by Nick Cutter
“Oh my,” said Edie, sycophantically. “Sounds terrible.”
“It is terrible. The stink of insanity, Edie, sharp as malt vinegar. It’s bad enough when they sweat it out. But their piss? The worst.”
At first the other orderlies—all male, predominantly black—grumbled. They had a bar bouncer’s mentality: yes, Beth had a no-bullshit disposition and could handle the nut jobs well enough with words. But what happened when words failed? Beth was a big woman, but still a woman—did she have the brawn to subdue a foaming-mad boy who cared little for his own body or that of others?
But Beth was a hellion. She was the first to jump on any dog pile, grabbing a boy’s wrist or neck and cranking with all her might. The orderlies came around to having her in their ranks. They nicknamed her Battle-ax Beth.
Many years later, working as a veterinarian, Luke had run into one of his mother’s old charges. Kurt Honey—whom Luke knew slimly, having gone to the same middle school—had spent time at the ranch for the aggravated assault of his eleventh-grade math teacher, whom he’d stabbed with a compass. Honey was a hired hand at a dairy farm where Luke had been summoned to tend to a sick Guernsey.
“She’s your ma, ain’t she?” Honey had asked.
Luke looked up from the cow’s inflamed udder. “Who?”
“Battle-ax Beth.”
Luke had no idea Honey knew she was his mother, but he assumed Honey would speak ill of her. Luke wouldn’t stop him. The days when he would’ve defended her were long gone.
“She was a viper.” Honey gave a spooked laugh. “Smart, you know? But in ways that don’t really profit a person, except in special situations.”
Luke went back to the udder, hoping that would be the end of it.
“She scared the bejesus outta this one guy, Brewster Galt. Ole Brew was none too smart—that’s half the reason he ended up at the ranch. This one time, he caught hell for stealing an apple from the cafeteria. Small things were big things at the ranch. Even a missing apple couldn’t go unpunished. Now Brew had this condition, okay? His one eye was all bugged out of its socket. He told me it was too much pressure, pushing the eyeball out. Your ma, she noticed that sort of thing.”
Luke had winced, his face turned away. Yes, his mother had always noticed things of that nature.
“After Brew got caught stealing the apple, your ma asked for a minute alone with him. Brew came away white as milk. A big kid, tough kid, but I ain’t never seen a boy so shit-scared. I found Brew one afternoon by the picnic tables a few days later. By and by, he gets around to telling me what your ma said . . .
“Brew said your ma told him he had two sets of eyes. One set behind the set in his face. That’s why his one eye was pushed out so bad, see? It was the other set trying to get out. Your ma said those other eyes were blood red and looked like a cat’s. Then she says maybe she’ll give that other set of eyes a little push—sneak into the bunks at night when Brew’s fast asleep and slit his eyes up with a razor blade. Then that would give those new peepers a chance to push out and see the world. The devil’s own eyes staring out of Brew’s face. ‘Wouldn’t that be real nice?’ she told him.”
Kurt Honey just shook his head. “Brew was fourteen. He didn’t have a damned clue what kind of black thing he’d run across.”
Black thing. Luke’s own mother. Black. Thing.
“That woman was half devil. Three-quarters, I’d go so far to say.”
“I’m sorry she said that,” was Luke’s only reply.
Honey snorted. “Christ, I’m sorry for you. You had to share four walls with that monster, didn’t you?”
Luke’s hands relaxed on the bed’s coverlet. The nightmare-sweat had dried on his chest, but his thoughts continued to circle restlessly around his mother. He hadn’t thought about her—really, clearly dwelled upon her—in years. Yet he couldn’t wrench her out of his mind tonight.
A few years into her stint at the ranch, Beth had been attacked by a resident, Chester Higgs. She’d been supervising the yard work assignments. After the incident, a few residents said that they’d seen Custodian Ronnicks talking to Higgs as he’d hoed the weeds . . . sidling up close and whispering to him.
Chester Higgs had been sent to the ranch on seven counts of animal cruelty. He’d snuck into a neighbor’s sheep pen and slit the yearlings’ bellies with a sickle knife known colloquially as a witch blade. When asked why he’d done so, Higgs said the lambs had been keeping secrets. That day and without warning, Higgs struck at Beth with the hoe. He brought it down on her leg, shattering her kneecap; then, as she’d screamed and grabbed for her riot baton, Higgs set about beating her mercilessly. A vicious and well-aimed swipe broke her left hip in three places.
