by Nick Cutter
“Clayton, do you think it might be a good idea to get out of here for a while? Take a powder, head up to the surface to clear your head?”
Luke wasn’t about to mention his sleepwalking incident, either. Or Westlake’s audio files. Not yet. He couldn’t face Clayton’s sneering scorn, not without Al here to back him up at least.
“You can do whatever you want, Lucas,” his brother said. “You shouldn’t even be here. But I can’t leave.”
“Why not?”
But Luke already knew the answer. The Trieste was the seat of the unknown, and his obsessive brother wasn’t about to abandon his attempt unlock its secrets.
“Fine,” he said, setting it aside for now. “Where’s Alice?”
“She’s getting some sleep.” Clayton cocked his head. “In the meantime, would you like to see what I’ve discovered? Now that you’re here?”
Clayton clearly wanted to show Luke. Childishly, part of Luke wanted to give his older brother what Abby used to call the RFU: the Royal Fuck You.
Nah, not interested, Clay. It sounds pretty boring, to be honest. Hey, you got a TV in this joint? You get decent reception down here?
More crucially, did Luke really want to see?
He’d witnessed Clayton’s blooper reel before—a mouse with a collapsed nose on its back, for one. Luke’s skin crawled at the thought of what his brother had been up to down here where the light never shone.
But of course, Luke did want to see. If anyone could figure out how to harness the ambrosia, his brother was that man.
Alice’s voice floated to them from another part of the station. She sounded vaguely fearful.
“Luke?” she called out. “Hey, Luke?”
“Hurry up,” Clayton said, shepherding Luke into his lab.
“Wait. What about Al?”
Clayton shook his head. Luke hesitated as Clay punched a code on the keypad.
“Family only. You have eight seconds to get inside, Lucas. Then it locks automatically.”
Luke didn’t move.
eight . . . seven . . .
Clay’s jaw tensed.
six . . .
Luke said: “The dog comes with me.”
“It does not. No dogs allowed,” said Clayton.
It was Luke’s turn to cock his head at his brother. He knew Clayton wanted to show him. Otherwise he’d never have offered.
Alice’s voice drew nearer. “Luke?”
three . . . two . . .
“Fine. Get in, both of you,” Clayton snapped, relenting. “Quickly.”
Luke gripped LB’s collar. She backpedaled, fighting him.
“What’s the matter, girl? It’s okay.”
Really? Was it?
Luke picked her up. LB tucked her head to his throat the way Zach used to do before falling asleep.
one . . .
3.
THE LOCK ENGAGED with a hiss. Clayton draped a blanket over a hook above the porthole, shielding them from the main lab.
Clay’s lab was a cube, yet its walls didn’t meet at right angles; instead they bellied outward to maintain the Trieste’s egg-based physics. A cot in one corner. Clayton must also sleep in here, Luke figured.
Westlake took to sleeping in his lab, too, he recalled. He wanted to be close to the hole. His hole.
Luke set the dog down but she remained zippered to his side. Her eyes rolled in their sockets; she was clearly afraid but Luke couldn’t pinpoint any immediate cause. A terrarium and a cage housing a pair of guinea pigs sat against one wall. Beside those rested a pair of larger cages—dog crates, one of which had surely held LB.
Where’s the other one? Luke wondered. Where’s Little Fly?
A stainless-steel lab bench occupied the middle of the room; Luke could see where it had been riveted together, as a bench that size would have been brought down here in sections. A large poster of Albert Einstein—that famous shot with his tongue sticking out—was hung on the wall directly behind the bench. The quote read: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
“I didn’t know you were a fan,” Luke said.
“It’s good to visualize your competition.” Clay smiled. “You will laugh at this, Lucas, but sometimes I talk to Albert. If I’ve been working long enough, sometimes he’ll talk back.”
