by Nick Cutter
“Thanks for rolling out the welcome wagon,” said Luke, feeling stupid, which is how he frequently felt in his older brother’s presence.
Clayton was narrow-shouldered and thin-hipped, dressed in gray coveralls. A custodian’s uniform. His face was austerely handsome in a way particular to polar icecaps—flinty and remote. As he’d aged, Clayton had come to look more and more like a member of some fallen Eastern European aristocracy.
The only feature working against that perception was his hair, which hung down his neck in a ragged fringe—the beginnings of a mullet. It gave him the look of a Double-A middle-relief pitcher; an aging player who’d had a cup of coffee in the majors and was now playing out the string with the Tuscaloosa Mud Hens or Richmond Flying Squirrels.
The fingertips of his left hand were bandaged.
“Let me help you up,” Clayton said mechanically, offering Luke his unbandaged hand.
Luke glanced down the storage tunnel. Empty. No giant millipede. Of course not. He rubbed his head. A fresh goose egg parted the short hairs on the back of his skull. LB hunched behind him, her tail tucked between her hind legs.
“Ah. You located the specimen,” Clayton said.
Anger flared in Luke. It was partly the adrenaline burn-off, and the shame at his crazed imaginings, but primarily the familiar rage he’d too often felt toward his brilliant, careless brother.
“Why was she in there?” he said. “It’s freezing. It’s dark. She was alone.”
“I wasn’t aware. Hugo took it.”
Luke bristled at the pronoun. It. As if Dr. Toy had stolen office supplies instead of a living creature.
“He must’ve abandoned it in there,” Clayton said.
“Why would he do that?”
Clayton’s eyebrow arched. “Have you seen Hugo?”
When Luke nodded, Clayton said, “Then I don’t need to tell you why he might act irrationally. I don’t know why he locked the specimen—”
“She, Clay. She’s not a specimen,” Luke said.
“Technically, yes, it is,” Clayton placidly replied.
“You named her Little Bee.”
“And? It’s just a name.”
“A stupid one.”
“Well, I’m sure the specimen appreciates your concern.”
Luke willed himself to calm down. What profit was there in arguing as they had as children? He wished Al would get her ass back. He needed a buffer.
“Clay . . . what the hell is happening down here?” he asked. “The monitors are out, you haven’t communicated for days. I get a phone call at three o’clock in the morning telling me to hightail my ass to Guam. They play me a recording where you’re telling me to come down—come home. After that, they took me into a chilly room, rolled out a slab, and showed me Dr. Westlake.”
“Hold on.” Clayton held up his unbandaged hand. “What’s this about a recording?”
Luke nodded. “The last transmission they received from you. You were saying come home, Lucas; we need you, Lucas. Stuff like that.”
Clayton scoffed. “Asking for you? Why in God’s name would I do that?”
“Clay, I heard you. Clear as day. Come home, Lucas.”
Clayton’s features were fixed in that just-sniffed-shit expression, and again, Luke was left feeling that he was the dog shit on Clayton’s shoe, the foul muck that his brother was just now realizing he’d stepped in.
“Whatever you heard, it wasn’t me. I have no need of you here.” He gave Luke an are-you-serious? look. “What would you possibly add?”
Clayton was telling the truth; Luke knew him well enough to see that. Who the hell could have sent that transmission, then, and how? Had someone taped Clayton covertly and spliced a sound file together? Why would Westlake or Toy—the only possible culprits—do that?
“You said something about Westlake,” Clayton prodded.
Luke eyed his brother evenly. “Are you saying you don’t know what happened to him?”
“We’ve had no recent contact with the surface. Disturbances in the water have muddied our transmissions. I know Westlake took the sub. I have no idea how he managed it. None of us were taught how to . . .” He exhaled through his nostrils. “I hadn’t seen him in some time. He locked himself in his lab. He left in . . . I was about to say the dead of night, but it always feels like that down here. He certainly left without telling me.”
“He’s dead, Clay.” Luke paused to let it sink in. “I mean . . . not just dead.” The word failed to express what Luke had seen. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I never want to again.”
