And outside, the snow piled up and the wind screeched their names.

29.

Well, it was no easy bit getting into the Vradaz Outpost.

It was a small camp, but the buildings - those that weren't crushed beneath the ice barrier-were pretty much drifted from roof to ground. Hayes and his compatriots had to fight through snow that came up above their hips at times and then was blown clean five feet away. Hayes had brought lanterns, ice-axes, and shovels and they put them to good use. They chose a squat, central structure that appeared to be connected to the others and got to work. The sight of the place had filled them all with an unknown terror, but after thirty minutes spent shoveling and cutting their way through the heaped snow, that pa.s.sed.

It was just a dead camp.

That was all it was and the exertion helped them see it. Their nerves were still sharpened, but Hayes figured that was only natural. Jesus, this was the South Pole at the dead of winter. Wind screaming and snow flying and the temperature hanging in at a steady fifty below. If their imaginations got a little worked up, it was to be expected.

When they found the door, it was sheathed in blue ice, buckled in its frame and Hayes had a mad desire to plow right through it with the SnoCat, but he didn't want to take the chance of destroying anything in there. Anything that might remain. So they took their turns chopping through the ice by lantern-light, the snow whipping and creating jumping, distorted shadows around them.

And then the door was free. One good kick and it fell in.

"You first," Cutchen said. "I'm the intellectual type . . . you're the brave, stupid type."

"s.h.i.t," Hayes said, ducking in through the doorway and turning on his flashlight, something pulling up inside of him as he entered the abandoned structure. There was a smell of age and dust and wreckage.

The place was made of wood and prefab metal like most of the buildings at the South Pole. Concrete didn't hold up too well with the abrasive wind and extreme temperature changes, it tended to flake away and crack wide open.

Looking around in there with his flashlight, Hayes was seeing debris everywhere like a cyclone went ripping through. The floor planking was ruptured, the roof sagging, great holes punched into the walls. Snow had drifted into the corners. He supposed the place was held mainly together by frost and ice. Seams of it necklaced the walls.

"Look," Sharkey said. "Even the back of the door."

"Jesus," Cutchen said.

There were crude crosses etched into just about any available surface. Hex signs, really, to ward off evil. You could almost breathe in the madness that must have overtaken the place. Those scientists losing their minds when their science could not explain what appeared to be some sort of malefic haunting . . . in their desperation they had turned to the oldest of apotropaics: the cross.

But it had failed them.

Hayes, Sharkey, and Cutchen stood there maybe five minutes, sucking in the memory of evil and insanity that seemed to ooze from those bowed, ice-slicked walls.

"Looks like a bomb went off in here," Cutchen finally said.

"Maybe one did."

They were in some sort of entry, what Hayes' mom had called a Mud Room back in Kansas. The sort of place you stowed your boots and coats and work clothes when you came in out of the fields. They pa.s.sed through another doorway into a larger room. There were some old fuel oil barrels in there and a stove over in the corner. Everything else was in shambles . . . camp chairs overturned, video equipment shattered, papers spread in the dusting of snow. What looked like a desk had been reduced to kindling. A light fixture overhead was dangling by wires. The rungs of a red fireman's ladder against the wall were hung with icicles.

Sharkey was examining some of the papers with her lantern.

"Make anything of it?" Hayes asked her.

She dropped them. "My Cyrillic is a little rusty."

They pa.s.sed into another room in which the ceiling was caved in, stalact.i.tes of ice hung down and pooled on the floor. The walls were charred and bowed. There was a lot of electronic equipment in there, most of it destroyed and locked in flows of ice.

"Looks like they had a fire," Cutchen said. "I wonder if it was an accident."

They kept going, moving down a short corridor past some cramped sleeping quarters and then into another room which had been a laboratory once. There was still equipment in there . . . microscopes and racks of test tubes, antique computers and file cabinets whose drawers had been yanked open and left that way. The floor was a down of broken gla.s.s and instruments and papers. Hayes found a couple drills and an electric saw they must have used to slice up their ice core samples. There was a small ell off the room with a handle like a freezer on it. Inside were the core samples themselves, dated and tagged.

Sharkey almost went on her a.s.s on a flow of ice on the floor. "Look at this," she said, indicating a room just off the lab. The walls in there had great, blackened holes ripped into them through which you could see a maze of snow, ice, and lumber . . . the portion of the outpost crushed beneath the ice fall. There were a series of smaller holes drilled into the walls, too.

"Bullet holes," Hayes said. "And those bigger ones . . . "

"Grenades?" Cutchen said, panning his light over them.

Sharkey was on her hands and knees studying some ancient stains on the walls, others spread over some folders caught in the ice flow. "This . . . well, this could be blood. It sure looks like it. I guess it could be ink or tomato sauce or something."

Hayes felt something sink in him. Yeah, and maybe the center of the universe has creamy white filling, but I don't think so. You were right the first time, Doc. That ain't the blood of tomatoes, it's the blood of people.

"Must've had themselves a showdown here," Cutchen said. "Or a slaughter."

