“There was the odd sign of strain, but that could be chalked up to their situation. Add to that the sensory deprivation. No sun, no fresh air. But our psychs are versed in signs of trauma fatigue; they assured us the trio was holding up well. Then… well, Westlake went off the grid.”
Al gripped the handle of the centermost vault and cracked it open a few inches. A chemical tang puffed out, sliming Luke’s tongue and making him slightly nauseous.
“Westlake may’ve been getting squirrelly,” Al said. “He’d been isolated inside his lab for quite some time. No updates, no contact. The video camera in his lab was busted. We couldn’t see what he was doing… or what was being done to him.”
Done to him? Luke thought.
“We thought about going down. Maybe he’d cracked, right? But descents have been tricky the past few weeks. A lot of subsurface disturbances, the most serious being a current ring situated directly above the trench.”
“Current ring?”
“An underwater tornado, basically. An eddy sucking a billion-odd tons of water into itself, creating a funnel. We sent a supply drone down last week; the eddy caught it, spun it, and smashed it into the trench wall.”
“And you expect me to go down into that?”
“The ring cleared two days ago. The sea’s gone sleepy again. Anyway, we didn’t go down for two reasons.” She held up a finger. “One, because of the current ring”—she held up a second finger—“and two, because your brother, whose contact had become sporadic, assured us things were fine. Then today, in the early hours of morning, Challenger 4, which had been docked to the Trieste, began to rise. Westlake was inside. How he’d managed to get the sub working—he hadn’t been trained in its operation—is unknown.
“A few things happened during Westlake’s ascent, all of them bad. First, we lost contact with the Trieste altogether. The comm link went kerflooey, or else someone shut it off. Second, we lost most of the monitors. We’d already lost a few, but this was a whole whack of them, all at once. Could be a technical issue. A major circuit blowout. Or else someone down there wanted them off.”
Someone or something, Luke thought irrationally.
“Something else happened as Westlake came up. Happened to him. He could only have done it to himself.”
Al’s fingers were steady on the vault’s handle, but a fragile muscle fluttered next to her eye.
“You go ahead and open it,” Luke said.
Without another word, she did so.
15.
AT FIRST LUKE COULDN’T TELL what he was looking at. His eyes rejected it, as it didn’t fit any prior conceptions of the human form.
Dr. Westlake’s naked body was a swollen mass of scar tissue. His body was all scars. A ballooned, inflated parody of the human form.
It appeared as if Westlake had been wrapped in pink elastic bands. Some were thick as garter snakes, others thin as copper wires. Some fibrous as canvas rigging, others frail as onionskin. They lapped over in gruesome profusion, each one nurtured to a sickening, sensuous bulbousity. It seemed as if at any moment they might burst open and thin ribbons of flesh would spool forth, covering the old scars in layers that further obscured the body trapped inside.
Westlake’s frame was bent, each limb wrenched at an unnatural angle. The bends. Nitrogen bubbles had built up in the blood, snapping Westlake’s bones as they expanded.
Luke wanted to look away. Couldn’t.
Sweet Christ, his face. The scars were the worst there. Elsewhere they seemed to have been laid down haphazardly, but the ones on his face had a more considered appearance. They had been delivered with special care. His eyes were trapped inside swollen bulbs of flesh—if Luke were to touch them, he imagined they would feel like India rubber balls—each so huge that they projected from the wrecked tapestry of his face like plums. His lips had been sliced and had healed until the flesh knit together, upper lip wedded to bottom, fused into a thick band that curved upward in a grisly rictus. His nostrils had a feathered look, the flesh slit back in fragile petals that revealed candle-white sinus cavities.
“Shut it.” Luke’s voice was a frail whisper. “Please.”
Al did so. Luke jackknifed at the waist, hands braced on his knees.
“How…?”
“I wish I had any idea,” Al said softly. “We found a scalpel in the sub. Its blade was gouged up, dull as a butter knife. We figure it’d been used to cut through flesh, tendon, cartilage. Eventually it went dull on the bone.”
“It’s not possible, Al. I mean, that kind of trauma… how long does it take to surface?”
“Eight or nine hours usually. Westlake came faster, which is why he got the bends. He decompressed too fast. Truth is, we were fully expecting that it wouldn’t be pretty. But no way could we have imagined this.”
“He did this to himself?”
“Who else? The submarine was empty.”
Totally empty? Luke wondered. What if Westlake had been carrying that goo?
“We didn’t find any ambrosia,” Al said before Luke could ask. “We tore the sub apart and found not a trace of the stuff. Just the scalpel, Westlake’s body, and one more thing.”
“What was that?”
“Luke,” Al said carefully, “Felz showed you the mouse video, right? You see what that stuff can do. A godsend? I can see that. But I can see other things, too.”
She didn’t need to finish. Luke had the same vision. Westlake rising up from Challenger Deep, hacking into himself—and every time he cut himself, he healed so fast that it was almost immediate. Luke pictured an endless zipper: Westlake’s flesh opening, only to close a few moments after the scalpel slit it, leaving very little blood and a ragged scar. Westlake could have sliced himself for hours, reducing himself in some exquisite way, laughing or shrieking or crying or who-knows-what, mindlessly—or mindfully?—layering scar over scar until… what? How did he die? Had the ambrosia deserted him? Evanesced, as Felz said?
Luke closed his eyes. The absolute worst of all was the expression frozen on Westlake’s face. Luke was quite certain he died smiling.
“What else, Al? What was inside the submersible?”
She set a hand on Luke’s shoulder. Luke didn’t realize how badly he’d been shaking. It had nothing to do with how cold the room felt.
16.
DR. FELZ WASN’T THERE when they returned to the deck of the Hesperus. They got into the cart, both of them sitting on the rear seat.
“Go,” Al told the driver.
Luke couldn’t inhale enough air to inflate his lungs. He couldn’t unsee Dr. Westlake’s horrible, twisted body. For the first time, doubt seeped into Luke’s mind. Why did he have to go down, anyway? He wasn’t saying he wouldn’t, but why him? He hadn’t asked this most elementary question when the phone had woken him two days ago. He’d flown to Guam unquestioningly, as many people might when their government made the request. He paid his taxes and renewed his license and never caught more fish than his limit, too. He wanted to help, to do something good, just as Leo Bathgate did. Governments approved of citizens like Luke Nelson.
Plus there was no one on the other side of his bed to tell Luke not to go. And the room down the hall that his son had once slept in was empty, too.