Deeper Read online

  Praise for the “superbly original…terrifying and exquisite” (Dan Brown) novels of New York Times bestselling author Jeff Long

  THE WALL

  “Heart-stopping vertical adventure….”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Jeff Long delivers a palpable sense of the Zen-like concentration and hand-straining physicality needed to conquer a big hunk of rock. A bravura description of a forest fire and the truly shocking ending…elevate The Wall far above an increasingly high pile of pedestrian thrillers.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Keeps the reader enthralled…. The Wall is Long at his piercing, probing best.”

  —The Denver Post

  “The surprise ending is a true shocker.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Thrilling…. Heart-stopping…. Powerful…. The steep granite setting is both exotic and harrowing.”

  —Boulder Daily Camera (CO)

  THE RECKONING

  “Gripping…menacing…. A neatly tied, portentous thriller.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Packed with satisfying shocks.”

  —Scripps Howard News Service

  “Suspenseful, tightly written…. Long superbly depicts war-scarred [Cambodia], its people, and its beautiful, hazardous landscape.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Excellent storytelling…. Jeff Long’s books have always been must-reads for me…. He’s the best thriller writer you’ve never read. Rectify that by picking up The Reckoning.”

  —Rocky Mountain News (Denver)

  YEAR ZERO

  “Jeff Long writes with poetry, style, and pace…crafting his twists and doling out his delectable details with exceptionally gratifying results.”

  —Dan Brown

  “Wow! There’s no other word for Year Zero.”

  —CNN.com

  “A dashing, exciting thriller…. The sum of this complex tale is more than its parts of medical thriller, archeological fiction, action/adventure, and doomsday scenario, as Long thrills with an intricate puzzle. Long doesn’t miss a step….”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] clever, apocalyptic thriller…. Long writes stylishly and tells a good yarn.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  THE DESCENT

  “A remarkable novel, an imaginative tour de force that somehow succeeds both as sober-minded allegory and nail-biting thriller…. A rip-roaring good read.”

  —Jon Krakauer, author of Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

  “Absolutely bone-chilling—every bit as good as Stephen King at his best.”

  —Charles R. Pellegrino, author of

  Dust

  “This flat-out, gears-grinding, bumper-car ride into the pits of hell is one major takedown of a read. Jeff Long writes with force and unearthly vision…. It is one page-burner of a book.”

  —Lorenzo Carcaterra, author of

  Sleepers and Gangster

  “A dizzying synthesis of supernatural horror, lost-race fantasy, and military SF…. Long’s novel brims with energy, ideas, and excitement.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Also by Jeff Long

  FICTION

  The Wall

  The Reckoning

  Year Zero

  The Descent

  Empire of Bones

  The Ascent

  Angels of Light

  NONFICTION

  Duel of the Eagles: The Mexican and U.S. Fight for the Alamo

  Outlaw: The Story of Claude Dallas

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Long, LLC

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Atria Books hardcover edition August 2007

  ATRIABOOKS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Dana Sloan

  “China Bills U.S. $1 Million for Plane’s Stay” reprinted courtesy of CNN.com.

  Reprint of Pat Robertson/Jerry Falwell dialogue on Christian Broadcast Network falls under the fair use rule as provided for in Section 107 of U.S. Copyright Law.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Long, Jeff.

  Deeper : a thriller / Jeff Long.—1st Atria Books hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3562.04943D44 2007

  813’.54—dc22 2007003862

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-3148-7

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-3148-3

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  To Ada

  Acknowledgments

  My deepest gratitude to the following.

  Emily Bestler is one of those rare and magical editors every writer dreams about, an editor who rolls up her sleeves, tackles your language, and tames your story, all with a Southern accent.

  Equal parts gentleman, gladiator, and prophet, my agent, Sloan Harris, continues to light my path and guide me through the wilderness.

  For some reason, film agents never seem to get mentioned in literary acknowledgments, maybe because real writers aren’t supposed to be starving for Hollywood’s attention. The fact is that my remarkable film agent, Josie Freedman, has helped keep the wolf from our door for years now.

  The greatest fly fisherman in the world, Cliff Watts, has been doctoring both the town of Boulder and my fictional walking wounded for the last three decades. Any and all errors should prove once and for all that you probably ought not go to a novelist for your brain surgery.

  Finally, Barbara and Helena, thank you for lending me to the dark depths for so many years. Now let us ride off into Mustang dawns.

  And in the lowest deep a lower deep

  Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide,

  To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.

  (Satan peering into the abyss)

  —JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST, BOOK IV

  Prologue

  Ike surrendered.

  As he stole from bed, naked, the cave dust in his old wounds and tattoos flickered like lightning. He paused at the door to listen. Ali was seven months pregnant and seemed to have found all the sleep Ike was losing. But he could not hear her soft breath, only the song.

