DEEPER
By
Jeff Long
To Ada
Acknowledgments
My deepest gratitude to the following.
Emily Bestler is one of those rare and magical editors every writer dreams about, an editor who rolls up her sleeves, tackles your language, and tames your story, all with a Southern accent.
Equal parts gentleman, gladiator, and prophet, my agent, Sloan Harris, continues to light my path and guide me through the wilderness.
For some reason, film agents never seem to get mentioned in literary acknowledgments, maybe because real writers aren’t supposed to be starving for Hollywood’s attention. The fact is that my remarkable film agent, Josie Freedman, has helped keep the wolf from our door for years now.
The greatest fly fisherman in the world, Cliff Watts, has been doctoring both the town of Boulder and my fictional walking wounded for the last three decades. Any and all errors should prove once and for all that you probably ought not go to a novelist for your brain surgery.
Finally, Barbara and Helena, thank you for lending me to the dark depths for so many years. Now let us ride off into Mustang dawns.
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.
(Satan peering into the abyss)
—JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST, BOOK IV
Prologue
Ike surrendered.
As he stole from bed, naked, the cave dust in his old wounds and tattoos flickered like lightning. He paused at the door to listen. Ali was seven months pregnant and seemed to have found all the sleep Ike was losing. But he could not hear her soft breath, only the song.
For more than a month it had been waking him in the middle of the night, always the same song sung by the same woman, or maybe it was a child. Ike couldn’t decide what to call the thing, a war hymn or a ballad. Or the death of him. Bottom line, he knew, the abyss was fishing for its faithless son. His time had come.
His pack was ready inside the garage, behind the garbage can. Tomorrow was pickup day. Ike dutifully lugged the can to the road, one final chore in this world. Then he saddled on the pack and set off into the moonlit hills.
When the song first began, Ike had blamed his ramped-up senses. All those years in the deep had retooled him, inside and out. Metamorphosis came with the territory, a medical fact. Everyone changed down below, some more than others, he more than most. The depths had spared him disfigurement, but left him half-animal. Tonight, for instance, he could count the birds in a tree by the rustle of their wings. The moon literally uplifted him: its gravity pulled the fluid in his spine. He could hear his child’s heartbeat…still growing in the womb.
Thinking the song might be coming from a sleepless neighbor or someone’s radio, Ike had spent a week of nights prowling through the yards in his bare feet. But the source eluded him, even as it grew stronger. He wondered if something in nature might be calling to him, some creature, say, or the sea. Maybe the muse was teaching him a song. Maybe this agitation was how you came to create something.
But a few days ago, at last, he had tracked the song to the mouth of a cave. That was his destination tonight. A short walk brought him to a gash in a limestone cliff. He stood there, facing the source. It did not exactly invite him with its dung and rot. But Ike was a veteran of such places. In a sense, he had been born in there.
The song guttered out from the cave. It lured him with his memories of the deep earth. The words were indistinct at best. Maybe Ali, the linguist, could have made better sense of them. What he perceived was what he imagined: come away, leave the golden apples of the sun. Or whatever. With a last glance back at the world, Ike nodded good-bye and began to descend.
Over the coming days, the abyss acquired him at an average rate of seventy-five heartbeats per minute. That was how calmly Ike abandoned all that he loved in the world. One step at a time, inching down his ropes, braving the tunnels and subterranean seas, Ike cast himself into the stone.
A week passed. His food ran out. His batteries failed.
Most people would have turned back. Most people never would have come down. Ike just kept on sinking deeper. From his days of captivity, he knew tricks for seeing in this infinite night.
Drink from black rivers.
Eat the flesh of midnight animals.
Listen for colors.
Smell for shadows.
The darkness unfolded before him.
For a while, Ike recognized the veins and cavities and chambers, not by name, but by the scent of their subterranean animals and minerals. Gradually, with intent, he got lost. No map, no memory, no compass served to guide him. Ike simply navigated through the planet’s basement by the tug of gravity, that and the slivers of meat left for him to find.
The meat was bait, he knew. The cave tribes were luring him into the depths, or thought they were. In fact, he was as much a creature of the void as they were. This labyrinth of tunnels and holes was his home, too. The only difference between him and those feeding him was his relentless quest. They were bottom dwellers, but not really, because this was not yet the bottom. They had their limits. He had none. They were hiding from humankind. He was trying to save it.
Every now and then, Ike scratched his initials onto the pillars and walls. He wasn’t quite sure why he bothered. His mark wasn’t meant to guide others who might follow, nor to point his way out. He did not harbor the slightest expectation of emerging. Unlike his other descents, this was a one-way ticket. Whatever waited for him down below—whatever had been infecting his dreams, whatever ruled this place—would never let him go, he was sure of it.
