The Chief decided to go down with Troyak and another Marine, a man named Chenko, and they would do a brief ground reconnaissance to see what Orlov had discovered. Orlov did not believe in fairy tales and ghost stories, though he had to admit that Selikov’s dark mood, and the almost palpable edginess and fear displayed by many of the crew members, was somewhat infectious. His curiosity drove him on that day, though he would come to regret his little fishing expedition here in more ways than one.
Chapter 8
It was the sound that undid them as they approached, a sound they could not hear. Acoustic trauma was a well known phenomenon. Humans were accustomed to a range of acceptable sound in the 20–20 scale, from 20 Hz to 20KHz. Even within that range, sound had long been a means of warning, from the clatter of swords deliberately beating on metal shields in a formation of ancient soldiers, to the harsh warning of a siren, alarm, or claxon on the ship before a missile fired. Sound we could hear might grate upon us, like fingernails scratching a blackboard, a dentist’s drill grinding through the enamel of the tooth ever closer to the pulsing infection of a swollen nerve in the abscess. The sound we could hear could be used to soothe, or to torture, to give pleasure or pain, to lure like the siren song, or give warning of imminent harm.
Beneath the threshold of human hearing, however, sound seemed to take on other mysterious properties. Animals with keener senses used it well enough. Pigeons could navigate by ultra low level sound, it was thought that other migrating birds could hear the low infrasound of air masses passing over distant mountains and move towards it as well. Elephants could emit low sounds that could migrate through the earth itself and range out as far as ten kilometers to coordinate with other herd members. And the growl of a Siberian Tiger was said to exhibit vibrations in the range of 16Hz, below the threshold of human hearing, but nonetheless perceived as the deep, threatening warning that it was.
There was something growling on the taiga that day. They could not hear it, but they could feel it, a discomfort in the chest, a thoracic sense of doom. It was a thrumming vibration that seemed to invade their very being with the warning of injury, and the closer the three men came to the clearing, the more uneasy they felt.
“Glubokiy zvuk,” said Troyak, feeling the disturbance around them in a palpable way now. It was Russian for “deep sound,” and the gritty Sergeant had undergone special training where he was exposed to dangerously low infrasound in the range of8-10 Hz, and challenged to perform normal routine duties-assembling and disassembling his rifle, loading ammunition, calculating target coordinates and keying the information for a presumed artillery fire.
Orlov was not so well conditioned, and he immediately began to regret his impulsive urge to come down and see what was shining at them from the clearing. They were out of the cargo basket, once used in decades past for men to stand and throw bomblets at ground targets in the older zeppelin models. Now it was an easy way to put down a squad sized contingent from heights up to 200 meters.
A stand of trees separated their clearing from low depression in the ground, a thicket of larch and pine that seemed oddly twisted and stunted in places as they passed through, with strange burls on the trunks of the trees that appeared to be odd boils in the wood, some genetic malformation that had caused a cancerous growth on the trunks. There, in that moment of suspended anticipation, Orlov could feel his disquiet redouble with each step he took. Something was wrong here, he knew, deep in his bones. Something was ugly, and bad, and vile here, and he had to resist the urge to turn and simply retrace his steps, yearning for the relative security of the metal cargo basket now, yearning for the cold interior of the airship again, his curiosity quashed by this strange, unfathomable fear.
Yes, it was fear-a fear they could almost hear quavering in the air about them, as though something was hidden in the marshy ground ahead, waiting to emerge like a demon from hell and devour them. They would hear it, and then not hear it, and the absence of the sound had an equally chilling effect on Orlov. Silence could choke a man too. It enveloped him like a shroud, utter silence, a soundless quiet that spoke of an uttermost void, where no life of any kind could ever live. There would come a moment of absolute silence when they stopped, all three men at once, where nothing could be heard. Nothing at all…
Then Troyak stepped forward, the sound of his heavy boots on the duff of rotting wood branches and pine needles in the thicket becoming a welcome balm… until the sound came at them again-a sound they could not hear, but yet one that assaulted them as they stepped to the edge of the tree line, intruding on every sense, bone deep sound that penetrated into their minds like a throbbing vibration of something old, something primal, something lost and forlorn.
For Orlov it was pure fear that he felt at that indefinable boundary’s edge. It brought a choking or gagging sensation to his throat that made him want to wretch, yet froze his larynx to the point where he could not speak. Beyond the edge of those trees lay the clearing, and there was something there that seemed to take him by the throat with the intent to choke the life from him. Strange visions emerged in his mind, the purple face of Commissar Molla, his eyes bulging, as Orlov choked him to death. Now the memory of an old story his grandmother had told him as a child emerged in this thoughts-the devil’s bone yard-the story he never believed, until that moment… “A bright star fell in the far away land, and tall grey phantoms were seen to haunt the woodlands in the days after, hunting the living and dragging their souls through the fens and moors of the taiga, to the gateway of Hell…”
ForChenko it was a deep feeling of sadness that came over him, like the melancholy of Russian Toska, the feeling that could not be truly described to anyone who was not Russian. There was no escaping it, for it became one’s entire thought process when it arose. Yet here it seemed to come from without, emanating from the center of that clearing and forcibly entering his mind, as if it had crawled out of the ground and entered his soul through the bones of his leg. His hands tingled and the air seemed to thicken as he struggled to breathe, as though he were drowning.
Troyak could clearly feel the same effects he had endured in his training. It was a resonance of doom, a sonic violence that some believed could rupture the organs of the body itself at very low frequencies around 7Hz, a frequency of the brain’s own theta wave rhythm associated with fear and anger. He could not hear the sound, yet he knew, on some inner level, that he was under attack. It prompted him to instinctively prime his automatic rifle, leveling it at the open clearing as though it were filled with some unseen enemy. It was “Glubokiy zvuk,” deep sound, body sound that entered not through the ears, but the body itself.
Chenko saw this and immediately raised his own weapon, and the three men stood there, a few feet into the clearing, in the pulsing dissonance of annihilating silence alternating with that dreadful vibrato, the devil’s whisper, the sound of death itself.
There, ahead of them, something lay gleaming in the wan sunlight, but none of them ventured to take one further step. The ground all about the clearing was littered with the dead, bleached skeletons of fallen animals-the devil’s bone yard if ever there was one. The unheard sound came again, and Orlov was the first man to break, turning and running back into the comforting closeness of the trees, yet tripping over a fallen branch and going down with a hard thump. There, right before his eyes he saw another shiny thing, what looked to be a small chunk of metal, which he impulsively grasped in the palm of his hand. He would not go back into that clearing to see what was there-to hell with that-but he would at least have this much to show for their foray into the Siberian wilds of Tunguska.