Neanderthal

by John Darnton

  Then he began to feel something funny, as if the cabin was slowly filling up with water. But it wasn’t happening inside the cabin; it was inside his head, a strange, frightening occupation of his skull. It was familiar, and he knew where he had felt it before. His heart began racing. But it was impossible!

  “What’s going on?” Sheriden cried. “I feel something weird.” He ripped the bandage off his eyes, revealing two blood-caked slits.

  Kane felt it before he saw it: something above him, the presence of a thick dark shadow. Slowly, with dread in his heart, he raised his head. There, on the other side of the window caked with ice, staring down at him, was the overly large face, the mouth as wide and ugly as a scar, the flat nose, the murderous eyes. The features were blurred, as if encased in ice, but they were wicked, arrogant, filled with unrelenting hate. The two of them locked stares. In his mind, Kane heard an echo: You’d do the same to us, wouldn’t you?

  Then he heard others moving around. How many of them were there?

  “What’s happening?” shouted Sheriden hysterically.

  Kane didn’t answer. He was too terrified. He heard the sounds they made as they took up positions around the chopper, the grunts, the rending as the metal scraped against the rock below. He felt them lifting, a few small bounces, more scraping.

  “What’s happening? Shit, why don’t you answer?”

  The cabin tilted like a tree in a storm, rocked for a bit, then slowly turned downward in a large arc. The moment seemed frozen in time. The radio flickered on, and Sodder’s voice said, “Hello, hello, do you read?” Sheriden screamed. There was a huge crash as the chopper smashed once more on the ledge and then toppled over soundlessly into space. Kane was floating, falling down, too scared to scream, waiting for it all to end with his body and brains smeared into a thousand pieces. As he floated upside down, he thought vaguely that he was pissing in his pants.

  Not long after the fireball in the ravine, Sodder’s helicopter landed close by. The spinning of its blades obliterated all traces of the footprints in the snow. The other men, who had heard the crash but did not see it, came running down the slope. They all agreed that it must have been some kind of freak wind gust out of nowhere.

  * * *

  Matt awoke early in the morning and went to the village. First he looked for Longtooth and found him fast asleep in a hut. Not far from his head were leftover bits of raw meat on a stone slab. Long-tooth had continued to be a hunter and had even drawn two other young males out on expeditions. Matt woke him by rocking his shoulder gently, and together they went outside and sat near the fire pit. Longtooth rubbed his eyes, stretched, and looked around. It was a brilliantly clear morning with dew on the juniper bushes. Cotton clouds had replaced the steel-gray sky that had dropped tons of snow on the other side of the mountain.

  Matt took out a notebook and pencil and tried to draw a picture of Susan, hoping that Longtooth would understand that he was asking him to communicate with her. But it was hopeless; Longtooth didn’t understand, and Matt quickly gave up.

  Then he gave Longtooth a task to perform, the most dangerous one in his short career as a hunter. He drew an animal he wanted Longtooth to slay, and worked carefully to portray it unmistakably: the bulk, the sheen of the fur, the powerful claws, the flat head with long teeth and small beady eyes. It was a good represen­tation of a cave bear. Then he drew Longtooth attacking the beast. The hominid watched him closely, noting the pencil moving on the paper in fascination. Matt drew Longtooth with his spear next to a dead bear, then handed the notebook to him to examine. The hominid got the message. He appeared excited; he went to his hut and reappeared with his spear. In his heart Matt wished him luck, for Longtooth’s success was essential to the plan.

  Next Matt went in search of Sergei. He found him washing at the stream and explained the plan to him, watching the Russian furrow his brows as he took it in. He could tell that Sergei doubted its efficacy but was too kindhearted to say so. He had been dis­tressed by Susan’s abduction and clearly would do anything to try to rescue her.

  “It is very imaginative,” he said finally, offering a handshake as if to close a deal.

  “Let’s get started,” Matt said. “The less time we lose, the better.” In the far distance he heard an alien, mechanical sound, muf­fled but steady. His gut tightened: It sounded like a helicopter. The forces of the Institute were getting close.

