It was hard to get over the idea that they were lifeless things, ancient mummies far older than the ones Gates had brought in. These had decayed and mummified before the glaciers arrived making them positive relics. They were hideous in life, but maybe more so in death . . . shrunken and wrinkled and leathery, tangled in their own limbs. Alien zombies.
And they were not powerless, Hayes thought.
Not in the least.
Maybe their great age had something to do with it, but those pruned eyes dangling from corded stalks still seemed to glimmer and shine with a blasphemous vitality.
Enough.
They started again, moving as quickly as they could through that labyrinth that probably made perfect sense from above, but at ground level was positively insane. Sharkey kept pausing to look at things, growing increasingly agitated at the other two for their lack of scientific curiosity. The graveyard alone, she told them, would have kept legions of archaeologists and anthropologists busy for years and years. The Old Ones had reverence for their dead, they had no doubt developed complex funerary rites and death customs.
“So what?” Cutchen said.
She looked like she was going to either call his mother an unflattering name or kick his ass, but she just sighed and stalked off with Hayes in tow. At least until they were nearly out of that charnel grounds and then something else caught her interest. On an elevated platform there was a huge sarcophagus cut from some unknown black stone and highly-ornamented with carven vines and bizarre squid-like creatures, things like clusters of bubbles and countless staring eyes. At the head, there was a lavish five-pointed mound of some tarnished metal like platinum. Inside, there was an Old One held in a rippling shroud of ice. Though blackened with immense age, it had not rotted like the others.
“This one’s important,” Sharkey said. She tapped the mummy with her ice-axe. “I’ll bet it’s some kind of chief or maybe even one of the original colonists. Who can say? But I’ll bet it was preserved somehow for future generations.”
“Why is it laying flat?” Cutchen asked.
“Looks like it fell over,” Hayes said.
He was staring down at that regal monstrosity and hating it instinctively as he hated them all. Maybe this one was a king or a chief or one of the first to make the journey and just maybe it was the very architect of all life on earth, but he could not respect it. You could wrap a bloated, vile spider in gold ribbons and fancy lace and it still repulsed you. Still made you want to step on it. And a spider, when you came down to it, was much more attractive to the human mind than what was laying in that stylized box.
Hayes thought: Christ, look at that old ice and what it holds. Like every dark and nameless secret of antiquity is locked up in that frozen sarcophagus. All of mankind’s primal fears, cabalistic myths, and evil sorceries given flesh. The archetype that inspired every nightmare and twisted racial memory, every witch-tale and every legend of winged demons. All the awful, unthinkable things the race had bred and purged from the black cauldron of collective memory, all the obscene things it could not acknowledge nor dare admit to . . . it was here. This horror. The engineer of the race and of all races. And it had been waiting down here in the eon-old ice. Waiting and waiting, dead but dreaming, consciously forgotten but grimly remembered in the subconscious and dark lore of humankind. But all along, they were dreaming of us just as we dreamed of them ... because they were us and we were them and now, dear God, millions upon millions of years later, they were waking up, they were rising to claim their children and their childrens’ intellect...
Thinking this and wanting to believe it was utter fantasy, but knowing it was dire and inescapable truth, Hayes felt like some savage standing before the grave of a fallen and cruel god. He had a mad desire to whip out his dick and piss on this thing. To show it his defiance that was innate and human and something he knew they had not foreseen developing in their carefully-manipulated progeny.
Enough.
They were stalling with all this and he knew it.
“Let’s go,” he said and meant it. “We’re not here for this and we all know it.”
So he took the lead and clambered over slabs and low walls, ignoring everything but that dead city rising above them. He got no arguments on this. Sharkey and Cutchen followed him and he figured they would have followed him just about anywhere at that moment.
“Oh, look,” Sharkey said, panning her light at the foot of some crumbled masonry.
It was Gates.
He was pressed into an alcove between shattered blocks of stone that had no doubt fallen from above. He was curled up in sort of a fetal position, knees to chin, his face white as new snow and contorted into a grimace of absolute horror. Blood had trickled from the rictus of his mouth. His eyes were spilled down his cheeks in gelatinous trails like squashed jellyfish.
It was horrible. Just like all the others.
But worse somehow, because you could almost feel the agonal convulsions that Gates had suffered before he died. There was no getting around the fact that he looked like he’d been literally scared to death. And that death had been a dark matter, mindless and perverse and ghastly. No man should have had to go like Gates did . . . alone and mad in that suffocating darkness, dying a crazy and hopeless death like a rat stuck in a drainpipe. Screaming as his eyes boiled to soup and splashed down his face. As his brain went to sauce and his soul was burnt to ash.
Gates had paid the final price for his curiosity.
But Hayes knew it was more than just scientific interest . . . Gates had been trying to unravel the mystery of the ages. He had been trying to put it all together so he could maybe save his own race. He was a hero. He was one of the greatest of great men.
Sharkey kneeled before him. She dug into his coat and found his field journal. “There’s a funny odor about him . . . not a death smell, something else. Sharp, acidic.”
Hayes had smelled it, too: a caustic, acrid stench like monkey urine.
The tenseness feeding between the three of them was electric and cutting. It lay in each of their bellies, a twisted knot of nausea.
“All right, all right, goddammit,” Hayes said, starting up into the city. “Let’s go see what did this, let’s go see what scared Gates to death.”
40
“No,” Cutchen said then, holding his lantern up. “Wait a minute now... what’s that over there?”
Hayes stepped down off some broken stones.
Sharkey was already over there, checking it out. Collapsible tables had been set out, half a dozen of them upon which were stone artifacts taken from the city, hammers and drills, cases of instruments, lanterns. There were piles of notebooks and a couple digital cameras. Microscopes. There was a crate full of rolled-up maps that turned out to be rubbings made from the walls inside . . . figures, glyphs, strange characters.
Cutchen grabbed a folding chair and sat down. There was a thermometer on the table. “It’s almost ten degrees in here. Balmy.”
Sharkey and Hayes looked around, found a flare pistol which she took and a twelve-gauge Remington pump that he took. They did not comment on these things. The men who had brought them down here had had their reasons and nobody dared question what those might have been.
Bottom line was, they felt better being armed.
“Look,” Hayes said. “A generator.”
It was. A Honda industrial job on a rolling cart. A spiderweb of power cords ran off of it, all of them leading up into the city itself. As Hayes followed them with his light he could see that there were cords hanging from the face of the city. There were several five-gallon cans of gasoline. He went to the generator. It had a 3800 watt capacity, so it could’ve lit up most of the entire city if you had enough light bulbs and judging from what he had seen, Gates and the boys certainly had enough of those.