by Bill Schutt
“Mac, we can’t take the chance that this shit doesn’t exist. Like I said, the commies could overrun that entire region at any moment.”
“And if it does exist?”
“If it does exist, then find it and bring it out of there.”
“Bring it . . . out?”
“You heard me,” Hendry said. “Shouldn’t be too hard to put it on ice.”
“And then what?”
“What you can’t bring out—destroy.”
“Destroy it?” Yanni asked.
“Right. We can’t have it falling into the wrong hands—if it hasn’t already.”
“Whatever it is,” Yanni said, quietly.
“Exactly,” Hendry continued. “Whatever it is.”
Mac held up a hand. “Look, Pat, I’ve only got a coupla thousand questions. But let me start with just one. Who did all the gnawing on that rib? From what I’ve seen so far, whatever it was isn’t in Pliny’s figures.”
Hendry hesitated. “We don’t know, Mac. Like I said, some of that codex is in shit shape or missing.” Then he gestured toward the bone. “But from the look of those bite marks I’d say the current inhabitants of that region might be a lot more interesting than a herd of little elephants.”
And a whole lot more dangerous, Mac thought.
Hendry turned to Yanni. He knew that her rather unique skills related to animal communication had landed her a job at the Central Park Menagerie, working with their elephants. He believed that those same skills might be perfectly matched to the mission he was planning. “And no offense about those pachyderms, Yanni.”
The woman gave him the briefest of nods. “I’ve got a question for you, too, Major.”
“Shoot,” he replied.
Yanni pointed to the stack of photos. “What’s Omega mean?”
The major flashed Yanni something Mac had been calling Hendry’s “mortician smile” for years. “It’s, um, one of the symbols they’ve been finding over and over again in this codex.” Then the officer appeared to give the revelation a dismissive wave. “This Pliny guy seemed obsessed with it.”
“It’s the last letter in the Greek alphabet, Yanni,” Mac said. “It often means, ‘the End.’”
Yanni shot both men a quizzical look. “As in—?”
“As in the end of the world,” Mac said.
He and Yanni turned toward the major.
“Yeah, that, too,” Hendry replied, sheepishly.
Chapter 2
Cerae
Some mischievous people always there.
Last several thousand years, always there.
In future, also . . . always there.
—The Dalai Lama (#14)
Terra incognita: three weeks sailing, and more than 13,000 stadia* from Taprobane*
April, a.d. 67
An early thaw.
Or so he believed.
That is how it began for Gaius Plinius Secundus. “A cataclysmic melting,” he hypothesized, though it was strange to consider that without it, Pliny could not have hoped to complete his mission. During the past four weeks, he and his centuria of eighty soldiers had traveled uphill, using the channeled scablands as a well-placed trail, carved by nature. Nevertheless, it was a disquieting path, knowing as he did that the same water-blasted wounds over which they walked had been far from well placed for those living below.
The path of destruction descended from the mountains into what had previously been a fair-sized city, named after the family lineage of the late Prince Pandaya, the most recent and final governor. From what Pliny could determine, a new and terrible river, glutted with sediment and debris, had come roaring and frothing through the city, sparing none and leaving behind only traces of buildings torn from their foundations.
All of this, he concluded, had occurred within the past year.
But Pliny also knew that the surge of mud, trees, and other natural battering rams had been more effective than a thousand trailblazers and road builders. Had the doomed city not met its fate when it did, there would have been no way up through an obstacle course of local politics, forest, ice crevasses, and sheer cliffs—no matter how early in the season they tried, and no matter how many times Emperor Nero would have commanded them to keep trying.
For a time, Pliny was grateful. But now he realized just how easy it had been to mistake bad omens for good fortune.
Now listen, Proculus, because I record these words for your eyes, and for my conscience, and for the dust of the earth. So began Pliny the Elder’s account of a lost expedition. Remind me, old friend, that these strange and terrifying things really occurred. Remind me Proculus, that you recall them as I do.
