The Deep (11 page)

“Predictably, I got lost. Thought I knew where I was going. Didn’t. It got so deep and twisty that if it weren’t for gravity, I wouldn’t have known up from down. My flashlight went on the fritz. I sat in the dark with the rocks dripping around me.” She paused, wrapped in the memory. “That darkness had
weight
, Doc. As a kid, it seemed
hostile
—like it wanted to keep me right where I was. And I was scared for practical reasons, too. I could’ve missed a step, slid down a shaft, and busted a leg. I’d have died down there. But I’d gotten into it, right? I had to get out. So I just listened. The dripping water helped. I figured it had to be trickling
down
, so I just had to follow it up. It was way past my curfew when I reached the cut. My dad skinned my ass raw.”

She sipped water from a silver pouch that reminded Luke of a Capri Sun drink.

“Anyway . . . the smell in that cave was the same as what came out of the
Trieste
. This overwhelming
reek
of darkness. A raw mineral smell; it had presence, an aliveness, like in Cave of the Winds. It freaked me out—no good reason; just that old childish worry—but Otto went right in. He sealed the compartments, made the
Trieste
truly safe for habitation. After that, others came down to set up the gennies, the air purifiers. But Otto was the guy who got it all rolling. He was the only one who died in the
Trieste
, too.”

“Jesus. How?”

“He just never came back out,” said Al. “I waited and waited, but when he didn’t show up they told me to resurface. I couldn’t get inside, anyway. But surface diagnostics indicated the station was safe to enter, meaning Otto had completed his task. When the electrical team came down, they found him curled up in the animal quarantine. Dead. Embolism. He just finished his job, then laid down in the dark and died.”

The only one who died
, Luke thought,
except for Westlake.

“It’s all self-contained,” Al said. “Electricity, air, waste removal. Food and water are brought down as needed. A perfect little microsystem that thumbs its nose at the laws of physics.”

Luke barely heard her. He was still dwelling on Otto Railsback, who’d crawled diligently through the tunnels with his foam gun until he reached his own end.

7.

THERE IS A SPECIFIC DEPTH
you’ll hit where the soul finds it impossible to harmonize with its surroundings.

It’s not the darkness. A man is acquainted with it by then—as acquainted as he can ever be. It’s not the vast silence or the emptiness or the absence of any life-forms he can draw warmth or certainty from.

It’s not the pressure. It’s not even the fear of death that constantly nibbles at the edge of his mind.

It’s the sense of unreality. This out-of-body feeling that you’ve stepped away from the path your species has always tread. Things become dreamlike, inessential. Your mind, seeking solace in the familiar, retreats to those things you understand, but those things become so much harder to grasp.

Memories degrade. You remember parts of people, but you surrender their wholes. Abby could crack an egg with one hand. It was a quirky skill Luke remembered wishing he had. He could still recall the sight of her doing it and the yearning that he could do it, too. But the more essential parts of her were already failing him.

The water wasn’t the same down here.

Water is what runs out of our kitchen taps or a playground drinking fountain. It fills bathtubs and pools and yes, of course, the ocean—but at a certain depth, water becomes a barrier from all you remember, all you think you know.

You’re trapped within it, a plaything of it.

Focus erodes. Your thoughts mutate. The pressure.

The
pressure.

The soul can’t cope with that. It shouldn’t be expected to.

Humans weren’t built for this. There’s a reason nothing lives down here.

Or nothing should.

8.

LUKE WAS UNAWARE
of the exact point when it began to snow.

Marine snow, according to Al. The detritus of animal and plant life that had died miles above. It fell steadily through each zone of the ocean, down and down, shredding into flakes, leached of pigment until it became bone white. A snow of death.

It fell without cease, each “flake” composed of lace-edged rags of flesh and bone and gut. Looking at it, Luke thought back to that first night with Abby—the snow falling from a coal-dark Iowa sky. He tried to isolate the details of Abby’s face but they slithered through his mind, eelish and ungrippable.

Al toggled the joystick, angling the
Challenger
slightly downward.

“We’re here,” she said quietly.

Luke squinted through the porthole. Darkness thick as grave dirt. Then, permeating that darkness, the tiniest speck of light.

This speck attached to another speck, and another. From these specks, a rough shape resolved and the
Trieste
came into view. Luke sat by the window, jaw open, staring.

It was repulsive.

The blood backflowed in his veins, the strangest sensation—like a clock running backward against its mechanics, stripping gears and snapping springs.

We need to ascend now,
he thought wildly.
Seek the sunlight
,
fast, and never come back.

1.

LUKE COULD ONLY GLIMPSE
the
Trieste
in sections. Whenever Al swung the
Challenger
around, illuminating a section he’d already seen, it looked different to Luke—as if it had shifted subtly, somehow reconfiguring its arrangement.

Luke’s mind continued to fight the reaction of his initial horror. It was nothing but steel and foam and space-age polymers. A marvel of engineering. It of course had no mind, no will. And still . . .

It was awful. He couldn’t isolate what repelled the eye, the revulsion that squatted so leadenly in the lizard brain. It was snakelike, for one—of course it was: the
Trieste
was all tubes. They spooled along the ocean floor, which was clad in a powdery drift of marine snow. The tubes were oddly segmented, branching off at unnatural angles, as to appear vaguely arachnid: long dark legs extending from a central hub.

There was a manic union between its various parts; it shouldn’t cohere as a structure. Its angles were bizarre and somehow despairing. Some tubes appeared to end abruptly . . . that, or they burrowed into the sea floor like an enormous worm.

