he was. Up there in those ruins with all the dead Old Ones. Jesus, they must’ve been having some kind of dreams up there. It was a wonder they hadn’t cut their own throats by now and maybe some of them had.

  Sharkey: Lots of things happening here. I found out from my Russian friend about that abandoned camp. What he knew about it. Apparently, it was a coring outpost and the crew up there got a little shack happy. Started seeing ghosts and killing themselves.

  Paleodoc: any survivors?

  Sharkey: None that were sane. They flew them out. The station was called Vradaz Outpost and it’s been deserted since the trouble, over twenty years now.

  Paleodoc: did he say what the nature of the trouble was?

  Sharkey: Just the usual haunted house stuff. Apparitions and sounds. Knockings and rappings. Things of that nature. Is any of that important?

  Paleodoc: how did the lake project make out?

  Sharkey: The cryobot was a success. Hayes was there when they released the hydrobot. They found a city down there. A gigantic city on the lake bed.

  Paleodoc: still there then? I thought it might be

  Sharkey: You knew about it?

  Paleodoc: I’ve been studying the pictographs up in the city they tell some pretty wild tales if I’m reading them right think I am there was something I interpreted as a mass exodus down into the lake when the glaciers began to move in

  Sharkey: Hayes saw them, Dr. Gates, from the hydrobot’s feed. There were hundreds if not thousands of those Old Ones still living down there. They were swarming. They lost contact with the hydrobot about that time.

  Paleodoc: yes, I imagine they did

  Sharkey: what does it all mean?

  Paleodoc: I’m not sure just yet but soon the fact that they’re still alive down there is bad though if I’m reading these gylphs correctly the old ones have plans for us they want to exploit us

  Sharkey: Are they terrestrial? Can you tell me that?

  Paleodoc: no, I don’t see how they could be there are evidences in the glyphs etchings on the walls of our star system and others I’m reading it to be evidence of interplanetary and possibly interstellar travel I believe these things existed as a race long before our planet cooled I’m guessing if we could visit mars and the outer planets we’d find evidence of their colonization they’ve been with us since the beginning

  Sharkey: Can you be more specific about that?

  Paleodoc: the winged devils elaine they’ve been with us since the beginning all our tales of winged demons and devils have a single source do you follow

  Sharkey: What do they want?

  Paleodoc: I can’t be sure but I believe they’ve been waiting many millions of years for us to find them.

  Sharkey: Why?

  Paleodoc: listen to me elaine these things are dangerous in ways I can’t even tell you 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

  Sharkey: We’ve had two deaths here.

  Paleodoc: you’ll have more they will harvest certain minds and crush the others listen to me elaine I think you should get out of there get in the snocat and make for vostok station you are in danger

  Sharkey: You had better come down first.

  Paleodoc: can’t too much to do up here too many clues to follow up on if I or others return watch us close very close something not right with Holm I think they have his mind now they want mine and yours too elaine get out get out while you can

  Sharkey did everything she could do to bring Gates back up, but he was gone. He had gone off-line according to her messenger. Finally, she gave up and shut her computer down and was forced to look at those two dour faces.

  Cutchen spoke first. “Well,” he said. “Well . . . either our good Doctor Gates has lost his mind or we’re in terrible danger.”

  “I don’t believe he’s lost his mind,” Sharkey said, but would not elaborate on it. “I don’t believe that at all.”

  “Neither do I,” Hayes said. He looked over at Cutchen. “I don’t think you do either. What Gates said . . . what he’s been reading from those hieroglyphs or whatever he found in that old city . . . it’s nothing I haven’t suspected or felt. A lot of us have been dreaming crazy shit and feeling worse things, but none of it really made sense. We all maybe connected it up with those mummies out there, but was that because we were sure they were the culprit or because we were scared and we needed a scapegoat, a witch to burn? But now -”

  “You left out something,” Cutchen said. “Gates’ little chat the night before he left. People were feeling funny about those fossils of his and Lind’s nervous breakdown, but the things he said to us in the community room were pretty wild. I don’t think there’s a one of us who didn’t come out of that with an inflamed imagination.”

  “Sure. I’ll admit to that. But it’s more than imagination, Cutchy, let’s get fucking real here. We didn’t imagine the dreams or Lind’s nervous breakdown or Meiner and St. Ours having their brains boiled to jelly. There’s a common cause for these happenings and it’s right out in Hut Six, like it or not. Because those things are not dead the way we know dead, their minds are still active and maybe that has something to do with the living ones down in the lake, I don’t know, but Gates is right: we’re in terrible danger here. You heard what he said. Those things . . . they’ve been waiting for us down here, they want to use us. They have plans for us.”

  “It’s pretty wild shit, Hayes,” was all Cutchen would say and yet, just behind his eyes, you could see an acceptance of it all.

