Читать книгу Planet Hate - James Axler - Страница 13

Chapter 4

There came a warm sensation in Kane’s eye and his vision blurred for a scant second. When it cleared, a monstrous child-thing was standing in front of him, his lizard-slit eyes staring into his own. Kane recoiled and tried to pull himself away, but the thing with lizard eyes continued to stare, holding his gaze.

Kane studied him.

His flesh was dark and calloused, hardened like something hewn from stone. He stood as if uncomfortable, limbs held awkwardly, the shoulders hunched as though his back was in pain. He wasn’t standing in front of him, Kane realized with a start—he was standing in a tall square frame of glass, a mirror. The mirror was set into a wall carved of stone, the glass turning dark and smoky at its edges, a decorative affectation to the design. The wall itself was of a bright stone the color of sand, and a crimson band had been painted through it like the bloody slash of a knife. The wall radiated heat as fierce sunlight played across its surface. They were indoors, but it was still bright, with square, open windows lining the wall opposite the mirror.

Where am I? Kane wondered.

The statuelike figure in the mirror smiled, a frightful rending of the rock that clad his face, his primitive features turning him into something even more hideous. It took a moment for Kane to recognize it, or at least he thought that he did. Though a child, the creature was tall—towering even—yet he still carried himself with the awkwardness of a child getting used to the changing shapes of his forming body. The tall child turned from the mirror, trudging down a flight of steps and into the darkness. It was cooler here, as they went underground, away from the sun. Kane seemed to be seeing all of this, yet he was traveling with the monstrous child, as if he was a part of him, as if the thing in the mirror was him. It was like a dream, a vivid story that Kane was being swept up by.

The child walked and Kane remained with him, feeling the weight of his stone cladding, the hideous aches that fought for attention in his muscles. He felt stretched, pulled almost to breaking point, his muscles screaming as if shot through with influenza.

His feet—which is to say, the child’s feet—clomped heavily on the brick floor, stone on stone as he descended the steps. Strange noises flittered to his ears from the foot of the stairs, and Kane marveled as they entered a vast laboratory set in the windowless room there. Clay containers hissed and burbled, naked flames playing on their bottoms and sides. The flames were mostly blue or orange, but Kane noticed that two of them were a fearsome green and a disarming lilac, neither color natural. A plain wooden bench waited in the center of the room, a high side table next to it like a bedside cabinet. A network of glass tubes ran along one wall, multicolored liquids turning to gas or being refined into solid lumps of crystal at various apertures along its glistening, sleek lines. A figure stood there amid the bubbling tubes, his back to the child, his green scaled flesh the color of jade. Kane looked at the figure with fascination—it was an Annunaki, the enemies of mankind. Kane tried to leap, to attack this hated enemy, but he was unable to move, still watching events as though watching a stage play.

Without warning, the scaled figure turned and Kane saw a strange apparatus masked the top half of his lizardlike face. The apparatus was made of circles of glass, lenses on metal arms that could be brought in front of his eyes to magnify his vision, one in front of another. The lens arrangement stood out almost six inches from the Annunaki creature’s face, and some of the metal arms remained in the upright position, the lenses not in use by its wearer. Behind the magnifying lenses, the creature’s eyes were as green as his skin with twin vertical slits down their centers in the bottomless black of the grave. The monster admired the stone child who was Kane for a moment, gazing up and down as though admiring his handiwork.

“You’re looking tall,” the creature with the magnifying lenses stated. Kane got the indefinable impression that this Annunaki saw him not as a living creature but as simply a slab of meat on which to experiment, a chef meeting a farm animal.

After a brief exchange, the child lay on the wooden bench, a slab of meat on the butcher’s block, and Kane seemed to be lying there with him, two as one. Then the Annunaki with the strange eyewear checked at some solution that was bubbling close to Kane’s ears, and he heard the hiss of steam as some superheated liquid expanded and tried to escape its container.

“Calm yourself, child,” the jade-scaled Annunaki instructed, his tone soothing. “I can hear your breathing from all the way over here.”

“I’m sorry, Lord Ningishzidda,” the child said, bringing his breathing down to a more normal level.