Maybe the pressure exerted the same warping effect it had on
Challenger
4, bending each angle slightly out-of-true—which, cumulatively, made the
Trieste
look disgustingly alien. Or maybe it was the fact that the bulk of it hadn’t been assembled by human hands: robots had no sense of beauty or symmetry; they simply slotted link A to coupler B. The structure throbbed with a numbing hunger—but for
what
? Luke was overcome with a sinister shrinking sensation, as if his soul had dwindled to a pinprick and the
Trieste
had swarmed in to fill that space, reducing him under its brooding, inanimate power. Luke couldn’t shake the ludicrous sense that the
Trieste
had built itself to serve a purpose known only
within itself. It seemed sentient, watching like a snake coiled in placid contentment under warm desert rocks. Knowing, in the seething core of itself, that it need only to wait.

“It’s got a certain look to it,” Al said.

“You’ve been inside?”

“A few times. Not for long, and only to drop off supplies. To speak the truth, none of us like spending all that much time down here. Docking’s the trickiest part.”

She edged them toward the
Trieste
. The
Challenger
swayed under the enormous pressure of water, which no longer
shushed
and gurgled against its hull but instead pushed back with leaden insistence as if they were moving through hardening concrete.

As they approached, Luke saw what had made those initial pinpricks of light: windows, same as the porthole on the submarine, dotted the length of one tube. Weak fingers of light spilled from each.

One of Al’s navigational tools
pinged
as she zeroed in.

Five feet, four, three, two . . .

Al guided the sub to the porthole and cut the engines. The
Challenger
met the
Trieste
with the sound of a locket snapping shut.

Other sounds: whirrings, clickings. A pneumatic whine—the noise you’d hear in a mechanic’s shop when they’re tightening the lug nuts on your all-seasons.

“It should be sealed now.”

Luke said, “And if it’s not?”

Al gave him a grim smile. “We won’t feel a thing.” She unsnapped her belt. “You’re going to have to step through first.”

“Me? Why?”

The flesh tightened around Al’s eyes. For the first time, she got that mildly irritated look a person gets when they’re dealing with a newbie.

“I’ve got to keep an eye on things from this end, Doc.”

There isn’t anything on the other side of that hatch
, said an unsteady voice in Luke’s head.
Nothing but your brother and another wonk and a few dogs and bees.

Luke wondered: had Dr. Westlake told himself the very same thing the first time he stepped inside?

“Once you’re through and I’ve shut things down, I’ll follow,” said Al.

Luke laid his hands on the hatch. The metal thrummed with an odd tension, as if a heavy motor was running behind it. His biceps tensed in expectation—but after the slightest strain, the wheel turned easily.

“That’s good.” There was relief in Al’s voice. “The seal’s tight.”

The hatch swung open. The thinnest trickle of saltwater beaded along the upper curve of the hatch, a single drop falling—
plip!
—to splash the metal. The light inside the
Challenger
wept into that hole of darkness. A smell perfumed the air. Cavelike and slightly alkaline, as Al had mentioned. The foreign odor of the deep sea mixed with something else, something unnameable.

A high note of dread sang through Luke’s veins—a mocking aria that sent a shiver through his bones.

What are you so afraid of?
said that same voice inside Luke’s head.

Everything
, another voice answered.

There was no reason for his fear, other than the obvious ones: they were eight miles underwater, about to enter a station built on the structural principles of an egg.

“Go on,” Al said. “I’m right behind you.”

Luke could make out the insides of the
Trieste
: the dim slope of a wall, the dull wink of metal.

He reached out to anchor his hands on the hatch. Then he saw something. His breath caught.

What the hell
was
that?

2.

WHEN THEY WERE BOYS,
their father used to take Luke and Clayton for a haircut at the Hawkeye barbershop.
Give ’em a high and tight
, he’d tell Vince, the old Italian barber. That, or
These boys are getting shaggy. Give ’em the ole whitewall.
It was the only place in town Luke had ever seen his father get even a hint of respect, and even then it seemed grudging.

Luke remembered the ancient magazines with names like
Men’s Adventure
and
Rage: For Men
, their lurid covers featuring men wrestling bears or coldcocking alligators, their cover lines reading: “Swastika Slave Girls in Guatemala’s No-Escape Brothel Camp!” and “Rabid Weasels Ripped My Flesh!” He remembered how the barber’s scissors would snip around his ears with the speed of hummingbird wings.

After every haircut, the barber would show Luke the back of his neck in a mirror that telescoped from the wall on metal armatures. When he angled the mirror, sometimes Luke would see Clayton sitting silently, or catch his father with his nose stuck in a magazine. That mirror offered a hidden view, Luke used to think. The face of the world when it wasn’t aware you were looking at it.

His mind fled back to that childlike sensibility—a mirror that showed the world’s hidden face—when his gaze focused on the insides of the
Trieste
. It was as if his view had shifted,
tilted
, the way that barber’s mirror had, like a solid pane of glass. His body was suddenly awash in warmth. He stared closer, transfixed by that pitchlike black . . .

His breath gritted in his chest like steel wool. Were
things
moving in there?

Sly liquid shiftings, mincing suggestions of activity, all attended by a silky sound that made him think of sightless crabs shucking over one another in a shallow tide pool . . .

“What’s wrong, Doc?”

Luke tore his eyes from the hatch.

“Some trick of the light,” he croaked.

“That happens down here,” Al said. “The light reflects differently, gets absorbed in weird ways.”

Don’t go in there
, shrilled the voice in Luke’s head.