The Deep

1.

LUKE DREAMED that he was sitting at his kitchen table back home in Iowa City. The sunlight prickled his arms as it streamed through the window above the sink. Distantly, through the open door, came the giddy shrieks of children at play.

Zachary sat in his high chair. The sunlight glossed the downy hairs of his infant head.

“How’s it going, buddy?” Luke said, smiling. “How you doin’, Zach Attack?”

Zach smiled. His milk teeth had punched through his gums, these rounded slivers that looked like soft, pale cheese. He still had that new baby smell, too; Luke would press his nose to his son’s scalp to inhale that fantastic scent.

“Ahhh… Mama,” Zach said, his chin tilted proudly.

“Close, bud. Dada. Try that. I’m daa-daa.”

“Ahhh… Mama!”

His son had been saying Mama for a month now—Mama and ball and even kitty. He’d never once said Dada. Gaga and tata and baba, oh yes, those syllables rolled merrily off his tongue. But not Dada. Not once.

He gripped his son’s hands. “Dada, Zach. Say Dada.”

“Tata.”

Luke’s hands tightened.

“Dada.”

“Ahhh… yaya!”

“Dada.” Say it, boy; you fucking say it. “Daa-daa.”

Luke squeezed tighter, his son’s bones pulsing in his grip.

“Ehhhhh! Wawa!”

Tears leapt into Zach’s eyes. Luke had been gripping his fingers so tightly that they’d turned white, the blood crushed out of them.

Luke whistled tunelessly as he walked over to the fridge.

“He’s a hungwy boy, issa? Zachy want his wunch?”

He took a bowl from the cupboard. There was a picture of a puppy on the bottom—Zach’s favorite bowl.

Luke opened the fridge. Zach continued to cry; tears rolled down his face and splattered his bib. Luke rooted amid the tubs and bottles, still whistling. The jar his hand closed upon was warm—why would it be warm in a fridge?

He had to lever his fingernails under the jar’s lid and dig them in; it felt like peeling off a massive scab. He slopped the container’s contents into the puppy bowl, not really looking, smothering the puppy’s grinning face with… whatever it was.

The bowl gave off a strange heat, as if he’d just taken it from the microwave. He grabbed a spoon and sat next to his son. Zachary’s tears had dried up; he stared at the bowl with mingled hunger and revulsion.

“Whoo da hungwy baby? Here’s some lunchy-wunchy for da fussy Zach.”

Luke dipped the spoon into the bowl—it made a gross, squishy sound, like a shovel sunk into a pile of rotten seaweed. He brought the spoon to Zach’s mouth. His son’s eyes reflected whatever was in the spoon… its shifting scintilla reminded Luke of embers glittering in a campfire.

Zach began to scream, a high, hopeless sound. Luke prodded the spoon into his mouth harshly—Just eat, please!—shutting those goddamned screams up.

Zach’s eyes widened, so huge they seemed to consume all the sunlight in the kitchen. His mouth worked against whatever Luke had shoved into it, lips quivering in a futile effort to spit it out. But his gorge flexed automatically, he swallowed, and when his mouth opened again it was to scream.

But not with pain. With hunger.

“Issa good, Zachy? Issa tasty in the belly? Open wide, here comes the aiwwwwooowww-plane!”

The spoon dipped and loop-de-looped, delivering its payload into Zach’s screaming mouth. His lips were coated in a glutinous gloss.

“Issa hungry boy, issa? Mmmm, nom-nom-nom.”

His son swallowed and opened his mouth again, screaming even louder now.

A fine wire of unease corkscrewed into Luke’s chest. The ambient sounds and scents, previously comforting, had changed. The sweet smell of the backyard lilac had become a rancid foulness you might catch downwind of an open sewer. The sounds of children at play had become fear-struck shrieks, as if those children were being pursued by monsters intent on ripping them limb from limb.

He continued to feed Zach. Strangely, the bowl never seemed to empty.

His son’s stomach strained against his bright blue onesie. Zach’s cries intensified, louder and more demanding. His mouth stretched, the flesh loosening as it puckered into a sucker-fish orifice.

A carp, Luke thought with distant horror. He’s growing a carp’s mouth.

The force of Zachary’s shrieks caused the papery flesh of his new mouth to flutter like a flag in a high breeze.

Luke tried to wrench his gaze downward to see what he’d been feeding his precious son, whose every morsel had always been carefully scrutinized. Abby would spend hours at the supermarket, reading labels on the baby food jars and buying organic produce to mulch in the Baby Bullet.

With aching slowness, Luke’s neck finally gave out, his skull wrenching painfully down. His breath caught with an agonized hitch.

Oh oh oh oh, was all he could think, his mind skipping like a stone on the still surface of a lake. Ohohohohohohooooooh—

The bowl was full of ambrosia. Almost gone now: just a few pulpy balls stuck to the sides.

The puppy’s face was gone, too. It had been erased. All that remained was a brownish smear, as if the ambrosia had eaten its face away.

Don’t feed him another bite. Throw the bowl away, now. Stick your finger down his throat and make him vomit up all that he can. Take him to the hospital and get the doctors to pump his stomach. Get it out of him, Luke—for Christ’s sake, get it out!

But in that awful way nightmares have, he scraped the sides of the bowl, collecting the remaining ambrosia into a tidy dollop. It sat on the spoon, tumorlike, heaving slightly as if breathing.

Zachary issued a string of gibbering hiccups. He bucked in his high chair, his engorged stomach rattling the feeding tray.

“Dada!” he screeched, the sound of a nail pulled from a sun-bleached plank of wood. “Dada! Daaaaaaadaaaaaaa!”

“Shhhh,” Luke said. “Eat all you like. You can never have enough.”

Luke stabbed the spoon into his son’s mouth; Zach’s lips closed over it triumphantly, sucking every last speck off of it. He stared at his father with a feral, too-old expression. Ancient hate radiated from his dead, gray eyes.

He opened his mouth again, screaming, screaming.

“There’s nothing left,” Luke said, holding up the bowl—which had melted entirely now, a gummy mess running down his fingers, burning slightly as something worked under his flesh.

Zach vented maddening, lung-rupturing shrieks in response. His strange new mouth stretched wider, wider…

Luke saw something in there.

Oh God. Oh good God, no…

A dozen or more eyeballs stared at Luke from inside Zachary’s mouth. They nested in the soft pink flesh of his palate and throat, staring unblinkingly, appraising Luke with cold scrutiny.

We all have different sets of eyes, my son.

His mother’s voice.

Very different, yes, but very lovely, Lucas. You only have to let them out, like I said I’d gladly do for stupid Brewster Galt. Let them out to see the world…

The eyes in Zach’s mouth blinked in unison—a dozen lewd winks. They made an awful pipping noise as the inflamed flesh inside Zach’s mouth clipped shut for an instant, like the edges of a fresh wound making contact.

Luke scooped his son out of the high chair and into his arms. Zach’s body had a sick, pendulous weight. His cheeks showed deep dents as they sucked greedily at the air. He kept screaming through his sucker-fish mouth, bathing Luke’s face with noxious breath. The mouth-eyes stared at him balefully.

Luke rocked him, as he’d done every night since Zach was born.

“Husha baby. Husha, husha, sleep now.”

Sometimes when Zach was overtired, Luke would hold his eyelids shut. Very gently, rolling Zach’s eyelids down and keeping them shut with gentle pressure from his fingertips; he did so now. Zach’s eyelids strained as the muscles trembled under Luke’s fingertips, much like flies buzzing under Saran Wrap.

Luke pushed a little harder. Keep those eyes closed, my beautiful boy. Please.

Zach’s screams only intensified. The eyes inside his mouth rotated madly in their cups of flesh. The skin of Zach’s chin and cheeks and forehead was developing red throbbing cysts and Luke knew eyes would soon be sprouting there, too.

Luke felt around in Zach’s eyes just a little. Gray fluid the consistency of model glue squished between the eyelids.

“Shhhh, now. Sleep. What’s there to see? Nothing good.”

His son’s face was cracking open in a dozen places. Luke peered at these new eyes, each one offering a hateful, shriveling stare.

Luke’s fingers sunk into Zach’s eye sockets to the second knuckle. They punched into a pocket of curdled sludge that reminded him of the congealed porridge his mother used to eat. There came a hissing sound, but from where, Luke couldn’t tell. Stinking fluid the color of molten lead bubbled up from Zachary’s sockets.

Luke pushed until the webbing between his fingers touched the bridge of his son’s nose. Zach’s flesh offered no resistance. Luke’s fingertips passed through the grooved tangerine of Zach’s brain to touch the inner swell of his skull.

“It’ll be over soon,” he whispered, hoping his son could hear. “I’m so sorry…”

The fontanel on the top of Zach’s head pulsed ominously, as if something underneath was struggling to free itself.

Luke stared, trapped in the calm eye of his dread, as his son’s scalp split in a bloodless trench. Something pushed through the squandered flesh, horrid and spiky and flecked with white curds…

…and turned in Luke’s direction, staring not with eyes but with a sense of merciless curiosity mingled with furious intent.

2.

LUKE STRUGGLED OUT OF SLEEP like a man crawling out of a mine shaft. Gummy strings of the nightmare clung to his brain. He heard Zachary screaming somewhere as the dream continued to unravel; Luke reached for his lost son—but his fingers closed on empty air.

Luke’s brain felt unattached to his senses, the way it often felt following a bad dream. He blinked and stared around Westlake’s quarters.

The hatch was open. Just a hair.

Four small appendages were wrapped around the edge of the hatchway.

A child’s fingers.

Luke saw them… then he didn’t. They had slipped away.

Next came a series of excitable, clumsy footsteps trailing down the tunnel.

His son’s name passed over his lips before he could choke it down.

“Zach?”

Laughter bubbled up the tunnel. The sound grew fainter, threatening to vanish. Luke rolled off the cot and shoved the hatch open.

“Zach?”

That champagne-bubble laughter flooded the dim tunnel in reply—the kind of laughter Zach used to make when Luke hefted him under the arms and lobbed him into the air, catching him deftly as he came down.

This is not happening, chirped a voice in Luke’s head. Your son isn’t down here. You know that, Luke. In your heart, in your head.

But he didn’t, really. That was the thing—Zach was everywhere. Anywhere. That’s what tore you apart.

Unthinkingly, Luke followed the laughter.

The tunnel seemed to heave like an enormous pair of lungs, the walls constricting before expanding again… just a trick of the light. He stumbled forward heedlessly, borne on a bubbly foam of anxiety. Luke felt his boots sinking into the floor as if into some sort of weird metallic mud. He felt it sucking at his feet, a disturbing sensation, and told himself it wasn’t actually happening. His mind was playing a funny trick, was all. Ha, ha, real funny. Thanks, brain. You have a great sense of comedic timing. He glanced around in an attempt to moor himself. He noticed a string of pipes jutting upward along the wall like the flutes on a church organ, their curves winking dull bronze in the dim. A rhythmic churn emanated from behind the walls, the sound of motors pounding without cease in the center of the earth.

Ahead of him in the darkness, something moved.

“Who’s there?” Luke said, the tendons cabled down his neck.

No answer, only the watery echo of his voice.

…there… ere… ere…

When it faded Luke heard, or was certain he’d heard, the low rustle of breathing. He stood in the tunnel dark, the hairs quilling on his forearms. That rustling did not come again. He was set to reject it as a figment (Fig Men) of his imagination, conjured by the terrible pressure of this place…

A shape coalesced where his eyes were trained. He saw a pair of pajamas. Oh-so-familiar. They were Zachary’s favorites—his peejays, Abby used to call them; Zach it’s bedtime get into your peejays!—with a pattern of fire trucks and police cars, signifiers of law, order, and safety from harm. Small hands and feet jutted from the sleeves and leg holes, shining whitely in the gloom.

He could not see a face. The air above the neckline was dark and empty.

The headless pajamas turned—a coy movement that seemed to say follow me! follow me!—and scampered down the tunnel.

Luke obeyed the directive. The floor sucked greedily at his boots; the metal flowed over his ankles as his feet sunk into the chilly muck at the bottom of the sea.

Darkness closed in behind him, deeper and deeper shades. Zachary’s laughter pealed off the walls and rebounded all around Luke.

“Zach! Hold on—please, stop!”

Zach slipped around a bend in the tunnel up ahead. Luke let out a strangled cry.

Nonononono, not again please not again…

He tried to run but his boots were mired, making every step an ordeal. He finally rounded the turn only to see he’d reached a dead end. The blackness was absolute; it was no different than staring down a mine shaft.

Three words were written on the wall in wet letters. Instinctively, Luke knew they were written in blood.

Something tugged on his sleeve. A small hand, four small fingers gripping his overalls. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to see his headless son… or something far more horrible.

He tried to jerk his arm away. But the tugging was insistent.

Look at me Daddy—LOOK!

No, Luke thought. I don’t want to. You’re not my son.

Oh, but I am. I’m your little Zach Attack. Right here in the flesh!

The voice was not that of his son. It belonged to something ineffably older, more calculating, and worse beyond anything Luke could imagine.

A terrific jerk at his arm now.

YOU FUCKING LOOK AT ME NOW.

Luke snatched his arm back. He overbalanced and fell, hammering his skull on the wall—

…and came to slumped against the tunnel. The overhead lights burned. LB stood a few feet away, eyeing him with a canine version of concern. His sleeve was wet with her slobber.

His son was gone. He’d never been here, of course. There was no dead end, no bloody words on the wall. He’d dreamed it all. Of course he had. He thought he’d woken from a nightmare only to now discover that the nightmare hadn’t yet finished.

And yet he’d left Westlake’s room. He’d opened the hatch, never waking, and walked down the tunnel. He’d… sleepwalked? Bullshit. He’d never done that in his life. LB must’ve followed him, then tugged on his sleeve to wake him.

Sleepwalked… just like Clayton might have been sleepwalking when he sent that transmission to the surface.

Happens a lot on submarines, Al’s voice chimed in his head. Guys who never had the habit before. Your brainwaves go a bit buggy…

“Thanks, girl,” Luke said. “You beat an alarm clock all to hell.”

LB chuffed as though to say: No problem, boss. Just doing my job.

Luke returned to Westlake’s quarters… then caught noise from the main lab. He followed it, craving any kind of companionship. LB tagged along at his heels.

It was Clayton. He was leaning against the lab bench, his head lowered. He seemed disoriented—discombobulated, as their mother might’ve said. He had the look of a man who’d been kicked awake with a pointy-toed shoe.

“You okay?” Luke asked.

“What?” Clayton’s face swiftly recomposed into its regular withering expression. “Yes… why wouldn’t I be?”

“Clay, I just had the strangest dream.”

His brother said, “Yes, they can be incredibly vivid down here.”

Luke decided to speak no further about it—the dream about Zachary eating ambrosia. After all, Clayton, wonderful sibling that he was, hadn’t even contacted Luke when Zach had gone missing. Not a phone call, not an e-mail, nothing. Complete radio silence. Maybe he hadn’t known what to say… or perhaps he hadn’t even known Zach had gone missing—or worse and probably more accurately, he hadn’t cared. He’d never even met Zach. Or Abby, for that matter. Clayton hadn’t responded to the RSVP for their wedding or Zach’s first birthday party. No cards, no gifts. What else should Luke have expected, anyway? It was fine, as far as Luke had been concerned. Better that Clayton exist distantly—his brother, the brilliant scientist. On a primal level, Luke hadn’t wanted Clayton’s presence wafting through the lives of the people he loved.

“Clayton, do you think it might be a good idea to get out of here for a while? Take a powder, head up to the surface to clear your head?”

Luke wasn’t about to mention his sleepwalking incident, either. Or Westlake’s audio files. Not yet. He couldn’t face Clayton’s sneering scorn, not without Al here to back him up at least.

“You can do whatever you want, Lucas,” his brother said. “You shouldn’t even be here. But I can’t leave.”

“Why not?”

But Luke already knew the answer. The Trieste was the seat of the unknown, and his obsessive brother wasn’t about to abandon his attempt unlock its secrets.

“Fine,” he said, setting it aside for now. “Where’s Alice?”

“She’s getting some sleep.” Clayton cocked his head. “In the meantime, would you like to see what I’ve discovered? Now that you’re here?”

Clayton clearly wanted to show Luke. Childishly, part of Luke wanted to give his older brother what Abby used to call the RFU: the Royal Fuck You.

Nah, not interested, Clay. It sounds pretty boring, to be honest. Hey, you got a TV in this joint? You get decent reception down here?

More crucially, did Luke really want to see?

He’d witnessed Clayton’s blooper reel before—a mouse with a collapsed nose on its back, for one. Luke’s skin crawled at the thought of what his brother had been up to down here where the light never shone.

But of course, Luke did want to see. If anyone could figure out how to harness the ambrosia, his brother was that man.

Alice’s voice floated to them from another part of the station. She sounded vaguely fearful.

“Luke?” she called out. “Hey, Luke?”

“Hurry up,” Clayton said, shepherding Luke into his lab.

“Wait. What about Al?”

Clayton shook his head. Luke hesitated as Clay punched a code on the keypad.

“Family only. You have eight seconds to get inside, Lucas. Then it locks automatically.”

Luke didn’t move.

eight… seven…

Clay’s jaw tensed.

six…

Luke said: “The dog comes with me.”

“It does not. No dogs allowed,” said Clayton.

It was Luke’s turn to cock his head at his brother. He knew Clayton wanted to show him. Otherwise he’d never have offered.

Alice’s voice drew nearer. “Luke?”

three… two…

“Fine. Get in, both of you,” Clayton snapped, relenting. “Quickly.”

Luke gripped LB’s collar. She backpedaled, fighting him.

“What’s the matter, girl? It’s okay.”

Really? Was it?

Luke picked her up. LB tucked her head to his throat the way Zach used to do before falling asleep.

one…

3.

THE LOCK ENGAGED with a hiss. Clayton draped a blanket over a hook above the porthole, shielding them from the main lab.

Clay’s lab was a cube, yet its walls didn’t meet at right angles; instead they bellied outward to maintain the Trieste’s egg-based physics. A cot in one corner. Clayton must also sleep in here, Luke figured.

Westlake took to sleeping in his lab, too, he recalled. He wanted to be close to the hole. His hole.

Luke set the dog down but she remained zippered to his side. Her eyes rolled in their sockets; she was clearly afraid but Luke couldn’t pinpoint any immediate cause. A terrarium and a cage housing a pair of guinea pigs sat against one wall. Beside those rested a pair of larger cages—dog crates, one of which had surely held LB.

Where’s the other one? Luke wondered. Where’s Little Fly?

A stainless-steel lab bench occupied the middle of the room; Luke could see where it had been riveted together, as a bench that size would have been brought down here in sections. A large poster of Albert Einstein—that famous shot with his tongue sticking out—was hung on the wall directly behind the bench. The quote read: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

“I didn’t know you were a fan,” Luke said.

“It’s good to visualize your competition.” Clay smiled. “You will laugh at this, Lucas, but sometimes I talk to Albert. If I’ve been working long enough, sometimes he’ll talk back.”

