by Tim Curran
Somebody dropped their flashlight and it rolled past him, end over end, the arcing light picking out the fissured convolutions of the crevice itself and then bouncing over the lip and into the fathomless blackness below. The light reflected off the splintered blue ice walls and the sheathed icicles marking the descent into nameless depths far below. Then the light was gone. They never heard it hit, down and down and down it went, swallowed into the chasm.
His head spinning, Coyle finally allowed himself to suck in an unrestricted breath.
43
WHEN COYLE GOT TO his feet, that rumbling rose up again and everything vibrated. The cavern shook and icicles fell. Seismic waves of force passed through the glacier and Coyle and Gwen clung to each other as it felt like the entire cavern was about to collapse on them.
But it didn’t.
But something was happening.
Something far below them was making itself known and nobody really wanted to know what that was. But in their hearts, they were aware of what it might be. That something hellish and pestilential was being born down there and what they were hearing and feeling was its birth pains.
It died away, then came again and the Emperor shook, ice falling around them. It was repeated again and again and each time, that rumbling from below was louder, closer, more insistent like something was being summoned from the bottomless, crevassed underworld beneath.
While the rest of them just trembled at the very idea of it, Dayton followed it to its source: the huge circular tunnel punched into the ice wall that looked very artificial and very recent. The rumbling echoed up from the tunnel and though it seemed to come from far below, it was not far enough for anyones’ liking.
Lights panned the mouth of the tunnel, reflecting off the blue ice and dying off in the stygian blackness far below. There was something cold, eternal, and mordantly evil about what might be down there, but nobody dared comment on the fact.
“Long? Reja?” Dayton said. “Go over to the Polar Haven and get us some rope and climbing gear. The survey crew left quite a collection.”
“You’re not going down there?” Gwen said, astounded at the very idea.
“Yes, I am.”
“But you can’t do that . . . whatever it is . . . is down there!”
Dayton smiled thinly. “That’s why I came. To search for survivors and sort out anything that posed a danger. And down there, down below, is something I’ve been waiting a long time to see. Something very old.”
“Nicky!” Gwen said. “Will you please talk sense to this man!”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll talk sense to him all the way down.”
44
THE TUNNEL CANTED DOWN at a near perfect 30° angle so the incline wasn’t so bad at all. With Stabilicers on their boots, climbing harnesses, and rope, it was a fairly easy descent. Dayton was an old hand at mountaineering. He pounded in the titanium ice-screws, checked everyone’s climbing rigs, then led the way down.
Twenty minutes into it, Coyle began to get uneasy.
It was silent.
Dead silent.
The only sounds were the echoing of cleats digging into ice and rope threading through harnesses, men grunting and occasionally cursing. Nothing else. That rumbling had stopped almost as soon as they began their descent which made him think that whatever had been making it was lying in wait down there for them.
But he wouldn’t dwell on it.
He was less worried about himself and where he was going and what he might meet than he was about leaving Gwen and Horn above. Just the two of them. They were both capable . . . but there were dangers in Emperor Cave that no man or woman was the equal of.
They kept descending.
After a time, Dayton called out, “We’ve come two-hundred feet.”
“How far we going?” Coyle called down to him, his voice echoing off into stillness.
“We got four-hundred feet of rope.”
Coyle knew full well that Horn and Gwen were not happy with him for volunteering for this. Gwen, as a matter of fact, was downright pissed. But he had to do this. He had to see. Somehow, it was necessary.
As they decended, flashlights lighting up the tunnel and casting jumping shadows around them, he was amazed by the tunnel itself. The ice was old, pellucid and deep blue. The tunnel was perfectly symmetrical. No so much as a scratch or cut as if it had been burned through, melted, something.
He couldn’t even imagine how.
And part of him didn’t want to.
Down, down, down.
Goddamn Dayton, he’s leading us to our deaths and look how happily we follow.
Coyle was amazed by it.
Every single shred of survival instinct and self-preservation within him was screaming at him to get out of here, to get back to the chopper and get out . . . but was he listening? He was not. Is this what it was like for soldiers in battle? Knowing they were going to die but pushing further into the breach anyway, consumed by a higher purpose than simple continuation?
About ten minutes after Dayton called out that they were down well over 300 feet, he called them to a stop. “Wait here, all of you,” he said and went down alone. They listened to his cleats biting into the glacier, felt the tug of the rope.
They waited five minutes.
Coyle was amazingly warm. Part of that was the exertion, but another part was the ice itself which maintained an even 32° farenheit regardless of external temperatures. It was simply a matter of physics.
“All right!” Dayton called out. “Come down!”
Coyle was the last to reach the ice plateau that Dayton stood on. It was sort of a shelf, perfectly smooth. Dayton was standing at its outer edge. There was a drop of maybe fifteen feet and then . . . earth. Solid ground. The actual crust of Antarctica.
He pounded in another ice-screw and threaded his rope through his harness and rapelled down there.
They followed him, one by one.
