She was crouching before one of those vault-like chambers cut into the stone. She got down on her belly and lowered the lantern down. She didn't need to alert them to what she had found. About twelve feet down, maybe fifteen, they could see the shriveled conical tops of alien corpses protruding from a pool of ice. They were corrugated, dehydrated-looking. Those starfish-shaped heads and attendant eyes were terribly withered, looking much like flaccid cl.u.s.ters of shriveled grapes.

"Well, they bury their dead," Cutchen said. "And vertically. So what?"

His scientific interest had waned considerably, been replaced pretty much by an I-don't-give-a high-hairy-s.h.i.t sort of att.i.tude.

"Why not vertically?" Sharkey said. "We bury our dead at rest, laying down. These things rest upright, so it's perfectly natural, isn't it?"

Cutchen grunted. "Yeah, this whole place is perfectly f.u.c.king natural."

Sharkey led them away, peering here and peering there. Nodding her head at things that interested her, speculating freely under her breath. Finally she came to one of those rectangular buildings and paused. This one had a long horizontal opening that you could look through. And, of course, she did just that.

"Look," she said. "Just look at this."

Cutchen refused, but Hayes did and mainly because he respected this woman and maybe even loved her. Otherwise he would have told her that enough was enough. His nerves were wearing thin as was his patience.

What he was looking into was a mausoleum of sorts. Arranged against the walls in there like Mexican mummies in a catacomb, were maybe a dozen or so Old Ones. Their oblong bodies were leaning against each other, many badly decomposed and rotted into hollowed husks like blackened cuc.u.mbers falling into themselves. Their appendages and eyestalks were nothing but dead, drooping worms. Many of the bodies had disintegrated down to wiry barrel frames that might have been some sort of primitive skeleton, but looked more like leathery networks of sinew and tendon.

Like some dead alien forest, is what Hayes found himself thinking. Some dead, mutated forest of distorted and cadaverous tree trunks that had grown into one another, sprouting narrow skeletal pipes and branching twigs, looping desiccated root systems and downs of snaking vines like threads of moonflax.

It was hard to get over the idea that they were lifeless things, ancient mummies far older than the ones Gates had brought in. These had decayed and mummified before the glaciers arrived making them positive relics. They were hideous in life, but maybe more so in death . . . shrunken and wrinkled and leathery, tangled in their own limbs. Alien zombies.

And they were not powerless, Hayes thought.

Not in the least.

Maybe their great age had something to do with it, but those pruned eyes dangling from corded stalks still seemed to glimmer and shine with a blasphemous vitality.

Enough.

They started again, moving as quickly as they could through that labyrinth that probably made perfect sense from above, but at ground level was positively insane. Sharkey kept pausing to look at things, growing increasingly agitated at the other two for their lack of scientific curiosity. The graveyard alone, she told them, would have kept legions of archaeologists and anthropologists busy for years and years. The Old Ones had reverence for their dead, they had no doubt developed complex funerary rites and death customs.

"So what?" Cutchen said.

She looked like she was going to either call his mother an unflattering name or kick his a.s.s, but she just sighed and stalked off with Hayes in tow. At least until they were nearly out of that charnel grounds and then something else caught her interest. On an elevated platform there was a huge sarcophagus cut from some unknown black stone and highly-ornamented with carven vines and bizarre squid-like creatures, things like cl.u.s.ters of bubbles and countless staring eyes. At the head, there was a lavish five-pointed mound of some tarnished metal like platinum. Inside, there was an Old One held in a rippling shroud of ice. Though blackened with immense age, it had not rotted like the others.

"This one's important," Sharkey said. She tapped the mummy with her ice-axe. "I'll bet it's some kind of chief or maybe even one of the original colonists. Who can say? But I'll bet it was preserved somehow for future generations."

"Why is it laying flat?" Cutchen asked.

"Looks like it fell over," Hayes said.

