Hive

He had only felt something like that once in his life. Just after high school he’d worked at a transformer substation where the juice traveling down high-tension wires was stepped down, dampened, for household and industrial consumption. He’d quit after three weeks. Those transformers had been pissing out an energy that only he seemed to be aware of. When he got too close to them, his teeth ached and his spine crawled like it was covered with hundreds of ants. But there was a mental effect, too. It amped him up. Made him feel nervous and antsy and wired like he was full of caffeine or coked-up. Later on, one of the engineers told him that the high-tension lines and their attendant transformers put out moderate alternating electrical and magnetic fields and some people were just more susceptible to them.

Those high peaks were doing that to him, he knew. Creating a negative charge of energy that maybe only he was feeling.

Sharkey put her gloved hand on his arm. “You can feel it, can’t you?” she said, touching her chest and her head. “In here and here . . . an attraction to this place, a magnetism or something. The secret life of these mountains and what they hide.”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s strong.”

Even turned away from those spires and cones he was feeling it right down to his marrow. A dizzy sense of deja-vu, deja-vu squared. A dark and misty recognition of something long-forgotten and rediscovered. But it was more that, it was much more. He was feeling something else, too, something huge that seemed to blot out his rational mind. He was in touch with some ancient network and he could feel the legacy of his race, the twisted and shadowy ancestral heritage that had been passed down from impossibly ancient and forgotten days. The race memory of this place and others like it, the creatures who occupied them . . . all of it was rushing up at him, sinking him in a mire of atavism and primal terror. These things had been written and remembered, he knew, in the form of folktale and legend and myth. Channeled through the ages into tales of winged demons and devils, night-haunts and the Wild Hunt itself.

But if those were just tales, then what inspired them was bleak and real.

“Okay, let’s go take a peak before I start beating my sacrificial drum and chanting about the Old Ones,” he said.

They both looked at him.

“Never mind.”

“I suppose we might see things,” Cutchen said, maybe just to himself. “I suppose we might hear things.”

As they climbed down away from the SnoCat and deeper into the valley towards Gates’ camp, Hayes concentrated only on each step. He pressed one boot down into the snow and followed it with another. Kept doing this, disconnecting himself from the aura of this place and what it could do to him. He saw nothing and he heard nothing and that was just fine.

When they reached the periphery of Gates’ encampment, they just stopped like they met a wall. They stopped and panned their lights around. Everything was quiet and still like sleeping marble. It could have been a midnight cemetery they were in and the atmosphere felt about the same . . . hush, breathless, uninviting. The camp was grim and cold and bleak, crawling with black, hooded shadows. It had all the atmosphere of a mausoleum. Just the gentle moan of the wind, tent flaps rustling in the breeze.

Hayes knew it was empty long before he entered.

Not so much as a single light was lit and the place just felt dead, deserted.

They could see a couple Ski-Doo snowmobiles dusted with white, the hulk of Gates’ SnoCat. A wall of snow blocks surrounded the actual camp as a wind-shelter, with secondary walls to protect the cooking area and give some privacy to the latrine. There were a series of rugged Scott tents and bright red mountaineering tents that were anchored down with nylon lines and ice-screws, dead man bolts. Snow had been heaped around them to guard against the fierce Antarctic gusts. A couple fish huts had been set up and there was a Polar Haven for storage.

Just a typical research camp.

Except it was completely lifeless.

Lifeless, yes, but far from unoccupied.

Hayes led the way into one of the fish huts. It was being used as sort of a community living area. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Cots and sleepmats, sleeping bags and vinyl duffels of personal items. Some boots and ECW’s hanging along the wall. A couple MSR stoves near the wall. Boxes of canned and dehydrated foods, propane stoves, water jugs. A field radio and INMARSAT system for voice and data transmission and retrieval. A corkboard was hanging above it with notes and telnet numbers. Somebody had tacked a photo of Godzilla up and pencilled in a smile on his face

Cutchen swallowed. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Except everything’s down,” Sharkey said. “Generator’s quit, Ethernet is off. Like it was abandoned.”

“C’mon,” Hayes said.