A squat white box sat along the near wall. Clayton opened its lid; plumes of vapor billowed out. He reached inside, whistling absentmindedly. Clayton used to whistle or even sing in his basement lab all the time; the notes would drift up the staircase into the kitchen. The most inane melodies. The theme to Gilligan’s Island, or even “Whistle While You Work”—except Clayton used to screw with the lyrics:

Whistle while you work, Hitler was a jerk; Mussolini bit his weenie and now it doesn’t work…

Clayton shut the cooler—but not before Luke noticed a squared-off shape wrapped in black plastic. It looked a bit like a butchered hog loin, though Luke knew it wouldn’t be that.

“Don’t be alarmed,” Clayton said, placing a guinea pig on the lab bench.

The animal was frozen stiff, glittering with frost. Luke wasn’t alarmed at all—as a veterinarian in the Midwest, he’d seen plenty of frozen animals.

“How did it die?” Luke asked. “Or is that important to your scientific query?”

The guinea pig tipped onto its side, its legs jutting up at the ceiling. LB edged to the lip of the table, snuffling with keen interest. Clayton swatted at her; the dog flinched away in fear.

Luke reached out and snatched his brother’s wrist. He felt the live-wire twitch of Clayton’s tendons—he also noticed that Clay’s fingers were now bandaged to the second joint, swaddled under thick gauze.

“Not very nice.” Luke tsked. “Do you treat all your guests that way?”

Clayton offered a gravedigger’s smile. The guinea pig was melting out of its icy encasement; a small pool of water had already formed around it.

Thhhwiiiilppppippit!

Luke craned his head around. Where had that noise come from? A dripping tap? They wouldn’t have running water down here, would they?

The sound stirred a memory, yet Luke couldn’t lay his finger on it.

Wait a second. The guinea pig’s leg. Had it… twitched?

LB spun in an agitated circle, whining pitifully.

The guinea pig’s leg twitched again, obviously this time.

“Clay,” Luke said. “What’s it doing? What’s that dead thing doing?”

“Who said it was dead, brother dear?”

It had to be dead. The laws of nature dictated as much. Some creatures could be frozen for a short period and be reanimated. Flies, crickets. Not warm-blooded animals of an elevated biological genus.

And yet…

The guinea pig’s sides began to heave as it took the smallest breaths.

This is not happening, Luke thought. It’s not possible.

The coating of ice over the guinea pig’s face melted. Its eyeballs were vibrantly red—the color of blood leaping from a torn vein. It flipped to its feet and trundled awkwardly over the lab bench.

Clayton picked it up and offered it to his brother. Luke was beset with a profound revulsion.

Why? There was nothing obviously the matter with it, other than the fact it had just come back from the dead. A perfectly ordinary guinea pig, shivering in his brother’s cupped palms.

Don’t you touch it, Luke, said the voice of caution. It’s… diseased. It’ll infect you—it doesn’t even have to bite you. Touching it will be enough.

“It’s a little-bitty, fluffy-wuffy guinea pig,” Clay said. “I take it you’re afraid?”

Luke’s jaw tightened. He held his hands out and Clay gave it to him. God, it felt awful: like holding a throbbing bezoar—a tumorous hairball, one of which he’d once removed from the stomach of a narcotized leopard at the Des Moines Zoo.

The creature just sat there in his palms, its pert nose twitching. An odd notion came into Luke’s mind: it was trying to look cute, the same way a calculating child could become doe-eyed and saccharine when there was something to gain from it. Its teeth—old man teeth; the nicotine-stained teeth of a three-pack-a-day smoker—clashed like tusks in the wet hole of its mouth.

Clayton opened the cage. “Put it inside.”

Luke did so with great relief. The other two guinea pigs, both quite small, avoided the unfrozen one, burrowing into the cedar shavings and squeaking in consternation.

“How…?”

“Oh, come now,” said Clayton. “You’ve spoken to Felz, haven’t you? So you know perfectly well how.” He retrieved a kit from beneath the table. Luke had used the same kit thousands of times. Inside you’d find two syringes and a vial of Euthasol.

An EK—Extinction Kit, as it was known in the veterinarian biz.

Clayton unwrapped a hypo and affixed the needle. He extracted 2.5 ccs of Euthasol, enough to flatline a Great Dane.

Agitated squeals broke out inside the cage. The unfrozen guinea pig was now attacking the other two. It lunged at the sensitive webbing of the much smaller guinea pig’s legs, hamstringing it. The third guinea pig clambered up the cage to hang in screeching, stupid shock from the upper bars.

The unfrozen one flipped the small one over; its head darted between the small pig’s legs, teeth gnashing at the poor thing’s exposed privates. Its victim shrieked in terror and pain.

LB advanced on the cage with a growl building in her throat.

“Keep that damn thing away,” Clayton said, pulling on a pair of vulcanized rubber gloves.

Luke gripped LB by the scruff. Clayton reached into the cage and vised his fingers around the zombified (except that wasn’t really the case, was it?) guinea pig. It squealed as he pulled it off the smaller one. Luke caught a glimpse of the victim’s shredded sex organs and blanched.

Clayton pinned the guinea pig to the table. Its face was a mask of blood, its head whipping in crazed paroxysms.

“The needle,” he grunted.

Luke handed it over. He wasn’t about to question his brother—he’d just as soon protest Clayton driving a stake through a vampire’s black heart.

An ungodly shriek bubbled out of the guinea pig’s throat. It bit Clayton’s glove and tore a groove out of the rubber.

It shouldn’t be capable of that. Luke was gobsmacked. A pit bull would have a hard time biting through those gloves.

Clayton sank the needle into the guinea pig’s flank.

The needle bent.

Jesus Christ. It actually bent, as though Clayton stabbed it into a car door.

Clay jabbed it again and the needle snapped with a singing tink, the spike of metal spinning through the air.

Luke’s mind was reeling but his brother remained calm—calmish. Greasy balls of sweat dotted his brow, but whether that was from dread or exertion Luke couldn’t tell. Luke’s own body was bathed in sticky heat that radiated up from the balls of his feet, panic ghosting through the ventricles of his heart.

“Screw on the other needle-tip for me, would you?” Clayton said.

Luke did so—an action he’d completed thousands of times, thank God, his fingers working instinctively. Clayton flipped the bleating creature onto its back, located its rectum and stabbed with the needle. It sank in deeply, the guinea pig hissing like a cockroach as Clayton depressed the plunger.

Clayton injected the full 2.5 ccs. Luke thought of telling him to save some for the guinea pig with the bloodied privates… but right now, he just wanted this big bastard dead.

The guinea pig’s body relaxed. Clayton quickly ducked underneath the lab bench and came up with what looked like a pair of sterling silver bolt cutters. They were Bethune surgical rib shears—an instrument used for splitting the cartilage between human ribs during open-heart surgery.

Clayton was singing now. A familiar children’s song, sung in a toneless, dial-tone voice.

“The itsy-bitsy spider went up the water spout; down came the rain and washed the spider out…”

He brought the shears down. The blades formed an inverted V around the guinea pig’s neck.

“What the hell are you doing, Clay?”

“Look closely.” Clayton’s eyes glittered. “Part its hair so you can see the flesh.”

Luke didn’t want to touch the thing again, but curiosity overrode his squeamishness. The guinea pig’s fur was stiff like the bristles of a dirty broom, the flesh under it pink and oily. Its body pumped off the noxious warmth of a compost heap.

“Do you see it?” said Clayton. “That shine?”

Its skin held the barest scintilla, as though dusted with powdered diamonds.

“It’s the ambrosia,” said Clayton.

“Is it leaking out of its body?”

“I don’t think it was ever inside its body. I think it covers bodies in the thinnest skein, so thin it would take electron magnification to spot it. Think of a spider’s web. It doesn’t take much pure matter at all; an ounce of ambrosia, stretched into skeins, could cover the entire population of our home city.”

Luke couldn’t help but picture it. The citizens of Iowa City covered in downy threads of ambrosia, finer than baby hair, unnoticeable to the naked eye but coiling deep into their bodies, fastening around their organs and bones. Everybody shimmered in the sunlight, their bodies aglitter…

“It might send roots inside.” Clayton wiped the feverish sweat collecting above his lip. “Roots so slender that they can slip between molecules of flesh and blood; so small they can even twine around atoms. Think about it.”

Phloooopppp…

That dripping sound again, coming from somewhere inside the lab—

That old childhood memory Luke’s mind had been chasing entombed itself in his skull with a concussive thump…

4.

THE STANDING PIPE on Old Langtree Road in Iowa City. A concrete tunnel with a grate over its mouth to prevent idiot kids from clambering into its damp, moss-crusted darkness. An overflow pipe—when the river rose, excess water jetted out of it to saturate the floodplain. But the river could go months at low ebb, meaning that the area ringing the pipe was most often a stagnant swamp that on high August days smelled like a pile of mildewed gym trunks.

Clayton visited the swamp often, as its microclimate hosted prize specimens. Unsurprisingly, he favored the most disgusting life-forms. If its body had the texture of a snot-filled bath bead, chances were that Clayton wanted it. Sometimes he’d let Luke tag along, needing an extra pair of hands.

One long-ago summer day, the young brothers had arrived at dusk, when the coolness brought the best specimens out of their hidey-holes. Luke never visited the standing pipe alone. Its wide, cavernous mouth jutting out of the gray caliche—which reminded him, disconcertingly, of elephant skin—sent an unpleasant shiver down his arms. The pipe’s interior was hung with rotting strands of moss that dangled down in stiff stalactites. Sunlight couldn’t penetrate it more than a few feet; after that it turned grainy, the shadows swimming with clever movements.

It was stupid to think. It was just a tunnel. Sure, it was dangerous; you wouldn’t want to squeeze past the grate and walk down it—not because there was something waiting for you in its gloomy guts, but because you could trip and fall and bust your fool skull wide open, as Luke’s mother was apt to say.

By the time the boys reached the pipe that day, the surrounding swampland was hovering with shadows. The inverted bells of the carnivorous pitcher plants lay bronzed in the dying sun. The creatures that had lain dormant during the day were slithering and spidering from their resting places.

Clayton forged into the swamp in a pair of hip waders, sending up swarms of no-see-ums. Luke’s sweatpants—he couldn’t bear wading through that bug-infested swamp barelegged—were soaked to his crotch. The fluffy tops of cotton grass poking out of the swamp reminded Luke of Peter Cottontail, the bunny, which led him to envision the grass-wads hiding a thousand drowned rabbits submerged in the brown muck with their tails sticking out of the water.

The brothers reached the mouth of the pipe. A new moon glossed its concrete lips, a silver O enclosing a solid pool of darkness.

Clustered along the pipe were translucent vein-strung sacs, each roughly the size of an oxblood marble. They were arranged in gooey clusters—bunches of albino grapes, or mutant fly eggs.

“They’re hatching,” Clayton said. “Perfect.”

The sacs were breaking open to disgorge tallowy creatures with flagellate tails. They squiggled to the edge of the pipe and—

Thhhwhooolloop…

Dropped into the water.

“Pollywogs are interesting creatures,” Clayton remarked. “No other amphibian undergoes such a massive change as it becomes an adult. Humans have a few more bones as babies, which fuse together as we grow, but we don’t grow new arms or legs or lose any part of our bodies as we mature. Humans,” he said with something approaching sadness, “are boring.”

Luke always felt unbelievably grateful for these moments when his brother treated him like a human being. In such moments Clayton seemed most like a human being himself, full of childlike wonder.

The mama bullfrogs croaked in protest as Clayton dragged a net and deposited pollywogs into the bucket Luke had brought. Luke heard something from inside the pipe—a sound that vibrated the sensitive hairs of his ear canal.

It came again. A gelatinous sliding like something coughed up from a kitchen drain… and what was the pipe, anyway, if not a drain? A huge, long drain. It stood to reason that the things coughed out of a pipe that size would be massive, as well.

Ghostly spiders scuttled up the back of Luke’s neck. His mouth filled with a dry wash of horror—the taste of mothballs covered in a choking film of dust.

The swamp stilled. The bullfrogs stopped croaking, even the insects seemed to stop buzzing. Only the sucking, slurping sound coming from the pipe.

The sound, or its maker, was drawing nearer in a stealthy kind of way… but not too stealthily. Maybe it wanted to be heard. The sucking sound was joined by an icy clickety-click reminiscent of cockroaches scuttling behind water-fattened drywall… or ragged claws dragged along mossy concrete.

The pipe’s mouth was covered with a checkerboard rebar grate to keep stupid kids out. Because kids were stupid sometimes. Even the smart ones, like Clayton. They would come to an isolated swamp past dark, say, to collect pollywogs. Far from the reliable streetlit world—hell, they may as well be on another planet. They could disappear and nobody would even know until morning. It was tragic, but it happened all the time…

Even a smart kid had to be stupid only that one time.

Clayton’s jaw was clenched tight, his eyes fixed above the tunnel’s mouth as if he couldn’t quite bear to stare directly into it.

The sound came again, closer now: a choked and mocking gurgle, an enormous mouth laughing around a wad of rotting meat.

Pollywogs fluttered against Luke’s sweatpants as they flicked past, racing away. He wished he could shrink somehow, become as small and insignificant as they were, and flee with them. He wished he had a minuscule and idiotic pollywog brain, because his own was an inferno of fearful images and possibilities.

The grate will stop it. It stopped dumb kids from getting in, and it will stop anything else from getting out.

But Luke knew this wasn’t true. Whatever it was—and he understood, in his lizard-brain cortex, that it was something real bad—it could snap the grate like matchsticks… or else ooze through the metal latticework like cancerous black taffy.

The brothers backed away slowly, the way you might from a slumbering bear. Clayton’s breath came in a flighty whistle like the whinny of a horse. Luke averted his eyes, didn’t dare look at the pipe. If he only heard it but didn’t see it, it wasn’t real. The sounds could be anything. The gurgle of sludgy water over ancient bottles and cans, or even over the water-bleached skeletons of drowned animals.

But if you saw it, made eye contact with it…

Their heels hit the dry wash. Once that happened, the boys turned and clawed up the pebbly incline, abandoning the bucket and net, hitting the moon-glossed road, and running as fast as their legs could carry them.

Some reckless urge made Luke glance back over his shoulder. Only once, and only for a second.

He saw something. He would swear to it. Something moving. A hand? No, not exactly. It was too elongated to be human. The fingers were twice as long as any he’d ever seen, the digits thin and witchy. Each finger was tipped with a cruel sickle that trapped the moonlight along its curve.

This enormous hand ticked delicately along the rusted rebar, back and forth, back and forth, as if plucking notes on an instrument. A soft and beckoning gesture.

Come baaaack, Lucas. Come baaaack. Bring your brother, too. Three is never a crowd. We’ll have… all the time in the world.

God help him, Luke felt himself turn around.

His hip, gripped by a compulsion he couldn’t fight, wrenched back—his feet would follow shortly, surely as two follows one… then Clayton jerked Luke’s arm so hard that it almost tore out of its socket. Come morning, the flesh of his collarbone would be a sullen mottle of bruises.

“No. Don’t,” was all Clay said. His neck was flexed taut, as if he were fighting an insistent pair of hands that were trying to wrench his gaze back to the pipe. “Don’t look.”

They turned and ran until their lungs burned, until the standing pipe and its noises were well behind them.

The next morning, Luke wouldn’t believe what he’d seen. It had been a trick of the moonlight, nothing more.

But he never did return to the pipe. Neither did Clayton, who struck up a deal with the local pet shop owner to buy mice at a bulk discount, which he claimed were better specimens anyway.

5.

SSSSSCHLLLIPPPPPTTZZ…

The sound broke Luke out of his reverie—except they had begun to feel less like reveries than waking dreams.

Lacuna was the term that leapt out at him: an old Latin word that meant an empty space, a missing part… a gap. His mind seemed to slip into those gaps much easier down here. Since he boarded the Challenger, he’d been tumbling into and out of these old memories—his past, trapped within these dream-pools, kept reaching out and pulling him into their murky depths.

Now he was back in his brother’s lab, where Clayton still held a pair of shears to that awful guinea pig’s throat. The sound coming from somewhere inside the lab—thwwwilliiiippp!—was almost the same sound those pollywogs had made falling into the swamp when they were boys.

Before Luke could figure out what was making that noise, the guinea pig’s leg twitched.

Impossible.

Clayton had injected it with enough Euthasol to stop a full-grown man’s heart. There’s no way it could come back from…

Its front legs stiffened. Its lungs inhaled reflexively. It unleashed a hellish squeal that sounded shockingly like the shriek of an infant. Its eyes burned, twin embers socked into the white fur of its face. It lunged—

Clayton brought the shears together.

SCCCHRIIK!

The sound was that of a bolt cutter snapping a brass Master Lock off a school locker. Luke’s eyes widened as the guinea pig’s head was snipped neatly off its neck.

No blood at first. Not a drop. The flesh and tendon and bone were clearly visible down the face of each wound, both head-stump and neck-stump—it was like sawing a tree in half.

None of this makes any sense, Luke thought stupidly. None of this can actually be happening…

Clayton pulled the guinea pig’s body and head apart, separating them by a foot. Belatedly, blood began to leak from its neck in thick strings that spread across the bench like fingers.

Blood-tentacles, was Luke’s thought.

These tentacles crept toward the guinea pig’s body, which was releasing tentacles of its own. They merged in the middle of the bench.

LB whined and buried her head against Luke’s thigh.

The tentacles began to constrict. With aching slowness, the split halves of the guinea pig began to inch back toward each other.

They’re trying to reattach. They want to make the guinea pig whole again.

Watching this, a small but essential part of Luke’s mind untethered itself from the whole. Luke actually heard it—a cartilaginous thok like a drumstick wrenched off a Thanksgiving turkey; he felt it go, too: a physical sensation that he could liken only to a lifeboat setting off from a sinking ship, taking some vital cargo with it.

The guinea pig’s sundered halves drew closer. The blood-tentacles sucked and squirmed. What would happen once the halves had linked up?

“Stop it, Clay. Please, just stop it.”

Clayton retrieved a plastic container with a snap-top lid. He put the gloves back on, grabbed a scalpel, and slit the bloody webbings. Luke heard a snakelike hiss as the blade severed the crimson tentacles.

Clayton picked up the guinea pig’s head gingerly, still trailing ribbons of blood, and set it inside the container. He snapped on the lid and left the box on the bench.

The tentacles from the guinea pig’s body crept over the container. Investigating, it would seem—sniffing it like a lonely hound at a porch door. They actually climbed the plastic and poked along the seal.

Their progress stymied, the tentacles sagged. A few moments later they surrendered their shape and collected into a pool of plasma. The guinea pig’s headless body relaxed, evacuating its contents in a stinking gout.

A tiny speck of ambrosia gathered on the guinea pig’s foot. Clayton lifted the ambrosia on the scalpel’s edge and crossed to the cage. The guinea pig with the torn privates lay in a pile of bloodied cedar shavings. Clayton set the scalpel near its head.

The ambrosia rolled off onto the wounded creature’s ear, then vanished.

