Howls From Hell

by Grady Hendrix

  “Shit, I’m gonna be sick,” Mendoza called from the back.

  “Just focus on my back and not on the walls or floor,” Sloane replied with no sympathy.

  “Gonna puke on you!” he said in a sing-song voice.

  “Make sure you remove your mask first, else you’ll be breathing in your own breakfast,” Gab called back to them, feeling a little dizzy herself.

  As a distraction, she ran a gloved hand over the stone, relishing the sense of stability it gave her. Down this staircase, there were more hieroglyphics and iconography. She felt the raised edges under her fingers. Stopping, she looked up along the walls. Behind her, the others had stopped as well, due to Berry pausing in front of a large bas-relief revealing another beast-headed man sitting on a great throne. Gab didn’t like the way it looked; it had the profile of a feral canine with a long, hungry snout and severely pointed ears like blades. Still, she couldn’t help but be fascinated, even drawn to it. There was something mesmerizing about its depiction, its features, its malevolent intelligence.

  Berry held his tablet up to the wall and scanned the image. He studied the tablet’s response as it pinged a search back up the shipboard databases.

  “Apparently this is an ancient god that was once worshipped in Egypt. Anubis: God of Death. You can recognize him by the jackal’s head.”

  Berry caressed the foot of the giant in such a revering way that Gab shivered.

  “Let’s move on,” she said.

  The others resumed their journey again after her. Gab checked her watch obsessively, tracking the time and their depth. She’d read the reports of teams that died underground in their own investigations—victims of sloppy mistakes or earthquakes—and she refused to be remembered alongside the other failures.

  The spiral staircase took them down two hundred meters before it bottomed out onto a large landing. This landing had neither railings nor walls, seeming to float in an ocean of darkness. Gab cast her light back and forth, revealing nothing. The way the sounds echoed led Gab to believe she was standing in an enormous room. Unnerved, she descended another set of stairs that ran along the wall and dumped her and her team onto the floor of this much larger chamber, which was so tall its ceiling was lost to the shadows.

  Berry and Mendoza dropped their bags and each pulled out a lamp. Berry set his by the stairs while Mendoza crept farther into the room, albeit hesitantly. His headlamp revealed thick columns lining both sides before the room ended in a tall archway. It was here that Mendoza set his lamp and turned it on. Gab pulled out her tablet, started her recording again.

  “We have descended just over two hundred meters and are now standing in another chamber. So far, no evidence of anything we can collect for study. This place is mainly dust and drawings.” She ended her recording, putting her tablet away. “See anything, Mendoza?”

  “Just a hallway. It goes on in both directions,” he replied, a hand on the side of the archway as he peered one way then the other.

  Berry cast the light from his headlamp over the walls, illuminating the story chiseled in the stone. He pulled out his expensive Vulpes IX camera—a piece of equipment that was higher quality than those supplied by the SS18’s university—and the flashes lit up the cavern in brilliant, blinding snapshots. Despite the fact he had ignored her instructions to use university-supplied gear, Gab couldn’t help but appreciate his fervor. He wasn’t her favorite student. In fact, she might even say he was her least. He always interrupted during her lectures, arguing her points, but he had top marks, and she’d had no reason not to bring him.

  “Mendoza, take Sloane and explore the right corridor. Lee and I will take the left. Make sure to put down the radio repeaters and report back in three hours. I want a lot of leeway when it comes to these battery-powered lights. Berry, do your thing.”

  “It’s so strange. It almost looks like these show—” Berry started.

  “Let’s go, Lee,” Gab said and led the way through the tall archway.

  The passage banked down, and Gab’s light revealed more engravings: detailed and grotesque closeups of bare-chested men and women with the heads of cats, crocodiles, and birds. Seeing these visages flash into view from the darkness made Gab shudder. Yet she feasted her eyes on this primitive art, relishing in its complexity and passion.

  “What kind of crazy ideas did these people have?” Renford said, averting his eyes.

