The Deep (10 page)

Luke hadn’t dared retrieve the comics from the lawn. By that evening, the grass was picked clean. From that time forward, Luke made a point out of secrecy: if his mother was unaware of the things that gave him joy, she couldn’t take them away. But she had other ways to maintain her dominance.

One night she’d climbed the staircase, each step whining under her bulk, and opened his bedroom door. Luke had been sleeping alone; Clayton was in the basement most nights. She crossed the room with thudding footfalls, threw back the covers, and slid into his bed. The springs squealed and the mattress took a sickening downward lurch. Luke felt as if he were being sucked down into greedy quicksand.

She nestled her body up with his, spooning him. There was nothing
motherly in the embrace. He caught the acrid whiff of her armpits and the dense, peaty scent wafting from her mouth.

She curled an arm around him; his pajama top had rucked up, and she spread her hand across his bare belly. Her flesh was sickeningly warm, a hot water bottle packed with boiled lard.

Her index finger tapped his stomach in time with the beat of his heart. As its rate accelerated, so did her tapping. Her mouth was close to his neck, her breath moistening the downy hairs. He was certain she’d sink her teeth into him, holding tight as she ate him the way she ate her porridge: in tiny, tiny bites.

Part of Luke realized she was trying to break him, as she’d already done to his father. Fear equaled control in the mind of Bethany Ronnicks. It was an effective tool. But only if you stood for it.

She wasn’t really clever. Luke had been coming to that realization for a while by then. Not smart, just cunning. Animals were cunning. Animals also ate their own shit and chewed live electrical wires.

The only way to deal with monsters—real or imagined—was to show no fear. You had to become the Human Shield.

Luke opened his eyes and gripped her wrist. Her muscles tensed under their encasement of flab. Shifting his weight, he slung himself out from under her and landed on the floor with a graceless thump. He stood and retreated to the door.

“Where are you going?” A mocking coo.

“This isn’t your bedroom, Mom. You don’t sleep here.”

“This is my house.” All mockery gone. “I sleep where I goddamn like.”

“Then I’ll sleep somewhere else.”

“Get. Back.
Here.
”

Luke hesitated . . . then left. He got halfway down the hallway and collapsed. What had he done? He was only thirteen. He couldn’t leave the house. He was trapped. What would his mother do to him now? What would she—

Luke awoke with a start. The dim ticking of instruments, the rush of water against the hull. He was in the
Challenger
. The heat of the instruments
pulled sweat out of his pores. Alice stared down at him with concern.

“You’re okay, Doc. You were dreaming.”

Luke wiped at the drool on his chin, mortified. “How long was I out?”

“Couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. You were grinding your teeth; sounded like rocks in a blender. Mumbling, too.”

Alice was leaning over, her hand on his shoulder. He felt the warmth of her flesh and caught the scent of her body—the softest note of vanilla. It wasn’t perfume; Al didn’t seem the sort to wear it. Probably just a dab of hand cream—it was dry as a desert inside the sub, which was weird seeing as they were surrounded by water. She’d unzipped her overalls a little—the heat was intense—and Luke couldn’t help his eyes from orienting on that slice of bare flesh trailing down to the dampened hem of her tank top . . .

He wrenched his eyes up to her face. She was watching him impassively, her head slightly cocked.

Enjoying the view?
her expression seemed to say. There was no recrimination in it, just a vague sense of mirth.

“What did I say?” Luke asked. “When I was sleeping, I mean.”

“
Get behind me
.” She smiled as if to say it wasn’t anything he ought to be embarrassed about. “
Get behind me where it’s safe
or something like that.”

5.

THE
CHALLENGER
LEVELED OFF.
They were presently over twenty thousand feet undersea. Luke heard sly pops and crackles, the sound of Rice Krispies doused in milk.

“Relax, that’s just the foam,” Al said. “It’s compressing to bear the strain.”

The view was disorienting. Profound, terrible darkness. What could possibly live down here? Luke pictured the water rolling away for miles in every direction, empty and pitiless. This stratum was cleansed of nearly all the fundamental assets that foster life—sunlight, warmth, air, food—so the only creatures that lived in it should be, by definition, less than whole. Their skin would be jellylike; Luke imagined bodies draped in a thin stretching of greased latex, like condom skin. He almost laughed at the idea of schools of condom fish flitting through the deeps—

Tink!