The guinea pig bleated and went rigid… then it rolled over and scampered to the running wheel. It began to race as fast as its stubby legs would carry it, tearing around and around and around like a mad dervish.

Clayton reached in and withdrew it from the cage. He showed Luke its sex organs. They were whole and, for all Luke knew, functional.

“This is madness. Utter madness.”

“No,” Clayton said. “It only looks like madness. You don’t know what you’re seeing.”

Clayton carried the guinea pig to the cooler. Lifting the lid, he set the creature inside. Luke didn’t protest this treatment, putting a live animal in deep freeze. Was that thing really alive anymore?

“What use is it?” Luke had to ask. “This ambrosia? Look at what it does, Clay. It… perverted that animal. Am I wrong? That guinea pig was savage. There was…”

Something demonic about it, was the thought his mind spat out. He’d felt the creature’s awfulness in his hands, the clammy grossness of its body.

“There could be any number of reasons why it acted that way,” Clayton said. “Firstly, it likely had no conception of what was being done to it.”

“ ‘Being done to it.’ Interesting choice of words, brother of mine. So let me ask you—do you know what was being done to it?”

“I’m beginning to understand, yes. There may be pain or trauma associated with the assimilation. The ambrosia may trigger certain psychotropic side effects, leading to heightened aggression.”

“My God, Clay—do you realize what you’re saying? This substance you’re studying won’t allow a creature to die. Not by freezing it, not by pumping it with a lethal dose, not by hacking its fucking head off. There has to be some other intelligence at work here. I don’t mean some take me to your leader shit; just something we can’t possibly understand. The way that blood moved… it was smart. It had a purpose.”

Clayton’s expression didn’t indicate that he felt the same horror Luke did—rather, it seemed that the prospect of a purposeful intellect excited him immensely.

“How can you know it won’t function the same way when used on a human being?” said Luke. “That it won’t turn people into raving maniacs?”

“There’s only one answer to that, Lucas—we don’t know how it will work, because we haven’t tried it on a human subject yet.”

YET. Dear God.

“Clay. Think. What about Westlake?”

“What about him?” Clayton said, eyebrows innocently raised.

“You’ve calculated this angle already,” said Luke. “You realize Westlake must have come in contact with the ambrosia.”

“I think…” A grudging nod. “Yes. That’s likely accurate. He must’ve abandoned the necessary precautions. He forgot the risks.”

Or the fucking stuff crawled inside his head, Luke thought wildly. Or else…

“Clay, what if he purposefully brought it into contact with himself? Not an accident or a goof-up,” said Luke. “What if he smeared it on himself or swallowed it or some other goddamn thing? What if he let himself be assimilated, as you put it.”

Luke suddenly and dearly wanted to tell his brother about the dream he’d had. He wanted to spill his guts about the giant millipede that, for a span of pulseless seconds, he’d been absolutely sure was stalking him down that darkened storage tunnel. He wanted to let Clayton know that these depths exerted a breed of pressure that lay entirely apart from the eight hundred fluid tons of water that pressed down on every square inch of the Trieste right this moment…

…but he had a terrible feeling Clayton knew all that already—he’d know it deep under his skin by now.

“Why don’t we leave?” Luke asked again. “A little sunlight on your face. You remember the sun, don’t you? Hey. Just a few days. Then you come right back down.”

And maybe—if we’re lucky—this whole place will cave in on itself in your absence. Would that be so bad?

Clayton shook his head, lips pursed in a playful tsk.

“It must be hard on you. It must really sting, Lucas. Acting as their errand boy.”

Luke frowned. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Think about why you’re even here, brother dear. They flew you halfway around the world and jettisoned you to the bottom of the sea. Could you be any more a pawn? Did they tell you how to frame it—did they coach you? You never were a good liar. You’re too earnest. Dr. Felz and the others—and I’m sure there were others—what did they promise you in return for retrieving me?”

Luke’s jaw hung open in disbelief.

“Holy fuck, what could they possibly offer? A new car? An all-expenses-paid trip to Cabo? I came because I wanted to. No, Jesus—I came because I had to. There was no choice. Everything’s gone to hell. I came for Abby and for—for—”

“Oh please!” Clayton said. “You don’t think I know? Felz, that incompetent nitwit, would like nothing more than to take over. Why do you think I stopped attending those shrink’s sessions? He was orchestrating it! Trying to get them to declare me insane so that he could have me deposed. Do I look crazy to you, Lucas? A mad scientist from a late-night creature feature? Do I really?”

Luke noted the itchy squint to his brother’s eyes, and the fatigued bags under them. His skin seemed too tight—it was as if a big metal key, same as on a wind-up toy soldier, was screwed into the back of his neck, twisting and twisting, pulling the flesh of his face to a sickening tautness.

Insane? Luke thought. Maybe not yet, but I’d say you’re within spitting distance.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Clayton said. “You go on and toddle up to the surface and tell Felz that. But don’t think that I blame you, Luke. Understand this: I pity you. This is far too immense for you to comprehend. Go now. Go. Let Alice take you, and don’t argue with me. We’re done here.”

“I don’t give a shit about Felz,” Luke said, a flash point of anger exploding in his chest. “I came here… Christ, Clay, you want the truth? I didn’t come here for you. You? You’re just a shitty, careless person whose last name I happen to share.”

Did Clayton’s expression change just a bit? A wounded wince?

“I’m here for what you might accomplish. For the people it could benefit. But now that I see all this… I’m not so sure. Hell, maybe you’ll figure out how to harness this stuff. But right now I’m getting a seriously fucked-up vibe here, okay? That’s all I was suggesting. We head topside and recalibrate. Then, if you want to come back down, I say fuck it. Fill your boots, asshole.”

Clayton smiled thinly. “You’re a better liar than you used to be. I’ll give you that.”

The men considered each other, neither talking. The guinea pig scratched at the cooler.

Luke thought: Westlake’s computer.

“Westlake said there was a hole in the station. In his lab.”

Clayton’s voice was laced with disdain. “Westlake said this? What a shock. Now, he did go crazy—nutty as squirrel turds, as our darling mother would have said.”

After listening to Westlake’s files, Luke wasn’t about to argue that the man hadn’t gone insane. But, having spent only a little time aboard the Trieste, Luke wasn’t about to blame him either. Luke told his brother about the sound files. The tests. Westlake and the hole.

“About these files, Lucas,” said Clayton, his scorn undisguised. “Tell me, did you hear anything besides Westlake’s voice?”

“There were… knocks.”

“Knocks. Uh-huh.”

Luke bit back a jeering rejoinder. Hadn’t he dismissed Westlake’s claims himself, just hours ago? Mocked them as Clayton was mocking them now?

“Why don’t we give them a listen? You tell me what you hear.”

Luke was convinced Clayton would dismiss the offer out of hand; instead, he surprised Luke by nodding curtly and saying: “Fine, show me.”

6.

THE MAIN LAB was unoccupied.

“Al?” Luke called out. “Hey, Al!”

Silence from the tunnels leading into the lab. How long had he been in Clay’s lab? Less than a half hour? Luke now felt treacherous for leaving Alice out here all alone, but he wouldn’t have gained entry into Clayton’s lab any other way.

His ears caught the buzz emanating from behind Westlake’s door. The sound crested and ebbed, the sonic equivalent of waves crashing on a beach.

“You’re sure that hatch isn’t going to open?” Luke asked.

Clayton shook his head. “Password protected. Our labs are meant to be bastions of privacy. If we wanted to share research, we did so out here.”

Luke turned from Westlake’s lab; it continued to exert an uncomfortable pull on his thoughts—insistent fingers tickling his forehead, seeking entrance.

He faced the viewing window. The sea was endless and hungering. It stirred a childlike fear in Luke: the dread of getting lost in the dark only to find yourself prey to whatever creatures made a home of that inhospitable element.

“Turn the lights on, will you?” Luke said.

Clayton switched on the spots. Twenty yards of sea floor was washed in a skeletal pall.

Something moved at the edge of the light… or had it flinched? Skittishly fled? No, it hadn’t really done that, had it? When you prod a snail with a stick, it will retreat inside its shell. Things react that way when they’re scared.

But the things occupying the mammoth sea beyond the window weren’t startled; Luke was sure of that much. If they were there at all, if they weren’t just fabrications of his overheated brain, then they had merely withdrawn—the shadowy fluttering of black scarves wavering through the water—because for the moment, they preferred to remain hidden.

“It’s not dangerous,” he heard Clayton say. “Not if you respect it.”

Luke turned to find Clay’s cold mineral eyes trapping his own.

LUKE LED CLAYTON to Westlake’s chambers. He opened the laptop on the cot. The screen was black. He pushed a few letter keys. It remained stolidly black.

Did the battery die? It still had plenty of juice when he’d shut it down last.

Stupid goddamn thing. He pressed the start button with increasing irritation. The computer screen remained obstinately black.

“I’m telling you, Clay. This was working a few hours ago.”

“Oooookay. Well, it’s not working now. And whatever’s on it isn’t the proof you believe it to be anyway.”

Luke wanted to put his fist through the fucking screen. It would feel so damn good—a release of the poisonous tension pulsing behind the bones of his face. Put his fist through it, and then plant that same fist square in his brother’s smug mouth. He wouldn’t be expecting that, would he? Fuckin-a right. It’d be so easy. His fist pistoning until Clay’s skull was nothing but a bowl of red mush, Luke laughing and laughing, his lips flecked with blood.

Luke recoiled, snorting like a man who’d been given smelling salts.

Where had those thoughts come from?

He’d never perpetrated premeditated violence on another person in his life. Yet he’d seen himself doing it. His fist slamming down again and again. His eyes alight with mad glee. An insectile buzz invading his mind as he nursed crude animalistic impulses… .

Clayton was scrutinizing him now. “You all right, brother?”

“Yeah.” Luke laughed coldly. “Just pissed this thing won’t work.”

“Down here, it’s unwise to let your emotions get out of hand.”

Are you coming down with a case of the sea-sillies, El Capitán? His mother’s mocking voice. You weren’t built for rough water, sailor.

Luke shut his eyes and squeezed her out of his head.

7.

THEY FOUND ALICE in the main lab. She was once again staring at Westlake’s hatch.

Her skin had a sickly pallor—cadaverous was the word that sprang into Luke’s mind—her eyes peering out of her cored sockets with bovine confusion. Her lips moved, reciting words or phrases Luke could not make out.

She ran a hand over the hatch… intimately, somehow searchingly. Luke could hear snatches of her speech now.

“I want to… yes, oh yes, I’d love to…”

Luke said: “Al?”

Her hand circled the hatch, tracing odd patterns. Her fingers fell to the keypad.

Clayton flicked a switch, bathing the lab in a harsh wash of halogen light. Al blinked, disoriented. In that moment her face held a wrathful, almost murderous look—the look of a person awoken from a dream she wished would never end.

Luke said: “You okay, Al?”

Al swiped her palm across her nose, a childlike gesture.

“Never better, Doc. Feelin’ fine like cherry wine.”

Luke peered out the window. Those inky scarves unfurled beyond the spotlights. A wave of panic rose in him. He tasted it: the tang of pure dread, acrid as the juice in a springtime leaf.

Get out of here, he thought wildly. You have to convince Al to leave.

“Alice, listen… Do things feel a bit hinky down here? I’m asking because you’ve spent years underwater. Maybe it’s just me.”

Al pulled her gaze away from Westlake’s lab with what seemed like a great, almost Herculean effort. Somewhat reluctantly, she nodded. “It’s not just you.”

Luke pointed to Westlake’s lab. “Something happened in there, I’m pretty sure. Something… not good. For all I know, it’s still happening.”

Clayton grunted dismissively. Luke ignored him.

“And oh yeah—Clayton showed me something very interesting.”

“Don’t you say a word,” Clayton snapped.

“Oh, screw off, Clay,” Luke said casually. “Al, you should give Clay a round of applause. Why? Well, my brilliant, brainy brother was able to cure a guinea pig of what is commonly viewed as a terminal condition. A condition known in the veterinary biz as getting its fucking head cut off.”

He told Al everything. The ambrosia, the shears, the blood-tentacles. About Westlake’s files, too. The hole.

“Is this true?” Al asked Clayton.

Clayton said: “The ambrosia, you mean? Yes. It’s a remarkable substance. But regarding this hole my brother keeps babbling about?” Clayton rotated his finger around his ear, the universal gesture for loony.

“That does sound a little nuts,” Al said to Luke with a charitable smile. “And Westlake… well.”

“I never claimed it was sane,” Luke said defensively. “I think it’s… symptomatic, maybe. Of what’s happening down here—how this place tears at your head. Westlake went nuts, fine. A hole in the wall is impossible. I thought so, too. But maybe the Trieste or whatever, it caved in his mind.”

Al nodded sympathetically—but to Luke it seemed too much like the pinched, dismissive nod someone would offer a raving bag lady.

“Some people aren’t built for this,” she said. “Doesn’t matter how smart they are or how rugged in every other way. This is a specific kind of pressure, and you can’t toughen yourself against it.”

“How do you feel, Luke?” Clayton asked with mock concern.

“This from the guy who’s walking around in his sleep, sending up pleading transmissions.” Luke’s voice rose to a reedy falsetto. “Oh brother, oh brother, where art thou my brother—I neeeeeeeds you!”

Clayton’s jaw tightened. “I did no such thing. I’d as soon have called for a janitor.”

Luke turned to Al, refusing to be baited into a fight. “I told Clay we should head up. Just until we can get a grip on what’s happening down here.”

“I can understand how this may come as a shock,” said Clayton, recovering his poise. “The things I’ve discovered are daunting. Frightening, even. But imagine living in the shadow of a dormant volcano. It’s scary at first… but you get used to it. People do it all the time. They exist under perpetual threat. And there’s so much work to be done here. Up there”—he pointed toward the surface—“people are suffering. Dying. They need us to stay here. To be strong and persevere. Surely you understand that?”

Oh please, you sententious bastard, Luke thought. You only care about yourself and your research, same as it ever was.

“What about the animals?” Clay continued. It was the first time he’d referred to them as anything but specimens. “If we go, we’ll have to leave them. And Dr. Toy, as well, who could destroy the station in our absence. Can we really take that risk?”

“What’s to stop him from destroying it right now?” Luke shot back.

“Maybe us just being here?” Al said reasonably. “There’s nothing in Toy’s quarters that he could use to wreck this place—but if we leave, giving him full run…”

Luke was dismayed to see that Al was taking his brother’s side on this.

“So we lock the hatches,” Luke said. “Can’t we do that? Can’t we—”

“Look, I told you I’m not leaving,” Clay said simply. “There’s too much to do, and too little time left. As I keep telling you—do whatever you want.”

A sense of despair had settled under Luke’s skin, itching like pink fiberglass insulation. Al held the deciding vote.

“Fuck it,” Al said after a spell. “Dr. Nelson, no disrespect, but Luke’s got a point. I think things may be on the verge of a catastrophic fuckup.”

Clayton impassively regarded Al. “I’ve spoken my piece.”

“Fuck it,” Al said again. “Luke, let’s go talk to topside operations. Dr. Nelson, I want you to stay where I can find you.”

“I’ll be in my lab,” Clayton said.

He turned his back to them. He was singing another nursery rhyme as he retreated into his lab.

“Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home; your house is on fire, your children all gone…”

8.

LUKE AND LB FOLLOWED AL to the storage area. They shimmied through the crawl-through chute. It was easier this time. Al caught LB as she rocketed awkwardly out of the chute; she licked her face appreciatively. Luke came last. They continued on to reach the storage tunnel hatch. Al spun the wheel; there was a steady hiss as the pressure abated.

“Hold the door for a sec, Luke. I don’t want us getting locked in again.”

She hunted around until she found a used air-purification canister. “Okay, come on through.”

LB hesitated—she’d been locked in the tunnel for Lord knows how long—before resignedly slipping through the doorway. Al wedged the canister in and let the hatch close under its own weight; it crimped the canister slightly but left the door propped open a few inches.

“That’ll hold,” she said. “Unless someone kicks it loose.”

“Who would do that?”

Al tilted her head—an analytical insurance adjuster’s gaze.

“I spent a lot of time with Westlake,” she said. “We trained together. Eight, ten hours a day. Most eggheads have got their head in the clouds or up their own clueless asses. Westlake was different. On the level. Even keel.”

Al headed down the storage tunnel. Luke followed. The cold locked around his limbs almost immediately, as if it had been waiting to embrace him again.

“Point being,” she continued, “Westlake and I got on. Your brother and Dr. Toy were all business. Westlake was different—normal. And he was still pretty normal down here, at least at first. In fact he seemed better than normal.”

“Better how?”

Al shrugged as if to say it was hard to explain. But she tried.

“Training was intense, right? It ground us all down—all but your brother, who seems sorta cyborgish. I’d expected Westlake’s furlough down here to wear on him. Doctor Toy really struggled in training; he almost didn’t make it down, in fact. We nearly replaced him. And like I said before, you can’t do mental push-ups to prepare yourself—you’ve either got that tolerance or you don’t. So we were surprised to see that when Westlake first got down, he actually seemed brighter, stronger, healthier. I couldn’t pinpoint it, but it was a change. Maybe not a good one, either.”

“What do you mean?”

They’d made it around the gooseneck, forging down the tunnel toward the Challenger’s entry hatch.

“I mean, just different. Something off in his eyes. His movements were weird, jerky, on the monitors. That is to say, before all the screens went blank. When we were topside, Westlake had a sense of what the ambrosia might be able to do… but he was skeptical. Once he got down, that changed. At his psych appointments—which were delivered remotely from a special room down here, every two days at the outset—it was all he’d talk about. The miracle agent, he called it. A kind of mania invaded him. And then he went AWOL. Stopped attending his psych appointments. Stopped being visible on the monitors. He just… poof. Vanished.”

Al shook her head. “And then you tell me Westlake was raving about holes in the station and other assorted bat-shittery. I’m not judging—I think I get it now. Luke, I need to ask: when you fell asleep down here, did you dream?”

Luke’s footsteps faltered. The phantom children raced overhead, their own footsteps keeping pace with the rapid beat of his heart.

“Did you?” she repeated.

“Yes,” he said finally. “A nightmare. The worst I can ever recall.”

Al nodded with a grim look of commiseration and of understanding. In the gloom, her teeth were gray: a row of tiny tombstones.

Luke told her about his dream. He trusted Al, and was emboldened by her forthrightness. He told her about Zach, the ambrosia, the eyes. He didn’t tell her what happened to his son that day in the park (which had been the reason the dream hadn’t just scared him—it hurt him, too), but it felt good, necessary, to disburden himself.

He kept the sleepwalking episode to himself. He needed her to trust him. She needed to trust that he had things on lockdown… because he did have things on lockdown, pretty much at least, and was going to keep it that way.

“I managed to catch a few minutes of shut-eye,” said Al. “I had a nightmare, same as you.”

She leaned against the tunnel. The wall seemed to belly inward around her body—opening up like a toothless mouth.

Stand up, quickly, Luke wanted to say. Get away from it.

