Then again, he realized, maybe she had nothing to do with it. Maybe the creature was simply a nightmare denizen of the lake, perhaps attracted by the habitat lights the way giant squid were sometimes drawn to deep-sea drilling platforms. Maybe. Possibly. But whatever it was, it attacked with fury, seemingly targeting the submersible.

No, there’s nothing random about this.

And more the reason Orr should have been sending the other submersible down for the team. But he wasn’t. And there was a reason for that, Bell just wished he knew what it was.

The bottom line was that they were all feeling the strain. And it wasn’t going to get any better. Orr seemed determined that they tough it out and locate the anomaly. Something which Bell thought was now incalculably dangerous.

“Any action on the screen?” he said over the comm.

“Nothing. Very quiet,” Hubbs told him.

He was still his old dour self. Ever since his first trip to the city, he’d been a little off. And with each succeeding voyage he’d gotten a little more so. He wouldn’t say what was really bothering him; he just dropped his daily quota of spooky, mystical remarks. Things which made no sense or maybe they made all the sense in the world (depending on your viewpoint). But in his eyes, there was always that funny look like maybe he knew lots of things, weird and scary things, that he could tell you all about if he chose to. Only he didn’t choose to.

Your team is fragmenting and you know it. The question is: what are you going to do about it?

Staying in visual range, Bell and Murphy scouted around on the baseplate with brief thrusts of their suit jets, moving in ever-widening concentric circles.

“Pretty dull down here,” Murphy said.

Bell wasn’t sure. It looked dead and harmless, yes…but was it?

He just wasn’t sure.

He’d seen too much now to trust his eyes.

What you saw in Lake Vordog was not necessarily what was really there. They all still suffered from the headaches that came and went with no reason; they were all having the nightmares; and everyone was plagued by that uncanny feeling of being watched or studied, an unsettling sense that there was someone or something right behind them at times…so close that if they turned really quick, they’d be staring it dead in the face. And how much of the latter was imagination and paranoia, it was hard to say.

But tangible, terrible things had happened, of course.