The Ark & Noah’s Folly

“You can understand why we weren’t exactly expecting this.”

Dr Greaves had been talking for hours, but I’d barely been listening. I was fixated on the windswept arctic plain beneath me. The turbulence this low down was rough, and the inside of the plane was close to freezing. But the view it offered was astonishing. It was like looking down on an alien world; an infinite white sheet broken by gargantuan clumps of black volcanic rock.

“Most of the team down there are geologists and meteorologists, so for the longest time they never really considered the possibility that we’d need an archaeologist,” he said. “The ice sheet is miles thick and over firm bedrock, and the team’s primary concern… well, up until a week ago, was to investigate the effect of global warming this far in land.” The doctor’s breath turned to mist with each excited word. He was smiling even as his nose turned blue.

“What did you think it was?” I asked.

“Well sonar showed it was hollow, but parts of it were clearly wood and metal. But the size of the thing… I guess the simple answer Dr Rollet is that we didn’t know. We aren’t keen on making guesses, as you know it can lead to bias, but I think if it wasn’t for the fissure we would never have never guessed the full truth. Current samples put the trapped air are over 85,000 years old! A ship like this rewrites everything we know about our history.”

“Quite a bit of luck,” I said.

“Well,” the doctor replied. “If you work here for long you’ll quickly learn that the ice sheet is degrading faster with each year. The warmer it gets the more liquid water there is to weather out old caves and expand them, or even to create new ones. It was exactly that process—and our looking for it—that led us to the discovery.”

“The effect is the same though,” I said. “A new cave system opened up within days of your discovery, and it led you right to it. As if the original find wasn’t bizarre enough.”

“Well… yes,” Dr Hargreave said. “It is a miracle. That’s what I’ve been trying to get at. Chances like this aren’t just once in a lifetime Dr Rosset, they’re once in an epoch. It makes winning the lottery look mundane.”

I couldn’t quite stymie a chuckle, and I had to shake my head apologetically to the doctor when he took offence. “I believe you,” I said. “I do. It’s just that exact same good luck has landed you in a rather… strange position.”

“Everyone thinks it’s a hoax,” Dr Greaves cried, slumping back into his seat like a scolded boy. “They’ve sent three different researchers from my own university and even after they’ve all confirmed the find, I’m still being treated like a fraud.”

“Proof is in the pudding,” I said. “You know the truth.”

“See,” the doctor said, cheered slightly by my words. “If anyone would understand, it’s you.”

I was saved from the need to reply further when a light chimed overhead and the captain’s words rang out over the speaker. The doctor straightened in his chair and Ryan, my assistant PhD student, finally woke up. I returned to the window and watched, breath held, as we finally made our descent, sinking into the fine white mists below.

-

Basecamp was filled with busy students shuffling back and forth. In the distance two young men argued over a half-dissembled ice drill while nearby three people worked to feed a small pack of sled dogs. In the centre of it all was a small table where two men around Hargreave’s age assembled various picks and other tools. I made towards them, dodging half-a-dozen people carrying boxes along the way. Everyone looked exhausted and utterly disinterested in my arrival, and it was only when Dr Greaves caught up with me and called out to the two men in the centre that they looked up and paid attention.

“Ah Dr Rosset,” the oldest called out, fat and plump with red cheeks like Santa. “Good to see you. Bloody tough going, isn’t it? Bet you’ve never flown anywhere like this before.”

“It’s certainly something,” I answered as he took my hand and shook it.

“I am Dr Whittle, this is Professor Shauley,” he pointed to the whip-cord thin man beside him who looked very much like the classic ideal of an aged adventurer. “And obviously you’re acquainted with Dr Greaves.” The moustachioed man beside me smiled and gave a small nod. “Now we’ve had a few of the staff put aside what data we’ve managed to collect so far and put it in your tent, which you’ll find hopefully to your liking just over there.” He pointed to some far corner of the camp and smiled as if that was all the introduction he needed. I ignored him, instead paying close attention to the rope coiled around his shoulder, his spiked ice boots, and the bundle of tools both men carried at their back.

“I’d like to see it,” I said. “I’ll gear up now and join you.”

“Oh well, we sort of hoped you’d…”

“No need to worry about my schedule, gentlemen.” I smiled. “That’s my job. I’ll be with you shortly.”

I picked up my things and marched towards my tent, taking only brief notice of the small cot and heater I’d been provided. I hadn’t arrived unprepared, and despite what Dr Whittle might have thought, I’d spent years working in the arctic circle and was just as well equipped to deal with the climate as the best of them. By the time I was unpacked and ready, barely half-an-hour had passed.

And yet, when I left my tent I saw that the three doctors were nowhere to be found. I pulled aside a young woman making her way past and asked if she’d seen where they went, and she told they’d announced their descent just after I’d entered my tent. I was seething at the news and had her show me the entrance to the fissure. Sure enough, there was fresh rigging buried into the ice, slack rope hanging loose over the edge.

“Thank you,” I muttered and attached my own safety line to the rigging, accepting that I’d be travelling solo. The girl tried to talk me out of it, but I was already a metre down before she could finish her first plea.

I can’t say exactly why I did it, except that I’d been pulled into this venture at the last possible minute and I wasn’t very happy about it. From Dr Hargreave’s behaviour on the plane I thought, perhaps, that the researchers on site would be friendly enough. But it seems they figured out what I’d known right from the beginning; I’d been brought in by the university to harm the project’s credit, not bolster it. I was a black enough sheep that from time to time my name would be stapled on to risky papers—willingly or not—to help ensure they sank in unfavourable journals. I’d learned to accept my fringe status years ago, but to researchers only just learning about the death of their career, I was about as welcome as a leper in a hot tub.

Thankfully the vertical drop wasn’t all that severe and the journey down was short. The fissure penetrated a small cave system below the surface and after a few dozen feet I landed on flat ground. I’d previously worked in ice caves close to the edge of the Canadian coast and most of them have a floor made of bedrock, but in Greenland the ice sheet can reach 3km in thickness and there was nothing but water-worn ice for my feet to find purchase. I felt a kind of vertigo imagining myself hovering two miles over the Earth. It was like another world down there. Fine motes of snow drifted lazily down from the breach above and the gale-force wind—ever present on the surface—had been whittled down to a distant whistle. It was not dark as you might expect because the crystal blue walls turned any torch into a dazzling light display. The effect was one of insulating warmth and uncanny beauty. But it made me feel small, too small to be mucking around in a continent-sized lump of ice where even the minutest shift in material would leave me crushed like a gnat.

I pushed on regardless, and the cave system opened up after a few dozen metres, but the vast empty spaces only doubled that feeling of insignificance. Thank God there were clearly marked guidelines to clip onto. I must have fallen half-a-dozen times and one of them brought me frighteningly close to tumbling into a bottomless chasm. Without those safety lines I would have slid right on over the sloped edge and died. But if those three old dolts could manage it, I knew I could too. It was just a matter of following the trail and staying clipped on.

By the time I arrived I was red-faced and sweaty and had more than a few bruises hidden by my thick clothes. The three men couldn’t see any of those, but they raised an eyebrow at my breathless state and I’m sure I heard Dr Whittle make some shitty comment beneath his breath. I was getting ready to really start tearing into them when finally, I saw it, and I wasn’t in much shape to do anything afterwards except gawk.