But that would sound crazy. Like he didn’t have things on lockdown.

“I spent three years aboard the USS Kingfisher,” Al said. “A nuclear attack sub. We were on tactical maneuvers. Routine stuff. I was junior lieutenant, tactical armaments. We suffered an electrical malfunction. We lost power. Total blackness at three hundred feet underwater. Then we were hit with a power surge. One of the two main engines blew out. Exploded, more or less.”

Luke said, “God, I can barely imagine.”

“So when the engine blew, our team evacuated into the maneuvering room and locked the hatch. But there was this kid, Eldred Henke. Nineteen years old. He got trapped in the hallway. I tried to open the hatch, but the locks had engaged. The kid hammered his fists on the porthole until his knuckles broke. Another explosion rocked us as the turbine blew. The wall beside Eldred tore apart like a tin can. Bits of the superheated turbine, screws and rivets and what all, blew through the ripped steel and buried into him. He slammed into the far wall and reeled like a drunk. This thin metal rod was stuck through his throat. Bolts and whatever else had ripped his cheeks open. I could see inside his face, places nobody ought to see. Next the hull caved and the sea rushed in. I saw it all. I was safe. The current carried him out lickety-split. The kid disappeared like he’d been sucked out of an airplane cruising at twenty-five thousand feet.”

Luke digested this, then said: “Al, there’s nothing you could have done. Surely you understand that.”

“No, I get that.”

“I mean, if I nailed myself to the wall every time I couldn’t save someone’s dog or cat—”

“I think this is a little different, Doc.”

“I’m just saying that guilt carves you up, right? Things happen sometimes and there’s no way to fix it—in the moment, or any time after. But no creature is more adept at putting themselves up on that cross than human beings.”

She nodded, accepting Luke’s logic. “The thing is, I used to dream about that kid. But those dreams weren’t so bad, because in them I wrenched the hatch open and yanked him through just before the sea poured in. Those dreams were bittersweet, sure, because some part of my subconscious knew there was a cream-colored headstone in a cemetery in Eldred’s hometown with his name etched on it.”

“But the dream you had down here wasn’t like that, was it?” Luke said. “The dream you had here was worse.”

She nodded reluctantly—her face looked softer and almost girlish in the queer light of the tunnel.

“Much worse,” she said.

The dream had the same setup, she told Luke. Eldred was trapped behind the hatch. Al was torqueing the hatch-wheel—and same as in real life, it wasn’t budging. Then the turbine blew and that shower of superheated rubble hit the kid. Except in the dream, Alice noticed something else. There was… stuff… mixed in with the rubble. A glittering patina in the air.

“The ambrosia,” Luke said softly. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

“Ding ding ding. Give the man a prize,” Al said.

Alice dreamed it in down to the tiniest detail—every pore on the kid’s face. He started to shriek. Why? Because of the bits of metal spiked in his flesh or the ambrosia? She could hear him screaming through the hatch. Fluttery, boyish screams.

“Which is impossible, right?” she said. “Those hatches are soundproof.”

“You don’t have to tell me any more,” Luke said.

“Don’t I?” Alice said wretchedly.

Next, the dream got real funny. Not ha-ha funny. Funny-awful. Eldred’s skin… it healed. Or only sort of. The metal was pushed out of it, the wounds shrinking, then disappearing altogether. He stayed that way for a heartbeat, his skin flawless, then the wounds opened up again, even though there was no cause for it. It was like watching his face get torn open by invisible surgeons with terrible intentions.

“Or like watching the most awful movie,” Alice said, “rewinding it and playing it again.”

Next the sea rushed in and carried Eldred down. And Alice knew the kid would keep suffering… but he’d never quite die. He’d keep falling into the dark but he’d live on—and in an agony like no human has ever known.

“The worst part is this,” she said. “Before Eldred’s sucked out, as his body’s swirling out that rip in the sub, he catches my eye. And he says—and I hear this clearly: You did this to me. This is your fault, Alice Sykes. Goddamn you to hell.”

She leaned forward miserably, cradling her skull in her palms. LB padded over and settled her head on Al’s knee.

“This station,” Luke said. “I don’t know what’s going on. It’s in the air, in the metal. Alice, it’s the most awful place I’ve ever set foot inside.”

“Clearly you’ve never felt the need to take a piss at a dog-racing track,” Al said with forced levity.

Luke smiled, appreciating her efforts. “There’s two possibilities,” he said. “One, something unexplainable is happening down here. Or two, and by far and away the more reasonable possibility—”

“Is that we’re going a bit batty,” said Al. “Jesus, Luke, we just showed up. This is a cup of coffee compared to the hitches I’ve pulled.”

“This isn’t a sub. It’s a different animal entirely, isn’t it?”

Alice ran her hand over her stubbled skull. “I’m inclined to agree with you. Bad enough to make Dr. Toy flip his lid. And Dr. Westlake, God rest his soul.”

With strange serenity, the two of them sat with the fact that they could be sunk neck deep into a case of the sea-sillies—or were perhaps even coming down with the preliminary manifestations of the ’Gets. It made more sense to believe they were going crazy or falling prey to the ’Gets than to believe that… well, any other logic was not logic at all. It was total insanity.

“Your brother could be suffering, too,” said Al. “He may just wear it differently.”

Dr. Toy’s words floated through Luke’s mind: You are not who you are.

9.

THEY REACHED THE CHALLENGER.

Al said: “Stay here. Keep an eye out for Dr. Toy or your brother. Although I don’t think you’ll see them. I’ll try to get a signal up to the Hesperus. I’m not ready to pack up shop down here yet—too much on the line for that.”

Luke grudgingly nodded. He’d already come 8,008 miles—the last eight miles straight down—and he didn’t want to leave quite yet, either. He could withstand the pressure a bit longer, couldn’t he?

Al opened the hatch and slipped through. The hatch closed and locked.

Luke crouched beside LB. She chuffed, a doggy hack, and gave him a look that said: What are we doing here, boss?

“Stuck in a holding pattern, girl.”

Somewhat stunningly, Luke didn’t find it at all weird that he’d be talking to a dog. LB could well be the sanest creature down here. She set a foreleg on Luke’s knee and rested her head on his thigh.

“It’s okay,” he said. The reassurance felt cold.

A faint humming filled his ears. The feverish drone of flies hovering over a heap of shit was the revolting mental image that hum kindled. He didn’t hear it so much as feel it—the hum radiated from his bones.

The crushing pressure of the station sucked to him like a second skin. It entered his clothes, stabbing through the material; he felt as if he were wrapped in bands of sinew while a huge muscle contracted, splitting his every vein—

LB licked his cheek. The tang of her breath was bracing.

The hatch opened and Al reappeared.

“There’s no power.”

A storm of busted glass blew through Luke’s chest. “What?”

“No power, Luke. Nada. The Challenger’s out of juice.”

“How the hell did that happen?”

“No idea. I didn’t leave the fucking headlights on, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Luke flinched at the tone of her voice.

“There was plenty of juice when I left her. Now I can’t even get a charge off the glow plugs. I couldn’t stay inside too long—it’s pitch-dark and freezing cold. But that’s not all. I found something on the Edison.”

“What’s that?”

“A stock ticker. Last-ditch communication method. It runs off a pair of nine-volt batteries. If the power goes, it’ll still feed communiqués through.”

She handed him a ribbon of paper, same as the stuff that used to fall during a ticker-tape parade. Luke read the words on it in a gathering swell of dread:

“It hardly matters,” said Alice. “The Challenger’s kaput. I sent a message back through the Edison, but they won’t be able to do anything until the ring clears. It’s as powerful as a tornado, and it’ll make mincemeat out of any vessel they send down.”

“How long will that take?”

“How long will the rain fall? How long will the wind blow? It’s nature, Doc. It doesn’t operate on a clock.”

“You said the last current ring was in place for…?”

“About two weeks.”

Two… weeks. The thought of spending that much time inside the guts of the Trieste… No. It was unthinkable.

Luke opened his mouth to ask the question—Are you saying there’s no way to get off this station?—but Al’s expression answered it well enough.

“Can we route electricity from someplace else to power up the Challenger? I mean, in case the ring clears? Do we have a portable generator?”

Al considered it. “We do have a genny, yeah, and it could work. Draw off the main power source, but we couldn’t overdo it—a blowout could black out the whole station, and then we’re royally screwed.”

The Trieste in total darkness. Christ. Luke couldn’t even contemplate it.

“If we fed enough juice into the Challenger, we could make a low-power ascent,” she said. “Providing the current ring clears, or even slackens a little. We’d need enough juice to run the oxygen pumps, a few key utilities. We could surface fifty miles from the Hesperus, we could run into the trench wall, or steer right into the ring. Or…”

“Or what?”

“Well, I could steer us through the heart of the ring. The water is calmest there, but it’s an eye-of-the-needle maneuver.”

“But you could do it?”

Al actually smiled. “Believe it or not, I’ve done crazier things.”

“I believe it, Al. So let’s find that fucking generator.”

“Okay. But we need to head to the communications room first. Maybe I can get in proper contact with the Hesperus from there.”

They backtracked toward the wedged-open door. Luke glanced over his shoulder, certain he’d heard something—a rustling like a giant moth flapping its wings.

But there was nothing. Was there…?

A gelatinous shimmer along the ceiling—a glittery snail trail that, even as Luke watched, dimmed to nothingness.

We’re trapped, he thought. Bugs in a kill jar.

“Come on, girl,” he said to the dog. LB needed no prodding—she was already at his side.

10.

THE HATCH WAS CLOSING as they rounded the gooseneck.

Luke heard the canister pop from where it’d been wedged with a chilling tink. Al had already broken into a run. Luke could see the lip of light beyond the hatch thinning by heart-stopping degrees.

Alice dove like an outfielder laying out to catch a long fly ball. She struck the hatch with a muffled thump and let out a strangled squawk. When Luke reached her, he saw that she’d managed to jam her left hand between the frame and the hatch door.

“Push it open.” Al’s voice was calm but her face was white. “Quick.”

Luke rocked the hatch open a few inches; its weight was immense, as though something was pushing from the other side. Al snatched her hand out and cradled it to her chest. Luke assessed the damage. There were twenty-seven bones in the human hand. It looked as if Al had broken more than a few of them.

“Let me see what you’ve done,” Luke said.

Her pinkie was bent at an unnatural angle, her middle finger snapped amidships. The dent in the back of her hand was a clear indication that some of the bones of her palm had been crushed. Her hand looked as if it had been compacted—as if something had set its considerable weight against the hatch and shoved with merciless pressure.

“There goes my juggling career,” Al said, her face greasy with shock.

Luke saw the dislodged air canister. He’d watched Al wedge it in. Its metal was dimpled where she’d rocked the hatch shut against it, pinning the canister firmly in place. Still, it had popped out. Had the tunnel heaved slightly—a sensation unfelt by Luke—to knock it loose?

Or had somebody jarred it free?

“Where’s a first-aid kit?” he asked.

“Should… should be one in the communications room.”

Luke helped her up. Al was running on shock and adrenaline at the moment; before long the pain would set in.

“Come on,” she grunted.

She stumbled from the storage area and stopped at another hatch set in the tunnel wall, about fifty yards shy of the crawl-through chute.

“You’re gonna have to open it, Doc. Can’t manage right this second.”

Luke cranked the wheel. The hatch opened into a tight passageway. He followed Al in, LB following them. The tunnel was strung with hatchways—four, by Luke’s count. He figured this was a central hub, branching out to other sections of the Trieste.

A red X had been slashed across the porthole window of one hatch. Luke remembered reading about when the Black Plague swept across Europe, red X’s had appeared on doors of houses—this place is infected, steer clear.

After a dogleg, they reached the communications room.

Al said: “What in fucking blue hell happened here?”

The room was tiny. The overhead lights were smashed, but enough light leaked through from the tunnel to see by. A bank of monitors occupied one wall, labeled Lab N, Lab W, Pure, Sleep, and so on.

“Looks like someone didn’t want to be watched,” said Luke.

Nine of the ten monitors had been shattered. It looked like an act committed in a violent frenzy. Glass was scattered on the floor. Luke shooed LB away, fearing she’d get a shard in her paw.

The final monitor—marked Pure—was unbroken, but dead and gray; Luke walked over to it; his swollen reflection played over the screen’s convex surface.

“The comm link’s busted,” Al said. “Fuck me, Freddy.”

She pointed to the snapped and skinned remains of the sea-to-surface radio. The receiver was broken neatly in half, the wires stripped out.

Luke said, “You think this was done recently?”

“I can’t tell. Whoever did it… I mean, they were fucking anal about it. Dr. Toy’s the strongest candidate for this shit. Or maybe Westlake, before he surfaced? Your brother, even?”

Luke pictured Clayton wielding a bone mallet, destroying the monitors in a state of controlled wrath. The steely calm in his eyes as he methodically stripped the wires from the receiver, stranding everybody down here so that he could study in peace.

“Yes,” Luke whispered. “It’s conceivable.”

Conceivable, if insane. If Clayton or Toy didn’t want to be in contact with topside operations, okay, don’t answer their calls—there was no need to destroy their only link to the surface. What if an emergency arose?

Lucas, nobody is coming to get you.

Shut up, Mom, Luke thought, bristling at the sound of her voice in his head. Shut the hell up. Who asked you, anyway? If I wanted your opinion, I’d visit your grave site.

Al winced, cradling her mangled hand to her chest.

“Hey, let’s get your hand looked at,” Luke said, figuring it was best to keep busy.

Good idea, Lucas, said Bethany Ronnicks. As they say, idle hands are the devil’s workshop.

The first-aid kit was clipped to the wall. Luke opened it and snapped on a pair of surgical gloves.

“Lay your hand on the console,” he said. “I’m going to splint your fingers, then tape them together. Fair warning, though: this’ll hurt like hell.”

Al nodded wryly. “Vicodin, Vicodin, my kingdom for a Vicodin.”

Al yelped when Luke set her pinkie bones. He did it as quickly as he could, but still, he could feel the broken edges of bone grinding.

“Sorry. I’ve done this before, but to cats or dogs.”

“You’re… eeeyyyash!” Al hissed through gritted teeth. “Yup, yup, you’re doing a bang-up job. Keep going.”

Luke cut a length of splint tape and wrapped it around her pinkie. The ring finger was only badly swollen; Luke taped those two fingers together.

“Your middle finger got it the worst. It’s broken down near the knuckle.”

“Does that mean I won’t be able to flip the bird anymore?”

“Depending on how it heals, you may not be able to bend it at all. So you might always be flipping the bird. Hold on—this is gonna hurt like a fuckofabitch.”

Al picked up the broken receiver and jammed it between her teeth.

Luke had to pop the finger up to set the bone. It took three hard tugs. On the third, Al’s jaw clenched so hard that the black plastic cracked between her canines.

Luke tore open a roll of gauze to wrap Al’s hand, in hopes of keeping all the little nicks free from infection.

“You’re good to go.”

The lone monitor fired to life. Their heads jerked in unison.

The monitor was labeled Pure. The O₂ purification chamber.

“Do you see that?” Al whispered.

The camera angle offered a long view of the chamber: light pulsed at the entrance, but trailed to shadows at the far end. Luke squinted.

Nothing definite. Slow, insistent, rhythmical—movement that reminded Luke of kelp strands drifting in a night tide.

A red warning light began to flash on the console.

Two words were stamped below the warning light.

The first was Oxy.

The second, Low.

“Oh, good Christ,” Al said as she sprinted out of the room.

11.

LUKE CAUGHT UP WITH HER in the passageway. She stood before one of the four hatches leading to unknown areas of the Trieste.

“This is the one. Can you open it?” she said.

“What’s happening?”

“You saw the light, right? We’re losing oxygen. The system monitors the amount of CO₂; when the concentrations get too high, it gives a warning.”

“That’s it? A little light flashing in some room?”

“Usually there’d be an alarm. But the system could be screwy. The door, Doc. Hurry.”

Luke threw his weight against the wheel. The hatch cracked open with a tortured squeal. The tunnel beyond was narrower than anything Luke had seen so far. A weak welter of light spread across the ceiling, as if sickly fireflies were trapped inside it.

“Leave the dog, Doc. It’s safer right here.”

Luke agreed. “Stay, girl.”

LB regarded Luke worriedly—afraid he’d leave, the way everyone else had.

“I’ll be back. I promise.”

The dog didn’t seem very reassured, but obediently stood her ground.

THEY STEPPED into the tight passageway.

Luke shut the hatch behind him, and his ears popped. He immediately became aware of the oxygen quality: stale and cool, not unlike the ancient air in a subterranean cave.

They inched through the diseased trickle of light. The walls hugged their bodies lovingly; the metal seemed to breathe as they moved forward.

“How far do we go?” he asked.

Al grunted. “I dunno. I’ve never been in here.”

Luke could barely see his fingers in front of his face. The walls brushed his hips; the passage was tapering ahead of them but also, as he sensed it, behind them. He could almost hear the tunnel issuing sly snaps and crunches as it crimped, the steel folding like onionskin.

The air tasted horrible. Not just stale—infused with the taste of dead things. They could’ve been in the mouth of some enormous monster, picking their way along teeth hung with rotted meat. Adrenaline twined up from Luke’s feet; it crawled into his chest and forced his breath out in harsh, plosive pops.

“Fuckin’—what the…?” Al said.

“What is it?” said Luke.

“Dead end.”

Spiders crawled over the dome of his skull as a skittish panic rushed over him—an unaccountable fear that reminded him of being a child in Iowa, walking down a lonely country road at night as headlights bloomed over the curve of the earth behind him, conjuring an uneasiness that would linger until the car had passed, the red embers of its taillights dimming around a curve.

“It’s not a cave-in,” Al said. “The wall is sheer.” Her feet shuffled. “There’s space at the bottom. Back up, will you?”

The walls pushed at Luke’s spine—an adoring suction like the mouth of a hungry lover. He managed to clear enough space for Al to get down on all fours.

“There’s something down here,” Al said, knocking her fist around. “Same as a crawl-through, really, but it feels even smaller… an access chute, I’d say. Could be that the air passes through a series of filters or what-the-fuck above the chute. I don’t remember the schematics.”

“Can we get through it?”

“We’ll have to wriggle—and pray there’s no grate at the other end—but yeah… it’s doable. It’s the only way into the purification room.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah. That I do remember from the schematics.”

“And there’s absolutely no other…?”

“Doc, hey. Not trying to be an asshole here, but this is it. No alternative.”

“Okay.” Luke vented a shaky breath. “Fine. Fine.”

“I’d let you stay here, but I may need help,” she said. “My hand’s fucked.”

Luke exhaled heavily. “Go on. I’ll follow.”

Al’s body bumped into the tube. Her elbows and knees made no noise at all—it was as if she were crawling through a hole carved into a mountainside.

“You coming, Luke?”

He knelt. His knees and feet were pressed tightly together, the knobs of his anklebones touching. It felt as though the tunnel behind him was no longer an O, but had been crimped into a V: a pair of jaws closing by degrees, forcing him forward if he didn’t want to be crushed.

