And Ahura Mazda spake unto Yima, saying: “O fair Yima, son of Vivanghat! Upon the material world the evil winters are about to fall, that shall bring the fierce, deadly frost; upon the material world the evil winters are about to fall, that shall make snow-flakes fall thick, even an aredvi deep on the highest tops of mountains. And the beasts that live in the wilderness, and those that live on the tops of the mountains and those that live in the bosom of the dale shall take shelter in underground abodes.”
—“Against the Demons”, the Vendidad or Vî-Daêvô-Dāta 2:22, ancient Avestan religious text
Interestingly for our purposes, elsewhere in the Vendidad we are told that Angra Mainyu the “Evil Mind” who is “All Death” created the dragon Aži Raoiδita to help the Daevas (demons) create Winter.
—Internal Monarch document, Speculations on a Hypothetical Titan, Maartens, Chen, and Omar
They followed along the top of the ridge, mostly in forest, occasionally on more open ground where the rocky substrate didn’t have enough topsoil to support large vegetation. To their right, the land dropped off so abruptly that it became more cliff than slope.
Trapper had been sidling up to Ilene for a while. She thought he probably wanted to talk about something, and she was right. But it wasn’t what she had been expecting.
“There’s a rumor going around,” he said.
“Oh yeah?” she said. “What’s that?”
“That Monarch offered you the top spot and you turned it down.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t want to spend my life chained to a desk. I like being out in the field.”
“Ah,” he said. “A fellow Monster Whisperer.”
She smiled. “I wouldn’t go that far,” she said. “It’s just, you know, I think time’s running out. For our planet, for our species. Everything. And I just… wanted to be able to say that I tried to do something while there was still time. That at least we tried.”
“I get that,” he said. “But… forgive me, okay? But even as things are, you don’t seem to get to the field that much anymore.”
“Right,” she said. “Well, I…” She glanced ahead at Jia.
“Yeah. You have to think of her. But how’s she doing right now?”
Ilene had noticed that, of course. The subdued, angry, melancholy girl she had known for the past couple of years was… gone. Replaced by a girl much more like the one she had first adopted. Injured, yes, but full of life and brimming with wonder at everything around her.
“I mean, look at her,” she said. “She loves it.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Trapper said.
She nodded, not sure what she was feeling. It was good to see her daughter like this. A huge relief, right in the middle of all the danger they were in. But it couldn’t last forever. When they left… well, Jia couldn’t stay in Hollow Earth.
Trapper seemed to sense Ilene had mentally gone somewhere she needed to be alone, so he dropped back out of her space. A flock of something flew overhead, but at this distance Ilene couldn’t tell if they were leafwing relatives or something else. Whatever they were, they either didn’t notice their tiny human visitors or didn’t think they were worth their time, for which she was grateful.
The insects, however, were enjoying the five travelers a good deal. The main offenders were mosquitos. They looked—and bit—pretty much like the mosquitos she was familiar with in the world above. That wasn’t a surprise, really. Mosquitos had existed on the surface since at least the Cretaceous period: they had the fossils, but molecular genetic studies suggested they probably went back to the Jurassic. Maybe the reason they didn’t have fossils that early was because they had come to the surface from down here. The data was starting to suggest that most, if not all, surface life had its origins in Hollow Earth. Of course, without genetic analysis, she couldn’t know if these were proper mosquitos. The creatures sucking on her exposed skin might be examples of convergent evolution, form following function, the way ancient reptilian ichthyosaurs resembled mammalian dolphins.
Somebody would eventually figure that out. Right now, they were just as annoying as any bloodsucker.
* * *
Bernie wasn’t disappointed. Well, not exactly. But he had yet to see anything really… impressive. The forest was cool, and everything, but besides the upsy-downsy sky, there wasn’t a lot so far to prove that he wasn’t in Brazil or Panama. He’d seen some weird birds in the distance, something that looked different from the vertacines from earlier—kind of like bats, actually. But he had expected, you know, Titans. Or at least really big, weird monsters. Not too close of course—he had been up close and personal with a skullcrawler once, and as far as he was concerned, he didn’t need another near-death experience to complete his monster experience. That box was checked. But it would be great to see something in the distance, a strange beast he could film for his documentary.
