Reid, Gates, and Tate took up positions guarding the three passageways leading out of the cavern, the one they had entered by and the two on the far side of the pool they had yet to investigate. Slater would be happy to never know what lay down them.
Aston stood still for several moments, his fists clenched at his sides. Slater couldn’t blame him for his anger. She shared it. Eventually he stalked off to one shadowed corner, sat down and pulled a small book from his jacket. He flicked on his headlight and started to read. Slater frowned. What the hell could he be reading down here? Why did he even bring a book? She smiled at Marla, still keeping to herself, away from the others. “Get something to eat and have a rest.”
The young woman nodded, her face hard. Slater respected her bravery in the face of all this. She had a survivor’s streak, was clearly someone to be relied upon. She went over, put a hand on Marla’s arms as the woman began to turn away. “Screw all the rest. We’ll look out for each other, okay?”
Marla grinned. “You got that right.”
Slater watched her go to find food, then went to Aston. He looked up, nodded once. She put her back against the wall and slid down to sit beside him. “What are you reading?”
“That first body we found? When everyone was distracted I found this journal.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
He gave a small, humorless laugh. “Because for some reason I didn’t quite trust anyone.”
“How prescient of you.”
“Right?”
She smiled. It was good to be talking like friends again. Her rage at him, she realized, had softened in the face of very real, new threats. And she had missed him so much. “So what is it?”
He showed her the front page, a neat script of fountain pen inscribing it as belonging to Dr. Murray Lee. “Seems Lee was an American professor of geology. I’ve been skimming this first part of the journal. Typical fare. He talks about general life events, research findings, day-to-day highlights of his lab experiments and so on. Then it gets interesting.”
“How so?”
Aston tapped the page he had reached. “Turns out Lee joined an expedition in 1928, led by one Admiral Adam Greer. They were searching for the Arctic Pyramids when their party was set upon by armed men speaking Russian.”
19
Aston was pleased Slater was talking to him like a friend again, but he didn’t want to jeopardize it by bringing attention to it. He would simply enjoy it for however long it lasted.
“Does it say why the Russians attacked?” Slater asked. She leaned in close, a loose strand of hair brushing his arm and sending a shiver through him.
“No.” Aston turned the page, eyes scanning. “But Professor Murray Lee got separated from his group and became lost. Seems he found his way down here.”
“To hide?”
“I’ll read it to you.”
Aston glanced quickly around the cavern to check no one was listening. He couldn’t articulate why, but he wanted to keep this knowledge between himself and Slater now. She was the only one here he trusted. Most of the others sat quietly, eating and drinking or resting. Dig had already curled up, head on his bag, eyes closed in sleep. Sol sat with Jen, helping her to eat small bites of rations. They talked in low voices. Reid, Gates, and Tate each stood at the entrance to one of the three tunnels leading from the cave, relaxed but alert. Aston couldn’t help feeling like they were sitting in the calm before the storm. He began to read.
“Once separated from my colleagues, lost in the swirling blizzard, and frightened I might run into the Russians once more, I decided the best course of action was inaction. At least until the weather cleared and, hopefully, the Russians moved on. I found a cave at the base of one of the strangely regular mountains (could these be the very pyramids we sought?) and I tucked myself into its safe depths. But the wind still whistled in and here’s where I made a mistake. Rather than winding up my dynamo lamp and checking carefully, I simply pushed deeper into the darkness, seeking shelter. The floor dipped suddenly downward and I had no purchase on the icy rock. I slipped and fell, hurtling down a steep incline, then dropping through open space. For an awful moment I thought I would surely be dashed to a premature death on sharp rocks below, but I hit a second incline that broke my fall, slid further, then crashed into a cavern floor. A jarring pain shot up my left leg (I believe I’ve torn ligaments in my knee there) but I was otherwise unharmed but for scrapes and bruises. Lucky, or so I thought, other than the obvious misfortune of falling through some natural fissure in the rocks. But there was no way I could scale the slopes that had led me in, so I needed to find another way out.
“I began following passageways, marking the walls periodically so I would know where I’d been, in hopes of finding an exit. Better, I thought, to take my chances with the Russians and the weather than to become lost and starve in subterranean darkness. And dark it was, pitch like the depths of hell. I would wind my lamp to check, then feel my way in blackness, then wind the lamp again. I went some way like this, beginning to despair of ever finding the outside world again, when a new wonder distracted me entirely. I began to realize that I could see, dimly, by a faint green illumination. Then I emerged into a cavern softly lit by its own radiant glow, emitted by sparkling veins of strange plants and minerals.”
“I guess he found this place,” Slater said.
Aston shrugged. “Or one like it. I wonder how far these caverns and the vines and crystals spread. It’s possible this stuff goes on for miles under the ice.”
“I hadn’t thought of that. This mountain range is massive, after all.”
“Exactly. But he must have been somewhere near here, as we found his body. So wherever he was in this account, he made it as far as us.”
Slater shivered, nodded. “Read more.”
“I limped on, the pain in my knee excruciating, but my determination to escape outweighed the inertia of agony. I found more caverns, lit by strange glowing tendrils of vegetation, and by glittering crystal deposits. I found streams of water, which slaked my grateful thirst, and underground lakes and pools. I began to wonder how extensive the network of caves and tunnels, and their indigenous life, could be. The water contained my thirst, but my hunger grew. Separated from the team, I had no pack, no supplies. Eventually I devised a way to use my clothing to net some of the small, slow-moving fish that inhabit the larger pools. Lacking any other means, I ate them raw, swallowing them down, cold and writhing. At first I felt my strength returning thanks to the fuel they gave my body, and despite the pain in my knee, I pushed on. But I began to hear things. Surely they could only be auditory hallucinations, but it was like the sibilant voice of something bodiless whispering to me. I assumed it was simply ravenous hunger, despite the small amounts of fish I had consumed, and general stress, of course, but now I’m not so sure. The voice cajoles me still.”
“That sounds a bit like what Jen told us about her friend,” Slater said.
Aston nodded. “Spedding. Jen said Spedding thought she was being called ‘down, down to the Jade Sea’.”
“Down to a sunless sea,” Slater whispered.
Aston cocked his head. “What was that?”
“Just a flashback to high school English.” She drew a deep breath, then blew it out slowly. “This journal creeps me out. What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know.”
“But Spedding ate the glowing plant stuff from the water, not the fish.”
“That’s true,” Aston said. “But I got a close look at the fish when I dived the pool over there. They share the same bright green bioluminescence. It stands to reason that whatever makes the plants glow, makes the fish glow too.”