The Deep

by Nick Cutter

  Luke turned to find Clay’s cold mineral eyes trapping his own.

  LUKE LED CLAYTON to Westlake’s chambers. He opened the laptop on the cot. The screen was black. He pushed a few letter keys. It remained stolidly black.

  Did the battery die? It still had plenty of juice when he’d shut it down last.

  Stupid goddamn thing. He pressed the start button with increasing irritation. The computer screen remained obstinately black.

  “I’m telling you, Clay. This was working a few hours ago.”

  “Oooookay. Well, it’s not working now. And whatever’s on it isn’t the proof you believe it to be anyway.”

  Luke wanted to put his fist through the fucking screen. It would feel so damn good—a release of the poisonous tension pulsing behind the bones of his face. Put his fist through it, and then plant that same fist square in his brother’s smug mouth. He wouldn’t be expecting that, would he? Fuckin-a right. It’d be so easy. His fist pistoning until Clay’s skull was nothing but a bowl of red mush, Luke laughing and laughing, his lips flecked with blood.

  Luke recoiled, snorting like a man who’d been given smelling salts.

  Where had those thoughts come from?

  He’d never perpetrated premeditated violence on another person in his life. Yet he’d seen himself doing it. His fist slamming down again and again. His eyes alight with mad glee. An insectile buzz invading his mind as he nursed crude animalistic impulses. . . .

  Clayton was scrutinizing him now. “You all right, brother?”

  “Yeah.” Luke laughed coldly. “Just pissed this thing won’t work.”

  “Down here, it’s unwise to let your emotions get out of hand.”

  Are you coming down with a case of the sea-sillies, El Capitán? His mother’s mocking voice. You weren’t built for rough water, sailor.

  Luke shut his eyes and squeezed her out of his head.

  7.

  THEY FOUND ALICE in the main lab. She was once again staring at Westlake’s hatch.

  Her skin had a sickly pallor—cadaverous was the word that sprang into Luke’s mind—her eyes peering out of her cored sockets with bovine confusion. Her lips moved, reciting words or phrases Luke could not make out.

  She ran a hand over the hatch . . . intimately, somehow searchingly. Luke could hear snatches of her speech now.

  “I want to . . . yes, oh yes, I’d love to . . .”

  Luke said: “Al?”

  Her hand circled the hatch, tracing odd patterns. Her fingers fell to the keypad.

  Clayton flicked a switch, bathing the lab in a harsh wash of halogen light. Al blinked, disoriented. In that moment her face held a wrathful, almost murderous look—the look of a person awoken from a dream she wished would never end.

  Luke said: “You okay, Al?”

  Al swiped her palm across her nose, a childlike gesture.

  “Never better, Doc. Feelin’ fine like cherry wine.”

  Luke peered out the window. Those inky scarves unfurled beyond the spotlights. A wave of panic rose in him. He tasted it: the tang of pure dread, acrid as the juice in a springtime leaf.

  Get out of here, he thought wildly. You have to convince Al to leave.

  “Alice, listen . . . Do things feel a bit hinky down here? I’m asking because you’ve spent years underwater. Maybe it’s just me.”

  Al pulled her gaze away from Westlake’s lab with what seemed like a great, almost Herculean effort. Somewhat reluctantly, she nodded. “It’s not just you.”

  Luke pointed to Westlake’s lab. “Something happened in there, I’m pretty sure. Something . . . not good. For all I know, it’s still happening.”

  Clayton grunted dismissively. Luke ignored him.

  “And oh yeah—Clayton showed me something very interesting.”

  “Don’t you say a word,” Clayton snapped.

  “Oh, screw off, Clay,” Luke said casually. “Al, you should give Clay a round of applause. Why? Well, my brilliant, brainy brother was able to cure a guinea pig of what is commonly viewed as a terminal condition. A condition known in the veterinary biz as getting its fucking head cut off.”

  He told Al everything. The ambrosia, the shears, the blood-tentacles. About Westlake’s files, too. The hole.

  “Is this true?” Al asked Clayton.

  Clayton said: “The ambrosia, you mean? Yes. It’s a remarkable substance. But regarding this hole my brother keeps babbling about?” Clayton rotated his finger around his ear, the universal gesture for loony.

