The Deep (33 page)

I want to put my head through the hole. Want to kiss those lips.

Whose lips? WHAT’S LIPS?

Is that a bad thing to want?

I won’t put my head through.

I am trying very hard not to.

. . .

put it

through

. . .

Cut myself with the razor. Slashed my wrists vertically, not horizontally, the way you do when you’re dead serious and not just squalling for attention, MOMMY-DADDY PAY ATTENTION TO ME OR I’LL SWALLOW A HANDFUL OF KIDDIE ASPIRIN—no I slit right down the ulnar artery, deep deep slashes, serious as a fucking heart attack, you bet your ass, the best way to let out a whoa-nelly gusher of blood.

I healed. Almost immediately, I healed.

I wept. Cut again. Wept. Wept. Jesus fucking wept.

My children buzzed about my ears, stinging me.

Bad mother! Bad mother! Don’t hurt yourself, mother! Stay with us, love us, be with us forever!

Fucking things. Fucking fucking fuck fuck FUCH HUCH UG UG UUUUU

. . .

Amazing. Simply amazing. It is beauty. The purest beauty imaginable.

. . .

THE FIG MEN

ARE DRAWING NEAR

. . .

THE FIG MEN

ARE HERE

. . .

LUCAS. LUCAS COME HERE. LUCAS COME HOME. COME HOME LUCAS.

COME HOME SON

DADDY COME HOME

19.

LUKE HURLED THE JOURNAL.
Pages riffling, it struck the wall. He shook violently, gooseflesh pebbling his scalp. LB’s head popped out from underneath the cot where she’d been resting, her eyes darting restlessly.

DADDY COME HOME

Jesus. Jesus Christ.

He shouldn’t have read it. He knew that belatedly, the same way he’d known he shouldn’t watch a scary movie as a young boy—but Luke always had to watch, peeking through his fingers.

The final ten pages were partially glued with a rank-smelling substance; the honey produced by those bastardized bees, Luke could only guess. And the last few pages were dark with blood.

The journal’s final words seemed less written than etched. Each letter had torn through several sheets of paper, their impressions carving deep into the sheets below. The letters were huge slashes, horizontal or vertical, no curves—the O’s looked like crazed cubes. Westlake must’ve wielded his pen like a knife, slashing each stroke several times, ripping and gouging them onto the page.

DADDY COME HOME

It made no sense. Dr. Westlake had no idea who the hell Luke was. That he was a father, or Luke’s tortured history with his son. Christ, they’d never met. Had Clayton mentioned him? Even if so, what would compel Westlake to write that?

THE FIG MEN ARE HERE
.

This cut even closer to the bone. How would Westlake know about the Fig Men, the monsters in Zachary’s closet? It made no sense. Luke thought about the words written in blood inside the
Challenger
:
THE AG MEY ARE HERE
. That’s how he’d read it. But Al thought the second
word was
Men
, hadn’t she? Could the
A
Luke had seen actually have been the capital letter
F
and and a lowercase
I
combined? Could the blood from a letter
F
have dripped down, joining the top of that
I
to become what looked to be a sloppy, too-big
A
?

Jesus, had Westlake actually written:
THE FIG MEN ARE HERE
?

The Fig Men didn’t
exist
. There was no such thing. They were something his son’s fevered imagination had cooked up—something Luke himself had fixed, trapping the Fig Men in obsidian cocoons. He remembered how the act had made him feel like a minor superhero. The Human Shield.

Could the journal be a deeper manifestation of Dr. Westlake’s psychosis? Rantings and ravings divorced from truth? Luke wanted to believe so. The “honey” could be something he’d mixed up in his lab, boiled sugar and some manner of toxic chemical. Physically speaking, the gunk on its pages was the only thing that separated Westlake’s journal from your standard loony bin manifesto—it was full of the same delusional thinking, paper-shredding pen strokes, and yes, even blood.

Home. Come home. Luke
had been
home, safe if despondent in Iowa City. The
Trieste
, though, wasn’t anybody’s home. Not the home of anything human, anyway.

