The Deep

1.

LUKE FOUND ALICE in the main lab. He’d backtracked from the horror of Dr. Toy’s quarters in a daze, his entire body trembling, to find her standing in front of Westlake’s hatch. The walls creaked dimly, issuing those spastic crackling noises, but the station wasn’t shuddering on the verge of collapse as it had seemed to be in Toy’s quarters. No, the Trieste felt quite solid at the moment.

It’s as strong as it needs to be, was Luke’s preposterous, overheated thought. It exists—it, and everything in it—at the benevolence of something far greater and more terrible than itself.

Luke’s mind was still reeling; his hands were clamped on his skull as if to prevent his brain from ripping in half: he pictured his frontal and parietal lobes tearing apart from each other like the stitches popping along an overtaxed inseam. He couldn’t stop thinking about how calculated Dr. Toy’s death had been. There was a methodical brutality about it—there was no way it had been a mere accident.

The Trieste had killed Hugo Toy. It had done so in the most horrible, gloating fashion. And it had made Luke watch.

Al’s face was slack. Her lips curled in a ghostly smile as if she’d heard somebody’s voice and appreciated what that person was telling her.

“Oh yes, Monty,” she said, “I’d really like to try for what’s behind door number three.”

Her fingers played over the keypad. She punched five digits, pressed enter, and got the red Fail light. Her features twisted in anger.

“No, I am sure. Totally one hundred percent. I want door number three.” Her voice rose to a girlish squeal. “I’m feeling lucky, Monty! No Zonks!”

It dawned on Luke: Alice was dreaming—no, she was trapped in a dream-pool. In this particular dream, she was a contestant on that old Monty Hall game show, Let’s Make a Deal. Luke’s mother used to watch reruns of it while shoveling lukewarm porridge into her mouth, laughing spitefully when a hapless contestant risked his new color TV or tropical vacation for a shot at what lay behind door number three, only to get zonked with a wheelbarrow full of creamed corn, a llama, or a pair of clown shoes.

Greedy guts! she’d shout at the screen, flecks of porridge flinging from her lips. Greedy guts got greedy so that’s what greedies get!

Al tried a different code, pressed enter, and got the Fail light again. Her body vibrated with rage.

“Door number three, Monty,” she seethed through gritted teeth. “Show me what’s behind the goddamn motherfucking door, for fuck’s sake.”

The drone from behind the hatch rose to an eager buzz. The porthole was smeared with that viscid substance—honey, Luke, he thought; it’s honey—and behind it, in the feeble light of Westlake’s lab, Luke swore he saw things zipping about.

Luke set a hand on Alice’s shoulder. “Al?”

She brushed his hand away. She laughed—a flighty, quizzical titter.

“Hey, Al, come on. Hey.”

Luke squeezed Al’s shoulder, still highly adrenalized after what had happened with Dr. Toy. Al’s eyelids flickered. Her eyes were filmy, as if they’d been soaped. Her lips spat out a loop of idiot babble.

“Door three—door three—three—three…”

“Goddamn it, Al!”

Luke shook her roughly. Al staggered back, her spine rattling on the wall.

“The what—?” she squawked.

But her eyes were clearer; her expression was that of a woman roused from a bad dream. The buzz died down. Those zipping shapes zipped no more. Al regarded Luke reproachfully—the same look Abby had given Luke the night their son went missing.

“Where the hell were you?”

“Me?” Luke said. “I was right where you left me, in Westlake’s room. I’ve been looking for you.”

“Bullshit.”

Luke recoiled. It was less the word itself than the icy tone Al spoke in.

“I checked Westlake’s room. You weren’t there.”

“You couldn’t have checked, Alice. You’d have seen me sitting there, reading.”

Al raked her unbandaged hand down her face. “Why are you lying to me?”

Something’s wrong here, Luke. Tread carefully.

“I’m not lying, Al. You were working on the generator—”

“I got it working. But I couldn’t move it,” she said. “It’s too heavy. I needed your help. But when I went to find you… poof! You were gone.”

Luke took a step back—he was worried that Al might lash out. Confused anger was kindling inside him now, too; hot coals burned at his temples.

It wants you to fight. Kill each other, maybe.

“I’m sorry, Al. I went to find you. The generator was there, but not you.”

“I went looking for you. But you weren’t… and then… and then…”

“Did you fall asleep, Al?” Luke raised his arms, just an innocent question. “Could that have happened? It was dark in that room and we’ve been up a real long time. Did you just, for a minute… shut your eyes?”

Al bit her lip. Her gaze kept flicking to Westlake’s hatch.

“Al, Dr. Toy is dead.”

Her gaze oriented on him again. “What do you mean?”

What else could I possibly mean? He’s dead, Al. The station killed him.

No, Luke realized, not the station. The station didn’t have the ability to kill, in the same way a pistol didn’t kill a person—only its wielder did. The station was simply the instrument. The Skinner Box, overseen by whatever was administering the shocks.

“After I tried to find you, LB dashed off,” said Luke. “I followed her. She led me to Hugo.”

Al slapped herself, hard. Her eyelids had been sinking closed. She slapped herself again. The sound, a sharp spak!, made Luke wince. She jetted air between her teeth in a series of hard gusts like a weight lifter preparing for a record lift. She nodded as if to say, Okay, I’m good now, and then said: “Tell me what happened to Dr. Toy.”

Luke gratefully let the terrible event pour out of him—sometimes the only way to disburden oneself of the poison is to share it with somebody else.

“That poor bastard,” Al said, her cheeks pink from the slaps. “Jesus Christ.”

Luke told Al what he’d read in Westlake’s journal, too. He felt ludicrous telling her—they were the confessions of a rubber-roomed madman. And yet, listening to him, Al became very quiet. Ambrosia drifted past the huge window as Luke spoke. Shreds piled up like snow against the side of a barn. LB growled at it, a low huff that puffed the loose skin over her upper teeth.

“A hole?” was Al’s first question once Luke finished.

Luke nodded. “That’s what Westlake wrote. Small at first, but growing bigger. He could hear voices from it. Sounds crazy, I know.”

Al’s expression wasn’t disbelieving. It was fearful.

“Luke, listen… I think… yeah, I might’ve fallen asleep. I sort of remember tightening a few wires on the generator, then sitting down to catch my breath. If I nodded off, the thing is—my dream picked up right there. It began in that storage room with my body in the exact same position as it was when I nodded off. And so I got up in my dream and walked down the tunnel to find you, thinking I was still awake. You weren’t there. You’re saying you were—which makes sense if I dreamed it. And then you find me here, trying to get in there.”

She nodded at Westlake’s lab. A shudder racked her frame.

“What I’m saying is,” she went on, “if I sleepwalked to the lab, how did you miss me? I would have stumbled right past Westlake’s room, right?”

Luke nodded. “You would have, yeah. And I would have seen you. Unless…”

“Unless you fell asleep, too. You were sleeping as I walked past.”

That was the only possibility that made sense: Luke had somehow drifted off while reading Westlake’s journal—slipped into a dream-pool without even knowing it. They’d both been asleep when Alice walked past Westlake’s room, right past Luke, neither of them aware of it.

How else could it have happened? Unless the Trieste was reorganizing itself, arranging into new configurations like puzzle pieces, snaking in different directions to ensure they wouldn’t have seen each other?

“We have to get that generator,” Al said. “Get the Challenger powered up and get our asses out of here. And stay awake.”

“What about Clayton?”

“Watch him, Luke. Hawk him. He’s been down here way too long.”

2.

IT WAS A SLOG dragging the generator to the Challenger. An hour? Two? Four? Luke couldn’t say how long. Time drew out like a blade.

The generator wasn’t all that heavy, but it was cumbersome. It had handles on the sides and tiny wheels to help it roll; Luke thought they made it look like the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, that familiar staple of small-town parades. A light sweat broke out over Luke’s body before they’d even muscled it out of the storage room; it trundled across the grates like a shopping cart with a wonky wheel.

Luke was bathed in sweat by the time they reached the crawl-through chute. Working together, using the handles, Al was sure they would be able to slide it into the crawl-through like a torpedo into the firing tube. But it would require both of them to lift it, meaning the generator would fall out the other end with nobody to catch it.

“The fall could break it,” said Al.

“Do we have anything to cushion it?”

A lightbulb clicked on in Al’s head. “Strip,” she said.

“What?”

“Your overalls,” she said, unzipping her own. “I’ll lay them on the other side as a crash mat.”

Luke removed his overalls. His body looked sickly in the tunnel’s light; the blackness of the sea, falling through a porthole above, cast a circular shadow over his heart. Al’s body was muscular and milky from a life spent underwater. She had a tattoo of a propeller on each hipbone.

“Old superstition,” she said, catching him looking. “Sailors used to get propellers tattooed on their ass, one on each cheek—a good luck charm against drowning. If your ship goes down, they help propel you to shore.”

They stood for a long moment, eyes on each other. Luke felt the warmth radiating off Alice’s body. There was appreciation in their gazes—the appreciation that prevails among soldiers sharing a bunker under heavy fire… but there was a raw hunger, too.

“Right,” she said, breaking eye contact. “Back in a jiff.”

She darted through the crawl-through in her tank top and fitted shorts, arranged their overalls on the other side, and slid back. They hefted the generator and slid it into the chute; it fit easily, with room to spare.

Alice powered it through, pushing it with her feet; Luke followed shortly behind her. The generator nosed out of the crawl-through and hit the floor with a crunch. They inspected it. It looked okay. They put their overalls back on and continued.

The tunnels seemed to be lengthening with a sly stretch and pull. They were narrowing, too, their ceilings lowering. The station’s geometries were shifting subtly. The beat of what sounded like footsteps came irregularly. These were not the mincing footfalls of the waterlogged children—these were plodding, dogged, and they came from somewhere inside.

Maybe it’s the thing from the crate, darling, Luke’s mother piped up. You must assume it’s got big feet to go along with its big hands…

Shut up, Mom, Luke thought. Who could it possibly be? Clayton was the only one left. Maybe it was Clay. Maybe he was stalking them. He really did want Luke to be here, and now he didn’t want to let him go.

Luke propped open the storage hatch. They shimmied the generator through, Luke doing most of the work on account of Al’s hand. A flashlight was clipped to the wall; Al grabbed it, flicked it on. It did very little to illuminate things.

The generator snagged on the grate. Luke hissed, a release of pent-up anger and fear, and gave it a kick, which only sent a spike of pain shooting up to his knee.

He collapsed, breathing heavily, his eyes stinging with sweat. A stone lodged in his chest—panic, but only a dull murmur of it now, mingled with a heavy sense of despair. The station wouldn’t let them go. Its overseers would erect roadblocks, allow them to feast on false hopes, then shred their escape plans.

Somehow, something would thwart them; Luke had become convinced of that. A small and silly matter, which would only sharpen the agony. A blown fuse. A stripped wire. A setback that wouldn’t daunt them for a moment on the surface—but down here, it would end them.

Or you may decide you want to stay, said a coal-dark voice in his head. Why not? It’ll be fun. Ooooh, the things we could show you…

Luke rocked the generator. His arms screamed and his shoulders nearly popped out of joint. The damn thing tore free with a screech of metal. He and Alice rolled it the final ten feet to the Challenger. Al unspooled three heavy-gauge cables and flicked a switch on the genny.

“If we’re lucky, we’ll have enough juice to skeedaddle,” she said. “But I want to pump every volt I can into the Challenger. That’ll take a few hours.”

“You’re gonna be able to do it with your hand like that?”

She nodded. “Just pushing buttons and flicking switches. I’m fine on my own. Plus it’s better if you keep an eye on your brother. I’d rather keep him in plain sight.”

Those footsteps thudded again. Closer now—just outside the storage area? The hackles stiffened down LB’s back.

The footsteps drew nearer, producing a thudding echo on the grates. Luke imagined someone—something?—standing—hunching?—in that dissolving edge of light. The outlines of this person or thing shifted restlessly, solidifying momentarily in Luke’s mind before adopting a new guise.

The footsteps stopped. In the silence came a low, liquid breathing. Unrushed and calm: the breath of a man on a leisurely hike.

“Clay?” Luke called.

The breathing stopped. Next, the source itself was gone. The presence vanished, evaporating like steam off a hot bath.

“It’s just the station,” Al said. “Groans and moans.”

“The station, sure,” Luke said, accepting her reasoning, as it made more sense than the alternative. “How you feeling, Al?”

Al held the flashlight under her chin like a boy telling a scary story around a campfire. “I’m feeling fine as cherry wine, Doc.” She chuckled. The walls sponged up her laughter. “We’re going to be okay, Luke. Aren’t we?”

“I think so. We just have to get a little lucky. And hope someone up there is watching over us.”

“Go on. Find your brother. Take the dog, too. And Luke—stay awake.”

3.

THE MAIN LAB was deserted. The lights burned at quarter power.

Luke flicked the switch to activate the exterior spotlights. They didn’t turn on. He flicked them again. Still dark. The viewing window reflected his haunted eyes.

He felt it out there. That sucking, hungering nothingness.

He found a flashlight in a drawer. He turned it on and trained it on the sea floor. The beam illuminated that mounded whiteness, marine snow piled in layers.

There are places on earth where light is unwelcome, Luke thought. Light has no power down here. Darkness is king. Light flees the dark, or it gets devoured.

He watched darkness eat into the glow of his flashlight, dissolving its weak radiance like acid. The beam winnowed and broke apart until—

Something snaked into the dregs of that light, lashing fretfully. Thick and reddish, an enormous night crawler flicking against the window. LB yipped in fright. Luke backed away… then was hit with another image, so much larger and so terrible that his soul withered at its prospect. And yet he didn’t see anything—it would’ve been impossible in that blackness. He only intuited it. Luke caught a sense of something out there. Its presence was enormous, mind-filling. In that moment, he saw how things would look if the seas were drained: the station surrounded by monolithic alabaster cliffs that went up and up until their faces welded with the blackness above. The trench unfurled flat and featureless to the base of those cliffs—and in his mind’s eye, he could see this… this… thing on those towering sheets of stone. It clung to the cliffs with many limbs, spanning all around the trench the way a spider fans its limbs across a web. It had no head to speak of. It was all limbs—all tubes—and each limb was the thickness of an oil tanker. Those limbs convulsed as it detached from the cliff, lowering its terrible body onto the ocean floor. Its limbs smashed down into the ghostly muck, sending up combers of marine snow that rolled in awesome white waves… .

“Lucas.”

Luke spun. The flashlight pinned Clayton in its beam. Luke inhaled sharply. Even LB let out a low yowl of concern.

“You look pained,” Clayton said.

Clay’s body appeared to have shrunk—it was as if the incredible pressure of the water was gradually crushing him down. His chest seemed thicker, his legs, too: Luke had the awful image of an accordion being squeezed with inexorable force.

Clay’s face bore the same hints of compression. Where before it had seemed aristocratic, with the high forehead and flinty cheeks, it now had a fleshy, porcine look. His eyes were squeezed between wadded-up skin, making it seem that he was peering through slits of fatback.

“Are you all right, Clay? You don’t look well.”

“Never better, brother.”

His lab was open. Light spilled across the floor. That familiar dripping noise invaded Luke’s ears.

Drrrrrthilllippppp!

“Come inside,” Clayton said. “You’ll catch your death of cold.”

