Hayes had seen something like it before.

A murky oblong shape that darted away from the light. Maybe it was nothing and maybe it was everything. Whatever they were seeing, catching glimpses of, there were more than one of them and they were quick, stealthy. That feeling was back on Hayes again and he couldn't shake it this time. Because he was thinking things that he didn't dare say . . . not out loud. For whatever was out there, he had the feeling it or they were following the hydrobot, but hiding away from the light. The hydrobot was picking up lots of blips, but that in itself meant nothing except that the sea was very alive . . . which it certainly was.

"I'd like to know what those are," Parks said. "They remind me of . . . "

"What?" Gundry asked him.

He shook his head. "Nothing, nothing. Thinking out loud."

But Hayes knew what he was thinking and he wondered if they all weren't thinking the same d.a.m.n thing, seeing those flitting shapes and remembering them from somewhere else and not liking them one bit.

And then - And then Gundry gasped. "Did you see that? Looked like . . . well, almost like an arch."

Parks fumbled over his words, relaxed and tried again. "Some weird volcanic structure. Can't be an arch down here, not down here."

But it was gone too quickly before any real guesses could be made. All they could say for sure was that it had looked like an arch jutting from the roiling sediment below. And a big one at that . . . the hydrobot had pa.s.sed through it.

Parks, almost nervously, started rambling on about volcanism and how it could shape ordinary rock into the most peculiar shapes. And particularly underwater where the lava flow would cool quite quickly, twisting into the oddest forms that very often appeared man-made . . . or, in this case, manufactured by an intelligence. For there was no possible way anything down here had ever been touched by man.

The hydrobot continued on, tracking that magnetic anomaly and Parks kept calling out numbers and other than that, there was only the occasional beeping of the computers as they logged what was going on below. The men, other than the geophysicist, were quiet, expectant maybe. Hayes could only speak for himself. His mouth was dry as fireplace soot and he was grinding his teeth and bunching his fists.

The silence was so thick suddenly you could've hung your hat from it.

The hydrobot ventured forward, scanning over cl.u.s.ters of things like anemones and spiny urchins and finally great outcroppings of coral. Here was an ecosystem of clinging sponges, pale worms, and bivalves. Primitive bryozoans encrusted like bee honeycombs. Campbell pointed out that, though marine zoology was not his forte, these were either new species or ones long thought extinct.

But he was talking just to be heard, maybe to be comforted by his own voice, as the hydrobot's magnometer was reading pulses right off the scale. To which Gundry joked offhand that it must be picking up the emissions of some ma.s.sive electromagnetic generator with the mother of all magnetic cores. But n.o.body laughed and maybe because they didn't like the idea of what that alluded to. Because at that particular moment n.o.body would have been surprised at anything. Had they seen a flying saucer jutting from the lake bed and weeds, they would not have been surprised. For whatever was putting out that kind of raw energy almost certainly had to be artificial.

And then they saw it . . . or the hydrobot did.

Another arch. And so perfect in form its design could not have been a simple natural abnormality for just beyond it other shapes . . . rectangular slabs standing upright and others lying flat like ancient tombstones and what might have been a shattered dome rising from the congested weeds. What they saw of it had to have been several hundred feet across, though in fact it was probably quite a bit larger. Jagged cracks were feathered over its surface.

n.o.body said anything, not a d.a.m.n thing because there was more of it all the time, whatever it was they were looking at. Now they were seeing what appeared to be monuments jutting at wild angles like gravestones in some incredibly ancient cemetery. Things like obelisks and monoliths leaning over, wanting to fall . . . they were coated in a pink slime and set with the holes of borer worms and appeared to be of a vast antiquity. But there was more, always more. Crumbling walls encrusted with colonies of sponges and the carbonate skeletons of long-dead marine organisms.

"Jesus H. Christ," Gundry said, sounding like he was hyperventilating. "Would you look at that . . . would you just look . . . "

Parks kept shaking his head. "A city . . . something, but down here?"

"Why not?" Hayes said. "Why the h.e.l.l not?"

Parks couldn't seem to stop shaking his head. "Because . . . because this G.o.dd.a.m.n lake has been cut off from the world, tucked under a glacier for forty-million years, Hayes, that's why."

"What about the ruins Gates found? Hundreds of million years old, pre-human in origin . . . I guess this pretty much supports what he told us."

But you could see the look of disbelief on Parks' face. Maybe he hadn't really believed what Gates had said, maybe in his mind - regardless of the facts staring him dead in the face - he had refused to accept the concept of a civilization predating humanity by half a billion years. Human arrogance had a hard time with that one. It reduced the species' significance considerably. Just another drop in the bucket, hardly the chosen ones.

