The Deep

1.

LIGHT. HIGH ABOVE HIM.

Beautiful golden light.

Luke stretched toward it. He was underwater. The light came from the sun. It shone upon the surface of the water, a plate of mellow gold.

He kicked, surging toward it. His legs were strong, his strokes confident. A dark square rested atop the water. It was a floating dock. A rope trailed down from it. Thick nautical gauge, clung with algae. It hung down through the water and disappeared into the darkness below.

His eyes hugged that darkness for a moment. Things thrashed and tilted down there, a few inches past the point where the light went bad.

He looked away. Looked up.

Two shapes jutted from that dark square. Shoulders, heads. Instinctively, he knew it was Abby and Zachary. The smaller shape dipped his hand into the water. The tips of his fingers sent out delicate ripples.

Luke thought: Don’t touch the water, Zach. Don’t give yourself over to it, ever.

His body speared toward them. His lungs burned. It felt good, necessary. You had to suffer to reach those you loved. To suffer was to care.

An emotion bigger than joy, bigger than relief, bigger than hope ripped through his chest: bigger because it was all these emotions, concentrated and magnified.

He arrowed upward. He was moments—a mere heartbeat—from breaking the surface.

Their faces. He could remember their faces again. Soon he’d touch them, hug them both, never leave their sides, not for a moment. Not for anything or anyone.

His hand stretched upward, fingers straining toward the surface—

2.

—LUKE SNAPPED AWAKE in the dark. Inside the Challenger.

Calling his son’s name.

How much time had gone by? He didn’t care. Something had broken inside his head. He lacked the ability to properly acknowledge this fact. His mind could no longer process the scale of its own ruin.

He laughed. A cold, empty note. It dissolved into a hiccuping cough and petered out in a prolonged moan. He sat in the silence. Alone.

A voice.

“Daddy… Daddy…”

Luke stirred. Sat up straight.

“Daddy, where are you…?”

The voice came from outside the Challenger. Inside the Trieste.

“I’m scared, Daddy…”

Luke strained toward that voice. His son was inside the station. Zachary was cold and lost. And he needed his father.

Luke crawled to the lip of the porthole. A chill crept over his flesh.

“Daddy, please…”

He went. Unthinkingly, he went.

The storage tunnel was lit with an alien glow. The generator still partially hid the hole that had consumed Clayton, but its surface was placid now.

“Daddy!”

Luke broke into a run. He flashed around the gooseneck and spotted Zach in the hatchway wearing his favorite PJs, the ones with the fire trucks and police cars.

“Zachary!”

His son turned and fled. A spike of ice penetrated Luke’s chest. Was Zach scared of him? For God’s sake, he wasn’t the monster here. He was desperately trying to protect him from the monsters. He wanted to be a good father. The Human Shield. It was all he’d ever wanted.

He followed Zach toward the main lab. The Trieste looked different. The walls were rusted and dull. A thick layer of dust had settled over everything.

He glanced down. Hey! LB was there, trotting at his side. His heart swelled to see her… until he looked a little closer.

“I thought you were dead, girl,” Luke said.

LB’s eyes were two plugs of midnight stuffed into her sockets. Her jowls sagged and her fur was bone-white and hoary, like ancient corn silk. She opened her jaws in a canine grin; the inside of her mouth was a cottony white, the blood all leeched away. Her teeth had rotted to nothing, gums drooping inward.

Nope, boss. I’m not dead. Wish I was some days, but what are you gonna do?

Luke smiled sadly. “You look… you look real old, girl.”

LB chuffed. It sounded painful, her insides rattling.

Well, time works differently down here, boss. Sometimes I feel like I’ve lived a thousand lifetimes… it’s funny. The pain is a constant. Sometimes it’s so much that I can’t stand it. I bite at myself, tear my skin off, but I can never quite die. Like I said, funny. But to hurt is to love, right?

“You bet,” Luke said companionably. “That’s just about the size of it.”

