Dedication
For Dr. Robert Woods
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
1. Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum
2. Forever Down There
3. Better for This
4. How They Get You
5. I Am the Compass
6. So Disruptive
7. Charitable Abyss
8. Reality Check
9. You Are Not the First and You Will Not Be the Last
10. In the Fright Kitchen
11. Nothing Awful Is without Its Beautiful Side
12. Spree
13. No Such Thing as Down
14. Can’t Get There from Here
15. No Passage of Space
16. Swabby
17. I’d Pay to See That
18. Mystery Ashtray
19. Deconstructing Xargon
20. Parrots Always Smile
21. Crew Member Questionnaire
22. The Mattress Didn’t Save Him
23. Eight-Point-Five Seconds
24. Don’t Think You Own It
25. You Were Not Given Permission
26. All Things Not Nice
27. Hand-Sanitized Masses
28. Skippy Rainbow
29. Some of My Best Friends Are Cirque-ish
30. The Movements of Flies
31. Is That All They’re Worth?
32. Less Than Nothing
33. Weakness Leaving the Body
34. Behind Her Back
35. The Unusual Suspects
36. Without Her We’re Lost
37. Third Eye Blind
38. Ah, Here’s the Proboscis
39. Stars on My Scantron
40. Hell Asail
41. Nothing of Interest
42. Spirit of Battle
43. It’s All Kabuki
44. Boss Key
45. Ten Graves Deep
46. Food Fight
47. We Even Have a Diving Bell
48. Really That Lonely
49. Don’t You Want a Whopper?
50. Garage Widows
51. Not Entirely Me
52. Evidence of the Truth
53. Hindsight at My Feet
54. Due Diligence
55. A Regular Infestation
56. The Stars Are Right
57. The Chemicals between Us
58. Head-banger
59. Man on Fire
60. The Things They Say
61. Check Brain
62. More Alive Than You Think
63. People I Don’t Know in Places I Can’t See
64. If Snails Could Talk
65. The Darkness Beyond
66. Your Terrifying Awesomeness
67. The Flesh Between
68. Worm Inside
69. Your Meaning Is Irrelevant
70. Silver Shark
71. A Worse Enemy
72. Our Only Hope
73. The Honors
74. In God We Trust
75. Safety Locks
76. No Way to Stop It
77. Oil Slick
78. Realm of the Forgiving Sun
79. Submitted for Your Approval
80. Salted Slug
81. War of the Nemesi
82. Deep in the Throat of Doom
83. Clockwork Robots
84. Lost Landscape
85. All Meat Must Be Tenderized
86. Therapy Rodeo
87. All That We’ve Worked For
88. Toxic Tide
89. Streets Green with Blood
90. Atlas Drugged
91. Not in the Olympics at All
92. The Greater Unknown
93. No Other Way
94. Critical Mass
95. Windmills of My Mind
96. Divine Dealer
97. Can I Trust You?
98. Decomposed Potential
99. Running on Saturn’s Rings
100. Her Embedded Extremities
101. A Piece of Skye
102. Severe Nails
103. Magic Mantras and Latex Poodles
104. Mutinous Mutton
105. Out of Alignment
106. The Skin of Who We Were
107. The Fo’c’sle Key
108. Up or Drown?
109. When Ink Acts Up
110. Garden of Unearthly Delights
111. Hot for You
112. Abstract Angular Angst
113. Who They Were
114. Happy Paper Cup
115. Double, Double, Toil and Trouble, Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble
116. Dirty Martini
117. While You Were Out
118. Zimple Physics
119. Little Chatterbox
120. The Maps Say Otherwise
121. Mentally We Roll Along
122. Historically Freaking
123. Bard and Dog
124. Hating the Messenger
125. Promenade
126. A Fine Kind of Pain
127. Have You Considered That Maybe It Was Intentional?
128. Intestinal Time-share
129. Against Us
130. Stay Broken
131. Cardboard Forts
132. Without Whispering
133. Crestmare Alley
134. On the Other Side of the Glass
135. Which Is More Horrifying?
136. Becoming a Constellation
137. Lost Horizon
138. Marksman on the Fields of Color
139. The Rest Is Silence
140. The Time of Words Is Over
141. Like He Never Existed
142. Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been?
143. Fail
144. Other Places
145. Soul of Our Mission
146. Psychonoxious
147. Genetic Life-form and Disk Operating System
148. Squirrelly
149. Half-life
150. Last Man Standing
151. King of All Destinies
152. Scarecrow
153. The Overwhelming Never
154. Challenger Deep
155. Vestibule
156. No Miracles Here
157. Kind of Like Religion
158. Morons in High Places
159. 10:03.
160. The Way It Works
161. Points Exotic
Author’s Note
Resources
About the Author and Artist
Books by Neal Shusterman
Credits
Back Ads
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
Challenger Deep has been a labor of love, the creation of which spanned many years. First and foremost, I’d 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. I’d 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.
1. Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum
There are two things you know. One: You were there. Two: You couldn’t have been there.
Holding these two incompatible truths together takes skill at juggling. Of course juggling requires a third ball to keep the rhythm smoot
h. That third ball is time—which bounces much more wildly than any of us would like to believe.
The time is 5 a.m. You know this, because there’s a battery-powered clock on your bedroom wall that ticks so loudly you sometimes have to smother it with a pillow. And yet, while it’s five in the morning here, it’s also five in the evening somewhere in China—proving that incompatible truths make perfect sense when seen with global perspective. You’ve 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 there’s great comfort in that.
