You’re being superstitious, she calmly told herself. You’re being an unreasoning, confused, emotive savage like Hubbs. That’s what you’re being.

But how could she help it?

How could she help any of it?

This place scared her like nothing before in her life. It made her feel small and fearful and panicky. Trapped, held in a cage. Like a bug on a pin slowly being impaled deeper and deeper.

The lake was fascinating, yes. Plenty of life. She had seen very little of it, but it was there. Forms that existed nowhere else on Earth. Still, she was scared. It wasn’t the great depths or local wildlife or even the desolation of this place, this sunken primordial world, but that goddamn city. It was like a haunted house dropped to the lake bottom: deserted and surreal and skeletal, leering out at you like a skull in the desert. She knew that if she was alone down there with it, she would have most certainly slit her wrists.

And how was that for unscientific?

Sighing, she stared down into the moon pool, feeling the weight of it all pressing down on her and threatening to squeeze her flat. She thought about Bell and Murphy and where they were going and what they were going to do.

She touched the crucifix at her throat. “Oh, God,” she said, “we need you now more than ever.”

11
THRESHOLD

The closer they got to it, the murkier the water became.

Of course, the entire lake was pitch-black save for a few phosphorescent colonies of marine life that clung to the rocks down in jagged crevices on the bottom. But the closer they got—and Bell did not need instrumentation to tell him that they were nearing it, he could feel it in his belly—the more sediment was suspended in great clouds like fluffy motes of dust. The SDV’s twin props pushed them through fields of it where there was absolutely no visibility. Inside his hardsuit, riding on the SDV, it made him feel claustrophobic. Even the lights of his suit and the powerful halogen lamps of the craft itself were useless. The SDV had onboard obstacle avoidance sonar, so there was never any danger of running into a shelf of rock or a jutting seamount…yet the claustrophobia was markedly real and tenacious.

And maybe it wasn’t the sediment so much as the idea that something had kicked it up.

Something they could not see.

Welcome to the world of Lake Vordog.

Even with the lights, it was like being in the world’s darkest cave, zipped tight in a body bag. When they cleared the sediment, it wasn’t so bad. Clumps of it clung to the aluminum shells of their suits like peat moss, but at least the lights could show them things.