Deeper

by Jeff Long

  “Meaning what?”

  “They only had to deal with accidents and bad luck. It’s different anymore. Now you have the drift.”

  His migrants again. “Maybe one of them saw the children,” said Ali.

  “Maybe one of them is the children,” said the captain.

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’re wasting your time out here,” the boatman said.

  “Not if we can find them.”

  “They’ll find you, don’t worry. Leave them alone, that’s my advice. Steer clear.”

  “The children need our help, though. Surely you understand. You’re a father.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “In your heart, I meant.”

  “That’s what they eat,” said the captain. “You’ve got to guard against them or they’ll eat your heart.”

  Ali didn’t pursue it. The colonists had a reputation for strange behavior. “Odd runs deep” ran the expression. If you weren’t a little off before you came down, you got there soon enough. Living among sea serpents and pale, joyless comrades and glass lobsters, it was no wonder the captain was so peculiar.

  They rode in silence for the next few hours. Then lights began to dance in the distance. “Missionary Point,” said the captain.

  Ali spied a thin beach beneath a cliff. The bay looked like a graveyard for boats. Only a few had been pulled out of the water. They passed the snout of a kayak that had capsized and partially sunk. The rest of the jumble of rafts and boats bobbed up and down as the boatman threaded between them. Their hulls squeaked and clacked softly against each other.

  The captain ran his Zodiac onto the sand and cut the engine. Immediately he hopped out and started grabbing for their gear. This was the most energy Ali had seen in him.

  Ali got out and played her light up the cliff. A trail wound up the side.

  “Who do we talk to about buying a boat?” she asked the captain.

  “Take one. Help yourself. There’s a good one over there.”

  “You mean steal it?”

  “They’ll never notice. Hell, take two, one for each of you, Jack and Jill.”

  He tossed the last of their bags onto the sand and shouldered his boat back into the water. Ali had a thought. “You said your wife is here.”

  “If she’s still alive.”

  A heart of stone, this man. “What’s her name?” At least they could have that much entrée.

  “Susannah.” The captain hopped in and yanked the starter cord. Not a good-bye or a good luck: he left them on the beach. They were as dead to him as his wife was.

  “Peace out to you, too, pendejo,” Gregorio growled.

  “Let’s go buy a boat,” Ali said.

  They left their gear and climbed the winding footpath. She expected a village up where the lights were. Instead they found thirty or forty people gathered on the flat crest of the cliff. They were crowded together, living in the open. No one noticed her or Gregorio.

  The ledge jutted like a great prow into the lake. There were no buildings, no tents, not even sheets or pads for sleeping, just this mass of people standing or sitting or kneeling. They were singing in drones, all different songs, or murmuring to themselves, watching, all faced out to the darkness. Waiting, it seemed.

  “This feels bad,” Gregorio said.

  “Bad?”

  “Weird.”

  She looked at his purple-and-white-striped rock-climber tights and “Reelect Pedro” T-shirt, and remembered his cell phone with a frog’s mating cry. Weird? “We’ll only be a few minutes.”

  “Let’s leave.” His hackles were up.

  “First we need a ride.”

  “Steal a boat, like the man said.”

  “Not a good attitude,” she said.

  Ali went out on the ledge. It smelled of human sewage and rotten fish and something sweet. The people there were like refugees gathered to weather a flood. Those with lights went on wagging them at the far darkness, whether beckoning or warning Ali couldn’t tell. Some were smiling, some humming hymns, some holding photos. A few held aloft lighters with little tongues of orange flame licking at the night. All faced out to the lake.

  “Excuse me,” she said to a woman clutching a rosary. The shoulder of her dress was coming unraveled.

  Like a blind woman, the rosary lady groped for Ali’s face. The moment her fingers touched Ali, she recoiled. “Wrong,” she said, and turned back to the lake.

  Ali frowned and went on. She stepped over a man asleep on his side. Then she saw he was dead. Mouth open, eyes staring, he lay uncovered in their midst.

  Ali backed away, shocked, and bumped against a man dangling his legs over the edge. She staggered back from the cliff side.

