The creature went wild, exuding a foaming blue-black cloud of blood like the ink of a squid. It pulled away as the manipulator cut channels into it.

Hubbs turned the suit around and jetted down the tunnel, the inside of his skull filled with the screaming essences of those trapped by the machine.

20
A MOTHER’S SECRETS

Though it was absolutely impossible, Regina was waiting for Javy in the chamber. And though it was also not possible that she could speak underwater (or that Javy could even hear her), she said, “It’s about time you came home, Alice.”

A surreal, hallucinatory sense of wavering reality filled Javy’s head. The real world could no longer hold its shape. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what you’ve always wanted to tell me. There’s always been a secret. I could see it in your eyes.”

Regina ignored that, simply shaking her head the way she’d always shaken her head at her daughter, as if everything she said were the ramblings of a congenital idiot.

Using the jets of her suit, Javy moved further into the chamber which had now become the living room of the house she had grown up in. The drab, ugly green carpet had become seaweed now, emerald and yellow and slimy, yet luxuriant in its abundance, the individual fronds and blades moving back and forth as if caught in a secret tidal pull. Corpse-white tube worms grew up from the algae-encrusted sofa. Clusters of clams and mussels covered the walls. Sea stars clung to the lampshades and pink-red marine growths dangled from the ceiling like Spanish Moss. Where the coffee table had been, there was the rotting husk of the rowboat Regina had disappeared in. Its hull was riven, crawling with tiny white crustaceans, groupings of brightly-colored brain coral growing inside it.

Regina’s armchair was facing the TV as usual, though it was invisible beneath colonies of bubble-tipped anemone. Krill and sediment were suspended in Javy’s light. Giant isopods roamed the floor.

“In the beginning,” Regina said, “the Earth was without form, and void. When they came, when the Old Ones first arrived, they created life in the sea, they engineered the proto-shoggoth, the progenitor of all life on this planet. And at our very genetic core, its still waits, dreaming across countless ages.”

“Mother, oh please, I don’t know what you mean…”

Javy realized that she was sobbing. Inside her suit, encapsulated in it like a nucleus at the heart of a cell, she was whimpering like a little girl. Tears rolled down her face to her trembling lips and her scalp crawled with hot sweat. Oh God, she was alone, she was so very, very alone and she had been her entire life and this made her bray with half-choked sobs.