“Or maybe some crazy theories are not so crazy after all,” Aston said. “Except for the primitive weapons. But maybe they could be little gray men that aren’t actually aliens. Just some sort of ancient race. Lee described the one he saw as brandishing a spear. He was killed with a stone dagger. Hardly the tools of an advanced alien race.” Aston paused, thoughtful. Then he said, “Although this is pretty recent, so if it is an ancient race, they were still here only a hundred or so years ago. So they could still be here now, having survived for millennia!”
“Unless a UFO crashed in the Antarctic millennia ago and the survivors made their way down here and found a way to survive?” Slater said. “They may have lost their technology that way, but lived on.”
Aston shrugged. “Holy hell, Jo, it’s all so absurd. But so was the idea of a dinosaur surviving in a Finnish lake.”
Slater managed a smile, then it faded. “I wonder if they are still alive, still here, watching us.”
“People right here, right now, are dying,” Aston said. “We have to assume it’s all real, and that it’s all still happening. So where are they? Why aren’t they confronting us?”
Slater shivered again, then scooted up closer to him and rested her head on his shoulder. Aston thrilled at the warmth of her, the closeness.
“You’re an asshole, Samuel Aston.”
“I know. I’m sorry, Jo. It wasn’t… personal.”
“Yeah, right. And sorry isn’t really good enough. You’re the only person in the world who can understand what I went through. What we went through. And I couldn’t talk to you about it. I had no one who believed me.”
“I struggled with it, honestly I did. But I had debts…” He stopped, took a deep breath. “Nah, you’re right. I was an asshole.”
“Especially after we, you know, connected like we did.”
Aston felt a slight flare of resentment at that. “Well, you made it pretty clear at the time that was a one-off.”
“At the time. We were facing a fucking dinosaur, Sam! That’s not to say we wouldn’t have found time for each other again afterward. But you let me think you were dead!”
Aston huffed a genuine laugh. “I will never understand women.”
“That’s because you’re an asshole.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. I mean that.”
She pressed more comfortably into his shoulder and he puts his arm around her. “Let’s just survive this one together,” she said. “Once everyone is rested, we get the hell out of here, then out of Antarctica. After that, who knows, right?”
“Right.”
“But you’re going to have to make it up to me, asshole. I’m going to make you suffer.”
He grinned. “Fair enough.”
Exhaustion dragged at Aston. He rested his head against hers and shut his eyes.
20
The cavern had dropped into a quiet stillness, the entire team asleep or dozing. He had no way to track the passage of time down here, but Dig O’Donnell was fairly certain it must be night in the real world above. They had been exploring, sampling, discovering, for hours. Sol Griffin was right to call a rest period, and it was the perfect opportunity for Dig. While everyone else slept, he had read key passages from At The Mountains Of Madness again. He was convinced these were those mountains. Lovecraft was a master storyteller, no one could argue that, but the man was a prophet, too. It took aesthetes like Dig to see that, to recognize the man’s greatness and his treatises.
Dig looked around again, to ensure that everyone slept. Even Reid and his two armed cronies, Tate and Gates, sat back against the walls of the tunnels they guarded, weapons across their knees, eyes closed. He thought they were only dozing, ready to act in an instant, but if he remained quiet, they wouldn’t notice. He crept unnoticed over to where Jahara Syed lay sleeping. Careful to make no noise, he looked through the biologist’s samples. He found what he was looking for, holding the small jar up into the green glow of the cavern. A small fish, maybe two inches long, swam confused circles around the confined space. Its flesh was pale white, almost translucent, the bones of its tiny skeleton clearly visible. It had a semblance of eyes, that glowed softly green, and a brighter green stripe along each side of its narrow body.
He had been sure from the start that the life down here was connected with what he sought. He’d always known there was a measure of truth to the story Lovecraft penned, facts and real events underlying the fiction. And those facts further revealed by the subsequent stories of other prophets like Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth. These men were aesthetes too, channeling cosmological truths.
Dig had seen Aston and Slater huddled together over something and had sidled into the next alcove of rock, unseen, but close enough to hear Aston’s voice as the Australian quietly read aloud. And that had convinced him. That account had been the final corroboration. All the proof he needed. His fears had melted in the face of evidence. The explorer, Professor Murray Lee, had not been losing his mind. The voice he reported hearing was very real, and still here, Dig was certain of that. It was, after all, eternal. And in order to hear that voice himself, he needed to commune with the life of this magnificent place.
He licked his lips, checked around himself again. Everything still, everyone quiet in slumber. He unscrewed the lid of Syed’s sample jar, took a deep steadying breath, then drank down the contents. He crunched the wriggling fish once between his teeth, tasted a jet of bitterness, then swallowed it all down with the hard, mineral-tasting water. He shuddered, whether from disgust or anticipation he couldn’t honestly say, but a joy thrilled through him nonetheless. He slipped the empty jar back into Syed’s bag, then sat quietly, waiting. Genesis Galicia’s story about Spedding made perfect sense. That and the words of the journal had all coalesced into a solid and perfect course of action. All his frustrations slipped away, now he had finally figured out the process. He licked his lips again, still tasting the bitterness of the unfortunate fish, but anticipation made the discomfort worthwhile. He sat waiting, willing the connection to rise, the magic to happen.
Nothing. His elation began to morph into anger and frustration. Why not him? Was he not deserving? Nonsense! Who among them could possibly be more deserving? Perhaps that Genesis Galicia, Jen, knew more than she was letting on. What about the story of her colleague had she omitted in the telling?
The woman lay alone, sleeping to one side of the large space, thankfully far from any of the dozing guards. Dig carefully crept around glowing stalagmites and crouched beside her. He would not be denied now, not when he was this close. He pressed one hand over her mouth and the other tightly around her throat. She startled awake, eyes bulging wide in shock. Dig leaned close, almost near enough to have kissed her if he wanted.
“Quiet! Don’t make a sound, okay?”
Eyes still wide, tinged with panic, she nodded rapidly.
“Tell me everything you know about what lives down here! Tell me what you left out!” His voice was an urgent hiss.
Her brows scrunched together and she shook her head.
Dig lifted his hand slightly from her mouth. “Why not? Tell me!”
“There’s nothing to tell,” she said in a harsh whisper. “I don’t understand, I told you everything.”
She drew a breath, as of she were about to scream, and Dig slammed his hand back over her mouth, felt her lips grind against her teeth. She grunted in pain. “I’ll kill you if you raise the alarm, you hear me?”
She nodded again, tears in her eyes.
“You must know more. Tell me.”
She seemed to think for a minute, then nodded again. Dig gently lifted his hand, ready to slam it back if she screamed. He wasn’t lying. He was more than prepared to kill her. A kind of ecstatic rage rushed through him, made his heart pound.