Nope, boss. I’m not dead. Wish I was some days, but what are you gonna do?
Luke smiled sadly. “You look… you look real old, girl.”
LB chuffed. It sounded painful, her insides rattling.
Well, time works differently down here, boss. Sometimes I feel like I’ve lived a thousand lifetimes… it’s funny. The pain is a constant. Sometimes it’s so much that I can’t stand it. I bite at myself, tear my skin off, but I can never quite die. Like I said, funny. But to hurt is to love, right?
“You bet,” Luke said companionably. “That’s just about the size of it.”
He leaned down to pet her. LB bit him. It didn’t hurt. She had no teeth. But he could tell that she wanted to hurt him—she wanted to hurt him real bad. He almost wished he could grant her that wish. He pulled his hand gently from her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t think I can be hurt anymore.”
She chuffed again. You can’t blame a dog for trying, Doc.
He reached the crawl-through chute. LB didn’t follow him through. He caught sight of Zach on the other side. His arms projected from his pajama sleeves as if they’d been pulled, the bones broken, the flesh stretched like gruesome taffy.
Zach’s hands were very big indeed. His fingers trailed down and down, these long twitchy wires that, for all their gauntness, looked incredibly strong.
His son’s face broke into a smile. Not a particularly nice one, Luke had to admit. He’d certainly never taught the boy to smile that way.
Mind your manners, kiddo.
Zachary lifted one arm. His index finger curled invitingly.
My son, my son, what long fingers you have…
All the better to beckon you with, Father…
Luke followed Zach, but more reluctantly now. The ceiling lowered. He had to duck. He breathed shallowly, drawing the curious scent of the station into his lungs. He stepped over something that looked very much like a human rib cage. The ceiling abruptly rose to an apex he could no longer chart. He turned another corner, and his son was waiting no more than five feet away.
Luke took an instinctive step back.
Zach’s pajamas were torn and moldering, the clothes of a disinterred corpse. His hair was gone. His scalp was bare and frighteningly wrinkled, summoning images of a living apple doll.
His fingers were enormous. Four dead snakes attached to his palms, their tips dangling to the floor. His face had stretched, too, becoming vulpine and weird. The flesh around his eyes sagged: the eyes of a sick beagle, the corneas jaundiced and incalculably ancient.
His mouth was overstuffed with teeth—they jutted outward, slicing his lips and pushing them apart.
My son, my son, what big teeth you have…
All the better to bite you with, Daddy…
Zachary thrust his chin forward, hurling bursts of laughter at him. Spittle jetted between his teeth to leave wet spots on Luke’s overalls.
Luke held his arms out. “Zachary, please.”
His son coyly turned away. Shapes thrashed and fretted, half glimpsed, as if his face had given birth to a nest of snakes.
The tunnel plunged into darkness. When the lights came on again, Zach was gone.
3.
LUKE WALKED AIMLESSLY.
Sometimes he laughed. Other times he wept. He made no conscious distinction between the two anymore.
The tunnels split and meandered. His footsteps echoed into silence. The pressure welted down on him. The children no longer raced overhead. Perhaps they’d lost interest or had been scared away.
The tunnel bellied into an alcove. The walls collapsed inward to create a perfect pocket of dark. Luke squinted until he saw what lay inside that darkness. A leaden wash of dread spread over his groin; he felt a sudden, dreadful urge to pee.
The Tickle Trunk rested in the alcove. The clowns on its lid—Pit-Pat and Floppsy and the rest—leered and jested, their tongues flicking over teeth the color of old bone.
Hello, Lukey-loo! So wonderful to see you!
The latch sprung open. Luke took a step back, but the walls had pushed in all around him. There was nowhere to go. The lid creaked open. The air filled with tinny notes, the sort that play when you opened a music box.
Tinka-tink-teeeee-ta-tinka-tink-teeeeee…
A flesh-colored bowling ball spun around and around inside the trunk… no, not a ball. Hugo Toy’s severed, split-open head. It lay awkwardly on its side, gummy strings of blood vessels and nerve endings trailing from the stump of its raggedly hacked neck. The flesh had been peeled off his face, making his eyes look very big and round indeed. The head revolved in a slow circle, much like a ballerina pirouetting inside its music box.
“I can hear the muh-music in my head.” Dr. Toy smiled. Flecks of brain shone on the flayed sinew of his cheeks. “It never ends, Lucas. Nuh-nuh-never, ever…”
The Tickle Trunk shut. Luke could still hear those cold, jangling notes. The walls exhaled again. He left the alcove behind. In time, he rounded back into the main lab. It was empty. He glanced at Westlake’s lab. Alice’s face was framed in the porthole.
“Oh hello, Al.”
Hiya, Doc.
Bees squirmed in and out of Alice’s eyes.
“You don’t look so hot.”
She opened her mouth and bees poured out, coiling around her neck in a yellow-and-black noose.
I’ve seen better days, Doc.
He turned away. He saw something beneath the lab bench. Had it been there all along? How had he not seen it before?
He set his shoulder to the bench. Despite its size, it slid easily.
There was a door in the floor. Solid wood with a ringbolt. The sort of door you’d find in old cabins and farmhouses, leading down to the…
—basement—
…root cellar.
The wood was warm and faintly pulsating. The skin of a slumbering elephant.
Luke gripped the bolt and pulled. Narrow stone steps sawed down.
“…Daddy!…”
Zach’s voice quivered up out of the dark, strained and fearful.
“The Fig Men, Daddy!”
“They’re only figments,” Luke croaked. “Figments of your imagination. They can’t hurt you if you don’t believe in them.”
Silence. Then: thick, chortling laughter. The laughter of the Fig Men? The hairs stiffened on Luke’s arms. His son was down there somewhere. And he needed his father.
The steps were worn smooth, as if subject to much traffic; the stone wept beads of moisture like the rock in a cave. Luke’s feet fit perfectly—the steps could have been built for him specifically. They carried him down under the lab to the bottommost place on earth. The true basement of the world.
Darkness slipped up his calves and knees in sly tendrils. It coated his chest and filmed his eyes. Somewhere above—a few feet; a million miles—the wooden door slipped softly shut.
He could see here in the dark. Not well, but enough to navigate by. Luke got the sense he was on an unsupported stairway spiraling down; if he slipped he’d fall forever, never hitting anything…
…or perhaps something would catch him eventually.
The air grew thicker. He inhaled the scent of ancient earth. He was beneath all things now. Beneath every pure element in life, beneath hope and joy and perhaps even love. None of that could touch him here.