The Day of the Nefilim (4 page)

“Shall we take a look?” Bark remembers that he’s the Captain.

Onethian and Sahrin return to the winch. The ship soon starts to move again, swaying slightly in the wind as it descends. When the bottom of the hull reaches the treetops, Bark calls for the winding to cease. Thead finds a space among the branches, and lowers the ladder to the ground.

A short walk across the sand dunes separates them from the site of Kali’s discovery. They set out, and are about to descend an incline when they notice below them the three people that they had seen from the ship. The strangers are watching the same area that has caught their own attention.

As Bark expects, Bryce, Reina and Tommy fail to see the new arrivals, who are now standing directly in front of them and inspecting them with great interest.

The visitors and the locals are in the same space, but like two signals traveling down one wire, they are out of phase with each other. They are in different versions of the same world.

“They’re a strange color,” says Sahrin. She looks at Reina’s dark coffee-colored skin, and then at Tommy, who is an even darker shade of the same color. Bryce is more her own color. “I like her,” she says, looking back at Reina. “She’s gorgeous.”

“She’s impressive, yes, but this one’s dress sense is winning the battle for my attention. Just look at this,” Bark says, nodding towards Bryce, who is shading his eyes against the sun as he peers down into the encampment. Had he known that his grip on fashion was being questioned, he wouldn’t have been able, let alone motivated, to defend himself. As usual, he was in jeans, tired runners and a torn denim jacket with a big yellow smiley face on the back. “Shocking,” says Bark, feeling suddenly pleased with his own choice of a loose red and purple striped silk shirt, burnt orange tights, and embroidered canvas boots. Bark can always be relied on to dress for an occasion, even one that has little chance of happening.

“Could you tell what rank he was?” asked Bryce.

“What rank who is?” says Thead. The local’s speech warbles slightly, as though he is speaking under water, but it can be understood.

“Remember,” says Onethian. “They can’t hear us.”

“I know that!” snaps Thead, who has a problem with Onethian and his unending helpfulness. “I wasn’t talking to him, I was talking to us. Even you, if you’ve got anything sensible to say.”

“A general, I think, I don’t know. Do you want a turn?” Reina handed Bryce the binoculars.

“They’d be handy,” says Bark.

“We don’t need more crew,” Sahrin says.

“The glasses, not the locals.”

“Oh, the glasses… yeah, I guess.”

“It’s guarded all the time, and now that there are more soldiers, we’d never get in, no way,” said Bryce.

“Did you hear that? They want to get in there,” says Onethian.

“It’s not as though we want to get in, anyway, right?” said Reina, suspecting that Bryce might be missing his soldiering days.

“Nah,” replied Tommy, watching a bird in a tree and at the same time feeling relieved that neither of his friends were sounding serious about going down there.

“These people appear to have the advantage of a bit of local culture,” the Senator says. “And if they’ve been watching this place for a while, they might have some useful information.”

“That may be,” replies Bark, “but I’d prefer that we rely on our own judgment.” The others agree, and begin to move down the hill.

“But why don’t you stay, Senator, and see if their conversation sheds any light our situation. We’ll be back soon,” Bark says, turning to follow the others.

The Senator, never one to argue (at least that is how he sees himself) finds a space on the rock ledge and sits down.

It doesn’t take Bark and the others long to reach the perimeter fence. They stop in front of it, and look along its length and then at each other. They shrug, as if deciding something not very important at all, and then walk through it. It flickers briefly, creating a brief nimbus of fairy lights around them.

* * *

Underground in the control room, a private currently more interested in a recent earthquake in the Ukraine than anything else was making a coffee when he was drawn back to his computer by the beeping of an alarm.

On the screen he saw that the fence’s field had been breached in five places, all close together, as though a group of something was moving together.

“Shit,” he thought and said in Ukrainian. “Intruders.” He flicked through the cameras along the fence. There was nothing there. Everything was fine; the fence was intact.

Damned machine. It hadn’t acted properly since they hauled it off the truck. Private Dosteyin went back to his coffee.

* * *

THE GENERAL AND THE ARCHAEOLOGIST were standing with a group of engineers in front of a wall, surrounded by the crumbling remains of subterranean buildings. The General reflected, not for the first time, on the attraction of archeology. To unveil these things that had been buried, unseen and unsuspected, for so long that no human had any idea of the time involved…

The original inhabitants of the excavations had been human, or at least humanoid, judging by the architecture. Whoever they were, they had been tall; the doorways and steps suggested a height of seven or eight feet. They didn’t yet know how many kilometers of tunnels there were, but it was a large system, bigger than the others that had been found in other parts of the world.

There were three other locations that were known of. One was in the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula. Another was in the Himalayas, inside the Chinese border, which had meant that some high-level and very careful cooperation was going on. The third site had been found under the sand in Saudi Arabia, at a place where nomads had gathered for rituals for as long as they could remember, and where earthmovers and trucks and scientists and soldiers now gathered.

And there was this site, near the northern tip of the North Island of New Zealand. It was the fourth site, the last to be identified.

Time was short. The other three sites were ready and waiting. Everything was in place.

The UN had been sure that there was something to be found when they sent the first party of surveyors here. The ruins had been found exactly where they had been expected; at the point which, combined with the other three sites around the world, formed an irregular but very precisely shaped tetrahedron, the four corners of which were occupied by these impossible ruins, buried under rock that was millions of years old.

The workers who had been involved in the initial exploration had been given all the normal mind-clearing drugs, after which all memory of the excavations had been removed. As always, there were a few in whom the suggestion didn’t take, so there had been some accidents to arrange. Training mishaps, the odd helicopter crash, that sort of thing.