He leaned down to pet her. LB bit him. It didn’t hurt. She had no teeth. But he could tell that she wanted to hurt him—she wanted to hurt him real bad. He almost wished he could grant her that wish. He pulled his hand gently from her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t think I can be hurt anymore.”

She chuffed again. You can’t blame a dog for trying, Doc.

He reached the crawl-through chute. LB didn’t follow him through. He caught sight of Zach on the other side. His arms projected from his pajama sleeves as if they’d been pulled, the bones broken, the flesh stretched like gruesome taffy.

Zach’s hands were very big indeed. His fingers trailed down and down, these long twitchy wires that, for all their gauntness, looked incredibly strong.

His son’s face broke into a smile. Not a particularly nice one, Luke had to admit. He’d certainly never taught the boy to smile that way.

Mind your manners, kiddo.

Zachary lifted one arm. His index finger curled invitingly.

My son, my son, what long fingers you have…

All the better to beckon you with, Father…

Luke followed Zach, but more reluctantly now. The ceiling lowered. He had to duck. He breathed shallowly, drawing the curious scent of the station into his lungs. He stepped over something that looked very much like a human rib cage. The ceiling abruptly rose to an apex he could no longer chart. He turned another corner, and his son was waiting no more than five feet away.

Luke took an instinctive step back.

Zach’s pajamas were torn and moldering, the clothes of a disinterred corpse. His hair was gone. His scalp was bare and frighteningly wrinkled, summoning images of a living apple doll.

His fingers were enormous. Four dead snakes attached to his palms, their tips dangling to the floor. His face had stretched, too, becoming vulpine and weird. The flesh around his eyes sagged: the eyes of a sick beagle, the corneas jaundiced and incalculably ancient.

His mouth was overstuffed with teeth—they jutted outward, slicing his lips and pushing them apart.

My son, my son, what big teeth you have…

All the better to bite you with, Daddy…

Zachary thrust his chin forward, hurling bursts of laughter at him. Spittle jetted between his teeth to leave wet spots on Luke’s overalls.

Luke held his arms out. “Zachary, please.”

His son coyly turned away. Shapes thrashed and fretted, half glimpsed, as if his face had given birth to a nest of snakes.

The tunnel plunged into darkness. When the lights came on again, Zach was gone.

3.

LUKE WALKED AIMLESSLY.

Sometimes he laughed. Other times he wept. He made no conscious distinction between the two anymore.

The tunnels split and meandered. His footsteps echoed into silence. The pressure welted down on him. The children no longer raced overhead. Perhaps they’d lost interest or had been scared away.

The tunnel bellied into an alcove. The walls collapsed inward to create a perfect pocket of dark. Luke squinted until he saw what lay inside that darkness. A leaden wash of dread spread over his groin; he felt a sudden, dreadful urge to pee.

The Tickle Trunk rested in the alcove. The clowns on its lid—Pit-Pat and Floppsy and the rest—leered and jested, their tongues flicking over teeth the color of old bone.

Hello, Lukey-loo! So wonderful to see you!

The latch sprung open. Luke took a step back, but the walls had pushed in all around him. There was nowhere to go. The lid creaked open. The air filled with tinny notes, the sort that play when you opened a music box.

Tinka-tink-teeeee-ta-tinka-tink-teeeeee…

A flesh-colored bowling ball spun around and around inside the trunk… no, not a ball. Hugo Toy’s severed, split-open head. It lay awkwardly on its side, gummy strings of blood vessels and nerve endings trailing from the stump of its raggedly hacked neck. The flesh had been peeled off his face, making his eyes look very big and round indeed. The head revolved in a slow circle, much like a ballerina pirouetting inside its music box.

“I can hear the muh-music in my head.” Dr. Toy smiled. Flecks of brain shone on the flayed sinew of his cheeks. “It never ends, Lucas. Nuh-nuh-never, ever…”

The Tickle Trunk shut. Luke could still hear those cold, jangling notes. The walls exhaled again. He left the alcove behind. In time, he rounded back into the main lab. It was empty. He glanced at Westlake’s lab. Alice’s face was framed in the porthole.

“Oh hello, Al.”

