About then, they all became aware of the most peculiar vibration that seemed to be traveling through the floor beneath their feet and up into their bones, making their teeth ache. It was subtle at first, but growing, rising up now like some generator amping into life, that rhythmic thrumming pa.s.sing through all of them and making them tremble and shake. And, Jesus, it was getting louder all the time like having your ear up against the metal casing of a hydraulic pump.

St. Ours tried to say something, but that thrumming drowned out his voice and the others were completely in thrall to it now, lost in a fog, their bodies moving now in cadence with that awful vibration. Noises began echoing around them . . . pinging sounds, whispering sounds, metallic sounds echoing down long pipes and brief squeals that almost sounded like human screams inverted or played in reverse.

And then there was a crackling like static electricity, a discharge of energy that made the hairs stand up on their arms and St. Ours wanted to cry out, but he couldn't. He still had the .22 in his hands and he wanted to open up on something, drill something, anything to make it stop before his head flew apart. Maybe the others didn't see what he saw then . . . and it was hard to say because they looked empty and dumb like window dummies . . . but it made him want to run.

Except, he didn't think he could.

The far outside wall of the room was getting fuzzy. It was made of bare concrete blocks, except now it looked like it was made of smoke. Something almost diaphanous and insubstantial. It was fluttering and glowing now as if it were backlit by some enormous burst of energy and you could see the mortaring between the blocks standing out lividly.

Yes, St. Ours wanted to run away, but all he did was stumble forward, a weird sucking feeling in the pit of his stomach. But he still had the .22 and he was going to use it . . . use it when whatever was out there melting through the wall made its appearance.

Because it would.

And then it did.

It came through the wall as easily as smoke through a window grating, insubstantial and ghostly, yet gradually gaining solidity. And at that point, a ghost carrying its head tucked under its arm would have been welcome. Because this . . . well, this was something else.

St. Ours knew it was one of those things from Hut #6 and the sight of it filled him with a terror that was dream-like and blank.

It was obscene to see it in motion, to see it gliding forth on those thick and muscular snakelike tentacles at its base. It should have been sluggish, but it moved with a marked fluidity, grace, and ease. Its body was like some oblong barrel, the flesh gray and oily and ribbed, some sort of wriggling parasitic podia hanging from the lower quadrant. When it got within five feet of St. Ours, it opened up its wings, almost seeming to inflate them, fanning them out like the collar of a frilled lizard. It sounded like wet umbrellas being snapped open.

St. Ours could see a black vein networking in those wings. They looked membranous and rubbery. He tried to scream and could not. He was horrified and sickened, knowing it was not truly there physically, could not possibly be, yet smelling its stink which was like a poisoned carca.s.s slowly decaying on a hot beach.

It stood before him, towering over him, wings fanned out like the sails of a hang-glider, stinking and evil and offensive. Those appendages at its middle were reaching out for him, quivering, looking much like branching dendrites and synapses of a brain cell. But the worst part was that starfish-shaped head with those glaring eyes like red gla.s.s. These, more than anything, are what made St. Ours start shooting, seeing those slugs pa.s.s harmlessly through the creature and punch into the concrete wall behind it.

The thing allowed him this one act of defiance and then those eyes stood out at the end of their stalks, looked at him and in him, showing him the pain of refusal, of raging against its kind. He heard a high, shrill, almost musical piping in his head like some distorted and trilling antique harmonium. And suddenly he was nothing and no one. His mind was bleached white and he was just a doll forged from warm plastic with a beating heart and staring eyes. He fell down before the thing, whimpering and giggling, and there was an intense wave of agony in his skull as his brain went to bubbling hot wax and his eyes exploded from their sockets and splashed down his face like wet vomit.

And then the thing began to fade, pulling away from the broken and sightless creature before it.

And back near the door, the spell broken, Rutkowski and the remaining Glory Boys began to scream.

24.

Like the wreckage left by some horrendous traffic accident, just about everyone at the station came by to look upon the remains of Tommy St. Ours. They bustled in the corridor, poking their noses through the doorway and asking questions and whispering and then leaving as quick as they could get away. St. Ours was like some horror kept in a jar at a roadside carnival and people had to see what was left just to say that they had, that such a thing could be. Because most of them had never gotten a good look at Meiner sitting in that chair out in Hut #6 with his eyes sprayed over his face like slime, but they weren't going to miss this.

