by Nick Cutter
18.
LUKE STARED DOWN at Clayton.
He did not know how he’d gotten here. Things had gone black after he’d left Westlake’s lab. The hands on the clock had melted, and next he’d found himself back here. He must have slipped into another dream-pool. All he remembered was this sense of having moved through a huge intestine. The walls flexing, pushing him through like a stubborn shred of last evening’s pot roast.
He’d lost the flashlight somewhere along the way. No matter: the station now pumped out a sick radiance all its own. The holes provided it.
His brother was propped awkwardly against the generator, which had been shoved almost flush to the wall. Had Clayton tried to sabotage it? Luke would kill him if he’d done that—that certainty rested easily in his mind. Kill him just as easy as breathing.
Clayton’s face glowed in the dim. He looked even more horrible, as if some nightmare creature had gunged down the tunnel and sucked the blood out of Clayton’s throat. Luke pictured Clay’s neck winnowing and withering until it was no thicker than a pipe cleaner. This image made Luke smile.
“You killed it. The dog.” Luke’s voice was flat and toneless. Very much like his mother’s voice, he noted.
Clayton’s eyelids cracked. “Whu?”
“The dog. Little Fly. You pushed him through.”
Clayton’s head lolled. “That’s what it was for.”
Luke kicked him. Not hard, but not softly, either. “Get up.”
“No.”
“They’re all dead. Alice. Hugo. Westlake. The dogs. All killed, all taken. We’re the only ones left.”
Are you sure they’re really dead, Luke? Are you sure you’re really so alone?
Luke kicked his brother again, harder this time. “Get your ass up. We have to at least try to get out of here.”
“You try, Lucas. You always were the trier.”
Things nattered and clicked beyond the tunnel bend. Luke’s guts turned over—the fear had been replaced with a churning nausea.
“I want to see the sun again,” Luke said, disgusted at his petulance—he sounded just as he had as a boy, begging to be let into Clay’s lab. “I want to talk to Abby. Just one more time. Tell her how sorry I am. How much I miss her, and miss our boy.”
“Go, then.”
“There’s nothing down here, Clayton. Can’t you see that? There never was. This was all a trick. We chased it down here. We were tricked. You were tricked.”
Clayton hung his head. “I can’t go, Lucas.”
Luke didn’t feel anger—it would be as senseless as being angry at a dog for digging up a yard or a mallard for flying south for the winter. Genius or not, Clayton remained a creature of stupid instinct.
“You’ll die, then, you dumb bastard.”
Clayton shifted. Had the cap of bandages sloughed off his wound? The position of Clayton’s body shielded the stump from view.
“Please, Clay. I’ve never asked you for anything. Just this once.”
The clicks and scratches grew more insistent. Luke knelt beside Clayton. He’d pick him up and drag him into the Challenger if he had to. He’d wrestle and punch and choke and bite if it came to that; the sonofabitch only had one hand, anyway, and was drugged to the gills.
Luke gripped Clayton’s shoulders. His brother thrashed, suddenly furious.
“I said, I can’t. For Christ’s sake, Lucas, please don’t—”
But Luke wasn’t to be denied. His hands slipped lower, pinning Clayton’s arm to his side—Clayton issued a kittenish moan of protest—while his other hand brushed against the stump of his wrist . . .
Luke saw it then. No shock, no horror. His mind accepted the fact dully. In a way it made total sense.
The rope, the tube, the . . .
—umbilical cord—
. . . ran out of a fresh hole in the wall, a hole that had been obscured by the generator. The cord was bright red, same color as Alice’s eyes. It was attached to Clayton’s stump; thick bands wrapped the flesh of his forearm like tropical creepers.
Luke’s fingers had sunk into that livid, twitching rope. They’d gone in without resistance, as if into warm mud. He glanced at Clayton, terror leaping up his throat; Clayton stared back with a look of ineffable sorrow and perhaps, finally if too late, understanding.
“I’m sorry,” he said simply.
