The Deep (42 page)

Click . . . click . . .

A head appeared around the gooseneck. Two eyes shone like balls of mercury in the flashlight’s glare.

“LB?”

She
woofed
—a grating, jagged note. Her jaws widened, strings of saliva stretched between her teeth as she chewed anxiously on the air.

She’s scared. Totally terrified.

Luke swung the flashlight behind him. Nothing. When he swung it back, LB had emerged a little more—half of her body was now visible. Her fur was torn away in places, each spot almost perfectly round. Luke didn’t see any blood.

“Come on, girl. It’s okay. It’s only me.”

She whined plaintively, then ducked back behind the bend. The
click-click
of her nails retreated.

“LB!”

Luke scrambled after her. He ran the way he should have run after Zach that afternoon in the park—as if the devil himself was on his heels. She yelped someplace ahead, a harrowing note that stung Luke’s heart.

He reached the spot where LB had been. Drops of some viscid substance swayed from the floor grate. A smell rose to Luke’s nose: dank and vinegary, with an undernote he couldn’t name.

He rushed on. The flashlight lit the holes along the
Trieste
’s hull. They
bulged
. Bubbles pushed up from their surfaces, shiny with tension.

“LB!”

He gritted his teeth and dove into the crawl-through chute, sliding for a few feet, then transitioning to his back and hauling himself over the final yards. He could hear LB barking not far ahead.

He ran into the main lab. Clayton’s lab hatch was open again; he could see something moving inside. Luke edged up to the hatchway and shone the flashlight inside.

LB’s head poked from behind Clay’s bench. She barked consumptively.

There was something
off
about that sound.

“You okay, girl?”

Luke trained the flashlight on the bench. LB rounded slowly into sight like a showgirl stepping into a spotlight. Her head, shoulders, chest—

“Oh, LB. Oh, Jesus. What happened to you?”

Something was wrong with the dog’s legs. They were sticks, winnowed and black like charred wood in a campfire. They made bonelike
clicks
as she came forward, her tongue—her long, seeping, cancerous tongue—dangling queerly from her mouth.

“What did this to you, girl?”

Luke beckoned her forward.
I can fix her
, he thought, although the chances of that were laughably remote.
She’ll be all right . . .

She lurched toward him. Her front legs could not bend—the bones had been fused somehow; she tottered as if walking on pegs.

Click, click . . .

Her back legs looked even worse: they’d been compressed, the bones snapped and jellied, leaving her with the squat hind end of a much smaller dog. Her paws had been flattened into clownish disks that slapped the floor.

Click, click. Click-click
.

Something projected from LB’s hind end. A red string unspooled from her anus. Jesus, what
was
that? Was something
inside
of her, trying to get out?

She staggered closer.
Click-click-click
. Her head sat weirdly on her neck, off-kilter like a doll’s head that had been cut off and clumsily glued back on . . .

Luke’s hands trembled. He didn’t want to touch her, and this fact shamed him. She needed someone to hold her, didn’t she? But he was terrified—the fear shot through his arteries like battery acid.

Her mouth opened in a too-big yawn. Her teeth were fearsomely long, crowded into sharp rows in her mouth. Her tongue was needled with holes where she’d bitten it . . .

. . . and what was
that
?

He squinted. Something was skewered on LB’s teeth. Black and shiny and—

Plastic. A shred of plastic.

Spilled-out pieces of a complex puzzle slotted together in Luke’s mind, forming a picture of shocking, horrifying clarity.

He jerked the flashlight toward the cooler. It was open, as he knew it would be. The lid had been torn off its hinges. It was surrounded with shreds of thick plastic and rags of duct tape. The creature that had resided inside it, the thing wrapped in black plastic, was out.

Luke trained the beam back on the dog-thing. It seemed to be smiling at him now.

Oh, God, this isn’t LB
, he thought.
It’s the other one. Mushka. Little Fly.

15.

THE DOG—SWEET CHRIST,
was it in any way a dog anymore?—staggered closer. Luke wanted to pull away but he couldn’t: his limbs were frozen.

Everything was so clear now. Clayton. He’d shaved away disks of fur to attach monitoring electrodes. He’d put something up the poor dog’s anus, too: a device to measure heat or nerve stimulus; the wire was still sticking out.