By the time the custodians arrived to haul Higgs off, Beth lay prostrate, bloodied and broken. According to eyewitness reports, Beth—bleeding through her stark white uniform, her face puffed and dangerously shiny—had screamed: “Lord love a duck!” Screaming this inane phrase over and over: Lord lovva duck! Lord lovva duck!
Chester Higgs was taken to another facility and, at eighteen, transferred to a state penitentiary. He’d never confess to what set him off. Beth meanwhile was laid up for some time in the hospital. Her hip had to be fused. Her kneecap didn’t heal properly. She was placed on long-term disability and would never work at the ranch again.
From the day she returned from the hospital until the end of her life, Luke’s mother rarely left the house. She’d sit alone in the TV room, an odious shape in the shadows. When Luke got home from school, she would summon him to her side.
Lucas! Come sit with your mommy.
Luke’s feelings for her changed gradually. Before the incident, he’d loved his mother openheartedly in spite of the worrisome signs—the spankings that left welts, the way her gaze could sit upon his skull like a tarantula ready to sink in its fangs.
But during the Bad Years, she became truly cruel. In time, Luke realized that cruelty was an implicit facet of her nature; she’d simply taken a while to express it.
6.
LUKE FINALLY FELL BACK ASLEEP and awoke hours later as the yacht slit the night sea. The feeling was not unlike being in a luxury sedan speeding across a freshly laid strip of asphalt; Luke sensed the velocity in his marrow, but the fine calibration of the machine prevented him from truly experiencing it.
He sat up in bed. If he’d had another dream, he couldn’t remember it.
He hadn’t dreamed regularly since he was a child, sleeping in the same room as his brother, Clayton, their beds separated two feet apart—Clayton had measured that distance, bedpost to bedpost. He measured a lot of things, space being vital to him.
Clayton had suffered night terrors pretty regularly as a child; he’d thrash, shriek, even make these doglike yelps. Usually their mother would shoulder through the door to shake Clay awake so violently that his head snapped back and forth.
You’re fine! she’d say, slapping Clayton’s cheeks hard enough to pinken the skin. You’re perfectly fine, for heaven’s sake!
Some nights, when Clayton started to thrash, Luke would slide under the covers with him. Clay’s skin was clammy and too hot—it made Luke think, horribly, of slipping into bed with someone who’d been boiled alive. Sometimes he’d wrap his arm around Clayton’s chest and whisper softly to him.
Ssshhh, Clay. It’s okay, just a nightmare. You’re okay, you’re home safe in bed.
Luke rose from the bed and padded into the bathroom. The carpet of the yacht’s interior was incredibly soft; it felt like walking on cotton batting. He twisted the bathroom spigot, but no water came out. Luke’s throat was gluey with thirst.
He made his way topside. His watch read 3:09 p.m. He could reset it, but time wouldn’t matter soon. Where he was going, everything was pitch-black all the time.
The ocean stretched out. A low-lying moon was halved by the horizon; they were steering straight at it, giving Luke the impression of heading toward a huge tunnel carved out of the night.
&n
bsp; “You’re awake.”
Leo Bathgate stood on an upper deck. Shirtless, his hipbones jutting above his shorts like jug handles. “You sleep okay?”
“Out like a light before my head hit the pillow.”
“Good to hear it. Hungry?”
At the mention of food, Luke’s stomach snarled.
“Starving, actually.”
“We got grub onboard—but temper your expectations, Doc.”
Bathgate led him to a kitchen as well appointed as any restaurant’s. The food was stashed in cardboard boxes. Japanese snacks. Cans of wasabi peas, bags of shrimp chips, Choco Baby bars, Pocky, plus bottles of Fanta and Pocari Sweat.
Luke said: “Is that squid jerky?”
“Wild, huh?” said Bathgate. “This tub was brought down from the Land of the Rising Sun, right? We’re loaded for bear with Japanese delights.”
“Anything you’d recommend?”
Bathgate said, “The shrimp chips aren’t half bad. Kinda of like Cheetos except, y’know, fishy.”