"A city," Campbell kept saying. "A city."

But "city" wasn't what Hayes was thinking, not at all. What he was seeing was sprawling and wild without any indication of an overall plan, more like a graveyard than a city, something that expanded as necessity required. All those monoliths and shafts, oblong slabs and worm-holed pillars, low stone buildings carpeted in ooze and weeds and marine creepers . . . yes, there was something inexplicably morbid about them like centuried graves and collapsing mausoleums and ivy-choked crypts. A necropolis, a marble-hewn city covered in rot and growth and sediment, falling into itself. The structures were crowded together and overlapping one another like what you might see in a medieval slum . . . crowded, claustrophobic, tangled with what might have been deep-cut lanes snaking amongst them. Hayes was looking upon it all, barely able to breathe, at the complexity and profusion. Everything jutting and leaning and rising and falling, like some litter pile of worm-holed bones heaped atop each other for uncounted millennia . . . pyramids and domes, shafts and cones and arches. Yes, like broken skulls and rib staves green with moss, pillared femurs and stove-pipe ulnas and ladders of eroding vertebrae. All dusted by a perpetual rain of silt that was blown and drifting like dandelion fuzz.

The hydrobot was rising as the city or graveyard itself began to rise up a sloping hill and then they saw it, the city. The real city. Not this rotting collection of debris and artifacts, but the city itself rising higher and higher up a submarine mountain . . . or maybe the city was the mountain. The silt began to thin and they saw the colossal, dead immensity of it as the hydrobot rose up, showing them something that had been hid from the light for forty million years.

Hayes just stood there, something fused inside of him.

A cyclopean, eon-dead city of towers and spires rising up to an incredible height and looking much like some fantastic crystalline growth ballooning up from its base . . . if it really had a base, for much of it seemed to be sunken in a forest of weeds and kelp. The structures were honeycombed with doorways that were like mossy cave mouths from which spilled a limitless blackness. It was a vast, shadow-enshrouded metropolis of perverse geometric architecture. The ruins of some primordial alien city deposited here on this muddy, weedy lake bottom . . . and still the hydrobot rose, its lights splashing over great galleries and domes and spirals of cubes that gravity should have pulled down, but didn't.

It looked to Hayes like some gigantic calliope set with the naked, tubular pipes of a cathedral organ rising above to unknown heights . . . deserted and derelict and tomb-like, shot through with vaults and hollows. He saw panes of crystal and arches and spires and spheres crowded together and built, it seemed, right through one another as if the entire thing had been dropped and had shattered like this, collecting in some irregular pattern of razor-backed shards. And all of it encrusted with an amazing variety of sponges and barnacles and flowering anemones, pale slimy mosses and gardens of thick weeds that seemed to grow right out of the lurching walls, swaying gracefully in some unseen current.

"The . . . the magnetic anomaly," Parks said. "It must be centered in there somewhere, somewhere."

"Yeah," Hayes heard himself say. "Like some engine, some generator that's still running after all this time."

The hydrobot was still rising, panning the city and trying to pull back as far as it could to give a broader view of what it was seeing, put it in some kind of perspective, but its lights simply wouldn't penetrate far enough and all it could show them was more of that weird architecture, that morbid gigantism. Shadows darted and jumped and danced amongst the structures and the effect of it was disconcerting to say the least, making the city appear to be in motion, to be creeping and reaching out at them, those doorways shifting . . . vomiting storms of silt, weeds swaying and undulating.

Hayes was thinking the entire thing looked like some enormous and hideous alien skull, articulated and grinning, punctured with holes and narrow crevices.

But the total effect made him realize how far he was from home and how very alone they were. In a place so distant and remote, a place of echoes and ghosts and lost voices. A place where the sun never rose and the chill never lifted.

No, even for Parks, there was nothing but acceptance now. Bare, stark acceptance of things they now knew and all those things they did not. For no human brain could have conceived of such a city. The very insane geometry of the place made you want to vent your mind in a single rending and wet scream.

The hydrobot had been steadily rising for nearly an hour now and it told them that it had come up over five-hundred feet, but finally they were reaching the pinnacle of the city. From above it looked like a maze-like, congested forest of dead trees . . . all spires and shafts and what looked like the intersecting steeples of a thousand churches. All of which seemed to be connected by a spider-webbing of filaments like ropes. Hayes caught sight of something like gargoyles perched near the tops on flat, see-sawing widow's walks. But they were not gargoyles as such, but slime-covered things like immense horned gra.s.shoppers with too many limbs. Something about them made his guts suck into themselves.