Clayton accepted the news stoically. Perhaps his upper lip twitched, but if so, it was barely noticeable.
“What the hell is going on down here?” Luke resisted the urge to punctuate each word with a poke to his brother’s chest—anything to pierce that Teflon exterior. “You’ve got Dr. Felz and everyone else in a flap, and that was before Westlake surfaced.”
“Our research. The tests are ongoing,” Clayton said. He had already accepted both Westlake’s death and Luke’s untimely arrival; his mind had processed both phenomena, catalogued and dismissed them with typical Claytonian swiftness. “It’s remarkable. What we’ve discovered beggars description. There have been setbacks. Some expected, others less so. Dr. Toy isolated himself . . .” He glanced at his watch with a hint of perplexity. “I can’t say how long ago. Time has a funny way of behaving down here.”
“Aaaand we’re in,” Al said, abruptly stepping in from the storage tunnel. “Nice work, guys.”
She offered her hand to Clayton, who shook it dryly.
“Sight for sore eyes, Doc. I was trying to get the door unlocked remotely, but I can’t pass a clear signal to the surface.”
“We’ve been having the same trouble,” said Clayton.
“Is that why the monitors are on the fritz, too?”
Clayton shrugged. “I don’t know why that might be. I assumed it was a breakdown on your end.”
Luke told Alice what Clay had said, about not sending the transmission.
“That seems unlikely,” said Al, turning to Clayton. “I’ve listened to that transmission two dozen times. It’s you, Dr. Nelson. It’s the reason Luke’s here.”
Clayton bristled. “It wasn’t me. Why on earth would I need a veterinarian?”
He spoke the word veterinarian with the same dismissive inflection others might accord the word moron.
“Well, isn’t this a touching family reunion,” Al said.
“Maybe you were sleeping, Clay,” Luke said. LB barked energetically, as if in support. “When you recorded it, I mean. You didn’t sound like yourself.”
Clayton wouldn’t dignify this possibility with an answer, but Al coaxed Luke to go on.
“You sounded . . . you sounded gone,” Luke said. “Just, I don’t know, somewhere outside your own skin. Your voice had a floaty quality. Maybe you were sleepwalking. Maybe you sent the transmission without knowing it.”
“I’ve never sleepwalked in my life,” Clay said.
But Al was nodding. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen that. Happens a lot on submarines. Sailors getting out of bed, walking around and waking up in funny places. Guys who never had the habit before. Lots of lucid dreaming, too—talking in your sleep. Your brainwaves go a bit buggy down here. Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Well,” Clayton said with a stagy eye-roll, “now that’s been sorted, perhaps you’d like to leave?”
Alice laughed without mirth. “You crack me up, Doc. I figure since we’ve come all this way—and factoring in what happened to Dr. Westlake—we best stay awhile, take a proper accounting of things.”
Clayton nodded impassively. “As long as you don’t disturb my lab or intrude on my work.” A hard look at Luke. “Either of you.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Al.
Clayton’s face reminded Luke of a blanket pulled over a nest of scorpions: seemingly tranquil, but with all manner of thoughts and instincts twisting beneath
it.
“Well then, come along.”
Clayton turned and walked away with every expectation they’d follow, treating them with the indifference you might accord to a pair of slack-jawed yokels who’d just fallen off the hay truck—which, Luke noted with an absence of bitterness, was how Clayton treated pretty much everybody he met. He’d always been an equal-opportunity disdainer.
11.
DESPITE THE LOW CEILING, Clayton moved down the tunnel with the grace of a man who did not so much walk as he did float a millimeter or two above the ground, hovercrafting on a ribbon of air.
The tunnel was well lit. Warmth emanated from gilled vents. They walked in silence and squeezed single file through a gap where the tunnel winnowed to a bottleneck. Separated by a flimsy barrier of polymers and foam, Luke could feel the sea pressing against his skull. His eardrums throbbed from the pressure of that static silence.
Luke had never been particularly prone to claustrophobia; as a child, he’d navigated drainage tunnels and dusty attics, happy as a hamster in a Habitrail. But these tunnels truly resembled a kind of digestive tract, with their ridged walls and scalloped ceilings. No wonder Toy’s and Westlake’s mental states had eroded—on top of the pressure and isolation, they’d spent too much time pacing these sinister tubes.
