Pandemonium Read online

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Don Lovett, chair of the biology department at the University of New Jersey, for helping me design another roller coaster; Michael Limber for bringing the visuals to life; my agent, Peter McGuigan at Foundry, for greasing the rails; and Bob Gleason, for being just crazy enough to open the ride to the public.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1957

  January 28

  PRESENT DAY

  January 29

  February 21

  March 12

  March 14

  March 15

  March 16

  March 17

  March 18

  March 19

  March 20

  March 21

  March 26

  March 28

  March 30

  March 31

  June 23

  Map and Illustrations

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Pandemonium the Palace of Satan rises, suddenly built out of the Deep.

  —JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost

  PROLOGUE

  We think of the underworld as a place for the dead. Yet beneath our feet teems a world of life more vibrant, diverse, mysterious, and resilient than anything clinging to Earth’s fragile exterior.

  Our deepest drills, boring a mile below the ocean floor, found life. Three miles down the shaft of a South African gold mine, life was waiting for us. Even inside a body of water the size of Lake Ontario locked two miles under the surface of Antarctica, researchers found an entire ecosystem of life they never imagined.

  In the depths of the Earth dwell organisms impervious to boiling heat, freezing cold, intense radiation, toxic salinity, noxious gases, extreme pressure, and total darkness. Far from fragile, these communities of extremophiles have proved themselves hardier than any surface life in the temperate zones that we call home.

  Indeed, after sampling the depths of our planet, scientists now believe that even cataclysmic impacts from extraterrestrial bodies could not eradicate life on Earth. Subterranean species would undoubtedly survive. Life might even have endured the death of other planets and traveled trillions of miles inside meteors to seed our islands and seas, resulting, three-and-a-half billion years later, in scientists who question life’s endurance.

  With all the shifting, layering, and folding of our planet’s geology, the variety of microorganisms evolving inside its crust must be impossible to guess. Whole worlds separated by an inner space of solid rock have been adapting for millions and billions of years, each in entirely unique conditions. Most organisms in these isolated ecosystems grow very slowly, some dividing only once a century. Others devour rock and, over geological ages, they have created some of the world’s largest cave systems.

  When exposed and then sealed, caves capture samples of life from the surface and carry them forward on diverging evolutionary pathways across inconceivable spans of time. The Movile Cave in Romania, isolated five million years ago, contains today thirty-three species found nowhere else. A recently unsealed cave in Israel revealed unique shrimps and scorpions whose ancestors must have entered from the former Mediterranean shore millions of years ago. Newly discovered caves of Sequoia National Park revealed twenty-seven new species, some of which had evolved to live in only one room of the cave.

  Over a quarter of a million caves have been documented, so far, and the number grows more rapidly each year. Humans have explored only a fraction of these subterranean worlds, each of which contains a different atmosphere of gases, a unique mix of minerals, and a collection of species that have adapted to its conditions descending from different epochs in our planet’s history.

  And yet, for all the exotic species that we know must dwell beneath the Earth, the species closest to the underworld, both physically and spiritually, may be us.

  Researchers excavating a South African cave recently discovered evidence that our “caveman” heritage stretches back at least two million years. Caves were, indeed, the cradle of mankind.

  Stone Age Europeans and ancient peoples in the Americas frequented caves that stretch for miles, as modern-day spelunkers have discovered to their astonishment. Such dangerous journeys were undertaken for mysterious purposes, and certainly not practical ones, suggesting a fearless fascination with the infernal regions that may run deep in our psychological heritage.

  During their long Stone Age, humans accumulated an intimate knowledge of Earth and its layers that would lay the foundations of our future progress. Along the way, the fossils borne up by the earth were like bas-relief friezes of gods and monsters. The odd shapes they saw in the stones, spiraling symbols and complex forms, leaped out of the rock like words into the brains of primitive hominids. The fossil record of the Earth was a premonition of art, mythology, and geometry. We now know that Neanderthals were the first to paint symbolic animals on a cave wall, and we know that they collected fossils. These first paleontologists actually sorted them by species like religious relics. The pages of Earth’s own history book thus instructed our ancestors’ intellectual evolution.

  As far back as 15,000 B.C., in Turkey, humans began to modify caves. And it is there that centuries later cave dwelling reached its apex in the underground cities of Cappadocia.

  Over the course of the Stone Age, accident and insight fused fire with rock. And at the end of that long precursor to human history, the principles of metallurgy emerged. The smelting of ore produced copper, equipping humans with tools that could cut limestone and construct the pyramids that mimicked mountains riddled with tunnels and caves. Bronze forged from the earth enabled men to chisel marble into cavernlike temples supported by stalagmite pillars of marble built of disks resembling the fossilized vertebrae of crinoids.

