This place was accursed. Of that the American and Russian soldiers assigned to guard this base in the Arctic Circle knew well enough. The black resonance of an unthinkable malice had lingered long here, giving an additional chill to the freezing ice winds of Novaya Zemlya.
Slowly the helicopter descended, letting Doctor Valentine out to look at the gate set in the cliff face.
To say it was immense was to put it mildly. The right-hand door, slightly ajar, was a 120 foot tall, 80 foot wide, 50 foot thick monolith of grey-carven granite - exceedingly primitive in construction but still unyielding to the elements. The left hand one, which was long collapsed, had left a massive pile of rubble fragments behind, almost totally blocking the way in.
The remaining door had a carving on it. A human figure was smashing down a massive stone pillar, whose pinnacle was giving off light, with his bare hands. Below figure and monolith a catastrophe of some sort was destroying a verdant, unspoiled natural landscape in what looked like fires, floods, and titanic earthquakes. Somehow, Valentine realised dimly that the image was celebrating this disaster, and recoiled at the sickening thought.
He was shaken from his reverie by a warmly extended hand.
"Captain Ivanov, commander of this base in service to the United Nations," the Russian heartily said in his slight accent. "You are the American we were promised?"
"Yes, but I don't understand why there're soldiers here," Valentine replied. "This is a ruin-"
"Come inside," the Russian said.
After giving more formal greetings the Russian spoke again.
"We discovered this place in 1950," he said, "Back in Cold War days. It was turned over to the UN agency in charge of such things in 1993, after we had properly ascertained its age. After we knew its importance."
"And what is that age?"
"It was first inhabited about 50 000 years ago and fell to external aggression after eleven thousand years of habitation."
"You're shitting me."
"No, we did all the tests we could. And more than that, this thing is massive beyond anything else. The tunnels we've mapped out alone are almost the size of Western Europe. All undeniably artificial."
"Aliens?" he asked. It was only half-flippant.
"We don't know," the Russian replied. "We don't have a slightest clue what it contains, who built this thing or why. But our scouts in the entrance hall just last year uncovered a complete skeleton. It was human enough, but scraping off some DNA samples got odd results we're still trying to figure out. And worse than that, this figure had been tortured."
"Tortured?"
"Yes, tortured. For decades or centuries. Its bones had been broken and reset hundreds, possibly thousands of times - nobody's sure what it would've looked like if it hadn't been treated so cruelly. There were no signs of infection, oddly, but the leg showed bite marks consistent with canine teeth. It was eaten alive."
"Just who ran this place?" the archaeologist asked, his face blanching with horror.
"That's what we're trying to find out."
+++INSIDE+++
The entrance hall just beyond the gates existed without light, and Valentine found himself chattering as the cold wore at him, guided only by a dim circle of flashlights. Then suddenly he caught a glance of a glare of spotlights not too far away, and after what seemed like hours of walking on the bare granite flagstones surrounded by echoing voices he was in the advance base just before a set of immense stairs. The spotlights they shone down that way revealed high, rough steps, descending steadily down into an impenetrable darkness. Screams and manic tribal yelps echoed from below - from cracks in the flagstones, from the destination of that incredible staircase, from chasms stretching miles down to places no light ever dared touch.
"Are...are there people living there?" Valentine asked.
"Not people," Ivanov replied. "Monsters."
He described at length their stunted, hairless bodies, their slits where nostrils should be, their crude and primitive but brutal weapons, their exceeding sadism and cruelty, and especially the way they were diabolically cunning and loved horrific mechanical traps.
"We lost two scout parties to them in as many weeks," he said gloomily to Valentine. "Guns do little more than draw them like flies. One of my superiors said they were described in the Red Book - that we needed special weapons to deal with them, ones that could be found or made elsewhere. Going here is a fool's game."
"What's the Red Book?"
"My superiors in the Agency said this: it's an impossible manuscript in an isolated language found about 60 years ago in the Oxford countryside. Other than that I'm not cleared to know."
Valentine nodded, simultaneously confused and desperately curious.
"These cave monsters - could they get to the surface?" he asked with a tinge of morbid curiosity.
"That's our main concern. There could well be countless millions in this lightless pit - or more than millions. Much more."
Ivanov looked downcast.
"What is the Agency?"
"I don't really know. They're my bosses, that's all I need to hear. They're mysterious men, Valentine. Constantly on the move, constantly busy, and constantly paranoid. That's what they sounded like in the briefings. What I know is that they bear the weight of the world itself on their shoulders."