THREE YEARS LATER
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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Deeper
by Jeff Long
Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Long, LLC.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Atria
Copyright © 2007
Jeff Long, LLC
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8454-7
