by Nick Cutter
“What?”
“Your overalls,” she said, unzipping her own. “I’ll lay them on the other side as a crash mat.”
Luke removed his overalls. His body looked sickly in the tunnel’s light; the blackness of the sea, falling through a porthole above, cast a circular shadow over his heart. Al’s body was muscular and milky from a life spent underwater. She had a tattoo of a propeller on each hipbone.
“Old superstition,” she said, catching him looking. “Sailors used to get propellers tattooed on their ass, one on each cheek—a good luck charm against drowning. If your ship goes down, they help propel you to shore.”
They stood for a long moment, eyes on each other. Luke felt the warmth radiating off Alice’s body. There was appreciation in their gazes—the appreciation that prevails among soldiers sharing a bunker under heavy fire . . . but there was a raw hunger, too.
“Right,” she said, breaking eye contact. “Back in a jiff.”
She darted through the crawl-through in her tank top and fitted shorts, arranged their overalls on the other side, and slid back. They hefted the generator and slid it into the chute; it fit easily, with room to spare.
Alice powered it through, pushing it with her feet; Luke followed shortly behind her. The generator nosed out of the crawl-through and hit the floor with a crunch. They inspected it. It looked okay. They put their overalls back on and continued.
The tunnels seemed to be lengthening with a sly stretch and pull. They were narrowing, too, their ceilings lowering. The station’s geometries were shifting subtly. The beat of what sounded like footsteps came irregularly. These were not the mincing footfalls of the waterlogged children—these were plodding, dogged, and they came from somewhere inside.
Maybe it’s the thing from the crate, darling, Luke’s mother piped up. You must assume it’s got big feet to go along with its big hands . . .
Shut up, Mom, Luke thought. Who could it possibly be? Clayton was the only one left. Maybe it was Clay. Maybe he was stalking them. He really did want Luke to be here, and now he didn’t want to let him go.
Luke propped open the storage hatch. They shimmied the generator through, Luke doing most of the work on account of Al’s hand. A flashlight was clipped to the wall; Al grabbed it, flicked it on. It did very little to illuminate things.
The generator snagged on the grate. Luke hissed, a release of pent-up anger and fear, and gave it a kick, which only sent a spike of pain shooting up to his knee.
He collapsed, breathing heavily, his eyes stinging with sweat. A stone lodged in his chest—panic, but only a dull murmur of it now, mingled with a heavy sense of despair. The station wouldn’t let them go. Its overseers would erect roadblocks, allow them to feast on false hopes, then shred their escape plans.
Somehow, something would thwart them; Luke had become convinced of that. A small and silly matter, which would only sharpen the agony. A blown fuse. A stripped wire. A setback that wouldn’t daunt them for a moment on the surface—but down here, it would end them.
Or you may decide you want to stay, said a coal-dark voice in his head. Why not? It’ll be fun. Ooooh, the things we could show you . . .
Luke rocked the generator. His arms screamed and his shoulders nearly popped out of joint. The damn thing tore free with a screech of metal. He and Alice rolled it the final ten feet to the Challenger. Al unspooled three heavy-gauge cables and flicked a switch on the genny.
“If we’re lucky, we’ll have enough juice to skeedaddle,” she said. “But I want to pump every volt I can into the Challenger. That’ll take a few hours.”
“You’re gonna be able to do it with your hand like that?”
She nodded. “Just pushing buttons and flicking switches. I’m fine on my own. Plus it’s better if you keep an eye on your brother. I’d rather keep him in plain sight.”
Those footsteps thudded again. Closer now—just outside the storage area? The hackles stiffened down LB’s back.
The footsteps drew nearer, producing a thudding echo on the grates. Luke imagined someone—something?—standing—hunching?—in that dissolving edge of light. The outlines of this person or thing shifted restlessly, solidifying momentarily in Luke’s mind before adopting a new guise.
The footsteps stopped. In the silence came a low, liquid breathing. Unrushed and calm: the breath of a man on a leisurely hike.
“Clay?” Luke called.
The breathing stopped. Next, the source itself was gone. The presence vanished, evaporating like steam off a hot bath.