Sailing forty days from Sinai past the horn of India we made landfall and trekked far inland. After a journey of great length but little intrigue or danger we arrived finally upon scenes of desolation and destruction. These evoked a new and immediate respect for a natural world that holds us so frighteningly at the mercy of its moods. Boulders, greater in size than Phidias’ statue of Zeus at Olympia, were dislodged and carried downhill by the flood, with a single stone obliterating what had once been the royal palace. A city of frescoes and marble concourses, of sapphires and silk, built over generations, must have vanished in only a few heartbeats.
Climbing for twenty days along the path cleared for us by the catastrophe, we detected no blade of grass, no sign of life. I wonder if it will be possible for me, ever again, to be complacent about this world upon which we live. I cannot escape the feeling that Nature watches us all with the barely repressed fury of Poseidon and Talos, waiting to lash out.
Above an altitude of ten stadia and nearly reaching the snow line, the mudflow over which Pliny and his men walked had solidified into plains of semihardened earth. Already these had been cut through by new glacial streams and it was here, at last, that they began to encounter evidence of the local inhabitants—footprints and handprints along the water’s edge. Most of the markings seemed to have been made by people of small stature but even so, Pliny could see that they appeared so deformed in their extremities that they might only vaguely be called people. He shared an unspoken question with each of the men who saw the prints: Are these the Cerae?
Pliny’s mind formulated another question, though this one he knew he could answer himself. During a decade in which he had survived African fevers, a shipwreck, pirates, and nearly every other disaster the gods could inflict upon him, the Roman asked himself:
How did I get here?
As a young man, Pliny had entered the army as a junior officer, demonstrating both heroism and keen intelligence in conflicts spanning all of Germania to the African provinces. Between a string of promotions, Pliny began to write extensively—of his travels, of military conquests and natural history.
Beginning with Nero’s paranoid stepfather, Claudius, Pliny’s ability to write about anything more controversial than grammar and cooking had become a dangerous endeavor. Then, just when it seemed that life in Rome could not get any worse, the gods made certain that it did. With the death of Claudius (poisoned, it was rumored, by his own wife), the seventeen-year old Nero ascended to the throne. Standing before the Senate, he took the name Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus—which became wildly popular with his sycophants and ghouls. Others, though, who spoke in hushed tones, came up with a more appropriate title—one that forced Pliny to realize that even writing a cookbook was now a risk. For neither Pliny nor any other reasonably sane person in all of Rome would knowingly attract special attention from the Cannibal Emperor. It was a name spoken only in whispers, and one Nero had earned from his penchant for dressing up in the skins and claws of a wild animal before attacking his terrified victims and consuming their genitalia.
Pliny was grateful, therefore, when Nero became obsessed with a mythical race of half-human grotesqueries said to inhabit an unknown land beyond the Emodian Mountains.* The obsession led the emperor to assign Pliny three ships, along with eighty battle-hardened soldiers and their of
ficers. Nero’s orders had been clear: “Find the Cerae, learn their many secrets, then return to Rome and teach them to me.” As an afterthought, the emperor had added, “And bring me a Ceran head, pickled in spirits.”
Pliny hoped that his immediate enthusiasm for what might seem to some a suicide mission hadn’t betrayed a strong secondary motive—to embark on a trip of such duration that it might outlast Nero’s rule.
But did the Cerae even exist? he wondered. And if so, were they people, minor gods, or perhaps even monsters? Pliny had tried to compare the strange markings in a patch of streamside mud with everything he knew about the Cerae. It wasn’t much. They were said to have thrived in the time before the Ogygian flood described by Plato—a primeval deluge that brought with it calamity on a worldwide scale. Then, while the ice and water receded into the Emodian Mountains, so too did the Cerae recede from the rest of humanity. As legend told it, they lived at the gateway to Hades, a region home to all manner of fantastic animals, plants, and trees, some with fur or leaves of stark white—the color of death.
