by Jeff Long
“What’s this?”
“Christ, it’s his heart. They tied his heart into his beard.”
Clemens went over. Sure enough, the dried fruit of muscle was a heart knotted into a man’s black beard. “But why didn’t they eat it?” Clemens asked. “That and the rest of their bodies?”
Bobbi stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“There must have been two thousand pounds of meat here when they were fresh,” Clemens said. “But instead of eating them, they dried and displayed them. I mean, why go to all this trouble preserving them?”
Hunger ruled this world within the world. No protein went wasted. From what they’d seen, the remains of the scientists, and even of the hadals, were always eaten to the bone, and the gnawed bones broken open for the marrow. And yet these bodies were whole, or mostly so.
Clemens’s crew was somber. He listened to them trying to make sense of the atrocity.
“It’s a warning,” a climber said. “Keep out. Beware of dog. Here dragons be.”
“The Romans used to do this. Crucify prisoners on the roads leading into the city. Behave, or else.”
“No, no. It’s like a trophy case. These are their war souvenirs.”
“Why did they do that to their eyes?”
“Jeez-is, would you look, they’re castrated, too. The bastards cut their nuts off.”
That got them, the men especially. “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
“You think any of them are still around?”
“You saw the city. They’re extinct. Dead and gone.”
“But what if some of them survived?”
“Impossible.”
“There are always survivors.”
“She’s right. The place is one giant hiding place.”
Their lights spun this way and that, scouring the blackness.
“Impossible.”
They were freaking themselves out. “Go get the camera and sound gear,” Clemens said. “The least we can do is record them for posterity.”
This time no one balked at his command. When they went, it was all together, leaving Clemens alone with the bodies. He began framing camera angles and composing narrative.
Pan left to right. “These few, these lucky few, this band of sons and brothers.”
He edited himself. People didn’t go to IMAX to hear Shakespeare. Give the crowd their boom, bang, kapow. He started over.
Shock cut to a mummy’s face. Pull back to show the dead. I step from their midst.
“Since the beginning, man has been at war with the dark side…”
He walked down the line, shopping for the right face. Their bared teeth gleamed. The stone eyes stared. Blackbeard, he decided. The one with the heart dangling from his chin.
He strode on and picked his mark, and backed between two bodies. The wall was cool. They smelled like a tanner’s shop, and a gym, too. Even dead, their different body odors clung to them. Leather and sweat. Dry as cornhusks.
Joshua.
The whisper jolted him. How could Huxley’s voice reach him here? Or was it another one of them messing with his yin/yang?
He shoved away from the wall, out from the carcasses. “Who is it?”
He thrust his light beam up and down the tunnel, hunting for the trickster. But he was alone.
Joshua. Again.
He splashed light across the faces, each grinning his death grin. The air, he decided. It moved in these tunnels. It made them whistle and moan sometimes. That was all. The whispers were just air.
In the middle of the night, Clemens woke with a start. He sat up and shook his head, looking around. This evening’s choice of chemical night-light was orange. His little tribe slept all around him in a jumbled orange clump, their limbs tangled and heads pillowed on one another, breathing each other’s breath. A fortress of snores and twitches. And guns.
The clustering had become a reflex. By day they were a bold bunch, all muscle and trash talk, itching to beat every cliff, river, or squeeze chute that got in their way. But when it came time to sleep, they huddled like children lost in a forest.
Joshua.
It slid in from the outskirts, a kitten of a sound, barely a breath of a word. He scanned the sleeping pack. None of them was the culprit. The whisper had come from beyond their bubble of orange light.
And then again, Joshua. So soft it might have been in his head. Was he dreaming? No. He was wide awake now.
“What?” He kept his voice low.
Joshua. It called to him. Someone was out there.
He counted them and, sure enough, came up one short. Then he remembered Huxley. She’d never shown up. In all the excitement about the mummies, they had forgotten about her.
“Huxley?” he whispered.