Another one of their mother’s pet phrases. Luke’s memory raced through a few others. Useless as tits on a bull. Snowball’s chance in hell. Lord love a duck—the phrase she’d screamed after Chester Higgs had beaten her with that hoe.

“It’s not that cold.”

Clayton nodded dismissively and turned back to the lab.

“Clay, wait.”

Clayton wore a sweater, the kind fishermen wear. His left hand was swaddled in gauze. His left arm seemed thicker than his right. Luke figured the whole limb was encased in bandages. God knew what lay underneath.

“Dr. Toy’s dead,” Luke said simply. “The ceiling caved in. Crushed him.”

“That’s too bad,” said Clayton.

“Christ, Clay. Did you hear what I just…? No, of course you did. Westlake, now Toy. The ambrosia is… it’s not what you think it is.”

Clayton scoffed. “It’s simply a substance, Lucas. A tool.”

So goddamn sure of himself. He never learns.

“Do you have any idea what was happening just behind that door?” Luke pointed at Westlake’s lab. “What still is, for all we know? Two men have been killed by… I don’t know what. It’s all linked. The station, the ambrosia, and…”

…whatever controls the ambrosia…

Clayton said, “Do you have any idea how stupid you sound? Westlake went crazy. By the sounds of it, Toy died in a structural collapse. Both of which were known threats. Men have perished underwater in such circumstances before, and will again. It’s the danger of working this deep.”

Luke wanted to grab Clay’s arm (his unbandaged one; the prospect of gripping the other arm was wildly revolting) and drag him to Dr. Toy’s destroyed quarters. He wanted to show Clayton the metal pulsing in the ruined porthole.

But he knew it would be useless. Westlake and Toy were fools. That’s what Clayton would say. And to an extent he was correct, if the only measuring stick for their intellect was his own immeasurable gifts. But they had been smart men, serious men, and they had shattered, utterly. This place had done it to them.

“What if you’re wrong?” Luke said. “Just this once? What if this stuff is of no benefit at all? It can’t cure the ’Gets, can’t cure anything. What if you can’t control it? What… what if it’s controlling you, Clay? If it knows you—your habits, your flaws? Maybe it’s playing you. What if…”

Westlake’s voice: We’re in the basement with the beast—

“…Clay, what if it never lets you go?”

Clayton’s reply was shocking.

“I don’t really care if it cures anything.”

“…wait, what?”

“I… don’t… care,” he said, enunciating each word. “People need to die. Of cancer and AIDS and whatever else. There’s too many of us. Too many by half. It’s a planetary imperative. Not enough resources to sustain the hordes. We needed a grand curative. We call the ’Gets a disease but it’s not. Mother Nature has taken out her broom; she’s sweeping up the trash.”

Luke’s skull throbbed. “Jesus, then… why agree to come down here, if you disagreed with the whole purpose?”

“Because I’m fascinated, Lucas. I really just want to know how it works.”

Luke found it almost impossible to grapple with his brother’s misanthropy. It wasn’t that he was hateful, as their mother had been—you required a working emotional barometer in order to feel anything at either pole, be it love or hate. Clayton’s barometer was zeroed out. His emotional weather patterns were unvarying. No shutter-rattling storms, no radiant sunlight. Just an endless string of gray, edgeless days.

Luke had never really known Clayton. It would have been like trying to comprehend the mindscape of a meticulously disguised alien, a creature composed of sentient goo poured into an empty shell that he’d called his brother.

“If you don’t give a shit,” Luke said, “then why the fuck didn’t they send down someone who does?”

“Because none of those people can do what I can do.”

“You fuck. You miserable fucking specimen of humanity.”

Clayton’s expression suggested he took this as a compliment. It was perfectly acceptable to be a miserable representative of a species you cared nothing for.

Drrrrrrithhlippppp!

“What is that, Clay?” Luke said coldly. “What the fuck is that noise?”

Luke shoved past his brother, adrenaline tweaked as he stalked toward the open hatch. LB was stuck tight to his heels.

4.

THE LAB WAS BRIGHT and ordered, not a hair out of place. Positively Claytonian. Luke’s gaze fell on the cooler containing the guinea pig…

…the guinea pig, and the strange shape wrapped in durable black plastic.

Ttthhwillipp!

The sound was coming from behind the Einstein poster. Ole Albert with his tongue stuck out of his mouth. A sense of unreality washed over Luke. It was so plainly obvious, wasn’t it? How had he missed it?

Hell, on my last descent I brought a poster of Albert Einstein for your brother, he remembered Alice telling him.

“Oh, shit. I don’t… how could you… you Shawshanked us,” he said softly. “Oh, Clay. You sly dog, you.”

“You cannot move it,” Clay said, setting himself in front of Luke. “Do you understand? It’s forbidden.”

Who was he, Bluebeard with his locked room full of severed heads? What did that make Luke then—his cringing, servile wife?

Luke took a step toward Clayton; a challenging smile tweaked his lips. LB came forward, too, her eyes resting on Clay with bright menace.

“You can’t move it.” Clayton spoke carefully. “Trust me, you don’t want to.”

The buzz drifted through from the main lab, adding to the riot in Luke’s head. It was as if wasps had built a nest between his ears, stinging the insides of his skull.

“I think I ought to know,” Luke said, deathly soft. “I’m not a scientist, right? Why keep your secrets from me? Unless, I mean, you’re working on a new dog-neutering system.” A hollow laugh. “You’re not working on that, Clay. Are you?”

“Get away from me.”

“Shouldn’t I know, brother? I came all this way.”

“I never asked you to.”

“Oh, I think you did.” Luke’s throat was dry, and the words came out in a choked rasp. “I think you’ve done plenty down here without even knowing it.”

Next they were grappling with each other. They waltzed awkwardly around the lab bench, locked up like professional wrestlers—not yet committed to actual violence, just testing their strength. Luke’s fingers sunk into the bandages on his brother’s hand; his flesh had a sickening give, spongier than skin should ever be.

Luke was dismayed to discover that Clayton’s strength overmastered his own. It was that age-old truism: no matter how old two brothers got, the older brother still had the upper hand in any physical confrontation. Clay’s elbow clipped the bridge of Luke’s nose. The room exploded in cold blue fire; Luke’s synapses lit up like a pinball machine. He stuttered backward on his heels and fell, a shockwave juddering up his spine.

Clayton’s face shaped itself into an expression that did not often grace it: concern. He stepped forward, his hand instinctively outstretched.

“Luke, I’m so—”

LB sprang. Her skull rammed into Clayton’s breadbasket; the wind whoofed out of him. He tottered backward, arms held out to ward off LB’s jaws. She was harrying him now, not nipping but really biting, aiming to do some serious damage.

“LB! Heel!” Luke shouted. “Heel!”

The dog paid him no mind. Clayton’s hip hit the edge of the lab bench, spinning him sideways. He fell backward, arms thrown out to check his fall.

His fingertips snagged on the poster. A look of helpless panic entered his eyes.

The poster stretched—for a heart-stopping moment it appeared as if it might hold—then it ripped from its hooks and fluttered down onto Clayton’s chest.

Dear Christ, Luke thought. It’s worse than I thought. More awful than I ever could have imagined.

5.

A HOLE. Halfway up the wall.

Except it wasn’t really a hole, was it? Whatever Westlake had seen, however he’d contextualized it, he’d been wrong.

Its surface was darker than the sea beyond the wall; it shimmered like the placid surface of a lake stirred by a breeze. Upon casual inspection, it may’ve seemed solid—it held back the water, didn’t it?—but Luke knew if he were to touch it, his fingers would pass through into… his mind couldn’t grasp what might occur next. It couldn’t even form an outline.

The (not a) hole was rung by smaller ones, the same way moons ring a planet. A few were the diameter of nickels; others were quite a bit larger.

The hole—stop calling it that, Luke. A hole is ordinary and of this world; this is something else entirely—the hole-thing followed the curve of the wall: Luke could see a heating pipe running beneath it.

The hole-thing, the rift, glittered dully around its edges. It was growing. The smaller holes appeared to be enlarging, too, nibbling into the wall.

A new sensation: fishhooks sunk into Luke’s brain, tugging insistently.

He leaned toward the hole, the pain of his nose forgotten. He felt no danger; not an imminent sense, anyway. A voice buried in his subconscious warned him not to trust that sense of calm, but… yes, he trusted the hole. Oh yes, he trusted it completely. More than he trusted the structural safety of the Trieste, in fact. He tasted blood on his tongue but this, too, was a faraway sense. The hole—

It’s not a goddamn—

But it was a hole, wasn’t it? Sure it was. What was a hole, after all, but a, a …

Doorway?

A split in the surface of things. An absence of matter. You could fill that absence with any old thing, couldn’t you? Put a lid over it, keep everything precious hidden from sight. You could bury dangerous things in holes, too. Holes were good that way.

Holes kept secrets. Holes and standing pipes and Tickle Trunks, yes, those too. We buried bodies in holes, and the dead were the best at keeping secrets. If a hole was big enough, well, you could hide any old thing at all.

Something was coming through the hole now.

Its surface split as a wriggling tongue pushed itself out.

It’s ambrosia, Luke realized, icy splinters filching into his heart. This is how it gets inside the station. It’s how Clayton’s been collecting it.

The ambrosia slipped through the hole and dropped—

Thwwwiiiilllliiipppp…

—into a small collection vessel Clayton had affixed to the wall, which had also been hidden by the poster.

It was the first time since Luke had been down that he’d experienced something undeniably not of this world. Everything else could be fobbed off as the product of his overheated imagination, or of Westlake’s runaway psychosis. Even Dr. Toy’s death could have been a structural mishap. But this—the hole, the ambrosia sliming out of it—stood outside all earthly logic.

“Don’t look at it directly,” Luke heard Clayton say.

Luke was on his knees now, crawling toward the hole. He found this distressing in a distant kind of way.

Hey, Luke, your arms and legs are moving on their own. Isn’t that kind of freaky?

Something was drawing him forward, pulling him closer to the, the doorway. He was struck with the profound urge to touch it—reach into it. He imagined it would feel warm and embracing. It’d crawl lovingly up his flesh as some strong current drew him deeper, to the wrist and then the elbow and eventually the armpit.

And it would feel like home, wouldn’t it? Like the summer sunshine he remembered from childhood, slanting in golden abundance from a cornflower-blue Iowa sky, hot but not uncomfortably so—cockle-warming, as the old men at the Hawkeye barbershop would say. Yes, it would feel just glorious.

A hand closed over his wrist. Clayton gripped his arm fiercely. Luke wanted to rip out of his brother’s grasp and continue toward the door—it really was more of a door, wasn’t it? He’d open the door and see what was on the other side. It would be simply wonderful, he was certain of it.

“Look at me,” Clayton said. “For Christ’s sake, Lucas—look.”

It required an epic force of will for Luke to keep his eyes locked on Clayton’s. When he did, the pull of the doorway lessened the tiniest bit.

“I have to put the poster back up,” said Clayton, his voice solidifying. “Don’t look at it. I know it’s hard—it wants you to look.”

A relentless pressure in Luke’s skull was torquing his head toward the hole.

“Talk to me, Lucas. Sing a song. It helps.”

Luke hunted his mind for one of the silly kids’ songs he’d sung to Zach. There were dozens; their lyrics danced on the tip of his tongue. But something else inside his head, a persistent presence, had other ambitions.

Why not take a look, Lucas?

An insistent voice. The voice of the hole.

What’s the harm? Little door, little door, open me up! One quick peek. You know you want to. Or touch it, why not? I bet it feels just dandy.

The urge to look was almost sexual. Luke felt the need twisting in his groin with giddy excitement. His penis throbbed with it. There was an unpleasant burn high in his sinuses, as if he’d just dived into an overchlorinated pool. Except it was a dreamy feeling, too, vaguely childlike—the need to peer into a darkened closet, if only to assure himself nothing was inside.

But what if something was inside? And what if it could bite?

“The wheels on the bus go round and round,” Clayton sang. “Round and round, round and round.”

“The wheels on the bus go round and round,” Luke joined in. “All around the town.”

“The wipers on the bus go swish-swish-swish,” they sang together. “Swish-swish-swish, swish-swish-swish; the wipers on the bus go swish-swish-swish, all around the town.”

Clayton picked up the poster. He approached the hole, his posture that of a man walking into a gale-force wind.

“The horn on the bus goes beep-beep-beep,” he sang, “beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep…”

He hung the poster upside-down, punching the paper through the hooks. Einstein’s expression now appeared baleful, his tongue cocked at a lewd angle.

As soon as the hole was covered, Luke’s mind cleared. The brothers retreated to the far side of the room. They sat in silence, breathing heavily.

“I know this must be a lot to take in,” Clayton said finally.

“It’s just like Westlake said.” Luke’s voice was barely above a whisper. “His journals. You knew he wasn’t crazy. You knew all along.”

Clayton’s face, oddly compressed and sun starved, gave him the look of a man in the final stages of tuberculosis.

“He wasn’t crazy, Luke. He was just weak.”

6.

“WHEN DID YOU FIRST see it?” Luke said.

Clayton leaned against the lab bench. He shot a furious glance at LB.

“Keep that dog away from me, you understand?”

Luke grasped his nose and gave it a wiggle; the cartilage crackled. He tasted blood, thick and ironlike. He felt no anger, only a dull shock. But the shock was tempered by the sense, deeply buried but sincere, that the holes did exist—he’d known it even without seeing them, so the adjustment now was easier. He wanted to hit Clayton but there was something about his brother, expressed in his sick pallor and swaddled arm, that indicated he was suffering in a serious way. And what would anger solve? It would only rip them further apart and reduce their chances of survival—which was just what the holes wanted, he was sure of it. So Luke would stow his childish hurts and stay calm.

“Just answer the question, Clay. When did you see it?”

“I don’t know,” Clayton said. “It’s tough keeping track of time. At first it was so small, the size of a penny. And it wasn’t so much that I even saw it at that point. It was that I… I felt it.”

Clayton clearly hadn’t hung the poster to stop anyone from seeing the hole—he’d hung it to stop the hole from seeing him.

That his brother had continued to work mere feet from it, collecting the ambrosia as it widened and grew, sucking ceaselessly at his psyche… Luke understood, not for the first time, that his brother’s mind was built to a different tolerance.

“How does the poster muffle that feeling?”

Clayton shrugged. “I don’t know the principles behind it. I only know it works.”

What if it only works because whatever’s behind the hole wants Clay to think it works? Luke wondered. Could be it’s slackening its pull, letting Clayton believe his flimsy poster is worth a tinker’s damn—and what if Clay’s too far gone to realize he’s being played in such a simplistic fashion?

It was conceivable. The smartest people were too often the stupidest—the most blind to manipulation, believing themselves immune to it.

“How much goo have you collected?”

Clayton’s face puckered with distaste at the word goo.

“A good deal,” he said. “At first we didn’t see any of it. Frankly, I’d begun to despair. We’d built this station already. A man had died to get it operational.”

“Not that you’d care about him,” Luke snapped.

“True,” Clayton said without rancor. “It was his job, as this is mine. But there was the expense to consider, too, in the trillions. And for days, weeks, there wasn’t hide or hair of the substance the Trieste had been built to study. But the sensors began to pick it up—scraps drifting lazily around.”

