My name is Evan and by the time anyone reads this I’ll be dead. I’ve already killed the research team I came here with, but it was in self-defense. If it’s any consolation to their families, I’m almost certain they were dead long before I killed them.
We came here to Aniakchak to study the volcano in an effort to explain a sudden uptick in seismic activity. Really, I should be saying “they” because I’m not a scientist, I’m just the guy they hired to “do computer things”. My job was a challenge from the start since we don’t have internet or cell service here and had to rely on alternative power sources.
We. I keep saying we when it’s really just me that’s left. God.
Two days into being here, the research team discovered something. I remember thinking it was odd, them discovering something, when they weren’t even supposed to be looking for anything. I should’ve questioned it more, but I kept my head down and did the job I’d been contracted to do. Until today, fourteen bizarre days later, when I finally reached my breaking point. I’d woken to find Zac standing next to my bunk staring at me. He didn’t say anything when I asked him what the hell was he was doing, he just turned and walked away.
It was that moment that sent me searching the team logs for answers and from that’s when I learned they’d found an ice mummy. Yasmin was the first to mention an “immolation chamber” (according to the logs, that’s fancy speak for sacrificial death by fire) before her logs abruptly stopped. An uneasy knot formed in my gut when a pattern emerged in the remaining entries. One by one, the researchers stopped entering logs after making references to the immolation chamber.
While I poured over their logs, I couldn’t help but think how they were supposed to be intelligent people. You think they’d have known better! I still can’t believe it wasn’t enough for them to find an actual mummy in Alaska, of all places, but then they had the brilliant idea to drag it out from where it had been entombed.
After spending the morning reading, I headed for the only place they could’ve stored the mummy. I’ll admit here, for sake of transparency, that I wasn’t supposed to have access to the auxiliary cabin. But in my line of work you always leave yourself a back door, just in case. I needed it now, more than ever, because I believed my life depended on the answers I hoped I’d find. My resolve on this particular day was strengthened by the knowledge that whatever was keeping the team occupied would hold them until the better part of the evening, just as it had every night since their discovery.
The moment I let myself into the cabin was rather anticlimactic but not disappointing. I found dozens of crates and all but one held relics they’d discovered. The lone crate out held something potent enough to send chills down my back. Explosives, and lots of them. I’d nearly given up searching at that point before noticing the top edge of a doorframe peeking out from above a stack of crates. I made my way through the tight gap between them and at last discovered the mummy.
At first, I was shocked at how perfectly preserved he was. I’d expected emaciated or skeletal remains but found a flesh and bones young boy. He was laid out on a cot as he’d been found, curled into a tight fetal position, with a thick layer of frost covering him. His expression was serene, as though he’d simply fallen asleep never to wake again.
I was inexorably drawn toward him, and I swear I heard a crackling noise as I got closer. When I saw flakes of ice clinging to his eyelashes and realized just how small he really was, I couldn’t help but wonder how he came to be where he’d been located, why his parents hadn’t been there and whether he’d been scared. The wild thought that he died alone and scared both terrified me and threatened to break me.
God, he looked so young and innocent!
I wanted nothing more than to shake him and rouse him just to try and dispel the horrible reality before me. I was moments from resting my hand on his shoulder when his eyes snapped open and locked onto mine. I jumped back with a shout and hastily retreated the est I’d come and slammed the door shut behind me.
Despite the autolock engaging, I checked the door twice, unable to shake the feeling that the boy watched me through it. Panting, and not so much because of the dash from the boy to the door, I tried to convince myself it had all been a trick of my mind. But my mind countered with a slow motion replay of ice cracking and flaking away from the boys eyes when they opened. Most of all, the emptiness of his gaze.
I retreated to the main cabin where I shivered uncontrollably. Despite it being warm, I couldn’t shake the oppressive cold that gripped me. I reviewed the logs once more, searching for clues or hidden messages I might have missed. I used administrator privileges, even dipped into my White Hat hacker background, but to no avail. They hadn’t hidden anything.
Late into the evening when the research team returned, I had the beginning of frostbite on my fingertips. I was as helpless to explain it as I was in explaining how a boy who was frozen solid and perhaps hundreds, if not thousands of years old, came back to life.
Just as I hadn’t felt safe asking the research team to kindly tell me what the hell was going on, I also didn’t feel particularly safe telling them I’d paid their mummy a visit. So I feigned ignorance. Still, knowing what I knew and hoping they didn’t know that I knew, made it feel as though there was a large pink elephant standing in the corner of the cabin.
Yasmin acted normal, smiling and making small talk with me while she grabbed a plate and sat beside me. I noticed a faint layer of frost covered her brow. I looked quickly away but my stomach roiled. Across the way, Marla and Gio sat shoulder to shoulder with their heads bent. They whispered intently and I was trying to devise a reason to wander their way when Zac dropped his tray onto the table beside me with a loud clatter. I jumped.
