by Tim Curran
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 bo
ttles 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. Be
cause 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.