The lake bottom was flat in places, in others, deep cut by submarine canyons that sonar told them dropped for hundreds of feet. There were rises and valleys, outcropping of glossy black volcanic rocks and cave mouths far below where schools of bioluminescent squids played and cavorted. They saw great clusters of pillar-shaped sponges and forests of brown kelp, inching mud worms and white cup-shaped mollusks. What looked to be tangled masses of large, feathery bright-red brittle stars and giant tube worms with puckered, sucking mouths. Trenches filled with colonies of orange- and yellow-tentacled sea whips and anemones. And once, several gigantic albino arthropods that were perfectly ghastly with their segmented legs and antennae and bizarre claws. Like something from a Roger Corman movie.

There was plenty of life.

And plenty of death.

Gullies were filled with the picked shells of mussels and clams, the bloated carcasses of long, finless eel-like fish which were being fed upon by tiny crustaceans and slinking flatworms.

Over the com, Bell said, “You still reading low salinity in the lake?”

“Absolutely, Chief,” Murphy told him.

“Makes no sense. Marine forms everywhere down here. Shouldn’t be anything like this in fresh water.”

“Nature has a way of adapting when the need arises.”

Yes, Vordog was very much alive and there were plenty of other things, shapes and elongated forms, that swam about at the edges of their lights, curious but frightened away by the brightness. Some of them were very large, even larger than the men themselves in their huge robotic suits. Bell didn’t know what they were, but he’d seen those darting shapes on his previous runs. They could have been just about anything, but he knew one thing they were not: Old Ones. Because if they had been, he would have known it. He would have felt it.

Now and again, Javonivic would come over the radio and ask, “How’s the trip, boys?”

“Peachy,” Murphy would say.

“Seeing anything?”

And Murphy would say, “You know I only have eyes for you.”

“Oh, that’s so sweet. If you were here, I’d wrap my legs right around you.”

“Damn…can you wait until I get back?”

“Nope. I’ll take care of myself by then.”

“Bitch.”

And she’d laugh. But that laughter was always slightly brittle, forced. Because she knew where they were and what they were facing. It was bad enough in the habitat, but out here…you felt so unprotected. Like something might make a snack of you at any moment.

Bell had never felt that before.

He’d been down in abyssal depths salvaging sunken subs or ships and had seen gigantic, profuse forms moving at the perimeter of the lights. Giant squid maybe, but they had not scared him. Nothing scared him like this place did. It got inside you, filled your belly with a black, creeping gestation that turned everything inside you sour, absolutely owned you at some primal level.