Because all he had right now was trees and bugs. And not even crazy-looking what-the-hell-is-that bugs, but just mosquitos, albeit big ones. But at least he wasn’t the only one bothered by them, he thought, as Mikael slapped his neck.
“I’m getting eaten alive out here,” he growled.
“You must be very tasty, Mikael,” Trapper said.
“Smartass,” the security chief shot back.
Trapper held up his arm. Bernie saw there was a mosquito clinging to it, already bloated with blood.
“Well, look at that,” Trapper said. “I must be tasty too.”
“Kill it,” the security chief said.
Trapper kept examining the insect. “Only female mosquitos drink blood,” he said. “So they can grow their eggs.” Sated, and perhaps shy of all the attention, the bug flew away with an audible whine. “She needs it more than me,” Trapper concluded, before he started walking again.
“And if one wanted to keep their blood on the inside of their body, what would you recommend?” Bernie asked.
For an answer, Trapper just smiled.
Bernie was beginning to wonder if they really knew where they were going. If they did, wouldn’t they have landed nearer it? How far through this bug-infested jungle were they going to have to walk? Would they have to spend the night?
That was a decidedly unappealing idea, if you asked him. Of course, no one had.
I’m just an observer here, he reminded himself. Someone else is in charge.
Although it wasn’t clear who. Dr. Andrews had given the order for this hike, but now that they were on it, Mikael seemed to have appointed himself pack leader. He had the gun, and the attitude. It’s just—he didn’t seem to know all that much about jungle. Trapper did, and it was clear that while the veterinarian wasn’t the type to directly dominate a situation, he was constantly offering suggestions about how to negotiate the terrain. The little dust-up over the mosquito was just a small example, but Mikael was clearly getting sick of having his authority undermined.
That came to a head just a little later, when for the first time, Trapper actually put his foot down about something. He had gone ahead of Mikael and the rest of them. Bernie saw him slowing, sniffing at the air.
“Wait,” he said, holding up his hand in the classic “halt” motion.
“What?” Dr. Andrews asked.
“What’s the hold-up?” Mikael demanded.
“Not this way,” Trapper said.
“What? Why?” Mikael said.
Bernie wondered the same thing. All he saw was the same forest they had been walking through for hours. A tree in their path had fallen over, roots and all, but they had seen plenty of those.
“No,” Trapper said. “We’ve got to take a detour. There’s something here.”
“What?” Bernie said. “Where here? Like here here?”
Mikael was studying the hand-held instrument he’d been consulting. Some kind of sensor box.
“Nah,” he said. “Not picking anything up.”
“Something doesn’t smell right. And it’s not just you, Mikael. Smell that? It’s like rotting flesh.”
“It’s probably just a carcass upwind,” Mikael said. “We keep moving.”
“Mikael, hold up,” Trapper began.
The security chief whirled around and cut him off. “Listen pal,” he said. “I’m gonna trust my state-of-the-art thermal over your Ace Ventura hippy-dippy sixth sense all day long. You got me?”
“Well, there’s no need to call people names,” Bernie said.
“As for you, Freakshow,” Mikael said, turning to him, “you don’t shut it, I’m gonna take that camera, and I’m gonna shove it right up your arse. I’m in charge. We move.” He bolted forward.
“Why don’t you just listen to somebody—” Bernie began.
“Wait!” Trapper said.
Mikael turned again, livid.
“I said I’m in charge!” he shouted. “I’m in charge!”
That’s when the roots of the fallen tree opened a huge mouth, lunged forward, and swallowed Mikael whole.
Bernie didn’t think about running. One minute he was standing still. The next, leaves were whipping at his face and his feet were pounding against the leaf-litter. Everything seemed brighter and unreal, as if he were seeing it by the light of an arc-welder. He was only dimly aware that he wasn’t alone, that someone was running with him. And that he had just screamed something about a tree eating Mikael. The pilot’s face frozen in an expression of surprise as the “roots” engulfed him and yanked him into… what? A stomach?
Someone else was talking. Trapper. Trying to sound calm.
“We should be alright,” the veterinarian was saying. “We should be alright. Those things don’t reach that far.”
“He was just eaten by a tree!” Bernie shouted. It was ridiculous. Outrageous. Totally horrifying. If a tree could eat you down here, what couldn’t?
