“The river that separates the living from the dead,” Hart said.
It didn’t seem nearly as clever when he thought about it in those terms. It cut a little too close to the bone.
“I’m confident we’re all familiar with the allusion,” Thyssen said
There was barely a foot of air above the surface, forcing them to walk, crawl, and swim over the uneven ground beneath the black water, which seemed impenetrable to their lights. He never would get used to the thermal eddies in the current. The same volcanic activity that created this series of caverns and tunnels still lingered here and there in the form of geothermal springs and the magma flowing deep beneath their feet. It was a strange sensation to feel warmth on his legs while the influx of both surface and seawater caused ice to form around the edges. At least the salt content increased their buoyancy and made the journey a little less exhausting.
The first time he swam through here, he had done so completely underwater and without the slightest idea where this passage might lead, if anywhere at all. Before they installed the surface pumps, nearly every inch of this place had been completely flooded.
When the men from Halversen showed up with their government escort in the midst of the chaos, he’d done everything in his power to avoid them, including assisting with the retrieval of the casualties. The way he saw it, whether directly or not, Halversen was responsible for all of the dead bodies he and Kress had seen in the collapsed tunnel, not to mention the deaths caused by the sudden drop in the sea level as the water flooded the earth.
The two of them had been practically hauled out of the ocean and onto the US Coast Guard’s National Security Cutter Ramsdell the moment it arrived. They’d been taken belowdecks and into a situation room where their commander, Rear Admiral Dennis Halcomb, awaited their arrival with their direct supervisor, Captain Tom Foley; the coast guard’s judge advocate general, Simon Clutterbuck; the deputy secretary of the entire Department of Homeland Security, Nathan Fitzgibbons; and the Halversen contingent headed by Thyssen. They hadn’t come right out and said that the matter had become one of national security, but Mitchell wasn’t so stupid that he needed it spelled out for him. He was one of two people who’d seen the natural formation into which the TBM had tunneled and recognized the potential for a hidden staging ground mere miles from the Russian border, inside a tunnel the entire world would soon know for certain had collapsed. He was also smart enough to play dumb. No one dispatched such powerful men on a whim, especially not a private business enterprise, unless they had the President himself on speed dial.
The mandate they’d given him was simple: don’t say anything to anyone. To make it easier to comply, the DHS had decided that he and Kress would be temporarily reassigned to the border patrol station in Grand Forks, North Dakota, until such time as the situation was resolved. They already had Kress’s wife and young son waiting for him at the airport in Juneau, ready to depart with him.
Mitchell had been prepared to be ushered from the ship and into the helicopter waiting for them abovedecks when he asked, almost without thinking, if his talents might not be better utilized there instead. Fitzgibbons had started to dismiss his request when Thyssen stayed his hand. The silver-haired man had stared at him with those intense blue eyes for several seconds before finally speaking.
“You were down there initially for more than an hour. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And in that time, you claim to have explored the adjacent cavern. Is that also correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And did you see—please allow me to consult my notes for the sake of clarity—did you see ‘skeletal remains concealed behind opaque membranes’?”
Mitchell had kept his expression as impassive as Thyssen’s while he composed his thoughts.
“No, sir.”
“But I have it right here in my notes. Are you telling me you lied about seeing something so remarkable?”
“I must have misspoken, sir. The lack of oxygen at that depth does strange things to a man’s brain. I didn’t see anything down there.”
Thyssen had leaned back in his chair, tented his bony fingers, and smiled.
Thirty minutes later they’d been on a chopper bound for the barren rock on top of which they would subsequently erect Speranza Station. An hour after that he was 260 feet down with a GPS unit, a video camera, and instructions to explore every last inch of that cavern while the engineers set about stabilizing the bedrock and sinking an elevator shaft right down through the island. They’d affixed to his diving helmet a DWM—digital wall mapping—unit, which consisted of thirty-two sonar transducers that sent out sound waves four times per second and collected the returning signals bouncing back from the walls. Those readings formed a three-dimensional image of the network of caverns and plotted them onto a computerized model that allowed for digital manipulation in every conceivable plane. In three days, he’d hardly come out of the water long enough to eat, sleep, and be debriefed while the DWM data was downloaded into the system. Every waking moment was spent squirming through the darkness, be it above the water level or below, navigating a world hidden inside the one he thought he knew, one where no man before him had ever set foot. He was having the time of his life while Kress was laid up in some barracks in the middle of nowhere, watching the pines grow and the snow fall.
Of course, he’d also been the first to stumble upon what was left of the sea lions inside the cavern they’d subsequently named the Vale of Mourning. Like all of the other major features, the name had come from Greek mythology. The main cavern was named Cumaean after the entrance where Aeneas first descended into the underworld. The smaller cavern leading to the River Styx was called The Elm. In all, they’d found and named a total of six caverns and three subterranean rivers in the process of mapping 3.7 miles of fissures, passageways, and lava tubes. And that wasn’t even a fraction of what was down here. Tunnels opened everywhere he looked. It would take a lifetime to explore each and every one of them, but he figured he didn’t have a whole lot longer before the government claimed jurisdiction and all of the miraculous things he’d seen were destroyed. He had no intention of wasting a single moment, especially not now that the team of experts had finally arrived.
