Cemetery Planet: The Complete Series (13 page)

6.

“Where have you led me?” he couldn’t keep his eyes off the mountain, looming large yet so far away. “Lea?”

He waited for a response. Spinning in a circle, he scrutinized every corner, every crevice, every centimeter of the bay for a sign of her, but found nothing.

Suddenly his visor display crackled. It was an old unit, but the suit’s system worked like a charm. And when Lea’s face appeared onscreen, he shouted into his helmet, stinging his own ears.

“Lea, what’s going on! I don’t like the looks of this!”

“I don’t like it either,” her somberness matched his fear. He knew she wasn’t trying to deceive him. “I don’t like the idea of asking you to go out there all alone. But we don’t have a choice. Broders was right. We can’t go out there. The Unspeakable Ones…just being their presence would mean death for spirit.”

“But what about me? I have a spirit, don’t I? Doesn’t that count?”

“The living are different when it comes to these situations. You have a physical body that grounds your soul in place against the negative energy.”

A rumble deep underground. She fell silent for a moment, until the small quake was finished, then continued.

“That’s them. We have to hurry!”

The rover started running, its electric powerplant purring, its overhead lights flashing on, casting bright beams through the dust and the dark inside the utility bay. It was an old model, certainly. However, Harvey recognized its bulk. It had a mean set of tires and a beefed-up suspension and extra batteries that, when he inspected them, found fully topped off. He also noticed his suit had supplemental battery packs.

“You guys have been planning this for a while, haven’t you?”

“Harvey, I wasn’t lying when I said I didn’t know about any of this. Not until the spirits took me back to Zone 6 and explained it all. The messages and the other things that happened…they were trying to get your attention, that’s all.”

“Trying to get my attention?” he chortled. “Is that what they were doing?”

“They’re scared and so am I,” Lea had never been so serious, putting extra weight on her every word. “I’m disgusted by the thought of the Unspeakable Ones using my body for something so awful. They want to conquer the galaxy, Harvey. And they’ll do it with such cruelty it’ll become a living hell. We can’t let them do it, Harvey…we can’t!”

Harvey stared at her image on his visor screen. Nothing more than a blurry, silver luminosity. He couldn’t tell, but he thought she was crying, and that tore his heart from his chest.

“Oh, God, Lea,” he fought for some sense in it all. “This is insane. I-I can’t even believe this is all happening.”

“I know,” she calmed him with her lyrical voice. “It
is
a little hard to believe. But trust me, Harvey, this is happening,” her eyes drifted, right along with Harvey’s, to the mountain. “That’s a bad, bad place. But it’s also a good place. The emergency beacon is there, and that has to be activated,” she looked at him once again with the most forlorn expression. “Harvey, you’re the only one on this planet that can do it.”

“But I wouldn’t even know the first thing to do,” he said genuinely. “I want to help…really I do. But I have no idea where to go or how to work the beacon even if I did find it.”

“I can help you,” she flashed a series of schematics at him on the screen. Maps. Coordinates. Directions. Details on how to find and operate the alien device.

“Where’d you get this?”

“The spirits. These files have supposedly been wiped out long ago. But somehow the spirits retained the data. It’s all here, Harvey. All the schematics on the communications tower. I can tell you exactly where to go. I can even go with you for a while,” just when she said that, she disappeared from his visor and the onboard computer in the rover flickered with her image. She smiled questioningly at him. He had no power to refuse, so he got in and started driving.

The rover cut a dusty path through the headstones, speeding along the solitary road that led, twisting and winding, out of the unfamiliar graveyard. It took an hour to reach the outer boundaries, and when they did, Harvey felt a sense of dread, forcing him to ease off the accelerator.

“What’s the matter, Harvey?” Lea asked.

“I’ve never been in an area without headstones,” he surveyed the virgin land, the foothills stepping gradually up to the larger, more dominating features, and, finally the nearly vertical rock face known as Mount Mausolus. “It’s just a little strange, that’s all.”

“We’d better get moving,” she said, and he obliged, pointing the rover into uncharted territory, navigating around, in-between and over countless rocks and small boulders.

The entire trip was like being in training. Lea sent him multiple images, maps, the exact approach to the mountain, directions to the structure that housed the beacon, and where to go once inside. It was a lot of information, and a long journey. At least two more hours later, just when he thought his rear-end couldn’t take it any longer, the road became impassable. Rocks too large to roll over and too close to go around.

“Well,” he shut down the rover’s systems. “Looks like it’s a hike from here.”

“This is where I stop,” Lea looked down. Her image was fading. “I can’t go any further. I can already feel them.”

“Lea, wait,” he begged before she went away completely. “Are you going to wait for me here?”

“I’ll try,” she said, but she didn’t look good. “I’m not sure if I can, Harvey. The hatred, the malice is just so overpowering, even here.”

“Okay, listen,” he had an idea. “If you can’t stay here, then go back to the visitor station, to the mausoleum. Your grave. I’ll meet you at your grave.”

“Okay, Harvey,” she sounded weak. “I’ll meet you there. Please don’t make me wait long.”

“I won’t,” he smiled, hoping that would ease her discomfort at least a little. “This should be a piece of cake, thanks to your amazing instructions.”

