The Deep (18 page)

Westlake loosed a tortured laugh of his own.

“This is madness, of course. It’s difficult to hear anything above the drone of the bees. I haven’t stepped outside the lab in some time. Nelson and Toy would only interfere. They wouldn’t understand. Their minds are too dense, too literal.
”

Westlake’s voice turned brittle. Luke could imagine him hunched in his lab, his body grown gnomish, his posture covetous as he hoarded his dark secret.

“
And I . . . I don’t want them to have it. This is all mine.”

More sucking. Luke pictured Westlake’s thumb, pink from the suction.

“I have to say this. Not long ago, when I was staring at the hole—it commands my attention, I’ll tell you that—it changed. Went
opaque
, is perhaps the word. Like watery milk. Behind it, or through it, I saw shapes. Indistinct but wonderful. Like dark wings fluttering. An enormous space filled with this antic fluttering.”

The tone of Westlake’s voice was off-putting—there was an uncomfortable echo of Alice’s voice in it, the way she’d sounded after she’d been caught staring at Westlake’s hatch.

“Whatever this is that I’ve discovered . . . it, they, can be communicated with, I am sure of it. Reasoned with. They are here to help. I sense no hatred. Only curiosity
.”

Curiosity
. The word stuck in Luke’s brain like a quill. Somehow it seemed even more frightening than pure hatred.

“This is my final recording. I will continue to chart my progress in my journals. I am confident that what lies on the other side is beneficial. Are they the bringers of the ambrosia? If so, perhaps they will tell us how to harness its awesome power. I believe in this possibility, and I will endeavor to make it so.”

Click
.

14.

LUKE’S ARMS WERE TENSED
hard as marble; a concerted effort was needed to force his muscles to relax.

He had to consider the possibility that none of this had happened. That Westlake had caught a malignant case of the sea-sillies—that, or a particularly baffling indicator of the ’Gets. These files were no more than a manifestation of his creeping insanity—he’d imagined the whole goddamn thing. He’d isolated himself in his lab the same way a dying bear will crawl into the shadows of its cave; in his own sickness and delusion, Westlake had played make-believe, slave to the apparitions in his head.

What had Luke heard, really? The buzz of bees. Some scraping and scratching. A few knocks—knocks Westlake could have made himself, playing a game of call-and-answer with himself. What about the watery echo? Luke figured immersing the microphone in a glass of water would have the same effect.

Disconcerted, Luke lay down. He was so damn tired. His body was physically shutting down, a power grid starved of electricity. He’d rest briefly, and upon waking, he’d take Westlake’s laptop to Al and Clayton. They could listen to the files and decide what to make of them.

He shut his eyes and tried to conjure Abby’s face. Instead, a different scene: Abby and Luke in the bedroom of their shoebox apartment, back when they were graduate students. The heat lay thick inside the walls; that late-summer warmth did something to Abby. Set her afire. She’d sat on the bed with that beguiling smile. She pulled his sweats down, then his Fruit of the Looms with one finger, leaving them strung clumsily around his knees.

Get closer, silly
, she’d whispered.
This isn’t going to work unless we’re pretty much touching, is it?

Luke remembered being overtaken by the friendliness of it. Just a chummy blow job, followed by some aw-shucks sex. Y’know, the kind of thing pals do. Friendly, and practiced—Luke felt the tiniest ripple of concern about that: just how had she gotten so damn practiced? But Luke had felt so overjoyed at the fact that your ideal lover could be your best friend, too . . .

Then Abby’s face changed. Her features went viscid, reshaping themselves into something dark and fearsome.

Luke’s eyes snapped open. He swore he could see a face at the porthole now, peering in at him.

Clay . . .

No, Al . . .

. . . then Westlake’s tortured face from the vault . . .

All three faces blurred together and became something else.

They became Zachary’s face. Luke’s son as a tot.

His boy was laughing.

Was there anything more wonderful than a baby’s laughter?

Not now, though. This was menacing—too adult, full of cruel mocking.

