The Deep

1.

LUKE COULD ONLY GLIMPSE the Trieste in sections. Whenever Al swung the Challenger around, illuminating a section he’d already seen, it looked different to Luke—as if it had shifted subtly, somehow reconfiguring its arrangement.

Luke’s mind continued to fight the reaction of his initial horror. It was nothing but steel and foam and space-age polymers. A marvel of engineering. It of course had no mind, no will. And still…

It was awful. He couldn’t isolate what repelled the eye, the revulsion that squatted so leadenly in the lizard brain. It was snakelike, for one—of course it was: the Trieste was all tubes. They spooled along the ocean floor, which was clad in a powdery drift of marine snow. The tubes were oddly segmented, branching off at unnatural angles, as to appear vaguely arachnid: long dark legs extending from a central hub.

There was a manic union between its various parts; it shouldn’t cohere as a structure. Its angles were bizarre and somehow despairing. Some tubes appeared to end abruptly… that, or they burrowed into the sea floor like an enormous worm.

Maybe the pressure exerted the same warping effect it had on Challenger 4, bending each angle slightly out-of-true—which, cumulatively, made the Trieste look disgustingly alien. Or maybe it was the fact that the bulk of it hadn’t been assembled by human hands: robots had no sense of beauty or symmetry; they simply slotted link A to coupler B. The structure throbbed with a numbing hunger—but for what? Luke was overcome with a sinister shrinking sensation, as if his soul had dwindled to a pinprick and the Trieste had swarmed in to fill that space, reducing him under its brooding, inanimate power. Luke couldn’t shake the ludicrous sense that the Trieste had built itself to serve a purpose known only within itself. It seemed sentient, watching like a snake coiled in placid contentment under warm desert rocks. Knowing, in the seething core of itself, that it need only to wait.

“It’s got a certain look to it,” Al said.

“You’ve been inside?”

“A few times. Not for long, and only to drop off supplies. To speak the truth, none of us like spending all that much time down here. Docking’s the trickiest part.”

She edged them toward the Trieste. The Challenger swayed under the enormous pressure of water, which no longer shushed and gurgled against its hull but instead pushed back with leaden insistence as if they were moving through hardening concrete.

As they approached, Luke saw what had made those initial pinpricks of light: windows, same as the porthole on the submarine, dotted the length of one tube. Weak fingers of light spilled from each.

One of Al’s navigational tools pinged as she zeroed in.

Five feet, four, three, two…

Al guided the sub to the porthole and cut the engines. The Challenger met the Trieste with the sound of a locket snapping shut.

Other sounds: whirrings, clickings. A pneumatic whine—the noise you’d hear in a mechanic’s shop when they’re tightening the lug nuts on your all-seasons.

“It should be sealed now.”

Luke said, “And if it’s not?”

Al gave him a grim smile. “We won’t feel a thing.” She unsnapped her belt. “You’re going to have to step through first.”

“Me? Why?”

The flesh tightened around Al’s eyes. For the first time, she got that mildly irritated look a person gets when they’re dealing with a newbie.

“I’ve got to keep an eye on things from this end, Doc.”

There isn’t anything on the other side of that hatch, said an unsteady voice in Luke’s head. Nothing but your brother and another wonk and a few dogs and bees.

Luke wondered: had Dr. Westlake told himself the very same thing the first time he stepped inside?

“Once you’re through and I’ve shut things down, I’ll follow,” said Al.

Luke laid his hands on the hatch. The metal thrummed with an odd tension, as if a heavy motor was running behind it. His biceps tensed in expectation—but after the slightest strain, the wheel turned easily.

“That’s good.” There was relief in Al’s voice. “The seal’s tight.”

The hatch swung open. The thinnest trickle of saltwater beaded along the upper curve of the hatch, a single drop falling—plip!—to splash the metal. The light inside the Challenger wept into that hole of darkness. A smell perfumed the air. Cavelike and slightly alkaline, as Al had mentioned. The foreign odor of the deep sea mixed with something else, something unnameable.

A high note of dread sang through Luke’s veins—a mocking aria that sent a shiver through his bones.

What are you so afraid of? said that same voice inside Luke’s head.

Everything, another voice answered.

There was no reason for his fear, other than the obvious ones: they were eight miles underwater, about to enter a station built on the structural principles of an egg.

“Go on,” Al said. “I’m right behind you.”

Luke could make out the insides of the Trieste: the dim slope of a wall, the dull wink of metal.

He reached out to anchor his hands on the hatch. Then he saw something. His breath caught.

What the hell was that?

2.

WHEN THEY WERE BOYS, their father used to take Luke and Clayton for a haircut at the Hawkeye barbershop. Give ’em a high and tight, he’d tell Vince, the old Italian barber. That, or These boys are getting shaggy. Give ’em the ole whitewall. It was the only place in town Luke had ever seen his father get even a hint of respect, and even then it seemed grudging.

Luke remembered the ancient magazines with names like Men’s Adventure and Rage: For Men, their lurid covers featuring men wrestling bears or coldcocking alligators, their cover lines reading: “Swastika Slave Girls in Guatemala’s No-Escape Brothel Camp!” and “Rabid Weasels Ripped My Flesh!” He remembered how the barber’s scissors would snip around his ears with the speed of hummingbird wings.

After every haircut, the barber would show Luke the back of his neck in a mirror that telescoped from the wall on metal armatures. When he angled the mirror, sometimes Luke would see Clayton sitting silently, or catch his father with his nose stuck in a magazine. That mirror offered a hidden view, Luke used to think. The face of the world when it wasn’t aware you were looking at it.

His mind fled back to that childlike sensibility—a mirror that showed the world’s hidden face—when his gaze focused on the insides of the Trieste. It was as if his view had shifted, tilted, the way that barber’s mirror had, like a solid pane of glass. His body was suddenly awash in warmth. He stared closer, transfixed by that pitchlike black…

His breath gritted in his chest like steel wool. Were things moving in there?

Sly liquid shiftings, mincing suggestions of activity, all attended by a silky sound that made him think of sightless crabs shucking over one another in a shallow tide pool…

“What’s wrong, Doc?”

Luke tore his eyes from the hatch.

“Some trick of the light,” he croaked.

“That happens down here,” Al said. “The light reflects differently, gets absorbed in weird ways.”

Don’t go in there, shrilled the voice in Luke’s head.

What choice did he have? What could he say: Sorry, I couldn’t do my part to save humanity because I’m a teensy bit scared of the dark?

Anchoring his hands on the hatch, Luke bit back his fears and propelled himself into that funneling blackness.

3.

HE TOPPLED THROUGH AWKWARDLY, having shoved himself hard enough to silence that inner voice that kept shrieking:

Don’t-don’t-don’tdon’tDON’T!

He’d expected some kind of crash pad, but there was nothing but steel gone frosty as the insides of a meat locker. He hit the floor; pain lanced down his collarbone and needled up his throat.

The Challenger’s hatch swung shut.

Luke rolled up, knees tucked to his chest. A goose egg was already swelling on his forehead. Lights winked on the floor, much like those of an airport runway. They didn’t help much—he could barely see six feet in either direction.

Cold. God, it was bracingly cold. This couldn’t possibly be the temperature throughout the station—everyone would freeze to death.

Who’s to say they’re still alive? a new, maddening voice asked, joining the chorus in his head—this one sounded a lot like his mother’s voice. Who’s to say they didn’t die days ago, Lucas my dear?

Noise from directly overhead: dap-dap-dap-dap, a sound that could be mistaken for the footsteps of eager children. This image now entombed itself in Luke’s head: a pack of waterlogged youths with their eyes vacuumed from their skulls scampering clumsily above him.

Where the hell was Al?

Luke stood, his adrenaline spiking. His head slammed into the tunnel. He couldn’t stand at his full height; the ceiling was too low. Claustrophobia assaulted him; for a moment he was suffocating inside his own skin.

This is a tomb, he thought. Nothing but a vast undersea crypt, and I’m alone inside of it.

Laughter.

Luke’s blood seized. Dry, nerveless dust caked his veins, as if he’d been pumped full of fast-dry cement.

There it was again, unmistakable. This wasn’t that dap-dap-dap noise from above. Unmistakably, it had been laughter. And it was coming from deeper down the tunnel.

A boy’s laughter.

No way could it—

“…Zach?”

Luke clapped a hand over his mouth. He couldn’t believe he’d spoken the name, even now, disoriented at the bottom of the world. His lips burned with the shame of it.

Of course his lost son wasn’t down here. He wasn’t anywhere on earth—he was in heaven. He was safe from harm now.

You don’t know that.

His mother invading his head again, her voice honeyed and lacerating at once.

They never found him, did they? He could be anywhere, Lucas. Anywhere at all.

Sound from behind him. Luke spun on his heel. It came again. A tentative, staccato skittering. The urge struck to scurry back through the hatchway—a hatchway he feared was locked in any case—but instead Luke leaned into that sound, his eyes hunting desperately.

A rhythmic panting traveled through the dark. A shape carved itself out of the gloom twenty yards away, squatting motionlessly. Luke could just make out the wet jewels of its eyes and the whitened plume of its breath.

Come on, he thought, his hands balling into fists. Come on if you’re coming.

Which it did. Eagerly in fact, attended by a rapid clickety-click-click.

Luke swung at its mad approach, wondering in some fear-shrunk chamber of his mind if this was something you could fight in the conventional ways—with fists and feet and teeth. How did you fight a monster?

His fist passed harmlessly over the creature’s head, then it was on him—

Panting and whimpering and wagging its tail.

4.

A CHOCOLATE LABRADOR RETRIEVER. It twined around Luke’s legs, nuzzled its snout into his crotch, and whined companionably.

“Oh, Jesus. Hey. It’s okay, boy,” Luke said, running his hands over the dog’s head. “Oh, wait—girl.”

The dog looked healthy, though a little too thin and clearly quite cold. Her hind legs were shaking. She rucked her snout under Luke’s armpit and rooted until her head popped out under his arm, giving his chin a slobbery lick.

One of Clayton’s lab animals? Did that mean the other specimens (Luke hated to think of them in his brother’s clinical terms) were out of their cages, too?

The porthole opened. Al’s boots appeared, her body gracefully following. She scanned the tunnel in both directions. Only then did her eyes settle on Luke.

“Your hands,” she said. “You’re cut.”