Hayes was wondering how much truth there was in what Kolich had told them. There was more to this mess than just men going mad and seeing ghosts and what not. You could almost feel the agony and suffering in the air. Those holes . . . there was no doubt about them. Somebody had opened up with an automatic weapon in here.

What had Kolich said?

A security force went up there, came back with the three and said the others were all dead.

Or been killed.

Hayes was picturing some security force, maybe something more along the lines of a hit squad coming in here and killing everyone. Saving those three others for interrogation or study. Whatever had happened it had been violent and harsh and ugly. The outpost had been under Soviet jurisdiction at the time. The Soviets knew how to handle little problems like hauntings and alien minds trying to take over their men.

"So what does it tell us?" Sharkey said.

Cutchen shook his head. "Nothing we want to know about."

There was a set of double doors against the far wall. They were encased in twining, thick roots of ice. Summer melt-water from the barrier that had frozen up come winter. Desks and furniture and battered file cabinets had been piled up against it. They had to use the ice-axes to free the wreckage.

"What do you suppose the point of this was?" Cutchen said.

Sharkey started hammering ice away from the doors. "Only two possibilities, isn't there? They were either trying to keep something in or something out."

Cutchen paused, resting his axe on the shoulder of his red parka. "I was thinking that and, you know, I wonder if certain doors shouldn't be opened."

"You scared?" Hayes asked him, because he knew he was.

Cutchen t.i.ttered. "I don't know the meaning of the word. Still . . . I think I might have left my electric blanket on. Maybe I should pop back to camp, come back for you two wide-eyed intrepids later on."

"Chop," Sharkey told him.

But it was really getting them nowhere, for the ice had puddled beneath the door and locked it tight as a bank vault. Hayes dashed out to the 'Cat and came back with a propane torch. He ran the flame along the bottom of the door until it loosened. Then he hit the hinges and the seam where the two doors came together.

"Okay," he said.

Cutchen looked from one to the other, then pushed his way through, stepping out into a larger room that held a variety of equipment, mostly portable ice drills, corers, and air tools. The far wall was collapsed and a foot of snow had blown over the floor.

"Looks harmless enough," Cutchen said. "You two coming in or -"

There was an instantaneous cracking and ripping sound and Cutchen let out a cry and disappeared from view. They heard him land below, swearing and calling the Russians everything but white Christians.

Hayes and Sharkey crept forward. They put their lights down there and saw Cutchen sitting in a drift of snow, a gleaming wall of blue ice behind him.

"Are you all right?" Sharkey asked him.

"Peachy. Why do you ask?"

Hayes went for the ladder they'd seen when they first came in. Sharkey stayed there, hanging her lantern over the edge of the hole. "Looks pretty big down there. Must have been their cold storage," she said. "I bet you stepped on the trap door."

"Do you really think so?"

Cutchen dug his flashlight out of the snow, stood up, slipped and dropped it farther away. He cursed under his breath and dug it out from a drift. "Hey, what the h.e.l.l?" he said, down on his knees, digging through the snow. He was uncovering something with mittened hands, brushing a dusting of white away from it.

"What is it?" Sharkey said from above.

"I'm not sure," Cutchen said, his voice echoing out in the cavernous hollows below. "Looks like a . . . oh Jesus, yuck." He stumbled away from whatever it was, breathing hard. "Where's that G.o.dd.a.m.n ladder? Tell your boyfriend to hurry."

"What?" Sharkey said.

Cutchen put his light on it.

Even from where she was, Sharkey could see it just fine. It was sculpted in ice, but there was no doubt what it was: a human death mask. A face peeled down nearly to the skull beneath and frosted white.

Cutchen wasn't liking it much. "I'm hoping this is just evidence of a Halloween party that got out of hand."

He stepped away from that leering, hollow-eyed face and made it maybe two or three steps and cried out. His leg had sank nearly up to the knee. His flashlight took another ride, this time landing about ten feet away, just under the trapdoor. It spun in circles, casting a magic lantern show of vast and twisted shadows over the ice walls. Cutchen went down on his hands and knees, struggling away from whatever he'd gotten himself stuck in. His knee sank once and his hand dropped down a foot another time. But he got out of there.

Whatever it was he'd been on . . . it was not made for walking.

Hayes came back with the ladder, banging it into walls and getting it hung up on the door. He saw the look on Sharkey's face, said, "What? What now?"

"Never mind, Rapunzel," Cutchen said, an odd edge to his voice. "Let down you f.u.c.king hair already."

Hayes fed it down into the hole and he'd barely gotten it balanced before Cutchen came scrambling up it like a monkey up grapevine. His foot slipped once and he banged his chin, but he never slowed down. He lay in the snow on his back, breathing hard, looking like he'd been inflated in his bulky ECW's.

"I found out where they keep the Halloween decorations," he said to Hayes.

Sharkey started down the ladder and Hayes went after her, taking the flashlights and leaving Cutchen the lantern.

The room they found themselves in was about twenty feet in width, maybe thirty in length. The floor was hard-packed snow and the walls were ice and you could clearly see the chopping and hacking marks in it. The Russians had cut it right down into the ice.

Hayes played his light around.

