"Jeff Long - Deeper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Long Jeff)

in this infinite night.
Drink from black rivers.
Eat the flesh of midnight animals.
Listen for colors.
Smell for shadows.
The darkness unfolded before him.
For a while, Ike recognized the veins and cavities and chambers, not by name, but
by the scent of their subterranean animals and minerals. Gradually, with intent, he got
lost. No map, no memory, no compass served to guide him. Ike simply navigated
through the planetтАЩs basement by the tug of gravity, that and the slivers of meat left
for him to find.
The meat was bait, he knew. The cave tribes were luring him into the depths, or
thought they were. In fact, he was as much a creature of the void as they were. This
labyrinth of tunnels and holes was his home, too. The only difference between him
and those feeding him was his relentless quest. They were bottom dwellers, but not
really, because this was not yet the bottom. They had their limits. He had none. They
were hiding from humankind. He was trying to save it.
Every now and then, Ike scratched his initials onto the pillars and walls. He wasnтАЩt
quite sure why he bothered. His mark wasnтАЩt meant to guide others who might
follow, nor to point his way out. He did not harbor the slightest expectation of
emerging. Unlike his other descents, this was a one-way ticket. Whatever waited for
him down belowтАФwhatever had been infecting his dreams, whatever ruled this
placeтАФwould never let him go, he was sure of it.
Once upon a time, he might have come for the pure adventure. As a young man, Ike
had been a climber and trek guide, a professional vagabond and survivor, and that
was the beginning of his curse. While muscling through the Himalayas, he had
accidentally strayed into the planetтАЩs far-flung cave system and its terrible mysteries.
In reaching for the sun, he had ended up reaching for the darkness. By going high,
he had been going deep all along. Everything in his life seemed to have been a
prelude to this final descent.
In his wildest imagination, even stoked by Afghani hash or Johnnie Walker red, he
could never have conjured up this world within the world. In retrospect, it should
have come as no shock to him or anyone else that hell really existed, a vast network
of arteries and chambers inhabited by primal nomads and lorded over by a sovereign
of sorts. Since the beginning of time, mankind had suspected as much. One
civilization after another had built a vocabulary of demons, ogres, and vampires to
explain the predation from below. When the occasional human escaped and brought
up wild tales, he or she was thrown into a dungeon or an insane asylum, or burned at
the stake, or made the subject of some epic poem. As it turned out, shamans and
exorcists had been trying to repel the darkness since the invention of fire.
Not so long ago, he had guided a scientific expedition into the tunnel complex
riddling the Pacific Ocean subfloor. Along with a single other survivor, Ali, he had
barely managed to claw his way out from the depths before a plague swept the inner
earth. Afterward, people were convinced that all subterranean life had been
exterminated, and that the devil was dead.
But now, as Ike soloed down into the bowels, it was plain as day that people were
wrong. The abyss had never quit living. Some restless spirit existed down below. It
was singing to him. And it wanted out.
 Three Years Later
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