It took Murphy a few minutes to get it out. What he had to tell was not something a man in his line of work liked to admit. “I was scared, Chief. I mean I was really fucking scared. I’d never felt anything like that before. I’ve been deep in the shit dozens of times and you know it…but this…it was…I don’t know, but like whatever controls fear inside me was jacked to the limit, amplified, right off the scale.” He sipped water from a bottle and his hand shook. The memory of what he’d experienced made his lips pull into a tight gray line. Tiny beads of sweat speckled his brow. “You hear people say they were paralyzed with fear and that’s exactly how it was. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t move.”

Bell considered it. “And this happened right after the whirlpool?”

“Yes. At that very moment.” Murphy breathed deeply, trying to calm himself. The memory still had power over him. “There’s more to it than that. I mean, shit, Chief, I hate to even tell you.”

“Tell me. It stays between us.”

It took Murphy some time, but he did. He told Bell about the faces, that looked suspiciously—and frighteningly—like that of Sarah Burges…the way he had imagined she’d looked down in the quarry when he was a kid: bloated, rotting, fish-nibbled. “That’s the craziest part. Soon as we got into the city, I felt…I don’t know…uneasy, I guess, which is understandable. But it was more than that. My fear kept amping up, getting stronger and stronger. For some reason, I was thinking about Sarah ten, fifteen minutes before it happened. It came back to me. I mean really came back me. The way all that felt when I was a kid. The way it scared the shit out of me.”

Bell thought it over for a time. “What bothers me, Murph, is that it was on your mind. Then it on physical form. That really disturbs me.”

“Yeah, me, too. It was like the thing that scared me most as a kid was plucked from my mind. Crazy.” He sighed slowly. “Is it possible that us entering the city triggered something?”

Bell shrugged. “Could be. We’re dealing with a technology beyond anything we know. Anything’s possible.”

Neither of them spoke for a time. Murphy knew himself as well as any man does and maybe even better because of the intensive psych profiling that had been done on him because of his dangerous occupation. He knew exactly how his mind worked. Fear did not break him. He felt it like anyone else, but he was cool by nature. He did not panic and he sure as hell did not freeze up.

“When you were pulling the jellies off me, it happened again.”