The Deep (34 page)

The smell was atrocious. Luke spied a heap of soiled overalls in one corner. On the surface, that heap would’ve attracted flies. Down here it just reeked.

“No access to the f-f-fuh-facilities, I’m afraid,” Toy said, displaying a slight congenital stutter. “Does the smell bother you?”

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

Toy shrugged. “I was r-ruh-raised by a nurse. She spent her days emptying bedpans and changing adult diapers. She didn’t want to encounter bodily fl-fluh-fluids at home. She posted a slogan above our toilet:
If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie, wipe the suh-seatie.
But if she ever
did
encounter tinkle, even a drop . . . She once thruh-thhh-threatened to make me clean it up with my toothbrush. And I’d have to use that same toothbrush until the bristles dulled and it was time to buy a nnn-nuh-new one.”

Your mom and my mom would’ve gotten on like bandits
, Luke thought.

“Fecal matter,” Toy said. “Her term for it. Not doo-doo or poop-poo or even that old standby,
shit
. Fff-fuh-fecal . . .
matter
. Please understand—I wasn’t
raised
to be a man who’d shit in a corner. But good manners have a way of buh-buh-bleeding away down here.” Toy shook his head as if to dispel a troublesome thought. “What-whuh-what
are
you—I mean, what do you, do you
do
? Your job.”

“I’m a veterinarian.”

“So Clayton Nelson’s brother is an animal sawbones.
Faaa
-scinating. Did you get your s-stuh-start fixing up his spuh-spuh-specimens? You’d have been at work all day.” When Luke didn’t reply, Toy said: “Chaos.” He swallowed as if to center himself. “That’s why I locked myself up. In case you were wondering.”

That’s right
, Luke remembered.
That’s one of Hugo the Horrible’s specialties, isn’t it? Chaos theory.

“Oh, uh, it started normally enough,” Toy said. “We set up shop. Three men, three labs. Instability systems was my role. Basically, uh, was it f-f-fuh-feasible? The ambrosia—did it
cure
anything, or did it simply create havoc under an illusion of cure?”

He picked up a crinkled sheet of paper and smoothed it over his knee.

“I was working with . . . theories, yes? Known thuh-theories that apply and have value on the”—pointing upward—“up there, yes? But, uh, down here, nothing b-b-behaves as it should. Theories and mathematics just dissolve. Even the most chaotic events, if you buh-buh-break them down, have a pattern and order—and if they
don’t
, then at least the level of chaos can be calculated, compartmentalized and uh, uh,
understood
.”

Dr. Toy grinned widely—he seemed manic, weirdly chipper. His demeanor struck Luke as that of a convict who’d been kept in solitary confinement for years, and now, finally given a chance to speak to another human being, he couldn’t help prattling on. He showed Luke what he’d written. A hen-scratched theorem, incredibly complex.

“Picture a rock rolling down a mountainside. Or a bead of mercury running down the back side of a spoon. Or skeins of
fff
-fruh-frost bristling across a windowpane. The movement would seem random, yes? But it’s not. If we could catalogue all the variables in the universe, we could know with utter certainty what happens next—the, uh, the . . . the next skip of that rock, the-the-the way the mercury will slip, the direction each skein will buh-branch. But we don’t, so, so . . . chaos.”

He stopped pacing and stared at Luke, his eyes wide as if seeing him—really
seeing him
—for the first time.

“What’s on the uh-uh-other side of the hole is chaos. But not like any I’ve ever known. Unorderable, unnameable, untheorizable. And that’s what pure evil looks like. A chaos whose v-vuh-variables are endless—so huge even the universe can’t contain them. Chaos incarnate.”

Luke had stopped listening by then. One word stuck in his head like a shard of polished glass.

Hole.
The
hole.

Westlake’s voice, ragged and covetous, as Luke remembered it from those sound files:
I put it through . . .

Luke shifted in his chair. Sweat trickled down his back, soaking the duct tape.

“What hole, Hugo?”

Toy’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve seen one. Don’t tell me you haven’t.”

“I read Westlake’s journal.”

“How is Cooper?” Toy asked, genuinely interested.

Luke blinked. The man clearly didn’t know.

“I’m afraid he’s dead, Hugo. He took one of the
Challenger
s. He was dead by the time he surfaced.”

Toy’s face twitched. Weird voltages raced under his skin.

