The Deep (27 page)

“I’m okay,” he said shakily. “My memories are so vibrant down here. I . . . I find that I’m getting a bit lost in them. Sorry.”

Al said, “Good to have you back, then,” and turned her attention to the crate. It didn’t
look
like the Tickle Trunk, not one bit. It was plastic, and black, and ribbed. Its dimensions were roughly the same, but its lid was flat.

No, it didn’t look anything like the Tickle Trunk, yet it held the
aura
of it.

It’s like bullies
, was Luke’s strangely apt thought.
They can be hulking and potato fisted or weaselly and slender. It’s that cruel quality in their eyes that identifies them as part of the same tribe
.

Which was idiotic to think. This crate had no relation to his old
trunk. Luke used to chastise his own son, often far too harshly, for his childish fears: the monster in the closet, the fanged thing under his bed.

The Fig Men.

But here he was, an adult, filled with dread at the sight of a crate that projected that same air of coy menace as his old childhood nemesis.

Who, little ole me?
the crate seemed to say in a cutesy-poo voice.
Menacing? Noooo. I’m just a crate, Lukey-loo. I’m a tool that stores other tools
—switching to a Popeye growl—
I yam what I ams, and that’s all that I yams!

Al stepped toward it.
No!
Luke wanted to say. But why? It was nothing but a crate. A tool that stored tools.

Al reached down and cracked the lid. A jumble of spare parts. Rooting through them, she found a plastic case. She opened it and shook out a small chip.

“Bingo.”

Al closed the lid and latched it. She gave it a final considering look, the skin tightening down her throat, before turning back the way they’d come.

The chip slotted neatly into the control panel. The air quality changed—where before it’d held a steely aftertaste that built up like plaque in the back of Luke’s throat, now it was . . . well, marginally better.

Al slumped against the wall.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “That chip just vanished. It wasn’t burned out, wasn’t busted. It was
gone
. Same thing would happen onboard a sub, too. Things would go missing. A guy’s books or personal photos, the little tchotchkes that tethered someone to the surface. In most cases, it was petty thievery. No reason aside from boredom and opportunity.”

A hollow knock emanated from the recesses of the purification room. Back where the crate sat.

Knock once for yes. Knock twice for no.

“A few times, though, things went missing and never did get found,” Al went on. “Was this one guy, Fields. A machinist. Carried a photograph of his dead mother in a locket. Wore it strung around his neck. Woke up
one day, it’s gone. He tore that sub apart to find it. Peered in every cranny, even went through the trash. Nada. He figured someone stole it. Hooked it off his neck in the night. But sometimes things just go missing. Fall through cracks, you know?”

The knocking intensified.

Luke peered in that direction, but his view was walled off by an impenetrable expanse of gloom. The canisters glowed whitely, a clutch of huge insect eggs laid in the walls.

“Could be the system kicking over,” Al said, reading his thoughts. “Lots of weird noises in a sub, too. Knocks and clunks you can’t explain. Only pressure and the ocean’s currents, but it can sound a little like . . . like ghosts, uh?”

“Right. Booga-booga.”

Their laughter sounded both canned and forced, as if they were recording a laugh track on a soundstage.

“You ever had a man go missing, Al?”

“On a sub, you mean? That’d be the ultimate locked-door mystery, uh? I heard about something that went down on another vessel, the SS-228
Stickleback
. A guy went missing. They turned that sub inside out, never found him. How do you vanish from a submarine, a thousand feet underwater?

“Turns out this guy got into an argument over a game of cards. Another guy, a sonar tech, hits him with a closed fist. Guy falls and hits the bulkhead all funny. Fractured skull. He dies. So the sonar tech and his buddy, a cook, chopped up the body and fed it into the garbage disposal. Those things could chew up cinder blocks. MPs dredged the disposal, found bits of the guy’s spine and rib cage.”

A new noise floated to their ears. A crisp, somehow silvery sound . . .

. . . the sound of a latch coming undone, maybe.

15.

