“Christ, it gives me a headache,” Sharkey said.
And that was very apt, for it did tax the brain… it was too busy, too profuse, too multitudinous in design. It was formed of arches and cubes, rectangular slabs set on their ends, a lunatic labyrinth of cones and pyramids, octagons and hexagons, spheres and towers, radiating spirals and bifurcating masts. Like the forking, tangled skeleton of some primal beast, some sideshow sea serpent tacked together out of dozens of unrelated skeletons into a single gangly whole, a mad bone sculpture. An insane and precarious armature that should have fallen, but didn’t. It balanced upon itself like some surreal experiment in abstract geometry and unearthly symmetry.
Hayes thought it looked impossibly random like something formed by nature, the hollowed remains of deep-sea organisms heaped upon one another… corals and sponges, anemones and sea cucumbers, crab carapaces and ghost pipes. Just an odd and conflicting collection of dead things that had boiled and rotted into a single mass, grown into one another and out of each other until there was no beginning and no true end. Standing back and taking it in, he was envisioning it as the black and glossy endoskeleton of some massive alien insect rising from the earth… a deranged biomechanical hybrid of girders and ribs, vertebrae and pelvic disks, conduits and hollow tubes held together by spiraling ladders of ligament. A chitinous and scaly ossuary, a jutting cyclopean honeycomb capped by rising narrow protrusions like the chimneys of a foundry or the smoker vents of hydrothermal ovens.
But even that wasn’t right, for as haphazard and conflicting as the city was, you could not get by the disturbing feeling that there was a purpose here, that the structure was highly mechanistic and practical to its owners, a symbiotic union of steel and flesh, rock and bone. It had an odd industrial look to it. Even the stone it was cut from was not smooth nor polished, but ribbed and knobby and oddly crystalline, set with saw-toothed ridges and jutting teeth and the threads of screws. Almost like there was some dire machinery inside attempting to burst through those bowing, scalloped walls.
To call it a city was an oversimplification.
For this was not a city as humans understood a city. No human mind could have dreamed of this and no human brain had the engineering skill to make it stand and not fall into itself. This was not a city as such, a place of homes and lives, this was harsh and hostile, utilitarian and machined, something brought forth by hopelessly cold and automated minds. An anthill.
A hive.
Hayes felt that just seeing it, just letting his eyes roam that obscene geometrical matrix, made him somehow less than human. It evaporated the sweet and fine milk of the human condition drop by drop. It was evil and unholy and sacrilegious. Words engendered by a weak, superstitious mind, but Hayes was proud of that mind. Because it made him human. He was warm and emotional, not a machine like the things that had reared this awful place.
“Just like Gates said, it seems to go for miles,” Cutchen pointed out.
There was no way to know just how far into the belly of the mountains the city reached. For as Gates said, it went on as far as the eye could see and as far as their lights could reach, though in the distance you could see that parts of it were covered by cave-ins and swallowed in frozen rivers of glacial ice.
A paleozoic megalopolis.
The sort of place that might have inspired the wild tales of mythical places like Thule and Hyperborea, Lemuria and the Mountains of the Moon. Mystical Commoriom and veiled Atlantis. This was the prototype of countless prehuman blasphemies such as the Nameless City and eldritch Kadath in the Cold Wastes beyond Leng. You could see plainly how it had been scarred and scraped by the movement of the glaciers, carried up and pressed down, ground between massive ice flows like corn meal.
“You don’t honestly expect us to go into that bone pile, do you?” Cutchen said in a dry, cracking voice. “I mean… c’mon, Jimmy, it doesn’t look safe. And, Jesus Christ, I’m not afraid to admit that it scares the shit out of me just looking at it.”
It scared Hayes, too.
Scared him in fundamental ways he was not even aware of. It offended him as it offended all men, whether savage or rational, and he had an overwhelming compulsion to come back here with all the dynamite he could fit in the SnoCat and bring that fucking mountain down right on top of it.
“It’s safe enough,” he said. “Gates and the others were crawling through it, so can we.”
“Bullshit. I don’t care what those fucking labcoat Johnnies were doing, I’m not going in there. That’s it. That’s all there goddamn well is to it.” He stood there, breathing hard, looking like he wanted to scream or cry. “C’mon, Jimmy, don’t do this to me… lookit that fucking thing, will ya? I’m having bad dreams just seeing it. But going in there… it’s like a tomb, like a big rotting casket with the lid thrown open… I… I’m sorry, Jimmy… I’m just not up to it.”
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.