“Like iron filings to a magnet, huh?”

Clayton shrugged again. “I tried bait boxes filled with colorful shapes and reflecting mirrors, but it exhibited no attraction. It was there, Lucas, the ambrosia was there in tantalizing, taunting abundance, but I couldn’t lay my hands on it.”

“And then?”

“Then it invited itself inside. Problem solved.”

“In Westlake’s journal, he said that you collected a sample in a… a vaccu-trap, he said it was.”

“I lied about that.” Clayton’s shrug indicated this could have been one of many lies he’d told. “I didn’t want him knowing about the hole.”

Westlake didn’t want you knowing about his, either, thought Luke.

LB padded over to sit beside Luke. Her gaze flicked anxiously to the cooler.

“It’s not safe,” Luke said. “The hole. Rift. Whatever. For Christ’s sake, Clay—whatever’s on the other side of these holes killed Westlake. Killed him, or drove him insane and made him kill himself. And I can feel myself slipping, too. My mind coming undone little by little. Do we know what it is, Clay?” Luke stared searchingly at his brother. “Could it be some kind of… Christ, does it lead someplace else? Not into the sea on the other side of the wall, but another place entirely?”

Clayton said, “That may be the stupidest thing you’ve ever said.”

The rage Luke had been struggling to tamp down exploded inside his brain—as if somebody had pushed the plunger on a detonation box wired to a stick of TNT sunk into his most sensitive neuron clusters.

“You colossal fucking idiot! Clay, you’re squirreled away in a lab, thinking that hanging a fucking poster over something as powerful as that”—jabbing his finger toward the hole—“will do a goddamn thing! And you’re calling me stupid? You may be the smartest man on earth, but you’re fucking clueless down here and you’re too mule-headed to admit it. Well, I’m here to tell you, brother of mine, you’re severely outclassed. Severely. You’re an idiot child compared to this thing. You’d need two brains, or three, to even begin to understand this. And even then you’d be too much of an obnoxious, smug, know-it-all prick to admit that you can’t comprehend it.”

Clayton withstood Luke’s tirade as he always did: silently, motionlessly, but with a supercilious smile, as if he were a shrink weathering the blatherings of a raving maniac.

“So you’re under the suspicion that it’s some kind of—what?” Clayton’s hands fluttered in front of his face: Oooh, spooky! “A hole that takes you away to the Land of Nod? Or back in time, perhaps?”

“Jesus, Clay,” Luke said. “There’s a hole in the fucking wall of this station, which happens to be at the bottom of the fucking ocean!”

“Lucas, listen to yourself. Calm down. It’s nothing to be afraid of—cautious, yes, but fear is a wasteful emotion.”

You’re insane, Clayton. You have to be, if any of this strikes you as reasonable.

The bandages had unwound around two fingers of his brother’s hand. The material was sodden with dark blood and something else, something fouler…

Luke’s breath hitched; he nearly screamed.

When Luke was a boy his neighbor Cedric Figgs had developed a goiter on his neck. The massive, throbbing lesion resembled an unpopped zit. Never look at it, his father instructed. Why make him feel bad?

But it had been almost impossible not to stare at Cedric Figgs’ goiter. The eye was drawn naturally, as a child’s eye usually is to such horrors.

Clayton’s hand was far more difficult to avoid staring at. But Luke couldn’t let Clayton know that he’d noticed—because if Clayton saw Luke’s eyes dodging to his hand, he’d know that Luke had perceived what he’d done.

And if Clayton knew, then it might know, too.

7.

THE EXTINCTION KIT. The thought blitzed through Luke’s fevered mind. The one Clayton used to kill that guinea pig. Was it still under the lab bench?

Luke had seen its contents. There was a vial of Telazol, an animal narcotic. Back in veterinary school, a student had gotten hooked on the stuff; the guy had been discovered in the drug lockup, limp as a cooked noodle—he’d nearly choked to death on his tongue.

But how could he prep a hypo without Clay noticing?

The next heartbeat, the lights went out.

Luke was trapped in a bubble of pure animal panic.

They snapped on again—not the regular lights, though. These were small red lights strung down the ceiling.

“Emergency backup,” Clayton said.

“We lost power?”

Clayton turned to face him in the blood-red glow. “For now. It should come back. It’s happened a few times.”

“Is there a power grid?”

“A fuse box, yes.” He favored Luke with a wintry smile. “Maybe we can reset the breaker. Why don’t I go check?”

Without another word, Clayton stepped into the main lab.

This is your chance, Luke. Your only chance, maybe.

The Extinction Kit was still under the bench. A much larger medical kit sat beside it. Luke found the Telazol. His hands shook as he snapped the cap off the vial, a motion he’d done a thousand times, so often it should be automatic. But right now his thumbnail couldn’t find the stupid seam.

Goddamn it, move!

He set the vial aside. He unwrapped a syringe and affixed a needle to the tip. It was a small gauge, not much thicker than an insulin needle; if it bent while he grappled with Clayton—and he anticipated a struggle—then he might not be able to inject enough to immobilize him.

Prepare two syringes, then. Split the dose.

He unwrapped another syringe and needle. His hands shook. His brother was knocking around the main lab. Harsh rattling sounds.

Convenient, isn’t it? his mother said from the deepest pits of Luke’s subconscious. The lights going out. What perfect timing for you, hmmm? Almost as if it was predetermined. Planned, somehow.

The red lights pulsed against Luke’s eyes. He didn’t care why the power had gone out, or how; he had thirty seconds, maybe less, to make use of it. He shook the vial and tried to sink the needle into the rubber stopper—only to have it skate off the metal cap he’d forgotten was still on.

His brother was thumbing breakers now; Luke could hear the heavy thu-thuck! as he reset them in turn.

Had Clay noticed yet? The bandages unraveling off his fingers, revealing…?

Don’t think about it now, Luke. Just work.

His thumbnail found the groove; the cap popped off. He jabbed the needle in and withdrew 3 ccs, released the excess air, and set the hypo aside.

Clayton’s footsteps approached across the main lab floor.

Luke sunk the second needle through the stopper. Shit. Too much air in the hypo; if he injected it, an air bubble could travel to Clay’s heart and flatline him.

Would that kill him now, though? Would it kill what he might have become?

Clayton stepped through the hatch. Luke dropped behind the bench.

“Lucas?”

Luke drew the plunger back and this time he got the telltale suck that told him he was drawing only fluid.

Clayton rounded the bench. “Lucas, what are you up to?”

His voice had gone cold. A grating, gravelly rasp.

Luke depressed the plunger. A stream of Telazol pissed from the needle tip.

Clayton’s hand fell upon his shoulder. The ragged, gummy edge of a bandage flapped against Luke’s ear. Clay’s hand squeezed with terrific force.

“Are you being bad, my child?”

The voice didn’t belong to Clayton anymore.

In one move—remarkably smooth, considering how scared he was—Luke jerked up the hem of Clayton’s overalls and sunk the needle into his calf.

It was, Luke imagined, like being stung by a hornet: it took a second for the message to travel to Clay’s brain, then back down to the sting site. Clayton roared and lashed out. His boot struck Luke’s chest. The glancing blow was enough to send Luke across the floor. The grate shredded his overalls and sent glittering shards of cold down his thighs.

“Very bad, my child. Oh yes-yes-yes, very bad indeed…”

Clayton’s eyes. Oh God, his eyes. They glimmered in the bloody red light. There was nothing in them—not hostility or hurt or lunatic rage. They looked like lead-colored marbles socked into the face of a stuffed animal.

Those eyes rolled from Luke’s face down to the hypodermic, which jutted straight from his calf, stiff as a diving board. Clayton’s mouth pursed in a wry smile.

“Clever boy.”

Luke crab-walked away. Clayton pursued sluggishly, dragging his leg.

“Clever, clever, clever…”

Luke’s back hit the wall. He spun, disoriented in the red light, and scuttled away as Clayton made a clumsy and almost playful lunge.

He moves like a child, Luke thought wildly. A baby learning how to walk.

Luke tripped awkwardly against the lab bench. Clayton spun like a happy drunk, a blankly joyous look on his face. His leaden eyes widened: the look of a predator whose prey had stumbled carelessly into its midst.

Clayton reached for Luke. His bandaged arm had elongated in some terrible way, his fingers stretching, each digit acquiring extra joints… a version of that terrible arm that had hu-thumped out of the Tickle Trunk.

LB charged at Clayton, snarling. With disturbing quickness, Clayton shifted his attention from Luke to the dog. He caught her deftly, almost lovingly. LB snapped and bit, her teeth tearing shallow grooves in Clayton’s neck—his flesh tore all too easily, like tissue paper.

“Good dog-gie.”

Luke scrambled up, hunting for the second hypo. The floor was scattered with bits of medical equipment.

Gauze, a box of Band-Aids, a scalpel…

Clayton’s hand tightened around LB’s ear flap. With one spastic movement, he tore it off. It came off the dog’s head with a gristly burr, kind of like an obstinate sleeve torn off an old letterman jacket. LB issued an electric yelp of pain.

The second hypo had fallen halfway through the floor grate; the plunger was hooked precariously on the saw-toothed metal. If the grate got rattled, the hypo could fall. Luke’s fingers weren’t long enough to reach it if that happened.

His brother’s fingers, however…

LB strained in Clayton’s grip, her legs scrabbling desperately. Clayton’s smile widened—a madcap leer that threatened to split his head in half.

Luke closed his thumb and forefinger around the hypo, pulling it carefully from the grate. He moved behind his brother—whose unearthly eyes seemed to track him from an impossible angle, telescoping like a snail’s eyes—then rose up and sunk the needle into his throat.

Clayton gargled and dropped the dog. The needle protruded from his neck. His bandaged arm flailed; Luke ducked as the limb swung over his skull like the unmoored boom on a sailboat.

Clayton staggered back and hit the wall and slid down, still clawing at the needle. He sat, legs splayed, toes pointed at the ceiling. His head dipped. His posture was that of a wino passed out in an alleyway.

LB had crawled to a corner and lay there whimpering.

Luke said, “It’s okay, girl.”

Gingerly, he pulled her paw away from the wound. A ragged tear, the flesh ripped unevenly to leave an inch or so of ear. Blood stained her golden coat.

“I’ll fix you up. You’ll be good as new.”

Clayton’s unbandaged hand still clutched LB’s ear. Luke knelt beside him, fearful that his brother’s eyes would pop open. He wrenched at Clayton’s fingers until he pried LB’s ear free. Staring at the blood-soaked flap, Luke was rocked by a wave of despondency and loneliness as profound as he’d ever known…

…the only time that came close to it was years ago, in that playground…

Luke’s mind heaved. Another chunk broke off the crumbling landmass of his psyche, drifting into the dark. The portion that remained could comprehend that madness—true, uncaring lunacy—was not far away. Madness had been there since he’d set foot on the station; it had been dogging him persistently, waiting for the cracks to develop so that it could slip painlessly inside. That’s exactly how it would happen, too: a quick little jab like a needle administered by an expert nurse. He’d barely feel the insanity take hold.

“You stuck your hand through the hole, Clayton. Couldn’t help yourself, could you?”

8.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER LB’s ear was bandaged and the dog was curled up, resting. Clayton was strapped to the bench in the main lab.

Luke used a Tensor bandage to lash his brother’s heels together, then tied them to the bench. He hacked another Tensor in half and tied his wrists down. He could only hope that the restraints, plus the coldcocking dose of Telazol, would keep Clayton immobile while Luke inspected his arm.

“Let’s see what we’re dealing with, brother of mine.”

Luke found latex gloves and a pair of medical shears in the first-aid kit. He slit Clayton’s sweater up to his shoulder. Bandages covered Clayton’s entire arm. They were encrusted with some kind of paste that smelled faintly of honeysuckle.

Luke cut the bandages away, starting at Clayton’s shoulder. The flesh was pale and sweaty. But as Luke pulled the wrappings back, things began to change.

Pencil-thin threads of black appeared. They darkened Clay’s flesh like tattoos. These gradually knit into a band of solid black, roughly four inches above his elbow.

Luke touched that flesh with his finger. He had a lot of experience with frostbite, which could turn skin black, but this wasn’t it. Frostbite turned flesh pulpy and pestilent. The flesh of Clayton’s upper arm was firm, just terribly discolored.

“What the hell what the hell what the hell…”

He snipped and gingerly peeled the bandages away; they trailed strings of gummy translucence like strips of duct tape whose glue had softened in the sun. The flesh beyond the black layer—about two solid inches—was the chalky white of processed lard. No arm hairs, no freckles or blemishes.

“Jesus, Clay. What have you done?”

He’d cut around the elbow and a few inches down the forearm when Clay’s flesh became opaque. The sight reminded Luke of bacon grease stored in a glass: a top of hardened grease that gave way to clearer fat studded with burned bits of bacon. A few more snips and he was peering into Clayton’s arm: a gray, gelatinous sheath of flesh—was it even flesh anymore?—that displayed the blue tubes of his veins.

The shears were gummed with translucent ooze. The bandages came away much easier now, anyway. He could peel them off with his fingers.

LB poked her head around Luke’s hips. “Go on,” Luke warned her. “Scat.” The dog tucked her tail and retreated to a corner, watching him fearfully.

When Luke uncovered Clayton’s hand, black dots popped before his eyes.

He could see bones. That wasn’t the worst of it. Clayton’s flesh quivered like Jell-O fresh from the fridge… and yet it didn’t seem squishy, as Jell-O would be.

A chrysalis, he thought. I’m seeing the same process that happens inside a cocoon, when a caterpillar turns into a moth… or a pollywog turns into a frog. A transformation so intense that everything melts and is reborn.

Clayton’s swollen fingers ended in stubs. Strips of medical tape sloughed off each one… Why had Clay taped them? His finger bones appeared to overlap one another, like photographic negatives set slightly off-kilter—

Clayton’s arm tensed. His hand curled into a fist.

His eyes were still closed.

Was there a ghost of a smile on his face?

His hand uncurled. Then something perfectly awful happened.

With a gluey suck, Clayton’s fingers… unfolded.

9.

CLAYTON’S FINGERTIPS BENT BACK from his palms, each digit trailing a runner of ooze.

He’s folded them down, Luke realized in horror. They grew longer and longer and he got scared so he folded them over themselves and taped them down. It was the only way to convince himself it wasn’t happening.

He pictured his brother doing it. Teeth gritted, gagging back his horror, gripping each terrible finger and bending it into his palm, then taping the doubled-over digit tight.

His fingers unkinked one by one; they looked like pocketknives unfolding. Fully outstretched, each finger was monstrously long: the pinkie at least six inches, the others longer than that. They were skinny and cruel, spread on the bench like the tines of a garden rake.

The tips were wide and spoon shaped, with large nail beds. The perfect mulch in which to cultivate dark, sharp nails.

It was a hand Luke had seen before. A hand that, as an adult, he’d convinced himself couldn’t possibly exist.

But here it was. Grafted onto—growing out of—his brother’s own flesh.

He would cut the fucking thing off. Not just the hand, the whole goddamn arm. It revolted him at a subcellular level. He thought that—and his thoughts were unfocused on this item, perhaps even a wee bit delusional—well, that if he took the infected arm off, maybe he could save Clayton. Excise the cancer, save the rest. Even though his brother was a miserable shit, Luke had to salvage what he could. The dog, Alice, even his brother. Everything else he would abandon to shriek and gibber down here at the bottom of the world, alone in its misery.