“It’s just the station,” Al said. “Groans and moans.”
“The station, sure,” Luke said, accepting her reasoning, as it made more sense than the alternative. “How you feeling, Al?”
Al held the flashlight under her chin like a boy telling a scary story around a campfire. “I’m feeling fine as cherry wine, Doc.” She chuckled. The walls sponged up her laughter. “We’re going to be okay, Luke. Aren’t we?”
“I think so. We just have to get a little lucky. And hope someone up there is watching over us.”
“Go on. Find your brother. Take the dog, too. And Luke—stay awake.”
3.
THE MAIN LAB was deserted. The lights burned at quarter power.
Luke flicked the switch to activate the exterior spotlights. They didn’t turn on. He flicked them again. Still dark. The viewing window reflected his haunted eyes.
He felt it out there. That sucking, hungering nothingness.
He found a flashlight in a drawer. He turned it on and trained it on the sea floor. The beam illuminated that mounded whiteness, marine snow piled in layers.
There are places on earth where light is unwelcome, Luke thought. Light has no power down here. Darkness is king. Light flees the dark, or it gets devoured.
He watched darkness eat into the glow of his flashlight, dissolving its weak radiance like acid. The beam winnowed and broke apart until—
Something snaked into the dregs of that light, lashing fretfully. Thick and reddish, an enormous night crawler flicking against the window. LB yipped in fright. Luke backed away . . . then was hit with another image, so much larger and so terrible that his soul withered at its prospect. And yet he didn’t see anything—it would’ve been impossible in that blackness. He only intuited it. Luke caught a sense of something out there. Its presence was enormous, mind-filling. In that moment, he saw how things would look if the seas were drained: the station surrounded by monolithic alabaster cliffs that went up and up until their faces welded with the blackness above. The trench unfurled flat and featureless to the base of those cliffs—and in his mind’s eye, he could see this . . . this . . . thing on those towering sheets of stone. It clung to the cliffs with many limbs, spanning all around the trench the way a spider fans its limbs across a web. It had no head to speak of. It was all limbs—all tubes—and each limb was the thickness of an oil tanker. Those limbs convulsed as it detached from the cliff, lowering its terrible body onto the ocean floor. Its limbs smashed down into the ghostly muck, sending up combers of marine snow that rolled in awesome white waves. . . .
“Lucas.”
Luke spun. The flashlight pinned Clayton in its beam. Luke inhaled sharply. Even LB let out a low yowl of concern.
“You look pained,” Clayton said.
Clay’s body appeared to have shrunk—it was as if the incredible pressure of the water was gradually crushing him down. His chest seemed thicker, his legs, too: Luke had the awful image of an accordion being squeezed with inexorable force.
Clay’s face bore the same hints of compression. Where before it had seemed aristocratic, with the high forehead and flinty cheeks, it now had a fleshy, porcine look. His eyes were squeezed between wadded-up skin, making it seem that he was peering through slits of fatback.
“Are you all right, Clay? You don’t look well.”
“Never better, brother.”
His lab was open. Light spilled across the floor. That familiar dripping noise invaded Luke�
�s ears.
Drrrrrthilllippppp!
“Come inside,” Clayton said. “You’ll catch your death of cold.”
Another one of their mother’s pet phrases. Luke’s memory raced through a few others. Useless as tits on a bull. Snowball’s chance in hell. Lord love a duck—the phrase she’d screamed after Chester Higgs had beaten her with that hoe.
“It’s not that cold.”
Clayton nodded dismissively and turned back to the lab.
“Clay, wait.”
Clayton wore a sweater, the kind fishermen wear. His left hand was swaddled in gauze. His left arm seemed thicker than his right. Luke figured the whole limb was encased in bandages. God knew what lay underneath.
“Dr. Toy’s dead,” Luke said simply. “The ceiling caved in. Crushed him.”
“That’s too bad,” said Clayton.
“Christ, Clay. Did you hear what I just . . . ? No, of course you did. Westlake, now Toy. The ambrosia is . . . it’s not what you think it is.”
Clayton scoffed. “It’s simply a substance, Lucas. A tool.”
So goddamn sure of himself. He never learns.
“Do you have any idea what was happening just behind that door?” Luke pointed at Westlake’s lab. “What still is, for all we know? Two men have been killed by . . . I don’t know what. It’s all linked. The station, the ambrosia, and . . .”
. . . whatever controls the ambrosia . . .
Clayton said, “Do you have any idea how stupid you sound? Westlake went crazy. By the sounds of it, Toy died in a structural collapse. Both of which were known threats. Men have perished underwater in such circumstances before, and will again. It’s the danger of working this deep.”
Luke wanted to grab Clay’s arm (his unbandaged one; the prospect of gripping the other arm was wildly revolting) and drag him to Dr. Toy’s destroyed quarters. He wanted to show Clayton the metal pulsing in the ruined porthole.
But he knew it would be useless. Westlake and Toy were fools. That’s what Clayton would say. And to an extent he was correct, if the only measuring stick for their intellect was his own immeasurable gifts. But they had been smart men, serious men, and they had shattered, utterly. This place had done it to them.
“What if you’re wrong?” Luke said. “Just this once? What if this stuff is of no benefit at all? It can’t cure the ’Gets, can’t cure anything. What if you can’t control it? What . . . what if it’s controlling you, Clay? If it knows you—your habits, your flaws? Maybe it’s playing you. What if . . .”
Westlake’s voice: We’re in the basement with the beast—
“. . . Clay, what if it never lets you go?”
Clayton’s reply was shocking.
“I don’t really care if it cures anything.”
“. . . wait, what?”
“I . . . don’t . . . care,” he said, enunciating each word. “People need to die. Of cancer and AIDS and whatever else. There’s too many of us. Too many by half. It’s a planetary imperative. Not enough resources to sustain the hordes. We needed a grand curative. We call the ’Gets a disease but it’s not. Mother Nature has taken out her broom; she’s sweeping up the trash.”
Luke’s skull throbbed. “Jesus, then . . . why agree to come down here, if you disagreed with the whole purpose?”
“Because I’m fascinated, Lucas. I really just want to know how it works.”
Luke found it almost impossible to grapple with his brother’s misanthropy. It wasn’t that he was hateful, as their mother had been—you required a working emotional barometer in order to feel anything at either pole, be it love or hate. Clayton’s barometer was zeroed out. His emotional weather patterns were unvarying. No shutter-rattling storms, no radiant sunlight. Just an endless string of gray, edgeless days.
Luke had never really known Clayton. It would have been like trying to comprehend the mindscape of a meticulously disguised alien, a creature composed of sentient goo poured into an empty shell that he’d called his brother.
“If you don’t give a shit,” Luke said, “then why the fuck didn’t they send down someone who does?”
“Because none of those people can do what I can do.”
“You fuck. You miserable fucking specimen of humanity.”
Clayton’s expression suggested he took this as a compliment. It was perfectly acceptable to be a miserable representative of a species you cared nothing for.
Drrrrrrithhlippppp!
“What is that, Clay?” Luke said coldly. “What the fuck is that noise?”
Luke shoved past his brother, adrenaline tweaked as he stalked toward the open hatch. LB was stuck tight to his heels.
4.
THE LAB WAS BRIGHT and ordered, not a hair out of place. Positively Claytonian. Luke’s gaze fell on the cooler containing the guinea pig . . .
. . . the guinea pig, and the strange shape wrapped in durable black plastic.
Ttthhwillipp!
The sound was coming from behind the Einstein poster. Ole Albert with his tongue stuck out of his mouth. A sense of unreality washed over Luke. It was so plainly obvious, wasn’t it? How had he missed it?
Hell, on my last descent I brought a poster of Albert Einstein for your brother, he remembered Alice telling him.
“Oh, shit. I don’t . . . how could you . . . you Shawshanked us,” he said softly. “Oh, Clay. You sly dog, you.”
“You cannot move it,” Clay said, setting himself in front of Luke. “Do you understand? It’s forbidden.”
Who was he, Bluebeard with his locked room full of severed heads? What did that make Luke then—his cringing, servile wife?
