by Nick Cutter
Luke gripped Al’s shoulders. Her body rocked unstably, eyes wide and horrified.
“What did you see?” Luke hissed. “For God’s sake, Al, what?”
“He’s alive,” Al whispered. “He’s . . . he’s still alive.” She gave vent to a series of nerveless screams. “Still alive!”
Luke’s mind settled around the image with shocking ease: the young sailor, Eldred Henke, crawling out of the crate. His body bloated with seawater, the skin hanging off his bones like hunks of wet wool. His face torn apart by searing metal. Squelching toward Al on his water-rotted feet, leaving blots of pulpy black flesh in his wake, lisping: You did this to me. You DID this . . .
They were clearly seeing something very unalike—whatever horror lay inside that trunk was different for each of them—but Luke wasn’t sure that mattered. Whatever it was that was making them see those things was no doubt capable of doing to them what it might so easily have done to Westlake. It could tear their brains apart.
“Go.” Luke shoved Al toward the tube. “Go, go! We’ve got to move now.”
HuTHUMP.
Al cast a dazed glance toward the noise—her face a mix of shock, disbelief, and primal fear. Luke noted the vacant cast to her eyes. She looked utterly barking mad.
Prepare the lifeboats, mates! The SS Sanity is capsizing! We’re going down!
HUTHUMP!—this time so forceful that the metal grate shivered under their feet.
They retreated to the chute. To that gaping mouth of darkness.
What was your original face before you were born?
It was a Zen koan Luke used to recite in veterinary school. Since then it had a habit of popping into his head at times of direst emergency—like that time Zachary choked on a strip of undercooked bacon and Luke had to give him the Heimlich.
What was your original face?
He’d never been able to picture his original face, but he realized that was the point of the exercise. It created a mental distraction—a pinprick of tranquillity at the dead center of all that twisting fear, an eye of the storm within which he could operate.
We can get out of this, he told himself now. I’ve saved lives before. Animal lives, okay, but a soul’s a soul. I can save us both now.
You’ve lost lives, too, his mother reminded him. Lost the most important one.
That was true, too. And he was as scared as he’d ever been—a terror more keen than he’d felt at the standing pipe or even in the crawl space. At least then he’d had the whole world to escape into.
Now, only one congested tube.
“You go first,” he told Al. “Al . . . ?”
Al stared gape-jawed into the darkness behind them. A thread of saliva spooled over her bottom lip and down her chin.
HUTHUMP!
A great sinuous flex, as though the darkness itself had gulped. Luke swore he saw something pale and snakelike thrust itself forward.
“Al!” He shook her roughly. “Come on, goddamn it!”
Her eyes cleared. She nodded to say she was listening.
Luke said, “Raise your arms, okay? Keep them above your head, like a diver. That should make it easier. Pull yourself, even with that busted hand—it’ll hurt like hell, but I’ll set those bones again if you need it. And remember the bend, right?”
Al kept nodding. “Okay. Yeah, okay.”
“Go. Now.”
Al ducked inside, her head and shoulders swallowed by the chute. When the soles of her boots wriggled out of sight, Luke cast a final look back.
There was a border within the room, semisolid, where light met darkness.
Eight appendages stretched over that border.
One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight!
Eight fingers. Just the tips.
Eight fingernails. Black, sharp.
Each finger was spread an unnatural distance from its neighbor—six inches apart, at least. An enormous hand spidering nimbly forward.
One of those fingers wiggled at him.
Hello Lukey-loo. After all this time, together again.
Luke hurled himself into the chute. He willed himself to breathe steadily; if he hyperventilated and passed out, he was certain he’d awaken to find that ghastly hand curled possessively around his ankle.
The chute closed over his head; the sea pressed down on him.
Breathe, Luke. For God’s sake, just breathe.
He settled into a system: anchoring his feet against the slick metal and pushing off with his toes, inchworming through the chute. It was like doing a thousand consecutive calf-raises. His muscles screamed.
HUTHUMP!
It was at the mouth of the tube now. Five feet away. Maybe less.