Luke said, “In his journals, Westlake mentioned a hole—”

Like magic, a blade appeared in Toy’s hand. A box cutter. He thumbed the mechanism. Two inches of blade slid out. Toy lunged forward, grabbed the matted hair atop Luke’s head, and pressed the blade to his neck.

“You’re luh-lying. You’ve seen a hole.”

Luke’s breath came in shallow heaves. “I haven’t.” He swallowed. The blade scraped his Adam’s apple. “But since I’ve been down here I’ve felt like . . . like something has been trying to crawl inside my head.”

The blade pressed harder. “Have you let it?”

Luke’s pulse shivered behind his eyes and at the root of his tongue.

“No.”

The blade withdrew.

“This chaos . . .” Toy went on as if he hadn’t threatened to slit Luke’s throat mere moments ago, “. . . it’s
orderly
. There’s the surface chaos, you could say, like a-a-a-a tangle of leaves and twigs laid over a
ttt
-truh-trap. A camouflage of chaos with something very logical and
cunning
beneath. A guiding principle or, uh, modus operandi. The real mmm-muh-master.”

Toy stood abruptly, kicking through drifts of paper to the nearest wall. Luke clenched his hands while Toy’s attention was elsewhere, trying to pull his wrists apart enough to slip a hand free.

“Protective runes.” He pointed at the duct-taped symbols, laughing stiffly. “I studied them as an undergraduate. Druids and, and, uh, that b-b-buh-bullshit. It’s all from memory. I don’t know if they have any effect at ah, at uh, at
all
.”

“I don’t see any holes.”

Toy smiled without humor. “I wonder if that’s because they don’t want me.”

They
.

Luke said: “Westlake’s journal. I read it.”

“Oh, yes?” Then, almost as an afterthought but with genuine sympathy: “Westlake, my God. Poor Cooper. That poor, poor man.”

“Dr. Westlake said a hole appeared on his lab wall . . . He claimed he heard sounds coming out of it. Voices.”

“The voice in the sea, as your brother would claim,” Toy said acidly. “Some pressure-treated harpy wailing for Cooper to stick his head out and kiss her.”

Westlake’s voice again:
I want to put my head through the hole. Want to kiss those lips
 . . .

“A hole ate into the wall of my lab, too,” Toy said. “Small at first, growing steadily b-b-bigger. I spoke to Clayton about it. Predictably, he called me a fuh-
fff
-fool. I told him to come into the goddamn lab, I’d show him. He refused. Of course, he probably had one blooming in his own lab. And Westlake too, as you say.” He shook his head. “Yet none of us acted. None of us told anyone—Felz, Alice, somebody on the suh-surface. Why? Because it was so horribly
exciting
.”

A hole in Dr. Toy’s lab? Luke had gotten a glimpse inside Toy’s lab when they arrived on the
Trieste
. Its porthole wasn’t coated in black ichor, like Westlake’s, or draped like his brother’s. Luke hadn’t seen a hole. Of course, it could be in a blind spot. It wasn’t worth challenging Toy on it. Luke worked his wrists, testing his bonds. The sweat oiled his skin. The tape was surrendering its hold in increments.

“Professionally, I’m never more alive than when I’m on the
cusp
,” Toy went on. “With surgeons, it’s when they’re ‘in the cut,’ you know? Wrist-deep inside a-a-a chest cavity. For me, or for your bruh-bruh-brother and Westlake—poor man!—it’s wuh-when we’re on the verge of a breakthrough. Of, yes, yes, unlocking some previously uh-uh-unknown system that our world operates under.”

“And that’s how you’ve felt down here.”

“Yes! If only we can just, just,
learn
more. See how the stuff, the
ambrosia, how it operates. But that’s the pruh-problem—it has no stable base. It’s always shifting. Worst of all, it
knows
. It understands our needs and desires. Knows how to d-
duddd
-dangle that carrot at the end of the stick. By the time we felt the noose around our necks, it was too duh-duh-damn late.

“We’re in a Skinner Box,” Dr. Toy said with a sick smile, the kind of expression a slipshod mortician might tease onto a corpse’s face. “Operant Conditioning Chambers, to use the scientific name. Designed by B. F. Skinner, that old
sss
-suh-sadist. You put a rat in a box with an electrified grate. Two buttons on one side of the box, red and gruh-green. Push the red one, get a treat. Push the green one, get a shuh-
shh
-shock. Or vice versa. Vary the pattern however you want. Push either button and you get a tuh-treh-treat, say. Or either button earns the subject a shock. Don’t you see? The
Trieste
is the box. We are the rats. And whatever’s on the other suh-side of those holes are the scientists. They’re watching us. Seeing how we react. We’re the grand expuh-expuh . . .
experiment
.”