As he stood debating this, still grappling with the sight of his brother’s horrible appendage, Clayton’s hand clenched again. A sudden spastic movement as if it had been hit with high voltage. Luke backed out of its range, watching pop-eyed. The wrist swiveled, those snakish fingers hooking the edge of the bench. With a convulsive flex, they tightened. The flesh of Clayton’s wrist stretched like carnival taffy. The ulna and carpal bones pulled apart with a meaty thok. The fingers crawled forward, reseated their grip, and contracted again. The realization dawned on Luke.

It’s tearing itself off.

The skin of Clayton’s wrist stretched and thinned, then began to rip apart. It did so noiselessly, like fork-tender beef. There was no blood at all; in that way it was as clean as unscrewing a hand from a mannequin. Luke knew this sight should bother him much more than it did—but now, right this minute, it didn’t seem nearly as strange as it ought to. That his brother’s hand was pulling itself off, amputating itself from the limb it had been attached to since birth, didn’t seem that unnatural at all. It wasn’t really part of Clayton, was it? It was infected. So in a way, Luke was happy to see it go—sort of like watching a tumor excise itself before a surgeon was forced to do it.

Clayton’s body juddered as his mutinous hand jerked and clenched, the last few tenacious rags of skin shearing through as it snapped forward, free now, the wrist trailing off blue ropes of nerve and veins filled with blackened blood. The hand went limp as soon as it had detached, the fingers relaxing. Gravity carried it off the edge of the bench; it hit the grate with a smack. Disgusted, Luke kicked it under the bench.

A sense of numb duty drove him to bandage up Clayton’s wrist stump—there was no blood at all. Events were happening too swiftly; his mind was struggling to process them. His one simpleminded ambition was to drag Clayton’s body to the Challenger, but the immensity of that task filled him with a bone-deep exhaustion. And even if he dragged him there, what then?

…skritch, skritch, skritch…

10.

THE NOISE HOOKED ITSELF to motes of dust, which drifted lazily through the air to Luke’s ears.

…skritch…

A playful scrape at his thighs. It was just LB, of course it was. The dog was trying to get his attention. But no—he could see LB in the corner, watching him with obvious concern.

…skriiiitch…

His overalls tightened a few inches below his groin. A thrilling tension. It reminded him of his first sexual experience in eleventh grade with Becky Sue Morgentaler. Becky was a good Baptist girl—she refused to take Luke’s pants off or to actually touch him down there. But she’d permit his hands to roam freely under her sweater while she grabbed his jeans midway down his thighs and pulled with aching pressure, drawing the denim tight over his throbbing erection.

Pulling isn’t touching, she’d murmur. Pulling isn’t touching, or sucking, or anything much at all.

…skritch…

Clayton’s amputated hand. It was on the floor at his feet. Its pointer finger curled in a come-hither gesture. Every time it curled, it brushed Luke’s overalls.

It’s just the nerves, Luke thought. Nothing but nerve endings firing one last futile salvo. I saw a decapitated corn snake bite its own tail; I watched venom spurt from its neck stump as it bit and chewed…

But this was slow and deliberate. Worst of all, there was something sexual to the gesture, that finger flirting lovingly along his ankle.

Hey big boy… pulling isn’t touching, right?

Luke lunged away. His arm swung, sending bandages and vials across the floor.

The hand flapped once more—a fey, mocking wave—and went limp.

Luke bit back his disgust and reached down for Mr. Hand—that’s how he suddenly thought of it; not Clayton’s torn-off hand, but Mr. Hand—although it really resembled a huge and horrible spider.

Go ahead, Luke, Mr. Hand seemed to say. Touch me. Grab me.

Jaw clenched, nerves jangling, Luke vised his fingers around Mr. Hand, gripping it by the mangled remains of its wrist. He held it at the end of his arm as though it was a poisonous snake. He realized that those long, crablike fingers could easily wrap around his own wrist—hell, they could reach halfway up his forearm.

“Go ahead,” he seethed. “Go ahead and try. See where it gets you.”

The hand remained limp. Luke threw open the cooler lid. A sad puff of mist billowed out—with the power cut, it wasn’t that cool anymore.

The small guinea pig rested in a thawing mantle of frost. The thing beneath it, the one wrapped in trash bags and duct tape, remained motionless.

Luke heaved Mr. Hand inside. It bounced off the cooler lid. Mr. Hand skidded down the side—then came alive, spidering about with nimble movements.

It finger-walked over to the frozen guinea pig and tightened into a fist.

The guinea pig… compacted. Its half-thawed flesh squished between Mr. Hand’s fingers. Rags of flesh splattered the cooler’s insides.

Mr. Hand unclenched again. Lay there covered in gore.

One finger twitched. Coyly beckoning.

No hard feelings, right, Luke? We can be friends. Heck, let’s shake on it.

Luke slammed the cooler shut, gagging on his fear. He set a heavy box of lab equipment on the lid.

Clayton was still passed out. Luke wanted to check on Al—it was critical to keep an eye on everything, but he couldn’t possibly be two places at once.

Luke pushed up Clayton’s eyelid. His pupil was a piss hole in the snow. He’d be out awhile—and when he awoke, he’d be groggy and safely trussed up on the lab bench. Luke could risk leaving him for a few minutes, couldn’t he?

“Come on, LB. Let’s go see Al.”

11.

LUKE SENSED IT right away. An emptiness in the storage tunnel.

His footsteps faltered as he rounded the gooseneck and made his way to the Challenger. He could dimly make out the generator and the cables snaking out of it.

“Al?”

He picked up the flashlight Al had left behind. He trained it down the tunnel. He walked past the genny to the far end of the tunnel. The hatch was locked. He walked back. LB padded obediently behind.

“Hey, Al?”

Was she inside the Challenger? Luke rapped the hatch with his knuckles. Long minutes went by. The hatch didn’t open. Was the sub still there? It had to be. Alice would never…

He sat, knees tucked to his chest, arms wrapped around his kneecaps. He wanted to cry but was too tired. LB rested her head on his crossed arms and peered soulfully into his bloodshot eyes.

The flashlight cut out. Luke slapped it with his palm a few times, flicked the switch on and off. Nothing. Christly fuck. At least the emergency lights were still on.

“Where could she be, girl?”

LB gave a noncommittal chuff. Al couldn’t have returned to the lab; Luke would have spotted her. She might have headed down one of the other tunnels, but why? They had two goals: get the sub working and get home. Neither of those goals could be met by wandering aimlessly down empty tunnels.

What if Al had fallen asleep again? She could’ve wandered anyplace…

Maybe she left, Lucas.

His mother’s cold voice, back once more. The bitch always came back.

She could be halfway to the surface by now, she said reasonably. Maybe she discovered there was only enough power to take one person. Maybe she said to herself: I’ll go and come back with a fully powered vessel. Or maybe, Lucas—and you have to consider this as a very strong possibility—she just left because she could. Because she was shit-scared. People do that, you know. Given their druthers, people do the nastiest, most weak-willed and insensitive things imaginable.

No. Luke didn’t believe that. He wouldn’t let his mother—his dead mother, dead nearly three decades now, her bones moldering in a Celestial Sleeper casket under six feet of Iowa clay—poison his thoughts.

No more, Ma. You don’t have that hold over me anymore.

The emergency lights flickered, then died. Darkness fell like a guillotine blade.

12.

THE SENSATION was not unlike being doused with a bucket of freezing water. Luke’s body went stiff as the fear shot through his veins. His chest convulsed with hiccupy inhales but he couldn’t let them go.

The most profound darkness he’d ever known swept over him. The absolute absence of light, fueled by a fearsome pressure. Workers in a caved-in mine shaft might have an inkling of this sensation, but how far down was the deepest mine shaft? A mile? At eight miles, the blackness was some new kind of scientific thing, a darkness nobody had experienced before… except this wasn’t new, was it? It was the opposite. This darkness was ageless. And it had been waiting a very long time for Luke to inherit it.

A reddish tinge painted the backsides of his eyes; his final sight—the tunnel, the generator, LB’s face—lingered in the afterglow before dissolving. The darkness pushed against his eyes and flitted against his shut lips, seeking entrance; it was so thick that he could feel its weight in his lungs. It was a different, horrible breed of darkness: brooding, knowing, full of all those things that as a child you were certain it must hold. But beyond that there was the sheer terror of that dark itself—its immensity, its incalculable isolation. And that’s what Luke felt most keenly: his abrupt and total isolation, as if he’d opened his eyes to find himself floating in deepest space, beyond the light of a single guiding star.

He staggered sideways, striking his knee on the generator; pain needled to his crotch. He shuffled forward in halting baby steps. His fingers grazed the wall; he flinched. The metal was as clammy as the rocks in a sea cave.

The dog yelped—a short, breathless note.

“LB?”

He couldn’t hear her nails clicking on the floor anymore. If it weren’t for the sound of his own raspy exhales, Luke would have thought he’d gone deaf.

“Where are you, girl?”

No sound of her breathing. He’d lost the distinctive scent of her breath. She was gone. Surely he’d have heard her go? A hole couldn’t have opened up in the floor and sucked her down…

Oh no? his mother said.

“LB? Come on, baby. I know you’re there. Don’t be scared.”

Nothing but the overwhelming dark and a faint rustling from all sides. A hard, prolonged compression invaded Luke’s chest. LB was gone. She’d been taken by the station. By its new—no, Luke, by its very very old—inhabitants.

It was as if a critical part of him had been stolen—the twine binding everything together. The dog had been the first creature he’d encountered on the Trieste. His anchor. The direness of her loss cleaved him in two. Alice was AWOL—Christ, maybe she had left. His brother was useless. Dr. Toy was dead. The power was out.

Luke was entirely alone.

Alone like your son was left alone in the woods alone because you lost him because you took your eyes off him at the moment it mattered most—

He heard a lush, tickling note. From where? It was so hard to tell in this darkness.

There. It must be coming from beyond the gooseneck, toward Toy’s quarters.

But that hatch was locked, wasn’t it? Yes. He’d checked only minutes ago.

It came again. A moist note like a mop dragged over a tile floor. Silence. It came again, closer this time.

Otto Railsback.

The name leapt out at him. Railsback, who’d welded this station together. Down here alone in the dark—this exact same dark. A wee scrap of a thing, isn’t that what Alice said? He finished his job, laid his head down and died.

But he wasn’t dead. No-no-no. He was here now, crawling toward Luke. His legs had been torn away above the hips; the knobs of his spine projected through the bloody meat. The moplike sound was made by his unraveling intestines, still wet and juicy, whishing across the grate.

Luke had no intention of confronting whatever was really making those sounds. He backed away, struggling to recall where the tunnel bent so he could trace his way out again.

In the dark, a man’s thoughts described an unhealthy spiral. No matter what he tried to orient his mind on—the shape of his wife’s face or the sound of his boy’s laughter or the taste of a fall peach plucked right off the tree—every thought seemed to loop back, unerringly, to those shapes in the darkness with their guts unfurling from cracked-open bellies… And it was worse down here, so much worse, because that hammering Christly goddamn pressure never stopped welting down on him, a never-ending compression that cinched his brain in a vise, warping all rational thought… Nothing is impossible down here, Luke. This singular thought blazed across his mind. He was in a place where truly anything could happen. The edges of reality were blown out, inviting in every conceivability. That terrifying notion—all was possible—stripped a man’s mind to its fragile bedrock.

The sounds changed. Became a clitter-clitter-clack.

Nails on metal. Dog nails?

LB?

No, it wasn’t LB. Luke couldn’t put this sense into words, but he knew. It was something else… though perhaps not entirely. A new kind of LB, maybe. Whatever a dog might become after the station had swallowed it and spat it back out.

Click… click… click…

A growl. A rippling rusty sound like a balky chainsaw revving up.

Luke turned and fled. His face slammed into a wall; his mouth filled with a bracing metallic tang—the same as when, as a boy, he’d slipped on a patch of ice and smashed his face on the frozen schoolyard slide. He spun, regained his balance, and kept running. The air in front of his face had a staticky appearance, like TV snow on a dead channel.

Click… click… click-click-click—

Luke ran headlong into another wall and reeled away, convinced that the LB-thing was close behind now, accelerating on legs bunched with muscle, its fang-studded jaws open wide.

His hands slapped the storage area hatch. He ran his palms over it until his fingers slipped around its edge. He slid through the hatchway just as something slammed against it, jarring the hatch shut and jolting him to the ground.

The hatch’s hinges squealed. Luke skittered away as the metal groaned. The porthole must have broken; Luke could hear cracks threading across the thick glass.

He imagined that glass shattering—imagined whatever was on the other side pouring through the broken glass like hungering oil.

The shuddering stopped. But Luke could still feel his pursuer behind that hatch. His mind was unable to conjure its shape. That was surely for the best.

He needed a flashlight. He was certain he’d seen one in the communications room. Why hadn’t he grabbed it then? Stupid idiot. He stood and got moving, feeling blindly along the wall. His fingers brushed the edge of another hatch. It led to the comm room, he was certain. Through this hatch and down a short tunnel, past one hatch to the next one. Yes, that was it.

The flashlight would be there. It had to be.

Luke swung the hatch open. He crossed the threshold timidly—he half expected the floor to be replaced with plummeting nothingness. His toe hit metal. He crept down the tunnel until he reached the second hatch. He stepped through into the comm room. His hands feathered along the wall. His fingers brushed something smooth and tubular like a sleeping boa constrictor. Luke recoiled, his breath whistling in his ears.

It’s just a pipe. A harmless heating or cooling pipe.

His entire frame was tense. Soon, very soon, something would reach out of the darkness and grab him… or worse, enfold him in a loving caress.

His hands closed on the flashlight. When he released the clips, it slipped through his fingers and clattered to the floor.

Damn-damn-DAMN!

He groped after it, hoping to God he hadn’t cracked the bulb. He found it and thumbed the switch. A circle of light appeared on the wall. Luke’s heart flooded with relief. It was weak, but goddamn, blissfully, it was light.

He followed the beam out of the room and back down the tunnel. He returned to the main tunnel and trained the light on the storage hatch.

It was unmarked. The steel unbuckled, the porthole unshattered.

This station does as it likes, he thought. It ruins itself and fixes itself. Stop questioning any of it.

Laughter.

He swung the light behind him. Nothing. He aimed it on the storage hatch again, then in the other direction, toward the main lab. Nothing.

A prepubescent giggle shot through the dark, splintering the air.

A mocking titter.

“Daddy…”

Another titter. Zach’s voice, unmistakably. Luke backed away from it—but that was impossible, wasn’t it? It came from every angle: a cold and airless giggle that made the flesh jump down Luke’s throat.

The flashlight felt pitiful in his hands, a piss-poor little toy, totally unfit for the task of pushing back the enormous dark that assaulted him… a darkness rebounding with his son’s laughter.

He didn’t want to see Zachary. He didn’t want to confront what this place had done to him. But his arm moved nonetheless, the beam staggering over the walls and floor and cei—

Pajama bottoms. A pair of them hanging pendulant from the ceiling.

Something jutted from the leg-holes. Thick and tubular, holding the mellow glow of well-polished metal.

Tiny appendages were studded all along their length, anchoring it to the ceiling.

