The Deep (19 page)

Luke pushed a little harder.
Keep those eyes closed, my beautiful boy. Please
.

Zach’s screams only intensified. The eyes inside his mouth rotated madly in their cups of flesh. The skin of Zach’s chin and cheeks and forehead was developing red throbbing cysts and Luke knew eyes would soon be sprouting there, too.

Luke felt around in Zach’s eyes just a little. Gray fluid the consistency of model glue squished between the eyelids.

“Shhhh, now. Sleep. What’s there to see? Nothing good.”

His son’s face was cracking open in a dozen places. Luke peered at these new eyes, each one offering a hateful, shriveling stare.

Luke’s fingers sunk into Zach’s eye sockets to the second knuckle. They punched into a pocket of curdled sludge that reminded him of the congealed porridge his mother used to eat. There came a hissing sound, but from where, Luke couldn’t tell. Stinking fluid the color of molten lead bubbled up from Zachary’s sockets.

Luke pushed until the webbing between his fingers touched the bridge of his son’s nose. Zach’s flesh offered no resistance. Luke’s fingertips passed through the grooved tangerine of Zach’s brain to touch the inner swell of his skull.

“It’ll be over soon,” he whispered, hoping his son could hear. “I’m so sorry . . .”

The fontanel on the top of Zach’s head pulsed ominously, as if something underneath was struggling to free itself.

Luke stared, trapped in the calm eye of his dread, as his son’s scalp split in a bloodless trench. Something pushed through the squandered flesh, horrid and spiky and flecked with white curds . . .

. . . and turned in Luke’s direction, staring not with eyes but with a sense of merciless curiosity mingled with furious intent.

2.

LUKE STRUGGLED OUT OF SLEEP
like a man crawling out of a mine shaft. Gummy strings of the nightmare clung to his brain. He heard Zachary screaming somewhere as the dream continued to unravel; Luke reached for his lost son—but his fingers closed on empty air.

Luke’s brain felt unattached to his senses, the way it often felt following a bad dream. He blinked and stared around Westlake’s quarters.

The hatch was open. Just a hair.

Four small appendages were wrapped around the edge of the hatchway.

A child’s fingers.

Luke saw them . . . then he didn’t. They had slipped away.

Next came a series of excitable, clumsy footsteps trailing down the tunnel.

His son’s name passed over his lips before he could choke it down.

“Zach?”

Laughter bubbled up the tunnel. The sound grew fainter, threatening to vanish. Luke rolled off the cot and shoved the hatch open.

“Zach?”

That champagne-bubble laughter flooded the dim tunnel in reply—the kind of laughter Zach used to make when Luke hefted him under the arms and lobbed him into the air, catching him deftly as he came down.

This is not happening
, chirped a voice in Luke’s head.
Your son isn’t down here. You know that, Luke. In your heart, in your head
.

But he didn’t, really. That was the thing—Zach was everywhere.
Any
where. That’s what tore you apart.

Unthinkingly, Luke followed the laughter.

The tunnel seemed to heave like an enormous pair of lungs, the walls constricting before expanding again . . . just a trick of the light. He stumbled forward heedlessly, borne on a bubbly foam of anxiety. Luke felt his boots sinking into the floor as if into some sort of weird metallic mud. He felt it sucking at his feet, a disturbing sensation, and told himself it wasn’t actually happening. His mind was playing a funny trick, was all.
Ha, ha, real funny. Thanks, brain. You have a great sense of comedic timing.
He glanced around in an attempt to moor himself. He noticed a string of pipes jutting upward along the wall like the flutes on a church organ, their curves winking dull bronze in the dim. A rhythmic churn emanated from behind the walls, the sound of motors pounding without cease in the center of the earth.

Ahead of him in the darkness, something moved.

“Who’s there?” Luke said, the tendons cabled down his neck.

No answer, only the watery echo of his voice.

. . . there . . . ere . . . ere . . .

When it faded Luke heard, or was certain he’d heard, the low rustle of breathing. He stood in the tunnel dark, the hairs quilling on his forearms. That rustling did not come again. He was set to reject it as a figment (Fig Men) of his imagination, conjured by the terrible pressure of this place . . .

