by Jeff Long
The exit tunnel lay somewhere close. It would lead them to the surface in a matter of weeks. For the millionth time, he pulled a sheaf of pages from a waterproof tube and studied its hodgepodge of maps.
The pages came from the daybook kept by a nun, one of only two survivors to emerge from this region three years ago. It was the ghosts of her doomed expedition that Clemens was chasing on film. Hers had been one of the most audacious journeys in all history, one to rival Marco Polo’s or Columbus’s, a six-thousand-mile passage through the tunnel system riddling the bedrock beneath the Pacific Ocean. It had been a journey with a punch line, a journey of scientists who bumped smack into an unpleasant article of faith. For here they had found the home of Satan, or the historical Satan, the man—hominid, take your pick—behind the legend. The leader of the pack.
The nun, a scholar cunt named Ali Von Schade, had written of meeting him. The city had still been alive back then, the plague not yet released. The last she’d seen of this Satan, he was wearing a warrior’s suit of green jade platelets. For three days now, Clemens had been scouring the city for the body or skeleton, looking for his film’s money shot, the one that would shock and amaze and bring the story all together in one image. He’d found a suit of jade armor all right, but it was empty, discarded, ownerless, not a bone in it. Despite his disappointment, he kind of liked that. In the end, Satan had been nothing more than an empty suit.
Clemens had made numerous requests to Von Schade for an interview, all in vain, always meeting the same polite refusal. I don’t wish to share the details of that disaster. As if the story belonged to her. As if intellectual property had some sacred protection. Cunt.
He and Quinn, his film partner, had needed her maps and clues to plan this journey. Clemens had tried flowers, dinner invitations, offers of money, even a percentage of the film’s net profit, yeah, net, not gross, an old Hollywood joke. Nothing worked with her. Zip. Nada. Quinn said to leave her alone. Instead Clemens had hired a burglar to steal her journal, copy it, and then return it. What was the harm? If she wouldn’t talk, her diary would.
Von Schade’s maps were as much memoir as cartography, laced with fanciful tales and ink-and-watercolor sketches of the Helios expedition’s progress. Along the way, every time Clemens was sure she must be wrong or had made something up, her maps would prove to be right.
A waterfall thundered in the darkness, hidden in the distance. That was on the map, too. Bound and blindfolded at the time, Von Schade had later recorded it in her daybook, an acoustic landmark. Through the waterfall lay their shortcut to the sun.
Long, ghostly strips of clouds drifted overhead. The cavern was so big it generated its own microweather. Geologists theorized that millions of years ago great bubbles of sulfuric acid had eaten upward from the earth’s deeper mantle, carving out this labyrinth of cavities and tubes known as the Interior. The perfect hiding place for a lost race.
Clemens rolled up the pages of Von Schade’s diary and switched off his headlamp. They were running low on batteries, and everything else, for that matter. But the shoot was largely over. His crew had reached its summit, so to speak, this dead city in the deepest reaches of the sub-Pacific cave system. Now they could ascend, back to the surface, back to the sun. Back to Clemens’s faded name and glory.
Most of the kids on this crew hadn’t even sprouted pimples when he’d won an Academy Award for his documentary, War High, about jackass athletes braving international war zones in their search for the ultra-extreme. After that, he’d coasted on his Oscar laurels, getting work as a second-unit director on Hollywood action vehicles.
Then the earth’s Interior had been “discovered.” Overnight, everyone’s attention had shifted to this vast, inhabited labyrinth right beneath their feet. The market for movies and books about adrenaline junkies had gone out the window. Clemens learned the hard way that there was no competing with the demons and fiends of religious lore. Within a year, he was bankrupt, divorced, and shooting porn videos for $200 per day.
Around that time, Quinn had come into his life. Quinn was an old-fashioned explorer who had dipped his toe in the subterranean world and had a film in mind, this film, about an expedition following in the footsteps of an expedition into hell. In a coked-up revelation, it had occurred to Clemens that in order to beat the devil, he needed to be the devil. And so—fifty-two years old—he’d convinced Quinn to partner with him on the production. Together they had assembled this desperate, calculated slog through the earth’s basement. Clemens figured that if “Hell,” splashed upon giant IMAX screens, couldn’t revive his career, nothing would. He’d have to go back to work for the skin mafia.