Few actually saw St. Ours, though.

After five, then six and seven people circled in like turkey buzzards, Dr. Sharkey threw a white sheet over him like a corpse in an old movie. What more could really be done? Later, they would wrap him up in a tarp and ship him out to join Meiner in the cold house where was also kept the station's meat and perishables, but for now at least they didn't need to look upon him. So, yes, only a handful saw his grim cadaver, but to listen to them later, you wouldn't have thought so. For they all had stories to tell that seemed to get more gruesome with the re-telling.

And then, after a time, there was only Sharkey and Hayes and La-Hune.

"What're you going to log as the cause of death?" LaHune said, gently touching a great red k.n.o.b over his left eye where St. Ours had hit him.

She looked over at him like maybe he was kidding, making some sick joke, but she saw he was dead serious. "Well, I'll have to do a post, won't I? But, chances are, I'll be writing it up as another cerebral hemorrhage."

"Yes," LaHune said. "Yes."

Hayes felt sorry for the guy . . . a little bit anyway, because n.o.body should've had to put up with being slugged and then tied up, but the guy just didn't seem to be in touch with mother reality here. He knew what killed St. Ours, just as they all knew it, but he wouldn't admit it.

Christ. An hour ago, Hayes had been sleeping alongside Sharkey and then Cutchen was at her door saying there had been another death and now he was here, looking at this and listening to LaHune.

Which was worse?

Of course, this death had a lot of drama tied to it. Rutkowski and the boys had gone screaming into the community room and the dorms beyond, banging their fists against doors, wanting help or salvation. Maybe both. That was how Cutchen and some of the others had untied LaHune and got a look at St. Ours. Now Rutkowski and his Glory Boys were sedated, because none of them were sure what had happened. They were raving about ghosts and monsters, saying that one of the Old Ones was traipsing about camp.

"I don't think, at this point, that we need to be so concerned with how St. Ours died, but with what killed him," Sharkey said. "Can we agree on that?"

"Well, yes, we need to know that. If you have any ideas, I'm listening."

Sharkey just stared at him like he was an idiot.

Hayes said, "Doc's right, chief. Don't matter what happened, so much as who did it."

"If you have any ideas . . . "

"Oh for chrissake, LaHune, what the f.u.c.k's wrong with you?" he wanted to know. "You know same as me what happened. Those things out there . . . Gates' f.u.c.king fossils . . . they aren't exactly dead as you and I understand dead. Their minds are still active and if we don't do something about shutting those minds down again, then who knows how many of us'll be left come spring."

LaHune swallowed. "I'm not about to accept any of that nonsense. There's simply no real proof. I expect that from Rutkowski . . . he's hysterical, but not you, Hayes."

"Oh, really? You think because they've been frozen a million years or whatever that they can't wake up again?"

"No, I don't."

"All right, then. We'll say it's not the frozen ones, okay? Maybe it was them down in that lake, LaHune, because I can tell you that those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are not anywhere near dead. So let's not f.u.c.k around here, all right? I know you saw the videotape by now. You know what's down there."

LaHune looked uncomfortable. "Yes, I've seen the tape. But I tend to think what's down in that lake and what's up here are two different situations."

Before Sharkey could hope to stop him, Hayes grabbed LaHune and slammed him up against the wall and with enough force to knock a few things off their shelves. "Listen to me, you pretentious f.u.c.king fool," Hayes said. "Those things are physically dead, but psychically very much alive. They killed St. Ours because he was going to burn those bodies up and those things don't want that yet. He was dangerous to them, so they squashed him. Those minds out there . . . I don't think they've cycled up all the way yet, but when they do, when they f.u.c.king do, we're all toast and you know it. If anybody's left in this camp by spring, I can guarantee you of one thing, they might look like men, but what's going to be in their heads will be anything but."

25.

"He said he would be online at six. That's what his email said," Sharkey was saying. "Let's give it a little longer."

They were sitting in the infirmary, Sharkey and Cutchen and Hayes, staring at her laptop like it was some oracle that would divine their future when it decided the time was right. n.o.body was speaking and it was pretty much like that all over camp: just go about your duties and lose yourselves in your work and when you had to talk to others, keep it light and filled with fluff. Talk about how long the winter was and how this was your last one, what you were going to do when you got back to the world. Regardless, don't talk about what was happening and what was still to come.

