RETURN
TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH
www.severedpress.com
COPYRIGHT: Greig Beck 2020
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:
Thank you to my test pilots: Jeremy Salter and Scott Erichsen. Your feedback was insightful, helpful, and allowed me to see through the forest to the trees.
“Those who descend into the dark find monsters.
Or become them.”
Jane Baxter, Krubera Caving Team
PROLOGUE
The frozen north of Georgia, Caucasus region, circa 102,000 years ago
The clan sat staring into the popping fire as if hypnotized. The flames were tiny now but at the fire’s center the embers still glowed a searing red and it warmed their cheeks and filled the cave with the smell of resin infused wood smoke.
Their band comprised of four families, with seven hunters, ranging in ages from twelve to twenty-eight. There were also women, five young children, a single new baby, and two withered and toothless elders in their forties.
They had lived in the front chambers of the huge cave for several generations, had defended it against other family groups, and once had even repelled a towering cave bear.
But this time of year was always hard; snow fell day and night and the ground was frozen solid so there were no green shoots. And no green shoots meant game was scarce, and a good-sized animal was needed at least once a week to feed the clan.
Druga was only ten years old and was now of age to be able to go out with the other men. But it would be two more summers before he would be allowed to carry a spear.
When there was food it would be first shared amongst the hunters because without their strength the tribe would become weak and vulnerable. But it meant the old and very young were only fed if there was enough to spare. And in the cold of winter the old and weak always died.
And so it was that old Clee-ak finally succumbed. Little Druga quietly suspected his foul gas smells and persistent night-cough would not be missed.
As was custom, his body was sung over, dressed in the best skins and adorned with the finest bone jewelry and weapons for a day. Then they would all be removed, his remaining possessions shared amongst the tribe, and his naked body taken into the deep caves and left there in darkness so he could join with the ancestors.
Two hunters carried the near-weightless body into the cave depths and Druga followed as the small procession’s torch-holder. They went deep beyond their outer chambers to the place of the ancestors. They never usually went this far as it was eternally dark, and darkness had always been something to fear.
Druga thought it odd that the further they went the more the men became cautious and their eyes darted about. He always thought their ancestors would be adored, not feared, and he had always wanted to see them. So he kept his eyes wide open.
They eventually came to an opening in the cave floor and leaning forward the boy looked down into the pit, but the utter darkness gave nothing away except for a warming breeze against his cheeks.
The men carefully laid the body down and immediately Druga began to smell an overpowering stench like bad meat or old Clee-ak’s breath when he leaned too close.
The trio backed away from the body and then began to creep away when from behind there was the sound of sliding. Druga immediately knew it was Clee-ak’s body being dragged into the pit.
The three clan members ran. Suddenly, Druga didn’t want to see his ancestors after all.
EPISODE 06
All was black, and such a dense black that, after some minutes, my eyes had not been able to discern even the faintest glimmer – Jules Verne
CHAPTER 01
Harry Wenton was pulled from the cage. He kicked and thrashed, but his soft body was no match for the hard-shelled monstrosities that dragged him out.
The things clicked, squeaked and twitched their excitement as the last ragged remnants of his clothing pulled from his body. Harry screamed in panic but knew that no one would hear, no one would be coming to save him, and no one even cared as they had all abandoned him to be tormented in this hellish-red underworld.
He was roughly dragged by his long, matted hair to a set of logs that had been lashed sparsely together, and then bound to it by his ankles, wrists and neck. He begged, screamed and blubbered, but the creature’s bulb-eyes on their quivering stalks were as dispassionate as blobs of dark glass.
Clawlike hands used small branches still holding their leaves to dip into a bucket and splash him with something that smelled of grease. He was lathered from the soles of his feet to the top of his head and he had to blink the oily liquid from his eyes and clamp his mouth shut.
He began to cry, knowing what it would mean. He was lifted then and carried toward the fire pit. The clicking and squeaking of the foul creatures reached a crescendo, and he wondered whether this was their form of laughing, or perhaps even singing.
“Help! He-eeeeelp!”
He yelled until his voice cracked and only stopped when one of the nightmarish things leaned over him to peer into his face.
“Kill me first… please,” he begged.
It stared, inching closer and Harry saw the multiple mouthparts and feelers working furiously inside its maw.
“Please,” he whispered to it.
“Eh-leee-zz,” the thing began to mimic. The bulb-eyes shivered excitedly as the clicking and squeaking began again. The thing pulled back and Harry was lifted higher.
Behind them another creature loomed, and it was a monstrosity of mountainous proportions. All the things deferred to it, perhaps waiting on instructions.
Harry kept his eyes on it and then lay back. Even though he wasn’t a religious man, he began to pray. He prayed this was all just a nightmare, he prayed he would be saved or spared, and he prayed that his heart would stop right now. But it didn’t.