Unfortunately Quinn had proved to be a problem. Quinn the decent. Quinn the grin. Quinn the Real McCoy. Quinn for president! The crew had loved Quinn’s easygoing style and his insistence on safety. And his sense of story and scriptwriting that made Clemens look like a dumb-it-down hack. Which Clemens was. But which he didn’t need to have the little people snickering about. Thus, Quinn the scream. Quinn the dead.
After his partner’s disappearance, Clemens had assumed things would get better. But the crew only grew more disrespectful of him. They suspected him. Idiots. Murder didn’t exist in a wilderness with no laws. And besides, no body, no crime. Quinn had chosen a bottomless pit to fall into. It had been easy, the slightest of nudges from behind, barely an ounce of adios, amigo. Clemens had made a few attempts at placating the crew, even giving them two days to search for their fearless leader. Then it was crack-the-whip time. On with the show.
Joshua. There it was again, that whisper. Clemens whirled around.
He jabbed his light left and right. As always, no one was there. It had been going on ever since they’d entered the city. The crew was screwing with him, whispering his name with Quinn’s voice, winding him up.
“Fuck ya,” Clemens said to the darkness.
“Likewise,” said a woman’s voice. Huxley came striding into his light. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Was that you?” said Clemens.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s me. You said we were making camp here.”
Huxley was a veterinarian Quinn had hired to be their medic. It was the pet doctor’s unsteady needle that had sewn together Clemens’s cheek after a rockfall in the tunnels system. He could guess what she wanted.
“Those wings,” she said. She went to the creature suspended in flowstone, the mineral seepage. “I need to take his measurements and get tissue samples. And I want those wings for my collection. The wings of an angel. A fallen angel. This specimen is unique.”
My ongoing rebellion, thought Clemens. The crew was an inch away from outright mutiny. They couldn’t wait to get out of here. Daylight was waiting up top. They could practically taste it. And Huxley wanted them to stay?
“You’ve been saying that about every bone and body we’ve stumbled across,” Clemens said. “We’re done here. Onward. Upward. Miles to go before we sleep, all that.”
“You don’t understand,” Huxley said. “Wings on men? And we saw that one yesterday with amphibian gills. And the reptile lady last week.”
“What do you want me to say?” said Clemens. “They’re hadals. Mutants. A dime a dozen down here. A dime a thousand. Besides, you’ve got your degree, Doc. What more do you want, the Nobel?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “What more do you want, another Oscar?”
It wasn’t Huxley’s ambition that Clemens resented. Once this was over, each one of them meant to squeeze the lemon for all it was worth. He’d been hearing their big plans for months. The kayakers were going to buy ad space in Outside and Men’s Journal to lure adventure travelers. There were dark, class IV tube rapids down here, and river beaches made of polished white marble. The cinematographer wanted to open an art gallery and publish a coffee-table book with her still shots of the Interior. Three of the climber types meant to incorporate, raise venture capital, and return to prospect the outrageous veins of gold they�
�d all touched, but left behind.
In short, there was money and reputation to be grabbed down here. Huxley was no different from the rest of them. Having suffered the darkness, she wanted her piece of the pie. But the thing about Huxley was that she didn’t have manners. Just because she’d been Quinn’s girlfriend didn’t exempt her from the rules. This was Clemens’s show. Everyone else, even the hotshot climbers, had asked his permission to capitalize on the expedition. Not Huxley, though. She treated him like he was stealing the descent.
“We had a deal,” she said.
“What deal was that?”
“I came along as a scientist.”
“You came along as a medic,” Clemens said. “That’s your job, to tend the sick and wounded.”
“You said we were camping here one more night.”
Clemens stared a hole through her. “End of discussion,” he said. “We’re leaving.”