Across the street a neighbor’s sprinklers come on, hissing loud enough to drown out the ticking of the clock. You can smell the sprinkler mist through the open window—mildly chlorinated, heavily fluoridated. Isn’t 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 sister’s wall cannot plot deadly schemes.
And a scarecrow’s eyes do not see.
Even so, there are nights where you can’t sleep, because these things you juggle take all of your concentration. You fear that one ball might drop, and then what? You don’t dare imagine beyond that moment. Because waiting in that moment is the Captain. He’s 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 you’ll wake them.
2. Forever Down There
“There’s 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 you’ll 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 it’s 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 sea—although 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 often—but just so it scares the dust out of ’em.”
I’ve stopped trying to decipher the things the captain says, but they still weigh on me. As if maybe I’m missing something. Something important and deceptively obvious that I’ll only understand when it’s too late to matter.
“It’s forever down there,” the captain says. “Let no one tell you any different.”
3. Better for This
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 don’t want to move. Or I’m afraid to move. Each time I have the dream, it’s a little bit different. There are people around me, only they aren’t people, they’re 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 love—but I know it’s 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 mother’s face. “It hasn’t been in long enough.”
“Only one way to find out,” says the monster disguised as my father. I sense laughter all around—not from their mouths, because the mouths of their masks don’t move. The laughter is in their thoughts, which they project at me like poison-tipped darts shot from their cutout eyes.
“You’ll 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.
4. How They Get You
I can’t remember when this journey began. It’s like I’ve always been here, except that I couldn’t have been, because there was a before, just last week or last month or last year. I’m pretty certain that I’m still fifteen, though. Even if I’ve been on board this wooden relic of a ship for years, I’m still fifteen. Time is different here. It doesn’t move forward; it sort of moves sideways, like a crab.
I don’t know many of the other crewmen. Or maybe I just don’t 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 ship’s officers, if you can call them that. They are Halloween pirates, like the captain, with fake blackened teeth, trick-or-treating on hell’s doorstep. I’d laugh at them if I didn’t believe with all my heart that they’d 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 don’t speak to me other than to say things like, “You’re 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 they’re doing, but they turn away, or push me away, resentful that I’ve even offered.
I keep imagining I see my little sister on board, even though I know she’s not. Aren’t I supposed to be helping her with math? In my mind I see her waiting for me and waiting for me, but I don’t 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.
“It’s my business to have my fingers curled around the heart of your business,” he told me.
The captain has an eye patch and a parrot. The parrot has an eye patch and a security badge around his neck.
“I shouldn’t be here,” I appeal to the captain, wondering if I’ve told him this before. “I have midterms and papers due and dirty clothes I never picked up from my bedroom floor, and I have friends, lots of friends.”
The captain’s jaw is fixed and he offers no response, but the parrot says, “You’ll have friends, lots of friends here too, here too!”
Then one of the other kids whispers in my ear, “Don’t tell the parrot anything. That’s how they get you.”
5. I Am the Compass
The things I feel cannot be put into words, or if they can, the words are in no language anyone can understand. My emotions are talking in tongues. Joy spins into anger spins into fear then into amused irony, like leaping from a plane, arms wide, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can fly, then discovering you can’t, and not only don’t you have a parachute, but you don’t have any clothes on, and the people below all have binoculars and are laughing as you plummet to a highly embarrassing doom.
The navigator tells me not to worry about it. He points to the parchment pad on which I often draw to pass the time. “Fix your feelings in line and color,” he tells me. “Color, collar, holler, dollar—true riches lie in the way your drawings grab me, scream at me, force me to see. My maps show us the path, but your visions show us the way. You are the compass, Caden Bosch. You are the compass!”
“If I’m a compass, then I’m a pretty useless one,” I tell him. “
I can’t find north.”
“Of course you can,” he says. “It’s just that in these waters, north is constantly chasing its own tail.”
It makes me think of a friend I once had, who thought that north was whatever direction he was facing. Now I think that maybe he was right.
The navigator requested me as a roommate when my old roommate, who I barely even remember, disappeared without explanation. We share a cabin that’s too small for one, much less two. “You are the most decent among the indecents here,” he tells me. “Your heart hasn’t taken on the chill of the sea. Plus, you have talent. Talent, talons, tally, envy—your talent will turn the ship green with envy—mark my words!”
He’s a kid who’s been on many voyages before. And he’s farsighted. That is to say, when he looks at you he’s not seeing you, but instead sees something behind you in a dimension several times removed from our own. Mostly he doesn’t look at people. He’s too busy creating navigational charts. At least that’s what he calls them. They’re full of numbers and words and arrows and lines that connect the dots of stars into constellations I’ve never seen before.
“The heavens are different out here,” he says. “You have to see fresh patterns in the stars. Patterns, Saturns, Saturday, Sunday, sundial. It’s all about measuring the passing day. Do you get it?”
“No.”
“Shore to boat, boat to goat. That’s the answer, I’m saying. The goat. It eats everything, digesting the world, making it a part of its own DNA, and spewing it out, claiming its territory. Territory, heredity, heresy, hearsay—hear what I say. The sign of the goat holds the answer to our destination. It all has a purpose. Seek the goat.”
The navigator is brilliant. So brilliant that my head hurts just being in his presence.
“Why am I here?” I ask him. “If everything has a purpose, what is my purpose on this ship?”
He goes back to his charts, writing words and adding fresh arrows on top of what is already there, layering his thoughts so thick, only he can decipher them. “Purpose, porpoise, dolphin, doorframe, doorway. You are the doorway to the salvation of the world.”
“Me? Are you sure?”
“Just as sure as we’re on this train.”
6. So Disruptive