  “That does sound a little nuts,” Al said to Luke with a charitable smile. “And Westlake . . . well.”

  “I never claimed it was sane,” Luke said defensively. “I think it’s . . . symptomatic, maybe. Of what’s happening down here—how this place tears at your head. Westlake went nuts, fine. A hole in the wall is impossible. I thought so, too. But maybe the Trieste or whatever, it caved in his mind.”

  Al nodded sympathetically—but to Luke it seemed too much like the pinched, dismissive nod someone would offer a raving bag lady.

  “Some people aren’t built for this,” she said. “Doesn’t matter how smart they are or how rugged in every other way. This is a specific kind of pressure, and you can’t toughen yourself against it.”

  “How do you feel, Luke?” Clayton asked with mock concern.

  “This from the guy who’s walking around in his sleep, sending up pleading transmissions.” Luke’s voice rose to a reedy falsetto. “Oh brother, oh brother, where art thou my brother—I neeeeeeeds you!”

  Clayton’s jaw tightened. “I did no such thing. I’d as soon have called for a janitor.”

  Luke turned to Al, refusing to be baited into a fight. “I told Clay we should head up. Just until we can get a grip on what’s happening down here.”

  “I can understand how this may come as a shock,” said Clayton, recovering his poise. “The things I’ve discovered are daunting. Frightening, even. But imagine living in the shadow of a dormant volcano. It’s scary at first . . . but you get used to it. People do it all the time. They exist under perpetual threat. And there’s so much work to be done here. Up there”—he pointed toward the surface—“people are suffering. Dying. They need us to stay here. To be strong and persevere. Surely you understand that?”

  Oh please, you sententious bastard, Luke thought. You only care about yourself and your research, same as it ever was.

  “What about the animals?” Clay continued. It was the first time he’d referred to them as anything but specimens. “If we go, we’ll have to leave them. And Dr. Toy, as well, who could destroy the station in our absence. Can we really take that risk?”

  “What’s to stop him from destroying it right now?” Luke shot back.

  “Maybe us just being here?” Al said reasonably. “There’s nothing in Toy’s quarters that he could use to wreck this place—but if we leave, giving him full run . . .”

  Luke was dismayed to see that Al was taking his brother’s side on this.

  “So we lock the hatches,” Luke said. “Can’t we do that? Can’t we—”

  “Look, I told you I’m not leaving,” Clay said simply. “There’s too much to do, and too little time left. As I keep telling you—do whatever you want.”

  A sense of despair had settled under Luke’s skin, itching like pink fiberglass insulation. Al held the deciding vote.

  “Fuck it,” Al said after a spell. “Dr. Nelson, no disrespect, but Luke’s got a point. I think things may be on the verge of a catastrophic fuckup.”

  Clayton impassively regarded Al. “I’ve spoken my piece.”

  “Fuck it,” Al said again. “Luke, let’s go talk to topside operations. Dr. Nelson, I want you to stay where I can find you.”

  “I’ll be in my lab,” Clayton said.

  He turned his back to them. He was singing another nursery rhyme as he retreated into his lab.

  “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home; your house is on fire, your children all gone . . .”

  8.


  LUKE AND LB FOLLOWED AL to the storage area. They shimmied through the crawl-through chute. It was easier this time. Al caught LB as she rocketed awkwardly out of the chute; she licked her face appreciatively. Luke came last. They continued on to reach the storage tunnel hatch. Al spun the wheel; there was a steady hiss as the pressure abated.

  “Hold the door for a sec, Luke. I don’t want us getting locked in again.”

  She hunted around until she found a used air-purification canister. “Okay, come on through.”

  LB hesitated—she’d been locked in the tunnel for Lord knows how long—before resignedly slipping through the doorway. Al wedged the canister in and let the hatch close under its own weight; it crimped the canister slightly but left the door propped open a few inches.

  “That’ll hold,” she said. “Unless someone kicks it loose.”

  “Who would do that?”

  Al tilted her head—an analytical insurance adjuster’s gaze.

