He didn’t know what for and part of him honestly did not want to know, but he listened nonetheless. Then he heard an echo from somewhere below . . . just a quick, furtive scratching sound that disappeared so quickly he wasn’t sure he had heard it at all. Then he heard it again not five seconds later . . . like a stick being scratched along a subterranean wall.
And down there in that underworld, going to a place that was as storied and terrible in their imaginations as some vampire’s castle, it was probably the worse possible thing to be hearing. For a scratching implied motion and motion implied something alive . . .
Hayes was thinking: Could be a man, could be one of the team... and it could be something else entirely.
They stood there, looking at each other and at those limestone walls, an ice-mist tangling through their legs like groundfog. In the glow of Cutchen’s lantern, there was only their frosting breath, suspended ice crystals and drifting motes of dust. And shadows. Because down in that creeping murk, the lights were casting huge and distorted shadows.
Hayes took a few more steps, his belly feeling hollow and feathery. He played his light farther down into the stygian depths of that channel which, from where he was sitting, might as well have led right down to the lower regions of Hell itself.
He heard the sound again and started.
A distant scraping that seemed to be moving up the passage at them and then a few seconds later, sounded impossibly far-off. It would pause for a moment or two, then start up again . . . closer then farther, that same scratching, dragging sound. Hayes felt a trickle of sweat run down his spine. Something in his bowels tensed. He could hear his own breathing in his ears and it seemed impossibly loud. Then, suddenly, the scratching was much closer, so very close in fact that Hayes almost turned and ran. Because it seemed that whatever was making it would show itself at any moment, something spidery with scraping twigs for fingers.
Then it abruptly ceased.
“What in Christ was that?” Sharkey said behind him, edging closer to him now.
And he was going to tell her that it was probably nothing. Sound would carry funny down in the hollowed earth. That’s all it was. Nothing to get excited about. But he never did say that, for less than a minute after the scratching stopped, something else took its place . . . a strident, squeaky piping like an out-of-tune recording of a church organ played on an old Victrola. It rose up high and shrieking, gaining volume and insistence. No wind blowing through no underground passage could have created something like that. The sound of it was eerie and disturbing, the auditory equivalent of a knife blade pressed against your spine and slowly drawn upwards.
Hayes suddenly felt very numb, rubbery and uncoordinated.
So much so that if he moved, he figured he would have fallen flat on his face. So he didn’t move. He stood there like a statue in a park waiting for a pigeon to shit on him. That still, that motionless. His tongue felt like it was glued to the roof of his mouth. The sound died out for maybe a second or two. But then it came again, shrill and piercing and somehow malevolent. It was reedy and cacophonous and something about it made you want to scream. But what really was bothering Hayes about it was that it was not neutral in the least . . . it sounded almost hysterical or demented.
And then it died out for good, ending it mid-squeal, shattering into a dozen resounding and tinny echoes that bounced around through caves and hollows and openings. But the memory of it was still there.
And what Hayes was thinking was something he did not dare say: That’s what they sound like... I heard it that night on the tractor and I heard it out in the hut... that was a voice of a living Old One...
But he kept that to himself.
He stood there, teetering from foot to foot, feeling like something had evaporated inside of him. Maybe it was courage and maybe it was just common sense.
“Okay,” Cutchen said, his voice barely audible. He cleared his throat. “I’m for getting the hell out right now.”
“I’m for that,” Sharkey said.
Which dumped the whole stinking mess at Hayes’ doorstep. He shook his head. “We want answers? We want to know what happened to Gates and the others? Then those answers are down there.”
Cutchen looked at him with anger that slowly subsided. “All right, Jimmy, if that’s what you want. But this is the last fucking date I go on with you.”
It was a pale attempt at humor, but it made them all smile. Hayes knew it was not intended to be funny, however, it was just how Cutchen responded to terror and uncertainty: with funny lines born out of contempt.
They started down again.
After another five or ten minutes in that passage, it narrowed to a hole that was perfectly circular like the shaft of a sewer. Its circumference was about ten feet, but so perfectly symmetrical it could not possibly have been cut by ancient floodwaters. Hayes stepped through first and found himself in a room that was again uniform, but rectangular in shape. At the far end, another passage dropped away into darkness. He examined it with his light and saw a set of carved stone steps dropping away into the blackness. They were long, low steps, more like slabs, each large enough, it seemed, to set a dining table and chairs on.
Whatever walked them, Hayes got to thinking, did not have the same tread as a man.
It took time to navigate them because each was about five feet wide. They were set with faults and cracks, the edges falling away. There were lots of tiny pebbles and bits of rock strewn over them as if some ancient subterranean river had deposited them there. Now and again, Hayes saw little protrusions like bumps or knobs that had been almost completely worn away. So maybe they weren’t steps at all.
On they went, their lights bobbing and their footfalls loud and scraping.
As they descended, Hayes was filled with an exhilaration much like Gates and his people must have felt originally coming down there. A sense of discovery, of anticipation, of great revelations laying ahead. As he moved ever downward, some smartass voice in his head kept saying things like, who do you suppose built all this? Is there life on Mars and in outer space? But it was not funny. It left a bad taste in his mouth like he’d been chewing on spiders.
Finally, he paused. “Everyone okay?”
Cutchen just grunted.
Sharkey said, “Peachy.”
Down they went and by the time they hit bottom, Hayes figured they had descended at least a hundred feet if not more. And now they entered a grotto that was absolutely immense. The floor was littered with fallen shelves of sedimentary rock, loose stones, the pillars of gigantic stalagmites that had been smoothed into near-perfect cones probably by those same long-gone floodwaters.
“Christ,” Sharkey said and her voice echoed out, breaking up and pulled away into fantastic heights above them.
They stepped farther into the grotto.
It was so huge that their lights literally would not penetrate up to the roof or the surrounding walls. Everything echoed. Somewhere, water was dripping. Faint, distant, but dripping all the same. They spread out in a rough circle, trying to find something in there. Overhead, what had to be at least a hundred feet straight up they could see the tips of stalactites. They kept in sight because it would have been just too easy to get lost in there and never find your way out again. The flashlight and lantern beams picked out a cloistered haze in the air, motes of dust. It smelled dirty and dry in there like relics pulled from an Egyptian tomb.
“You’d need a spotlight in here to see anything,” Cutchen said.
They kept fanning out, stepping over rock outcroppings, the occasional vein of ice. There were crevices cut into the floor. Some were no more than a few feet deep and a few inches wide, but others were big enough to swallow a car and had no bottom that the lights could find. They moved on, trying to follow what they thought was a path through that colossal underworld. Everything echoed and bounced around them. It was like an amphitheater in there . . . one exaggerated to a tremendous scope. Now and again, a light rain of ice crystals would fall on them. The air was oddly rarefied like they were on a mountaintop and not far below the surface.