LaHune or Gates or both had locked the hut with a chain and a Masterlock and the bolt cutter took care of that pretty d.a.m.n quick. And, holy oh G.o.d, it was time for the show.

The wind almost pulled the door out of his hand and his arm out of socket to boot. After a time, he got it closed and went inside, feeling the heat of the hut melting the ice out of his beard. It was only about fifty degrees in there, but that was positively tropical for East Antarctica in the cruel depths of winter.

In that stark and haunted moment before he turned on the lights, he could've almost sworn there was movement in the hut . . . stealthy, secretive.

Then the light was on and he was alone with the dead.

He saw the mummies right away, trying to shake the feeling that they were seeing him, too.

Crazy thinking.

They were stretched out on the tables like shanks of thawing beef.

The shack shook in the wind and Hayes shook with it.

Two of the specimens were gradually defrosting, water dripping from them into collection buckets. For the most part, they were still ice-sheathed and obscured, unless you wanted to get in real close and peer through that clear blue, acrylic-looking ice and see them up close and personal. But that wasn't necessary anyway, for the other mummy was completely unthawed.

Unthawed to the point where it was really starting to smell. Gates had thrown a canvas tarp over it and Hayes knew he had to pull that tarp back, had to pull it back and look at the thing in all its hideous splendor. And the very act took all the guts he had or would ever have. For this was one of those G.o.dawful defining moments in life that scared the s.h.i.t right out of you and made you want to fold-up and hide your head.

And that's exactly how Hayes was feeling . . . terrified, alone, completely vulnerable, his internals filled with a spreading helix of white ice.

He took off his mittens, let his fingers warm, but they refused. He took hold of the tarp, something clenching inside him, and yanked it free . . . and it slid off almost of its own volition. He backed up, uttering a slight gasp.

The mummy was unthawed.

It was still ugly as ugly got and maybe even a little bit worse, because now it had a hacked and slit appearance from Gates and his boys taking their samples and cutting into it with knives and saws.

And the smell . . . terrible, not just rotting fish now, but low tides and decaying seaweed, black mud and something like rotten cabbage. A weird, ga.s.sy odor.

f.u.c.king thing is going bad, Hayes was thinking, like spoiled pork... why would Gates want that? Why would he let the find of the ages just rot?

But there were no answers for that. Maybe the thing turned faster than he antic.i.p.ated.

Regardless, that wasn't why Hayes had come.

He got in close as he dared to the monstrosity, certain that it was going to move despite that smell. It looked much the same as it had the other day, despite the various incisions: like some bloated, fleshy eggplant. Its sh.e.l.l was a leaden, shiny gray, looked tough like the hide of a crab. Chitinous. Its wings - if that's what they were and not modified fins - were folded-up against its sides like umbrellas, some sticky fluid like tree sap had oozed from them in puddles and runnels, collected on the table. Those branching tentacles at the center of its body now looked like nothing but tree roots, tangled up and vestigal. And those thick, muscular tentacles at its base had blackened, hung limp like dead snakes.

Yes, it was dead, it was surely dead.

Yet . . .

Yet the tapering arms of that bizarre starfish-shaped head were erect like an unclenched, reaching hand. Those globular eyes at each tip wide and blazing a neon red, filled with an impossible, unearthly vitality. They were shiny with tiny black pupils, the gray lids shriveled back, something like pink tears running down the stalks.

Hayes had to remember to breathe.

He could see where one eye had been cut away, the black chasm left in its place. He was trying desperately to be rational, to be lucid and realistic, but it was not easy because once you looked at those eyes it was very difficult to look away. They were not human eyes and there was nothing you might even abstractly call a face, still . . . Hayes was looking at those eyes and thinking they were filled with an absolute, almost stupid hatred, a loathing that made him feel weak inside.

Turn away, don't look at it.

But he was looking and inside it felt like he'd popped a hole, everything draining out of him. He had to turn away. Like a vampire, you couldn't stare into its eyes or you were done. But he kept looking, feeling and emoting and sensing and it was there, all right, something in the back of his head. He couldn't put a name to it at first . . . just that it was something invasive, something alien that did not belong in his mind. But it had taken root and was spreading out like fingers, a high and sibilant buzzing, a droning whine like that of a cicada. Growing louder and louder until he was having trouble thinking, remembering anything, remembering who and what he was. There was just that buzzing filling his head and it was coming from the thing, it was being directed into him and he knew it.

Hayes wasn't even aware of how he was shaking or the p.i.s.s that ran down his leg or the tears that filled his eyes and splashed down his face in warm creeks. There was only the buzzing, stealing him away and . . . and showing him things.

Yes, the Old Ones.