  “I spent a lot of time with Westlake,” she said. “We trained together. Eight, ten hours a day. Most eggheads have got their head in the clouds or up their own clueless asses. Westlake was different. On the level. Even keel.”

  Al headed down the storage tunnel. Luke followed. The cold locked around his limbs almost immediately, as if it had been waiting to embrace him again.

  “Point being,” she continued, “Westlake and I got on. Your brother and Dr. Toy were all business. Westlake was different—normal. And he was still pretty normal down here, at least at first. In fact he seemed better than normal.”

  “Better how?”

  Al shrugged as if to say it was hard to explain. But she tried.

  “Training was intense, right? It ground us all down—all but your brother, who seems sorta cyborgish. I’d expected Westlake’s furlough down here to wear on him. Doctor Toy really struggled in training; he almost didn’t make it down, in fact. We nearly replaced him. And like I said before, you can’t do mental push-ups to prepare yourself—you’ve either got that tolerance or you don’t. So we were surprised to see that when Westlake first got down, he actually seemed brighter, stronger, healthier. I couldn’t pinpoint it, but it was a change. Maybe not a good one, either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  They’d made it around the gooseneck, forging down the tunnel toward the Challenger’s entry hatch.

  “I mean, just different. Something off in his eyes. His movements were weird, jerky, on the monitors. That is to say, before all the screens went blank. When we were topside, Westlake had a sense of what the ambrosia might be able to do . . . but he was skeptical. Once he got down, that changed. At his psych appointments—which were delivered remotely from a special room down here, every two days at the outset—it was all he’d talk about. The miracle agent, he called it. A kind of mania invaded him. And then he went AWOL. Stopped attending his psych appointments. Stopped being visible on the monitors. He just . . . poof. Vanished.”

  Al shook her head. “And then you tell me Westlake was raving about holes in the station and other assorted bat-shittery. I’m not judging—I think I get it now. Luke, I need to ask: when you fell asleep down here, did you dream?”

  Luke’s footsteps faltered. The phantom children raced overhead, their own footsteps keeping pace with the rapid beat of his heart.

  “Did you?” she repeated.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “A nightmare. The worst I can ever recall.”

  Al nodded with a grim look of commiseration and of understanding. In the gloom, her teeth were gray: a row of tiny tombstones.

  Luke told her about his dream. He trusted Al, and was emboldened by her forthrightness. He told her about Zach, the ambrosia, the eyes. He didn’t tell her what happened to his son that day in the park (which had been the reason the dream hadn’t just scared him—it hurt him, too), but it felt good, necessary, to disburden himself.

  He kept the sleepwalking episode to himself. He needed her to trust him. She needed to trust that he had things on lockdown . . . because he did have things on lockdown, pretty much at least, and was going to keep it that way.

  “I managed to catch a few minutes of shut-eye,” said Al. “I had a nightmare, same as you.”

  She leaned against the tunnel. The wall seemed to belly inward around her body—opening up like a toothless mouth.

  Stand up, quickly, Luke wanted to say. Get away from it.

  But that would sound crazy. Like he didn’t have things on lockdown.

  “I spent three years aboard the USS Kingfisher,” Al said. “A nuclear attack sub. We were on tactical maneuvers. Routine stuff. I was junior lieutenant, tactical armaments. We suffered an electrical malfunction. We lost power. Total blackness at three hundred feet underwater. Then we were hit with a power surge. One of the two main engines blew out. Exploded, more or less.”

  Luke said, “God, I can barely imagine.”

  “So when the engine blew, our team evacuated into the maneuvering room and locked the hatch. But there was this kid, Eldred Henke. Nineteen years old. He got trapped in the hallway. I tried to open the hatch, but the locks had engaged. The kid hammered his fists on the porthole until his knuckles broke. Another explosion rocked us as the turbine blew. The wall beside Eldred tore apart like a tin can. Bits of the superheated turbine, screws and rivets and what all, blew through the ripped steel and buried into him. He slammed into the far wall and reeled like a drunk. This thin metal rod was stuck through his throat. Bolts and whatever else had ripped his cheeks open. I could see inside his face, places nobody ought to see. Next the hull caved and the sea rushed in. I saw it all. I was safe. The current carried him out lickety-split. The kid disappeared like he’d been sucked out of an airplane cruising at twenty-five thousand feet.”