Luke couldn’t look away as Zachary laughed with unhinged gasps, his face shading redder and redder . . . the same color it’d been as he’d screamed with the millipede inside his sleeper.

Laughing at his father. Laughing fit to bust a gut.

Ha-ha! They won’t let you go, Daddy! They won’t never
ever
let you go!

1.

LUKE DREAMED
that he was sitting at his kitchen table back home in Iowa City. The sunlight prickled his arms as it streamed through the window above the sink. Distantly, through the open door, came the giddy shrieks of children at play.

Zachary sat in his high chair. The sunlight glossed the downy hairs of his infant head.

“How’s it going, buddy?” Luke said, smiling. “How you doin’, Zach Attack?”

Zach smiled. His milk teeth had punched through his gums, these rounded slivers that looked like soft, pale cheese. He still had that new baby smell, too; Luke would press his nose to his son’s scalp to inhale that fantastic scent.

“Ahhh . . . Mama,” Zach said, his chin tilted proudly.

“Close, bud. Dada. Try that. I’m
daa-daa
.”

“Ahhh . . . Mama!”

His son had been saying
Mama
for a month now—
Mama
and
ball
and even
kitty
. He’d never once said
Dada
.
Gaga
and
tata
and
baba
, oh yes, those syllables rolled merrily off his tongue. But not
Dada
. Not
once
.

He gripped his son’s hands. “Dada, Zach. Say Dada.”

“Tata.”

Luke’s hands tightened.

“Dada.”

“Ahhh . . .
yaya
!”

“
Dada
.” Say it, boy; you fucking
say it
. “Daa-daa.”

Luke squeezed tighter, his son’s bones pulsing in his grip.

“Ehhhhh! Wawa!”

Tears leapt into Zach’s eyes. Luke had been gripping his fingers so tightly that they’d turned white, the blood crushed out of them.

Luke whistled tunelessly as he walked over to the fridge.

“He’s a hungwy boy, issa? Zachy want his wunch?”

He took a bowl from the cupboard. There was a picture of a puppy on the bottom—Zach’s favorite bowl.

Luke opened the fridge. Zach continued to cry; tears rolled down his face and splattered his bib. Luke rooted amid the tubs and bottles, still whistling. The jar his hand closed upon was warm—why would it be warm in a fridge?

He had to lever his fingernails under the jar’s lid and dig them in; it felt like peeling off a massive scab. He slopped the container’s contents into the puppy bowl, not really looking, smothering the puppy’s grinning face with . . . whatever it was.

The bowl gave off a strange heat, as if he’d just taken it from the microwave. He grabbed a spoon and sat next to his son. Zachary’s tears had dried up; he stared at the bowl with mingled hunger and revulsion.

“Whoo da hungwy baby? Here’s some lunchy-wunchy for da fussy Zach.”

Luke dipped the spoon into the bowl—it made a gross, squishy sound, like a shovel sunk into a pile of rotten seaweed. He brought the spoon to Zach’s mouth. His son’s eyes reflected whatever was in the spoon . . . its shifting scintilla reminded Luke of embers glittering in a campfire.

Zach began to scream, a high, hopeless sound. Luke prodded the spoon into his mouth harshly—
Just eat, please!
—shutting those goddamned screams up.

Zach’s eyes widened, so huge they seemed to consume all the sunlight in the kitchen. His mouth worked against whatever Luke had shoved into it, lips quivering in a futile effort to spit it out. But his gorge flexed automatically, he swallowed, and when his mouth opened again it was to scream.

But not with pain. With
hunger
.

“Issa good, Zachy? Issa tasty in the belly? Open wide, here comes the aiwwwwooowww-plane!”

The spoon dipped and loop-de-looped, delivering its payload into Zach’s screaming mouth. His lips were coated in a glutinous gloss.

“Issa hungry boy, issa? Mmmm, nom-nom-nom.”

His son swallowed and opened his mouth again, screaming even louder now.

