The old man tried to walk on his own as they lifted him off the chopper. They let him fall on his face, then lifted him off the helipad deck by his handcuffed wrists and drove him up the catwalk.
His mangled nose spewed blood over his mustachioed mouth, glazed eyes rolled back in his bald, heavily sedated head, but the image he sent her almost blinded her with its intensity. She shivered as the brilliant sunny day and the endless ocean vanished behind a wave of frigid white mind-noise.
Cold.
White cold. Snow flurries. Cold white and hot red splashing from his frostbitten hand, as he tries to get his black severed fingers from the wolves that haunt the perimeter of the gulag. The laughing guards, the long red wolf-tongues panting behind clouds of breath-mist…
And then… blackness. Total and crushing darkness. Buried alive under five miles of bone-chilling cold, sunless ocean.
She gagged on the flood of phantom sensation and clung to the railing as they carried him out of sight.
The message was clear. Their cruelty was amateurish, next to that of his old masters. An unaccustomed treat they would gorge themselves on until it made them sick.
He told her even more by assaulting her so, even as they led him down below the waterline, to the interrogation cells. He was more powerful than even his old Soviet handlers had known… but maybe he could only do it when they hurt him.
Beside her, Roger Mankiw shook the crushed ice in his mojito and turned to look at her through green lenses. “You’re afraid of him, Ingrid?”
Not half as afraid of him as you should be of me, she thought back, and he might have tasted the sting of it, even he, her skeptical boss. His reedy neck straightened. The sweat rings on his linen shirt deepened. “He’s capable, but he’s a coward,” she told him. “He’s afraid of something he saw down there.”
“He led us a merry chase, you know. Two contractors topped, untold collateral damage over there. Thailand’s off-limits, now. Our legal eagles are triple-billing us for—”
“Three.”
“Pardon?”
“A contractor jumped out of the chopper, a half hour out. Pulled his grenade pins and jumped. Sergei touched him, they say. Just once.”
He didn’t ask her how she knew. “Christ!” He tossed his drink over the side. The glass shattered on the lower railings of the research ship and dimpled the heaving sea. Some lucky fish got the bits of mint and ice. Some luckier fish in the indigo deeps far below would get the ones who ate the glass.
“I never signed on for any of this One Step Beyond shit,” Mankiw growled. “The data shows a steady warming trend with trace radioactivity that’s sweeping the whole South Pacific starting right here, but I’d just as soon keep tossing five million-dollar drone submersibles into the breach, until the head office wises up and drops this entire idiotic venture.”
Easy for him to say. He was vested, and would fail up the ladder to a corner office in Hong Kong. She would sink like a stone. “Roger, pressing with that kind of urgency sends the wrong message. Sergei will read it as weakness—”
“Then show none. If you don’t get anything out of him now, I for one will go to the mat for you. But if he doesn’t produce immediately, no more games. No more threats. One way or the other, he’s going to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Today.”
She waited until he was lucid and beginning to show visible discomfort before she entered his cell. “Perhaps now, Sergei Vasilievich, you will take us a bit more seriously.”
“This is why you did this? So I would respect you? I know a thing or two about torture. You could have asked me for advice…”
“We don’t do torture, Sergei. We do negotiation. Nobody forced you to take our money. We only want what we paid for.”
A fat girl, gobbling sweets and cake under a table at a wedding reception.
Sergei Lyubyenko reclined as much as his shackles and the bolted-down steel chair allowed, and slid his mangled, three-fingered hand out of its cuff. He flashed his sly, sorry grin, as if they’d both tried to flee, as if they’d been caught together, and would both be punished.
A gray-faced mastiff rolls in a laboratory cage, licking his prodigious cock and balls.
“I need your goodwill like my asshole needs a tongue,” he finally replied. “I told you where to find the Rybinsk in less than an hour. I assumed our business was concluded. Was I wrong?”
The dog again, now busily devouring its own hind legs.
Ingrid pinched the bridge of her nose. She could smell the dog with the clarity of memory. “You described something else you saw while under hypnosis…”
“Remote viewing is not hypnosis, but no matter. You got what you paid for. The Rybinsk is unrecoverable, yes? But you know exactly where she is. Now, I believe when I came in, I had a hat…”
“We paid you to remote view the wreck, but also the source of the unusual radiation signatures, and to find out what happened to the Nereid and Triton 3 submersibles.”
Sergei produced a pouch from his breast pocket and, using only one hand and his agile lips, rolled a scrawny cigarette. “You rose to this job not just for your good looks, yes? You are a sensitive, but your talents are unformed. They have never been pushed…” He waggled the cigarette at her. She lit it, hand shaky, flinching when he almost touched her.