  “It is eerie, isn’t it? The art is beautiful in its own way though,” she replied, touching the fingertips of her right hand against a stern-looking bird head.

  “If you say so.”

  The walls pulled back, and the tunnel opened out onto a narrow catwalk spanning a vast void. Columns ran the length of the catwalk on both sides. Each featured a large jackal head carved from basalt mounted at face level, and each of these heads snarled with its own feral expression. As her headlamp flicked over the heads, the light caused the faces to move, sneering and laughing in turn.

  “Watch your step now!” Renford laughed, but Gab detected a slight quiver of fear in his voice.

  She wanted to study the faces more but forced herself to look forward, to the edge of her light, keeping her eyes on the catwalk. Heel to toe, heel to toe, she inched over the catwalk—edged on both sides by an absolute darkness that rivaled space. When she stepped into the next room, Gab let out a sigh of relief. Then she almost jumped out of her skin when her short-wave comms crackled.

  “Prof? Sloane here. We found some living quarters, but everything else this way has collapsed. We brought the few artifacts we found back for Berry to document. Want us to join you now?”

  “Yeah, be careful though. The tunnel opens on a catwalk that connects to the room where we are now. We’ll wait for you here,” Gab replied.

  Renford set down his last light, but the chamber was so large that the vast darkness swallowed its beam. This time she didn’t jump when her comms went off again.

  “Berry touching base. Really interesting stuff up here. I’ve cataloged most of it. Anything your way?”

  Gab rolled her eyes.

  “Yeah there’s some intricate but creepy carvings. Mind your step on the catwalk though.”

  “Careful, boss. Berry might catch on that you don’t like him,” Renford said.

  Gab stretched her arms over her head to rid herself of the shivers crawling over them.

  “I’m sure he’s used to being disliked, considering.” Readjusting her head lamp, Gab crept deeper into the darkness, watching the ground for any drop-offs.

  She was concentrating so hard on the floor that she didn’t see the metal counter before she knocked her hip against the corner of it, sending bright pain radiating through her torso. Gripping the edge of the counter, she sucked in a breath.

  “You okay, Gab?”

  She ran her hand over the smooth surface, casting up a thick cloud of dust.

  “Did . . . did the ancient humans have this type of metalworking? This seems advanced,” she said.

  Renford joined her.

  “I don’t think so. Honestly, based on when this structure was built, the Egyptian people were primitive. They did build the pyramids, which were a marvel at the time, but nothing like this. What do you think it’s for?”

  “Holy shit,” she said, running her fingers over a set of buttons embedded into the surface. “It’s a keyboard!”

  Each key was marked with a hieroglyph. She passed farther down the counter and found another, and another, yet no monitors or wires, no visible power sources or power buttons.

  “Are we sure this is as ancient as we were told?” Renford asked.

  Gab made it to the end of the counter and found a smaller, solitary station next to a massive doorway. This station lacked a keyboard like the others and instead was host to four small, unmarked buttons and three dials.

  She knew better, she really did, but Gab reached out and tapped the button closest to her.

  Nothing.

  Feeling slightly reassured, she tapped the
next.

  Nothing.

  She tapped the third.

  The ground shivered and dust fell from above as something began to hum deeper underground. The air grew ripe with the smell of ozone, and all the tiny hairs on her body rose as electricity filled the air.

  “Earthquake!” Renford hissed, appearing beside her and gripping her arm.

  Things steadied, and they stood together, nerves sparking as they waited for something worse. From above them came a buzz, and the room was flooded with artificial light radiating from filament-thin tubing embedded in the stone ceiling. Behind them rose a short chorus of screams. Gab tapped her comms to relay a team-wide message.

  “My bad,” she said and couldn’t help but chuckle a bit.

  Renford returned to the counter nearest them. The keyboards were now lit from beneath with a sharp green light; more astounding was the fact that holographic screens had appeared above each one, projected from some unseen source. Renford tapped a button at random, and the screen flickered from green to white. There was a symbol in the middle—a half circle with two bars of unequal length descending from the flat bottom. Beneath it was a flashing bar.