But maybe he hadn't seen them at all.

Maybe it was a trick of the light or darkness, for everything was obscured and encrusted with polyp colonies, gorgonians, whip corals, and the corrugated helixes of bryozoans.

The hydrobot hung over the top of the city, within spitting distance of a tangle of skeletal spires. It just hovered, apparently interested in something. Hayes and the others didn't see what it was, not right away. But for Hayes, he could feel it. Feel that something was coming, something terrible and overwhelming, something that crushed him and sucked the juice from his soul. Oh, yes, it was coming, it was coming now. Hayes felt weak and dizzy like some low-grade flu was chewing at his guts. And in his head, there was a low, constant humming like high-power lines at midsummer or a transformer cycling at a low ebb.

"What the h.e.l.l is that?"

Somebody said that and n.o.body seemed to know who it was. They were all staring at the screen, at what the hydrobot had been tracking long before it became visual. Except it wasn't an it, but a they. Everyone in the booth saw them . . . those streamlined, cylindrical forms that looked impossible and ungainly laying on, say, a dissection table, but down here were fluid and free and fast-moving. They rose up above the city, like a swarm of vampire bats come to drain the world dry. Gliding up and forward, filling the ether above the city, their bodies pulsed as they rocketed forward, expelling water like squids and octopi, moving easily with those great outstretched fin-like wings.

Hayes felt like he was going to pa.s.s out or throw-up or maybe both. Alive, dear Christ, they were alive. The Old Ones. And what was even worse is that what he was seeing, that swarm rising like locusts, was exactly the image he had gotten from Lind's mind.

Exactly.

The creatures came on, incredibly obscene as they bloated up and narrowed with their b.a.s.t.a.r.d propulsion. There was no doubt what was attracting them.

When they were maybe twenty feet away, the screen flickered, rolled, and went black. Everyone stood in shocked silence for a moment or two, not sure what to say or what to do.

Parks started hammering on his keyboard. "Dead," he said. "Dead. Primary and secondary cryobots have lost contact with the hydrobot. It's off-line, I guess."

Well, thank G.o.d for small favors, Hayes thought, feeling numb and ungainly. He was glad. If he had had to see those things any closer, he would have lost his mind. If those globular red eyes had filled the screen they would have wiped his brain clean and he didn't think that was an exaggeration.

"They're still down there, still active," he said, almost mumbling. "All these millions of years they've been waiting down there . . . waiting for us."

Parks stood up, something like rage burning in his eyes. He went right after Hayes and Gundry had to stop him from going right over the top of him and maybe stomping him down in the process. "You can't know that!" he said, drool hanging from his lower lip in a ribbon. "There's no way you could possibly know that! You're imagining things and making up things and acting like a scared little boy!"

Hayes laughed and walked straight past him, wanting badly to curl up in a dark corner somewhere. "You got that right, Doc, because I am scared. And I think you are, too. We all are and we have a real f.u.c.king good reason to be."

22.

Sure, Elaine Sharkey was iron. All hard edges and cutting corners sharp enough to slit your throat, you got too close, but when she was with Hayes? Maybe melted b.u.t.ter, something soft and warm and liquid and they both knew it and it was getting to the point that they didn't bother pretending otherwise. Maybe to the other men her eyes were blazing and cold, blue diamonds in a deep-freeze and her scowling mouth was hard and bitter. But to Hayes it was anything but that. It was a mouth to desire and want and feel. Yes, there was a connection between them and it was electric and real and that was the secret they coveted. Which was no secret at all.

When he was done telling her his story, he said simply, "I saw them, Doc . . . Elaine, I saw them. They're down there and they have been for millions of years, breeding and living and waiting in that warm darkness. Waiting for us . . . I know they've been waiting for us. It doesn't make sense or maybe it does, but I know it's true. Jesus, I know it's true."

"I wish I really thought you made all this up," was all she could say.

"Me, too. But we all saw that city, those things down there. Christ." He paused, trying to catch his breath just like he'd been trying to catch it ever since he'd seen them. Trying to catch his breath and trying to plane his world flat before it went too far askew and pitched him on his a.s.s. "It's all on tape, though. Wait until LaHune gets his hands on this . . . we'll have a blackout like never before. I bet he won't even let anyone see it."

