A nervous murmur rolled among the spirit ranks. Faint human forms became swirling vortexes as whispers resonated. Even Lea exhibited a profound concern.
“The Unspeakable Ones are pure evil,” Broders continued. “And they will perpetrate atrocities the likes of which humans can’t even begin to comprehend. They must be stopped, Harvey Crane—and you have to stop them!”
“Me!” he searched the room. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Mount Mausolus,” was Broders’s answer.
“What about Mount Mausolus?”
“Before the Guardians left, they built an emergency beacon, a way to signal them in case the Unspeakable Ones escaped from their underground prison. At the top of Mount Mausolus is where the beacon can be located. We need you to activate that beacon.”
Harvey back stepped. “But why me?”
“That place is seething with dark energy,” Broders said. “A spirit would be drawn in and absorbed by evil if it came too close.
Lea grasped his arm. “Harvey, I’m afraid.”
He couldn’t turn away from her pleading eyes. She looked to him for protection. How could he say no? Fear. That’s how.
“But-but what about the Unspeakable Ones?”
“They’re confined deep underground. The emergency beacon is at the very summit of the mountain, and as we understand, a clear path leads up to it. You should have no difficulties.”
“And I’ll go with you as far as I can,” Lea said anxiously. Harvey saw in her look, heard in the tone of her voice, felt the desperate determination in her energy. She wasn’t a physical being anymore. She never was. But now, more than ever, she seemed alive to him. Whatever that meant.
“I just…I don’t know…”
Another disturbance in the masses. The ghosts were growing restless once again, and it all had to do with Harvey. More heated allegations. More accusatory glares.
“You say you’re not in on this,” Broders spoke for the multitude. “You say you aren’t helping DeepSix with their Faustian deal…then prove it!”
A crushing roar. Harvey knew he was backed in a corner. Pressure from all sides. Lea desperately begging him. A thousand spirits coercing him.
“Well, Harvey Crane,” Broders conveyed the message from every soul in the soupy mix of mist and smoke. “Will you help us? Will you go?”
Harvey wished he had time to mull over this terrible choice. Something happened, though, that proved time had run out. A sudden sound so terrifying it sent the spirits into a chaotic tempest. The clanging of metallic claws on soft stone. Then Harvey spotted them, marching in single file, and his whole body went numb. The cyborgs had found them.
5.
Harvey stood flatfooted, watching the cyborgs kick and thrash their way into the catacombs, crashing into walls and spilling bones. The spirits, now a giant, turbulent cloud of shimmering light, worked as one, circling and confusing the androids. Not all of the killing machines were affected, and three in particular eluded the paranormal attack, setting their cold, dead stares on Harvey.
“Run!” Broders coalesced from the haze, pointing. “There!”
He sensed Lea pushing him toward a small set of stairs, down into a dark, narrow tunnel. Behind them the spirits were wailing and the robots were roaring. His legs ached from running, yet he pressed on, knowing if he slowed even a little, those mechanical monsters would be nipping at his heels.
Lea was a dazzling chromatic halo, urging Harvey onward, darting into the darkness like a prism of light. Her eternal glow helped him navigate the narrow trail, into an area of large pipes and conduits Harvey recognized from his history. Obsolete technology, but it still seemed operational. He felt the constant whirring even before hearing it, and that soothed him a little. He didn’t know why.
Up and over one large pipe. On his belly to creep under another. He had to contort and twist around several large ducts, heading deeper and deeper into the inner substructure. He came across what looked like air condensers, heating and cooling systems, the whole life support apparatus. The going was tight, and he thought maybe the cyborgs were too bulky and cumbersome to make it through. So he paused just for an instant to catch his breath. A creak and a groan from behind. By the ambient from the machinery, he caught a glimpse of an articulated leg, bending and flexing with surprising agility. That’s when he realized those damn cyborgs could go anywhere he could go, and probably many places he couldn’t.
Lea urged Harvey forward again, and he ran. Tirelessly on and on—until he came to a dead end. The passageway just stopped. The end of the line.
In desperation, he felt with his hands and found a crank. Realizing it was an old airlock, he twisted the round handle. It turned one revolution and wouldn’t budge a millimeter more.
“Shit!” he strained and strained with everything he had. Nothing. Stuck beyond his power. But was it beyond Lea’s? Her ethereal radiance surrounded the crank handle, a shapeless blanket of dense air. He could see the stress against the corroded mechanism. Her effort had an effect, and the crank began turning. In a matter of seconds, she had the door open a crack, just enough for him to crawl under, and not enough for the cyborgs to follow.
It didn’t take long before he heard the androids pounding, screeching, frantic to get past the rusted hatch. He kept running, knowing the mechanical assassins wouldn’t be able to make it. He wondered what they would do next. What retaliatory move would they make?
He got his answer.
A long, slow moan. A series of clicks. The sound of a great motor winding down. The rumbling stopped. The robots had shut down the life support systems. Check and mate.