  First they needed lumber. It was beyond their capability to fell huge trees and carve them into boards, but they had some ready-made bits of wood that had been used in roofing the huts. They de­molished three of them. For the longer pieces, they roamed the forest until they found downed trees.

  Matt fashioned a large stone hammer and attached a handle, talking out loud as the hominids watched his every move.

  “This is called hafting. You guys never learned how to do it, ac­cording to the textbooks.” Then he shaped large pieces of flint into wedges, holding the lumps of rock carefully in one hand and with the other using a rock to strike off a series of small chips. “The Levallois technique, we call it,” he said as they gave him uncom­prehending looks. “Named after a Paris suburb. Your ancestors were pretty good at it back in the Middle Paleolithic. Of course, that was before you gave up France for this place.”

  Matt knocked the wedges into the trees already softened by decay, hammered them home with the ax, and split the trunks. It was exhausting; he and Sergei took turns. After two hours, they had a large stack of usable beams, which Blue-Eyes, Hurt-Knee, and five others helped them carry to the village.

  They drafted more workers and Matt helped them make stone axes. He had spent a summer years ago with archaeology graduate students who replicated the lifestyle of prehumans in the woods of Massachusetts—and soon the group was turning out tools, a tiny prehistoric workshop. The clinks of their shaping could be heard for miles. When they had half a dozen axes, Matt and Sergei took a group back into the forest, searching for strong pines with flawless, rounded trunks. They hacked down four of them, cut them into logs ten feet long, and used stone axes to chisel the ends smooth.

  Back in the village, they collected all the animal skins that remained from their earlier hunts. They stacked them in a pile near the beams and logs. By evening, when almost everything was pre­pared, the whole center of the village was taken up with their new equipment.

  Matt was too worried about Susan to eat a proper meal. He had lost a whole day making his preparations, but there was no other way. With a notebook and pencil, he sat down at the fire near Sergei. Earlier, the Russian and Longtooth had roasted a haunch of antelope on the fire; now the hominid had gone off to distribute the cooked meat to his coterie of hunters. Sergei had crushed bits of raspberry leaf, heated it with water for ersatz tea, and followed this with a crude cigarette made from bits of jasmine leaf wrapped in vine. He took a long drag, coughed, and offered a drag to Matt, who shook his head and began sketching. He was dissatisfied with his first attempt, crumpled the paper, and threw it in the fire.

  “It doesn’t have to be perfect,” Sergei said.

  “No, but it’s got to do the job.”

  He tried again, beginning from the base this time. He sketched a rough platform, supported by two of the logs, which would act as wheels. The other two logs could be placed ahead, so that the whole apparatus could roll forward. From the platform, he drew four upright beams, the supports for a smaller platform ten feet in the air. On that he drew a chamber, and then, extending from one side of it and still higher, a cylinder representing a neck. Then came the skull: a huge, frightening, unmistakable bear’s head. Finally, on the underside of the belly of the chamber, he added a small trap door. It looked good, a perfect representation of the renegades’ godhead. A perfect Trojan horse.

  So involved was Matt in examining his handiwork that he did not notice Kellicut until the older man eased up next to him and looked over his shoulder. Then Kellicut looked away, sniffed the air, looked at Sergei, and addressed him for th
e first time. “You’ve been cooking meat.” It wasn’t a question but a declaration of fact, and was stated as an accusation. Sergei nodded and casually took another drag on his cigarette.

  Kellicut gazed into the fire for a long time, and it became clear that he was contemplating a major pronouncement.

  “You know,” he said finally, turning to Matt and dragging out the words for maximum impact, “you have no right to do what you’re planning to do. This nasty little trick is a violation of every­thing we believe. It’s against everything I have devoted my life to.” He looked deeply into Matt’s eyes.

  “You cooperated with the Institute,” Matt retorted. “You came here first. You’re the one who opened Pandora’s box.”

  Kellicut paused. “Yes, that’s true,” he said. “I was always suspi­cious of the Institute—but not as suspicious as I should have been.” He paused. “I needed them. Without them I never would have had a chance to come here.”

  “They were using you.”