Luke tore open a pack of squid jerky.
“Pretty good,” he said, chewing thoughtfully.
Bathgate said, “I found this, too.” He held up a bottle of Japanese whiskey. “I had a warm beer the other night,” he continued, “but there’s something about drinking hard liquor alone on a boat. But now you’re here, want me to crack it open?”
Luke bit into another rawhide squid, chased it with a handful of wasabi peas, and snorted as the burn hit his nostrils.
“You only live once, Leo.”
Leo poured a stiff belt of whiskey into two glasses and cocked his head at Luke.
“Want a splash of Coke? Some’d say it’s sacrilege, sugaring up good hooch. But hell, I’m a low-class man with animal tastes.”
“Oh, I doubt a low-class man would have a yachting license, would he?” Luke told Leo with a grin.
Leo tipped a wink. “No, but a low-class man would have a trawling license. A trawler and a yacht are pretty much the same thing. Just one’s a helluva lot nicer than another. Like upgrading to a Ferrari when you’re used to driving a Kia. Now you, however, a doctor . . .”
“My brother’s the brainiac,” Luke said. “I’m just a veterinarian.”
“Just? I’d say that’s a damn noble living.”
“Sure, and I love what I do,” said Luke. “Just, y’know . . . had to get there on my own. My folks couldn’t afford to send me or my brother to school. Now for Clay, there were scholarships and grants and bursaries. Me? Shoveling shit out of dog cages at the ASPCA, midnight-to-8-a.m. shift, to pay for school.” Luke smiled. “So believe me, I’m no top-shelf liquor drinker.”
Leo tipped Coke into Luke’s glass. They gave their drinks a quick stir around with their index fingers, thumbing their noses at propriety, and clinked glasses.
“Cheers, Doc.”
“Cheers to you, Leo.”
Smoky, with a burned aftertaste. Whiskey had never been his tipple. Guilt crashed over Luke. Here he was drinking another man’s property—a dead man’s property in all likelihood—and he had no appreciation for it.
7.
LEO USHERED LUKE to the helm. The instrument panel was lit in ghostly greens and blues. A monitor charted the present depth of the sea: 2,300 feet.
“I’ve been on the ocean since I was a kid,” said Leo. “My pops owned a lobster boat. I was out on it soon as I could walk. By seven, I was holding the wheel while he dragged the pots. Dad had me stand on an old telephone book.”
He laughed at the memory, his gaze returning to the water.
“I love the sea, and I understand it—much as you can understand something like this. But I haven’t spent time under it, y’know? In my line of work, if you find yourself there, well, you’ve screwed the pooch.”
The points of isolated stars reflected off the water. Luke and Clay used to stare at the stars from their bedroom’s skylight.
The light we’re looking at right now, Clay had told Luke, took billions of years to reach our eyes. Light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second. And still, it takes a billion years to get here. That’s how big the universe is. It’s 99.99999999 percent darkness. And did you know that the stars we’re looking at right now could be dead already? Burned up, nothing but a black hole. We’re just seeing their ghosts. Ghosts that traveled a quintillion miles just to say Boo!
If they’re ghosts, Luke had asked, then how come we’re not scared of them?
Clay just looked at him as if he’d fallen off the turnip truck—which, apart from an expression of mute dispassion, was the most frequent look he used on Luke in those days.
On the main instrument panel, the ocean floor dropped beneath the yacht: 2,309 feet, 2,316, 2,325, a brief rise to 2,319, followed by a dip to 2,389. A different world existed down there—an inverse of the one human beings existed on. After a hundred feet, it was permanent midnight.
“Didn’t mean to put your feet to the flames earlier,” Leo said. “Asking about your brother and all.”
It didn’t really matter to Luke. He hadn’t spoken to his brother in years. Clayton had never cared about maintaining their connection, anyway. A day, a week, a year, a decade. Time was immaterial to him—and people were even more forgettable.
“Hope,” Leo said. “That’s the hardest part. Maintaining hope after what happens, happens. Because it already happened to my wife.”
Leo’s eyes met Luke’s—Luke caught that wretched need to tell him what had happened. And Luke would let him. That was part of the pact in this new version of the world. Listen to people’s stories, tell your own. It was the only way to cope sometimes.
