Dark Rising (15 page)

‘Should I stay here?’ Zach whispered. The sound of his voice in the tomb-like silence was a jarring intrusion.

Alex looked at Zach and held his finger to his lips. Then he pointed at Zach’s chest, then down into the pit – Zach was going.

Zach’s teeth chattered. The nightscope he wore made everything around him a ghostly green, and the absolute silence meant that all he heard in his helmet was his own breathing and an intermittent dry swallowing.

When the American captain pointed at him and then down into the pit, he felt his stomach roll. The sensitive nightscope failed to pick up even the faintest fragment of light down there. For all he could tell, that hole descended all the way to the centre of the Earth.

Captain Hunter looked back at him and placed his fingers to his lips again.
It’s his eyes
, he thought,
they look strange; they shine unnaturally, like a wolf
.

They’re all so calm. I should never have said I needed to come with them
, he thought, as Captain Hunter disappeared into the hole. Zach willed his legs to move, but instead they threatened to collapse. Adira grabbed him by the arm and led him to the edge of the pit. For once she looked taller than he did.
I’m crouching, why am I crouching?
he thought, and dry-swallowed once more.

*

It took them twenty minutes – a half-mile climb down the side railings, then a small drop into the open cage of the elevator. Alex noticed Zach was breathing heavily; he knew the kid would suffer even more on the way back up.

The blackness was all-consuming at this level. The night-vision goggles only delivered faint green outlines. Unless they could switch to white light soon, much of the investigation from here would be done by feeling around with their hands.

Alex’s enhanced abilities told him they were standing in a corridor facing a fortified steel door that was slightly ajar a few inches. A black tunnel stretched both to the left and right, into the unknown depths of the Persepolis ruins. Alex put two fingers into the gap at the door and rolled the heavy steel back with ease. He was thankful it was open – judging by its density and thickness, they didn’t have enough ordnance to break through if it had been sealed shut.

He felt the emptiness as soon as he stepped through the doorway. Where once had stood an enormous laboratory with walls of computers and electronic monitoring equipment, now there was nothing but scoured ground leading to a large circular pit that smelled of cut rock, ozone and something repellent.

‘What happened here? Go to torchlight,’ Alex ordered. He pressed a stud inside his helmet rim, and a coin-sized disc covered his left eye. It was one of nature’s little secrets, discovered by English pirates hundreds of years before and adopted by the US military. It took up to thirty minutes to recover full night vision after being exposed to light, but night blindness affected the eyes independently. Covering one eye ensured it remained night-ready when the lights went back out.

In the light of their helmet torches, the Blue team could appreciate the magnitude of the devastation. The ground where they stood looked to have been rubbed raw then somehow liquefied. Strangely coloured streaks and swellings ran across the floor like the gristle and arteries of some great beast’s innards.

Zach’s helmet torch beam swung rapidly back and forth across the strange mosaic under his feet. ‘What happened?’ he replied to Alex. ‘Not exactly sure, but I can tell you what
I think
happened. These marks are the effects of an enormous gravitational tide. I believe a black hole existed here – perhaps for only a millionth of a second – and it swallowed the entire facility. Whatever was here before – men, machinery, rock – has simply ceased to exist in our universe.’

The team backed up and formed a circle, their combined torchlight brightly illuminating the strange mélange under their feet.

‘What’s that in there?’ Sam knelt down and removed a glove so he could feel the texture of the surface. ‘Wood, metal, plastic . . . is that a pencil, part of a chair? It’s all fused together – like it’s been melted and then solidified. But not by heat.’ He ran his hand over the small lumps and depressions. ‘Dr Shomron, is this an example of your spaghettification?’ he asked without looking up.

Zach was staring at the ground as if in a trance and it took him a moment to register his name and the question. ‘Yes. Yes, this is theoretically what happens when the molecular structure of physical matter is stretched within an enormous gravitational tidal surge – an attractive force so impossibly strong it bends and elongates time and space. Anything this close to it gets turned to taffy as it’s drawn in and consumed. My guess is that the gamma rays irradiated this entire site and bleached it of every living organism, right down to the virus level. Everything that was here is either gone, dead, or ended up like this.’

