Hayes went over to him, clapped him on the shoulder. “Just wait out here for us. We shouldn’t be long. Keep an eye on that generator.”
“Hell, I can’t even change the oil in my goddamn car,” Cutchen said.
He stood there, hands on his hips, watching them scramble up shattered stone columns and through an oval opening, one of hundreds if not thousands set into the weathered face of that city.
“You two would really leave me alone out here, wouldn’t you?” they heard him call. “Boy, isn’t that just great? Assholes. Your both assholes.”
They were barely inside and Cutchen came stumbling in after them, calling them every name he could think of and some that made absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Maybe the city did look like a casket, but at least inside it, he wouldn’t be alone with the bleak, antehuman memory of the place.
41
Inside, the city was no less amazing.
No less insane.
There were endless hexagonal mazes of corridors that seemed to lead into nothing but other corridors that branched to either side, above and below like jungle gym tangles of hollow pipes that had been welded at right angles to one another. Some were quadrilateral and others were triangularly obtuse. Circular passages began and ended with solid walls or sphere-shaped apartments. Rooms simply opened into other rooms like dozens of narrow cubes strung together or stacked atop one another. They were either massive and vault-like or cramped like the cells of monks or honeybees. Arched doorways were set halfway up fifteen foot walls. Sometimes they led into cylindrical channels that went on for hundreds of feet before narrowing to tiny, cubelike alcoves or sometimes they opened into gargantuan amphitheaters with madly curving walls that were set, sloping floor to fifty-foot ceiling, with ovoid cells. Some rooms had no ceilings, just immense shafts that led into a grainy fathomless blackness above and others had no floors, just narrow walkways spanning the great depths below. There was nothing that might have been called stairways, but now and again ribbed helixes rose to the floors above or far below.
The building plan was chaotic at the very least.
The floors were not necessarily distinct nor differentiated from one another. There was no first floor, second floor, third floor etc. The stories converged into one another, rooms and chambers dropping from above or rising up from below, tangled in lattices like diamond crystals.
Five minutes into it, the three of them were sweating and shaking and having trouble catching their breath. The marrow of that damnable city was claustrophobic, profuse, and intersecting. The angles were wildly exaggerated, roofs becoming floors and floors arching up into roofs that were walls. Chambers were never perfectly square but slightly off-kilter and set off-center. Corridors were never exactly linear, but convoluted and sloping, tall then squat and then enormous. There was something geometrically perverse about any brain that could make sense of such a thing without backing itself into some jagged, narrow corner and screaming itself insane. Moving through there was like navigating through the tangled, surreal gutters of a lunatic’s mind, looking for reason that did not exist . . . for reason here was swallowed by amorphous shadows, the shattered wreckage of paranoia as imagined by German expressionists.
They followed the electrical cords that had been attached to walls and strung over black depths below. Even so, it was not long before they had to rest. This place was not engineered for the ease of mobility of the human race. And moving through it was not only psychologically exhausting, it was physically fatiguing as well. Constantly climbing through those tomblike hollows, scuttling down threaded tunnels, and crawling over the litter and debris of collapsed partitions.
They finally paused amidst a line of rooms that were not rooms at all, but sunken chambers with translucent concave floors made of some transparent glass or plastic. If you rubbed very hard, you could clean the grit off the material just enough to make out structures lying far beneath.
“This is a fucking madhouse,” Cutchen said. “What the hell was wrong with Gates? This should have been pulled down. You know? Just fucking pulled down.”
Sharkey said, “It seems mad, but I think it’s all very carefully systematic if you happen to have a brain that can understand the system. I’m afraid our simple mammalian brains are not up to the task . . . maybe not for another couple million years anyway.”
“Can we just get out?” Cutchen said. “Christ, I’ve never felt like this before . . . half the time I’m so nervous and depressed I want to slit my wrists, the other half I feel like I could vomit my intestines out.”
“Just a little while longer, then we’ll call it quits,” Hayes said.
Cutchen rested his head on his knees, squeezing his eyes very tightly shut.
Hayes felt for the guy, for he knew exactly how he felt.
The way this place opened up a can of something creeping and ugly inside of you and shook it around. Tied your belly in knots and made your head ache and your eyes bulge. The human mind was designed to consider regularities, straight lines and simple angles, forms and shapes that were consistent with themselves. But this place . . . it was mathematically distorted, a fourth-dimensional madness. Like being inside some alien wasp hive. It was just too much.
After a brief rest, they moved on and suddenly discovered themselves in an immense courtyard set between rising blocks of that nightmare city. They moved between colossal seventy-foot walls and around towering spires that seemed to serve no earthly purpose. The courtyard was tiled and roofless, nothing above but empty blackness reaching to dizzying heights. Now and again there were domes like buildings set about, but the only way of getting into them was scaling the smooth walls and entering from apertures at the top. There were also high blank facades lacking egress that were set with jutting rectangles fifty and sixty feet above that looked like nothing but perches for rooks or hawks.
They had left the strings of lights behind and were moving with flashlight and lantern again. They came to another of those crazy domes and this one was honeycombed with oval passages that seemed to lead down.
“Give me the lantern, Cutchy,” Hayes said. “I’m going in there.”
Sharkey shook her head. “No, Jimmy . . . it’s too dangerous.”
He took the lantern. “I’m going. I’ll be careful.”
He chose a passage and entered it.
It was about five feet in diameter at the opening and he had to move downwards at a crouch. It was like being inside a funhouse twisty slide, just a hollowed tube that moved this way, then that, ever downward. But the walls and floor were set with tiny bumps so there was no chance of losing your footing or sliding away into darkness. Hayes kept going, his throat constricting and sweat beading his face. Finally, the passage opened into a series of massive rooms with hooded ceilings.
He stood there in that shrouded darkness, panning the lantern around. He instantly did not like the place. That terrible sense of deja-vu was haunting him again, clawing and worming at the pit of his mind.
“Yeah,” he whispered. “I remember this place, too, but why?”
He moved on, passing beneath archways and steering himself around accumulated heaps of detritus. He came into a room that seemed to be nothing but an ossuary, a collection of aged bones . . . skulls set into little cells in the walls, the skeletons of men and extinct animals fully articulated, great birds dangling from above with nothing seeming to hold them. The floor was a litter of bones as if most of the displays here — and there must have been thousands at one time — had collapsed through the ages, maybe from their own weight or seismic activity shaking them loose. It was tough going climbing over those heaped bones, the lantern casting flying and grotesque shadows, the air swimming with clots of dust. But it was necessary. For as much as this place disturbed him, he knew it was no simple natural history collection.