A fine wire of unease corkscrewed into Luke’s chest. The ambient sounds and scents, previously comforting, had changed. The sweet smell of the backyard lilac had become a rancid foulness you might catch downwind of an open sewer. The sounds of children at play had become fear-struck shrieks, as if those children were being pursued by monsters intent on ripping them limb from limb.

He continued to feed Zach. Strangely, the bowl never seemed to empty.

His son’s stomach strained against his bright blue onesie. Zach’s cries intensified, louder and more demanding. His mouth stretched, the flesh loosening as it puckered into a sucker-fish orifice.

A carp,
Luke thought with distant horror.
He’s growing a carp’s mouth
.

The force of Zachary’s shrieks caused the papery flesh of his new mouth to flutter like a flag in a high breeze.

Luke tried to wrench his gaze downward to see what he’d been feeding his precious son, whose every morsel had always been carefully scrutinized. Abby would spend hours at the supermarket, reading labels on the baby food jars and buying organic produce to mulch in the Baby Bullet.

With aching slowness, Luke’s neck finally gave out, his skull wrenching painfully down. His breath caught with an agonized hitch.

Oh oh oh oh
, was all he could think, his mind skipping like a stone on the still surface of a lake.
Ohohohohohohooooooh
—

The bowl was full of ambrosia. Almost gone now: just a few pulpy balls stuck to the sides.

The puppy’s face was gone, too. It had been erased. All that remained was a brownish smear, as if the ambrosia had eaten its face away.

Don’t feed him another bite. Throw the bowl away, now. Stick your finger down his throat and make him vomit up all that he can. Take him to the hospital and get the doctors to pump his stomach. Get it out of him, Luke—for Christ’s sake,
get it out
!

But in that awful way nightmares have, he scraped the sides of the bowl, collecting the remaining ambrosia into a tidy dollop. It sat on the spoon, tumorlike, heaving slightly as if breathing.

Zachary issued a string of gibbering hiccups. He bucked in his high chair, his engorged stomach rattling the feeding tray.

“Dada!
” he screeched, the sound of a nail pulled from a sun-bleached plank of wood. “
Dada! Daaaaaaadaaaaaaa!
”

“Shhhh,” Luke said. “Eat all you like. You can never have enough.”

Luke stabbed the spoon into his son’s mouth; Zach’s lips closed over it triumphantly, sucking every last speck off of it. He stared at his father with a feral, too-old expression. Ancient hate radiated from his dead, gray eyes.

He opened his mouth again, screaming, screaming.

“There’s nothing left,” Luke said, holding up the bowl—which had melted entirely now, a gummy mess running down his fingers, burning slightly as something worked under his flesh.

Zach vented maddening, lung-rupturing shrieks in response. His strange new mouth stretched wider, wider . . .

Luke saw something in there.

Oh God. Oh good God, no . . .

A dozen or more eyeballs stared at Luke from inside Zachary’s mouth. They nested in the soft pink flesh of his palate and throat, staring unblinkingly, appraising Luke with cold scrutiny.

We all have different sets of eyes, my son.

His mother’s voice.

Very different, yes, but very lovely, Lucas. You only have to let them out, like I said I’d gladly do for stupid Brewster Galt. Let them out to see the world . . .

The eyes in Zach’s mouth blinked in unison—a dozen lewd winks. They made an awful
pipping
noise as the inflamed flesh inside Zach’s
mouth clipped shut for an instant, like the edges of a fresh wound making contact.

Luke scooped his son out of the high chair and into his arms. Zach’s body had a sick, pendulous weight. His cheeks showed deep dents as they sucked greedily at the air. He kept screaming through his sucker-fish mouth, bathing Luke’s face with noxious breath. The mouth-eyes stared at him balefully.

Luke rocked him, as he’d done every night since Zach was born.

“Husha baby. Husha, husha, sleep now.”

Sometimes when Zach was overtired, Luke would hold his eyelids shut. Very gently, rolling Zach’s eyelids down and keeping them shut with gentle pressure from his fingertips; he did so now. Zach’s eyelids strained as the muscles trembled under Luke’s fingertips, much like flies buzzing under Saran Wrap.