by Tobias Wade
“Let go of her, you monster!”
Rough hands haul Jessica away, and she’s too numb to resist. More gunshots, one after another, pounding endlessly into the facedown corpse. A flurry of movement, and then Mackenzie’s body is kicked onto her back. Another gunshot, and her rib cage explodes to send shrapnel of bone flying in every direction.
“Mom! Mom! Mom!” is all she can cry. Dantes is there—he stoops down and tries to hold Jessica, but she writhes away from him to crawl across the ground. “Mom, get up! You have to get out of here!”
“That’s not your mother, Jessica. You’ve got to listen—”
The corpse lurches upright, gasping for breath. Black marble eyes glisten in the pale light. She’s looking directly at Jessica as another bullet plants itself squarely in her forehead. Her chest cavity gapes open, revealing something like black vines which have grown everywhere inside her. Tendrils drill into her organs, wrap around her ribs, pulsing feebly throughout the infestation. Despite it all, Mackenzie is staggering to her feet again. She isn’t breathing exactly, but she’s dragging in one long inhale that seems to go on forever.
A final gunshot, and the body crumples to the ground like a sack of meat. Jessica is screaming at the top of her lungs, blind from the pain in her back as she tries to wriggle across the ground.
“That was my mom! I’ll kill you! She was still in there, I was talking to her—”
“Jordan, let’s go,” Dantes barks. “There might be more of them around.”
Jessica is forced back into her chair. She tries to claw her way out to get back toward her mother’s ruined body, but her strength is fleeing by the second. Her whole body shakes with uncontrollable sobs, the trembling robbing her last will to resist. She’s vaguely aware of a face leaning down in front of her, but she’s so blind from her tears that she can’t tell it’s Dantes until he starts to speak.
“The demon had you, but you’re okay now. It’s gone, and it’s never going to hurt you again.”
She’s crawls back toward her discarded chair without a word.
“What did she tell you?” Jordan asks. Nothing. “You have to tell us!”
“We’re all on the same side, Jessica,” Dantes says. “It’s us against them, humans against demons. Nothing can ever change that.”
“I want to go home,” Jessica whispers, dragging herself to sit upright. As she turns, no demon could have matched the dark intensity of Jessica’s eyes.
21
Where man has been, man has left his mark. From the irrevocable alteration of ecosystems to the mass extinction of indigenous life, they have slashed and burned their way through every corner of this planet. Out of all the contamination Kathleen Williams has come across in her twenty years as a marine biologist however, nothing has left so grievous an impact on her psyche as the footprints she discovered on the ocean floor.
Kathleen is employed by the global Geotraces Project. Her study of biogeochemical cycles has led her and her partner Erik to Vik, an Icelandic fishing village with long black beaches of scattered ash and fragmented lava. Although the volcanoes lie dormant, local reports have indicated an uncharacteristically vibrant level of marine life which is consistent with active hydrothermal vents billowing dissolved minerals into the water.
Kathleen and Erik have spent the last two weeks performing chemical tests along the shoreline before identifying the most likely locations for the vent. Each morning before sunrise, they’d pack their gear and walk across the serene black sand, leaving a lonely trail of tracks like astronauts on an alien world. Each new day gave them a brand-new land, their previous footprints devoured by the ocean tide which thunders relentless against cliff like the tolling laughter of an ancient God. Standing here so vulnerable to the forces of nature, it’s clear that man has learned to treat the elements with the utmost reverence.
"Not today. No sailing today," their guide Aaron translates for the wizened creature who is even more gnarled than the walking stick he leans upon. The old man adjusts his dark spectacles, his eyebrows huddling together like lost sheep in a storm. A thick rush of Iclandic prompts Aaron to add: "The spirits rest lightly in the waves."
Erik and Kathleen exchange a tight-lipped smirk. Erik is even more dismissive of the supernatural than Kathleen, but neither want to burn bridges with the locals who had volunteered to shelter and feed them for the duration of their expedition. The old man appears as a force of nature unto himself and offending him seemed like shouting obscenities at the ocean during a storm.