LUKE SAW IT IN HIS
mind: the crate’s hasp falling open just like the tongue lolling from a tired dog’s mouth. The lid opening the tiniest bit.

Just a hair.

“Al . . .”

“I heard it, too.”

Al had this
what the fuck?
look on her face. There wasn’t a soul back there. Only the crate.

And whatever was inside the crate.

Which was nothing, Luke told himself. He’d seen inside it, hadn’t he? Nothing but tools and—
and an unnaturally long hand tipped with jetblack nails
—and circuits and nothing else. Not a goddamn thing else.

Al stood and moved toward the noise, her boots going
tak
on the steel grate. She took five steps, then ten.

Tak. Tak. Tak. Tak.

Her body knit with the darkness carpeting the deeper recesses of the room—that darkness seemed to drink at her body, sucking her in.

Luke stood. “Al, why don’t we—?”

But she’d already melted into the gloom.

Tak. Tak. Tak. Ta
—

The silence stretched. Luke’s breath came out in whistling gasps.

Al, get your dick-swinging ass back here. Let’s bug the fuck out.

Tak. Tak. Ta
—

An enormity of silence.

Then Al’s voice wafted out of the dim:

“Jesus Christ. No. No. Jesus Chri—”

Tak . . . tak . . . taktaktaktak

Al flew out of the darkness and barreled into Luke, nearly knocking
him down. Her face was set in a rictus of terror; her mouth, frozen open in fear, emitted a series of choked, hiccuping wheezes.

Luke had never seen a grown person look so petrified. He couldn’t conceive what could have reduced Al—as sturdy a person as he’d ever met—to a twitching puddle of nerves.

Hu-Thump!

It came from the dark, where such sounds always germinated.

From the crate, which in his mind’s eye no longer resembled a crate at all.

It was wooden now, engraved with a pattern of leering clowns.

Hyuk-hyuk-hyuk, coming to get you Lukey-loo! Hyuk-yuk, and we’re going to finish it this time!

It wasn’t possible. It hadn’t
been
possible, all those years ago. It’d been a manifestation of his overburdened imagination. Something his own mother had planted, he’d often thought, to coldly chart the effect it would have on her younger son.

The trunk was empty. The
crate
was empty. There was no—

HuTHUMP.

Closer now. Closing the distance.

How could it get down here?
Luke childishly asked himself.

The answer was equally childlike in its logic:
That’s a stupid question—it got here because it’s a monster. That’s what monsters
do.

Luke gripped Al’s shoulders. Her body rocked unstably, eyes wide and horrified.

“What did you see?” Luke hissed. “For God’s sake, Al, what?”

“He’s alive,” Al whispered. “He’s . . . he’s still
alive
.” She gave vent to a series of nerveless screams. “
Still alive!
”

Luke’s mind settled around the image with shocking ease: the young sailor, Eldred Henke, crawling out of the crate. His body bloated with seawater, the skin hanging off his bones like hunks of wet wool. His face torn apart by searing metal. Squelching toward Al on his water-rotted feet, leaving blots of pulpy black flesh in his wake, lisping:
You did this to me. You DID this . . .

They were clearly seeing something very unalike—whatever horror
lay inside that trunk was different for each of them—but Luke wasn’t sure that mattered. Whatever it was that was
making
them see those things was no doubt capable of doing to them what it might so easily have done to Westlake. It could tear their brains apart.

“Go.” Luke shoved Al toward the tube. “Go, go! We’ve got to move
now
.”

HuTHUMP.

Al cast a dazed glance toward the noise—her face a mix of shock, disbelief, and primal fear. Luke noted the vacant cast to her eyes. She looked utterly barking mad.

Prepare the lifeboats, mates! The SS
Sanity
is capsizing! We’re going down!

HUTHUMP!
—this time so forceful that the metal grate shivered under their feet.

They retreated to the chute. To that gaping mouth of darkness.

What was your original face before you were born?

It was a Zen koan Luke used to recite in veterinary school. Since then it had a habit of popping into his head at times of direst emergency—like that time Zachary choked on a strip of undercooked bacon and Luke had to give him the Heimlich.