Once upon a time, he might have come for the pure adventure. As a young man, Ike had been a climber and trek guide, a professional vagabond and survivor, and that was the beginning of his curse. While muscling through the Himalayas, he had accidentally strayed into the planet’s far-flung cave system and its terrible mysteries. In reaching for the sun, he had ended up reaching for the darkness. By going high, he had been going deep all along. Everything in his life seemed to have been a prelude to this final descent.
In his wildest imagination, even stoked by Afghani hash or Johnnie Walker red, he could never have conjured up this world within the world. In retrospect, it should have come as no shock to him or anyone else that hell really existed, a vast network of arteries and chambers inhabited by primal nomads and lorded over by a sovereign of sorts. Since the beginning of time, mankind had suspected as much. One civilization after another had built a vocabulary of demons, ogres, and vampires to explain the predation from below. When the occasional human escaped and brought up wild tales, he or she was thrown into a dungeon or an insane asylum, or burned at the stake, or made the subject of some epic poem. As it turned out, shamans and exorcists had been trying to repel the darkness since the invention of fire.
Not so long ago, he had guided a scientific expedition into the tunnel complex riddling the Pacific Ocean subfloor. Along with a single other survivor, Ali, he had barely managed to claw his way out from the depths before a plague swept the inner earth. Afterward, people were convinced that all subterranean life had been exterminated, and that the devil was dead.
But now, as Ike soloed down into the bowels, it was plain as day that people were wrong. The abyss had never quit living. Some restless spirit existed down below. It was singing to him. And it wanted out.
Three Years Later
1
BENEATH THE INTERSECTION OF THE PHILIPPINE, JAVA, AND PALU SEA TRENCHES
He snapped his fingers. Let there be light. And they popped the flares.
The faces of his crew sprang from the darkness, flinching. The flare light hurt their eyes. It painted them green and hungry.
The city of stone materialized around them.
Clemens gave a nod. The clapboard snapped shut like a gunshot. In grease pencil: “HELL, scene 316, take 1. IMAX.”
“Dead, all dead,” he intoned as the camera panned across the city. It was a bony thing, hard and empty, ancient long before Troy was built, before Egypt was even a word. Walls stood cracked or breached by geological forces. Arches hung like ribs. Windows stared: blind sockets. The camera stopped on him.
Clemens turned his head to the lens. He gave it the tired bags under his eyes, and his shaggy salt-and-pepper beard, and the greasy hair, and the bad stitch job along one cheekbone. No makeup. No concealment. Let the audience see his weariness and the marks of five months spent worming through the bowels of the earth. I have sweated and bled for you, he thought. I have killed for you. And for my cut of the box office. He put fire in his blue eyes.
“Day one hundred and forty-seven, deep beneath the deepest trenches,” he said. “We have reached their city. Their Athens. Their Alexandria. Their Manhattan. Here lies the center.”
He coughed quietly. The whole film crew had it, some low-grade cave virus. Just one more of their shared afflictions: a rash from poison lichens, fouled stomachs from the river water, lingering fevers after an attack by crystal-clear ants, rot in their wounds, and headaches from the pressure. To say nothing of the herpes and gonorrhea raging among his randy bunch of men and women.
Clemens approached a tall, translucent flange of flowstone. It had seeped from the walls like a slow, plastic, honey brown avalanche. A carefully placed flare lit the stone from behind. The dark silhouette of a man hung inside, like a huge insect caught in amber.
Clemens glanced at the camera—at his future audience—as if to ponder with them. What new wonders lie here? He pressed his flashlight against the stone, and peered in. Through my eyes, behold.
He moved his light. Inch by inch, the shape revealed its awful clues. This was no man, but some primal throwback. A freak of time. The camera closed in.
Clemens illuminated the pale, hairless legs covered with prehistoric tattoos. His light paused at the groin. The genitals were wrapped in a ball with rawhide strips, a sort of fig leaf for this dreadful Adam. That was the creature’s sole clothing, a sack tied with leather cord from front to back across the rump. Leather, in a place devoid of large animals…except for man. These hadals had wasted nothing, not even human skin.
“We were their dream,” Clemens solemnly intoned to the camera, “they were our nightmare.”
He scooted the light beam higher. The beast was by turns delicate, then savage. Winged like a cupid, this one could not have flown. They were more buds than wings really, vestigial, almost comical. But this was no laughing matter. Like a junkyard mutt, the creature bore the gash marks and scars of a hunter-warrior.