Luke nodded. “I didn’t exactly nail the dismount. I’ll live. What took you so long?”

“The porthole shut after you went out. It shouldn’t have. I had to disengage the pressure locks all over again.”

Al had a flashlight. When she flicked it on, Luke noted that they were situated in a gooseneck: the tunnel curved ninety degrees to the left and right, roughly thirty yards ahead on either side.

The tunnel was ovoid: narrower at the top, wider at the bottom. Pipes and tubes ran along the walls, each labeled with their use. Many appeared to be wrapped with… Christ, was that friction tape? It was—the stuff the army called “hundred-mile-an-hour tape,” as its manufacturers claimed it could hold a Jeep together at that speed.

My God, Luke thought with a dizzy species of dread. Is this fucking place held together with tape?

Black foam had been applied around the entire tunnel in twenty-yard increments, in buckled seams running from floor to ceiling—Otto Railsback’s handiwork, had to be. Elsewhere Luke spotted signs of lowtech, on-the-fly fixes: baling wire and putty and soldering lead—the station had that shopworn, fix-me-up quality he remembered from the spaceships in the Alien movies.

Al gestured to the dog. “I see you’ve met Little Bee.”

“Little Bee?” Luke said. “Did my brother name her?”

“He named all of them.”

Luke should have known. Pchyolka and Mushka. “Little Bee” and “Little Fly,” in English. They were the dogs, in 1960, that were shot into space aboard Sputnik 3. But the Russians miscalculated the satellite’s return trajectory; the poor dogs had been incinerated during reentry. It was just like Clayton to name his specimens after those doomed pooches.

“So where are we right now?” Luke asked. “What part of the station?”

“Docking and storage,” said Al. “Your standard dumping depot. You can see the start of the storage zone down thataway.”

She aimed the flashlight. Luke could make out a pile of discarded air canisters. The beam threw wavering shadows on the wall beyond. Long thin tendrils seemed to lick and lash just out of sight, only their serrate tips visible.

“Is it usually this dark? This cold?” he asked.

Al shook her head. “It’s running on phantom power. That’s not unusual—saving power is always key. But… the heat’s been cut, too.”

“What’s she doing in here?” Luke said, petting Little Bee.

“Dunno, Doc. That’s why we’ve been sent—to find out what’s the rhubarb. It’s why I’ve been sent, anyway. You’re more the PR guy.”

That chilling noise kicked up again: children’s feet dashing above them, through the coal-dark sea.

“You’ll hear it a lot,” Al said. “It’s just the pressure from outside. The Trieste is built to disperse it, in kind of a parabolic wave. Sounds freaky, huh? Like scuttling rats.”

Luke petted LB (as he’d decided to name her) until she quit shaking. She peered at him with a grateful gaze. The edges of her eyes were a tallowy white. She was probably suffering from hypothermia.

“We have to get this dog someplace warm, Al.”

“Right,” she agreed. “Let’s get at—”

The scream came from somewhere to the left, although in truth it was so piercing that it seemed to radiate out of the tube itself. Al broke into a run, moving in the sound’s direction. Luke dashed after her. LB remained pinned where she was.

Luke said: “Come on, girl. Let’s go. Move your ass.”

The Lab whined, her eyes rolling as the glow of Al’s flashlight vanished around the gooseneck.

Luke crouched down and cradled the dog to his chest. She whined again, mournfully this time—please don’t leave me—but began to stiffen when Luke set off after Al with her in his arms.

“Shhhh, girl. You’re okay.”

The dog softened into his chest. She kept her chin tucked tight to Luke’s shoulder, looking backward, studiously avoiding whatever lay ahead.

5.

TUBES. SOME KIND of laboratory setup. A snarl of copper tubes spiraling at weird angles, like an octopus frozen in a huge lump of amber.

This is what I saw before, Luke told himself. Not the tentacles of some monster or mutant. Just a mess of lab equipment.

He avoided its spiky metal fingers while cradling the dog, which was already growing heavy.

More clutter: MRE packets and empty jugs whose mouths were ringed with crusted pinkness.

Shish-shish-shishshish-shish-shish…

That eerie pattering overhead again. Luke craned his head up; his skull rung off the ceiling. He cursed, his body set in an uncomfortable stoop. Never in his life had he been so bummed to be six foot two.

Portholes were strung along the ceiling. Luke saw nothing except the black water pressing down. If anything, the holes made the interior darker.

You may as well install a porthole in a coffin.

They reached a dead end. The tunnel had narrowed considerably; Luke’s elbows nearly scraped the walls. He and Al couldn’t stand side by side; Al stood slightly ahead, Luke hunched off her shoulder. The dog was squashed between them, though she didn’t seem to mind.

“Some of the tunnels bottleneck as they reach a junction,” Al said. “It fattens out on the other side.”

“Was that a scream we heard?” said Luke.

Al shook her head. “Steam, I’d say. Another release valve.”

Luke didn’t spot anything that looked like a release valve. They stood before a metal hatch with a single porthole. Al swung the flashlight. The ground was littered with junk—mostly busted glass, but also a gelatin-like lump that was dripping through the diamond grating. Its smell was spoiled and somehow malarial: the odor that might perfume an African village racked with disease.

Luke peered through the porthole. After ten feet, the tunnel widened into what appeared to be a chamber. Luke could just make out its scalloped roof and the edge of a cot. It looked cramped, but still much warmer and more hospitable than his present situation.

Luke set the dog down; his arms had grown weary. She bit his sleeve and held fast. Luke had seen this behavior with shelter dogs. Abandonment issues.

Al shone the flashlight through the porthole. “If anyone’s in there, they’re being coy about it.”

She tapped on the glass.

“We can’t get in here,” she said. “It only opens from the other side.”

“Why?”

“It’s designed that way. There are two exits, this one and another exactly like it on the other side. This area… primarily it’s storage, but the thinking was that in certain cases, it could be used as containment, too.”

“You mean a jail, Al. Right?”

“Or if one of the scientists got sick with the ’Gets. We needed a spot where a person in that state could be put.”

“Who’s to say that person doesn’t lock the healthy ones in here?”

Al said, “An imperfect system, I’ll grant you that. Like a few other systems down here. Most of them we never expected to use.”

“So where does that leave us? How do we get out of here?”

“Short answer? We don’t, for now. Unless your brother’s waiting down at the other hatch.”

“Wait a second. You’re saying it never occurred to anybody that we’d be locked in?”

“It did, absolutely. But we had to get down here all the same. They might be able to work a manual override up on the Hesperus, pop one of the locks electronically.”

“Might? Are you kidding?”

“Well, there could be technical issues.”

Luke couldn’t believe it. He’d been sent to a trillion-dollar deathtrap at the bottom of the sea without any surety he’d even be able to reach his brother. He and Al could roam this storage tunnel until they froze to death.

“So, are we just going to wait until Clayton opens the door?” he said. “What if he refuses to?”

“That’s what you’re here for. To sweet-talk him.”

“Oh my God. You obviously don’t know my brother.”

Al’s nose was running from the cold. “We’ll be okay. Look, we’ve got emergency blankets in the Challenger and a few days’ worth of MREs. This isn’t the best-case scenario, but it’s not the worst.”

“And what the hell was your worst-case scenario?”

“Well, look around you. The station’s still here. It’s all uphill from there.”

Luke managed to return Al’s cockeyed smile.

“Let’s check the other hatch,” said Al. “Maybe your brother—”

Just then, a face filled the porthole glass, flexing and seething and threatening to shatter right through.

The coppery, festering face of madness.

6.

ITS FEATURES WERE WRENCHED into an expression of tortured hostility. Its eyes, threaded with broken capillaries, bulged from their sockets.

Luke flinched as he would from a vicious dog snapping at the end of a chain.

The man behind the glass screamed; flecks of spittle hit the glass.

He’s slipped a gear, Luke thought. A familiar phrase back home, used to describe someone who’d become addle-brained. But Luke figured this guy had done more than slip a gear—he’d fried his entire damn gearbox.

“It’s Dr. Toy,” Al said. “Hugo the Horrible.”

This then was Dr. Hugo Toy, the molecular biologist Felz had mentioned. The only one still down here other than Clayton.

“He doesn’t look so hot,” Al deadpanned.

Dr. Toy’s expression reconstituted itself into a mask of chilly observation. His hands drifted in front of his face, his fingers tapping and fidgeting. One hand stretched toward the porthole, two fingers knocking on the glass as a child might tap on a terrarium to rouse a pair of sluggish lizards.

His lips moved, repeating a simple phrase. His fingers tapped along in time.

You are not who you are… you are not who you are… you are not, you are not, you are NOT who you are…

One of his hands disappeared, then reappeared with a scalpel. Toy held the tip to his own throat and pulled it slowly across, not breaking the skin.

Is he threatening us, Luke wondered, or threatening to do it to himself?

Toy retreated down the tunnel with a scuttling crablike gait. He vanished around a bend and out of sight.

“Well,” Al said finally, “I don’t figure he’s letting us in, do you?”

7.

THEY TREKKED BACK toward the Challenger. The cold crept into their bones. Luke was getting used to the patter of footsteps overhead—they had a rhythm he found oddly comforting.

“Do you have any clue what that was all about?” he asked Al.

It didn’t look like the ’Gets. Toy wasn’t spotting.

“Down here, people… they go nuts,” Al said. “You see it a lot on subs. An extremely concentrated form of cabin fever. Even if you’re cooped up in a cabin in the woods in the middle of winter, you can still open the door and breathe fresh air. Inside a sub it’s the same gray walls, same cold lights, same smells of bearing grease and dust burning in control consoles.

“On a sub, if a bubblehead looked to be coming down with a case of the sea-sillies we’d give him a color wheel, same as you’d do with a grade-schooler. Or let him run his fingers through a book of carpet samples. I remember one guy carrying around a book of carpet rags, petting his favorite ones the way you pet a dog. But if you’re prone to the sillies, you’ll catch them eventually. The sea whittles at you like a sharp knife taking curls off a log until you just…”

Al mimed snapping a twig between her hands.

“So Dr. Toy’s gone batshit?” Luke said. “Didn’t you say everyone down here was under psychiatric examination?”