  “I think this is for a password,” her second-in-command said.

  “Well, this is pretty damn awesome,” said Mendoza as he stepped in the room, Sloane on his heels.

  “If we can somehow get this tech back to the ship, it will be highly valuable,” Gab said. “This is something astounding.”

  The team became complete when Berry joined them, his eyes lighting up.

  “I thought those Anubis heads would be the most significant find down here but this . . . this is something else entirely,” he breathed, his hands clutching his camera greedily.

  “Our tests must have been wrong. No way this is from six thousand years ago,” Renford said.

  “The tests weren’t wrong. I’ve been carbon-dating the cloth scraps and pottery fragments Sloane found, everything checks out,” Berry replied, moving to a keyboard and tapping a button.

  “Then how do you explain this?” Renford asked.

  Gab pulled up a database of hieroglyphics, placing her tablet next to a different keyboard.

  “I think the evidence points to one clear fact,” she said. “This facility wasn’t built by ancient humans at all. Even the hieroglyphics down here are different. More sophisticated than the versions used by the ancient Egyptians. However, I think I can match them pretty well using this lexicon.”

  “So, what, aliens did it?” Mendoza said with a laugh.

  “If that were true, we would have records,” Sloane said. “There’s no way we wouldn’t know that we had been visited by extraterrestrials.”

  The others stared at the professor. She matched a symbol from the database on her tablet to one on the keyboard and tapped it. Her work was slow but steady.

  “We have records of the Egyptian religion involving humanoid beings with the heads of animals.” She tapped another button and the screen flashed green. “We know Egyptians managed to build incredible structures that lasted centuries until the Calamity. Did any of you even take time to look at the stories told on these walls? There have been legends of intervention with the ancient human races, technologies that evolved far past what was logical for human progress of the time. This could be evidence for that.”

  The login screen disappeared and revealed a complicated mess of symbols, cryptic diagrams, and graphs changing in real time.

  “You figured out the password?” Renford hurried to Gab’s side, his hand sliding around her waist.

  “Simple with all the death-god imagery everywhere. I tried ‘Anubis’ first, but if it hadn’t worked, I would have made my way through all the Egyptian gods hoping for the best.”

  “Is this something you think you can dismantle so we can bring it back to the ship?” Berry asked.

  “Tough to say, honestly. There are no visible seams or screws on this. I can try my laser cutter. Hopefully I don’t end up damaging the inner contents,” she said, staring at the screen, hypnotized.

  “What story was on the walls?” Sloane asked.

  “An oblong shape descends from the sky as humans look on from below,” Berry said, flicking through the photos on his camera’s holoscreen. “Then animal-headed beings mingle with the humans, and the humans fall down in worship. The jackal-headed one appears most often, and in one scene, seems to be working in some kind of lab.”

  “What’s in this room?” Mendoza was standing next to the large doorway at the other side of the room, opposite to the doorway that led back to the catwalk.

  “We haven’t gone in yet. The revelation of cosmic visitors was a bit distracting,” Gab replied drily.

  Curiosity, an irresistible pull, drew the five explorers to the large door. Beyond was complete darkness. As one, side by side, they stepped through the mammoth threshold. Overhead came the telltale buzz of the lights as they clicked on, creeping along the tubes towards the back, revealing the contents of the massive room in segments. Nearest to them were three large constructs of tubes, wires, metal, and coils—generators. Beyond that was a space of flooring that soon became splashed with color as towering holographic screens came to life, displaying schematics and anatomy diagrams.

  Last to be lit was the body of a giant, lying on its back. Sloane let out a shrill shriek. Gab’s breath caught in her throat as her skin became clammy and her hair stood on end.