It really did look like the photos. And in fact, for a second there, I didn’t believe my own eyes. I just, well… I just couldn’t piece it together as something real. If I had taken a picture, you would have called it fake. If had I sketched it, or painted it, you’d think it a pretty picture of a dream, but nothing more. I have seen photos of glacial ice bisected by sudden geological change, seen the clear blue crystal standing tall like an impossible snapshot of the ocean depths but this was something else. Just a few metres away from where I stood, the wall of ice began, and a few metres further the prow of an enormous ship was clearly seen, frozen perfectly in time. Impossibly large for any wooden vessel I’ve ever seen, it was like a jagged piece of rock or wood that jutted out of the darkness towards us so that only the nose was visible. It looked like some colossal aquatic predator with its face pressed against a sheet of glass and you couldn’t help but feel a little afraid looking at it.

“How big is it?” I said, stammering the words out like a frightened child.

“The air pocket is around 800m.”

I looked towards the three men. I didn’t even remember who’d spoken, but my face must have said what I was thinking because Dr Whittle spoke up quickly enough.

“The nose which is clearly visible is about 100m tall. Whether the ship behind it is 800m long we can’t easily say. But the sonar shows the cavity it’s trapped in is 800m long.”

“It could be half that,” I said. “And still piss all over everything I’ve ever understood about the limits of ship building. The largest ships currently in existence reach around 4 to 500 metres. This… this is a city that floats.”

“It shouldn’t exist,” Professor Shauley snarled and I realised the sour faced adventurer wasn’t making the comment out of awe or even curiosity. It was more of a flat statement, with the emphasis on shouldn’t. Dr Whittle and Greaves both noticed this and something of an argument quickly broke out.

“Well it does exist Garett!” Dr Whittle cried. “That issue has long been settled!”

“This is the opportunity of a lifetime,” Dr Greaves said. “Please gentlemen, this is truly something special.”

But Professor Shauley was obstinate and difficult, and he never fully stated his case while I was present. Instead he skirted around the idea that they should have never reported it, that they had somehow breached their scientific responsibility by not ignoring the evidence of their own eyes. In the meantime I returned to the ship, absolutely breath-taken by its imposing size and jagged outline. It looked unlike any ship I’d ever seen, pitch-black and full of blunt hard angles, like an oil-tanker made out of burnt match sticks.

“This won’t reach the outside world,” I said, my loud voice cutting cleanly through their bickering so that they all looked towards me. “I’m sorry to say this Dr Greaves but you won’t be recognised for this kind of discovery, or in all likelihood any others. Some truths are a little too big and this is one of them.”

“You can’t say that!” Dr Greaves cried. “We’ve had visitors from at least a dozen universities and they’ve all seen this very thing right in front of you.”

“And they won’t be recognised either.” I smiled. “Some things break the scientific method and this is… hoo boy this is a big one.”

“But we have to try!” he cried. “You said it yourself: the proof is in the pudding.”

“I’m not surprised you’re trying to pull us into your silly conspiracy peddling,” Dr Whittle snorted.

“None of you will see this work published,” I told them, ignoring Dr Whittle’s remark. “Not even in the small journals. To be honest, I thought it was all a hoax, despite the things I’ve seen, and so does everyone else and they don’t have the benefit of my experience. The fact you so readily called in help will only make this worse for you because the sooner it becomes clear you really do have something, well, that’s when they show up.”

“They are welcome to it,” Professor Shauley said, a glint of defeat in his eye. “I never wanted to be Galileo.”

“I don’t blame you,” I replied. “But there are worse hills to die on. As it stands, I’d say you have a week or two before some very stern looking people turn up and start taking everything you have. At least, that’s my experience.”

“Of course!” cried Dr Whittle. “Here we go again. The strange men in suits, the inexplicable stalling of a bright young career, threats and even direct coercion. The difference here Dr Rollett is that we have proof of our claims instead of parading some nonsense theory about prehistoric civilisations.”

I left that last part unanswered and instead cut to the chase.

“You have 7 to 14 days,” I said. “Your careers are dead. There is no acclaim to be had, no place in the history books. I am truly sorry, but sooner or later you must mourn the death of your life’s work because it’s happening one way or another. Why else would I be sent here to taint you all by association? Any of your colleagues who openly support you will quickly find themselves out of pocket for all sorts of reasons. Dismiss it as conspiracy all you want. I’m long past arguing it. But all you have going for you is that the people who matter still think you’re lying and that buys you time.”

“Time to do what?” asked Dr Greaves.

I pointed to the ship.

“To go take a closer look. There will be no credit, no claims, no glory, no acclaim. Just the truth, for you and you alone. Scream this news from a mountain top and all you’ll get is struck by lightning. But for those of us who value knowledge for its own sake, there will always be the truth of what lies in that ship. So,” I rubbed my hands together with barely contained glee, “who wants to crack this thing open?”

-

Ryan was fiddling with the lighting on his camera, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him none of it would leave the camp intact. Still, his expertise on remote camera rigs was very helpful and there was something strangely funny about watching him explain the concept of a GoPro to Professor Shauley. As it was, we’d managed to jury rig a pretty half-decent solution to just about every problem that had popped up in the last four days and with the recording equipment all set up we were good to go.

Now the cave was almost always occupied as various engineers and mechanics had worked tirelessly to first drill into the ice and then establish a safe corridor to the ship’s hull, all under sealed airtight conditions. Tents were set up and quarantine procedures established, and standard hazmat deep-pressure suits were hanging by the improvised bulkhead. Turns out that my connections weren’t so unwanted after all, and by the time I’d had a drill flown in that was worth over £250,000, Dr Whittle finally started warming up to me. Professor Shauley remained distant, but he broke one quiet evening while I sat outside my tent and smoked, coming over to ask how I’d possibly known the head of the company well enough to work that kind of favour.

“Proof is in the pudding,” I said with a smile. “My theories went down in flames but the truth is still worth something in the right places. How do you think I fund my research? Some people will give anything to know what no one else does, and they’ll pay even more to tag along or play some vital role in digging it all up. But then, you’ll find out soon enough.” He said nothing in return and simply stomped off in silence, his footfalls crunching in the snow.

But whether he liked it or not I’d played a vital role in making this all happen, and I watched Dr Whittle and Professor Shauley suit up with a kind of glint in my eye. The professor caught it at one point and turned visibly red and I had to look away to stop myself from laughing. This couldn’t have happened without me, and I stopped just short of openly revelling in it.

Once Ryan had the remote camera feed all set up, they pulled on their unwieldly helmets and started the long waddle to the bulkhead. I had felt a powerful sense of accomplishment all throughout this day, and yet the sight of the two men approaching the door with the ship looming overhead left me frightened for them. The ship was a pitch-black splinter in the abyssal depths and nothing about it looked welcoming – a floating city of tar too large to imagine moving around the open ocean. My own experiences taught me that there were old things buried deep in the Earth that do not like being woken up, and the question of who had built this ship and how remained hanging over all our heads. When I took the time to consult a few marine architects, they all practically laughed me off the phone at the suggestion of an 800m long wooden ship. Even with all the luxuries of modern technology, they said, such a thing simply isn’t feasible. One, only one, had floated the novel idea that it might somehow be workable if the wood scaled in size as well.

“But of course,” he’d laughed. “That’d require a tree over 800m tall to create a really solid structure with any hope of surviving the stress. And gravity puts a hard limit on how tall trees grow.”

I hadn’t liked to think too much on that. I wasn’t sure how to file it away in my brain, so I left it floating around until it came back to me in that moment as I watched the doctors enter the bulkhead and disappear from view. It was a question that should have inspired awe and fascination, but that ship looked all too hungry and I turned to the remote feed with a feeling of intense anxiety. It took hours for the two men to finally cut an entrance into the hull, and the whole time a small army of students waited on hand to take away the steady stream of samples and begin testing.

By the time they cut the final section away Dr Greaves had joined me and we waited with bated breath.

