The Deep (7 page)

Al gripped the handle of the centermost vault and cracked it open a few inches. A chemical tang puffed out, sliming Luke’s tongue and making him slightly nauseous.

“Westlake may’ve been getting squirrelly,” Al said. “He’d been isolated inside his lab for quite some time. No updates, no contact. The video camera in his lab was busted. We couldn’t see what he was doing . . . or what was being done to him.”

Done to him?
Luke thought.

“We thought about going down. Maybe he’d cracked, right? But descents have been tricky the past few weeks. A lot of subsurface disturbances, the most serious being a current ring situated directly above the trench.”

“Current ring?”

“An underwater tornado, basically. An eddy sucking a billion-odd tons of water into itself, creating a funnel. We sent a supply drone down last week; the eddy caught it, spun it, and smashed it into the trench wall.”

“And you expect
me
to go down into that?”

“The ring cleared two days ago. The sea’s gone sleepy again. Anyway, we didn’t go down for two reasons.” She held up a finger. “
One
, because of the current ring”—she held up a second finger—“and
two
, because your brother, whose contact had become sporadic, assured us things were fine. Then today, in the early hours of morning,
Challenger
4, which had been docked to the
Trieste
, began to rise. Westlake was inside. How he’d managed to get the sub working—he hadn’t been trained in its operation—is unknown.

“A few things happened during Westlake’s ascent, all of them bad. First, we lost contact with the
Trieste
altogether. The comm link went kerflooey, or else someone shut it off. Second, we lost most of the monitors. We’d already lost a few, but this was a whole whack of them, all at once. Could be a technical issue. A major circuit blowout. Or else someone down there wanted them off.”

Someone or some
thing, Luke thought irrationally.

“Something else happened as Westlake came up. Happened
to
him. He could only have done it to himself.”

Al’s fingers were steady on the vault’s handle, but a fragile muscle fluttered next to her eye.

“You go ahead and open it,” Luke said.

Without another word, she did so.

15.

AT FIRST LUKE COULDN’T TELL
what he was looking at. His eyes rejected it, as it didn’t fit any prior conceptions of the human form.

Dr. Westlake’s naked body was a swollen mass of scar tissue. His body was
all
scars. A ballooned, inflated parody of the human form.

It appeared as if Westlake had been wrapped in pink elastic bands. Some were thick as garter snakes, others thin as copper wires. Some fibrous as canvas rigging, others frail as onionskin. They lapped over in gruesome profusion, each one nurtured to a sickening, sensuous bulbousity. It seemed as if at any moment they might burst open and thin ribbons of flesh would spool forth, covering the old scars in layers that further obscured the body trapped inside.

Westlake’s frame was bent, each limb wrenched at an unnatural angle. The bends. Nitrogen bubbles had built up in the blood, snapping Westlake’s bones as they expanded.

Luke wanted to look away. Couldn’t.

Sweet Christ, his
face
. The scars were the worst there. Elsewhere they seemed to have been laid down haphazardly, but the ones on his face had a more considered appearance. They had been delivered with special care. His eyes were trapped inside swollen bulbs of flesh—if Luke were to touch them, he imagined they would feel like India rubber balls—each so huge that they projected from the wrecked tapestry of his face like plums. His lips had been sliced and had healed until the flesh knit together, upper lip wedded to bottom, fused into a thick band that curved upward in a grisly rictus. His nostrils had a feathered look, the flesh slit back in fragile petals that revealed candle-white sinus cavities.

“Shut it.” Luke’s voice was a frail whisper. “Please.”

Al did so. Luke jackknifed at the waist, hands braced on his knees.

“How . . . ?”

“I wish I had any idea,” Al said softly. “We found a scalpel in the sub. Its blade was gouged up, dull as a butter knife. We figure it’d been used to cut through flesh, tendon, cartilage. Eventually it went dull on the bone.”

“It’s not possible, Al. I mean, that kind of trauma . . . how long does it take to surface?”

“Eight or nine hours usually. Westlake came faster, which is why he got the bends. He decompressed too fast. Truth is, we were fully expecting that it wouldn’t be pretty. But no way could we have imagined this.”

