“I’ll need something factual, Hayes. St. Ours, Meiner, and, yes, Lind have died from cerebral hemorrhages. If you don’t believe me, ask Dr. Sharkey. Dammit, man.”
Hayes uttered that laugh again. “Cerebral hemorrhages? No shit? Three of ’em in a row? I didn’t know they were catchy. C’mon, LaHune, don’t you think that three exploded brains pretty much tweaks the tit of chance a little too hard?”
“I’m not a medico here. It’s not my job to engage in forensics.”
Hayes just shook his head. “All right, let me try again. Remember that day we called Nikolai Kolich over at Vostok? Sure you do. Well, old Nikolai, boy, he told us some kind of fucking yarn. You remember that derelict camp Gates and his boys found? Yeah? Well, that there was a Russian camp from the old Soviet red scare days of yore. Joint called the Vradaz Outpost. Yup. Now this part here, boyo, it’s going to sound just whackier than Mother Teresa working the pole in a thong and pasties. But Kolich told us they all went mad at Vradaz. Yup. Crazier’n bugs in bat shit. You know what drove ’em crazy? Spooks. Sure. Now I know this is all going to sound real fantastic to you, real far-out and nutty, because you’ve never heard of nothing like this, but I’m willing to bet you can wrap your spooky little brain right around it, you try hard enough.
“See, how it started at Vradaz was that those scientists up there, they drilled into a chasm, found some things in there. We’ll call ’em mummies, okay? Well, not long after, all those commy scientists started having real weird dreams and before you could say Jesus in drag, they started hearing things. Knockings and poundings. Funny sounds. Then they started seeing apparitions, ghosts that walked through walls and the like. Well, the Soviets said that’s enough of this horseshit, so they sent in a team to take care of those boys, root out the infection so to speak. So, those silly communists, they killed everyone there. Isn’t that a funny story?”
LaHune was unmoved. “That’s some pretty high speculation, isn’t it?”
“Oh, not at all. See, the other day when Sharkey and I went with Cutchen to check his remote weather stations, we went out to Vradaz instead. Took a look around there.”
LaHune just shook his head. “You are so very out of control, Hayes. That installation, abandoned or not, is property of the Russian Federation.”
“No, they disowned it years back, LaHune. Some twenty-odd years back to be exact.” Hayes had him and he knew it. He had LaHune hooked and he was now going to play him for all it was worth. “Okay, so we dug our way in there and, lo and behold, we found bullet holes and blood, crosses cut into the walls to keep the haunts away. Then, down below, we found a pit with bodies in there. All them scientists but the three insane ones the Ruskies took away with ’em. All those bodies, LaHune, they’d been gunned down and then burned. Yeah, you heard me right. We also found one of those alien carcasses down there that had been toasted like a marshmallow at Camp Cockalotta. And Ivan did these things because he realized the very thing that you’re afraid of: that those aliens are dangerous. They get in men’s mind and destroy them, same way they’re doing here. The Russians killed those men and burned them along with My Favorite Martian because those dead, alien minds are a contagion that spreads and devours healthy human minds just as they always have. It was quite a scene there, LaHune. There were even a few Russian soldiers in that pit and you know why? Because those alien minds got them, too.”
LaHune said nothing.
There was nothing he could say.
But Hayes could see that he believed him. Completely believed him. But he wasn’t really shocked or surprised by any of it and Hayes figured that was because their grand NSF administrator knew all about what happened at Vradaz.
“Now, while back, LaHune, you asked me why in the hell I knocked in that wall on Hut Six. Well, I did it to freeze those fucking Martians back up before this entire goddamn station is destroyed. Before we all have our minds sucked out or blown up. See, I don’t think those dead minds are completely unthawed yet, but when that happens… well, you get the picture, don’t you?”
“You’re completely mad, Hayes.”
“Oh, but let me share one more thing with you. We gave old Nikolai a jingle at Vostok and you know what? He denies ever telling us any of that business. His puppet masters have yanked his strings and now he’s dancing to their tune same way you’re dancing to yours.” Hayes stood up. “But that’s okay, LaHune, I’m just shit-tired of arguing with you. What happened to the Russians will happen to us. Those minds will eat us alive. But you just sit there on your shiny white ass and do nothing. That’s fine. Your mind already belongs to some ass-fucking suits back in Washington. But as for me? I’m going to fight this tooth and nail and if you want to get in my way, I’ll fucking step on you. And that, sonny, is a promise.”
With that, Hayes offered him a courtly bow and left LaHune’s office.
34
The next two days passed with a measured, languid slowness… drawn out, elastic, and mordantly unreal. A claustrophobic, evil shadow had fallen over the station, breeding a tension and a fear that was barely concealed like a moldering skull seen through a funeral veil. It was an almost palpable thing, a suffocating sense of malevolence and you could feel it wherever you went… bunching in the shadows, scratching at the frosted windows, oozing from the ice like contaminated bile. You could tell yourself it was imagination and nerves and isolation, but you never believed it, because it was everywhere, hanging over the camp in a frightful pall, patient and waiting and acutely sentient. It was behind you and to either side, giggling and chattering its teeth and reaching out for your throat with cold, white fingers. And like your soul, you could not put a finger on it, but it was there, alive and breathing and namelessly destructive. It was in your blood and bones like a disease germ and just beneath your thoughts like a dire memory. And whatever it was, it was something born to darkness like worms in a grave.
The personnel at Kharkhov did not speak of it.
Like a cluster of little old ladies at a church luncheon who refused to discuss disquieting things like cancer or the boy next door who came back from the war in a body bag, it was a taboo subject, one their minds burdened under, but one that never got past their lips.
Such things did not make for polite company.
They stirred up bad odors and opened dank cellars that were best left bolted and chained. So the scientists carried on with their research and experiments. The contract personnel kept things humming. People gathered in the community room for lunch and dinner and talked sports and current events and went out of their way not to look one another in the eye because it was better that way. And the subject of Gates and the ruined city, the mummies and those down in Lake Vordog, were never brought up.
A psychologist would have called it avoidance and he or she would have been right. When you did not openly discuss things, they seemed all the less real… even if said things did make your skin crawl. But you ingested them, tucked them away into the scarred and secret landscape of your subconscious where you ultimately knew they would boil and fester and one day fill you with a seething poison. Like being touched in a private place by a child molester, you purged it and pretended such things could not have happened.
But later? Well, yes, later it would show its teeth, but that was later.
And this is how it was at Kharkhov Station.
This was how the population kept their sanity… by sheer deception and willpower born of self-preservation and desperation. But it was there, of course, that gnawing and pervasive sense of violation. The feeling that maybe your mind and your thoughts were not entirely your own and maybe never had been. But such ideas were venomous and infective, so the small colony refused them and went about being industrious and ignorant even while that ancient web was spun around them thickly. What they were feeling and how they were dealing with those feelings was exactly how they were supposed to deal with them. Exactly how the architects of their minds had intended it so very long ago.