Alex nodded. ‘Other than validating what we suspected, there’s nothing here for us. Go to dark, let’s go.’

He was about to switch off his torch, when something on the ground caught his eye. Embedded in the confused mess, deformed but still recognisable, was a human tooth.
Gone, dead . . . or ended up like this
.

Alex switched off his torch and headed for the steel door. Sam, Adira and Zach followed. The discs slid back off their left eyes, and all except Alex went back to nightscopes.

At the door, Alex had the urge to turn – he could sense something in the blackness around him. Perhaps there were such things as ghosts, he thought, trapped in some kind of tormented limbo by the trauma that had occurred here. He shook his head to clear it of the morbid idea.

Tavira, Portugal

The smell of diesel fuel and dried fish wafted across the deck as the three de Macieira brothers prepared to pull in the nets. It would take all three of them. The new green cord-nylon was much lighter than the older rope twine, but the men’s years added weight to the drag; every pull took longer, was heavier, and hurt a little more.

The hatch was off the fish freezer and chill air spread from the dark interior, even though Paulo rarely bothered to load much ice these days. The men pulled fish from the mesh of the nets and threw them into the hold. Rarely did anything go back unless they were really
merda pescado
, shit fish.

Carlos, the eldest brother, smiled to himself; he could feel good weight in the final net and couldn’t resist peeking over the side. The water was jade green and almost milky – the high algae content in the cold Atlantic Ocean robbed it of any transparency below ten feet. The net came up slowly and now all three men felt the weight. Paulo, the youngest at sixty-one, joked that perhaps they had finally found the ocean’s plug and would need to walk home if they pulled it free.

They could see the mass in the net now, large, about ten feet long, and a light colour; it was not struggling so it must have already drowned in the mesh on its way to the surface. The water here was deep – around 150 feet – and they had heard of fishermen catching strange fish and crabs that had been whipped up from the seabed to mid-water by strong deep-ocean currents. The thing flopped onto the deck; at first glance it looked like a body, although perhaps not a human body.

Paulo gasped, let go of the net and clutched the small pewter crucifix around his neck with both hands. Santo muttered, ‘
O meu Deus
,’ and crossed himself. Even Carlos, the oldest and most practical of the brothers, felt a wave of fear ripple through him.

‘
Sereia; mermaido!
’ he said. A girl brought up from the depths – it could be nothing else. Her beautiful face was the colour of honey and milk, though her skin looked hardened, like stone or ice. Her dark eyes were open and unclouded; strange for a body brought up from such deep water. The brothers could feel the cold coming off her – perhaps the freezing Atlantic depths had preserved her for a while. But even the cold would not have protected her eyes and angelic face from the normal ravages of the fish and crabs.

Carlos looked around at the horizon – no boats large or small anywhere. He looked back down at the girl. Maybe she hadn’t fallen overboard and into the depths; maybe she had fallen ‘up’ to them. His eyes traced her perfect face, her small rounded breasts and tiny waist . . . but from there things got crazy. From the hips down, her body stretched and elongated into a twisted rope-like mass; to Carlos, it looked like a long flowing tail – a mermaid’s tail. A scarf was tangled in her long hair – it was royal blue with small golden tulips and crimson Arabic-looking writing.

Santo leaned over the girl to pull back some of the fish netting – as he did, blood ran thickly from his nose.

TWENTY-TWO

A
hmad Al Janaddi was standing at the door of the containment cell when the president’s call was transferred through to him. He listened for a few minutes and gathered his strength; there were tears flowing down his cheeks. Looking back into the cell he felt the gorge rise in his throat once more. He turned quickly away as the thing started to howl again.

‘Yes, my President, we have recovered most of the bodies and also the special subject I mentioned. Yes, the lead lining of the suit seemed to give the man some physical protection and he still lives . . . in a manner.’