It was easier to breathe with his hands over his head, opening up his lungs. He hit the bend but, knowing it was coming, was able to contort his body. His toes skidded on the metal, which was maddeningly clingy and oily at once.
What was your original face before you were born?
He willed himself to calm down. His calves were quivering; for all he knew he’d ripped the tendons clean off the bone.
Skrriiiiiiitch . . .
Nails on metal. The hand was inside the chute, scratching toward him. Tapping and feeling its way forward like a blind and hungry tarantula.
Luke stretched out, his fingers creeping, his toes muscling his aching body forward inch after painful inch. He pictured the chute elongating the same way the crawl space had years ago. An endless suffocating tunnel. The perfect kill zone.
No. It had an end, and he was reaching it. He could hear Al stumbling out someplace ahead. The air tasted a bit less polluted. It couldn’t be far now.
Skriiiiiitch . . .
On his boot now.
A fingernail scratching down the sole, gouging the rubber. Luke bit back a shriek—don’t fall through the trapdoor and into the snakepit now, sonny-boy; you fall now and it’s game over, no more tokens—and surged forward on a tide of adrenaline.
Another push, another, calf muscles twitching, sweat soaking his overalls, another push, mouth wide and gasping, fingers reaching—
The chute ended. Alice’s strong hand clutched his wrist and yanked him out.
They stood in the tunnel, panting. The hatch was ten feet away. A mellow coin of light shone through its porthole. LB would be out there, waiting.
They ran for it like kids fleeing the bogeyman—which, in a way, they absolutely were. Luke hazarded one last look back. He couldn’t help himself. He almost wanted to thumb his nose.
Nyah-nyah, missed me, missed me, now you’ve gotta kiss me.
The hand was visible at the end of the chute. Huge—even bigger than he remembered. Its five fingers—no no no it has eight fingers eight like a spider—its fingers rested on the swell of the tube, each a good five inches apart.
Luke’s mind performed a few lunatic calculations. What was the distance between the access chute’s mouth and the crate? A hundred feet, at least. That hand had crawled across the purification room and through the chute . . . how much farther could it reach? Perhaps that hand was attached to an arm that unspooled endlessly . . .
. . . no, it had to eventually attach to something, didn’t it? A body. A host.
When Luke tried to envision that body—an image flared briefly in his skull—his mind sprinted swiftly away from its nightmarish outline.
The hand raised up ever so slightly. Rocking side to side.
Waving good-bye.
Taa-taa, Lukey-loo. We’ll be seeing each other again real soon. We’ll be close by. We’ve always been close. Bye for now. TTFN.
16.
LB YIPPED EXCITEDLY as they staggered out of the hatch. They looked to have aged half a decade since they’d stepped through it.
They were slick with the kind of adrenal perspiration that squeezes from the pores like the sweat off foreign cheese. Their overalls were stained with that unnameable oil coating the chute, the fabric ripped from their . . . escape? What had they been running from? Al’s ov
eralls were torn across her belly, a slash like a sagging mouth that revealed her abdominal muscles.
They hunched, hands on knees, gathering their breath, unable to look each other in the eye. The fear Luke had felt—the nattering, mindless fear of a child—already seemed foolish . . . mostly. Were he to stare through the porthole into the cramped, dimly lit tunnel, he knew he’d see nothing. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to look.
He couldn’t convince himself that what he’d seen hadn’t been real, either—if not enough to hurt him physically, then at least to damage or even destroy his mind.
You’re being played, Luke.
It felt that way. Stupidly, he almost believed it, too. Every angle cut off, every attempt to escape thwarted. He felt much like a rat down a hole with the terriers chewing after him and the rat-catcher somewhere above, stomping his feet to make the ground thunder. As if some calculating force was funneling him toward a dire certainty, the contours of which Luke could only dimly grasp.
Let’s be serious here, brother. It’s probably a classic case of the sea-sillies.
Clayton’s voice.
You mustn’t discount that possibility, O brother of mine.
Luke hadn’t discounted it. Or that it could be the ’Gets taking hold. It could happen just this way. A person began to imagine things. That they are pursued by faceless hunters, their childhood nightmares come back to snatch them. The world warped and their brains warped right along with it.