“I’m staying.”
“By yourself? In this place?” The flares were dying. The shadows loomed.
“You’re not a man of science,” Huxley said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Clemens thought for a minute, not about staying with her, but about getting shed of her. He wasn’t born yesterday. She was going to try to bring a murder charge against him once they got up top. That or slap him with a lawsuit. Lien him to death. This was his retirement she was threatening here.
Clemens shrugged. “You got to do what you got to do, Doc.”
Huxley blinked. She’d been bluffing. Too late now. Clemens gave her his crocodile grin. “That’s right,” she said. “I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do. With or without you.”
“We’ll be on the trail leading up,” Clemens told her. “You go through a waterfall and there will be a tunnel. Don’t forget.”
Huxley lifted her chin. “This won’t take more than a few hours. I’ll be right behind you.”
“You’d better be. I’m telling you, man, don’t miss the bus. Because nobody’s waiting for nobody anymore. It’s dog-eat-dog, Huxley. You hear me?”
She stared, as if he’d just confessed. “I’ll catch you before night.”
Night. There it was again, their strange conceit. Even, in this lightless place, they clung to convention, calling their wakefulness day, and their sleep night. Never mind that their bodies had forgotten the sun and they dreamed in shades of blackness.
They left Huxley in a tiny puddle of light. Good night, sweet princess, thought Clemens. Fantasizing, he began to write the sad loss of Dr. Huxley into his mental screenplay.
For three days they had been meandering through the city, gathering a bounty of images. It was like Pompeii among these ruins, with this difference: instead of being locked inside volcanic ash, the dead hung in translucent flux. The plague had killed them; the mineral ooze had made them immortal. You could see them underfoot, suspended in the flowstone, hundreds, no, thousands of them. For three nights they had slept atop the last resting place of the ultimate barbarian. Now they were done with it.
A gigantic waterfall seemed to block the end of the cavern. They shot a flare into the heights. As it drifted down, the spray lit with rainbows in the blackness.
“Lord,” one of the kayakers said. That said it all.
Just as the nun’s daybook promised, a tunnel lay behind the central waterfall: caves within caves within caves. It was like Swiss cheese down here.
Clemens tried to get his crew to set up the camera and take a shot of him entering the falls tunnel. But they pretended not to hear him. He had been waiting for their muttering and scowls to spill over into actual defiance, and now that it had, now that they had broken from his command, he was relieved. Finally he could quit lashing them deeper. He could just float back up to the world.
The path led up and up in giant circles. The stair steps, carved from solid stone by a subterranean civilization that some scholars dated to twenty-five thousand years ago, had been worn to faint corrugations. The stone was slick from the humidity that blew at their backs on a warm, steady draft.
It didn’t take long for Huxley to change her mind about staying behind. Clemens was at the back of the line for a reason. Her voice began echoing up to them after the first hour, but Clemens was the only one to hear it. He couldn’t make out her words, but her distress was clear. Maybe her batteries had run out. More likely she couldn’t find the tunnel entrance. Bummer.
Soon her echoes grew almost faint enough to ignore. Almost. The whisper still reached him. Joshua. How did she do that?
The tunnel walls tightened. The current of warm air quit rushing from below. Clemens could sense the space closing around him by the change in his hearing. Things just sounded closer.
Joshua. He ignored her.
As they went on, Clemens kept looking for debris, bones, or other signs of the original expedition. Funded by the Helios conglomerate, the party of scientists, soldiers, and porters had numbered over two hundred at their start beneath the Galapagos Islands.
Following their lead, Clemens and the crew of nineteen had hiked, climbed, and rafted some six thousand miles. They had retraced the Helios expedition’s route by its remains, finding clues to its long breakdown in their graffiti, trash, dried dung, and, near the end, their bones. Quinn had likened the doomed explorers to Lewis and Clark crossing America, except the sub-Pacific journey was almost three times as long, and they had been slaughtered by the natives, these so-called hadals of this geological Hades. Only Von Schade and the expedition’s scout had lived to tell the tale, though they had barely told it. The scout had vanished without saying a word about anything. The nun had gone into therapy, and then academic seclusion. Which had left their story ripe for the picking.