  For more than a month it had been waking him in the middle of the night, always the same song sung by the same woman, or maybe it was a child. Ike couldn’t decide what to call the thing, a war hymn or a ballad. Or the death of him. Bottom line, he knew, the abyss was fishing for its faithless son. His time had come.

  His pack was ready inside the garage, behind the garbage can. Tomorrow was pickup day. Ike dutifully lugged the can to the road, one final chore in this world. Then he saddled on the pack and set off into the moonlit hills.

  When the song first began, Ike had blamed his ramped-up senses. All those years in the deep had retooled him, inside and out. Metamorphosis came with the territory, a medical fact. Everyone changed down below, some more than others, he more than most. The depths had spared him disfigurement, but left him half-animal. Tonight, for instance, he could count the birds in a tree by the rustle of their wings. The moon literally uplifted him: its gravity pulled the fluid in his spine. He could hear his child’s heartbeat…still growing in the womb.

  Thinking the song might be
coming from a sleepless neighbor or someone’s radio, Ike had spent a week of nights prowling through the yards in his bare feet. But the source eluded him, even as it grew stronger. He wondered if something in nature might be calling to him, some creature, say, or the sea. Maybe the muse was teaching him a song. Maybe this agitation was how you came to create something.

  But a few days ago, at last, he had tracked the song to the mouth of a cave. That was his destination tonight. A short walk brought him to a gash in a limestone cliff. He stood there, facing the source. It did not exactly invite him with its dung and rot. But Ike was a veteran of such places. In a sense, he had been born in there.

  The song guttered out from the cave. It lured him with his memories of the deep earth. The words were indistinct at best. Maybe Ali, the linguist, could have made better sense of them. What he perceived was what he imagined: come away, leave the golden apples of the sun. Or whatever. With a last glance back at the world, Ike nodded good-bye and began to descend.

  Over the coming days, the abyss acquired him at an average rate of seventy-five heartbeats per minute. That was how calmly Ike abandoned all that he loved in the world. One step at a time, inching down his ropes, braving the tunnels and subterranean seas, Ike cast himself into the stone.

  A week passed. His food ran out. His batteries failed.

  Most people would have turned back. Most people never would have come down. Ike just kept on sinking deeper. From his days of captivity, he knew tricks for seeing in this infinite night.

  Drink from black rivers.

  Eat the flesh of midnight animals.

  Listen for colors.

  Smell for shadows.

  The darkness unfolded before him.

  For a while, Ike recognized the veins and cavities and chambers, not by name, but by the scent of their subterranean animals and minerals. Gradually, with intent, he got lost. No map, no memory, no compass served to guide him. Ike simply navigated through the planet’s basement by the tug of gravity, that and the slivers of meat left for him to find.

  The meat was bait, he knew. The cave tribes were luring him into the depths, or thought they were. In fact, he was as much a creature of the void as they were. This labyrinth of tunnels and holes was his home, too. The only difference between him and those feeding him was his relentless quest. They were bottom dwellers, but not really, because this was not yet the bottom. They had their limits. He had none. They were hiding from humankind. He was trying to save it.

  Every now and then, Ike scratched his initials onto the pillars and walls. He wasn’t quite sure why he bothered. His mark wasn’t meant to guide others who might follow, nor to point his way out. He did not harbor the slightest expectation of emerging. Unlike his other descents, this was a one-way ticket. Whatever waited for him down below—whatever had been infecting his dreams, whatever ruled this place—would never let him go, he was sure of it.

  Once upon a time, he might have come for the pure adventure. As a young man, Ike had been a climber and trek guide, a professional vagabond and survivor, and that was the beginning of his curse. While muscling through the Himalayas, he had accidentally strayed into the planet’s far-flung cave system and its terrible mysteries. In reaching for the sun, he had ended up reaching for the darkness. By going high, he had been going deep all along. Everything in his life seemed to have been a prelude to this final descent.

  In his wildest imagination, even stoked by Afghani hash or Johnnie Walker red, he could never have conjured up this world within the world. In retrospect, it should have come as no shock to him or anyone else that hell really existed, a vast network of arteries and chambers inhabited by primal nomads and lorded over by a sovereign of sorts. Since the beginning of time, mankind had suspected as much. One civilization after another had built a vocabulary of demons, ogres, and vampires to explain the predation from below. When the occasional human escaped and brought up wild tales, he or she was thrown into a dungeon or an insane asylum, or burned at the stake, or made the subject of some epic poem. As it turned out, shamans and exorcists had been trying to repel the darkness since the invention of fire.

  Not so long ago, he had guided a scientific expedition into the tunnel complex riddling the Pacific Ocean subfloor. Along with a single other survivor, Ali, he had barely managed to claw his way out from the depths before a plague swept the inner earth. Afterward, people were convinced that all subterranean life had been exterminated, and that the devil was dead.

  But now, as Ike soloed down into the bowels, it was plain as day that people were wrong. The abyss had never quit living. Some restless spirit existed down below. It was singing to him. And it wanted out.