Al shrugged. “We had to go on what we could see through the monitors—were these guys eating properly and sleeping on a regular schedule, that kind of thing. Westlake, Toy, and your brother were supposed to report for a counseling session every few days; lately they’ve all been AWOL.”

Luke said: “Why did you call him that, anyway? Hugo the Horrible.”

“That’s everyone’s name for him. He embraces it. He’s not just a biologist—he’s a chaos theory wonk. You know much about that?”

When Luke shook his head, Al said: “Basically it’s a mathematical field based on trying to make sense out of random events—which seems in hindsight like a solid prescription for psychosis, wouldn’t you say? Apparently Toy was given to forecasting worst-case scenarios. Every silver cloud had a dark lining. And hey,” she asked, “did you make out what he was saying?”

“I’m pretty sure it was, You’re not who you are. Over and over.”

“Yeah. That’s what I was seeing, too.”

She made that stick-breaking gesture again.

You are not who you are.

They forged down the tunnel like parasites trapped in the guts of an organism so huge it was oblivious to their presence. The darkness closed in, running swiftly on their heels.

Luke wanted to tell Al about the laughter he’d heard. The singing laughter of a child…

…his son’s laughter?

He couldn’t. She’d think he’d gone nuts himself. He pictured the look of tolerant concern that would grace Alice’s face when she heard.

First Toy, and now this poor fuck’s gone around the bend already, she’d think.

More crucially, Luke didn’t want to associate the memory of his lost son with this unfriendly, unfeeling place. But that laughter continued to ring out in a recessed quadrant of his mind… maddening, so maddening.

8.

LUKE’S SON HAD GONE MISSING on a crisp fall day. He was six years old.

Missing… the word didn’t quite fit. Vanished was better.

And like a tight-lipped magician, the world would never tell Luke how it had performed this horrible trick.

It happened seven years ago, at a public park not far from home. They often stopped by after Zach’s first-grade class finished to let some steam off before meeting Abby. The park faced the road, the grass rolling out fifty feet in every direction until it hit a dense forested area to the west.

The afternoon was like any other. Luke took a late lunch, left the veterinary clinic, and picked Zach up. They walked home through the fallen leaves, holding hands; Zach made a point of stepping on the crinkliest leaves, loving the sound they made under his boots.

At the park, Zach swung on the monkey bars and slid down the slide into a drift of leaves Luke had heaped at the bottom. Luke relished this time, knowing that before long Zach wouldn’t be caught dead in public with his goonybird father. Too soon, the sun began to set over the firs.

“Five more minutes, sport.”

How many times had Luke imagined that they’d left that very instant? How many times had Luke wished that he’d taken his son’s hand and ushered him home? He’d lost count. The thought never fully left his mind.

“Let’s play hide-and-seek, Daddy!”

“Okay. One game. Then we hit the road.”

Zach smiled. It was the last clean look Luke would ever have of his boy. Zach’s left canine had come out days before; his smile was lopsided with that fresh gap. Luke remembered that. He remembered every little thing.

“I’ll hide, Daddy.”

“Okay, but don’t hide too far off. It’s getting dark.”

Zach nodded obediently. “Count!”

“I’ll count to twenty, then I’m coming to get you!” Luke said. “One… two… three…”

“Count slower!” Zach’s voice was fading toward the trees. “You have to give me time to hide!”

Those were the last words his son would ever speak—the last ones to touch Luke’s ears, in any case. Whenever Luke closed his eyes he could hear them, breathless and manic, as Zach hunted for a hiding spot. A spot he’d found and never left.

“…eleven… tweeeeelve… thirteeeeeen…”

Zach’s giddy laughter carried back to Luke.

“…fourteen… fifteeeeeeen…”

Luke heard another noise, impossible to identify. A ragged zippering sound, was the closest he could get to explaining it. Nestled within that wet ripping note was another one: a resonant sucking. Suck-suck-suck, a pair of enormous lips pulling on a straw.

“…sixteenseventeeneighteennineteentwenty!”

Luke rattled off the last five numbers rapidly, adrenaline spiking in his chest. He couldn’t say why he was so suddenly petrified; he could only accept that feeling inside of him and act on it.

He rounded the corkscrew slide and scanned for a sign of his son. Nothing. Just this horrible emptiness, the wind screaming over every blade of grass.

“Zach?”

The wind snatched the name from his lips. Panic filched into Luke’s chest. Diffuse and dreamlike, wormed with self-consciousness… it was silly, so silly, to be worried. He’d spy the top of Zach’s head peeking around that boulder over there, or ducked behind that trash can. And when that happened, Luke would chuckle at his foolishness and chase his son down and heft him, squealing with delight, into his arms. They’d go home, where supper was waiting, and after dinner Zach would sit in his room contentedly, assembling a jigsaw puzzle he’d bought with the money the tooth fairy had left under his pillow.

That’s exactly how it would happen, Luke figured. That’s how it had to happen, because until that very moment Luke had believed the world was essentially reasonable. If you followed the rules, the world played fair with you.

Kids didn’t just disappear off the face of the earth. Not in empty public parks. Not in the time it took to count to twenty. Things like that never happened.

“You can come out now, buddy. Olly olly oxen free!”

The swings creaked in the wind. The streetlights were popping on. Why had he stayed out so late? Daylight saving time had just kicked in and he hadn’t made the mental adjustment yet. But that could happen to anyone, couldn’t it?

A possibility came to him: that his son had burrowed under a drift of leaves, covering himself so that Luke couldn’t spot him.

Next he remembered the sounds: that meaty zippering, that sucking inhale…

“Come on, sport, you win! I’m sure Mom’s got dinner ready. Spaghetti with macaroni noodles, your favorite!”

He’d reached the edge of the forest. Luke had lived in the city his whole life, treading every inch of it. He’d explored this very place for hours on end. He’d never gotten a sense of danger from it. But now, squinting into its dark tangle of branches, trees standing like gloomy sentinels… yes, it seemed very threatening indeed.

Abby had lost Zachary a year or so before at a discount store: uneven floors, bins of irregular clothing. It was only for a minute, but she said that minute had stretched into an eternity. She was certain he’d been taken. Snatched, she said. Someone had lured him away while her back was briefly turned. That was all it would take. Next Zachary was in a van. Next, a remote warehouse or a soundproof basement. When she found him several aisles over, tickling his chin with a feather duster, she nearly wept with relief before furiously scolding him to never leave her sight again.

And the same thing would happen now—Luke was still sure of it.

“Zach?” His voice rose several octaves. “Buddy, please, enough!”

A thread of pure unadulterated terror now braided into his heart. Fear mixed with a love more profound than any he’d ever felt, and mingled with dizzying guilt for letting that most precious thing slip from his view at a crucial moment.

He’s gone.

The voice in his head was black—discolored and malevolent, the voice of something conjured at a Black Mass. It spoke with calm certainty.

Your boy is gone.

Swallowed.

The possibility jolted Luke into action. He stumbled into the woods.

“Zach! Zach! Christ, Zaaaaaach!”

How long had he wandered through the trees, screaming for his son? Far too long. He should have called the police. They would have arrived in minutes. But even as he’d hunted more and more desperately, the fear and mania mounting, he remained certain that it was all some ridiculous accident—a misunderstanding that, once rectified, would be something they’d laugh about when Zach was an adult.

Remember that time Dad thought he’d lost me in the woods, only what happened is that I’d tripped and conked my head on a tree trunk and knocked myself cold for a few minutes? Har-har-har!

Something just like that, yes, goofy and commonplace and nothing to call the police about because it was fine, really, everything was okayokayOKAY—

Luke staggered out of the woods, wild-eyed and bleeding from the brambles. His mind was a jumble of horrific images: windowless vans and fillet knives and his son’s fear-struck eyes. Only then had he dialed 911.

The police arrived within minutes; Abby arrived a short time later. Luke couldn’t bear to look his wife in the eyes.

The first twenty-four hours were the real killers. That’s what everyone will tell you. In any missing persons case, the chances of success drop drastically after a full day. The search area gets too wide; the potential locations of that person (or, it must be said, their body) become overwhelming.

At first, Luke had been confident. The police cruisers with their cherries alit, the team of tracking dogs, just about every plainclothes officer in the city tromping through that half-mile stretch of forest… How could they not find his son? His son, who’d only been out of his sight for twenty seconds—no, less.

A search-and-rescue helicopter strafed the forest with its spotlight. Luke had been in the woods by then, searching with everyone else. The helicopter roved toward the creek; maybe Zach had fallen in, borne along in the current that flowed west toward Coralville. Maybe he was lying on its banks, shivering but unhurt.

As midnight passed into the witching hours, a sense of disbelief settled over Luke. A feeling of unreality washed over him. This couldn’t be happening. It was like waking up to find out your arm was missing—you went to bed, slept well, and when you woke up, it was gone. There was no pain, no scar. Only a smooth expanse of skin over the nub and an empty space where the limb once lay. It was that kind of nightmarish inconceivability he was facing. He couldn’t cope with it. Luke could live without his arm. Both arms. Both legs. His tongue and ears and nose. He’d forfeit them all gladly just to have Zach back.

But the world has always been resistant to bargains of that nature.

When dawn paled over the treetops, Luke stumbled out of the woods into a ring of emergency vehicles. His brain was pinned in a merciless vise, on the verge of tearing in half. He overheard some policemen debating the conceivability that someone had been in the woods, watching and waiting until Zach had drawn near before grabbing him and stuffing an ether-soaked rag over his face, then dragging him through the trees and hucking (Luke remembered that clearly; the policeman had actually used the verb huck) Zach’s body into the trunk of a car. After that, he could have been driven to where the access road met a main thoroughfare. If so, the abductor could be four hundred miles away… or only a few blocks distant, in a nearby house.

Luke sat beside Abby, who was wrapped in a blanket and sitting on an ambulance bumper. He slipped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her into him. She resisted, her eyes bruised and reproachful.

“Did he run away?” Her voice had this terrible faraway quality. “No. Why would he run away? What did we do, that he would do that? Oh my God.”

There was something else in her eyes, too. Fuming in the green of her irises. Fury. She was so, so angry at Luke. Over time, that fury might’ve even shaded into hatred.

There were moments over the coming years when Luke wished that Zachary was dead. The fervency of his wish was sickening. But yes, dead. Of cancer or brain parasites or even drowning in the creek. If he’d died of cancer, Luke and Abby could have been at his bedside, making his final days as comfortable as possible. It would have broken them in some ineffable way, yes, but it would have allowed them to love their son through his final days on earth.

