by Nick Cutter
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.