Wild. Dangerous. Curious.
Something shifted, a tiny sound as though a single grain of sand had trickled down from the wall of the mine to land gently on a metal tile. Ethan’s gaze was fixed upon the dark maw of the tunnel, unable to tear himself away from it. He could hear his lungs sucking in air in short, sharp breaths. And then he realized that wasn’t the only breathing he could hear.
Ethan held his breath.
The sound came in long, slow rasps from out of the darkness. Ethan was briefly reminded of the sound a diver’s oxygen tank makes, though this was far deeper in tone.
Ethan stared at the darkness, and then in the faint glow he saw two discs of light near the top of the door briefly reflect the emergency lights in the laboratory, like translucent red orbs floating nine feet high in the darkness.
It’s here. It can see me.
Ethan saw a slow movement against the tunnel, like a shadow upon a shadow as a tuft of brown hair glinted in the soft light. All at once Ethan’s brain digested the information and identified the tuft of hair as being from an immense, muscular arm, and in an instant Ethan could see it standing there on the edge of the light.
His gaze flicked instinctively up and once again he looked straight into a pair of dull red eyes, the retina occasionally flashing as they reflected the emergency lights. Ethan swallowed as his stomach twisted upon itself and shuddered involuntarily. It was fear, but not like he had ever felt before. This was something ancient, buried deep in the cerebral cortex, a flashback from prehistory when men huddled together naked and afraid in the night, listening to the sounds of huge, dangerous creatures prowling nearby.
Whatever is watching me is far from human.
It moved again, a tiny step forward until the soft glow bathed its thick fur in a pale red light. Ethan stared at a huge form, bipedal just like a human but with thick, stocky legs of immense musculature. Even with the thick, knotted fur that covered them it was still obvious that this creature was possessed of incredible strength.
Ethan could see ranks of abdominal muscles beneath the finer fur covering its belly, each as big as his fist, bulging prominently outward and flexing slowly as the creature drew its breath. The chest was broad and muscular, thickly forested with more hair, and the shoulders were like cannonballs.
The arms hung long by its side and almost reached its knees, as though it were stooping slightly. Ethan saw that its legs were not straight but slightly bent at the knee, as though acting like shock absorbers.
Ethan looked into its eyes again and felt the same ancient fear course through his veins.
The features were unmistakeably human, far more so than a gorilla or chimpanzee. The nose was more pronounced, not flat, and the line of the mouth was wider than a human’s. Even in the low-light conditions Ethan could just make out that the creature’s head was conical in shape, but that the skull was round like that of a human. Only the thick fur coating the top of the head gave it a conical appearance, perhaps an adaption to prevent heat loss from the scalp during the cold mountain winters.
No gunshot broke the silence. Ethan realized that although he could see the creature’s skull from his position on the table, the creature was too tall for Kurt to spot its head or even its eyes from his position down the south corridor. Without a clean shot at the head he couldn’t be sure of a kill. All that was saving this immense creature’s life was the fact that it was too tall to walk into the control room. It would have to stoop to get in.
Ethan shivered as he became aware that the creature was looking directly at him. The eyes seemed black now, bottomless pits beneath a slight ridge running along the skull above them. He could see that the creature’s facial hair was like a man’s, thick around the jaw and the sides of the face, but the nose and cheeks were hairless, the skin there darkened by exposure to a thousand Idaho suns.
The eyes remained transfixed upon his as they stared at each other. Ethan searched desperately for some kind of recognition, an emotion to appear on that face, but he saw nothing. The eyes stared back at him blankly for what felt like an eternity.
Then, they began looking around the control room.
Ethan felt a new kind of fear tingle uncomfortably through him as he saw the creature slowly scan the room, sweeping methodically from one side to the other. Watching. Observing. Waiting. He realized without a shadow of doubt that it was thinking.
Ethan flinched in shock as it suddenly sniffed loudly, sucking in air like a hoover. It looked at him for a long moment and then softly let the breath out, its huge chest sinking as it did so. Now it focused on Ethan again and seemed to look at the cables securing him to the table. Thinking. Assessing.
Ethan took a chance and whispered.
‘Hey.’
The dark eyes flicked back onto his and bore into him like laser beams. The face remained impassive but Ethan was in no doubt that he had its attention. He swallowed, and then looked up at the east corridor before looking down at the west corridor. Ethan looked back at the creature, saw it still focused directly upon him, and then repeated his gesture, checking out the two corridors and looking back at the creature.
It stared at him blankly.
Ethan tried the whole routine again. The animal just looked at him, unreadable. Ethan tried again, looking at the corridors intently and then back at the creature.
It wasn’t looking at him. With a chill that ran down through his bones he saw it looking from one corridor to the next, the big dark eyes rolling from left to right before looking down at Ethan. Ethan could not tell if the creature was simply mimicking him or actually understanding what he was trying to do.
Ethan repeated his gesture one more time, and then looked at the creature and shook his head slowly.
The vast majority of human civilizations used identical means of indicating ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Ethan had once read that the origin of this universally accepted gesture was conceived shortly after birth, when hungry babies would search for milk from their mother’s breast by moving their heads up and down, and would generally decline milk by turning their heads aside.
And if this creature could understand that, then it might also have recognized that Ethan was trapped, perhaps just as it had once been.
The creature looked at him again, that blank and inhuman expression still cast across its face. Ethan repeated the entire gesture again and shook his head. This time, he put on a worried expression.
The creature stared at him for several long seconds, then looked at the corridors again.
Slowly, ever so quietly as though it were not walking but floating above the ground, it began to melt back into the darkness.
‘Open fire, now!’
Kurt’s voice shouted out, shockingly loud in the silence. It was instantly drowned out by a salvo of deafening shots. Ethan heard a shriek of rage and pain and then the creature vanished as though it had never even existed. He heard footfalls receding swiftly into the night beyond the mine tunnel.
Ethan stared at the darkness for a few moments, and then he breathed out.
The entire encounter had taken less than a minute, but it felt as though he had been watching the creature for a lifetime.
‘Damn it!’
Kurt burst into the control room, his rifle pulled into his shoulder as he worked his way around the table and kicked the steel doors shut. Two of his soldiers emerged from the other corridors and helped him seal the doors with the bars before Kurt turned to look at Ethan.