Then, Harry Wenton, Englishman, lawyer, multi-millionaire, and professional caver, was lifted and then laid over the fire pit for the cooking to begin.
Harry screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and…
“Arghhh.” Jane sat up, holding her face.
She began to weep in the darkness of her room. Please, no, she thought miserably. We left him to die.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed and sat there feeling like her heart had turned to lead. She knew what Mike would say: there was nothing they could have done, and he was right. In fact, it had been her that had dragged Mike away from poor Harry.
She put the heels of her hands in her eye sockets and pressed, trying to erase the mental images. Even though the guy had been an asshole, he didn’t deserve that. No one deserved that.
He might still be alive, her conscience whispered. But she knew that could be an even worse fate.
Jane looked at her bedside clock. It was just gone 4am, all was quiet, she was home, safe, and it was over a year since they had climbed out of the hole in the ground.
For the most part, the memories of their descent to the center of the Earth were now more like a lingering fever dream. Much of it was vague and felt like an old photograph left in the sunshine that was fading and fraying at the edges. She knew that psychologically it was some form of coping mechanism, and the only time she was really troubled was in her sleep when her mental defenses were down. And it was dark.
Straight after their escape she had dated Mike Monroe on and off but after a while he had become remote, obsessed with their adventure, and said he was still writing its history down. Then he had simply walled himself off from his friends, her included. She knew curiosity still burned within him, but he had promised her that there was nothing that could make him travel down t
here again.
She wanted to believe him. But he had also mentioned to her he had tried to contact Katya Babikov in Russia. But he found she was now gone from the medical facility in Krasnodar, and all he was told was that Russian government officials had taken her somewhere for some sort of special cancer treatment. And that was something else that gnawed at him.
Of their other team members who had survived, Andy had headed off surfing somewhere, and she and Maggie had finally gone back to their jobs. However, Michael, being independently wealthy, had been able to sit alone in his remote cabin in the woods, writing and brooding, and ruminating on a secret place at the center of the world.
She wondered if it was only her finding it difficult to slot back into a normal life again, but when she had spoken to Maggie, her friend had professed to the same. Everything seemed bland, colorless, and unremarkable since they had escaped from that red Hell.
Jane looked at the clock again; still way too early to get up, so she lay back down on her sweat-soaked pillow. She forced her eyes to stay closed and tried to think of azure skies over snow-capped mountains, birds singing, and fields of flowers.
And she refused to hear Harry Wenton screaming from the boiling-red center of the Earth.
CHAPTER 02
National Defence Command and Control Center, Moscow
Katya hated her room. The gurney-style bed was hard and the sheets tucked in so tight they bent her toes. But at least they were clean.
Surrounding her were gleaming white, hard ceramic tiles, walling a room that was far too big for just her. It was bigger than her entire apartment at the Krasnodar mental health hospital she had lived at for decades.
She sighed and let her eyes travel around the room’s austere interior; the thing she hated the most was at night they turned out all the lights, and that terrified her, as there were pools of absolute darkness that her imagination conjured into steep tunnels burrowing all the way down to the center of the Earth.
When she had escaped the lightless caves nearly half a century ago, she never wanted to be in darkness again. Because things hid in the darkness. Things that could see and smell and find you even in blackness so complete it was as if you were blind.
Katya had tried to flee her room once, but outside she found she wasn’t in a hospital at all, and there weren’t other patients or doctors and nurses in the corridors, but instead military people and their joyless faces looked at her with stone-like empathy.
She had been quickly caught and now she had tethered wrist cuffs, for her own protection, the burly male attendant had told her gently as he strapped her down.
And then there were the interviews that had been going on for several weeks now, or was it months? They had wanted to know everything from the time she first dropped into the Krubera in 1972 with her friends, and when she had found the new passage that took them all the way to the center of the Earth.
They wanted to know about how they traveled, where they traveled, and what they found there. They wanted to know in detail about the entities they had called them, and how her friends had died; each one of them, and she wasn’t to omit any detail no matter how gruesome or painful to her.
They spent days going over how she made it out by herself, and about her sister, Lena, who almost made it out with her. And then they had subjected her to all manner of tests to prove she was telling the truth, from injections of ice-cold liquid into her veins that made her relive the horrors all over again, to machines that monitored her heart rate and made scratchy lines on paper as she told her story.
They were rude to her, rough and uncaring, and acted with a mix of derision and disdain. She knew then that they wanted to travel there, and at first she didn’t want to give up everything to try and stop them experiencing the fate her own team members had suffered.
Katya craned forward to look down at one of her strapped hands and at the bandages that were covering the ulcers all over her flesh. The sickness was on her skin and metastasizing deeper into her body, eating her away, one tiny cell-sized bite at a time.