Kane waited, helpless as if strapped to the bench where the child remained free. Then the Annunaki, the one that the child had called Lord Ningishzidda, strode over to the bench, wielding a syringe tipped with a vicious-looking needle. Within the syringe, an orange concoction bubbled and steamed like lava, a trail of hot mist whispering at its edges.

“You must keep your eyes open, mighty prince,” Lord Ningishzidda explained. “There is no other way.”

Then the green-scaled Annunaki came at Kane with the syringe, watching with sick delight as he drove its needle deep into Kane’s left eye. It felt like liquid fire being pumped into his eye, burning all sense and reason away. Kane cried out, loosing a scream that seemed to echo beyond the walls of the underground chamber itself, shattering them as he watched. Colors swirled there for a moment.

Around him, the multicolored lotus blossom of the interphaser was fading, lightning strikes firing across its depths like electricity-firing neurons.

Shunted two hundred miles through quantum space by the interphaser, the three companions emerged on a tranquil, grassy plain beneath a cloudless azure sky. Kane staggered forward, clutching a hand to his face where his left eye continued to burn. The eye was watering and he could feel warm tears burning at the dam of his tear duct, swelling as they clamored to burst free. He rubbed at his eye with the ball of his hand, wiping at the tears as he stumbled blindly forward, two steps, three, before tumbling to the ground, the bright green grass rushing up to meet him with its fresh-cut smell so strong that Kane could taste it.

“You okay, man?” Grant’s voice came as if from far away. Beneath that sound, threatening to obscure it, a dog barked repeatedly—Rosalia’s mutt, excited at the instantaneous transition through space-time. And beneath that, distant like a shushing hush in a library, the waves of the sea crashed against some nearby shore.

“Kane?” Grant asked again, reaching for his partner where he lay facedown on the grass.

Kane rolled over at his partner’s gentle shove, and Grant saw the tears streaming down his cheeks. “You okay, buddy?” Grant asked.

Kane’s eyes flickered and he nodded, his head feeling suddenly sore as he moved it. “Jump dream,” he explained.

The human body had not been designed for the instantaneous transportation of the teleport, and one side effect was the so-called jump dream that threatened a user’s sanity. Mostly associated with the mat trans, a man-made teleportation system that the Cerberus team had employed on numerous occasions, jump dreams were accompanied by nausea and a sense of disturbed reality. However, the interphaser units had rarely generated such jump dreams, and Grant was surprised to hear his friend refer to such a thing after so long.

“You need some time?” he asked, concerned.

Kane brushed at his face, swiping at the tears. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Let’s keep moving.” His face looked red and his left eyelid was puffy, the eye itself bloodshot. “I’ll be fine,” he repeated as Grant looked at him.

Turning then, Kane led the way up a subtle incline that led to a one-story building set amid the quiet grounds. His companions followed, Rosalia’s dog scurrying ahead excitedly to scope out this new place. Off to their left was a simple wooden fence, a long strip of two horizontal boards attached to wide-spaced posts like a farmyard gate. Behind the fence, a sheer drop fell away, ending in the pebble-dappled shore of a tiny beach.

“Looks like a nice spot,” Rosalia observed as she peered over the cliff side. “Quiet.”

“Work on your tan later,” Kane growled as he marched onward. “We have us a meeting to attend.”

He was angry, he knew—not with Rosalia but with himself. Whatever that vision had been, that “jump dream,” as he had called it, it had left some mark inside him, an indelible burning behind his eye. He blinked, forcing back the salty tears that welled there once again at the memory.

IT WAS A FEW MINUTES after dawn in Tibet and the watery yellow-white orb of the sun was just starting to nudge itself over the towering mountains that dominated the landscape. The woman with the fire-red hair pulled her cloak around her as she ascended the rise that led to the cave opening, striding the final few miles of the snow-dusted mountain path, her horse abandoned with exhaustion. It was cold out here in this mountainous range where Tibet bordered China, bitingly so. In fact it was cold enough to freeze the flesh of the woman’s steed almost three hours before. She hadn’t cared—the armor-like properties of her shadow suit kept her warm, regulating her body temperature beneath the scarred black leather of the supple armor she wore like a second skin. The cloak that she wore was made of animal fur, a dead thing cinched around her throat, encasing her with its ghosts. Hung inside the cloak, a bag slapped against her hip, a large leather satchel containing something heavy. It had been better when the satchel had been contained in her horse’s saddlebag where it couldn’t irritate her, but it mattered little.