And if two sad souls catch it at the same time? Clayton chimed in. Well, it can certainly accelerate their mutual deterioration. They both start grasping at the same straws; they’re plagued by the same phantoms. Wouldn’t you agree?
Luke glanced at Al. He didn’t see any sores on her face or hands—if she was spotting already, he couldn’t see it. As for Luke, he could feel a stress pimple beginning to hatch under his lip but that was about it.
LB rucked under his elbow, prodding him with her snout. She licked his palm, her head cocked at a quizzical angle.
I know this dog, Luke thought, scrupulously itemizing his surroundings. Her name is LB. She is a chocolate Lab, a bit small for her breed. We are eight miles below the surface of the Pacific. The woman beside me is Lieutenant Alice Sykes, U.S. Navy. I am Luke Nelson, a veterinarian. I live at 34 Cherryhill Lane in Iowa City. My wife’s name is Abby. My son has a chevron-shaped birthmark on his right arm.
He shook his head, angry at himself.
My ex-wife’s name is Abby. My son had a chevron-shaped birthmark.
“What do you think, Doc?” Al asked. “Are we going bugfuck nuts down here or what? What I saw in there”—pointing toward the purification room—“can’t exist. I know that. But I saw it. I saw that Henke kid crawl out of that fucking crate, scuttling like a crab with his wet flesh falling off his bones . . . and he never took his gaze off me, Doc. His eyes were clear and cold and so fucking angry. That can’t be, but it is. Down here it is.”
Luke lifted his foot to get a look at the sole of his boot. A ragged trench was gouged through the rubber. He was only mildly shocked to see it.
“We’ve got to find that generator, Al.”
Al nodded, content to have a plan. “We can do that.”
THEY RETURNED to the main lab. Returned to the buzz behind the door marked LW—dulcet now, even harmonic. Al’s gaze flitted toward Westlake’s lab. Luke sensed it took a great effort for her to pry her eyes away from it.
Clayton was inside his lab. Luke saw him through the porthole and hammered his fist on the glass.
“Clay! Open up! We’ve got to talk!”
Clayton’s hand was bandaged to the wrist now. Viscid fluid leaked through the gauze—thick and translucent, the consistency of 5 Minute Epoxy. It had gummed to the sleeve of his overalls, forming a white crust like the stuff that forms at the edges of a horse’s mouth when it’s been run too hard.
Clayton approached the hatch, a strange smile pasted on his face. He draped that curtain over the porthole to shield his lab from view.
“Goddamn it, Clay!” Luke hit the glass hard enough to rake the skin off his knuckles. “We need your help! You need ours!”
“Screw it. Leave him in there,” Al said. “It’s where he can do the least harm. Think of how long we’ve been down here, Luke. Look at how it’s affecting us already. Look at what it did to Westlake, too. Your brother and Dr. Toy . . . we can’t trust anyone who’s been down here that long.”
They headed down the tunnel that led to Westlake’s quarters. Al said she was pretty sure the generator was stored in that area of the station.
“How’s your hand?” Luke asked once they’d made it to Westlake’s room.
“It’s fucked,” she said simply. “You did what you could—it feels a lot better, but it’s still busted up. I’d love to pop a few heavy-duty pain pills, but they make me sleepy and I’d prefer to stay awake.”
“That’s a good idea,” Luke said grimly. “Or if we do, we should sleep together.”
Al cocked a Spockian eyebrow at him. Belatedly, Luke realized what he’d said; a flush crept up his neck.
“Pretty small beds down here,” she said, with a nod at Westlake’s cot.
Trapped in the tension of that moment, Luke wanted to kiss her. She wasn’t one of the stereotypical corn-fed Iowa beauties he’d grown up around—but then neither was Abby, with her raven hair and Nordic cheekbones. Yet there was something deeply alluring about Alice, an aliveness, a wildness even; it would be like making love to a Valkyrie or something. And why not? What could it harm? He was single, lonely, and hadn’t felt a woman’s touch since Abby left. Alice hadn’t mentioned anyone, either. They could have a friendly little romp. Make love in the foxhole, release some tension, then get back to business . . .
