The Scar - China Mieville [248]
There were small motions below them, and on either side, as scavengers ate at the exposed meat.
The submersible moved slowly in the shadows of this meat ravine. And everyone in the little bubble of metal and air thought and did not say, What did this?
They turned as the split turned, as hard corners of ruined skin reared before them. The Ctenophore swiveled in the water.
“Did you see something move?”
Chion’s face was white.
“There! There! Did you? Did you see it?”
Silence. The stroke of blood. Silence.
Johannes tried to see what Chion saw.
The gulch is widening. They are at the edge of a deep pit. Its base is blood and pus. It stretches out, a hollow scores of yards across. This is the avanc’s wound.
Something moves. Johannes sees it and cries out, and the others answer him.
There is motion in the blood below them.
“Oh dear gods,” he whispers, and his voice dies and becomes a thought. Oh gods. Something inevitable and very bad is unfolding.
The Ctenophore rocks, to more screams. Something buffets it.
A part of Johannes’ mind is frozen, and he thinks, We must find it and cure it, find what’s wrong and cure it, cut out what’s bad, cure it, but on top of that, and smothering it, a shock of fear descends as they enter the pit, the heart of the malady.
(It’s been in me since the waves closed over my head.)
The rotten blood below them is pulsing with strange tides. The submersible shudders again as something heavy hits it, unseen. Chion begins to keen.
Moving his head slowly, through time suddenly congealed, Johannes watches the scabmettler’s hands, as sluggish and clumsy as stumps, grappling with the controls, hauling backward, tugging to pull the vessel away; but it is hit again, and it eddies unsteadily.
Johannes hears himself shrieking with Chion to get out get out.
Something outside is knocking at the Ctenophore’s hatch.
Johannes cries out, staring aghast at the blood-plain below.
A dark harvest, a thicket of black flowers, has burst from it in the oscillating glare of the lamp, blossoms that thrust upward toward that cold false sun on thick stems, muscled and veined, that are not stems but arms, those are not flowers but hands; claws, crooked, and arms spread wide and predatory, and now chests and heads and bodies rise, shoved up from below the slick of blood where they have been gnawing and spitting venom.
Like spirits rising from graveyard earth, bodies are ascending, dissipating the blood with their tails, staring up at the newcomers with colossal eyes into which Johannes gazes with awe and horror. Their faces are fixed in unwitting grins that mock him, flesh scraps fluttering free from teeth bigger than his fingers.
They swim with the grace of eels toward the vessel, which rolls under their weight, which is borne down by their outstretched hands, whose portholes sway and face suddenly up, tipping the three within into each other, where they lie screaming, staring up and screaming in the dying lantern light at the faces at their windows, the scrabbling hands.
Johannes feels his mouth stretched wide, but he can hear nothing. His arms smash against the bodies of his crew, and they beat him in terrified turn, and he feels nothing.
The light pours up from the Ctenophore and is eaten by the abyss. Johannes watches the creatures press down on the portholes, and a rage of thoughts arc through him. These are the sickness, he keeps thinking hysterically. These are the sickness.
The sickness crowd around the submersible. They burst the phosphor lamp, which douses in a rush of bubbles, and now all that illuminates their distended faces is the faint yellow from the lantern within.
Johannes is staring up through the cabin into a pair of eyes outside, four miles below the sea. For a tiny fraction of a second he sees, absolutely vividly and clearly, how he must appear to those eyes, his own face bloodied from the tumbling and stark with lines and lantern light, his frozen, stricken expression.
He watches as the