“Easy there, cowboy!” He laughed.
He’d taken to calling me cowboy after hearing my Texan accent, something I found mildly annoying, even if I technically was a cowboy. It was the assumption that everyone from Texas wore cowboy boots and hats and called one another cowboy that irked me. All the same, I laughed, but it came out forced. Yasmin looked at me strangely and even Gio and Marla turned to stare.
“You must be curious by now?” Yasmin asked, clearing her throat.
Gio and Marla turned their backs to us but stayed silent. Wound as tight as a bowstring, I struggled to feign calmness so I thought of someone that never failed to make me smile: my fiancé, Ella. Yasmin’s expression softened, the edges of suspicion melting away as I answered.
“Nah. I’ve got no interest in knowing what Zac rolled around in before coming back here.”
Zac guffawed, but even he was a little too interested in me. I could feel his attention on me and it felt intense, like a laser boring a hole through wood.
“About what it is we’ve found.” Yasmin corrected, watching me with matching scrutiny.
Fortunately, my composure remained intact since I was imagining returning home to Ella and escaping this madness. Fifteen days wasn’t so long. I could make it. “Nah. I’m just here for the computers.”
“But wouldn’t you like to see it for yourself?”
I had just taken a bite and used that as an excuse while I tried to think of something to say other than, ‘You mean the not so dead but definitely frozen boy y’all got locked away?’.
Yasmin watched me the whole time, patiently, but with an edge of suspicion resurfacing. The room was eerily silent. Zac wasn’t eating and Zac never passed up an opportunity to eat.
I swallowed hastily and dabbed at my mouth with my napkin.
“I thought y’all were recording seismic activity?”
“We are. But we also found something we think you’d love to see.”
“Don’t tell me y’all found a computer?” I asked genuinely, with a short laugh. I sobered right quick when I imagined the little boy, frozen and dead, before a computer.
“No, cowboy. What we found is life changing.”
Yasmin cut Zac off with a single look. “It’s something you should see for yourself.”
She made an effort at sounding agreeable, but I could tell she was upset. Zac looked nervous and pushed the food around on his plate. I’d also lost my appetite, but I imagine for completely different reasons.
“Well, sure. I’m interested but unless y’all want to lose those recordings, I’ve gotta stay here and map one of the spare drives, then backup the drive from today.”
“Of course. The data. We wouldn’t want to lose that,” Yasmin soothed. “Thursday, then. We’ll show you what we’ve discovered.” Her eyes, just for a fraction of an instant in the span of a moment, looked exactly like the frozen boys.
“You won’t regret it, cowboy.” Zac said with a thump of his fist to my shoulder.
I tried not to dwell on how cold my shoulder felt after, but then Gio and Marla began whispering feverishly and I swear I heard my name. Damn Elephants.
That night promised to be a sleepless night for me. Zac slept in the bed above me and despite bunking early, wasn’t snoring like usual. I mounted a herculean effort at feigning sleep as well, aided in part, by burying myself beneath a bevy of blankets I hoped might conceal any fits or starts. Everything was going fine, too, until the wind picked up. It gusted across the barren caldera and slammed into the side of the cabin several times before quieting. I’d just begun to relax and feel safe when the wind started again, this time shrieking past the windows.
Wind wasn’t supposed to shriek and certainly hadn’t before that moment.
I strained my ears, not daring to give any indication I was awake. If I thought it was a herculean effort to keep my eyes shut, then it was a herculean plus infinity effort to keep my fear in check as I confirmed there was, in fact, something or someone shrieking right outside the cabin. Zac shifted in his bed moments before he dropped from it. I felt his breath on my face as outside, the shrieking drew closer.
EllaEllaEllaElla… her sweet smile, her laugh, the way she smelled. The way her lips tasted. The warmth of her body as it pressed against mine. My heart hammered painfully in my chest, the pressure squeezing out a soft moan. “Ella…”
A harsh whisper sounded, astonishingly close to me. “Don’t wake him! We need him alive.” Yasmin, to Zac, whose noncommittal grunt filled my insides with lead.
“You keep saying that, but-“
“Quiet!”
It sounded like she hit him.
“We need to go. Now!” Marla rasped from across the cabin.
I rolled away from them, no longer able to trust myself to maintain my ruse. But once my back was to them, a wash of vulnerability gripped me. Too late. I remained locked in that rigid state until I heard a soft click from the latch catching as the door was shut. The shrieking finally stopped.
After a painfully long wait, I rolled over and slowly opened an eye. The cabin was empty. I shook and I trembled as I wondered how many other nights had they talked so casually about killing me before stealing away to who knows where. Then I wondered where that was and how it tied into the shrieking.