A shape coalesced where his eyes were trained. He saw a pair of pajamas. Oh-so-familiar. They were Zachary’s favorites—his
peejays
, Abby used to call them;
Zach it’s bedtime get into your peejays!
—with a pattern of fire trucks and police cars, signifiers of law, order, and safety from harm. Small hands and feet jutted from the sleeves and leg holes, shining whitely in the gloom.

He could not see a face. The air above the neckline was dark and empty.

The headless pajamas turned—a coy movement that seemed to say
follow me! follow me!
—and scampered down the tunnel.

Luke obeyed the directive. The floor sucked greedily at his boots; the metal flowed over his ankles as his feet sunk into the chilly muck at the bottom of the sea.

Darkness closed in behind him, deeper and deeper shades. Zachary’s laughter pealed off the walls and rebounded all around Luke.

“Zach! Hold on—please,
stop
!”

Zach slipped around a bend in the tunnel up ahead. Luke let out a strangled cry.

Nonononono, not again please not again . . .

He tried to run but his boots were mired, making every step an ordeal. He finally rounded the turn only to see he’d reached a dead end. The blackness was absolute; it was no different than staring down a mine shaft.

Three words were written on the wall in wet letters. Instinctively, Luke knew they were written in blood.

DADDY COMY HOME

Something tugged on his sleeve. A small hand, four small fingers gripping his overalls. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to see his headless son . . . or something far more horrible.

He tried to jerk his arm away. But the tugging was insistent.

Look at me Daddy—LOOK!

No
, Luke thought.
I don’t want to. You’re not my son.

Oh, but I am. I’m your little Zach Attack. Right here in the flesh!

The voice was not that of his son. It belonged to something ineffably older, more calculating, and worse beyond anything Luke could imagine.

A terrific jerk at his arm now.

YOU FUCKING LOOK AT ME NOW.

Luke snatched his arm back. He overbalanced and fell, hammering his skull on the wall—

. . . and came to slumped against the tunnel. The overhead lights burned. LB stood a few feet away, eyeing him with a canine version of concern. His sleeve was wet with her slobber.

His son was gone. He’d never been here, of course. There was no dead end, no bloody words on the wall. He’d dreamed it all. Of course he had. He thought he’d woken from a nightmare only to now discover that the nightmare hadn’t yet finished.

And yet he’d left Westlake’s room. He’d opened the hatch, never waking, and walked down the tunnel. He’d . . .
sleepwalked
? Bullshit. He’d never done that in his life. LB must’ve followed him, then tugged on his sleeve to wake him.

Sleepwalked . . . just like Clayton might have been sleepwalking when he sent that transmission to the surface.

Happens a lot on submarines
, Al’s voice chimed in his head.
Guys who never had the habit before. Your brainwaves go a bit buggy . . .

“Thanks, girl,” Luke said. “You beat an alarm clock all to hell.”

LB chuffed as though to say:
No problem, boss. Just doing my job.

Luke returned to Westlake’s quarters . . . then caught noise from the main lab. He followed it, craving any kind of companionship. LB tagged along at his heels.

It was Clayton. He was leaning against the lab bench, his head lowered. He seemed disoriented—
discombobulated
, as their mother might’ve said. He had the look of a man who’d been kicked awake with a pointy-toed shoe.

“You okay?” Luke asked.

“What?” Clayton’s face swiftly recomposed into its regular withering expression. “Yes . . . why wouldn’t I be?”

“Clay, I just had the strangest dream.”

His brother said, “Yes, they can be incredibly vivid down here.”

Luke decided to speak no further about it—the dream about Zachary eating ambrosia. After all, Clayton, wonderful sibling that he was, hadn’t even contacted Luke when Zach had gone missing. Not a phone call, not an e-mail, nothing. Complete radio silence. Maybe he hadn’t known what to say . . . or perhaps he hadn’t even known Zach had gone missing—or worse and probably more accurately, he hadn’t cared. He’d never even
met
Zach. Or Abby, for that matter. Clayton hadn’t responded to the RSVP for their wedding or Zach’s first birthday party. No cards, no gifts. What else should Luke have expected, anyway? It was fine, as far as Luke had been concerned. Better that Clayton exist distantly—his brother, the brilliant scientist. On a primal level, Luke hadn’t wanted Clayton’s presence wafting through the lives of the people he loved.