  “Almost lost you there,” the man said with a British accent. “Pull up a seat.”

  The Brit was emaciated, with long, oily strings for hair, but quite jolly. He continued flashing short and long bursts of light out across the water in some private semaphore. He had to be aware of that corpse. It lay only a few feet behind him and the smell was overpowering.

  “You’re new here,” the Brit said. His eyes were glassy and unfocused. Were they all on drugs?

  “We came from Port Dylan.”

  “Good news then,” he said. “This is the spot. They’ll be arriving any minute now.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, who did you come for?” the man asked.

  “The children,” said Ali.

  “Good, good.” The Brit winked. “Then your children are on their way. Have a seat.”

  Ali looked across the water as far as their feeble lights reached, and there was only the inky stone night. No flotillas of rafts and boats sailing in from the recesses. No children. Nothing.

  “How long have you been here?” Now she saw other bodies lying at their feet.

  “We’ve conquered time,” he said.

  “There’s a dead man right behind you,” she said.

  “Conquered death, too,” he said.

  She didn’t see any food. “Aren’t you hungry?”

  “That’s just your stomach talking, don’t you think?” The man flipped his hand dismissively. “Once they come, everything’s right with the world again. You’ll see.”

  His serenity was eerie and regal and terrible. These people were wasting away in their own filth and starvation. Those boats floating in the bay were never going to be used again.

  She glanced out at the lake. “Who are you waiting for?”

  “Me? My wife. The others, they have their own priorities.”

  Ali looked around her at the starved faces. Few had any fat still left on them. It was a form of collective delusion. Had they shared some toxic meal, or drunk something in the water? Had their ghosts driven them mad? Or was this the local dump for the insane? “Who looks after you?”

  “Don’t be afraid.” The Brit smiled. “Have a seat.”

  “We need a boat,” she said.

  But the Brit had tuned her out. He was slowly waving his light at the void. Ali remembered the captain’s wife.

  “Susannah?” she called to the gathering. No one answered. Ali moved through the huddle. She had to step over three more bodies. If they didn’t care about corpses, then they didn’t care about their boats. Yet Ali felt obliged to give someone some money to make it all official. “Susannah?” she called again.

  A woman’s face turned. Ali went to her. “Are you Susannah?”

  Susannah had a dazed smile. From the waist up, she was nude. “I don’t know you,” she said.

  “My name is Ali. Your husband brought us here.”

  “Jason? The children ask for him. Is he here?”

  “He had to leave,” she said. “He told me you have children.”

  “Seven years old, that’s Jacob. The two girls are three.”

  “I don’t see them, Susannah.”

  “They went to look for Daddy,” Susannah confided. “I told them where to find him. They miss him so bad. It’s awful, t
heir weeping and howling. Go find him, I said.”

  The stench of death and unwashed bodies and human waste alarmed Ali. “I’m searching for children,” she said. “They were stolen from their homes.”

  “Wait here,” Susannah said. “Just wait.”

  It was the same lotus-eating advice that the Brit had offered. “This is urgent,” said Ali.

  “Have faith,” Susannah said.

  “They need our help,” Ali said.

  “Oh, not anymore. It’s so beautiful. Believe me. They’re safe now.”

  “Susannah,” said Ali. She gripped the bare, bony shoulder and gave a gentle shake. “We need to find these children.”

  “No you don’t. They’ll find you.”

  “The children were stolen by hadals,” Ali said.

  Susannah only smiled at her. “Mine went out on the lake,” she said.

  Ali didn’t want to be here anymore. “We need a boat, Susannah. Do you have a boat? I’ll buy it.”

  “The children took it,” Susannah said. Her tranquillity muddied for a moment. A measure of sanity bubbled to the surface.

  “They took your boat?” A seven-year-old and his two little sisters? To look for Daddy. “They went out on the lake?”

  “I don’t know what got into their heads,” said Susannah. “Two years ago. We searched. Finally they came floating home, one by one. I pulled them out of the water with my own hands.”

  The moist breeze felt cold suddenly. “What happened, Susannah?”

  “The boat must have tipped. Maybe it sank. The lake took them. It erased their little faces and eyes. But I knew it was them. One, two, three.” The terrible memory twisted her features.

  Ali could hardly breathe. “You lost your children?”

  “Ah,” said the woman, as if stabbed. Then the madness took over again. Her pain lifted. “We’re together again. They found me. Bless their little souls.”

  Ali stared at the woman, then around at the others, all signaling to their dead. The drift. Migrants. Memories. Guard against them.

  Someone hooted. The crowd was stirring. People pressed forward.

  “They’re coming!”

  Ali threw a look at the lake’s empty blackness and shuddered. She retreated from the ledge. Gregorio stood up. Ali could not quit shaking. He looped one arm around her. “Did they sell you a boat?”

  “The captain was right,” she said. “We have to help ourselves.”

  They chose a good, stout Zodiac. Gregorio checked its engine. While Ali loaded in the supplies, Gregorio went from one boat to another and siphoned fuel into cans.

  As they pulled out of the bay, Ali glanced up at the twinkling lights on the cliff’s edge. For a moment she could have sworn she heard voices spilling in over the bow from the open water and far distances. But it had to be carrying out from those poor lunatics on Missionary Point. She made a nest for herself next to the engine, and after a while its noise brought her peace.

  ARTIFACTS

  THE LOS ANGELES TIMES

  China Submarine Grounds on California Coast

  Dec. 26. Santa Cruz. A Chinese submarine loaded with nuclear missiles grounded on the beach at Santa Cruz, California, yesterday. Its entire crew was captured and the submarine is now in U.S. custody.

  President Burr has called on Americans not to panic. “The missiles have all been secured,” he stated. “There is no danger that the submarine might explode.”

  The submarine apparently rammed ashore at full speed, sending surfers flying. According to eyewitnesses, Chinese crew members emerged shaken, disoriented, and very frightened. Several were armed, but held their fire upon seeing the amusement park. The captain is reportedly being held at a hospital, on the psychiatric wing, and is under a round-the-clock suicide watch.

  The submarine now sits beached in Monterey Bay for all to see from a distance. Military specialists are poring over the vessel, a new diesel-powered attack submarine of the Yuan class.

  “This is a major disaster for China,” said David T. Shamling, a China specialist at the Rand Corporation. “Their most advanced submarine, one that has been photographed just once, and then only from space, has fallen into American hands at exactly the wrong time for China. Just as China is making threats about the Green Barrens massacre, her best and brightest come crashing onto our shores armed and ready for nuclear war.”

  21

  NINE HUNDRED FEET BENEATH THE BERING SEA FLOOR

  Ali and Gregorio followed the lake’s mute shore, moving from one deserted settlement to another by boat. Now and then they passed some gaunt man or woman standing beside the water, looking out expectantly, waiting with infinite, lunatic patience.

  Off one spit of land, they spied a man’s head floating on the water. Drawing closer, they realized the rest of him was mired neck deep in the lake. They shined their light at him, and Gregorio almost fell overboard when the man blinked. He was still alive. When Ali called to him, he moved his lips in that mindless way they had seen at Missionary Point. They left him standing in the water, food for the fishes.

  Fearing a virus might be responsible for the dementia, they purified their water religiously, stuck to their own rations, and did not eat the fish. The only times they landed was to plunder empty boats for more fuel.

  They settled into a routine, one of them piloting the boat while the other slept. In that way they could stay on the move almost constantly.

  Gregorio woke Ali from her doze. “We’re coming to another village,” he said. He nosed the boat into a cove, spotlighting its beach and outcrops and the terraces with huts, searching for any dangers.

  “More bones,” said Ali.

  Gregorio swept the light left. Half buried in sand, a human rib cage stood at the water’s edge. The desolation and bones were no longer spooky, just wearying. Ali watched him watching for danger, his black eyes glittering.

