Hayes didn't interfere because she wasn't just wasting their time. If she was bothering to look through those heaping stacks then she was hot on the trail of something. Something relevant.

Hayes leaned against the doorway, thinking about the cold.

They were each wearing an easy thirty-odd pounds of cold weather gear: long underwear, sweaters, wool socks, insulated nylon overalls, Gore Tex down parkas, mittens, ski gloves, and bunny boots . . . those big white moon boots that were inflated with air to provide insulation. But even so, prolonged exposure to the Antarctic winter night was not recommended. The trough of glacial air was sweeping over the top of the valley and screaming across the ice-plain at an easy seventy miles an hour . . . driving a temperature of eighty below zero somewhere into the range of 120 below. They were protected from that here, but it was still d.a.m.nably cold. The sooner they could wind this up the better. Hayes was keeping an eye on both Cutchen and Sharkey, as well as himself. Looking for the signs that they needed to get out of the cold right away . . . stupor, fatigue, disorientation. So far, so good.

But it would happen out here.

Sooner or later.

"Nothing," Sharkey said. "Nothing at all."

"What were you looking for?" Cutchen asked her.

"I don't know . . . something belonging to Gates. A personal journal or something. Maybe it's in the 'Cat."

Outside again, the cold seemed worse . . . bitter, unrelenting. They could hear the distant sounds of the glaciers cracking and snapping, the crackling sound their own breath made as the moisture in it froze and drifted down as they walked.

They stopped by the Polar Haven and there wasn't much of interest in there either. Just the usual: shovels and ice-axes, sledge hammers and ice drills, spare parts for the coring rig, cots and tarps. Sharkey steered them back towards Gates' SnoCat. There was nothing in it either. Nothing resembling a journal, at any rate.

Sharkey found something beneath the seat, though. It looked like a TV remote. "What's this?"

"Detonator," Cutchen said.

Hayes took it away from her, studied it in his light. "Yeah . . . it's armed, too."

They were all looking around now. The proximity of high explosives was the sort of immediate threat that could make you forget very quickly about aliens that could suck your mind away. Hayes set the detonator on the seat.

"Are we in danger here?" Sharkey asked him.

"No . . . I don't think so." Hayes looked around. "My guess is somebody has a charge rigged around here somewhere, maybe doing some seismic echo work. Maybe."

But that wasn't what he was thinking at all. Given what must have happened here, Hayes would not have been surprised to learn that the entire camp was rigged to blow-up.

They moved back down beyond the snow-block walls, away from the structures and to a wall of black sandstone that rose up maybe two-hundred feet. Situated at the base of it was Gates' corer, a portable shot-hole drilling system. The drill tripod, compressor, and hose spool were sled-mounted and had been pulled away from a yawning black fissure that led down into the earth. It was roughly elliptical in shape, maybe twenty feet at its widest point. A winch was set up near it so supplies could be lowered and specimens could be brought up and swung out.

"The famous chasm," Cutchen said. You could hear the bitterness in his voice and n.o.body blamed him for it. "If they would have drilled somewhere else, we might not be in this fix now."

"Oh, yes we would," Hayes said. "What's happening down here has been meant to happen."

39.

Gates' team had set up an emergency ladder for people to climb down with. Using his light, Hayes saw that the drop was maybe twenty feet. But it was just as black as a mineshaft down there and the idea of descending made something seize up in his chest. But there was no real choice. He went down first and it was no easy bit in his ballooned-out bunny boots, like walking a tight rope in hip waders. He went down slowly, while Sharkey kept her flashlight beam on him. Tiny crystals of ice floated in it, clouds of his steaming breath.

Finally, he made it.

The floor was uneven, rocky, veined with frost and ice. Hayes played his light around and saw that he was in a pa.s.sage that gradually sloped deeper into that frozen earth. "Okay," he called out. "Next."

Sharkey's turn. She moved fairly quickly down the ladder. Cutchen followed, b.i.t.c.hing the entire way that the last time he'd followed them down into a hole he'd had to squeeze out his long johns when they'd gotten back to the station. But, finally, he was down, too.

"Looks like the set from an old B-movie," he said, holding his lantern high. "A natural cavern, I'd say. I don't see any signs of chipping or toolwork on the walls."

Hayes didn't either. "Limestone," he said, studying the striations, the layers pressing down upon one another.

"Sure, a natural limestone cavern. Probably hollowed out by ground water over millions of years," Cutchen said.

Sharkey chortled. "Now who's talking Geo one-oh-one?"

The pa.s.sage was about eight or nine feet in height, maybe five in width. Hayes leading, they started down its sloping path. It would angle to the left, then to the right, had more twists and turns to it than a water snake. And they were going deeper into the mountain with each step. Ten minutes into it, Hayes began to notice that things were warming up. It still wasn't time for a bikini wax and a thong, but it was certainly warmer. Cutchen noticed it, too, saying that it had to be due to a volcanic vent or geothermal action.