“He did this to himself?”

“Who else? The submarine was empty.”

Totally empty?
Luke wondered.
What if Westlake had been carrying that goo?

“We didn’t find any ambrosia,” Al said before Luke could ask. “We tore the sub apart and found not a trace of the stuff. Just the scalpel, Westlake’s body, and one more thing.”

“What was that?”

“Luke,” Al said carefully, “Felz showed you the mouse video, right? You see what that stuff can do. A godsend? I can see that. But I can see other things, too.”

She didn’t need to finish. Luke had the same vision. Westlake rising up from Challenger Deep, hacking into himself—and every time he cut himself, he healed so fast that it was almost immediate. Luke pictured an endless zipper: Westlake’s flesh opening, only to close a few moments after the scalpel slit it, leaving very little blood and a ragged scar. Westlake could have sliced himself for hours, reducing himself in some exquisite way, laughing or shrieking or crying or who-knows-what, mindlessly—or
mindfully
?—layering scar over scar until . . . what? How did he die? Had the ambrosia deserted him?
Evanesced
, as Felz said?

Luke closed his eyes. The absolute worst of all was the expression frozen on Westlake’s face. Luke was quite certain he died smiling.

“What else, Al? What was inside the submersible?”

She set a hand on Luke’s shoulder. Luke didn’t realize how badly he’d been shaking. It had nothing to do with how cold the room felt.

16.

DR. FELZ WASN’T THERE
when they returned to the deck of the
Hesperus
. They got into the cart, both of them sitting on the rear seat.

“Go,” Al told the driver.

Luke couldn’t inhale enough air to inflate his lungs. He couldn’t unsee Dr. Westlake’s horrible, twisted body. For the first time, doubt seeped into Luke’s mind. Why did he have to go down, anyway? He wasn’t saying he
wouldn’t
, but why him? He hadn’t asked this most elementary question when the phone had woken him two days ago. He’d flown to Guam unquestioningly, as many people might when their government made the request. He paid his taxes and renewed his license and never caught more fish than his limit, too. He wanted to help, to do something good, just as Leo Bathgate did. Governments approved of citizens like Luke Nelson.

Plus there was no one on the other side of his bed to tell Luke
not
to go. And the room down the hall that his son had once slept in was empty, too.

“Why me?” he said. “Clayton’s my brother, but we aren’t close. I don’t have any specific skills that might help you out down there.”

“We’ll make a motley pair then, won’t we?” said Al. “What you’re asking, I take it, is why don’t we send down a crew of Special Forces badasses and put things right? We considered it. Dismissed it. First, that current ring made it dangerous to get down until recently. Second, the two men still down there—your brother and Dr. Toy—wield the whip hand now. They’re inside, we’re outside. I’ll give you a full debriefing later, but suffice it to say, the
Trieste
is fragile. All it takes is one screwdriver—pierce any wall just a fraction and it’s pancake city. So if we head down cocked and locked, well, what do we stand to lose if things go sideways? Everything. Absolutely everything.”

“That’s a cheerful thought. Jesus.”

They passed down a row of low, black, flat-sided buildings connected by linked walkways; they made Luke feel like he was touring a medium-security prison.

“But why
you
?” Al said. “Good question. You’re as green at deep dives as I am at neutering spaniels, right? The main reason, Luke, is that your brother asked for you.”

“Get out of here.”

She pulled an iPhone from her pocket and thumb-shuffled until she found what she was looking for. “This came through fifty hours ago. You received a call in Iowa City shortly thereafter. Sound file, no video. It stands as our last contact with your brother. We were debating whether to act on it, but the Westlake situation forced our hand.”

She pressed
play
. Clayton’s voice floated out of the speaker.

“Come home, Lucas. Come down, Lucas. We need you, Lucas. Come home.”

Clayton’s flat, monotone cadence was rendered tinny by the recording. Clayton sounded as if he was asleep; his voice was syrupy and water-warped, like a 45 rpm record playing at a relaxed 33 rpm. That could be a problem with the transmission itself, which had to carry through eight miles of water. Clayton repeated himself again before the message cut out abruptly.