“Clayton, do you think it might be a good idea to get out of here for a while? Take a powder, head up to the surface to clear your head?”

Luke wasn’t about to mention his sleepwalking incident, either. Or Westlake’s audio files. Not yet. He couldn’t face Clayton’s sneering scorn, not without Al here to back him up at least.

“You can do whatever you want, Lucas,” his brother said. “You shouldn’t even be here. But I can’t leave.”

“Why not?”

But Luke already knew the answer. The
Trieste
was the seat of the unknown, and his obsessive brother wasn’t about to abandon his attempt unlock its secrets.

“Fine,” he said, setting it aside for now. “Where’s Alice?”

“She’s getting some sleep.” Clayton cocked his head. “In the meantime, would you like to see what I’ve discovered? Now that you’re here?”

Clayton clearly
wanted
to show Luke. Childishly, part of Luke wanted to give his older brother what Abby used to call the RFU: the Royal Fuck You.

Nah, not interested, Clay. It sounds pretty boring, to be honest. Hey, you got a TV in this joint? You get decent reception down here?

More crucially, did Luke really
want
to see?

He’d witnessed Clayton’s blooper reel before—a mouse with a collapsed nose on its back, for one. Luke’s skin crawled at the thought of what his brother had been up to down here where the light never shone.

But of course, Luke
did
want to see. If anyone could figure out how to harness the ambrosia, his brother was that man.

Alice’s voice floated to them from another part of the station. She sounded vaguely fearful.

“Luke?” she called out. “Hey, Luke?”

“Hurry up,” Clayton said, shepherding Luke into his lab.

“Wait. What about Al?”

Clayton shook his head. Luke hesitated as Clay punched a code on the keypad.

“Family only. You have eight seconds to get inside, Lucas. Then it locks automatically.”

Luke didn’t move.

eight . . . seven . . .

Clay’s jaw tensed.

six . . .

Luke said: “The dog comes with me.”

“It does not. No dogs allowed,” said Clayton.

It was Luke’s turn to cock his head at his brother. He
knew
Clayton wanted to show him. Otherwise he’d never have offered.

Alice’s voice drew nearer. “Luke?”

three . . .  two . . .

“Fine. Get in, both of you,” Clayton snapped, relenting. “Quickly.”

Luke gripped LB’s collar. She backpedaled, fighting him.

“What’s the matter, girl? It’s okay.”

Really? Was it?

Luke picked her up. LB tucked her head to his throat the way Zach used to do before falling asleep.

one . . .

3.

THE LOCK ENGAGED
with a hiss. Clayton draped a blanket over a hook above the porthole, shielding them from the main lab.

Clay’s lab was a cube, yet its walls didn’t meet at right angles; instead they bellied outward to maintain the
Trieste
’s egg-based physics. A cot in one corner. Clayton must also sleep in here, Luke figured.

Westlake took to sleeping in his lab, too,
he recalled.
He wanted to be close to the hole.
His
hole.

Luke set the dog down but she remained zippered to his side. Her eyes rolled in their sockets; she was clearly afraid but Luke couldn’t pinpoint any immediate cause. A terrarium and a cage housing a pair of guinea pigs sat against one wall. Beside those rested a pair of larger cages—dog crates, one of which had surely held LB.

Where’s the other one?
Luke wondered.
Where’s Little Fly?

A stainless-steel lab bench occupied the middle of the room; Luke could see where it had been riveted together, as a bench that size would have been brought down here in sections. A large poster of Albert Einstein—that famous shot with his tongue sticking out—was hung on the wall directly behind the bench. The quote read: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

“I didn’t know you were a fan,” Luke said.

“It’s good to visualize your competition.” Clay smiled. “You will laugh at this, Lucas, but sometimes I talk to Albert. If I’ve been working long enough, sometimes he’ll talk back.”

A squat white box sat along the near wall. Clayton opened its lid; plumes of vapor billowed out. He reached inside, whistling absentmindedly. Clayton used to whistle or even sing in his basement lab all the time; the notes would drift up the staircase into the kitchen. The most
inane melodies. The theme to
Gilligan’s Island
, or even “Whistle While You Work”—except Clayton used to screw with the lyrics: