Standing there, taking in that primeval vista all around him and feeling its haunted aura, Hayes was struck how the landscape looked like something plucked from some dead, alien world light years distant. High and jagged and surreal, a phantasmal netherworld of sharp and spiky summits that reminded him of monuments, of obelisks, of menhirs . . . as if they were not merely geological features, but the craggy and towering steeples of ancient, weathered tombstones. That what he saw was nothing so simple as a mountain range, but the narrow and leaning masonry of the world’s oldest cemetery.
Yes, this is where the gods came to bury their own . . . here in this polar mortuary at the bottom of the world. A shunned place like a graveyard of alien witches.
And, Jesus, hadn’t he seen these mountains in his dreams? In dozens of nightmares since earliest childhood? Weren’t they imprinted on the mind and soul of every man and woman? That deranged geography of sharp-peaked cones, that unwavering line of warning beacons?
Hayes stood there, his beard frosted white, shaking, seeing those mountains and feeling certain that they were seeing him, too. They inspired a terror so pure, so infinite, so aged, that he literally could not move. Those peaks and pinnacles were somehow very wrong. They were desolate and godless and spiritually toxic, a perverse geometry that reached inside the human mind and squeezed the blood out of what they found there. Literally wrung out the human soul like a sponge, draining it, leeching it. Yes, there was something ethereal and spatially demented about those aboriginal hills and they were like a siren song of destruction to the human mind. Geometrically grotesque, here was the place where time and space, dimension and madness came together, mating into something that fractured the human mind.
So Hayes stood there, letting it fill him as he knew it must.
The cones had an uncanny hypnotic effect on him, a morphic pull that made him want to do nothing but stare. Just stand there and watch them, trace them with his eyes, feel their soaring height and antiquity. And he would have stood there for an hour or five, mesmerized by them, until he froze up and fell over. Because the more you watched them, the more you wanted to. And the more you began to see almost a funny sort of light arcing off the crests and narrow tips, a jumping and glowing emission like electricity or stolen moonlight. It made Hayes’ heart pound and his head reel, made his fingertips tingle and filled the black pot of his belly with a spreading heat like coals being fanned up into a blaze. He had felt nothing like it in years, maybe never: an exhilaration, a vitality, a preternatural sense of awe that just emptied his mind of anything but those rising, primal cones.
Pabodie had called them the “Mountains of Madness” and, dear God, how very apt that was.
For Hayes felt practically hysterical looking upon them.
But more than that he felt a budding, burgeoning sense of wonder and purpose and necessity. The import and magnitude of this place . . . yes, it was enough to drive any man insane. Insane with a knowledge of exactly who and what he was. Destiny. The sense that he had come full circle.
“Jimmy?” Sharkey said and it almost sounded like she was calling to him from one of those conic apexes. “Jimmy? Jimmy, are you all right?”
“Yeah,” he said.
He looked away from those peaks that had snagged his mind. Looked at Sharkey and then at Cutchen. In the glow of Cutchen’s lantern their faces were drawn with concern. With fright and apprehension and too goddamn many things to catalog.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Really.”
He had only felt something like that once in his life. Just after high school he’d worked at a transformer substation where the juice traveling down high-tension wires was stepped down, dampened, for household and industrial consumption. He’d quit after three weeks. Those transformers had been pissing out an energy that only he seemed to be aware of. When he got too close to them, his teeth ached and his spine crawled like it was covered with hundreds of ants. But there was a mental effect, too. It amped him up. Made him feel nervous and antsy and wired like he was full of caffeine or coked-up. Later on, one of the engineers told him that the high-tension lines and their attendant transformers put out moderate alternating electrical and magnetic fields and some people were just more susceptible to them.
Those high peaks were doing that to him, he knew. Creating a negative charge of energy that maybe only he was feeling.
Sharkey put her gloved hand on his arm. “You can feel it, can’t you?” she said, touching her chest and her head. “In here and here . . . an attraction to this place, a magnetism or something. The secret life of these mountains and what they hide.”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s strong.”
Even turned away from those spires and cones he was feeling it right down to his marrow. A dizzy sense of deja-vu, deja-vu squared. A dark and misty recognition of something long-forgotten and rediscovered. But it was more that, it was much more. He was feeling something else, too, something huge that seemed to blot out his rational mind. He was in touch with some ancient network and he could feel the legacy of his race, the twisted and shadowy ancestral heritage that had been passed down from impossibly ancient and forgotten days. The race memory of this place and others like it, the creatures who occupied them . . . all of it was rushing up at him, sinking him in a mire of atavism and primal terror. These things had been written and remembered, he knew, in the form of folktale and legend and myth. Channeled through the ages into tales of winged demons and devils, night-haunts and the Wild Hunt itself.
But if those were just tales, then what inspired them was bleak and real.
“Okay, let’s go take a peak before I start beating my sacrificial drum and chanting about the Old Ones,” he said.
They both looked at him.
“Never mind.”
“I suppose we might see things,” Cutchen said, maybe just to himself. “I suppose we might hear things.”
As they climbed down away from the SnoCat and deeper into the valley towards Gates’ camp, Hayes concentrated only on each step. He pressed one boot down into the snow and followed it with another. Kept doing this, disconnecting himself from the aura of this place and what it could do to him. He saw nothing and he heard nothing and that was just fine.
When they reached the periphery of Gates’ encampment, they just stopped like they met a wall. They stopped and panned their lights around. Everything was quiet and still like sleeping marble. It could have been a midnight cemetery they were in and the atmosphere felt about the same . . . hush, breathless, uninviting. The camp was grim and cold and bleak, crawling with black, hooded shadows. It had all the atmosphere of a mausoleum. Just the gentle moan of the wind, tent flaps rustling in the breeze.
Hayes knew it was empty long before he entered.
Not so much as a single light was lit and the place just felt dead, deserted.
They could see a couple Ski-Doo snowmobiles dusted with white, the hulk of Gates’ SnoCat. A wall of snow blocks surrounded the actual camp as a wind-shelter, with secondary walls to protect the cooking area and give some privacy to the latrine. There were a series of rugged Scott tents and bright red mountaineering tents that were anchored down with nylon lines and ice-screws, dead man bolts. Snow had been heaped around them to guard against the fierce Antarctic gusts. A couple fish huts had been set up and there was a Polar Haven for storage.
Just a typical research camp.
Except it was completely lifeless.
Lifeless, yes, but far from unoccupied.
Hayes led the way into one of the fish huts. It was being used as sort of a community living area. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Cots and sleepmats, sleeping bags and vinyl duffels of personal items. Some boots and ECW’s hanging along the wall. A couple MSR stoves near the wall. Boxes of canned and dehydrated foods, propane stoves, water jugs. A field radio and INMARSAT system for voice and data transmission and retrieval. A corkboard was hanging above it with notes and telnet numbers. Somebody had tacked a photo of Godzilla up and pencilled in a smile on his face