They rounded a tight bend. Luke stopped so suddenly that LB butted into the backs of his legs, leaving a streak of drool on his overalls.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
The tunnel hit an abrupt stop. It was as if they’d reached a dead end . . . except for the circular hole in the wall at the end of the tunnel, about the size of a manhole. The mouth of the hole was dark, but Luke could see that it stretched off to meet some unknown terminus within the station.
“Relax,” said Al. “They’re called crawl-throughs. It’s a structural necessity. You’ll see the same thing at space stations: chutes connecting one area to the other, which the astronauts float through. We, unfortunately, are tethered by gravity. But at least it’s got rungs, just like a ladder. It’s a twenty-second trip, Luke. Piece of cake.”
Luke approached the chute. God, it was tiny—a choking ring. He could see straight through it, at least, to the lit tunnel on the other end. Rungs ran along its ceiling. But why had he thought it was the diameter of a manhole? It looked about as big around as the door on his clothes dryer, if that.
Clayton slid in on his stomach. He wriggled until his ass was past the chute’s mouth, transitioned onto his back, and gripped the rungs. He pulled himself through, grunting slightly in exertion; shortly afterward he slid out the other end.
“You go,” Al said to Luke. “Then the dog. Then me.”
Luke slid himself in. He tried to move as he’d seen his brother do, but it was difficult. He turned over awkwardly. A black tongue of foam ran around the chute, top to bottom. When he exhaled, his shoulders touched its edges: an uncomfortable feeling, one that made his knees rise to his chest instinctively—his kneecaps hit the top of the chute and made no sound at all. There was a terrible solidity to everything down here, put there by the water: he could have been crawling through an underground cave with a billion tons of rock pushing down.
It doesn’t matter, he told himself. If this chute collapses, you’ll be dead before your mind even registers the threat.
Gripping the rungs, he pulled himself through. The chute was coated with a helpful silicon agent: he slid as effortlessly as a plastic puck over an air-hockey table. He reached the other end, turned onto his stomach, and fell gracelessly onto the floor.
Clayton made no effort to help him up. “You really know how to make a guy feel welcome,” Luke said.
With some gentle coaxing, LB came next. She whined and whimpered, but Al gave her a push and the dog shot through the chute as if she’d been greased.
Once Al herself was through, they continued. The tunnel followed a gentle curve until it hit another hatch, which opened into a lab area. It was much larger than any room Luke had seen so far. His head nearly touched the overhead lights, which buzzed with an insectile hum. The lab was spartanly appointed: a few chairs, cardboard filing cabinets. Everything was collapsible, foldable, compressible—as it would have to be to have gotten down here. It’s not as if they could back up a moving truck to the Trieste’s front door and let burly men in weight-lifting belts off-load supplies. It all would’ve been ferried down in the Challengers, and been small enough to fit through their hatches.
Luke noted five hatches: the one they’d come through—marked Access 1—plus four more marked LN, LW, LT, and Access 2.
The second hatch, LW, was locked. Luke saw a keypad beside it. LW’s porthole was slicked from the inside with coagulated dark matter. A buzz emitted from behind the hatch, which quivered the delicate hairs of Luke’s inner ear.
A foldable lab bench was scattered with papers, most of them scrawled with his brother’s spiky handwriting. Petri dishes were stacked in a small cooler; empty MREs were heaped in a trash bin.
Luke said: “Is that a viewing window?”
“Yes,” Clayton said. “The only one of any size in the station.”
It stretched nearly floor-to-ceiling, perhaps eight feet across. Luke’s eyes charted the curve of the glass . . . was it glass? Probably not. Glass would shatter. Beyond lay a blackness so profound that it unrooted something in his chest.
Clayton flicked a switch. The interior lights dimmed. He flicked another. A bank of high-intensity spotlights flooded the ocean bottom.
12.