  Three Years Later

  1

  BENEATH THE INTERSECTION OF THE PHILIPPINE, JAVA, AND PALU SEA TRENCHES

  He snapped his fingers. Let there be light. And they popped the flares.

  The faces of his crew sprang from the darkness, flinching. The flare light hurt their eyes. It painted them green and hungry.

  The city of stone materialized around them.

  Clemens gave a nod. The clapboard snapped shut like a gunshot. In grease pencil: “HELL, scene 316, take 1. IMAX.”

  “Dead, all dead,” he intoned as the camera panned across the city. It was a bony thing, hard and empty, ancient long before Troy was built, before Egypt was even a word. Walls stood cracked or breached by geological forces. Arches hung like ribs. Windows stared: blind sockets. The camera stopped on him.

  Clemens turned his head to the lens. He gave it the tired bags under his eyes, and his shaggy salt-and-pepper beard, and the greasy hair, and the bad stitch job along one cheekbone. No makeup. No concealment. Let the audience see his weariness and the marks of five months spent worming through the bowels of the earth. I have sweated and bled for you, he thought. I have killed for you. And for my cut of the box office. He put fire in his blue eyes.

  “Day one hundred and forty-seven, deep beneath the deepest trenches,” he said. “We have reached their city. Their Athens. Their Alexandria. Their Manhattan. Here lies the center.”

  He coughed quietly. The whole film crew had it, some low-grade cave virus. Just one more of their shared afflictions: a rash from poison lichens, fouled stomachs from the river water, lingering fevers after an attack by crystal-clear ants, rot in their wounds, and headaches from the pressure. To say nothing of the herpes and gonorrhea raging among his randy bunch of men and women.

  Clemens approached a tall, translucent flange of flowstone. It had seeped from the walls like a slow, plastic, honey brown avalanche. A carefully placed flare lit the stone from behind. The dark silhouette of a man hung inside, like a huge insect caught in amber.

  Clemens glanced at the camera—at his future audience—as if to ponder with them. What new wonders lie here? He pressed his flashlight against the stone, and peered in. Through my eyes, behold.

  He moved his light. Inch by inch, the shape revealed its awful clues. This was no man, but some primal throwback. A freak of time. The camera closed in.

  Clemens illuminated the pale, hairless legs covered with prehistoric tattoos. His light paused at the groin. The genitals were wrapped in a ball with rawhide strips, a sort of fig leaf for this dreadful Adam. That was the creature’s sole clothing, a sack tied with leather cord from front to back across the rump. Leather, in a place devoid of large animals…except for man. These hadals had wasted nothing, not even human skin.

  “We were their dream,” Clemens solemnly intoned to the camera, “they were our nightmare.”

  He scooted the light beam higher. The beast was by turns delicate, then savage. Winged like a cupid, this one could not have flown. They were more buds than wings really, vestigial, almost comical. But this was no laughing matter. Like a junkyard mutt, the creature bore the gash marks and scars of a hunter-warrior.

  Moving higher, his headlamp beam lit the awful face. Milky pink eyes—dead eyes—stared back at him. Even though he’d seen the thing while they were setting up
the shot, it made Clemens uneasy. Like the crickets, mice, and other creepy crawlers inhabiting these depths, it was an albino. What little facial hair it had was white. The eyelashes and wisps of a mustache looked almost dainty.

  The brow beetled out, heavy and apelike. Classic Homo erectus. This one had filed teeth and earlobes fringed with knife cuts. Its crowning glory, the reason Clemens had picked this over all the other bodies, was its rack of misshapen horns. Horns upon other horns, a satanic freight.

  The horns were calcium growths, described to him as a subterranean cancer. These happened to have sprouted from its forehead, which fit his film’s title to a T. Every hell needed a devil.

  Never mind that this wasn’t the devil Clemens had come looking for. This was not the body of Satan, said to be lying somewhere in the city. Never mind that through the millennia man’s demons had been ancestors of a sort, or at least distant blood cousins. Clemens would deal with the family tree later, in the editing room.

  “Now they’re gone,” he spoke to the microphone clipped to his tattered T-shirt. “Gone forever, destroyed by a man-made plague. Some call it genocide, others an act of God. This much is certain. We have been delivered from their reign of terror. Freed from an ancient tyranny. Now the night belongs to us—to humanity—once and for all.”

  Clemens stood back and gazed upon the horror, like Frankenstein contemplating his monster. He held his pose to the count of five. “And cut,” he said.

  The cameraman gave a thumbs-up from behind his tripod. The soundman took off his earphones and signaled okay. A clean take.

  “Get a few close-ups of our friend here,” Clemens said. “Then break down the gear and pack up. We’re moving on. Up. There’s still hours in the day.” A running joke. In a place without sun, what day? “We’re heading home.”

  Home! For once the crew jumped to his command.