Clayton had done all this, then he’d . . . he’d . . .

Pushed the dog through the fucking hole. Fed it into the rift, the same way Westlake had fed that microphone through . . .

Luke could picture it: the dog whining and kicking, its legs braced against the wall as his brother shoved it rudely through. Or else he’d drugged it and fed the poor thing through while it was narcotized.

He wanted to see how the thing or things on the other side would react,
Luke realized.
What they would do. The dog was an offering.

So it had gone into the hole and come back as . . .
this
. Clayton must’ve known immediately that something was wrong, so he’d killed it. Cut its head off, as he’d done to the guinea pig. But it had come back, hadn’t it? So he killed it again and again until it was dead enough, for long enough, that he could encase it in plastic, bind it with tape, and stuff it into the—

A feral, considering brightness entered the dog’s eyes. Its facial features were stretching. Rank foulness pumped from its pores. The flashlight picked up a faint glimmer over its coat. Its mouth stretched wide. Its eyes sunk back into its sockets.

Get out of here. RUN.

The tendons mooring its jaw snapped like overtaxed elastic bands. It
issued the anxious mewls of a hungry baby. Luke stood in spellbound horror, transfixed as the dog’s mouth cantilevered open, wider and wider, so big it seemed capable of swallowing hearts, souls, entire worlds . . .

It growled—but how could it, with its mouth ripped into that fearsome leer?

No, that growl was coming from somewhere else—

LB charged into the lab. Luke’s heart leapt. Where had she come from? She ran right past Luke, making a beeline for her old pal. The dog-thing shifted its attention nimbly, but not quite quick enough. LB hit it broadside, jaws snapping; they tumbled around the bench and out of sight.

Luke took a few steps forward, sweeping the flashlight to make sure nothing else lurked in a darkened cubby of Clayton’s lab.

LB issued a muffled yelp that rose to a pain-filled shriek.

Luke stepped around the bench and saw.

“Oh, God, no . . .”

The Mushka-thing’s mouth was sunk into LB’s flank; its jaws were scissored around LB’s left rear leg, high up where it met her body. But it wasn’t merely
biting
her; it was . . .
fusing
to her, was the word Luke’s fevered brainpan spat out. As he watched in a delirium of panic, the Mushka-thing’s muzzle flattened and spread over LB’s fur; there were a series of dreadful metallic
fnk!
sounds, one after another, which reminded Luke of an industrial sewing machine punching through tough leather. Darts of blood shot from LB’s skin. She whimpered, clawing toward Luke.

Luke rushed to her. His legs went to jelly at the exquisite horror of the scene; he reached her at a crawl. He was staring right into LB’s eyes—two shocked orbs that radiated animal terror of a sort he had seen too many times. Yet they were unquestionably a dog’s eyes. Luke had no idea where LB had been these past hours, but she was still the creature he’d known. The station hadn’t changed her; she had not surrendered her innate . . .
humanity
was of course the wrong word, but the sentiment was the same—LB was fundamentally unaltered, still a dog, a very good dog who was terrified now and that fear shone starkly in her eyes.

Luke tried to wrap his arms around LB’s front legs but they were scrabbling with such mindless intensity that he quickly changed course. Instead he grabbed her head and neck in a modified front headlock and tried to pull her away from the Mushka-thing . . . away from the hole that it was so clearly backing toward.

“Come on, girl,” he panted. “Hold on, hold on with me here.”

The Mushka-thing’s entire head was now welded to LB’s flanks, stitched to her flesh by some grisly alchemy. It was already difficult to tell where LB’s body stopped and the Mushka-thing’s started. Its skull was flattened and fanned out, the fur bunching up between its ears like the folds of a shar-pei dog. Its eyes, which were flat and gray as oysters, slid across the loosening canvas of its face until they merged into a single jellylike eye that stared at LB with an unquenchable hunger. It issued ceaseless sucking sounds. LB’s body convulsed as something was hoovered out of her from the inside, creating a fleshy indentation in her chest. She howled.