A squat white box sat along the near wall. Clayton opened its lid; plumes of vapor billowed out. He reached inside, whistling absentmindedly. Clayton used to whistle or even sing in his basement lab all the time; the notes would drift up the staircase into the kitchen. The most inane melodies. The theme to Gilligan’s Island, or even “Whistle While You Work”—except Clayton used to screw with the lyrics:
Whistle while you work, Hitler was a jerk; Mussolini bit his weenie and now it doesn’t work . . .
Clayton shut the cooler—but not before Luke noticed a squared-off shape wrapped in black plastic. It looked a bit like a butchered hog loin, though Luke knew it wouldn’t be that.
“Don’t be alarmed,” Clayton said, placing a guinea pig on the lab bench.
The animal was frozen stiff, glittering with frost. Luke wasn’t alarmed at all—as a veterinarian in the Midwest, he’d seen plenty of frozen animals.
“How did it die?” Luke asked. “Or is that important to your scientific query?”
The guinea pig tipped onto its side, its legs jutting up at the ceiling. LB edged to the lip of the table, snuffling with keen interest. Clayton swatted at her; the dog flinched away in fear.
Luke reached out and snatched his brother’s wrist. He felt the live-wire twitch of Clayton’s tendons—he also noticed that Clay’s fingers were now bandaged to the second joint, swaddled under thick gauze.
“Not very nice.” Luke tsked. “Do you treat all your guests that way?”
Clayton offered a gravedigger’s smile. The guinea pig was melting out of its icy encasement; a small pool of water had already formed around it.
Thhhwiiiilppppippit!
Luke craned his head around. Where had that noise come from? A dripping tap? They wouldn’t have running water down here, would they?
The sound stirred a memory, yet Luke couldn’t lay his finger on it.
Wait a second. The guinea pig’s leg. Had it . . . twitched?
LB spun in an agitated circle, whining pitifully.
The guinea pig’s leg twitched again, obviously this time.
“Clay,” Luke said. “What’s it doing? What’s that dead thing doing?”
“Who said it was dead, brother dear?”
It had to be dead. The laws of nature dictated as much. Some creatures could be frozen for a short period and be reanimated. Flies, crickets. Not warm-blooded animals of an elevated biological genus.
And yet . . .
The guinea pig’s sides began to heave as it took the smallest breaths.
This is not happening, Luke thought. It’s not possible.
The coating of ice over the guinea pig’s face melted. Its eyeballs were vibrantly red—the color of blood leaping from a torn vein. It flipped to its feet and trundled awkwardly over the lab bench.
Clayton picked it up and offered it to his brother. Luke was beset with a profound revulsion.
Why? There was nothing obviously the matter with it, other than the fact it had just come back from the dead. A perfectly ordinary guinea pig, shivering in his brother’s cupped palms.
Don’t you touch it, Luke, said the voice of caution. It’s . . . diseased. It’ll infect you—it doesn’t even have to bite you. Touching it will be enough.
“It’s a little-bitty, fluffy-wuffy guinea pig,” Clay said. “I take it you’re afraid?”
Luke’s jaw tightened. He held his hands out and Clay gave it to him. God, it felt awful: like holding a throbbing bezoar—a tumorous hairball, one of which he’d once removed from the stomach of a narcotized leopard at the Des Moines Zoo.
The creature just sat there in his palms, its pert nose twitching. An odd notion came into Luke
’s mind: it was trying to look cute, the same way a calculating child could become doe-eyed and saccharine when there was something to gain from it. Its teeth—old man teeth; the nicotine-stained teeth of a three-pack-a-day smoker—clashed like tusks in the wet hole of its mouth.
Clayton opened the cage. “Put it inside.”
Luke did so with great relief. The other two guinea pigs, both quite small, avoided the unfrozen one, burrowing into the cedar shavings and squeaking in consternation.
“How . . . ?”
“Oh, come now,” said Clayton. “You’ve spoken to Felz, haven’t you? So you know perfectly well how.” He retrieved a kit from beneath the table. Luke had used the same kit thousands of times. Inside you’d find two syringes and a vial of Euthasol.
An EK—Extinction Kit, as it was known in the veterinarian biz.