  Luke digested this, then said: “Al, there’s nothing you could have done. Surely you understand that.”

  “No, I get that.”

  “I mean, if I nailed myself to the wall every time I couldn’t save someone’s dog or cat—”

  “I think this is a little different, Doc.”

  “I’m just saying that guilt carves you up, right? Things happen sometimes and there’s no way to fix it—in the moment, or any time after. But no creature is more adept at putting themselves up on that cross than human beings.”

  She nodded, accepting Luke’s logic. “The thing is, I used to dream about that kid. But those dreams weren’t so bad, because in them I wrenched the hatch open and yanked him through just before the sea poured in. Those dreams were bittersweet, sure, because some part of my subconscious knew there was a cream-colored headstone in a cemetery in Eldred’s hometown with his name etched on it.”

  “But the dream you had down here wasn’t like that, was it?” Luke said. “The dream you had here was worse.”

  She nodded reluctantly—her face looked softer and almost girlish in the queer light of the tunnel.

  “Much worse,” she said.

  The dream had the same setup, she told Luke. Eldred was trapped behind the hatch. Al was torqueing the hatch-wheel—and same as in real life, it wasn’t budging. Then the turbine blew and that shower of superheated rubble hit the kid. Except in the dream, Alice noticed something else. There was . . . stuff . . . mixed in with the rubble. A glittering patina in the air.

  “The ambrosia,” Luke said softly. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “Ding ding ding. Give the man a prize,” Al said.

  Alice dreamed it in down to the tiniest detail—every pore on the kid’s face. He started to shriek. Why? Because of the bits of metal spiked in his flesh or the ambrosia? She could hear him screaming through the hatch. Fluttery, boyish screams.

  “Which is impossible, right?” she said. “Those hatches are soundproof.”

  “You don’t have to tell me any more,” Luke said.

  “Don’t I?” Alice said wretchedly.

  Next, the dream got real funny. Not ha-ha funny. Funny-awful. Eldred’s skin . . . it healed. Or only sort of. The metal w
as pushed out of it, the wounds shrinking, then disappearing altogether. He stayed that way for a heartbeat, his skin flawless, then the wounds opened up again, even though there was no cause for it. It was like watching his face get torn open by invisible surgeons with terrible intentions.

  “Or like watching the most awful movie,” Alice said, “rewinding it and playing it again.”

  Next the sea rushed in and carried Eldred down. And Alice knew the kid would keep suffering . . . but he’d never quite die. He’d keep falling into the dark but he’d live on—and in an agony like no human has ever known.

  “The worst part is this,” she said. “Before Eldred’s sucked out, as his body’s swirling out that rip in the sub, he catches my eye. And he says—and I hear this clearly: You did this to me. This is your fault, Alice Sykes. Goddamn you to hell.”

  She leaned forward miserably, cradling her skull in her palms. LB padded over and settled her head on Al’s knee.

  “This station,” Luke said. “I don’t know what’s going on. It’s in the air, in the metal. Alice, it’s the most awful place I’ve ever set foot inside.”

  “Clearly you’ve never felt the need to take a piss at a dog-racing track,” Al said with forced levity.

  Luke smiled, appreciating her efforts. “There’s two possibilities,” he said. “One, something unexplainable is happening down here. Or two, and by far and away the more reasonable possibility—”

  “Is that we’re going a bit batty,” said Al. “Jesus, Luke, we just showed up. This is a cup of coffee compared to the hitches I’ve pulled.”

  “This isn’t a sub. It’s a different animal entirely, isn’t it?”

  Alice ran her hand over her stubbled skull. “I’m inclined to agree with you. Bad enough to make Dr. Toy flip his lid. And Dr. Westlake, God rest his soul.”

  With strange serenity, the two of them sat with the fact that they could be sunk neck deep into a case of the sea-sillies—or were perhaps even coming down with the preliminary manifestations of the ’Gets. It made more sense to believe they were going crazy or falling prey to the ’Gets than to believe that . . . well, any other logic was not logic at all. It was total insanity.