So they sat and waited, waited for Gates to come online. He was still up at the tent camp, at the excavation, and he had emailed Sharkey that he wanted to talk to her, but not on the radio. Hayes thought that was funny, odd . . . but then again, he was seeing everything a little off-kilter these days. For him, there were spooks and conspiracies behind every tree.

Good healthy paranoia, he liked to tell himself, sometimes it's all that can save your bacon.

When he thought about it, tried to get a handle on things and balance them out in his mind, he could not be sure anymore just when the knowledge that things were f.u.c.ked up at Kharkhov Station had come to him. True, he had had a bad feeling in his gut from the first moment he had arrived at the camp. And there had been no real reason for it, none whatsoever. But it had lingered on like a summer cold, annoying him and, at times, making him think that he was losing his mind. It wasn't until word had come about Gates finding those mummies and those ruins, that whatever was in his belly really started chewing at him and when he'd seen those awful things in Hut #6 that day -the day Lind had gone mad - he somehow knew they were all in dreadful danger. And that was the funny part of it all, the things he knew. Sometimes when he started talking, he said things that he did not know to be true, but was certain of nonetheless. For example, he did not know that there was a direct link between the mummies and the living ones down in Lake Vordog, yet he was sure there was. Just as he was sure that the Old Ones wanted their minds and that men knew them from the dim past, that the hatred and terror they inspired was carried inside him and the others as some sort of race memory.

Christ, a therapist would have had a field day with him and he knew it, yet the certainty of these things remained.

Hayes was having the dreams like everyone else, but it was more than that for him. He had had that thing out in the hut invade his mind and nearly destroy him, but unlike Meiner and St. Ours, he had survived the invasion. Maybe this gave him an edge and maybe some of that telepathy was still cooking in his head. Regardless, he knew there were connections here between all these things and they were the sort you could hang yourself from.

"Getting something," Sharkey said.

Her laptop beeped, letting her know she had incoming.

Paleodoc: gates here you there elaine?

Sharkey: I'm here. How goes it up there?

Paleodoc: we're making progress finding out about things that maybe we'd be better off not knowing about but don't mind me I'm tired

Hayes could just bet that he was. Up there in those ruins with all the dead Old Ones. Jesus, they must've been having some kind of dreams up there. It was a wonder they hadn't cut their own throats by now and maybe some of them had.

Sharkey: Lots of things happening here. I found out from my Russian friend about that abandoned camp. What he knew about it. Apparently, it was a coring outpost and the crew up there got a little shack happy. Started seeing ghosts and killing themselves.

Paleodoc: any survivors?

Sharkey: None that were sane. They flew them out. The station was called Vradaz Outpost and it's been deserted since the trouble, over twenty years now.

Paleodoc: did he say what the nature of the trouble was?

Sharkey: Just the usual haunted house stuff. Apparitions and sounds. Knockings and rappings. Things of that nature. Is any of that important?

Paleodoc: how did the lake project make out?

Sharkey: The cryobot was a success. Hayes was there when they released the hydrobot. They found a city down there. A gigantic city on the lake bed.

Paleodoc: still there then? I thought it might be Sharkey: You knew about it?

Paleodoc: I've been studying the pictographs up in the city they tell some pretty wild tales if I'm reading them right think I am there was something I interpreted as a ma.s.s exodus down into the lake when the glaciers began to move in Sharkey: Hayes saw them, Dr. Gates, from the hydrobot's feed. There were hundreds if not thousands of those Old Ones still living down there. They were swarming. They lost contact with the hydrobot about that time.

Paleodoc: yes, I imagine they did Sharkey: what does it all mean?

Paleodoc: I'm not sure just yet but soon the fact that they're still alive down there is bad though if I'm reading these gylphs correctly the old ones have plans for us they want to exploit us Sharkey: Are they terrestrial? Can you tell me that?

Paleodoc: no, I don't see how they could be there are evidences in the glyphs etchings on the walls of our star system and others I'm reading it to be evidence of interplanetary and possibly interstellar travel I believe these things existed as a race long before our planet cooled I'm guessing if we could visit mars and the outer planets we'd find evidence of their colonization they've been with us since the beginning Sharkey: Can you be more specific about that?