Hiya, Doc.

Bees squirmed in and out of Alice’s eyes.

“You don’t look so hot.”

She opened her mouth and bees poured out, coiling around her neck in a yellow-and-black noose.

I’ve seen better days, Doc.

He turned away. He saw something beneath the lab bench. Had it been there all along? How had he not seen it before?

He set his shoulder to the bench. Despite its size, it slid easily.

There was a door in the floor. Solid wood with a ringbolt. The sort of door you’d find in old cabins and farmhouses, leading down to the…

—basement—

…root cellar.

The wood was warm and faintly pulsating. The skin of a slumbering elephant.

Luke gripped the bolt and pulled. Narrow stone steps sawed down.

“…Daddy!…”

Zach’s voice quivered up out of the dark, strained and fearful.

“The Fig Men, Daddy!”

“They’re only figments,” Luke croaked. “Figments of your imagination. They can’t hurt you if you don’t believe in them.”

Silence. Then: thick, chortling laughter. The laughter of the Fig Men? The hairs stiffened on Luke’s arms. His son was down there somewhere. And he needed his father.

The steps were worn smooth, as if subject to much traffic; the stone wept beads of moisture like the rock in a cave. Luke’s feet fit perfectly—the steps could have been built for him specifically. They carried him down under the lab to the bottommost place on earth. The true basement of the world.

Darkness slipped up his calves and knees in sly tendrils. It coated his chest and filmed his eyes. Somewhere above—a few feet; a million miles—the wooden door slipped softly shut.

He could see here in the dark. Not well, but enough to navigate by. Luke got the sense he was on an unsupported stairway spiraling down; if he slipped he’d fall forever, never hitting anything…

…or perhaps something would catch him eventually.

The air grew thicker. He inhaled the scent of ancient earth. He was beneath all things now. Beneath every pure element in life, beneath hope and joy and perhaps even love. None of that could touch him here.

A rock wall materialized to his left. It ran sheer beneath his fingertips, as cold and featureless as iced steel. He heard a sharp thunk somewhere below. It sounded a little like a door sliding open.

He followed the stairs until the rock vanished under his fingertips. He stared at the spot where it had been with dull shock.

“Hello, Lucas.”

Clayton was curled into a box carved out of the rock. A perfect square cut into the sheer rock face, barely big enough to hold his body. Luke stifled the moan that rose up in his throat. His brother was naked and skinnier than any human being should possibly be. A living skeleton. His joints bulged. His head was nothing but a skull covered in latex-thin skin. He was folded into the rock-box in a cross-legged swami pose, his head bowed to fit.

“How… how long have you been here?” Luke whispered.

Clayton cocked his terrible fleshless head, considering his brother’s question.

“I can’t say exactly,” he said. “How long is forever?”

Clayton’s hands fussed over his caved-in stomach. His fingers, tipped with sharp black nails, sunk into his belly. The flesh ripped with sickening ease. He tore and gouged at himself. The thinnest hint of a smile painted his lips.

“Oh, Clay, really, I wish you wouldn’t…”

Clayton’s innards spilled into his lap. They were chalky and dry, like sausage links coated in flour. He rummaged through the knotted loops, selecting the finest portion and raising it to his mouth. It made the lovely snap of a good Coney Island hot dog when he bit into it. Fine bluish powder spurted out. Robin’s egg blue: same color as the chemical inside the pot of tree killer.

Clayton chewed thoughtfully, absorbed in the act. His lips were stained dark blue, like a child who’d eaten too many grape Popsicles.

“I really shouldn’t,” he said shamefacedly, “but honestly, I can’t help myself.”

He turned away, embarrassed. Luke was filled with an ineffable despair; he reached toward his brother—then the rocks slid over him in a solid sheet, shutting Clayton back inside his tiny box. The wall was solid again: not a seam, not a mark.

He continued down until the stairway abruptly ended. Luke stumbled the way a man does when misjudging the number of steps in a darkened house, his arms outflung.

The ground was spongy. He got the sense of standing atop a pair of lungs taking the shallowest breaths.