“Harvey!” Lea was still with him—somewhere. He heard her voice and followed the sound, coughing, wheezing, lungs tightening more with each step. His skin boiled at the tremendous heat escaping the machine room and festering in the underground funk. The air became a soggy sponge, and he had to fight for each breath. The worst part—he had no idea where he was going.
There comes a point when the human body begins to shut down, when it can’t take any more. Harvey, once upon a time, had been an athlete. Not a mega-jock, but he could hold his own in a sprint or pin someone relatively close to his size in a fair wrestling match. He prided himself on his strength and endurance in those days, in the flower of his youth. Those days seemed light years ago. He was glad, though, that he’d been disciplined and had maintained his regular exercise regimen. Otherwise, he never would have made it this far. As it was, from his experience as an athlete, he recognized the signs of muscle failure. Shaking knees. Flittering stomach. Blurred vision. A steady ringing in his ears. The classic signs. He knew if he didn’t make it to safety soon, he’d collapse and never wake up.
That’s when he stumbled. The wall was hard and cold despite the stuffy atmosphere. He wanted just to sit, to rest…to sleep.
“NO!” Lea’s strident command jarred him back to consciousness. He felt feathery for a moment as she helped him to his feet. Weak and wobbly, he responded to her commanding words. “Harvey, don’t give up on me now! It’s just a little further…please!”
He stumbled and staggered, willing himself forward. He sounded like a fish out of water, gasping, grasping at whatever could keep him upright. After a few more steps, he felt it again, the overwhelming need to rest. That was all he needed. Just a few minutes on the floor with his eyes closed and…
“We’re here, Harvey! Right here! Look!”
It was the hardest thing ever just to lift his head, but when he did, he had the biggest jolt of unexpected joy. It was a service bay, complete with racks of space suits, a rover, and, best of all, an autoserve. There was even a working H2O dispenser, an ancient one that operated via hand pump. Everything was there for him to recover, restore, revive.
He got on his knees and thanked God for the fortuitous find. He also thanked Lea, and wondered aloud just where he would have been if it weren’t for her.
“Probably dead a long time ago,” he coughe
d into his hand, a raspy sound originated from his throat.
“You sound horrible,” she said, ignoring his praise. “Hurry!”
And when she said that, she caused the transparent cabinet doors to click open, allowing Harvey easy access. All he had to do was put on the suit, one thing he could do without her help.
His first breath in the old suit was, as usual with such an antique condenser, a little tough to swallow. He was grateful anyway. It kept him alive. And as he took the wonderfully stale air, a giant shockwave in the floor made him spit it right back out. A crack in the darkness, at floor level, produced a bout of temporary blindness. The crack grew into a fissure. The radiant illumination of two stars hit him, and he had to shield his eyes. As his vision adjusted, he began to make out shapes. Crosses, then tall spires, columns and cubic slabs, darkened against the stunning star rises, both Fomalhaut and Piscis Austrini blazing in the low horizon. In the center, between the blazing sky and the gloomy foreground, lingered a towering peak, rocky and irregular, rising tall and strong like a fist pointed to the stars.
Mount Mausolus.
6.
“Where have you led me?” he couldn’t keep his eyes off the mountain, looming large yet so far away. “Lea?”
He waited for a response. Spinning in a circle, he scrutinized every corner, every crevice, every centimeter of the bay for a sign of her, but found nothing.
Suddenly his visor display crackled. It was an old unit, but the suit’s system worked like a charm. And when Lea’s face appeared onscreen, he shouted into his helmet, stinging his own ears.
“Lea, what’s going on! I don’t like the looks of this!”
“I don’t like it either,” her somberness matched his fear. He knew she wasn’t trying to deceive him. “I don’t like the idea of asking you to go out there all alone. But we don’t have a choice. Broders was right. We can’t go out there. The Unspeakable Ones…just being their presence would mean death for spirit.”
“But what about me? I have a spirit, don’t I? Doesn’t that count?”
“The living are different when it comes to these situations. You have a physical body that grounds your soul in place against the negative energy.”
A rumble deep underground. She fell silent for a moment, until the small quake was finished, then continued.
“That’s them. We have to hurry!”
The rover started running, its electric powerplant purring, its overhead lights flashing on, casting bright beams through the dust and the dark inside the utility bay. It was an old model, certainly. However, Harvey recognized its bulk. It had a mean set of tires and a beefed-up suspension and extra batteries that, when he inspected them, found fully topped off. He also noticed his suit had supplemental battery packs.
“You guys have been planning this for a while, haven’t you?”
“Harvey, I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t know about any of this. Not until the spirits took me back to Zone 6 and explained it all. The messages and the other things that happened…they were trying to get your attention, that’s all.”
“Trying to get my attention?” he chortled. “Is that what they were doing?”