Luke tried to pull his fingers free. But he couldn’t; they were stuck in a warm, fleshy Chinese finger trap. He glanced at his brother, their eyes locking—
Luke felt his consciousness traveling into Clayton’s eyes, into his body, up his brainstem, and into his brain itself. His mind entered Clayton’s somehow; a hidden latch lifted, a secret trapdoor springing open. Luke’s mind was swallowed into Clayton’s own; a chilly metallic veneer settled over his thoughts—the way Clayton must see the world.
Next Luke was rocked by a vision of searing clarity that swept over him like a tidal wave, obliterating all consciousness.
A MEMORY. A shared one, but now Luke was seeing it from his brother’s perspective instead of his own.
They were kids again. Luke was eight years old—except he wasn’t Luke, not right now. He was Clayton, nestled inside Clayton’s body somehow, staring across the kitchen table at . . . well, himself. Their mother sat at the head of the table. It was night, blackness painted to the windows.
“I’ve got a job for you, my little soldiers,” she said slyly.
She put a small pot on the table. Beside it, a hacksaw and two paintbrushes.
Luke remembered this night. Oh yes, he remembered it well.
Clayton and Luke donned their boots and warm sweaters. It was so odd, watching the world through his brother’s eyes—a little like being strapped into an amusement park ride that he had no control over.
“You sure this is such a hot idea, Clay?” Luke heard his young self whisper once they were alone in the backyard, out of their mother’s earshot.
Luke felt the words forming in Clayton’s mouth before he spat them out.
“Shut up, dummy.”
They stole into their neighbor’s backyard. The branches of Mr. Rosewell’s crabapple tree stretched over the fence into their yard; its hard, inedible fruit always fell on their lawn. Their mother had asked—really, she’d ordered—Mr. Rosewell to trim its branches, or better yet hack the awful thing down. Mr. Rosewell, a retired mailman with a buzz cut who’d recently lost his wife, said to hell with that. They’d stared at each other over the fence; then their mother had spun, graceless in her bulk, and waddled back into the house.
The boys knelt at the base of the tree. Clayton spun the lid off the pot. Their mother had bought it at the local hardware store that afternoon; its label bore a picture of a wilted, cronelike tree.
Clayton notched thin cuts in the tree with the hacksaw. Luke watched his younger self cast worried glances toward Mr. Rosewell’s porch, as if in expectation the old mailman would step through the screen door, shotgun in hand.
The boys spat on the paintbrushes and painted the tree with whatever foul poison lay inside that pot. Then they dashed back to their house, eyes fairly shining with their deviltry.
“The two most precious boys in the whole world,” their mother said. She’d baked a “celebration pie.” Lemon meringue, Clayton’s favorite. Trapped inside his brother’s head, Luke could feel the sugary meringue dissolving on Clayton’s tongue.
The memory took a weird lurch forward. Suddenly it was daytime. Luke was staring at the crabapple tree through Clayton’s eyes. Its leaves were wilting. Gravity was treating it cruelly—punishing it, shoving it hard to the earth. Clayton picked up one of its fallen apples and took a bite. It was revolting, like sucking on a busted-open battery. Luke tried to get a grip on his brother’s mind, searching for something—a shred of pity for the tree, perhaps, which shouldn’t have had to die so horribly. He got nothing but a chilly backwash, as if he’d touched the insides of an industrial freezer.
The memory lurched again, the sc
ene shifting. Clayton was in his basement lab now. A key rattled in the lock. He turned to see their mother filling the door frame. She wore her housecoat—the ratty one with the bleached-out stripes that gave her body the look of a moldering circus tent. The one she wore all day and night that stunk of her crazy sweat and bones.
“Go away.” Clayton’s voice was preternaturally calm, but Luke could feel an intense heat cooking at his brother’s temples. “Leave me alone.”
Their mother smiled. The most feral, cunning expression Luke had ever seen, her head cocked coyly to one side. The look of a predator who’d boxed in its quarry. She turned, carefree, and locked the door. Then she untied the sash on her robe, her back still turned. She did something with her hips, a lewd little shimmy; Luke felt the hairs standing up on Clayton’s arms. She slipped the robe off one shoulder—the salacious movement of a peep-show worker—and turned to look over that same shoulder, pinning her son in a flat and viperish stare.