“Here we go,” Dr Whittle muttered to himself and I watched as he plunged ahead.

The entrance was about two foot off the ground, and one of the men leaned forward into the darkness. His light was pale and chalky in the gloom, showing a floor coated in thick layers of dust that flared bright white in the camera. Debris littered the floor, buried under the blanket of dust like cabins in the snow. When one of the men started to climb upwards, his movement disturbed a flurry of ashy flakes that swept across the screen like a blizzard. They flashed brightly in the camera’s glare and visibility was poor. We could see no walls yet, just an empty space.

Hesitantly, Shauley took his first steps and swept his head around to gauge the size of the room. It was enormous, though the ceiling was low and the shadows felt claustrophobic. We hadn’t had time to arrange for proper medical monitoring, but I could well imagine both men’s hearts were racing. Their breathing filled their helmets and more than once they swallowed too loudly for our comfort. They walked onwards until, after a few metres, something came into view. It swept past the camera at first, and before any of us could tell him to swing back he had already done a double take and brought the object into full view.

It was a cage filled with little more than a pile of white dust and beside it was an identical one with similar contents. A few feet behind it a wall came into sight, and the men’s torches caught sight of other crates all lined up in a row. Their exact number was lost to darkness but even with our limited sight we saw that they were arranged in a repeating pattern of pairs.

“Two by two,” I muttered.

Dr Greaves was pink, his face a puzzle I couldn’t crack. Ryan’s expression at least was familiar.

“What the fuuuck…” he groaned.

I turned back to the feeds and watched the two men follow the wall. The going was slow, and both scientists stopped often to collect a few lone items resting on top of some of the crates; they were knives mostly, but one looked oddly like something the Egyptians used to remove the brain prior to mummification. One by one they were bagged and put away into various pouches along the men’s suits. They were meticulous in detailing what little they found so the going was slow, but eventually a break in the wall appeared. It was a rounded doorway and looking through it we all saw a set of wooden steps rising into the darkness. They were wooden planks fixed to the wall with no sign of rails, and the thought of ascending them turned my stomach.

“Did you see that?” Dr Whittle cried and everyone in the small crowd that had gathered around us jumped all at once. From the back, laughter could be heard but my eyes were wide and fixed on the screen. He was staring straight up at the stairs, desperately trying to see past the gloom.

“Did you see that!?” Dr Whittle cried again, his voice suddenly frail.

“I did,” replied. “I saw it.”

“Something moved!”

“That’s not possible Doctor,” Dr Greaves said, grabbing the speaker.

“Check the audio readings,” Professor Shauley said, his voice grave. “I didn’t see anything but I’m sure I heard it.”

Ryan was already on it. While we had access to two standard radios the suits included extremely sensitive recorders designed to pick out the faintest noise. I didn’t tell anyone on site, but they were actually specialist items used by ghost hunters to detect EVP. At the time I’d found the irony delicious. Sitting there as Ryan skipped through the first twenty minutes of recording, it wasn’t irony I could taste but instead the acid wash of terror that stung the back of my throat.

We saw it before we heard it, a rising peak in the waveform that stood out from the other noise. When it reached playback it began as some ill-defined shuffling, briefly pierced by a loud and clearly defined thump, followed by fading drumming sound akin to footfalls retreating into the distance.

For the last few minutes Whittle had refused to take his eyes from the stair way, but Shauley’s feed was roaming from side to side. He had focused on a doorway that appeared in the corridor a few metres down. I imagine he was terrified just like the rest of us, but it was clear he couldn’t stop curiosity getting the better of him. He peered through the doorway and found an identical room to the last, filled with rows and rows of endless pale cages.

“What’s that?” he said and approached one a few metres away. Whatever he saw, our cameras couldn’t make it out until he was right by it.

This pile of white dust had a face. It emerged out of the mound like a primitive face carved into a volcano. Attached to two bars on either side of the cage were hands, frail and thin like a shrivelled monkey’s paw. Of the arms there was no sign.

“Looks almost human, doesn’t it?” the professor said.

“It does,” I replied, my voice like paper. “Is there anything under it? Or is it just a pattern left by the dust?”

“Why don’t we find out,” Shauley replied and I watched as he knelt down and pushed his arm between the bars. He gently poked the surface and it yielded to his fingers, but he must have felt something nonetheless because he spoke. “It’s not all dust,” he mumbled, before pulling out a small section of skull that included some brow, eye-socket, and cheekbone. He sifted through a bit more and found a few teeth that were too sharp and long to belong to a primate, and he deposited them safely to the excitement of us all.

“Wait,” he added, “what’s this? That wasn’t in the last room?”

He went further into the darkness until a small flat surface unveiled itself on the far wall. It was looked like a kind of workspace, little more than a stone slab with a few large jars huddled around the floor beside it. One of the jars, about two feet tall, had been hauled onto the top and was open.

“Be careful,” I said as he approached it, suddenly aware of how far into the darkness he’d gone.

“Dr Whittle,” I added, turning to the second screen. “Are you okay?”

His eyes were still fixated on the stairs above him. His breaths were quivering, desperate, and no matter how hard I tried, he refused to reply. “Professor,” I said, returning to his feed. “I think you need to return to Dr Whittle.”

He was standing over the pot staring down into a featureless pile of white clay-like material. It was soft, yielding like soil to the small scraper he used to collect a sample. “Professor,” I repeated myself. “You need to check on—”

The speaker beside me exploded into a cacophony of screams. The professor’s own feed cried out as well so that the whole workspace was filled with duelling copies of the same shrieking horror. I snapped my head to the side and tried to see what was happening but the doctor’s screen showed only darkness while the professor shuffled quickly to the spot where his colleague had once stood. He found only a lone strip of the doctor’s suit but no sign of the man himself. I was already shouting at Ryan to playback the recording of the doctor’s feed while Dr Greaves grabbed another screen and stared at the audio recording. He was pressing one side of a pair of headphones to his ear and his face had gone white with sheer terror.

“What is it?” I asked, but he didn’t reply. He looked at me and I saw he was close to passing out. “Professor,” I yelled, grabbing the radio. “You need to leave!”

Shauley’s speaker burst into protest but I ignored them and turned back to Dr Greaves. “What is it?” I cried. “What can you hear!?” Ryan, hovering just behind me who could no longer bear the tension leaned forward and tore the headphone jack out of the computer. Both the doctor and I cried out at once:

“No, don’t!”

But it was already too late. The camp was filled with the sounds of wet and painful splutters. Someone was hyperventilating close by, short sharp desperate breaths, and occasionally those deathly shudders turned into small gentle moans of dying protest.

“No,” the Dr Whittle whispered. His voice was distant, but he repeated the word a few more times. “No…

“Please…

“No.”

There was a terrible crack and some of us winced. The hyperventilating stopped but the frantic gurgles and wet animal panting continued. I turned the sound off with shaking hands. I could see that Professor Shauley was close to the stairs, one foot raised to go looking for his friend, and I cried out.

“Professor Shauley!” I said. “You need to leave.”

“I have to find him!” he roared. “You can’t be serious! We can’t abandon him!”

His voice was so loud it hurt the speakers. It was a sobering outburst. As his words died the whole cave become silent until only the sound of dripping water and radio static could be heard. Suddenly we were all aware of how alone the Professor was, and so was he. I could see him looking around, surrounded on almost all sides by aching shadow. This was an impossible nightmare carved out of tar, disorientating and distressing in ways that reeked of the uncanny.