Legs. Dozens and dozens of little legs. A millipede’s legs jutting out of his son’s old pajamas.

The titter came again. Choked and somehow insectile this time. Luke could not even begin to conceive of the organism that might make such a sound.

It’s me, Daddy. Just little ole me. Ole Zach Attack. Shine your little light on me. You’ll see, I promise you’ll see everything!

Luke wouldn’t—couldn’t—let the light touch the thing hooked to the ceiling ten yards away, wearing his son’s pajamas. If he allowed that to happen, he would go mad. It would happen instantaneously, the moment the light touched the thing’s teeming face. A sharp note would sound in the dead center of his mind, a brittle snap or click, and his sanity would be burned out like a fuse going dead. A deadness would enter his eyes. He’d begin to titter along with the thing on the ceiling.

He might even be inclined to… to hug it. The two of them entwined lovingly in the dark. Yes, he could imagine that happening quite clearly.

The flashlight beam lurched, taking in the thing’s chest. The pajamas were stretched under the bulbous weight of whatever lay beneath them, the way his mother’s old clothes had stretched under the tortuous bulk of her fattening body. The fabric was split under the armpits and across the belly; Luke saw parts of some awful anatomy bristling and constricting through those tears.

“Daddy.” The voice was cold. Commanding. “Look at meeeee…”

And dear Jesus, he wanted to. Even if it drove him insane. It would be an end, wouldn’t it? He could give up. His obligation would end. Just switch the flashlight off and surrender. Let the things inside the station slither and hiss out of every dark hollow and claim him.

It wants to drive you mad, Luke. A final, desperate plea from his subconscious. It’ll make it all so much easier. You’ll be their plaything—do you really want that, after all you’ve been through?

The beam crept toward the thing’s head. It hung from the ceiling, batlike, its horrible body shuddering and bucking. Its hips thrust lewdly, in furious rut.

Luke’s thumb found the flashlight button. Something fought his intent—no no no you must not do that you disobedient boy you must look must look look you fucking bastard look at me look at US—but Luke fought back, overriding it.

He clicked the light off.

“You don’t exist.” His voice quavered, but only slightly. “My son is not down here. You do not have that control—not over him, or me. If you want me, I’m here.” His hand curled around the flashlight. “Come get me, you fucker.”

Silence. Then: a soft note like a silk scarf unwinding from around a metal pole. Next, a percussive pop followed by the gentlest outrush of air.

The tunnel was empty. Luke didn’t have to switch the flashlight on to know that. He felt it. The presence, whatever it was, had departed for the time being.

He flicked the flashlight on and got moving. Darkness was netted in the crawl-through chute; he went through feetfirst—he wanted a chance, at least, to kick at anything that might try to slither through from the other side. He slid through and continued on to the main lab. The beam roamed up the walls to the ceiling—

What the hell was that?

Holes were eating into the ceiling now. He saw one, then two, then a third, staggered a few feet apart.

Fresh fear scuttled up from the balls of his feet on febrile spider legs; when he swallowed, his throat felt like it was lined with carpenter’s glue.

The main lab was empty. Luke shone the flashlight on his brother. The stump was… gooey. Some gluey substance had already soaked through the cap of bandages; strings of ichor dangled to the bench.

“Al? LB?”

Luke’s despair thickened. After all this, Luke was left with his misanthropic, one-handed brother. He’d have to carry on as planned. Lug Clay to the Challenger and wait. If it became clear that Al and LB were truly lost and gone, he’d have to leave. He didn’t know how to pilot the damn thing, but Al said there wasn’t much to it. Seal the hatch, drop the weights, rise like a cork. Maybe he would rise too fast and the bends would twist the Nelson boys into human pretzels. Luke didn’t care. He didn’t want to die down here. If he had to die, okay, he was nearly resigned to it now—but he wanted to die while moving toward the sun.

He leaned on the bench, summoning the remains of his physical energy. His flashlight traced idle patterns on the wall. The beam touched the window, which was now covered in a gelatinous sheet of ambrosia. The stuff shuddered in the light—a sight not unlike a thousand eyelids snapping open and closed in rapid motion.

Luke swung the flashlight away, sickened. The beam landed on Westlake’s lab. The porthole was smeared with that tarlike black. The light pelted right off it.

Until a hand slapped the glass.

13.

LUKE FLINCHED, even though the glass was too thick for the slap to have made a sound. He bobbled the flashlight and when he trained it on the porthole again, the hand was still there.

His arms broke out in gooseflesh. The hand pressed to the glass, that squalid black squeezing between its fingers. Then it was gone.

A small hand.

A feminine hand.

Al’s hand?

How had she gotten inside? The hatch was locked and only Westlake’s combination would open it… unless it’d come unlocked during the power outage?

When Luke tried to push off the bench to investigate, he was dismayed to discover his ass was tightly glued to it.

Get up, for Christ’s sake. Open that goddamn door.

He heaved himself up. His legs carried him forward as his mind raced through a View-Master’s reel of horrifying images, both real and imagined.

Click: Westlake’s scarified body in its cooling vault.

Click: The pages of Westlake’s diary smeared with black gunk.

Click: Huge fire-eyed bees droning around Westlake’s lab, trundling through carbuncled, ooze-dripping honeycombs.

Click: A hole in the lab wall, bees flitting in and out, the narcotic buzz of their wings melding with the whispers drifting from the hole.

Luke’s fingers fell upon the wheel on Westlake’s hatch. It wouldn’t budge. He stuck the flashlight under his armpit and used both hands. Nothing.

Did the lock have a fail-safe in the event of a power outage? Was it wedged shut from the other side?

Luke settled his ear against the hatch. He tried to pick up a sound apart from that frenetic buzz. Al’s voice, perhaps. Her screams, even.

“Al?” he whispered. “Jesus, if you’re in there…”

The drone spiked—a warning? an invitation?—then settled again.

Luke couldn’t get inside. But thankfully that meant Al couldn’t be inside, either.

Unless she’s locked herself in. And wedged the hatch shut.

Why in Christ’s name would she…?

Quit thinking about it, he chided himself. You can’t get inside. She’s not in there. She has more sense than that. This place is fucking with you again—it wants you to open the hatch, don’t you see? You’ve got to keep moving. Stick to the plan.

The plan. Okay. First things first. Transport Clayton to the Challenger.

Luke cut the Tensors and rolled Clayton onto his side. His brother showed no sign of awakening, but Luke filled another hypo with Telazol and slipped it into his pocket just in case. After a moment’s consideration, he slipped a scalpel in with it.

Luke raised Clayton’s arm and ducked his head under to heft him up. Clayton was incredibly heavy, especially with Luke as exhausted as he was. He’d manage it somehow. As he was leaving the lab, Luke heard a muffled thump from Clayton’s lab.

The cooler.

Oh, God. Its contents were thawing. And they wanted out.

He set Clayton down and shone the flashlight into the lab.

The cooler lid rattled ominously.

Thump. Tha-thump-thump.

The box of lab equipment Luke had set atop the cooler jumped. Before long, it would get knocked off. Then the creatures inside would be set loose in the dark.

Luke retrieved the Tensors he’d used to bind Clayton. Working quickly, he strung them under the cooler and knotted them tightly across the lid. When he was finished, it looked like a birthday present that nobody in their right fucking mind would want to open. He put the lab equipment back on top, thinking it couldn’t hurt.

With his ear pressed to the cooler, he could make out noises inside: long slow scratches, not unlike nails raking the inside of a coffin.

He shut the hatch to the lab and turned his attention back to Clayton.

“Okay, brother dear. Let’s get cracking.”

Dragging him through the tunnels was draining, awkward work. Luke tried a modified fireman’s carry, but the tunnel was too low for that. He tried carrying him the way you’d hoist a drunk, one arm hooked over his shoulder. Clay hung limp and heavy, toes scraping the floor. It was hard to carry him and keep the flashlight focused forward at the same time. Eventually Luke sat Clayton down and hooked his arms under Clay’s armpits, hands clasped across his chest, and dragged him. Luke hated not being able to see where he was going—he couldn’t see what, if anything, was waiting in the dark—but it was a lot quicker this way. Every few feet he stopped to sweep the flashlight behind him, ensuring that the tunnel looked as he remembered it.

He reached the crawl-through chute. Jesus. How was he going to manage this? It’d be easier to shove his brother in headfirst, humans being naturally top-heavy, but without anyone to catch him on the other side, Clay would fall bonelessly; he might smash his head open. So feetfirst it would have to be.

Luke shone the flashlight down the crawl-through. Its insides glittered fitfully; the beam didn’t penetrate the solid dark on the other side.

“Fuck it,” he muttered. “Upsy-daisy.”

He wrangled Clay’s heels and calves into the chute. It was hard work to shove and shoulder Clayton’s body up and in; Clay’s scalp got cut open on the grate and one of his arms got hooked behind his back in a painful-looking chicken wing. Luke was breathing hard by the time Clay’s knees cleared the lip of the chute. He felt like a mobster feeding a dead stoolie into a wood chipper.

Luke cranked Clay’s midsection up and levered him into the chute. Luke figured he should go feetfirst, too, his heels braced on Clayton’s shoulders to push him along. Progress would be tortuous, but he could do it.

He pushed Clayton down the crawl-through as far as he could using his hands, then pulled himself out, gripped the first overhead rung in both hands, swung into the chute, and settled his feet on either side of Clayton’s head. Pushing with his hips and hauling with his arms, he was able to get Clayton’s body sliding forward. Luke’s shoulders and head were swallowed into the chute. He braced his palms and pushed against the rungs, propelling their bodies forward. The flashlight jutted from the hip pocket of his overalls, shining directly into his eyes—

Something was behind him. Coming down the dark tunnel.

He couldn’t see it, not yet—but oooh, he could smell it.

A childhood smell. The same one that would waft up from the white Styrofoam container with the perforated lid he’d buy at the local bait shop for two bucks. He’d put that container in his backpack and sling his fishing rod over his shoulder and head down to the river. On the banks he’d open the container and see them wriggling under a layer of sawdust. Maggots. The best bait for rock bass. Luke had always found them revolting—their fat, milky bodies so translucent you could see the weird workings of their guts through their skin. They wriggled delightedly, it seemed, when he pinched them between his thumb and fingers—just happy to be touched, even if it meant they’d shortly be skewered on a barbed hook. Their skin would dimple like a badly inflated balloon before the hook punched through their bodies—and their elated paroxysms would persist after they’d been skewered, these crazed squirms that would entice a fish to bite…

This was what filled Luke’s nose: that rancid, sawdust smell of maggots in a bait cup.

He snatched the flashlight and twisted onto his stomach. The beam flooded out of the crawl-through and hit a sheer wall of darkness where he’d just been. The light picked up a patina of dust—dead skin cells, it could only be, seeing as there was nothing else down here that could become dust.

Lubbaduuuuu… Loooooolubbaduuuu…

This sound came next, sluicing out of the dark. A slick and gooey noise, like a ball of Vaseline-smeared yarn squished in a fist.

Luke felt it out there now—pulsating and lewd, a giant maggot. A horrific white grub in search of its wormhole; the very hole Luke and Clayton were trapped inside.

The tunnel lights flickered on for a moment.

Luke saw it, or was certain he had. Enormous. It curled around the tunnel and out of sight, thirty feet of it visible, as thick around as an industrial trash can. Its pale ringed ugliness seared his eyeballs; its huge gelatinous body convulsed along the floor in a series of giddy, peristaltic flexes. The sight filled Luke with a narcotizing terror—a slow-acting nectar that oozed into his veins.

The lights went out again. The thing continued to suck and shudder itself forward.

…looolubbaaaaaduuuuu…

Frantically, Luke pushed himself backward. His hands slipped uselessly on the frictionless coating inside the tube: he may as well be trying to climb a greased pole. He reached up, spine bowed, and shoved desperately at the rungs with his palms.

The flashlight picked up an oily slab of chalk-white flesh no more than a yard away from the mouth of the crawl-through…

Loorblovvaducthhh…

Luke paused, trapped in a breathless bubble of panic. That noise, which he’d mistaken for the sound of the maggot’s body shucking across the floor, was something else.

It was a voice. A familiar one.

Looooordloveaducthhhhh…

A quivering mass of unctuous, marble-white flesh plugged the end of the crawl-through. The air turned dense; that stink rolled off the maggot in thick, drowsy waves.

The maggot’s face was not his mother’s—of course not; maggots didn’t have faces—and yet, this was exactly what Luke saw. Her visage stitched onto the maggot’s shuddering, enormous body. There was a porcine fleshiness, that flat-hanging sagginess his mother’s face had held at her heaviest. And its eyes—two of them, socked deep into the puddled sickliness of that sallow face—were black and empty, as his mother’s would get when she was angry. Its mouth was a puckered orifice like an anteater’s: a long, needlelike proboscis.

Looooordloveaductthhhh… it sputtered, putrid bits of goo flinging from its mouth. Looooordlovvvvaducthhhhh…

OhGodOhGodOhGodOhGod—this was the only thought Luke’s mind could summon, a brainless yawp of fright. He rammed his heels into his brother’s shoulders, trying to get them both moving again.

The Beth-maggot squelched deeper into the tube; Luke could hear its massive body drumming against the tunnel, coiling and bucking like agitated eels in a bucket. Its mouth opened with stunning elasticity, a rubbery O big enough to consume his entire head. Its insides resembled a huge intestine, a funnel of suffocating corrugated flesh.

He grabbed another rung and pushed. His brother’s body lurched as his feet dropped out of the crawl-through chute and hit the floor.

The maggot was a yard from Luke’s face. It shuddered over the flashlight, which lit up its body—it looked, Luke thought with paralyzing horror, like the vein-strung insides of an eyeball. The featureless white was strung with tiny veins and capillaries. Next, the flesh split raggedly down the middle of the maggot’s face. It made no sound, as its skin had the consistency of a waterlogged sponge.

It’s too big to fit, Luke thought frantically. It’s ripping itself apart.

He watched, horrified, as his mother’s face tore in half. A new face was pushing through the split, though, and this one was also all-too-familiar…

Nononononono—

Abby. White and gory as a newborn babe. Her eyes were wet jewels; her lips stretched across the canvas of her horridly misshapen features, pursed in a lascivious come-on.

Giveuttthhakistthhh, babbeeeee…

Luke knew that if those lips touched him, he would go insane.

Are you sure you’re not already? asked a frail voice in his head. At least a little?

Elbowing, squirming, he retreated down the chute in total desperation. The Abby-maggot squelched after him, hungering for a kiss. Just one little kiss, baby.

Its face split for a final time—just as Luke knew it would, in the deepest chambers of his heart. The crowning detail. Abby’s face tore apart, molting in wet, waxy rags, her mouth issuing a very human scream of pain and despair, and, bristling through her sundered face like a knotted fist… his son. It looked nothing like Zachary—a face so wizened and repellent that it could only belong to some terribly ancient and hateful thing that had never tasted sunlight on its flesh, its eyes peering with a cheery and mocking avarice—and yet it so clearly was Zachary. It was what this place had made of him, and Luke’s soul shuddered to see it.

