The Deep

by Nick Cutter

  Luke said: “Is that what I am, then? Supplies?”

  Leo smiled. “The work keeps my head straight. I like to think I’m doing a bit of good here. When your brother went down . . . I’m not a religious man, but I prayed he’d find answers. Not for me. The one it could’ve helped is gone from my life. But I harbor that hope all the same.”

  The marine band radio squawked.

  “What’s your ETA, Bathgate?” someone asked.

  Leo consulted his monitors and then keyed the mike. “This is Bathgate. Thirteen hours, twenty-two minutes. Over.”

  “Bump it up.” A prolonged silence. “Something has surfaced from the Trieste. It’s . . . Is Dr. Nelson with you now?”

  “He’s right beside me. Over.”

  “What’s surfaced is . . . You better get here as soon as you can manage.”

  A knot—something as hard and sticky as clay—twisted in Luke’s stomach.

  “I’ll go full bore, then. Bathgate out.”

  Leo adjusted his controls. The turbines churned. The yacht surged.

  “Home again, home again,” Leo sang. “Jiggedy jig.”

  8.

  THE HESPERUS HOVERED against the horizon, holding its position against the rising sun.

  God of the Evening Star—Venus. That’s what Hesperus meant in Greek, Luke had been told. But it was frequently mistranslated in Latin as Phosphorus. Namely, Lucifer. Of all the names in creation, why risk that invocation?

  There wasn’t anything especially demonic about the Hesperus. The research station looked a lot like an offshore oil rig. It sat atop the Mariana Trench, the deepest point in any ocean. The trench went down six miles—the same distance to reach the top of Mount Everest. And Luke’s brother was two miles below that, in the heart of a narrower fissure called Challenger Deep.

  The Hesperus floated on huge nitrogen-filled bladders. Each one can shoulder ten tons, Leo had told Luke earlier. The Hesperus floats on thousands of those things.

  Its sheer enormity was staggering. Though squat—most of its structures were only a single story—the station sprawled across the water like a raucous frontier town. Ten thousand metric tons of low-slung architecture, salt-whitened scaffolding, and waterproof storage canisters. Dozens of ships were moored around it like moons ringing a planet.

  Leo said: “Impressive, huh? That’s what happens when a bunch of first-world countries toss their moolah in a big pot.”

  “It is amazing,” Luke said.

  “Not half as amazing as what’s happening down below.”

  A shiver cat-walked up Luke’s spine. They were now floating above the Trieste—above Clayton. And Luke would be down with his brother soon enough.

  Something has surfaced . . . get here as soon as you can manage.

  Leo nosed the yacht alongside the Hesperus and docked neat as a pin. By the time Luke had gathered his belongings and returned topside, stationed soldiers in camouflage fatigues had swung a gangplank into position.

  Who the hell wears camouflage on the ocean? Luke wondered.

  “Should we go?” he asked Leo.

  “Not me, Doc. All this”—Leo nodded at the soldiers—“is above my pay grade.”

  How long had Luke known Leo? No more than a few hours. Seemed much longer. He wanted Leo to come with him, pay grades be damned. But he could only shake his hand. “Pleasure meeting you. Thanks for the lift. And the squid.”

  “Anytime, Doc. I’m so glad you’re here. Like I said, I’m hopeful.”

  Luke headed down the gangplank and slid into the backseat of a golf cart. An adenoidal soldier drove them down a walkway strung with windowless structures. People passed in and out of doors, some in fatigues and others in lab coats. The Hesperus reminded Luke of a MASH unit: the stumpy outbuildings, the hum of generators, the calls going out over a loudspeaker system: L-Team to SQR, Code Orange . . . L-Team to SQR, Code Orange . . .

  The cart snaked down narrow paths strung between the buildings, jogging left and right. Sparks fanned from a darkened doorway; the soldier drove through the glittering fall, the embers falling painlessly on Luke’s exposed arms—they had the dry sulfurous smell of Fourth of July sparklers. The cart shot through a tight corridor between two domed structures tipped with inverted satellite dishes that resembled a pair of perfect conical breasts, veered left, and followed the edge of the Hesperus for a hundred yards. The sea shone like a bronze mirror in the sun. Luke was amazed. They must have driven the length of a city block. He couldn’t have found his way back to Leo’s yacht without a map.

