Hive

He moved on, passing beneath archways and steering himself around accumulated heaps of detritus. He came into a room that seemed to be nothing but an ossuary, a collection of aged bones . . . skulls set into little cells in the walls, the skeletons of men and extinct animals fully articulated, great birds dangling from above with nothing seeming to hold them. The floor was a litter of bones as if most of the displays here — and there must have been thousands at one time — had collapsed through the ages, maybe from their own weight or seismic activity shaking them loose. It was tough going climbing over those heaped bones, the lantern casting flying and grotesque shadows, the air swimming with clots of dust. But it was necessary. For as much as this place disturbed him, he knew it was no simple natural history collection.

This was much more.

At the far end, there were cylindrical plastic cases that he had to scrape the grit off. Inside were more human skeletons . . . but most were small and hunched, not quite erect, the craniums set with great brow ridges that sloped ever backward to braincases much smaller than those of modern men. Some of those skulls had exaggerated canines and incisors, heavy jaws. None of them were anatomically the same. These were the skeletons of manlike apes and quasi-human types — Afropithecus and Australopithecus — and their proto-primate ancestors and primitive forms of anthropoids, homo erectus and Neanderthal man, and something like an archaic form of homo sapien.

Hayes scraped the gunk from a dozen of those cylinders, but there must have been hundreds.

You know what this is, don’t you? he thought. You know what kind of awful, gruesome place this.

And he did.

The very idea of what he was seeing and feeling and thinking and remembering made the sap of his race run cold and poisoned.

In the next room, more skulls and more bones.

They were all carefully arranged on tables and hung from the walls, set into recesses . . . they were all human or proto-human and they had to span millions of years. A paleoanthropologist’s wonderland. But as Hayes examined many of the skulls, they fell apart like delicate crockery, but he did notice that a great many of them had what appeared to be holes in their craniums that had either been drilled into them or burned through. There were several tables upon which the articulated skeletons of prehistoric men had been strapped down with what appeared to be some sort of plastic wire . . . and the fact that they had been bound so, made Hayes think that they had not been skeletons when they were brought in here.

The next of those gigantic vaults was piled floor to ceiling with more plastic tubes, but these were much smaller like laboratory vats. Once he’d used his knife to scrape them clean, Hayes could see pale, fleshy things floating in solidified serum like flies trapped in amber. They were all anatomical specimens . . . glands and muscles, ligaments and spinal columns, brains and sexual organs, eyes drifting like olives in ancient plasma and hundreds of things Hayes simply could not identify.

The next room held more tables made of some unknown quartz-like mineral, perhaps fifty or sixty of them. There were weird spirals of discolored plastic tubing and spidery nets of hoses and conduits leading from spheres overhead that must have been some sort of biomedical machinery. There were racks of instruments . . . at least what he thought were instruments . . . some were made of a transparent glassy material that might have been some alien mineral. There were great assemblages of these things . . . hooks and blades and probes and others that were flat and hollow like magician’s wands. Hundreds of varieties and everywhere, those spiraling tubes and things sprouting from the walls like fiber optic threads. Great convex mirrors and plate-like lenses set upon tripods. There were other things that had gone to dust and wreckage and a great part of the room had been buried in a cave-in.