The Deep (37 page)

Drrrrrrithhlippppp!

“What is that, Clay?” Luke said coldly. “What the
fuck
is that noise?”

Luke shoved past his brother, adrenaline tweaked as he stalked toward the open hatch. LB was stuck tight to his heels.

4.

THE LAB WAS BRIGHT
and ordered, not a hair out of place. Positively
Claytonian
. Luke’s gaze fell on the cooler containing the guinea pig . . .

. . . the guinea pig, and the strange shape wrapped in durable black plastic.

Ttthhwillipp!

The sound was coming from behind the Einstein poster. Ole Albert with his tongue stuck out of his mouth. A sense of unreality washed over Luke. It was so plainly obvious, wasn’t it? How had he missed it?

Hell, on my last descent I brought a poster of Albert Einstein for your brother,
he remembered Alice telling him.

“Oh, shit. I don’t . . . how could you . . . you
Shawshanked
us,” he said softly. “Oh, Clay. You sly dog, you.”

“You cannot move it,” Clay said, setting himself in front of Luke. “Do you understand? It’s forbidden.”

Who was he, Bluebeard with his locked room full of severed heads? What did that make Luke then—his cringing, servile wife?

Luke took a step toward Clayton; a challenging smile tweaked his lips. LB came forward, too, her eyes resting on Clay with bright menace.

“You can’t move it.” Clayton spoke carefully. “Trust me, you don’t
want
to.”

The buzz drifted through from the main lab, adding to the riot in Luke’s head. It was as if wasps had built a nest between his ears, stinging the insides of his skull.

“I think I ought to know,” Luke said, deathly soft. “I’m not a scientist, right? Why keep your secrets from me? Unless, I mean, you’re working on a new dog-neutering system.” A hollow laugh. “You’re not working on that, Clay. Are you?”

“Get away from me.”

“Shouldn’t I know, brother? I came all this way.”

“I never asked you to.”

“Oh, I think you did.” Luke’s throat was dry, and the words came out in a choked rasp. “I think you’ve done plenty down here without even knowing it.”

Next they were grappling with each other. They waltzed awkwardly around the lab bench, locked up like professional wrestlers—not yet committed to actual violence, just testing their strength. Luke’s fingers sunk into the bandages on his brother’s hand; his flesh had a sickening
give
, spongier than skin should ever be.

Luke was dismayed to discover that Clayton’s strength overmastered his own. It was that age-old truism: no matter how old two brothers got, the older brother still had the upper hand in any physical confrontation. Clay’s elbow clipped the bridge of Luke’s nose. The room exploded in cold blue fire; Luke’s synapses lit up like a pinball machine. He stuttered backward on his heels and fell, a shockwave juddering up his spine.

Clayton’s face shaped itself into an expression that did not often grace it: concern. He stepped forward, his hand instinctively outstretched.

“Luke, I’m so—”

LB sprang. Her skull rammed into Clayton’s breadbasket; the wind whoofed out of him. He tottered backward, arms held out to ward off LB’s jaws. She was harrying him now, not nipping but really
biting
, aiming to do some serious damage.

“LB! Heel!” Luke shouted. “
Heel!
”

The dog paid him no mind. Clayton’s hip hit the edge of the lab bench, spinning him sideways. He fell backward, arms thrown out to check his fall.

His fingertips snagged on the poster. A look of helpless panic entered his eyes.

The poster stretched—for a heart-stopping moment it appeared as if it might hold—then it ripped from its hooks and fluttered down onto Clayton’s chest.

Dear Christ
, Luke thought.
It’s worse than I thought. More awful than I ever could have imagined.

5.

A HOLE.
Halfway up the wall.

Except it wasn’t really a hole, was it? Whatever Westlake had seen, however he’d contextualized it, he’d been wrong.

Its surface was darker than the sea beyond the wall; it shimmered like the placid surface of a lake stirred by a breeze. Upon casual inspection, it may’ve seemed solid—it held back the water, didn’t it?—but Luke knew if he were to touch it, his fingers would pass through into . . . his mind couldn’t grasp what might occur next. It couldn’t even form an outline.