  The cart stopped in front of a black-sided building. As Luke was collecting his bags, a guy in a lab coat popped his head out of the door. Short and squat with a bottom-heavy, bowling ball build. His sunburned face was either cheery—His eyes, how they twinkle, Luke thought; His dimples, how merry!—or faux-cheery, as his eyes shone with cold scrutiny.

  “Dr. Nelson, yes?” he said. “Of course—you have Clayton’s eyes . . . and nose! I’ve been waiting on your arrival. Come in, quickly.”

  9.

  LUKE FOLLOWED THE MAN down a hallway that doglegged into a small, dark room. A bank of monitors dominated one wall. Strips of medical tape were affixed beneath each monitor, all labeled in black Sharpie: Lab 1; Lab 2; Mess; Nelson’s Chambers; Toy’s Chambers; Westlake’s Chambers; Water Closet; Kennel/Storage; O2 Purification; Containment; Quarantine.

  Most of the monitors were either black or fuzzed with static. The few still in operation offered stationary black-and-white shots, similar to a surveillance video. One, Toy’s Chambers, offered a fish-eye view of modest sleeping quarters: a cot that hinged down from a curved wall, one wafer-thin mattress, a latticework of steel grating that functioned as a walkway.

  “The power could be failing,” the man—who had yet to identify himself—told Luke. “We don’t know. Our communication link isn’t working.”

  “How long?”

  “How long what?” The man turned and stuck out his hand. “Dr. Conrad Felz, by the way.”

  “You’re my brother’s partner?”

  Felz made a sour face. “Have you talked to your brother lately?”

  “Not in some time, no.”

  “Weeks? Months?”

  A strained smile from Luke. “A titch longer than that.”

  It had been over eight years since they had spoken. But why burden Felz with their dour brotherly history?

  Felz’s chin jutted. “Partner. Huh. I don’t know if Clayton’s ever had a partner—more subordinates. Subservients. Not that I’m complaining.”

  It sure sounds like you’re complaining, Luke thought but didn’t say.

  “Clayton doesn’t exactly play nicely with others,” Felz went on. “I’m sure you were jabbed by the pointy end of that particular stick, being the younger brother.”

  “Not so much as you’d think. Unless you count being ignored as abusive.”

  Felz’s eyebrow cocked, as if to say: You don’t consider that abuse? “Clayton does what he does,” he said, “and because he’s supremely talented, his ways are tolerated. It’s the way it is with savants. Or geniuses, if you’d prefer. That line is so thin sometimes.

  “We were competitors at first,” Felz went on, “though I’m certain Clayton never saw it that way. Your brother competes against DNA helixes, against scientific absolutes, against the universe. The notion of competing with another person is, I’m convinced, totally foreign to him.”

  Felz’s fleshy lower lip protruded sullenly, a foamy dab of spit collecting in its vermilion zone.

  “Your brother and I met at MIT,” Felz said. “He didn’t have to apply, of course; his reputation allowed him to waltz on in. I soon discovered that Clayton wasn’t so much driven as pathological. The man doesn’t sleep.”

  It was true that as Clayton hit adolescence, sleep had become nonessential. He’d been up at all hours, squirreled down in his basement lab at twelve years old. He’d stopped going to school by then; he’d been granted an exemption when it became
clear that his knowledge outstripped that of his teachers—the equivalent of forcing a piano prodigy to take lessons from a dotty church organist.

  “What your brother was doing even before he arrived at MIT was astounding,” Felz said. “Were you on hand to see what he did with that mouse?”

  Of course Luke remembered the mouse . . .

  Ernie. The mouse’s name was Ernie. Clay named all of his mice—a grisly fixation, considering their fates. Clayton had heard about this anesthesiologist, a Dr. Charles Vacanti, who’d grafted a human ear onto a mouse’s back; the “ear” was cartilage grown by seeding cow cartilage cells into a biodegradable ear-shaped mold, which was then implanted under the mouse’s skin.