  “I knew that, but I was using them too. I was wary from the beginning. The scientists weren’t world class, their studies were all recent, they had too much money to throw around. But frankly, I didn’t care, not at first. They told me they had vague reports of sightings in the Pamirs. They wanted me to investigate. I jumped at the chance. Who wouldn’t? A prehistoric band of hominids—the mind reels at the thought. Even if there’s one chance in a million, it’s worth taking.”

  “Did you know they were here before you?”

  “Yes. I found that out from Sharafidin’s father. That made me even more suspicious but also more intrigued; they acted like they really believed in these things. I began to believe it too.”

  He stared into the fire. “Then when I got here I found these incredible beings. I saw they had this special power. And suddenly all my suspicions took shape and I was on to their game. I knew the power could be used for darker purposes—that was what the In­stitute was all about. I decided to cut myself off.”

  “But you sent back the skull.”

  “Right. A final message to discourage them. It didn’t work.”

  “Why did you bury the diary?”

  “That was for you. I thought the Institute would send you looking for me. I knew only you could locate it. At that point I still cared about things like reputation—I wanted you to know what I had found. But I didn’t count on them sending someone with you. I became suspicious that you had joined them. By then, I didn’t care about sharing my discovery. I cared only about the power, learning it, acquiring it, a road to a higher truth.”

  “We were never part of the Institute, Jerry. You should have known that,” Matt said.

  “Maybe. But you’re still part of the problem.”

  Matt put down his pad, but he was sure Kellicut had seen his blueprint. He considered telling him that Van had been sending back satellite messages and that there was reason to believe that the Institute’s enforcers were already on the way, but decided not to.

  Kellicut nodded at the notebook. “Now perhaps you see why your scheme is wrong, morally wrong. It’s beyond the pale. You saw what happened when you rescued Van. You cannot bring con­cepts from the outside world into this one. To do so is evil. It can­not be allowed to succeed, I’m afraid”—here his voice dropped a notch, which made it sound menacing—“even if that means al­lowing Susan to perish.”

  Matt looked at him in disbelief. “You can’t mean that,” he said. Kellicut didn’t flinch. “I do.” He paused and looked into the fire again, so that the flames lit the outline of his face and his eyes became two black holes. He sighed, as if reluctantly assuming a bur­den, and said, “It can’t be allowed to succeed. I won’t let it. If you choose to go ahead with it, then you will die as well as Susan.”

  Kellicut rose and within seconds disappeared into the forest, under the full moon.

  27

  Susan knew Kee-wak was coming before she could hear him because she detected a buzz of excitement in the cavern above the pit and also, in a way she couldn’t define, she was able to intuit his approach.

  Her thirst was so powerful her whole mouth felt sucked dry. She thought of feigning sleep but knew the ruse would not work; there was nothing to do but wait for him.

  First came the praetorian guard, two creatures with striped yellow skins hung over their shoulders like capes. They peered down contemptuously, and she felt each of them briefly probing her mind, two clouds that passed through her consciousness and were gone. She held no interest for them, and they backed away from the edge of the pit.

  She dropped her eyes to the dirt floor and saw the bulky shadow appear over her own like a gargoyle. She looked up and there Kee­wak was on the lip of the pit, his height accentuated because he was above her, a grotesque statue on a pedestal. He had red paint around his mouth so that it looked like an open wound, his eyes offset in black were sunken like a hyena’s, and around his brow was the ragged black-and-white monkey skin.

  He seemed to know she was thirsty, and he lowered a half skull with filthy brown water in it, but with her hands behind her she could not raise it to her lips. He made no attempt to help her. The water looked too rank to drink anyway. He jumped into the pit behind her, and clasped the snare, pulling it even tighter. The smell of him, an odor of musk and blood, made her reel. He grabbed her by the hair, pulled so that she fell to her knees, and stood towering behind her. She could feel the slap of the gun holster against her back. Then she felt what she had dreaded: He began to enter her through the mind, slowly, like a leak spreading. Then the pain began, a dull ache, at first, which grew sharper and sharper until she wanted to scream. He was right behind her; it was as if he were inside her, looking out through her cornea, receiving what she saw upon his own retina. But he was also infiltrating her pain center.

