And then it died out for good, ending it mid-squeal, shattering into a dozen resounding and tinny echoes that bounced around through caves and hollows and openings. But the memory of it was still there.
And what Hayes was thinking was something he did not dare say: That’s what they sound like… I heard it that night on the tractor and I heard it out in the hut… that was a voice of a living Old One…
But he kept that to himself.
He stood there, teetering from foot to foot, feeling like something had evaporated inside of him. Maybe it was courage and maybe it was just common sense.
“Okay,” Cutchen said, his voice barely audible. He cleared his throat. “I’m for getting the hell out right now.”
“I’m for that,” Sharkey said.
Which dumped the whole stinking mess at Hayes’ doorstep. He shook his head. “We want answers? We want to know what happened to Gates and the others? Then those answers are down there.”
Cutchen looked at him with anger that slowly subsided. “All right, Jimmy, if that’s what you want. But this is the last fucking date I go on with you.”
It was a pale attempt at humor, but it made them all smile. Hayes knew it was not intended to be funny, however, it was just how Cutchen responded to terror and uncertainty: with funny lines born out of contempt.
They started down again.
After another five or ten minutes in that passage, it narrowed to a hole that was perfectly circular like the shaft of a sewer. Its circumference was about ten feet, but so perfectly symmetrical it could not possibly have been cut by ancient floodwaters. Hayes stepped through first and found himself in a room that was again uniform, but rectangular in shape. At the far end, another passage dropped away into darkness. He examined it with his light and saw a set of carved stone steps dropping away into the blackness. They were long, low steps, more like slabs, each large enough, it seemed, to set a dining table and chairs on.
Whatever walked them, Hayes got to thinking, did not have the same tread as a man.
It took time to navigate them because each was about five feet wide. They were set with faults and cracks, the edges falling away. There were lots of tiny pebbles and bits of rock strewn over them as if some ancient subterranean river had deposited them there. Now and again, Hayes saw little protrusions like bumps or knobs that had been almost completely worn away. So maybe they weren’t steps at all.
On they went, their lights bobbing and their footfalls loud and scraping.
As they descended, Hayes was filled with an exhilaration much like Gates and his people must have felt originally coming down there. A sense of discovery, of anticipation, of great revelations laying ahead. As he moved ever downward, some smartass voice in his head kept saying things like, who do you suppose built all this? Is there life on Mars and in outer space? But it was not funny. It left a bad taste in his mouth like he’d been chewing on spiders.
Finally, he paused. “Everyone okay?”
Cutchen just grunted.
Sharkey said, “Peachy.”
Down they went and by the time they hit bottom, Hayes figured they had descended at least a hundred feet if not more. And now they entered a grotto that was absolutely immense. The floor was littered with fallen shelves of sedimentary rock, loose stones, the pillars of gigantic stalagmites that had been smoothed into near-perfect cones probably by those same long-gone floodwaters.
“Christ,” Sharkey said and her voice echoed out, breaking up and pulled away into fantastic heights above them.
They stepped farther into the grotto.
It was so huge that their lights literally would not penetrate up to the roof or the surrounding walls. Everything echoed. Somewhere, water was dripping. Faint, distant, but dripping all the same. They spread out in a rough circle, trying to find something in there. Overhead, what had to be at least a hundred feet straight up they could see the tips of stalactites. They kept in sight because it would have been just too easy to get lost in there and never find your way out again. The flashlight and lantern beams picked out a cloistered haze in the air, motes of dust. It smelled dirty and dry in there like relics pulled from an Egyptian tomb.
“You’d need a spotlight in here to see anything,” Cutchen said.
They kept fanning out, stepping over rock outcroppings, the occasional vein of ice. There were crevices cut into the floor. Some were no more than a few feet deep and a few inches wide, but others were big enough to swallow a car and had no bottom that the lights could find. They moved on, trying to follow what they thought was a path through that colossal underworld. Everything echoed and bounced around them. It was like an amphitheater in there… one exaggerated to a tremendous scope. Now and again, a light rain of ice crystals would fall on them. The air was oddly rarefied like they were on a mountaintop and not far below the surface.
Then suddenly, maybe a full city block into the grotto, they stopped.
Before them was a gigantic gully about as wide as a football field choked with debris… much of it was nothing but huge boulders, some of them as big as two-story houses, lots of loose rocks and stacked wedges of sandstone. But not all of it was of natural origin, for there were other shapes down there, ovals and pillars, assorted masonry that had been cut into those shapes.
And there was no doubting where it had come from.
For to either side of the gully, they could see the remains of the ancient city climbing up sharp slopes into the murk above. It was enormous, what they could see of it, for it climbed much higher than their lights could reach. A sleeping fossil, a mammoth city from nightmare antiquity.
Looking upon it, Hayes was instantly reminded of Ansazi cliff-dwellings and pit houses… but those were primitive and pedestrian compared to this. For the city they were seeing had been a metropolis carved from solid rock—clusters of rising cubes and crumbling arches, cones and pyramids and immense rectangular towers honeycombed with passages. At one time, both halves of the city must have been joined together until that deep chasm opened up and the center collapsed beneath into that grave of bones.
“Oh my God,” Sharkey said and that pretty much summed it up.
Cutchen was too busy ooing and ahhing to feel the atavistic terror that was thrumming through Hayes. Part of it was that he had seen this before, except that it was at the bottom of Lake Vordog… and part of it was that just the sight of that cyclopean prehistoric city made something inside him recoil.
He finally had to look away.
It was just too much.
Like everything about the Old Ones, this city… it lived in the race memories of all men. And there was nothing remotely good associated with it. Just horror and pain and madness.
“C’mon,” Hayes said, a little harsher than he had intended. “You can sightsee later.”
He edged around the gully to the right until he was at the foot of the city itself. He could feel its height and weight towering over him. There was a flat table of stone to walk on and then a haphazard collection of trenches and deep-hewn vaults, megaliths and conical monuments, the city itself set some distance back. It had been the same beneath the lake, that irregular borderland of bizarre masonry, only now Hayes was walking amongst that jutting profusion. There seemed to be no plan, no blueprint, just a crazy-quilt of shattered domes and rising menhirs, narrow obelisk and great flat slabs, a twisting and confused lane cut through it all like the path through a maze. There were patches of frozen lichen growing on some of the shapes, arteries of blue ice.