"How much longer will they be restless?" Erik asks. They wait for Aaron to twist the words into the musical score of babble, but neither could guess what the reply would be before the translation returns.
“He says he hears them every night,” Aaron says. “Below the houses, below the lava, below the ocean even—howling, and weeping, and warning us to stay away.” Aaron pauses while the old man continues to talk. “He says he’ll ask them, but you must stay away until he hears a reply.”
"It's okay," Kathleen tells Eric as they walk along the beach that afternoon. "We can go back over the ridge we went yesterday and retest the samples to make sure we’ve mapped the vent probability correctly."
"It's a waste of time. I think they're just screwing us around," Eric says, running an anxious hand through his thick brown hair.
"They know how important our work is. If they didn't, they'd never be helping us so much. We have to respect their customs though."
"Yeah? Then what's he doing over there?" Eric asks.
Squinting against the sun's glare on the sand, it takes a moment for Kathleen to make out the old man untying his boat by the shore. Even the serenity of this incredible landscape can’t stop a bitter hot frustration rising in her chest.
"If he's sailing, then there's no reason for us not to set out too," Eric says. "Where does he get off with that restless spirit crap? He probably just didn't want us to use his boat."
"Well, we can't ask to go with him now that he's already said no," Kathleen replies. "Let's just try again tomorrow—"
"Hey! Aaron! Can you find us another boat for the afternoon?" Eric wasn't listening. He never was any good at sitting still. He spent the whole flight from London pressing his face against the window, practically exploding out of the seat the second they landed. Kathleen can’t deny her own eagerness though, and they both soon found themselves loading the next dinghy that was big enough to carry their TDC sample kit and diving gear.
"It looks like he's going the same way," Kathleen points out. The old man is even staring in their direction for a long while, although he doesn’t make the slightest sign of acknowledgment. "Should we hide or something?"
"He's the one who should be embarrassed to be out here, not us," Eric says. "Restless spirits, my ass. Just ignore him. We got a late start and a full dive schedule ahead of us."
“So the spirits don’t bother you at all?”
“I’d put up with more than that to spend a day with you at sea. Come on!” There’s something cute about how Eric can’t quite meet her eye as he says it. His enthusiasm is infectious, and despite herself Kathleen feels the siren call of the open water. The rich salty air penetrates her body, every breath permeating the anticipation.
Even after they’d set sail, it’s hard to concentrate on their test kits with the old man staring the whole time. Whenever the researchers stop to collect samples, the other boat stopped too, just bobbing up and down on the waves about a hundred yards off. At Kathleen’s request they start going deeper to avoid him, but as chance would have it, the concentration of iron isotopes begins to immediately diminish, and they have to get back on his trail.
"It's like he knows exactly where the vent is," Eric grumbles, straining his oar to pull them back into line behind the old man. "Would it have been that hard for him to just tell us?"
"Maybe he is the restless spirit he warned us about," Kathleen jokes, failing to wipe the scowl off Eric's face. "Try to just ignore him. It's not like
you would have listened even if he pointed to a map. You would have wanted to make your own measurements."
"Now look what he's doing—what in the world?"
Kathleen follows the line of Eric's bewilderment just in time to see a gentle ripple vanish into the icy waters.
"Where did he go? Don't tell me—"
"Yeah. Dove right in," Eric confirms. "No thermal gear or snorkel or anything. We better hurry."
It takes almost five minutes to pull their boat alongside his. Nothing stirs below the water, not even a splash. The scouring wind lances off the freezing spray to pitch the dinghy treacherously to and fro. There is no sign that a living being had entered nature's domain except—
"Bubbles! Over here!" Kathleen is already struggling into her diving suit which clings to her lithe body like a second skin.
“Where?” Eric asks, his eyes slow to pull away from Kathleen to scan the water.
“Right there! There’s a steady stream of them.”
