by Nick Cutter
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 insi
de. 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.