The ceiling lowered incrementally until his helmet grazed the roof and he had to lean his head back to keep his face above the water. The splashing sounds grew louder behind him and the echoes of the others’ breathing became faster and more frantic. He’d forgotten he was dealing with inexperienced divers.
“It’s not much farther from here. Just keep your chin up and breathe through your nose.”
His headlamp scraped across the rock. He felt the ground rise beneath him and the current increase, as he knew it would. The ceiling abruptly rose toward the domed roof of a cavern. Stratified layers of reddish-pink stone formed shelves leading all the way up into the darkness. The river broadened into a pool ringed with sharp rocks. A ledge projected over it, where the force of the river had eroded the rock and worked its way back underground. He pushed himself up out of the water and helped the others onto dry land.
Their headlamps traced the walls before alighting upon the ring of stalactites hanging from the ceiling like an inverted crown. Several of them reached all the way to the ground, forming columns that framed the narrow walkway leading up the slope.
“Turn off your lights for just a second,” he said. “It’s too bright to see them.”
One by one, they clicked off their headlamps until his was the only one left. He turned his helmet around so his beam shined in the opposite direction from the columns. The chiaroscuro of light and shadow defined the faint impressions on the flowstone that had been invisible mere seconds prior—and the hideous faces that watched them through eyes that appeared to follow them wherever they moved.
III
“These are The Watchers,” Mitchell said. “It’s more than a little unnerving how they always seem to be looking right at you, n
o matter where you stand.”
Nabahe reached for the face, but hesitated. He’d never seen such a perfect specimen. All of the others he’d discovered were essentially invisible to the naked eye until he created the rubbings. He feared even the gentle contact with his fingertips might damage them or, worse, spoil the illusion that they were even there at all. A part of him was certain that he was seeing only what he wanted to see, and his tactile senses would prove as much. In the end, his curiosity proved too great. He softly traced the contours and laughed out loud when he actually felt them.
The stone was soft and smooth, almost like a cross between wax and glass, much more malleable than the granite and sandstone into which the previous faces had been formed. The continued accretion of minerals would eventually conceal the features, but for now it served to preserve them. He thought of the skull they’d seen back where they entered the tunnel. While its resemblance to his rubbings was questionable at best, there was no denying its similarities to these sculptures. The detail was phenomenal. It was almost as though a living being stared back at him from beneath the flowstone. The forehead sloped to a ridged brow, beneath which were disproportionately wide, shallow eyes lacking any kind of definition. At first it looked like the lower half of the face was oddly narrow and tapered, but he felt the subtle striations on both sides and realized it was a consequence of facial hair growing from the cheekbones and framing the mouth. The nose squatted on top of a bulbous, jutting jaw. He felt the tendons in its neck, the swell of its upper chest, and then nothing but uninterrupted stone all the way down to the floor.
“It’s absolutely amazing,” he whispered.
Hart crouched beside him and stared into the face, which was just above her eye level.
“It’s approximately the same size as the remains. If this is life-size, then we’re looking at a species roughly 120 centimeters tall. Right about four feet.”
“We can only guess as to how old these are,” Thyssen said.
“Flowstone grows between seven and ten hundredths of a millimeter per year.” Duan knelt near the face and cocked his head first one way, then the other. “I estimate a centimeter depth, so between one hundred fifty and two hundred fifteen years old.”
“It looks like an alien,” Payton said.
Nabahe cringed. There it was, the whole reason none of his peers had taken him seriously; The reason NAU had been so quick to dismiss him and why no publishers had wanted anything to do with his work. The reason even his website was treated like a joke. The facial architecture looked like the stereotypical presentation of what people thought of as “the grays.”
“Only this is real,” Mitchell said. “Whatever you might think of the carvings, there’s no mistaking . . . those.”
He turned his helmet around and shined his light toward the opposite end of the cavern, where flowstone that looked like folded batter dripping with icing formed a terrace leading all the way up to the ceiling.
Nabahe followed Hart across the smooth, uneven rock. The condensation made it slick and forced him to turn on his light and use his hands for balance as the rock grew steeper. It was only then that he saw the impressions in the stone. They were faint yet unmistakable. He’d seen similar markings throughout his explorations, from dinosaurs to men whose bodies had turned to dust thousands of years ago. It never failed to amaze him how they were so perfectly preserved, especially in such a hard substrate and after so many years.
“They’re footprints,” Hart said. “Look at the valgus formation of the great toe where it grasped the edge, the contact mark from just the ball of the foot. They walked upright. At least on the ground, but they could just as easily climb through the trees.”
“I can’t imagine there are too many trees down here,” Payton said.