One of the women stirred. She lifted her head. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”
Her eyes closed.
He sat there for another few minutes, listening intently. But the tunnel was silent again. He lay back and tried to sleep. No dice. Voice or not, Huxley was in his head now. She was alone down there, terrified no doubt, probably lost. She’d asked for it, staying back. Accusing him with her glares.
At the end of a sleepless half hour, Clemens sighed and stood up. He didn’t believe in conscience. But the voice had him going now. Screw it, he thought. Bring her in. Maybe she’d show a little gratitude.
He stood up and tiptoed from their orange halo. No sense waking anyone. By morning, he’d be back, with Huxley in tow. One more rebel to add to his collection.
As he headed down the tunnel, the image came to Clemens of an immense throat about to swallow him, and for a minute he almost returned to get his sawed-off shotgun. But his knees were bad enough without the extra weight. Besides which, for the past six thousand miles they had found nothing alive larger than a lobster. Satan is dead. Long live…whatever.
Down he sank through the tunnel. The thunder of the waterfall grew louder.
Huxley was waiting just inside the entrance. Her pale face appeared in Clemens’s light. The whites of her eyes bulged. She looked indignant.
“I told you not to stay behind,” he said to her.
She didn’t say anything. Sulking. Probably hungry. It was going to be a chore prodding her up the trail.
Just the same, Clemens was glad he’d come to fetch her. He would work it into his script, the tale of his midnight rescue. Never mind that it had taken him less than three hours to descend. He’d make it eight hours. Hours? Days. Milk it for all it was worth. People would hail his compassion. Reviewers would note his guardian care of the crew. Couldn’t save everyone, poor Quinn, but not for lack of trying. Everything helped during awards competitions.
Huxley went on staring at him. She didn’t make a move to come up the trail. “So let’s go,” he said, descending the final stretch.
She glared at him.
“Can’t we just get along, Hux?”
Clemens stopped. Now he saw the blood painting the spike between her legs. Her mouth was sewn shut. She was impaled on a stalagmite. “Jesus, mother,” said Clemens. He stepped back from the mess.
Huxley’s eyes followed him. Impossible. She was still alive.
Joshua.
Clemens knifed at the shadows with his light. The darkness parted. It sealed shut again. The walls glistened with waterfall sweat. There was a crevice. Something moved in there. He thrust the light at it.
Eyes glittered back at him. A face in there. It spoke his name again. But this time it was out loud. “Joshua.”
Clemens jumped. “What?” The thing didn’t answer. For a moment, he thought his buddy in the flowstone had come back to life and broken free. But the eyes weren’t pink. There was no rack of horns. He had a tattered, greasy cowl of hair and a ragged beard, years long.
The beast eased from its womb of a crevice.
Stone scraped on stone as it emerged. To Clemens’s shock, it was wearing that suit of armor m
ade with green jade Clemens had found on the ground. The green platelets tinkled like chandelier glass.
The stone tube began crying from above. They sounded like puppies. The men’s screams were even shriller than the women’s.
Reject. Refuse. Make it go away. Clemens tried to pace his breathing. This couldn’t be happening. The city was dead. Killed. Just bones.
Clemens remembered his camera. Even as he backed away, he could not help thinking what a great shot this would have made. In the belly of the abyss, in a city of lost souls, out of sweating stone…Satan was resurrecting himself.
ARTIFACTS
The United Nations Subplanetary Treaty
Recognizing that it is in the interest of all mankind that the subplanet shall continue forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and shall not become the scene or object of international discord; acknowledging the substantial contributions to scientific knowledge resulting from international cooperation in scientific investigation in the subplanet; etc…. The signatory governments have agreed as follows:
Article I [The Subplanet for Peaceful Purposes Only]
The subplanet shall be used for peaceful purposes only. There shall be prohibited, inter alia, any measures of a military nature, such as the establishment of military bases and fortifications, the carrying out of military maneuvers, as well as the testing of any type of weapons.