  The giant filled the majority of the room and, if she had to guess, exceeded well over two hundred meters in height. It had the body of a well-muscled man—though void of any genitalia—but, where a head should be, only the bottom jaw of an animal remained—a jaw the size of a small cargo ship. It was coated in a sleek black fur and rimmed with a thin ebony lip, from which jutted fearsome fangs. Gurgling softly, fat tubing ran from the giant’s flank, feeding back to the three generators.

  “Just what the hell is that thing?” Sloane hissed.

  Gab swallowed down the lump of fear in her throat, forcing herself to move forward, though her heart quickened in her chest.

  “Is it—was it alive?” she asked, pausing long enough to kneel and place a hand on one of the large tubes that connected the giant to the generators.

  It wasn’t warm, it wasn’t humming. She prayed that meant the power sources were inactive.

  Berry moved to examine where the giant’s head should have been. Despite her overall feeling of dread, Gab joined him. She didn’t like being so close to it, even if it did seem to be dead. Looming over her, the jaw was a crude mockery of what the inside of a mouth should look like. Instead of fleshy folds, it teemed with barbs and lacked a tongue. At the back, approximately where a throat would be, a massive tangle of tubes spewed out onto the floor.

  “Is this going to be on our exam?” Mendoza asked, his voice squeaking.

  While the majority of the tubing was a pale fleshy color, several were black and swollen. Berry moved forward and, before Gab could tell him to stop, he grabbed the edge of the tube closest to him and gave it a tug.

  “It’s rubbery. I don’t think it’s wholly organic. Nothing natural would have lasted this long without rotting,” he said as Gab let out a hiss of disgust. “I wonder where its head is.”

  Something caught Gab’s eye, and she leaned forward. At the corner of the jaw, just under some tubing, she could see what resembled a hinge. Reassured by the giant’s lack of response to Berry’s tug, Gab reached out, tapping it with her knuckles. The material felt fleshy, but underneath, it resonated like metal.

  “They built this thing?”

  “Looks like they hadn’t gotten it completely right or were maybe doing some repairs, but I’d bet anything that it was modeled to look like our friend, Anubis.” Berry had his fancy camera back up, and brilliant white flashes coated the giant in mini-novas.

  “That’s the stuff of nightmares right there.” Renford joined them.

  Gab glanced down the giant’s massive flank and saw that Mendoza and Slo
ane were walking to the far end of the room. It made her nervous to see them so far from the group, though she didn’t know why.

  “Based on your theory, Berry, would you say that those weird animal-human hybrid gods made this thing?” Renford asked. “For what purpose?”

  Gab pulled her Cognitool out and scanned the inside of the giant’s maw.

  The result that popped up on the small screen made Gab frown.

  “This material was Earth-based,” she said, offering the tool to Renford. “Circa 4,900 Pre-Calamity. Around the same time the pyramids were said to have been built.”

  Renford took the Cognitool and re-scanned it himself, standard procedure to check his commanding officer’s initial read.

  “I can’t believe it, Gab! This is astounding—imagine what they’ll say once we bring samples back to the station,” he said.

  Gab stared at the ceiling.

  “Looks like the chamber took some damage. We should mention to the commander that an engineering team is needed down here to shore up the stability of the chamber,” she said, pointing at a three-meter-long fissure in the thick stone ceiling.

  Although she was physically still on Earth, her imagination pulled her up into the stars, into the space station. Her heart raced as she imagined all the accolades she might receive from the leadership council.

  “Prof!”

  Gab gazed down the giant’s side where Sloane stood by its hip, her hand raised, finger pointing up.

  “Do those look like impact marks to you, or is it just me?” Sloane asked.

  Gab’s eyes followed the woman’s finger. The ceiling above the giant’s knees were pockmarked deeply. The damage implied a struggle. A giant-sized struggle . . . perhaps out of rage, fear, a desire to escape? She looked further along and found great gouges raked into the stone above the giant’s chest. Gab jogged down along the side of the giant’s jaw, its shoulder, down its right arm, and to its right hand. A chill settled over her body. Its nails were torn, its fingertips raw-looking.