And their tests continued. She lowered her head and sighed. After a while she began to hate them, and in the end she did tell them, everything, perhaps cruelly, because she wanted them to experience what she had endured to wipe those disbelieving sneers from their faces.
She knew they’d go and knew their exploration wasn’t just for scientific reasons. The military presence was enough to confirm that to her. Whatever they were planning, it probably had little to do with science.
Then came the bombshell and the choice they had given her was the devil’s choice. No more treatment for her cancers, and so to die here, in pain, alone and forgotten. Or come with them to act as their guide and become a national hero. And then the final promise: that they would make her well again.
In the end, she had no choice.
CHAPTER 03
CIA Headquarters, Fairfax County, Virginia, United States
Robert Lee Johnson worked for ISOD, the Central Intelligence Agency’s International Surveillance Operations Division, and he was one of the dozens of agents responsible for collecting, assessing and analyzing, and then distributing the information they collected from their embedded foreign assets.
His brows came together as he read the latest data from a senior source within the Russian Federation: an exploratory expedition had been approved to travel to the deep Earth, with the objective of examining the viability of setting up a military base.
At first he thought it was to do with undergrounding yet more of the Russian military facilities, and it would have been of interest to the US armed forces’ strategists. But then as more verifying information came in, it seemed so much more.
“You gotta be kidding me.” If he didn’t recognize the source’s name, he would have discarded it. But this source was always accurate and was implanted at the highest level of the Russian military’s administrative machine. If this agent said it was happening, then it was happening.
Johnson looked at the compiled information for another few moments before blowing air through his pressed lips, bundling the data, and then sending it upstairs to management.
CHAPTER 04
Blue Ridge, Georgia, United States
Michael Monroe jogged along his usual track out in the wilderness. He stayed in his getaway holiday home in the forest permanently now: no car horns, no exhaust, no glass, concrete and steel towers, and no shouting people on every corner. Just hundreds of miles of pine forest, lakes and rivers, mountains, and air so fresh he wanted to breathe it in forever.
Ever since he had emerged from the Krubera cave over a year ago, the thought of enclosed spaces made him feel anxious and agitated. But right now, he felt he was about as far from that as he could get.
He grinned as he ran; he remembered when he first came out here Jane asked him whether he was afraid of bears or wolves out in the woods. Never, he had replied. Given what he and his team had all faced down below, nothing on the planet’s surface would ever scare him again, period.
He had finally finished his manuscript, complete with illustrations of the world within a world, and the weird, wild, and wonderful things he had seen. He described the gravity wells and how he thought they worked. He also included some of his theories about what else could be down there.
The finished document had ended up being quite large and disc-space hungry, so as he created it, he stored previous versions on the cloud instead of his local drive. Thank heavens for new-gen anywhere Internet, he thought.
Mike usually jogged for an hour and was halfway out when, for the first time in months, he heard a helicopter pass over him. He wondered whether a neighboring county was flying in some loggers. Or if some asshole poachers had rented a helo to drop them deep into prime hunting grounds out of season.
Mark growled deep in his chest. If that’s what they were and he caught them, he’d send them packing. He had a rifle and knew how to use it.
It was on the homeward leg that he
smelled the exhaust of the chopper. Ever since he had retuned from the center of the Earth he had found his senses seemed to have become super honed. Maybe it was being so close to death that had brought so much more awareness of his surroundings, and what it was like to be truly alive.
He came out of the last stand of trees and saw the helicopter, now with its blades fully stopped. It was insignia free, but looked military and possibly an MH-139. Mike could see in the cockpit a helmeted pilot, with obligatory dark, aviator sunglasses.
The man turned and then nodded to him. He then thumbed toward Mike’s cabin, where the door was now ajar.
“You gotta be shitting me.” Mike bounded up the few wooden steps, pushed the door fully open and stood in the frame.
Inside was a single man, seated at the table. He was about the same age as Mike, but extremely fit and tough looking. He smiled and stood.
He stuck a hand out. “Raymond Harris. Call me Ray.”
Mike ignored him. “What are you doing in my house?”
Harris lowered his hand but the smile remained. “Door wasn’t locked, and I’m here because I obviously wanted to see you.”
“Why?” Mike stayed where he was.
Harris waved him closer. “C’mon Mike, sit down and grab a coffee. I only want five minutes of your time. And I just put your pot on.” He sat and looked around. “Love your place by the way; I’ve got something similar outside of Boulder in Colorado.” He nodded. “It’s good to get away from it all now and then, right?”
“I thought I was away from it all. Guess I was wrong.” Mike took a cup from his kitchen cabinet and poured a coffee. “You in the military?”
“Me, no.” Harris waited until Mike finally sat. “Not really.” He sipped his coffee, and then let his smile fade away. “You’ve been reclusive for quite some time now. Why is that?”
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