Hart ignored him and scampered ever higher. Nabahe smiled. Her enthusiasm was contagious. He found handprints on the higher ledges, where whatever made the footprints had grabbed for leverage, just like he had. The individual indentations of the fingers were faint and strangely short in relation to the length of the palm. He followed them higher until he saw the mouth of a dark passage behind a row of stalactites just below the roof.
The others were all climbing now, too. They examined the footprints with childlike wonder. For the first time in as long as he could remember, Nabahe didn’t feel broken. Between the years battling through the pain and his diminishing sight to those spent collecting rubbings only conspiracy nuts gave credence, he’d begun to think that it might not just have been his eyes that had failed him. Seeing the faces—actually seeing them—was a liberating feeling. There was no denying their authenticity, no possible way anyone could say the features were merely a coincidental pattern formed in the stone and captured by rubbing in a manner fueled by his imagination. And the footprints . . . it was almost as though the creators had been painters who left their tracks as they walked away from their canvasses.
People would have to believe him now. This would be his new beginning. He could positively feel a part of himself he thought was lost forever awakening inside of him.
Nabahe was just about to haul himself up through the gap between stalactites when something caught his attention. It was a print, although unlike the others. It reminded him of a maple leaf. There were three digits. The one in the middle was significantly longer than the other two, which themselves were asymmetrical. Were it not so well preserved, he might have written it off as a print of where a foot had slipped. He placed his hand on top of it for comparison’s sake. They were roughly the same size.
“Where does this lead?” Hart called. Her voice echoed from inside the earth. She wriggled between the stalactites. Her light limned a narrow oblong crevice that looked barely wide enough for her to squeeze through if she turned her head to the side.
“The Vale of Mourning,” Mitchell said.
There was something about the way he said it that caused Nabahe to glance back down at him. He shielded his eyes from the man’s headlamp, but it wasn’t until Mitchell crawled past him that he could see the other man’s face.
Mitchell and Thyssen were the only ones who weren’t smiling.
IV
Hart could hardly climb with her hands shaking so badly. She imagined this was how the first Europeans to explore the Dark Continent must have felt, stumbling upon strange remains and artifacts and following the footprints of unknown species to their source. Only this was beyond anything humans had experienced in history. They were dealing with a species capable of creating artwork in its own likeness, which was a decidedly human trait, one beyond even the bonobo’s seemingly limitless potential. And the idea that it still might be living down here . . .
She chased away the thought. The last thing she wanted was to get her hopes up. How crushing would it be to discover that this whole thing was an elaborate hoax or, worse, that this species that had somehow managed to survive inside the planet had only recently become extinct. With as much water as had flooded this area, it was hard to believe that anything could have survived.
Instead of thinking about the carvings that could be mere centuries old and their resemblance to remains that weren’t much older than she was, Hart focused on Mitchell’s silhouette, which nearly sealed off the tunnel ahead of her. Their combined heavy breathing and the scraping of knees and elbows and helmets amplified the claustrophobia and made her feel as though she were being buried alive. The weight of the island and the ocean pressed down on her, smothering her. Each breath came faster than the last. Her vision dimmed around the edges and she realized she was hyperventilating. She glanced back, but all she could see through the slim gap over her own shoulder and hip was the blinding light on the head of the person behind her, whose body physically blocked the only known way back to the surface. The crown of her head struck Mitchell’s heels and she nearly cried out.
He’d stopped crawling and appeared to be in the process of contorting his body to climb out of the tunnel. She felt an enormous swell of relief when
he stepped aside and she saw open air through the earthen orifice.
And then she saw the ledge.
It was barely eighteen inches wide and what looked like fifty feet straight up from water so far down it barely reflected her light.
Mitchell stood to her left, his back pressed against the smooth stone. His head was turned so that his light shined onto the ledge ahead of him, which seemed to narrow as it charted a wending course toward a point where it appeared to simply terminate.
Duan ran into her from behind. Her gasp of surprise echoed into the far distance.
“Take my hand,” Mitchell said.
“I can’t do this.”
“Of course you can. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“I could fall.”
“Okay. Then don’t fall.”
“That’s your advice?”
“Falling is an absolute state. Either you’re falling or you aren’t. There’s really no in-between.”
He offered his hand. She stared at it for a moment before looking up into his face. She blew out her breath to steady her nerves and grabbed his hand before she could change her mind. He didn’t pull; he merely steadied her while she rolled onto her side and squirmed out onto the ledge, which felt considerably smaller than it looked. She stood, leaned back into the wall, and slid sideways, away from where Duan effortlessly rose to his feet, as though he’d done so a million times before.
She tried not to look down as she scooted along the wall behind Mitchell. The water was as black as oil, making it impossible to gauge its depth. Her fingers probed uselessly for any sort of irregularities in the stone she could use for balance. She tried to slow her breathing to no avail.
“How much farther have you gone?” she asked, hoping conversation would distract her from the irrational sensation of the stone ledge cracking beneath her.
“Not much farther,” Mitchell said. “We’ve identified five egresses from this cavern, but so far we’ve only explored two of them. Both were dead ends.”
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