The air changed once again as he entered the chute: heavier, sickeningly moist. He worked his way forward on his belly, bucking his hips in a clumsy humping motion.

“Dig those moves,” he said, hoping the sound of his voice might drive away the onrushing panic. “Liquid hips, baby, liquid hips.”

The tube reduced his voice to a hysterical warble. After a few feet, his arms were pinned to his sides. He could barely move them, other than to spider-crawl his fingers along the inside of the chute. How the hell was Al managing to do the same with her broken mitt? She was smaller than Luke, more nimble. The tube was coated in a thin layer of oil, but instead of making it easier to move—as it did in the crawl-through chute—it had the opposite effect: Luke felt like an insect gummed on a strip of flypaper.

“Al? Hey, Al?”

When the reply finally arrived, it held a funny echo:

“Luke… uke… uke…”

He wriggled forward, his breath coming in hot gasps. He adopted a peristaltic wave, the way a maggot gets around: toes, then calves, then thighs, then ass, then hips; this movement netted a few inches at a go. Al grunted in exertion somewhere ahead. The chute tightened as Luke forged deeper into it. His nose raked the metal, which was pebbled with rough bumps—Luke envisioned a huge greasy tongue covered with diseased nodules.

It’s okay, okayokayokay. Even the voice in his head sounded hysterical now. Al’s made it through; you can bet she’s already waiting in the purification room. You just need to get a few more feet and you’ll be there, too.

And then? Well damn, he’d just have to turn around and do it all over again.

Don’t think about that. Just take it inch by inch.

His shoulders jammed.

Pushing with his heels did nothing—he was stuck, his body pinned. He couldn’t budge; his heels drummed a helpless tat-a-tat. His lungs constricted as darkness poured into them.

Was the chute shrinking? It pressed on the back of his skull with an insistent, menacing weight—it would keep pressing, slowly and remorselessly, until the bones of his face collapsed.

It’s a bend, Luke. Just a little bend in the tube, for God’s sake.

Suddenly he felt it: the chute was pressing into his right-hand side, but there was a little space on the left. Luke torqued his elbows and bucked his hips, squirming onto his side. His spine followed the bend of the tube now. He could breathe shallowly again.

He pushed against the chute with his feet, which slipped on its greasy coating. Incrementally, fighting for inches, he propelled his torso around the bend.

The air before his eyes burst with puffs of cottony light. Those puffs were a manifestation of exertion, panic, and a lack of breathable air—he was gasping now, the onset of a claustrophobic attack.

He’d never been prone to that. Crowded elevators and windowless rooms had never bothered him. But now he was eight miles underwater—Eight miles! Eight miles! his mind parroted idiotically—in a chute that felt like it was being compressed in a vise. The sea was held back by nothing more than a fragile shell. He heard, or believed he could hear, the subtlest creaks as the water exerted its bone-smashing force… except it wouldn’t smash his bones, would it? No, it would do something else entirely. He’d be crushed into a cube, like a car at a wrecking yard. It was highly unlikely that his body would be compressed into anything so neatly geometric, but that was the image his mind settled around.

Dap-dap-dap-dap-dap—those nightmare children dashing overhead, the bloated pads of their feet only an inch from his face now.

He wriggled his shoulders, clenched his fists, and inched onward. He was bathed in sick sweat; his thighs chafed. He couldn’t hinge his knees more than a few inches. His lungs burned, packed with hot rivets.

Why had he done this? How could he have been such a fool?

It was torturous to breathe—were his sinuses constricting? What if the chute narrowed until he couldn’t move another millimeter—what if he caught up to Al, who’d gotten stuck herself, his head butting her heels? What if she told him the exit was grated? Could they get out? Luke didn’t think so. Moving forward was hard enough; moving backward would be impossible. They would die in the chute like rats trapped in a heating duct.

…whush, whush, whush…

The sound floated out of the darkness, dancing delicately up his calves, slipping around his skull and into his ears.

…whush, whush…

That insistent, unpleasantly familiar sound.

NonononononoNO—

He was nearly around the bend in the chute; he’d been progressing in centimeters, in millimeters, in

—millipedes—

the smallest increments, but he was making headway. His hips were clear; in a minute or so he’d be able to work around the bend and really boogie.

But something was inside the chute with him now.

Whush-tikatikatikatikatikatika-whush, whush…

He could picture it behind him… twenty feet long, thick and sinuous, its feelers dancing lightly along the mouth of the tube. Its exoskeleton throbbing with moody colors; under that armor its guts were as soft and featureless as mashed bananas. Its compound eyes pulsing with alien hunger.

The millipede was inside the chute with him, its million-skillion legs tapping as it advanced gradually but with complete ease—tubes were its natural habitat, weren’t they?

Luke tensed, every muscle quivering. His heart hammered at his rib cage. The fear paralyzed him—his body, his mind. Finally he began to move. Hips bucking, feet shoving. But his body just uselessly accordioned. He felt like a worm stuck in the barrel of a clear, cheap ballpoint pen. Panic chewed his brain into pulp, rendering him stupid with fear.

Bug! yelped a giddy voice from his lizard brain, obliterating every last vestige of calm. Bug! Bug! Bug! BUG! BUUUG!

Whusha-whusha-tikatikatikatika…

He felt it now. At his feet. Its antennae—long and thick as extension cords—picked along the exposed skin of his ankles. Its mandibles gnashed like scissors. Its proboscis (they had those, didn’t they?) was a thick needle dripping venom.

Would it punch through the soles of his shoes, injecting poison into the pads of his feet while he thrashed helplessly? Would that poison kill him, or only paralyze him—would he feel it chewing through his boots, snipping off his toes like Jujubes and funneling them into the clotted hole of its mouth?

The sound switched direction—it was coming from ahead of him now.

Whush-whush-WHUSH…

Oh Jesus. Oh God no.

His feet would be bad enough, but for it to devour his head—its legs twitching through his hair as it scuttled over his forehead, his face, carrying the insectile stink of a roach nest, noxious nectars drooling out of its mouth as its mandibles fastened around the fragile nut of his skull, its proboscis injected through one twitching eyeball—

Bug! Bug! BugbugbugbugBUG!

Luke shook all over, screeching now, gripped by out-of-body terror. A vein of white-hot fire ripped up his spine as his overtaxed synapses detonated in his brainpan—

Fingers. Feelers.

Something was gripping his shoulders and was hauling him into—

12.

“IT’S OKAY, DOC! DOC! You’re out! You’re out.”

Luke lay on the floor of what must be the purification room. Grainy light trickled down the walls, illuminating the canisters screwed into them.

He tried to sit up. His body wouldn’t comply, his muscles limp as wrung dishrags. A tidal wave of embarrassment crashed over him. Mindless terror had cracked him right open inside the chute. And over what? There wasn’t a goddamn thing inside it except for the cloying stench of his fear.

“I’m sorry, Al. I… I lost my head for a second there.”

Al touched Luke’s shoulder. “I was jumpy by the time I made it out, too. Enclosed spaces, right?” She displayed her broken hand; the fingernail of her index finger was peeled back, hanging on a tenacious strip of skin. “I wrecked my hand some more, too. Thank God for adrenaline, huh?”

Luke swallowed the burnt-chalk taste in his mouth. “That stuff’s a godsend.”

Al walked to a control panel on the near wall and flipped it open with her good hand. “Sonofabitch… goddamnit, the relay chip’s missing.”

“What does that do?”

“Regulates the warning system, for one.”

Luke stood. “Did somebody take it?”

“I don’t see it laying around here anywhere, and I can’t see how it’d just pop out. I was thinking Dr. Toy might’ve taken it. Some nutty sabotage attempt. But would that bastard, no matter how rat-shit crazy he’s gone, go through what we just did to cut off his own air supply?”

“So… maybe we’re not losing air then?”

“Impossible to tell without that chip. Thankfully…”

Al forded deeper into the room. Luke trailed her. It was perhaps fifty steps long—the longest room Luke had been inside down here. Thousands of canisters were screwed into the walls. They glowed faintly, like enormous eggs.

At the very back of the room lay a lone crate. The size of an old army footlocker, fashioned from molded black plastic. Its latch shone silver in the dim.

Seeing it, Luke’s feet churned to a dead stop.

“Something the matter, Doc?”

“No,” Luke said. Jesus. Jesus Christ. “Nothing.”

He felt it then—his mind opening up, an inky blackness flowing into it. The room spun and swum as he slipped suddenly into a memory hole, his psyche funneling deep down a dream pool.

“You okay, Doc?”

Al’s voice was far off, swimmy. It’s fine, Luke tried to tell her. It’s nothing at all. It’s just… it’s just…

…just my old Tickle Trunk.

13.

HIS MOTHER HAD FOUND IT at Treasure Village, a flea market on the outskirts of Lake Okoboji.

It called out to me, she’d told Luke with a self-satisfied smile. It said: Pick me, Ms. Ronnicks. Pick me for Lucas. His very own Tickle Trunk. He’ll just adooore me.

Tickle Trunk. His friends had the same type of thing—except theirs were called toy boxes. But his mother insisted on the name, as she insisted on a great many things. A Tickle Trunk for my special boy, she’d said. A special place for all his ticklish things. She’d seen it at the flea market amid the ninja stars and chipped knickknacks—seen it and known. It must’ve shone like a beacon to her.

Oh, she would have thought, Luke will just die when he sees this.

The trunk was a nasty trick. Luke knew that right away. Exactly the sort of trick his mother liked to play from time to time to show who was boss. But of course she presented it as a gift, a token of love and affection.

Tickle Trunk. That name. Luke pictured a trunk lined with disembodied fingers—hundreds of them, callused and bony with nicotine-stained fingernails—and if he wasn’t careful those fingers would snatch him, drag him inside, and tickle and pinch him until he screamed…

The trunk appeared joyful. It was big enough that Luke’s seven-year-old body could fit inside, and was decorated with smiling clown faces. His mother urged him to name them, the same way Clayton would name his poor mice.

Look, there’s Chuckles, she’d say, pointing them out. And this one can be Koko. And there’s Mr. Tatters and Floppsy and Punkin Pie.

The trunk’s lid was rounded like that of a treasure chest. The clowns’ faces stretched over its top, as warped as reflections in a funhouse mirror. If you looked closer, you’d notice most of the clowns weren’t smiling so much as leering. Their lips were swollen and too red, as if they’d been painted with blood. And if you looked very closely, the lips of a few of those clowns—the ones his mother had named Bingo and Pit-Pat, specifically—were parted just slightly to disclose what looked like a row of discolored, daggery teeth.

The trunk had a huge silver latch. If you got trapped inside the trunk—if that were to happen somehow, accidentally or not—that latch would keep you locked in. Its interior smelled like the white balls Luke’s neighbor Mr. Rosewell scattered under his crabapple tree to keep mice away… that, plus another smell, impossible to name. The trunk was lined with cracked brown skin; Luke imagined it’d been stripped off an alligator, or a Komodo dragon. The skin was tacked inside the box with dull brass rivets.

Luke didn’t like the box. No, his feelings were stronger than that—he hated it on sight. He wondered if whoever had sold it to his mother had given her a steep discount just to get it off his hands.

Luke hadn’t wanted it in his room, which was of course where it ended up. His mother insisted.

Now you’ve got a spot for all your stuff, she said mock-brightly. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

He grudgingly threw his toys into it—all but his most precious ones, which he couldn’t imagine leaving inside. His foolish prepubescent self had been scared that when he closed the lid, the trunk would release an acid that would melt them into runny goo like beaten eggs; its lid would open and close, a pair of greedy lips, gummy strings of what had been his Matchbox cars and army men stretched between them.

Feed us, Lucas, he’d imagine it whispering in a guttural voice after all the houselights had been switched off. We’re so hungry. So hungry. Feed us any old thing; we don’t mind. It’s all meat. Come closer, why don’t you, so we can tell you what we really want…

He hated sleeping with it in his room. Clayton had been spending most nights down in his lab by then, so it was just Luke and the trunk and the shadows cast by the backyard maple bending over the walls.

Sometimes he’d awaken with a shudder and swear he’d heard the trunk moving on its casters: the sound of marbles rolling across a pane of glass.

He decided one night to mark the trunk’s edge with a piece of sidewalk chalk; the next morning, Luke discovered with fright that it had moved an inch over the line. Slowly but surely it was advancing toward his bed.

When he told Clayton, his brother smirked.

The floor is warped. The trunk is on wheels. Of course it rolls a little, dummy.

The next day, he dragged the Tickle Trunk down to the basement. His parents were both out. Clayton was supposed to watch Luke, but he’d left the house on a specimen hunt. It was Luke’s best chance to rid himself of it once and for all.

He hated touching the wormy grain of its wood, festooned with those capering clowns. As he’d backed down the staircase with it, the trunk sat heavily against his chest; its weight was dreadful, a slab of pulsating stone.

He dragged it across the kitchen linoleum and bumped it down the basement stairs. He dropped it, breathing heavily, and opened the crawl space door. A three-foot-tall storage room sprawled over half the basement. Inside were old boxes cowled in spider’s webs, full of stuff Luke’s parents had no use for but were loath to throw away.

He snapped on the lightbulb, which swayed on a knotted cord, and pushed the trunk past the crawl space door. He got on his hands and knees and pushed it farther inside. Dust motes swam in the air. His heart thumped; his mouth could’ve been packed with sawdust. He wanted to abandon the trunk at the very back of the crawl space. It seemed to have gained fifty pounds since he’d lugged it out of his bedroom.

Suddenly he pictured the crawl space lightbulb burning out, the door slamming shut, and the trunk lid popping open.

Alone at last. That guttural whisper—but real this time, not just in Luke’s mind. Come here, Lucas, and let us whisper in your ear. No? Okay, we’ll come to you…

Anxiety coated Luke’s brain in a suffocating glaze as he pushed it to the very back of the crawl space. It was early afternoon; sunlight streaked through a dirty casement window. If it weren’t for that fragile link to the outside world, Luke might not have gotten it that far.

He let go of its handle—for an instant his hands wouldn’t come unglued—and started back toward the door. The trunk sat in the fall of weak sunlight, bloated and sullen.

“There,” Luke said with a triumphant little smile. “You stay where you belong.”

That night, his mother forced him to go fetch it again. In the dark.

She’d immediately noticed it was missing. Luke was positive she had been waiting for Luke to try something sneaky. She crossed her enormous fat-girdled arms at the dinner table, eyeing him down.

“The trunk, Lucas. You’ve moved it.”

Luke didn’t look up from his plate. He pushed peas around with his fork. “I put it downstairs. It’s just, there’s not enough room. The trunk’s big and our bedroom, with me and Clay both in it, it’s really too—”

“What do you suggest? Move into a mansion?” Harsh, barking laughter. “Do you think your father could afford that?”

Luke swallowed, forced his head up.

“I don’t like it, Mom. I’m sorry. Thank you for buying it, but…”

Her mouth set in a hard line—it was the only part of her body that hadn’t gone permanently soft.

“You’ve hardly given it a chance. You will go downstairs, Lucas Adelaide Nelson. You will bring it up.”

The dread etched on his son’s face forced Luke’s father, Lonnie, to intervene.

“Beth, honey, do we really have to—?”

Lonnie’s objection died with a glance from his wife. He gathered his menthols and his cup of tea and slipped into the family room.

“What are you waiting for?” His mother’s arms remained crossed. “An engraved invitation?”

Luke sat rooted to his chair. It wasn’t a matter of wanting to move—he physically couldn’t. His mother gripped his wrist fiercely and marched him to the basement door.

“Go,” his mother said. “Now.”

Luke didn’t argue. He had a vague but dire notion that given reason, his mother could conjure torments worse than whatever the trunk held in store.

He trooped down the squeaky, swaybacked stairs. He waved his hand around until his fingers brushed the light cord. The bulb illuminated his father’s workbench, the water heater, and the door to Clayton’s unoccupied lab.

His mother shut the door. Luke’s heart made a donkey kick in his chest.

It’s just a stupid trunk, he told himself. It’s ugly and gross but it’s not alive, okay? It can’t hurt you.

Then why did you try to get rid of it? asked a second, traitorous voice. And why did it inch across your bedroom floor?

The crawl space’s cheap plywood door swung open to reveal a darkness that raised the downy hairs on his arms. The trunk lay inside, waiting.

You’re back, Lucas! So soon, so soon. Lovely. Do come in.

The crawl space’s light cord dangled to the left of the door, a flimsy string with a bell-shaped bob of plastic on the end. It took a few adrenaline-pinching seconds to find it—had it been moved? He overbalanced, nearly toppling face-first onto the floor.

His fingers brushed the cord. He’d reached too far at first.

The trunk sat where he’d left it, at the very back of the crawl space. Boxes were stacked on either side, forming a rough corridor. He hadn’t noticed the alignment that afternoon. Had someone—something—moved the boxes?

He crawled toward it. Silky rustling noises emanated from behind the boxes. Mice? But they didn’t have a mouse problem. Clayton had trapped them all. Every last squeaker.

Luke’s nose filled with the smells of wood rot and mildew. Our house is diseased, Luke thought weirdly. But only right here, in the crawl space. And Luke was in the heart of the disease now, crawling toward its decaying tumor.

He craned his neck back to the door—he’d seen something in his periphery, or sort of thought so. Fleeting movement behind the stacked boxes, a skittering of little legs as something moved behind him.

To do what? Close the door? Switch off the light?

Luuuucas. You’re such a precious boy. So soft, so pretty. Come closer.

Fuck you, Luke thought. He’d never uttered this word aloud (God only knew what his mother would do to him), but it felt good to say it in his head. FUCK you, box. I can burn you and say it was an accident. I can flood you until your wood bloats and rots. I can leave you on the stoop on garbage day when Mom’s gone and the garbagemen will take you to the dump, where seagulls will drop gooey turds all over you.

The trunk waited for him, unmoving, unblinking.

Luke’s head jerked. He saw it again—something moving behind the boxes. They were in rows like big brown teeth, and he saw or thought he’d seen something scuttling between the gaps.

A pair of pants… were those pants? They were wadded up like the skin of an enormous serpent on top of one box. And something else that might have been a lampshade. And something that looked like—

The trunk’s latch snapped open. It made a silvery snipping sound.

Luke turned in time to see it happen. The metal hasp fell forward lazily like the tongue lolling from a tired dog’s mouth.

Luke couldn’t believe it—that is to say, his mind couldn’t process it. There wasn’t a puff of wind. No earthquake had shaken the house’s foundation. The latch had simply… opened.

The clowns on the trunk suddenly seemed different. Their eyes were tracking him now. Pinning him in their fleshless, jeering gaze.

Luke spun wildly on his knees. As he did, he heard a sound that chilled the ventricles of his heart.

Eeeee… the trunk’s hinges levering up.

He didn’t want to look back. Not one bit. But his skull was gripped by an immense force, which twisted it slowly around.

The trunk was open. Not much. It couldn’t open fully, as the lid would hit the crawl space’s ceiling.

No, it was open only a bit. Just a hair.