He was staring down at that regal monstrosity and hating it instinctively as he hated them all. Maybe this one was a king or a chief or one of the first to make the journey and just maybe it was the very architect of all life on earth, but he could not respect it. You could wrap a bloated, vile spider in gold ribbons and fancy lace and it still repulsed you. Still made you want to step on it. And a spider, when you came down to it, was much more attractive to the human mind than what was laying in that stylized box.

Hayes thought: Christ, look at that old ice and what it holds. Like every dark and nameless secret of antiquity is locked up in that frozen sarcophagus. All of mankind's primal fears, cabalistic myths, and evil sorceries given flesh. The archetype that inspired every nightmare and twisted racial memory, every witch-tale and every legend of winged demons. All the awful, unthinkable things the race had bred and purged from the black cauldron of collective memory, all the obscene things it could not acknowledge nor dare admit to . . . it was here. This horror. The engineer of the race and of all races. And it had been waiting down here in the eon-old ice. Waiting and waiting, dead but dreaming, consciously forgotten but grimly remembered in the subconscious and dark lore of humankind. But all along, they were dreaming of us just as we dreamed of them ... because they were us and we were them and now, dear G.o.d, millions upon millions of years later, they were waking up, they were rising to claim their children and their childrens' intellect...

Thinking this and wanting to believe it was utter fantasy, but knowing it was dire and inescapable truth, Hayes felt like some savage standing before the grave of a fallen and cruel G.o.d. He had a mad desire to whip out his d.i.c.k and p.i.s.s on this thing. To show it his defiance that was innate and human and something he knew they had not foreseen developing in their carefully-manipulated progeny.

Enough.

They were stalling with all this and he knew it.

"Let's go," he said and meant it. "We're not here for this and we all know it."

So he took the lead and clambered over slabs and low walls, ignoring everything but that dead city rising above them. He got no arguments on this. Sharkey and Cutchen followed him and he figured they would have followed him just about anywhere at that moment.

"Oh, look," Sharkey said, panning her light at the foot of some crumbled masonry.

It was Gates.

He was pressed into an alcove between shattered blocks of stone that had no doubt fallen from above. He was curled up in sort of a fetal position, knees to chin, his face white as new snow and contorted into a grimace of absolute horror. Blood had trickled from the rictus of his mouth. His eyes were spilled down his cheeks in gelatinous trails like squashed jellyfish.

It was horrible. Just like all the others.

But worse somehow, because you could almost feel the agonal convulsions that Gates had suffered before he died. There was no getting around the fact that he looked like he'd been literally scared to death. And that death had been a dark matter, mindless and perverse and ghastly. No man should have had to go like Gates did . . . alone and mad in that suffocating darkness, dying a crazy and hopeless death like a rat stuck in a drainpipe. Screaming as his eyes boiled to soup and splashed down his face. As his brain went to sauce and his soul was burnt to ash.

Gates had paid the final price for his curiosity.

But Hayes knew it was more than just scientific interest . . . Gates had been trying to unravel the mystery of the ages. He had been trying to put it all together so he could maybe save his own race. He was a hero. He was one of the greatest of great men.

Sharkey kneeled before him. She dug into his coat and found his field journal. "There's a funny odor about him . . . not a death smell, something else. Sharp, acidic."

Hayes had smelled it, too: a caustic, acrid stench like monkey urine.

The tenseness feeding between the three of them was electric and cutting. It lay in each of their bellies, a twisted knot of nausea.

"All right, all right, G.o.ddammit," Hayes said, starting up into the city. "Let's go see what did this, let's go see what scared Gates to death."

40.

"No," Cutchen said then, holding his lantern up. "Wait a minute now... what's that over there?"

Hayes stepped down off some broken stones.

Sharkey was already over there, checking it out. Collapsible tables had been set out, half a dozen of them upon which were stone artifacts taken from the city, hammers and drills, cases of instruments, lanterns. There were piles of notebooks and a couple digital cameras. Microscopes. There was a crate full of rolled-up maps that turned out to be rubbings made from the walls inside . . . figures, glyphs, strange characters.