I glanced at my hand. The frostbite reached almost to my wrist now. I thought not so long and hard before I pulled on a heavy coat, boots, hat and gloves. After grabbing a flashlight, I struck out into the night.
The weather in Aniakchak is unpredictable at best. Minutes ago, the wind came and went in strong gusts. Now it was as calm as a pond on my ranch back home. As I stood outside alone and in the dark, casting the beam of my flashlight around, I felt oddly exposed. It was unnerving to be so far from help when it was truly needed.
Since Aniakchak sees only a baby sized handful of visitors yearly the likelihood of people venturing here, especially at this time of year, was non existent. We’d also settled in a more remote area of the caldera along the eastern rim where there was more bare rock than anything else. The only help I’d receive was what I gave myself, and my options were painfully limited. Since we’d scheduled a month long stay, they’d flown in two modular cabins, along with a couple of portable wind turbines and an array of solar panels alongside a generator. For surviving the elements, they were great. But to survive the people I’d come here with, I knew I needed answers.
A brief snowstorm from earlier in the evening had dumped a fresh layer of snow which showed only one set of tracks. I followed them and before long I found something that wasn’t supposed to exist: an entrance leading into the caldera.
When I read they’d discovered a mummy, I knew it had to have been from somewhere other than on the surface of the caldera, but it was still a shock to see the entrance. I hesitated there, afraid of what I’d find once I entered. Nothing good was a guarantee, obviously, but to knowingly head into that took a special kind of stupid.
That said, it was easier than I thought to embrace my inner stupid. Desperate times, desperate measures and all that.
The entrance gave way to a long, winding tunnel with glow stakes spaced evenly along its length. Drawing a breath, I followed them. The tunnel system had to have been ancient. Glyphs lined the walls every few feet, most were indistinguishable save for the ones depicting flames encased in a triangle. Several minutes in, the bare stone abruptly gave way to frost and ice when I neared an empty antechamber. I pulled my coat tight and after bracing myself, I pushed on. The ambient temperature was downright frigid and continued to grow colder the deeper I went. But the deeper I went, the more I discovered.
The boy hadn’t been the only frozen person entombed here. I passed scores of others laying along the tunnel. They were different, not just because they stayed dead, but also due to their matching expressions of pain. Sometimes it was a single person I’d come across but more often than not they were grouped in twos and threes, huddled together with their arms wrapped around one another.
If the bodies in the tunnel weren’t enough, there were bodies in the walls, too. I thought it was a coincidence when I spotted the first face. You know, that trick your mind plays on your eye when it spots something vaguely resembling a face and then all you can see is a face? By the third or fourth one, I realized there were actual bodies melded into the ice covered rock, mostly leaving their tortured faces exposed.
Like the boy, they were perfectly preserved and blue. I had to stop looking at them because whenever I did, I expected them to reach out and grab me. By the time I spotted the soft orange glow at the far end of the tunnel, I was shivering as much from the cold as I was from my frayed nerves. It was painful to move and I was relatively certain my legs had begun to ice over.
I suppose I could’ve turned around at any point, but I’d have headed back to a certain death. We were well and truly stranded here for at least another fourteen days, maybe longer, if the chopper we flew in on wasn’t able to land due to weather. Being Aniakchak, that was a strong possibility. I forged on in the beginning because I was grasping at straws, at the faintly remote chance I might somehow find a way out of this peculiar mess. Now I forged on because I desperately sought the warmth radiating from the glow at the opposite end of the tunnel. Once I reached it, I boldly rounded it and stepped eagerly into an immense cavern.
Unfortunately, I’d been right about my legs icing over and caught the toe of my boot on a clump of ice after falling to gain enough clearance. I went tumbling into the cavern. Directly across the way, standing with their backs to me, was the research team.
I was dead.
I was damn certain of it, being that there was no real good way to explain why I was here.
Only they didn’t turn around. They didn’t so much as flinch at my rather loud entrance. Echoes from my hammering heart filled my ears as I slowly got to my feet and stared hard at Yasmin’s back. She was as unmoving as the others. After noticing how, despite the immense warmth of the cavern, frost had reclaimed my legs and crawled slowly upwards, I made a dangerous assumption and approached the team.
There was no celebration when I confirmed my suspicions and saw they were frozen solid. I tried to find a way to make sense of it, to explain how any of it was possible, but really couldn’t. My sanity cracked further when I stepped between Yasmin and Zac and looked over the edge of the cliff we all stood upon.
Hundreds of feet below us flowed a sea of lava. In moments, I became mesmerized by the roil and toil of reds, oranges and yellows. It took me a little longer to realize bodies also churned within it. They were specters, ghosts unable to escape a horrific loop, rising briefly to the fiery surface and letting out plaintive moans and wails before being pulled back down. Were it not for Yasmin, I might never have broken free of it.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” She whispered.