“We need you, Lucas. Come ho—”

“It took a while to figure out who
Lucas
was,” said Al. “Your brother doesn’t speak about his family. We figured it could’ve been a research associate, a friend, a lover even. Our intel people dug around a bit and figured he must’ve been talking about you.”

“But Clayton doesn’t need me. He doesn’t need anyone. He never has.”

Except for those nights when the sleep terrors descended on him
, he thought.
The nights when you’d climb into bed with him until he settled down.
But that was years ago, when they were only boys.

Yet Clayton had been saying
We need you
. We. WE. We who?

“Think of him as our pampered rock star whose rider calls for a big
bowl of M&M’s, only the red ones,” said Al. “In this case, he’s asking for his brother. We give him what he wants—making every effort to preserve your safety, of course.”

“Why would he want me down there?”

Al cocked her head. “You put people’s minds and bodies under that kind of pressure . . . Things snap, right? We want to do everything possible to avoid that snap.”

“So that’s what I am, then? A bandage?”

“Think of yourself more as a key.”

Luke couldn’t imagine his brother needing a bandage, anyway. He was armor plated, titanium coated. But that voice . . . it hadn’t sounded entirely like Clayton. Granted, it had been years since they’d last spoken, but still, something was
off
about it. The difference wasn’t in the words themselves or the pitch of his voice—it lurked somewhere behind the obvious, sly and scuttling like rats in the walls.

Come home, Lucas. Come home come home come home . . .

“That’s not my home down there,” he said.

Al said: “It’s nobody’s home. Trust me.”

Two rights, a left, and they came to another dry dock. Three subs were cradled in hammocks. The numbers 2, 3, and 1 lay on their flanks. A workman was filling a seam in one of them with foam that pumped from a sophisticated caulking gun.

“That’s the secret ingredient,” Al told Luke. “Some kind of superfoam that expands or compresses depending on pressure. It can withstand fifty tons per square inch. The
Trieste
is held together with the stuff. Cost a billion-plus to develop, but it’s worth every dime.”

Luke followed Al across the tarmac. It was like being on the deck of an aircraft carrier—the sky was wide and trackless, the sun beating down from a cloudless sky. It was so hot that the patching tar had softened; it clung to the treads of their boots like Black Jack chewing gum.

Another sub was partially obscured by a pile of pallets; all Luke saw was its back end canted over the water. It sat in moody isolation, its stocky shape banded by yellow tape—the kind that ringed a crime scene.

“The MPs are still investigating,” Al said. “It seems worthless.” She laughed without mirth. “Like investigating a haunting or something.”

The
Challenger
4 rounded into view. Luke’s lips curled in an instinctive expression of distaste.

It looked no different than the sub he’d seen earlier, and yet it repelled his gaze. There was something profoundly awful about it. He sensed that Al felt the same way about it—and he imagined it unnerved her just as it did him, because rational minds objected to unreasoned fear.

Perhaps it was because it had traveled so far below the sun’s reach. The pressure had warped it, giving its shape a madman’s hint of those depths. Or perhaps it was what happened within it—in Luke’s head, the sight of it melded with that of Westlake’s tortured corpse. The vessel was hateful in some way he could not accurately distill.

Al approached it, and Luke reluctantly followed. An awful coldness wept off the sub’s metal. Had it carried up that icy chill from the Challenger Deep itself?

Al wrenched the hatch wheel. The muscles trembled up her arms, as if a subconscious part of her rebelled at the act.

The hatch was circular, slightly smaller than a manhole cover, a solid foot of steel. Al let it
clunk
against the hull.

A smell wafted out. Luke had never inhaled its equal. Raw, adrenal, and profoundly human.

The stink of insanity, Edie, sharp as malt vinegar
, as his mother once said.

Luke bent to peer inside. Several deflated bladders dangled down inside the cabin; he could only suppose that they were the equivalent of nautical air bags.

What he didn’t see yet was blood, which was incredible considering what had occurred inside. Maybe the MPs had swabbed it out already?

“You’re gonna need to crane your neck,” he heard Al say. “Look higher.”

He crouched, neck twisted at an uncomfortable angle. Something was written on the far wall. Rust-colored scratches. Messy, frantic.