Even if he’d drowned in the creek… it was awful to envision, but at least it would be done. They would have a body to dress. Rituals to observe. A coffin, a funeral. There would be a sense of knowing where their boy was—even if that meant under six feet of dirt at the Muscatine Avenue cemetery.

But Zachary wasn’t dead. His case was classed as missing/unsolved. There was no closure. It was the equivalent of a movie missing its final reel.

Death was final. It meant Zach had passed beyond pain or fear. Missing was so much worse. Missing was a cavalcade of possibilities, none of them good.

NEITHER ZACHARY nor his abductors were ever found. His disappearance made the rounds in the press, locally and eventually nationally, but the media’s ardor cooled. There were other missing kids and a million other tragedies besides.

Luke drove.

For a solid year after Zachary vanished, he spent every night on the road. Driving around the city and farther afield, down the streetlit corridors of night searching for his lost boy.

He found him, too. Found him everywhere. It was a phenomenon other parents talked about; Luke and Abby had attended a support group at the urging of their grief counselor. A dozen empty-eyed parents (ex-parents?) sitting in a circle in a chilly community center. They kept seeing their missing children, too. Seeing them in busy malls or whenever they drove past a schoolyard. They saw them in crowds: an arm, a foot, or maybe something in a child’s posture that mimicked that of their own lost son or daughter. They had all rushed heedlessly into a throng, scooped up a child whose back was turned—so sure; so goddamn sure—only to see the frightened face of a stranger staring up at them.

Luke could understand. He’d see the crook of Zachary’s leg folding into a strange car and would follow that car until it stopped and a boy who wasn’t Zach got out. He’d seen his son’s tousled hair bobbing amid the crowd at the Iowa State Fair. In his more desperate moods he’d considered snatching someone else’s boy while his parents’ backs were turned—serves you right! You’ve got to pay attention every… single… second!

He’d drive all night, come home at dawn, and fall into an exhausted sleep. His dreams were horrific. Dreams where Zach called to him from the bottom of a deep well. Or where Zach screamed that he’d run away and never wanted to see Luke again. But the most insidious night terrors were the ones where Zach lay beside him in bed, his breath feathering Luke’s neck… and when Luke awoke, his son just wasn’t there.

One evening, he woke up and Abby wasn’t there, either. She’d packed and left while he was sleeping. This came as only a small surprise to Luke. They hadn’t spoken, really spoken, in months. They were two shells emptied out by grief.

The Human Shield. His old childhood persona, the one he’d cooked up to insulate himself from the predations of his mother. He’d always seen himself as that to Abby and Zach. A shield against the awfulness of the world—an awfulness his son would have to grapple with, yes, but hopefully not for many years. As a boy, he could simply stand behind his father and let Luke absorb the cruelest blows. Except somehow Luke’s defenses had been penetrated. The forces of evil had found a blind spot, their tentacles creeping behind his back to snatch Zach away.

Twenty seconds. Lives can collapse in that time span. Abby accepted the fact that it wasn’t all Luke’s fault—it could have happened to anyone, sure—and yet she came to hate him regardless. She walked out because she wanted to stop hating the man she’d once loved… and because she must have realized that her hatred, though powerful, was a pale reflection of the loathing Luke felt for himself.

Luke couldn’t blame her. He was even mildly relieved to discover she’d gone. When the divorce papers arrived a few weeks later, he’d signed them without rancor.

In time, he returned to his veterinary practice. Tending to animals gave his life a glimmer of value. And if he occasionally broke down in tears, or screamed or shook, well, animals were eminently forgiving of such behavior.

So Luke did his job, and at night, to avoid sleeping, he’d drive. Consciousness couldn’t stave off the memories, though. In time, his memories became waking dreams. It got so that he could actually dream with his eyes wide open.

Luke remembered feeding Zach this one time when he had a fever. Zach, then just a toddler, hadn’t wanted to eat. But if he didn’t, he’d get sicker. This worried Luke tremendously. He’d wished Abby was there—he needed her calm composure—but she had been working late. In frustration, Luke shoved a spoonful of applesauce into his son’s mouth. “Just eat it, please!”

Zach went silent, the dismay and bewilderment building as his face turned pink. Then he’d begun to bawl, the applesauce still pooled in his mouth.

Sick with guilt, Luke carried him upstairs to the bath. Zach sat in the tub, withdrawn and motionless. When Luke dried him, Zach started shivering. He wouldn’t make eye contact with Luke. This scared Luke so badly. Had he wrecked that beautiful bond of trust between them? Some things you can never get back. Even if Zachary couldn’t remember it consciously, the act—his dad shoving a spoon into his mouth and shouting at him to eat—would stick in his developing mind like a barb.

That’s why I ran away, Daddy. I ran because you were mean to me.

Luke had been afraid that Zach wouldn’t trust him anymore, because he had let him down.

And years later, Luke would let his son down again at the worst possible moment.

As a father, Luke couldn’t cope with that.

He still breathed, still functioned, but he was ruined inside. Guilt and despair crushed him into something unrecognizable.

So he drove and grieved, and in time the ’Gets took its hold on the world.

He dearly wished he would catch it. Forgetting was the best remedy, wasn’t it? Forget Abby. Forget Zach. Forget the wonderful life they’d had together.

Just let me forget. Please, for the love of God.

But the world was resistant to bargains of that nature, too.

9.

“YOU OKAY, DOC?”

Alice’s voice snapped Luke out of these unhealthy ruminations. First his mother, now his son—the sharp blades of a tiller churned through his gray matter, dredging up blackened pulp and old bits of bone. Luke felt them there in the Trieste, both Bethany and Zachary. Not in any material way, but their shapes and voices clung tightly to him now—it had started the moment that the Challenger slipped under the sea. He was trapped with them now, under the hammering intensity of a trillion tons of water.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Just… having some trouble concentrating.”

Luke was flanking Al. The dog, LB, padded behind them. They’d already stopped to collect their bags at the Challenger hatch. Then they’d rounded the gooseneck on the other side of the tunnel, heading toward the remaining hatch.

“Your brother will let us in,” Al said. To Luke’s ears, her voice held the mad certainty specific to leaders of doomed polar expeditions.

“Oh, yeah, most certainly.”

Luke glanced at the portholes along the ceiling. He caught movement across one of them. A pale shred drifting languorously along. “Al—?”

“That’s it—the ambrosia,” she said, her eyes following his pointing finger. “That’s why the portholes were built: to see where it’s concentrated.”

The ambrosia wafted to the porthole’s rim and hung there a moment before vanishing. Luke continued to stare at the ring of blackness where the foot-thick glass and polymer held back the crushing sea—he half expected something to flare across it. A disembodied face, perhaps; a suety pockmarked face glowing a sick maggot-white except for the eyelids, which were red as flayed beef. The pressure had vacuumed the eyes into their sockets—they stared from deep within those cold pits…

…but of course nothing appeared. Just the bleak emptiness of the deep. Luke wondered if this was how an astronaut felt staring through the porthole of his lunar module to catch a glimpse of space where not a single star shone: an infinite blackness, bleak and dehumanizing.

The tunnel was less cluttered on the other end. Light burned behind the hatch’s porthole. Al knocked on it. It sounded as if she was rapping her knuckles on a cast-iron cannon at a Civil War memorial. Nobody answered.

“Thick door,” she said as if this were a new fact.

“Not to sound desperate here, Al, but what are our options?”

Al stuck her tongue between her teeth, biting down. “Well, we can wait. Chances are your brother will pass down this way.”

“Tip-top plan. And how do we know Toy doesn’t have control of the whole station?” Luke said. “How can we be sure he hasn’t tied Clayton up, or worse?”

“The thought crossed my mind ever since we lost contact,” Al admitted. “Most of the areas can be self-sealed and contained—the lab, the purifiers—so my hope is that it’s Toy who’s been isolated, or he’s isolated himself. But you’re right. He may have the run of the entire joint. We have to get in there somehow.”

“You said something about triggering the lock remotely?”

“Yeah, that may be our best bet.” A shiver racked Al’s frame. “I’ll head back and see what I can do. You stay here. If I pop the lock, you hold the door.”

She squeezed past Luke—the tunnel was so cramped that Luke had to suck in his stomach to let her pass. Her footsteps receded down the tunnel, and with them went the reassuring glow of the flashlight.

Luke dropped his duffel bag and sat on the floor. The dog rested her head on his lap. He felt foolish. Ineffective. God in heaven, sitting beside a locked door in the hope it would open. A glorified bellhop.

“Goddamn it,” he said softly. “Christly Jesus goddamn hell.”

It felt good to blaspheme—goddamn fucking good. Could God even hear him down here?

You go ahead, son, he figured God might say, good sport that He was. Take my name in vain if it keeps your powder dry. People take it in vain when they stub their toe or get cut off on the freeway. I’m used to it.

“I’m closer to hell than heaven down here, anyway,” Luke said, and laughed. It freaked him out a little how hollow it sounded.

“Hello-oh-oh-oh,” he said. His words soaked into the darkness only to come back in a mocking lilt.

Oh-ho-ho-o-o-o…

He glanced down and spotted a spiral-bound notebook that had either fallen or been wedged under the grate. Curious, he lifted the grate a few inches and fished the notebook out—and nearly dropped it just as fast. The cover was slick with a dark sticky substance.

Psych Report, the cover read.

He riffled the pages. The first few were filled with neat, clinical handwriting. The overhead lights dimmed, a fluttering brownout. He slid the notebook into an empty pocket in his bag, not wanting that black gunk to touch his clothes.

The lights went out.

All of them, this time, and all at once. The light beyond the porthole glass, the dim runway lights winking in the floor.

Darkness clogged in Luke’s sockets and invaded his throat. His brain fused shut in utter panic—he couldn’t think, could barely breathe. LB sat bolt upright, her breath feathering the nape of his neck. Her hackles rose against his arm, stiff as porcupine quills.

A new noise slipped out of the darkness. Back where Al had gone.

Not footsteps. No, this was a deliberate, smooth slithering.

LB whined next to Luke’s ear. Her breath held a shaved-iron tang. The scent of pure animal fear.

What could possibly make a noise like that? Had Clay brought a snake down for his tests? Oh God, what if he’d brought a python? Could it have gotten loose?