I felt like my mind was a billion miles away from my body but I managed to look at Yasmin in time to see her lips frost over. The others hauntingly whispered her exact words.
I saw it then. As if it took being told the lava was a living thing in order to see it. Now that it had been invoked, a creature made entirely of lava rose from the depths until it towered above the five of us. The spirits swirled around, their plaintive moans eerily similar to the shrieking wind I’d heard earlier. As they passed by us, they reached out and it seemed to me that they wanted help, but I didn’t dare trust my judgement.
I turned away, ready to run, only to collide with the boy from the auxiliary cabin who had snuck up behind me. The instant our bodies connected an intense, agonizing cold poured into me. Frost crackled and spread rapidly over my body. I stumbled toward the edge of the cliff while the boy was knocked to his rear. I didn’t seek out his eyes, but they found mine and were just as empty as ever. A thought entered my mind as I willed myself to look away. Join us.
I scrambled to my feet, breaking eye contact in time to see the others close in on me. Their movements were slowed by the ice covering them, which was a great deal more than what I furiously shook from myself as I tried to think of a way out.
There was only one.
Panting with fear, I seized the boy by his arm then whipped myself around and flung him with all my strength toward the edge of the cliff. One by one, the team screamed but only Yasmin threw herself toward him. She missed catching him by a hair. The screams intensified as she plummeted over the edge alongside the boy. It was like they were of a singular mind.
I cringed and covered my ears when a louder noise filled the cavern, drowning out their inhuman screams. It sounded like waves breaking against a rocky shore, only magnified. It reverberated through my body and ping ponged inside my skull until my ears popped. I beat feet in that moment, making a mad dash for the tunnel with a last look over my shoulder.
The lava creature exploded, sending a hand shaped wave of lava toward the still screaming Gio, Marla and Zac. Being closest to the edge, Gio and Marla were crushed as the lava washed over them, its ebb pulling their flame riddled, twitching bodies into the mass. Spray from the wave clipped Zac’s side, knocking him to the ground and silencing him. Flames erupted at the point of impact, spreading rapidly to consume him. My last sight was of Zac being dragged toward the cliffs edge by the receding lava. I threw myself out of the cavern.
Scrambling on my hands and knees, I continued to slip until finally making my way to my feet. I was so shaken by the experience that I kept crashing into the wall during the long journey back to the caldera entrance. More times than I care to count, I came face to face with the entombed, only to scream and fall backwards where I’d once more struggle to regain my footing. When I reached the entrance, I launched myself out. I laid there panting, but soon began clawing at the ground in an effort to resist a strongly pervasive urge to return to the lava chamber.
After a short while, I began crawling toward the cabin with single minded determination. Ultimately, I knew I’d have to return. But before I did, I needed to do one last thing.
I hope the chopper that comes for us will find this information, but just in case, I’ve transferred as much as I could to three external drives, along with a copy of this log and picture. All someone needs to do is plug one of the drives in and the script I encoded will take care of the rest. There’s a few rivers here on the South side of the caldera and once I put the drives in watertight cases, I’m tossing them in and hoping for the best. Then, I mean to seal the tunnel entrance before returning to the lava chamber, but I haven’t the faintest clue of what I’m doing with the explosives I found. Still, I don’t figure too much can go wrong at this point.
Finally, and I can’t express how uncertain I am of this, please don’t trust any of the people you see in the attached pictures. They aren’t who you think they are, not any more. I know said I killed them all and I mean to kill myself, because I don’t want to let loose what I feel growing inside of me, but I’m not so certain any of us can really die. I was right when I said the team was of one mind, how, when Yasmin screamed they all screamed. How the thought that entered my mind wasn’t my own. They’re in my head, even now, and they’re trying to keep me from doing what I am. I don’t know how much longer they’ll let me resist.
Ella. Her perfect face, her perfect smile. Her laugh. The wrinkles in the corners of her eyes. Her smell. The tiny scar on the underside of her chin that I love. The moment she said yes to me when I proposed. I think of Ella whenever the voice becomes too strong and it buys me time.
They were all good people, Yasmin, Marla, Gio and even Zac. Despite knowing they lied to get me here, I still think of them as good people with good hearts. They were human and humans aren’t infallible. What they became, what I’m becoming, it’s not human and I hope to God I can keep it contained here. So, again, if you see any of us please don’t mistake us for the people you knew. Those people are dead.
Finally, Ella, I wish more than anything I could’ve come home to you. I want you to know I will always love you with all of my heart. You have been my comfort in the dark and my last thoughts will be of you. I’m sorry for what I have to say to you, but I need you to know.
“The man you love died in Aniakchak.”