by Mat Johnson
That’s all. That’s all you need to start a fight among a bunch of people sacrificing everything to get rich, to build a legacy. The largely deflated Garth Frierson still had enough air in him to float out the tarp as the conversation grew steadily more heated.‡ In the mix of things, amid the accusations and retractions, Captain Jaynes left the space. When he returned, my cousin had his full gear laid out before him: the steel spikes for his hiking boots, his face mask, pick, climbing rope, goggles, all in addition to his normal polar walkabout gear. As he prepared, the room became quieter. Even I, who had just been in the process of mounting a fierce defense of my more elaborate conclusions, joined the growing silence.
“Pardon, Booker, but what are you doing?” Nathaniel Latham asked Jaynes. Nathaniel seemed perplexed that the man appeared to be taking action when an argument was still being waged. Particularly when his wife was winning.
“Out,” Captain Jaynes responded. Tying up his dreads behind his head in a bun, he looked up at us and saw that further explanation was demanded. “I’m going down that tunnel, going to see what’s in there.”
Nathaniel opened his mouth to respond, but Angela interrupted him before he started. “With all due respect, sir, you don’t know what is down there. You don’t know that it’s safe.” Her tone was definitive, the hand on her hip conclusive, but the captain kept tying and zipping, working to get his boots back on over his thicker layers of socks. Frustrated by his lack of response, Angela continued louder. “What about the naming rights, Jaynes? That’s real intellectual property. If there is something down there, something huge, something with major social or scientific implications, whose ownership claim is that going to be?”
“Well hell, I guess it’s going to belong to whoever else comes to explore the thing with me,” Booker Jaynes declared and shrugged, pulling his bootlaces tight. Within moments, the others began preparing too.
There were seven of us standing before the chasm, ready to plunge below. Some of us felt like there was fortune waiting just beneath our feet, unseen. Garth came not because he believed that there was anything worth the effort but because he didn’t want to be left alone in an empty truck. “Dog, that shit is creepy,” he told me. As he struggled to be lowered into the chasm, the big man forced his eyes closed and clung to the two climbing cables supporting him. I took his box of Little Debbie Banana Twins cakes from the glove compartment and threw it to the bottom of the chasm so at least he had something to look forward to.
It was among the requirements of employment by the Creole Mining Company that all personnel should be skilled in rock surface climbing, with specific training in ice climbing. It was the captain’s belief that anybody who lived on the ice should at least have it in his or her power to climb that ice. Unfortunately, like many job requirements, this one was fulfilled more in the letter than in spirit in our little squad. My own wilderness training, for instance, consisted of an intensive two-day course on the climbing wall at the Reebok Sports Club/NY at Sixty-sixth Street to refresh my indoor, plastic wall climbing skills. The polar qualification of the certification came from the fact that, even though I took this course indoors, it was in January. I felt a bit guilty about that until I found out that Garth believed he had fulfilled his requirements by walking to his bus station once the day after a seven-inch snowstorm. “Don’t look at me that way. It was real slippery and shit,” Garth, catching my glance as he signed his waiver, told me. Although they presented a much better face on the subject, Nathaniel’s and Angela’s training wasn’t much better. While Nathaniel made a big fuss about their having gone glacial hiking in Seward, Alaska, in the early days of her separation, further anecdotes revealed that they’d flown to the flat glaciers in a prop plane and walked around for a few minutes before setting up a foldout table and having a picnic. Nathaniel had showed me pictures of the outing soon after we first met: the two sat in their matching snowsuits on metal chairs before a table covered in red checkered cloth. They toasted the camera with champagne flutes, their snow picks dangling loosely from their wrists as they smiled. “The pilot was a licensed masseuse too. It was sweet,” Nathaniel recalled. I don’t know what Angela had told him, but he seemed to have no concept of the fact that I despised him, or why.
