The dog yelped—a short, breathless note.
“LB?”
He couldn’t hear her nails clicking on the floor anymore. If it weren’t for the sound of his own raspy exhales, Luke would have thought he’d gone deaf.
“Where are you, girl?”
No sound of her breathing. He’d lost the distinctive scent of her breath. She was gone. Surely he’d have heard her go? A hole couldn’t have opened up in the floor and sucked her down…
Oh no? his mother said.
“LB? Come on, baby. I know you’re there. Don’t be scared.”
Nothing but the overwhelming dark and a faint rustling from all sides. A hard, prolonged compression invaded Luke’s chest. LB was gone. She’d been taken by the station. By its new—no, Luke, by its very very old—inhabitants.
It was as if a critical part of him had been stolen—the twine binding everything together. The dog had been the first creature he’d encountered on the Trieste. His anchor. The direness of her loss cleaved him in two. Alice was AWOL—Christ, maybe she had left. His brother was useless. Dr. Toy was dead. The power was out.
Luke was entirely alone.
Alone like your son was left alone in the woods alone because you lost him because you took your eyes off him at the moment it mattered most—
He heard a lush, tickling note. From where? It was so hard to tell in this darkness.
There. It must be coming from beyond the gooseneck, toward Toy’s quarters.
But that hatch was locked, wasn’t it? Yes. He’d checked only minutes ago.
It came again. A moist note like a mop dragged over a tile floor. Silence. It came again, closer this time.
Otto Railsback.
The name leapt out at him. Railsback, who’d welded this station together. Down here alone in the dark—this exact same dark. A wee scrap of a thing, isn’t that what Alice said? He finished his job, laid his head down and died.
But he wasn’t dead. No-no-no. He was here now, crawling toward Luke. His legs had been torn away above the hips; the knobs of his spine projected through the bloody meat. The moplike sound was made by his unraveling intestines, still wet and juicy, whishing across the grate.
Luke had no intention of confronting whatever was really making those sounds. He backed away, struggling to recall where the tunnel bent so he could trace his way out again.
In the dark, a man’s thoughts described an unhealthy spiral. No matter what he tried to orient his mind on—the shape of his wife’s face or the sound of his boy’s laughter or the taste of a fall peach plucked right off the tree—every thought seemed to loop back, unerringly, to those shapes in the darkness with their guts unfurling from cracked-open bellies… And it was worse down here, so much worse, because that hammering Christly goddamn pressure never stopped welting down on him, a never-ending compression that cinched his brain in a vise, warping all rational thought… Nothing is impossible down here, Luke. This singular thought blazed across his mind. He was in a place where truly anything could happen. The edges of reality were blown out, inviting in every conceivability. That terrifying notion—all was possible—stripped a man’s mind to its fragile bedrock.
The sounds changed. Became a clitter-clitter-clack.
Nails on metal. Dog nails?
LB?
No, it wasn’t LB. Luke couldn’t put this sense into words, but he knew. It was something else… though perhaps not entirely. A new kind of LB, maybe. Whatever a dog might become after the station had swallowed it and spat it back out.
Click… click… click…
A growl. A rippling rusty sound like a balky chainsaw revving up.
Luke turned and fled. His face slammed into a wall; his mouth filled with a bracing metallic tang—the same as when, as a boy, he’d slipped on a patch of ice and smashed his face on the frozen schoolyard slide. He spun, regained his balance, and kept running. The air in front of his face had a staticky appearance, like TV snow on a dead channel.
Click… click… click-click-click—
Luke ran headlong into another wall and reeled away, convinced that the LB-thing was close behind now, accelerating on legs bunched with muscle, its fang-studded jaws open wide.
His hands slapped the storage area hatch. He ran his palms over it until his fingers slipped around its edge. He slid through the hatchway just as something slammed against it, jarring the hatch shut and jolting him to the ground.
The hatch’s hinges squealed. Luke skittered away as the metal groaned. The porthole must have broken; Luke could hear cracks threading across the thick glass.
He imagined that glass shattering—imagined whatever was on the other side pouring through the broken glass like hungering oil.
The shuddering stopped. But Luke could still feel his pursuer behind that hatch. His mind was unable to conjure its shape. That was surely for the best.
He needed a flashlight. He was certain he’d seen one in the communications room. Why hadn’t he grabbed it then? Stupid idiot. He stood and got moving, feeling blindly along the wall. His fingers brushed the edge of another hatch. It led to the comm room, he was certain. Through this hatch and down a short tunnel, past one hatch to the next one. Yes, that was it.
The flashlight would be there. It had to be.
Luke swung the hatch open. He crossed the threshold timidly—he half expected the floor to be replaced with plummeting nothingness. His toe hit metal. He crept down the tunnel until he reached the second hatch. He stepped through into the comm room. His hands feathered along the wall. His fingers brushed something smooth and tubular like a sleeping boa constrictor. Luke recoiled, his breath whistling in his ears.
It’s just a pipe. A harmless heating or cooling pipe.
His entire frame was tense. Soon, very soon, something would reach out of the darkness and grab him… or worse, enfold him in a loving caress.
His hands closed on the flashlight. When he released the clips, it slipped through his fingers and clattered to the floor.
Damn-damn-DAMN!
He groped after it, hoping to God he hadn’t cracked the bulb. He found it and thumbed the switch. A circle of light appeared on the wall. Luke’s heart flooded with relief. It was weak, but goddamn, blissfully, it was light.
He followed the beam out of the room and back down the tunnel. He returned to the main tunnel and trained the light on the storage hatch.
It was unmarked. The steel unbuckled, the porthole unshattered.
This station does as it likes, he thought. It ruins itself and fixes itself. Stop questioning any of it.
Laughter.
He swung the light behind him. Nothing. He aimed it on the storage hatch again, then in the other direction, toward the main lab. Nothing.
A prepubescent giggle shot through the dark, splintering the air.
A mocking titter.
“Daddy…”
Another titter. Zach’s voice, unmistakably. Luke backed away from it—but that was impossible, wasn’t it? It came from every angle: a cold and airless giggle that made the flesh jump down Luke’s throat.
The flashlight felt pitiful in his hands, a piss-poor little toy, totally unfit for the task of pushing back the enormous dark that assaulted him… a darkness rebounding with his son’s laughter.
He didn’t want to see Zachary. He didn’t want to confront what this place had done to him. But his arm moved nonetheless, the beam staggering over the walls and floor and cei—