Moving higher, his headlamp beam lit the awful face. Milky pink eyes—dead eyes—stared back at him. Even though he’d seen the thing while they were setting up the shot, it made Clemens uneasy. Like the crickets, mice, and other creepy crawlers inhabiting these depths, it was an albino. What little facial hair it had was white. The eyelashes and wisps of a mustache looked almost dainty.
The brow beetled out, heavy and apelike. Classic Homo erectus. This one had filed teeth and earlobes fringed with knife cuts. Its crowning glory, the reason Clemens had picked this over all the other bodies, was its rack of misshapen horns. Horns upon other horns, a satanic freight.
The horns were calcium growths, described to him as a subterranean cancer. These happened to have sprouted from its forehead, which fit his film’s title to a T. Every hell needed a devil.
Never mind that this wasn’t the devil Clemens had come looking for. This was not the body of Satan, said to be lying somewhere in the city. Never mind that through the millennia man’s demons had been ancestors of a sort, or at least distant blood cousins. Clemens would deal with the family tree later, in the editing room.
“Now they’re gone,” he spoke to the microphone clipped to his tattered T-shirt. “Gone forever, destroyed by a man-made plague. Some call it genocide, others an act of God. This much is certain. We have been delivered from their reign of terror. Freed from an ancient tyranny. Now the night belongs to us—to humanity—once and for all.”
Clemens stood back and gazed upon the horror, like Frankenstein contemplating his monster. He held his pose to the count of five. “And cut,” he said.
The cameraman gave a thumbs-up from behind his tripod. The soundman took off his earphones and signaled okay. A clean take.
“Get a few close-ups of our friend here,” Clemens said. “Then break down the gear and pack up. We’re moving on. Up. There’s still hours in the day.” A running joke. In a place without sun, what day? “We’re heading home.”
Home! For once the crew jumped to his command.
The exit tunnel lay somewhere close. It would lead them to the surface in a matter of weeks. For the millionth time, he pulled a sheaf of pages from a waterproof tube and studied its hodgepodge of maps.
The pages came from the daybook kept by a nun, one of only two survivors to emerge from this region three years ago. It was the ghosts of her doomed expedition that Clemens was chasing on film. Hers had been one of the most audacious journeys in all history, one to rival Marco Polo’s or Columbus’s, a six-thousand-mile passage through the tunnel system riddling the bedrock beneath the Pacific Ocean. It had been a journey with a punch line, a journey of scientists who bumped smack into an unpleasant article of faith. For here they had found the home of Satan, or the historical Satan, the man—hominid, take your pick—behind the legend. The leader of the pack.
The nun, a scholar cunt named Ali Von Schade, had written of meeting him. The city had still been alive back then, the plague not yet released. The last she’d seen of this Satan, he was wearing a warrior’s suit of green jade platelets. For three days now, Clemens had been scouring the city for the body or skeleton, looking for his film’s money shot, the one that would shock and amaze and bring the story all together in one image. He’d found a suit of jade armor all right, but it was empty, discarded, ownerless, not a bone in it. Despite his disappointment, he kind of liked that. In the end, Satan had been nothing more than an empty suit.
Clemens had made numerous requests to Von Schade for an interview, all in vain, always meeting the same polite refusal. I don’t wish to share the details of that disaster. As if the story belonged to her. As if intellectual property had some sacred protection. Cunt.
He and Quinn, his film partner, had needed her maps and clues to plan this journey. Clemens had tried flowers, dinner invitations, offers of money, even a percentage of the film’s net profit, yeah, net, not gross, an old Hollywood joke. Nothing worked with her. Zip. Nada. Quinn said to leave her alone. Instead Clemens had hired a burglar to steal her journal, copy it, and then return it. What was the harm? If she wouldn’t talk, her diary would.
Von Schade’s maps were as much memoir as cartography, laced with fanciful tales and ink-and-watercolor sketches of the Helios expedition’s progress. Along the way, every time Clemens was sure she must be wrong or had made something up, her maps would prove to be right.
A waterfall thundered in the darkness, hidden in the distance. That was on the map, too. Bound and blindfolded at the time, Von Schade had later recorded it in her daybook, an acoustic landmark. Through the waterfall lay their shortcut to the sun.
Long, ghostly strips of clouds drifted overhead. The cavern was so big it generated its own microweather. Geologists theorized that millions of years ago great bubbles of sulfuric acid had eaten upward from the earth’s deeper mantle, carving out this labyrinth of cavities and tubes known as the Interior. The perfect hiding place for a lost race.
