The Deep

by Nick Cutter

  Ghostly spiders scuttled up the back of Luke’s neck. His mouth filled with a dry wash of horror—the taste of mothballs covered in a choking film of dust.

  The swamp stilled. The bullfrogs stopped croaking, even the insects seemed to stop buzzing. Only the sucking, slurping sound coming from the pipe.

  The sound, or its maker, was drawing nearer in a stealthy kind of way . . . but not too stealthily. Maybe it wanted to be heard. The sucking sound was joined by an icy clickety-click reminiscent of cockroaches scuttling behind water-fattened drywall . . . or ragged claws dragged along mossy concrete.

  The pipe’s mouth was covered with a checkerboard rebar grate to keep stupid kids out. Because kids were stupid sometimes. Even the smart ones, like Clayton. They would come to an isolated swamp past dark, say, to collect pollywogs. Far from the reliable streetlit world—hell, they may as well be on another planet. They could disappear and nobody would even know until morning. It was tragic, but it happened all the time . . .

  Even a smart kid had to be stupid only that one time.

  Clayton’s jaw was clenched tight, his eyes fixed above the tunnel’s mouth as if he couldn’t quite bear to stare directly into it.

  The sound came again, closer now: a choked and mocking gurgle, an enormous mouth laughing around a wad of rotting meat.

  Pollywogs fluttered against Luke’s sweatpants as they flicked past, racing away. He wished he could shrink somehow, become as small and insignificant as they were, and flee with them. He wished he had a minuscule and idiotic pollywog brain, because his own was an inferno of fearful images and possibilities.

  The grate will stop it. It stopped dumb kids from getting in, and it will stop anything else from getting out.

  But Luke knew this wasn’t true. Whatever it was—and he understood, in his lizard-brain cortex, that it was something real bad—it could snap the grate like matchsticks . . . or else ooze through the metal latticework like cancerous black taffy.

  The brothers backed away slowly, the way you might from a slumbering bear. Clayton’s breath came in a flighty whistle like the whinny of a horse. Luke averted his eyes, didn’t dare look at the pipe. If he only heard it but didn’t see it, it wasn’t real. The sounds could be anything. The gurgle of sludgy water over ancient bottles and cans, or even over the water-bleached skeletons of drowned animals.

  But if you saw it, made eye contact with it . . .

  Their heels hit the dry wash. Once that happened, the boys turned and clawed up the pebbly incline, abandoning the bucket and net, hitting the moon-glossed road, and running as fast as their legs could carry them.

  Some reckless urge made Luke glance back over his shoulder. Only once, and only for a second.

  He saw something. He would swear to it. Something moving. A hand? No, not exactly. It was too elongated to be human. The fingers were twice as long as any he’d ever seen, the digits thin and witchy. Each finger was tipped with a cruel sickle that trapped the moonlight along its curve.

  This enormous hand ticked delicately along the rusted rebar, back and forth, back and forth, as if plucking notes on an instrument. A soft and beckoning gesture.

  Come baaaack, Lucas. Come baaaack. Bring your brother, too. Three is never a crowd. We’ll have . . . all the time in the world.

  God help him, Luke felt himself turn around.

  His hip, gripped by a compulsion he couldn’t fight, wrenched back—his feet would follow shortly, surely as two follows one . . . then Clayton jerked Luke’s arm so hard that it almost tore out of its socket. Come morning, the flesh of his collarbone would be a sullen mottle of bruises.

  “No. Don’t,” was all Clay said. His neck was flexed taut, as if he were fighting an insistent pair of hands that were trying to wrench his gaze back to the pipe. “Don’t look.”

  They turned and ran until their lungs burned, until the standing pipe and its noises were well behind them.

  The next morning, Luke wouldn’t believe what he’d seen. It had been a trick of the moonlight, nothing more.

  But he never did return to the pipe. Neither did Clayton, who struck up a deal with the local pet shop owner to buy mice at a bulk discount, which he claimed were better specimens anyway.

  5.

  SSSSSCHLLLIPPPPPTTZZ . . .

  The sound broke Luke out of his reverie—except they had begun to feel less like reveries than waking dreams.