The New Zealand site was the last piece of the puzzle. There had been some tension in the air at Mount Weather when the General had left to come here. There was doubtless a lot more now.

The wall in front of them was at the end of one of the labyrinth’s main tunnels. They were almost a kilometer underground.

Both men could feel what had been described in the reports. The soldiers and engineers who were with them stirred uneasily. The first people to stand here three months ago had described it as a feeling of apprehension that grew stronger the longer you stayed in the vicinity of the wall. Eventually, it became so strong that it was impossible to remain there. It crawled at the base of your brain, physical and thoroughly visceral. An unnamed dread of
something
.

They could feel it now.

“Amazing,” the General said, his flesh gathering into cold goose bumps. His breathing had become shallow. “I found it hard to believe the reports.”

“It gets worse than this, sir,” one of the soldiers said, moving back a step.

The archaeologist moved closer to the wall. He was sweating heavily. Fumbling, he pulled an implement from one of his pockets and picked at the surface of the stone. After a few seconds he interrupted his scratching and paused, seeming to pay attention to something in the air. Then he leaned closer to the wall and placed one ear against the surface. He turned and beckoned.

The General went over and put his ear against the wall. A deep humming sound was audible somewhere behind the rock. The feeling of apprehension was getting stronger. They moved away, putting welcome distance between themselves and the rock face.

The General turned to a sergeant. “Get a team down here with a resonance cutter and get to work on it. Keep me informed. If there are any problems, I want to know. And I don’t want anyone going through there when the wall is breached. As soon as you’ve made it through, call me.”

* * *

A kilometer above, the three locals were still there, but their vigil had entered a familiar and relaxed stage. Reina was rolling a joint from Tommy’s leaf, while Tommy himself lay on his back, hands behind his head as he dozed, smiling, in the warmth of the afternoon sun. Bryce was pushing the cork into a bottle of wine with the handle of a knife.

The Senator, deeply impressed by this capacity for luxury, and warming to the three of them, decides to join in by chewing a few bindoo leaves. They soon have the desired result.

“You seem to have a relaxed attitude towards things,” he says out loud, not caring that they can’t hear him. “You would probably enjoy bindoo,” he smiles dreamily. He offers them a sample from his pouch, and shrugs happily when they ignore him.

* * *

Having passed through the perimeter fence and interrupted Private Dosteyin’s routine, the others arrive at the mouth of the tunnel.

“What is it?” asks Sahrin, who has never seen a cave before.

“It’s a hole,” replies Bark. They move forward, tentatively edging into the mouth of the cave. It looks as though it goes on forever. “It’s a strange thing indeed,” says Bark. A guard standing nearby remains oblivious of their presence.

This is the place that Kali had seen from the ship. The movement in the air that had drawn his attention is barely visible now; like smog over a city, it exists only in the distance.

Even so, they can still sense that there is something going on. There is an energy here that twists like a trapped animal, caught somewhere between the space that the travelers occupy and the local space. Like a sheet of rubber stretched taut and thin, it threatens to tear and reveal the entities they know are here, moving and skittering around like the rats in the ship’s cargo hold.

They enter the cave. Ahead of them, lights strung along the ceiling offer a dimly lit path into the depths. To their right is the entrance to the offices and labs.

“Let’s have a look in here,” says Bark, “before we go any deeper.” The truth is that like all of them, he finds the prospect of going underground daunting. It is a new idea, after all. They are all accustomed to open space, with its fields of clouds and stars and nebulae, and its winds that keep changing everything, over and over again.

They go through the locked door and into the administration area. At the end of the corridor they come to a large room, in which a great number of objects have been laid out on long tables. People, some in white coats and some in uniform, are studying the artifacts.

Onethian leans over one of the tables. He watches as one of the whitecoats picks up one of the ceramics. “You should see this.”

The rest of them gather around. The figurine the scientist is holding has a human face from which a bird’s beak protrudes, and there is some kind of comb on the top of its head. Bird’s wings sprout from a hunched back, and it has the legs and tail of a reptile. It is rearing up on its hind legs, using its tail for balance.

They look at the other figures on the table. It is a collection of monsters, mutants and half-breeds. There are combinations of human and non-human, non-human and non-human. One of the figures stands intact and larger than the others, dominating the center of one of the tables. As they recognize it, their spirits fall. The figure, skeletally thin and insect-like, is almost as tall as any of them. The dome of its skull is large, as though it contains great intelligence, but it is obvious from the face that there is no place here for compassion. The eyes, cruel and heavy with black shadows, have been carved deep into the head. The smooth stone gazes coldly at them all, asserting its authority across the ages.

“They’ve been here.”

“And I hope they’re long gone,” says Kali, disconcerted.

“Do you think these people know what they’re dealing with?” asks Sahrin.

“I have a strange feeling,” says Bark, “that they don’t. And that they will.”

* * *

THE GENERAL LEFT THE WALL to the exertions of the engineers and returned to his office, where he found the pile of photographs that had been left on his desk.

They were of a chamber, just discovered, in another part of the system. The report with the photos said it was about a hundred meters long, fifty wide, and about ten meters from floor to roof. Big, in other words. It wasn’t natural, of course; it had been carved out of the stone using the same heat process that had produced the rest of the tunnel system.

The megaliths he had been expecting were there, arranged across the expanse of the chamber’s floor. Massive heavy-roofed porticoes squatted against the walls of the chamber, looking like theatrical props in the stark, high-relief lighting of the engineers’ equipment. This was a good find. Mount Weather would be pleased.

And there was something familiar about it… but he was too busy and his mind too distracted for him to connect it with his dream of the night before. It was the fleetest of impressions, coming and going in an instant.