“Sergei, my superiors are very disappointed in you and, to put it frankly, they’re also highly dubious of your alleged abilities.”
He smiled and shrugged. President Nixon hunches over on the toilet aboard Air Force One, masturbating grimly into a Sears catalog.
“Maybe you think that because you survived the KGB treatment, you’re invincible and answerable to no one. But we are not a government. This is not a country. This is a private ship in international waters, over the deepest hole in the earth. And my superiors in Hong Kong, Moscow and San Francisco may deal in shit most of them don’t believe in, but they expect results. Whatever you think you’ve endured before, I can guarantee you it’s nothing compared to what’ll happen to you, if you don’t show us what we want to know.”
Sergei yawned, exposing yellow but sturdy, straight teeth. “Do you know where I was going? I stopped in Bangkok, who would not, but I was going back to Russia. If you truly know anything about me, think about that.”
She nodded. When Sergei slipped the KGB and defected, they arrested his wife and two sons. Somewhere in that dizzying succession of Premiers in the late 80’s, all of them were executed. They did this to make him come out to the South Pacific to view something they called Opaque Zone 38a, so they could drop a tactical nuclear weapon on it.
“Moscow is worse than ever, but is five time zones from nearest water.” He sighed and rolled another smoke. “You were a very fat girl, when young, yes, Ingrid? Nobody liked you or understood, but is clear to me.”
“This is not getting us any closer to our objective, Sergei.”
“You were not just piggy little girl, no. You thought if you ate faster, if you ate everything, you would grow up faster, not so? But you only grew fat.”
Ingrid declined to play his game.
“It must eat at you, no?” he pressed. “To be unable to do this, yourself. Such a fool, you actually want to do it, don’t you?”
Her doctorate was in psychology, but her training as a remote observer required intense concentration on a host vector—the pair of eyes through which she would see whatever her handlers set as her objective. Her success rate was near perfect, with targets she’d slept with.
Sergei was more properly classified as a projector. He could leave his body and roam freely on what mediums used to call the astral plane or the aether. He needed no prior contact with the target, nothing but a cigarette and his preposterous fee. His hit rate was legendary, before Opaque Zone 38a drove him insane.
He killed the cigarette and gestured for another. In the past, he would go into his trance after taking his first drag, and rest his hand on the table before him with the lit cigarette gnawing away at the stained paper. In about seven minutes, the cigarette burned his fingers, and jolted him awake. Back into his body.
She reached out with her Bic disposable lighter and lit the shaking cigarette. He took one hit off it and held the smoke in until the burst capillaries on his nose and cheeks flared deep violet. His frosty blue eyes sparkled at her, then went vague and rolled back under drooping lids.
Ingrid reached out and took the cigarette from his unfeeling fingers, stubbed it out on the table.
Now, they would get to the bottom of this. He would not come back without answers.
His three-fingered hand shot out and seized her arm, pulling her across the table towards his empty face. His other arm snaked around her neck to cradle her head, and somehow, she was powerless to push back or strike him.
When her body fell across the table and settled against Sergei, Ingrid was not inside it.
Everything goes blue.
A blue so pure and bright, she thinks, he’s taken my sight, I’m blind.
Blue deepened to indigo as she began to understand that she was seeing all there was to see. When confronted by a featureless color field, the human eye tends to fill the void with visual hallucinations—the ganzfeld effect—but no optical illusions rose up out of the darkening blue, leaving her to conclude that she was not viewing this with her eyes.
Let us go and see, Sergei whispered, let us go together. She did not hear him or feel him—or anything else—but he was there. The only sensation she felt was a tugging that echoed his gnarled, nicotine-stained grip on her wrist, dragging her inexorably down into the void.
One time on assignment in Thailand, Ingrid got so stoned on opium that she felt like she tumbled up out of her body. She saw her empty vessel on the silk pallet, drooling as the boy loaded another bolus of tarry resin into her bowl, and then the jumbled rooftops and skeins of wires and cables connecting every synapse of the city, and she was terrified beyond anything she ever experienced before. She fought a raging riptide that tried to pull her up into the smoggy sky, battled back to her body to find herself shivering in a pool of cold urine as the boy and his family went through her pockets.
Sergei chuckled at her panic, and offered her a body.
Through a pair of dead black eyes that perceived the ocean as layers of heat and gradients of food trails, she watched the light fail and felt the pressure build as their perfect cruise missile dove beyond the reach of the sun.