Daaaaaddeeeee… it lisped through cracked, pus-weeping lips. Heeelp meee…

Luke’s feet slipped from the tube. With one convulsive shove, he propelled himself out. His feet got tangled with his brother, who was slumped gracelessly on the floor. Luke tripped backward, his son’s voice—Daddeeee—still ringing in his ears; his skull rung off the side of the tunnel and—

—he came to with a spastic jerk of his limbs. He squinted. The flashlight had rolled out of the crawl-through, pinning both him and Clayton in its beam.

The crawl-through chute was empty. He didn’t need to see that to know.

The maggot was gone. The station had had its fun and, for now, was satisfied.

He picked up the flashlight, hefted Clayton, and continued on.

14.

LUKE REACHED the storage tunnel hatch and hesitated.

The station wants to keep you frightened so you’ll make mistakes, Luke. Make enough of them, take long enough, and it’s game over.

Clayton’s eyelids twitched. Was he waking up? Luke fingered the hypodermic in his pocket. He didn’t want to overdose his brother. But the last time he’d been conscious, he hadn’t behaved all that nicely.

He could leave Clayton right here at the hatchway. He was a lot closer, at least…

Fuck half measures, Luke. Dump his ass at the Challenger, then either wait for Al and the dog or go find them.

Luke gripped the wheel. The lock disengaged with a thunk. The hatch opened half an inch. For an instant, Luke swore that hell itself was breathing through that gap.

The feeling ebbed. He opened it and shone the flashlight into the storage tunnel. Nothing moved. Nothing appeared out of place.

He dragged Clayton around the gooseneck to the Challenger. The generator was making odd whirrs and clicks like a computer warming up.

He rested with his hands on his knees, centering himself. He felt okay. Dog tired, but okay. Things were falling into place. He had Clayton where he needed to be. He’d find Al—this sudden surety filled him with a bright gaiety that pushed the bleakness away a fraction. He would find her, or she would come to him. And LB, too. The world owed him, didn’t it? The world had taken, and now it would give back. That was the way things worked, wasn’t it? On a long enough time line, you paid what you owed—but you also got paid back. And hadn’t they all paid enough? Weren’t they owed, by God? Al, the dog, his brother. That was all Luke was asking for. A helping, fortuitous upward draft. Let a single beam of light in and let him follow it up, up, up out of the dark—

Click… click…

Luke trained the flashlight in the direction of this new noise—with the station swathed in darkness, sound had become his key sense. He slid one hand into his pocket and closed it around the scalpel.

Click… click…

A head appeared around the gooseneck. Two eyes shone like balls of mercury in the flashlight’s glare.

“LB?”

She woofed—a grating, jagged note. Her jaws widened, strings of saliva stretched between her teeth as she chewed anxiously on the air.

She’s scared. Totally terrified.

Luke swung the flashlight behind him. Nothing. When he swung it back, LB had emerged a little more—half of her body was now visible. Her fur was torn away in places, each spot almost perfectly round. Luke didn’t see any blood.

“Come on, girl. It’s okay. It’s only me.”

She whined plaintively, then ducked back behind the bend. The click-click of her nails retreated.

“LB!”

Luke scrambled after her. He ran the way he should have run after Zach that afternoon in the park—as if the devil himself was on his heels. She yelped someplace ahead, a harrowing note that stung Luke’s heart.

He reached the spot where LB had been. Drops of some viscid substance swayed from the floor grate. A smell rose to Luke’s nose: dank and vinegary, with an undernote he couldn’t name.

He rushed on. The flashlight lit the holes along the Trieste’s hull. They bulged. Bubbles pushed up from their surfaces, shiny with tension.

“LB!”

He gritted his teeth and dove into the crawl-through chute, sliding for a few feet, then transitioning to his back and hauling himself over the final yards. He could hear LB barking not far ahead.

He ran into the main lab. Clayton’s lab hatch was open again; he could see something moving inside. Luke edged up to the hatchway and shone the flashlight inside.

LB’s head poked from behind Clay’s bench. She barked consumptively.

There was something off about that sound.

“You okay, girl?”

Luke trained the flashlight on the bench. LB rounded slowly into sight like a showgirl stepping into a spotlight. Her head, shoulders, chest—

“Oh, LB. Oh, Jesus. What happened to you?”

Something was wrong with the dog’s legs. They were sticks, winnowed and black like charred wood in a campfire. They made bonelike clicks as she came forward, her tongue—her long, seeping, cancerous tongue—dangling queerly from her mouth.

“What did this to you, girl?”

Luke beckoned her forward. I can fix her, he thought, although the chances of that were laughably remote. She’ll be all right…

She lurched toward him. Her front legs could not bend—the bones had been fused somehow; she tottered as if walking on pegs.

Click, click…

Her back legs looked even worse: they’d been compressed, the bones snapped and jellied, leaving her with the squat hind end of a much smaller dog. Her paws had been flattened into clownish disks that slapped the floor.

Click, click. Click-click.

Something projected from LB’s hind end. A red string unspooled from her anus. Jesus, what was that? Was something inside of her, trying to get out?

She staggered closer. Click-click-click. Her head sat weirdly on her neck, off-kilter like a doll’s head that had been cut off and clumsily glued back on…

Luke’s hands trembled. He didn’t want to touch her, and this fact shamed him. She needed someone to hold her, didn’t she? But he was terrified—the fear shot through his arteries like battery acid.

Her mouth opened in a too-big yawn. Her teeth were fearsomely long, crowded into sharp rows in her mouth. Her tongue was needled with holes where she’d bitten it…

…and what was that?

He squinted. Something was skewered on LB’s teeth. Black and shiny and—

Plastic. A shred of plastic.

Spilled-out pieces of a complex puzzle slotted together in Luke’s mind, forming a picture of shocking, horrifying clarity.

He jerked the flashlight toward the cooler. It was open, as he knew it would be. The lid had been torn off its hinges. It was surrounded with shreds of thick plastic and rags of duct tape. The creature that had resided inside it, the thing wrapped in black plastic, was out.

Luke trained the beam back on the dog-thing. It seemed to be smiling at him now.

Oh, God, this isn’t LB, he thought. It’s the other one. Mushka. Little Fly.

15.

THE DOG—SWEET CHRIST, was it in any way a dog anymore?—staggered closer. Luke wanted to pull away but he couldn’t: his limbs were frozen.

Everything was so clear now. Clayton. He’d shaved away disks of fur to attach monitoring electrodes. He’d put something up the poor dog’s anus, too: a device to measure heat or nerve stimulus; the wire was still sticking out.

Clayton had done all this, then he’d… he’d…

Pushed the dog through the fucking hole. Fed it into the rift, the same way Westlake had fed that microphone through…

Luke could picture it: the dog whining and kicking, its legs braced against the wall as his brother shoved it rudely through. Or else he’d drugged it and fed the poor thing through while it was narcotized.

He wanted to see how the thing or things on the other side would react, Luke realized. What they would do. The dog was an offering.

So it had gone into the hole and come back as… this. Clayton must’ve known immediately that something was wrong, so he’d killed it. Cut its head off, as he’d done to the guinea pig. But it had come back, hadn’t it? So he killed it again and again until it was dead enough, for long enough, that he could encase it in plastic, bind it with tape, and stuff it into the—

A feral, considering brightness entered the dog’s eyes. Its facial features were stretching. Rank foulness pumped from its pores. The flashlight picked up a faint glimmer over its coat. Its mouth stretched wide. Its eyes sunk back into its sockets.

Get out of here. RUN.

The tendons mooring its jaw snapped like overtaxed elastic bands. It issued the anxious mewls of a hungry baby. Luke stood in spellbound horror, transfixed as the dog’s mouth cantilevered open, wider and wider, so big it seemed capable of swallowing hearts, souls, entire worlds…

It growled—but how could it, with its mouth ripped into that fearsome leer?

No, that growl was coming from somewhere else—

LB charged into the lab. Luke’s heart leapt. Where had she come from? She ran right past Luke, making a beeline for her old pal. The dog-thing shifted its attention nimbly, but not quite quick enough. LB hit it broadside, jaws snapping; they tumbled around the bench and out of sight.

Luke took a few steps forward, sweeping the flashlight to make sure nothing else lurked in a darkened cubby of Clayton’s lab.

LB issued a muffled yelp that rose to a pain-filled shriek.

Luke stepped around the bench and saw.

“Oh, God, no…”

The Mushka-thing’s mouth was sunk into LB’s flank; its jaws were scissored around LB’s left rear leg, high up where it met her body. But it wasn’t merely biting her; it was… fusing to her, was the word Luke’s fevered brainpan spat out. As he watched in a delirium of panic, the Mushka-thing’s muzzle flattened and spread over LB’s fur; there were a series of dreadful metallic fnk! sounds, one after another, which reminded Luke of an industrial sewing machine punching through tough leather. Darts of blood shot from LB’s skin. She whimpered, clawing toward Luke.

Luke rushed to her. His legs went to jelly at the exquisite horror of the scene; he reached her at a crawl. He was staring right into LB’s eyes—two shocked orbs that radiated animal terror of a sort he had seen too many times. Yet they were unquestionably a dog’s eyes. Luke had no idea where LB had been these past hours, but she was still the creature he’d known. The station hadn’t changed her; she had not surrendered her innate… humanity was of course the wrong word, but the sentiment was the same—LB was fundamentally unaltered, still a dog, a very good dog who was terrified now and that fear shone starkly in her eyes.

Luke tried to wrap his arms around LB’s front legs but they were scrabbling with such mindless intensity that he quickly changed course. Instead he grabbed her head and neck in a modified front headlock and tried to pull her away from the Mushka-thing… away from the hole that it was so clearly backing toward.

“Come on, girl,” he panted. “Hold on, hold on with me here.”

The Mushka-thing’s entire head was now welded to LB’s flanks, stitched to her flesh by some grisly alchemy. It was already difficult to tell where LB’s body stopped and the Mushka-thing’s started. Its skull was flattened and fanned out, the fur bunching up between its ears like the folds of a shar-pei dog. Its eyes, which were flat and gray as oysters, slid across the loosening canvas of its face until they merged into a single jellylike eye that stared at LB with an unquenchable hunger. It issued ceaseless sucking sounds. LB’s body convulsed as something was hoovered out of her from the inside, creating a fleshy indentation in her chest. She howled.

“No no no,” Luke heard himself shouting. “No please no please no—”

He tightened his grip and pulled as hard as he could. LB shuddered. The bandages ripped away from her torn ear. The Mushka-thing continued to back toward the Einstein poster on its stick legs. Clickety-click. Luke pulled with so much force that he felt’s LB’s spinal cord pop as the discs dislocated. It was useless. He may as well try to pull a tree out by its roots.

You’re going to kill her, he thought. You’ll snap her neck.

His next thought: Would that really be so bad?

The Mushka-thing was relentless. It had waited a long time to claim its prize. Luke pictured the two dogs coming down in one of the Challengers. Had Al brought them? Maybe so. They would have been shivering and worried as the fathoms dropped, but they had each other. And maybe that’s all the Mushka-thing wanted—for them to be together again. To explore whatever lay behind the hole as one.

Luke couldn’t budge her. Functionally, they were one creature now. Physically fused together. Finally, heartbreakingly, Luke sat in front of LB. He stopped pulling her. He hugged her instead. Even as she was being tugged remorselessly toward her fate—one Luke could not derail—he hugged her fiercely. He kissed her nose, hot with shock. It was, he realized, the same standard of care he offered shelter strays. Every few months he would volunteer at the local pound, putting down creatures who were too old, too sick, too irredeemable or simply unwanted. A dozen, fifteen at a go. It wrecked him. He would stagger out to his car afterward, shivering, and cry. It was easier with animals who were loved; their owners, whole families, would stand around that cherished fur-ball as Luke ushered it out of this life and into the next. But strays were euthanized in a cement room where a single light bulb hung on a cord. They may have gone their whole lives unmothered and unloved. They didn’t deserve that. No creature did. The one thing that anyone should be able to count on receiving in their lives, love, had too often been withheld from those poor souls. And so Luke would comfort them. Each animal. He would spend a few minutes cradling them, rocking them, speaking softly to them. Sometimes they wouldn’t stop shivering, or nip his fingers. This hurt him—not the pain, but the fact that love and gentleness was so foreign to these creatures that they didn’t know how to accept it. Then he would kill them. It was not fair, and he hated himself for being the agent of that pure, inevitable fact. The world did not hold to any standard of fairness that Luke could comprehend. All his life stood testament to that. Good men die in wretched agony and bad men die happily in their beds. Creatures live and die never knowing love.

The Mushka-thing jerked. LB was wrenched backward again, yanked out of Luke’s grip. He slid forward and reseated his grip. He wasn’t desperate anymore. His fingers caressed those soft spots behind the jaw that all dogs loved to have rubbed. He rested his forehead against hers. He felt the thud of blood pounding in her skull.

The Mushka-thing reached back with one clownish rear leg. It snagged on the poster and tore it down.

The whispers assaulted Luke immediately. A yammering, mindless—

No, not mindless there is a mind behind all this

—riot. Those fishhooks sunk into his head again, skewering his brain.

The hole was the width of a manhole cover, but wider on one side; it resembled a mouth twisted into a murderous sneer.

He began to cry then, clutching LB. The tears came easily. He had not cried tears of such distilled regret since his son had gone missing. LB was going limp, either spent, tired of fighting, or resigned to her fate. Luke hugged her so, so tight. He wanted LB to remember his touch. The warmth and love that radiated from his whole body, coupled with the sadness that she was being ripped away from him. He wanted her to take that one physical memory with her wherever she was going. The imprint of his hands on her. He wished it to be a reminder that she was a good creature, and loved, and that there were places on the continuum where love and kindness still existed, even if she did not share that world presently. She did not deserve this. But things happened. They happened.

LB’s body came alive in his grip, bucking in what Luke hoped was a final death-spasm. Her paws beat a frantic tattoo between his legs. White foam like beaten eggs emitted from the sides of her mouth.

“Oh no,” Luke said. It was all he could say, in the end. It seemed to say everything. “Oh no oh no oh no.”

The Mushka-thing was being sucked into the hole. Once its body made it halfway through, the pressure intensified exponentially; LB was jerked forward, at the mercy of whatever monstrous force existed on the other side. Luke kept pace with her. He stroked her head as gently as he could, but his hands were shaking badly.

Please remember this, he thought. Please remember that you are part of the goodness of it all and that, and that, oh God oh please girl oh no oh no oh—

LB’s body was steadily sucked into the hole; she could have been on a conveyor belt, such was her unstoppable ingestion. She had calmed by then, her struggles over. She peered at him with sorrowful, weeping eyes and bit down gently on his hand, as if that might anchor her to Luke. Her grip loosened by degrees, freeing Luke’s hand again. She gave him a hopeful look, as if this might all be a terrible dream they would both wake from shortly. Luke held on to her forelegs, her paws, the tips of her nails. She pulled away from him reluctantly, a kindergartner leaving the arms of her father on the first day of class. Fearful, yet perhaps understanding that this was the way of the world. Separations were unavoidable. These things happened every day.

She was snatched from Luke’s numb grip, the upper half of her body dragging bonelessly up the wall. She gave a puppyish, exhausted bark. Her head went through last, and it went soundlessly, leaving only the faintest ripple on the hole’s surface.

16.

LUKE GRABBED THE FLASHLIGHT and stumbled from Clayton’s lab, away from the horrible whispers coming from the hole.

