by Nick Cutter
Enjoying the view? her expression seemed to say. There was no recrimination in it, just a vague sense of mirth.
“What did I say?” Luke asked. “When I was sleeping, I mean.”
“Get behind me.” She smiled as if to say it wasn’t anything he ought to be embarrassed about. “Get behind me where it’s safe or something like that.”
5.
THE CHALLENGER LEVELED OFF. They were presently over twenty thousand feet undersea. Luke heard sly pops and crackles, the sound of Rice Krispies doused in milk.
“Relax, that’s just the foam,” Al said. “It’s compressing to bear the strain.”
The view was disorienting. Profound, terrible darkness. What could possibly live down here? Luke pictured the water rolling away for miles in every direction, empty and pitiless. This stratum was cleansed of nearly all the fundamental assets that foster life—sunlight, warmth, air, food—so the only creatures that lived in it should be, by definition, less than whole. Their skin would be jellylike; Luke imagined bodies draped in a thin stretching of greased latex, like condom skin. He almost laughed at the idea of schools of condom fish flitting through the deeps—
Tink!
Something struck the porthole’s glass, then pelted away.
Tink! Tink!
“Do you hear that?” he whispered.
Al’s voice was tight. “Viperfish, I’m thinking.”
The water exploded with frenzied movement.
Tink! Tink! Ti-tin-ti-ti-tink! Tink! TINK!
Luke recoiled as quicksilver flashes smashed into the glass.
Ti-tin-t-t-t-ti-TI-ti-TIN-TINK!
It sounded as if they were being shelled with machine-gun fire.
“Al, hey, is this normal?”
“Yeah, it’s pretty unnerving,” she said. “We’ll be okay. Viperfish are the undersea version of wolverines. They’ll attack anything, even if it’s a hundred times their size.”
Just then, a viperfish got snagged before the glass. Its jaws—huge, sickle shaped, fearsomely toothy—were enmeshed in the foam. The creature was long and eelish, with fluted gills and oily black eyes socked in a polished-steel face. It was the most predatory thing Luke had ever seen.
“They’re mean as catshit,” Al said. “And I’d say we’ve hit a swarm of them.”
TINK! Ti-ti-ti-TINK!
“I’ve never seen so many of them. They’re fixing to tear that foam to shreds. We gotta boogie, Luke. Hold on.”
The Challenger plummeted. Luke caught a flash of the massing school of viperfish: a glowing sheet of bodies staggered into the water, tens of thousands of whiplike fish darting furiously about.
The sounds ceased as Al stabilized the vessel.
Tink!
“Fucking things,” said Al. “We must be in a cone of them—there’s no way they could drop that fast.”
Again, the Challenger plunged. The pressure built in Luke’s ears. That tickle returned to his bones, becoming quite painful now.
“Hold on,” Al said. “I’m feeling it, too.”
Luke’s gums tightened around his teeth until he was sure they’d shatter. The plates of his skull ground together.
Al stabilized the sub again. She shot a look down at Luke. A rill of blood, as thin as a pencil line, was trickling out of her nose.
“You’re bleeding,” Luke said.
She wiped it away. “Yeah, you, too.”
Luke wiped his nose. His fingers came away clean.
“Higher,” said Al.
Luke felt wetness leaking from his eye. He wiped away a single, bloody tear. “Am I bleeding from my eye?”
Al nodded. “You’ll be fine. Happens a lot down here. The blood comes out of you in funny, nontraditional places.”
Luke wiped the bloody tear on his overalls. “That will take some getting used to.”
They waited for those dreadful tinks! to resume. When they didn’t, Luke’s heartbeat settled into its normal rhythm. Al jimmied the controls and got the Challenger dropping again at a more leisurely rate. Water shushed against the hull, causing the foam to issue splintery popping sounds. Luke blinked and swiped a finger under his eye. A watery rill of blood tracked across his fingertip, warm and—
SWACK!
Luke jolted in his seat. Something entirely different was stuck to the glass now. A band of albino tissue, shockingly thick.
“What the—” Al said as the Challenger juddered. “Oh, are you shitting me?”
The band thinned out as it flexed across the glass. Eight inches across, with a vein running under its skin that was so black it could’ve been filled with ink. Studded all along it were disks—they reminded Luke of the plastic suction cups you’d use to stick sun-catchers to your kitchen windows.
“It’s a giant squid,” Al said, although Luke somehow knew that already. “I didn’t think we’d encounter one this far down.”
The Challenger rattled. An alarm shrilled.
“For the love of fuck!” said Al, the words exiting her mouth with a brittle snip. She flicked a switch and the vessel went dark.