The rude nub of brain that housed them both was little more than a binary box flashing eat/don’t eat as it scented trails of organic waste streaming away from the research ship.
You could learn to love life as a shark, I think, he thought at her. I could leave you here—
Sergei trampled the mako shark’s hardwired instincts and drove it to descend ever deeper. The indigo zone gave way to a blue-black twilight, broken by the murky horizon of the ocean floor at the edge of the Marianas Trench. The sheer cliffs of slimy basalt tumbled away into perfect blackness.
The flow of water over their gills grew frigid and forced them back. Expelling the contents of its bowels and compressing its tissues with the agonizing relentlessness of a wringer, the shark struggled downward for another mile until the pressure crushed its cartilaginous skeleton.
Expelled out through the shark’s collapsed eyes, she spilled helplessly down into almost total darkness that soon became a starry night sky filled with swooping, stalking, luminescent life.
An anglerfish drifted past, bloated black head bisected by a grin of needles painted eerie thallium green by the glow of its bobbing barbel lures. Other creatures she saw only by the fitful glow of their beguiling witch-lights, fluttering or skulking through the drifting sleet of organic debris from the surface.
Tiny jewels of glistering ectoplasm and endless garlands of stinging tendrils and greedy gullets seemed to pulsate with arousal at the passage of their bodiless ghosts, but the predators’ attentions were diverted by the rich feast of the imploded shark’s carcass that came tumbling after them.
It abruptly dawned upon her that, as a mote of pure intelligence, her senses were limited solely by her will. Whatever caught her mind’s eye seemed to magnify itself until it loomed over her bodiless mind or engulfed her whole. And yet she was drawn inexorably downward, into zones of pure darkness and paralyzing cold, by the invisible grip of the mad Russian psychic.
Falling, flowing through the inky void, she still felt some inkling of the mounting pressure above them. Water is a thousand times denser than air, yet seawater is only one tenth as dense as lead. The pressure at their destination would exceed six tons per square inch. Exposed to this environment, her physical body would implode long before it could drown.
Ingrid was not claustrophobic, and as her instinctual fears for her body receded, she began to feel a kind of creeping exhilaration, the euphoria that submariners called the rapture of the deep. No human had ever been where they were going. No one had ever seen what they were going to see. Not like this.
The last fleeting traces of glowing marine life faded away far above, and the blackness again became absolute. Only by painful degrees did her mind begin to discern the deeper contours of tortured stone, little more solid than the water laying heavy upon them.
They touched down before a cathedral of bones—the skeleton of a whale, trailing tattered banners of putrefied blubber to feed swarms of gulper eels and dragonfish. Swarms of giant brittle stars squirmed and spawned in the calcareous ooze that coated the ocean floor.
How deep? she asked.
This is the bottom of your bottomless pit. We are nearly five miles beneath the surface. You are only a breath away from your body, but the mind plays tricks, yes? To return so quickly would kill us both.
Floating over a plain of basalt slabs fragmented into disturbingly tessellated geometrical patterns, they approached a towering column like a skyscraper volcano, easily twelve stories high.
Festooned with giant tubeworms and anemones that twisted in the gelid gloom to bask in the torrent of superheated water and clouds of molten minerals that gushed from its peak.
Swarms of enormous shrimp sported on the corona of the boiling outflow, only to be ensnared and devoured by monstrous arachnids, which farmed globules of cooling heavy metals, and bore them off across the plain, like leaf cutter ants harvesting fungi from carrion.
And beyond the chimney lay more chimneys, and larger ones. Hundreds of them, in a uniform field. A farm.
This was what they had really been sent to find, though Ingrid knew the company would lie to her as blithely as they’d deceived Sergei. The energy wasted here could power a city, if only they could harness it.
Beyond the last chimney, the plain was broken by dozens of octagonal pits, each hundreds of yards across, and seemingly bottomless. But as she reluctantly floated over them, Ingrid perceived honeycombs of wormholes in the walls. Their hypnotic complexity suggested that they were inhabited by something utterly alien, yet older—and perhaps wiser—than humankind.
They live, Ingrid railed, and they’re still active, the ones you supposedly exterminated at Opaque Zone 38a?
Men try to steal the power from their enemies by numbering them. Call it what it was, and what it will be again—R’lyeh.
Something gleamed in the nearest pit, and she warily reached down to focus on it. Massive metal hulks hung suspended over the void—the missing company submersibles, and the sunken Soviet sub. All were badly crushed, but also dismantled. Rybinsk’s empty nuclear missile silos gaped like the holes in a toothless jaw.