Not three like there were in the hut or even ten or twenty, but hundreds, thousands of them. A buzzing, trilling swarm of them filling the sky and descending like locusts come to strip a field. They were darting in and out of low places and hollows and over sharp-peaked roofs, rising up into that luminous sky . . . only, yes, it was not in the sky, but underwater. Thousands of them, a hive of the Old Ones, swimming through and above some geometrically impossible sunken city in a crystalline green sea with those immense membranous wings spread out so they could glide. He saw their bodies bloat up obscenely as they sucked in water and deflate as they expelled it like squids . . . moving so quickly, so efficiently. There had to be a million of them now, more showing themselves all the time, swimming and leaping and rising and falling - Hayes went on his a.s.s.

Teetered and fell and it was probably the only thing that indeed saved him, kept his mind from going to sludge. He hit the floor, fell back and cracked his head against a table and that buzzing was gone. Not completely, there was still a suggestion of it there, but its grip had been broken.

And he came to himself and realized that it had taken hold of him, that thing, and n.o.body would ever make him believe different. He could hear Lind's voice in his head saying, Can't you feel it getting inside your head, wanting to steal your mind . . . wanting to make you something but what you are?

Hayes scrambled to his feet, smelling the thing and hating it and knowing it somehow from some past time and the revulsion he felt was learned and instinctual, something carried by the race from a very distant and ancient time. What he did next was what any savage would have done when a monster, a beast was threatening the tribe, invading it, trying to subvert and steal away all that it was: he looked for a weapon.

Panting and half-out of his mind, he stumbled through Gates' makeshift laboratory, past the two thawing horrors and amongst tables of instruments and chemicals. He wanted fire. His simplified brain told him the thing had to be burned, so he sought fire, but there was nothing. Acid, maybe. But he was no chemist, he wouldn't know acid if he saw it.

And in those precious seconds that he stumbled drunkenly through the hut, he could feel that buzzing in his head rising up again and he looked over his shoulder at the Old One, certain now it would be rising up, those bulging red eyes seeking him out with a flat hatred and those branching tentacles reaching out for him - But no.

It lay there, dreaming meat.

But its mind was alive and he knew that now, could feel it worrying at his will, and that was insane because there was an incision just beneath that starfish-shaped head and he knew without a doubt that Gates had removed its brain. That even now it was sunk in one of those jars around him, a fleshy and alien thing like a pickled monstrosity in a sideshow.

Yet, its mind was alive and vibrant. The idea of that made hysterical laughter bubble up the back of Hayes' throat and then he saw the axe hanging by the fire extinguisher and then his hands were on it, gripping it with a primitive glee. He raced back at the thing, knocking a table of fossils over in his flight. He was going to chop that motherf.u.c.ker up, hack it to bits.

And he meant to.

He stood over the thing, axe raised and then the buzzing rose up, felt like a fist taking hold of his brain and squeezing until the agony was white-hot and he cried out.

The axe fell from his fingers and he went down to his knees.

Fight or flight.

He crab-crawled to the door, fumbling it open and falling out into the screaming polar night. He got the door shut, those frozen winds slapping him none too gently back into reality. He found his mittens, put them on and pulled himself along the guylines back to Targa House, the door of Hut #6 wide open, hammering back and forth in the wind.

He looked over his shoulder only once, thinking he saw some lurid alien shape moving through the blowing snow at him . . .

12.

The next morning, before they started their day, the boys were hanging out in the community room, chewing scrambled eggs and bacon, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes, doing a lot of talking.

"I'll tell you guys something," Rutkowski said. "LaHune is some kind of f.u.c.king nut about all this. No communication, no email . . . I mean, what the h.e.l.l? What's all this James Bond s.h.i.t about? Because of those dead things that might be aliens? Jesus H. Christ, so what? What if they are? He can't lock us down here like prisoners. It ain't right and somebody's gotta do something about it."

St. Ours lit another cigarette from the b.u.t.t of his first, flagrantly ignoring the NO SMOKING sign on the wall and getting hard looks from some of the scientists who were trying to eat. "Yeah, something's gotta be done. And it's up to us to do it. You know those f.u.c.king eggheads won't lift a finger. You lock them in a closet with a microscope and they'd be just fine and dandy with it. Now, way I'm seeing this, LaHune has slipped a cog and he's about six inches from being as crazy as Lind. He's supposed to be in charge? Well, if we were at sea and the captain was crazy . . . "

"Mutiny?" Rutkowski said. "Get the h.e.l.l out of here."

"You got a better idea?"

If Rutkowski did, he wasn't admitting it.

Meiner sat there watching them, thinking things. He knew these two. He'd wintered over with them half a dozen times. Rutkowski was full of hot air, liked to talk, but was essentially harmless. St. Ours, however, was a hardcase. He liked to talk, too, but he was a big boy and he wasn't above using his hands on someone that p.i.s.sed him off or got in his way. When he drank, he liked to fight and right now there was whiskey on his breath.