Luke’s lungs locked up as an icy ball of terror crystallized in his chest. It was as if the sea itself had slid inside the Challenger, filling his eyes and throat and brain.
The squid’s tentacle sluuurped across the glass. A shape shot out—THACK!—snapping violently. It was the squid’s beak, which resembled that of an enormous parrot.
THACK!—harder this time.
Luke waited for the glass to crack and his life to end.
The lights flicked on.
“I thought it might leave us alone if we went dark,” Al said in a low voice. “Let’s try the opposite.”
She hit the spotlights. They didn’t illuminate much, despite their incredible intensity—a pall of sickly light picked up a patina of deep-sea sediment that swirled like dust in an enormous room.
The squid immediately detached and vanished with one convulsive flex. Luke got a split-second sense of its size: stunningly long, torsional and many limbed, whipping into the darkness like a bullet train speeding into a tunnel.
“Hold on,” Al said, and again they dropped.
They seemed to be falling even faster—the depth gauge near Luke’s head spun wildly, around and around like a cartoon clock. Al was busy with the readouts; thankfully, it appeared neither the squid nor viperfish had dealt the Challenger a terminal blow.
Shock-sweat had broken out all over Luke’s body. Tiny beads of moisture clung to the hull, too.
“The sub’s sweating,” he said.
“That’s normal,” Al said tersely. “Condensation. Our breath. Cold as a witch’s tit down here. Minus thirty or so.”
“Doesn’t the water freeze?”
“Never with saltwater. Not this deep.”
Al shut the spotlights off, plunging the sea into darkness again.
“Wow. That was the weirdest thing,” she said, exhaling heavily. “You have to understand—this is like the desert down here. It’s barren. Picture it this way: we’re a pin dropped into an Olympic swimming pool almost totally devoid of life. So why and how we’ve run across all these critters . . . it’s just weird. And that they’d attack us . . . The viperfish I get, but the squid? And back-to-back like that? No. Just no.”
“Not outside of a Jules Verne book, anyway.” Luke’s laughter held a glass-snap edge.
“Right, and then we’ve had that current ring the last week or so. Every possible disturbance you could encounter, we’ve been facing it lately,” Al said. “If I didn’t know any better I’d almost think . . .”
She trailed off, not saying the words. But Luke was thinking the same thing.
It’s as if something is trying to stop us from reaching the Trieste.
6.
“THEY SHOULD’VE INSTALLED A RADIO in this thing,” said Al, “or a CD player or something.” She blew a raspberry. “They sunk a trillion bucks into this operation. A radio’s gonna bankrupt ’em?
“They spent hand over fis
t,” she went on. “Nobody had ever tried building anything like the Trieste before. Space shuttles, sure, but in space you’re dealing with an absence of pressure. You can put on a suit, step out, float around. Try and do that down here and . . .”
“Flesh pâté.”
“Bingo. They had to bring the station down in sections. Lots of trial and error, lots of problems. Dropped them with heavy weights, collected them with robotic dive craft. Every section came down encased in a protective shell, with a seam of foam sandwiched between. They got slotted together, riveted by the pressure-resistant robo-divers, foamed, then the shell was cracked away. The station was designed in the principles of orb physics; the egg was the designer’s blueprint. Push on the sides of an egg, right, and it’ll break. But if you press on the top and bottom, it’s nearly unbreakable. A miracle of nature, or so they tell me.
“Plus the material the station’s made out of . . . it’s metal but not metal. Some kind of high-tech, ultra-state-of-the-art polymer core—it allows the tunnels to flex and bend and . . . bubble, I guess you could say? Instead of cracking under pressure, the material will expand the way rubber does. The water can warp it, but it won’t burst through.
“Anyway, once the pieces of the station were all slotted together, someone had to go in and open it all up from the inside. There was this membrane linking each section that had to be cut and foamed simultaneously; if it sprung even one leak, the whole structure would flatten. Otto Railsback—that was the name of the guy. Wee scrap of a thing. A single man did the whole job. You want to talk about a real hero? I brought Otto down. He was the first man inside. I attached to the entry port, cracked the hatch, then he went inside.”
“So what happened?” asked Luke, now fascinated.
“Well . . . I remember the smell that came out at first,” Al said. “My family ran a ranch in Colorado. There was this cave system where I lived, Cave of the Winds. The main part was a tourist trap—drunk dudes wandering around with miner’s helmets, calling themselves spelunkers. But the whole thing sprawled twenty miles underground. You could enter it through a vent in the forest floor about a mile from my home. Just a dark cut into the rocks, right? I went down there one day, alone. I was thirteen, fourteen. Thought I was a badass. I had a flashlight and a sack lunch.