LB clambered onto the mattress and rested her head on Luke’s lap. As he massaged her ears, Luke felt the energy coursing through her bunched muscles. Did he really believe it? The bees, the hives, the madness lurking behind the hatch to Westlake’s lab? The
hole
?

Westlake had gone insane. Succumbed to the same pressures that had consumed Dr. Toy—the mental erosion Luke himself had felt from the moment he’d set foot inside the station.

Could he possibly believe the journal? Would he do that up on the surface? Presented with those pages, wouldn’t he dismiss them as the ramblings of a madman?

You would, of course,
he told himself.
But you aren’t on the surface. You know what
is
on the surface? Westlake’s corpse. Do you remember what it looked like? Put that image in your mind, Luke, and ask yourself: What’s behind that hatch now?

Luke could answer that question easily:
It doesn’t matter, as long as I don’t fucking open it.

But what if someone else opened it?

I believe Westlake
, Luke realized with piercing clarity.
Not all of what’s written, but I believe the ambrosia drove him insane. I believe him enough to realize we’re in very serious danger here.

“Let’s assess things,” he said to LB, who pricked up her ears. “We’ve got a broken communication link. We can’t contact the surface, and they can’t contact us. We’ve got an escape vehicle with no power, and a current ring that could rip it to shreds if we try to ascend. A crazy person who’s locked himself up. Another person, now deceased, who must’ve gone batshit, too. My brother, who’ll stay here out of pure stubbornness. We’ve got Al, and you and me. The sane ones.”

LB chuffed, seemingly in agreement. She was a wonderful companion—Luke wondered if, without her, he might’ve already slipped around the bend. He was getting the dog off the damn station. Lord knows she’d been through enough.

“Would you like that, girl? Early retirement?”

LB blinked and licked his cheek.

Okay
, Luke thought,
what’s the list?

1. Get the hell off this station. Mission be damned.

2. Take Clayton. Drug him if necessary.

3. Get back home. Bring LB.

Three objectives. It calmed Luke to break the situation down into small goals leading to one ultimate goal: sunlight, fresh air, home.

Granted, there were obstacles. Eight miles of water and pressure. His brother’s legendary stubborn streak. A sub without power . . .

And the thing or things inside the station with them. Inside, or partially inside, or struggling to gain entrance.

The thing his brother had willingly invited in. The ambrosia.

The thing whose lips Westlake could hear whispering on the other side of his beloved hole. That thing (
things?
) had wrecked Westlake. Oh, maybe it hadn’t touched him directly, but it had ruined him regardless.

It must’ve done the same to Hugo. Even Clayton? His brother’s mind was stony, but even stone eroded under constant assault. Luke’s own resolve was definitely weakening; a phantom hammer tapped along the block of his brain, searching for the seam that, when struck, would crack it in half.

“Come on, LB. Let’s find Al.”

20.

LUKE HAD TAKEN A FEW
steps down the tunnel when it struck him that he hadn’t heard any noise for quite some time.

When last he’d consciously checked, he’d heard Al hammering away. It had possessed that steady, confident rhythm: the sound of a carpenter pounding a nail.

Now the silence was eerie. Luke wondered if Al was working on the generator’s finer mechanisms. That could be quiet work. Maybe she’d even drifted off to sleep. A little power nap.

A nap. That sounded nice. Luke’s eyes stung with exhaustion—except hadn’t they promised each other not to fall asleep?

The storage room was shadowy. The generator sat in a fall of light slanting through the open hatch. A huge cylinder made up of several disklike batteries wired end-to-end. Which made sense: you couldn’t use a gasoline genny in a closed space; everyone would die of carbon monoxide poisoning.

“Al?”

The room was dead empty. Where the hell could she have gone? Why hadn’t she come back for Luke? A bolt of panic jackhammered up his spine. What if Al had slipped into one of the same dream-pools that he had fallen prey to already?

He stepped out of the room. LB’s snout was aimed farther down the tunnel, where Al must have gone. Her tail pointed straight up, quivering.

“What is it, girl?”

LB’s haunches tensed. She growled, then took off.

“No!”

Luke couldn’t imagine losing the dog. If she disappeared in the warren of tunnels, he’d come apart.