“Leave,” I whispered and this time he didn’t argue. He nodded, probably more to himself than to me. And at last he turned back the way he came. It was awkward to walk in the suit but I willed him on to go as quickly as possible. I don’t know if it was our imagination, but during such tense silence the white hiss of the radio seemed full of spectral bumps and shuffles. And I could see the paranoia and fear affect Shauley; his feed was constantly moving from side to side and occasionally he jumped at something none of us could hear or see.

“I’m close to the entrance,” he said at last.

“Come on, come on, come on!” I whispered.

Shauley was no more than ten or fifteen metres from the exit when something shifted in the pixelated shadows on either side of the blinding white portal. The professor stopped dead in his tracks and froze like a deer in headlights. In defiance of everything I knew possible, something stepped out into the light and barred the professor’s way. It was tall, stooped against the ceiling in a blurry humanoid silhouette. The professor cried out and so did we all. The shape of this thing, the way it moved, sent shivers down my back. I felt like I was watching film from another world, but a part of my mind reminded myself the events occurred no more than a hundred metres from where I stood.

The professor was trying to back up when this thing reached out towards him. Its giant misshapen hand filled the screen and the professor’s cries rose to a crescendo. There was a sound like a tree falling and the screen went black and the professor’s screams stopped. For a moment I thought he was truly dead until Ryan looked up from the workstation. His eyes were red and I could see he was crying, but it took me a moment to realise what had caught his attention.

The professor’s screams hadn’t stopped. The microphone had been disabled, but we could still hear him. His voice was now tinny, faintly audible through distance, ice, and thick airlock doors. But we could still hear him, and he was squealing like a pig. I was barely able to stand but I managed to approach the door. I was close enough to touch it when the screaming finally stopped for real this time. In those final few seconds I was just about able to make out what it was he was saying.

He was pleading for it to stop.

-

“Is the air safe?” I asked.

“Yes, quite safe now we’ve pumped oxygen into the cavity,” Dr Greaves replied.

My face was pressed to the bulkhead’s window. From where I stood I could just about make out the tattered remnants of Professor Shauley’s suit, sitting a few feet inside the hull of the ship.

“How long until the security detail arrive?” the doctor asked, his head peering over my shoulder.

“Days,” I answered. “We’re pushed for time. I want what’s left of that suit.”

“You… you can’t be seriously going through with this?”

The camp was quiet. After the previous day’s events I’d forbidden anyone from sleeping in the secondary site and insisted everyone make the hike up to the old one on the surface. It wasn’t just about safety; the doctor and I had devised a plan to snatch the suit and hopefully whatever few samples remained and I wanted no one around when we did it.

“For the thousandth time,” I told him. “I am deadly serious. Good God I could sprint there and back in less than ten seconds. Just keep the lights on, the door open, and that shotgun pointed firmly at that hole.”

“This isn’t very scientific,” he groaned.

“And dolphins don’t look like mammals but they absolutely still are,” I said. “Sometimes science isn’t very scientific.”

I didn’t wait for him to reply. I opened the door and stepped forward. I wore no suit for this encounter and took a deep breath—stifling the urge to dwell on the exact nature of the air I breathed—before breaking out into a sudden sprint. I felt like a kid running past the closet to get to the bathroom late at night, except now I was running right towards the darkness, not past it.

I cleared the tunnel quickly, reaching the entrance in a few seconds. I wanted this to be over. My heart was in my throat, my scalp felt ice cold, and my stomach was like a lead weight holding me down. I was so scared I could have easily forgotten to breathe as I reached my arm into the shadow and grabbed a hold of the suit’s cuff. I could feel myself losing control but I couldn’t stop, not now. I pulled at the material and cried out in despair when something tore and I was left holding nothing but a small clump of thick vinyl-like fabric.

“Shit!” I cried, snapping my head back towards the petrified doctor. “Keep that fucking door open!”

I reached my hand out into the dakrness, so far that my chest touched the floor and every single cell in my body started screaming at me to me leave. Without the suit my perception was crystal clear and I could hear every creak and groan of that wooden superstructure. But I wouldn’t back out, and when my hand failed to get a proper grasp of Shauley’s old suit I actually took a small running jump and threw myself into the dark. All that remained outside were my ankles, but this time both my hands grabbed the suit and when I leaned up onto my elbows and started to haul it I felt the satisfying weight of heavy equipment drag along the floor.

The brief flush of victory lasted barely a second. I shuffled back slowly until my feet touched the floor and looked up to inspect my haul when I saw a large white oval floating in the dark. It looked almost like a bowling ball, if one of the holes was a little larger and further apart than the rest. When two of those same holes blinked, I finally realised what it was I was looking at.

It was a face as large as my torso, and the body it belonged to was cloaked with shadow. It was so still it was uncanny, exuding no emotion or thought or intent. I didn’t know if it was scared of me, curious, or hateful, and it made the sight all the more terrifying. Sooner or later, something would give, but I wouldn’t leave the suit behind so I maintained eye-contact—even through the tears—and moved as slow as continental drift, back, back, back out of the entrance. About half-way there I snapped into action, whipping the suit over my shoulder before springing like a madman towards the exit. For a moment the doctor looked confused, but then his eyes fixed on something over my shoulder and I knew it had come out into the light. Thankfully the distance wasn’t that far, and I flew past the doctor like a sprinter passing the finishing line. I threw myself onto the ground and screamed,

“Shut the door! Shut the fucking door!”

I relaxed only when the doctor heaved it closed and turned the handle with a satisfying clunk. He had yet to look at me, instead fixated on whatever had been close behind. When I finally got back up from the ground, I jostled him aside and stared through the window. That alien face—no eyes, no nose, nothing but three aching cavities in a pale white disk—was staring at us from the hole in the ship’s hull.

It was dead still for the longest of times, all three of us locked into each other’s gaze. When it did finally move it was to tilt its head perfectly to the side like a turning wheel. There it stayed for a few more seconds, watching us like a curious dog, before sinking back slowly into the monstrous ship.

-

“It’s fungal,” the young woman said, holding a sample of the clay. “Unlike anything I’ve ever seen except in some ancient fossils and even then… nothing quite like this.”

“Food, perhaps?” the doctor asked.

“I wouldn’t eat it,” the biologist squirmed. “It’s going nuts under this petri dish. It may look inert but whatever’s going on under the surface, it’s doing it at an astonishing rate. In the time we’ve had it, the sample has undergone tens of thousands of generations.”

“What about the dust?” I asked. “And the skull sample we retrieved.”

“Similar makeup but different. I’m not sure, some of them are corrupted with the fungus but just like the sample from the vase it’s inert. I’d say it’s contamination but… well, it looks different.”

“What do you mean?” the doctor asked.

“I don’t know,” she replied with a shake of her head. “In some of the samples they share similar features. Dry air helped to preserve some cell samples in the skull but that’s even stranger. The marrow itself is fungal in origin but there are blood vessels that look distinctly mammalian, not to mention the cranial structure is definitely primate.”

“I don’t suppose you can shed any light on this?” Dr Greaves asked, turning to me.

I walked over to the sample and took a small piece of it onto my finger. Both the doctor and biologist hissed endless warnings at me but I waved them off. I crushed the small piece between two fingers and then rolled it back into a single ball. I even took a moment to smell it.

“It’s clay,” I said. “Or rather it’s something that anyone without a microscope would call clay.”

“What does that mean?” the doctor asked.