"They can’t be coming from him though," Eric says. "Too consistent. This has to be gasses escaping from the vent. Besides, he’s already been down long enough that he wouldn’t have that much air left…"
"Doesn't matter, he has to be down there somewhere." Mask, check. Tank, check. Regulator, check.
"He was," Eric adds darkly. “Kathleen, I don’t think we should —”
Kathleen tips backward off the boat and submerges into the icy liquid. Another burst of bubbles—she swims straight through, trying to find a clearer view. A few moments later and she hears another splash as Eric makes his plunge. Kathleen doesn’t spare him a glance. All she can focus on are the footprints on the ocean floor.
Not in the sand. Those would have been washed away the moment they were placed. A long trail of footprints are embedded directly into the black volcanic rock. No natural phenomenon could have produced such deep, even strides. A thousand questions flit through her brain, but the inescapable conclusion was that someone—or something—must have walked through here before the molten lava had cooled.
The footprints headed in the opposite direction of the underwater vent. A hotbed of tube worms, shrimp, and crabs which fed on the microbes living there blanked the floor and swayed rhythmically with the tide like a sentient garden. At one point the footprints abruptly vanish as though whoever was walking had simply lifted off and swam away. Kathleen plunges deeper, fighting her way to pierce the thickening stream of bubbles.
Following the footprints in the opposite direction leads her closer to the base of the vent. Kathleen glances back at Eric, still close to the surface, capturing a variety of water samples at different depths on the way down. Back to the vent, Kathleen begins to truly appreciate the scale of the underwater complex. Hydrothermal vents are created and maintained by the heat of underlying volcanic activity, and even though the surface only looked like a barely elevated craggy slope, she knew they had to be on the tip of a massive underwater volcano. From the volcanic rock which stretched for miles in all directions to the wide expanses of black beaches, all that lava had to have come from somewhere.
Once her feet touch the ocean floor—about 40 meters below the surface—Kathleen discovers a small archway carved into the rock. Carved—the closely fitted stones and intricate engraven spiral patterns unmistakably a human effort. The foot prints exiting from this arch open into the mound of rock which is dominated by a series of chimney vents. She pulls herself hand over hand until she’s inside, feeling as though she is entering a primordial temple hidden below the silent waters.
The spirits rest lightly in the waves. That’s what the old man said. Had he led them here deliberately? And if he knew about the city, then could he really be one of the spirits?
Kathleen has to use her flashlight to continue beyond this point. She is surrounded by a torrent of bubbling dissolved gasses now, and everywhere her beam of light touches is crowded with all manner of thriving crustaceans. The walls around her look more natural here: a truly gargantuan underground cavern which yawns into the vacuous black water below. She considers going back for Eric, but she still has more than half of her air reserves and there is something about the raw power of the place that she’s loathe to turn her back on. Never before had she encountered a hidden world which so readily lent itself to the darkest recesses of her imagination. Her heart is electric with the thrill of discovery as she propels deeper into those black waters.
This is unequivocally the greatest find in Kathleen’s career. Besides the oceanography and biogeochemical findings, she’ll be able to fill a whole journal with archaeological publication. Kathleen continues to pass more carvings: covering the walls, nesting within alcoves, decorating this sanctuary of forgotten worship with layer upon layer of perfectly interlocking geometric designs. Even with modern equipment, there's no way someone could have maintained this depth long enough to build this labyrinth. The sonorous moan of the water pulsing through the caverns gives credence to even more unlikely explanations however, and she resolves to keep an open mind as the limits of her scientific knowledge are strained.
Especially now that the watery pulse of the cavern begins to alter with malicious intent. The water pulls and pushes her as though she is caught in the swell of a behemoth’s labored breathing. She has to start kicking to stay in place lest the current drag her deeper into the vents and their bubbling clouds of noxious gases. She’ll wear herself out if she stays too long, but on the edge of turning back, she lingers a moment more. A shimmer runs up the cavern walls like an animal frozen in terror, and then some faint flicker of red light catches her eye.
