Sharkey nodded again. "I tried everything short of a lapdance, Jimmy. It's a no-go. He told me that when he receives clearance from the NSF bigwigs, he'll give us our Internet and all the rest back. But not until. The National Science Foundation rules."

"Clearance? Clearance for what?"

She shrugged. "He's very cloak-and-dagger about the whole thing. But I get the feeling it's because of Gates' discovery and the things he was saying. The NSF doesn't want that stuff getting out, not yet. Not until they've had time to think over how they're going to handle all the questions they're going to get barraged with. This is big stuff, Jimmy. You've got to know that."

"I do know it, Doc. But, s.h.i.t, I'm almost a thousand in the hole with those ringers at McMurdo. I mean, d.a.m.n."

Sharkey said she thought that part of it might be the flack the NSF was going to take, the intimations that everyone at Kharkhov was cracking up. Cabin fever.

"We are cracking up for chrissake," Hayes said. "This whole G.o.dd.a.m.n winter has a real bad smell to it, Doc. I've had a bad feeling since the planes left and the snow started blowing like h.e.l.l. A real bad feeling and don't you dare laugh at me."

"I'm not laughing," she said.

He shrugged. "Like I said the other day, those G.o.dd.a.m.n mummies are like some kind of catalyst here, a big ugly spoon to stir the pot. And now that pot is all stirred-up and the soup is smelling like s.h.i.t. If that makes any sense."

She smiled, seemed to understand.

"I guess what I'm saying, Doc, is that LaHune cutting us off like this is just plain stupid. What with those weird mummies and Lind's breakdown, the crew down here are thinking funny things, you know? They sit around and do their bit, pretend like none of it's bothering them, but it is. You can see it behind their eyes. They're getting paranoid and scared. They're sensing something and its eating their guts out, only they don't dare admit to it and you can't blame them."

Hayes would never have said any of this to anyone else, but it was true. What you generally had at a station like Kharkhov during the winter was a lot of boredom. There was work to be done, sure, but the pace was nowhere near as frenetic as you saw during the summer. This year the boredom had been replaced by something else . . . a nervous tension, a sense of expectancy, the knowledge that the ball was going to drop. Hayes could feel it. Although the crew wandered around with stupid smiles on their faces and went through the motions, it was all an act. You peeled those smiles off and underneath you were going to see people on the edge, people cringing, people confused and worried and, yes, scared.

The atmosphere at a winter station locked down by the cold and snow and perpetual darkness was never exactly yippy-skippy, let's-have-ourselves-a-parade, but even on bad years when you threw together a group that simply did not get along, it was not like this. There was not this sense of brooding apprehension, that almost spiritual sort of taint hanging in the air.

"What're you thinking, Doc?" Hayes asked, seeing Sharkey's blue eyes focused off into s.p.a.ce.

She shrugged. "I'm just wondering if I'm going to have enough happy pills to get these people to spring."

"Pills won't cut it," Hayes told her.

Sharkey smiled, looked into his eyes. "I was just thinking, Jimmy, how easy it would be for the NSF to dump a group of us down here and then throw something odd at us like this, see how we handled it. A sort of feasibility study. A group of people fairly diverse in that they come from the working cla.s.s right up to the scientific elite. See how we react to certain things."

"You saying they invented those mummies? Those ruins?"

"No, of course not. But it would be an interesting opportunity for the powers that be to take advantage of. Us stranded down here, facing philosophical and psychological challenges brought about by our isolation and the discovery of Gates' mummies."

"Doc, really, don't be feeding my paranoia."

She laughed. "Oh, I'm just speculating here."

"Sure, but it sounds right to me. The bunch of us riding out this f.u.c.king winter, our lines of communication severed. Those G.o.dd.a.m.n mummies out there that are scaring the s.h.i.t out of everyone . . . whether they're willing to admit it or not."

"Yes, exactly. And with our good Mr. LaHune as the control. Because, you know, if it wasn't for him I wouldn't be surprised if a mob decided to gather up Gates' mummies and burn them like alien witches."

