Here again, Hayes was thinking things he had no right to think. Maybe it was like Cutchen said, maybe part of it was Gates’ disturbing little talk coupled with all the badness those mummies emanated. But he honestly thought it was something more. He truly believed that the Old Ones and their phantasmal, eldritch city were locked down in the minds of all men in the form of primal memory.
We interacted with those things, he found himself thinking, in our distant past. We must have. And probably not out of choice. That’s the only thing that can explain our instinctual terror of them and that nameless city . . .
Without realizing it, Hayes had stopped the tractor.
Most of the job was done, but with that blizzard pounding down on them, he could pretty much start again for already the walkways were drifting over. But the thing was, he had stopped the tractor on its way to Hut #6 and he did not know why. He just sat there, feeling cold and hot, looking around desperately for the reason and not coming up with a thing. The night was alive with viscid shadows and creeping shapes and the wind was full of voices. He could hear them calling to him through that blowing white death: There’s no hurry, Jimmy. You just sit tight and wait and all will be revealed to you. Because you’re waiting for something as you’ve been waiting from day one and maybe all your life and that something is coming, Jimmy. It’s coming out of the darkness of the polar graveyard and, like a chameleon, it’s about to show itself . . .
And then it did.
About the time he was ready to call himself a fucking lunatic, it did.
But before he saw it, he heard it.
Heard that weird, high musical piping that he knew was a voice. Heard it in his head and outside the cab, and in the pit of his mind he remembered that voice as one of authority, as the voice of a master and such was its dominance, he did not dare try to get away from it. He could feel the ice of Antarctica breathing in his belly, sending out breaths of frost that shut him down and made him watch.
Then he saw it.
It came drifting out of the shadows, a ghostly alien form with outspread wings and trembling tentacles and leering red eyes that opened up his brain like a tin can and reached in there with cold fingers. He screamed, he supposed he screamed, for something came ripping out of him that slapped him sure and hard across the face.
The thing came closer and Hayes pressed down on the accelerator of the tractor, those chained balloon tires catching and vaulting Hayes forward and right at the thing. And he felt something snap in his brain like a tree branch and the pain was immense. But then the tractor rammed into that thing and it broke apart into a thousand luminous fragments.
Then he was alone.
And the wind was just the wind and the snow was just the snow. But in his mind, there were shadows. Ancient shadows that called him by name.
27
There were things in life that could destroy you an inch at a time.
Booze, drugs, depression, tobacco. Hayes knew all about the tobacco-thing, because he’d been smoking for nearly thirty years now. So he knew that one and understood it and realized like anyone else that you lost a minute or five or whatever it was every time you lit up.
But he never saw it that way.
He looked on it by the months and years. That he was buying himself a plot of cemetery earth, shovelful by shovelful. But it didn’t stop him and it didn’t slow him down. The nicotine had him and it was a pure and senseless thing that was more than just a simple physical addiction, but something destructive in the soul that saw its own end and welcomed it.
So, he understood there were things that took your life slowly. But there were also things that ate away your life in big chunks, in heaping spoonfuls. And what was laying on the cot in the sick bay the next morning was definitely one of them.
Lind.
Or maybe not Lind at all.
Sharkey had him strapped down and he was sweating and feverish and his skin was bubbling like hot fat. Actually bubbling. You could say in your mind that they were blood blisters or water blisters, but that didn’t cut it and you knew it. Just as Hayes knew it. What he was looking at, what Lind had become, was something akin to the little girl in that old scary movie. The one who puked up green slime and had the Devil in her.
“What the hell’s wrong with him?” Hayes asked.
“You tell me,” Sharkey said. “I can’t explain the lesions any more than I can really explain his state of mind. I would guess this is something psychosomatic, but -”
“Yes?”
“But to this degree? This is out of my league, Jimmy.”
She had wisely shut the door now to the sick bay and the outer door to the infirmary itself. Lind was just laying there, staring up at the ceiling, his mouth opening and closing. He was making a gulping sound in his throat like a beached fish.
Hayes swallowed down whatever was in him that made him want to turn and run. He swallowed it down and went over to Lind. He looked terrible. His flesh was white as a toad’s belly and the oddest smell was coming off him . . . a sharp chemical odor like turpentine.
“Lind? Can you hear me? It’s Hayes.”
The eyes blinked, the pupils hugely dilated, but nothing else. There was no sense of recognition. Anything. Lind’s mouth snapped close and then his lips parted slowly. The voice that came out was windy and echoing, unearthly . . . almost like Lind was speaking from the bottom of a very deep well. “Hayes . . . Jimmy . . . oh, Christ, help me Jimmy, don’t let them . . . .”
He stopped, making that gulping noise again. Although he was restrained, his hands were flopping madly about, looking for something to grasp. Horrified as he was by all of it, Hayes was seeing another human being in a terrible plight and he put his hand in Lind’s own. He almost immediately pulled away . . . touching Lind was like laying your hands on an electric cow fence. Hayes could feel the energy, the electricity thrumming through the man. It seemed to be moving in waves and he could feel it crawling over the back of his hand.
Lind took a deep breath and that energy died away. Thankfully.
Now all Hayes was aware of was the actual feel of Lind’s flesh against his own. It was hot and moist and repulsive. Like handling some reptilian fetus that had been expelled from its mother’s womb in a breath of fevers. Lind’s hand was like that . . . smooth, warm, sweating toxins and bile. It took everything Hayes had in him not to pull away.
“Lind . . . c’mon, old buddy, you can’t go on like this, you -”
“I can hear you, Jimmy, but I can’t see you, I can’t see anything but this place, this awful place . . . oh, where am I, where am I?”
That voice was making a rushing, hollow sound that human lungs were simply incapable of. Hayes couldn’t get past the notion that it was coming from very far away. It sounded like it was being accelerated across great distances.
Hayes looked over at Sharkey and she chewed her lip.
“You’re in the infirmary, Lind.”
Lind’s hand played in his own, felt pliant like warm clay, something that might melt away from body heat. “I can’t see you, Jimmy . . . Jesus Christ, but I can’t fucking see you,” he whimpered. “I . . . I can’t see the infirmary either . . . I see . . . oh I see . . . “