Zachary was there. Luke saw him clearly. He looked the way Luke remembered him. His hands and fingers proportional again. Luke beheld the boy he and his wife had raised in a cheery sunlit house in Iowa. The boy who still held his plastic cups with both hands when he drank cherry Kool-Aid, which left a crimson mustache above his lip. The boy who would nestle his chin into the swell of his father’s throat at bedtime—the groove so perfect, two bodies locking together in flawless synchronicity—and whisper: I love you more than ice cream and pizza.

It’s very nice to be loved, Luke thought. Is there anything nicer in life?

He opened his arms. “Zachary. Please.”

The space behind Zachary swelled with light. The darkness blew away; beyond that lay a new emptiness, illuminated by an aquifer of sickly light. A pair of arms filled that emptiness. Enormous, world swallowing. Flabby and wrinkled, sallow flesh draping the bones like proofing dough. Ghastly arms ending in huge, cruel hands. Thick knuckled, each finger curled into a sickle.

Familiar hands. Those of his mother.

Behind those hands lay a shape or shapes that Luke could not fathom. It spanned out and up, sheer as a cliff face, rising beyond the reach of his sight and his mind. The cliff shone in places—the dazzling but condensed light of a camera flash reflected in tinted glass. It was dark in other spots, a shade more profound than any Luke had known.

Zachary ran into those hands the way a child might chase a bouncing ball onto a busy street. Luke opened his mouth, but no sound came out. The hands enfolded his son. Zachary turned and stared at Luke through a gap in those massive fingers. His eyes emptied out, his face melting as his skin ran like candlewax.

The hands opened. They were empty.

Next the hands decayed and collapsed, flesh dripping off in gobbets until only the bones remained. Those were then absorbed into that nest of livid industry…

…but they left something behind. An ovoid ball that pulsated gently.

Next, his mother and father stepped from the trembling darkness.

4.

A CHILL SWEPT OVER HIM. His mother, corpulent and fearsome—and a few steps behind her came his father, stooped and hangdog.

“You have come, child. After all this time.”

No, it wasn’t his parents. That wasn’t his mother’s voice. Whatever these creatures were, they were merely draped in the flesh and figure of his parents. The imitation was good, cunning, but imperfect in some way—perhaps purposefully so.

The two figures who stood before him seemed to have been birthed from the cliff of flesh that backgrounded them. Their fleshy coverings withered and peeled. His mother and father’s faces rotted away in pestilent rags. The creatures underneath were humanlike in their rudiments, but not so in their particulars.

One was tall and shockingly thin; the other was squat and pear-shaped. Their flesh had a boiled, piglet-pink sheen; raw sinews cabled the visible portions of their anatomies.

Their legs were squat and elephantine, their groins sexless. Their arms were so long and thick—engorged fire hoses—that they trailed to the ground and curled back, networking into the roiling cliff.

Luke found his voice. “Dear God…”

“God is not here,” the tall one said.

“Perhaps he should apologize for his absence,” said the squat one.

Ancient. These things were older than anything any human being had ever laid eyes on. Their flesh was flayed open, the raw tendons scored with tiny cracks. Yet their skin was nearly translucent, too, as if their bones had been smeared with a thick coating of Vaseline—it was as though the years in their endless accumulation had sucked the pigment from it. Their skulls showed through in places, the bone as brittle as the parchment in a dusty book.

These creatures were carved out of time itself—the hands on the clock couldn’t touch them anymore, though they had certainly left their mark.

Pitiless. This was Luke’s second and overriding sense. Beholding them, Luke realized for the first time in his life that there are things on earth, or beyond it, who are careless in the most quotidian terms: they lack the inclination or desire to care for anything. They are pitiless in the most simplified fashion, as they simply lack the ability to feel it.

“What are you?” Luke asked.

“Call us the Fig Men,” the creatures said in unison.

Luke shook his head. “The Fig Men don’t exist. The Fig Men are figments.”

“We go by many names,” the tall Fig Man said. “It is of no matter.”

“We exist in many guises,” said the squat one.