Article IV [Territorial Claims]
All previously asserted rights of or claims to territorial sovereignty beneath the international waters of the Oceans and Seas shall be frozen for the duration of this treaty.
All previously asserted rights of or claims to territorial sovereignty beneath the existing boundaries of sovereign nations shall hold jurisdiction over their own nationals in those contained areas.
Nothing contained in Article IV re territorial claims shall overrule Article I. There shall be no military measures of any nature in the subplanet, whether beneath the Oceans and Seas or beneath sovereign nations.
Seven Years Later
2
SAINT MATTHEW ISLAND, FAR WESTERN ALASKA
Mommy?
The little voice floated through the blue fog.
Ali straightened in the long cut of earth. It had rained last night, turning the sedge emerald green. The muddy bones were spattered with white drops.
She stood still for a minute, listening for more, trying to make sense of the haunting. The heart is an echo chamber. Memories round on you. Ali accepted that. But her daughter had been dead for seven years now. Maggie had finally let go of her.
It was the bones, she decided. All these children’s bones.
“Maggie?” she whispered.
The fog made no answer. The presence faded. Ali looked down. Her yellow galoshes glistened beside the tumbled ribs and skulls.
Sleep, baby.
Ali returned to her work. Summer was nearly over. In a few weeks, the island would return to the wind and ice. The dead could have their peace.
Like so many digs, this one resembled a sewer project with its trenches, shovels, string, and colored pin flags. Besides the bones, the dig held the usual pottery shards, carved trinkets, and bric-a-brac of days long gone. But there was no Babylon under here, no lost Atlantis, no gold of kings. Only mystery.
Math-3, as they had dubbed the third of the St. Matthew’s excavations, was a common, even sorry, place. Yet it promised to change the story of man. Her task was to decipher the slaughter of these Ice Age children.
After seven weeks of soggy work under a midnight sun, they were close to solving the mystery. Ali could feel it. The bones were guiding her someplace. Going forward meant seeing…seeing like a hadal, not a human. But she kept bumping up against the Sape barrier.
“Sape” referred to Homo sapiens, and barrier referred to an engrained mind-set. It was probably going to take another generation before people finally came to accept that they and their ancestors had been sharing the planet with a separate and once superior species of man until just a few years ago. Technically both species were human, but that offended the hell out of folks, so the street divided them into human and hadal.
A little over one decade had passed since the planet’s Interior had been “discovered.” That was when it became clear that Homo hadalis (for Hades Man) had preceded his cousin throughout early Europe, Asia, and the Americas, including this island that was once part of the Bering Strait land bridge. Archeologists had gone scurrying back to their supposedly exhausted sites—ancient tells, pyramids, and middens—to figure out how they could have missed an entire epoch in mankind’s history. Digging deeper, down through the Sape barrier, they were uncovering a tale of codependency, competition, and racial warfare that dated back twenty thousand years or more.
Even with all the renewed archeological vigor, Saint Matthew Island should have been irrelevant. It was an uninhabited flyspeck in the middle of a hostile sea. Before World War II, the U.S. Coast Guard had placed a small, irrelevant installation here that lasted barely three years. In between storms, an intrepid seaman named Jones had gone exploring the island on foot and strayed across odd petroglyphs half-buried at the root of the grassy mound that Ali now stood before.
Shortly afterward, Jones had gone AWOL. Until getting here, Ali had not realized how unlikely going AWOL would have been. The frigid sea chopped at the island, a relentless boundary. Swimming would have been impossible. A raft would have been swept away. The tallest vegetation stood no higher than your ankle. There was no place to hide, no way to escape. Ali wondered about foul play, or suicide. At any rate, the commander had written off Jones’s glyphs as “Eskimo scrawl,” and they were forgotten about.
