THE HAUNTED AND THE POSSESSED.

"The nethermost caverns... are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head."

- H.P. Lovecraft.

26.

After he got out of the infirmary, it began to occur to Hayes just how apt his rats in a maze a.n.a.logy was. It was so apt that he wanted to run screaming out of the compound . . . except, of course, there was nowhere really to run to. He kept imagining the lot of them there like microbes on a slide while some huge, horrible eye peered down on them gauging their reactions. It was very unsettling.

So, since he couldn't run, he did the next best thing: he got rid of some snow.

It was something Biggs and Stotts generally did, but after what happened to St. Ours and what they had seen . . . or not . . . they weren't in much shape to do much but hide in their rooms. Rutkowski was doing the same. None of them were as bad off as Lind, but they'd been broken on some essential level.

So Hayes decided he would pick up the slack.

The snow blower they used to keep the walkways clear was basically a big garden tractor with a blower attachment on it and a little cab that kept the wind off you. Hayes was tucked down in his heated ECW's, so the cold that was hovering around sixty below wasn't bothering him. The night was black and blowing, broken only by the security lights of the buildings themselves. Hayes moved the tractor along at a slow clip, clearing the walkways that led from Targa House to the drill tower and power station. The secondary paths that connected them with the numerous garages and outbuildings and huts, some of which held equipment and some of which had become makeshift labs. He banked the snow up against the walls of the buildings to help keep them insulated and most, by that point in the long winter, no longer had walls as such, just drifts of snow that sloped from the roofs to the hardpack on the ground. Doorways were cut and windows kept clear, beyond that everything looked like igloos.

He cleared a path to the meteorology dome - Cutchen would appreciate that - and tried to sort out what was in his head. The things Gates had said were exactly the sorts of things Hayes did not want to hear. Just affirmations that all the crazy s.h.i.t he'd been thinking and feeling were not out and out bulls.h.i.t, but fact. That was hard to take.

But, then again, everything down here this year was hard to take.

There was so much ugliness, it was hard to take it all in, keep it down. Sharkey said that Lind was getting no better. He no longer was any danger as such and didn't need to be restrained, but he did need to be watched. She said she considered him to be clinically depressed now. He wouldn't leave the little sick bay. He sat in there and watched TV, most of which was routed through American Forces Antarctic Network-McMurdo. Sometimes he read magazines. But most of the time he just sat on his cot with his head c.o.c.ked to the side like a puppy listening for his master's approach.

And maybe that's exactly what he's doing, Hayes thought.

And maybe it was what they were all doing without realizing it. Waiting and waiting. Because, when he thought about it, didn't that seem almost right? That maybe what he'd been feeling since he stepped onto the frozen crust of Kharkhov Station was a sense of expectancy? Sure, underlying dread and fear and rampant nerves, but mostly expectancy. Like maybe somehow, some way, he'd known what was coming, that they were going to make contact with something.

Sounded like some pretty ripe bulls.h.i.t when you actually thought about it, framed it into words, but it almost seemed to fit. And maybe, when you got down to it, there was no true way of knowing what was going on in that great soundless vacuum of the human psyche and its subcellar, the subconscious mind. There were things there, imperatives and memories and scenarios, you just didn't want to know about. In fact, you - Jesus, what in the h.e.l.l was that?

Hayes stopped the tractor dead.

Terror punched into him like a poison dart. He was breathing hard, thinking things and not wanting to think them at all. He swallowed. Swallowed again. He thought . . . Christ, he was almost sure he had seen something over near Hut #6, something the tractor lights splashed over for just an instant. Looked like some shape, some figure pulling away, moving off into the darkness. And it wasn't a human shape. He peered through the clear plastic shield of the cab. Didn't see anything now and maybe he hadn't in the first place.

f.u.c.k that horse, there was something there. I know something was there.

But whatever it had been, it was gone now.

Hayes sat there for a few more minutes and then started throwing snow again. A storm was on them and the snow was flying thick as goose down, filling the shaking security lights of the compound with white clots that seemed busy as static on a TV screen. Snow was drifting and whipping, powdering the cab of the tractor like sand. The wind and blackness were sculpting it into huge, flying shapes that danced through the night.

Hayes stopped the tractor again.

That wind was funny, the way it howled and screamed and then dropped off to a steady buzzing whisper. You listened long enough, you started not only seeing things, but hearing voices . . . sweet, seductive voices that were pulled out long and hollow by the wind. The voices of women and lovers lost to time. Voices that wanted you to run off out into those bleak, frozen plains where you could lose yourself forever and maybe, just maybe, you wouldn't mind being lost, those blizzard winds wrapping you up tight and cooing in your ear until it was just too late. And by then, you would recognize the voice of the wind for what it was: death. Lonely, hungry death and maybe something else, maybe something diabolic and secret that was older than death.

