Hive

Hayes was on his ass from the palpitations of the city, cracks fanning out under his legs. But he was seeing Cutchen and knowing what he was feeling, catching momentary glimpses of what he was seeing. Dear God, he’s living it, he’s living the terror of it, Hayes was thinking, trying to hold onto Sharkey. This place has soaked up so much terror and pain and madness in its existence from so many manic, fevered minds that it can no longer hold it all.

And that’s what was happening to Cutchen.

Those memories . . . not the memories of aliens, but the memories of humans . . . were bleeding out and filling him and he was remembering what they remembered, living through them as them. Yes, he was recalling an ancient ritual practiced by the Old Ones when they filled the skies in swarms of winged devils and collected specimens and sometimes entire populations to be brought here for experimentation and modification. He was a primitive man and then an ape and then something between and something not even remotely human, knowing the terror of all species for the swarm, the invading swarm of aliens.

Hopping about madly and gnashing his teeth, Cutchen threw himself over the edge of the pit.

Somebody screamed.

Maybe it was Hayes and maybe it was Sharkey and maybe it was both of them. But then as if it had received a sacrifice, the pit seemed to come alive with a flurry of vibrations and squeals and electric cracklings. And then it began to glow with a rising luminous mist. Whatever it was, a field of phosphorescent energy or just electrified mist, it was boiling up out of the pit like steam from a witch’s cauldron. Snaking tendrils and white ropes of it overflowed the lip of the pit and spread over the floor in a shimmering ground mist. Hayes could feel it moving over his legs and arms, swirling and consuming, making his skin crawl like he’d been dipped into an anthill. It was alive and vital and kinetic, like some sentient lifeforce that had come to devour them.

He couldn’t seem to move and neither could Sharkey.

And then from far below, but getting closer, rising on that plexus of supercharged mist, there came the sound they had heard earlier: the mad and discordant piping, the frenzied voices of the Old Ones echoing up from the pit. It billowed up, unfolding, becoming a cacophonous shrill whining that sounded more like thousands of droning cicadas than the melodic piping he could remember. It grew louder and louder, a screeching reedy fluting of perhaps hundreds of those things, the rising swarm. They were coming up from beneath, bleating and whistling with squeaking off-key stridulations, a lunatic susurration that rose to an ear-splitting volume like having your head stuck in a hive of hornets.

They were coming, Hayes knew.

The swarm.

Yes, from deep below through nighted and moldering passageways they were coming, just as they had come in those ancient days to reap and collect, to gather specimens for their morbid experiments. But this time they were not coming from the sky, but moving along subterranean networks that probably connected with Lake Vordog under the ice cap.

The spell was broken.

Hayes and Sharkey fought to their feet and that weird fog came up to their waists, perfectly white and shining. And just behind them there came a sound, a single high-pitched squeal of that macabre piping like bellows and pan flutes blown with hurricane winds. They saw one of the things there, one of the Old Ones, those red eyes high and wide on their fleshy stalks, its wings spread and its appendages scratching together.

Then there was another and another.

But they were not real . . . they were ghosts.

Reflections.

Memories loosed from that tombyard below by the influx of human psychic energy and maybe the minds of those coming from below. They dipped and drifted, piping and flapping their wings, trailing wisps of white vapor, ethereal things, insubstantial but lurid and frightening, those eyestalks writhing like flaccid white worms. They bled from the hollows of the city like glowing serpents from burrows, passing through each other and through Hayes and Sharkey in cold breaths. Harmless now as will-of-the-wisps.

Hayes refused to be scared of them, scared of things dead millions of years.

He took Sharkey by the hand and she grabbed Cutchen’s lantern and they began moving away from the pit and its attendant phantoms. The city was haunted, it was rife with spirits and drifting spectral intelligences that were only dangerous if you made them so, if you let those bleak minds touch your own, power themselves on your fears and aimless psychic energy. But if that happened, there was enough undirected, potential energy lying in wait to rip a hole in your mind and gut the world.

Hayes and Sharkey would not empower those decayed intellects. They simply refused.