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.
“Will it work?” Sharkey asked.
“I think so.” Hayes checked the tank. It held ten gallons and was about half full. He took one of the cans and filled it up. Then he threw the circuit breaker and hit the electronic ignition. It roared to life immediately, finding a happy idle and sticking with it.
“Where’s the light?” Cutchen said.
“Just a minute. Let it warm up.” Hayes stood there, lighting a cigarette and waiting for the engine to push the coldness from itself. It didn’t take long. He turned the circuit breaker back on and suddenly, the cavern was bright.
“Damn,” Cutchen said. “That’s better.”
With all those bulbs netting the first thirty or so feet of the city, Hayes finally got a good look at that ancient structure. It was simply incredible. The sight of it literally sucked the breath from his lungs and the blood from his veins. That old, ugly familiarity was there, of course, the sense that these aged ruins were something long-hidden in the depths of all men’s minds. But looking up at it, canceled all that out. On TV, ancient cities always looked too neat, too tidy, too planned in their obsolescence, but not this one. It rose up incredibly high, yet sagging and leaning and crumbling away in too many places. Hayes could see that it went up at least two-hundred feet until it met the grotto’s domed roof… and even then, it simply disappeared into solid rock. As if the mountain had grown up around it and engulfed it through the ages. Such incredible antiquity was mind-boggling. But Gates had reiterated what Professor Dyer of the Pabodie Expedition had said: the ruins were at least 350 million years old and that was a conservative estimate.
These ruins were from an amazingly advanced pre-human civilization.
Hayes knew that, but the words had meant little to him until now.
Pre-human city. Pre-human intelligence.
“God, look at that will you?” Cutchen finally said. “You can… you can almost feel how ancient it is… right up your spine.”
Ancient? No, the sphinx and the Acropolis were ancient, this was primordial. This predated man’s oldest works by hundreds of millions of years. It was a dawn city. A nightmare exercise in diverging geometrical association, a relic from some depraved and evil elder world. It did not look so much like a city, but like some immense and derelict machine, some dreadful mechanism from a Medieval torture chamber. A profoundly synergistic and yet nonsensical device made of pistons and pipes, wires and cylinders, vents and cogs. Something rising and leaning, squat yet narrow and tall, diverging at impossible right angles to itself. The human mind was not prepared to look upon such a thing… it automatically sought an overall structural plan, a uniformity, and found nothing it could pull in and make sense of. This was a perverse and godless architecture born of minds reared in some multi-dimensional reality.