  We left our caves behind for freestanding dwellings aboveground, and yet we humans have continued to return to the underworld long after to mine its mysteries and treasures. With new technology, our species has drilled and blasted vast subways for us to travel beneath Moscow, New York, London, San Francisco, Paris, and Hong Kong. Whole underground cities have been carved under Seattle, Montreal, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Beijing, Kish, Osaka, Tokyo, Kawasaki, and Nagoya, and they are currently occupied by millions of people every day. Yet even these titanic excavations shrink before the future engineering projects already grinding their way into our planet’s crust.

  Particle accelerators that spare the surface from the consequences of quantum physics, sensors buried deep under mountains to detect cosmic rays, earthquake sensors miles beneath the ocean floor, and even more ambitious underground engineering projects to divert surface floods, span channels, cross mountain ranges, or hide secret military operations are under way around the globe every day. Deep oil-drilling techniques will soon bore five miles into the Earth’s crust and, as oil grows ever more scarce, drill ever deeper.

  We know we are not the only exotic creatures expanding their niche in the vast inner space beneath us. Whatever the earth yields up, whatever its shape, story, and strategy, it will certainly prove more incredible, perhaps more
infernal and diabolical, than all the myths our ignorance has conjured.

  —from the afterword of The Underground History of Planet Earth by Anastasia Kurolesova, Moscow Geological Institute Press

  1957

  JANUARY 28

  12:02 P.M.

  “Poékhali!” bellowed Taras Demochev, Guard No. 114 of Corrective Labor Camp No. 479. He pushed through the men in the tunnel as he walked beside a mining car carrying a load of blasting powder. “Why aren’t we moving?”

  For nine days, prisoners had struggled with faulty pneumatic jackhammers and pickaxes to widen the last fifty yards of the tunnel so that a newly arrived boring machine could gnaw through a stubborn layer of dolomite. Tethered by straining cables a hundred yards up the grade behind Taras, the borer steamed like a locomotive on wide-gauge rails.

  Taras barely regarded the half-starved prisoners clogging the tunnel ahead, casting them aside like scarecrows as he bulled forward. The wretched convicts, even the ones in their twenties, were already dokhodyaga, “goners,” buying their last hours of life by digging their own graves. “Move your asses!” Taras yelled. “Out of my way!”

  A young subordinate guard rushed to meet him.

  “What’s the holdup, Yvgeny?”

  “Some zeks fell out of the airshaft.”

  As the men parted before him, Taras saw five men sprawled on the ground under a hole in the ceiling twenty yards ahead. He had sent the men up that morning to continue drilling the ventilation shaft. Their heavy pneumatic drills had battered and mangled them on the way down, and the men lay tangled under the heavy equipment and hoses in a pitiful heap. Taras strode forward and fired his revolver into the groaning pile, shocking the younger guard. Many of the prisoners doubled over at the earsplitting gunshot, though most could not hear.

  Since they had come under Taras’s command, none of these men officially existed anymore. Once they were sent to Corrective Labor Camp No. 479, their lives were erased. Sixty thousand ghosts labored in this ancient salt mine near the village of Gursk in the Kaziristani highlands. Criminals and lawyers, rapists and poets, murderers and doctors, all were now zeks to the guards. Like ants, they worked until they died and were carried away.

  On the mountainside above, the zeks slept in rough wooden barracks slapped together with timber from the foothills of Mount Kazar. Each of their dormitories was the size of a double-wide trailer and housed 120 men by day and 120 by night. Hundreds of the ramshackle dormitories dotted the mountain slopes around the salt mine that, until now, had provided the nearby town’s sustenance for seven centuries. Since their new rulers confiscated the mine four years ago, the villagers of Gursk called the mine that once fed them, “Stalin’s Mouth.”

  Over twenty thousand men had been swallowed by the mine. Convicts continuously arrived, but the camp’s population never grew. The townspeople rarely saw salt harvested these days. Instead, an endless stream of mining cars and conveyors disgorged a miniature mountain range of pulverized rock at the foot of the mountain.

  More bewildering to the villagers was what they saw going into the mine. Endless shipments arrived by train and were taken by truck and mining car into the mountain—cement and ceiling fans, bricks and marble bathtubs, Persian rugs, alabaster pillars, terra-cotta tiles, bronze streetlamps, bicycles, beds, even baby carriages. Some whispered that they had seen crates of French champagne, beluga caviar, even ZIS-115 limousines straight from Automotive Factory No. 2 in Moscow, all fed into the mine’s mouth.

  Taras fired another round at the hesitating prisoners, this time dropping one with a gut shot. “Get going!” he shouted at the rest. He had outlived 61 guards who came before him and 122 guards after. He knew he would be executed along with any convicts who tried to escape on his watch. This had never become a problem for him, since most of Taras’s zeks were dead after only a few weeks. His superiors did not complain about this. In fact, they began deliberately assigning certain prisoners to his detail, which Taras Demochev took as a compliment.

  Taras waved away the smoke of his pistol, questioning his eyes: instead of running away from the bullets, this time the zeks were running toward him. A terror rehearsed in his dreams gripped him. He backed away, but as he turned to run, he noticed blue and green sparks gushing out of the unfinished ventilation shaft. An oval of light oozed from the hole and glided like a flashlight beam over the ceiling. Then it peeled from the roof and landed on the back of a screaming convict.