The ground was uneven, frozen solid as granite, rising in low hills and tight hollows, rivers of ice spreading in every which direction. The ceiling was at least sixty feet above them, an absolutely dazzling display of hanging icicles. Light had never touched this place before. The ground had not been exposed to the sun in at least thirty million years.
They came to a lake of ice and crossed it.
With only flashlights to see by, it would have been easy to get lost down there as they threaded over ice flows and in-between rising shelves of rock and through winding hollows, but Dayton, as always, was prepared: every twenty feet or so he sprayed a glob of luminous paint, leaving a ghost trail behind them.
As they moved down a slope and finally reached a great flattened plateau that looked very much like an ancient riverbed, he said, “We’ve come down another seventy feet.”
As they crossed the rocky plateau, the belly of the glacier so high above now that their lights could not reach it, Coyle began to notice that instead of shelves of jutting rock and heaps of loose stones he was seeing titanic broken columns and flat slabs and what looked like shattered pyramidal shapes rising from the earth.
All of it was far too symmetrical to be natural in origin.
They were getting close to something now.
Something ancient.
Something that made him feel tense.
And they were all feeling it, he knew. He could sense it coming from every man in an unbroken current: an almost electric atavistic dread. But they pushed on and the shapes around them became more numerous and then, within ten minutes, a huge gully opened up before them . . . and rising from it and up into the glacier high above was what they had come to see.
45
THE CITY.
They were looking at a city and on a scale that dwarfed the great pyramids.
Coyle knew it was not of human origin. Perhaps part of the ruins that Dr. Gates from Kharkov Station had discovered. But that had been in the Dominion Range, an easy hundred miles from here . . . could the ruins extend that far?
The gully reached down farther than their lights would illuminate, the city going on and on, descending into blackness as it clung to the gully wall, then rising up out of the darkness below and ascending to unimaginable heights above. It was immense. Just a piece of an ancient city, but one that was mammoth and spread out as far as their lights could reach . . . the glacier reaching down in places and engulfing it completely in runnels and flows of clear blue ice.
What Coyle saw was the face of it and it was very crowded and compressed like some Medieval slum, everything pressed together, intersecting, and overlapping, so geometrically busy that it taxed the brain to follow its lines and try to figure out where one thing began and where another ended. There were stacks of blocks giving way to bulbous cylinders and ornate columns, they themselves cut through by towers and cones welded to rectangles and bubble-like obelisks and narrow piping which gave away seamlessly to gargantuan spires and steeples that vanished high above in the primal darkness.
All of it was honeycombed with oval passages that looked like wormholes in the face of that nightmarish, cyclopean alien tomb. It was made of some glossy black rock that looked oddly machined, set with discs and tubes, shafts and something like obtuse gear teeth.
He could not get past the idea that it almost looked like it was machined from a single massive slab of metal or some stone that was a composite of both.
In the back of his skull, there was a thrumming noise that began to make his head ache and a voice, a single traumitized voice that said, your race was born to this place. Let the cradle of humanity be its grave.
They could not reach the city over the gully and, honestly, to a man they did not want to.
It was bad enough standing where they were, viewing it from a distance without crawling through those nighted passages and claustrophobic tangles. There were spaces within, they knew, hollows and corridors and labyrinthine rooms haunted by primrodial memory that would strip the unprotected human mind bare.
If the urban legends were true and what Dr. Gates of Kharkov said were in fact reality, then it was cold alien wombs like this where the human race had not only been born but taken through the ages and modified with the ultimate goal of raising not only intelligence but an intelligence that could be harvested.
“We’re not the first here,” Reja said and his voice was almost shocking in the silence. If he hadn’t have spoken it was hard to say how long they would have stood there like that, gape-jawed, wide-eyed, their minds cycling down into bottomless black depths.
He was pointing his flashlight beam at something tangled in a rocky dip.
They all went over there.
It was a body . . . yet it didn’t look right. It was wearing ECWs, bunny boots, standard-issue red parka . . . but it looked deflated.
And it was.
For inside those ECWs were only bones, bones encrusted with frozen blood. A skull stared up at them from the hood.
“What the hell could do something like that?” Long said.
Something unbelievable, Coyle thought. Something that sucks the flesh off a man and leaves only bones and clothing behind.
“It must be one of the engineers, the survey guys who’d been working with Dryden,” Dayton said. “Reese, I think.”
Coyle turned back to the city. As he panned it with his light, that thrumming noise began to increase in his head. It came with sharp fingers of pain that seemed to blot everything out in pulsations of blinding white light that made his vision blur.
As sensory imput was dampened, he began to hear–
Screams.
A great exhaled susurration of screams echoing through his head. Not the screams of two or three or even a dozen, but the screams of hundreds, of thousands, all of them screaming in writhing agony . . . and he knew, he knew from the pit of his being, that these were the voices from the city . . . the voices of his ancestors that had been brought here to undergo forced mutation, genetic engineering, vivsection... a hundred techniques that filled them with wild superstitious terror and a bone-deep physical agony, a carnival of suffering that was literally nameless . . .