“Is all this…” Luke shivered involuntarily. “Did you…?”

The creatures inclined their heads at one another, teeth chattering in their seemingly lipless mouths. Was it laughter?

“Why?” was all Luke could ask.

“Fun,” the tall Fig Man said in a honeyed voice.

“Fun,” the squat one echoed.

“Games.”

“Games,” came the echo.

Torturously, the gears in Luke’s head began to mesh. He was beset by the same sense that he imagined a field mouse might hold the moment before the falcon swooped down: the sense of having been singled out, tracked at great distance, studied for a purpose that he could not possibly understand—and then, when the time was ripe, he was plucked squealing from the long grass. Meat for the feast.

“Why me?” was his next, utterly selfish question.

“You?” the squat one scoffed.

“You were not the key,” said the tall one.

“Then who…”

The Fig Men’s faces split in lewd rictuses.

“Oh, child,” they said in unison.

Luke knew. Of course he knew.

“We observed you,” the tall one said. “For as long as you can remember, we have been watching you both.”

“Tedious,” the squat one said.

“Our reach is not insignificant.” The tall one angled its head like a dog intuiting a high-pitched whistle. “We have connections to your world. You have seen them, child.”

It arrived with a thunderclap of understanding. The thing in the drainage pipe. The thing in the Tickle Trunk. Maybe even the thing in Westlake’s basement in Belmont, Connecticut…

…the thing lurking in the park not far from Luke’s house in Iowa City?

All the same thing, or parts of it. The Fig Men were their proud parents. And their children were malevolent, but not as old or repellent as these things.

The tall one said, “We have observed many of your species, over centuries.”

“Eons,” said the squat one.

“Your brother intrigued us.”

“As much as any of your kind do.”

“The special qualities of his mind.”

“Mulish, but intriguing.”

“We chart these qualities. There is so little else to occupy us down here. There have been other minds to capture our interest.”

“Better ones,” said the squat one.

“The short-eyed Florentine,” the tall one said.

“Da Vinci.”

“And the other one. The insomniac pigeon-keeper.”

“Tesla.”

“Fine minds.”

“Superior to your brother,” the squat one said.

“Perhaps so,” the tall one agreed. “And of a quality suited to our purposes… and yet.”

“And yet.”

“You were not ready. As a species. You lacked the knowledge to find us. But now you have that knowledge,” the tall one said mock-brightly.

“And here you are,” said the squat one.

Tricksters—the word raced through Luke’s mind. Merciless game players. Everything that had occurred had been the work of these… things.

“Why not just leave this place if you hate it so much?”

The tall one shook its head. “We cannot, child.”

“We have been shackled,” the squat one said petulantly.

The Fig Men’s eyes swiveled skyward. Heavenward. Luke could only wonder at their origins. Perhaps they were the last surviving members of an ancient tribe who’d been cast out, cast down. Shunned. They had lain down here, licking their wounds. Next, they set about baiting their trap—and when that moment arrived, their knives were sharp for the opportunity.

“Why?” Luke asked.

“We like to toy,” they said in perfect unity.

Toy. Never in Luke’s life had the word sounded so monolithically sinister.

“We fiddle,” the squat one said.

“We test,” said the tall one.

“We discover how things work.”

“How they fail.”

“Their pressure points.”

“Their tolerances.”

“We are curious.”

“Eternally curious.”

Luke envisioned these ageless tinkerers examining bodies and minds for the sheer sport of it. Flaying brains open and plucking each synapse like the strings of a lute, teasing out every private fear and horror. Caring nothing for those they entrapped and tortured, committed solely to their games. They had done it to everyone down here. They had turned the Trieste into their laboratory. Their killing jar.

“I remember everything down here,” Luke said. “My mother. My family. My old life. But it’s too clear. The clarity is… hellish.”

The Fig Men grinned like children.

“Oh, yes?” said the tall one.

“This pleases us,” said the squat one.

Luke’s brain pounded within its bowl of bone; it seemed to expand, the grey matter expanding with the mad hum of his tormented thoughts, pressing against his nasal shelf until he was ill with it. Memory as a sickness.