The (not a) hole was rung by smaller ones, the same way moons ring a planet. A few were the diameter of nickels; others were quite a bit larger.

The hole—
stop calling it that
,
Luke
.
A hole is ordinary and of this world; this is something else entirely
—the hole-
thing
followed the curve of the wall: Luke could see a heating pipe running beneath it.

The hole-thing, the
rift
, glittered dully around its edges. It was growing. The smaller holes appeared to be enlarging, too, nibbling into the wall.

A new sensation: fishhooks sunk into Luke’s brain, tugging insistently.

He leaned toward the hole, the pain of his nose forgotten. He felt no danger; not an imminent sense, anyway. A voice buried in his subconscious warned him not to trust that sense of calm, but . . . yes, he trusted the hole. Oh yes, he trusted it completely. More than he trusted the structural safety of the
Trieste
, in fact. He tasted blood on his tongue but this, too, was a faraway sense. The hole—

It’s not a goddamn
—

But it
was
a hole, wasn’t it? Sure it was. What was a hole, after all, but a, a  . . .

Doorway
?

A split in the surface of things. An absence of matter. You could fill that absence with any old thing, couldn’t you? Put a lid over it, keep everything precious hidden from sight. You could bury dangerous things in holes, too. Holes were good that way.

Holes kept secrets. Holes and standing pipes and Tickle Trunks, yes, those too. We buried bodies in holes, and the dead were the best at keeping secrets. If a hole was big enough, well, you could hide any old thing at all.

Something was coming through the hole now.

Its surface split as a wriggling tongue pushed itself out.

It’s ambrosia,
Luke realized, icy splinters filching into his heart.
This is how it gets inside the station. It’s how Clayton’s been collecting it.

The ambrosia slipped through the hole and dropped—

Thwwwiiiilllliiipppp . . .

—into a small collection vessel Clayton had affixed to the wall, which had also been hidden by the poster.

It was the first time since Luke had been down that he’d experienced something undeniably not of this world. Everything else could be fobbed off as the product of his overheated imagination, or of Westlake’s runaway psychosis. Even Dr. Toy’s death could have been a structural mishap. But
this
—the hole, the ambrosia sliming out of it—stood outside all earthly logic.

“Don’t look at it directly,” Luke heard Clayton say.

Luke was on his knees now, crawling toward the hole. He found this distressing in a distant kind of way.

Hey, Luke, your arms and legs are moving on their own. Isn’t that kind of freaky?

Some
thing
was drawing him forward, pulling him closer to the, the
doorway
. He was struck with the profound urge to touch it—reach
into
it. He imagined it would feel warm and embracing. It’d crawl lovingly up his flesh as some strong current drew him deeper, to the wrist and then the elbow and eventually the armpit.

And it would feel like home, wouldn’t it? Like the summer sunshine he remembered from childhood, slanting in golden abundance from a cornflower-blue Iowa sky, hot but not uncomfortably so—
cockle-warming
, as the old men at the Hawkeye barbershop would say. Yes, it would feel just glorious.

A hand closed over his wrist. Clayton gripped his arm fiercely. Luke wanted to rip out of his brother’s grasp and continue toward the door—it really was more of a door, wasn’t it? He’d open the door and see what was on the other side. It would be simply wonderful, he was certain of it.

“Look at me,” Clayton said. “For Christ’s sake, Lucas—
look
.”

It required an epic force of will for Luke to keep his eyes locked on Clayton’s. When he did, the pull of the doorway lessened the tiniest bit.

“I have to put the poster back up,” said Clayton, his voice solidifying. “Don’t look at it. I know it’s hard—it
wants
you to look.”

A relentless pressure in Luke’s skull was torquing his head toward the hole.

“Talk to me, Lucas. Sing a song. It helps.”

Luke hunted his mind for one of the silly kids’ songs he’d sung to Zach. There were dozens; their lyrics danced on the tip of his tongue. But something else inside his head, a persistent presence, had other ambitions.

Why not take a look, Lucas?

An insistent voice. The voice of the hole.

What’s the harm? Little door, little door, open me up! One quick peek. You know you want to. Or touch it, why not? I bet it feels just dandy.

