by Nick Cutter
Twenty seconds. Lives can collapse in that time span. Abby accepted the fact that it wasn’t all Luke’s fault—it could have happened to anyone, sure—and yet she came to hate him regardless. She walked out because she wanted to stop hating the man she’d once loved . . . and because she must have realized that her hatred, though powerful, was a pale reflection of the loathing Luke felt for himself.
Luke couldn’t blame her. He was even mildly relieved to discover she’d gone. When the divorce papers arrived a few weeks later, he’d signed them without rancor.
In time, he returned to his veterinary practice. Tending to animals gave his life a glimmer of value. And if he occasionally broke down in tears, or screamed or shook, well, animals were eminently forgiving of such behavior.
So Luke did his job, and at night, to avoid sleeping, he’d drive. Consciousness couldn’t stave off the memories, though. In time, his memories became waking dreams. It got so that he could actually dream with his eyes wide open.
Luke remembered feeding Zach this one time when he had a fever. Zach, then just a toddler, hadn’t wanted to eat. But if he didn’t, he’d get sicker. This worried Luke tremendously. He’d wished Abby was there—he needed her calm composure—but she had been working late. In frustration, Luke shoved a spoonful of applesauce into his son’s mouth. “Just eat it, please!”
Zach went silent, the dismay and bewilderment building as his face turned pink. Then he’d begun to bawl, the applesauce still pooled in his mouth.
Sick with guilt, Luke carried him upstairs to the bath. Zach sat in the tub, withdrawn and motionless. When Luke dried him, Zach started shivering. He wouldn’t make eye contact with Luke. This scared Luke so badly. Had he wrecked that beautiful bond of trust between them? Some things you can never get back. Even if Zachary couldn’t remember it consciously, the act—his dad shoving a spoon into his mouth and shouting at him to eat—would stick in his developing mind like a barb.
That’s why I ran away, Daddy. I ran because you were mean to me.
Luke had been afraid that Zach wouldn’t trust him anymore, because he had let him down.
And years later, Luke would let his son down again at the worst possible moment.
As a father, Luke couldn’t cope with that.
He still breathed, still functioned, but he was ruined inside. Guilt and despair crushed him into something unrecognizable.
So he drove and grieved, and in time the ’Gets took its hold on the world.
He dearly wished he would catch it. Forgetting was the best remedy, wasn’t it? Forget Abby. Forget Zach. Forget the wonderful life they’d had together.
Just let me forget. Please, for the love of God.
But the world was resistant to bargains of that nature, too.
9.
“YOU OKAY, DOC?”
Alice’s voice snapped Luke out of these unhealthy ruminations. First his mother, now his son—the sharp blades of a tiller churned through his gray matter, dredging up blackened pulp and old bits of bone. Luke felt them there in the Trieste, both Bethany and Zachary. Not in any material way, but their shapes and voices clung tightly to him now—it had started the moment that the Challenger slipped under the sea. He was trapped with them now, under the hammering intensity of a trillion tons of water.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Just . . . having some trouble concentrating.”
Luke was flanking Al. The dog, LB, padded behind them. They’d already stopped to collect their bags at the Challenger hatch. Then they’d rounded the gooseneck on the other side of the tunnel, heading toward the remaining hatch.
“Your brother will let us in,” Al said. To Luke’s ears, her voice held the mad certainty specific to leaders of doomed polar expeditions.
“Oh, yeah, most certainly.”
Luke glanced at the portholes along the ceiling. He caught movement across one of them. A pale shred drifting languorously along. “Al—?”
“That’s it—the ambrosia,” she said, her eyes following his pointing finger. “That’s why the portholes were built: to see where it’s concentrated.”
The ambrosia wafted to the porthole’s rim and hung there a moment before vanishing. Luke continued to stare at the ring of blackness where the foot-thick glass and polymer held back the crushing sea—he half expected something to flare across it. A disembodied face, perhaps; a suety pockmarked face glowing a sick maggot-white except for the eyelids, which were red as flayed beef. The pressure had vacuumed the eyes into their sockets—they stared from deep within those cold pits . . .