Whush-whush-whush. Soft, silky, advancing steadily through the dark.

No, Luke remembered. Felz said there were dogs, lizards, guinea pigs, bees. No snakes.

Those footsteps raced overhead again, but this time the darkness gave them a new, knowing cadence. Luke pictured a group of stunted youths in the water outside the station. Their bodies white as candle wax, sun-starved flesh flaking from their skeletons. Their heads, projecting from their collared shirts, were flat as flounders; their mouths were enormous and studded with the same needlelike teeth he’d glimpsed on the viperfish. They would be staring through the porthole with sightless silvery eyes, not really seeing but sensing him…

Now the whush-whush was joined by another sound: a dry chittering, almost mechanical. The sound of a million tiny limbs dancing lightly along the metal floor.

It’s the old man, Luke thought wildly. The old man with the mantises on his head. Luke pictured him trudging down the tunnel, his radial-tire sandals whushing on the floor while mantises spilled off of his skull.

Then another image darkened his mind—an older memory this time, a recollection drawn down from the surface world.

Yes, said a cold voice inside his head. Oh yessss, that’s it exactly. And it’s coming for you, Lucas. Coming for you this very moment…

YEARS AGO, when his life was much better, Luke had been invited to a veterinary conference in Arizona. They had gone as a family, staying at a motel edging the desert. The first night, they settled their infant son into the Pack ’n Play, then once Zach was asleep, Luke and Abby made love stealthily. Luke slipped inside Abby and rocked gently. Afterward they slept, only to be awakened by Zach’s horrific screams.

Abby jackknifed up in bed. “Zach?” she said. “What is it, baby?”

Luke could just make out the shape of his son in the finger of moonlight falling through the motel window. He was curled inside the Pack ’n Play. His face was pressed to the breathable mesh, which distorted his features.

Luke snapped on the bedside lamp. Zachary was shrieking, these lung-shredding sounds Luke had never heard before. He leapt out of bed. Zachary’s face was beet red and alarmingly puffed. Luke picked his son up and pressed the boy to his chest, a calming gesture.

Luke’s heartbeat skyrocketed when he felt something squirming against his own chest. Something inside Zachary’s sleeper, trapped against his son’s skin.

Zach’s piercing screams unlocked this dreadful hysteria in Luke; each one shot a jolt of scalding acid through his veins. The boy thrashed and squealed as Luke gripped him under the armpits, his little face a balloon ready to burst.

Jesus oh Jesus fuck what IS that?

Something was moving under Zach’s sleeper. Luke saw these terrifying whiplike motions in the left leg of Zach’s sleeper. It looked like a big fish caught in a net, trying to fling itself free. Luke made a dry gagging sound, the panic swelling in his throat like a sponge.

He tore the sleeper open. There, curling around his son’s ankle and all the way up his thigh, was the largest insect Luke had ever seen.

A long torsional tube. Its black body was segmented, sinuous, reflecting the room’s meager light. It looked the same at both ends, so Luke couldn’t tell where its head was. Luke saw inflamed divots all over Zach’s chest where the fucking thing must’ve bitten his boy.

It moved—was moving, even as Luke stared slack-jawed—with subtle undulations, powered by a dizzying multitude of legs. It released itself from Zach’s ankle, slipping up the back of his leg and around the frilled, absorbent ridge of his diaper. It was enormous, at least eight inches long; it kept coming and coming like a freight train steaming out of a tunnel, kinking and unwinding and flexing its revolting body.

Luke caught the final half inch of it—disgustingly warm, with a greasy sheen; it reminded him of grabbing the fireman’s pole at his old playground, the metal hot and slick from the hands of a hundred children.

He pinched his fingers with the desperate hope of snaring the bug, ripping the fucker in half, but it shimmied free and slithered under his son’s back.

Abby tore madly at Zach’s sleeve, trying to yank the sleeper off. The fear chewed into the sensitive wires in Luke’s brain, paralyzing his nerve centers. He pushed Abby away forcefully, too panicked to notice, flipped Zach onto his back, and pressed down on his sleeper, finding the bug—a millipede, he knew by then—and trapping it in the fabric. He freed Zachary’s arms, then leapt off the bed with the balled-up sleeper. The millipede whipped in his grip; Luke absorbed a series of bites as painful as the stings of a wasp.

Luke’s only thought: This fucker’s been doing that to my son.

He threw the sleeper down and stamped on it with his bare heel. A satisfying metallic crunch, like stepping on a beer can. He stomped again and again, fueled by a rage as primordial as any he’d ever experienced.

Die, you fucking brainless monster! Die, you awful thing!

He stepped away, panting. Abby cradled Zach; he was still bawling, but his cries had lost their death-struck pitch.

Luke’s gaze returned to the sleeper. Amazingly, it was moving.

The millipede crawled out of one sleeve. Skittering hesitantly, leaking viscid pus-yellow fluid, it curled into a cochlear coil on the carpet.

“Oh no,” Luke breathed. “Oh no-no-no.”

He retrieved his heavy-soled dress shoe and slammed it down. The bug actually leapt up, bouncing off the thick, nappy pile. With the same shoe, Luke flicked it through the open bathroom door and onto the tiles, muttering “Fucking thing oh you fucking thing,” and knelt on the tiles, slamming the shoe down furiously until the insect was nothing but a jamlike smear…

…AND RIGHT THEN, alone in the Trieste’s tunnel, this was the memory Luke’s mind conjured:

That slippery whush-whush in the cavernous dark was the whush of a millipede stalking toward him, chitter-clattering on its million-skillion legs.

This wasn’t your garden-variety one, either. Oh, no. The darkness nursed it into something new entirely. A millipede the size of a fourth-generation Aleppo pine, thick around as a trash can. Something primeval, hailing from the Permian age, where the scale of life was all out of whack. Its mandibles, sharp as hedge shears, clashed silkily: the sound of a razor drawn down a leather strop.

Whush-whush… pause… whush-whush.

Chitta-chit-skriiitch-chizzt-chit-chit.

It advanced slowly, in no rush. Where was there to go? It had all the time in the world.

Impossible, the rational center of Luke’s mind insisted. Even if it did exist anywhere on earth, which it absolutely fucking does not, how would something like that get down here? It’s nothing. Nothing at all, for fuck’s sake, nothing at ALL.

His mind took a sickening lurch. That reasonable (if increasingly shrill) voice in his head held no sway down here. Maybe his brain had conjured this nightmare bug out of nothingness. But it was still here—if only in this moment.

Either he’d created it…

—or the Trieste had—

…or he was coming down with a case of the sea-sillies already.

Your seabag’s leaky, sailor. Isn’t that what they said in the Navy when a guy went batshit? Your seabag’s leaking its guts all over the friggin’ place, swabbie. You’ve gone Section 8, ya fookin’ loonybird—

Whush-whush… WHUSH-whush…

You think that’s nothing, Luke? his mother said mockingly, with that throaty chuckle of hers. Ohh, I think we both know it’s something. After all, the dog can feel it, too, wouldn’t you say? Can’t you feel her shivering against you? Oh yes, it’s something all right, and whatever it is, Luke, it’s coming for you.

Luke pushed the dog behind him and butt-bumped toward the locked hatch. The tunnel narrowed. His breath came in hot, nauseous gusts.

Whush-WHUSH…

Luke swore he could see the segmented shape of the millipede’s gargantuan and somehow gothic body, the plating of its exoskeleton exuding its own sick glow. It was approaching with a mincing sidewinder movement.

Jesus, no, this is not happening… there’s nothing—NOTHING—!

He flattened his back against the hatch. The dog was tucked and trembling behind his knees. Luke leaned forward slightly, terror buzzing in his skull like angry yellow jackets…

Whush-whush-WHUSH-WHU—

The airlock hissed behind him. The hatch fell open. Luke’s heels stuttered back and hit the metal lip. He squawked, toppling backward as he scrambled away from the chattering noises in the hallway.

Light flooded his eyes. A familiar face stared impassively down at him.

“Hello, brother.”

10.

CLAYTON NELSON’S FACE wore a particular expression a good deal of the time. It had begun to grace his features as a child, and although his face had changed over the years, the expression had not. There was a noticeable thinning of the lips and a flaring of the nostrils; the flesh drew tight at the top of his nose where it met the edges of his eyes, while his eyebrows tented in an inverted V. It was the look of a man who’d sniffed something foul, but could not determine the source of the odor.

Clayton Nelson’s face could hold this expression for hours. It was the very expression it held now, in fact, as he looked at Luke sprawled on the tunnel floor.

“Thanks for rolling out the welcome wagon,” said Luke, feeling stupid, which is how he frequently felt in his older brother’s presence.

Clayton was narrow-shouldered and thin-hipped, dressed in gray coveralls. A custodian’s uniform. His face was austerely handsome in a way particular to polar icecaps—flinty and remote. As he’d aged, Clayton had come to look more and more like a member of some fallen Eastern European aristocracy.

The only feature working against that perception was his hair, which hung down his neck in a ragged fringe—the beginnings of a mullet. It gave him the look of a Double-A middle-relief pitcher; an aging player who’d had a cup of coffee in the majors and was now playing out the string with the Tuscaloosa Mud Hens or Richmond Flying Squirrels.

The fingertips of his left hand were bandaged.

“Let me help you up,” Clayton said mechanically, offering Luke his unbandaged hand.

Luke glanced down the storage tunnel. Empty. No giant millipede. Of course not. He rubbed his head. A fresh goose egg parted the short hairs on the back of his skull. LB hunched behind him, her tail tucked between her hind legs.

“Ah. You located the specimen,” Clayton said.

Anger flared in Luke. It was partly the adrenaline burn-off, and the shame at his crazed imaginings, but primarily the familiar rage he’d too often felt toward his brilliant, careless brother.

“Why was she in there?” he said. “It’s freezing. It’s dark. She was alone.”

“I wasn’t aware. Hugo took it.”

Luke bristled at the pronoun. It. As if Dr. Toy had stolen office supplies instead of a living creature.

“He must’ve abandoned it in there,” Clayton said.

“Why would he do that?”

Clayton’s eyebrow arched. “Have you seen Hugo?”

When Luke nodded, Clayton said, “Then I don’t need to tell you why he might act irrationally. I don’t know why he locked the specimen—”

“She, Clay. She’s not a specimen,” Luke said.