The wind blew around the woman as she clambered along the rough path, her booted heels breaking the night frost that covered it before sinking into the layer of snow that dwelled beneath like a bloated egg white. Her name was Brigid Haight and she had made this approach before, several years ago when she had been a member of the Cerberus team. That had been before Ullikummis had remade her, showing her the true path and filling her head with a secret knowledge that had always seemed just out of reach before.

Back then she had been known as Brigid Baptiste, an archivist from Cobaltville who had formed one-third of the seemingly inseparable trinity that lay at the heart of Cerberus. Where Kane had brought his integrity and Grant his strength, Brigid had brought knowledge. Blessed with an eidetic memory, Brigid had the ability to recall information to the smallest detail with photographic accuracy. She had traveled the globe under the aegis of Cerberus, expanding her experiences and her knowledge and challenging her archivist’s mind with the most complex of conundrums. Alongside Kane and Grant, Brigid Baptiste had learned of the secret history of the Earth, uncovered a conspiracy that stretched back millennia and placed the star-born Annunaki at the top of the evolutionary tree. In those days Brigid had thought that humankind should rebel against this notion, that Cerberus was engaged in a noble fight to turn these alien usurpers away and free humanity from the shackles of their subjugation. She had been naive.

Ullikummis had changed all that, his words bending her prodigious mind, letting it achieve its full potential for the first time. Now she stood reborn, and had chosen the new name of Haight. The role of the Annunaki was deeper than she had ever suspected, their tentacles reaching out beyond this simple plane of existence. The things she had seen as Brigid Baptiste had been nothing more than performances on a stage, but Brigid had been too ignorant to think to look past the curtain, beguiled to think that the play was real without ever considering the activity backstage that created the illusion in front of her eyes. Ullikummis had changed that.

Brigid Haight took a deep breath of the icy air as if challenging it to harm her, to make itself felt. Ignorantly, the air remained cold, caring nothing for the affairs of man or Annunaki.

She had come here before in search of a mythical city called Agartha. Buddhist and Taoist legends had spoken of this city, a secret enclave beneath a mountain range on the China-Tibet border from which strange gray people emerged to influence human affairs. In actuality, the city had once housed a race of aliens called the First Folk, among whom a long-lived creature called Balam had been witness to many of the most pivotal points of human history. Balam had befriended the Cerberus team, welcoming them into his underground city that stood all but deserted hundreds of years on from the days when those initial legends had first sprung up. Balam remained in the city even now, living there with his foster daughter, the hybrid spawn known as Little Quav.

It was Little Quav that brought Brigid to Agartha on this occasion under the instructions of her master, the fallen god Ullikummis. The half-human girl child was actually an Annunaki in chrysalis state. The members of the Annunaki royal family had been reborn in hybrid form on Earth, their tweaked DNA hiding their true nature until a catalyst download was applied by their mother ship, Tiamat. The two-and-a-half-year-old child known as Little Quav housed inside her the genetic sequence of the goddess Ninlil, child bride of Enlil and mother to Ullikummis. When the Annunaki, those terrible children of the serpent, had re-emerged on planet Earth, Lord Enlil, the most fearsome of their number, had sought out Little Quav to complete their ghastly pantheon. The Cerberus warriors had protected the child until an agreement could be reached that placed her in the custody of Balam until such time as she came of age. It had been a tentative solution at best, and Balam had been forced to return to hiding with the child so that she would come under no further scrutiny. Ullikummis was determined to bring his mother back to his side in his war against his father—the full nature of his scheme, however, remained unknown. While Ullikummis could not enter the secret city of Agartha without alerting the child’s watchdog, Balam’s longtime ally Brigid should be able to without raising any undue curiosity.

For a moment Brigid stopped, searching the shadow-painted mountains as they towered above her. There was an access point near here, she recalled, a physical entryway that led into the ground itself. Her emerald eyes narrowed as she peered into the darkness, scouring the base of the mountains until she found the place she sought. It was lodged within her eidetic memory, the location still vibrant despite the rudimentary change in the mountains’ snowy covering.

