A substance resembling red pancake batter burped out of the trunk. The lid opened again. The moon shone down from its icy altar, the dump wrapped in stillness once again.
14.
THE BLACKNESS SLID AWAY as Luke floated up out of the dream-pool. This long-buried memory had flooded back to him whole cloth—the sights and smells and the fear that had filled his veins that afternoon in the crawl space, a terror as bright and sharp as lemon juice squirted on a paper cut.
“Doc?” said Al, shaking him with her good hand. “You still with me?”
He was back inside his own skin now. He stood in the Trieste with Alice, staring at a supply crate that rested in the deepest, most shadowed point of the purification room. How long had he been checked out? It didn’t feel like more than a few seconds—and maybe that was all it had been, each second stretching out inside his head.
Eight miles above, all over the world, people were forgetting their pasts. Trapped down here in the charmless dark, Luke couldn’t escape his own.
“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.