“Your species is so busy forgetting,” the squat one said.

“But not you, child,” said the tall one.

“It is our special offering.” The squat one stared at Luke placidly. “Does it not please you?”

Were they even evil? Luke considered the fact that these things may well exist above the terms that humankind ascribes to certain actions or behaviors. The Fig Men were elementally themselves, as surely they had always been.

But their natures must have gotten them in trouble with the higher ups. And so they had been put in a place where they could do the least harm.

“The ambrosia,” he said. “Yours?”

“Your kind requires a small enticement. You need…”

The tall one looked to the squat one in search of the word.

“Bait,” the squat one said.

“Yes, bait. The hounds must chase the hare down the hole.”

“And the ’Gets?”

“A happy convergence,” said the squat one. “Our powers do not extend to such a degree.”

“You would have come for less,” said the tall one.

“You are a vain species,” the squat one sneered.

Luke knew this was true. Ambrosia appeared to cure the ’Gets, and so that was how the narrative played out—the hunt to find a solution for the incurable disease. But Clayton and others of his ilk would have pursued the lure of the ambrosia regardless of circumstance, whether it promised relief from cancer, AIDS, or old age. The unknown was a profoundly powerful intoxicant.

“Why me?” he asked again. “You had my brother already. So why?”

“Because,” the tall one said, “we had nothing to offer him in return for bearing our gift.”

“There was nothing tying your brother to the surface.” A look of true confusion graced the squat one’s face. “He prefers to be with… us.”

“There is no accounting,” the tall one said.

“But you.” The squat one flicked a serrate black tongue over its teeth. “Ohhh, now you…”

“You have loved, my child.”

“You have supped that weak nectar.”

“You have ties to the sunlit world. And you see, we too wish to see the sun again.”

“After all, we were there for its birth,” said the squat one. “Your brother was the key. He was a satisfactory tool. But his use has been served.”

“Your use has yet begun,” the tall one told Luke.

“I just want to go home,” Luke said. It was the simplest request he’d ever made, and he asked as a child would.

“And you may,” the tall one said laughingly. “Of course, of course. We insist upon it. But with our gift. You will bear it.”

Gift?

The cliff behind the Fig Men flexed and cramped. A shrill, prolonged moan filtered out of the dark. Chillingly, it sounded like a dog’s moan.

“Our gift,” the tall one repeated.

“You must take it,” the squat one echoed. “We have arranged it. You must accept our terms.”

“What terms?”

The tall one grinned. “Oh, come now.”

“It took all of our powers to accomplish it,” the squat one said. “It was… draining, would be your understanding of it. We had to slumber afterward.”

“Such sweet slumber.”

“Sweet, yes. And when we awoke we had company.”

“Such merry company.”

The long con.

It was a term Abby had described to Luke years ago, after they had watched a movie about a pair of bunko artists plying their trade across the Midwest.

There are two types of cons, she’d told him. Short and long. The short con is a confidence trick that can be pulled in minutes. Three-card monte’s your classic short con. The other one, the long con, unfolds over days or weeks, even years. It involves preparation, props, costumes, scripted lines. The long con takes time. The con men have to gain the full trust of their rubes; it’s got to be seamless, you know? A perfect facsimile of life.

How the hell do you know all this? Luke had asked her. Should I be watching my wallet around you?

Your wallet? Abby sniffed. That’s pure short con. You should watch your bank account.

These creatures had known. Luke saw that now. All along they had known.

They had seen the shape of the world to come and had bent it to their own devices. They had divined it all a lifetime ago, back when Clayton and Luke were only babes. They had watched the two of them their entire lives, doting over them like careful babysitters… no, more like pig farmers waiting with idle interest while the spring hogs were fattened for slaughter. These things had toyed with the fates of both Clayton and himself, engineering their lives to the finest calibration…

…and then, one autumn evening at a park not far from Luke’s home, they’d played their finest trick of all.

“You stole my son.”

The squat one tittered. “Foolish child, you must always mind your belongings. Never let them out of sight.”