. . . but of course nothing appeared. Just the bleak emptiness of the deep. Luke wondered if this was how an astronaut felt staring through the porthole of his lunar module to catch a glimpse of space where not a single star shone: an infinite blackness, bleak and dehumanizing.
The tunnel was less cluttered on the other end. Light burned behind the hatch’s porthole. Al knocked on it. It sounded as if she was rapping her knuckles on a cast-iron cannon at a Civil War memorial. Nobody answered.
“Thick door,” she said as if this were a new fact.
“Not to sound desperate here, Al, but what are our options?”
Al stuck her tongue between her teeth, biting down. “Well, we can wait. Chances are your brother will pass down this way.”
“Tip-top plan. And how do we know Toy doesn’t have control of the whole station?” Luke said. “How can we be sure he hasn’t tied Clayton up, or worse?”
“The thought crossed my mind ever since we lost contact,” Al admitted. “Most of the areas can be self-sealed and contained—the lab, the purifiers—so my hope is that it’s Toy who’s been isolated, or he’s isolated himself. But you’re right. He may have the run of the entire joint. We have to get in there somehow.”
“You said something about triggering the lock remotely?”
“Yeah, that may be our best bet.” A shiver racked Al’s frame. “I’ll head back and see what I can do. You stay here. If I pop the lock, you hold the door.”
She squeezed past Luke—the tunnel was so cramped that Luke had to suck in his stomach to let her pass. Her footsteps receded down the tunnel, and with them went the reassuring glow of the flashlight.
Luke dropped his duffel bag and sat on the floor. The dog rested her head on his lap. He felt foolish. Ineffective. God in heaven, sitting beside a locked door in the hope it would open. A glorified bellhop.
“Goddamn it,” he said softly. “Christly Jesus goddamn hell.”
It felt good to blaspheme—goddamn fucking good. Could God even hear him down here?
You go ahead, son, he figured God might say, good sport that He was. Take my name in vain if it keeps your powder dry. People take it in vain when they stub their toe or get cut off on the freeway. I’m used to it.
“I’m closer to hell than heaven down here, anyway,” Luke said, and laughed. It freaked him out a little how hollow it sounded.
“Hello-oh-oh-oh,” he said. His words soaked into the darkness only to come back in a mocking lilt.
Oh-ho-ho-o-o-o . . .
He glanced down and spotted a spiral-bound notebook that had either fallen or been wedged under the grate. Curious, he lifted the grate a few inches and fished the notebook out—and nearly dropped it just as fast. The cover was slick with a dark sticky substance.
Psych Report, the cover read.
He riffled the pages. The first few were filled with neat, clinical handwriting. The overhead lights dimmed, a fluttering brownout. He slid the notebook into an empty pocket in his bag, not wanting that black gunk to touch his clothes.
The lights went out.
All of them, this time, and all at once. The light beyond the porthole glass, the dim runway lights winking in the floor.
Darkness clogged in Luke’s sockets and invaded his throat. His brain fused shut in utter panic—he couldn’t think, could barely breathe. LB sat bolt upright, her breath feathering the nape of his neck. Her hackles rose against his arm, stiff as porcupine qu
ills.
A new noise slipped out of the darkness. Back where Al had gone.
Not footsteps. No, this was a deliberate, smooth slithering.
LB whined next to Luke’s ear. Her breath held a shaved-iron tang. The scent of pure animal fear.
What could possibly make a noise like that? Had Clay brought a snake down for his tests? Oh God, what if he’d brought a python? Could it have gotten loose?
Whush-whush-whush. Soft, silky, advancing steadily through the dark.
No, Luke remembered. Felz said there were dogs, lizards, guinea pigs, bees. No snakes.
Those footsteps raced overhead again, but this time the darkness gave them a new, knowing cadence. Luke pictured a group of stunted youths in the water outside the station. Their bodies white as candle wax, sun-starved flesh flaking from their skeletons. Their heads, projecting from their collared shirts, were flat as flounders; their mouths were enormous and studded with the same needlelike teeth he’d glimpsed on the viperfish. They would be staring through the porthole with sightless silvery eyes, not really seeing but sensing him . . .
