Altered States -Volume III. Hinge of Fate

Chapter 8

It was the sound that undid them as they approached, a sound they could not hear. Acoustic trauma was a well known phenomenon. Humans were accustomed to a range of acceptable sound in the 20–20 scale, from 20 Hz to 20KHz. Even within that range, sound had long been a means of warning, from the clatter of swords deliberately beating on metal shields in a formation of ancient soldiers, to the harsh warning of a siren, alarm, or claxon on the ship before a missile fired. Sound we could hear might grate upon us, like fingernails scratching a blackboard, a dentist’s drill grinding through the enamel of the tooth ever closer to the pulsing infection of a swollen nerve in the abscess. The sound we could hear could be used to soothe, or to torture, to give pleasure or pain, to lure like the siren song, or give warning of imminent harm.

Beneath the threshold of human hearing, however, sound seemed to take on other mysterious properties. Animals with keener senses used it well enough. Pigeons could navigate by ultra low level sound, it was thought that other migrating birds could hear the low infrasound of air masses passing over distant mountains and move towards it as well. Elephants could emit low sounds that could migrate through the earth itself and range out as far as ten kilometers to coordinate with other herd members. And the growl of a Siberian Tiger was said to exhibit vibrations in the range of 16Hz, below the threshold of human hearing, but nonetheless perceived as the deep, threatening warning that it was.

There was something growling on the taiga that day. They could not hear it, but they could feel it, a discomfort in the chest, a thoracic sense of doom. It was a thrumming vibration that seemed to invade their very being with the warning of injury, and the closer the three men came to the clearing, the more uneasy they felt.

“Glubokiy zvuk,” said Troyak, feeling the disturbance around them in a palpable way now. It was Russian for “deep sound,” and the gritty Sergeant had undergone special training where he was exposed to dangerously low infrasound in the range of8-10 Hz, and challenged to perform normal routine duties-assembling and disassembling his rifle, loading ammunition, calculating target coordinates and keying the information for a presumed artillery fire.

Orlov was not so well conditioned, and he immediately began to regret his impulsive urge to come down and see what was shining at them from the clearing. They were out of the cargo basket, once used in decades past for men to stand and throw bomblets at ground targets in the older zeppelin models. Now it was an easy way to put down a squad sized contingent from heights up to 200 meters.

A stand of trees separated their clearing from low depression in the ground, a thicket of larch and pine that seemed oddly twisted and stunted in places as they passed through, with strange burls on the trunks of the trees that appeared to be odd boils in the wood, some genetic malformation that had caused a cancerous growth on the trunks. There, in that moment of suspended anticipation, Orlov could feel his disquiet redouble with each step he took. Something was wrong here, he knew, deep in his bones. Something was ugly, and bad, and vile here, and he had to resist the urge to turn and simply retrace his steps, yearning for the relative security of the metal cargo basket now, yearning for the cold interior of the airship again, his curiosity quashed by this strange, unfathomable fear.

Yes, it was fear-a fear they could almost hear quavering in the air about them, as though something was hidden in the marshy ground ahead, waiting to emerge like a demon from hell and devour them. They would hear it, and then not hear it, and the absence of the sound had an equally chilling effect on Orlov. Silence could choke a man too. It enveloped him like a shroud, utter silence, a soundless quiet that spoke of an uttermost void, where no life of any kind could ever live. There would come a moment of absolute silence when they stopped, all three men at once, where nothing could be heard. Nothing at all…

Then Troyak stepped forward, the sound of his heavy boots on the duff of rotting wood branches and pine needles in the thicket becoming a welcome balm… until the sound came at them again-a sound they could not hear, but yet one that assaulted them as they stepped to the edge of the tree line, intruding on every sense, bone deep sound that penetrated into their minds like a throbbing vibration of something old, something primal, something lost and forlorn.

For Orlov it was pure fear that he felt at that indefinable boundary’s edge. It brought a choking or gagging sensation to his throat that made him want to wretch, yet froze his larynx to the point where he could not speak. Beyond the edge of those trees lay the clearing, and there was something there that seemed to take him by the throat with the intent to choke the life from him. Strange visions emerged in his mind, the purple face of Commissar Molla, his eyes bulging, as Orlov choked him to death. Now the memory of an old story his grandmother had told him as a child emerged in this thoughts-the devil’s bone yard-the story he never believed, until that moment… “A bright star fell in the far away land, and tall grey phantoms were seen to haunt the woodlands in the days after, hunting the living and dragging their souls through the fens and moors of the taiga, to the gateway of Hell…”

ForChenko it was a deep feeling of sadness that came over him, like the melancholy of Russian Toska, the feeling that could not be truly described to anyone who was not Russian. There was no escaping it, for it became one’s entire thought process when it arose. Yet here it seemed to come from without, emanating from the center of that clearing and forcibly entering his mind, as if it had crawled out of the ground and entered his soul through the bones of his leg. His hands tingled and the air seemed to thicken as he struggled to breathe, as though he were drowning.