  Lacuna was the term that leapt out at him: an old Latin word that meant an empty space, a missing part . . . a gap. His mind seemed to slip into those gaps much easier down here. Since he boarded the Challenger, he’d been tumbling into and out of these old memories—his past, trapped within these dream-pools, kept reaching out and pulling him into their murky depths.

  Now he was back in his brother’s lab, where Clayton still held a pair of shears to that awful guinea pig’s throat. The sound coming from somewhere inside the lab—thwwwilliiiippp!—was almost the same sound those pollywogs had made falling into the swamp when they were boys.

  Before Luke could figure out what was making that noise, the guinea pig’s leg twitched.

  Impossible.

  Clayton had injected it with enough Euthasol to stop a full-grown man’s heart. There’s no way it could come back from . . .

  Its front legs stiffened. Its lungs inhaled reflexively. It unleashed a hellish squeal that sounded shockingly like the shriek of an infant. Its eyes burned, twin embers socked into the white fur of its face. It lunged—

  Clayton brought the shears together.

  SCCCHRIIK!

  The sound was that of a bolt cutter snapping a brass Master Lock off a school locker. Luke’s eyes widened as the guinea pig’s head was snipped neatly off its neck.

  No blood at first. Not a drop. The flesh and tendon and bone were clearly visible down the face of each wound, both head-stump and neck-stump—it was like sawing a tree in half.

  None of this makes any sense, Luke thought stupidly. None of this can actually be happening . . .

  Clayton pulled the guinea pig’s body and head apart, separating them by a foot. Belatedly, blood began to leak from its neck in thick strings that spread across the bench like fingers.

  Blood-tentacles, was Luke’s thought.

  These tentacles crept toward the guinea pig’s body, which was releasing tentacles of its own. They merged in the middle of the bench.

  LB whined and buried her head against Luke’s thigh.

  The tentacles began to constrict. With aching slowness, the split halves of the guinea pig began to inch back toward each other.

  They’re trying to reattach. They want to make the guinea pig whole again.

  Watching this, a small but essential part of Luke’s mind untethered itself from the whole. Luke actually heard it—a cartilaginous thok like a drumstick wrenched off a Thanksgiving turkey; he felt it go, too: a physical sensation that he could liken only to a lifeboat setting off from a sinking ship, taking some vital cargo with it.

  The guinea pig’s sundered halves drew closer. The blood-tentacles sucked and squirmed. What would happen once the halves had linked up?

  “Stop it, Clay. Please, just stop it.”

  Clayton retrieved a plastic container with a snap-top lid. He put the gloves back on, grabbed a scalpel, and slit the bloody webbings. Luke heard a snakelike hiss as the blade severed the crimson tentacles.

  Clayton picked up the guinea pig’s head gingerly, still trailing ribbons of blood, and set it inside the container. He snapped on the lid and left the box on the bench.

  The tentacles from the guinea pig’s body crept over the container. Investigating, it would seem—sniffing it like a lonely hound at a porch door. They actually climbed the plastic and poked along the seal.

  Their progress stymied, the tentacles sagged. A few moments later they surrendered their shape and collected into a pool of plasma. The guinea pig’s headless body relaxed, evacuating its contents in a stinking gout.

  A tiny speck of ambrosia gathered on the
guinea pig’s foot. Clayton lifted the ambrosia on the scalpel’s edge and crossed to the cage. The guinea pig with the torn privates lay in a pile of bloodied cedar shavings. Clayton set the scalpel near its head.

  The ambrosia rolled off onto the wounded creature’s ear, then vanished.

  The guinea pig bleated and went rigid . . . then it rolled over and scampered to the running wheel. It began to race as fast as its stubby legs would carry it, tearing around and around and around like a mad dervish.

  Clayton reached in and withdrew it from the cage. He showed Luke its sex organs. They were whole and, for all Luke knew, functional.

  “This is madness. Utter madness.”

  “No,” Clayton said. “It only looks like madness. You don’t know what you’re seeing.”

  Clayton carried the guinea pig to the cooler. Lifting the lid, he set the creature inside. Luke didn’t protest this treatment, putting a live animal in deep freeze. Was that thing really alive anymore?