“What are you doing?” Trapper asked.
I’m panicking, he thought. Who wouldn’t be? But Trapper wasn’t talking to him. He was talking to Andrews, who was fiddling with a piece of equipment.
“I’m calling the base for extraction,” Dr. Andrews said.
“One minute he’s right there, in my face, and then bam. A tree! Out of nowhere.”
“I know, man, I know. That’s the natural world,” Trapper said. “Red in tooth and claw.”
“Tennyson,” Bernie said, gesturing back the way they had come, panting to catch his breath. “You just watched a man get devoured by a topiary nightmare and now you wanna quote Tennyson? Down here.”
Trapper laid a hand on his shoulder. “Yeah,” he said. “He knew all about it. Come here.” He enfolded Bernie in a hug. Normally he didn’t like hugging. No, he still didn’t. But it was slightly comforting, and at the moment it was worth it.
“We humans think we took ourselves off the food chain,” Trapper went on, now whispering in his ear. “Maybe… maybe the Titans are here to remind us.”
“I think...” Bernie patted him on the shoulder. “I think there is something seriously wrong with you.”
“Okay,” Trapper said, releasing him and stepping back.
“It’s not working,” Dr. Andrews announced.
“Okay,” Trapper said. “We’d better move on. Mourn later.” He started off. So did Andrews and Jia.
“But he was eaten by a tree,” Bernie said. “I don’t want to die like that. Not by a tree.”
And yet he followed them. What else was he going to do?
Dr. Andrews had said this would be dangerous. He’d thought he understood what that meant. Maybe she should have used another word. Was there one? That meant incredibly, horrifyingly dangerous? For real, all-kidding-aside dangerous?
Because if there wasn’t, there should be. And she should have used it.
Suko glanced over his shoulder at Stranger. He was still following. Suko wasn’t sure why. The Skar King had sent him with One-Eye and the others to find Stranger and capture him, drag him back before the Skar King. Suko wasn’t sure what the Skar King planned after that, but it would be bad for Stranger. Probably very bad.
But Stranger had killed Stone Fist and he had driven One-Eye and Catcher away. He had dominated Suko. But now Stranger was making Suko lead him to the Skar King. If Stranger wanted to go there, why had he fought at all?
Suko was confused that Stranger even existed. He shouldn’t. All the apes lived together. They always had, for far longer than Suko had been alive, for longer than almost anyone but the Skar King could remember. Nothing had changed in a very long time. Suko knew all the apes, even the females that the Skar King kept all to himself.
But now everything had changed. The stone of the caverns had shaken, which happened often enough. But this time the Skar King had risen from his stone seat. He stalked about the caverns, his nose twitching as even he smelled something. He made sounds to himself. He snarled and spit, his hands twitching restlessly at his sides. And he smiled: a terrible, frightening smile. It was always bad when the Skar King smiled.
Suko hadn’t noticed anything different. Neither did any of the other apes, but they were all wary of the Skar King’s behavior. They all watched and waited to see what it meant.
The Skar King called together all of the red-stripes, his loyal fighters, his personal protectors. By motion and sound he made it known that they were to prepare for a hunt.
Suko was not a red-stripe, so he did not join them. Not until the hand fell on his shoulder and he found the Skar King there, staring down at him with his hard blue eyes. Suko flinched, fearing he would be hit, kicked, or bitten. But instead the Skar King tilted his head and flexed a finger at One-Eye.
One Eye grunted in disapproval. The Skar King hissed at him, and One-Eye fell silent. One-Eye motioned Suko forward. He looked angry, but he wouldn’t go against the Skar King. Suko held his breath, not knowing what would happen.
One-Eye painted red stripes on Suko’s belly. He blinked. He looked up at the Skar King, but he wasn’t watching anymore. He was coiling his bone-whip. Getting ready to hunt.
Suko was a red-stripe now. He was one of them.
Which meant he was going hunting too.
His fear retreated. He began to feel bigger, more important. The Skar King had chosen him.
They started through the usual hunting grounds, but soon they had traveled far beyond any place Suko had been and eventually beyond the travels of any ape except perhaps the Skar King himself. The Skar King went in silence, his eyes burning, his gaze twitching about. When any dared to make a sound, he struck them without warning, and so eventually they all learned to move without chatter or complaint.