  Clayton made it his mission to outdo Vacanti. How he’d managed to do it baffled Luke to this day. As a veterinarian, Luke understood the vagaries of flesh and trauma and disease, but Clayton occupied a different stratum of intellect. He could see doors set in the ordinary fabric of things that were invisible to everyone else—and if he lacked a key to those doors, he goddamn well made one.

  Luke had helped Clayton shave the test mice. Clayton was a teenager by then; Luke a few years younger. He was rarely allowed into Clayton’s lab, which was set up in their father’s old workshop. Clayton kept it scrupulously clean, as even a speck of dust could ruin his projects. When he was deep into an “objective,” as he called them, Clayton could go days without food or sleep.

  But Clayton had allowed Luke in to prep the mice. Luke used the old Wahl clippers his father used on his wiry neck hairs. For the “Vacanti Objective,” there were thirteen mice, all named: Doug and Pepper and Dot and Beanie and Clyde and Percival, et cetera. They squealed and pissed and shit perfect little chocolate-sprinkle-shaped turds as Luke worked the clippers over their squirming bodies.

  “Okay, you can go now,” Clay said brusquely after Luke had finished. Not even a thank-you.

  That was the last Luke had seen of his brother for days.

  At night, the squeaks of those mice traveled through the vents. One morning Luke found one of them in the garbage can, atop the old coffee grounds and eggshells. A weird lump projected from the mouse’s back: it looked like a horn, or a shark’s fin. Luke plucked it from the trash and dug a hole in the garden and buried it.

  A few weeks later, Luke was downstairs tossing his soccer uniform into the dryer when the door to Clayton’s lab opened.

  “Come see,” Clayton said.

  The mouse, which Clayton had named Doug, trundled awkwardly around a plastic bin. Luke was stunned.

  “Is that a . . .”

  “Nose?” Clayton smiled. “Yes, it is.”

  A nose—a human-sized nose—spread across Doug’s entire back, from his tail to the tip of his spine. The nostrils fanned around Doug’s rump. The mouse staggered around like a donkey lugging an overloaded saddlebag.

  “How did you . . . ?”

  “It’s not so hard,” Clayton said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  It was typical for Clayton to be dismissive of his own accomplishments—and he was right, Luke wouldn’t have understood.

  Incredibly, the nose twitched. The nostrils dilated.

  “Is it—?”

  “Breathing?” Clayton said. “No. Doug’s muscles have grown through the new tissue. When its body twitches, so does the nose.”

  “What . . . what are you going to do with him?”

  Clayton shrugged, as if he hadn’t thought about it. He’d accomplished his goal—outdoing Dr. Vacanti. Now Doug existed. But what did the world want with a mouse with a nose on its back?

  Squeals came from under the lab bench. Luke noticed another tub.

  “What’s in there?” he asked.

  “Oh, that’s just Ernie.”

  Luke reached down and pulled the tub out. Clayton made no move to stop him. For a long moment, Luke’s eyes couldn’t register what they were seeing.

  “Oh no . . . oh . . .”

  The single mouse—could it really be called that anymore?—in the tub was hairless, its body as pink as the skin under a scab. Ernie’s legs . . . it had no legs. Three nubs projected from the bloat of its body—it was as if its legs had melted into scarified bulbs of flesh. One of its ears was normal, but the other tapered into a whip of flesh: its misplaced tail, the one that should’ve rightly been growing at the back of its body.

  “Clay . . . oh God what . . .”

  A pink, misshapen sac hung off Ernie’s side. It was sheer as a bat’s wing; tiny capillaries braided over its surface. Under this greasy stretching of skin, Luke could see the torpid movements of Ernie’s guts: its stomach quivering, its intestines shuddering. The foreign structure was vaguely peaked, and there were two shallow divots on one side.

  “The nose didn’t hold its integrity,” Clayton explained clinically. “The cellular walls broke down, its insides migrating into the new structure. And . . . other structural collapses. You wouldn’t understand.”

  Ernie pulled itself in a lopsided circle using a smooth hook of skin that projected from its sternum. It dragged itself to a pile of food pellets and dipped its tubelike mouth to eat. The squeals became slurps, which switched back to squeals when it couldn’t get the pellets into its toothless mouth.

  “I’ve been crushing the pellets up,” Clayton said. “So Ernie can eat.”