THE SEA FLOOR was as flat as a ballroom. It unfurled to the farthest edge of the light’s reach—perhaps twenty feet—before rolling under a solid wall of darkness that no man-made light could penetrate. The marine snow drifted in seismic combers, gentle waves of motion . . . or as though something was moving cunningly under the surface.
Luke’s heartbeat thudded dully at his temples. He put a hand on the window. The mammoth density of the sea throbbed against his fingertips. He pictured spider-legged cracks forming in his reflection, then water needling through to slice his fingers off painlessly; next the window would shatter inward as the ceiling crumpled down, crushing him before he could make peace with God.
“We watch it out there,” Clayton said. “Perhaps it watches us, too.”
Luke saw it then, as though it had arrived on cue. Ambrosia. A solid sheet of the stuff. It drifted across the ocean floor, reminding Luke of a manta ray. It shaped itself into a playful O and rolled along like a hula hoop.
Luke got the oddest sense of being teased—it was like watching a lure jigged past his sightline, some canny angler making it dance and shimmy oh-so-invitingly in hopes Luke would lunge and take an incautious bite . . . then what?
Clayton said, “Magnificent, isn’t it?”
Luke caught a sense of shapes cavorting where the light turned granular. At the precise point where the spotlights faded and died, he swore he could see . . . things. They coalesced, solidifying into something swirling with angry movement, so large that the darkness could scarcely contain it, rushing at him swiftly—
He flinched.
But there was nothing. The drifting snow. That impenetrable wall of black.
“Are you catching much of it?” Luke asked his brother. “Will it . . .”
Will it let itself be caught? was the question he thought but did not say.
“We don’t have to catch it anymore,” Clayton said.
“You have enough?”
“Oh, you can never have enough, Lucas.”
“Then why don’t you have to catch it?”
“Because it’s coming to us.”
He snapped the lights back on. Luke saw that Al had gravitated toward the door marked LW. Her face had a disconnected, swimmy quality—the look of a person suspended in a wonderful, all-consuming dream.
“Al . . . ?” said Luke.
Her expression didn’t change. She trailed one finger over the hatch of LW sensuously, as she might over a lover’
s sensitive flesh.
LB gave a short bark. The fog over Al’s eyes lifted.
“Sorry. Off in my own world there,” she said sheepishly. “This is Westlake’s lab, right?”
“Of course it is.” Clayton waved his hand edgily. “Come away from there.”
Obediently, Al did so. She was grinning and rubbing the back of her neck, as if she’d been caught doing something embarrassing. Luke watched her circumspectly, a little weirded out by her detached expression: too much like the zoned-out look that would enter an animal’s eyes once the Euthasol took hold. LB padded over and sniffed at Al’s pocket. She produced a half-eaten energy bar, snapped off a piece and tossed it to LB, who snatched it out of the air and wolfed it down.
From another part of the station arose a dull, monotonous knocking.
“Is that Dr. Toy?” Al asked.
Clayton’s shrug said: Who else?
“You figure he’s dangerous, Doc?” said Al. “We can’t have him running around trying to punch holes in the damn walls.”
“He’s staked out his fiefdom, Lieutenant,” Clayton said. “He’s squatting in the animal quarantine. He’s not bothering me. I’m not bothering him.”
Luke said: “What is he doing?”
“Pursuing scientific inquiry, I assume,” Clayton said. “What else?”
Luke’s gaze tracked from Clay to the hatch marked LW . . . suddenly it hit him. LW: Westlake. LT: Toy. LN: Nelson. These must be their private labs. Luke could see into Dr. Toy’s through the porthole—orderly and empty. He could even see into Clayton’s.
But Westlake’s porthole was obscured by that slick black coating. And there was that odd hum from behind the hatch.
“Has anyone been in Westlake’s lab since . . . ?” said Luke.
Clayton shook his head. “It’s locked. Only Westlake knew the keypad code to gain entry.”
“Should we take a look inside?” Luke said, eyeing that black stuff critically.
“That is unwise,” Clayton said. “Westlake was working with . . . certain toxic compounds, I believe. There may be a contamination risk, but we’re perfectly safe if it remains shut. That hatch is hermetically sealed.”