“The deluge is the oldest myth in the world. Noah and his ark are found in the oldest recorded civilisations, creeping through Sumerian, Mesopotamian, and Babylonian cultures. It’s part of nearly every single creation myth whether it’s Hindu, Greek, or even Welsh,” I said. “And yet what does old even mean? The oldest officially recognised version of Noah dates to around 2000 BC. So what? Current estimates say the human race is a million years old. Humans as we would recognise them, anatomically modern humans, reach back anywhere between 100,000 and 150,000 years. The bulk of my work has focused on uncovering the truth of those lost epochs where conventional science would have you believe we lit fires and chased ox. We certainly did those things, but I have spent my life trying to prove that we were not idle. That many people in those times achieved great heights, some even greater than ours.”

“You believe this ship was built by the very civilisations you claim—” Dr Greaves paused briefly to correct himself. He couldn’t treat my research like some fringe conspiracy theory anymore, not with a floating city frozen in ice a few hundred metres away. “The civilisations you found evidence of?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. I have certainly come across the deluge myth in some of the works I uncovered in the Canadian wilderness. I would have tried publishing but I was long past that sort of thing.”

“What did the myths say?” the biologist asked.

“They wrote of Dyr-un-anash, a man compelled to construct an enormous ship at the behest of his gods. It was to be a test of his character, of his faith. And just like our versions he was to use this ship to repopulate the world after an apocalyptic flood that did, indeed, arrive in some form. But unlike all the other versions of this tale, Dyr-un-anash was not a hero. He was a sculptor of clay, perhaps the greatest in the world or to have ever lived. And the gods resented his arrogance. So one night they approached him, and said his gift for sculpture was so magnificent it exceeded even theirs. And even though the world was due to end with a terrible flood, they wished for him to be the benefactor of the blank slate that would be left over. He was to take a gift of clay, the very clay used to create all living things, and spend his time aboard the ship fashioning any and all manner of life he desired.

“Dyr-un-anash was only too eager to fulfil his destiny and drove his family into ruin building the ship. But when the flood came it carried him and his ark away, but left the world untouched although Dyr-un-anash could not see this. He carried on with his plan not knowing that the clay he had been gifted was cursed and corrupted. How exactly, I don’t know. Still, the gods were laughing at him, and so was the whole world. The moral being that the wise shouldn’t trust gifts from the gods.”

There was a long silence. I continued to fixate on the small lump of clay-that-wasn’t-clay. My heart was pounding. My chest felt tight. A thought had entered my mind while I spoke and I couldn’t shake it. I couldn’t get it loose. I wondered if for a moment this really was…

“What are you doing?” the biologist asked, but I didn’t pay any attention. I brought the tip of my finger close to my mouth and gently breathed, just like I’d imagined God doing when I was in church hearing about Genesis.

For a short while nothing happened. I think Dr Greaves said something. I didn’t catch it. My finger was starting to tingle and I squinted so hard it hurt my head. Slowly at first, but with gathering certainty, the small piece of clay started to squirm. It was moving. From beside me the young woman started to laugh a gasping exultation of awe. She had moved in to take a closer look, but Dr Greaves stepped back and cried out in terror. I still didn’t speak. I kept the lump on my finger and approached a table where I placed it gently and we all stood, watching it crawl like a caterpillar.

“Get it under a microscope,” I said to the young woman. “Hurry!”

She snatched a pair of tongs and went to gently pluck the small worm—no larger than a grain of rice—from the table. The metal had barely touched it when suddenly something white and veiny shot out of the worm and groped around the tongs. It expanded and branched like the tongue of ribbon worm, forking across the table in pale rivulets so quickly that he biologist was forced to drop the instrument with a cry of terror. She jumped back just as a proboscises left the table and tongued the air, roaming, grasping for something else to take.

“Kill it!” Dr Greaves cried. “It’s growing.”

He was right. In less than thirty seconds its tendrils had reached out across the table and we watched as it grew to cover three quarters of the table. Thankfully, the biologist had her senses about her. She started to splash something on the writhing pile of snow-white flesh, the beaker she held was filled with all sorts of flammable chemicals. I snatched a few with the same universal warning symbol and began hurling them until, at last, I felt some kind of satisfaction that fire would find purchase.

By the time I stopped the worm had started to grip and pull down one of the tent walls. Dr Greaves took the initiative and ran forward, throwing a burning rag right at it from just a metre away. The fire went up with a loud whoosh and the mutated lump of clay began to change and bubble. The chamber we were in was large enough to house a small building, so we waited nearby as the fire raged onward and took not only the creature but the tent as well.

I took the time to steal the important samples away, but the young woman grabbed my arm before I could leave and made sure we checked the seal of each one. We couldn’t risk the rest of that stuff exploding into life. I suppose that was the scientist in her. But standing there as that tent went up in flames, I felt the scientist within me die. The worm screamed in agony in its final moments and we all watched, our faces twisted into disgust and fear, unable to turn away or block out the sound.

It was screaming in my voice.

-

“You know you shouldn’t do this?” the biologist asked. Since the fire she had risen to replace Dr Whittle and Professor Shauley in their absence, proving herself to be a capable manager of the scores of students and staff and an excellent scientist. I hadn’t expected to need a biologist for what I’d figured to be an archaeological problem, but I was glad her expertise was on hand.

The four men beside me were arming themselves with shotguns, the kind used to blow out door locks during police raids. They were small with good stopping power, and my hope was that in such a large space they’d run little risk of doing too much damage to anything we weren’t aiming at. All of the men worked for the same company that had provided the drill and the team had a long history in corporate sabotage and all sorts of shady things. They were used to knowing very little but I had given them a brief overview of what had happened to the last two men to enter the ark. By the time I’d finished they all looked at me with acidic glares.

“Fucking spook,” one had hissed before spitting on the floor.

But they didn’t have to like it. They just had to aim and shoot if the worst should happen. I thought our best bet was to hope that our numbers would discourage attack and allow us to roam in peace. Neither the biologist nor Dr Greaves shared this view. They thought this was madness, but they were so far from learning just how cruel the world can be when it’s deliberately set against you. I lost everything and for what? Exemplifying the very scientific principles I’d been told were the light against darkness. I found the truth and I fought for it and I wound up dragged through filth and muck and laughed out of every university until I finally slunk off and found other ways to live. Now I was being given a second chance to do it all differently, and nothing from heaven or hell was going to stop me.

“Gentlemen,” I said to those assembled before me. “Let’s go.”

With that I turned and made for the bulkhead. I gave no one, not even myself, any time to think or voice protests. That ship towered ahead like all my nightmares made real and I had to go inside. I had to know more. We had glimpsed something in that tent. We had pulled apart all the tangled knots, all the myths, all the legends, and cut right to the central truth of our long-forgotten origin. The clay. The gods. The ship. At night I was wracked with nightmares and in them the ship spoke to me in my own voice. My pursuit of the truth, it told me, had elevated me beyond science.

This was something divine.

And it was thinking of this that I passed through the tunnel with no more fear than a man going to the bathroom. I was even smiling for a while, and I gestured to the entrance like I was inviting the men to step onto an elevator. They looked at me like I was strange, especially after they climbed in and found the congealed and blood-spatters where Shauley had died. All that arterial spray had soaked the dusty floor into gooey pulp, and there were a few scattered pieces of rotting bone and flayed skin, but of the rest of the body we found no sign.

Divine or not, I had no intention of losing my life on this little venture. I took control quickly and began to photograph the variety of tracks all around us. Most looked human, but quite a few were round ovals resembling an elephant’s prints. Others were long and slithery, and others were completely unrecognisable.

“What exactly are we looking for?” the man beside me asked.

“A gallery or a workshop,” I said. “This was all made by an artist. He’d have at least one of those.”

