Hive

Five minutes into it, the three of them were sweating and shaking and having trouble catching their breath. The marrow of that damnable city was claustrophobic, profuse, and intersecting. The angles were wildly exaggerated, roofs becoming floors and floors arching up into roofs that were walls. Chambers were never perfectly square but slightly off-kilter and set off-center. Corridors were never exactly linear, but convoluted and sloping, tall then squat and then enormous. There was something geometrically perverse about any brain that could make sense of such a thing without backing itself into some jagged, narrow corner and screaming itself insane. Moving through there was like navigating through the tangled, surreal gutters of a lunatic’s mind, looking for reason that did not exist . . . for reason here was swallowed by amorphous shadows, the shattered wreckage of paranoia as imagined by German expressionists.

They followed the electrical cords that had been attached to walls and strung over black depths below. Even so, it was not long before they had to rest. This place was not engineered for the ease of mobility of the human race. And moving through it was not only psychologically exhausting, it was physically fatiguing as well. Constantly climbing through those tomblike hollows, scuttling down threaded tunnels, and crawling over the litter and debris of collapsed partitions.

They finally paused amidst a line of rooms that were not rooms at all, but sunken chambers with translucent concave floors made of some transparent glass or plastic. If you rubbed very hard, you could clean the grit off the material just enough to make out structures lying far beneath.

“This is a fucking madhouse,” Cutchen said. “What the hell was wrong with Gates? This should have been pulled down. You know? Just fucking pulled down.”

Sharkey said, “It seems mad, but I think it’s all very carefully systematic if you happen to have a brain that can understand the system. I’m afraid our simple mammalian brains are not up to the task . . . maybe not for another couple million years anyway.”

“Can we just get out?” Cutchen said. “Christ, I’ve never felt like this before . . . half the time I’m so nervous and depressed I want to slit my wrists, the other half I feel like I could vomit my intestines out.”

“Just a little while longer, then we’ll call it quits,” Hayes said.

Cutchen rested his head on his knees, squeezing his eyes very tightly shut.

Hayes felt for the guy, for he knew exactly how he felt.

The way this place opened up a can of something creeping and ugly inside of you and shook it around. Tied your belly in knots and made your head ache and your eyes bulge. The human mind was designed to consider regularities, straight lines and simple angles, forms and shapes that were consistent with themselves. But this place . . . it was mathematically distorted, a fourth-dimensional madness. Like being inside some alien wasp hive. It was just too much.

After a brief rest, they moved on and suddenly discovered themselves in an immense courtyard set between rising blocks of that nightmare city. They moved between colossal seventy-foot walls and around towering spires that seemed to serve no earthly purpose. The courtyard was tiled and roofless, nothing above but empty blackness reaching to dizzying heights. Now and again there were domes like buildings set about, but the only way of getting into them was scaling the smooth walls and entering from apertures at the top. There were also high blank facades lacking egress that were set with jutting rectangles fifty and sixty feet above that looked like nothing but perches for rooks or hawks.

They had left the strings of lights behind and were moving with flashlight and lantern again. They came to another of those crazy domes and this one was honeycombed with oval passages that seemed to lead down.

“Give me the lantern, Cutchy,” Hayes said. “I’m going in there.”

Sharkey shook her head. “No, Jimmy . . . it’s too dangerous.”

He took the lantern. “I’m going. I’ll be careful.”

He chose a passage and entered it.

It was about five feet in diameter at the opening and he had to move downwards at a crouch. It was like being inside a funhouse twisty slide, just a hollowed tube that moved this way, then that, ever downward. But the walls and floor were set with tiny bumps so there was no chance of losing your footing or sliding away into darkness. Hayes kept going, his throat constricting and sweat beading his face. Finally, the passage opened into a series of massive rooms with hooded ceilings.

He stood there in that shrouded darkness, panning the lantern around. He instantly did not like the place. That terrible sense of deja-vu was haunting him again, clawing and worming at the pit of his mind.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “I remember this place, too, but why?”