But there were no answers for that. Maybe the thing turned faster than he anticipated.
Regardless, that wasn’t why Hayes had come.
He got in close as he dared to the monstrosity, certain that it was going to move despite that smell. It looked much the same as it had the other day, despite the various incisions: like some bloated, fleshy eggplant. Its shell was a leaden, shiny gray, looked tough like the hide of a crab. Chitinous. Its wings — if that’s what they were and not modified fins — were folded-up against its sides like umbrellas, some sticky fluid like tree sap had oozed from them in puddles and runnels, collected on the table. Those branching tentacles at the center of its body now looked like nothing but tree roots, tangled up and vestigal. And those thick, muscular tentacles at its base had blackened, hung limp like dead snakes.
Yes, it was dead, it was surely dead.
Yet . . .
Yet the tapering arms of that bizarre starfish-shaped head were erect like an unclenched, reaching hand. Those globular eyes at each tip wide and blazing a neon red, filled with an impossible, unearthly vitality. They were shiny with tiny black pupils, the gray lids shriveled back, something like pink tears running down the stalks.
Hayes had to remember to breathe.
He could see where one eye had been cut away, the black chasm left in its place. He was trying desperately to be rational, to be lucid and realistic, but it was not easy because once you looked at those eyes it was very difficult to look away. They were not human eyes and there was nothing you might even abstractly call a face, still . . . Hayes was looking at those eyes and thinking they were filled with an absolute, almost stupid hatred, a loathing that made him feel weak inside.
Turn away, don’t look at it.
But he was looking and inside it felt like he’d popped a hole, everything draining out of him. He had to turn away. Like a vampire, you couldn’t stare into its eyes or you were done. But he kept looking, feeling and emoting and sensing and it was there, all right, something in the back of his head. He couldn’t put a name to it at first . . . just that it was something invasive, something alien that did not belong in his mind. But it had taken root and was spreading out like fingers, a high and sibilant buzzing, a droning whine like that of a cicada. Growing louder and louder until he was having trouble thinking, remembering anything, remembering who and what he was. There was just that buzzing filling his head and it was coming from the thing, it was being directed into him and he knew it.
Hayes wasn’t even aware of how he was shaking or the piss that ran down his leg or the tears that filled his eyes and splashed down his face in warm creeks. There was only the buzzing, stealing him away and . . . and showing him things.
Yes, the Old Ones.
Not three like there were in the hut or even ten or twenty, but hundreds, thousands of them. A buzzing, trilling swarm of them filling the sky and descending like locusts come to strip a field. They were darting in and out of low places and hollows and over sharp-peaked roofs, rising up into that luminous sky . . . only, yes, it was not in the sky, but underwater. Thousands of them, a hive of the Old Ones, swimming through and above some geometrically impossible sunken city in a crystalline green sea with those immense membranous wings spread out so they could glide. He saw their bodies bloat up obscenely as they sucked in water and deflate as they expelled it like squids . . . moving so quickly, so efficiently. There had to be a million of them now, more showing themselves all the time, swimming and leaping and rising and falling -
Hayes went on his ass.
Teetered and fell and it was probably the only thing that indeed saved him, kept his mind from going to sludge. He hit the floor, fell back and cracked his head against a table and that buzzing was gone. Not completely, there was still a suggestion of it there, but its grip had been broken.
And he came to himself and realized that it had taken hold of him, that thing, and nobody would ever make him believe different. He could hear Lind’s voice in his head saying, Can’t you feel it getting inside your head, wanting to steal your mind . . . wanting to make you something but what you are?
Hayes scrambled to his feet, smelling the thing and hating it and knowing it somehow from some past time and the revulsion he felt was learned and instinctual, something carried by the race from a very distant and ancient time. What he did next was what any savage would have done when a monster, a beast was threatening the tribe, invading it, trying to subvert and steal away all that it was: he looked for a weapon.
Panting and half-out of his mind, he stumbled through Gates’ makeshift laboratory, past the two thawing horrors and amongst tables of instruments and chemicals. He wanted fire. His simplified brain told him the thing had to be burned, so he sought fire, but there was nothing. Acid, maybe. But he was no chemist, he wouldn’t know acid if he saw it.
And in those precious seconds that he stumbled drunkenly through the hut, he could feel that buzzing in his head rising up again and he looked over his shoulder at the Old One, certain now it would be rising up, those bulging red eyes seeking him out with a flat hatred and those branching tentacles reaching out for him -
But no.
It lay there, dreaming meat.
But its mind was alive and he knew that now, could feel it worrying at his will, and that was insane because there was an incision just beneath that starfish-shaped head and he knew without a doubt that Gates had removed its brain. That even now it was sunk in one of those jars around him, a fleshy and alien thing like a pickled monstrosity in a sideshow.
Yet, its mind was alive and vibrant. The idea of that made hysterical laughter bubble up the back of Hayes’ throat and then he saw the axe hanging by the fire extinguisher and then his hands were on it, gripping it with a primitive glee. He raced back at the thing, knocking a table of fossils over in his flight. He was going to chop that motherfucker up, hack it to bits.
And he meant to.
He stood over the thing, axe raised and then the buzzing rose up, felt like a fist taking hold of his brain and squeezing until the agony was white-hot and he cried out.
The axe fell from his fingers and he went down to his knees.
Fight or flight.
He crab-crawled to the door, fumbling it open and falling out into the screaming polar night. He got the door shut, those frozen winds slapping him none too gently back into reality. He found his mittens, put them on and pulled himself along the guylines back to Targa House, the door of Hut #6 wide open, hammering back and forth in the wind.
He looked over his shoulder only once, thinking he saw some lurid alien shape moving through the blowing snow at him . . .
12
The next morning, before they started their day, the boys were hanging out in the community room, chewing scrambled eggs and bacon, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes, doing a lot of talking.
“I’ll tell you guys something,” Rutkowski said. “LaHune is some kind of fucking nut about all this. No communication, no email . . . I mean, what the hell? What’s all this James Bond shit about? Because of those dead things that might be aliens? Jesus H. Christ, so what? What if they are? He can’t lock us down here like prisoners. It ain’t right and somebody’s gotta do something about it.”
St. Ours lit another cigarette from the butt of his first, flagrantly ignoring the NO SMOKING sign on the wall and getting hard looks from some of the scientists who were trying to eat. “Yeah, something’s gotta be done. And it’s up to us to do it. You know those fucking eggheads won’t lift a finger. You lock them in a closet with a microscope and they’d be just fine and dandy with it. Now, way I’m seeing this, LaHune has slipped a cog and he’s about six inches from being as crazy as Lind. He’s supposed to be in charge? Well, if we were at sea and the captain was crazy . . . “