Troyak could clearly feel the same effects he had endured in his training. It was a resonance of doom, a sonic violence that some believed could rupture the organs of the body itself at very low frequencies around 7Hz, a frequency of the brain’s own theta wave rhythm associated with fear and anger. He could not hear the sound, yet he knew, on some inner level, that he was under attack. It prompted him to instinctively prime his automatic rifle, leveling it at the open clearing as though it were filled with some unseen enemy. It was “Glubokiy zvuk,” deep sound, body sound that entered not through the ears, but the body itself.

Chenko saw this and immediately raised his own weapon, and the three men stood there, a few feet into the clearing, in the pulsing dissonance of annihilating silence alternating with that dreadful vibrato, the devil’s whisper, the sound of death itself.

There, ahead of them, something lay gleaming in the wan sunlight, but none of them ventured to take one further step. The ground all about the clearing was littered with the dead, bleached skeletons of fallen animals-the devil’s bone yard if ever there was one. The unheard sound came again, and Orlov was the first man to break, turning and running back into the comforting closeness of the trees, yet tripping over a fallen branch and going down with a hard thump. There, right before his eyes he saw another shiny thing, what looked to be a small chunk of metal, which he impulsively grasped in the palm of his hand. He would not go back into that clearing to see what was there-to hell with that-but he would at least have this much to show for their foray into the Siberian wilds of Tunguska.

Chenko was soon at his side, eager to help him if only to get himself farther away from that god forsaken clearing. Only Troyak stood his ground, his eyes puckered as he scanned the distant tree line on the far side of the clearing, mindless so his mind could not unnerve him, his every movement no more than a well honed military reflex. A man who was afraid could not fight well, and Troyak was fearless. He knelt, shifting the pack on his back to off shoulder the equipment he had brought along. His shielded military field radio set had a mode that could detect electromagnetic interference and store the measurement level in memory. He also had a Geiger counter set that could see if there was any unseen radiation in the area. Both readings convinced him that this was no place to linger. He completed his survey, took a soil sample and sealed it off in a special container, and then turned to join the others.

He found them back in the main clearing, hastening towards the safety of the zeppelin basket.

“Orlov!” he called. “Don’t you want to have a look at that damn thing back there?” The Sergeant thumbed over his shoulder.

“Leave it!” Orlov was no longer curious. He had a chunk of something shiny enough in his pocket, and now all he wanted to do was to get back up to the zeppelin and get something hot to drink, followed by something much stronger.

Troyak looked back over his shoulder and stared at the object protruding from the matted duff of the tundra. He had heard so many tales of these hidden dens from his youth, and he knew what this must be. Kheldyu, he said to himself, a word from the Yakut Siberian dialect that meant “Iron House.” There was a vale nearby, between two rivers, that was known as Kheliugur, the “Place of the Iron People.” Others simply called them “Cauldrons” due to their concave, circular shape.

The regional lore was rich with tales of these strange dome like structures, overturned cauldrons, half buried in the marshy ground. Place names all throughout the region testified to their existence. He knew of a stream called Algy Timirbit, which meant “the large cauldron sank.” Another was called the Olguidakh, or “Cauldron Stream.” Some said they were orange in color, like copper, but made of a strange metal that no tool could cut, a metal that could not be chipped, scratched or hammered. They were thought to be the haunts of tall demons who roved the taiga looking for the souls of wayward hunters.

Usually covered by frost and snow in the winter, they seemed like nothing more than small hills to the unwary traveler. But some of the local peoples had stumbled upon them, and those that returned claimed there was a small opening in the top, and a winding stair that led down, where a series of metal rooms were arrayed about a central core, the home of Niurgun Bootur, a demon of the taiga called the “Fiery Champion.” Shamans warned the people to stay away from such things, or they would be stricken with incurable ailments. He had finally found one, and from the feeling in his gut now, the deep thrumming sensation of peril, he knew all the old legends and tales of the Valley of Death were true. He would do what any shaman of the taiga would advise-get away from this place, and as fast as possible.

When they were all secured aboard the Narva again, Corporal Zykov came in and brewed up a pot of good coffee, spiked with a brandy. “Trouble?” he asked of Troyak, who nodded, saying only one word: “Siberia.”