When he faced back the other way, an odd thing happened. The crawl space elongated, its dimensions stretching like taffy. The door was thirty feet away, when it should only be twenty… and it was moving farther away by the second.

Lucas, don’t go. Staaaaaaay.

Luke began to scrabble toward the door, his fingers scraping madly at the cement. A spider web broke across his face, strangling the cry building in his throat. He wanted to call out for Clayton, his mother, anyone, but his voice had fled into his stomach—all that came out of his mouth was a breathless whisper.

He looked back again. He couldn’t help it.

A hand was coming out of the trunk.

Gray and waxen—the hand of a long-dead thing. It was thin, the fingers terribly long, the bones projecting under that drab stretching of skin. If it were to grab him, Luke figured each finger could wrap around his ankle at least twice. Every finger was tipped with a sharp black nail.

It was, he realized with dawning horror, the same hand he’d seen inside the standing pipe—the hand belonging to the creature they’d fled in the swamp.

That thing that was here, now, in the basement.

He’d been wrong to fear his mother. His mother could be cruel, yes, but at least she was human.

Is this actually happening?

This was the most adult question Luke had ever asked himself. There was no place in the normal world, the world his mother and father and brother lived in, the world of baseball and snow cones and sunshine, for this thing to exist.

This is not really happening, he thought, more definitively now. And quite suddenly, the crawl space turned insubstantial, gauzy—a dreamscape. He felt a strange inner buoyancy, as though his stomach were full of soap bubbles. He drifted on a sudsy wash of horror, but it was dream-horror, unattached to real-life concerns. A giant hand in his Tickle Trunk, how silly! It was nothing to be afraid of, really…

He realized, with a thickness of mind he felt only when waking from a very deep sleep, that the voice he was hearing in his head was actually coming out of the trunk. An insidious, narcotizing mimicry of his own voice—it slipped out of the trunk and slid into his ears like some effortless oil. It matched his own voice exactly… or almost exactly: it held a coppery undernote that rasped over the vowels and consonants like a straight razor over a barber’s strop.

Nothing to be afraid of… not really happening…

Luke turned to face the door again and started to crawl desperately. His fingernails and kneecaps scraped the cement, opening the skin up. The door galloped away in heart-clutching increments—he chased it the way a car pursues a heat shimmer on the highway: always tantalizingly close, but you never quite catch it.

The hand spider-walked down the trunk. The attached arm was long and sinewy and seemed both boneless and jointless: a ropy appendage like a fire hose.

I don’t exist, Lukey-loo. You said so yourself, didn’t you? You’re just a big dummy, like your brother says…

But it did exist—at least right then it did. And that could be all the time a creature like this ever needed.

He crawled, blood welling on his knees, throwing a glance over his shoulder at the trunk. The crawl space light went out.

Luke didn’t know if something had switched it off or if the bulb had chosen that exact moment to go out. It didn’t matter. The darkness galvanized his blood. Maybe the darkness was better, in a weird way.

He raised his back, pumped his legs, and scurried across the crawl space. The wooden beams raked his spine but he didn’t feel any pain. His adrenaline was redlined, the fear sharpening the edge on his every sense. He could hear the thing’s arm slithering and shucking across the grimy cement—a huthump! huthump! noise, as if it were flapping in a wavelike motion, those long nail-tipped fingers digging into the cement for purchase and then huthump! as it flicked forward another foot.

The door was closer—he could see the light of the basement now, the edge of the water heater. Mercifully, the crawl space was shrinking back to its old dimensions. Or maybe they’d never changed: it was just another nasty trick the thing in the trunk had been playing on him.

HuTHUMP!

Right behind him now.

Luke swore he felt a hard cold finger touch his ankle, a sharp nail leaving a sizzling line of pain.

With a final convulsive heave, Luke propelled himself through the door frame and into the forgiving light of the basement. As he skittered away on his heels, his eyes were drawn to the square of blackness housing the crawl space.

All was silent, only the drumming of blood in his ears.

But he may’ve seen something. Maybe not.

Eyes? Black, ageless, regarding him from the dark.

Some other time, Lucas. We have all the time in the world.

The adrenaline curdled in his veins. Luke hurtled upstairs, bawling. His mother was too shocked to insist he go back down.

But she got her hangdog husband to bring the trunk up. Luke sat on the front porch, chewing his fingernails to the quick as his father had hauled it up two flights of stairs, quiet as a church mouse. Afterward, he’d given Luke a sheepish grin, his shoulders sunk forward and his hands deep in his pockets. What are you gonna do? his expression said. Luke had never known his father any other way. He was broken by the time Luke had been born, and was beyond hope by the time he could’ve been of any use to either of his sons.

Luke stayed away from his room until bedtime. He begged to stay up a half hour later to read his comics quietly in the family room, but his mother refused. Of course she refused.

The Tickle Trunk sat in the corner of his room. He forced himself to open it. Empty. By then, the events in the crawl space had taken on the taint of absurdity. Nightmares get blown apart in the sane light of day, even in a boy’s mind. And Luke was a rational boy; everyone said so. His knees were skinned and his palms scraped, but there was no cut on his ankle from the creature’s nails.

No, it had been a silly episode. Luke was embarrassed to think about it.

But…

One corner of the trunk had been pried up. A triangle of that strange brown skin was peeled back from its interior, as if something had come out through there.

A tiny rip, no more than an inch. Would that have been enough?

A different boy, one more flighty than Luke, might’ve viewed it as a sign. Something wanting him to know it’d been inside the trunk. Not a figment of his imagination—no way, nohow. It wanted to show how it’d gotten in, and leave the hint that it could easily do it again. Any old time it wished.

The next day Luke “accidentally” spilled fish oil over the trunk. God, that smell could gag a maggot, his father said when he got home. Why he’d been in the proximity of the trunk with a full bottle of fish oil was a fact Luke could never fully explain. But the deed had been done. The room had to be aired out; Luke slept on the sofa for two nights. The trunk was thrown away. His mother had her methods of making Luke pay for that, but at least it was gone. He never saw it again…

…except for once, years later, in a dream.

He dreamed that the Tickle Trunk sat at the city dump. The moon cast its pallid light over the windblown piles of trash. The trunk’s lid hung open like a cavernous, toothless mouth.

A raccoon trundled through the stinking wasteland. It scrambled up a softening heap to the trunk. Nose twitching, it clawed up the bloated wood to squat on top of it. Next it screeched, having seen something inside the trunk that must’ve left it petrified. The lid levered up, snapping closed on its back. The sound of the raccoon’s spine breaking was as sharp as the report of a .22 cartridge.

The raccoon slipped bonelessly inside. The lid closed. The trunk swayed slowly, the way a mother rocks a child in her arms. Inside, the raccoon started to scream. This had been the worst part of the dream—the way the animal had sounded very much like the squall of an infant.

A substance resembling red pancake batter burped out of the trunk. The lid opened again. The moon shone down from its icy altar, the dump wrapped in stillness once again.

14.

THE BLACKNESS SLID AWAY as Luke floated up out of the dream-pool. This long-buried memory had flooded back to him whole cloth—the sights and smells and the fear that had filled his veins that afternoon in the crawl space, a terror as bright and sharp as lemon juice squirted on a paper cut.

“Doc?” said Al, shaking him with her good hand. “You still with me?”

He was back inside his own skin now. He stood in the Trieste with Alice, staring at a supply crate that rested in the deepest, most shadowed point of the purification room. How long had he been checked out? It didn’t feel like more than a few seconds—and maybe that was all it had been, each second stretching out inside his head.

Eight miles above, all over the world, people were forgetting their pasts. Trapped down here in the charmless dark, Luke couldn’t escape his own.

“I’m okay,” he said shakily. “My memories are so vibrant down here. I… I find that I’m getting a bit lost in them. Sorry.”

Al said, “Good to have you back, then,” and turned her attention to the crate. It didn’t look like the Tickle Trunk, not one bit. It was plastic, and black, and ribbed. Its dimensions were roughly the same, but its lid was flat.

No, it didn’t look anything like the Tickle Trunk, yet it held the aura of it.

It’s like bullies, was Luke’s strangely apt thought. They can be hulking and potato fisted or weaselly and slender. It’s that cruel quality in their eyes that identifies them as part of the same tribe.

Which was idiotic to think. This crate had no relation to his old trunk. Luke used to chastise his own son, often far too harshly, for his childish fears: the monster in the closet, the fanged thing under his bed.

The Fig Men.

But here he was, an adult, filled with dread at the sight of a crate that projected that same air of coy menace as his old childhood nemesis.

Who, little ole me? the crate seemed to say in a cutesy-poo voice. Menacing? Noooo. I’m just a crate, Lukey-loo. I’m a tool that stores other tools—switching to a Popeye growl—I yam what I ams, and that’s all that I yams!

Al stepped toward it. No! Luke wanted to say. But why? It was nothing but a crate. A tool that stored tools.

Al reached down and cracked the lid. A jumble of spare parts. Rooting through them, she found a plastic case. She opened it and shook out a small chip.

“Bingo.”

Al closed the lid and latched it. She gave it a final considering look, the skin tightening down her throat, before turning back the way they’d come.

The chip slotted neatly into the control panel. The air quality changed—where before it’d held a steely aftertaste that built up like plaque in the back of Luke’s throat, now it was… well, marginally better.

Al slumped against the wall.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “That chip just vanished. It wasn’t burned out, wasn’t busted. It was gone. Same thing would happen onboard a sub, too. Things would go missing. A guy’s books or personal photos, the little tchotchkes that tethered someone to the surface. In most cases, it was petty thievery. No reason aside from boredom and opportunity.”

A hollow knock emanated from the recesses of the purification room. Back where the crate sat.

Knock once for yes. Knock twice for no.

“A few times, though, things went missing and never did get found,” Al went on. “Was this one guy, Fields. A machinist. Carried a photograph of his dead mother in a locket. Wore it strung around his neck. Woke up one day, it’s gone. He tore that sub apart to find it. Peered in every cranny, even went through the trash. Nada. He figured someone stole it. Hooked it off his neck in the night. But sometimes things just go missing. Fall through cracks, you know?”

The knocking intensified.

Luke peered in that direction, but his view was walled off by an impenetrable expanse of gloom. The canisters glowed whitely, a clutch of huge insect eggs laid in the walls.

“Could be the system kicking over,” Al said, reading his thoughts. “Lots of weird noises in a sub, too. Knocks and clunks you can’t explain. Only pressure and the ocean’s currents, but it can sound a little like… like ghosts, uh?”

“Right. Booga-booga.”

Their laughter sounded both canned and forced, as if they were recording a laugh track on a soundstage.

“You ever had a man go missing, Al?”

“On a sub, you mean? That’d be the ultimate locked-door mystery, uh? I heard about something that went down on another vessel, the SS-228 Stickleback. A guy went missing. They turned that sub inside out, never found him. How do you vanish from a submarine, a thousand feet underwater?

“Turns out this guy got into an argument over a game of cards. Another guy, a sonar tech, hits him with a closed fist. Guy falls and hits the bulkhead all funny. Fractured skull. He dies. So the sonar tech and his buddy, a cook, chopped up the body and fed it into the garbage disposal. Those things could chew up cinder blocks. MPs dredged the disposal, found bits of the guy’s spine and rib cage.”

A new noise floated to their ears. A crisp, somehow silvery sound…

…the sound of a latch coming undone, maybe.

15.

LUKE SAW IT IN HIS mind: the crate’s hasp falling open just like the tongue lolling from a tired dog’s mouth. The lid opening the tiniest bit.

Just a hair.

“Al…”

“I heard it, too.”

Al had this what the fuck? look on her face. There wasn’t a soul back there. Only the crate.

And whatever was inside the crate.

Which was nothing, Luke told himself. He’d seen inside it, hadn’t he? Nothing but tools and—and an unnaturally long hand tipped with jetblack nails—and circuits and nothing else. Not a goddamn thing else.

Al stood and moved toward the noise, her boots going tak on the steel grate. She took five steps, then ten.

Tak. Tak. Tak. Tak.

Her body knit with the darkness carpeting the deeper recesses of the room—that darkness seemed to drink at her body, sucking her in.

Luke stood. “Al, why don’t we—?”

But she’d already melted into the gloom.

Tak. Tak. Tak. Ta—

The silence stretched. Luke’s breath came out in whistling gasps.

Al, get your dick-swinging ass back here. Let’s bug the fuck out.

Tak. Tak. Ta—

An enormity of silence.

Then Al’s voice wafted out of the dim:

“Jesus Christ. No. No. Jesus Chri—”

Tak… tak… taktaktaktak

Al flew out of the darkness and barreled into Luke, nearly knocking him down. Her face was set in a rictus of terror; her mouth, frozen open in fear, emitted a series of choked, hiccuping wheezes.

Luke had never seen a grown person look so petrified. He couldn’t conceive what could have reduced Al—as sturdy a person as he’d ever met—to a twitching puddle of nerves.

Hu-Thump!

It came from the dark, where such sounds always germinated.

From the crate, which in his mind’s eye no longer resembled a crate at all.

It was wooden now, engraved with a pattern of leering clowns.

Hyuk-hyuk-hyuk, coming to get you Lukey-loo! Hyuk-yuk, and we’re going to finish it this time!

It wasn’t possible. It hadn’t been possible, all those years ago. It’d been a manifestation of his overburdened imagination. Something his own mother had planted, he’d often thought, to coldly chart the effect it would have on her younger son.

The trunk was empty. The crate was empty. There was no—

HuTHUMP.

Closer now. Closing the distance.

How could it get down here? Luke childishly asked himself.

The answer was equally childlike in its logic: That’s a stupid question—it got here because it’s a monster. That’s what monsters do.

Luke gripped Al’s shoulders. Her body rocked unstably, eyes wide and horrified.

“What did you see?” Luke hissed. “For God’s sake, Al, what?”

“He’s alive,” Al whispered. “He’s… he’s still alive.” She gave vent to a series of nerveless screams. “Still alive!”

Luke’s mind settled around the image with shocking ease: the young sailor, Eldred Henke, crawling out of the crate. His body bloated with seawater, the skin hanging off his bones like hunks of wet wool. His face torn apart by searing metal. Squelching toward Al on his water-rotted feet, leaving blots of pulpy black flesh in his wake, lisping: You did this to me. You DID this…

They were clearly seeing something very unalike—whatever horror lay inside that trunk was different for each of them—but Luke wasn’t sure that mattered. Whatever it was that was making them see those things was no doubt capable of doing to them what it might so easily have done to Westlake. It could tear their brains apart.

“Go.” Luke shoved Al toward the tube. “Go, go! We’ve got to move now.”

HuTHUMP.

Al cast a dazed glance toward the noise—her face a mix of shock, disbelief, and primal fear. Luke noted the vacant cast to her eyes. She looked utterly barking mad.

Prepare the lifeboats, mates! The SS Sanity is capsizing! We’re going down!

HUTHUMP!—this time so forceful that the metal grate shivered under their feet.

They retreated to the chute. To that gaping mouth of darkness.

What was your original face before you were born?

It was a Zen koan Luke used to recite in veterinary school. Since then it had a habit of popping into his head at times of direst emergency—like that time Zachary choked on a strip of undercooked bacon and Luke had to give him the Heimlich.

What was your original face?

He’d never been able to picture his original face, but he realized that was the point of the exercise. It created a mental distraction—a pinprick of tranquillity at the dead center of all that twisting fear, an eye of the storm within which he could operate.

We can get out of this, he told himself now. I’ve saved lives before. Animal lives, okay, but a soul’s a soul. I can save us both now.

You’ve lost lives, too, his mother reminded him. Lost the most important one.

That was true, too. And he was as scared as he’d ever been—a terror more keen than he’d felt at the standing pipe or even in the crawl space. At least then he’d had the whole world to escape into.

Now, only one congested tube.

“You go first,” he told Al. “Al…?”

Al stared gape-jawed into the darkness behind them. A thread of saliva spooled over her bottom lip and down her chin.

HUTHUMP!

A great sinuous flex, as though the darkness itself had gulped. Luke swore he saw something pale and snakelike thrust itself forward.

“Al!” He shook her roughly. “Come on, goddamn it!”

Her eyes cleared. She nodded to say she was listening.

Luke said, “Raise your arms, okay? Keep them above your head, like a diver. That should make it easier. Pull yourself, even with that busted hand—it’ll hurt like hell, but I’ll set those bones again if you need it. And remember the bend, right?”

Al kept nodding. “Okay. Yeah, okay.”

“Go. Now.”

Al ducked inside, her head and shoulders swallowed by the chute. When the soles of her boots wriggled out of sight, Luke cast a final look back.

There was a border within the room, semisolid, where light met darkness.

Eight appendages stretched over that border.

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight!

Eight fingers. Just the tips.

Eight fingernails. Black, sharp.

Each finger was spread an unnatural distance from its neighbor—six inches apart, at least. An enormous hand spidering nimbly forward.

One of those fingers wiggled at him.

Hello Lukey-loo. After all this time, together again.

Luke hurled himself into the chute. He willed himself to breathe steadily; if he hyperventilated and passed out, he was certain he’d awaken to find that ghastly hand curled possessively around his ankle.

The chute closed over his head; the sea pressed down on him.

Breathe, Luke. For God’s sake, just breathe.

He settled into a system: anchoring his feet against the slick metal and pushing off with his toes, inchworming through the chute. It was like doing a thousand consecutive calf-raises. His muscles screamed.

HUTHUMP!

It was at the mouth of the tube now. Five feet away. Maybe less.

It was easier to breathe with his hands over his head, opening up his lungs. He hit the bend but, knowing it was coming, was able to contort his body. His toes skidded on the metal, which was maddeningly clingy and oily at once.

What was your original face before you were born?

He willed himself to calm down. His calves were quivering; for all he knew he’d ripped the tendons clean off the bone.

Skrriiiiiiitch…

Nails on metal. The hand was inside the chute, scratching toward him. Tapping and feeling its way forward like a blind and hungry tarantula.

Luke stretched out, his fingers creeping, his toes muscling his aching body forward inch after painful inch. He pictured the chute elongating the same way the crawl space had years ago. An endless suffocating tunnel. The perfect kill zone.

No. It had an end, and he was reaching it. He could hear Al stumbling out someplace ahead. The air tasted a bit less polluted. It couldn’t be far now.

Skriiiiiitch…

On his boot now.

A fingernail scratching down the sole, gouging the rubber. Luke bit back a shriek—don’t fall through the trapdoor and into the snakepit now, sonny-boy; you fall now and it’s game over, no more tokens—and surged forward on a tide of adrenaline.

Another push, another, calf muscles twitching, sweat soaking his overalls, another push, mouth wide and gasping, fingers reaching—

The chute ended. Alice’s strong hand clutched his wrist and yanked him out.

They stood in the tunnel, panting. The hatch was ten feet away. A mellow coin of light shone through its porthole. LB would be out there, waiting.

They ran for it like kids fleeing the bogeyman—which, in a way, they absolutely were. Luke hazarded one last look back. He couldn’t help himself. He almost wanted to thumb his nose.