Something struck the porthole’s glass, then pelted away.

Tink! Tink!

“Do you hear that?” he whispered.

Al’s voice was tight. “Viperfish, I’m thinking.”

The water exploded with frenzied movement.

Tink! Tink! Ti-tin-ti-ti-tink! Tink! TINK!

Luke recoiled as quicksilver flashes smashed into the glass.

Ti-tin-t-t-t-ti-TI-ti-TIN-TINK!

It sounded as if they were being shelled with machine-gun fire.

“Al, hey, is this normal?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty unnerving,” she said. “We’ll be okay. Viperfish are the undersea version of wolverines. They’ll attack anything, even if it’s a hundred times their size.”

Just then, a viperfish got snagged before the glass. Its jaws—huge, sickle shaped, fearsomely toothy—were enmeshed in the foam. The creature was long and eelish, with fluted gills and oily black eyes socked in a polished-steel face. It was the most predatory thing Luke had ever seen.

“They’re mean as catshit,” Al said. “And I’d say we’ve hit a swarm of them.”

TINK! Ti-ti-ti-TINK!

“I’ve never seen so many of them. They’re fixing to tear that foam to shreds. We gotta boogie, Luke. Hold on.”

The
Challenger
plummeted. Luke caught a flash of the massing school of viperfish: a glowing sheet of bodies staggered into the water, tens of thousands of whiplike fish darting furiously about.

The sounds ceased as Al stabilized the vessel.

Tink!

“Fucking things,” said Al. “We must be in a cone of them—there’s no
way
they could drop that fast.”

Again, the
Challenger
plunged. The pressure built in Luke’s ears. That tickle returned to his bones, becoming quite painful now.

“Hold on,” Al said. “I’m feeling it, too.”

Luke’s gums tightened around his teeth until he was sure they’d shatter. The plates of his skull ground together.

Al stabilized the sub again. She shot a look down at Luke. A rill of blood, as thin as a pencil line, was trickling out of her nose.

“You’re bleeding,” Luke said.

She wiped it away. “Yeah, you, too.”

Luke wiped his nose. His fingers came away clean.

“Higher,” said Al.

Luke felt wetness leaking from his eye. He wiped away a single, bloody tear. “Am I bleeding from my
eye
?”

Al nodded. “You’ll be fine. Happens a lot down here. The blood comes out of you in funny, nontraditional places.”

Luke wiped the bloody tear on his overalls. “That will take some getting used to.”

They waited for those dreadful
tinks!
to resume. When they didn’t,
Luke’s heartbeat settled into its normal rhythm. Al jimmied the controls and got the
Challenger
dropping again at a more leisurely rate. Water
shushed
against the hull, causing the foam to issue splintery popping sounds. Luke blinked and swiped a finger under his eye. A watery rill of blood tracked across his fingertip, warm and—

SWACK!

Luke jolted in his seat. Something entirely different was stuck to the glass now. A band of albino tissue, shockingly thick.

“What the—” Al said as the
Challenger
juddered. “Oh, are you shitting me?”

The band thinned out as it flexed across the glass. Eight inches across, with a vein running under its skin that was so black it could’ve been filled with ink. Studded all along it were disks—they reminded Luke of the plastic suction cups you’d use to stick sun-catchers to your kitchen windows.

“It’s a giant squid,” Al said, although Luke somehow knew that already. “I didn’t think we’d encounter one this far down.”

The
Challenger
rattled. An alarm shrilled.

“For the love of fuck!” said Al, the words exiting her mouth with a brittle snip. She flicked a switch and the vessel went dark.

Luke’s lungs locked up as an icy ball of terror crystallized in his chest. It was as if the sea itself had slid inside the
Challenger
, filling his eyes and throat and brain.

The squid’s tentacle
sluuurp
ed across the glass. A shape shot out—
THACK!
—snapping violently. It was the squid’s beak, which resembled that of an enormous parrot.

THACK!
—harder this time.

Luke waited for the glass to crack and his life to end.

The lights flicked on.

“I thought it might leave us alone if we went dark,” Al said in a low voice. “Let’s try the opposite.”