That made her smile, but only faintly.

“Be careful, Harvey.”

“I will.”

“Harvey,” her image was gone completely now. All he had as he began his trek up the mountain were her last words. “Harvey…I love you.”

7.

It wasn’t long before a rigorous hike became a precarious climb. Only a few meters up, Harvey found himself ascending hand over hand, sliding his feet from one niche to the next. The ascent would have been difficult enough with full climber’s rigging. In his space suit, it became as comical as it was deadly.

He didn’t find it funny, though, when, stretching to reach a foothold a few short treacherous centimeters away, he felt his fingers slip inside his gloves, and that in turn made him lose his hold. He was now so far up the rover looked like a toy, and when he took that tragic misstep, his life flashed before his eyes. Somehow he found his footing, and made it to the higher ledge, where, once he rounded a small outcropping, he gazed upon a sight that, had it been on Earth, would have been one of the wonders of the world.

The inside of the mountain had been carved away, but not by crude tools. Smooth surfaces, so clean and straight it must have taken incredible engineering. He pressed his hand against the wall next to him and looked up. That’s when his brain began to comprehend the size and scope of this new discovery.

Towering columns cut from the rock. Massive arches, adorned with bas-reliefs of the most eloquent designs. Pictures of living beings. Not of Earth, that much was certain. Harvey walked until he saw a clean-cut wall in every direction, and, backing up and letting his helmet lights probe further, he saw he was on the very bottom of some rather large steps.

With more than a little effort, he managed to hoist himself up to the next step. The next was a little harder. And the next harder yet, until, when he made it to the last one, finally and mercifully, he was spent. Thankfully, his suit levels were all in the green still, even with all the exertion. The extra batteries were doing the trick. As long as he made it to the beacon in a reasonable amount of time, he’d be fine.

He let his sights drift up. Statues, immense and foreboding, of beings with long hair and features that appeared vaguely human, yet not human. The stone figures seemed to be holding their hands, on which there were seven fingers, in strange gestures, most of which struck Harvey as being not at all hospitable.

Then he saw other statues. Grotesque features on even more grotesque bodies. Strange creatures indeed, these new statues, and the more Harvey looked, the more of them he saw, striking various poses, in different types of scenes with other strange but much less ominous types of beings surrounding them. After a little more studying, Harvey saw a pattern, and soon discovered the key to the riddle. It was a history of sorts, a story in rock, much the same as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs or Sumerian texts. He didn’t have the exact translation down in such a short amount of time, but he got the gist, and soon came to the conclusion that these ugly beings were coldblooded killers, and they’d waged a terrible campaign of terror on countless different worlds.

Harvey saw so many depictions of atrocities, he began to conjecture that this was more than a simple chronology of the events. It was an indictment. These carvings were left as an eternal damnation for the outrages committed by these beings, the Unspeakable Ones.

And, mixed with the sense of accusation from the stone tableaus, Harvey also received a solemn sense of warning. The carvings were so frightening in nature, a notice to stay away was the overriding impression he received. And it was strong.

In his meticulous inspection, Harvey made another discovery—a pathway. Or, rather, two pathways. One leading up, the other down. Harvey knew which way he was supposed to go. The markings on the walls became even clearer as he went in the gigantic entryway. The grand arches and towering columns seemed to converge and bend at the ceiling, creating a dizzying spectacle, with all signs pointing up.

The way down was blocked, barred, fortified with heavy gates and a phalanx of barbed metal that looked quite deadly to the touch. Harvey had a palpable desire to get away from this ominous place, the entrance to Hell itself. The emergency beacon. That was his mission. Yet something inside stirred when he thought about what could possible merit such warnings. Ever since he was a child, he couldn’t contain his desire to know, his overpowering thirst for facts.

It was this thirst that allowed him to forsake his fear and make a bold move for the downward path. He didn’t intend on going far. Just wanted to inspect the fortifications up close. When he did get closer, though, he recognized some peculiar things. What appeared to be an impenetrable stronghold actually had several points of weakness, places where Harvey could slip through easily. It almost seemed as if passages were opened up on purpose, though it was hard to tell for certain.

Then he noticed a rhythmic sound. Steady, almost melodic. It was the same type of low rumble he’d heard before, underneath Mausoleum One. His entire body shivered at the thought of that endless assembly line, packed with human remains.

After that initial sense of fear, his tingling thirst for answers once again started teasing him. So many questions yet unanswered. Was the conveyor so long that it actually reached Mt. Mausolus? If so it would have been a marvel of engineering. The very idea fascinated him. Like a single thread dangling from a tightly-packed ball of yarn. All he had to do was tug the thread and he could unravel the mystery.

What was down there? The Unspeakable Ones? Did they really exist in a harmless pupae form? Harvey wanted to think they were harmless, but had a hard time believing a race of beings capable of the atrocities described on the murals could be harmless, no matter what physical state. He went back and forth about it, the inner struggle between self-preservation and inquisitiveness raged like a war. Finally, it wasn’t even a contest. The beacon wasn’t going anywhere. He had to see for himself if all of this was true. So he did exactly what all the signs, all the inscriptions and carving were screaming at him not to do—he went down.