His breath escaped in sharp whinnies. Oh, Jesus. Jesus. LB was gone. Worse—eaten. No. Eaten would be preferable. Chewed up and digested and gone, her suffering over. But she’d just been… taken. And whatever lay on the other side of that hole was worse than a million cramped dog crates or vicious dogcatchers or rolled-up newspaper whacks, worse than anything any dog on Earth had ever suffered.

And Luke was terrified that LB would suffer for a long, long time.

The main lab was quiet. Disembodied voices fluttered against his eardrums, the wing beat of moths. He shut his eyes and swayed unsteadily. He could feel it now. Madness hungering at the edges of his mind. Maybe it was for the best. He could just go gibberingly, shit-smearingly insane. Then he could wrap his arms around his chest and huddle in a corner, shivering and drooling, until whatever was going to happen, happened.

Luke swung the hatch to Clayton’s lab shut. The voices dimmed. He turned and immediately sensed something moving just below the flashlight’s beam. A shape bristled up the wall, seeking the light.

Mr. Hand. His old friend.

It didn’t look like anything that could once have been part of his brother. Pallid and gelatinous, sharp bones running under a horrible stretching of skin. It had sprouted additional fingers, too: it had eight now, giving it an arachnid appearance.

It walked up the wall and paused. It… stretched. A showy display, each finger lifting gracefully before settling back in place.

It looks like Thing, Luke thought with giddy, unhinged hilarity. From The Addams Family, that old TV show.

“What do you want?” he croaked at it.

Mr. Hand twitched—had it heard him? One of those long crablike fingers tapped the wall as if in deep thought.

What do I want, Luke? What do I want, indeed!

Mr. Hand hopped on the wall, playful little bobs. Each time it landed, there came this squitch from its fingertips.

One finger pointed straight up: Aha!

Mr. Hand leapt off the wall and advanced on Luke. He reached into his pocket and held up the scalpel in one trembling fist. Mr. Hand shivered—Oooh, so scaaary!—then flopped over like a dog playing dead.

One finger curled. That beckoning gesture again.

Follow me, follow me, said the spider to the fly…

Mr. Hand righted itself and skittered across the lab. Luke tracked it with the flashlight. The hand danced impishly along the floor, spinning balletically. Mr. Hand feinted left, back right, then flipped onto the wall. Where the hell was it going…?

The keypad to Westlake’s lab. A glowing square, each numeral outlined in a faint red square. Mr. Hand sprung up and landed on the keypad.

You always were the curious cat, weren’t you?

His mother’s voice in his head now, bitter as aspic.

Always sticking your nose in. Same as when you were a boy, wanting to get into your brother’s lab even though he told you no, no, no. You couldn’t take no for an answer, could you? You wanted to drink your greedy eyes full.

Mr. Hand punched a number. Punched another.

Curious, curious boy. You want to see what’s behind door number three, my son? Do you want to play the bonus round, where the scores can really change?

“No, Mom,” Luke croaked. “I don’t want to see. Don’t show me.”

Mr. Hand tapped another number, and another…

There are some secrets, Lucas dear, that really ought to stay secrets.

“I don’t want to see,” Luke said hoarsely. “Please. Don’t show me.”

Take your medicine, son. Bitter, yes, but it’s oooh-so-good for you.

Mr. Hand pushed the red button. The keypad went dark.

A hiss as the pressure valve on Westlake’s hatch let go. A sweet, corrupted smell hit Luke’s nostrils… the scent of rotting honeycomb, just maybe.

The hatch opened. Only a crack. The metallic squeal peeled back the nerve endings over every inch of Luke’s skin.

And after the squeal came the buzz.

17.

COME-COME-COME-COME-COME-SEE-COME-SEE-COME-SEE

The whispers were louder now. Almost as loud as the maddening drone that curled through the hatch. The whispers vacillated, the singsong call of a bird.

Come-SEE! Come-SEE! Come-SEE!

The buzz fell and rose like crazed laughter at some insectoid dinner party.

Come-SEE! Come-SEE!

Luke’s feet obeyed this command. He begged them to stop but they just went stupidly on. His brain was a horrified inmate inside his body—Rapunzel trapped in a garret.

The flashlight illuminated the edge of the hatch, coated in foul syrup. The whispers mingled with the buzz, unifying in a single voice.

A bee—one of Westlake’s bees, Luke realized with druggy horror—struggled through the syrup, its wings beating weakly. It toppled from the hatch and fell to the floor, its crooked legs waving uselessly in the air.

Luke’s foot came down on the bee. It crunched agreeably under his boot. He felt the mad buzz of its wings through the sole. He laid one hand on the hatch. His fingers sunk into the desiccated syrup, crusty as old shaving foam.

Westlake’s lab was muggy, the air perfumed with that sweet reek. The only light came from a serrated ring set an indeterminate distance away: that light was coming from the hole, it could only be.

By the hole’s light Luke saw the bees—thousands; tens of thousands—surging around him on unseen currents, as if riding zephyrs that gusted through the lab.

He could sense rather than see a structure to his left. Monolithic in scope, far larger than this room should possibly contain. The hum found its center here: sonorous, rhythmic. It wasn’t a bad sound, far from it: it was natural and clean, hitting notes that softened pleasantly into his bones.

You wanted to see, said his mother. So see, Lucas. See it all.

His hand rose, and with it the beam of his flashlight.

“My Lord…”

The hive was enormous. A carbuncled mass of wax and honeycomb that rose beyond the light. The ceiling had risen against the tremendous weight of water, becoming a great domed cathedral that could scarcely contain the colony.

It was horrible and beautiful. It was not unlike a city: parts of it were rotting and sloughing off in decayed rags, while industrious drones built new spires and whorls elsewhere. Its surface was crawling with industry. The bees were huge, some the size of sewer rats. They moved with a sluggish, almost stupid lethargy.

Uncomprehendingly, Luke traversed this staggering kingdom with the flashlight. He couldn’t get a true measure of its size. The ceiling was out of sight and the walls had been blown back and out. Everyday notions of scale dissolved.

His eyes caught something. A ribbed tube, off-white, projecting through the honeycomb. It hung like an executioner’s noose. Heavy-bodied bees trundled over that tube, pasting it to the hive with the ichor that spurted from puckered orifices on their abdomens.

Luke could see stuff moving through the tube. Slowly, like sludge through a partially blocked pipe…

Get out of here, Luke. Before you see something that ruins you.

He almost laughed. Too late for that. Too late by far.

The beam swept the hive. Lab equipment was studded through it. He saw half of a beaker. A glass pipette…

…a trio of blunt twigs projected from the comb. They looked like hardy buds sprouting from a pot of dirt. The bees busied themselves about them, tending to each bud in the manner of patient gardeners.

The sticks twitched.

The bees took flight with an aggrieved buzzing of wings before settling again.

Fingers. Those are fingers they’re fingers they’re—

Luke’s hand operated of its own accord now. He saw things. Dreadful things.

A dusky loaf suspended from the hive on a strip of organ-meat…

A glint of bone that shone a delirious sapphire-blue…

A pinkly grooved ball that twitched when the light touched it…

Other things. Some worse, none better.

You wanted to see, my son. Do you like it? Does it please you?

Finally, horribly, the light fell upon a ball crawling with bees.

It projected from the hive a few feet above Luke’s head. At first Luke had no idea what he was seeing—it could have been the bottom of a wide-bellied beaker. The bees fretted lovingly over its surface. Perhaps an exhaled breath sent them off; whatever the cause, they lifted away to attend to other labors.

I’ll kiss it better.

That was the stupid thought that zipped through Luke’s mind while his eyes drank in this most sublime horror. Abby used to say it to Zach whenever he scraped his knee or stubbed a toe. As if something so simple as a kiss could salve all hurts.

Don’t worry, Alice, I’ll kiss it better. Just a kiss and it will all be okay…

Her neck bulged from the hive, webbed with syrup. Her face had been sliced open vertically and horizontally, the cuts intersecting at her nose; the flesh was skinned back from the center of her face in four triangular flaps, stretched out and stitched to the comb. Her scalp was split down the center, the skin peeled back in thick folds; each fold had been anchored to the hive on thin metal armatures that must have once been part of Westlake’s lab equipment. Her naked skull bone was dull as chalk.

Alice’s body had been teased apart and strung all through the hive. Luke understood that without actually seeing all the evidence. Every limb and vein and nerve stem woven throughout the comb, tended to by diligent drone bees. Luke could only hope that she’d been dead before any of this began. He could only—

Al’s eyelids snapped open. Her eyes were so very white in the flayed redness of her face. They rolled down languidly to meet Luke’s horrified gaze. She smiled, her teeth ripped out. The grin of a newborn.

Luke felt no fear at the sight. That emotion had burned out quite suddenly, like an overloaded electrical switch. He felt nothing but an ineffable hopelessness—which in its way was so much worse than fear.

The buzz grew louder—hungrier. The whispers drummed into Luke’s skull. Bees jigged nimbly around his head, alighting on his ears and hair. They returned to Alice, too, landing daintily on her skull, their antennae dancing lightly on the raw bone. Alice threw her head back, her mouth open as if in laughter; the flaps of her scalp strained threateningly against the metal armatures.

The scalpel was back in Luke’s hand. He took a step toward Alice. Sensing his intent, the bees darted at his face, their wings paper-cutting his flesh. He slapped at them and caught one solidly; it fell to the floor with a squeal and Luke stepped on it, enjoying the sound of it pulping under his boot. The hive came alive. Drones emptied out of it, their fat bodies squeezing from the comb.

Luke would kill Alice. Slash her throat open—one swift sideways swipe to let the blood out. If these putrid things killed him for that, so be it. But he’d kill her before they finished him.

Alice’s eyes filled with red as they hemorrhaged blood. They became the same color as the bees’ eyes. Her lips formed a single word.

“No.”

Luke’s hand stilled. Bees alit on his arms, friendly now, nuzzling his flesh with their furry abdomens.

Alice smiled—it was the same one he’d seen on Abby’s face at the hospital after Zachary was born.

The smile of a new mother.

The bees lifted off his arms, whirring into the dark. Luke followed them with the flashlight—

He saw it then. The final horror.

A huge translucent sac hung pendulant from the underside of the hive. It was the size of a trash bag—this was Luke’s first, incredibly domestic thought. The big orange ones he’d stuff with autumn leaves after Zachary had finished jumping in the piles Luke had so diligently raked.

Instead of orange, this sac was milky, strung with blooms of red and blue veins. The bees zipped around it in protective patterns, a thousand insect nursemaids. A few large bees tiptoed over its surface, which was convulsing with unnatural birth.

The sac hung in close proximity to the hole—which was far bigger than even the one in Clayton’s lab. Light poured around its edges.

By that light Luke could see something moving inside the sac. Limbs strained against its membrane the way stray elbows and knees will push against the canvas of a tent. Luke could barely glimpse the fearsome outline of whatever lay inside.

The sac ruptured. Thick, veiny broth gushed out. Luke shone the flashlight up to Alice. Her face was dented, her nose and cheeks forming a horrifying concavity—the pressure of this unnatural birth was caving her skull in.

But she was laughing. High, breathless screams of laughter.

Luke backed toward the hatch. There was no saving her. No saving LB. No saving no saving no saving—

The bees formed a corona around his head, their bodies beating at his back. Something breached the sac. Luke didn’t get a good look at it, which was a mercy. Only a sense of some gaunt and nightmarish limb slitting its own womb apart with mechanical ruthlessness, making a sound like a thousand knuckles cracking as it tore and gouged.

Luke’s heels hit the lip of the hatch, spilling him into the main lab.

The hatch swung shut on Alice’s deformed, gibbering laughter.

18.

LUKE STARED DOWN at Clayton.

He did not know how he’d gotten here. Things had gone black after he’d left Westlake’s lab. The hands on the clock had melted, and next he’d found himself back here. He must have slipped into another dream-pool. All he remembered was this sense of having moved through a huge intestine. The walls flexing, pushing him through like a stubborn shred of last evening’s pot roast.

He’d lost the flashlight somewhere along the way. No matter: the station now pumped out a sick radiance all its own. The holes provided it.

His brother was propped awkwardly against the generator, which had been shoved almost flush to the wall. Had Clayton tried to sabotage it? Luke would kill him if he’d done that—that certainty rested easily in his mind. Kill him just as easy as breathing.

Clayton’s face glowed in the dim. He looked even more horrible, as if some nightmare creature had gunged down the tunnel and sucked the blood out of Clayton’s throat. Luke pictured Clay’s neck winnowing and withering until it was no thicker than a pipe cleaner. This image made Luke smile.

“You killed it. The dog.” Luke’s voice was flat and toneless. Very much like his mother’s voice, he noted.

Clayton’s eyelids cracked. “Whu?”

“The dog. Little Fly. You pushed him through.”

Clayton’s head lolled. “That’s what it was for.”

Luke kicked him. Not hard, but not softly, either. “Get up.”

“No.”

“They’re all dead. Alice. Hugo. Westlake. The dogs. All killed, all taken. We’re the only ones left.”

Are you sure they’re really dead, Luke? Are you sure you’re really so alone?

Luke kicked his brother again, harder this time. “Get your ass up. We have to at least try to get out of here.”

“You try, Lucas. You always were the trier.”

Things nattered and clicked beyond the tunnel bend. Luke’s guts turned over—the fear had been replaced with a churning nausea.

“I want to see the sun again,” Luke said, disgusted at his petulance—he sounded just as he had as a boy, begging to be let into Clay’s lab. “I want to talk to Abby. Just one more time. Tell her how sorry I am. How much I miss her, and miss our boy.”

“Go, then.”

“There’s nothing down here, Clayton. Can’t you see that? There never was. This was all a trick. We chased it down here. We were tricked. You were tricked.”

Clayton hung his head. “I can’t go, Lucas.”

Luke didn’t feel anger—it would be as senseless as being angry at a dog for digging up a yard or a mallard for flying south for the winter. Genius or not, Clayton remained a creature of stupid instinct.

“You’ll die, then, you dumb bastard.”

Clayton shifted. Had the cap of bandages sloughed off his wound? The position of Clayton’s body shielded the stump from view.

“Please, Clay. I’ve never asked you for anything. Just this once.”

The clicks and scratches grew more insistent. Luke knelt beside Clayton. He’d pick him up and drag him into the Challenger if he had to. He’d wrestle and punch and choke and bite if it came to that; the sonofabitch only had one hand, anyway, and was drugged to the gills.

Luke gripped Clayton’s shoulders. His brother thrashed, suddenly furious.

“I said, I can’t. For Christ’s sake, Lucas, please don’t—”

But Luke wasn’t to be denied. His hands slipped lower, pinning Clayton’s arm to his side—Clayton issued a kittenish moan of protest—while his other hand brushed against the stump of his wrist…

Luke saw it then. No shock, no horror. His mind accepted the fact dully. In a way it made total sense.

The rope, the tube, the…

—umbilical cord—

…ran out of a fresh hole in the wall, a hole that had been obscured by the generator. The cord was bright red, same color as Alice’s eyes. It was attached to Clayton’s stump; thick bands wrapped the flesh of his forearm like tropical creepers.

Luke’s fingers had sunk into that livid, twitching rope. They’d gone in without resistance, as if into warm mud. He glanced at Clayton, terror leaping up his throat; Clayton stared back with a look of ineffable sorrow and perhaps, finally if too late, understanding.