The Russians said they destroyed them all, Ingrid railed.
Destroyed them! Girl, even if you could believe a Russian, never suppose that they can be destroyed. This is their world. We live in it only so long as they sleep.
Beyond the wells lay a vast plain of fluted lava spires and craters that might have covered a mile. They sped over it to stop suddenly at a gaping, glowing rift in the abyssal plain, which seemed to hold the sun in it.
No, my dear. All we did was wake them up…
Tornadoes of heavy black smoke roared up out of the spreading rift in the floor of the trench, which seemed far too hot for even the best-adapted inhabitants of the ocean floor. Slurping waves of fresh magma oozed up over the lips of the rift, melting the crust of Archaean basalt and remaking the earth’s crust at the rate of a flood engulfing a levee.
This isn’t natural, is it?
Everything is natural, you fool. Watch…
Something splashed in the white lava flow, lurched up out of the molten stone and thrust a net of barbed tentacles after her. She almost felt their razored heat, until she was chilled by Sergei’s intangible laughter.
It was at least as large as the biggest submersible in the company fleet, and resembled a fusion of trilobite and salamander with snarls of segmented tentacles for a head, but only the merest portion of it emerged from the rock-river before it sank again.
This is retaliation for what you did, twenty years ago.
What we did, all those years ago, was done with your country’s secret blessing. It was perhaps Soviet Russia’s first and last true selfless act for the good of the world. To end the nightmares, yes? Or perhaps it was not so pure… Moscow could not imagine a world without itself at the helm. Perhaps they meant to rid the world of its nightmares by awakening the sleeper who sent them.
But it mattered not. The bomb hit its target, and the mission was a success, yes? And yet the one they sought to slay, they did not even disturb his sleep. His children… they are awake again, but they would not trifle in revenge upon insects.
Away across the plain they flew, to the red mouth of the lava river. A glowing seam of fresh faultline sprouted from it and arrowed away across the plain. The cracked earth subsided like a misfit jigsaw puzzle, and eager gouts of magma bubbled up between the jagged edges.
At last, they came upon a mountain that crawled across the murky plain, gouging open the earth’s brittle crust with thousands of armored claws like steamshovels. Pitted with age and clotted with colorless, glowing coral reefs, infested by clouds of submarine parasites, its colossal, chitinous shell hid all but the countless antennae and eyestalks that emerged from seams, fissures and faults in the cyclopean exoskeleton.
The size of a city, the creature yet bore some kinship with the lava-borne larvae. In its wake, the mountainous isopod left glowing opals which bored into the splintered earth like depth charges, like the treasures carelessly spilled by a god, or the eggs sown by a devil.
There are no gods, as you mean it, Sergei interrupted. There are those who dwell outside, and who neither live nor die, as we know of life and death. They answer prayers, but only when offered in blood and geometry, and their miracles…
But if they’re not gods, then they can be stopped.
Stopped! This is their world. It always was, and will be again. They do not seek our extinction, but only to hasten the day when the world will be ripe for their dominion, and His awakening. They redraw the faultlines of the ocean floor to drive the continents back beneath the waves, and raise the Pacific seamounts to the sky, as it was when they came down from the stars.
But it’s not their world, it’s ours! We’ll destroy them, or send them back where they came from—
If you could but see them, you would know how insane that is. And why should you care? In two thousand years, their plans will bear fruit. In two hundred years, the ice caps will melt, the ocean will rise and drown all human cities, anyway. But this is not their concern—
Ingrid ripped free of Sergei and fled away across the shattered abyssal plain, back to the bottomless pits. Diving into an octagonal well, she made her focus into a sword that slashed at the darkness. Before she could find anything upon which to practice her attack, something found her, and seized her in talons of icy, paralyzing pain.
A gargantuan humanoid form reached up out of the pit with mammoth forelimbs cloaked in crawling, viscous flesh, and unfurled vast black wings or outsized dorsal fins that effortlessly beat back the lead-dense water.
Trapped and suddenly feeling as corporeal as she was helpless, she cried out.
Sergei answered, instantly beside her as always, yet even he trembled in fear before her captor. See! he raved. Behold what we hoped to destroy, and what you hope to plunder, and what will bury us all!
It stretched out to nearly fill the vast pit, yet only the roughest outline of its titanic form could be picked out of the darkness, for its body was festooned with crinoids, clams and tubeworm colonies. So glacially slow and deliberate were its movements, that life thrived on it undisturbed; and yet now, it flew faster than she could perceive to draw her bodiless ghost up to its inscrutable, luminous eyes.