Luke took a step toward Clayton; a challenging smile tweaked his lips. LB came forward, too, her eyes resting on Clay with bright menace.
“You can’t move it.” Clayton spoke carefully. “Trust me, you don’t want to.”
The buzz drifted through from the main lab, adding to the riot in Luke’s head. It was as if wasps had built a nest between his ears, stinging the insides of his skull.
“I think I ought to know,” Luke said, deathly soft. “I’m not a scientist, right? Why keep your secrets from me? Unless, I mean, you’re working on a new dog-neutering system.” A hollow laugh. “You’re not working on that, Clay. Are you?”
“Get away from me.”
“Shouldn’t I know, brother? I came all this way.”
“I never asked you to.”
“Oh, I think you did.” Luke’s throat was dry, and the words came out in a choked rasp. “I think you’ve done plenty down here without even knowing it.”
Next they were grappling with each other. They waltzed awkwardly around the lab bench, locked up like professional wrestlers—not yet committed to actual violence, just testing their strength. Luke’s fingers sunk into the bandages on his brother’s hand; his flesh had a sickening give, spongier than skin should ever be.
Luke was dismayed to discover that Clayton’s strength overmastered his own. It was that age-old truism: no matter how old two brothers got, the older brother still had the upper hand in any physical confrontation. Clay’s elbow clipped the bridge of Luke’s nose. The room exploded in cold blue fire; Luke’s synapses lit up like a pinball machine. He stuttered backward on his heels and fell, a shockwave juddering up his spine.
Clayton’s face shaped itself into an expression that did not often grace it: concern. He stepped forward, his hand instinctively outstretched.
“Luke, I’m so—”
LB sprang. Her skull rammed into Clayton’s breadbasket; the wind whoofed out of him. He tottered backward, arms held out to ward off LB’s jaws. She was harrying him now, not nipping but really biting, aiming to do some serious damage.
“LB! Heel!” Luke shouted. “Heel!”
The dog paid him no mind. Clayton’s hip hit the edge of the lab bench, spinning him sideways. He fell backward, arms thrown out to check his fall.
His fingertips snagged on the poster. A look of helpless panic entered his eyes.
The poster stretched—for a heart-stopping moment it appeared as if it might hold—then it ripped from its hooks and fluttered down onto Clayton’s chest.
Dear Christ, Luke thought. It’s worse than I thought. More awful than I ever could have imagined.
5.
A HOLE. Halfway up the wall.
Except it wasn’t really a hole, was it? Whatever Westlake had seen, however he’d contextualized it, he’d been wrong.
Its surface was darker than the sea beyond the wall; it shimmered like the placid surface of a lake stirred by a breeze. Upon casual inspection, it may’ve seemed solid—it held back the water, didn’t it?—but Luke knew if he were to touch it, his fingers would pass through into . . . his mind couldn’t grasp what might occur next. It couldn’t even form an outline.
The (not a) hole was rung by smaller ones, the same way moons ring a planet. A few were the diameter of nickels; others were quite a bit larger.
The hole—stop calling it that, Luke. A hole is ordinary and of this world; this is something else entirely—the hole-thing followed the curve of the wall: Luke could see a heating pipe running beneath it.
The hole-thing, the rift, glittered dully around its edges. It was growing. The smaller holes appeared to be enlarging, too, nibbling into the wall.
A new sensation: fishhooks sunk into Luke’s brain, tugging insistently.
He leaned toward the hole, the pain of his nose forgotten. He felt no danger; not an imminent sense, anyway. A voice buried in his subconscious warned him not to trust that sense of calm, but . . . yes, he trusted the hole. Oh yes, he trusted it completely. More than he trusted the structural safety of the Trieste, in fact. He tasted blood on his tongue but this, too, was a faraway sense. The hole—
It’s not a goddamn—
But it was a hole, wasn’t it? Sure it was. What was a hole, after all, but a, a . . .
Doorway?
A split in the surface of things. An absence of matter. You could fill that absence with any old thing, couldn’t you? Put a lid over it, keep everything precious hidden from sight. You could bury dangerous things in holes, too. Holes were good that way.