by Nick Cutter
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 bu
t 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.