Sharkey fed him whiskey and soft words, gave him a shoulder to lean on. It was enough. It had to be enough. They were in her room, sitting on the bed and maybe it was the best possible place to be and maybe it was the worse. For what came next was the result of chemistry. Later, they could not say who started it. Just that it happened. That they fell into each other and lost themselves in the warmth and necessity of the act. The foreplay had been the telling of Hayes' story, no sweet nothings, but a great and voluminous blackness that had to be covered, had to be shut away somewhere and so it was. Like dread or mourning, the impact of what they knew to be true and what they guessed to be true threw them into each other's arms and the connection was made whole, potential energy gone kinetic, and the power was real. Foreplay abandoned, there was the act, there was motion and breathing and moaning and hot skin, limbs entwined and heat shared and maybe hearts touched and filled. All that Hayes could remember later was that he had never felt so strong or so weak. When he was inside Elaine Sharkey and she was wrapped around him, her eyes glowing like azure flames, he had never felt so completely alive and so utterly pure.

There was an excitement, he knew, in bedding another man's wife. The illicit thrill, the taboo. But it was far beyond that. The hunger had been growing for weeks and it was only a matter of time before the beast showed its teeth and filled its belly. And then, afterwards, the afterglow, a secret and a memory they shared and held deep inside themselves in a special place other hands could not touch or hope to sully. It was theirs and theirs alone and this was enough. This was all and everything and it was not spoken of. They could no more frame it with words than they could hold one another's souls in the palms of their hands. And that was the beauty of it, the thrill and joy and the magic.

And later, wrapped in each other's arms and touching and never wanting to let go, there were soft voices in the darkness.

"What . . . what are we going to do, Elaine?"

"I don't know, Jimmy, I just don't know."

And he didn't either, so he laid there, feeling her, and loving the tactile sensation of her flesh, smelling that perfume coming off her which didn't come out of any bottle, but was just her inner beauty announcing itself as sweet honey, jasmine, and musk.

There were no answers, there was only the two of them in the darkness, feeling and being felt. Listening to the wind sc.r.a.ping across the compound and the blood rushing at their temples. What they had at that moment was the memory of their seduction and it was secret.

23.

So LaHune had been feeding them a straight ration of s.h.i.t for too long now, expecting them to chew and swallow, maybe ask for seconds, fill their bellies and smile and shove back empty plates, my compliments to the f.u.c.king cook. But day by day that was getting harder and you could see it behind their eyes and just under their smiles, like there was something p.i.s.sed-off and randy waiting to show itself and when it did, my dearly beloved, cover your heads and hold onto your privates, this is going to be ugly and fierce and loud.

Sure, LaHune, Christian saint that he was, had given them back their Internet and SAT TV and maybe everyone should have been happier than a p.e.n.i.s on a Playboy shoot . . . but it wasn't that simple. The TV, the radio, the Internet . . . when you were locked down and nailed shut for five months in the coffin of Antarctica, got so you needed these things. Like clean air to breath. And when someone shoved a pillow over your face and cut off your wind, you didn't exactly thank 'em when they pulled it off, let you breathe. What you did was kick them in the nuts so hard their little gonads rang off the inside of their skulls like ball bearings in a pinball game. Didn't matter how many sweet nothings about the Official Secrets Act they hummed in your ear, you kicked 'em hard and sure so maybe next time they'd keep that in mind.

At least, that's how the Glory Boys - Rutkowski, St. Ours, and a few others - were seeing this little scenario.

"We can sit here and hold each other's d.i.c.ks while we p.i.s.s," St. Ours told them. "Or we can zip our flies shut and do something. We can show that f.u.c.king monkey-skull LaHune which side his bread is b.u.t.tered on."

Maybe it was the loss of Meiner and too much whiskey and maybe it was just plain poor sense combined with isolation and confinement and that frustration they'd been gathering up like wool, but it made sense. St. Ours talked and the others listened with an almost religious rapture and plans were laid and not a one of them questioned any of it. Like a swift-rushing river they let it flow and carry them along, never once thinking of damming it.

At the far north end of Targa House, at the end of the corridor that split off the community room, you could find the radio room and supply lockers. You kept going, just around the bend, you'd find an Emergency Supplies Room that held extra radio parts, survival gear, freeze-dried food, ECWs, just about anything you'd need if the going got tough. You'd also find a weapon's locker there.

And if you wanted to get into it, then it was only a matter of kicking through LaHune's door across the hallway. Maybe going in there with three, four tough boys with liquor in their bellies and taking the keys.

LaHune never really saw them come in.