When she faced him again, the robe was open a few inches. Her body was obscenely enormous, bulging in thick rolls down to the shadowy delta between her legs. A smell wafted off her: not her normal stink, the one a body develops when deprived of sunlight and clean air, when all it does is sit on a cracked chesterfield and shovel porridge between its spittle-wet lips, a smell not unlike the stink that wafts off a mildewed shower curtain—no, this was raw, throttlingly hormonal. The smell of arousal.
“Come here, boy,” she said softly. “Come to your mama.”
Luke felt it seeping out of Clayton’s skull—a jumpy, rabbity tick-tick-tick that made him think of cockroaches roasting and sputtering in a hot pan. That jumpy pop and crackle washed all through Luke’s piggybacking mind, too—it was fear, or the closest approximation to that emotion his brother could feel.
Their mother advanced, limping slightly. Clayton backpedaled, his hip knocking a flask off the lab bench, where it shattered on the floor.
“Tsk-tsk. Clumsy boy. You’ll have to pay for that in trade.”
Her body was a sheet of suffocating flab but her arms were oh-so-strong. Luke felt his brother’s heart pounding as he fought back wildly, aiming a knee at her wounded hips; she only laughed and pulled him closer—his struggles were nothing compared to that of the residents at the Second Chance Ranch. The heat of her body was weirdly narcotic; Clayton went limp, exhaling into the shelf of her enormous breasts, lips sputtering as he gasped for air.
“It’s okay,” their mother cooed, one hand fussing with Clayton’s trousers. “You like it, remember? If you didn’t like it, you wouldn’t get so . . . so . . .”
The scene fried out in a stinking puff of smoke. Next: Clayton was back in the lab. Alone. The pot of tree killer sat on the bench. Clayton was concentrating on it intently. Luke could feel his furious focus. Clayton opened the lid and tapped a small amount of the pale blue powder onto the bench; it looked like pulverized robin’s eggs. He opened other jars and vials containing compounds Luke knew nothing about. Mixing, measuring . . .
A series of memories shuffled past like holiday photos in a slide projector:
Flash: Clayton in the bathroom, shaking powder into their mother’s shampoo bottle.
Flash: Clayton in the master bedroom, stirring powder into their mother’s facial cream.
Flash: Clayton in the kitchen, tipping powder into the huge pot of porridge simmering on the stove.
A final memory:
Luke staring through Clayton’s eyes again, up the basement stairs at their mother, who lay on the kitchen floor, nothing but skin and bones. She’d lost hundreds of pounds, the weight sloughing off. Doctors and specialists had paraded through the house for months by then; she’d visited hospitals as far distant as Houston and Rochester, Minnesota. Her condition left the best medical minds stumped. Bethany Ronnicks continued to wither into decay, her body the equivalent of an old jack-o’-lantern left on a front stoop weeks after Halloween had passed.
“Please,” she whispered. “Stop this. I know it’s you, Clayton . . . a mother knows.”
Luke felt a smile spread across Clayton’s face, a sliver of teeth in the dark. He must’ve looked beatific, a child saint.
Upstairs, their mother wept. These raw, hacking sobs.
“You bastard . . . rotten-ass bastard.”
Luke felt something trickling down from the fuming stew of Clayton’s subconscious. Pleasure. The most incredible pleasure imaginable, beyond sexual in its intensity.
Luke had always known Clayton was a monster of sorts—he now understood that Clayton grasped this fact of his essential self with a rational, clinical objectivity. He was a monster of detachment, eternally unmoored from his fellow man.
But their mother was a monster, too, and one much worse than Clayton. She’d given Clayton a reason to let his own monster out of its box . . . and his monster was a steely, calculating, devouring one, able to kill another of its kind with relative ease.
Clayton lay at the base of those steps, drinking in the sobs of the woman who’d given him life—the woman whose life he stole by subtle degrees until she was gone, her scarecrow remains buried in a cedar casket in the Memory Gardens cemetery on Muscatine Avenue in Iowa City—and he smiled. His contentment was more sublime than anything he’d ever felt until then or had felt since.
LUKE’S FINGERS pulled out of the ambrosia rope with a gluey suction. His consciousness fled back into him as he broke contact with Clayton’s mind. Luke gagged, his skin feeling too heavy on his bones—like being smothered under a sopping bear pelt.