The scientist compressed his lips and turned again to look through the cell window. It was true the creature lived, but it would never be a man again. When they tried to cut away the heavy lead-impregnated suit, they discovered that suit and man had somehow combined. The black hole had created a soup of flesh and lead, reformed it and delivered it back to them. Now the creature was contained in a large tub; spread out, its body covered nearly twenty feet, with tendrils and flaps of flesh splaying in all directions. It was able to move around and raise itself up. Al Janaddi knew this because a small square mirror on the wall above the tub had been smashed into sparkling splinters. He guessed the creature did not want to see its own image. He could not blame it.

He swallowed and moved his gaze up to its face. One eye was a milky white; the other, though still clear and brown, was over three feet long. Sickeningly, it still managed to fix on the scientist whenever he entered the room. That single eye held a plea – perhaps for a quick death and release from the permanent hell it was now trapped in.

The president was hungry for information about what the man had experienced. Where had he gone, what had he seen? Had he been judged and allowed to cross the bridge to Jannah, or did he fall to Jahannam?

Al Janaddi squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. ‘I think he was judged unworthy, my President; maybe even more so than Professor Shihab.’ The voice on the phone grew louder.

‘It will take us some time to prepare another event,’ Al Janaddi replied. ‘Even if we . . . Here? Yes, of course, my President; we would be delighted for you to observe our work first-hand.’

Al Janaddi sucked in a juddering breath as he listened.
Please don’t ask me to take the phone in to . . . him
, he thought.

He answered the final question as best he could. ‘I’m afraid we may never know what he saw, my President; all he does is scream.’

Something thumped wetly against the door. Al Janaddi turned to see that horrific face pressed up against the window. The screaming stopped for a moment and the giant lolling tongue writhed as if the creature were trying to speak.

Ahmad Al Janaddi wiped more tears from his eyes. ‘Allah forgive me,’ he cried, and sprinted away down the corridor.

Out in the Iranian desert, something lay motionless on the ground, disorientated. One minute it had been feeding with the others of its kind on the massive carcass of a plant-eater at the edge of a brackish swamp, warm blue sunlight bathing its back; the next it was here. It remained immobile as its senses slowly returned. The gravity was lighter here, giving its body more strength, but the air was thinner and drier. Though its exoskeleton contained a wax-like lubricant, the dry atmosphere was irritating and it needed liquids to survive – to feed on.

It raised its eyes on their cartilaginous stalks and surveyed the area. It had no idea what predators might stalk this strange barren land with its intense golden sun. Fan-like mouthparts extruded from between its bony mandibles and sampled the air, tasting the aromas. It could detect water, vegetation, salts and minerals, and strange fluids in creatures it had never known or sensed before.

It called – a subsonic sound that frightened a falcon overhead and woke a band of shivering bats sleeping in a cave miles to its south. To the rest of the animal kingdom, the sound was not perceptible, especially to any modern biped’s ears.

The creature compressed its gristly carapace plates against the heat – it needed to be away from the burning yellow sun. Articular membranes and muscle fibres pulled its chitinous exoskeleton segments together and it burrowed its pointed, armoured body a few feet below the surface of the sand. The going would be slower than above the ground, but it would retain more body fluid by staying out of the heat.

In the distance, the city of Arak was waking. Its inhabitants had no idea that the universe had delivered a little piece of hell to their doorstep.

TWENTY-THREE

A
lex sensed something else in that dark tunnel, something more tangible than the tortured souls he’d imagined trapped there. There were people approaching – he could feel the vibrations of their footsteps.

He held up a flattened hand. The team stopped and crouched left and right behind the steel door. Alex silently pulled the door closed, leaving just a small gap.

He put his hand against the cold steel so he could read the vibrations from the other side. Three large men approaching –
must be part of a Takavaran squad
, he thought.

He looked at Sam and held up three fingers. Sam stared hard until he could make out the gesture in the dark and then nodded. Alex quickly glanced over his shoulder – there was no cover, nothing to provide some form of concealment or a defensive position. They had their backs to a pit that may have fallen to the very base of the Kouh-e Rahmat mountain.