by Nick Cutter
Luke flinched as he would from a vicious dog snapping at the end of a chain.
The man behind the glass screamed; flecks of spittle hit the glass.
He’s slipped a gear, Luke thought. A familiar phrase back home, used to describe someone who’d become addle-brained. But Luke figured this guy had done more than slip a gear—he’d fried his entire damn gearbox.
“It’s Dr. Toy,” Al said. “Hugo the Horrible.”
This then was Dr. Hugo Toy, the molecular biologist Felz had mentioned. The only one still down here other than Clayton.
“He doesn’t look so hot,” Al deadpanned.
Dr. Toy’s expression reconstituted itself into a mask of chilly observation. His hands drifted in front of his face, his fingers tapping and fidgeting. One hand stretched toward the porthole, two fingers knocking on the glass as a child might tap on a terrarium to rouse a pair of sluggish lizards.
His lips moved, repeating a simple phrase. His fingers tapped along in time.
You are not who you are . . . you are not who you are . . . you are not, you are not, you are NOT who you are . . .
One of his hands disappeared, then reappeared with a scalpel. Toy held the tip to his own throat and pulled it slowly across, not breaking the skin.
Is he threatening us, Luke wondered, or threatening to do it to himself?
Toy retreated down the tunnel with a scuttling crablike gait. He vanished around a bend and out of sight.
“Well,” Al said finally, “I don’t figure he’s letting us in, do you?”
7.
THEY TREKKED BACK toward the Challenger. The cold crept into their bones. Luke was getting used to the patter of footsteps overhead—they had a rhythm he found oddly comforting.
“Do you have any clue what that was all about?” he asked Al.
It didn’t look like the ’Gets. Toy wasn’t spotting.
“Down here, people . . . they go nuts,” Al said. “You see it a lot on subs. An extremely concentrated form of cabin fever. Even if you’re cooped up in a cabin in the woods in the middle of winter, you can still open the door and breathe fresh air. Inside a sub it’s the same gray walls, same cold lights, same smells of bearing grease and dust burning in control consoles.
“On a sub, if a bubblehead looked to be coming down with a case of the sea-sillies we’d give him a color wheel, same as you’d do with a grade-schooler. Or let him run his fingers through a book of carpet samples. I remember one guy carrying around a book of carpet rags, petting his favorite ones the way you pet a dog. But if you’re prone to the sillies, you’ll catch them eventually. The sea whittles at you like a sharp knife taking curls off a log until you just . . .”
Al mimed snapping a twig between her hands.
“So Dr. Toy’s gone batshit?” Luke said. “Didn’t you say everyone down here was under psychiatric examination?”
Al shrugged. “We had to go on what we could see through the monitors—were these guys eating properly and sleeping on a regular schedule, that kind of thing. Westlake, Toy, and your brother were supposed to report for a counseling session every few days; lately they’ve all been AWOL.”
Luke said: “Why did you call him that, anyway? Hugo the Horrible.”
“That’s everyone’s name for him. He embraces it. He’s not just a biologist—he’s a chaos theory wonk. You know much about that?”
When Luke shook his head, Al said: “Basically it’s a mathematical field based on trying to make sense out of random events—which seems in hindsight like a solid prescription for psychosis, wouldn’t you say? Apparently Toy was given to forecasting worst-case scenarios. Every silver cloud had a dark lining. And hey,” she asked, “did you make out what he was saying?”
“I’m pretty sure it was, You’re not who you are. Over and over.”
“Yeah. That’s what I was seeing, too.”
She made that stick-breaking gesture again.
You are not who you are.
They forged down the tunnel like parasites trapped in the guts of an organism so huge it was oblivious to their presence. The darkness closed in, running swiftly on their heels.
Luke wanted to tell Al about the laughter he’d heard. The singing laughter of a child . . .
. . . his son’s laughter?
He couldn’t. She’d think he’d gone nuts himself. He pictured the look of tolerant concern that would grace Alice’s face when she heard.
First Toy, and now this poor fuck’s gone around the bend already, she’d think.