  “What use is it?” Luke had to ask. “This ambrosia? Look at what it does, Clay. It . . . perverted that animal. Am I wrong? That guinea pig was savage. There was . . .”

  Something demonic about it, was the thought his mind spat out. He’d felt the creature’s awfulness in his hands, the clammy grossness of its body.

  “There could be any number of reasons why it acted that way,” Clayton said. “Firstly, it likely had no conception of what was being done to it.”

  “ ‘Being done to it.’ Interesting choice of words, brother of mine. So let me ask you—do you know what was being done to it?”

  “I’m beginning to understand, yes. There may be pain or trauma associated with the assimilation. The ambrosia may trigger certain psychotropic side effects, leading to heightened aggression.”

  “My God, Clay—do you realize what you’re saying? This substance you’re studying won’t allow a creature to die. Not by freezing it, not by pumping it with a lethal dose, not by hacking its fucking head off. There has to be some other intelligence at work here. I don’t mean some take me to your leader shit; just something we can’t possibly understand. The way that blood moved . . . it was smart. It had a purpose.”

  Clayton’s expression didn’t indicate that he felt the same horror Luke did—rather, it seemed that the prospect of a purposeful intellect excited him immensely.

  “How can you know it won’t function the same way when used on a human being?” said Luke. “That it won’t turn people into raving maniacs?”

  “There’s only one answer to that, Lucas—we don’t know how it will work, because we haven’t tried it on a human subject yet.”

  YET. Dear God.

  “Clay. Think. What about Westlake?”

  “What about him?” Clayton said, eyebrows innocently raised.

  “You’ve calculated this angle already,” said Luke. “You realize Westlake must have come in contact with the ambrosia.”

  “I think . . .” A grudging nod. “Yes. That’s likely accurate. He must’ve abandoned the necessary precautions. He forgot the risks.”

  Or the fucking stuff crawled inside his head, Luke thought wildly. Or else . . .

  “Clay, what if he purposefully brought it into contact with himself? Not an accident or a goof-up,” said Luke. “What if he smeared it on himself or swallowed it or some other goddamn thing? What if he let himself be assimilated, as you put it.”

  Luke suddenly and dearly wanted to tell his brother about the dream he’d had. He wanted to spill his guts about the giant millipede that, for a span of pulseless seconds, he’d been absolutely sure was stalking him down that darkened storage tunnel. He wanted to let Clayton know that these depths exerted a breed of pressure that lay entirely apart from the eight hundred fluid tons of water that pressed down on every square inch of the Trieste right this moment . . .

  . . . but he had a terrible feeling Clayton knew all that already—he’d know it deep under his skin by now.

  “Why don’t we leave?” Luke asked again. “A little sunlight on your face. You remember the sun, don’t you? Hey. Just a few days. Then you come right back down.”

  And maybe—if we’re lucky—this whole place will cave in on itself in your absence. Would that be so bad?

  Clayton shook his head, lips pursed in a playful tsk.

  “It must be hard on you. It must really sting, Lucas. Acting as their errand boy.”

  Luke frowned. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Think about why you’re even here, brother dear. They flew you halfway around the world and jettisoned you to the bottom of the sea. Could you be any more a pawn? Did they tell you how to frame it—did they coach you? You never were a good liar. You’re too earnest. Dr. Felz and the others—and I’m sure there were others—what did they promise you in return for retrieving me?”

  Luke’s jaw hung open in disbelief.

  “Holy fuck, what could they possibly offer? A new car? An all-expenses-paid trip to Cabo? I came because I wanted to. No, Jesus—I came because I had to. There was no choice. Everything’s gone to hell. I came for Abby and for—for—”

  “Oh please!” Clayton said. “You don’t think I know? Felz, that incompetent nitwit, would like nothing more than to take over. Why do you think I stopped attending those shrink’s sessions? He was orchestrating it! Trying to get them to declare me insane so that he could have me deposed. Do I look crazy to you, Lucas? A mad scientist from a late-night creature feature? Do I really?”

