Hive (30 page)

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 bumps or knobs 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 scraping.

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 anticipation, of great revelations laying ahead. As he moved ever downward, some smartass voice in his head kept saying things like,
who do you suppose built all this? Is there life on Mars and in outer space?
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 stalactites. 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, assorted 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—clusters of rising cubes and crumbling arches, cones and pyramids and immense rectangular towers honeycombed with passages. 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 God,” 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 associated 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 clustered like toadstools. They had to turn sideways to pass 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 reassure him that, yes, Sharkey was fucking 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.

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 clusters 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-shit sort of attitude.

“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 fucking 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 cucumbers 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 ass, 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 clusters 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 God, millions upon millions of years later, they were waking up, they were rising to claim their children and their childrens' intellect...