Then a year ago, a grad student from northern Spain had stumbled across the old Coast Guard file with its black-and-white photos. Suspecting these might be pictures of hadal glyphs, young Gregorio Montaña had taken them to the Institute of Human Studies, Ali’s brainchild. In short order that had led to this fogbound excavation.
Ali was a linguistics expert, not an archeologist. She had come for glyphs, not bones. But when she and her team had peeled back the thick lichen mat—on a whim of hers, a whispered suggestion—they had found the bones waiting. Ever since, she had been wrestling with them.
Forty-three sets of children’s bones lay in a row at the foot of the mound and its wall of glyphs. The children—all girls, all Ice Age humans—had been ritually sacrificed. Even Ali’s untrained eye could read the knife marks on the front of their neck vertebrae.
“Here you are, Alexandra.”
The voice jerked Ali from her thoughts. What emerged from the fog was the handsomest man she had ever seen. It was not a matter of personal taste. Some creatures are simply born perfectly formed. With his long black hair and Basque cheekbones, Gregorio was one of them.
“It is like hide-and-seek with you,” he said, waving at the fog by way of explanation. But also he meant the kiss. Things had actually gone that far last night. Just one quick good-night peck. Enough to crack the earth open. “You like to be by yourself too much.”
Ali saw the bouquet of little wildflowers in his fist. Gregorio was in full siege mode.
“I’m trying to make sense of things,” she said. “Before it’s too late.” She gestured at the bones by way of explanation. But she also meant the kiss.
For some unfathomable reason, this god had decided to fall head over heels in love with a woman fourteen years and three months his senior, a woman who had been a nun before she became a mother, a wife who had never been married, a widow whose husband might not even be dead. Ali still didn’t know what to do with Gregorio, scold him or run from him. Or jump him. For what it was worth, Gregorio didn’t know what to do with himself.
“Yes,” he said, turning to the bones. “It is time to put the children to bed for the winter.”
Unable to properly excavate the site, they had decided to leave everything in situ and cover it over again with the blanket of lichen mat. A larger team would come fo
r the bones the next summer.
As if suddenly noticing the bouquet in his hand, Gregorio laid it beside a skull. That eased some of the tension. Now they could be on the same page, he and Ali, attending to the mystery of the bones.
“This is eating me up,” said Ali. “Why kill these children? What a horrible day that must have been.”
Gregorio shrugged. “Savage gods,” he said. “One more sadness in the universe.”
Ali could smell him. “There are too many of them,” she said. “All killed at once. All females.”
“An orgy of blood,” he said. “A hadal thing.”
“That’s what gets me, though,” she said. “It’s not a hadal thing. There is not a single instance of child sacrifice in their world. They were vicious, but when it came to human captives they were pragmatists. The women were used as breeders. The men became slaves. But it was the children who were the real treasure. They were integrated into the life cycle of the underworld. They were beloved, especially the girls. There are captive tales of hadals sacrificing themselves in order to protect a human child.”
“There is a limit to love,” Gregorio declared.
“Excuse me?” Just last night he had declared the very opposite.
Others in the office made do with Greg. But from the very start she had pronounced every vowel in his name. It sounded rounder and richer. And it drew out his presence, even when he wasn’t in the room. Also, of course, it was his actual name. In turn she was Alexandra. Alek-sondra. And Gregorr-io. Only slowly had she become aware that their courtship was a public affair, or even that it was a courtship. Everyone in the office listening to their weaving of sounds could tell something was in the works.
“What I mean is, we were just animals to them,” he said.
“Agreed,” said Ali, “but child sacrifice wasn’t their style. Capturing humans meant training hunters and sending expeditions to the surface and maintaining a slave network. Their empire was built on slaves. We’ve found codes of law that dealt with the treatment of slaves. Killing a slave was a serious offense. How do you explain this then? Forty-three children, in one fell swoop, their throats cut, their bodies abandoned. And these were girls who could have produced hundreds of more children for them.” Girls, she thought, like her Maggie.