I knew he had no idea what I meant but I gestured for us to move on. We walked quickly past the very boxes Shauley and Whittle had, and I saw that atop a few there were empty spaces in the dust from where the men had taken a few tools while walking the same way. The effect was oddly unsettling but I didn’t have much time to think. We were soon at the first doorway where we found signs of a scuffle amongst all the white dust. This was where Whittle had been snatched. Close by I could see where Shauley had walked off towards the second room he’d found, but the doorway was out of sight. The shadows in the ark felt like they ate light, and our beams lit little more than narrow disks that fell weakly upon the floor.

“Up?” one of them asked pointing towards the stairs.

“Up,” I replied.

The steps were ancient but they held. I knew from analyses they were a kind of organic woven fibre harder than steel but organic in origin. How that resulted in a ship this size floating, I don’t know. But we climbed the first flight and found the steps to be as firm as steel. On the first platform we found another doorway and I had us make a short excursion but there was nothing of particular interest. We returned to the stairs and continued climbing, briefly poking our heads through each doorway in the hope of finding something new. We never saw more than empty rooms with cages for a long, long time. But I knew there must be more and with any luck it’d be close to our point of entry.

From behind me I could hear one of the men was counting steps. He was grinding marks into the back of his hand his thumbnail, along with diagonal slashes to indicate left or right turns. He was preparing for a worst-case scenario, a desperate flight in total darkness to safety where he’d have to reverse each step one by one if he had any hope of making it home.

On the eight floor we stopped briefly. There was no railing on any of the platforms and I kept far away out of fear of heights. One of the men stepped right up to the edge and dropped a glowstick into the chasm below where it flew straight down, illuminating the gnarled ancient walls and steps in a neon green glow until at last it struck the floor and stopped shrinking in size. From so far up it was just a speck.

“Jesus Christ!” the man cried, snatching his shotgun up before thinking better of firing. Somehow, the glow stick was moving. It bobbed side to side before disappearing into some unseen nook. “We’re not alone!” he hissed.

“We knew that,” I said. “Come on. A few more floors, at least.”

We moved onwards but from then on two men remained with guns drawn to their shoulders, constantly turning side to side to cover the space behind us. They, at least, managed the climb quite easily but I was starting to lag. Thankfully the twelfth floor we reached showed signs of human life. There was a thistle-broom nearby and a small table with pots and vases. Some of the doors had hieroglyphs around them, and the posts on this door were carved in fine and beautiful patterns. This was not a sterile empty space waiting to be filled with thousands of hand-made animals and I entered the hallway feeling giddy with excitement.

I pushed a few doors open and found old wooden beds next to small tables. There were small figurines carved out of wood on quite a few, along with small metal plates I think were used to hold candles. In total we found twenty rooms with these simple and rustic signs of occupation. There were ancient blankets rolled up onto shelves, plates laid out for food, one room even had a few toys left out on the floor. They were crude but clearly meant to be horses, and I couldn’t help but laugh as I held one up in the light.

“Oh we were busy,” I muttered.

But after that the rooms became strange. Signs of normal human life were replaced with something more manic, more frightening. It was in these rooms that the dust piled up highest, reaching up to our knees. The walls were scratched and gouged, and all-too-familiar faces were carved into the wood.

“Bowling balls?” one of the men snorted, pointing towards one.

I swallowed the acid in my throat and had us move on. Those pictures reminded me of crude cave paintings and I had a strong instinct as to what had made them.

We kept going deeper into the structure. It was half-a-mile long and I doubted we had any chance of thoroughly exploring any given floor, but I couldn’t quite stop myself from trying just one more door. I should have been more careful, but I kept on going until we were well over half-way in the ship, and the scratchy low-hanging corridor we stood in stretched off in both directions, lost to darkness.

Suddenly, one of the men cried out in terror and brought his weapon to bear. He fired before anyone had a chance to speak and the sound was so loud it practically floored me.

“Good God!” the man next to him roared. “It was a fucking rat! Ceasefire!”

The lone gunman lowered his weapon and started to laugh. His pale face glistened in the light of my torch. His eyes were bloodshot and wide, but you could see the relief clearly on his face.

“It was just a rat,” he repeated. “I’m just… just a bit jumpy is all.”

“What room did it go in?” I asked.

“Two doors on the right,” the leader answered.

I walked towards it, beckoning for them to join.

“What are we looking for?” one hissed. “It was only a rat.”

“There aren’t any rats on this ship,” I said. “Not alive.”

I pushed the door and a sea of dust that flowed out into the hallway like water, wedging the door stuck in a half-open position. I stepped back and waited for the hissing sound to stop and for the dust to settle. Once it was quiet I poked a light through and saw a small mousy face staring at us from the corner, resting on the dust at chest height. It was an albino thing, a lot like a rat but with webbed limbs and barbed tail.

“What the fuck?” one of the men muttered.

The creature lifted its arms and blew out the sails between its hands and legs. We all jumped back but it made no more movements, instead staring at us intently and hissing. I noticed dark eye-like ovals on the skin it had stretched out, and I realised we were looking at a threat display.

“Nothing to be worried about,” I said. “Just some kind of—”

Something fell from the ceiling and ate the rodent. It happened so quickly I had only flashing impressions of claws, teeth, and long spindly limbs extended to their furthest reach. One of the men turned his flashlight upward and we saw what might be described as a praying mantis, if they reached two feet in length and had a centipede’s body. Its clicking mandibles ground the vermin into dust that sprinkled down from above like salt from a shaker.

“It’s eating it,” someone hissed.

“Or at least,” I said. “It thinks it is.”

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t worry,” I answered.

The mantis left us alone and we returned quickly to the stairway. For the next few hours we continued to explore the prow of the ship floor by floor until we reached the top. On each one we encountered stranger and stranger forms of life including a wasp’s nest made by more of those small rat-like things. About a dozen broke from the larger horde and rushed us but stamping on them made quick work of our attackers. Each one exploded in a welt of pale milky fluid, but their skin and organs flattened beneath our feet like wet soil. The effect was quite odd and I even peeled one of the cleaner specimens off the floor and bagged it for later examination.

Further on we stumbled across lone insects buzzing in a small cloud like snowflakes in mid-air. They were like wasps but with fewer legs and two pairs of shimmering dragonfly wings. We shooed them away and found an arachnoid the size of a tv struggling on the floor. It was infested, rotting from the inside out. And we watched as small pustules along the surface of its crustacean shell popped and small larva came crawling out.

That wasn’t all. We found fungal flowers that had torn through multiple rooms, their meaty pale caps glowing white in the dark. Small creatures with four needle-like legs, roaming the ceiling with sharp mouths that pecked randomly at the wood like birds snatching up seed. All in all we saw a fair bit of the ship’s life cycle on the upper floors and got to watch a lot of things eat, either nibbling away at the stalks of mushrooms or snatching small insects from the floor, and in every example we watched as they ground up their prey and left a sprinkling of dust. The only real clue we got as to how things worked was in the rat-hive, where I found a fat swollen queen surrounded by workers who were rolling up the matted dust and depositing it in small holes along the hive-wall. They were eggs made from the same base-clay dust that littered everything on this ship. I watched long enough to see some of the larger ones hatch into mewling cubs no bigger than my thumb.

At a guess I’d say that a fair-sized lump of the ship was infested with these lifeforms. In just a few hours I’d filled every pouch I’d brought and we were all lugging at least one duffel bag filled with pots and jars that clinked with every movement. I decided to call this particular excursion done and we all moved as a group back to the stairway, ready to begin the descent.

“Not the worst thing I’ve done,” one of the men sighed as we checked our surroundings checked for signs of being followed. “They look scary but they’re just hiding away in the dark.”

“Like a wax museum where everything moves,” another said.

“Exactly,” I replied, surprised at just how accurate that statement was. “They were harmless.”