Cutchen grabbed a folding chair and sat down. There was a thermometer on the table. "It's almost ten degrees in here. Balmy."

Sharkey and Hayes looked around, found a flare pistol which she took and a twelve-gauge Remington pump that he took. They did not comment on these things. The men who had brought them down here had had their reasons and n.o.body dared question what those might have been.

Bottom line was, they felt better being armed.

"Look," Hayes said. "A generator."

It was. A Honda industrial job on a rolling cart. A spiderweb of power cords ran off of it, all of them leading up into the city itself. As Hayes followed them with his light he could see that there were cords hanging from the face of the city. There were several five-gallon cans of gasoline. He went to the generator. It had a 3800 watt capacity, so it could've lit up most of the entire city if you had enough light bulbs and judging from what he had seen, Gates and the boys certainly had enough of those.

"Will it work?" Sharkey asked.

"I think so." Hayes checked the tank. It held ten gallons and was about half full. He took one of the cans and filled it up. Then he threw the circuit breaker and hit the electronic ignition. It roared to life immediately, finding a happy idle and sticking with it.

"Where's the light?" Cutchen said.

"Just a minute. Let it warm up." Hayes stood there, lighting a cigarette and waiting for the engine to push the coldness from itself. It didn't take long. He turned the circuit breaker back on and suddenly, the cavern was bright.

"d.a.m.n," Cutchen said. "That's better."

With all those bulbs netting the first thirty or so feet of the city, Hayes finally got a good look at that ancient structure. It was simply incredible. The sight of it literally sucked the breath from his lungs and the blood from his veins. That old, ugly familiarity was there, of course, the sense that these aged ruins were something long-hidden in the depths of all men's minds. But looking up at it, canceled all that out. On TV, ancient cities always looked too neat, too tidy, too planned in their obsolescence, but not this one. It rose up incredibly high, yet sagging and leaning and crumbling away in too many places. Hayes could see that it went up at least two-hundred feet until it met the grotto's domed roof . . . and even then, it simply disappeared into solid rock. As if the mountain had grown up around it and engulfed it through the ages. Such incredible antiquity was mind-boggling. But Gates had reiterated what Professor Dyer of the Pabodie Expedition had said: the ruins were at least 350 million years old and that was a conservative estimate.

These ruins were from an amazingly advanced pre-human civilization.

Hayes knew that, but the words had meant little to him until now.

Pre-human city. Pre-human intelligence.

"G.o.d, look at that will you?" Cutchen finally said. "You can . . . you can almost feel how ancient it is . . . right up your spine."

Ancient? No, the sphinx and the Acropolis were ancient, this was primordial. This predated man's oldest works by hundreds of millions of years. It was a dawn city. A nightmare exercise in diverging geometrical a.s.sociation, a relic from some depraved and evil elder world. It did not look so much like a city, but like some immense and derelict machine, some dreadful mechanism from a Medieval torture chamber. A profoundly synergistic and yet nonsensical device made of pistons and pipes, wires and cylinders, vents and cogs. Something rising and leaning, squat yet narrow and tall, diverging at impossible right angles to itself. The human mind was not prepared to look upon such a thing . . . it automatically sought an overall structural plan, a uniformity, and found nothing it could pull in and make sense of. This was a perverse and G.o.dless architecture born of minds reared in some multi-dimensional reality.

"Christ, it gives me a headache," Sharkey said.

And that was very apt, for it did tax the brain . . . it was too busy, too profuse, too mult.i.tudinous in design. It was formed of arches and cubes, rectangular slabs set on their ends, a lunatic labyrinth of cones and pyramids, octagons and hexagons, spheres and towers, radiating spirals and bifurcating masts. Like the forking, tangled skeleton of some primal beast, some sideshow sea serpent tacked together out of dozens of unrelated skeletons into a single gangly whole, a mad bone sculpture. An insane and precarious armature that should have fallen, but didn't. It balanced upon itself like some surreal experiment in abstract geometry and unearthly symmetry.