Sharkey laughed nervously as if to dismiss it all, but Hayes wasn't ready to dismiss it. He wasn't much on conspiracies and the like, but those mummies were having a very negative effect on the crew. They were getting under peoples' skins, making them imagine the worst possible things and runaway imaginations were a bad thing when you were trapped down at the bottom of the world. A ma.s.s-paranoia becoming a ma.s.s-insanity could become savage and devastating at the drop of a hat.

"If LaHune has any brains," Hayes said, "then he'll open this place back up, let these people chat with the outside world. It can't be good for them to be internalizing this s.h.i.t, chewing on it and swallowing it whole, letting it boil in their bellies."

"It's not," Sharkey said. "Ever since those mummies came I've had people coming to see me wanting sedatives. They can't sleep, Jimmy, and when they do they have nightmares."

Oh, I'll just bet they do. Some real doozies no doubt.

LaHune knew what all this was doing, but he was a company man and he'd toe the line regardless of what it did to these people. Even if the crew started cracking up and going at each other - and themselves - with razors, it wouldn't move him. He'd sit there like some s.h.i.t-eating weasel atop a heap of t.u.r.ds, simply enjoying the stink, the rot, and the flies.

Because that's the kind of guy he was.

"I tell you what, Doc, LaHune better get his hands out of his f.u.c.king shorts already and derail this train because I got me a nasty feeling the track ahead is real dark and real b.u.mpy."

PART TWO.

THE MIND-LEECHES.

"A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs."

- H.P. Lovecraft.

10.

But the train wasn't derailed.

And that night, about two in the morning, there was a fierce pounding at Hayes' door and from the intensity of it, you could be sure it wasn't a social call. Hayes came awake, shaking off some dream about mountains of black ice, and took a pull from his water bottle.

"Hayes!" a voice called. "Hayes! Would you f.u.c.king wake up already!"

It was Cutchen.

Hayes climbed out of bed, hearing the wind moaning through the darkness of the camp, cold and eternal. It sounded like something hungry that wanted in, something looking for warmth to steal.

"Coming," Hayes said.

He fumbled the lock open - never used to lock his door, but lately he'd gotten in the habit - and pulled the door in. Cutchen was standing out there in the corridor, a small gray-haired man with a matching beard and dark, probing eyes that always seemed to know something you didn't.

"It's Lind," Cutchen said. "Sharkey said to bring you. Lind has really gone over the edge now. C'mon, we better go."

s.h.i.t, s.h.i.t, and s.h.i.t.

Hayes climbed into his Kansas State joggers and sweatshirt, brushed his bushy hair back with the flat of his hand and then he was following Cutchen down the gray corridors to the other side of the building where the infirmary was.

Outside the door, in the hallway, St. Ours, Meiner, Rutkowski and a few of the other Glory Boys were gathered, whispering like little old ladies at a funeral, espousing dirty secrets.

"See, Jimmy?" Rutkowski said to Hayes. "I told you he'd do something like this. Crazy b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"What happened?" Hayes said, his head blown with fuzz from sleep.

"He slit his f.u.c.king wrists," St. Ours said. "Got a knife in there and plans on using it."

"He won't let Doc get to him," Cutchen explained. "He's lost a lot of blood and if she can't get to work on him right away, he's going to be toast. She thought you could talk to him."

Hayes sucked in a breath and went in there slowly, heavily, like he was dragging a ball and chain behind him. Before he saw the blood, he could smell it: sharp and metallic. It got right down into his guts. He scoped out the situation pretty quickly because the infirmary just wasn't that big. Lind was sitting in the corner between two cabinets of drugs and instruments, kind of wedged in there like maybe he was stuck. His back was up against the wall and his knees were drawn up to his chin. There was a lot of blood . . . it was scarfed over his shirt and there was a smeared trail of it running across the tiles to his present position. His left arm looked like he'd stuck it in a barrel of red ink.

And, yeah, he had a knife in his hand. A scalpel.

Sharkey was standing next to an examination table, her usually capable and confident face looking pinched and rubbery like she'd been out in the cold. Her blue eyes were wide and helpless.