Nyah-nyah, missed me, missed me, now you’ve gotta kiss me.

The hand was visible at the end of the chute. Huge—even bigger than he remembered. Its five fingers—no no no it has eight fingers eight like a spider—its fingers rested on the swell of the tube, each a good five inches apart.

Luke’s mind performed a few lunatic calculations. What was the distance between the access chute’s mouth and the crate? A hundred feet, at least. That hand had crawled across the purification room and through the chute… how much farther could it reach? Perhaps that hand was attached to an arm that unspooled endlessly…

…no, it had to eventually attach to something, didn’t it? A body. A host.

When Luke tried to envision that body—an image flared briefly in his skull—his mind sprinted swiftly away from its nightmarish outline.

The hand raised up ever so slightly. Rocking side to side.

Waving good-bye.

Taa-taa, Lukey-loo. We’ll be seeing each other again real soon. We’ll be close by. We’ve always been close. Bye for now. TTFN.

16.

LB YIPPED EXCITEDLY as they staggered out of the hatch. They looked to have aged half a decade since they’d stepped through it.

They were slick with the kind of adrenal perspiration that squeezes from the pores like the sweat off foreign cheese. Their overalls were stained with that unnameable oil coating the chute, the fabric ripped from their… escape? What had they been running from? Al’s overalls were torn across her belly, a slash like a sagging mouth that revealed her abdominal muscles.

They hunched, hands on knees, gathering their breath, unable to look each other in the eye. The fear Luke had felt—the nattering, mindless fear of a child—already seemed foolish… mostly. Were he to stare through the porthole into the cramped, dimly lit tunnel, he knew he’d see nothing. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to look.

He couldn’t convince himself that what he’d seen hadn’t been real, either—if not enough to hurt him physically, then at least to damage or even destroy his mind.

You’re being played, Luke.

It felt that way. Stupidly, he almost believed it, too. Every angle cut off, every attempt to escape thwarted. He felt much like a rat down a hole with the terriers chewing after him and the rat-catcher somewhere above, stomping his feet to make the ground thunder. As if some calculating force was funneling him toward a dire certainty, the contours of which Luke could only dimly grasp.

Let’s be serious here, brother. It’s probably a classic case of the sea-sillies.

Clayton’s voice.

You mustn’t discount that possibility, O brother of mine.

Luke hadn’t discounted it. Or that it could be the ’Gets taking hold. It could happen just this way. A person began to imagine things. That they are pursued by faceless hunters, their childhood nightmares come back to snatch them. The world warped and their brains warped right along with it.

And if two sad souls catch it at the same time? Clayton chimed in. Well, it can certainly accelerate their mutual deterioration. They both start grasping at the same straws; they’re plagued by the same phantoms. Wouldn’t you agree?

Luke glanced at Al. He didn’t see any sores on her face or hands—if she was spotting already, he couldn’t see it. As for Luke, he could feel a stress pimple beginning to hatch under his lip but that was about it.

LB rucked under his elbow, prodding him with her snout. She licked his palm, her head cocked at a quizzical angle.

I know this dog, Luke thought, scrupulously itemizing his surroundings. Her name is LB. She is a chocolate Lab, a bit small for her breed. We are eight miles below the surface of the Pacific. The woman beside me is Lieutenant Alice Sykes, U.S. Navy. I am Luke Nelson, a veterinarian. I live at 34 Cherryhill Lane in Iowa City. My wife’s name is Abby. My son has a chevron-shaped birthmark on his right arm.

He shook his head, angry at himself.

My ex-wife’s name is Abby. My son had a chevron-shaped birthmark.

“What do you think, Doc?” Al asked. “Are we going bugfuck nuts down here or what? What I saw in there”—pointing toward the purification room—“can’t exist. I know that. But I saw it. I saw that Henke kid crawl out of that fucking crate, scuttling like a crab with his wet flesh falling off his bones… and he never took his gaze off me, Doc. His eyes were clear and cold and so fucking angry. That can’t be, but it is. Down here it is.”

Luke lifted his foot to get a look at the sole of his boot. A ragged trench was gouged through the rubber. He was only mildly shocked to see it.

“We’ve got to find that generator, Al.”

Al nodded, content to have a plan. “We can do that.”

THEY RETURNED to the main lab. Returned to the buzz behind the door marked LW—dulcet now, even harmonic. Al’s gaze flitted toward Westlake’s lab. Luke sensed it took a great effort for her to pry her eyes away from it.

Clayton was inside his lab. Luke saw him through the porthole and hammered his fist on the glass.

“Clay! Open up! We’ve got to talk!”

Clayton’s hand was bandaged to the wrist now. Viscid fluid leaked through the gauze—thick and translucent, the consistency of 5 Minute Epoxy. It had gummed to the sleeve of his overalls, forming a white crust like the stuff that forms at the edges of a horse’s mouth when it’s been run too hard.

Clayton approached the hatch, a strange smile pasted on his face. He draped that curtain over the porthole to shield his lab from view.

“Goddamn it, Clay!” Luke hit the glass hard enough to rake the skin off his knuckles. “We need your help! You need ours!”

“Screw it. Leave him in there,” Al said. “It’s where he can do the least harm. Think of how long we’ve been down here, Luke. Look at how it’s affecting us already. Look at what it did to Westlake, too. Your brother and Dr. Toy… we can’t trust anyone who’s been down here that long.”

They headed down the tunnel that led to Westlake’s quarters. Al said she was pretty sure the generator was stored in that area of the station.

“How’s your hand?” Luke asked once they’d made it to Westlake’s room.

“It’s fucked,” she said simply. “You did what you could—it feels a lot better, but it’s still busted up. I’d love to pop a few heavy-duty pain pills, but they make me sleepy and I’d prefer to stay awake.”

“That’s a good idea,” Luke said grimly. “Or if we do, we should sleep together.”

Al cocked a Spockian eyebrow at him. Belatedly, Luke realized what he’d said; a flush crept up his neck.

“Pretty small beds down here,” she said, with a nod at Westlake’s cot.

Trapped in the tension of that moment, Luke wanted to kiss her. She wasn’t one of the stereotypical corn-fed Iowa beauties he’d grown up around—but then neither was Abby, with her raven hair and Nordic cheekbones. Yet there was something deeply alluring about Alice, an aliveness, a wildness even; it would be like making love to a Valkyrie or something. And why not? What could it harm? He was single, lonely, and hadn’t felt a woman’s touch since Abby left. Alice hadn’t mentioned anyone, either. They could have a friendly little romp. Make love in the foxhole, release some tension, then get back to business…

…but they wouldn’t make love—they would fuck. Rut. Luke was certain of it. Fall upon each other like wolves, tearing and ripping and biting; there wouldn’t be an ounce of tenderness or concern for each other’s body or needs; it would be a brutal release, a letting go of the pressure they’d existed under for too long, no different than two swollen clouds splitting open with rain. The Trieste would warp the act, making it loveless and mocking—afterward they would be sweaty and bloody in places, ashamed for reasons they couldn’t pinpoint, weaker, mistrustful and less unified than before.

“I’d do the honorable thing and sleep on the floor,” Luke finally said. “I’m real gallant that way.”

The spark that had been kindling in Al’s eyes was snuffed. She gave him a strained smile and offered an awkward curtsy.

“Thank you, m’lord, for keeping me safe from predation.”

Luke smiled. “Think nothing of it, milady. Your virtue must remain untrammeled until you are given away at the grand cotillion ball six months hence.”

The awkwardness passed. Luke’s gaze fell on the stack of Westlake’s journals under the cot. Hadn’t Westlake commented during that final audio file that he’d continued to update his research in those very journals?

“I’d like to leaf through Westlake’s papers,” Luke said. “I may find something.”

Al nodded. “The genny should be just down this tunnel, through another hatch. I’ll check it out while you’re in here.”

Al’s footsteps echoed down the tunnel—she still sounded close by, but sound had a funny way of traveling in the station. Luke did hear a hatch hiss open, and next Al was banging around inside.

“You find it?” he called.

“Yeah,” came her reply. “It’ll need some work. Gimme a holler every so often, okay? It’ll keep us both alert.”

“Ten-four,” said Luke. He sat on the cot. His eyes itched with exhaustion; he screwed his palms into his sockets and blinked to clear the fuzziness. LB hopped up beside him. He rummaged through Westlake’s gear and located a bag of beef jerky. Saliva squirted into his mouth. He was ravenous. He split it with the dog; LB bolted down the tough rags of beef and licked the salt off Luke’s fingers. She tried to stuff her nose inside the bag but Luke snatched it away.

“Where are your manners, girl?”

LB hung her head and watched him indirectly, like a clumsy spy.

Luke reached for Westlake’s journals. Al was still banging away at a comforting cadence. Luke flipped through the first few journals. Scientific jargon, formulas, stuff Luke couldn’t comprehend. He set them aside.

He unzipped his duffel bag and pulled out the journal he’d found in the storage tunnel: Psych Report. The cover was smeared with that weird ooze.

He flipped it open. The first page and many pages thereafter were filled with Westlake’s neat and careful handwriting.

17.

LUKE PAUSED. LB had been resting on his lap; she stirred, looking up at him questioningly. He couldn’t hear anything down the tunnel.

“Hey, Al?” he called. “Everything okay?”

For a moment, nothing. Then her voice filtered back to him.

“S’okay. Trying to figure out this genny.”

“Need a hand?”

“Funny, Doc, real funny… I could use two good hands, but I’m managing with the one.”

Luke petted LB, giving her those long strokes down her back that every dog enjoys; she whimpered gratefully and settled her head against his stomach. Luke yawned so wide that his jaw cracked.

He picked the journal up and started to read again.

LUKE’S EYEBALLS ITCHED; his shoulders were tight.

Westlake’s journal had developed a sinister momentum. The handwriting, which had started out neat and clinical, was starting to erode. Some of the pages were crumpled, as though Westlake had clenched his hand into a fist while writing.

Most worryingly, it… it seemed to be speaking directly to Luke. A voice behind the printed words whispered softly into his ear. Fingers crawled up the back of his neck—Westlake’s scarified fingers racing ticklingly over his scalp…

…what an idiotic notion.

Nothing is idiotic now, he told himself. The worst mistake you can make is to think it’s idiotic.

He could still hear Al down the tunnel, banging away. It held a rhythmic note, like the pump of a piston in a slow-running engine.

Bang… bang… bang…

His eyes snapped open. He’d let them slip shut, lulled by that banging, which matched the beat of his own heart. A shadow twisted across the wall where the tunnel bent. He watched the hatchway, thinking something—fingers, four small fingers, a boy’s small fingers—might wrap around the gray metal. When that didn’t happen, his eyes fell back upon the journal. The pages hooked his gaze, tugging insistently. Westlake’s voice—cold and raspy with death—said: You need to know, Lucas, because down here anything can happen. Anything at all.

18.

19.

LUKE HURLED THE JOURNAL. Pages riffling, it struck the wall. He shook violently, gooseflesh pebbling his scalp. LB’s head popped out from underneath the cot where she’d been resting, her eyes darting restlessly.

DADDY COME HOME

Jesus. Jesus Christ.

He shouldn’t have read it. He knew that belatedly, the same way he’d known he shouldn’t watch a scary movie as a young boy—but Luke always had to watch, peeking through his fingers.

The final ten pages were partially glued with a rank-smelling substance; the honey produced by those bastardized bees, Luke could only guess. And the last few pages were dark with blood.

The journal’s final words seemed less written than etched. Each letter had torn through several sheets of paper, their impressions carving deep into the sheets below. The letters were huge slashes, horizontal or vertical, no curves—the O’s looked like crazed cubes. Westlake must’ve wielded his pen like a knife, slashing each stroke several times, ripping and gouging them onto the page.

DADDY COME HOME

It made no sense. Dr. Westlake had no idea who the hell Luke was. That he was a father, or Luke’s tortured history with his son. Christ, they’d never met. Had Clayton mentioned him? Even if so, what would compel Westlake to write that?

THE FIG MEN ARE HERE.

This cut even closer to the bone. How would Westlake know about the Fig Men, the monsters in Zachary’s closet? It made no sense. Luke thought about the words written in blood inside the Challenger: THE AG MEY ARE HERE. That’s how he’d read it. But Al thought the second word was Men, hadn’t she? Could the A Luke had seen actually have been the capital letter F and and a lowercase I combined? Could the blood from a letter F have dripped down, joining the top of that I to become what looked to be a sloppy, too-big A?

Jesus, had Westlake actually written: THE FIG MEN ARE HERE?

The Fig Men didn’t exist. There was no such thing. They were something his son’s fevered imagination had cooked up—something Luke himself had fixed, trapping the Fig Men in obsidian cocoons. He remembered how the act had made him feel like a minor superhero. The Human Shield.

Could the journal be a deeper manifestation of Dr. Westlake’s psychosis? Rantings and ravings divorced from truth? Luke wanted to believe so. The “honey” could be something he’d mixed up in his lab, boiled sugar and some manner of toxic chemical. Physically speaking, the gunk on its pages was the only thing that separated Westlake’s journal from your standard loony bin manifesto—it was full of the same delusional thinking, paper-shredding pen strokes, and yes, even blood.

Home. Come home. Luke had been home, safe if despondent in Iowa City. The Trieste, though, wasn’t anybody’s home. Not the home of anything human, anyway.

LB clambered onto the mattress and rested her head on Luke’s lap. As he massaged her ears, Luke felt the energy coursing through her bunched muscles. Did he really believe it? The bees, the hives, the madness lurking behind the hatch to Westlake’s lab? The hole?

Westlake had gone insane. Succumbed to the same pressures that had consumed Dr. Toy—the mental erosion Luke himself had felt from the moment he’d set foot inside the station.

Could he possibly believe the journal? Would he do that up on the surface? Presented with those pages, wouldn’t he dismiss them as the ramblings of a madman?

You would, of course, he told himself. But you aren’t on the surface. You know what is on the surface? Westlake’s corpse. Do you remember what it looked like? Put that image in your mind, Luke, and ask yourself: What’s behind that hatch now?

Luke could answer that question easily: It doesn’t matter, as long as I don’t fucking open it.

But what if someone else opened it?

I believe Westlake, Luke realized with piercing clarity. Not all of what’s written, but I believe the ambrosia drove him insane. I believe him enough to realize we’re in very serious danger here.

“Let’s assess things,” he said to LB, who pricked up her ears. “We’ve got a broken communication link. We can’t contact the surface, and they can’t contact us. We’ve got an escape vehicle with no power, and a current ring that could rip it to shreds if we try to ascend. A crazy person who’s locked himself up. Another person, now deceased, who must’ve gone batshit, too. My brother, who’ll stay here out of pure stubbornness. We’ve got Al, and you and me. The sane ones.”

LB chuffed, seemingly in agreement. She was a wonderful companion—Luke wondered if, without her, he might’ve already slipped around the bend. He was getting the dog off the damn station. Lord knows she’d been through enough.

“Would you like that, girl? Early retirement?”

LB blinked and licked his cheek.

Okay, Luke thought, what’s the list?

1. Get the hell off this station. Mission be damned.

2. Take Clayton. Drug him if necessary.

3. Get back home. Bring LB.

Three objectives. It calmed Luke to break the situation down into small goals leading to one ultimate goal: sunlight, fresh air, home.

Granted, there were obstacles. Eight miles of water and pressure. His brother’s legendary stubborn streak. A sub without power…

And the thing or things inside the station with them. Inside, or partially inside, or struggling to gain entrance.

The thing his brother had willingly invited in. The ambrosia.

The thing whose lips Westlake could hear whispering on the other side of his beloved hole. That thing (things?) had wrecked Westlake. Oh, maybe it hadn’t touched him directly, but it had ruined him regardless.

It must’ve done the same to Hugo. Even Clayton? His brother’s mind was stony, but even stone eroded under constant assault. Luke’s own resolve was definitely weakening; a phantom hammer tapped along the block of his brain, searching for the seam that, when struck, would crack it in half.

“Come on, LB. Let’s find Al.”

20.

LUKE HAD TAKEN A FEW steps down the tunnel when it struck him that he hadn’t heard any noise for quite some time.

When last he’d consciously checked, he’d heard Al hammering away. It had possessed that steady, confident rhythm: the sound of a carpenter pounding a nail.

Now the silence was eerie. Luke wondered if Al was working on the generator’s finer mechanisms. That could be quiet work. Maybe she’d even drifted off to sleep. A little power nap.

A nap. That sounded nice. Luke’s eyes stung with exhaustion—except hadn’t they promised each other not to fall asleep?

The storage room was shadowy. The generator sat in a fall of light slanting through the open hatch. A huge cylinder made up of several disklike batteries wired end-to-end. Which made sense: you couldn’t use a gasoline genny in a closed space; everyone would die of carbon monoxide poisoning.

“Al?”

The room was dead empty. Where the hell could she have gone? Why hadn’t she come back for Luke? A bolt of panic jackhammered up his spine. What if Al had slipped into one of the same dream-pools that he had fallen prey to already?

He stepped out of the room. LB’s snout was aimed farther down the tunnel, where Al must have gone. Her tail pointed straight up, quivering.

“What is it, girl?”

LB’s haunches tensed. She growled, then took off.

“No!”

Luke couldn’t imagine losing the dog. If she disappeared in the warren of tunnels, he’d come apart.

He tore after her. Her tail vanished around a bend. Luke pursued heedlessly, not knowing what was around that corner—and in that moment not caring. He flashed around the bend, encountering nothing but stale air, then ran through an open hatchway (had Al left it open?) and hurtled headlong after the dog.

The tunnel described a wide ambit that descended so gradually that Luke wasn’t sure it was happening at all, then tightened into a choking spiral; Luke was hit by a wave of nausea brought on by the disorientation—until the tunnel abruptly ended in a crawl-through chute. LB’s rump was wriggling through the far end; she tumbled out, her nails skittering, and raced on.

Luke dove into the crawl-through. It was laughably wide in comparison to the access chute he’d been forced to navigate. He shifted onto his back, gripped the rungs, and swiftly hauled himself through.

Dropping out of the chute and rounding the near corner, he came to another dead stop. LB was hunched before a hatch. The hackles stood up on her shoulders.

“Easy, girl.” Luke ran his hand down her back, feeling the muscles jump. “It’s okay. It’s nothing.”

Where was Al? This was the only way she could’ve come. Luke inspected the hatch. It was locked from the other side. Al couldn’t open it. So where—?

A face rose up in the porthole. Malevolent and familiar.

21.

DR. HUGO TOY was pallid and shrewlike, his features pinched together on the pasty canvas of his face.

But he doesn’t look crazy, Luke thought. Last time yes; this time… no.

Dr. Toy looked like a man living under an incredible pressure that had warped his bones. Luke now understood how that pressure could make a man look crazy.

He held up his hands, a peaceful gesture. Dr. Toy calculatingly eyed him.

A scrap of paper slapped against the glass.

WHO ARE YOU?

The paper withdrew.

“Luke Nelson. Clayton’s brother.”

Dr. Toy nodded. Scribbled quickly.