What was your original face?

He’d never been able to picture his original face, but he realized that was the point of the exercise. It created a mental distraction—a pinprick of tranquillity at the dead center of all that twisting fear, an eye of the storm within which he could operate.

We can get out of this,
he told himself now.
I’ve saved lives before. Animal lives, okay, but a soul’s a soul. I can save us both now.

You’ve lost lives, too
, his mother reminded him.
Lost the most important one.

That was true, too. And he was as scared as he’d ever been—a terror more keen than he’d felt at the standing pipe or even in the crawl space. At least then he’d had the whole world to escape into.

Now, only one congested tube.

“You go first,” he told Al. “
Al . . . ?
”

Al stared gape-jawed into the darkness behind them. A thread of saliva spooled over her bottom lip and down her chin.

HUTHUMP!

A great sinuous flex, as though the darkness itself had gulped. Luke swore he saw something pale and snakelike thrust itself forward.

“Al!” He shook her roughly. “Come on, goddamn it!”

Her eyes cleared. She nodded to say she was listening.

Luke said, “Raise your arms, okay? Keep them above your head, like a diver. That should make it easier. Pull yourself, even with that busted hand—it’ll hurt like hell, but I’ll set those bones again if you need it. And remember the bend, right?”

Al kept nodding. “Okay. Yeah, okay.”

“Go.
Now
.”

Al ducked inside, her head and shoulders swallowed by the chute. When the soles of her boots wriggled out of sight, Luke cast a final look back.

There was a border within the room, semisolid, where light met darkness.

Eight appendages stretched over that border.

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight!

Eight fingers. Just the tips.

Eight fingernails. Black, sharp.

Each finger was spread an unnatural distance from its neighbor—six inches apart, at least. An enormous hand spidering nimbly forward.

One of those fingers wiggled at him.

Hello Lukey-loo. After all this time, together again.

Luke hurled himself into the chute. He willed himself to breathe steadily; if he hyperventilated and passed out, he was certain he’d awaken to find that ghastly hand curled possessively around his ankle.

The chute closed over his head; the sea pressed down on him.

Breathe, Luke. For God’s sake, just breathe.

He settled into a system: anchoring his feet against the slick metal and pushing off with his toes, inchworming through the chute. It was like doing a thousand consecutive calf-raises. His muscles screamed.

HUTHUMP!

It was at the mouth of the tube now. Five feet away. Maybe less.

It was easier to breathe with his hands over his head, opening up his lungs. He hit the bend but, knowing it was coming, was able to contort his body. His toes skidded on the metal, which was maddeningly clingy and oily at once.

What was your original face before you were born?

He willed himself to calm down. His calves were quivering; for all he knew he’d ripped the tendons clean off the bone.

Skrriiiiiiitch . . .

Nails on metal. The hand was inside the chute, scratching toward him. Tapping and feeling its way forward like a blind and hungry tarantula.

Luke stretched out, his fingers creeping, his toes muscling his aching body forward inch after painful inch. He pictured the chute elongating the same way the crawl space had years ago. An endless suffocating tunnel. The perfect kill zone.

No
. It had an end, and he was reaching it. He could hear Al stumbling out someplace ahead. The air tasted a bit less polluted. It couldn’t be far now.

Skriiiiiitch . . .

On his boot now.

A fingernail scratching down the sole, gouging the rubber. Luke bit back a shriek—
don’t fall through the trapdoor and into the snakepit now, sonny-boy; you fall now and it’s game over, no more tokens
—and surged forward on a tide of adrenaline.

Another push, another, calf muscles twitching, sweat soaking his overalls, another push, mouth wide and gasping, fingers reaching—

The chute ended. Alice’s strong hand clutched his wrist and yanked him out.

They stood in the tunnel, panting. The hatch was ten feet away. A mellow coin of light shone through its porthole. LB would be out there, waiting.

They ran for it like kids fleeing the bogeyman—which, in a way, they
absolutely were. Luke hazarded one last look back. He couldn’t help himself. He almost wanted to thumb his nose.