Finder’s keepers, thought Clemens. It was his now, the scraps of diaries and logbooks, the rags of uniforms, the broken instruments, the forlorn skulls mounted on stalagmites, the hadal bones lying where the plague had felled them…all collected and digitized on large-format tape.
Climbing higher, they found hadal symbols cut into the walls or floor. One, in particular, suggested they were on track. It was a simple, recurring spiral shape. For months, they had been seeing different versions of it, like a blaze mark, only more beautiful and ornate. The closer they got to the city, the more elaborate the spirals had become. Here, for instance, the spiral was woven so deftly into an arabesque engraving that it seemed to be hiding.
Clemens still found it hard to believe the brutish hadals had once conducted an empire that extended throughout this tubular maze. While humankind was still learning to make fire, the hadals had been busy constructing a metropolis far from the sun. Some experts even claimed the hadals had tutored man at the dawn of agriculture and metallurgy.
A lot of people objected to the notion. Us? Schooled by them? Now that he’d spent time down here, though, it made terrible sense to Clemens. Why not get your meat to grow its own food, to breed, and to cluster in villages and cities? Fatten them up before bringing them down.
At a fork in the trail, the group halted for the night. Without a word, the men and women shucked their packs and laid out their sleeping pads. The daybook said nothing about a split in the trail. Indeed, it said almost nothing about the ascent from the city. Apparently the nun had been in shock after her captivity and rescue there. That or she had intentionally concealed where the tunnel exited in New Guinea.
Bobbi, another one of the alpha females, took it upon herself to reconnoiter ahead and determine which of the two trails they should follow in the morning. Within minutes her shout for help rang down the tunnel walls. Immediately everyone got to his or her feet. No hesitation. Out came their motley collection of rifles and handguns.
Not once in eight months had they needed to fire a single shot. There was nothing left to shoot down here. The darkness had been sterilized. The Interior was scrubbed clean of threats. Exorcised, as some put it. The pandemic had erased the hadals from existence. Haddie was out of business.
They found Bobbi
in a broad hollow, speechless and pale beneath her subterranean pallor. She pointed up the trail. Clemens watched as the women gathered around their sister and the men flocked ahead with their firearms. They rounded the corner.
“God help us,” barked a man.
A long row of human mummies stood tied on either side of the trail. There were thirty of them, still wearing pieces of military webbing, boots, and uniforms…with the sun and wings of the Helios corporation logo on their shoulder patches.
“Finally,” said Clemens.
They looked at him. “Finally?”
“The lost patrol,” he said. “I wondered where they went.”
For the past three hundred miles, Clemens’s crew had been finding what was left of the Helios scientists, but always absent their hired guns. Here at last were their bodyguards, dried and arrayed for public view, complete with arrows and darts and various death wounds. A black obsidian ax blade with a broken haft jutted from a skull.
“What is this? What happened here?”
“Stone Age taxidermy,” someone said.
“Custer’s last stand, dude.”
Their soundman murmured, “Like sinners burning in hell.”
Bound with ropes, their jaws agape and flesh shrunk to the bone, they did look tortured. A chorus of the damned. No wonder mankind had feared the underworld. The subplanet really had contained the torments of legend.
The money shot, Clemens was thinking to himself.
They walked up and down the line like visitors in a darkened art museum, shining their lights on different mummies. The soldiers looked alien to Clemens, like barrel-chested insects with bulging eyes.
Then he saw the incisions. Their rib cages seemed so huge because their abdomens were so small. The men had been gutted. Their eyes had been scooped out and replaced with round white stones that stared into eternity. Their shriveled thighs and biceps all bore the same cut marks, some kind of ritual mutilation.
Their assault rifles lay at their feet, stocks splintered, so much kindling wood. Except they were plastic. Broken into pieces. Clemens could almost see the hatred in it. The hadals had despised these men.