Paleodoc: the winged devils elaine they've been with us since the beginning all our tales of winged demons and devils have a single source do you follow Sharkey: What do they want?

Paleodoc: I can't be sure but I believe they've been waiting many millions of years for us to find them.

Sharkey: Why?

Paleodoc: listen to me elaine these things are dangerous in ways I can't even tell you I believe they have seeded hundreds of worlds in the galaxy with life and directed the evolution of that life they have an agenda and I believe it is the subjugation of the races they developed Sharkey: We've had two deaths here.

Paleodoc: you'll have more they will harvest certain minds and crush the others listen to me elaine I think you should get out of there get in the snocat and make for vostok station you are in danger Sharkey: You had better come down first.

Paleodoc: can't too much to do up here too many clues to follow up on if I or others return watch us close very close something not right with Holm I think they have his mind now they want mine and yours too elaine get out get out while you can Sharkey did everything she could do to bring Gates back up, but he was gone. He had gone off-line according to her messenger. Finally, she gave up and shut her computer down and was forced to look at those two dour faces.

Cutchen spoke first. "Well," he said. "Well . . . either our good Doctor Gates has lost his mind or we're in terrible danger."

"I don't believe he's lost his mind," Sharkey said, but would not elaborate on it. "I don't believe that at all."

"Neither do I," Hayes said. He looked over at Cutchen. "I don't think you do either. What Gates said . . . what he's been reading from those hieroglyphs or whatever he found in that old city . . . it's nothing I haven't suspected or felt. A lot of us have been dreaming crazy s.h.i.t and feeling worse things, but none of it really made sense. We all maybe connected it up with those mummies out there, but was that because we were sure they were the culprit or because we were scared and we needed a scapegoat, a witch to burn? But now -"

"You left out something," Cutchen said. "Gates' little chat the night before he left. People were feeling funny about those fossils of his and Lind's nervous breakdown, but the things he said to us in the community room were pretty wild. I don't think there's a one of us who didn't come out of that with an inflamed imagination."

"Sure. I'll admit to that. But it's more than imagination, Cutchy, let's get f.u.c.king real here. We didn't imagine the dreams or Lind's nervous breakdown or Meiner and St. Ours having their brains boiled to jelly. There's a common cause for these happenings and it's right out in Hut Six, like it or not. Because those things are not dead the way we know dead, their minds are still active and maybe that has something to do with the living ones down in the lake, I don't know, but Gates is right: we're in terrible danger here. You heard what he said. Those things . . . they've been waiting for us down here, they want to use us. They have plans for us."

"It's pretty wild s.h.i.t, Hayes," was all Cutchen would say and yet, just behind his eyes, you could see an acceptance of it all.

"Sure, it's the wildest thing in our history, without a doubt." There was a big NO SMOKING sign on the wall and Hayes lit up anyway, completely carried away by what he was saying and maybe just happy to be letting it all out of his head. "Imagine them, Cutchy. Try and imagine a race like theirs that is so f.u.c.king patient they can wait for us millions of years. And so intelligent, they know that sooner or later, we'll come down here because we have to."

"How could they know that?"

"You saw what Gates said . . . other worlds, other stars . . . G.o.d only knows how many times they've watched beings like us evolve until they reached a state where they might be useful to them. No, Gates is right. They knew we'd come. It's our nature to come down here and they were completely aware of the fact. They're ancient and they know things we'll never know. Who knows how many races like ours they've cultivated?"

"You make me feel like a potato," Cutchen said.

"To them, you're not much more," Sharkey said.

Hayes didn't say anything for a time. Maybe he was afraid of what he might say if he opened his mouth. "Rats in a maze, that's what we are. Just rats running the maze," he said finally, laughing at something he didn't seem to find very funny at all. "It's perfect, isn't it? We're trapped down here and they know it. It's exactly what they wanted. It's been some time, I think, since they've had an ample opportunity to pick away at human minds. But now here we are and here they are. This camp is a great living laboratory and they've got months to do whatever it is they want to do."

"Which is?" Cutchen said Hayes swallowed. "To harvest our minds."

PART FOUR.