by Nick Cutter
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.