“They’re scared and so am I,” Lea had never been so serious, putting extra weight on her every word. “I’m disgusted by the thought of the Unspeakable Ones using my body for something so awful. They want to conquer the galaxy, Harvey. And they’ll do it with such cruelty it’ll become a living hell. We can’t let them do it, Harvey…we can’t!”
Harvey stared at her image on his visor screen. Nothing more than a blurry, silver luminosity. He couldn’t tell, but he thought she was crying, and that tore his heart from his chest.
“Oh, God, Lea,” he fought for some sense in it all. “This is insane. I-I can’t even believe this is all happening.”
“I know,” she calmed him with her lyrical voice. “It is a little hard to believe. But trust me, Harvey, this is happening,” her eyes drifted, right along with Harvey’s, to the mountain. “That’s a bad, bad place. But it’s also a good place. The emergency beacon is there, and that has to be activated,” she looked at him once again with the most forlorn expression. “Harvey, you’re the only one on this planet that can do it.”
“But I wouldn’t even know the first thing to do,” he said genuinely. “I want to help…really I do. But I have no idea where to go or how to work the beacon even if I did find it.”
“I can help you,” she flashed a series of schematics at him on the screen. Maps. Coordinates. Directions. Details on how to find and operate the alien device.
“Where’d you get this?”
“The spirits. These files have supposedly been wiped out long ago. But somehow the spirits retained the data. It’s all here, Harvey. All the schematics on the communications tower. I can tell you exactly where to go. I can even go with you for a while,” just when she said that, she disappeared from his visor and the onboard computer in the rover flickered with her image. She smiled questioningly at him. He had no power to refuse, so he got in and started driving.
The rover cut a dusty path through the headstones, speeding along the solitary road that led, twisting and winding, out of the unfamiliar graveyard. It took an hour to reach the outer boundaries, and when they did, Harvey felt a sense of dread, forcing him to ease off the accelerator.
“What’s the matter, Harvey?” Lea asked.
“I’ve never been in an area without headstones,” he surveyed the virgin land, the foothills stepping gradually up to the larger, more dominating features, and, finally the nearly vertical rock face known as Mount Mausolus. “It’s just a little strange, that’s all.”
“We’d better get moving,” she said, and he obliged, pointing the rover into uncharted territory, navigating around, in-between and over countless rocks and small boulders.
The entire trip was like being in training. Lea sent him multiple images, maps, the exact approach to the mountain, directions to the structure that housed the beacon, and where to go once inside. It was a lot of information, and a long journey. At least two more hours later, just when he thought his rear-end couldn’t take it any longer, the road became impassable. Rocks too large to roll over and too close to go around.
“Well,” he shut down the rover’s systems. “Looks like it’s a hike from here.”
“This is where I stop,” Lea looked down. Her image was fading. “I can’t go any further. I can already feel them.”
“Lea, wait,” he begged before she went away completely. “Are you going to wait for me here?”
“I’ll try,” she said, but she didn’t look good. “I’m not sure if I can, Harvey. The hatred, the malice is just so overpowering, even here.”
“Okay, listen,” he had an idea. “If you can’t stay here, then go back to the visitor station, to the mausoleum. Your grave. I’ll meet you at your grave.”
“Okay, Harvey,” she sounded weak. “I’ll meet you there. Please don’t make me wait long.”
“I won’t,” he smiled, hoping that would ease her discomfort at least a little. “This should be a piece of cake, thanks to your amazing instructions.”
That made her smile, but only faintly.
“Be careful, Harvey.”
“I will.”
“Harvey,” her image was gone completely now. All he had as he began his trek up the mountain were her last words. “Harvey…I love you.”
7.
It wasn’t long before a rigorous hike became a precarious climb. Only a few meters up, Harvey found himself ascending hand over hand, sliding his feet from one niche to the next. The ascent would have been difficult enough with full climber’s rigging. In his space suit, it became as comical as it was deadly.
He didn’t find it funny, though, when, stretching to reach a foothold a few short treacherous centimeters away, he felt his fingers slip inside his gloves, and that in turn made him lose his hold. He was now so far up the rover looked like a toy, and when he took that tragic misstep, h
is life flashed before his eyes. Somehow he found his footing, and made it to the higher ledge, where, once he rounded a small outcropping, he gazed upon a sight that, had it been on Earth, would have been one of the wonders of the world.
The inside of the mountain had been carved away, but not by crude tools. Smooth surfaces, so clean and straight it must have taken incredible engineering. He pressed his hand against the wall next to him and looked up. That’s when his brain began to comprehend the size and scope of this new discovery.
Towering columns cut from the rock. Massive arches, adorned with bas-reliefs of the most eloquent designs. Pictures of living beings. Not of Earth, that much was certain. Harvey walked until he saw a clean-cut wall in every direction, and, backing up and letting his helmet lights probe further, he saw he was on the very bottom of some rather large steps.
Cemetery Planet: The Complete Series Page 11