In a conversational tone, Luke said: “Fuck you.”

The squat one’s face peeled back from its skull, its teeth elongating into curved rat’s teeth. Its arms undulated silkily.

“Have you any idea what I could—”

The tall one hissed warningly. The squat one cringed.

“Such a harsh word, stole,” the tall one said. “We have held him. Kept him safe. And we did so knowing you would pay what you owe to reclaim that which was once yours.”

Luke closed his eyes. Ole Zach Attack. They had taken him. Ruined his family. Ripped Luke’s life apart—they knew he would have to be utterly hopeless before he agreed to come to this watery hell in pursuit of his insufferable brother. Luke must have nothing left to live for. Well, they had seen to that. Zach had spent the last seven years with these things. Seven human years, the passage of which seemed immaterial in a place like this. More years than he had spent with his own parents. What would that do to his son—to anyone?

Luke opened his eyes. “What do you want?”

“To be free,” they said simply.

“You don’t deserve it,” Luke croaked, a ghastly smile spreading across his face. “You deserve to be down here. Alone.”

The Fig Men smiled back. Luke’s soul shuddered. The cliff was swelling behind them—it seemed to be curling over in its upper recesses, beyond Luke’s sight, a horrific wave preparing to break.

The Fig Men smiled bashfully, coquettishly. It’s just little ol’ us, child. What harm can we cause?

“Our gift…”

“I won’t accept it.”

The tall one said, “Why ever not?”

Luke set his feet. “I’ll die here.”

They chuckled mordantly.

“Oh my child,” the squat one said, “will you remain a stranger to yourself to the very end?”

“You love too much,” the tall one said. An expression flitted across its face that could have charitably passed for sorrow. “Your kind does so—loves heedlessly, without restraint or governance. It can lead you to grand places, surely. Places we have never seen or ever will.”

“But love has other uses, too,” said the squat one.

The ovoid ball those monstrous hands had left behind began to throb, its exterior issuing crackling birch-bark sounds. It bulged and heaved as whatever lay within struggled to set itself free…

A cocoon. Of course it was. Just like the one he’d once pointed out to Zach in the backyard, the one with a lunar moth crawling out of it. This cocoon was tar-black, just like the ones that had encased the Fig Men in his son’s closet…

The cocoon expanded, pulsing like a diseased heart. Its exterior shed in crackling layers as it stretched with an awful elasticity.

Something split through. Dark and bladelike. A broth of pulpy sludge issued forth. One appendage was joined by another. Two arms, two huge and spidery hands. Tearing and sawing the cocoon apart.

A bulbous head appeared. It was all black. It opened its mouth—out came the shocked cry of an infant.

Its eyes opened next. They pinned Luke in a gaze that was equal parts malevolent and loving.

“Daddy,” it said.

It slipped from its sheath. Its shape was incomprehensible. Its lunatic anatomy humped toward Luke, those two gnarled but powerful arms dragging the ruin of a body still slick with amniotic fluid.

Zachary. After all this time, Luke’s son had returned to him.

He fell to his knees. The Fig Men watched impassively.

“Our gift,” they said. “Will you accept it?”

His son drew nearer. His skull was swollen and hairless; veins bulged over his scalp, pulsating weakly. Luke saw elements of others he’d known in the awful contours of that face—his brother’s pursed lips, his mother’s delicate ears. His son’s mouth split into a smile. His teeth were tiny, his old milk teeth, each one trimmed to a sharp point.

Luke held his arms out. He wanted to touch his son again. To be Zachary’s protector, his Human Shield—he’d failed his son once at that, failed Zach and Abby both, but never again. Not in a million years. He’d die first.

My son, my son. Come back to me. Let me hold you again. I’ll protect you this time, I promise. I will never let you go. I WILL NEVER EVER EVER LET YOU GO—

Tendrils spooled out of Zachary’s mouth, each no thicker than baby’s hair. They danced toward Luke’s face, licking and sampling. They needled painlessly into his flesh, twining with the twitching tendons under his skin, hooking around his skull and tightening with the fierceness of a devoted lover.