  Life aboard the Zodiac had grown electric. When she slipped off straps or opened buttons to take her little bird baths, he would busy himself to comic agitation. While he slept, and she was supposed to be steering the boat, her disobedient eyes would go roaming over him. But the ghost of Ike hung over them.

  Gregorio idled a safe distance from shore, his pistol ready. A long hump of shells glistened on the beach. Four boats stood on the water like horses at a hitching post. The stone buildings were long and low, built by hadals thousands of years ago and borrowed, for a brief while, by squatters with no lasting power.

  Finally he decided. “Empty. We are safe.” And took them to shore.

  Ali climbed down, careful not to stick herself on any broken bones. “I’m going for a look,” she said.

  “Take the gun.”

  “There’s no one here, Gregorio. Keep the gun.”

  They had talked about this. There were only two of them, neither trained in the war arts. No amount of weaponry could insulate them from a hadal menace. They were better off relying on their strengths: her languages, his flute. They had come to negotiate a peace, or at least the release of the children, not to blow up the place.

  Ali took off with long strides, working out the kinks. She picked up several of the shells. One species had stripes identical to the banded colors of a rainbow, violet at the bottom, red on top. How extraordinary, she thought. First that a thing evolving in darkness should have any color at all, and second that it should mimic the spectrum of light with such blind precision. She held the shell up to her lamp beam.

  Out of the blue, Ali recalled a certain rainbow after a summer thunderstorm. Maggie had been two then. They had lain on a blanket on a hill, oohing and ahing at the rainbow’s colors. Abruptly the memory shifted. She was reading The Rainbow Fish to Maggie in bed. It shifted again. This time she and Maggie were drinking hot chocolate, listening to the Cowboy Junkies. And painting rainbows.

  Ali dropped the shells. She threw the rainbow away from her. The memories faded.

  The association was happening more frequently since their arrival at Emperor Lake.
It disturbed her. Maggie kept materializing from nowhere, almost real enough to hold. Sometimes the memories were moored to the present, as with the rainbow shells. Other times, it seemed Maggie was calling to her from a distance, not with her three-year-old voice, just a voice, a Maggie voice.

  Ali had come within a hair of reentering the convent after the funeral, thinking maybe she should find God again. Instead she had founded the institute and thrown herself into researching the devil and his dark civilization. If she could tease out of that savagery some ray of sunshine, then…then what? Then maybe she could discover mercy in God’s infinite cruelty toward them? The danger had always been that she might hold the hadals too close, that she might learn to love them. Now there was this new risk, that she might hold her memories too close.

  She had been so sure the remembering was laid to rest. But the darkness bred yearning. Sleep, baby, thought Ali. I love you. That’s all I can do for you anymore.

  Gregorio caught up with her. “Alexandra, why do you get so reckless? Stay with me. Or let me stay with you.”

  “You said the place was empty.”

  “But what if I was wrong? Something could be in here.”

  “I would know,” she said.

  “How?”

  I would smell them. I would hear them. And it was true. Her senses were growing more acute every day. The abyss was taking her in once again. But she did not tell Gregorio, because it frightened her, the gifts of this place, the temptations. The cave could sweep you away in an instant. Ike was proof of that.

  They cast through the village, poking their lights here and there. Where the roofs had fallen apart, Ali peeped over the tops of walls. The settlers’ possessions spoke of minds slowly unraveling. Clothing lay scattered and rotting. Photographs, newspapers, books, and discs had been thrown madly into the air and left where they lay. She rooted through their leavings, mystified.

  After the Interior’s discovery fifteen years ago, pioneers had descended to a handful of fortress “cores” built on blueprints for proposed lunar or Martian colonies. The NASA connection again. But the hadals had still been active back then, choking off expansion. Settlers rarely ventured farther than a day’s reach of the fortified centers. Indeed, until the Helios expedition that had given her Ike, “deep exploration” was limited to timid short-range forays by miners, scientists, and military patrols. Then came the plague—released by someone on the Helios expedition—and the Interior had been evacuated. The settlers who refused to leave had died along with the hadals. That had marked the end of the first wave.