"We can't just go doing s.h.i.t like that," Meiner said, though part of him liked the idea. "Come spring they'll throw us in the clink."

"h.e.l.l we can't," St. Ours said. "Let me do it. I'd like to take that little c.o.c.kmite LaHune outside and pound the snot out of him."

Meiner didn't even bother commenting on that. The visual of a couple guys out in that sub-zero blackness in their ECW's swinging was hilarious.

"Just simmer down now," Rutkowski said. "LaHune is a pushb.u.t.ton boy, all company. Push b.u.t.ton A, he s.h.i.ts. Push b.u.t.ton B, he locks us down. He's just doing what hard-ons like him always do. The mummies is why. He's towing the NSF line and it's because of those f.u.c.king mummies."

"That's Gates' fault," St. Ours said.

"Sure, it is. But you can't blame him, finding something like that. Like a kid first discovering his p.e.c.k.e.r, he can't help but take it out and pull on it. Besides, Gates is not a bad sort. You can talk to the guy. s.h.i.t, you can even talk p.u.s.s.y with him. He's all right. Not like some of these other monkeyf.u.c.ks - " Rutkowski shot a glance over at a few scientists at a nearby table, some of the wonder boys who were drilling down to Lake Vordog " - he's okay. See, boys, the problem here is those mummies. If they were gone, LaHune might be willing to pull an inch or two of that steel rod out of his a.s.s and let us join the freaking world again."

"You plan on stealing 'em?" St. Ours said.

"Well, maybe losing them might be a better word for it. Regardless, it's something for us to think about."

"It couldn't happen soon enough for me," Meiner said, his hand shaking as he brought his coffee cup to his lips.

"You . . . you still having those nightmares?"

Meiner nodded weakly. "Every night . . . crazy s.h.i.t. Even when I do manage to fall asleep, I wake up with the cold sweats."

"Those things out there," St. Ours said, looking a little green around the gills, maybe even blue. "I'm not too big of a man to admit that they're getting to me, too. No, don't you f.u.c.king look at me like that, Rutkowski. You're having the dreams, too. We're all having the dreams. Even those eggheads are."

"What . . . what are your dreams about?" Meiner wanted to know.

Rutkowski shifted in his seat, licked his lips. "I can't remember, but their good ones . . . something about colors or shapes, things moving that shouldn't move."

"I remember some of mine," St. Ours said. He pulled off his cigarette, let the smoke drift out through his nostrils and past those wide, blank eyes. "A city . . . I dream of a city . . . except it ain't like no city you've ever seen before. Towers and pyramids and shafts, honeycombs that lead through stone, don't come out anywhere but into themselves. I dream I'm flying above the city, moving fast, and there are others flying with me and they all look like those ugly p.r.i.c.ks out in the hut. We . . . we fly and then we dip down, down into those holes and hollow places, then . . . then I wake up. I don't want to remember what happens down in those holes."

"I dream about holes sometimes, too," Meiner admitted. "Like tunnels going up and down and left and right . . . lost in those tunnels and hearing a buzzing like wasps, only that buzzing is like words I understand. I'm scared s.h.i.tless, in the dream. I know those voices want something from me."

He stopped there. By G.o.d, it was enough. He wasn't going any farther with it, he wasn't going to pick at the scabs of his nightmares until all that black blood started flowing again. He wasn't going to tell them about the rest of it. The tunnels and high stone rooms, all those things standing around while Meiner and dozens of others laid on tables. The things . . . oh Jesus . . . those things would be inside their heads and touching them, sticking things into them and cutting into them with blades of light, making things happen to them . . . and the pain, all the pain . . . needles going into him and knives cutting and tubes stuck in his head and oh dear sweet Jesus the agony, the agony while those trilling voices kept talking and talking, hands that were not hands but things like tree branches or twigs taking him apart and putting him back together again . . .

Rutkowski looked gray and old suddenly. "I don't like it, I just don't like it. Those dreams . . . they're so familiar, you know? Like I've seen it all before, lived through all that s.h.i.t years ago. Don't make no sense."

And it didn't. Not on the surface. But they'd all felt it, that sense of familiarity, that deja vu they couldn't get out from under. It haunted them. Just like the first time they'd seen the mummies - they had all known implicitly that they had seen them before, very long ago, and the fear those things inspired was inbred and ancient, a wisp of memory from a misty, forgotten past.

"Yeah, I remember those things. Somehow, I do," St. Ours said. "f.u.c.k me, but Gates sure opened up a Pandora's box here."

And, G.o.d, how true was that.

