Pym_ A Novel - Mat Johnson [43]
“Hey, this is wild. You got to come see this. You got to take a look at this, Chris Jaynes. Carlton, you got to get a shot of this.” Jeffree was getting really excited now. You could tell, because for once he didn’t sound as if he was reading lines off of a teleprompter.
I turned to Captain Jaynes, showing too much excitement before the first word, because he knew where I was going.
“Look,” my older cousin interrupted me. “I don’t want to hear none of that snow honky bullshit, you hear? We got reality to worry about. Real issues, real money. I don’t want to hear any of your dead ofay book theories, conspiracies, or anything else.” Captain Jaynes raised his head to address Carlton Damon Carter and the Lathams, who were only now deeming the event worth coming out of their own truck’s heated cab. “And I don’t want anyone else hearing your nonsense either. We’re going to suspend down there, get our drill out of the snowball it’s stuck in, and then we’re done here. Not another word.”
So I didn’t offer one. Not as we attached our own harness gear around our waists and between our thighs. Not as we dangled slowly in the air into the hole and carefully controlled the slack as we drifted down. I didn’t offer to say anything, not even after our feet touched firmly on packed ice, and I looked over at Jeffree, who was standing on top of the drill’s snow-encased carcass where it rested against the wall, staring into the space around us. As I looked around, they did seem to be real footprints—an observation I made quickly and while Captain Jaynes was busy disengaging himself from his line. The spacing of the holes was a bit wide for footprints, but it was consistent.
“Help me get this goddamn drill out of here,” Jaynes ordered, and I went over and pulled on it with the others. It had to be flipped, but the impact had packed the snow into its every groove, and the only reachable part was the bumper. If we tried to lift it up from that, chances were the bumper would just rip off it. Forcing myself to focus on the task at hand, I joined my muscle with Jeffree’s, pulling as Jaynes offered direction from off to the side. There was the difficult first lifting, then the teetering, then it fell over with the slightest of bounces on the giving surface. I turned to Jeffree when it was done, but he wasn’t even looking at the thing. Staring back from where the drill had just come, Jeffree was instead focused on the hole of maybe four feet that the machine’s removal had revealed.
“You see that too, don’t you?” he asked. I just saw a hole. Behind me, Captain Jaynes just saw something that was not worth his attention, and he was already fastening the harnesses to the rifler’s frame.
Jeffree pushed past us, went to the little opening in the side of the hollow. I followed. The hole seemed to lead to another chasm. Or rather something more, its depth becoming more apparent as I got closer. It was a room that someone had recently entered; when I approached I saw those massive footprint-looking indentations, obscured as they were by the falling snow and the rifler’s landing, heading directly toward this space.
“What is it, some kind of crevice?” In spite of my belief, or maybe because of it, I felt the first pangs of fear at what might be beyond. Jeffree shook his head at me. Or maybe not at me—his eyes were wide and distant, his thick jaw slackened in a rare moment of self-reflection. I could see Carlton Damon Carter adjusting his zoom to catch the expression as well.
With the sounds of Jaynes’s diligent working still behind me, I crouched to look into the space. No, it was not simply an ordinary crevice. It was long, it was expansive, the footprints going far off into the distance and fading into the rest of the snow. It was tall too, this ceiling; the opening was just a space in the collapse. There are many natural ice caves under the surface of Antarctica. But it was hard to believe that this was one of them. The walls looked chipped away, the space too straight, and if there had been any debris it had been cleared away.
“It’s a cave,