"Lind," she said in a very soft voice. "Hayes is here. I want you to talk to him."

Lind jerked like maybe he'd been asleep. He held the b.l.o.o.d.y scalpel out in warning towards Sharkey, droplets of blood dripping from his wrist. "I'm not talking to anyone . . . you're all infected and I G.o.dd.a.m.n well know it. I know what's going on here . . . I know what those things want, I know how they got to you."

Hayes clenched his teeth, unclenched them, willed himself to go loose, to relax. It was not easy. Jesus, Lind looked like s.h.i.t. And it wasn't just the blood either. He looked like maybe he'd dropped twenty pounds, his once round face seemed to be sagging under his scraggly beard. Just hanging like the jowls of a hound, slack and sallow. His eyes were bulging from their sockets, discolored and shot through with tiny red veins. They gleamed like wet chrome.

Hayes squatted about four feet away from him. "Lind? Look at me. It's me, it's Jimmy. Your old bunkmate . . . just look at me, tell me about it. Tell me how they get to you."

Lind jerked again, seemed to be doing so anytime somebody mentioned his name like he was hooked up to a battery. "Jimmy . . . oh, s.h.i.t, Jimmy . . . they . . . them out in that f.u.c.king hut, you know what they do? You know what they want? They come in your dreams, Jimmy. Those mummies . . . the Old Ones . . . hee, hee . . . they come in your dreams, Jimmy, and they start sucking your mind dry because that's all they want: our minds."

"Lind, listen to me," Hayes said. "Those ugly p.r.i.c.ks have been dead millions of years - "

"They're not dead, Jimmy! Maybe they can't move their bodies no more, but their minds, Jimmy, their minds are not f.u.c.king dead! You know they're not . . . they've been waiting down here in the ice for us, waiting for us all these millions of years to come and set them free! They knew we would because that's how they planned it!" Lind was breathing real hard, gasping for breath or maybe gasping for something he just couldn't find. "Jimmy . . . oh Jesus, Jimmy, I know you think I'm f.u.c.king crazy, you all think I'm f.u.c.king crazy, but you better listen to me before it's too late."

Hayes held his hands out. "Lind, you're going to bleed to death. Let the Doc patch you up and then we'll talk."

"No." Flat, immovable. "We talk now."

"Okay, okay."

Lind was trying to catch his breath. "They been frozen in the ice, Jimmy, but their minds never died. They just waited . . . waited for us to come. Those minds . . . oh, Jimmy, those awful f.u.c.king minds are so cold and evil and patient . . . they've been dreaming about us, waiting until we came for them. And when we did . . . when that limpd.i.c.k Gates went down in that cave . . . those minds started waking up, reaching out to our own . . . that's why everyone's having nightmares . . . the Old Ones . . . those minds of theirs are invading ours, getting into our heads one inch at a time and by spring, by spring there won't be any men left down here, but things that look like men with poisoned alien minds . . . "

Lind started laughing then, but it was not good laughter. This was stark and black and cutting, a screech of despair and madness echoing from his skull.

"Have . . . have they come in your dreams, too, Lind?" Hayes asked him, feeling Sharkey's eyes burning into him, knowing she did not like him encouraging this delusion. But, f.u.c.k it, that's how it had to be handled and he knew it.

"Dreams," Lind sobbed, "oh, all the dreams. Out in the hut, you remember out in the hut, Jimmy? It touched my mind then and it hasn't let go since. Tonight . . . "

"Yes?"

There were tears rolling down Lind's face now. "Tonight I woke up . . . I woke up, Jimmy, and I could feel the cold, oh, the terrible blowing cold . . . and it was there, one of them things . . . it was standing there at the end of my cot, thinking about me... all those terrible red eyes looking at me and ice dropping off it in clots . . . "

Hayes felt gooseflesh run down his arms and up his spine, thinking that he would have went for the knife, too. But it was just a dream, had to be just a dream.

Lind looked like he wanted to say something else, but his eyes slid shut and he slumped over. Hayes moved quick and pulled the scalpel from his fingers, all that blood, but there was no fight left in Lind. With Sharkey's help they got him on the table and she started swabbing out his slit wrist.