One of the men who’d been bitten quite badly by one of the rats grimaced as he checked the wound. It was already starting to fester and smell.

“Harmless my ass,” he grumbled. “I hope whatever they’re hiding finds and eats the fucking lot.”

I stopped dead in my tracks.

“What did you just say?”

“All these fucking vermin,” he growled, poking the leaking wound on his leg. “Something has to eat ‘em. They’re all sneaking around, silent as hell. Did you notice that? It’s the dark,” he said. “They don’t worry about sight they worry about sound.”

“That’s why they’re all up here,” another chimed in. “I thought you’d have figured that out by now doc.”

“Shit!” I cried. “We’ve been looking in the wrong place! We should have stayed on the lower floors. What we’re looking for will be down there.”

“Do you hear yourself?” one of the men asked. “I thought you wanted to be safe? Didn’t you see that glowstick moving?”

“Exactly,” I answered. “Let’s go.”

We descended the stairs and quickly returned to the entrance, rushing past one black doorway after another. The misty air of each hall was thick with floating moats of dust and it reminded me of looking into the cabin of a sunken ship which, I suppose, we were. After a while I stopped looking, not liking the look of the shifting watery darkness. But the feeling of danger only sharpened by need to go on. We’d come so far, I desperately had to know more.

Well, we found it. The bottom floor had strange tracks not unlike the oval ones we’d found by Shauley, recently made and slinking off into the dark further along the ship. Without wasting time I had us follow them until the shaft opened up into a larger chamber. It was an aching groaning space towards the rear of the ship with the ceiling out of sight. If it wasn’t for the cloying stillness you could have thought you were outside. But there were clear tracks through the dust, so many they looked like paths in the snow. This was a busy space, quite possibly even some kind of meeting space.

“Guys?”

I turned around to see one of the men gazing at the opening in the rear wall where we’d just emerged. Something was glowing green far off in the distance, hovering where we’d been walking just minutes before.

“Is that…?”

We had made a critical mistake. All of us faced the one direction, and before either of us could say too much one of the men near our rear was plucked screaming into the air. He had been lifted head first by a grotesque hand as large as my torso, the knuckles grotesque and the fingernails cracked and bloody. With a single squeeze it crunched and the man’s head was pulped into nothing, his limp body falling to the floor with a wet thud.

We started shooting, all of us, but the effect was pitiful. White clumps of soil flew off the monster’s chest and face, and the shot sent wild shudders through its frame, but it weathered the strikes like a well-trained boxer. Once it was done shrugging them off it was left with a hundred small pock marks that bled thick milk down its skin, but that strange gaping face with three empty holes showed no signs of anger or pain. It simply reached and grabbed another man and I soon realised our hopes of stopping it were close to nil. We should have retreated, run even. But a look behind us showed another strange thing emerging from the darkness, its head a gloriously abstract carving reminiscent of raindrop hitting a puddle.

Meanwhile the ball-headed shape began to twist and pull at his captive with the detached curiosity of a child. It pinched his wrist like it was manipulating an action figure before pulling too hard and tearing the arm off whole, along with a thin strip of muscle that was left dangling from the torso.

“We were so close!” I screamed, barely aware of what I was saying. I couldn’t countenance failing at this stage and without really thinking anything through, I decided my best chance was to strike out alone. I ran past the dying man and the golem who held him, narrowly avoiding a sweeping arm that reached to grab me. I could hear some of the other men screaming for me but they had no chance to follow. I switched off my light and trusted myself to fate. From behind came the steady discharge of two shotguns that, after a few seconds, was reduced to a single desperate man shooting and yelling defiance into the dark.

-

Do not stop.

“I won’t,” I muttered, crawling through the dark.

Keep going.

“I will.”

This is a gift.

“My gift.”

My words were a hushed sob. I was speaking just to hear the comforting sound of my own voice. It had been at least a day. By sheer chance I’d reached a small room all the way on the other end of the ship during my flight, and I’d hidden away in it while listening to the ever-so-quiet footfalls of the clay men that lived here. It had been so tempting to stay in the one place where I might avoid their groping hands. But it wasn’t that simple. I had no food, only a small supply of water, and sleep was impossible. After a long time huddled in the dark I finally pushed the door open and began to crawl my way along the righthand wall, desperate not to make a sound. All my equipment had been abandoned barring the light and gun; whatever I brought out of the ship would just have to fit in my head.

You’re so close.

“I know,” I hissed. The words sounded a little too loud for comfort, so I stopped and waited for signs of the slightest change in my surroundings. I had no idea where I was, but I could only assume danger wasn’t far off. Thankfully, nothing moved, and I released a breath before continuing.

The others failed.

“They all did,” I whispered, a little more carefully this time.

They never wanted the truth.

“No one wants the truth,” I replied.

You won’t have to share it with them.

“They never deserved it.”

You are close to where he worked.

I stopped. I couldn’t risk turning the light on but I waited to see if I could feel anything, some possible change in air pressure, that might tell me if I was near a doorway. I must have stayed like that for a full minute only to reach my hand out and nearly fall through a vacant spot in the wall. I was hardly a tunnel rat. I couldn’t even tell that I’d been kneeling next to an open room. I might have laughed under other circumstances.

I crawled inside and pulled the door shut with aching care. Hoping for the best, I turned my light on and revealed a modestly sized space with rows and rows of desks. I was the only living thing there. It was a workspace with one corner filled with vases of clay and half-finished pieces lying haphazardly on the ground. Some had been smashed, beaten, stomped. Others were still standing, precious, beautiful.

He really was a good sculptor. Each one was a meticulous and beautiful rendering of a different bird. They didn’t look like perfect replicas of the real things, but rather like the ideal of how they should look. There was a shelf filled with thousands of pairs of sparrows, crows, parrots, and hens, all inert but incredibly lifelike. I picked one up and noticed it felt different to the clay samples I had taken. I figured it for a practice run, a way to hone his skills before trying for the real thing.

“Not like the others,” I muttered quietly.

He destroyed these works and many others. He did not understand the curse, did not understand why the real ones failed.

“How long was he on this ship thinking the fate of humanity depended on him?” I asked myself.

He never stopped trying.

“So why did he smash these ones? Rage? Frustration?”

He died of old age. Alone.

At the far end of this room was another doorway. I approached it, shaking, ready to enter the next chamber when the door I’d closed juddered forward with a terrible grind. It moved no more than an inch and I snapped around, fixing my light on it—wild shadows flying around the room like gargoyles on a cathedral’s spires—but it was still. For a moment I thought I’d imagined the sound when, once again, the frame shivered and the door moved forward another inch. A single white finger probed the gap and reached around the door, soon followed by two others.

Run.

I turned just as a round head peered at me, but I didn’t wait to see what it was. I ran, passing into another room filled with dozens of sculptures of life-sized deer, each one hauntingly beautiful, a complete a far cry from the wretched misshapen thing that chased me. Others lay smashed on the floor, broken before they could ever be finished. These rooms were chained together in an open row of workshops where the ancient artist had practiced making all kinds of things. I ran straight through each one, trying my hardest to ignore the rising boom of footfalls behind me.

His talent wasn’t enough, I thought.

You’re getting close.

The rooms started to change, and I noticed that they were now filled with those familiar empty cages. It made me hope I was close to where we’d entered. Although close is a relative term when trapped in a nightmarish labyrinthian city of pitch-black wicker walls.

Left.

I burst out of the cage-room into yet another corridor and headed left without even thinking. Those footfalls continued, and as I sprinted I found long white arms appearing out of doorways on either side. I ducked them as best I could but at the very last moment one grabbed my hood and lifted me from the ground. My heart was in my throat and my vision narrowed to a static-white tunnel—I think I pissed myself, I don’t remember—but I quickly wriggled my way out of my jacket before the arm’s twin snatched at the space where my head had been just moments before.