DO YOU FEEL IT?

Luke nodded. “Yes. Everywhere.”

Dr. Toy shivered—excitement? Anticipation?

CUT YOURSELF, he wrote.

Luke’s brows knit together. “What?”

Dr. Toy slapped the paper against the glass. CUT YOURSELF CUT YOURSELF CUT YOURSELF

Luke said: “Why?”

I WANT TO SEE YOU BLEED SHOW ME YOUR BLOOD

Luke figured he might as well comply—what were a few drops of blood? He crouched over the grate. Its lattices were serrated. He raked the tip of his index finger over one. His skin opened on the third stroke, blood welling down the cut.

He showed it to Dr. Toy.

WIPE YOUR FINGER ON THE WINDOW

Luke did so. Dr. Toy leaned in, nose flattening against the glass. The blood appeared to mollify him. He wrote:

I’LL LET YOU IN BUT I’M TYING YOUR WRISTS

“I have one of the dogs,” Luke said.

SHE CAN STAY OUTSIDE

Luke shook his head. “No way.”

Dr. Toy bared his teeth.

OK, he wrote in thick angry letters. BUT I TIE HER UP, TOO

Dr. Toy set his shoulder to the wheel; the hatch opened inward, less than a foot. “Turn around,” he said. “P-puh-put your wrists through the door.”

“Listen, I’m not—”

“Shut up. Do it.”

Luke turned and thrust his wrists through the gap. Dr. Toy used duct tape—it made that telltale whoooonk noise as he stripped it off the roll. “Tight?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” He dragged Luke inside and shut the hatch.

“The dog—”

“Scruh-scruh-screw the dog.”

“You said—”

“I say a lot of stuff I don’t mean.”

Dr. Toy led Luke to a folding chair and shoved him down. Luke could see LB’s snout bobbing frantically at the bottom of the porthole.

“You lying bastard.”

Dr. Toy smiled, unruffled. Glimpsed in full, he was a reedy man whose long articulate limbs seemed to be constructed from knotted wires. He was slightly walleyed, his left eyeball drifting lazily toward his nose.

The room was about twelve feet square, with a low ceiling. Symbols covered the walls—Toy had fashioned them out of duct tape. They didn’t look scientific… more pagan. The rest of the room was scattered with papers, most of them balled up in evident frustration.

The smell was atrocious. Luke spied a heap of soiled overalls in one corner. On the surface, that heap would’ve attracted flies. Down here it just reeked.

“No access to the f-f-fuh-facilities, I’m afraid,” Toy said, displaying a slight congenital stutter. “Does the smell bother you?”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

Toy shrugged. “I was r-ruh-raised by a nurse. She spent her days emptying bedpans and changing adult diapers. She didn’t want to encounter bodily fl-fluh-fluids at home. She posted a slogan above our toilet: If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie, wipe the suh-seatie. But if she ever did encounter tinkle, even a drop… She once thruh-thhh-threatened to make me clean it up with my toothbrush. And I’d have to use that same toothbrush until the bristles dulled and it was time to buy a nnn-nuh-new one.”

Your mom and my mom would’ve gotten on like bandits, Luke thought.

“Fecal matter,” Toy said. “Her term for it. Not doo-doo or poop-poo or even that old standby, shit. Fff-fuh-fecal… matter. Please understand—I wasn’t raised to be a man who’d shit in a corner. But good manners have a way of buh-buh-bleeding away down here.” Toy shook his head as if to dispel a troublesome thought. “What-whuh-what are you—I mean, what do you, do you do? Your job.”

“I’m a veterinarian.”

“So Clayton Nelson’s brother is an animal sawbones. Faaa-scinating. Did you get your s-stuh-start fixing up his spuh-spuh-specimens? You’d have been at work all day.” When Luke didn’t reply, Toy said: “Chaos.” He swallowed as if to center himself. “That’s why I locked myself up. In case you were wondering.”

That’s right, Luke remembered. That’s one of Hugo the Horrible’s specialties, isn’t it? Chaos theory.

“Oh, uh, it started normally enough,” Toy said. “We set up shop. Three men, three labs. Instability systems was my role. Basically, uh, was it f-f-fuh-feasible? The ambrosia—did it cure anything, or did it simply create havoc under an illusion of cure?”

He picked up a crinkled sheet of paper and smoothed it over his knee.

“I was working with… theories, yes? Known thuh-theories that apply and have value on the”—pointing upward—“up there, yes? But, uh, down here, nothing b-b-behaves as it should. Theories and mathematics just dissolve. Even the most chaotic events, if you buh-buh-break them down, have a pattern and order—and if they don’t, then at least the level of chaos can be calculated, compartmentalized and uh, uh, understood.”

Dr. Toy grinned widely—he seemed manic, weirdly chipper. His demeanor struck Luke as that of a convict who’d been kept in solitary confinement for years, and now, finally given a chance to speak to another human being, he couldn’t help prattling on. He showed Luke what he’d written. A hen-scratched theorem, incredibly complex.

“Picture a rock rolling down a mountainside. Or a bead of mercury running down the back side of a spoon. Or skeins of fff-fruh-frost bristling across a windowpane. The movement would seem random, yes? But it’s not. If we could catalogue all the variables in the universe, we could know with utter certainty what happens next—the, uh, the… the next skip of that rock, the-the-the way the mercury will slip, the direction each skein will buh-branch. But we don’t, so, so… chaos.”

He stopped pacing and stared at Luke, his eyes wide as if seeing him—really seeing him—for the first time.

“What’s on the uh-uh-other side of the hole is chaos. But not like any I’ve ever known. Unorderable, unnameable, untheorizable. And that’s what pure evil looks like. A chaos whose v-vuh-variables are endless—so huge even the universe can’t contain them. Chaos incarnate.”

Luke had stopped listening by then. One word stuck in his head like a shard of polished glass.

Hole. The hole.

Westlake’s voice, ragged and covetous, as Luke remembered it from those sound files: I put it through…

Luke shifted in his chair. Sweat trickled down his back, soaking the duct tape.

“What hole, Hugo?”

Toy’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve seen one. Don’t tell me you haven’t.”

“I read Westlake’s journal.”

“How is Cooper?” Toy asked, genuinely interested.

Luke blinked. The man clearly didn’t know.

“I’m afraid he’s dead, Hugo. He took one of the Challengers. He was dead by the time he surfaced.”

Toy’s face twitched. Weird voltages raced under his skin.

Luke said, “In his journals, Westlake mentioned a hole—”

Like magic, a blade appeared in Toy’s hand. A box cutter. He thumbed the mechanism. Two inches of blade slid out. Toy lunged forward, grabbed the matted hair atop Luke’s head, and pressed the blade to his neck.

“You’re luh-lying. You’ve seen a hole.”

Luke’s breath came in shallow heaves. “I haven’t.” He swallowed. The blade scraped his Adam’s apple. “But since I’ve been down here I’ve felt like… like something has been trying to crawl inside my head.”

The blade pressed harder. “Have you let it?”

Luke’s pulse shivered behind his eyes and at the root of his tongue.

“No.”

The blade withdrew.

“This chaos…” Toy went on as if he hadn’t threatened to slit Luke’s throat mere moments ago, “…it’s orderly. There’s the surface chaos, you could say, like a-a-a-a tangle of leaves and twigs laid over a ttt-truh-trap. A camouflage of chaos with something very logical and cunning beneath. A guiding principle or, uh, modus operandi. The real mmm-muh-master.”

Toy stood abruptly, kicking through drifts of paper to the nearest wall. Luke clenched his hands while Toy’s attention was elsewhere, trying to pull his wrists apart enough to slip a hand free.

“Protective runes.” He pointed at the duct-taped symbols, laughing stiffly. “I studied them as an undergraduate. Druids and, and, uh, that b-b-buh-bullshit. It’s all from memory. I don’t know if they have any effect at ah, at uh, at all.”

“I don’t see any holes.”

Toy smiled without humor. “I wonder if that’s because they don’t want me.”

They.

Luke said: “Westlake’s journal. I read it.”

“Oh, yes?” Then, almost as an afterthought but with genuine sympathy: “Westlake, my God. Poor Cooper. That poor, poor man.”

“Dr. Westlake said a hole appeared on his lab wall… He claimed he heard sounds coming out of it. Voices.”

“The voice in the sea, as your brother would claim,” Toy said acidly. “Some pressure-treated harpy wailing for Cooper to stick his head out and kiss her.”

Westlake’s voice again: I want to put my head through the hole. Want to kiss those lips…

“A hole ate into the wall of my lab, too,” Toy said. “Small at first, growing steadily b-b-bigger. I spoke to Clayton about it. Predictably, he called me a fuh-fff-fool. I told him to come into the goddamn lab, I’d show him. He refused. Of course, he probably had one blooming in his own lab. And Westlake too, as you say.” He shook his head. “Yet none of us acted. None of us told anyone—Felz, Alice, somebody on the suh-surface. Why? Because it was so horribly exciting.”

A hole in Dr. Toy’s lab? Luke had gotten a glimpse inside Toy’s lab when they arrived on the Trieste. Its porthole wasn’t coated in black ichor, like Westlake’s, or draped like his brother’s. Luke hadn’t seen a hole. Of course, it could be in a blind spot. It wasn’t worth challenging Toy on it. Luke worked his wrists, testing his bonds. The sweat oiled his skin. The tape was surrendering its hold in increments.

“Professionally, I’m never more alive than when I’m on the cusp,” Toy went on. “With surgeons, it’s when they’re ‘in the cut,’ you know? Wrist-deep inside a-a-a chest cavity. For me, or for your bruh-bruh-brother and Westlake—poor man!—it’s wuh-when we’re on the verge of a breakthrough. Of, yes, yes, unlocking some previously uh-uh-unknown system that our world operates under.”

“And that’s how you’ve felt down here.”

“Yes! If only we can just, just, learn more. See how the stuff, the ambrosia, how it operates. But that’s the pruh-problem—it has no stable base. It’s always shifting. Worst of all, it knows. It understands our needs and desires. Knows how to d-duddd-dangle that carrot at the end of the stick. By the time we felt the noose around our necks, it was too duh-duh-damn late.

“We’re in a Skinner Box,” Dr. Toy said with a sick smile, the kind of expression a slipshod mortician might tease onto a corpse’s face. “Operant Conditioning Chambers, to use the scientific name. Designed by B. F. Skinner, that old sss-suh-sadist. You put a rat in a box with an electrified grate. Two buttons on one side of the box, red and gruh-green. Push the red one, get a treat. Push the green one, get a shuh-shh-shock. Or vice versa. Vary the pattern however you want. Push either button and you get a tuh-treh-treat, say. Or either button earns the subject a shock. Don’t you see? The Trieste is the box. We are the rats. And whatever’s on the other suh-side of those holes are the scientists. They’re watching us. Seeing how we react. We’re the grand expuh-expuh… experiment.”

Luke continued to work at his bindings. He clenched his hands to stretch the tape. He could slide his wrists back and forth a bit now.

“Why did you need to see my blood?”

Toy’s focus was drifting. “What?”

“You made me cut myself.”

Toy waved his hand impatiently. “It gets inside you, understand? And wuh-wuh-once it’s there, you’re not yourself anymore. It has ways and means to gain entry. You’ve heard it, yes? It has a powerful pull. Very uh, uh, seductive.”

“I’ve heard it,” said Luke, though he hadn’t heard anything: just those sly fingertips worming against his skull.

“Cuh-Cooper came by not too long ago,” Dr. Toy said. “He looked awful. His neck covered in sores. I couldn’t let him in,” he said with a touch of guilt. “I opened the h-h-hatch only enough so we could talk. He sounded as bad as he luh-looked. We talked about our children. We both have daughters. Jennifer, my own. Precious child. She’s suh-sick. She’s caught the Disease, as Cooper called it. She started spotting a month ago.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Luke.

“We were performing trial runs on the Hesperus when my wife called to inform me. At the time I was worried that I wouldn’t be uh-able to operate in encluh-encluh… enclosed spaces. Claustroph-ophob-oph-oph…” He gave Luke a look that said: You know what I’m trying to say. “I was about to ask them to send someone uh-else instead. But then… Jennifer. So I cuh-came. I had to, for her.”

“Alice has found a generator,” Luke told him. “We’re going to power up the Challenger and get out of here. Will you come?”

Toy favored him with a look of utter pity.

“Oh, you poor devil. Do you really think they’re going to luh-let us go?”

Luke had stretched the tape to where he might be able to pop a wrist free. But he’d have to stand up to get the momentum needed to—

SHHHRAAAAKKK!

Hell invaded the Trieste.

22.

A SECTION OF THE CEILING dented down: a jaggedy fang that struck Toy with tremendous force, knocking him flat. His skull hit the floor with a hollow ringing note.

Luke jerked his arms. The tape was unraveling; he felt a ragged edge flapping against his fingertips.

Toy rolled onto his back with a groan. His nose was broken, the cartilage shoved off at a rude angle.

The children’s footsteps intensified: they danced a mad tarantella now.

TRRRRRAACHIKKK!

Another section levered down and slammed into Toy’s legs at midcalf. The sound of his tibias snapping was horribly loud. He shrieked, sat up, slammed his head into the lowering shelf of ceiling and slumped back, dazed.

The folding chair’s rear legs collapsed under Luke’s weight, spilling him backward; his shoulder hit the ground with a sickening crunch. He struggled to his knees, sliding his bound arms down around his buttocks and under his thighs. He rolled to his back and straightened his arms, but his duct-taped hands wouldn’t clear his heels.

Dr. Toy sat up again, numb with shock and clutching uselessly at his shins. Blood spritzed in thin jets, pulsing with the wild beat of his heart, slithering across the floor and soaking into the balled papers.

Luke’s mind fused shut. He understood how hares caught in traps could die of fright. He couldn’t yank his fucking hands over his heels. It was a physical impossibility. He was like some moron jerking at a locked door in hopes it would open. He’d literally gone stupid with fear.

The ceiling shuddered, rolling a few more inches up Toy’s legs. He howled as his hands scrabbled mindlessly at his knees. It was just as Alice had described: the ceiling of the Trieste ballooned and bubbled, its nature more rubbery than metallic. It groaned and shrieked but did not rupture… not yet. The sound of the man-made barrier fighting the pressure of water was terrifying: the trillion-dollar miracle polymer buckling by degrees, popping and splintering as it flexed. It was an arm-wrestling match, Nature versus the Works of Man, where one competitor was grinding himself to a steady advantage.

One leg at a time, nattered a voice inside Luke’s head. You can’t clear both heels at once, dummy! Drop your arms, bend one leg, and try again!

Luke straightened one leg, crooked the other, and was able to jerk his bound wrists around his dropped heel. He rolled to one knee—the posture of a man proposing marriage—with his hands under his crotch. From that position he was able to twist his wrists until his hands were free.

The ceiling shivered again as Luke crawled over to Toy. When Luke touched the man’s shoulder, Toy unleashed a desperate keening scream that made Luke flinch. The metal consumed another few inches of Toy’s shins, shattering bones and flattening flesh. What had Al said? Pressure equivalent to twenty-seven jumbo jets? The ceiling rolled over Toy’s legs as if his overalls were filled with Styrofoam packing peanuts.

“Ub-ubb-uuuuuuub!” he screeched, a senseless string of syllables.

The roof trundled over Toy’s kneecaps in a slow, persistent advance. It was no different than watching a man gradually run over by a steamroller. Toy’s bones were pulverized like shards of crockery. The veins in his wrists and neck stood out in horrid blood-bulged strings under his skin.

Luke grabbed Toy’s shoulder as if it was possible to pull him away from this fate. The man’s arm was tensed tight, the blood pumping it to a freakish density.

“GlllluuuuuuhHH!”

A rope of blood ejected from Toy’s mouth, unfurling like a scarlet ribbon from a New Year’s Eve party favor. His eyes rolled back to their twitching, vein-threaded whites as he shuddered in a sickening dream state.

Go! He’s done for. No saving him, Luke. Get the hell out of here!

Dumbly, Luke jerked at Toy’s arm even as the roof dented inward at him, its murderous weight no more than a foot from his head. He figured the pressure might sever Dr. Toy’s legs; Luke pictured it the way a hot dog gets sliced off the link at a factory—a quick snip between two sharp blades and six inches of pink, processed meat drops into the hopper. If so, Luke could drag Toy out and maybe, with any luck, cauterize the stumps before he died of blood loss.

But the pressure was knowing. Toy’s legs were merely crushed, leaving an inch or so of clearance to the floor. The foam popped spastically as the ceiling trundled over Toy’s thighs, blood spraying in pressurized fans, then over his hips, which shattered and flattened with a percussive jolt that shook his entire frame—the sight reminded Luke of a butterflied chicken, its spine snapped with one deft downward thrust of a chef’s palm.

Toy’s face was greasy with shock. The gamy stink of adrenaline poured off him. The ceiling pushed drifts of paper forward; the balled-up wads accumulated at the sides of Toy’s body like dust bunnies around a bedpost. The metal rolled over Toy’s chest, but only enough to crack his ribs, which snapped with the sound of Black Cat firecrackers.

It’s savoring it, Luke’s mind yammered. Whatever it is, this thing or things, it’s taking its time now.

Dr. Toy’s eyelids sucked around their edges like the papery mouths of suckerfish. Blood burped from his ears in fits and starts, like sludgy water from a tap that hadn’t been used in some time. Toy vented a volley of gluey, piglike squeals. How was he still alive?

The roof bellied down menacingly, striking Luke and knocking him aside. He stood and staggered to the hatch.

I’m sorry so sorry Hugo…

He spun the wheel and glanced back just as the ceiling flowed over Toy’s head in an awesome wave.

Toy’s skull bulged in its overtaxed wrapping of skin.

Nonononono…

Toy began to laugh. The sound was muffled by the frantic pop-pop of the space-age material, but Luke heard it perfectly. Horrifically, insanely, it was the laughter of a child. An infant’s laugh—his son Zachary’s laugh: that high, wheezing, out-of-control titter he used to make as a toddler when Luke pressed his lips to Zach’s belly and blew a raspberry. A zzzrrrbbt! he’d called them, that being the sound it made.

Zzzzzzrrrbbt! ZZZZZZRRRRRBT!

Toy’s skull split with an ear-rending crack. The skin tore apart in a perfect horizontal seam—a tight smile splitting his scalp. Tremendous pressure forced Toy’s mashed and twitching brain through the split.

Luke threw the hatch open as the metal ballooned toward him. He shoved it shut just as the ceiling flowed against it with a hissing crinkle.

The porthole glass webbed. Luke backed away and tripped over LB, who skidded backward on her rump. Luke watched the porthole with bulging eyes. He expected the glass to break and that flexible material to flow through—he pictured it stretching like taffy to project in a blunt spike, splitting his head in half as it came.

But it didn’t. The glass held.

The Trieste shivered. The walls seemed to expand like a pair of lungs inhaling a slow, contented breath. The station settled and there came, suddenly, a persistent silence—a creeping, secretive silence that carried down every tunnel.