Yes, Luke thought dimly. Together again. Together forever.

Luke could feel it inside him now: blooming outward like an oil slick, covering everything with darkness.

Luke Nelson’s final memory was this:

Zachary was five. Abby had enrolled him in peewee soccer. Zachary was the goalie. He’d let in the winning goal. They walked home afterward, Zachary in his cleats and shin pads, his white socks stained with grass.

People think it’s about winning and losing, sport, Luke told him, because he could tell his son was upset. About winning, mainly. But that’s not it. It’s about the trying. The not-giving-up. We’re all going to lose. So it’s about losing and going on, keep going on, even though you may lose again and again. You may never win, buddy, not at some things. So it’s about working as hard as you can, every day, to find your spot on the mountain. And then it’s about being okay with where you are so that you can get some enjoyment out of that, and out of the things in life that are more important than whatever place you end up on that silly old mountain, anyway.

Zachary turned his face up to his father, the underside of his chin lit by the paling sunlight. He’d nodded stoically—a gesture well in advance of his years—and kept his silence. Perhaps he’d understood that even if his father hadn’t managed to put his mind at ease, at least he’d tried. Being a father was an imperfect science, and its test subjects, that man’s sons and daughters, had to accept their father’s imperfections just as each father must eventually accept those same imperfections within himself.

Luke felt his face opening as the tendrils stripped his flesh back. He felt no fear or pain. His skin parted in a solid flap—a door swinging open.

Inside was the warmest, most inviting light Luke had ever known.

His son came inside. Luke invited him in with every ounce of love in his heart. Zachary’s hands pushed through Luke’s face, entering his skull. First one, then the other. There was so much space in there now. His house had many rooms, all splendorous.

Yes, yes, my boy my boy oh do come in…

Zachary’s head came next. Luke stared into his son’s cruelly slitted eyes. A flutter arose in his chest, a dark wingbeat… it went away. It all went away.

Luke was happy to let it go.

It felt so good to simply let… go.

I’m sorry, he thought, though to whom or for what cause he was incapable of expressing. I’m so sorry so sorry so sorry so—

Finally, Luke Nelson slipped silently inside himself to join his son. His passage made no sound at all.

Somewhere, a door swung shut.

5.

THE CHALLENGER ASCENDED.

And within it, nothing human.

The vessel’s ascent was swift—the sea ripped away in deferential sheets in order to aid its climb, or perhaps to cast it out.

Far below, the Trieste lay in spiderlike contemplation. No light shone in its labs. Its tunnels ran empty. It waited as it had since the beginning of all things, in one guise or another. Its walls bellied against the ceaseless pressure. Perhaps the thinnest stream of water would needle in, and moments later the strange and horrible edifice would be flattened… but some places are resistant to both time and pressure. Their occupants—their true occupants—are similarly impervious to such things.

Perhaps the Trieste’s many-splendored halls would entertain life again. A select group of good-hearted souls entrusted with the salvation of the human race. Students of rationality and science who had heard the breathless stories of those who’d gone before and smartly dismissed them. The Trieste’s prior occupants had been weak-minded, superstitious fools.

And so they would come down in ones and twos, arriving with their hopes and goals and adamantine minds—minds they believed to be unbreakable.

And who knows? They might bring a dog or two with them.

The power would be restored. The lights would flicker down the tunnels and over the wide window in the main lab. And whatever existed there would retreat into the darkness, its natural element, until the time came to call itself once more into the light.

NIGHTTIME NOW. The Hesperus sat in isolated abandonment. Pinprick fires danced from the points of its blackened architecture.

A single figure awaited. Its body was a canvas of scars. It stared through clumsy slits it had made in its own face, its eyes peering through bulbs of scar tissue with feverish avidity. When the sea began to roil, it gibbered with excitement: the unconcealed glee of a dog at the return of its long-lost master.

The Challenger surfaced. The heavens flinched.

The hatch swung open.

Moonlight fell upon its darkest cargo.

What shambled forth was unspeakable.