Now the whush-whush was joined by another sound: a dry chittering, almost mechanical. The sound of a million tiny limbs dancing lightly along the metal floor.
It’s the old man, Luke thought wildly. The old man with the mantises on his head. Luke pictured him trudging down the tunnel, his radial-tire sandals whushing on the floor while mantises spilled off of his skull.
Then another image darkened his mind—an older memory this time, a recollection drawn down from the surface world.
Yes, said a cold voice inside his head. Oh yessss, that’s it exactly. And it’s coming for you, Lucas. Coming for you this very moment . . .
YEARS AGO, when his life was much better, Luke had been invited to a veterinary conference in Arizona. They had gone as a family, staying at a motel edging the desert. The first night, they settled their infant son into the Pack ’n Play, then once Zach was asleep, Luke and Abby made love stealthily. Luke slipped inside Abby and rocked gently. Afterward they slept, only to be awakened by Zach’s horrific screams.
Abby jackknifed up in bed. “Zach?” she said. “What is it, baby?”
Luke could just make out the shape of his son in the finger of moonlight falling through the motel window. He was curled inside the Pack ’n Play. His face was pressed to the breathable mesh, which distorted his features.
Luke snapped on the bedside lamp. Zachary was shrieking, these lung-shredding sounds Luke had never heard before. He leapt out of bed. Zachary’s face was beet red and alarmingly puffed. Luke picked his son up and pressed the boy to his chest, a calming gesture.
Luke’s heartbeat skyrocketed when he felt something squirming against his own chest. Something inside Zachary’s sleeper, trapped against his son’s skin.
Zach’s piercing screams unlocked this dreadful hysteria in Luke; each one shot a jolt of scalding acid through his veins. The boy thrashed and squealed as Luke gripped him under the armpits, his little face a balloon ready to burst.
Jesus oh Jesus fuck what IS that?
Something was moving under Zach’s sleeper. Luke saw these terrifying whiplike motions in the left leg of Zach’s sleeper. It looked like a big fish caught in a net, trying to fling itself free. Luke made a dry gagging sound, the panic swelling in his throat like a sponge.
He tore the sleeper open. There, curling around his son’s ankle and all the way up his thigh, was the largest insect Luke had ever seen.
A long torsional tube. Its black body was segmented, sinuous, reflecting the room’s meager light. It looked the same at both ends, so Luke couldn’t tell where its head was. Luke saw inflamed divots all over Zach’s chest where the fucking thing must’ve bitten his boy.
It moved—was moving, even as Luke stared slack-jawed—with subtle undulations, powered by a dizzying multitude of legs. It released itself from Zach’s ankle, slipping up the back of his leg and around the frilled, absorbent ridge of his diaper. It was enormous, at least eight inches long; it kept coming and coming like a freight train steaming out of a tunnel, kinking and unwinding and flexing its revolting body.
Luke caught the final half inch of it—disgustingly warm, with a greasy sheen; it reminded him of grabbing the fireman’s pole at his old playground, the metal hot and slick from the hands of a hundred children.
He pinched his fingers with the desperate hope of snaring the bug, ripping the fucker in half, but it shimmied free and slithered under his son’s back.
Abby tore madly at Zach’s sleeve, trying to yank the sleeper off. The fear chewed into the sensitive wires in Luke’s brain, paralyzing his nerve centers. He pushed Abby away forcefully, too panicked to notice, flipped Zach onto his back, and pressed down on his sleeper, finding the bug—a millipede, he knew by then—and trapping it in the fabric. He freed Zachary’s arms, then leapt off the bed with the balled-up sleeper. The millipede whipped in his grip; Luke absorbed a series of bites as painful as the stings of a wasp.
Luke’s only thought: This fucker’s been doing that to my son.
He threw the sleeper down and stamped on it with his bare heel. A satisfying metallic crunch, like stepping on a beer can. He stomped again and again, fueled by a rage as primordial as any he’d ever experienced.
Die, you fucking brainless monster! Die, you awful thing!