  Luke noted the itchy squint to his brother’s eyes, and the fatigued bags under them. His skin seemed too tight—it was as if a big metal key, same as on a wind-up toy soldier, was screwed into the back of his neck, twisting and twisting, pulling the flesh of his face to a sickening tautness.

  Insane? Luke thought. Maybe not yet, but I’d say you’re within spitting distance.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Clayton said. “You go on and toddle up to the surface and tell Felz that. But don’t think that I blame you, Luke. Understand this: I pity you. This is far too immense for you to comprehend. Go now. Go. Let Alice take you, and don’t argue with me. We’re done here.”

  “I don’t give a shit about Felz,” Luke said, a flash point of anger exploding in his chest. “I came here . . . Christ, Clay, you want the truth? I didn’t come here for you. You? You’re just a shitty, careless person whose last name I happen to share.”

  Did Clayton’s expression change just a bit? A wounded wince?

  “I’m here for what you might accomplish. For the people it could benefit. But now that I see all this . . . I’m not so sure. Hell, maybe you’ll figure out how to harness this stuff. But right now I’m getting a seriously fucked-up vibe here, okay? That’s all I was suggesting. We head topside and recalibrate. Then, if you want to come back down, I say fuck it. Fill your boots, asshole.”

  Clayton smiled thinly. “You’re a better liar than you used to be. I’ll give you that.”

  The men considered each other, neither talking. The guinea pig scratched at the cooler.

  Luke thought: Westlake’s computer.

  “Westlake said there was a hole in the station. In his lab.”

  Clayton’s voice was laced with disdain. “Westlake said this? What a shock. Now, he did go crazy—nutty as squirrel turds, as our darling mother would have said.”

  After listening to Westlake’s files, Luke wasn’t about to argue that the man hadn’t gone insane. But, having spent only a little time aboard the Trieste, Luke wasn’t about to blame him either. Luke told his brother about the sound files. The tests. Westlake and the hole.

  “About these files, Lucas,” said Clayton, his scorn undisguised. “Tell me, did you hear anything besides Westlake’s voice?”

  “There were . . . knocks.”

  “Knocks. Uh-huh.”

  Luke bit back a jeering rejoinder. Hadn’t he dismissed Westlake’s claims himself, just hours ago? Mocked them as Clayton was mocking them now?

  “Why don’t we give
them a listen? You tell me what you hear.”

  Luke was convinced Clayton would dismiss the offer out of hand; instead, he surprised Luke by nodding curtly and saying: “Fine, show me.”

  6.

  THE MAIN LAB was unoccupied.

  “Al?” Luke called out. “Hey, Al!”

  Silence from the tunnels leading into the lab. How long had he been in Clay’s lab? Less than a half hour? Luke now felt treacherous for leaving Alice out here all alone, but he wouldn’t have gained entry into Clayton’s lab any other way.

  His ears caught the buzz emanating from behind Westlake’s door. The sound crested and ebbed, the sonic equivalent of waves crashing on a beach.

  “You’re sure that hatch isn’t going to open?” Luke asked.

  Clayton shook his head. “Password protected. Our labs are meant to be bastions of privacy. If we wanted to share research, we did so out here.”

  Luke turned from Westlake’s lab; it continued to exert an uncomfortable pull on his thoughts—insistent fingers tickling his forehead, seeking entrance.

  He faced the viewing window. The sea was endless and hungering. It stirred a childlike fear in Luke: the dread of getting lost in the dark only to find yourself prey to whatever creatures made a home of that inhospitable element.

  “Turn the lights on, will you?” Luke said.

  Clayton switched on the spots. Twenty yards of sea floor was washed in a skeletal pall.

  Something moved at the edge of the light . . . or had it flinched? Skittishly fled? No, it hadn’t really done that, had it? When you prod a snail with a stick, it will retreat inside its shell. Things react that way when they’re scared.

  But the things occupying the mammoth sea beyond the window weren’t startled; Luke was sure of that much. If they were there at all, if they weren’t just fabrications of his overheated brain, then they had merely withdrawn—the shadowy fluttering of black scarves wavering through the water—because for the moment, they preferred to remain hidden.

  “It’s not dangerous,” he heard Clayton say. “Not if you respect it.”