There were crates of food and barrels of gasoline along the walls. One barrel was tipped over and ruptured as if somebody had opened it with an axe. A small room off to the left held a small Honda gasoline-powered generator that was now hopelessly ruined, covered in frozen melt-water. Huge stalact.i.tes hung from the ceiling and Hayes had to duck under them. Some reached right to the floor.

Sharkey was on her hands and knees, brushing snow away from what Cutchen had found.

Hayes helped her.

It took some time, but before they were done they had uncovered a roughly circular pit filled with frozen cadavers. It looked like a winter scene from Treblinka: skulls with yawning jaws and hollowed orbits, jutting femurs and ulnas, the barrel staves of ribcages. He figured there were probably twenty bodies in there, all tangled in a central heap of limbs and skull-faces and spirals of vertebrae that were fused together in a pool of ice. Some had the rags of clothes wrapped around them and others went to their maker naked. They weren't exactly skeletons, but d.a.m.n close. They all looked blackened and melted, knitted with sinew and wasted quilts of muscle.

And they'd all been shot.

Skulls had bullet holes in them. As did iliums and sternums and clavicles. Arm and leg bones were snapped. Jaws blasted away and pelvic wings shattered. No, this hadn't been a careful cleansing here, this had been a wild murder spree carried out with submachine guns and automatic rifles. These bodies had taken an incredible volume of fire and at close range.

Hayes just stood there, breathlessly, staring down into that bone pit and almost sensing the terror and madness that had brought an atrocity like this into being. He stepped back and away, having trouble being clinical about it all like Sharkey. To him, it looked like those cadavers were trying to crawl out of the ice. All those staring faces and reaching, cremated hands. Like something from a waxworks or a spookshow, but certainly nothing real.

He ducked away beneath the ceiling of icicles and saw another irregular shape in the snow. For some reason, it caught his eye. Motes of dust and crystals of ice hung in the air. His breath frosted from his lips in great clouds. Using his boot, he scattered the snow away from that shape beneath. He was looking down at a shriveled, conical form maybe six or seven feet long that had been incinerated right down to a husk. Looking now like something that had been pulled from an alien crematory.

Hayes knew what it was, of course.

He recognized that shape and it filled his belly with fluttering wings. Another one of those things. Probably chopped from the ice and then burned when they realized what it was doing to them. Or maybe the security force had burned it. Not that it mattered.

"You better come over here," he said to Sharkey, using a hush and quiet voice. The kind you used when you didn't want to wake an infant . . . or something sleeping in a coffin.

"What now?" Cutchen said from above. "Can you guys hurry this up? I'm . . . I'm starting to lose it up here."

Sharkey came over, saying, "Some of those bodies are wearing fatigues, Jimmy. Some of Kolich's security people must have went in there, too."

And Hayes didn't doubt it.

... a rash of insanity up there. Men killing each other and committing suicide... weird figures wandering through the compound that were not men... ghosts, bogies, I think... they spoke of devils and monsters, figures that walked through walls . . .

Yes, he could hear Nikolai Kolich saying it.

Except Kolich had left out the meat of the matter. These men at the outpost had drilled into a chasm, yes, but it hadn't been just any chasm, but maybe a burial chamber of the Old Ones. And opening it had been like cutting the scab off some primordial, invidious wound. And the pus that leaked out was infectious and evil, a wasting pestilence in the form of alien memories and undead essences, a decayed intelligence that was still virulent after all those uncounted eons, a spiritual contamination that took their minds one by one by one. Making them something less than human, something ageless and undying, a cosmic horror.

"Another one," Sharkey said. "Their tombs must be all over these mountains and rifts."

Hayes kicked it with his boot to prove to himself that it was dead. A piece of its leathery, burnt hide fell off like tree bark. It was hollow inside, that alien machinery boiled to ash. Even its ghost was dead now. Or what Hayes would have called a ghost, because nothing else seemed to fit. That diabolic power, the vestiges of those remorseless minds that seemed to cling on after death like a negative charge in a dry cell battery . . . just waiting to come into contact with living mental energies they could twist and subvert.

"You wanna guess what happened here?" Sharkey said.

"Oh, you know as well as I do. They dug up some of these ugly p.r.i.c.ks and those minds woke up, became active. The Russians started having bad dreams and seeing ghosts and hearing things . . . and by the time they realized what was happening, they weren't even men anymore. Just . . . vessels for dead, alien minds that maybe wanted to fulfill some perverse plan set into motion millions of years ago." He put a cigarette in his lips and lit. "Then the people at Vostok got worried, so they sent in soldiers. Some of the soldiers got contaminated by those minds . . . but not enough. Those that weren't, killed everyone except those three Kolich mentioned, those drooling and insane things that had once been men. The soldiers burned the rest and the Old Ones, too."

"That's why they abandoned this camp, Jimmy. To stop the spread of the infection."

Cutchen said, "C'mon already, I . . . " He paused like his throat had seized up. "I'm hearing things up here, people. Sounds. I don't know . . . like things moving, sliding . . . "

Hayes walked over to the ladder.

He heard a thump up there, followed by another. Then a sc.r.a.ping sound like nails dragged over ice. Then there was silence. Cutchen came barreling down the ladder, missing the last three rungs and landing on his a.s.s.