“Predictably, I got lost. Thought I knew where I was going. Didn’t. It got so deep and twisty that if it weren’t for gravity, I wouldn’t have known up from down. My flashlight went on the fritz. I sat in the dark with the rocks dripping around me.” She paused, wrapped in the memory. “That darkness had weight, Doc. As a kid, it seemed hostile—like it wanted to keep me right where I was. And I was scared for practical reasons, too. I could’ve missed a step, slid down a shaft, and busted a leg. I’d have died down there. But I’d gotten into it, right? I had to get out. So I just listened. The dripping water helped. I figured it had to be trickling down, so I just had to follow it up. It was way past my curfew when I reached the cut. My dad skinned my ass raw.”
She sipped water from a silver pouch that reminded Luke of a Capri Sun drink.
“Anyway . . . the smell in that cave was the same as what came out of the Trieste. This overwhelming reek of darkness. A raw mineral smell; it had presence, an aliveness, like in Cave of the Winds. It freaked me out—no good reason; just that old childish worry—but Otto went right in. He sealed the compartments, made the Trieste truly safe for habitation. After that, others came down to set up the gennies, the air purifiers. But Otto was the guy who got it all rolling. He was the only one who died in the Trieste, too.”
“Jesus. How?”
“He just never came back out,” said Al. “I waited and waited, but when he didn’t show up they told me to resurface. I couldn’t get inside, anyway. But surface diagnostics indicated the station was safe to enter, meaning Otto had completed his task. When the electrical team came down, they found him curled up in the animal quarantine. Dead. Embolism. He just finished his job, then laid down in the dark and died.”
The only one who died, Luke thought, except for Westlake.
“It’s all self-contained,” Al said. “Electricity, air, waste removal. Food and water are brought down as needed. A perfect little microsystem that thumbs its nose at the laws of physics.”
Luke barely heard her. He was still dwelling on Otto Railsback, who’d crawled diligently through the tunnels with his foam gun until he reached his own end.
7.
THERE IS A SPECIFIC DEPTH you’ll hit where the soul finds it impossible to harmonize with its surroundings.
It’s not the darkness. A man is acquainted with it by then—as acquainted as he can ever be. It’s not the vast silence or the emptiness or the absence of any life-forms he can draw warmth or certainty from.
It’s not the pressure. It’s not even the fear of death that constantly nibbles at the edge of his mind.
It’s the sense of unreality. This out-of-body feeling that you’ve stepped away from the path your species has always tread. Things become dreamlike, inessential. Your mind, seeking solace in the familiar, retreats to those things you understand, but those things become so much harder to grasp.
Memories degrade. You remember parts of people, but you surrender their wholes. Abby could crack an egg with one hand. It was a quirky skill Luke remembered wishing he had. He could still recall the sight of her doing it and the yearning that he could do it, too. But the more essential parts of her were already failing him.
The water wasn’t the same down here.
Water is what runs out of our kitchen taps or a playground drinking fountain. It fills bathtubs and pools and yes, of course, the ocean—but at a certain depth, water becomes a barrier from all you remember, all you think you know.
You’re trapped within it, a plaything of it.
Focus erodes. Your thoughts mutate. The pressure.
The pressure.
The soul can’t cope with that. It shouldn’t be expected to.
Humans weren’t built for this. There’s a reason nothing lives down here.
Or nothing should.
8.
LUKE WAS UNAWARE of the exact point when it began to snow.
Marine snow, according to Al. The detritus of animal and plant life that had died miles above. It fell steadily through each zone of the ocean, down and down, shredding into flakes, leached of pigment until it became bone white. A snow of death.
It fell without cease, each “flake” composed of lace-edged rags of flesh and bone and gut. Looking at it, Luke thought back to that first night with Abby—the snow falling from a coal-dark Iowa sky. He tried to isolate the details of Abby’s face but they slithered through his mind, eelish and ungrippable.
Al toggled the joystick, angling the Challenger slightly downward.
“We’re here,” she said quietly.
Luke squinted through the porthole. Darkness thick as grave dirt. Then, permeating that darkness, the tiniest speck of light.
This speck attached to another speck, and another. From these specks, a rough shape resolved and the Trieste came into view. Luke sat by the window, jaw open, staring.
It was repulsive.
The blood backflowed in his veins, the strangest sensation—like a clock running backward against its mechanics, stripping gears and snapping springs.
We need to ascend now, he thought wildly. Seek the sunlight, fast, and never come back.
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.