Stop it for the life of Pete, Hayes warned himself.

But it could get to you, the wind and the snow and perpetual night. So many men had gone glaring mad with it that the medicos had coined a term to explain something that was perhaps not explainable at all: Dementia Antarctica. They saw it as a disease born of loneliness and isolation and maybe they were half right, but the ugly and bitter truth was that it was also a condition of the soul and its dark, destructive poetry that seemed to cry in your head: I am your soul and I am beautiful, I am a lover's sonnet and silver rain, now destroy me... if you love me, destroy me and yourself, too.

Hayes figured if he kept up like this, he would run off into the silent devastation of the polar night. So he put his mind on other things, things he could get his hands on and wrap his brain around, make work for him. And what he started to think about was not something you could really touch or ever know: the city. That great sunken, cyclopean city which lay dreaming on the bottom of Lake Vordog. Sheathed in weeds and morbid aquatic growths, time and madness, it was like some grotesque and moss-covered alien skeleton down there.

Remembering it now, it seemed like seeing it had been some nightmare, but Hayes had seen it all right and it had seen him. At the time he had not been able to truly understand the way it made him feel, it was just too shocking and overwhelming, but now he thought he understood: that city was taboo, shunned. He . . . and all men, he supposed . . . retained a vestigal memory of the place. It was some awful archetype electroplated onto the human soul from the race's infancy that would later re-channel itself as haunted houses and cursed castles and the like. Evil places. Places of malignancy and disembodied horror. Maybe something about the angles and the sense of desertion, but it had persisted and it always would, that memory. The first true dream of supernal terror humankind had known.

Here again, Hayes was thinking things he had no right to think. Maybe it was like Cutchen said, maybe part of it was Gates' disturbing little talk coupled with all the badness those mummies emanated. But he honestly thought it was something more. He truly believed that the Old Ones and their phantasmal, eldritch city were locked down in the minds of all men in the form of primal memory.

We interacted with those things, he found himself thinking, in our distant past. We must have. And probably not out of choice. That's the only thing that can explain our instinctual terror of them and that nameless city . . .

Without realizing it, Hayes had stopped the tractor.

Most of the job was done, but with that blizzard pounding down on them, he could pretty much start again for already the walkways were drifting over. But the thing was, he had stopped the tractor on its way to Hut #6 and he did not know why. He just sat there, feeling cold and hot, looking around desperately for the reason and not coming up with a thing. The night was alive with viscid shadows and creeping shapes and the wind was full of voices. He could hear them calling to him through that blowing white death: There's no hurry, Jimmy. You just sit tight and wait and all will be revealed to you. Because you're waiting for something as you've been waiting from day one and maybe all your life and that something is coming, Jimmy. It's coming out of the darkness of the polar graveyard and, like a chameleon, it's about to show itself . . .

And then it did.

About the time he was ready to call himself a f.u.c.king lunatic, it did.

But before he saw it, he heard it.

Heard that weird, high musical piping that he knew was a voice. Heard it in his head and outside the cab, and in the pit of his mind he remembered that voice as one of authority, as the voice of a master and such was its dominance, he did not dare try to get away from it. He could feel the ice of Antarctica breathing in his belly, sending out breaths of frost that shut him down and made him watch.

Then he saw it.

It came drifting out of the shadows, a ghostly alien form with outspread wings and trembling tentacles and leering red eyes that opened up his brain like a tin can and reached in there with cold fingers. He screamed, he supposed he screamed, for something came ripping out of him that slapped him sure and hard across the face.

The thing came closer and Hayes pressed down on the accelerator of the tractor, those chained balloon tires catching and vaulting Hayes forward and right at the thing. And he felt something snap in his brain like a tree branch and the pain was immense. But then the tractor rammed into that thing and it broke apart into a thousand luminous fragments.

Then he was alone.

And the wind was just the wind and the snow was just the snow. But in his mind, there were shadows. Ancient shadows that called him by name.

27.

There were things in life that could destroy you an inch at a time.

Booze, drugs, depression, tobacco. Hayes knew all about the tobacco-thing, because he'd been smoking for nearly thirty years now. So he knew that one and understood it and realized like anyone else that you lost a minute or five or whatever it was every time you lit up.

But he never saw it that way.

He looked on it by the months and years. That he was buying himself a plot of cemetery earth, shovelful by shovelful. But it didn't stop him and it didn't slow him down. The nicotine had him and it was a pure and senseless thing that was more than just a simple physical addiction, but something destructive in the soul that saw its own end and welcomed it.

