"There's... a door here!!!"
I spun around. Marcus was shining his flashlight directly at a section of ice wall.
Embedded in the ice was a square metal door.
"How do we open it?!" Marcus shoved at it, but the door didn't budge.
"We don't have a key! What good's a door without a key?"
Marcus was frantic. "What do we do? Maybe it leads out!"
I opened my palm. "Is this the key you're looking for?"
---
The lock had been frozen shut for so long that it took considerable effort to turn.
We were terrified of snapping the key, inching it in with agonizing caution.
Click.
A faint sound as the mechanism released. Marcus and I exchanged a glance.
He stepped back, took a running start, and slammed his shoulder into the door.
It swung open.
A wave of frigid air washed over us.
We tensed, half-expecting something to lunge from the darkness.
Nothing. It was quiet inside. Seemingly empty.
But when our flashlights swept the walls, Marcus and I both recoiled as if doused in ice water.
The massive ice chamber was dim and cold, its edges cut precisely, like a giant coffin.
Lining both sides were a dozen or more glass cylinders, each two or three meters tall, topped with a circular metal cap and a tube protruding from it.
The tubes had been violently severed, their jagged ends dangling limply to the floor.
And the most horrifying thing of all: each cylinder contained a person.
Or rather, what could no longer be called a person.
Bloated, sickly-pale faces floated behind glass like corpses steeped in water for days.
Their eye sockets held no eyeballs — only two hollow, black voids, just like the creature we'd seen above.
Their skin was covered in dense folds, a sickly bluish-white, completely hairless.
These bodies bobbed in yellowish liquid, arranged in rows, their black-hole eyes staring directly at us.
My stomach heaved. A wave of nausea mixed with terror surged up my throat, and I stumbled to the side and threw up.
I hadn't eaten anything all morning. Only bitter, sour bile came up.
Marcus's face had gone as white as the ice around us.
I'd been wondering what those creatures were.
Now we both had our answer.
They weren't subterranean humans at all.
They were people. Products of experimentation.
I leaned against the wall, dry-heaving until my stomach was completely empty.
Marcus patted my back and unscrewed the thermos from his pack, handing it to me.
The water inside was ice-cold, with bits of ice floating on top.
I rinsed my mouth and clutched Marcus's sleeve, trembling.
This place was like a giant morgue. Dozens of floating corpses in jars, bobbing in liquid that never froze — who knew how long they'd been soaking in this frozen hell.
My fear had peaked.
Unidentified humanoid monsters. Artificially excavated ice chambers beneath the ice. Bizarre corpses preserved in glass jars.
Why did any of this exist beneath Antarctica?
And who had left it here?
I'd lived over twenty years and never even seen a dead body, let alone monster corpses like these.
My hands wouldn't stop shaking. I clung to Marcus like a drowning person, my voice tight:
"Why doesn't this stuff freeze?!"
Marcus gripped my hand in return. I could feel his trembling too.
"...I don't know."
For people who'd grown up in the sunlight, this sight was enough to shatter you.
I held onto Marcus, scanning the room.
Papers yellowed with age were scattered on the ground, and a small metal cabinet sat in the corner.
I swallowed hard and crept over to pick up the papers.
Honestly, I wanted to get out of here immediately. I was terrified those things inside the jars might suddenly break through the glass and come alive.
The papers had been frozen for so long they were stiff and brittle; I barely dared apply pressure, fearing they'd crumble to dust.
They were covered in a language I couldn't read, densely packed lines of unfamiliar text.
"Looks like some kind of phonetic script..." I squinted at it in confusion. "French? Spanish?"
"It's German."
Marcus took the paper from my hand, frowning as he sounded out words. "Germany... Germany something... Lake... Experiment..."
"What does it say?" He gripped the paper too tightly, and I quickly stopped him. "Hey! You're going to crumble it!"
"Can you even read this?" I glared at him, holding the nearly-shredded document.
"A real man never says no!" Marcus snorted, then looked a bit sheepish. "Well, when I finished my undergrad I was planning to study in Germany. I learned some, but I've basically forgotten it all."
"Let me look at it. I'll figure it out slowly."
"Fine."
I handed him the stack of papers and gathered my courage to search elsewhere.
My stomach growled again, a sour churning.
We hadn't eaten much since morning, and what little compressed biscuit I'd had was long gone — not to mention I'd thrown up everything in my stomach.
I felt nauseous and didn't want to eat, but my body was screaming for calories.
If I didn't eat in this extreme cold, I wouldn't survive.
"Got any food?" I went over to Marcus.
Marcus dropped Professor Marshall's pack on the ground. "There's compressed biscuits inside. Make do."
I picked up the pack and rummaged through it.
Professor Marshall's bag was surprisingly full: ice axe, thermos, cigarettes, camera...
Impatient, I just dumped everything out and sifted through the pile.
Something caught my eye.
A photograph, partially hidden beneath the camera.
I pulled it out, and my pupils contracted.
Every drop of warmth drained from my body. A deep cold enveloped me.
The yellowed photograph showed a younger Professor Marshall with his arm around a girl with a large birthmark on her face. He had a cigarette dangling from his lips, grinning with roguish charm.
The girl was beaming, her sharp face radiant as spring sunshine. But looking at her now, I found her more terrifying than the monster above.
Because I'd seen this girl just yesterday.
In the photograph found aboard Expedition Ship 1740.
---
Since coming to Antarctica, Professor Marshall had been acting differently — possessed by a near-pathological obsession with this southernmost frozen land.
He'd been willing to risk our lives.
I was starting to believe he'd deliberately lured us here.
Now it was obvious: he had a special relationship with the missing female crew member of Ship 1740.
She might even be our advisor's wife.
But what did that have to do with us?
I couldn't make sense of it.
Why drag us along?
Was he investigating the truth behind his wife's disappearance, but too old and frail to do it alone, so he brought his students as backup?
My thoughts swirled in chaos. I handed the photo to Marcus.
"Look at this."
Marcus went pale.
He stared at the photo for a long moment, then looked up, dazed. "What the hell is Professor Marshall trying to do?"
I sighed.
"I wish I knew. He's not here to ask, but if he were, I'd give him a piece of my mind. We're his students, not his enemies. Who drags their students to feed them to monsters?"
"How's your German coming along?"
Marcus held the papers, his face twisted with the particular agony of a struggling student. "I've basically forgotten everything. I've been squinting at this forever and only made out a few words."
"Germany, lake, organism, experiment, human, large, death, no... uh, and failure?"
I scowled. "What kind of gibberish is that? You can't make head or tail of it."
Marcus looked embarrassed and tried to explain. "Maybe they ran some kind of experiment here and it failed."
"Uh... then things got out of hand, everyone died, and they left a warning for the dead not to mess around anymore?"
"Oh, give me a break," I said feebly, waving my hand. "Let's find Professor Marshall. He probably knows more than we do."
"What's in the cabinet?"
Marcus changed the subject. "Looks like a safe. Think there's gold inside? Maybe the Nazis buried treasure here after losing World War II!"