This place wasn’t right and you couldn’t trust anything. He knew Murphy. He trusted Murphy. What he had seen was not what Bell himself had seen. Jellies did not attack. Bell had dived amongst colonies and schools before. Outside of a few dangerous species, they were harmless, amusing things. Even the ones that attacked did it out of simple stimulation, not rage or hunger. Jellyfish did not attack men. They just didn’t. And those things had been jellies, strange and unknown types, but jellies all the same.

But what did that say? Murphy was hallucinating?

Yes, and no. The jellies wouldn’t attack a man, not unless something directed them to, some force made them do it. The same force that made Murphy think they were monsters.

Mind games.

They had been in the city one hour exactly. And something had not wanted them there.

15
THE SCRATCHING

They were coming back now.

Thank God, they were coming back.

Bell had just radioed in that they were on their way.

Javonivic was sitting in the control room as she had been for hours, her face expressionless, her eyes just staring at the video monitors and the computer screen which fed her the telemetry from the hardsuits, giving her not only physiological factors such as the heart rate and oxygen usage of the divers, but water temperature and salinity etc. The numbers rolled in and she watched them, but her mind was in other places.

For something like an hour, while Bell and Murphy were in the city, there had been nothing coming in. No radio contact, no telemetry, no video images. Nothing. It was the city, Bell had told her when he came out. The city interfered with the signals. And that made perfect sense…yet, she was disturbed by it.

One hour, she thought as the divers were about thirty minutes from the habitat, plodding along in the SDV. For one hour they were out of contact. One hour. Anything could have happened to them in that city. Anything.

Yes, it bothered her.

It bothered her that all their high-tech, expensive technology and sensitive instrumentation had been blacked-out. And she knew why. She did not want to admit it, even to herself, but she was afraid that they had come into contact with something in there. It was pure human paranoia, but she couldn’t stop thinking it.

She remembered what had happened at Kharkov Station five years before, how—supposedly—people there had stopped being people after awhile. How they had been something else, vessels for an ancient and diabolic evil. It had happened not just at Kharkov back then, but at the tent camp of the paleobiologist, Dr. Gates. She remembered the gossip about that. How Gates and his team had become infected by something while digging amongst the ruins of that city under the mountain. A city that sounded very much like what was at the bottom of Lake Vordog—