"Least we won't freeze down here," Sharkey said.

Cutchen nodded. "You know, I was wondering how Gates and the boys were handling this so well. Being down here hour after hour. If it wasn't for the warmth they would have froze their b.a.l.l.s off - "

Sharkey put a gloved finger to her lips. "Quiet."

"What?"

"Shut the h.e.l.l up," she whispered.

Hayes was listening with her now, too.

He didn't know what for and part of him honestly did not want to know, but he listened nonetheless. Then he heard an echo from somewhere below . . . just a quick, furtive scratching sound that disappeared so quickly he wasn't sure he had heard it at all. Then he heard it again not five seconds later . . . like a stick being scratched along a subterranean wall.

And down there in that underworld, going to a place that was as storied and terrible in their imaginations as some vampire's castle, it was probably the worse possible thing to be hearing. For a scratching implied motion and motion implied something alive . . .

Hayes was thinking: Could be a man, could be one of the team... and it could be something else entirely.

They stood there, looking at each other and at those limestone walls, an ice-mist tangling through their legs like groundfog. In the glow of Cutchen's lantern, there was only their frosting breath, suspended ice crystals and drifting motes of dust. And shadows. Because down in that creeping murk, the lights were casting huge and distorted shadows.

Hayes took a few more steps, his belly feeling hollow and feathery. He played his light farther down into the stygian depths of that channel which, from where he was sitting, might as well have led right down to the lower regions of h.e.l.l itself.

He heard the sound again and started.

A distant sc.r.a.ping that seemed to be moving up the pa.s.sage at them and then a few seconds later, sounded impossibly far-off. It would pause for a moment or two, then start up again . . . closer then farther, that same scratching, dragging sound. Hayes felt a trickle of sweat run down his spine. Something in his bowels tensed. He could hear his own breathing in his ears and it seemed impossibly loud. Then, suddenly, the scratching was much closer, so very close in fact that Hayes almost turned and ran. Because it seemed that whatever was making it would show itself at any moment, something spidery with sc.r.a.ping twigs for fingers.

Then it abruptly ceased.

"What in Christ was that?" Sharkey said behind him, edging closer to him now.

And he was going to tell her that it was probably nothing. Sound would carry funny down in the hollowed earth. That's all it was. Nothing to get excited about. But he never did say that, for less than a minute after the scratching stopped, something else took its place . . . a strident, squeaky piping like an out-of-tune recording of a church organ played on an old Victrola. It rose up high and shrieking, gaining volume and insistence. No wind blowing through no underground pa.s.sage could have created something like that. The sound of it was eerie and disturbing, the auditory equivalent of a knife blade pressed against your spine and slowly drawn upwards.

Hayes suddenly felt very numb, rubbery and uncoordinated.

So much so that if he moved, he figured he would have fallen flat on his face. So he didn't move. He stood there like a statue in a park waiting for a pigeon to s.h.i.t on him. That still, that motionless. His tongue felt like it was glued to the roof of his mouth. The sound died out for maybe a second or two. But then it came again, shrill and piercing and somehow malevolent. It was reedy and cacophonous and something about it made you want to scream. But what really was bothering Hayes about it was that it was not neutral in the least . . . it sounded almost hysterical or demented.

And then it died out for good, ending it mid-squeal, shattering into a dozen resounding and tinny echoes that bounced around through caves and hollows and openings. But the memory of it was still there.

And what Hayes was thinking was something he did not dare say: That's what they sound like... I heard it that night on the tractor and I heard it out in the hut... that was a voice of a living Old One...

But he kept that to himself.

He stood there, teetering from foot to foot, feeling like something had evaporated inside of him. Maybe it was courage and maybe it was just common sense.

"Okay," Cutchen said, his voice barely audible. He cleared his throat. "I'm for getting the h.e.l.l out right now."

"I'm for that," Sharkey said.

Which dumped the whole stinking mess at Hayes' doorstep. He shook his head. "We want answers? We want to know what happened to Gates and the others? Then those answers are down there."

Cutchen looked at him with anger that slowly subsided. "All right, Jimmy, if that's what you want. But this is the last f.u.c.king date I go on with you."

It was a pale attempt at humor, but it made them all smile. Hayes knew it was not intended to be funny, however, it was just how Cutchen responded to terror and uncertainty: with funny lines born out of contempt.

They started down again.

After another five or ten minutes in that pa.s.sage, it narrowed to a hole that was perfectly circular like the shaft of a sewer. Its circ.u.mference was about ten feet, but so perfectly symmetrical it could not possibly have been cut by ancient floodwaters. Hayes stepped through first and found himself in a room that was again uniform, but rectangular in shape. At the far end, another pa.s.sage dropped away into darkness. He examined it with his light and saw a set of carved stone steps dropping away into the blackness. They were long, low steps, more like slabs, each large enough, it seemed, to set a dining table and chairs on.

Whatever walked them, Hayes got to thinking, did not have the same tread as a man.

