Hive

Hayes slowed the SnoCat, downshifted, said, “Yippy-fucking-skippy.”

38

When Hayes stepped out of the SnoCat, first thing he became aware of was that silence. The wind was still blowing and the snow was still falling, but they were protected here in the lower ranges of the Transantarctic Mountains. You could hear the wind howling still, but it was distant now. Here, in the little valley where Gates had set up his tent camp, it was silent and lonely and forever. All he could hear around them was an odd sighing sound like respiration. Like something was breathing. Some weird atmospheric condition produced by the rocky peaks around them, no doubt.

The sky above was pink and you could see fairly-well in the semi-darkness. Here the glacial sheet had been stopped by the Dominion Range, had piled up into breathtaking bluffs of crystal blue ice like sheets of broken glass several hundred feet in height. The snow had been stripped down to the glossy black volcanic rock beneath, a terrain full of sudden dips and craggy draws. And above, standing sentinel were those rolling Archaean hills and the high towers of the mountains themselves, like the cones of witch hats rising grimly up into the polar wastes. Rolling clouds of ice-fog blew down from them in a breath of mist.

Standing there, taking in that primeval vista all around him and feeling its haunted aura, Hayes was struck how the landscape looked like something plucked from some dead, alien world light years distant. High and jagged and surreal, a phantasmal netherworld of sharp and spiky summits that reminded him of monuments, of obelisks, of menhirs . . . as if they were not merely geological features, but the craggy and towering steeples of ancient, weathered tombstones. That what he saw was nothing so simple as a mountain range, but the narrow and leaning masonry of the world’s oldest cemetery.

Yes, this is where the gods came to bury their own . . . here in this polar mortuary at the bottom of the world. A shunned place like a graveyard of alien witches.

And, Jesus, hadn’t he seen these mountains in his dreams? In dozens of nightmares since earliest childhood? Weren’t they imprinted on the mind and soul of every man and woman? That deranged geography of sharp-peaked cones, that unwavering line of warning beacons?

Hayes stood there, his beard frosted white, shaking, seeing those mountains and feeling certain that they were seeing him, too. They inspired a terror so pure, so infinite, so aged, that he literally could not move. Those peaks and pinnacles were somehow very wrong. They were desolate and godless and spiritually toxic, a perverse geometry that reached inside the human mind and squeezed the blood out of what they found there. Literally wrung out the human soul like a sponge, draining it, leeching it. Yes, there was something ethereal and spatially demented about those aboriginal hills and they were like a siren song of destruction to the human mind. Geometrically grotesque, here was the place where time and space, dimension and madness came together, mating into something that fractured the human mind.

So Hayes stood there, letting it fill him as he knew it must.

The cones had an uncanny hypnotic effect on him, a morphic pull that made him want to do nothing but stare. Just stand there and watch them, trace them with his eyes, feel their soaring height and antiquity. And he would have stood there for an hour or five, mesmerized by them, until he froze up and fell over. Because the more you watched them, the more you wanted to. And the more you began to see almost a funny sort of light arcing off the crests and narrow tips, a jumping and glowing emission like electricity or stolen moonlight. It made Hayes’ heart pound and his head reel, made his fingertips tingle and filled the black pot of his belly with a spreading heat like coals being fanned up into a blaze. He had felt nothing like it in years, maybe never: an exhilaration, a vitality, a preternatural sense of awe that just emptied his mind of anything but those rising, primal cones.

Pabodie had called them the “Mountains of Madness” and, dear God, how very apt that was.

For Hayes felt practically hysterical looking upon them.

But more than that he felt a budding, burgeoning sense of wonder and purpose and necessity. The import and magnitude of this place . . . yes, it was enough to drive any man insane. Insane with a knowledge of exactly who and what he was. Destiny. The sense that he had come full circle.

“Jimmy?” Sharkey said and it almost sounded like she was calling to him from one of those conic apexes. “Jimmy? Jimmy, are you all right?”

“Yeah,” he said.

He looked away from those peaks that had snagged his mind. Looked at Sharkey and then at Cutchen. In the glow of Cutchen’s lantern their faces were drawn with concern. With fright and apprehension and too goddamn many things to catalog.

“I’m okay,” he said. “Really.”