“Technically, yes, it is,” Clayton placidly replied.

“You named her Little Bee.”

“And? It’s just a name.”

“A stupid one.”

“Well, I’m sure the specimen appreciates your concern.”

Luke willed himself to calm down. What profit was there in arguing as they had as children? He wished Al would get her ass back. He needed a buffer.

“Clay… what the hell is happening down here?” he asked. “The monitors are out, you haven’t communicated for days. I get a phone call at three o’clock in the morning telling me to hightail my ass to Guam. They play me a recording where you’re telling me to come down—come home. After that, they took me into a chilly room, rolled out a slab, and showed me Dr. Westlake.”

“Hold on.” Clayton held up his unbandaged hand. “What’s this about a recording?”

Luke nodded. “The last transmission they received from you. You were saying come home, Lucas; we need you, Lucas. Stuff like that.”

Clayton scoffed. “Asking for you? Why in God’s name would I do that?”

“Clay, I heard you. Clear as day. Come home, Lucas.”

Clayton’s features were fixed in that just-sniffed-shit expression, and again, Luke was left feeling that he was the dog shit on Clayton’s shoe, the foul muck that his brother was just now realizing he’d stepped in.

“Whatever you heard, it wasn’t me. I have no need of you here.” He gave Luke an are-you-serious? look. “What would you possibly add?”

Clayton was telling the truth; Luke knew him well enough to see that. Who the hell could have sent that transmission, then, and how? Had someone taped Clayton covertly and spliced a sound file together? Why would Westlake or Toy—the only possible culprits—do that?

“You said something about Westlake,” Clayton prodded.

Luke eyed his brother evenly. “Are you saying you don’t know what happened to him?”

“We’ve had no recent contact with the surface. Disturbances in the water have muddied our transmissions. I know Westlake took the sub. I have no idea how he managed it. None of us were taught how to…” He exhaled through his nostrils. “I hadn’t seen him in some time. He locked himself in his lab. He left in… I was about to say the dead of night, but it always feels like that down here. He certainly left without telling me.”

“He’s dead, Clay.” Luke paused to let it sink in. “I mean… not just dead.” The word failed to express what Luke had seen. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I never want to again.”

Clayton accepted the news stoically. Perhaps his upper lip twitched, but if so, it was barely noticeable.

“What the hell is going on down here?” Luke resisted the urge to punctuate each word with a poke to his brother’s chest—anything to pierce that Teflon exterior. “You’ve got Dr. Felz and everyone else in a flap, and that was before Westlake surfaced.”

“Our research. The tests are ongoing,” Clayton said. He had already accepted both Westlake’s death and Luke’s untimely arrival; his mind had processed both phenomena, catalogued and dismissed them with typical Claytonian swiftness. “It’s remarkable. What we’ve discovered beggars description. There have been setbacks. Some expected, others less so. Dr. Toy isolated himself…” He glanced at his watch with a hint of perplexity. “I can’t say how long ago. Time has a funny way of behaving down here.”

“Aaaand we’re in,” Al said, abruptly stepping in from the storage tunnel. “Nice work, guys.”

She offered her hand to Clayton, who shook it dryly.

“Sight for sore eyes, Doc. I was trying to get the door unlocked remotely, but I can’t pass a clear signal to the surface.”

“We’ve been having the same trouble,” said Clayton.

“Is that why the monitors are on the fritz, too?”

Clayton shrugged. “I don’t know why that might be. I assumed it was a breakdown on your end.”

Luke told Alice what Clay had said, about not sending the transmission.

“That seems unlikely,” said Al, turning to Clayton. “I’ve listened to that transmission two dozen times. It’s you, Dr. Nelson. It’s the reason Luke’s here.”

Clayton bristled. “It wasn’t me. Why on earth would I need a veterinarian?”

He spoke the word veterinarian with the same dismissive inflection others might accord the word moron.

“Well, isn’t this a touching family reunion,” Al said.

“Maybe you were sleeping, Clay,” Luke said. LB barked energetically, as if in support. “When you recorded it, I mean. You didn’t sound like yourself.”

Clayton wouldn’t dignify this possibility with an answer, but Al coaxed Luke to go on.

“You sounded… you sounded gone,” Luke said. “Just, I don’t know, somewhere outside your own skin. Your voice had a floaty quality. Maybe you were sleepwalking. Maybe you sent the transmission without knowing it.”

“I’ve never sleepwalked in my life,” Clay said.

But Al was nodding. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen that. Happens a lot on submarines. Sailors getting out of bed, walking around and waking up in funny places. Guys who never had the habit before. Lots of lucid dreaming, too—talking in your sleep. Your brainwaves go a bit buggy down here. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Well,” Clayton said with a stagy eye-roll, “now that’s been sorted, perhaps you’d like to leave?”

Alice laughed without mirth. “You crack me up, Doc. I figure since we’ve come all this way—and factoring in what happened to Dr. Westlake—we best stay awhile, take a proper accounting of things.”

Clayton nodded impassively. “As long as you don’t disturb my lab or intrude on my work.” A hard look at Luke. “Either of you.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Al.

Clayton’s face reminded Luke of a blanket pulled over a nest of scorpions: seemingly tranquil, but with all manner of thoughts and instincts twisting beneath it.

“Well then, come along.”

Clayton turned and walked away with every expectation they’d follow, treating them with the indifference you might accord to a pair of slack-jawed yokels who’d just fallen off the hay truck—which, Luke noted with an absence of bitterness, was how Clayton treated pretty much everybody he met. He’d always been an equal-opportunity disdainer.

11.

DESPITE THE LOW CEILING, Clayton moved down the tunnel with the grace of a man who did not so much walk as he did float a millimeter or two above the ground, hovercrafting on a ribbon of air.

The tunnel was well lit. Warmth emanated from gilled vents. They walked in silence and squeezed single file through a gap where the tunnel winnowed to a bottleneck. Separated by a flimsy barrier of polymers and foam, Luke could feel the sea pressing against his skull. His eardrums throbbed from the pressure of that static silence.

Luke had never been particularly prone to claustrophobia; as a child, he’d navigated drainage tunnels and dusty attics, happy as a hamster in a Habitrail. But these tunnels truly resembled a kind of digestive tract, with their ridged walls and scalloped ceilings. No wonder Toy’s and Westlake’s mental states had eroded—on top of the pressure and isolation, they’d spent too much time pacing these sinister tubes.

They rounded a tight bend. Luke stopped so suddenly that LB butted into the backs of his legs, leaving a streak of drool on his overalls.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

The tunnel hit an abrupt stop. It was as if they’d reached a dead end… except for the circular hole in the wall at the end of the tunnel, about the size of a manhole. The mouth of the hole was dark, but Luke could see that it stretched off to meet some unknown terminus within the station.

“Relax,” said Al. “They’re called crawl-throughs. It’s a structural necessity. You’ll see the same thing at space stations: chutes connecting one area to the other, which the astronauts float through. We, unfortunately, are tethered by gravity. But at least it’s got rungs, just like a ladder. It’s a twenty-second trip, Luke. Piece of cake.”

Luke approached the chute. God, it was tiny—a choking ring. He could see straight through it, at least, to the lit tunnel on the other end. Rungs ran along its ceiling. But why had he thought it was the diameter of a manhole? It looked about as big around as the door on his clothes dryer, if that.

Clayton slid in on his stomach. He wriggled until his ass was past the chute’s mouth, transitioned onto his back, and gripped the rungs. He pulled himself through, grunting slightly in exertion; shortly afterward he slid out the other end.

“You go,” Al said to Luke. “Then the dog. Then me.”

Luke slid himself in. He tried to move as he’d seen his brother do, but it was difficult. He turned over awkwardly. A black tongue of foam ran around the chute, top to bottom. When he exhaled, his shoulders touched its edges: an uncomfortable feeling, one that made his knees rise to his chest instinctively—his kneecaps hit the top of the chute and made no sound at all. There was a terrible solidity to everything down here, put there by the water: he could have been crawling through an underground cave with a billion tons of rock pushing down.

It doesn’t matter, he told himself. If this chute collapses, you’ll be dead before your mind even registers the threat.

Gripping the rungs, he pulled himself through. The chute was coated with a helpful silicon agent: he slid as effortlessly as a plastic puck over an air-hockey table. He reached the other end, turned onto his stomach, and fell gracelessly onto the floor.

Clayton made no effort to help him up. “You really know how to make a guy feel welcome,” Luke said.

With some gentle coaxing, LB came next. She whined and whimpered, but Al gave her a push and the dog shot through the chute as if she’d been greased.

Once Al herself was through, they continued. The tunnel followed a gentle curve until it hit another hatch, which opened into a lab area. It was much larger than any room Luke had seen so far. His head nearly touched the overhead lights, which buzzed with an insectile hum. The lab was spartanly appointed: a few chairs, cardboard filing cabinets. Everything was collapsible, foldable, compressible—as it would have to be to have gotten down here. It’s not as if they could back up a moving truck to the Trieste’s front door and let burly men in weight-lifting belts off-load supplies. It all would’ve been ferried down in the Challengers, and been small enough to fit through their hatches.

Luke noted five hatches: the one they’d come through—marked Access 1—plus four more marked LN, LW, LT, and Access 2.

The second hatch, LW, was locked. Luke saw a keypad beside it. LW’s porthole was slicked from the inside with coagulated dark matter. A buzz emitted from behind the hatch, which quivered the delicate hairs of Luke’s inner ear.

A foldable lab bench was scattered with papers, most of them scrawled with his brother’s spiky handwriting. Petri dishes were stacked in a small cooler; empty MREs were heaped in a trash bin.

Luke said: “Is that a viewing window?”

“Yes,” Clayton said. “The only one of any size in the station.”

It stretched nearly floor-to-ceiling, perhaps eight feet across. Luke’s eyes charted the curve of the glass… was it glass? Probably not. Glass would shatter. Beyond lay a blackness so profound that it unrooted something in his chest.

Clayton flicked a switch. The interior lights dimmed. He flicked another. A bank of high-intensity spotlights flooded the ocean bottom.

12.

THE SEA FLOOR was as flat as a ballroom. It unfurled to the farthest edge of the light’s reach—perhaps twenty feet—before rolling under a solid wall of darkness that no man-made light could penetrate. The marine snow drifted in seismic combers, gentle waves of motion… or as though something was moving cunningly under the surface.