It took time to navigate them because each was about five feet wide. They were set with faults and cracks, the edges falling away. There were lots of tiny pebbles and bits of rock strewn over them as if some ancient subterranean river had deposited them there. Now and again, Hayes saw little protrusions like b.u.mps or k.n.o.bs that had been almost completely worn away. So maybe they weren't steps at all.

On they went, their lights bobbing and their footfalls loud and sc.r.a.ping.

As they descended, Hayes was filled with an exhilaration much like Gates and his people must have felt originally coming down there. A sense of discovery, of antic.i.p.ation, of great revelations laying ahead. As he moved ever downward, some smarta.s.s voice in his head kept saying things like, who do you suppose built all this? Is there life on Mars and in outer s.p.a.ce? But it was not funny. It left a bad taste in his mouth like he'd been chewing on spiders.

Finally, he paused. "Everyone okay?"

Cutchen just grunted.

Sharkey said, "Peachy."

Down they went and by the time they hit bottom, Hayes figured they had descended at least a hundred feet if not more. And now they entered a grotto that was absolutely immense. The floor was littered with fallen shelves of sedimentary rock, loose stones, the pillars of gigantic stalagmites that had been smoothed into near-perfect cones probably by those same long-gone floodwaters.

"Christ," Sharkey said and her voice echoed out, breaking up and pulled away into fantastic heights above them.

They stepped farther into the grotto.

It was so huge that their lights literally would not penetrate up to the roof or the surrounding walls. Everything echoed. Somewhere, water was dripping. Faint, distant, but dripping all the same. They spread out in a rough circle, trying to find something in there. Overhead, what had to be at least a hundred feet straight up they could see the tips of stalact.i.tes. They kept in sight because it would have been just too easy to get lost in there and never find your way out again. The flashlight and lantern beams picked out a cloistered haze in the air, motes of dust. It smelled dirty and dry in there like relics pulled from an Egyptian tomb.

"You'd need a spotlight in here to see anything," Cutchen said.

They kept fanning out, stepping over rock outcroppings, the occasional vein of ice. There were crevices cut into the floor. Some were no more than a few feet deep and a few inches wide, but others were big enough to swallow a car and had no bottom that the lights could find. They moved on, trying to follow what they thought was a path through that colossal underworld. Everything echoed and bounced around them. It was like an amphitheater in there . . . one exaggerated to a tremendous scope. Now and again, a light rain of ice crystals would fall on them. The air was oddly rarefied like they were on a mountaintop and not far below the surface.

Then suddenly, maybe a full city block into the grotto, they stopped.

Before them was a gigantic gully about as wide as a football field choked with debris . . . much of it was nothing but huge boulders, some of them as big as two-story houses, lots of loose rocks and stacked wedges of sandstone. But not all of it was of natural origin, for there were other shapes down there, ovals and pillars, a.s.sorted masonry that had been cut into those shapes.

And there was no doubting where it had come from.

For to either side of the gully, they could see the remains of the ancient city climbing up sharp slopes into the murk above. It was enormous, what they could see of it, for it climbed much higher than their lights could reach. A sleeping fossil, a mammoth city from nightmare antiquity.

Looking upon it, Hayes was instantly reminded of Ansazi cliff-dwellings and pit houses . . . but those were primitive and pedestrian compared to this. For the city they were seeing had been a metropolis carved from solid rock-cl.u.s.ters of rising cubes and crumbling arches, cones and pyramids and immense rectangular towers honeycombed with pa.s.sages. At one time, both halves of the city must have been joined together until that deep chasm opened up and the center collapsed beneath into that grave of bones.

"Oh my G.o.d," Sharkey said and that pretty much summed it up.

Cutchen was too busy ooing and ahhing to feel the atavistic terror that was thrumming through Hayes. Part of it was that he had seen this before, except that it was at the bottom of Lake Vordog . . . and part of it was that just the sight of that cyclopean prehistoric city made something inside him recoil.

He finally had to look away.

It was just too much.

Like everything about the Old Ones, this city . . . it lived in the race memories of all men. And there was nothing remotely good a.s.sociated with it. Just horror and pain and madness.

"C'mon," Hayes said, a little harsher than he had intended. "You can sightsee later."

He edged around the gully to the right until he was at the foot of the city itself. He could feel its height and weight towering over him. There was a flat table of stone to walk on and then a haphazard collection of trenches and deep-hewn vaults, megaliths and conical monuments, the city itself set some distance back. It had been the same beneath the lake, that irregular borderland of bizarre masonry, only now Hayes was walking amongst that jutting profusion. There seemed to be no plan, no blueprint, just a crazy-quilt of shattered domes and rising menhirs, narrow obelisk and great flat slabs, a twisting and confused lane cut through it all like the path through a maze. There were patches of frozen lichen growing on some of the shapes, arteries of blue ice.

"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 cl.u.s.tered like toadstools. They had to turn sideways to pa.s.s 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 rea.s.sure him that, yes, Sharkey was f.u.c.king 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.