More crucially, Luke didn’t want to associate the memory of his lost son with this unfriendly, unfeeling place. But that laughter continued to ring out in a recessed quadrant of his mind . . . maddening, so maddening.
8.
LUKE’S SON HAD GONE MISSING on a crisp fall day. He was six years old.
Missing . . . the word didn’t quite fit. Vanished was better.
And like a tight-lipped magician, the world would never tell Luke how it had performed this horrible trick.
It happened seven years ago, at a public park not far from home. They often stopped by after Zach’s first-grade class finished to let some steam off before meeting Abby. The park faced the road, the grass rolling out fifty feet in every direction until it hit a dense forested area to the west.
The afternoon was like any other. Luke took a late lunch, left the veterinary clinic, and picked Zach up. They walked home through the fallen leaves, holding hands; Zach made a point of stepping on the crinkliest leaves, loving the sound they made under his boots.
At the park, Zach swung on the monkey bars and slid down the slide into a drift of leaves Luke had heaped at the bottom. Luke relished this time, knowing that before long Zach wouldn’t be caught dead in public with his goonybird father. Too soon, the sun began to set over the firs.
“Five more minutes, sport.”
How many times had Luke imagined that they’d left that very instant? How many times had Luke wished that he’d taken his son’s hand and ushered him home? He’d lost count. The thought never fully left his mind.
“Let’s play hide-and-seek, Daddy!”
“Okay. One game. Then we hit the road.”
Zach smiled. It was the last clean look Luke would ever have of his boy. Zach’s left canine had come out days before; his smile was lopsided with that fresh gap. Luke remembered that. He remembered every little thing.
“I’ll hide, Daddy.”
“Okay, but don’t hide too far off. It’s getting dark.”
Zach nodded obediently. “Count!”
“I’ll count to twenty, then I’m coming to get you!” Luke said. “One . . . two . . . three . . .”
“Count slower!” Zach’s voice was fading toward the trees. “You have to give me time to hide!”
Those were the last words his son would ever speak—the last ones to touch Luke’s ears, in any case. Whenever Luke closed his eyes he could hear them, breathless and manic, as Zach hunted for a hiding spot. A spot he’d found and never left.
“. . . eleven . . . tweeeeelve . . . thirteeeeeen . . .”
Zach’s giddy laughter carried back to Luke.
“. . . fourteen . . . fifteeeeeeen . . .”
Luke heard another noise, impossible to identify. A ragged zippering sound, was the closest he could get to explaining it. Nestled within that wet ripping note was another one: a resonant sucking. Suck-suck-suck, a pair of enormous lips pulling on a straw.
“. . . sixteenseventeeneighteennineteentwenty!”
Luke rattled off the last five numbers rapidly, adrenaline spiking in his chest. He couldn’t say why he was so suddenly petrified; he could only accept that feeling inside of him and act on it.
He rounded the corkscrew slide and scanned for a sign of his son. Nothing. Just this horrible emptiness, the wind screaming over every blade of grass.
“Zach?”
The wind snatched the name from his lips. Panic filched into Luke’s chest. Diffuse and dreamlike, wormed with s
elf-consciousness . . . it was silly, so silly, to be worried. He’d spy the top of Zach’s head peeking around that boulder over there, or ducked behind that trash can. And when that happened, Luke would chuckle at his foolishness and chase his son down and heft him, squealing with delight, into his arms. They’d go home, where supper was waiting, and after dinner Zach would sit in his room contentedly, assembling a jigsaw puzzle he’d bought with the money the tooth fairy had left under his pillow.
That’s exactly how it would happen, Luke figured. That’s how it had to happen, because until that very moment Luke had believed the world was essentially reasonable. If you followed the rules, the world played fair with you.
Kids didn’t just disappear off the face of the earth. Not in empty public parks. Not in the time it took to count to twenty. Things like that never happened.
“You can come out now, buddy. Olly olly oxen free!”
The swings creaked in the wind. The streetlights were popping on. Why had he stayed out so late? Daylight saving time had just kicked in and he hadn’t made the mental adjustment yet. But that could happen to anyone, couldn’t it?