Luke continued to work at his bindings. He clenched his hands to stretch the tape. He could slide his wrists back and forth a bit now.

“Why did you need to see my blood?”

Toy’s focus was drifting. “What?”

“You made me cut myself.”

Toy waved his hand impatiently. “It gets
inside
you, understand? And wuh-wuh-once it’s there, you’re not yourself anymore. It has ways and means to gain entry. You’ve heard it, yes? It has a powerful pull. Very uh, uh,
seductive
.”

“I’ve heard it,” said Luke, though he hadn’t
heard
anything: just those sly fingertips worming against his skull.

“Cuh-Cooper came by not too long ago,” Dr. Toy said. “He looked awful. His neck covered in sores. I couldn’t let him in,” he said with a touch of guilt. “I opened the h-h-hatch only enough so we could talk. He sounded as bad as he luh-looked. We talked about our children. We both have daughters. Jennifer, my own. Precious child. She’s suh-sick. She’s caught the Disease, as Cooper called it. She started spotting a month ago.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Luke.

“We were performing trial runs on the
Hesperus
when my wife called to inform me. At the time I was worried that I wouldn’t be uh-able to operate in encluh-encluh . . . enclosed spaces. Claustroph-ophob-oph-oph . . .” He gave Luke a look that said:
You know what I’m trying to say.
“I was about to ask them to send someone uh-else instead. But then . . . Jennifer. So I cuh-came. I had to, for her.”

“Alice has found a generator,” Luke told him. “We’re going to power up the
Challenger
and get out of here. Will you come?”

Toy favored him with a look of utter pity.

“Oh, you poor devil. Do you really think they’re going to luh-let us go?”

Luke had stretched the tape to where he might be able to pop a wrist free. But he’d have to stand up to get the momentum needed to—

SHHHRAAAAKKK!

Hell invaded the
Trieste
.

22.

A SECTION OF THE CEILING
dented down: a jaggedy fang that struck Toy with tremendous force, knocking him flat. His skull hit the floor with a hollow ringing note.

Luke jerked his arms. The tape was unraveling; he felt a ragged edge flapping against his fingertips.

Toy rolled onto his back with a groan. His nose was broken, the cartilage shoved off at a rude angle.

The children’s footsteps intensified: they danced a mad tarantella now.

TRRRRRAACHIKKK!

Another section levered down and slammed into Toy’s legs at midcalf. The sound of his tibias snapping was horribly loud. He shrieked, sat up, slammed his head into the lowering shelf of ceiling and slumped back, dazed.

The folding chair’s rear legs collapsed under Luke’s weight, spilling him backward; his shoulder hit the ground with a sickening crunch. He struggled to his knees, sliding his bound arms down around his buttocks and under his thighs. He rolled to his back and straightened his arms, but his duct-taped hands wouldn’t clear his heels.

Dr. Toy sat up again, numb with shock and clutching uselessly at his shins. Blood spritzed in thin jets, pulsing with the wild beat of his heart, slithering across the floor and soaking into the balled papers.

Luke’s mind fused shut. He understood how hares caught in traps could die of fright. He couldn’t yank his fucking hands over his heels. It was a physical impossibility. He was like some moron jerking at a locked door in hopes it would open. He’d literally gone stupid with fear.

The ceiling shuddered, rolling a few more inches up Toy’s legs. He howled as his hands scrabbled mindlessly at his knees. It was just as
Alice had described: the ceiling of the
Trieste
ballooned and bubbled, its nature more rubbery than metallic. It groaned and shrieked but did not rupture . . . not yet. The sound of the man-made barrier fighting the pressure of water was terrifying: the trillion-dollar miracle polymer buckling by degrees, popping and splintering as it flexed. It was an arm-wrestling match, Nature versus the Works of Man, where one competitor was grinding himself to a steady advantage.

One leg at a time,
nattered a voice inside Luke’s head.
You can’t clear both heels at once, dummy! Drop your arms, bend one leg, and try again!

Luke straightened one leg, crooked the other, and was able to jerk his bound wrists around his dropped heel. He rolled to one knee—the posture of a man proposing marriage—with his hands under his crotch. From that position he was able to twist his wrists until his hands were free.