Clayton slumped against the generator, his eyelids hanging at half-mast. Just taking a little catnap, as their mother called them. Luke was still reeling from the revelation—not a vision, not a dream; that had been a truthful recounting of his brother’s past, a shard chipped off the granite of his memory. He’d killed their mother. It was that simple. He was smarter than her and he’d made her pay. No guilt, no consequence. Clayton was simply expressing that monstrous part of himself—perhaps the truest part.
And Luke was grateful to him for that. He’d surely saved them both. But, like most of the great things his brother had done, it had been to satisfy himself and nobody else.
“I could try to cut through it,” Luke said softly. “Maybe we could still . . .”
The cord undulated lazily, as if it had heard Luke’s plan; Luke could sense its immense power coursing through his brother’s body.
“You go, Lucas,” said Clayton. “Go up. Go to the people you love, if they’re still there. You . . . you try. You keep on trying, yes?”
The cord jerked, dragging Clayton with it. Luke reached for him . . . then he stopped. This was how his brother wanted it. More importantly, it was what he’d earned. Clayton belonged to whatever lay on the other side of that hole more than he’d ever belonged to the human race. Maybe the voices had sensed this and called out to him. They’d found a way to bring him down.
Clayton smiled. He kept smiling as the cord retracted into the hole. Smiled as his stump and shoulder were swallowed into it. Smiled as his skull bent against the Trieste’s unyielding wall. Smiled as his spine broke with a wishbone snap, his heels beating a jittery tattoo on the floor. His head was consumed. The rest of his body followed.
Afterward all was silence. Nothing came back out of the hole. Maybe it had taken all it could possibly take.
“Will you let me leave?” Luke asked it. “I only want to see my wife again.”
Nothing answered him.
Luke faced the Challenger’s hatch. He hadn’t been back inside it since Alice had sent him through into the Trieste.
The wheel spun smoothly. The hatch opened with machined precision. He anchored his hands and boosted himself up into the—
19.
—INSIDE.
Light. The first sensation. Stinging brightness. His rods and cones went haywire; tears squeezed out of his eyes and sheeted down his face.
Warmth. The second, glorious sensation.
For a second,
Luke imagined he was on a beach. Warm sand, sun blazing overhead. Gulls screeching as they wheeled in the postcard-pretty sky. Abby and Zach would be somewhere close by. Romping in the surf, snorkeling for starfish. He would find them and sweep them into his arms and never let them—
“How you doing, Doc? Ready to blow this Popsicle stand?”
The Challenger came into focus incrementally. Luke’s jacket was still slung over the web chair; he’d slid it off when it’d gotten too hot during the descent and had forgotten to take it with him. An energy bar wrapper was folded and threaded through an eyelet on his chair . . .
Luke’s gaze traveled upward, a rising note of confusion hammering his chest—
“Doc? Hey! Jesus, what happened?”
He ignored that impossible, treacherous voice. His eyes traversed the instrument panels, the shiny metal switches hooded with red switch guards. The buttons and gauges were all labeled—somebody must’ve used one of those old DYMO label makers, Luke had thought during the descent. The ones that punch each letter onto a sticky black strip . . .
“Doc?”
Alice Sykes stared down from the Challenger’s cockpit, looking a bit worried.
Whole. Intact. Smiling cautiously. Alive. Alice . . . Sykes.
Luke reached a trembling hand toward her—then stopped, partially due to the puzzled look on her face but mostly out of the fear that . . .
Toy’s voice: You are not who you say you are . . .
“What’s up, Doc? Look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
The gears inside his head spun wildly, burning out in gouts of smoke. Her hand fell on his shoulder. Luke flinched from her touch.
“Doc? For the love of . . . What the hell happened to you?”
Luke said, “Are you . . . you?”
Alice recoiled at the rasp of his voice—or was it the capering lunacy in his eyes?
“Who else would I be?”
Was it her? Or was he dreaming? Had he dreamed that terrible hive in Westlake’s lab with Alice’s body strung all through it? Had she been here all along, waiting for the Challenger to charge up?
