“He’s guessing two- to three-hundred million years. Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth.”
Lind clucked his tongue. “Imagine that. I didn’t even know there were mummies back then.”
Hayes just looked at him, shook his head. It was a good thing Lind was some kind of plumber, because when you came down to it, he wasn’t much smarter that most dingleballs hanging off a camel’s ass. A real natural with pipes and venting, but anything else? Forget it.
As Hayes watched, Lind began pulling on his fleece jacket and thermal pants, parka, boots, and wool mittens. “Well aren’t you coming, Hayes?”
But Hayes just shook his head. Already he could see people spilling out of shacks and buildings, some of them still pulling on their ECW’s even though the wind was shrieking and it was pushing seventy below out there.
“I’ll wait until the groupies thin,” he told Lind.
But Lind was already going out the door, the frigid breath of Antarctica blowing in until the heaters swallowed it.
Hayes sat down, lit a cigarette and sipped coffee, staring at the game of solitaire on his laptop. Yeah, it was going to be a long goddamn winter. The thought of that set on him wrong for reasons even he wasn’t sure of, made him feel like he was bleeding inside.
Outside the compound, the wind rose up, showing its teeth.
3
You had to love Lind, Hayes thought later as he got a look at the mummies over in Hut #6. He was really something, positively good to the last drop. Hayes was standing there with him and two other contractors that knew about as much about evolutionary biology as they did about menstrual cramps… and Lind? Oh, he was just going on and on while Gates and Bryer and Holm took notes and photographs, made measurements and scraped ice from one of the mummies.
“Yeah, that’s one ugly, prick, Professor,” Lind was saying, hovering around them, taking up their light while they continually, and politely, told him to step back. “Damn, look at that thing… enough to give you the cold sweats. I bet I have nightmares until spring just looking at it. But, you know, more I look at it, more I’m thinking that what you got there is one of those animals without a spine, you know, an un-vertebrate like a starfish or a jellyfish. Something like that.”
“You mean invertebrate,” Bryer, the paleoclimatologist corrected him.
“Isn’t that what I said?”
Bryer chuckled, as did a few of the others.
Outside, the wind pelted the walls with snow just as fine as blown sand. And inside, the air was greasy, warm, close. A funny, acrid stink beginning to make itself known as the thing continued to melt.
“We really made a find here, eh, Professor?” Lind said to Gates.
He looked up over his spectacles, a pencil hanging from his lips. “Yes, we certainly did. The find of the ages, Lind. What we have here is entirely new to science. I’m guessing its neither animal nor plant, but a sort of chimera.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” Lind said. “Boy, this is gonna make us famous.”
Hayes laughed low in his throat. “Sure, I can already see your picture on the cover of Newsweek and Scientific American. There’s a picture of Professor Gates, too, but it’s kind of small, stuck down in the corner.”
There were a few laughs over that.
Lind scowled. “You don’t have to be a smartass, Hayes. Jesus Christ.”
But Hayes figured he did. Here these guys were trying to figure out what this was all about while Lind circled them on his unicycle, pumping his red horn and shaking a rubber chicken at them.
So, yes, he had to be a smartass.
Same way Lind had to talk… even about things he knew nothing of. These were traits they both practiced month by dark month during the long, grim South Pole winters. But in the hut… with that defrosting mummy laid out like something spilled from a freakshow jar… well, maybe they were doing it because they had to do something. Had to say something. Make some noise, anything to disrupt the malign sound of that nightmare melting, dripping and dripping like blood from a slit throat. Hayes couldn’t stand it… it made his scalp feel like it wanted to crawl off the back of his head.
And he kept thinking: What the hell’s with you? It’s a goddamn fossil, it can’t do nothing but wait.
Wait. Yeah, maybe that wasn’t what he’d meant to think, but had thought it all the same. And the more you stared at that goddamn thing, more you started thinking it wasn’t a fossil at all, just something ancient… waiting.
Christ, of all crazy things to be thinking.
The wind shook the hut and that was enough for the other two onlookers — a couple contractors named Rutkowski and St. Ours. They went out the door like something was biting their asses. And maybe something was.
“I’m starting to get the feeling that our friends here don’t like what you’ve found,” Holm said, running a hand through his white hair. “I think it’s giving them the creeps.”
Gates laughed thinly. “Is our pet here bothering you, Hayes?”
“Hell, no, I like it, big ugly sonofabitch,” he said. “Got all I can do not to hug it and get it alone somewhere.”
They all started laughing at that. But it didn’t last long. Not very long at all. Like laughter in a mortuary, good cheer just did not belong in this place. Not now. Not with what was berthed in there.
Hayes did not envy Gates and his people.
Sure, they were scientists. Gates was a paleobiologist and Holm was a geologist, but the very idea of touching that monstrosity in the melting ice, well, it made something in his stomach roll over and then roll over again. He was trying desperately to catalog what it was he was feeling, but it was just beyond him. All he could say for sure is that that creature made his guts roll up like a dirty carpet, made something inside him run both hot and cold. Whatever that thing was, it revolted him on some unknown inner level and he just couldn’t get a handle on it.
It was dead.
That’s what Gates said, but looking at it, Christ and the saints, you really had to wonder. For the blue ice was getting very clear now and it was like looking through thick glass. It distorted things, but nowhere near enough for Hayes’ liking.
The mummy was big. Probably an easy seven feet from end to end, shaped like some great fleshy barrel that tapered at each end and was set with high vertical ridges that ran up and down its length. Its skin was an oily gunmetal gray like that of a shark, set with tiny fissures and minute scars. Midline, there was a pair of appendages that branched out like tree limbs and then branched out again into fine tapering tendrils. At the bottom of the torso, there were five muscular tentacles, each an easy four feet in length. They looked oddly like the trunks of elephants… though not wrinkled, but smooth and firm and powerful. They ended in flat triangular spades that might have been called feet on another world.
And the ice kept melting and the water kept dripping and that weird rotten fish-stink began to come off the thing.
“What’s that there?” Lind said. “That… that a head?”
“Yes,” Gates said. “It would seem to meet the criteria.”
Maybe for a biologist, but not for Hayes or Lind. They stood around like mourners, just wanting to throw dirt over it. At the top of the thing’s torso was a flabby, blunt neck that almost looked like a wrinkled-up scarf or foreskin. On top of it was something like a great five-pointed starfish, dirty yellow in color. The radial arms of the star were made of tapering, saggy tubes and at the end of each, a bulbous red eye.