Clemens rolled up the pages of Von Schade’s diary and switched off his headlamp. They were running low on batteries, and everything else, for that matter. But the shoot was largely over. His crew had reached its summit, so to speak, this dead city in the deepest reaches of the sub-Pacific cave system. Now they could ascend, back to the surface, back to the sun. Back to Clemens’s faded name and glory.
Most of the kids on this crew hadn’t even sprouted pimples when he’d won an Academy Award for his documentary, War High, about jackass athletes braving international war zones in their search for the ultra-extreme. After that, he’d coasted on his Oscar laurels, getting work as a second-unit director on Hollywood action vehicles.
Then the earth’s Interior had been “discovered.” Overnight, everyone’s attention had shifted to this vast, inhabited labyrinth right beneath their feet. The market for movies and books about adrenaline junkies had gone out the window. Clemens learned the hard way that there was no competing with the demons and fiends of religious lore. Within a year, he was bankrupt, divorced, and shooting porn videos for $200 per day.
Around that time, Quinn had come into his life. Quinn was an old-fashioned explorer who had dipped his toe in the subterranean world and had a film in mind, this film, about an expedition following in the footsteps of an expedition into hell. In a coked-up revelation, it had occurred to Clemens that in order to beat the devil, he needed to be the devil. And so—fifty-two years old—he’d convinced Quinn to partner with him on the production. Together they had assembled this desperate, calculated slog through the earth’s basement. Clemens figured that if “Hell,” splashed upon giant IMAX screens, couldn’t revive his career, nothing would. He’d have to go back to work for the skin mafia.
Unfortunately Quinn had proved to be a problem. Quinn the decent. Quinn the grin. Quinn the Real McCoy. Quinn for president! The crew had loved Quinn’s easygoing style and his insistence on safety. And his sense of story and scriptwriting that made Clemens look like a dumb-it-down hack. Which Clemens was. But which he didn’t need to have the little people snickering about. Thus, Quinn the scream. Quinn the dead.
After his partner’s disappearance, Clemens had assumed things would get better. But the crew only grew more disrespectful of him. They suspected him. Idiots. Murder didn’t exist in a wilderness with no laws. And besides, no body, no crime. Quinn had chosen a bottomless pit to fall into. It had been easy, the slightest of nudges from behind, barely an ounce of adios, amigo. Clemens had made a few attempts at placating the crew, even giving them two days to search for their fearless leader. Then it was crack-the-whip time. On with the show.
Joshua. There it was again, that whisper. Clemens whirled around.
He jabbed his light left and right. As always, no one was there. It had been going on ever since they’d entered the city. The crew was screwing with him, whispering his name with Quinn’s voice, winding him up.
“Fuck ya,” Clemens said to the darkness.
“Likewise,” said a woman’s voice. Huxley came striding into his light. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Was that you?” said Clemens.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s me. You said we were making camp here.”
Huxley was a veterinarian Quinn had hired to be their medic. It was the pet doctor’s unsteady needle that had sewn together Clemens’s cheek after a rockfall in the tunnels system. He could guess what she wanted.
“Those wings,” she said. She went to the creature suspended in flowstone, the mineral seepage. “I need to take his measurements and get tissue samples. And I want those wings for my collection. The wings of an angel. A fallen angel. This specimen is unique.”
My ongoing rebellion, thought Clemens. The crew was an inch away from outright mutiny. They couldn’t wait to get out of here. Daylight was waiting up top. They could practically taste it. And Huxley wanted them to stay?
“You’ve been saying that about every bone and body we’ve stumbled across,” Clemens said. “We’re done here. Onward. Upward. Miles to go before we sleep, all that.”
“You don’t understand,” Huxley said. “Wings on men? And we saw that one yesterday with amphibian gills. And the reptile lady last week.”
“What do you want me to say?” said Clemens. “They’re hadals. Mutants. A dime a dozen down here. A dime a thousand. Besides, you’ve got your degree, Doc. What more do you want, the Nobel?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “What more do you want, another Oscar?”
It wasn’t Huxley’s ambition that Clemens resented. Once this was over, each one of them meant to squeeze the lemon for all it was worth. He’d been hearing their big plans for months. The kayakers were going to buy ad space in Outside and Men’s Journal to lure adventure travelers. There were dark, class IV tube rapids down here, and river beaches made of polished white marble. The cinematographer wanted to open an art gallery and publish a coffee-table book with her still shots of the Interior. Three of the climber types meant to incorporate, raise venture capital, and return to prospect the outrageous veins of gold they’d all touched, but left behind.