He was sleeping and about the time his eyes started to flicker open and register a vague shape standing over him, a fist had already collided with his temple. There was about enough time to cry out and then another fist caught him just above the eye and the lights went out. LaHune fell into blackness and his last sensory input was of pain and the stink of cheap whiskey, body odor, and machine oil . . . a very working man kind of smell.

"Tie that f.u.c.king puke up," St. Ours said, toying with a flap of skin at his knuckle that he'd torn on LaHune's head.

Rutkowski and the others - a couple maintenance jocks named Biggs and Stotts-just stood there like toys waiting to be wound, maybe considering for the first time that they were involving themselves in some real deep s.h.i.t here. The sort of s.h.i.t you could and would drown in when the whiskey left your brain.

"With what?" Rutkowski said.

"Cut up some of those bed sheets," St. Ours said. "Tie and gag him, then we'll get some guns and kerosene and have ourselves a wienie roast with Gates' pets out in the hut."

And maybe the others weren't crazy about the idea of hurting LaHune or being an accomplice to an a.s.sault, but they liked the idea of torching the mummies. Yeah, they liked that just fine. Using pocket knives, Stotts and Biggs trussed LaHune up and that poor boy was out cold as a salmon steak in a freezer. When they were done, they were sweaty and maybe even a little confused.

"C'mon," St. Ours told them.

In LaHune's desk, they found keys for every lock at the station, but all they wanted were the keys to the Emergency Supplies Room and the gun locker in there. When they had them, they went across the corridor and let themselves in. The room was about the size of a two-car garage. Crates and boxes, medical supplies and laboratory equipment marked fragile, drums of fuel, just about everything else. Because down there at the South Pole during winter, if you didn't have it and you needed it, you had to make it.

In the gun locker they found flare guns, .22 caliber survival rifles. They were hoping for some bigger hardware, but they figured the rifles would be enough. They found the sh.e.l.ls easily enough and loaded the guns. Then they stood in a tight little circle, holding up those guns and liking the feel of them . . . their weight and solidity, the way weapons always made a man feel somehow more like a man. A hunter. A warrior. They stood there looking at each other, seeing the lights in each other's eyes, but not knowing what it was, only that it was strong and necessary and good.

It was all up to St. Ours now.

They would do what he said.

"All right," he told them. "We're going to get ourselves some kerosene in the Equipment Garage . . . maybe gas or even diesel fuel, then we're going over to Hut Six and you know what we're going to do then. Anyone gets in our way . . . "

They seemed eager a moment before, but now something in them was weakening and wavering and St. Ours didn't care for it. "What? What the h.e.l.l is it?" he put to them.

Rutkowski opened his mouth to say something, but the words didn't want to come. He'd been feeling something the past few minutes, but he wasn't really sure what it was. Only that it was in his head.

Biggs was rubbing his temples. "d.a.m.nedest thing . . . got me a headache, I'm thinking."

"A headache? So take a f.u.c.king aspirin already. Jesus." But St. Ours was looking at the other two and seeing it on them as well. Something was afoot. "Well? Are we going to do this or sit around p.i.s.sing about our heads?"

Stotts, tall and angular and lantern-jawed like some stock New Englander, kept licking his lips. "It's in the back of my head . . . I can feel it back there."

"Oh, for chrissake."

Rutkowski shook his head, too. There was something there and it wasn't to be denied. The more he tried to ignore it, the more it raged, the more pain it brought with it. Maybe this wasn't a migraine coming on him, but it lived next door.

"f.u.c.k is with you people?" St. Ours wanted to know.

But they couldn't really say because they were having trouble stringing words together and the pain was uniform and disorienting. Like something had woken up in their heads. Woken and stretched and started clawing up things. Rifles were lowered and then dropped and eyes went from being confused to being dark and shifting like simmering oil. Those eyes stared and rarely blinked and there was something very strange about it all.

St. Ours had been thinking maybe these boys had been affected by a leaky gas furnace or something because headaches were sure as h.e.l.l not catchy. But what he was seeing in their eyes and beginning to feel along the nape of his neck was not gas, it was . . . it was a sense of visitation. Something was in that room with them, something unseen and nameless and malefic was filling the empty s.p.a.ces between them, making everything and everyone just go bad to their cores.

Rutkowski kept trying to talk, but his mouth wouldn't seem to open and his head was filled with a thick, black down and he couldn't seem to think around it. His belly was filled with spiders and he could feel them in there, crawling up his spine and along his nerve ganglia making him want to fold-up or scream and - "f.u.c.k's with you people?" St. Ours was saying, flat-out scared now. What was in their heads wasn't in his, but he had enough other bad stuff going on to make up for it.