Hive

And he was going to tell her that it was probably nothing. Sound would carry funny down in the hollowed earth. That’s all it was. Nothing to get excited about. But he never did say that, for less than a minute after the scratching stopped, something else took its place . . . a strident, squeaky piping like an out-of-tune recording of a church organ played on an old Victrola. It rose up high and shrieking, gaining volume and insistence. No wind blowing through no underground passage could have created something like that. The sound of it was eerie and disturbing, the auditory equivalent of a knife blade pressed against your spine and slowly drawn upwards.

Hayes suddenly felt very numb, rubbery and uncoordinated.

So much so that if he moved, he figured he would have fallen flat on his face. So he didn’t move. He stood there like a statue in a park waiting for a pigeon to shit on him. That still, that motionless. His tongue felt like it was glued to the roof of his mouth. The sound died out for maybe a second or two. But then it came again, shrill and piercing and somehow malevolent. It was reedy and cacophonous and something about it made you want to scream. But what really was bothering Hayes about it was that it was not neutral in the least . . . it sounded almost hysterical or demented.

And then it died out for good, ending it mid-squeal, shattering into a dozen resounding and tinny echoes that bounced around through caves and hollows and openings. But the memory of it was still there.

And what Hayes was thinking was something he did not dare say: That’s what they sound like... I heard it that night on the tractor and I heard it out in the hut... that was a voice of a living Old One...

But he kept that to himself.

He stood there, teetering from foot to foot, feeling like something had evaporated inside of him. Maybe it was courage and maybe it was just common sense.

“Okay,” Cutchen said, his voice barely audible. He cleared his throat. “I’m for getting the hell out right now.”

“I’m for that,” Sharkey said.

Which dumped the whole stinking mess at Hayes’ doorstep. He shook his head. “We want answers? We want to know what happened to Gates and the others? Then those answers are down there.”

Cutchen looked at him with anger that slowly subsided. “All right, Jimmy, if that’s what you want. But this is the last fucking date I go on with you.”

It was a pale attempt at humor, but it made them all smile. Hayes knew it was not intended to be funny, however, it was just how Cutchen responded to terror and uncertainty: with funny lines born out of contempt.

They started down again.

After another five or ten minutes in that passage, it narrowed to a hole that was perfectly circular like the shaft of a sewer. Its circumference was about ten feet, but so perfectly symmetrical it could not possibly have been cut by ancient floodwaters. Hayes stepped through first and found himself in a room that was again uniform, but rectangular in shape. At the far end, another passage dropped away into darkness. He examined it with his light and saw a set of carved stone steps dropping away into the blackness. They were long, low steps, more like slabs, each large enough, it seemed, to set a dining table and chairs on.

Whatever walked them, Hayes got to thinking, did not have the same tread as a man.

It took time to navigate them because each was about five feet wide. They were set with faults and cracks, the edges falling away. There were lots of tiny pebbles and bits of rock strewn over them as if some ancient subterranean river had deposited them there. Now and again, Hayes saw little protrusions like bumps or knobs that had been almost completely worn away. So maybe they weren’t steps at all.

On they went, their lights bobbing and their footfalls loud and scraping.

As they descended, Hayes was filled with an exhilaration much like Gates and his people must have felt originally coming down there. A sense of discovery, of anticipation, of great revelations laying ahead. As he moved ever downward, some smartass voice in his head kept saying things like, who do you suppose built all this? Is there life on Mars and in outer space? But it was not funny. It left a bad taste in his mouth like he’d been chewing on spiders.

Finally, he paused. “Everyone okay?”

Cutchen just grunted.

Sharkey said, “Peachy.”

Down they went and by the time they hit bottom, Hayes figured they had descended at least a hundred feet if not more. And now they entered a grotto that was absolutely immense. The floor was littered with fallen shelves of sedimentary rock, loose stones, the pillars of gigantic stalagmites that had been smoothed into near-perfect cones probably by those same long-gone floodwaters.