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.