He stepped away, panting. Abby cradled Zach; he was still bawling, but his cries had lost their death-struck pitch.
Luke’s gaze returned to the sleeper. Amazingly, it was moving.
The millipede crawled out of one sleeve. Skittering hesitantly, leaking viscid pus-yellow fluid, it curled into a cochlear coil on the carpet.
“Oh no,” Luke breathed. “Oh no-no-no.”
He retrieved his heavy-soled dress shoe and slammed it down. The bug actually leapt up, bouncing off the thick, nappy pile. With the same shoe, Luke flicked it through the open bathroom door and onto the tiles, muttering “Fucking thing oh you fucking thing,” and knelt on the tiles, slamming the shoe down furiously until the insect was nothing but a jamlike smear . . .
. . . AND RIGHT THEN, alone in the Trieste’s tunnel, this was the memory Luke’s mind conjured:
That slippery whush-whush in the cavernous dark was the whush of a millipede stalking toward him, chitter-clattering on its million-skillion legs.
This wasn’t your garden-variety one, either. Oh, no. The darkness nursed it into something new entirely. A millipede the size of a fourth-generation Aleppo pine, thick around as a trash can. Something primeval, hailing from the Permian age, where the scale of life was all out of whack. Its mandibles, sharp as hedge shears, clashed silkily: the sound of a razor drawn down a leather strop.
Whush-whush . . . pause . . . whush-whush.
Chitta-chit-skriiitch-chizzt-chit-chit.
It advanced slowly, in no rush. Where was there to go? It had all the time in the world.
Impossible, the rational center of Luke’s mind insisted. Even if it did exist anywhere on earth, which it absolutely fucking does not, how would something like that get down here? It’s nothing. Nothing at all, for fuck’s sake, nothing at ALL.
His mind took a sickening lurch. That reasonable (if increasingly shrill) voice in his head held no sway down here. Maybe his brain had conjured this nightmare bug out of nothingness. But it was still here—if only in this moment.
Either he’d created it . . .
—or the Trieste had—
. . . or he was coming down with a case of the sea-sillies already.
Your seabag’s leaky, sailor. Isn’t that what they said in the Navy when a guy went batshit? Your seabag’s leaking its guts all over the friggin’ place, swabbie. You’ve gone Section 8, ya fookin’ loonybird—
Whush-whush . . . WHUSH-whush . . .
You think that’s nothing, Luke? his mother said mockingly, with that throaty chuckle of hers. Ohh, I think we both know it’s something. After all, the dog can feel it, too, wouldn’t you say? Can�
��t you feel her shivering against you? Oh yes, it’s something all right, and whatever it is, Luke, it’s coming for you.
Luke pushed the dog behind him and butt-bumped toward the locked hatch. The tunnel narrowed. His breath came in hot, nauseous gusts.
Whush-WHUSH . . .
Luke swore he could see the segmented shape of the millipede’s gargantuan and somehow gothic body, the plating of its exoskeleton exuding its own sick glow. It was approaching with a mincing sidewinder movement.
Jesus, no, this is not happening . . . there’s nothing—NOTHING—!
He flattened his back against the hatch. The dog was tucked and trembling behind his knees. Luke leaned forward slightly, terror buzzing in his skull like angry yellow jackets . . .
Whush-whush-WHUSH-WHU—
The airlock hissed behind him. The hatch fell open. Luke’s heels stuttered back and hit the metal lip. He squawked, toppling backward as he scrambled away from the chattering noises in the hallway.
Light flooded his eyes. A familiar face stared impassively down at him.
“Hello, brother.”
10.
CLAYTON NELSON’S FACE wore a particular expression a good deal of the time. It had begun to grace his features as a child, and although his face had changed over the years, the expression had not. There was a noticeable thinning of the lips and a flaring of the nostrils; the flesh drew tight at the top of his nose where it met the edges of his eyes, while his eyebrows tented in an inverted V. It was the look of a man who’d sniffed something foul, but could not determine the source of the odor.
Clayton Nelson’s face could hold this expression for hours. It was the very expression it held now, in fact, as he looked at Luke sprawled on the tunnel floor.