Clayton unwrapped a hypo and affixed the needle. He extracted 2.5 ccs of Euthasol, enough to flatline a Great Dane.
Agitated squeals broke out inside the cage. The unfrozen guinea pig was now attacking the other two. It lunged at the sensitive webbing of the much smaller guinea pig’s legs, hamstringing it. The third guinea pig clambered up the cage to hang in screeching, stupid shock from the upper bars.
The unfrozen one flipped the small one over; its head darted between the small pig’s legs, teeth gnashing at the poor thing’s exposed privates. Its victim shrieked in terror and pain.
LB advanced on the cage with a growl building in her throat.
“Keep that damn thing away,” Clayton said, pulling on a pair of vulcanized rubber gloves.
Luke gripped LB by the scruff. Clayton reached into the cage and vised his fingers around the zombified (except that wasn’t really the case, was it?) guinea pig. It squealed as he pulled it off the smaller one. Luke caught a glimpse of the victim’s shredded sex organs and blanched.
Clayton pinned the guinea pig to the table. Its face was a mask of blood, its head whipping in crazed paroxysms.
“The needle,” he grunted.
Luke handed it over. He wasn’t about to question his brother—he’d just as soon protest Clayton driving a stake through a vampire’s black heart.
An ungodly shriek bubbled out of the guinea pig’s throat. It bit Clayton’s glove and tore a groove out of the rubber.
It shouldn’t be capable of that. Luke was gobsmacked. A pit bull would have a hard time biting through those gloves.
Clayton sank the needle into the guinea pig’s flank.
The needle bent.
Jesus Christ. It actually bent, as though Clayton stabbed it into a car door.
Clay jabbed it again and the needle snapped with a singing tink, the spike of metal spinning through the air.
Luke’s mind was reeling but his brother remained calm—calmish. Greasy balls of sweat dotted his brow, but whether that was from dread or exertion Luke couldn’t tell. Luke’s own body was bathed in sticky heat that radiated up from the balls of his feet, panic ghosting through the ventricles of his heart.
“Screw on the other needle-tip for me, would you?” Clayton said.
Luke did so—an action he’d completed thousands of times, thank God, his fingers working instinctively. Clayton flipped the bleating creature onto its back, located its rectum and stabbed with the needle. It sank in deeply, the guinea pig hissing like a cockroach as Clayton depressed the plunger.
Clayton injected the full 2.5 ccs. Luke thought of telling him to save some for the guinea pig with the bloodied privates . . . but right now, he just wanted this big bastard dead.
The guinea pig’s body relaxed. Clayton quickly ducked underneath the lab bench and came up with what looked like a pair of sterling silver bolt cutters. They were Bethune surgical rib shears—an instrument used for splitting the cartilage between human ribs during open-heart surgery.
Clayton was singing now. A familiar children’s song, sung in a toneless, dial-tone voice.
“The itsy-bitsy spider went up the water spout; down came the rain and washed the spider out . . .”
He brought the shears down. The blades formed an inverted V around the guinea pig’s neck.
“What the hell are you doing, Clay?”
“Look closely.” Clayton’s eyes glittered. “Part its hair so you can see the flesh.”
Luke didn’t want to touch the thing again, but curiosity overrode his squeamishness. The guinea pig’s fur was stiff like the bristles of a dirty broom, the flesh under it pink and oily. Its body pumped off the noxious warmth of a compost heap.
“Do you see it?” said Clayton. “That shine?”
Its skin held the barest scintilla, as though dusted with powdered diamonds.
“It’s the ambrosia,” said Clayton.
“Is it leaking out of its body?”
“I don’t think it was ever inside its body. I think it covers bodies in the thinnest skein, so thin it would take electron magnification to spot it. Think of a spider’s web. It doesn’t take much pure matter at all; an ounce of ambrosia, stretched into skeins, could cover the entire population of our home city.”
Luke couldn’t help but picture it. The citizens of Iowa City covered in downy threads of ambrosia, finer than baby hair, unnoticeable to the naked eye but coiling deep into their bodies, fastening around their organs and bones. Everybody shimmered in the sunlight, their bodies aglitter . . .