Beasts, they may be, Pliny wrote. But beasts with skilled hands. What we discovered twenty days’ march beyond the prints and scratches in the ground should have removed most every doubt of this. The scablands over which we had walked, and the destruction of Pandaya were not created by a cataclysmic thaw of alpine ice and mud. Colossal and clearly hand-hewn blocks of stone had been formed into a dam, and then levered intentionally to either side.
This alone should have been warning enough to turn back; but curiosity, and my own fatal pride, led us into thinning air and deepening snow, even as the mountain pass narrowed and the tall massifs on either side grew more imposing. Even after a level and easily traveled plain of ice collapsed beneath our feet, revealing itself to be a cleverly constructed trap bridging a bottomless ravine, I callously measured the lost (nearly half of our men) and the injured against those still able to continue the expedition. I sent the Medicus, Chiron and nineteen deemed unfit to trek higher, back down to the ruins of Pandaya, and pushed the twenty who remained with me to higher ground.
One of our finest young engineers, the centurion from Libya known as Severus, held contrary views to everything I believed we had seen. To him, the ground that collapsed beneath our feet could have been a natural formation. In his mind’s eye, the prints in the mud were made by ordinary animals—at least three different types. The great dam could have been built by the Pandayans themselves, to control the flow of water through their city—with the destruction that followed a result of flawed design rather than intent.
Then listen, Severus—for I can tell you now that conjuring what could have been, inevitably attracts its dark twin, what is.
Chapter 3
Morlocks
I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.
—H. G. Wells
We are not retreating—we are advancing in another direction.
—General Douglas MacArthur
On the Labyrinth’s shelf, South Tibet
July 9, 1946
“We ain’t alone.”
No sooner had Yanni confirmed Mac’s suspicion than the strange whistling ceased as abruptly as it had begun. He found this to be even more unnerving than the sounds themselves.
Yanni’s stare was fixed on one of the car-sized boulders arrayed at the base of the nearest cliff face.
Mac nudged her with an elbow. “You see something?”
“I think so,” she replied, quietly. “In the space between those two boulders.”
Mac squinted. “I don’t see anything. Just some—”
What he saw then was movement. A snow-packed section of the wall visible between the stones seemed to have shifted. Now, though, it was still.
“Some, what?” came a voice from behind, and Mac gave a start. It was Jerry.
“—rocks, ice, and snow,” Mac said, completing the thought. “But they don’t ripple in the breeze, do they?”
“Nope,” Yanni responded. “But fur does.”
Jerry sniffed at the air, which had picked up a thick, musky odor. “Jeez, you smell that?”
They did.
Yanni ignored the comment. “I’m gonna try something,” she said, turning to Mac for approval.
He nodded without hesitation.
Yanni turned toward the space between the boulders again and began to whistle, pausing, to mimic as best she could the high-pitched sounds they had heard earlier.
There was no response, and the section of rock wall where they had seen movement was apparently unimpressed as well. Yanni resumed her whistling.
“I found the crate with the weapons, Mac,” Jerry said, keeping his voice low. “And pretty much everything survived intact.” By way of demonstration he opened his parka to reveal the Colt .45 he had holstered to his belt.
As he did this, an ear-piercing shriek rang out—then several more, coming from different directions. Mac caught a flash of movement from the rock wall and then another movement, farther away along the cliff face. Then another.
It appeared to R. J. MacCready as if eight-foot-tall, vaguely humanoid sections of snow and rock had stepped out of the very face of the mountain itself.
Metropolitan Museum of Natural History
Fifth Floor
Charles Knight was clearly unimpressed with the typewritten communiqué Major Hendry had shown him several minutes earlier. In stodgy, official Army jargon, it gave the officer permission to appoint anyone he chose to an advisory role in “Project Kelvinator”—the mission title, a less-than-subtle nod to the ubiquitous household refrigerator company.
“So let me get this straight,” Knight said, holding up a codex photograph. “You think these weird-looking simians Pliny drew might have been what chewed on that elephant rib?”