  Taras decided to hold his ground. He fired his gun, and two men fell as the rest retreated. But one of the zeks leaped like a gazelle over his comrades’ heads, shrieking and soaring with superhuman force. He landed on all fours at Taras’s feet, his back covered by a glowing mass. The convict jackknifed upright, and as he recognized Taras, an expression of relief came over his face. Taras was horrified, having never provoked that response in a zek before.

  The convict reached forward and clutched Taras’s arm. Two white ovals glided down the prisoner’s wrist, over Taras’s gun, and under the guard’s sleeve.

  “Shit!” Taras yelled. He felt tongues fringed with needles sliding up his arm. Leeches! he thought. With urgent strength, the zek jerked the barrel of Taras’s pistol to his own forehead with pleading eyes. Taras obliged him, squeezing the trigger and blasting his head apart. Then he pulled himself away as the prisoner dropped like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

  Half a dozen glowing ovals were now sliding over the tunnel’s ceiling toward him. Hundreds of glowing red and yellow goblinlike creatures poured from the ventilation shaft onto the men. Taras turned and ran as the tunnel was filled with shrieks. “Let the Grinder go!” he screamed at the men in the tunnel up ahead.

  Rising on all fours behind him, the dead zek leaped into the air.

  Taras did not look back as he made it to the narrow-gauge rails beside the tunnel borer and shouted, “Cut it loose!”

  As the dead zek landed on all fours in front of the hissing machine, Taras reached the far side and the convicts there uncoupled the cables, unleashing the machine’s two hundred tons of mass, which gathered a terrible momentum as it rumbled down the tracks.

  Taras scratched at his chest as he charged up the tunnel, past laborers who were plastering and tiling the walls. “Out of my way!” Taras snarled, kicking them aside.

  The boring machine accelerated as it mowed over miners and smashed into the mining cart that carried the blasting powder. Driving the cart like a warhead through a forest of flesh and bone, it finally crashed into the dolomite dead end of the tunnel and detonated its payload, rupturing the tunnel like a backfiring cannon.

  6:39 P.M.

  When the first inspection team arrived, the only human remains visible at the edge of the rubble were Taras Demochev’s hand, disembodied, still clutching his Tokarev pistol.

  It was soon determined that it was more practical to cement over this tunnel and memorialize the loss of men with a plaque, and then try drilling in a different direction.

  Guard No. 321 took the undamaged gun and pushed some gravel over Guard No. 114’s hand with his boot.

  PRESENT DAY

  JANUARY 29

  6:11 A.M.

  Toughened and tanned by salt spray and sun, the mummified corpse of Thatcher Redmond resembled beef jerky. His formerly red hair and beard were now snow white. The remains of the zoologist had meandered across the open sea in a partially deflated raft for 134 days.

  As though conveyed by a series of belts, the sagging Zodiac had drifted on Pacific currents for thirty-five thousand miles. Sucked east into the Peru–Chile Current, the raft was slung around the South Pacific gyre to the west along the top of the South Equatorial Current, where it was sloughed by the remnants of a storm into the North Equatorial Current. Now it glided on an eddy of the Kuroshio Current, passing the spray of volcanic islands north of Japan.

  As it wandered too close to a rocky islet, a large wave caught the Zodiac and pushed it out of the sea, depositing it high up a pebble beach on a
colorful tide line of trash.

  6:20 A.M.

  The first sand flies from the island arrived. As they scribbled the air around the beached raft, a wasplike creature with five wings like a whirlybird emerged from the mummy’s mouth. Its five quivering legs gripped the man’s chin as it basked in the sun to warm its copper blood. Its five upper legs opened and snapped like praying mantis claws, methodically snatching sand flies two at a time out of the air and feeding them like popcorn into a mouth at the end of its distended abdomen. From each of the corpse’s eye sockets two more of these bugs emerged, emulating the first as they stood on each of his cheekbones.

  6:31 A.M.

  Beach fleas and crabs began invading the Zodiac.

  Like a sand dollar fringed by a centipede, a disk the size of a dime rolled on its edge out of the zoologist’s ear.…

  6:33 A.M.

  Drawn by a scent signal from the scout, a few dozen more of the rolling bugs emerged from the watertight corpse, which had been hollowed out like a leather flask by the creatures that had sought refuge inside it.

  Like discuses, the bugs launched at the advancing sea roaches, sand flies, and crabs. Generations of juveniles unloaded from the backs of the disk-shaped bugs and gnawed through the joints of the island’s native arthropods, consuming them from the inside, and recycling them into more of themselves, each one of them an assembly line.

  10:02 A.M.

  The zoologist’s bony hands clutched a jar on his chest. A breeze moaned in the jar’s mouth as a winged creature with three legs and wings took flight from the jar, drawn by the smell of land. A single green scale of what appeared to be lichen clung to one of its three legs.

  11:21 P.M.