So, he understood there were things that took your life slowly. But there were also things that ate away your life in big chunks, in heaping spoonfuls. And what was laying on the cot in the sick bay the next morning was definitely one of them.

Lind.

Or maybe not Lind at all.

Sharkey had him strapped down and he was sweating and feverish and his skin was bubbling like hot fat. Actually bubbling. You could say in your mind that they were blood blisters or water blisters, but that didn't cut it and you knew it. Just as Hayes knew it. What he was looking at, what Lind had become, was something akin to the little girl in that old scary movie. The one who puked up green slime and had the Devil in her.

"What the h.e.l.l's wrong with him?" Hayes asked.

"You tell me," Sharkey said. "I can't explain the lesions any more than I can really explain his state of mind. I would guess this is something psychosomatic, but -"

"Yes?"

"But to this degree? This is out of my league, Jimmy."

She had wisely shut the door now to the sick bay and the outer door to the infirmary itself. Lind was just laying there, staring up at the ceiling, his mouth opening and closing. He was making a gulping sound in his throat like a beached fish.

Hayes swallowed down whatever was in him that made him want to turn and run. He swallowed it down and went over to Lind. He looked terrible. His flesh was white as a toad's belly and the oddest smell was coming off him . . . a sharp chemical odor like turpentine.

"Lind? Can you hear me? It's Hayes."

The eyes blinked, the pupils hugely dilated, but nothing else. There was no sense of recognition. Anything. Lind's mouth snapped close and then his lips parted slowly. The voice that came out was windy and echoing, unearthly . . . almost like Lind was speaking from the bottom of a very deep well. "Hayes . . . Jimmy . . . oh, Christ, help me Jimmy, don't let them . . . ."

He stopped, making that gulping noise again. Although he was restrained, his hands were flopping madly about, looking for something to grasp. Horrified as he was by all of it, Hayes was seeing another human being in a terrible plight and he put his hand in Lind's own. He almost immediately pulled away . . . touching Lind was like laying your hands on an electric cow fence. Hayes could feel the energy, the electricity thrumming through the man. It seemed to be moving in waves and he could feel it crawling over the back of his hand.

Lind took a deep breath and that energy died away. Thankfully.

Now all Hayes was aware of was the actual feel of Lind's flesh against his own. It was hot and moist and repulsive. Like handling some reptilian fetus that had been expelled from its mother's womb in a breath of fevers. Lind's hand was like that . . . smooth, warm, sweating toxins and bile. It took everything Hayes had in him not to pull away.

"Lind . . . c'mon, old buddy, you can't go on like this, you -"

"I can hear you, Jimmy, but I can't see you, I can't see anything but this place, this awful place . . . oh, where am I, where am I?"

That voice was making a rushing, hollow sound that human lungs were simply incapable of. Hayes couldn't get past the notion that it was coming from very far away. It sounded like it was being accelerated across great distances.

Hayes looked over at Sharkey and she chewed her lip.

"You're in the infirmary, Lind."

Lind's hand played in his own, felt pliant like warm clay, something that might melt away from body heat. "I can't see you, Jimmy . . . Jesus Christ, but I can't f.u.c.king see you," he whimpered. "I . . . I can't see the infirmary either . . . I see . . . oh I see . . . "

"What do you see?" Hayes asked him, thinking it might be important. "Tell me."

Lind just lay there, staring holes through the ceiling. "I see, I see . . . " He began to thrash, a wet and tortured scream coming from his mouth. And it almost seemed more like a shout of surprise or terror. "The sea . . . there's only the sea . . . that big, big sea . . . the steaming, boiling sea . . . and the sky above . . . misty, misty. It's . . . it's not blue anymore . . . it's green, Jimmy, shimmering and glowing and full of sparkling mist. Do you smell it? That bad air . . . like bleach, like ammonia." He started to gag and cough, moving in boneless gyrations like a snake, sweat rolling down his blistered face. He was madly gulping air. "Can't . . . breathe . . . I can't f.u.c.king breathe, Jimmy, I can't f.u.c.king breathe!"

Hayes held onto him, trying to talk him down. "Yes, you can, Lind! You're not really there, only your eyes are there! Only your eyes!"

Lind calmed a bit, but kept gulping air. His eyes were huge and filled with tears and madness. His breath smelled unnatural, like creosote.

"Take it easy now," Hayes told him. "Now just relax and tell me what you see. I'll help you find your way out."

And Hayes figured maybe he could, if he could find out just where the h.e.l.l this place was. Sharkey was watching him, neither approving nor disapproving of what he was doing. Just standing by with a hypo if it came to that.

