Hayes just stood there, breathlessly, staring down into that bone pit and almost sensing the terror and madness that had brought an atrocity like this into being. He stepped back and away, having trouble being clinical about it all like Sharkey. To him, it looked like those cadavers were trying to crawl out of the ice. All those staring faces and reaching, cremated hands. Like something from a waxworks or a spookshow, but certainly nothing real.
He ducked away beneath the ceiling of icicles and saw another irregular shape in the snow. For some reason, it caught his eye. Motes of dust and crystals of ice hung in the air. His breath frosted from his lips in great clouds. Using his boot, he scattered the snow away from that shape beneath. He was looking down at a shriveled, conical form maybe six or seven feet long that had been incinerated right down to a husk. Looking now like something that had been pulled from an alien crematory.
Hayes knew what it was, of course.
He recognized that shape and it filled his belly with fluttering wings. Another one of those things. Probably chopped from the ice and then burned when they realized what it was doing to them. Or maybe the security force had burned it. Not that it mattered.
“You better come over here,” he said to Sharkey, using a hush and quiet voice. The kind you used when you didn’t want to wake an infant . . . or something sleeping in a coffin.
“What now?” Cutchen said from above. “Can you guys hurry this up? I’m . . . I’m starting to lose it up here.”
Sharkey came over, saying, “Some of those bodies are wearing fatigues, Jimmy. Some of Kolich’s security people must have went in there, too.”
And Hayes didn’t doubt it.
... a rash of insanity up there. Men killing each other and committing suicide... weird figures wandering through the compound that were not men... ghosts, bogies, I think... they spoke of devils and monsters, figures that walked through walls . . .
Yes, he could hear Nikolai Kolich saying it.
Except Kolich had left out the meat of the matter. These men at the outpost had drilled into a chasm, yes, but it hadn’t been just any chasm, but maybe a burial chamber of the Old Ones. And opening it had been like cutting the scab off some primordial, invidious wound. And the pus that leaked out was infectious and evil, a wasting pestilence in the form of alien memories and undead essences, a decayed intelligence that was still virulent after all those uncounted eons, a spiritual contamination that took their minds one by one by one. Making them something less than human, something ageless and undying, a cosmic horror.
“Another one,” Sharkey said. “Their tombs must be all over these mountains and rifts.”
Hayes kicked it with his boot to prove to himself that it was dead. A piece of its leathery, burnt hide fell off like tree bark. It was hollow inside, that alien machinery boiled to ash. Even its ghost was dead now. Or what Hayes would have called a ghost, because nothing else seemed to fit. That diabolic power, the vestiges of those remorseless minds that seemed to cling on after death like a negative charge in a dry cell battery . . . just waiting to come into contact with living mental energies they could twist and subvert.
“You wanna guess what happened here?” Sharkey said.
“Oh, you know as well as I do. They dug up some of these ugly pricks and those minds woke up, became active. The Russians started having bad dreams and seeing ghosts and hearing things . . . and by the time they realized what was happening, they weren’t even men anymore. Just . . . vessels for dead, alien minds that maybe wanted to fulfill some perverse plan set into motion millions of years ago.” He put a cigarette in his lips and lit. “Then the people at Vostok got worried, so they sent in soldiers. Some of the soldiers got contaminated by those minds . . . but not enough. Those that weren’t, killed everyone except those three Kolich mentioned, those drooling and insane things that had once been men. The soldiers burned the rest and the Old Ones, too.”
“That’s why they abandoned this camp, Jimmy. To stop the spread of the infection.”
Cutchen said, “C’mon already, I . . . “ He paused like his throat had seized up. “I’m hearing things up here, people. Sounds. I don’t know . . . like things moving, sliding . . . “
Hayes walked over to the ladder.
He heard a thump up there, followed by another. Then a scraping sound like nails dragged over ice. Then there was silence. Cutchen came barreling down the ladder, missing the last three rungs and landing on his ass.
He looked up at Hayes with wild, unblinking eyes. His face was white as kidskin. “There’s . . . there’s something up there, something moving in the other room.”
They were all tensed and waiting, just as still as the ice around them.
A floorboard overhead creaked. There was a weird and low vibration followed by a crackling sound. A pounding like a fist at the door above. A sliding, whispering noise. They were all crouched down low with Cutchen now, holding onto one another. A shrill, echoing peal sounded out above.
“What the hell is it?” Cutchen said.
“Shut up,” Hayes whispered. “For the love of God, be quiet . . . “
They waited there, hearing sounds . . . thumpings and knockings, scratching noises and that unearthly crackling. Hayes held onto them, never having felt this absolutely vulnerable in his life. His thoughts had gone liquid in his head. His soul felt like some whirlpool sucking down into fathomless blackness. He felt something catch in his throat, a cry or a scream, and Sharkey made a muted whimpering sound.
No, they hadn’t seen anything, but they had heard things.
The things that probably drove the Russians insane. And they were feeling something, too . . . something electric and rising and palpable.
Those vibrations started again, making the entire building tremble. The walls above sounded like hammers were beating into them. There were other sounds above . . . like whispering, distorted voices and hollow pipings, a buzzing noise. And then -
Then Sharkey gasped and a huge, amorphous shadow passed over the trap door as if some grotesque figure had passed before the lantern, making a sound like forks scraped over blackboards and then fading away.
They stayed together like that maybe five or ten minutes, then Hayes went up the ladder, expecting to see something that would leech his mind dry. But there was nothing, nothing at all. The others came up and not a one of them remarked on those weird spade-like prints in the snow.
The wind was whipping and the snow coming at them in sheets as they found the SnoCat and Hayes started it up. He brought it around and bulldozed through a few drifts. Cutchen was staring into his rearview mirror, seeing things darting in and out of the blizzard that he would not comment on.
“Just drive,” he said when Hayes asked him. “For the love of Christ, get us out of here . . . “
30
So in the days following the successful probe of Lake Vordog, Professor Gundry found himself wishing that he had stayed at CalTech working on his glaciological models. Wishing he had never come down to Antarctica and opened Pandora’s Box, got a good look at what was inside. For though it made absolutely no scientific sense, he now knew there were things a man was better off not seeing, not knowing. Things that could get down inside a man, unlocking old doors and rattling primal skeletons from moldering closets, making him feel things and remember things that could poison him to his marrow.
Gundry was no longer the man Hayes had gotten to know, however briefly.
He was not a bundle of nervous energy and inexhaustible drive and ambition. He was no longer a perpetual motion machine that seemed to move in all directions simultaneously, constantly thinking and emoting and reacting. No, now he was a worn, weathered man in his mid-sixties whose blood ran cold and who felt the weight and pull of each of those years dragging him down, compressing him, squashing him flat. His mind was like some incredibly rare and tragic orchid whose petals no longer sought tropical mists and the heat of the sun, but had folded up and withered, pulled into itself and sought the dark, dank depths of cellars and crawlspaces. Cobwebbed, moist, rotting places where the soul could go to mulch and fungus in secret. There were such places in Gundry, crevices and mildewed corners where he could lose himself.