“Ah,” said Zykov. “Don’t tell me you ran across old Chuchuna, the hairy wild man of the taiga.” Legends held that there was a remnant of a strange Siberian hominoid, Siberia’s Bigfoot, still lingering in a region that was completely uninhabited by humans. Even into modern times there were hundreds of thousands of square miles of land where no human had ever ventured. The name was related to the Yakut Turkic word for “fugitive” or “outcast,” and in the Siberian Evenki language it meant “bandit.”

Described as a heavily built giant of a man that stood up to seven feet tall, Chuchuna was said to have long arms and an ape like aspect. Some thought they might have been remnants of the ancient Neanderthals, surviving to modern times. The creature had many other names, but in the West they came to be called “Yeti.”

“Who knows,” said Troyak. “Maybe a demon house, maybe a cauldron, maybe nothing at all.” He had seen what looked like a round metallic dome protruding from the mossy duff of the clearing.

Other legends spoke of unseen creatures that lurked in the depths of the bogs, dragging reindeer and other animals beneath the dark waters there in the summer. Another told of an alien creature that wandered into the cemetery of a small village near Chelyabinsk, less than a foot tall but with grey skin, blotched with small brown spots, claws on its hands, huge eyes, and only two tiny holes where the ears should be. The creature had been called the Siberian Chupacabra, but the woman who found it called it Aleshenka.

Yakut legends held that there were places in the wilderness where tall whirlwinds of fire would emerge from the ground, and massive circular structures would appear, described as “rotating metal islands” that would fly off into the sky. They had all heard them, some old stories, some new, none believed, all feared.

“Nothing at all?” Zykov shook his head. “Look at Orlov there! I haven’t seen him look so glum since we hauled him off that trawler in the Caspian Sea.”

“Yob tvoyu mat!” Orlov swore, telling Zykov what he could do with his mother, not wanting to be reminded of his ill-fated capture during Fedorov’s expedition. “Maybe we should stick you in that metal basket and send you down there, eh? Did you see all those bones, Chenko? That place was evil.”

Troyak shifted his equipment pack. “Whatever it was, it was radioactive,” he said quietly. “We got a low dosage in the time we were there, not enough to worry about anything, but better to be somewhere else.”

“Anywhere else,” said Orlov with a shrug. “That damn place is so thick a man can’t even walk. I fell right on my face.” He covered for the embarrassment of having turned to run for the tree line, but neither Troyak or Chenko held it against him. They knew what he had felt.

Then Orlov remembered the small shiny metal he had found by chance, wondering if it was silently burning him with a radioactive emission. He reached into his pocket and pulled it out, holding it up to see that it glittered with an unnatural light. “Test this,” he said.

“Where did you get that?” Zykov leaned his way to get a better look at the fragment.

“It was right in front of my face when I tripped up. Is it radioactive, Troyak?”

The Sergeant grunted, pulling out his Geiger counter and doing a scan of the object, eventually shaking his head.

“Nothing to worry about,” he said. “Keep it as a little souvenir.”

Orlov pocketed the object returning to his coffee, the memory of that unheard sound still deeply troubling. They were cruising at 500 meters now, but he still felt uneasy, and he could sense the other men were equally discomfited.

They all lapsed into silence until Captain Selikov came back to the aft cargo gondola and saw them all huddled with their mugs of hot spiked coffee.

“Well?” He was understandably curious as to what the men had found, but Orlov just kept staring into his coffee mug. No one else said anything, and the Captain nodded, inwardly knowing that they had just had a taste of the reason he wanted to get the ship as far from this place as possible.

“We’re low enough to navigate beneath this cloud deck,” Selikov said at last. “I could follow this river northwest, and with any luck we may get back to the main branch of theYenisei River and find our way to the Angara. But that is 400 to 600 kilometers out of our way, and we might just as easily head south from this point. The Tunguska river bends that way here. If I follow it for a little while it will point us towards the Angara, which is where we were supposed to be all along, before that storm took us off course. In fact, the Tunguska River is pointing us right at our objective at the moment.”

“Let’s hope the damn ship’s compass settles down,” said Zykov. “How do you know you can keep us heading south? What if we get lost again?”

“I think I know where we are on the chart now. The river splits here, and one branch leads south for a while. There should be a little Evenik village called Kuyumba soon. Then it will begin to jog east again, and If you think you have seen the real nightmare in Siberia, let me tell you that you have seen nothing yet. That way leads to hell on earth. There’s a place there where every tree has been blown to the ground, for hundreds of kilometers in every direction. I think you know of what I speak.”

Selikov folded his arms, considering. “Shall we try to get south from here?”

No one objected.