The Deep (30 page)

What he did to them never made the papers—only the insinuations. One article said the police found a large tool chest in Huey’s house with the word
Toybox
on the lid. Plus there was the fact that the funerals were all closed-casket affairs.

One of the girls lived a few blocks away from me. Tiffany Childers. In my memory she exists as a cliche. Blond hair spilling over her shoulders in ringlets, a starspray of freckles across her cheeks.

They never found Tiffany’s head. That little tidbit did leak out to the public. Loose lips at the coroner’s office.

Anyway. The dream. I’m in the woods. An orange band of light limns the horizon, casting its light between the firs.

Huey’s truck rests on the periphery of my sight. I can see the rainbow on the side. I walk toward it, not wanting to but helpless. The truck’s making that tinkling jingle. Taa-ta-teeeee-tinka-tinka-taaa-teeeee. It’s awful—not even a song. It’s just a discordant collection of notes, an ugly sonic slap.

The truck’s back doors are thrown open. The sun, gashing through the trees, highlights the slashes of blood on the white paint.

Things are hanging inside. Dangling down beside the soft-serve machine and next to the sleeve of sugar cones. Parts of bodies. They hang on snarled lengths of copper wire. They brush against one another in a breeze that skates across the forest floor. They make a faintly musical note, like wind chimes. They shouldn’t, but they do.

I look down and see that I’m wearing a white uniform—Uncle Huey’s ice-cream man uniform. I am fat, my belly swelling to the point I can’t see my belt buckle. Suddenly I realize I cannot see very well, either; it’s as though I’m staring through a crusty, grease-smeared window.

I become aware of the sound of my own insectile thoughts. Imagine lowering a boom microphone into a tub of night crawlers—that squishy, squirming sound. That is the noise inside my skull.

And the worst part is, I’m at home with that sound.

I awoke back in the Trieste, in the tunnels. I’d gotten up and walked out of my quarters. I’ve never sleepwalked before, ever.

I was caressing a pipe running down the tunnel . . . caressing it as I might the leg of my own daughter to soothe her to sleep.

I had an erection.

A raging hard-on, one better suited to a hormonal teen. Even my second wife—the most inventive hellcat I’ve ever shared a bed with—couldn’t bring me to such nail-pounding hardness.

Morning wood. That’s all it was. Morning wood.

Monday, June 31 (?)

Success! We’ve discovered trace elements of ambrosia. The sensors picked it up two days (???—time has surrendered most of its meaning down here) ago.

With good news, though, comes bad. Hugo has isolated himself. Surely you know this already, having watched it on the monitors. He has locked himself in the animal quarantine quarters, abandoning his lab.

He’s got the sea-sillies, all right. A crippling case. Clayton and myself debated capturing him, to make sure he didn’t punch a hole in the wall with the first sharp object he could lay his hands on. But he doesn’t strike us as dangerous. Only terrified and mistrustful.

Not long before he locked himself up, I encountered Hugo in the main lab. He’d switched on the spotlights and was staring over the ocean floor. It is, admittedly, a soul-sapping vista. Your heart trembles just to see it.

“If you look long enough,” Hugo said, “you can see it move.”

Hugo’s hair was unkempt, his overalls stained, and his odor quite foul.

“See what move?” I asked.

“The floor, out there,” said Hugo. “It moves in waves. It stares at us with a trillion eyes.”

I dropped my own eyes, speechless. It was awful to see a man go crazy right in front of your face. But I didn’t blame Hugo one bit. Minds crack down here. Pressure bursts pipes, as the saying goes.

“We’ll be able to leave soon,” I told him. “Try to think of that. It helps me, Hugo. A simple lungful of fresh air, think of that.”

Hugo stared at me. His face was a horrid, shuddering mask.

“We’re not going anywhere, Cooper. We’re caught now. It’s got us.
They’ve
got us. We built our own trap, and now we’re snared.”

It. They.

“Hugo, for Christ’s sake,” I said, rising to quick anger. “Get a grip. Think of your family.”

Hugo hissed at me—truly hissed, like a vampire staked through the heart.

“You fucking fool,” he said. “Why think of things you’ll never see again?”

Unnerved, I retreated into my own lab. The honeybees droned comfortingly. They buzzed sluggishly around, ferrying sugar water from the feeders to their hives.

Bees are the most mathematical creatures on earth. Their hives are marvels of geometric functionality. The drones map out their nectar-collecting routes better than a computer, calculating the shortest distance between pollinating buds.

The bees were the first—and so far the only specimens in that phylum—to develop the condition we now recognize as the Disease. The G-word. CCD, or Colony Collapse Disorder, was noted many years ago. Entire hives were obliterated. Death in the billions. Imagine it: a population the equivalent of New York or Cairo decimated in days.

How had it happened? Several possibilities were bandied about: parasite infestations, fungus, mold, the use of antibiotics by beekeepers. Then Dr. Curtis Smails at the University of Birmingham tendered the theory that the bees were simply forgetting to do the things bees always did, the tasks grafted into their genome.

Life in a hive is perfect in the way things in nature often are. The drones collect nectar, build the combs, make honey, and defend the hive. The queens produce offspring and royal jelly. Dr. Smails noticed that the hives suffering from CCD were populated by bees that were no longer fulfilling their roles. The queens stopped giving birth or did so randomly. Drones flew miles from the hive, collecting no nectar, coming back empty-handed. They would fly into ponds and drown, sting other creatures for no reason, and die . . . They’d become fatalistic. Bees are ritualistic, and they were abandoning their rituals.