“No no no,” Luke heard himself shouting. “No please no please no—”

He tightened his grip and pulled as hard as he could. LB shuddered. The bandages ripped away from her torn ear. The Mushka-thing continued to back toward the Einstein poster on its stick legs.
Clickety-click
. Luke pulled with so much force that he felt’s LB’s spinal cord pop as the discs dislocated. It was useless. He may as well try to pull a tree out by its roots.

You’re going to kill her
, he thought.
You’ll snap her neck.

His next thought:
Would that really be so bad?

The Mushka-thing was relentless. It had waited a long time to claim its prize. Luke pictured the two dogs coming down in one of the
Challengers
. Had Al brought them? Maybe so. They would have been shivering and worried as the fathoms dropped, but they had each other. And maybe that’s all the Mushka-thing wanted—for them to be together again. To explore whatever lay behind the hole as one.

Luke couldn’t budge her. Functionally, they were one creature now. Physically fused together. Finally, heartbreakingly, Luke sat in front of LB. He stopped pulling her. He hugged her instead. Even as she was
being tugged remorselessly toward her fate—one Luke could not derail—he hugged her fiercely. He kissed her nose, hot with shock. It was, he realized, the same standard of care he offered shelter strays. Every few months he would volunteer at the local pound, putting down creatures who were too old, too sick, too irredeemable or simply unwanted. A dozen, fifteen at a go. It wrecked him. He would stagger out to his car afterward, shivering, and cry. It was easier with animals who were loved; their owners, whole families, would stand around that cherished fur-ball as Luke ushered it out of this life and into the next. But strays were euthanized in a cement room where a single light bulb hung on a cord. They may have gone their whole lives unmothered and unloved. They didn’t deserve that. No creature did. The one thing that anyone should be able to count on receiving in their lives,
love
, had too often been withheld from those poor souls. And so Luke would comfort them. Each animal. He would spend a few minutes cradling them, rocking them, speaking softly to them. Sometimes they wouldn’t stop shivering, or nip his fingers. This hurt him—not the pain, but the fact that love and gentleness was so foreign to these creatures that they didn’t know how to accept it. Then he would kill them. It was not fair, and he hated himself for being the agent of that pure, inevitable fact. The world did not hold to any standard of fairness that Luke could comprehend. All his life stood testament to that. Good men die in wretched agony and bad men die happily in their beds. Creatures live and die never knowing love.

The Mushka-thing jerked. LB was wrenched backward again, yanked out of Luke’s grip. He slid forward and reseated his grip. He wasn’t desperate anymore. His fingers caressed those soft spots behind the jaw that all dogs loved to have rubbed. He rested his forehead against hers. He felt the thud of blood pounding in her skull.

The Mushka-thing reached back with one clownish rear leg. It snagged on the poster and tore it down.

The whispers assaulted Luke immediately. A yammering, mindless—

No, not mindless there is a mind behind all this

—riot. Those fishhooks sunk into his head again, skewering his brain.

The hole was the width of a manhole cover, but wider on one side; it resembled a mouth twisted into a murderous sneer.

He began to cry then, clutching LB. The tears came easily. He had not cried tears of such distilled regret since his son had gone missing. LB was going limp, either spent, tired of fighting, or resigned to her fate. Luke hugged her so, so tight. He wanted LB to remember his touch. The warmth and love that radiated from his whole body, coupled with the sadness that she was being ripped away from him. He wanted her to take that one physical memory with her wherever she was going. The imprint of his hands on her. He wished it to be a reminder that she was a good creature, and loved, and that there were places on the continuum where love and kindness still existed, even if she did not share that world presently. She did not deserve this. But things happened. They happened.

LB’s body came alive in his grip, bucking in what Luke hoped was a final death-spasm. Her paws beat a frantic tattoo between his legs. White foam like beaten eggs emitted from the sides of her mouth.

“Oh no,” Luke said. It was all he could say, in the end. It seemed to say everything. “Oh no oh no oh
no
.”

The Mushka-thing was being sucked into the hole. Once its body made it halfway through, the pressure intensified exponentially; LB was jerked forward, at the mercy of whatever monstrous force existed on the other side. Luke kept pace with her. He stroked her head as gently as he could, but his hands were shaking badly.