In short, there was money and reputation to be grabbed down here. Huxley was no different from the rest of them. Having suffered the darkness, she wanted her piece of the pie. But the thing about Huxley was that she didn’t have manners. Just because she’d been Quinn’s girlfriend didn’t exempt her from the rules. This was Clemens’s show. Everyone else, even the hotshot climbers, had asked his permission to capitalize on the expedition. Not Huxley, though. She treated him like he was stealing the descent.
“We had a deal,” she said.
“What deal was that?”
“I came along as a scientist.”
“You came along as a medic,” Clemens said. “That’s your job, to tend the sick and wounded.”
“You said we were camping here one more night.”
Clemens stared a hole through her. “End of discussion,” he said. “We’re leaving.”
“I’m staying.”
“By yourself? In this place?” The flares were dying. The shadows loomed.
“You’re not a man of science,” Huxley said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Clemens thought for a minute, not about staying with her, but about getting shed of her. He wasn’t born yesterday. She was going to try to bring a murder charge against him once they got up top. That or slap him with a lawsuit. Lien him to death. This was his retirement she was threatening here.
Clemens shrugged. “You got to do what you got to do, Doc.”
Huxley blinked. She’d been bluffing. Too late now. Clemens gave her his crocodile grin. “That’s right,” she said. “I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do. With or without you.”
“We’ll be on the trail leading up,” Clemens told her. “You go through a waterfall and there will be a tunnel. Don’t forget.”
Huxley lifted her chin. “This won’t take more than a few hours. I’ll be right behind you.”
“You’d better be. I’m telling you, man, don’t miss the bus. Because nobody’s waiting for nobody anymore. It’s dog-eat-dog, Huxley. You hear me?”
She stared, as if he’d just confessed. “I’ll catch you before night.”
Night. There it was again, their strange conceit. Even, in this lightless place, they clung to convention, calling their wakefulness day, and their sleep night. Never mind that their bodies had forgotten the sun and they dreamed in shades of blackness.
They left Huxley in a tiny puddle of light. Good night, sweet princess, thought Clemens. Fantasizing, he began to write the sad loss of Dr. Huxley into his mental screenplay.
For three days they had been meandering through the city, gathering a bounty of images. It was like Pompeii among these ruins, with this difference: instead of being locked inside volcanic ash, the dead hung in translucent flux. The plague had killed them; the mineral ooze had made them immortal. You could see them underfoot, suspended in the flowstone, hundreds, no, thousands of them. For three nights they had slept atop the last resting place of the ultimate barbarian. Now they were done with it.
A gigantic waterfall seemed to block the end of the cavern. They shot a flare into the heights. As it drifted down, the spray lit with rainbows in the blackness.
“Lord,” one of the kayakers said. That said it all.
Just as the nun’s daybook promised, a tunnel lay behind the central waterfall: caves within caves within caves. It was like Swiss cheese down here.
Clemens tried to get his crew to set up the camera and take a shot of him entering the falls tunnel. But they pretended not to hear him. He had been waiting for their muttering and scowls to spill over into actual defiance, and now that it had, now that they had broken from his command, he was relieved. Finally he could quit lashing them deeper. He could just float back up to the world.
The path led up and up in giant circles. The stair steps, carved from solid stone by a subterranean civilization that some scholars dated to twenty-five thousand years ago, had been worn to faint corrugations. The stone was slick from the humidity that blew at their backs on a warm, steady draft.
It didn’t take long for Huxley to change her mind about staying behind. Clemens was at the back of the line for a reason. Her voice began echoing up to them after the first hour, but Clemens was the only one to hear it. He couldn’t make out her words, but her distress was clear. Maybe her batteries had run out. More likely she couldn’t find the tunnel entrance. Bummer.
Soon her echoes grew almost faint enough to ignore. Almost. The whisper still reached him. Joshua. How did she do that?
The tunnel walls tightened. The current of warm air quit rushing from below. Clemens could sense the space closing around him by the change in his hearing. Things just sounded closer.
Joshua. He ignored her.
As they went on, Clemens kept looking for debris, bones, or other signs of the original expedition. Funded by the Helios conglomerate, the party of scientists, soldiers, and porters had numbered over two hundred at their start beneath the Galapagos Islands.
Following their lead, Clemens and the crew of nineteen had hiked, climbed, and rafted some six thousand miles. They had retraced the Helios expedition’s route by its remains, finding clues to its long breakdown in their graffiti, trash, dried dung, and, near the end, their bones. Quinn had likened the doomed explorers to Lewis and Clark crossing America, except the sub-Pacific journey was almost three times as long, and they had been slaughtered by the natives, these so-called hadals of this geological Hades. Only Von Schade and the expedition’s scout had lived to tell the tale, though they had barely told it. The scout had vanished without saying a word about ...
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