This is not to say that no one of the Creole Mining Company had any training for the environment we found ourselves in. Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter put us all to shame, and Jeffree clearly took great joy in this. It was their thing, the climbing, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing—whatever was the fringe sport of the moment. They were Afrocentrics who loved the adventure. It was an eccentricity that they (or rather Jeffree, as Carlton Damon Carter never bragged at all) were very proud of. Theirs was a type of pride peculiar to our ethnic group. It said, “Look, I’m black and I’m taking pleasure in something I’m not expected to.” I don’t know if it was the snow itself or the act of defiance they found more enjoyable.
After returning to our opening in the white wall, the entryway I did not then or will ever refer to as the Jeffree Tube, I was shocked to see the footprints still there, moving off into the expanse. Like dreams or haunts, in part I expected them to dissolve back into imagination and mythology. In fact, as we moved as a group, tentative and hushed by the cathedral-like quality of the tunnel, it became clear that the footprints had not only remained in our absence but multiplied.
“There’s another set, look. There is one set walking off, and then there’s a set that comes back, and then walks off,” Jaynes told us. He pointed them out with his flashlight. Looking back toward the entrance, we saw that we weren’t more than twenty yards into the journey.
“These weren’t here before,” I said, but it seemed the others had already deduced as much from Jaynes’s tone. In response, Jeffree bent down on one knee, snapped a bit of the packed snow in the track with his fingers, and took it to his nose for a heavy snort before declaring, “It’s fresh.”
“What does stale ice smell like, Jeffree?” I asked, but if there was an answer I didn’t hear it as the marching continued.
Nathaniel had brought a still camera too this time. When the whiteness of its flash hit, the explosion of light revealed nothing. The dimmer, persistent blue sunshine that made its way through so much ice was far more revealing. The ceiling of the expanse, cathedral-like in its arch, reached a good twenty yards above us. The group walked to the side of the tracks, careful not to crush them. As they did on their regular fitness walks, Jeffree and Carlton Damon Carter wore aluminum teardrop snowshoes, which let them float above the snow’s crust nicely. Despite the heavy steps of the hiking boots that the rest of us wore, after a few minutes I noticed that my own steps did not go as deep as the footsteps we were tracking, my own feet packing the snow mere centimeters while the prints pushed down inches.
“What’s the rush, y’all? You know there ain’t nothing down there,” Garth yelled ahead to me when I stopped to let him catch up, while the others moved on. Garth could move fast, but he couldn’t move fast for long.
“Well, we’ll find whatever soon,” I assured him.
Garth paused when he reached me, leaning on my shoulder to do so. Pulling off his hood for a moment, he looked up, gazed around at the stillness.
“Nope. If there was something down here, this would be quick, because there would be something to find,” he declared. “But searching for nothing: that takes all damn day.”
Contrary to Garth Frierson’s pessimism, there was something ahead. The path did have a direction. Aside from its straightforward line, it was also clearly heading down, the angle becoming more steep as we moved. It took Garth and me only a few minutes to catch up with the others despite Garth’s slow pace, the road dipping at points significantly enough that until we were within thirty paces of the group we couldn’t see them. Couldn’t see them even when they were just black shadows within the snow, a clearly alien presence in this environment. Around us the walls were glistening and curved; I could even hear the echoes of water drippin
g in the distance.
“Which direction you think we should go?” Captain Jaynes asked me when I reached him. Our tunnel broke into three possible routes. Looking down at our two sets of tracks I saw it: a third set, and what could even be a fourth. There, beneath so many tons of ice and for the first time feeling its suffocating implications, I felt the vertigo hit me.
“That don’t mean there are more than one of … whoever this is … in here.” My cousin exuded his usual confidence, but it wasn’t working. The marks seemed all to be made by feet of roughly the same massive size. Regardless, retreat was never even discussed. When I look back now, I wonder about this. We were all down here for our own hustles, pursuing our own self-serving delusions, maybe, but now that we found ourselves on the trail of something genuinely new, something undiscovered, all that could wait. We had to see it through. It was decided then that we should break up into pairs and explore the three tunnels ahead, returning to this spot after five minutes.