. . . but they wouldn’t make love—they would fuck. Rut. Luke was certain of it. Fall upon each other like wolves, tearing and ripping and biting; there wouldn’t be an ounce of tenderness or concern for each other’s body or needs; it would be a brutal release, a letting go of the pressure they’d existed under for too long, no different than two swollen clouds splitting open with rain. The Trieste would warp the act, making it loveless and mocking—afterward they would be sweaty and bloody in places, ashamed for reasons they couldn’t pinpoint, weaker, mistrustful and less unified than before.
“I’d do the honorable thing and sleep on the floor,” Luke finally said. “I’m real gallant that way.”
The spark that had been kindling in Al’s eyes was snuffed. She gave him a strained smile and offered an awkward curtsy.
“Thank you, m’lord, for keeping me safe from predation.”
Luke smiled. “Think nothing of it, milady. Your virtue must remain untrammeled until you are given away at the grand cotillion ball six months hence.”
The awkwardness passed. Luke’s gaze fell on the stack of Westlake’s journals under the cot. Hadn’t Westlake commented during that final audio file that he’d continued to update his research in those very journals?
“I’d like to leaf through Westlake’s papers,” Luke said. “I may find something.”
Al nodded. “The genny should be just down this tunnel, through another hatch. I’ll check it out while you’re in here.”
Al’s footsteps echoed down the tunnel—she still sounded close by, but sound had a funny way of traveling in the station. Luke did hear a hatch hiss open, and next Al was banging around inside.
“You find it?” he called.
“Yeah,” came her reply. “It’ll need some work. Gimme a holler every so often, okay? It’ll keep us both alert.”
“Ten-four,” said Luke. He sat on the cot. His eyes itched with exhaustion; he screwed his palms into his sockets and blinked to clear the fuzziness. LB hopped up beside him. He rummaged through Westlake’s gear and located a bag of beef jerky. Saliva squirted into his mouth. He was ravenous. He split it with the dog; LB bolted down the tough rags of beef and licked the salt off Luke’s fingers. She tried to stuff her nose
inside the bag but Luke snatched it away.
“Where are your manners, girl?”
LB hung her head and watched him indirectly, like a clumsy spy.
Luke reached for Westlake’s journals. Al was still banging away at a comforting cadence. Luke flipped through the first few journals. Scientific jargon, formulas, stuff Luke couldn’t comprehend. He set them aside.
He unzipped his duffel bag and pulled out the journal he’d found in the storage tunnel: Psych Report. The cover was smeared with that weird ooze.
He flipped it open. The first page and many pages thereafter were filled with Westlake’s neat and careful handwriting.
17.
Wednesday, June 18
Let me say first off, the idea of keeping a journal strikes me as foolish. But I’ve been asked to keep a record of my . . . FEELINGS? As my old mentor memorably said: “Scientists don’t have feelings, they have agendas!”
But a little about myself, since you’ve insisted. Cooper Westlake. Forty-five years old. Computational biologist. A wife—my third. A daughter, Hannah, seven years old.
On a more serious note, I’m grateful to have been selected for this mission. Like most everyone on earth, I’ve lost loved ones to the Disease (which I refuse to call by its more popular sobriquet). The Disease is curable, I’m sure of it. My surety is shared by Drs. Nelson and Toy.
That will be all for today. Toodleoo.
Friday, June 20
I’ve been onboard the Hesperus three weeks now. The seasickness is gone, but bad dreams are commonplace. Yet a mood of optimism prevails. Having seen Dr. Eva Parks’ footage of the lantern fish and the results of Clayton’s preliminary research, excitement is running high.
I have been suffering nightmares. No—a specific, recurring nightmare. There is some background to it.
I had my daughter, Hannah, with my second wife. She was born in Belmont, Massachusetts; I was on a grant from MIT. Our neighborhood had wide streets, big lawns, rows of well-kept colonial homes.
When Hannah learned to walk, we reorganized our living quarters. We were fastidious in creating a safe environment.