“I met her in middle school,” Leo said. “Mona Leftowski. The skinniest, gangliest, most remarkable girl. We lived on the same block, and I made every excuse to spend time with her. That didn’t mean I was stuck doing girly things. Mona had a slingshot; we’d peg cans down at the town dump. One time I suggested pegging one of the dump critters—the big rats, maybe a raven—and she slugged me so hard that my shoulder was purple the next day. God, she was so mad. She said that ugly creatures got a right to exist same as you or me.”
Leo chuckled, the skin at the edges of his eyes crinkling. He gave Luke a knowing shrug that said: You’ve heard this story before, haven’t you?
Luke had. Just about everyone left had heard it, or lived it, or both.
“I proposed to her on her nineteenth birthday. Down on one knee in Doyer’s Burger Barn, of all places. When she said yes, my heart just about floated out of my chest and bobbed in the rafters like a balloon on a string. I took over my father’s business. Mona taught at the local elementary school. We had great years together, twenty-one of them in a row. The last two were harder, sure . . . but hell. That’s life, right?”
Leo refilled his glass and drained half at a go, his Adam’s apple jogging.
“Happened first was, Mona forgot our anniversary. It wasn’t such a big deal, except she had a mind for dates. But what the heck, Mona forgets our anniversary. No big deal.”
He finished his drink and poured another belt. He didn’t drink it; he just cupped the glass in his hands as if to draw warmth from it.
“It happened so gradually you could half convince yourself it wasn’t anything to worry about. You could say: Well, hell, Mona is past fifty; a little memory loss is par for the course. But it got worse. She forgot to flick the turn signal when she was driving. No big whoop—our town was small, traffic’s light. But then she forgot that a red light means ‘stop’ and blew right through an intersection; our Toyota got T-boned by a Lincoln. She was okay, thank God, but after that we decided it was best that I hold on to the car keys.”
Leo beheld Luke miserably over the rim of the glass.
“Mona brought it up after the accident—was it Alzheimer’s? Early onset? That made the most sense. Heck, at first that’s what all the wonks thought it was, too—a hyper-aggressive strain of Alzheimer’s. But as we figured out, the ’Gets is something else entire
ly. She started writing notes to herself. When it was getting bad, I mean, when she was breaking out in those god-awful scabs. She’d fill notebooks with dates and times and little fragments of info. She had a stack of them, all filled with her neat schoolteacher’s handwriting.”
Luke set a hand on his shoulder. “Listen, you don’t have to—”
Leo waved Luke’s suggestion off with impatience. “What, am I dropping your mood, Doc?”
Luke thought: The story I could tell you, my friend, would sour your mood far worse. So don’t you worry about it one bit.
“Go on, Leo.”
“I watched it,” Leo continued. “God. I watched her forget. Then one day, she’s staring at me across the kitchen table. And her mouth falls open and out comes a half-chewed dinner roll. She hadn’t spoken for days at that point. I don’t even know how much of her was left anymore. We sat that way for a few hours. Mona slumped there, mouth open. I tried to close it for her, but it’d just fall right open again.
“That night, I carried her upstairs and undressed her. I took off her . . . Doc, she was wearing diapers. Those were hard to lay your hands on by then. Pharmacies all sold out. It busted me up to pull those god-awful things on and off my wife—but if you love someone, you love them in all their states, don’t you? Sickness and health.
“I put her nightgown on and put her in bed and lay down beside her. I was crying, yeah, but I tried to be real soft about it. I don’t imagine it troubled her. Sometime that night, she . . . stopped, I guess? It happened quickly, which was a relief. She forgot how to live, or . . . damn it all, I don’t know how this disease finishes us. It didn’t seem real.”
It didn’t seem real. Luke understood that. He’d felt the exact same way the day his son had gone missing.
“I’m so sorry, Leo.”
Leo sawed his palm across his nose. “It’s all percentages, Doc. Life is percentages. When Mona came down with it, hardly anyone had gotten the ’Gets. Less than 1 percent of the population. But that’s the thing about percentages—no matter how small, they’ve got to affect someone, right? After Mona passed I sold the house, packed up, and caught on as a commercial boat captain. When the ’Gets started spreading, a few guys at my company started ferrying supplies to the Hesperus.”