Jeffree pushed off with Carlton Damon Carter before the rest of us had even adjusted our gear, so the captain moved to the left entrance with Garth in tow. I tried to follow them, but my cousin literally pushed me back to the last group. Nathaniel and Angela Latham. Nathaniel smiled. Angela wouldn’t even look at me, the way she hadn’t since we’d gotten here. Not like she was mad, or even uncomfortable. Just like her eyes naturally went three feet over and down in my presence.
“If we were to find something, Chris.” Nathaniel left her to run up beside me, the most energy I’d seen him exert since we got down here. He tapped on my hood to get me to reveal an ear to him. “Naming rights would be no small issue. Of course, it’s really intellectual property rights that are prominent here.” The ceilings continued to lower as we went. It was all downhill, taking Nathaniel, Angela, and I farther into the depths.
“Fortunes can be made in being an expert, I’m sure you know,” he damn near purred. “There’s documentaries, coffee table books, reality shows. But even if you get to play the expert role, you’d need management. Someone to deal with the finances, publicity.”
“Slow down, Chris. Listen to him. He’s the best.” Angela followed me on my other side, tugging on my arm in a way I decided to read as seductive. Nathaniel, watching, smiling, knew his wife hypnotized me, but he also knew she was so far out of my reach that my obsession posed no threat. “There’s not much left to be new in the world anymore, Chris,” he told me, grabbing her gloved hand right across me and squeezing it. I stopped, just to look at them. This sent Nathaniel into a riff on international property rights and the Internet. I turned to Angela. She was looking at me now, but just to impress upon me that I should be listening to him. Her face modeled the seriousness with which she thought I should be taking Nathaniel’s pitch. I mimicked her without meaning to, until I caught myself.
“That’s enough. For today. Let’s go back.” I turned to walk in the other direction. I tried to split through the two of them, but Angela held tight and they stepped out of my path before I could reach them.
“We’re lost, aren’t we?” Nathaniel asked when he caught up to me. It had been five minutes and we were heading back to the first cavern, and from the dread in his voice I knew that he too had noticed the mess of tracks that had formed behind us. Tunnel entrances I had ignored on the way down now seemed to tempt me as possible return routes. Had we really walked down in a straight line, or was that just an illusion? Was one of these side openings actually our way out?
“These are the freshest tracks right here.” Angela, bent down on her knees, took a picture of the evidence with her cell phone for posterity. “The others are shallower; the wind’s thinned them out. And they’re crusted over.” The two of us looked down at her, and when she got up, we followed behind. She walked faster leading, but it wasn’t more than a minute later when the little woman halted abruptly. Flung a flat palm up in the air to motion for us to cease as well.
I followed Angela Latham’s eyes, saw nothing.
“Listen,” Angela mouthed, and this I tried as well. There was nothing to warrant the wide-eyed expression that had seized her face.
“Breathing,” Angela mouthed, and I knew that I was breathing very hard, not quite used to the level of physical exertion currently being demanded. Then, logic clicking into my brain, I stopped my breathing, or at least paused it for a little while.
But the breathing kept going.
Harder than my own this time, although fainter from the distance. Just beyond the next corner, the next bend, something was alive. Something was alive and breathing like a thing wounded, its gasps heavy and deliberate, broken up by occasional forced sighs. It sounds almost like a horse, I thought. That is what it reminded me of.
I stood there waiting for Angela to continue walking toward the sound, which she did not. It seemed that Angela had changed her mind about being the first to discover our big-footed prey. Nor did she appear to want to let Nathaniel engage with the unseen beast either. Me, she was willing to sacrifice, and she reached out and pulled my sleeve, giving a slight push in the small of my back in the direction of my destiny.
Never had my own footsteps seemed so loud. Fortunately, the closer I came to the source, the louder its inhuman breath seemed to boom. Turning the corner, I saw the beginning of the beast, a massive black form in the shadow. As I inched closer, I could see that whatever it was was sprawled out, legs before it as it sat leaning against an ice wall. Heading forward in my slowest gait, I could see its chest heaving in the shadow, shuddering from the effort. Then as I came even closer, I saw the creature push a massive hand into its side and remove a small, high-fructose-corn-syrup laden Little Debbie snack cake and shove half the thing into its mouth.