When he came out of it, riven with fright, he could nearly smell those awful places in the city where the techniques had been practiced . . . he could smell blood and marrow, spilled guts and siphoned fluids, biopsies and transplants, tears and vomit and insanity and, yes, the sharp acid stink of fear.
“We better get the hell out of here,” Long said and meant it. “That chopper will touch down again in forty-five minutes and I don’t want to miss it.”
The fright beneath his words was palpable and he had every reason in the world to be afraid. They all did. Coyle was nearly overwhelmed by it himself. The Old Ones inspired it and this city, with malign and deranged memories ghosting from its bones, only amplified it.
They were children.
The whole race was in the shadow of alien dominance, but particularly Coyle and those three that stood with him at the threshold of the evil that was and the evil that would be. Children afraid of the dark and the shadows in the corner, the thing under the bed and that loathsome breathing in the closet. And maybe, and most importantly, themselves. For it was inside them. All of them. What the aliens had developed and implanted. Being so close to the city, they could feel it. Feel it gaining strength, rising up to consume their humanity.
They were mired now in horror.
Children shivering in their beds as a branch scrapes at the window and absolutely no one could promise them that that stick was not what their overheated imaginations told them it was.
Coyle could see it in their faces. Cold logic and reason were malfunctioning as something unseen and malefic gained strength. Reality had taken on the silver, surreal shades of madness, of nightmare. Demons were riding the wind and this time they were not hallucinations.
They were stark and real and malevolent.
And inescapable.
It was about that time that the rumbling started again. The same sort of trembling seismic action they’d heard and felt in the crevice. It seemed like the city was shaking, weird rhythmic vibrations running through the earth beneath their feet.
In the city, there was a weird sort of shine like phosphorus. They could see it through the honeycombed mouths as if something luminous and large were winding its way through those primeval channels.
“RUN!” Dayton said. “RUN!”
There was no getting around the complete panic in his voice. For unlike the others he knew exactly what it was, what was moving through the ruins just as he knew it was coming for them.
A nightmare horror.
From the bowels of the city.
46
WITH THE STABILICER CLEATS on their boots, the best they could do was an even jog and it was dangerous moving amongst all that shattered masonry, low dips and yawning hollows, the occasional jagged crevice that could have swallowed them alive. It was a manic race and they all knew it was a race for life. They could hear the thing from the city screeching with a piercing, almost hypersonic cry as it gave chase.
By the time they reached the slope, they barely had the strength left to climb it. At least Coyle didn’t. But then he was in nowhere near the condition of Dayton and his men. When he moved too slow, clawing up the embankment on his hands and knees, Reja hooked an arm around him and pretty much dragged him to the top.
“Hold it,” Dayton panted, unclipping a white phosphorus grenade from his web belt. “Spread out . . . we’ll never outrun that thing. I’d rather face it here than in the tunnel. Stand ready with the flamethrowers.”
They did as they were told.
Coyle could see that thing picking its way towards them, its faint luminous shine lighting up the graveyard dimensions of the grotto. It was plowing over anything in its path—free-st
anding pillars and polished black towers that looked to be part of the city or another that had sunken into the earth or been swallowed by it. It took them off like saws felling trees, pushing ever forward like some immense glowing fleshy ghost, all the while making that sharp, strident whining sound.
“Get ready,” Dayton said.
The cries of the beast were answered by an uncanny keening sound that rose to a solid wall of almost musical piping, wavering sharply and echoing morbidly through the grotto. This was the Old Ones, Coyle knew, directing their creature.
He heard it approaching the slope.
Closer.
Closer yet.
The tension of the men waiting for it was like an unbroken circuit of dread.
“Jesus,” Long said when it came in sight, moving unbelievably fast.
“Shoggoth,” Dayton said.
It was a slithering fleshy mass of gray and black tissue seamed with pink and red convolutions, a liquiform accumulation of dully luminous protoplasm formed into some great spherical mantle about the size of a pick-up truck. Dozens of rudimentary eyes opened on its greasy surface amongst wiry tendrils and slick bubbles that expanded and deflated like they were breathing.
It moved, it slithered, it wriggled, an abhorrent perpetual motion machine, toad-fleshed, jelly-eyed, an amebal vomit-gush of wormy tissue, oozing pulp, and coiling entrails.
It was repulsive beyond words and the stink of it . . . carrion liquefying with rot.
It waited there.
“Burn it?” Long said, awaiting orders.
Dayton was watching it. “No. Not yet. If it was going to attack, it would have.”
Coyle was shaking. His entire body was shaking. Nothing had ever made him feel like this thing . . . simultaneously sickened, frightened, and raging. At that moment he lived only to kill it.
He watched it in his flashlight beam
And worse, it was watching him.
On the mantle of the creature itself, a single huge juicy yellow eye opened and stared at him with a slit pupil. A clear drop of liquid rolled from it like a tear.