“I’m sorry,” he said simply.

Luke tried to pull his fingers free. But he couldn’t; they were stuck in a warm, fleshy Chinese finger trap. He glanced at his brother, their eyes locking—

Luke felt his consciousness traveling into Clayton’s eyes, into his body, up his brainstem, and into his brain itself. His mind entered Clayton’s somehow; a hidden latch lifted, a secret trapdoor springing open. Luke’s mind was swallowed into Clayton’s own; a chilly metallic veneer settled over his thoughts—the way Clayton must see the world.

Next Luke was rocked by a vision of searing clarity that swept over him like a tidal wave, obliterating all consciousness.

A MEMORY. A shared one, but now Luke was seeing it from his brother’s perspective instead of his own.

They were kids again. Luke was eight years old—except he wasn’t Luke, not right now. He was Clayton, nestled inside Clayton’s body somehow, staring across the kitchen table at… well, himself. Their mother sat at the head of the table. It was night, blackness painted to the windows.

“I’ve got a job for you, my little soldiers,” she said slyly.

She put a small pot on the table. Beside it, a hacksaw and two paintbrushes.

Luke remembered this night. Oh yes, he remembered it well.

Clayton and Luke donned their boots and warm sweaters. It was so odd, watching the world through his brother’s eyes—a little like being strapped into an amusement park ride that he had no control over.

“You sure this is such a hot idea, Clay?” Luke heard his young self whisper once they were alone in the backyard, out of their mother’s earshot.

Luke felt the words forming in Clayton’s mouth before he spat them out.

“Shut up, dummy.”

They stole into their neighbor’s backyard. The branches of Mr. Rosewell’s crabapple tree stretched over the fence into their yard; its hard, inedible fruit always fell on their lawn. Their mother had asked—really, she’d ordered—Mr. Rosewell to trim its branches, or better yet hack the awful thing down. Mr. Rosewell, a retired mailman with a buzz cut who’d recently lost his wife, said to hell with that. They’d stared at each other over the fence; then their mother had spun, graceless in her bulk, and waddled back into the house.

The boys knelt at the base of the tree. Clayton spun the lid off the pot. Their mother had bought it at the local hardware store that afternoon; its label bore a picture of a wilted, cronelike tree.

Clayton notched thin cuts in the tree with the hacksaw. Luke watched his younger self cast worried glances toward Mr. Rosewell’s porch, as if in expectation the old mailman would step through the screen door, shotgun in hand.

The boys spat on the paintbrushes and painted the tree with whatever foul poison lay inside that pot. Then they dashed back to their house, eyes fairly shining with their deviltry.

“The two most precious boys in the whole world,” their mother said. She’d baked a “celebration pie.” Lemon meringue, Clayton’s favorite. Trapped inside his brother’s head, Luke could feel the sugary meringue dissolving on Clayton’s tongue.

The memory took a weird lurch forward. Suddenly it was daytime. Luke was staring at the crabapple tree through Clayton’s eyes. Its leaves were wilting. Gravity was treating it cruelly—punishing it, shoving it hard to the earth. Clayton picked up one of its fallen apples and took a bite. It was revolting, like sucking on a busted-open battery. Luke tried to get a grip on his brother’s mind, searching for something—a shred of pity for the tree, perhaps, which shouldn’t have had to die so horribly. He got nothing but a chilly backwash, as if he’d touched the insides of an industrial freezer.

The memory lurched again, the scene shifting. Clayton was in his basement lab now. A key rattled in the lock. He turned to see their mother filling the door frame. She wore her housecoat—the ratty one with the bleached-out stripes that gave her body the look of a moldering circus tent. The one she wore all day and night that stunk of her crazy sweat and bones.

“Go away.” Clayton’s voice was preternaturally calm, but Luke could feel an intense heat cooking at his brother’s temples. “Leave me alone.”

Their mother smiled. The most feral, cunning expression Luke had ever seen, her head cocked coyly to one side. The look of a predator who’d boxed in its quarry. She turned, carefree, and locked the door. Then she untied the sash on her robe, her back still turned. She did something with her hips, a lewd little shimmy; Luke felt the hairs standing up on Clayton’s arms. She slipped the robe off one shoulder—the salacious movement of a peep-show worker—and turned to look over that same shoulder, pinning her son in a flat and viperish stare.

When she faced him again, the robe was open a few inches. Her body was obscenely enormous, bulging in thick rolls down to the shadowy delta between her legs. A smell wafted off her: not her normal stink, the one a body develops when deprived of sunlight and clean air, when all it does is sit on a cracked chesterfield and shovel porridge between its spittle-wet lips, a smell not unlike the stink that wafts off a mildewed shower curtain—no, this was raw, throttlingly hormonal. The smell of arousal.

“Come here, boy,” she said softly. “Come to your mama.”

Luke felt it seeping out of Clayton’s skull—a jumpy, rabbity tick-tick-tick that made him think of cockroaches roasting and sputtering in a hot pan. That jumpy pop and crackle washed all through Luke’s piggybacking mind, too—it was fear, or the closest approximation to that emotion his brother could feel.

Their mother advanced, limping slightly. Clayton backpedaled, his hip knocking a flask off the lab bench, where it shattered on the floor.

“Tsk-tsk. Clumsy boy. You’ll have to pay for that in trade.”

Her body was a sheet of suffocating flab but her arms were oh-so-strong. Luke felt his brother’s heart pounding as he fought back wildly, aiming a knee at her wounded hips; she only laughed and pulled him closer—his struggles were nothing compared to that of the residents at the Second Chance Ranch. The heat of her body was weirdly narcotic; Clayton went limp, exhaling into the shelf of her enormous breasts, lips sputtering as he gasped for air.

“It’s okay,” their mother cooed, one hand fussing with Clayton’s trousers. “You like it, remember? If you didn’t like it, you wouldn’t get so… so…”

The scene fried out in a stinking puff of smoke. Next: Clayton was back in the lab. Alone. The pot of tree killer sat on the bench. Clayton was concentrating on it intently. Luke could feel his furious focus. Clayton opened the lid and tapped a small amount of the pale blue powder onto the bench; it looked like pulverized robin’s eggs. He opened other jars and vials containing compounds Luke knew nothing about. Mixing, measuring…

A series of memories shuffled past like holiday photos in a slide projector:

Flash: Clayton in the bathroom, shaking powder into their mother’s shampoo bottle.

Flash: Clayton in the master bedroom, stirring powder into their mother’s facial cream.

Flash: Clayton in the kitchen, tipping powder into the huge pot of porridge simmering on the stove.

A final memory:

Luke staring through Clayton’s eyes again, up the basement stairs at their mother, who lay on the kitchen floor, nothing but skin and bones. She’d lost hundreds of pounds, the weight sloughing off. Doctors and specialists had paraded through the house for months by then; she’d visited hospitals as far distant as Houston and Rochester, Minnesota. Her condition left the best medical minds stumped. Bethany Ronnicks continued to wither into decay, her body the equivalent of an old jack-o’-lantern left on a front stoop weeks after Halloween had passed.

“Please,” she whispered. “Stop this. I know it’s you, Clayton… a mother knows.”

Luke felt a smile spread across Clayton’s face, a sliver of teeth in the dark. He must’ve looked beatific, a child saint.

Upstairs, their mother wept. These raw, hacking sobs.

“You bastard… rotten-ass bastard.”

Luke felt something trickling down from the fuming stew of Clayton’s subconscious. Pleasure. The most incredible pleasure imaginable, beyond sexual in its intensity.

Luke had always known Clayton was a monster of sorts—he now understood that Clayton grasped this fact of his essential self with a rational, clinical objectivity. He was a monster of detachment, eternally unmoored from his fellow man.

But their mother was a monster, too, and one much worse than Clayton. She’d given Clayton a reason to let his own monster out of its box… and his monster was a steely, calculating, devouring one, able to kill another of its kind with relative ease.

Clayton lay at the base of those steps, drinking in the sobs of the woman who’d given him life—the woman whose life he stole by subtle degrees until she was gone, her scarecrow remains buried in a cedar casket in the Memory Gardens cemetery on Muscatine Avenue in Iowa City—and he smiled. His contentment was more sublime than anything he’d ever felt until then or had felt since.

LUKE’S FINGERS pulled out of the ambrosia rope with a gluey suction. His consciousness fled back into him as he broke contact with Clayton’s mind. Luke gagged, his skin feeling too heavy on his bones—like being smothered under a sopping bear pelt.

Clayton slumped against the generator, his eyelids hanging at half-mast. Just taking a little catnap, as their mother called them. Luke was still reeling from the revelation—not a vision, not a dream; that had been a truthful recounting of his brother’s past, a shard chipped off the granite of his memory. He’d killed their mother. It was that simple. He was smarter than her and he’d made her pay. No guilt, no consequence. Clayton was simply expressing that monstrous part of himself—perhaps the truest part.

And Luke was grateful to him for that. He’d surely saved them both. But, like most of the great things his brother had done, it had been to satisfy himself and nobody else.

“I could try to cut through it,” Luke said softly. “Maybe we could still…”

The cord undulated lazily, as if it had heard Luke’s plan; Luke could sense its immense power coursing through his brother’s body.

“You go, Lucas,” said Clayton. “Go up. Go to the people you love, if they’re still there. You… you try. You keep on trying, yes?”

The cord jerked, dragging Clayton with it. Luke reached for him… then he stopped. This was how his brother wanted it. More importantly, it was what he’d earned. Clayton belonged to whatever lay on the other side of that hole more than he’d ever belonged to the human race. Maybe the voices had sensed this and called out to him. They’d found a way to bring him down.

Clayton smiled. He kept smiling as the cord retracted into the hole. Smiled as his stump and shoulder were swallowed into it. Smiled as his skull bent against the Trieste’s unyielding wall. Smiled as his spine broke with a wishbone snap, his heels beating a jittery tattoo on the floor. His head was consumed. The rest of his body followed.

Afterward all was silence. Nothing came back out of the hole. Maybe it had taken all it could possibly take.

“Will you let me leave?” Luke asked it. “I only want to see my wife again.”

Nothing answered him.

Luke faced the Challenger’s hatch. He hadn’t been back inside it since Alice had sent him through into the Trieste.

The wheel spun smoothly. The hatch opened with machined precision. He anchored his hands and boosted himself up into the—

19.

—INSIDE.

Light. The first sensation. Stinging brightness. His rods and cones went haywire; tears squeezed out of his eyes and sheeted down his face.

Warmth. The second, glorious sensation.

For a second, Luke imagined he was on a beach. Warm sand, sun blazing overhead. Gulls screeching as they wheeled in the postcard-pretty sky. Abby and Zach would be somewhere close by. Romping in the surf, snorkeling for starfish. He would find them and sweep them into his arms and never let them—

“How you doing, Doc? Ready to blow this Popsicle stand?”

The Challenger came into focus incrementally. Luke’s jacket was still slung over the web chair; he’d slid it off when it’d gotten too hot during the descent and had forgotten to take it with him. An energy bar wrapper was folded and threaded through an eyelet on his chair…

Luke’s gaze traveled upward, a rising note of confusion hammering his chest—

“Doc? Hey! Jesus, what happened?”

He ignored that impossible, treacherous voice. His eyes traversed the instrument panels, the shiny metal switches hooded with red switch guards. The buttons and gauges were all labeled—somebody must’ve used one of those old DYMO label makers, Luke had thought during the descent. The ones that punch each letter onto a sticky black strip…

“Doc?”

Alice Sykes stared down from the Challenger’s cockpit, looking a bit worried.

Whole. Intact. Smiling cautiously. Alive. Alice… Sykes.

Luke reached a trembling hand toward her—then stopped, partially due to the puzzled look on her face but mostly out of the fear that…

Toy’s voice: You are not who you say you are…

“What’s up, Doc? Look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

The gears inside his head spun wildly, burning out in gouts of smoke. Her hand fell on his shoulder. Luke flinched from her touch.

“Doc? For the love of… What the hell happened to you?”

Luke said, “Are you… you?”

Alice recoiled at the rasp of his voice—or was it the capering lunacy in his eyes?

“Who else would I be?”

Was it her? Or was he dreaming? Had he dreamed that terrible hive in Westlake’s lab with Alice’s body strung all through it? Had she been here all along, waiting for the Challenger to charge up?

“You can’t go inside the station,” he said, his breath knocking hollowly in his lungs. “It’s… it’s death in there.”

She nodded—a bit oddly, he noted, her chin dipping to touch her chest like a marionette in the hands of a clumsy puppeteer.

“You bet, Doc. We’re getting out of here. Clear seas above. We’re gonna bob right up like a cork. We’ll be eating broiled snapper al fresco in a few hours. You just sit tight, okay?”

Luke nodded, puppyish in his desire to please her. He’d sit tight as a drum, he’d be quiet as a church mouse oh yes indeedy, everything would be just right as rain, neato torpedo as Zach used to say, wowee zowee and neato torpedo; Luke would do any goddamn fucking thing Alice wanted as long as she—

“Huh,” she said in obvious puzzlement.

“What is it?”

She flicked a switch. A relay kicked over, shuddering the hull. The lights dimmed, then brightened again.

Alice glanced down at him. She looked different.

Her dark hair was thinner, with kinked gray threads shot through it. She smiled. Luke recoiled. Her teeth looked all wrong in her mouth, yellowed and rotten like shoepeg corn.

“Everything’s fine,” she said in a queer singsong. “Fine as cherry wine.”

She started whistling a familiar tune. Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.

There was an unbuckling sensation inside Luke’s head, the feel of a hasp popping under extreme duress. With it came relief of a sort. His brain smoothed out, achieving a state of total unconcern. It felt good. Very good indeed.

“You’re dead, Alice,” he said, his voice itself dead as a dial tone.

The whistling stopped. In its place came a sucking, whispering exhale.

“You’re dead, Al, and I’m very sorry. I wish… I wish you were here. I wish that so, so much. But you’re not. This is just another game.”

“A game, a game, a game…”

Alice’s voice had changed, too. Higher, reedier. A child’s voice.

“…all the world’s a game…”

Something slammed into the Challenger, rocking Luke in his seat. An alarm pealed; the emergency lights kicked on, bathing him in their blood-red glow.

“Oh my child,” that voice said, “the game is only just beginning.”

He looked up, unable to help himself. Alice’s eyes were melting.

They puddled in her sockets as she stared down at him, smiling through her rotted mouth. The corneas liquefied to a jet-black fluid that flowed upward against gravity, over her forehead and hair, fanning out, crawling over the insides of the Challenger.

“It’s fun, Daddy,” she said in perfect mimicry of Zachary’s voice. “The Fig Men have the very best games. Oh, it’s just the most fun you can possibly imagine.”

The blackness unraveled from her eyes, black scarves fluttering over the submarine’s interior, coating the consoles and blotting out the lights. The Challenger rocked again, the metal squealing—please, Luke thought, please rupture—as something hammered at the hatchway, hard staccato beats like an enormous fist rapping on a door. Alice was laughing now, howling while the black fluid poured from her eye sockets and crept down the walls toward him.

The power cut out. The Challenger plunged into total darkness.

A voice spoke right next to Luke’s ear.

“I’m so happy, Daddy. You’ve come home.”