Hive

Hayes walked into the room, over near Lind’s cot and right away Lind started to thrash in his sleep. He began to twitch, his eyelids fluttering. Hayes stepped back in the doorway, a weird thrumming sensation at his temples, and Lind settled back down. What the hell was that about? Hayes walked back over there and the thrumming started again with drumming waves and Lind started jerking again like he could sense Hayes’ presence and maybe he could and maybe it was even more than just that.

A voice in Hayes’ head was saying: It isn’t your mere presence he’s reacting to, you silly bastard, it’s what you’re carrying. That thing in the hut, that pissing Old One, it touched you, it got inside you, it stained something in you that’ll never wash completely clean. That’s what Lind’s reacting to ... he can smell it on you same as he can smell it on himself. Violation.

You bear Their touch.

It was crazy, but it made sense. Like they had planted some seed in his head just as they had done with Lind, woke something up inside them that had been sleeping a long time. Something mystic, something ancient, something unspeakable.

But what? What was it?

For as Hayes neared Lind again, he started twitching and moaning, trembling as if he had come into contact with some sort of energy. Hayes backed away again, all the spit in his mouth dried up, a tension headache starting behind his eyes . . . except it wasn’t that, it was something else completely. For he could -

He was seeing inside of Lind’s head.

It was crazyass bullshit, but, yes, he was seeing what Lind dreamed. It could be nothing else. He was connecting with him, their minds touching, sharing thoughts and brainwaves. The thrumming had gone away now and there was just those grainy, distorted pictures like a broadcast coming in on an old black and white Sylvannia tube set. Hayes felt dizzy, disoriented, those images rushing through his brain and making him want to pass cold out. But he saw, he saw . . .

He saw... a landscape... valleys and low snow-covered hills, hollows in which great beasts wandered listlessly, gnawing at squat vegetation. The beasts were shaggy things like bison or maybe rhinoceros, but with huge archaic horns. It was tundra mostly, the snowline creeping in from all sides, the world turning to winter. There was an immense lake in the distance or maybe it was part of the sea. It was flanked by mounds about which was built some rolling, immense city that looked to be quarried from stone. The image was wavering, fading, but Hayes could still see those towers and weird skeletal spires, arched domes and scalloped discs . . . an impossible city heaped and clustered and crowded, tangled up in itself like the bones of some gigantic beast . . .

Then it was gone.

Hayes backed away into the infirmary, wide-eyed and shocked. He had not imagined any of it, he had not hallucinated any of it. He sat at Sharkey’s desk, trying to catch his breath, wiping the sweat from his face. He was thinking things then, thinking terrible, impossible things that he believed nonetheless. That landscape . . . it was Antarctica as seen maybe in the late Miocene before the glaciers had covered it. When that immense, alien city found first by Pabodie and then later by Gates was not up in the mountains but set atop low mounds that would someday be mountains.

Gates had said the ice sheet was roughly forty-million years old.

Hayes went through all the normal channels trying to make sense of it, but there was no getting around what he had seen or how he had seen it. Lind was maybe like some sort of receiver picking up broadcasts from the dead and dreaming brains of the Old Ones, images of life in Antarctica forty-million years gone. And Hayes had been able to see what he was seeing.

Telepathy.

Parlor tricks. Psychic bullshit.

But he had it now, at least some rudimentary form.