There was something else in her memory, too, appearing for just a fraction of a second as she delved for the hidden location in her mind’s eye—a series of golden circles disappearing into the blue, regular highlights of red and green dotted all around the pattern like a Julia set.

Then, her red-gold hair billowing around her like a lion’s mane, Brigid made her way to a familiar indentation in the snow-covered foothills, her emerald eyes seeking the opening that was hidden in the shade. Her boots slipped for a moment on the shifting snow, and then Brigid had located the path, clambering down to a clump of rocks that waited like sentries, timeless and eternal.

A few months ago the Ontic Library had gifted Brigid knowledge she had never accessed before, and it had opened her mind to new pathways into Agartha, places that had been hidden before. Standing at the hard rock wall, Brigid twisted her leather-sheathed body, and somehow an opening appeared in the wall where there had been none just a moment before. It was not a mechanical thing, nor a supernatural one; it was simply a way of looking for things that Ullikummis had taught her, a way to comprehend the world as the Annunaki did, no longer constrained by just three dimensions.

Brigid stepped into the open mouth of the cave, and found herself in a tunnel, barely five feet in width with a low ceiling, its black basalt walls faintly lit by a ghostly blue luminescence. There was the distinct metronome sound of dripping as snowmelt plip-plopped down into a puddle that pooled along the floor of the tunnel. The puddle itself was so cool that, in turn, the water would freeze again, creating a glistening silvery sheen on its surface like some slug’s midnight trail.

Brigid moved down into the tunnel, descending as it clawed a pathway beneath the surface of the Earth. As she went farther, the rough-walled tunnel opened up and the ceiling became higher overhead, the blue luminescence becoming fainter through its distance from her. Brigid closed her eyes, recalling the map of the area in her prodigious mind’s eye. As she did so, she thought she heard something—a voice—and she stilled her thoughts, filtering through the noises around her, the dripping echoes, until she could be sure. It was a child’s voice, joyful, laughing, awake with the crack of dawn and hungry to live and to play and to experience.

Brigid opened her eyes and moved on down the incline, making her way toward the far exit of the tunnel. After a while, the tunnel widened even more, and then instead of a tunnel it was a chamber in its own right, a vast room whose shape was like a funnel with the narrow tunnel as its spout. High above, stalactites reached down from the ceiling like grasping talons, many of them wider than a man’s body. The child’s laughter was louder now, like a musical instrument being playfully plucked and strum.

It took almost four minutes to stride across the vast cavern before Brigid reached a staircase hewn directly into the rock. The staircase was narrow and without sides, and went down another fifteen feet into a far larger cavern. More of that ghostly blue luminescence spilled from the high, arched roof, tiled here in square light panels like a child’s jigsaw of the sky, with some pieces still waiting to be placed. Beneath, a grand settlement stretched off through the enormous cavern, its squat, windowless buildings carved of the same black basalt as the cavern itself, radiating like the spokes of a wheel from a central tower—yet again, the towering-center-and-lower-surrounds pattern that had repeated itself throughout history. The outskirts of the settlement sloped gently upward to meet with the stone stairwell that Brigid was descending.

The city was eerily quiet, not a single sign of movement across its vast entirety. Then, as Brigid reached the bottom of the staircase, a small figure came charging through the street in front of her, appearing from behind one of the black stone buildings, her short legs pumping as she hurried to greet the stranger. The girl was human in appearance and not yet three years old, wearing an indigo-colored one-piece suit and carrying a rag doll with red hair and a dress that matched the child’s clothing exactly. The girl had snow-blond hair hanging loosely to past her shoulders, and her large blue eyes were wide with excitement. Behind the little girl, another figure strode at a more languid pace, shorter than a man with grayish-pink skin and a bulbous, hairless head. Two huge, upslanting eyes dominated his scrunched-up face, black watery pools like the bottom of two wells lost in shadow. Beneath these, twin nares lay flat where a man’s nose would protrude, and a small slit of mouth held the faintest expression of pleasure, the corners turned up infinitesimally.

“Briggly,” the little girl said, laughing as she ran up to the woman in the black leather armor.

Brigid knelt on the floor, stretching her arms wide to clasp the girl and pull her toward her.

“Welcome, Brigid Baptiste,” the gray-skinned creature acknowledged from behind the little girl.

It was all so easy.