He tore after her. Her tail vanished around a bend. Luke pursued heedlessly, not knowing what was around that corner—and in that moment not caring. He flashed around the bend, encountering nothing but stale air, then ran through an open hatchway (had Al left it open?) and hurtled headlong after the dog.

The tunnel described a wide ambit that descended so gradually that Luke wasn’t sure it was happening at all, then tightened into a choking spiral; Luke was hit by a wave of nausea brought on by the disorientation—until the tunnel abruptly ended in a crawl-through chute. LB’s rump was wriggling through the far end; she tumbled out, her nails skittering, and raced on.

Luke dove into the crawl-through. It was laughably wide in comparison to the access chute he’d been forced to navigate. He shifted onto his back, gripped the rungs, and swiftly hauled himself through.

Dropping out of the chute and rounding the near corner, he came to another dead stop. LB was hunched before a hatch. The hackles stood up on her shoulders.

“Easy, girl.” Luke ran his hand down her back, feeling the muscles jump. “It’s okay. It’s nothing.”

Where was Al? This was the only way she could’ve come. Luke inspected the hatch. It was locked from the other side. Al couldn’t open it. So where—?

A face rose up in the porthole. Malevolent and familiar.

21.

DR. HUGO TOY
was pallid and shrewlike, his features pinched together on the pasty canvas of his face.

But he doesn’t look crazy
, Luke thought.
Last time yes; this time . . . no.

Dr. Toy looked like a man living under an incredible pressure that had warped his bones. Luke now understood how that pressure could make a man look crazy.

He held up his hands, a peaceful gesture. Dr. Toy calculatingly eyed him.

A scrap of paper slapped against the glass.

WHO ARE YOU?

The paper withdrew.

“Luke Nelson. Clayton’s brother.”

Dr. Toy nodded. Scribbled quickly.

DO YOU FEEL IT?

Luke nodded. “Yes. Everywhere.”

Dr. Toy shivered—excitement? Anticipation?

CUT YOURSELF, he wrote.

Luke’s brows knit together. “What?”

Dr. Toy slapped the paper against the glass. CUT YOURSELF CUT YOURSELF CUT YOURSELF

Luke said: “Why?”

I WANT TO SEE YOU BLEED SHOW ME YOUR BLOOD

Luke figured he might as well comply—what were a few drops of blood? He crouched over the grate. Its lattices were serrated. He raked the tip of his index finger over one. His skin opened on the third stroke, blood welling down the cut.

He showed it to Dr. Toy.

WIPE YOUR FINGER ON THE WINDOW

Luke did so. Dr. Toy leaned in, nose flattening against the glass. The blood appeared to mollify him. He wrote:

I’LL LET YOU IN BUT I’M TYING YOUR WRISTS

“I have one of the dogs,” Luke said.

SHE CAN STAY OUTSIDE

Luke shook his head. “No way.”

Dr. Toy bared his teeth.

OK, he wrote in thick angry letters. BUT I TIE HER UP, TOO

Dr. Toy set his shoulder to the wheel; the hatch opened inward, less than a foot. “Turn around,” he said. “P-puh-put your wrists through the door.”

“Listen, I’m not—”

“Shut up. Do it.”

Luke turned and thrust his wrists through the gap. Dr. Toy used duct tape—it made that telltale
whoooonk
noise as he stripped it off the roll. “Tight?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” He dragged Luke inside and shut the hatch.

“The dog—”

“Scruh-scruh-screw the dog.”

“You said—”

“I say a lot of stuff I don’t mean.”

Dr. Toy led Luke to a folding chair and shoved him down. Luke could see LB’s snout bobbing frantically at the bottom of the porthole.

“You lying bastard.”

Dr. Toy smiled, unruffled. Glimpsed in full, he was a reedy man whose long articulate limbs seemed to be constructed from knotted wires. He was slightly walleyed, his left eyeball drifting lazily toward his nose.

The room was about twelve feet square, with a low ceiling. Symbols covered the walls—Toy had fashioned them out of duct tape. They didn’t look scientific . . . more pagan. The rest of the room was scattered with papers, most of them balled up in evident frustration.