Meiner knew it was true, just like he knew he was afraid to close his eyes even for an instant. Because when he did the dreams came and the things swam up out of the darkness, those buzzing voices in his head, filling him, breaking him down. And sometimes, yes, sometimes even when he was awake, when he'd come out of the nightmares at three a.m. sweating and shaking, feeling the pain of what they had done to him or someone like him, he would still be hearing those voices. High and trilling and insectile, outside, carried by the winds, calling him out into the storm and sometimes out to the hut where they were waiting for him.

But he wasn't about to admit any of that.

13.

Of course, Hayes didn't sleep.

He didn't do much of anything after his return from Hut #6 except drink a lot of coffee laced with whiskey and take a few hot showers, trying to shake that awful feeling of violation, the sense that his mind had been invaded and subverted by something diabolic and dirty. But it was all in vain, for that feeling of invasion persisted. That his most private and intimate place, his mind, had been defiled. He nodded off for maybe thirty minutes just before dawn -what pa.s.sed for dawn in a place where the sun never rose, that was -and came awake from the mother of all nightmares in which shapeless things had their fingers in his skull, rooting around and touching things, making him think and feel things that were not part of him but part of something else. Something alien.

No, none of it made any real sense.

But what had happened in Hut #6 didn't make any either. It had happened, he was certain it had happened. But what proof was there? Minute by minute it was fading in his head like a bad dream, becoming indistinct and surreal . . . like something viewed through yellowed cellophane.

Hayes knew he had to put it into some kind of perspective, though, had to beat it into submission and stomp it flat. Because if he couldn't do that, if he couldn't bronze his b.a.l.l.s and inflate his chest . . . well then, he would start raving like Lind, his mind going to a warm fruiting pulp.

Hut #6, Hut #6, Hut #6.

Jesus, he was starting to think of it as some taboo place, a shunned place like a haunted house filled with evil sprits that oozed from the shattered walls or the cobwebby tomb of some executed witch that had eaten children and called up the dead, was looking for a good reason to rise herself. But that's how he saw it: a bad place. Not a place that was necessarily physically dangerous, but psychologically toxic and spiritually rotten.

Twice since returning from Hut #6, he had marched over to the infirmary, stood outside Doc Sharkey's room, wanting to pound on the door, scratch his way through it, throw himself at her feet and scream out the horrors he had suffered. But each time he got there, the strength, the volition to do anything more than listen to his own feeble, crushed voice shrieking in his head was gone.

He wasn't entirely sure how he felt about Sharkey . . . a married woman, Christ in Heaven . . . but he knew, deep down he knew, that he could have gone to her, any time of day or night and she would have helped him, she would have been there for him. Because the bond between them was there, it was real, it was strong, it was strung tight and sure like cable. Yet, for all that, he just couldn't do it. Couldn't see him dumping this rotting, smelly mess at her feet.

She would want you to.

But Hayes still couldn't do it, just couldn't open up his flank like that. Not yet. That feeling of violation - go ahead and say the word, bucko, rape, because that's how it made you feel, like you'd been viciously raped - was too real yet and he couldn't put it into perspective. He would need time.

His second trip to the infirmary, he just stood outside Sharkey's door with a breathless, silent sobbing knotted in his throat. Before the sobbing became the real thing, he went into the infirmary itself and beyond to the room where there were a few cots set up for sick people.

Lind was on one of them.

He had been restrained now, pumped full of G.o.d-knows-what to keep him calm and quiet, Thorazine or something like that. Hayes stood in the doorway looking at the form of his old roommate lying there, looking wasted and old and fragile like if he fell off the cot he might break into pieces. Hayes could see him fine in the nightlight like some little old man shot through with cancer, his life wheezing out of him in rattling breaths.

It was a h.e.l.l of a thing, wasn't it? To see him like that?

Hayes felt a lump of something insoluble in his throat that he couldn't seem to swallow down. f.u.c.king Lind. Dumb sonofab.i.t.c.h, but harmless and funny and even sweet in his own way.

Lind, Jesus, poor Lind.

Lind whose vocabulary was severely challenged and thought gonorrhea was one of those boats they used in the ca.n.a.ls of Venice and bullocks were a woman's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Claimed he had a maiden aunt named Chlamydia and that his sister married a guy named Harry Greenslit. He used to make Hayes laugh all the time, talking about his shrewish wife and how she rode his a.s.s so hard when he was home he couldn't wait to get back to f.u.c.king Antarctica to cool it off. He equated his wife's tirades and foul mouth with being sodomized, as in, Jesus, Hayes, she banged me for three days straight, soon as I walk in the door, she bends me over and pounds the stuffing out of me. My a.s.shole's so f.u.c.king loose by the time I get back here, I gotta shove a lemon up there to get it to pucker back up.

Lind. Christ.