  “Sure, it’s the wildest thing in our history, without a doubt.” There was a big NO SMOKING sign on the wall and Hayes lit up anyway, completely carried away by what he was saying and maybe just happy to be letting it all out of his head. “Imagine them, Cutchy. Try and imagine a race like theirs that is so fucking patient they can wait for us millions of years. And so intelligent, they know that sooner or later, we’ll come down here because we have to.”

  “How could they know that?”

  “You saw what Gates said . . . other worlds, other stars . . . God only knows how many times they’ve watched beings like us evolve until they reached a state where they might be useful to them. No, Gates is right. They knew we’d come. It’s our nature to come down here and they were completely aware of the fact. They’re ancient and they know things we’ll never know. Who knows how many races like ours they’ve cultivated?”

  “You make me feel like a potato,” Cutchen said.

  “To them, you’re not much more,” Sharkey said.

  Hayes didn’t say anything for a time. Maybe he was afraid of what he might say if he opened his mouth. “Rats in a maze, that’s what we are. Just rats running the maze,” he said finally, laughing at something he didn’t seem to find very funny at all. “It’s perfect, isn’t it? We’re trapped down here and they know it. It’s exactly what they wanted. It’s been some time, I think, since they’ve had an ample opportunity to pick away at human minds. But now here we are and here they are. This camp is a great living laboratory and they’ve got months to do whatever it is they want to do.”

  “Which is?” Cutchen said

  Hayes swallowed. “To harvest our minds.”

  PART FOUR

  THE HAUNTED AND THE POSSESSED

  “The nethermost caverns... are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head.”

 
; — H.P. Lovecraft

  26

  After he got out of the infirmary, it began to occur to Hayes just how apt his rats in a maze analogy was. It was so apt that he wanted to run screaming out of the compound . . . except, of course, there was nowhere really to run to. He kept imagining the lot of them there like microbes on a slide while some huge, horrible eye peered down on them gauging their reactions. It was very unsettling.

  So, since he couldn’t run, he did the next best thing: he got rid of some snow.

  It was something Biggs and Stotts generally did, but after what happened to St. Ours and what they had seen . . . or not . . . they weren’t in much shape to do much but hide in their rooms. Rutkowski was doing the same. None of them were as bad off as Lind, but they’d been broken on some essential level.

  So Hayes decided he would pick up the slack.

  The snow blower they used to keep the walkways clear was basically a big garden tractor with a blower attachment on it and a little cab that kept the wind off you. Hayes was tucked down in his heated ECW’s, so the cold that was hovering around sixty below wasn’t bothering him. The night was black and blowing, broken only by the security lights of the buildings themselves. Hayes moved the tractor along at a slow clip, clearing the walkways that led from Targa House to the drill tower and power station. The secondary paths that connected them with the numerous garages and outbuildings and huts, some of which held equipment and some of which had become makeshift labs. He banked the snow up against the walls of the buildings to help keep them insulated and most, by that point in the long winter, no longer had walls as such, just drifts of snow that sloped from the roofs to the hardpack on the ground. Doorways were cut and windows kept clear, beyond that everything looked like igloos.

  He cleared a path to the meteorology dome — Cutchen would appreciate that — and tried to sort out what was in his head. The things Gates had said were exactly the sorts of things Hayes did not want to hear. Just affirmations that all the crazy shit he’d been thinking and feeling were not out and out bullshit, but fact. That was hard to take.

  But, then again, everything down here this year was hard to take.

  There was so much ugliness, it was hard to take it all in, keep it down. Sharkey said that Lind was getting no better. He no longer was any danger as such and didn’t need to be restrained, but he did need to be watched. She said she considered him to be clinically depressed now. He wouldn’t leave the little sick bay. He sat in there and watched TV, most of which was routed through American Forces Antarctic Network-McMurdo. Sometimes he read magazines. But most of the time he just sat on his cot with his head cocked to the side like a puppy listening for his master’s approach.

  And maybe that’s exactly what he’s doing, Hayes thought.

  And maybe it was what they were all doing without realizing it. Waiting and waiting. Because, when he thought about it, didn’t that seem almost right? That maybe what he’d been feeling since he stepped onto the frozen crust of Kharkhov Station was a sense of expectancy? Sure, underlying dread and fear and rampant nerves, but mostly expectancy. Like maybe somehow, some way, he’d known what was coming, that they were going to make contact with something.

  Sounded like some pretty ripe bullshit when you actually thought about it, framed it into words, but it almost seemed to fit. And maybe, when you got down to it, there was no true way of knowing what was going on in that great soundless vacuum of the human psyche and its subcellar, the subconscious mind. There were things there, imperatives and memories and scenarios, you just didn’t want to know about. In fact, you -

  Jesus, what in the hell was that?

  Hayes stopped the tractor dead.

  Terror punched into him like a poison dart. He was breathing hard, thinking things and not wanting to think them at all. He swallowed. Swallowed again. He thought . . . Christ, he was almost sure he had seen something over near Hut #6, something the tractor lights splashed over for just an instant. Looked like some shape, some figure pulling away, moving off into the darkness. And it wasn’t a human shape. He peered through the clear plastic shield of the cab. Didn’t see anything now and maybe he hadn’t in the first place.