The rolling boil of the water intensifies and pushes warm currents over her skin. It’s a pleasant tingle after the icy water, but it still causes her muscles to stiffen in shock. An eruption? Right now? Exactly when she happened to be there? But she knows in the pit of her stomach that it isn’t blind chance which fills the surrounding vents with pressure and evaporates the water into waves of boiling steam. Someone—or something—knows she’s here.
She has to get out now. It can’t be more than a minute before the molten rock will begin to flood the cavern and reach her. Hesitating could mean being enveloped by the boiling steam. She can’t retreat though—not yet—not while the dull red light of the lava provides her only chance to see what lies at the heart of the pit. Where is Erik? The stubborn fool must still be collecting samples. Didn’t he see the arch?
She considers turning back for him, but a sudden vision gives her pause. This isn’t an isolated temple or shrine. This is an entry chamber. Beyond the meager extent of her portable light and into the unfathomable depths now illuminated by the volcanic discharge stretches a city of profound magnitude. Twisting spires like the teeth of hell rupture from the rock along the deplorable descent. Ordered rows of houses are carved into the cliff sides, expansive basins housing stark monoliths, and occult runes and symbols blazon across every surface for as far as she can see.
If only she could stay to explore—but no. The water is already reaching a boil around her, and she can feel her hands and feet scalding where they aren’t covered with the thermal suit. She strikes hard against the swirling water, fighting for every inch against the terrible breath of the cave which inhales her deeper. The walls around her are oozing and running from the heat, dribbling like candle wax beneath a flame. She surges outward, propelled by a mindless desperation that her fragile mortality spins. The groan of the cave rises into a primal bellow of hissing steam, until at last she is hurled from the rocky confines and spat into the open water off the Icelandic coast.
The archway—the cavern—the footprints—it’s all being submerged in a fresh layer of volcanic rock. She rises slowly through the remaining water toward the surface. She should have been relieved at even being alive, but the helpless frustration of watching that splendorous secret buried beneath the waves makes her feel as though part of her is dying with it.
Even this far up, the water is beginning to churn and boil. Kathleen’s
air is running low, and she can't waste any more time getting back to the boat. Just before she surfaces though, she sees him emerge from the archway before it collapses in utter ruin.
The old man is walking through the molten rock, leaving a fresh trail of footprints to exit the hidden city. His cane tossed aside, his back straight and proud, he looks like a victorious hero returning from battle. No—he isn’t just standing taller, he is taller—at least six feet, although it’s difficult to tell through the turbulent water and distance. There’s something else about him too—something incongruous about the bulge of his muscle beneath loose sagging skin—which doesn’t look natural.
Willing herself to flee but unable to turn away, Kathleen watches the creature survey his transforming kingdom. His eyes swivel to lock on Kathleen. He is too far away to see clearly, but it seems to her as though he is beckoning her to return. An urge to descend overcomes her, intruding into her mind and penetrating deep into her core. As surely as a clock must record the passing seconds, it is her purpose to be drawn back down. Not far above, Eric is gesturing wildly for her. She doesn’t react, and he begins urgently swimming in her direction.
The heat doesn’t matter anymore. Her dwindling air is immaterial. The very thought of turning back is a surreal impossibility, like a daydream of flying. Through boiling water and clouds of gas, her lungs fighting for every breath, she turns away from the surface and kicks downward toward the very heart of emerging lava. Eric snatches at her foot, but she evades him, his presence seeming no more important than the obstacle of a passing rock. Eric makes another lunge and tries to wrap his arms around her, but she maneuvers at the last minute and all he’s able to grab is her air tank.
That doesn’t matter. She won’t need it where she’s going. Kathleen releases the air tank without a second thought, wriggling free to dive deeper again. Powerful strokes propel her beyond the reach of her shocked companion. All she can see are the old man’s outstretched arms, welcoming her into the chaos of his infernal realm.