"It's deep, but he pretty much missed the artery," she said, cleaning the blood from his wrist and injecting some antibiotics right into it.

Hayes watched as she st.i.tched him close, saying she was going to have to get an IV going, get some whole blood and plasma into him.

"Then you better dope him up, Doc," Hayes said, "and strap his a.s.s down. Because he might have failed this time, but he's going to try again and we both know it."

Then Hayes went out into the corridor, out to the wolves skulking around there, waiting for him to toss them sc.r.a.ps of b.l.o.o.d.y meat.

"He dead?" St. Ours said.

"No, he'll be all right."

"He say . . . he say why he did it? Why he slit his wrists?" Meiner wanted, had to know.

They were all looking at Hayes now. Even Cutchen was. They were all thinking things, maybe things they'd imagined and maybe things they'd dreamed. You could see it on their faces . . . unspoken fears, stuff they didn't even dare admit to themselves.

"Tell us," Rutkowski said. "Tell us what made him do it."

Hayes grinned like a skull. He was sick of this place, sick of these people and their ghoulish curiosity. "Oh, come on, boys, you know d.a.m.n well what made him do it . . . the nightmares. The things in his head . . . same things that are going to make you all do it, sooner or later."

11.

Hayes could remember having to do things that scared him.

Could remember how he felt before and how he felt afterwards. He remembered having to call his mother up when he was sixteen from the police station, tell her he'd been busted for selling pot, she had to come and get him. He remembered getting in a car accident when he was nineteen, walking away without a scratch while his best friend, Toby Young, who'd been driving, died in the emergency room. When Toby's parents got there, asking how Toby was, he'd had to tell them, see that look in their eyes - disbelief, shock, then something like anger because he was alive and their son was dead. And, yes, he remembered when his old man was laying in that hospital bed eaten up with the cancer and his sister was out of her head with religious hysteria. He remembered having to tell the doctor to shut the old man off.

All these things had scared him, had stripped away his innocence and made something rot inside him. These were things you had to do, things which you could not walk away from unchanged, but you did them because it was expected of you. It was the right thing and it had to be done.

But none of them, none of those things, as terrible and necessary as they'd been, had gotten inside him like when he'd gone to Hut #6 to look at those mummies, to prove to himself that they were dead and nothing but dead. The temperature had dipped to a bitter seventy below and the wind was shrieking at sixty miles an hour, flinging snow and pulverized ice crystals across the compound. Antarctica at dead-winter: black and unforgiving, that wind wailing around you like wraiths. Hayes went alone.

He did not ask for the key from LaHune. He took a set of boltcutters, bundled into his ECW - Extreme Cold Weather - gear and started off across the compound, following the guylines through that blasting, sub-zero tempest, knowing that if he let go of the guiding rope and got off the walkway, he'd probably never find his way back. That they'd find him curled up out there come spring, a white and stiffened thing frozen up like meat in a deepfreeze.

The snow was piling up into drifts and he pounded through it with his white bunny boots, gripping the guyline with a wool-mittened hand that was already going numb.

You're crazy to be doing this, he told himself and, hallelujah, wasn't that the G.o.dd.a.m.ned truth? For, Christ, it wasn't as if he really believed what Lind had said. But there was something there . . . a grain of sanity, an underlying nugget of truth . . . in what the man had been raving about. Something behind his eyes that was incapable of lying. And Hayes was going to see what that was.

The snow crunched beneath his boots and the wind tried to strip him right out of his Gore-Tex parka. His goggles kept fogging over, but he kept going until he made Hut #6. Outside the door, he just stood there, swaying in the wind like some heavily-swaddled child just learning the fine art of balance.

Just f.u.c.king do it.

And he knew he had to, for something both ancient and inexplicable had woken deep in the very pit of his being and it was screaming danger! in his head. There was danger here and that half-forgotten sixth sense in him was painfully aware of the fact. And if Hayes didn't get on with it already, that voice was going to make him turn and run.