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“Well, Dyer returned with what remained of his party and quite of few of them were completely mad and had to be institutionalized. Dyer’s findings . . . supported only by those dim photographs . . . were scoffed at. His journal, which went into some impressive detail about the city and culture of what he called the Old Ones or Elder Things, was shown only to certain scientists, then locked away in the vaults of the Miskatonic. I was allowed to read it about ten years ago, one of a handful that have been granted that opportunity. Well . . . “ Gates sighed and shook his head “ . . . it’s wild stuff, people. Dyer had no doubt that these Old Ones built that city and were of an extraterrestrial origin. Much of Dyer’s journal is probably sheer fantasy induced by temporary madness, but there can be no doubt now that Lake did indeed find these Old Ones, for, as you know, we’ve found them now, too.

“Well, where does any of this leave us? I’m not really sure. I rather doubt we’ll be able to corroborate much of what Dyer said, but some of it, yes, a great deal in fact. But what about that city? Is it still up there? Yes and no.” Gates looked around at those faces, seeing maybe fascination and curiosity and, yes, maybe fear, too. “What Dyer described, unfortunately, is gone. The area he visited was decimated in the 1930s and ‘40s by geologic cataclysm and intense glaciation. Those awe-inspiring ‘Mountains of Madness’ of his were destroyed for the most part . . . the seismic activity and shifting of the glaciers now makes it almost impossible to say where his ruins in fact were. The entire area is changed . . . gorges and valleys opened where none existed before and the shattering of those high peaks he spoke of opened up the area to intense snowfall. If any of it’s there, it’s now buried beneath a mountain of snow and ice.”

“What about that other expedition?” someone asked.

“Starkweather-Moore? That was a follow-up to Dyer’s in 1931 to ‘32, but it proved inconclusive. Shortly after the Pabodie Expedition, the first of those geologic upheavals obliterated much of the region. So it was a bust. They had gone seeking evidence of a pre-human civilization and particularly of that great stone city built by an alien race and found neither. So, as you can imagine, all that Dyer claimed was scoffed at by the scientific community. Another expedition was funded privately in the 1960s but without any success. And since the days of the Pabodie Expedition, the tales down here of aliens and weird civilizations have been ripe and abundant. There has been no proof . . . until now . . . “

Here we go, Hayes was thinking. Now comes the spooky shit as if all of this wasn’t spooky enough already. Jesus. He looked over at Sharkey and she looked at him. It was hard to say what exactly passed between them, but it was akin to the look a couple of wide-eyed kids might give each other around a campfire after they were told that, yes, the ghost story they had just heard was really true. It was certainly a day of revelations.

Gates was busy sketching out for them his own excavations in a series of naturally-hollowed limestone caves which were far east of Dyer’s “Mountains of Madness.” The original aim of Gates’ team was paleontological and was extremely successful. They discovered Mesozoic theropods and tetrapods, near-complete sauropod dinosaurs. Proto-mammals such as triconodonts and cynodonts as well as Jurassic mosasaurs and plesiosaurs, even more recent fossils of cetacians from the Cenozoic. And not just animals, but plants, cycads and cycadeoids. Vascular pteridophytes from the Devonian which included new species of Lycopods, club mosses, and sphenopsids. Gates went into great, dusty clinical detail concerning Cretaceous angiosperms and gymnosperms, Permian seed ferns.

It almost seemed that maybe he wanted to discuss anything but those “Old Ones” and the ruins he had discovered. But, finally, he came back around.

“So, as you can see, we did not go into this hoping to validate any of Dyer’s wild stories, we had plenty of other concrete things to do amongst those ancient fossiliferous rocks. The specimens we found will take months to remove from the strata and years and years to classify properly. But, as you know, we found other things there that immediately diverted our attention. These limestone caves I spoke of is where we found our richest fossil beds. But as we explored deeper into this labyrinth of caverns we discovered something like a burial pit into which our creatures had been interred vertically and then . . . yes, then our caverns grew into immense grottos hundreds and hundreds of feet in height. What we found there easily dwarfs Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave . . . some of the caverns were so large you could tuck away entire cities in them . . . “ And somebody had.