After a while, Suko thought he smelled something different. Maybe what the Skar King had smelled, all the way back in the Living Caves. He didn’t know what it was, but he liked it. It was… light, without the bitter stench of smoke. It smelled like plants and flowers, and now and then the air moved as if it was alive, as if it was coming or going from somewhere.
The smells got stronger until they came to a place where the cave sky had broken. One by one, they climbed up. Up into a different place. Still dark, but bigger—much bigger. And everything smelled new, better. Like water, but not like the still pools and damp mists he knew. This water smelled… alive.
They passed through more caves, but beyond that was jungle, deeper and denser than Suko had ever seen or even imagined. The cave roof was so far away that he couldn’t even see it, and now the air was always restless—playful even, growing softer and stronger, sometimes mischievously changing directions. And always more things to smell. Fruit, flowers, carrion, and many other things he couldn’t identify. It was frightening. It was wonderful.
He felt lucky to have come. Fortunate that the Skar King had chosen him to be a red-stripe.
The Skar King paused now and then, choosing the trail. Suko could tell he was looking for something.
Finally, he found it. He dispersed the apes into a large hunting circle which then began contracting, driving any prey toward the middle where there was no escape. But there was no sign of prey, at least nothing big enough to feed them all. Instead they came across strange trees made of hard stuff like stone. They broke them, and everything else that didn’t seem natural. They were quiet, as the Skar King commanded. Finally they came to the thing in the middle, the thing that did not belong.
Suko didn’t see it. One-Eye stopped him from going to the middle, put him on watch against anything that might be coming behind them. But he heard the weird, thin screams in the distance, the ripping and tearing.
As he waited, the world grew light, and he saw, for the first time, how big the cave really was. He stared in wonder at what ought to be the roof of the cave, but wasn’t. Instead he saw a reflection, another cave floor covered in forest and grassland. Rivers and streams flowed there, and lakes that must be huge. Between the cave floor he was on and the one above him, rocks drifted, and white clouds of fog. It was frightening; he kept fearing that at any moment he would plunge to his death on that other floor. But after some time passed, and it didn’t happen, he began to relax.
In the distance he heard the Skar King calling everyone in, so he went there, curious to see what all the noise had been about. Smoke curled up in that direction, trailing up into the peculiar distance and pooling where the stones floated.
When he reached the place of smoke, he stopped for a moment, trying to understand what he saw. The Skar King and the others had destroyed something, but he wasn’t sure what. It wasn’t made of trees or branches or stone or earth, but of stuff that Suko did not recognize. In this ruin, there were dead creatures. Small things, smaller than him, yet they looked something like apes that had been stripped of their fur. Suko didn’t know what they were. But the Skar King seemed to. And he was… excited.
What was this place, he wondered? Was it the promised place, the place all apes were supposed to go to and conquer? The place the Skar King had been searching for for so long?
The Skar King didn’t seem to think so. But he was different now. After a long time being the same, something new was changing inside of him. Every move he made, every gesture reflected that, reflected a purpose. Suko was sure of that. He just didn’t know what it was.
The Skar King picked through the debris, grunting. Then he stood tall and gestured back the way they had come.
The hunt was over. For now at least. They started back toward the Living Caves.
On the way back to their caves, they found signs of the Stranger. Signs like theirs, but not theirs. It had never happened before. The Skar King was in a hurry to return to the Living Caves, but he was curious about the Stranger. He left One-Eye, Stone Fist, Catcher, and Suko to wait for him. To bring him home, alive if possible. But dead would be okay, too.
Well, now Suko was bringing Stranger home. The Skar King was never pleased, but sometimes he was less angry. And there was the question of what Stranger might do. He was big, and strong, and clever. He wanted to find the Skar King.
The King wanted Stranger captured or dead. He might be very angry if Suko just led him home still holding his weapon.
So what could be done? Suko began to think.
Godzilla wasn’t hard to follow. He left France and bore in a straight line across southern Spain. He looked terrifying; the blue energy that was usually seen in his fins as he charged up to kindle his breath was leaking from his eyes and scales. It reminded Hampton all too much of Boston, but there he had been glowing red just before releasing a terrific energy blast. This didn’t seem as extreme, but was nevertheless still very, very worrying.