A possibility came to him: that his son had burrowed under a drift of leaves, covering himself so that Luke couldn’t spot him.
Next he remembered the sounds: that meaty zippering, that sucking inhale . . .
“Come on, sport, you win! I’m sure Mom’s got dinner ready. Spaghetti with macaroni noodles, your favorite!”
He’d reached the edge of the forest. Luke had lived in the city his whole life, treading every inch of it. He’d explored this very place for hours on end. He’d never gotten a sense of danger from it. But now, squinting into its dark tangle of branches, trees standing like gloomy sentinels . . . yes, it seemed very threatening indeed.
Abby had lost Zachary a year or so before at a discount store: uneven floors, bins of irregular clothing. It was only for a minute, but she said that minute had stretched into an eternity. She was certain he’d been taken. Snatched, she said. Someone had lured him away while her back was briefly turned. That was all it would take. Next Zachary was in a van. Next, a remote warehouse or a soundproof basement. When she found him several aisles over, tickling his chin with a feather duster, she nearly wept with relief before furiously scolding him to never leave her sight again.
And the same thing would happen now—Luke was still sure of it.
“Zach?” His voice rose several octaves. “Buddy, please, enough!”
A thread of pure unadulterated terror now braided into his heart. Fear mixed with a love more profound than any he’d ever felt, and mingled with dizzying guilt for letting that most precious thing slip from his view at a crucial moment.
He’s gone.
The voice in his head was black—discolored and malevolent, the voice of something conjured at a Black Mass. It spoke with calm certainty.
Your boy is gone.
Swallowed.
The possibility jolted Luke into action. He stumbled into the woods.
“Zach! Zach! Christ, Zaaaaaach!”
How long had he wandered through the trees, screaming for his son? Far too long. He should have called the police. They would have arrived in minutes. But even as he’d hunted more and more desperately, the fear and mania mounting, he remained certain that it was all some ridiculous accident—a misunderstanding that, once rectified, would be something they’d laugh about when Zach was an adult.
Remember that time Dad thought he’d lost me in the woods, only what happened is that I’d tripped and conked my head on a tree trunk and knocked myself cold for a few minutes? Har-har-har!
Something just like that, yes, goofy and commonplace and nothing to call the police about because it was fine, really, everything was okayokayOKAY—
Luke staggered out of the woods, wild-eyed and bleeding from the brambles. His mind was a jumble of horrific images: windowless vans and fillet knives and his son’s fear-struck eyes. Only then had he dialed 911.
The police arrived within minutes; Abby arrived a short time later. Luke couldn’t bear to look his wife in the eyes.
The first twenty-four hours were the real killers. That’s what everyone will tell you. In any missing persons case, the chances of success drop drastically after a full day. The search area gets too wide; the potential locations of that person (or, it must be said, their body) become overwhelming.
At first, Luke had been confident. The police cruisers with their cherries alit, the team of tracking dogs, just about every plainclothes officer in the city tromping through that half-mile stretch of forest . . . How could they not find his son? His son, who’d only been out of his sight for twenty seconds—no, less.
A search-and-rescue helicopter strafed the forest with its spotlight. Luke had been in the woods by then, searching with everyone else. The helicopter roved toward the creek; maybe Zach had fallen in, borne along in the current that flowed west toward Coralville. Maybe he was lying on its banks, shivering but unhurt.
As midnight passed into the witching hours, a sense of disbelief settled over Luke. A feeling of unreality washed over him. This couldn’t be happening. It was like waking up to find out your arm was missing—you went to bed, slept well, and when you woke up, it was gone. There was no pain, no scar. Only a smooth expanse of skin over the nub and an empty space where the limb once lay. It was that kind of nightmarish inconceivability he was facing. He couldn’t cope with it. Luke could live without his arm. Both arms. Both legs. His tongue and ears and nose. He’d forfeit them all gladly just to have Zach back.
But the world has always been resistant to bargains of that nature.