“Damn Negro, you about scared me half to death. Why you creeping like that?” Garth managed. I say “managed” because he had a good amount of pastry in his jowls at the time. Hearing his voice, Angela and Nathaniel came up behind me. Angela used her adrenaline-fueled energy wisely: by giving Garth a good unwarranted kick in his leg before turning around and stomping back in the direction of our starting point. Nathaniel offered a smile and a shrug before he followed her.
Leaning an arm over me for support, the huffing Garth let some of his girth onto my shoulders, and as I walked us out I was soon breathing as hard as he was.
“You’re weak,” Garth huffed.
“You’re fat,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but I’m strong, see? I carry all this fat around every day like it’s nothing.”
Angela and Nathaniel were far beyond us. By the time I’d pulled Garth up and started moving, they’d made a significant distance. Even in the halls that didn’t turn for hundreds of yards, I couldn’t see the end of them. Despite the rustling, despite the considerably heavy wheezing of my boy, the massive silence of this cavern started to hang over me. It occurred to me, more so than before, that if the ice above us gave in to its own weight, we would be completely lost. Enveloped in the cold, the labyrinth returned to nothing more than the packed solid mass it was supposed to be. Just when I was really starting to feel the strain, Garth removed his arm and attempted to walk again unaided.
“Listen,” he said as he trudged along. “You laughed at me before, but let me tell you something: Thomas Karvel is down here, you know, in Antarctica. He’s down here, waiting all the bad shit in the world out. Just chilling, hibernating almost. This could be his hideout.”
“What the hell does that have to do with anything? Look: I’m sure the rich have taken off to faraway places to escape the poisoned reservoirs, the bombs, wars,” I acknowledged. “But it’s to places like Aruba. White sand, not white snow.”
“Naw, dog. Karvel, he’s too smart for that. This is a man that went from a nobody to a billionaire selling pictures. Pictures. No, Karvel’s down here, away from everything. Nuclear, chemical, suicide bombs, everything.”
I got pissed. At him, at his fantasy. Here I was, on the cusp of my own great dream, my own impossible truth,
and this gluttonous man was crowding it with his improbable vision. There wasn’t enough magic in the universe for both of us. Worse, Garth’s mad theory put mine in an altogether new light. Was I as crazy as his fat ass? You saw something, the footprints, I told myself, but as soon as I did, my rational mind began asserting dominance once again. The corporations were everywhere. It was a fact that a major corporation had hired the Creole itself—wasn’t it possible that our efforts were being surveyed, or that we were hired as a front for a greater subterranean effort? It was all viable, and the viable always outweighed the improbable.
Looking at the ground beneath my feet, I saw the footprints, numerous now and going in a variety of directions. Mundane, lost, mindlessly treading. I could hear with some relief that the others were shuffling along in front of us, their crunching steps and muffled voices audible.
“There are no billionaire painters down here, Garth. And let me admit this, there are no albino monsters or Neanderthals either. Nothing other than the mundane abounds, as usual.”
I said this last bit, this stubborn pessimism, just as I turned in to door—a narrow crevice in the ice between corridors. What I saw on the other side was a crew standing around, talking to each other. I say “a crew” because they were not my crew, not the members of the Creole. Nor were they a crew of humans. At least not in any understanding I had of my species.
Garth came behind me, continuing his mumbles about a rumor some Karvel dealer in Buenos Aires had told him, then bumped into my back, looking up at his surroundings just as these other figures were doing, and he was no less startled.
There were six of them, standing there, mountainous creatures. Their white robes hung loosely around them, and while they stood frozen by the sight of us, those robes continued to sway. There was a moment when I questioned those first seconds of physical movement, being tempted to believe instead that the monsters were merely statues carved from the snow around us, garbed for effect. But then one turned his eyes from Garth to me, and held his massive, pale hand out before him. I knew by some instinct that this was the one, this was the one that I had seen earlier in the day. Even before I spoke, I understood the scene we had walked in on: the creature had been explaining to the others what he’d seen and what it meant, much as I had done earlier to my people.