The urge to look was almost sexual. Luke felt the need twisting in his groin with giddy excitement. His penis throbbed with it. There was an unpleasant burn high in his sinuses, as if he’d just dived into an overchlorinated pool. Except it was a dreamy feeling, too, vaguely childlike—the need to peer into a darkened closet, if only to assure himself nothing was inside.

But what if something
was
inside? And what if it could bite?

“The wheels on the bus go round and round,” Clayton sang. “Round and round, round and round.”

“The wheels on the bus go round and round,” Luke joined in. “All around the town.”

“The wipers on the bus go swish-swish-swish,” they sang together. “Swish-swish-swish, swish-swish-swish; the wipers on the bus go swish-swish-swish, all around the town.”

Clayton picked up the poster. He approached the hole, his posture that of a man walking into a gale-force wind.

“The horn on the bus goes beep-beep-beep,” he sang, “beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep . . .”

He hung the poster upside-down, punching the paper through the hooks. Einstein’s expression now appeared baleful, his tongue cocked at a lewd angle.

As soon as the hole was covered, Luke’s mind cleared. The brothers retreated to the far side of the room. They sat in silence, breathing heavily.

“I know this must be a lot to take in,” Clayton said finally.

“It’s just like Westlake said.” Luke’s voice was barely above a whisper. “His journals. You knew he wasn’t crazy. You knew all along.”

Clayton’s face, oddly compressed and sun starved, gave him the look of a man in the final stages of tuberculosis.

“He wasn’t crazy, Luke. He was just weak.”

6.

“WHEN DID YOU FIRST
see it?” Luke said.

Clayton leaned against the lab bench. He shot a furious glance at LB.

“Keep that dog away from me, you understand?”

Luke grasped his nose and gave it a wiggle; the cartilage crackled. He tasted blood, thick and ironlike. He felt no anger, only a dull shock. But the shock was tempered by the sense, deeply buried but sincere, that the holes
did
exist—he’d known it even without seeing them, so the adjustment now was easier. He wanted to hit Clayton but there was something about his brother, expressed in his sick pallor and swaddled arm, that indicated he was suffering in a serious way. And what would anger solve? It would only rip them further apart and reduce their chances of survival—which was just what the holes wanted, he was sure of it. So Luke would stow his childish hurts and stay calm.

“Just answer the question, Clay. When did you see it?”

“I don’t know,” Clayton said. “It’s tough keeping track of time. At first it was so small, the size of a penny. And it wasn’t so much that I even
saw
it at that point. It was that I . . . I
felt
it.”

Clayton clearly hadn’t hung the poster to stop anyone from seeing the hole—he’d hung it to stop the hole from seeing
him
.

That his brother had continued to work mere feet from it, collecting the ambrosia as it widened and grew, sucking ceaselessly at his psyche . . . Luke understood, not for the first time, that his brother’s mind was built to a different tolerance.

“How does the poster muffle that feeling?”

Clayton shrugged. “I don’t know the principles behind it. I only know it works.”

What if it only works because whatever’s behind the hole
wants
Clay to
think
it works?
Luke wondered.
Could be it’s slackening its pull, letting Clayton believe his flimsy poster is worth a tinker’s damn—and what if Clay’s too far gone to realize he’s being played in such a simplistic fashion?

It was conceivable. The smartest people were too often the stupidest—the most blind to manipulation, believing themselves immune to it.

“How much goo have you collected?”

Clayton’s face puckered with distaste at the word
goo
.

“A good deal,” he said. “At first we didn’t see
any
of it. Frankly, I’d begun to despair. We’d built this station already. A man had died to get it operational.”

“Not that you’d care about him,” Luke snapped.

“True,” Clayton said without rancor. “It was his job, as this is mine. But there was the expense to consider, too, in the trillions. And for days,
weeks
, there wasn’t hide or hair of the substance the
Trieste
had been built to study. But the sensors began to pick it up—scraps drifting lazily around.”

“Like iron filings to a magnet, huh?”

Clayton shrugged again. “I tried bait boxes filled with colorful shapes and reflecting mirrors, but it exhibited no attraction. It was
there
, Lucas, the ambrosia was there in tantalizing, taunting abundance, but I couldn’t lay my hands on it.”