He reached the Spanish port of Cadiz on the Atlantic.
“The jets are in range,” Laurier reported.
Hampton nodded as she watched the images stream. Godzilla was glowing more brightly than before, and the air above him showed signs of heat distortion.
“Tower,” the lead pilot reported. “We can’t get any closer than this, Godzilla’s burning hot with radiation. Whatever he’s headed for has him really pissed off.”
Hampton nodded, hoping this wasn’t going to be a repeat of the Boston incident, when Godzilla had melted half the city.
Godzilla walked to the end of Spain and then he was back in the water, sending up huge plumes of steam, but Cadiz remained largely unmelted.
“Where are you going now, you big iguana?” Hampton murmured.
The sub commander answered her question. “Projected trajectory has him going toward the Arctic Ocean.”
What, to cool off? But somehow she didn’t think so.
“Do we have intel on that?” she asked. “What Titans are in the area?”
“Pulling it up,” Laurier said.
The screen showed a still image of what could only be called a sea serpent complete with fins, long whiskers, and eerie white eyes.
“My God,” the sub commander said. “Looks like he’s hunting Tiamat.”
“Oh,” Hampton said. She sat back. “I thought Tiamat was dormant.”
“She is. Not a peep out of her since Godzilla thrashed her years ago in the Pacific. She’s just been hanging out in the ice.”
“Uh-huh.” Tiamat had originally been documented beneath Stone Mountain Georgia, establishing Outpost 53. She had awakened at Ghidorah’s call and then gone missing for a while. Godzilla had gone on a grand tour a few years back, basically establishing his dominance over the other Titans. He had flushed Tiamat out of some underwater caves below a Pacific island. They had been tracking Godzilla by sub, but didn’t get a lot of footage of the fight. Tiamat had seemed pretty nasty; she had pulled Godzilla underwater, and for a while they’d lost track of the situation. Next thing they saw was a visibly wounded Tiamat fleeing the vicinity. Years had passed. Why was Godzilla suddenly spoiling for a rematch?
The briefing on Tiamat came up.
“Titanus Tiamat, Titan 19. Extremely aggressive and territorial, weaponizing her body of razor-sharp scales. Tiamat’s arctic lair sits in the direct path of electromagnetically charged solar winds making it the largest stockpile of energy on Earth.”
“If Godzilla takes down Tiamat,” the sub commander said, “he’ll supercharge.”
Are you okay? Ilene asked Jia, as they pushed further into the jungle.
Jia quirked her lips and lifted her shoulders. Not a shrug.
I don’t know, she said. I’m sorry for Mikael. He should have listened to Trapper.
Yeah, she nodded. Me too.
And for those other people, Jia added. At the outpost.
Jia was no stranger to death. She had seen more than her fair share of awful things, and she, like Ilene, was probably still in a little bit of shock over the latest fatalities. She kept catching herself, wondering where Mikael was, and then remembering he just… wasn’t.
There was nothing we could have done for him, she said, maybe more for herself than for Jia. Monarch expeditions had encountered tree mimics before. Several species had been described, and this might be a new one, because she had never seen one that looked like roots before. But what they all had in common was that they killed their prey instantly. They were hard to kill, too, and even if they had managed to kill that one, it wouldn’t have saved Mikael’s life—or him any suffering for that matter. He had probably never known what happened.
Anyway, they didn’t have anything with them that could have killed it. Mikael’s gun was the only one they had, and it had been eaten with him.
She was about to continue the conversation when she noticed Jia was looking up. Something was drifting downward. It looked a bit like feather-down, but Ilene figured it was some variety of pappus, like the fluffy parachutes that blew off dandelions to spread their seeds. She noticed one or two more, carried on the breeze.
I thought it was ash, Jia signed.
It looks like that, Ilene replied.
I mean when I saw them before, Jia clarified.
When did you see these before? Ilene wondered. But Jia wasn’t paying attention anymore. She was pushing ahead, the tree-mimic and Mikael apparently forgotten. Ilene hurried after her, but before she got very far she noticed angular, symmetrical shapes in the undergrowth, the sort of geometric profiles that were rare in nature.
