A series of memories shuffled past like holiday photos in a slide projector:
Flash: Clayton in the bathroom, shaking powder into their mother’s shampoo bottle.
Flash: Clayton in the master bedroom, stirring powder into their mother’s facial cream.
Flash: Clayton in the kitchen, tipping powder into the huge pot of porridge simmering on the stove.
A final memory:
Luke staring through Clayton’s eyes again, up the basement stairs at their mother, who lay on the kitchen floor, nothing but skin and bones. She’d lost hundreds of pounds, the weight sloughing off. Doctors and specialists had paraded through the house for months by then; she’d visited hospitals as far distant as Houston and Rochester, Minnesota. Her condition left the best medical minds stumped. Bethany Ronnicks continued to wither into decay, her body the equivalent of an old jack-o’-lantern left on a front stoop weeks after Halloween had passed.
“Please,” she whispered. “Stop this. I know it’s you, Clayton… a mother knows.”
Luke felt a smile spread across Clayton’s face, a sliver of teeth in the dark. He must’ve looked beatific, a child saint.
Upstairs, their mother wept. These raw, hacking sobs.
“You bastard… rotten-ass bastard.”
Luke felt something trickling down from the fuming stew of Clayton’s subconscious. Pleasure. The most incredible pleasure imaginable, beyond sexual in its intensity.
Luke had always known Clayton was a monster of sorts—he now understood that Clayton grasped this fact of his essential self with a rational, clinical objectivity. He was a monster of detachment, eternally unmoored from his fellow man.
But their mother was a monster, too, and one much worse than Clayton. She’d given Clayton a reason to let his own monster out of its box… and his monster was a steely, calculating, devouring one, able to kill another of its kind with relative ease.
Clayton lay at the base of those steps, drinking in the sobs of the woman who’d given him life—the woman whose life he stole by subtle degrees until she was gone, her scarecrow remains buried in a cedar casket in the Memory Gardens cemetery on Muscatine Avenue in Iowa City—and he smiled. His contentment was more sublime than anything he’d ever felt until then or had felt since.
LUKE’S FINGERS pulled out of the ambrosia rope with a gluey suction. His consciousness fled back into him as he broke contact with Clayton’s mind. Luke gagged, his skin feeling too heavy on his bones—like being smothered under a sopping bear pelt.
Clayton slumped against the generator, his eyelids hanging at half-mast. Just taking a little catnap, as their mother called them. Luke was still reeling from the revelation—not a vision, not a dream; that had been a truthful recounting of his brother’s past, a shard chipped off the granite of his memory. He’d killed their mother. It was that simple. He was smarter than her and he’d made her pay. No guilt, no consequence. Clayton was simply expressing that monstrous part of himself—perhaps the truest part.
And Luke was grateful to him for that. He’d surely saved them both. But, like most of the great things his brother had done, it had been to satisfy himself and nobody else.
“I could try to cut through it,” Luke said softly. “Maybe we could still…”
The cord undulated lazily, as if it had heard Luke’s plan; Luke could sense its immense power coursing through his brother’s body.
“You go, Lucas,” said Clayton. “Go up. Go to the people you love, if they’re still there. You… you try. You keep on trying, yes?”
The cord jerked, dragging Clayton with it. Luke reached for him… then he stopped. This was how his brother wanted it. More importantly, it was what he’d earned. Clayton belonged to whatever lay on the other side of that hole more than he’d ever belonged to the human race. Maybe the voices had sensed this and called out to him. They’d found a way to bring him down.
Clayton smiled. He kept smiling as the cord retracted into the hole. Smiled as his stump and shoulder were swallowed into it. Smiled as his skull bent against the Trieste’s unyielding wall. Smiled as his spine broke with a wishbone snap, his heels beating a jittery tattoo on the floor. His head was consumed. The rest of his body followed.
Afterward all was silence. Nothing came back out of the hole. Maybe it had taken all it could possibly take.
“Will you let me leave?” Luke asked it. “I only want to see my wife again.”
Nothing answered him.
Luke faced the Challenger’s hatch. He hadn’t been back inside it since Alice had sent him through into the Trieste.
The wheel spun smoothly. The hatch opened with machined precision. He anchored his hands and boosted himself up into the—
19.
—INSIDE.
Light. The first sensation. Stinging brightness. His rods and cones went haywire; tears squeezed out of his eyes and sheeted down his face.
Warmth. The second, glorious sensation.
For a second, Luke imagined he was on a beach. Warm sand, sun blazing overhead. Gulls screeching as they wheeled in the postcard-pretty sky. Abby and Zach would be somewhere close by. Romping in the surf, snorkeling for starfish. He would find them and sweep them into his arms and never let them—
“How you doing, Doc? Ready to blow this Popsicle stand?”
The Challenger came into focus incrementally. Luke’s jacket was still slung over the web chair; he’d slid it off when it’d gotten too hot during the descent and had forgotten to take it with him. An energy bar wrapper was folded and threaded through an eyelet on his chair…
Luke’s gaze traveled upward, a rising note of confusion hammering his chest—
“Doc? Hey! Jesus, what happened?”
He ignored that impossible, treacherous voice. His eyes traversed the instrument panels, the shiny metal switches hooded with red switch guards. The buttons and gauges were all labeled—somebody must’ve used one of those old DYMO label makers, Luke had thought during the descent. The ones that punch each letter onto a sticky black strip…
“Doc?”
Alice Sykes stared down from the Challenger’s cockpit, looking a bit worried.
Whole. Intact. Smiling cautiously. Alive. Alice… Sykes.
Luke reached a trembling hand toward her—then stopped, partially due to the puzzled look on her face but mostly out of the fear that…
Toy’s voice: You are not who you say you are…
“What’s up, Doc? Look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
The gears inside his head spun wildly, burning out in gouts of smoke. Her hand fell on his shoulder. Luke flinched from her touch.
“Doc? For the love of… What the hell happened to you?”
Luke said, “Are you… you?”
Alice recoiled at the rasp of his voice—or was it the capering lunacy in his eyes?
“Who else would I be?”
Was it her? Or was he dreaming? Had he dreamed that terrible hive in Westlake’s lab with Alice’s body strung all through it? Had she been here all along, waiting for the Challenger to charge up?