Dream Thing

Something was wrong with him, and when he put his hand to his head he could feel the swelling. Oh, shit. Fluid buildup on the brain. Lagrasse knew what that meant. Disorientation, unconsciousness, then death, unless he relieved the pressure fast

He had to find other survivors. With luck, he’d find a doctor.

Lagrasse entered a maze of stone monoliths. It was an ancient place, eroded by the ages. Each of the buildings was huge, twenty feet floor-to-ceiling, and the open doorways were made for giants. The walls were yards thick and where they had fallen, which was infrequent, Lagrasse saw that the stones were pieced together with tongue-and-groove construction. No wonder they lasted so long—but who had built them?

The coating of glimmering slime confused Lagrasse. The algae was as thin as a first coating of wet paint. Why was that? Where was the smothering blanket of barnacles and coral and other sea life that would have built up on the surface of the rock during the centuries it was submerged—and Lagrasse knew it had been submerged. This island, these ruins, had not been sitting here on the surface undiscovered.

How old were they? Lagrasse was a diver and he had explored the sunken ruins off Alexandria. Could he use that as a measure? The ruins off Alexandria had been eroded by the passage of two thousand years, but this city looked positively smoothed by the millennia. That implied that their age was four times the age of the Alexandria ruins. Maybe ten times.

Impossible.

There was a smell. Lagrasse followed it to a circular building, where it became an overpowering stench. He forced himself through the gigantic passage and emerged on a narrow ramp above a ring-shaped trough that was forty feet in diameter. In the center, the trough walls rose and blossomed—the opening to a dark tube that disappeared into the floor.

The trough was full of rot and decay. Thousands of fish bones. Masses of seaweed. Sprigs of coral.

Sweepings. This was where the detritus was brought when the city was cleaned. But the coral pieces were tiny and the plants were saplings. The city had not been recently cleaned of thousands of years of accumulation; it had been cleaned on a regular basis throughout the passage of time. The growth of parasites had never been allowed to get out of hand and rip the city apart—this was another clue as to its excellent preservation.

So who had served as the janitorial staff?

Then Lagrasse’s question was answered. A limb rose from the murky trough and scooped a mound of detritus into the trash chute.

Lagrasse squinted into the darkness, and something in the trough looked back at him.

It was a giant squid, a monster, a whale fighter. No one had ever seen one of these creatures alive. Modern man had seen only their corpses. But this one was alive, although how it could survive in the polluted cesspool of the trough was beyond Lagrasse.

Lagrasse’s presence alarmed the squid, and it reached for him. Lagrasse wasn’t afraid, but rather fascinated by the thing, which barely had the strength to lift its tentacle into the heavy air. The creature was poisoned by its environment, and dying by degrees. It wouldn’t last much longer. The tentacle fell back into the thick sludge, and it seemed to sigh in defeat, then, with a great effort, took another scoop of bones and muck and pushed it up the trough wall, into the trash tube.

Lagrasse walked away from the building, wondering how close he was to madness. What he was seeing couldn’t be real. Every moment some new aspect of the nightmare presented itself. He had pieces of many different puzzles.

From the center of the island was a towering shape, rising to a point. He made his way toward it, moving from wall to wall so as to stay hidden. But there was never any sound. Never a hint of movement. He gave up on finding footprints—the surface of the island was the same black rock, but the flowing sheen of water kept the algae off, and any tracks would have been washed away.

There had to be other survivors. It couldn’t be just him.

When he felt a wave of vertigo he forced his feet to propel him inside a boxy stone structure, and he collapsed behind the wall, in the darkness of shadow.

When he awoke again, he heard voices. They weren’t real—that’s what he thought. But his vision cleared and the voices remained.

He got to his feet, fought off dizziness, and went to find out where the voices were coming from.

The voices were beyond the wall that surrounded the pyramid. Lagrasse tried calling to them, but his head exploded with pain when he tried to shout.

He found one of the rare collapsed buildings along the edge of the wall and painstakingly climbed the rubble, from there scrambling atop a neighboring structure. From that roof, he saw over the wall and into the courtyard surrounding the pyramid.

It was a three-sided pyramid. Lagrasse had never heard of such a thing—and it was as massive as the biggest of the Egyptian or South American pyramids.