  “Why? Why is it still alive?”

  “I don’t know,” Clayton said honestly. “Organisms are tough. They do not want to expire. But don’t worry. I was able to harvest tissue from Ernie and used it on Doug. And Doug worked.”

  Luke noticed the plugs of flesh that Clay had carved from the deformed mouse’s flanks. Seedlings from which Doug could grow. That was how Clayton saw things: as workable premises, or simply one of many faltering steps toward that workable premise. And Ernie belonged on Clayton’s blooper reel.

  Luke cupped Ernie in his hands. The mouse-thing mewled and shuddered.

  “I’m taking it,” said Luke.

  Clayton shrugged. “I don’t need it anymore.”

  Luke filled a bucket with water from the hose and drowned Ernie on the porch. It seemed the quickest, most painless way. He buried Ernie in the garden. While he was digging the hole, still backhanding tears from his eyes, he’d seen Clay staring at him from the basement window, his face set in a bemused and slightly scornful expression.

  “Yes, of course,” Luke told Felz after a long pause. “I remember what Clayton did with that mouse.”

  Clayton’s miracle mouse had set off a furor in the scientific community and soon, the media. Clayton was feted in some circles, demonized in others. Over the next year the press coined a number of monikers, from “Kid Frankenstein” to “Cute Clay” on account of his striking good looks (he remains the only scientist to grace the pages of Tiger Beat and Bop magazines, which dispatched photographers to snap him coming and going from his house) to “Jonas Sulk,” for his moodiness with reporters. Clayton was approached by the heads of several major medical institutions; they pursued him with the ardor of a blue-chip athletic recruit, offering full run of their facilities. He also entertained overtures from Big Pharma and more than a few genetic research firms. He turned them all down. When asked why, he said, “I’d miss my mother’s meatballs too much”—this was a lie, and Luke knew it. Clayton hated his mom’s meatballs.

  Felz directed Luke’s attention to the bank of monitors. Luke’s gaze was drawn to one marked O2 Purification. White objects resembling oil filters were screwed into the room’s walls. Luke figured the oxygen inside the undersea station must pass through those cylinders, which siphoned off the carbon monoxide to make it breathable again.

  The monitor’s image adjusted. A fragmentary darkening in the lower left hemisphere. It was so brief, so inconsequential, that Luke wondered if he’d seen anything at all. Could it be a technical malfunction? The signal had to travel up through eight miles of water after all.

  “So who’s down there?”

  “Other than your broth
er?” Felz said. “There are two others, both Americans. I’m sorry, Jesus—there’s one. There were three at first, but . . .”

  “But?”

  Felz held up a hand. “We’ll get to that. Right now there’s only your brother and Dr. Hugo Toy, the molecular biologist.”

  “That’s it? Two people?”

  Felz nodded. “Their vital signs monitors indicate they’re both alive and . . . functional? Sorry, I don’t know a better word. So them, plus the test subjects. Two Labrador retrievers, various reptile species, guinea pigs, and of course, the bees.”

  Luke nodded. “Okay, so here’s the billion-dollar question: why are they down there at all?”

  Felz’s face held the look of a boy with a secret so monumental that holding it in caused him physical pain.

  “What we’ve discovered appears to exist beyond all explication.”

  10.

  FELZ OPENED A DOOR, which led into a small lab dominated by a steel bench. A hum filled the air. It held an uneven cadence, the odd chirp or hiccup, the way a computer sounds when it’s processing huge amounts of data.

  Felz walked to an upright black box. It had the dimensions of a hotel fridge, with a keypad on its front.

  “It still amazes me that access could be so simple,” he said. “Five years ago, we’d have had to pass through an armed checkpoint, a titanium door, a retinal scan, a blood serum scan, and a body-cavity search just to fill out the requisition forms to look at what I’m about to show you. The Hesperus exists because of this . . . but we don’t know what this is. So in that way, it’s like leaving the Hope Diamond in a bus station locker: as long as nobody really understands its value, it’s perfectly safe where it is.”

  Felz entered a pass code. The lock on the black box disengaged. He cracked the lid. A stream of supercooled air escaped.

  Luke leaned forward, dimly aware of the throbbing tension in his chest.