I hit the floor running and carried on, legs powering like pistons while my lungs burned with acid. I could hear more of them coming and there was just enough oxygen left in my brain for me to start wondering what the long-term plan really was.

Keep going.

They won’t follow.

I ran for what felt like forever until, eventually, I looked back and saw more of those strange things lingering far off in the darkness. It was only fleeting glimpse, but I felt as if they should have been closer than they were. I didn’t want to think they were slowing. I didn’t want to feel that sort of hope. But I found my feet moving faster nonetheless, as if whatever lay ahead really might just keep me safe.

You’re here.

I stopped at last. Where I stood was a cross-roads of sorts, quite possibly in the same chamber we’d been attacked in the day before. Dozens of small footpaths had been carved in the dust by regular passage and they converged on some space far ahead. I followed to the centre where a small crater a few metres wide had been made in the snowy ash. As far as I could tell I was alone so I took the time to catch my breath. But after that? I had no idea.

So close.

“So close,” I murmured.

The air in that place had a reverent stillness. My torch seemed to stretch farther than usual, lighting the space around me in a cool lunar glow. Endless flakes of dust fell around me and for a moment I thought of standing in a snow globe. I felt like I was at the heart of the cosmos, like the whole world was holding its breath.

He blamed himself. Blamed his mortality.

Something stirred and I faced the darkness. Its footsteps were quiet like a deer’s in the snow but I could feel the vibrations in the sole of my feet.

He needed something better than he was.

It approached. I realised this was the truth I’d been looking for, the explanation for it all.

He needed a god.

“And he made one,” I answered, my voice a quiver.

Where there had been a need for breath, the artist had made something to breathe in his place. In the darkness it had stayed for the last eighty millennia, crafting endless creatures and shapes to bring to life. Ersatz creations for an ersatz god; it had never stopped trying to fulfil its purpose.

It stepped into the light and I saw the face of a weathered old man with a furrowed brow and a grey crown of hair, something inherited from one who’d given it life. He was born of racial characteristics that no longer exist and yet I recognised the face of a man who was intelligent, patient, and committed. It was the face of a priest or a teacher, an idealised representation of its creator that stood 12 feet tall. Time or perhaps the curse had worn it down into a haggard leper of a man, skinny and gaunt with lesion riddled skin. Even as it stood, parts of it fell to the floor in wet clumps that writhed and died. I decided it must be blind since it had no interest in me, not even passing. It strode past and reached down, grabbing some of the ever-present dust to compress and role into slithers of skin it slapped onto its crumbling torso. It was re-fashioning its own body even as it rotted to pieces.

When one of its limbs came too close to me I stood aside and let it wander ahead where I followed. Its feet carved wide paths in the ash and I kept close as it wandered with purpose through the dark. After a while it came to stop by some mounds of dust and it lowered itself to the floor with a ground-shaking thud. Slowly it took some of the loose material and compressed it back into solid lumps of clay. Carefully it began to fashion something. I couldn’t be sure what but I found all fear gone. I could have stayed there for days. I still don’t know how long it exactly was that I stayed there. The god never moved and nor did I. I couldn’t. I was rooted to the spot by the sheer beauty of its work, and I watched with intense fascination as it rolled and shaped and twisted and pulled until at last it had the perfect image. Its enormous hands were deftly skilled and the final product appeared whole before me almost as if by magic.

It was me. My clothes, my hair, my face, even the coat I’d shaken loose just hours before. Every last detail was recreated with inhuman perfection.

The god looked toward me. Its stony blank eyes regarded me with no human emotion I recognised before rising from the floor. It turned back swiftly towards the darkness and exited the light. And just like that, I was alone once more in the dark.

Not alone. You have a gift.

I turned to the statue. It was perfectly still almost as if it was waiting.

Waiting for someone to breathe life into it.

"No," I whispered.

Yes.

-

“Why am I not surprised you’re here?”

I opened my eyes. I was lying in the tunnel just behind the bulkhead with no memory of how I’d got there. Standing over me was a very grim looking older man. His name, as far as I knew, required a level of clearance that was somehow above even the president’s head.

“Because you make a habit of shitting all over my dreams?” I grunted, pushing myself upright while wincing from the pain. I must have been out for hours, lying on the hard frozen floor. Sheer luck had stopped me from suffering hypothermia. Thank God I had my jacket.

“You really shouldn’t have gone in,” he gestured to the ship. “There are a million different reasons to leave things like this buried and I would hope that over the years even just a few might have sunk in for you.”

“There are no good reasons to ignore the truth,” I replied before adding: “How did I get here? Do you know that at least? How I got out?”

The man shrugged.

“I was hoping you’d tell me, along with a few other details perhaps,” he replied.

“Ah well,” I said. “Funny thing is but my experiences within that ship are classified.”

“Really?” He raised his eyebrows.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that the information I learned from my excursion is too dangerous to share with the public and uh, none of you men-in-black pricks meet my steep criteria for security clearance. Why don’t you have your people talk to my peo—”

“Very funny,” he said. “I don’t know why you do it. It doesn’t change anything. No one will listen.”

“They don’t need to,” I said, begrudgingly taking his hand as he pulled me up. “Now, are you assholes going to arrest me or is this carnival finally over?”

“It’s over,” the man smiled. “The others are being evacuated now. Charges will be pressed against Dr Greaves for illegally taking donations from organisations associated with fracking lobbyists. He won’t see prison time but he’ll never work legitimately again. As for you, we didn’t feel it was worth our time to tarnish you any further. At this stage you’d be lucky to get something out there on Reddit.”

“The students?” I asked.

“Strongly encouraged to change their current avenue of study. You know how it goes. First the carrot, then the stick. We’ll get them out of the field soon enough.”

“I remember quite well,” I replied. “What about the samples?”

“Some kind of fungal parasite that leeches genetic traits from whatever it finds in the atmosphere. Some quirk of temperature and humidity makes it best disposed to absorb breath but nothing’s technically stopping it from going all grey-goo in the back of a warm cupboard. When you factor in its potent ability to absorb memories then, who knows? Maybe even you might understand why it needs to be kept under our strict control. We’ve had access to the samples for a few days while we waited for you to pop up. It’s ability to absorb even the most complex of human memories makes it an apocalypse waiting to happen. We found your lead biologist dead in her lab while the thing she was experimenting on finished up her written report.”

“That’s a shame,” I said. “She was a hard worker and very smart.”

“Yes it is,” he replied, eyeing me with disdain. “Yet another avoidable death.”

“Good thing you’ve got all the samples then isn’t it?” I said. “Locked away for all eternity, I imagine. God forbid we get to study it!”

The man laughed uproariously like I’d just made a very clever joke.

“Your words not mine, doctor,” he said before leaving like he’d won the argument (something he loved to do). But I didn’t pursue, instead allowing myself to be taken away by a crew of paramedics to check for signs of injury. Far away, the man began marshalling several groups of people to work on sealing the ark away for all eternity. I watched as, once again, the world set itself towards the goal of destroying the truth I’d worked so hard to unearth. But this time I didn’t feel despair or dejection. I’d learned the full truth this time, and although my stomach hurt like hell and my head was full of holes, I smiled from ear-to-ear.

I knew the truth. The whole truth, or so I thought.

“Christ,” one of the paramedics laughed, shaking a cloud of white clay loose from my jacket. “It’s like you’re made of the stuff.”

Little-by-little, my smile began to fade.