“What is all this?” Cutchen said, panning his lantern around, throwing wild and creeping shadows. “Did all this fall from up there? Parts of the city?”
But Hayes didn’t think so.
He wasn’t certain what he was thinking, but all of this was no accident. He knew that much. They climbed over low walls and edged around towering monoliths, ever aware of those vault-like trenches cut here and there without any plan. It was positively claustrophobic, monuments towering above and to either side, long and low, high and narrow. Everywhere it was rising and falling, busy and confusing, uprisings of stone clustered like toadstools. They had to turn sideways to pass between some of them.
Sharkey suddenly stopped.
She leaned against a squat stone chamber with a multi-peaked roof. She swept her light around, taking in those broken domes like fossilized craniums, the crumbling and pitted columns rising above them, those squared off vaults below… many of which were clogged with pools of black ice. She squatted down, peering into one of those chasms. “Have you guys ever been to Paris?” she asked them. “To Pere Lachaise? It’s like this there… just a crowded tangle of marble… stones and markers and crypts with very little egress.”
Cutchen said, “But Pere Lachaise… that’s a cemetery.”
“And so is this,” she said.
Hayes stood there, something like madness scratching at the pan of his brain. An alien graveyard. Well, yes, certainly. A necropolis. That’s what this was… a network of graves and tombs, headstones and sepulchers. A funerary grounds as envisioned by those cold and insectile minds of the Old Ones. The disorientating geometry was apparent in everything they built.
Cutchen turned and looked at him and it was hard to say what he was thinking. There was a vacancy in that look, an emptiness threatening to fill up with something impossibly bad. His face was blotchy, maybe from the cold and maybe from something else. He kept looking at Hayes like he was looking for a denial, looking for Hayes to reassure him that, yes, Sharkey was fucking crazy, so just relax. Nothing to worry about here.
But Sharkey wasn’t crazy and she certainly wasn’t wrong, so he said nothing and Cutchen just looked at him, his eyes moist and rubbery like eggs floating in dirty brine.
Sharkey was leading now, the other two slowly deflating behind her. Maybe the idea of an alien graveyard was setting on them wrong, but she found it all simply incredible and you could see it. She led them in circles, paying little to no attention to Hayes telling her that they had to move this along and Cutchen telling her he was leaving. With or without them, he was leaving.
Finally, she crouched down. “Hand me that lantern, Cutchy,” she said.
He grumbled under his breath, but did so.
She was crouching before one of those vault-like chambers cut into the stone. She got down on her belly and lowered the lantern down. She didn’t need to alert them to what she had found. About twelve feet down, maybe fifteen, they could see the shriveled conical tops of alien corpses protruding from a pool of ice. They were corrugated, dehydrated-looking. Those starfish-shaped heads and attendant eyes were terribly withered, looking much like flaccid clusters of shriveled grapes.
“Well, they bury their dead,” Cutchen said. “And vertically. So what?”
His scientific interest had waned considerably, been replaced pretty much by an I-don’t-give-a high-hairy-shit sort of attitude.
“Why not vertically?” Sharkey said. “We bury our dead at rest, laying down. These things rest upright, so it’s perfectly natural, isn’t it?”
Cutchen grunted. “Yeah, this whole place is perfectly fucking natural.”
Sharkey led them away, peering here and peering there. Nodding her head at things that interested her, speculating freely under her breath. Finally she came to one of those rectangular buildings and paused. This one had a long horizontal opening that you could look through. And, of course, she did just that.
“Look,” she said. “Just look at this.”
Cutchen refused, but Hayes did and mainly because he respected this woman and maybe even loved her. Otherwise he would have told her that enough was enough. His nerves were wearing thin as was his patience.
What he was looking into was a mausoleum of sorts. Arranged against the walls in there like Mexican mummies in a catacomb, were maybe a dozen or so Old Ones. Their oblong bodies were leaning against each other, many badly decomposed and rotted into hollowed husks like blackened cucumbers falling into themselves. Their appendages and eyestalks were nothing but dead, drooping worms. Many of the bodies had disintegrated down to wiry barrel frames that might have been some sort of primitive skeleton, but looked more like leathery networks of sinew and tendon.
Like some dead alien forest, is what Hayes found himself thinking. Some dead, mutated forest of distorted and cadaverous tree trunks that had grown into one another, sprouting narrow skeletal pipes and branching twigs, looping desiccated root systems and downs of snaking vines like threads of moonflax.
It was hard to get over the idea that they were lifeless things, ancient mummies far older than the ones Gates had brought in. These had decayed and mummified before the glaciers arrived making them positive relics. They were hideous in life, but maybe more so in death… shrunken and wrinkled and leathery, tangled in their own limbs. Alien zombies.
And they were not powerless, Hayes thought.
Not in the least.
Maybe their great age had something to do with it, but those pruned eyes dangling from corded stalks still seemed to glimmer and shine with a blasphemous vitality.
Enough.
They started again, moving as quickly as they could through that labyrinth that probably made perfect sense from above, but at ground level was positively insane. Sharkey kept pausing to look at things, growing increasingly agitated at the other two for their lack of scientific curiosity. The graveyard alone, she told them, would have kept legions of archaeologists and anthropologists busy for years and years. The Old Ones had reverence for their dead, they had no doubt developed complex funerary rites and death customs.
“So what?” Cutchen said.
She looked like she was going to either call his mother an unflattering name or kick his ass, but she just sighed and stalked off with Hayes in tow. At least until they were nearly out of that charnel grounds and then something else caught her interest. On an elevated platform there was a huge sarcophagus cut from some unknown black stone and highly-ornamented with carven vines and bizarre squid-like creatures, things like clusters of bubbles and countless staring eyes. At the head, there was a lavish five-pointed mound of some tarnished metal like platinum. Inside, there was an Old One held in a rippling shroud of ice. Though blackened with immense age, it had not rotted like the others.
“This one’s important,” Sharkey said. She tapped the mummy with her ice-axe. “I’ll bet it’s some kind of chief or maybe even one of the original colonists. Who can say? But I’ll bet it was preserved somehow for future generations.”
“Why is it laying flat?” Cutchen asked.
“Looks like it fell over,” Hayes said.
He was staring down at that regal monstrosity and hating it instinctively as he hated them all. Maybe this one was a king or a chief or one of the first to make the journey and just maybe it was the very architect of all life on earth, but he could not respect it. You could wrap a bloated, vile spider in gold ribbons and fancy lace and it still repulsed you. Still made you want to step on it. And a spider, when you came down to it, was much more attractive to the human mind than what was laying in that stylized box.