Hayes thought it looked impossibly random like something formed by nature, the hollowed remains of deep-sea organisms heaped upon one another . . . corals and sponges, anemones and sea cuc.u.mbers, crab carapaces and ghost pipes. Just an odd and conflicting collection of dead things that had boiled and rotted into a single ma.s.s, grown into one another and out of each other until there was no beginning and no true end. Standing back and taking it in, he was envisioning it as the black and glossy endoskeleton of some ma.s.sive alien insect rising from the earth . . . a deranged biomechanical hybrid of girders and ribs, vertebrae and pelvic disks, conduits and hollow tubes held together by spiraling ladders of ligament. A chitinous and scaly ossuary, a jutting cyclopean honeycomb capped by rising narrow protrusions like the chimneys of a foundry or the smoker vents of hydrothermal ovens.

But even that wasn't right, for as haphazard and conflicting as the city was, you could not get by the disturbing feeling that there was a purpose here, that the structure was highly mechanistic and practical to its owners, a symbiotic union of steel and flesh, rock and bone. It had an odd industrial look to it. Even the stone it was cut from was not smooth nor polished, but ribbed and k.n.o.bby and oddly crystalline, set with saw-toothed ridges and jutting teeth and the threads of screws. Almost like there was some dire machinery inside attempting to burst through those bowing, scalloped walls.

To call it a city was an oversimplification.

For this was not a city as humans understood a city. No human mind could have dreamed of this and no human brain had the engineering skill to make it stand and not fall into itself. This was not a city as such, a place of homes and lives, this was harsh and hostile, utilitarian and machined, something brought forth by hopelessly cold and automated minds. An anthill.

A hive.

Hayes felt that just seeing it, just letting his eyes roam that obscene geometrical matrix, made him somehow less than human. It evaporated the sweet and fine milk of the human condition drop by drop. It was evil and unholy and sacrilegious. Words engendered by a weak, superst.i.tious mind, but Hayes was proud of that mind. Because it made him human. He was warm and emotional, not a machine like the things that had reared this awful place.

"Just like Gates said, it seems to go for miles," Cutchen pointed out.

There was no way to know just how far into the belly of the mountains the city reached. For as Gates said, it went on as far as the eye could see and as far as their lights could reach, though in the distance you could see that parts of it were covered by cave-ins and swallowed in frozen rivers of glacial ice.

A paleozoic megalopolis.

The sort of place that might have inspired the wild tales of mythical places like Thule and Hyperborea, Lemuria and the Mountains of the Moon. Mystical Commoriom and veiled Atlantis. This was the prototype of countless prehuman blasphemies such as the Nameless City and eldritch Kadath in the Cold Wastes beyond Leng. You could see plainly how it had been scarred and sc.r.a.ped by the movement of the glaciers, carried up and pressed down, ground between ma.s.sive ice flows like corn meal.

"You don't honestly expect us to go into that bone pile, do you?" Cutchen said in a dry, cracking voice. "I mean . . . c'mon, Jimmy, it doesn't look safe. And, Jesus Christ, I'm not afraid to admit that it scares the s.h.i.t out of me just looking at it."

It scared Hayes, too.

Scared him in fundamental ways he was not even aware of. It offended him as it offended all men, whether savage or rational, and he had an overwhelming compulsion to come back here with all the dynamite he could fit in the SnoCat and bring that f.u.c.king mountain down right on top of it.

"It's safe enough," he said. "Gates and the others were crawling through it, so can we."

"Bulls.h.i.t. I don't care what those f.u.c.king labcoat Johnnies were doing, I'm not going in there. That's it. That's all there G.o.dd.a.m.n well is to it." He stood there, breathing hard, looking like he wanted to scream or cry. "C'mon, Jimmy, don't do this to me . . . lookit that f.u.c.king thing, will ya? I'm having bad dreams just seeing it. But going in there . . . it's like a tomb, like a big rotting casket with the lid thrown open . . . I . . . I'm sorry, Jimmy . . . I'm just not up to it."