A rugose, boneless sac bearded with restless coiling tentacles, the creature’s head was an octopoid of obscenely magnified proportions. There was no escaping those clutching, prescient tentacles, or the piercing gaze of its hideously lambent eyes, which seemed to turn her mind inside out.
For all its awesome size and unfathomable intelligence, the godlike monster seemed to retreat into a fugue for an age of endless moments, until some decision was made.
What does it want? she demanded.
Suddenly, the colossal prodigy bombarded her with convoluted psychic hymns. It sang to her of One older and more terrible than all its kind beneath the sea, the One who slept until the world was perfect, and of the rapture of His imminent return.
I am most disturbed to report, Sergei numbly sent, that it wishes to… what is your word…? Negotiate.
What could such a creature want from her, that it could not simply take? Ingrid retreated into the innermost bolthole of herself and pulled the cerebral dirt in after her, but the psychic onslaught only redoubled as it sought to crush her with understanding.
What do they want?
They want to share their knowledge with the human race. For your benefit and theirs.
Why would they do this?
The power to harness the fire of the earth’s core… they want you to have it. They have come to understand only dimly how quick, how fragile, is the human mind, but how devastating the effects of its tiny genius. In human hands, that power will hasten their ends a hundredfold.
But why? Who would have given them such an idea?
I believe you did, my dear…
Ingrid feigned shock and let herself seem dead, until the tentacles and talons relaxed their grip. She pulled away and forced herself to visualize her body, miles above her, lying prone on the table in the holding cell on the research ship.
She willed herself across that distance instantly, as she would will herself out of a nightmare. For in the end, that was all this was. Sergei was a master manipulator. Somehow, he got inside the minds of his mercenary captors and drove three of them to suicide. Surely, he was trying to do the same to her, but she was not so powerless.
She opened her eyes, and the cell, dingy and too brightly lit, surrounded her. Her body hung heavy from her exhausted mind, an exquisite assembly of dead weight that trembled when she sought to draw in a breath of fresh air.
Her hands lay on the table, trapped in the scarred, stained hands of Sergei Lyubyenko. His eyes floated up behind drooping lids, regarding her with empty, bloodshot orbs.
Her arms dangled from her shoulders like concrete counterweights with the cables cut. She struggled to make her body move, to sever the contact from her that seemed to hold her still, that yet trapped a part of her beneath the sea.
Abruptly, Sergei’s eyes opened impossibly wide and stared at her. An eerie, yellow-green light kindled within them and ate through the cornea and iris, spreading until his slack, waxen face gleamed like a torch blazed within it.
“I will negotiate with your masters now,” he said, with no trace of an accent, no scintilla of humanity.
Ingrid fought to free herself. She raked his hands with her nails and hurled herself back in her chair to sprawl across the uncarpeted steel floor. Sergei made no move to pursue her, but repeated his demand in the same flat, untenanted tone, as he shuffled towards the door.
Ingrid had to stop him. She had to get to Mankiw first, and try to make him understand what they would be dealing with.
Her head boiled with the opening salvo of a five-alarm migraine. Her body resisted her best efforts to climb to her feet. The door swayed and rocked before her, but she was resolute, even if her body was not.
Blood dripped from both her nostrils, and her muscles began to ache, then to tear themselves apart. Her bowels and bladder explosively evacuated and swelling bubbles of pure agony erupted in her belly and chest and every muscle, in the marrow of her bones, and the pressurized cage of her skull.
She screamed, but she could hear only the teapot whistle of compressed gases pouring out of her burst eardrums, her tear ducts and sinuses, forcing its way out of her pores.
It made no difference that she had been sitting at the table with Sergei the entire time, or even if the entire jaunt was only a dream or a telepathic fantasy. The mind plays tricks, Sergei had said, and he was not lying.
The agony of explosive decompression swept aside all doubts and points of debate and devoured her whole. And still, she tried to stop them. Still, she tried to beat Sergei to the door.
She almost made it.
Her outstretched hands were blue-black with burst capillaries and liquefied muscle tissue. The steel mirror on the back of the sealed hatch showed her only a shapeless red collage, doubly filtered through the blood flooding her eyeballs. Her tongue swelled to fill her mouth and block her throat, but her brain exploded out her eye sockets before she could drown on the briny tide of her own fluids.
Ingrid flew away, taking the only escape left to her—out of her body and down into the dark to claim a sleek new body. And this time, she felt no fear, for she was going home.