  She maneuvered herself nearer to the pit wall. Inch by inch, she pulled herself closer, disregarding the pain in her shoulders and the spreading ache inside, until she saw the object she was searching for. She did not look at the mirror until she was only two feet away, and then she opened both eyes wide and stared straight ahead into the silvery reflection, seeing her own eyes staring back, widened in fear but recognizable, deeply green. She looked at her own eyes as if they were twin wells of green water and she was falling into them, until suddenly she felt a jerk behind her, a retreat, and the ache that had closed in on her mind like a tightening fist abruptly relaxed and disappeared. Kee-wak cried out—in confusion, not in pain, it seemed—and with a single bound he leaped out of the pit and was gone, like a specter disappearing with the dawn.

  She stood up. There was a smidgen of grease on her lower back where he had touched her, and she rubbed her wrist in it, working it around and loosening the bind of the snare.

  * * *

  Kellicut felt no fear. He was like prophets of old, the Christian be­lievers praying in the underground tunnels of the Coliseum. He was driven by the all-encompassing conviction that what he was doing was right.

  He skirted the burial ground and arrived at the mouth of the cave at first light. There was no one about, nothing to interrupt the calming music of the birds. He had one shirt left to his name and he had decided to wear it—out of a sense of occasion and also because he was an emissary and emissaries dressed for their role.

  Kellicut touched the pocket and felt the piece of paper there. This was his message, his mission, but he could hardly hand it over like some courier arriving unexpectedly in Caesar’s Rome from the out­skirts of the empire. This would take some doing to be done right.

  He looked around outside before he stepped inside the cave. He was not saying good-bye exactly, he told himself, because he might well return. He was just fortifying himself with the sight of the out-of-doors for his trip through the tunnels. He had never been inside the cave but he had often imagined how dark and oppres­sive it must be.

  His mission was not without perils. What if he stumbled upon a thick-headed guard who decided he had come for some nefariou
s purpose and cut him down on the spot? What if he could not reach the one he needed to, the only one who was sufficiently intelligent to figure out the warning he was attempting to deliver?

  The tunnel was huge and cut straight into the mountainside as if it had been constructed for a giant railroad. He felt dwarfed by it, listening to his footsteps echoing back. There was no point, really, in being quiet, since he had come to be discovered. The tunnel curved, then gave way to a large underground cavern, lit by torches set into the walls. He stopped and listened: nothing but the occasional drip of water from stalactites landing on the stalagmites below. He was overtaken by a wave of doubt and had to fight it down. He thought he felt them invading his mind but he couldn’t be sure.

  Just keep going, he told himself, and soon he lost himself in the details: the niches cut for torches, which intrigued him, and the oc­casional abandoned hearth. He chose the largest passageway and followed it as it rose gradually, moving up inside the mountain. He passed more pathways on either side and was bewildered by the possibilities. The tunnel turned left, then right. He saw a narrow entrance under an arch, took it, and found himself inside a giant cavern, and a dozen faces turned toward him.

  He had expected to catch them off guard but instead he was the one surprised, as powerful arms grabbed him from behind, squeez­ing his shoulders so tight he couldn’t move. As the pain cut into his shoulder blades, the truth struck home: They had lured him to the cavern—that was why he had encountered no one in the tunnels. Now he had only one hope, that they were sufficiently endowed with curiosity to keep him alive, to wonder why he had come, and that they would take him to the highest authority.

  He was not kept in suspense. Three of the creatures trundled him along a side tunnel, one on each side and the third holding the point of a spear in the small of his back, until they came to a side chamber. Inside, reclining on a rock slab, was Kee-wak, who turned his head slightly to look at him but otherwise did not move. Kellicut was thunderstruck: So majestic was the creature lying there, so powerful, so manifestly superior to those Kellicut had been living among these past months. He felt a curious flood of re­lief; the decision he had made, risking his life, had been correct. The renegades were clearly marked by destiny as the future of the species. His relief was quickly followed by another feeling, of Kee-­wak’s energy pouring inside him and unrolling to occupy his re­ceptor field. It made him feel shaky, almost panicky, because it was so much stronger than anything he had experienced before.