Hayes went over to him, clapped him on the shoulder. "Just wait out here for us. We shouldn't be long. Keep an eye on that generator."

"h.e.l.l, I can't even change the oil in my G.o.dd.a.m.n car," Cutchen said.

He stood there, hands on his hips, watching them scramble up shattered stone columns and through an oval opening, one of hundreds if not thousands set into the weathered face of that city.

"You two would really leave me alone out here, wouldn't you?" they heard him call. "Boy, isn't that just great? a.s.sholes. Your both a.s.sholes."

They were barely inside and Cutchen came stumbling in after them, calling them every name he could think of and some that made absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Maybe the city did look like a casket, but at least inside it, he wouldn't be alone with the bleak, antehuman memory of the place.

41.

Inside, the city was no less amazing.

No less insane.

There were endless hexagonal mazes of corridors that seemed to lead into nothing but other corridors that branched to either side, above and below like jungle gym tangles of hollow pipes that had been welded at right angles to one another. Some were quadrilateral and others were triangularly obtuse. Circular pa.s.sages began and ended with solid walls or sphere-shaped apartments. Rooms simply opened into other rooms like dozens of narrow cubes strung together or stacked atop one another. They were either ma.s.sive and vault-like or cramped like the cells of monks or honeybees. Arched doorways were set halfway up fifteen foot walls. Sometimes they led into cylindrical channels that went on for hundreds of feet before narrowing to tiny, cubelike alcoves or sometimes they opened into gargantuan amphitheaters with madly curving walls that were set, sloping floor to fifty-foot ceiling, with ovoid cells. Some rooms had no ceilings, just immense shafts that led into a grainy fathomless blackness above and others had no floors, just narrow walkways spanning the great depths below. There was nothing that might have been called stairways, but now and again ribbed helixes rose to the floors above or far below.

The building plan was chaotic at the very least.

The floors were not necessarily distinct nor differentiated from one another. There was no first floor, second floor, third floor etc. The stories converged into one another, rooms and chambers dropping from above or rising up from below, tangled in lattices like diamond crystals.

Five minutes into it, the three of them were sweating and shaking and having trouble catching their breath. The marrow of that d.a.m.nable city was claustrophobic, profuse, and intersecting. The angles were wildly exaggerated, roofs becoming floors and floors arching up into roofs that were walls. Chambers were never perfectly square but slightly off-kilter and set off-center. Corridors were never exactly linear, but convoluted and sloping, tall then squat and then enormous. There was something geometrically perverse about any brain that could make sense of such a thing without backing itself into some jagged, narrow corner and screaming itself insane. Moving through there was like navigating through the tangled, surreal gutters of a lunatic's mind, looking for reason that did not exist . . . for reason here was swallowed by amorphous shadows, the shattered wreckage of paranoia as imagined by German expressionists.

They followed the electrical cords that had been attached to walls and strung over black depths below. Even so, it was not long before they had to rest. This place was not engineered for the ease of mobility of the human race. And moving through it was not only psychologically exhausting, it was physically fatiguing as well. Constantly climbing through those tomblike hollows, scuttling down threaded tunnels, and crawling over the litter and debris of collapsed part.i.tions.

They finally paused amidst a line of rooms that were not rooms at all, but sunken chambers with translucent concave floors made of some transparent gla.s.s or plastic. If you rubbed very hard, you could clean the grit off the material just enough to make out structures lying far beneath.

"This is a f.u.c.king madhouse," Cutchen said. "What the h.e.l.l was wrong with Gates? This should have been pulled down. You know? Just f.u.c.king pulled down."

Sharkey said, "It seems mad, but I think it's all very carefully systematic if you happen to have a brain that can understand the system. I'm afraid our simple mammalian brains are not up to the task . . . maybe not for another couple million years anyway."

"Can we just get out?" Cutchen said. "Christ, I've never felt like this before . . . half the time I'm so nervous and depressed I want to slit my wrists, the other half I feel like I could vomit my intestines out."