When dawn paled over the treetops, Luke stumbled out of the woods into a ring of emergency vehicles. His brain was pinned in a merciless vise, on the verge of tearing in half. He overheard some policemen debating the conceivability that someone had been in the woods, watching and waiting until Zach had drawn near before grabbing him and stuffing an ether-soaked rag over his face, then dragging him through the trees and hucking (Luke remembered that clearly; the policeman had actually used the verb huck) Zach’s body into the trunk of a car. After that, he could have been driven to where the access road met a main thoroughfare. If so, the abductor could be four hundred miles away . . . or only a few blocks distant, in a nearby house.
Luke sat beside Abby, who was wrapped in a blanket and sitting on an ambulance bumper. He slipped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her into him. She resisted, her eyes bruised and reproachful.
“Did he run away?” Her voice had this terrible faraway quality. “No. Why would he run away? What did we do, that he would do that? Oh my God.”
There was something else in her eyes, too. Fuming in the green of her irises. Fury. She was so, so angry at Luke. Over time, that fury might’ve even shaded into hatred.
There were moments over the coming years when Luke wished that Zachary was dead. The fervency of his wish was sickening. But yes, dead. Of cancer or brain parasites or even drowning in the creek. If he’d died of cancer, Luke and Abby could have been at his bedside, making his final days as comfortable as possible. It would have broken them in some ineffable way, yes, but it would have allowed them to love their son through his final days on earth.
Even if he’d drowned in the creek . . . it was awful to envision, but at least it would be done. They would have a body to dress. Rituals to observe. A coffin, a funeral. There would be a sense of knowing where their boy was—even if that meant under six feet of dirt at the Muscatine Avenue cemetery.
But Zachary wasn’t dead. His case was classed as missing/unsolved. There was no closure. It was the equivalent of a movie missing its final reel.
Death was final. It meant Zach had passed beyond pain or fear. Missing was so much worse. Missing was a cavalcade of possibilities, none of them good.
NEITHER ZACHARY nor his abductors were ever found. His disappearance made the rounds in the press, locally and eventually nationally, but the media’s ardor cooled
. There were other missing kids and a million other tragedies besides.
Luke drove.
For a solid year after Zachary vanished, he spent every night on the road. Driving around the city and farther afield, down the streetlit corridors of night searching for his lost boy.
He found him, too. Found him everywhere. It was a phenomenon other parents talked about; Luke and Abby had attended a support group at the urging of their grief counselor. A dozen empty-eyed parents (ex-parents?) sitting in a circle in a chilly community center. They kept seeing their missing children, too. Seeing them in busy malls or whenever they drove past a schoolyard. They saw them in crowds: an arm, a foot, or maybe something in a child’s posture that mimicked that of their own lost son or daughter. They had all rushed heedlessly into a throng, scooped up a child whose back was turned—so sure; so goddamn sure—only to see the frightened face of a stranger staring up at them.
Luke could understand. He’d see the crook of Zachary’s leg folding into a strange car and would follow that car until it stopped and a boy who wasn’t Zach got out. He’d seen his son’s tousled hair bobbing amid the crowd at the Iowa State Fair. In his more desperate moods he’d considered snatching someone else’s boy while his parents’ backs were turned—serves you right! You’ve got to pay attention every . . . single . . . second!
He’d drive all night, come home at dawn, and fall into an exhausted sleep. His dreams were horrific. Dreams where Zach called to him from the bottom of a deep well. Or where Zach screamed that he’d run away and never wanted to see Luke again. But the most insidious night terrors were the ones where Zach lay beside him in bed, his breath feathering Luke’s neck . . . and when Luke awoke, his son just wasn’t there.
One evening, he woke up and Abby wasn’t there, either. She’d packed and left while he was sleeping. This came as only a small surprise to Luke. They hadn’t spoken, really spoken, in months. They were two shells emptied out by grief.
The Human Shield. His old childhood persona, the one he’d cooked up to insulate himself from the predations of his mother. He’d always seen himself as that to Abby and Zach. A shield against the awfulness of the world—an awfulness his son would have to grapple with, yes, but hopefully not for many years. As a boy, he could simply stand behind his father and let Luke absorb the cruelest blows. Except somehow Luke’s defenses had been penetrated. The forces of evil had found a blind spot, their tentacles creeping behind his back to snatch Zach away.