Luke’s heartbeat thudded dully at his temples. He put a hand on the window. The mammoth density of the sea throbbed against his fingertips. He pictured spider-legged cracks forming in his reflection, then water needling through to slice his fingers off painlessly; next the window would shatter inward as the ceiling crumpled down, crushing him before he could make peace with God.

“We watch it out there,” Clayton said. “Perhaps it watches us, too.”

Luke saw it then, as though it had arrived on cue. Ambrosia. A solid sheet of the stuff. It drifted across the ocean floor, reminding Luke of a manta ray. It shaped itself into a playful O and rolled along like a hula hoop.

Luke got the oddest sense of being teased—it was like watching a lure jigged past his sightline, some canny angler making it dance and shimmy oh-so-invitingly in hopes Luke would lunge and take an incautious bite… then what?

Clayton said, “Magnificent, isn’t it?”

Luke caught a sense of shapes cavorting where the light turned granular. At the precise point where the spotlights faded and died, he swore he could see… things. They coalesced, solidifying into something swirling with angry movement, so large that the darkness could scarcely contain it, rushing at him swiftly—

He flinched.

But there was nothing. The drifting snow. That impenetrable wall of black.

“Are you catching much of it?” Luke asked his brother. “Will it…”

Will it let itself be caught? was the question he thought but did not say.

“We don’t have to catch it anymore,” Clayton said.

“You have enough?”

“Oh, you can never have enough, Lucas.”

“Then why don’t you have to catch it?”

“Because it’s coming to us.”

He snapped the lights back on. Luke saw that Al had gravitated toward the door marked LW. Her face had a disconnected, swimmy quality—the look of a person suspended in a wonderful, all-consuming dream.

“Al…?” said Luke.

Her expression didn’t change. She trailed one finger over the hatch of LW sensuously, as she might over a lover’s sensitive flesh.

LB gave a short bark. The fog over Al’s eyes lifted.

“Sorry. Off in my own world there,” she said sheepishly. “This is Westlake’s lab, right?”

“Of course it is.” Clayton waved his hand edgily. “Come away from there.”

Obediently, Al did so. She was grinning and rubbing the back of her neck, as if she’d been caught doing something embarrassing. Luke watched her circumspectly, a little weirded out by her detached expression: too much like the zoned-out look that would enter an animal’s eyes once the Euthasol took hold. LB padded over and sniffed at Al’s pocket. She produced a half-eaten energy bar, snapped off a piece and tossed it to LB, who snatched it out of the air and wolfed it down.

From another part of the station arose a dull, monotonous knocking.

“Is that Dr. Toy?” Al asked.

Clayton’s shrug said: Who else?

“You figure he’s dangerous, Doc?” said Al. “We can’t have him running around trying to punch holes in the damn walls.”

“He’s staked out his fiefdom, Lieutenant,” Clayton said. “He’s squatting in the animal quarantine. He’s not bothering me. I’m not bothering him.”

Luke said: “What is he doing?”

“Pursuing scientific inquiry, I assume,” Clayton said. “What else?”

Luke’s gaze tracked from Clay to the hatch marked LW… suddenly it hit him. LW: Westlake. LT: Toy. LN: Nelson. These must be their private labs. Luke could see into Dr. Toy’s through the porthole—orderly and empty. He could even see into Clayton’s.

But Westlake’s porthole was obscured by that slick black coating. And there was that odd hum from behind the hatch.

“Has anyone been in Westlake’s lab since…?” said Luke.

Clayton shook his head. “It’s locked. Only Westlake knew the keypad code to gain entry.”

“Should we take a look inside?” Luke said, eyeing that black stuff critically.

“That is unwise,” Clayton said. “Westlake was working with… certain toxic compounds, I believe. There may be a contamination risk, but we’re perfectly safe if it remains shut. That hatch is hermetically sealed.”

Clayton folded his hands complacently, smiling at them both. Smiles always sat badly on his face: too often he appeared to be snarling. Luke thought his brother looked haggard. Exhaustion was etched into the flesh around his eye sockets.

Something’s happened to everyone down here. And it’s still happening.

But what? It refused to be pinpointed, no more than a dark speck in Luke’s brain, growing steadily and gathering weight.

“Why are you here again, anyway?” Clayton asked Luke icily. “Why you, precisely? I mean, of all people.”

“Like I said, they called me. The government. They thought you might…”

…Lucas come home we need you come home…

“…need me here. Need something from me.”

“I can tell you that you’re not needed here,” Clayton said simply.

A sheet of anger draped over Luke as he was ripped back through time, a younger brother knocking on the door of his big brother’s basement lab. He was holding a small gift—a glass of chocolate milk—and in return only hoped for a glimpse of Clayton’s sorcery or, far better, an invitation to help out. But inevitably the door would open a crack, his offering hurriedly snatched away and the door slammed shut in his face.

You’re not needed.

Luke was furious that his brother would still treat him so shabbily. That fury crystallized into anger at himself—why did Clayton’s predictable scorn still wound him? He wasn’t here for his rat-shit brother. He was here for the people up in the real world, the ones who had human feelings and needed the help Clayton might be able to provide.

“You don’t know what you need anymore, Clay,” Luke said. “You ever consider that—that you might be in over your head? Oh, no, not the legendary Clayton Nelson. Not Cute Clay, onetime pinup boy of bubblegum magazines from coast to coast—”

Luke swooned. The lab tilted under his feet, the lights streaking across his vision.

“You’re dead on your feet, Luke,” Al told him. “You need to get some sleep.”

When had Luke last slept? An eternity ago. He’d powered through on fear and adrenaline. But now the fatigue hit him like a hammer blow. The Nelson Brothers’ Death Match—the same battle they’d been engaged in off and on for their entire lives—could wait.

“Yeah. Maybe just an hour or two,” he said. “Recharge the batteries.”

Al took his hand—her grip was strong and calming. “I’ll take you somewhere you can rest.”

Luke grabbed his bag. Clayton watched in stony silence as Al led Luke down the tunnel marked Access 2. LB padded behind Luke, her head darting side to side alertly.

“How are you feeling?” Luke asked Alice. They’d been inside the station only a few hours, but oh God it felt much longer.

“I’ll manage.” But Luke could hear the fatigue in her voice.

Flee, Luke thought. Jet. Blow this Popsicle stand. Use your feet to beat the street…

Don’t be a worm, Lucas, his mother spoke up. You could as soon outrun your own skin. What are you, scared? A little fraidy-cat?

They came to a hatch that opened into a cramped bunk room. A cot, a stack of journals, a heap of dirty clothes. LB sniffed around the cot, chuffed dubiously, and curled up on the floor.

“It was Dr. Westlake’s,” Alice said. “Will it do?”

Luke thought: Whyever not? The last body to lie on this cot now lies in a vault.

“Yes,” he said, tamping down his revulsion. “Thank you.”

“Sleep. Then we’ll put our heads together and figure things out.”

Luke stowed his bag and sat on the bunk. LB leapt up, prodding Luke with her snout and eventually settling over his thighs. He shooed her off; she went reluctantly, her eyes shining wetly up at him.

The floor under the bunk was scattered with Westlake’s research. A laptop lay atop one pile. The silver casing was sticky with dark matter. He scraped at it with his fingernail; it peeled away in a long ebony curl. It reminded him of the half-set coating on a toffee apple, so sticky it could rip the fillings out of molars.

He sniffed it. Ugh. A sweet decay, like the pool of mystery juice at the bottom of an amusement park trash bin.

Clayton’s voice drifted through his mind: Westlake was working with certain toxic compounds…

Luke opened Westlake’s laptop. Files were clustered at the bottommost left-hand corner of the desktop. Luke used the trackpad to spread them out.

Three audio files. Contact 1, Contact 2, Contact 3.

Curiosity overruled exhaustion. He clicked on the first file.

13.

THE BUZZING.

That was the first thing he heard. Low and ragged, the burr of a malfunctioning servo motor—hundreds of them on the fritz at once.

Next: a voice, close to the microphone.

“Test one. Wednesday, the thirteenth of August, 5:13 p.m.”

Westlake’s voice. Keening, slightly nasal. The voice of a dead man.

“I noticed it just last night. Last night? I think so, yes, yes—time has a way of slipping through one’s fingers down here. In the wall… eating through it, you might say. Behind a box of equipment. This was why I missed it at first.”

The buzz settled. Westlake breathed heavily into the microphone.

“A… hole. This is the best means of description, though that does not adequately describe the phenomenon. A hole, after all, is a… an emptiness, yes? This, on the other hand… the phenomenon is roughly two inches in diameter. I’d measure to get its exact size but it may be unwise to draw too near. It exudes a certain disturbance.”

A hole? Luke thought. In the station? Couldn’t be. Insanity.

“Its surface is black, shimmery. I cannot discern whether it is simply lying atop the wall, or whether an exterior influence—something outside the station, in the water—has managed to eat its way through. Either way, it appears to be growing incrementally. Amazingly, it has not breached the structural integrity of the Trieste. I wouldn’t be here to transcribe this if so.”

Ambient noises: clickings, snappings.

“The bees do not seem troubled by it. In fact, they display great interest. They cluster at the edge of their containment unit facing the phenomenon, occasionally bashing their bodies against the glass. The other specimens, my lizards, display the opposite reaction: they huddle as far away from it as possible.

“I covered it with several long strips of duct tape. I have not alerted Drs. Nelson or Toy. They are occupied with their own labors and… this will sound foolish, and doubtlessly unprofessional, but I don’t want them interfering. Clayton most especially—if he knew about this, he would swing his hammer of divine authority.” Westlake’s voice changed. It became flinty, obsessive. “This? This is… mine. My discovery.”

A gulf of silence punctuated by Westlake’s breathing. Then:

“Hah, listen to me! A covetous schoolboy hoarding my packet of candy! Good God, if the ethics committee could see me now! I imagine they would…”

Westlake’s voice trailed off. His breathing grew heavier.

“Can you hear that? Is the microphone picking it up?”

Luke strained his ears. Nothing but that buzz and Westlake’s ragged breaths.

“Sounds emanating from the phenomenon. I hear them… feel them. There’s a prickling sensation over my skin. How very bizarre.”