"It's hot, Jimmy, it's hot here . . . everything is smoking and misting and those, those great jagged sheets of gla.s.s . . . sheets of broken gla.s.s rising up from the sea and shattering into light . . . that green, green, green sky . . . purple clouds and pink clouds and shadows . . . those shadows coil like snakes, look how they do that . . . do you see? Do you see? Shadows with . . . veins, veins . . . living shadows in the green misting sky . . . "

"Yes," Hayes said. "I see them. They can't hurt us, though."

"I'm sinking, Jimmy, don't let me go, don't let me go down there! I'm sinking down into the sea and the water is warm, so very warm and thick . . . like jelly . . . how can it feel like that? The depths, oh those glittering emerald depths. The sea lights itself up and it shows you things . . . and . . . and I'm not alone, Jimmy. There are others here, many others. Do you see them? They swim with me . . . swimming and gliding and rising and falling. Yes, yes! Them things, them things like in the hut . . . but alive, all of them alive, gathering at the city!"

It could have been the city beneath Lake Vordog, but Hayes seriously doubted it by that point. Wherever this was, it was no place man had ever trod. Some awful, alien world with a poison atmosphere. And the crazy thing was, although Hayes could not see it and was glad of the fact, he could feel it. He could feel the heat of the place, that thick and turgid heat. Sweat was running down his face and the air was suddenly close and gagging, like trying to suck air through a hot oven mitt.

Jesus.

Hayes was nearly swooning now.

He could see the heat and it was coming from Lind, rolling off him like shimmering heat waves from August pavement. Hayes looked over at Sharkey and, yes, her face was beaded with sweat. It was incredible, but it was happening.

Lind was like some weird portal, some doorway to those seething alien wastes. He was there, his mind was there, and he was bringing some of it back with him. Because now it was more than just the heat, it was the smell, too. Hayes was gagging, coughing, his head reeling, the room saturated with an unbearable stench of ammoniated ice. Steam was rising from Lind now and bringing the smell of that toxic atmosphere with him. It reminded Hayes of wash day back home when he was a kid. That eye-watering, nose-burning stink of Hilex bleach.

Sharkey wisely opened the door to the infirmary and started a fan going. It cleared the air a bit, at least enough where Hayes wasn't ready to pa.s.s out.

Lind was talking on through it all: " . . . seeing it, Jimmy? You seeing it? Oh, that's a city, a gigantic city . . . a floating city . . . look how it bobs and sways? How can it do that? All them high towers and deep holes, honeycombs . . . like bee honeycombs, all them cells and chambers . . . "

"Are you still with them, Lind? Those others?"

Lind chattered his teeth, shook his head. "No, no, no . . . I'm not me anymore, Jimmy, I'm one of them! One of them spreading my wings and swimming and diving through those pink honeycombs and knowing what they think like they know what I think . . . we . . . we're going to . . . yes! That's the plan, isn't it? That's always, always, always been the plan . . . "

"What's the plan?" Hayes asked. "Tell me the plan, Lind."

But Lind was just shaking his head, a funny light in his eyes now like a reflection from a mirror. "We're rising now . . . the hive is rising now . . . through the water and ice into the green glowing sky . . . thousands of us into the sky on buzzing wings, thousands and thousands of wings. We are the hive and the hive is us. We are the swarm, the ancient swarm that fills the skies . . . "

"Where are you going?"

"Above, up and up and up into them clouds and thickness, sure, that's where we go . . . up beyond into the cold and blackness and empty s.p.a.ces. The long, hollow s.p.a.ces, long, long . . . "

"Where are you going? Can you see where you are going?"

Lind's breathing had slowed now to barely a rustle. His eyes were glazed and sleepy and lost. The air in the room no longer stank like bleach. It was cold, very cold suddenly. The temperature plummeting until a bone-deep chill settled into Hayes. Sharkey killed the fan and cranked the heat up, but it was barely keeping an edge on that glacial cold. Hayes could see his breath coming out in frosty plumes.

"There are winds," Lind said in a squeaky whisper. "We drift on the winds that carry the hive and we dream together . . . we all dream together through the long, black night that goes on and on and on . . . nothingness . . . emptiness . . . only the long, empty blackness . . . "

Lind stopped talking. In fact, his eyes drifted shut and it seemed he had gone out cold. He was sleeping very peacefully. He stayed that way for ten or fifteen minutes while Hayes and Sharkey could do nothing but wait. About the time Hayes decided to pull his hand free, Lind gripped it and his eyes came open.

"The world . . . the blue world . . . the empty blue world . . . this is where we come, this is where the hive goes now. Oceans, great oceans . . . black, blasted lands . . . mountains and valleys and yellow mist."

Hayes knew where they were now. They could be nowhere else. "Is there anything alive there, Lind? Is there any life?"