“It’s ruins,” she said as she realized the truth. Jia already knew; she had knelt at a low stone structure of some sort and was pushing back the vegetation.
“Human civilization?” Trapper said. “Down here?”
Jia had moved on to a square column, carved with odd figures. Ilene leaned in to inspect. Jia got her attention.
These are the symbols of my people, her daughter informed her.
Ilene was already thinking the same thing. Stylistically they were slightly different, the way written English looked different if you compared something penned in the thirteenth century to something printed in the twenty-first. The same alphabet, so to speak. Of course, it wasn’t an alphabet per se, but the symbols did carry meaning.
“The markings look older than the ones on Skull Island,” she said for the benefit of the others. “Centuries older. But the architecture is consistent with the Iwi.”
The feathery white stuff was falling everywhere now, like a gentle snow. It was beautiful, and peaceful—and somehow sad. Jia looked at all of those things as she took in their surroundings. Now that Ilene was really looking, she saw the remains of buildings everywhere. This had been at least a decent-sized town, if not a city.
What happened to them? Jia asked.
I don’t know, she mouthed, shaking her head.
Trapper and Bernie moved slowly, almost reverentially, through the ruins. Bernie was uncharacteristically quiet, as if aware that he was in a sacred space of some kind.
Ilene had long suspected that humans had lived in Hollow Earth. Images found in deep caves, legendary tales from around the world, all suggested that at least some humans had emerged from the ground. The ancient Kong structures they had discovered on their first trip to Hollow Earth had pictures of humans on the walls. She had come to think it was possible that, as other species had moved back and forth between the surface world and the world beneath, so had humans and human ancestors like homo erectus, homo habilis, and homo naledi. But until now, the only evidence for that had been stories and rock drawings.
These were buildings, not to the scale of Titans, but at human scale, with obvious similarities to those of the Iwi of Skull Island, a place with perhaps the strongest connection to Hollow Earth on the surface world. The Iwi themselves had told her they came up from below with Kong’s ancestors.
They continued to move silently through the ancient settlement. Bernie whispered a little, obviously to himself, and he took a few pictures. But at least he didn’t get out his video camera and start a running commentary.
“This site must be thousands of years old,” she whispered.
Ahead, Trapper had found a stone staircase and started up it. He paused.
“Now, that’s weird,” he said, indicating the steps. “There’s no moss on these ones.”
She saw that now. The stone of the stairs and the area above was relatively bare. As if they had been cleaned—or were still in use.
The space at the top looked almost like a sanctuary of some sort, a small stone-paved yard surrounded by walls, most of which were still intact. A shallow oval basin about a meter across was set down into the floor. Eight channels radiated from the hollow like the beams of the sun in a kid’s drawing, except they weren’t totally symmetrical in arrangement. They were evenly spaced except on one side, where there was a conspicuous gap.
Trapper stepped through the basin and on toward the wall beyond.
“Hello,” he said. He pushed back some trailing vines, revealing a bas-relief carving of a winged creature. Even stylized, the creature depicted was instantly recognizable.
“Mothra,” Ilene said.
“Queen of the Monsters,” Bernie said, “in Hollow Earth.”
“Her lineage must go back further than we thought,” Ilene said.
A Titan, one of the most mysterious. When Godzilla fought Ghidorah, when all seemed on the verge of being lost—it was the intervention of Mothra that made the difference. If it wasn’t for Mothra, Ghidorah might have killed Godzilla. If he had, there was no doubt he would have stripped the globe of life.
Mothra had hatched from an egg that had been kept in an ancient temple in the Yunnan rainforest of China. No one was exactly certain how long it had been there, but it opened into a caterpillar only days before Godzilla’s battle with Ghidorah. The pupa had attached itself under a nearby waterfall and had quickly matured into an adult, mothlike form.
This carving was far too old to be that Mothra, but a scattering of legends from around the world claimed the mysterious Titan had been born and died many times, always arriving when she was needed.
This was a temple, Jia signed. A place of worship.
It wasn’t a question; Jia was fully confident. Ilene hadn’t seen her like this in… a long time.
“Yeah,” she said.
Something flitted through the air, just past Jia. An insect, a big one. It looked something like a wasp, with two pairs of wings, but it was glowing, like a lightning bug. It made a strange little chittering sound and landed on a protrusion in the wall.