Silence.

“Can you hear them? Can you?”

Click.

The file ended abruptly.

Dreamily, his blood racing, Luke opened the next one.

“Test two.”

The buzz again. Quite a bit louder now.

“The hole has doubled in size. Ceaselessly, the phenomenon chews into the wall. The bees—surely you can hear them?—they are compelled by it. I let one out yesterday and it flew straight toward the hole. But it banked sharply away and settled on the wall a foot above. It made a few creeping attempts to approach the phenomenon, its antennae flicking, but never drummed up the gumption. When it settled back on the lab equipment, I cupped it in my palms in order to return it to its hive-mates.

“The little brute stung me! These are the most docile creatures I’ve ever dealt with. They were so tame I could almost sing them to sleep. Never once have I been stung without cause. I… I killed it. Ground it to paste between my palms. I was in a rare rage.”

The buzz rose and fell rhythmically.

“The other specimens have expired. Every lizard, dead. They made it down here without issue, adjusting well to their new habitat. Then yesterday I awoke—I’ve been sleeping in the lab the last few nights—to discover them all unmoving. Their bodies stiff, strangely white. It was as if they’d been injected with liquefied chalk. I’ve never seen anything like this. I wondered for a moment: could they have died of fright? Surely they cannot feel emotions. The bees, however, are thriving. Their numbers seem to be increasing.”

Luke could hear Westlake fumbling around. A sharp click! Suddenly his voice was amplified, the sound of it much richer.

“I’ve hooked up a microphone. Hello? Hello? Good. It runs on a long cord. I’ll attempt to feed the mic into—through—the hole. This sounds absurd. How could I push a microphone through a hole eaten into the wall of an undersea station? Were I even able to do so, where would it go? That I am unable to answer as yet.”

A series of staticky raps. The mic scratching against the weave of Westlake’s clothes, Luke figured.

“I’ve hooked the microphone to a metal rod. I’ll feed it through the hole from a safe distance. In all objectivity, the hole… alarms me. It exerts a pull. Not on one’s body so much as the mind. I can only compare it to the sensation of some kind of, of claw I suppose, sunk into the tissues of the brain.”

More noises as the microphone, clipped to the metal rod, bumped along the laboratory floor.

“Careful now… careful.”

A series of harsh baps! as the mic bumped up the wall. Luke could discern the exact moment it slipped through the hole: the resonance became watery, as if the mic had slid into a deep pool. But Westlake’s voice remained clear.

“It’s in! I’ve run a secondary audio channel to record my own commentary. Both my voice and whatever the microphone picks up should be clear.”

For a very long while, nothing. Only the liquid shifting as the microphone drifted in whatever lay beyond the hole.

Then: a powerful knock. Distant, yet resonant.

“Hello?”

Westlake made a noise of his own: a chiding tsk, as if sickened at himself for thinking someone—something—might answer him.

The noise came again. That faraway knock. And again. An even, careful cadence. There was something knowing in it. Luke couldn’t say why he felt that, yet he did.

He broke out in a sweat. The clammy kind he associated with onrushing sickness—the maiden signs of the flu.

The knock. Watery but insistent. Again. Again.

“Is someone there?”

Knock.

“Who is it?”

Luke almost laughed at the inanity of Westlake’s question—but the fearful quail of the man’s voice stilled that impulse.

The silence ran thick as a current. Then: knock.

“All right. Let’s try this. When I ask a question now, you may answer by knocking. One knock for yes, two knocks for no. Will that be acceptable?”

Knock.

“You understand?”

Knock.

“Well. Good. Very good.”

The excitement in Westlake’s voice was palpable.

“Are you extraterrestrial?”

Knock… knock.

“So you are of this planet?”

Knock… knock.

“Are you friendly?”

No reply.

“Do you know what that means? Friendly?”

Knock.

“How many of you are there? Knock once for only one. Knock twice for more than one.”

Knock… knock.

“Do you come in peace?”

No reply.

“Do you come to share information with us? To help?”

Knock.

“Do you know what is happening to us? Of the disease we’ve come down in search of a cure for?”

Knock.

“Can you help us?”

A gulf of silence.

“Do you know what that is—the substance we’re here to study?”

Again, silence. The feathery sound of water swirling around the microphone.

When next he spoke, Westlake’s voice was tight.

“Do you wish us no harm?”

Sounds from the liquid. Rustling and shucking.

Knock… knock.

What the hell does that mean? Luke asked himself. No, we wish you no harm? Or no, we do wish you harm?

“I’ll ask again,” came Westlake’s voice, “can you help us? We are… we may be dying. Our species. Do you understand? Can you—”

A gnashing grind. The squeal of feedback.

“Jesus Chr—!”

Click.

Fear crawled over the dome of Luke’s skull. He was filled with a sense that he was hovering on the cusp of something as terrible as he’d ever known—new knowledge, facts he could live a thousand lifetimes without knowing. He could feel it pulsing against his skull, tapping at the plates of bone with an icy fingertip. He ached with the desire to hurl the laptop at the wall and smash it to pieces. But there was no way he could allow himself to do that.

Heart thudding, he opened the third and final file.

“Test number… immaterial. The day is… immaterial. Time, also immaterial.”

The buzz was incredibly loud now. Westlake’s voice drifted hazily, sounding somehow untethered from his body.

“The phenomenon ate the microphone. Ate? Is there a better word than that? Something certainly yanked it through the hole. So yes, ate. It happened so fast. I was lucky to salvage the laptop.”

A sucking sound, very close. A rapid suck-uck-uck. A wet pop.

Was Westlake… was he sucking his thumb? Like an infant?

“There has been no further contact. Not in the prior-established manner, I should say. But the hole has grown. A great deal, I must say. The bees are now constantly agitated.

“And I… I hear things. Sometimes it’s things being ripped. Other times they’re noises like nothing I’ve ever heard. The buzzing of flies—this sounds quite different from the drone of the bees, somehow lower, and not only in register: it is the hum of a baser order of life. Of stupid, witless, shit-colonizing flies. Occasionally, there is also the hammer and clash of machinery. How the hell is that possible? And … and laughter? Yes, I do believe I heard that, too. A child’s laughter. If it were not absurd to say so, I’d tell you it was that of my own daughter, Hannah.”

Westlake loosed a tortured laugh of his own.

“This is madness, of course. It’s difficult to hear anything above the drone of the bees. I haven’t stepped outside the lab in some time. Nelson and Toy would only interfere. They wouldn’t understand. Their minds are too dense, too literal.”

Westlake’s voice turned brittle. Luke could imagine him hunched in his lab, his body grown gnomish, his posture covetous as he hoarded his dark secret.

“And I… I don’t want them to have it. This is all mine.”

More sucking. Luke pictured Westlake’s thumb, pink from the suction.

“I have to say this. Not long ago, when I was staring at the hole—it commands my attention, I’ll tell you that—it changed. Went opaque, is perhaps the word. Like watery milk. Behind it, or through it, I saw shapes. Indistinct but wonderful. Like dark wings fluttering. An enormous space filled with this antic fluttering.”

The tone of Westlake’s voice was off-putting—there was an uncomfortable echo of Alice’s voice in it, the way she’d sounded after she’d been caught staring at Westlake’s hatch.

“Whatever this is that I’ve discovered… it, they, can be communicated with, I am sure of it. Reasoned with. They are here to help. I sense no hatred. Only curiosity.”

Curiosity. The word stuck in Luke’s brain like a quill. Somehow it seemed even more frightening than pure hatred.

“This is my final recording. I will continue to chart my progress in my journals. I am confident that what lies on the other side is beneficial. Are they the bringers of the ambrosia? If so, perhaps they will tell us how to harness its awesome power. I believe in this possibility, and I will endeavor to make it so.”

Click.

14.

LUKE’S ARMS WERE TENSED hard as marble; a concerted effort was needed to force his muscles to relax.

He had to consider the possibility that none of this had happened. That Westlake had caught a malignant case of the sea-sillies—that, or a particularly baffling indicator of the ’Gets. These files were no more than a manifestation of his creeping insanity—he’d imagined the whole goddamn thing. He’d isolated himself in his lab the same way a dying bear will crawl into the shadows of its cave; in his own sickness and delusion, Westlake had played make-believe, slave to the apparitions in his head.

What had Luke heard, really? The buzz of bees. Some scraping and scratching. A few knocks—knocks Westlake could have made himself, playing a game of call-and-answer with himself. What about the watery echo? Luke figured immersing the microphone in a glass of water would have the same effect.

Disconcerted, Luke lay down. He was so damn tired. His body was physically shutting down, a power grid starved of electricity. He’d rest briefly, and upon waking, he’d take Westlake’s laptop to Al and Clayton. They could listen to the files and decide what to make of them.

He shut his eyes and tried to conjure Abby’s face. Instead, a different scene: Abby and Luke in the bedroom of their shoebox apartment, back when they were graduate students. The heat lay thick inside the walls; that late-summer warmth did something to Abby. Set her afire. She’d sat on the bed with that beguiling smile. She pulled his sweats down, then his Fruit of the Looms with one finger, leaving them strung clumsily around his knees.

Get closer, silly, she’d whispered. This isn’t going to work unless we’re pretty much touching, is it?

Luke remembered being overtaken by the friendliness of it. Just a chummy blow job, followed by some aw-shucks sex. Y’know, the kind of thing pals do. Friendly, and practiced—Luke felt the tiniest ripple of concern about that: just how had she gotten so damn practiced? But Luke had felt so overjoyed at the fact that your ideal lover could be your best friend, too…

Then Abby’s face changed. Her features went viscid, reshaping themselves into something dark and fearsome.

Luke’s eyes snapped open. He swore he could see a face at the porthole now, peering in at him.

Clay…

No, Al…

…then Westlake’s tortured face from the vault…

All three faces blurred together and became something else.

They became Zachary’s face. Luke’s son as a tot.

His boy was laughing.

Was there anything more wonderful than a baby’s laughter?

Not now, though. This was menacing—too adult, full of cruel mocking.

Luke couldn’t look away as Zachary laughed with unhinged gasps, his face shading redder and redder… the same color it’d been as he’d screamed with the millipede inside his sleeper.

Laughing at his father. Laughing fit to bust a gut.

Ha-ha! They won’t let you go, Daddy! They won’t never ever let you go!