Hive

But there were no answers for that. Maybe the thing turned faster than he anticipated.

Regardless, that wasn’t why Hayes had come.

He got in close as he dared to the monstrosity, certain that it was going to move despite that smell. It looked much the same as it had the other day, despite the various incisions: like some bloated, fleshy eggplant. Its shell was a leaden, shiny gray, looked tough like the hide of a crab. Chitinous. Its wings — if that’s what they were and not modified fins — were folded-up against its sides like umbrellas, some sticky fluid like tree sap had oozed from them in puddles and runnels, collected on the table. Those branching tentacles at the center of its body now looked like nothing but tree roots, tangled up and vestigal. And those thick, muscular tentacles at its base had blackened, hung limp like dead snakes.

Yes, it was dead, it was surely dead.

Yet . . .

Yet the tapering arms of that bizarre starfish-shaped head were erect like an unclenched, reaching hand. Those globular eyes at each tip wide and blazing a neon red, filled with an impossible, unearthly vitality. They were shiny with tiny black pupils, the gray lids shriveled back, something like pink tears running down the stalks.

Hayes had to remember to breathe.

He could see where one eye had been cut away, the black chasm left in its place. He was trying desperately to be rational, to be lucid and realistic, but it was not easy because once you looked at those eyes it was very difficult to look away. They were not human eyes and there was nothing you might even abstractly call a face, still . . . Hayes was looking at those eyes and thinking they were filled with an absolute, almost stupid hatred, a loathing that made him feel weak inside.

Turn away, don’t look at it.

But he was looking and inside it felt like he’d popped a hole, everything draining out of him. He had to turn away. Like a vampire, you couldn’t stare into its eyes or you were done. But he kept looking, feeling and emoting and sensing and it was there, all right, something in the back of his head. He couldn’t put a name to it at first . . . just that it was something invasive, something alien that did not belong in his mind. But it had taken root and was spreading out like fingers, a high and sibilant buzzing, a droning whine like that of a cicada. Growing louder and louder until he was having trouble thinking, remembering anything, remembering who and what he was. There was just that buzzing filling his head and it was coming from the thing, it was being directed into him and he knew it.

Hayes wasn’t even aware of how he was shaking or the piss that ran down his leg or the tears that filled his eyes and splashed down his face in warm creeks. There was only the buzzing, stealing him away and . . . and showing him things.

Yes, the Old Ones.

Not three like there were in the hut or even ten or twenty, but hundreds, thousands of them. A buzzing, trilling swarm of them filling the sky and descending like locusts come to strip a field. They were darting in and out of low places and hollows and over sharp-peaked roofs, rising up into that luminous sky . . . only, yes, it was not in the sky, but underwater. Thousands of them, a hive of the Old Ones, swimming through and above some geometrically impossible sunken city in a crystalline green sea with those immense membranous wings spread out so they could glide. He saw their bodies bloat up obscenely as they sucked in water and deflate as they expelled it like squids . . . moving so quickly, so efficiently. There had to be a million of them now, more showing themselves all the time, swimming and leaping and rising and falling -

Hayes went on his ass.

Teetered and fell and it was probably the only thing that indeed saved him, kept his mind from going to sludge. He hit the floor, fell back and cracked his head against a table and that buzzing was gone. Not completely, there was still a suggestion of it there, but its grip had been broken.

And he came to himself and realized that it had taken hold of him, that thing, and nobody would ever make him believe different. He could hear Lind’s voice in his head saying, Can’t you feel it getting inside your head, wanting to steal your mind . . . wanting to make you something but what you are?

Hayes scrambled to his feet, smelling the thing and hating it and knowing it somehow from some past time and the revulsion he felt was learned and instinctual, something carried by the race from a very distant and ancient time. What he did next was what any savage would have done when a monster, a beast was threatening the tribe, invading it, trying to subvert and steal away all that it was: he looked for a weapon.