Because as they started dropping like balloons at midnight on New Year’s Eve—or, and more appropriately for his turn of mind, like spiders from some webby crawl space overhang-he suddenly felt about three inches from full-blown hysteria. They were descending and he could almost hear the slithery sounds they made, the rush of cold fluid in their bellies, the whickering of frill-like combs. His head pounded. He felt faint. The world spun and lilted. His heart hammered five or six times with an agony in his chest…and then it just stopped dead the way the venom of box-jellies would make it stop. He gasped and it started again, pounding so fast that the throb in his temples was like a drum roll, bringing a violent headache with it. His skin was damp and hot and constricted.

Bell might have said something; he wasn’t sure really.

Because by then, he saw something like a whirlpool opening before him, spinning round and round, an agitated storm of bubbles reaching out toward him. He watched it with hypnotic fascination and it was as if his mind was rotating with it, a tornado of thoughts and impulses and cold fear.

And then the jellies were no longer jellies, but …faces. White, pulsating faces with gigantic suckering mouths like those of sea lamprey. As terror flooded him in hot waves, he knew they had all become the face of Sarah Burges. The way his young mind had pictured it rotting away at the bottom of the quarry. Her eyes were black holes, her hair like squirming red worms.

The hungry faces filled his helmet view plate.

He thrashed the arms of the hardsuit around, the hydraulic rotary joints hissing as he moved them up and down and side to side. They did not move as fast as his arms wanted them to. In the hand pods, his fingers worked manipulators, trying to slash and cut the faces away from the suit.

He had never known such utter manic claustrophobia before as they made him part of the colony of corpse faces, enveloping him, suctioning leech mouths pressed up against the view plate.

They’ll break through, they’ll break through and get those mouths on me and suck the flesh from my bones, worry it away with those busy, chewing teeth. Help me, Bell! Jesus Christ, help me! They’re squeezing me, squashing me! I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I can’t fucking BREATHE—

Murphy fought and flailed, screaming in his helmet, but he never ever heard himself do so. The faces pulled away, dissolved in a gray, inky cloud and he saw something gigantic coming at him like a boiling, spinning whirlpool of sediment and black shadows…and reaching from it, three or four coiling, corpse-white tentacles, their undersides pink and bulging with suckers the size of teacups, a huge arching hook extending from each like the claw of a hunting cat.