She hit the spotlights. They didn’t illuminate much, despite their incredible intensity—a pall of sickly light picked up a patina of deep-sea sediment that swirled like dust in an enormous room.

The squid immediately detached and vanished with one convulsive flex. Luke got a split-second sense of its size: stunningly long, torsional and many limbed, whipping into the darkness like a bullet train speeding into a tunnel.

“Hold on,” Al said, and again they dropped.

They seemed to be falling even faster—the depth gauge near Luke’s head spun wildly, around and around like a cartoon clock. Al was busy with the readouts; thankfully, it appeared neither the squid nor viperfish had dealt the
Challenger
a terminal blow.

Shock-sweat had broken out all over Luke’s body. Tiny beads of moisture clung to the hull, too.

“The sub’s sweating,” he said.

“That’s normal,” Al said tersely. “Condensation. Our breath. Cold as a witch’s tit down here. Minus thirty or so.”

“Doesn’t the water freeze?”

“Never with saltwater. Not this deep.”

Al shut the spotlights off, plunging the sea into darkness again.

“Wow. That was the weirdest thing,” she said, exhaling heavily. “You have to understand—this is like the desert down here. It’s barren. Picture it this way: we’re a pin dropped into an Olympic swimming pool almost totally devoid of life. So why and how we’ve run across all these critters . . . it’s just
weird
. And that they’d
attack
us . . . The viperfish I get, but the squid? And back-to-back like that? No. Just no.”

“Not outside of a Jules Verne book, anyway.” Luke’s laughter held a glass-snap edge.

“Right, and then we’ve had that current ring the last week or so. Every possible disturbance you could encounter, we’ve been facing it lately,” Al said. “If I didn’t know any better I’d almost think . . .”

She trailed off, not saying the words. But Luke was thinking the same thing.

It’s as if something is trying to stop us from reaching the
Trieste.

6.

“THEY SHOULD’VE INSTALLED A RADIO
in this thing,” said Al, “or a CD player or something.” She blew a raspberry. “They sunk a trillion bucks into this operation. A radio’s gonna bankrupt ’em?

“They spent hand over fist,” she went on. “Nobody had ever tried building anything like the
Trieste
before. Space shuttles, sure, but in space you’re dealing with an absence of pressure. You can put on a suit, step out, float around. Try and do that down here and . . .”

“Flesh pâté.”

“Bingo. They had to bring the station down in sections. Lots of trial and error, lots of problems. Dropped them with heavy weights, collected them with robotic dive craft. Every section came down encased in a protective shell, with a seam of foam sandwiched between. They got slotted together, riveted by the pressure-resistant robo-divers, foamed, then the shell was cracked away. The station was designed in the principles of orb physics; the egg was the designer’s blueprint. Push on the sides of an egg, right, and it’ll break. But if you press on the top and bottom, it’s nearly unbreakable. A miracle of nature, or so they tell me.

“Plus the material the station’s made out of . . . it’s metal but
not
metal. Some kind of high-tech, ultra-state-of-the-art polymer core—it allows the tunnels to flex and bend and  . . .
bubble,
I guess you could say? Instead of cracking under pressure, the material will expand the way rubber does. The water can warp it, but it won’t burst through.

“Anyway, once the pieces of the station were all slotted together, someone had to go in and open it all up from the inside. There was this membrane linking each section that had to be cut and foamed simultaneously; if it sprung even one leak, the whole structure would flatten. Otto Railsback—that was the name of the guy. Wee scrap of a thing. A
single man did the whole job. You want to talk about a real hero? I brought Otto down. He was the first man inside. I attached to the entry port, cracked the hatch, then he went inside.”

“So what happened?” asked Luke, now fascinated.

“Well . . . I remember the smell that came out at first,” Al said. “My family ran a ranch in Colorado. There was this cave system where I lived, Cave of the Winds. The main part was a tourist trap—drunk dudes wandering around with miner’s helmets, calling themselves spelunkers. But the whole thing sprawled twenty miles underground. You could enter it through a vent in the forest floor about a mile from my home. Just a dark cut into the rocks, right? I went down there one day, alone. I was thirteen, fourteen. Thought I was a badass. I had a flashlight and a sack lunch.