“It might send roots inside.” Clayton wiped the feverish sweat collecting above his lip. “Roots so slender that they can slip between molecules of flesh and blood; so small they can even twine around atoms. Think about it.”
Phloooopppp . . .
That dripping sound again, coming from somewhere inside the lab—
That old childhood memory Luke’s mind had been chasing entombed itself in his skull with a concussive thump . . .
4.
THE STANDING PIPE on Old Langtree Road in Iowa City. A concrete tunnel with a grate over its mouth to prevent idiot kids from clambering into its damp, moss-crusted darkness. An overflow pipe—when the river rose, excess water jetted out of it to saturate the floodplain. But the river could go months at low ebb, meaning that the area ringing the pipe was most often a stagnant swamp that on high August days smelled like a pile of mildewed gym trunks.
Clayton visited the swamp often, as its microclimate hosted prize specimens. Unsurprisingly, he favored the most disgusting life-forms. If its body had the texture of a snot-filled bath bead, chances were that Clayton wanted it. Sometimes he’d let Luke tag along, needing an extra pair of hands.
One long-ago summer day, the young brothers had arrived at dusk, when the coolness brought the best specimens out of their hidey-holes. Luke never visited the standing pipe alone. Its wide, cavernous mouth jutting out of the gray caliche—which reminded him, disconcertingly, of elephant skin—sent an unpleasant shiver down his arms. The pipe’s interior was hung with rotting strands of moss that dangled down in stiff stalactites. Sunlight couldn’t penetrate it more than a few feet; after that it turned grainy, the shadows swimming with clever movements.
It was stupid to think. It was just a tunnel. Sure, it was dangerous; you wouldn’t want to squeeze past the grate and walk down it—not because there was something waiting for you in its gloomy guts, but because you could trip and fall and bust your fool skull wide open, as Luke’s mother was apt to say.
By the time the boys reached the pipe that day, the surrounding swampland was hovering with shadows. The inverted bells of the carnivorous pitcher plants lay bronzed in the dying sun. The creatures that had lain dormant during the day were slithering and spidering from their resting places.
Clayton forged into the swamp in a pair of hip waders, sending up swarms of no-see-ums. Luke’s sweatpants—he couldn’t bear wading through that bug-infested swamp barelegged—were soaked to his crotch. The fluffy tops of cotton grass poking out of the swamp reminded Luke of Peter Cottontail, the bunny, which led him to envision the grass-wads hiding a thousand drowned rabbits submerged in the brow
n muck with their tails sticking out of the water.
The brothers reached the mouth of the pipe. A new moon glossed its concrete lips, a silver O enclosing a solid pool of darkness.
Clustered along the pipe were translucent vein-strung sacs, each roughly the size of an oxblood marble. They were arranged in gooey clusters—bunches of albino grapes, or mutant fly eggs.
“They’re hatching,” Clayton said. “Perfect.”
The sacs were breaking open to disgorge tallowy creatures with flagellate tails. They squiggled to the edge of the pipe and—
Thhhwhooolloop . . .
Dropped into the water.
“Pollywogs are interesting creatures,” Clayton remarked. “No other amphibian undergoes such a massive change as it becomes an adult. Humans have a few more bones as babies, which fuse together as we grow, but we don’t grow new arms or legs or lose any part of our bodies as we mature. Humans,” he said with something approaching sadness, “are boring.”
Luke always felt unbelievably grateful for these moments when his brother treated him like a human being. In such moments Clayton seemed most like a human being himself, full of childlike wonder.
The mama bullfrogs croaked in protest as Clayton dragged a net and deposited pollywogs into the bucket Luke had brought. Luke heard something from inside the pipe—a sound that vibrated the sensitive hairs of his ear canal.
It came again. A gelatinous sliding like something coughed up from a kitchen drain . . . and what was the pipe, anyway, if not a drain? A huge, long drain. It stood to reason that the things coughed out of a pipe that size would be massive, as well.
