Neal Shusterman - Challenger Deep

For Dr. Robert Woods

Challenger Deep has been a labor of love, the creation of which spanned many years. First and foremost, Id like to thank my son Brendan for his contributions; my son Jarrod for his amazing book trailers; and my daughters, Joelle and Erin, for their many insights and for being the wonderful human beings they are. My deepest gratitude to my editor, Rosemary Brosnan; associate editor, Jessica MacLeish; and everyone at HarperCollins for the amazing amount of support they have given this book. Thanks also to my assistants Barb Sobel and Jessica Widmer for keeping my life and speaking schedule on track. Id like to thank to the Orange County Fictionaires for their support and critiques through the years; NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, for being such a great resource; and finally my friends for always being there through the best and worst of times.

Thank you all! My love for you is bottomless.

There are two things you know. One: You were there. Two: You couldnt have been there.

Holding these two incompatible truths together takes skill at juggling. Of course juggling requires a third ball to keep the rhythm smooth. That third ball is timewhich bounces much more wildly than any of us would like to believe.

The time is 5 a.m. You know this, because theres a battery-powered clock on your bedroom wall that ticks so loudly you sometimes have to smother it with a pillow. And yet, while its five in the morning here, its also five in the evening somewhere in Chinaproving that incompatible truths make perfect sense when seen with global perspective. Youve learned, however, that sending your thoughts to China is not always a good thing.

Your sister sleeps in the next room, and in the room beyond that, your parents. Your dad is snoring. Soon your mom will nudge him enough to make him roll over and the snoring will cease, maybe until dawn. All of this is normal, and theres great comfort in that.

Across the street a neighbors sprinklers come on, hissing loud enough to drown out the ticking of the clock. You can smell the sprinkler mist through the open windowmildly chlorinated, heavily fluoridated. Isnt it nice to know that the neighborhood lawns will have healthy teeth?

The hiss of the sprinklers is not the sound of snakes.

And the painted dolphins on your sisters wall cannot plot deadly schemes.

And a scarecrows eyes do not see.

Even so, there are nights where you cant sleep, because these things you juggle take all of your concentration. You fear that one ball might drop, and then what? You dont dare imagine beyond that moment. Because waiting in that moment is the Captain. Hes patient. And he waits. Always.

Even before there was a ship, there was the Captain.

This journey began with him, you suspect it will end with him, and everything between is the powdery meal of windmills that might be giants grinding bones to make their bread.

Tread lightly, or youll wake them.

Theres no telling how far down it goes, the captain says, the left side of his mustache twitching like the tail of a rat. Fall into that unknowable abyss, and youll be counting the days before you reach bottom.

But the trench has been measured, I dare to point out. People have been down there before. I happen to know that its 6.8 miles deep.

Know? he mocks. How can a shivering, malnourished pup such as you know anything beyond the wetness of his own nose? Then he laughs at his own assessment of me. The captain is full of weatherworn wrinkles from a lifetime at seaalthough his dark, tangled beard hides many of them. When he laughs, the wrinkles stretch tight, and you can see the muscles and sinews of his neck. Aye, it be true that those who have ventured the waters of the trench speak of having seen the bottom, but they lie. They lie like a rug, and get beat twice as oftenbut just so it scares the dust out of em.

Ive stopped trying to decipher the things the captain says, but they still weigh on me. As if maybe Im missing something. Something important and deceptively obvious that Ill only understand when its too late to matter.

Its forever down there, the captain says. Let no one tell you any different.

I have this dream. I am lying on a table in an overlit kitchen where all the appliances are sparkling white. Not so much new as pretending to be new. Plastic with chrome accents, but mostly plastic.

I cannot move. Or I dont want to move. Or Im afraid to move. Each time I have the dream, its a little bit different. There are people around me, only they arent people, theyre monsters in disguise. They have gone into my mind and have ripped images from it, turning the images into masks that look like people I lovebut I know its just a lie.

They laugh and speak of things that mean nothing to me, and I am frozen there among all the false faces, at the very center of attention. They admire me, but only in the way you admire something you know will soon be gone.

I think you took it out too soon, says a monster wearing my mothers face. It hasnt been in long enough.

Only one way to find out, says the monster disguised as my father. I sense laughter all aroundnot from their mouths, because the mouths of their masks dont move. The laughter is in their thoughts, which they project at me like poison-tipped darts shot from their cutout eyes.

Youll be better for this, says one of the other monsters. Then their stomachs rumble as loud as a crumbling mountain as they reach toward me and tear their main course to bits with their claws.

I cant remember when this journey began. Its like Ive always been here, except that I couldnt have been, because there was a before, just last week or last month or last year. Im pretty certain that Im still fifteen, though. Even if Ive been on board this wooden relic of a ship for years, Im still fifteen. Time is different here. It doesnt move forward; it sort of moves sideways, like a crab.

I dont know many of the other crewmen. Or maybe I just dont remember them from one moment to the next, because they all have a nameless quality about them. There are the older ones, who seem to have made their lives at sea. These are the ships officers, if you can call them that. They are Halloween pirates, like the captain, with fake blackened teeth, trick-or-treating on hells doorstep. Id laugh at them if I didnt believe with all my heart that theyd gouge my eyes out with their plastic hooks.

Then there are the younger ones like me: kids whose crimes cast them out of warm homes, or cold homes, or no homes, by a parental conspiracy that sees all with unblinking Big-Brother eyes.

My fellow crewmates, both boys and girls, go about their busywork and dont speak to me other than to say things like, Youre in my way, or Keep your hands off my stuff. As if any of us has stuff worth guarding. Sometimes I try to help them with whatever theyre doing, but they turn away, or push me away, resentful that Ive even offered.

I keep imagining I see my little sister on board, even though I know shes not. Arent I supposed to be helping her with math? In my mind I see her waiting for me and waiting for me, but I dont know where she is. All I know is that I never show up. How could I do that to her?

Everyone on board is under constant scrutiny by the captain, who is somehow familiar, and somehow not. He seems to know everything about me, although I know nothing about him.