No, we realized in time—not abandoning, but
forgetting
.

Thus bees became the first bellwether of the Disease. The honeybee in the coal mine, you could say.

My specimens were healthy when we arrived, but they are now displaying the initial symptoms of CCD. Honeycombs going untended, decreasing numbers of larvae. The bees fly without purpose, bumping into the lab walls. The floor is littered with expired specimens. If this continues, they’ll all be dead in a matter of days.

The footsteps overhead. Racing along the ceiling. It sounds so much like the running of children . . . of Hannah’s own footsteps in our Belmont home.

It’s disorienting, like so much of life down here. I don’t like it.

June 32 (maybe, baby!)

There is a hole in the station.

Teeny-tiny, no bigger than a pinprick. It appeared on the wall nearest the hives. The hole is dark, nearly the color of the metal itself. I wouldn’t have noticed were it not for the strange pull it emits.

It is not an unpleasant sensation. I can only liken it to a scalp massage . . . except the fingers are inside one’s skull, manipulating the gray matter.

I covered the phenomenon with a long strip of duct tape. I didn’t want to touch the hole. It seems unwise.

Having done so, the pull lessened.

I confess, I missed the pull.

July Something-Something (day/date immaterial)

We were able to harvest a sample of ambrosia. Clayton did it. I wasn’t there. A tricky procedure, but Clayton (of course it had to be Clayton; nerves-of-steel Clayton) corralled it through the vaccu-trap. Good on him.

We got less than a thimbleful. It was split between Clayton and myself. We did not speak while he portioned it out. We haven’t really spoken to one another for . . . days? A week? I couldn’t tell you. Silence is our element now. Silence and darkness. I have stopped attending my psychological counseling sessions, too. I suspect Clayton has done the same. And Hugo, of course.

I have not told Clayton about the hole.

I like to look at it, I must say. The ambrosia, I mean. It’s strangely entrancing.

The hole is entrancing in much the same fashion.

The hole has grown. It consumed the tape I placed over it. A slow suctioning, the tape stripping from the metal and tugged through the engorged opening . . . a sight, were you to watch from start to finish (I did not, being asleep for some of it), that would be reminiscent of an infant’s toothless mouth devouring a velvet ribbon.

I’ve performed tests, captured on audio files knocking and howling sounds. Laughter, perhaps? There appears to be some rudimentary intellect at work . . . not the hole itself, I can’t imagine that, but whatever lays in the dark space beyond.

My tests are ongoing. I perform them in secrecy. Clayton would only meddle.

We did visit Hugo recently, Clayton and I. We hadn’t heard from him in some time, other than a random banging that could’ve been Hugo bashing his fists on the tunnels. Clayton felt that he may have been roaming around while we slept—he claims to have seen shadows stretching across the walls where the tunnels bend out of sight.

Hugo would not let us in. He is a fright. A gibbering ghoul. His mind has come unglued. He screamed at us through the porthole, refusing to unlock the hatch. He held up a piece of notebook paper that said: YOU ARE NOT WHO YOU SAY YOU ARE.

Clayton has alerted topside operations. It may be best to have someone—perhaps Al, who Hugo trusts—come and take him away. He’s of no use to the mission now.

Has Hugo encountered a hole, too?

No, I don’t think so. The hole is meant for me and me alone.

I took my ambrosia to the lab. The bees were very close to extinction; I’d swept up hundreds of carcasses. I introduced the lion’s share of the ambrosia into the sugar-water receptacle; my hope was that the unaffected specimens would ferry it back to the hive. I trapped a few other bees—the sick, baffled ones that buzzed aimlessly into the walls—dabbed their abdomens with red ink to identify them, and fed them ambrosia-fortified sugar water with a dropper.

The footsteps. There they go again, pattering overhead as I write this.

I see the shadows on the walls, too. Clayton is not alone in that.

LUKE’S EYEBALLS ITCHED;
his shoulders were tight.

Westlake’s journal had developed a sinister momentum. The handwriting, which had started out neat and clinical, was starting to erode. Some of the pages were crumpled, as though Westlake had clenched his hand into a fist while writing.

Most worryingly, it . . . it seemed to be speaking directly to Luke. A
voice behind the printed words whispered softly into his ear. Fingers crawled up the back of his neck—Westlake’s scarified fingers racing ticklingly over his scalp . . .

. . . what an idiotic notion.

Nothing is idiotic now,
he told himself.
The worst mistake you can make is to think it’s idiotic.

He could still hear Al down the tunnel, banging away. It held a rhythmic note, like the pump of a piston in a slow-running engine.

Bang . . . bang . . . bang . . .

His eyes snapped open. He’d let them slip shut, lulled by that banging, which matched the beat of his own heart. A shadow twisted across the wall where the tunnel bent. He watched the hatchway, thinking something—
fingers, four small fingers, a boy’s small fingers
—might wrap around the gray metal. When that didn’t happen, his eyes fell back upon the journal. The pages hooked his gaze, tugging insistently. Westlake’s voice—cold and raspy with death—said:
You need to know, Lucas, because down here anything can happen. Anything at all.

18.

Science Day!

This place repulses.

There is nothing to nourish the soul. Nothing but man-made angles and inert materials. Nothing is cut from nature, holding the supple appeal of objects that God has touched. God’s finger doesn’t reach down this far.