“With no other suspects, that’s the current theory,” Hendry replied.
“Well, it’s not a theory. It’s a hypothesis,” Knight countered, sounding a bit too much like MacCready for Hendry’s liking. “And it’s wrong.”
The major frowned.
“Anybody paying attention can see that the primates in your codex were man-sized or smaller. And whatever gnawed that bone was big—a lot bigger than a human.”
Now the old guy was really beginning to remind him of MacCready. So instead of replying, Hendry eyed the sketches, paintings, and sculptures that seemed to cover every square inch of wall and every flat surface of the artist’s office. “You did all these?”
Knight ignored the question. “And now you’ve lost contact with them as well.”
“That’s correct.”
“But you’re not too concerned about that?”
The officer answered with another question of his own. “You do know MacCready, right?”
Knight thought about it for a moment. “Okay, you’ve made your point. So what can I do for you, Major Discomfort?”
“I don’t know, Chuck,” Hendry said, pausing to relish the sour expression he’d hoped to generate. “But Mac seems to think you’re a whiz and he trusts you. So . . . what can you do for me?”
“Let me think,” Knight responded, still wearing an annoyed expression. “Well, for one, I can probably translate this goddamned codex faster than the clowns you’ve been working with.”
“All right, you’re in!” Hendry said, slamming his fist down on Knight’s desk, the blow causing a sixteen-inch-high statue of T. rex to shift precariously. Then, just as suddenly, he turned to leave. “I’ll have a photo set of all the originals here by tomorrow.”
“Hold it,” Knight said, adjusting the King of the Dinosaurs to its former position. “You’ll have all the originals here by tomorrow,” he responded calmly. “And I’ll be working with an assistant.”
The major hesitated. “An assistant? Wait a minute. Who?”
Knight waved the major away from the closed office door and the puzzled officer took a step to the side. “Patricia,” he called.
Almost immediately, the door popp
ed open and a bespectacled head appeared. “Well hello!” came a cheerful greeting.
Now it was Hendry who winced, before turning back toward the elderly artist. “You had this all planned out, didn’t you? Right from the start!”
Knight flashed his best “who me?” look, then smiled. “Now if you’ll excuse us Major, Miss Wynters and I have quite a bit of work to do.”
Hendry dropped a handful of new photographs onto Knight’s desk. “Here, start with these.”
The artist picked up the first photo in the pile and used his hand lens to examine it. A passage by Pliny immediately drew him in and he roughed out the translation in his head.
“Unbelievable.”
A moment later Knight’s arm shot out and he passed half of the prints to his newly arrived colleague before returning to his examination of the photo.
“Well . . . I’ll leave you to it then,” Hendry said, but neither of the museum workers acknowledged him. The major considered emphasizing something about the top-secret nature of the project but instead he exited the office, making certain to close the door very quietly.
South Tibet
May, a.d. 67
During what Pliny eventually came to call his “last night of the old world,” the notorious insomniac had joined Severus and the rest of the night guard, adding his watchful eyes to theirs. The hours passed slowly and in silence. On this night, the air was so thin that only by chewing a third of the way through his remaining ration of coffee beans was it possible for Pliny to maintain his breathing without growing faint. Observing the moon as it passed behind a fleet of rapidly advancing clouds told him that the uncanny stillness of the narrow mountain pass—through which not even breezes stirred—would not last much beyond dawn.
“A storm is coming,” Severus said.
The commander nodded, weakly. Though they had reached a point at which the path could not possibly ascend more than a day’s walk higher, to Pliny the absence of sounds was more oppressive than the thin air. He listened with increasing intensity, for noises that never came. As dawn approached, he discovered that, with the high-altitude absence of trees and life’s usual background noise, the human brain created its own forests of the night. Something moaned threateningly among the nearer of the cliffs, and something howled back from the opposite cliff face. Pliny glanced at Severus with startled surprise, but he and the rest of the night guard had heard nothing.