Jia padded toward it. When she got near she reached toward it.
“No, no, no,” Trapper said, forgetting the girl couldn’t hear him. Ilene shared his concern; it might well be venomous, or—something. But she felt, in that moment, that she needed to trust her daughter.
Jia didn’t touch the insect. Instead she placed her hand on the projecting stone and pressed.
The stone moved. It went in, until it was flush with the rest of the wall.
The insect flew away, and immediately Ilene heard the gurgle of water. It came down from above, flowing in steep channels into the grooves in the stone floor, filling the basin at the center.
Jia stared at it for a moment, then started to run back down the stairs. Ilene now realized the apparent gap in the symmetry of the channels was misleading; a channel ran under the stones of the temple, shooting the water out and down the stairs. It was that little torrent that Jia was chasing after.
“Hey,” Ilene called after her, realizing at the same time Jia couldn’t hear her but also aware it probably wouldn’t make a difference if she could.
“Whoa, whoa,” Trapper called, making the identical mistake.
“It’s like some… irrigation system,” Bernie said. He did have his video camera out now, as he too ran after Jia. “It predates everything! Mesopotamians, the Lemurians. These guys were the first, man.”
Jia ran on, following the newly created stream. The rest pursued her through the jungle until she stopped in front of… something.
It was like a cloud or a cobweb, and yet like neither, a pale barrier that ran through the trees, blocking their path. Jia was still now, contemplating it.
“Now, that’s a trip,” Trapper opined.
“Great Mulder and Scully, look at that,” Bernie said.
Ilene moved closer. Not cobwebs. Not any kind of web she’d seen. And not a cloud, although it seemed to swirl around inside, incandescing with uneven blueish light.
“What could have created this?” Ilene asked.
“Ancient alien astronauts,” Bernie said.
Trapper moved up and knelt where the wall and the little canal met.
“Look at this here,” he said. “The water’s running underneath. This is… this is organic.” He slowly extended a finger toward it. When he encountered what appeared to be the surface, his finger stopped and was met by a blue spark. He drew back a little, but looked more curious than hurt or alarmed. He stood up, moving one of his ears nearer.
“Hear that?” he said. “Some kind of bioelectric hum.”
He took both hands and pushed against it.
The reaction was instantaneous. The wall of… whatever it was pushed back, flickering with interior lightning, the hum becoming more distant thunder. Vague silhouettes moved within the web, or fog, or… but then she understood. It was a wall, a barrier. To keep something in or out—or maybe both.
“It’s like camouflage,” Ilene said.
Everyone had stepped back, but Jia strode confidently forward, quickly pushing her hands fingers-first into the wall. Actinic blue-white light poured through, but Jia kept pushing.
“Should she be doing that?” Bernie asked. “She shouldn’t be doin’ that, right?”
Jia kept pulling, and the slit grew wider, the light pouring through, rendering her face incandescent.
Ilene moved to her side, put her hands in, and pulled with her. The rift grew wider. The light, or electricity, or whatever it was didn’t hurt: it just sort of tingled. And the material felt one moment like a sort of spongy fabric and at others like a jellyfish. And as they pulled, the rift tore broader and longer, until they could see through it.
And what they saw was… astonishing, even for Hollow Earth.
Nearby, just beyond the rift, feathery fronds of continuing jungle framed the view. In the distance, Ilene could make out three towers, wider at the base and tapering toward their flat tops, almost like candles. No, very steep pyramids. They looked the same size, by they didn’t stand side by side. Instead, one hung down from the land above and one thrust up from the ground they stood on, blunt stalagmites and stalactites almost touching at the narrow ends. In the void between them drifted a line of floating boulders, caught in the zero-gravity borderland between the two major planes of Hollow Earth. Smaller, similar tapering structures descended from near the upper tower, along with what appeared to be a city of some sort. The jungle prevented them from seeing if the lower tower had similar buildings.
From my dreams, Jia said.
“This must be the source of the signal,” Ilene said.
“Oh, we gotta check this out,” Trapper said.
“Yeah,” she agreed.
Together, they pulled the opening wide enough to step through. Bernie, camera in hand, followed them.