  Fuck that horse, there was something there. I know something was there.

  But whatever it had been, it was gone now.

  Hayes sat there for a few more minutes and then started throwing snow again. A storm was on them and the snow was flying thick as goose down, filling the shaking security lights of the compound with white clots that seemed busy as static on a TV screen. Snow was drifting and whipping, powdering the cab of the tractor like sand. The wind and blackness were sculpting it into huge, flying shapes that danced through the night.

  Hayes stopped the tractor again.

  That wind was funny, the way it howled and screamed and then dropped off to a steady buzzing whisper. You listened long enough, you started not only seeing things, but hearing voices . . . sweet, seductive voices that were pulled out long and hollow by the wind. The voices of women and lovers lost to time. Voices that wanted you to run off out into those bleak, frozen plains where you could lose yourself forever and maybe, just maybe, you wouldn’t mind being lost, those blizzard winds wrapping you up tight and cooing in your ear until it was just too late. And by then, you would recognize the voice of the wind for what it was: death. Lonely, hungry death and maybe something else, maybe something diabolic and secret that was older than death.

  Stop it for the life of Pete, Hayes warned himself.

  But it could get to you, the wind and the snow and perpetual night. So many men had gone glaring mad with it that the medicos had coined a term to explain something that was perhaps not explainable at all: Dementia Antarctica. They saw it as a disease born of loneliness and isolation and maybe they were half right, but the ugly and bitter truth was that it was also a condition of the soul and its dark, destructive poetry that seemed to cry in your head: I am your soul and I am beautiful, I am a lover’s sonnet and silver rain, now destroy me... if you love me, destroy me and yourself, too.

  Hayes figured if he kept up like this, he would run off into the silent devastation of the polar night. So he put his mind on other things, things he could get his hands on and wrap his brain around, make work for him. And what he started to think about was not something you could really touch or ever know: the city. That great sunken, cyclopean city which lay dreaming on the bottom of Lake Vordog. Sheathed in weeds and morbid aquatic growths, time and madness, it was like some grotesque and moss-covered alien skeleton down there.

  Remembering it now, it seemed like seeing it had been some nightmare, but Hayes had seen it all right and it had seen him. At the time he had not been able to truly understand the way it made him feel, it was just too shocking and overwhelming, but now he thought he understood: that city was taboo, shunned. He . . . and all men, he supposed . . . retained a vestigal memory of the place. It was some awful archetype electroplated onto the human soul from the race’s infancy that would later re-channel itself as haunted houses and cursed castles and the like. Evil places. Places of malignancy and disembodied horror. Maybe something about the angles and the sense of desertion, but it had persisted and it always would, that memory. The first true dream of supernal terror humankind had known.

  Here again, Hayes was thinking things he had no right to think. Maybe it was like Cutchen said, maybe part of it was Gates’ disturbing little talk coupled with all the badness those mummies emanated. But he honestly thought it was something more. He truly believed that the Old Ones and their phantasmal, eldritch city were locked down in the minds of all men in the form of primal memory.

  We interacted with those things, he found himself thinking, in our distant past. We must have. And probably not out of choice. That’s the only thing that can explain our instinctual terror of them and that nameless city . . .

  Without realizing it, Hayes had stopped the tractor.

  Most of the job was done, but with that blizzard pounding down on the
m, he could pretty much start again for already the walkways were drifting over. But the thing was, he had stopped the tractor on its way to Hut #6 and he did not know why. He just sat there, feeling cold and hot, looking around desperately for the reason and not coming up with a thing. The night was alive with viscid shadows and creeping shapes and the wind was full of voices. He could hear them calling to him through that blowing white death: There’s no hurry, Jimmy. You just sit tight and wait and all will be revealed to you. Because you’re waiting for something as you’ve been waiting from day one and maybe all your life and that something is coming, Jimmy. It’s coming out of the darkness of the polar graveyard and, like a chameleon, it’s about to show itself . . .

  And then it did.

  About the time he was ready to call himself a fucking lunatic, it did.

  But before he saw it, he heard it.

  Heard that weird, high musical piping that he knew was a voice. Heard it in his head and outside the cab, and in the pit of his mind he remembered that voice as one of authority, as the voice of a master and such was its dominance, he did not dare try to get away from it. He could feel the ice of Antarctica breathing in his belly, sending out breaths of frost that shut him down and made him watch.

  Then he saw it.

  It came drifting out of the shadows, a ghostly alien form with outspread wings and trembling tentacles and leering red eyes that opened up his brain like a tin can and reached in there with cold fingers. He screamed, he supposed he screamed, for something came ripping out of him that slapped him sure and hard across the face.

  The thing came closer and Hayes pressed down on the accelerator of the tractor, those chained balloon tires catching and vaulting Hayes forward and right at the thing. And he felt something snap in his brain like a tree branch and the pain was immense. But then the tractor rammed into that thing and it broke apart into a thousand luminous fragments.