The Deep

by Nick Cutter

  He craned his neck back to the door—he’d seen something in his periphery, or sort of thought so. Fleeting movement behind the stacked boxes, a skittering of little legs as something moved behind him.

  To do what? Close the door? Switch off the light?

  Luuuucas. You’re such a precious boy. So soft, so pretty. Come closer.

  Fuck you, Luke thought. He’d never uttered this word aloud (God only knew what his mother would do to him), but it felt good to say it in his head. FUCK you, box. I can burn you and say it was an accident. I can flood you until your wood bloats and rots. I can leave you on the stoop on garbage day when Mom’s gone and the garbagemen will take you to the dump, where seagulls will drop gooey turds all over you.

  The trunk waited for him, unmoving, unblinking.

  Luke’s head jerked. He saw it again—something moving behind the boxes. They were in rows like big brown teeth, and he saw or thought he’d seen something scuttling between the gaps.

  A pair of pants . . . were those pants? They were wadded up like the skin of an enormous serpent on top of one box. And something else that might have been a lampshade. And something that looked like—

  The trunk’s latch snapped open. It made a silvery snipping sound.

  Luke turned in time to see it happen. The metal hasp fell forward lazily like the tongue lolling from a tired dog’s mouth.

  Luke couldn’t believe it—that is to say, his mind couldn’t process it. There wasn’t a puff of wind. No earthquake had shaken the house’s foundation. The latch had simply . . . opened.

  The clowns on the trunk suddenly seemed different. Their eyes were tracking him now. Pinning him in their fleshless, jeering gaze.

  Luke spun wildly on his knees. As he did, he heard a sound that chilled the ventricles of his heart.

  Eeeee . . . the trunk’s hinges levering up.

  He didn’t want to look back. Not one bit. But his skull was gripped by an immense force, which twisted it slowly around.

  The trunk was open. Not much. It couldn’t open fully, as the lid would hit the crawl space’s ceiling.

  No, it was open only a bit. Just a hair.

  When he faced back the other way, an odd thing happened. The crawl space elongated, its dimensions stretching like taffy. The door was thirty feet away, when it should only be twenty . . . and it was moving farther away by the second.

  Lucas, don’t go. Staaaaaaay.

  Luke began to scrabble toward the door, his fingers scraping madly at the cement. A spider web broke across his face, strangling the cry building in his throat. He wanted to call out for Clayton, his mother, anyone, but his voice had fled into his stomach—all that came out of his mouth was a breathless whisper.

  He looked back again. He couldn’t help it.

  A hand was coming out of the trunk.

  Gray and waxen—the hand of a long-dead thing. It was thin, the fingers terribly long, the bones projecting under that drab stretching of skin. If it were to grab him, Luke figured each finger could wrap around his ankle at least twice. Every finger was tipped with a sharp black nail.

  It was, he realized with dawning horror, the same hand he’d seen inside the standing pipe—the hand belonging to the creature they’d fled in the swamp.

  That thing that was here, now, in the basement.

  He’d been wrong to fear his mother. His mother could be cruel, yes, but at least she was human.

  Is this actually happening?

  This was the most adult question Luke had ever asked himself. There was no place in the normal world, the world his mother and father and brother lived in, the world of baseball and snow cones and sunshine, for this thing to exist.

  This is not really happening, he thought, more definitively now. And quite suddenly, the crawl space turned insubstantial, gauzy—a dreamscape. He felt a strange inner buoyancy, as though his stomach were full of soap bubbles. He drifted on a sudsy wash of horror, but it was dream-horror, unattached to real-life concerns. A giant hand in his Tickle Trunk, how silly! It was nothing to be afraid of, really . . .

  He realized, with a thickness of mind he felt only when waking from a very deep sleep, that the voice he was hearing in his head was actually coming out of the trunk. An insidious, narcotizing mimicry of his own voice—it slipped out of the trunk and slid into his ears like some effortless oil. It matched his own voice exactly . . . or almost exactly: it held a coppery undernote that rasped over the vowels and consonants like a straight razor over a barber’s strop.

  Nothing to be afraid of . . . not really happening . . .

  Luke turned to face the door again and started to crawl desperately. His fingernails and kneecaps scraped the cement, opening the skin up. The door galloped away in heart-clutching increments—he chased it the way a car pursues a heat shimmer on the highway: always tantalizingly close, but you never quite catch it.

  The hand spider-walked down the trunk. The attached arm was long and sinewy and seemed both boneless and jointless: a ropy appendage like a fire hose.

  I don’t exist, Lukey-loo. You said so yourself, didn’t you? You’re just a big dummy, like your brother says . . .

  But it did exist—at least right then it did. And that could be all the time a creature like this ever needed.

  He crawled, blood welling on his knees, throwing a glance over his shoulder at the trunk. The crawl space light went out.

  Luke didn’t know if something had switched it off or if the bulb had chosen that exact moment to go out. It didn’t matter. The darkness galvanized his blood. Maybe the darkness was better, in a weird way.

  He raised his back, pumped his legs, and scurried across the crawl space. The wooden beams raked his spine but he didn’t feel any pain. His adrenaline was redlined, the fear sharpening the edge on his every sense. He could hear the thing’s arm slithering and shucking across the grimy cement—a huthump! huthump! noise, as if it were flapping in a wavelike motion, those long nail-tipped fingers digging into the cement for purchase and then huthump! as it flicked forward another foot.

  The door was closer—he could see the light of the basement now, the edge of the water heater. Mercifully, the crawl space was shrinking back to its old dimensions. Or maybe they’d never changed: it was just another nasty trick the thing in the trunk had been playing on him.

  HuTHUMP!

  Right behind him now.

  Luke swore he felt a hard cold finger touch his ankle, a sharp nail leaving a sizzling line of pain.

  With a final convulsive heave, Luke propelled himself through the door frame and into the forgiving light of the basement. As he skittered away on his heels, his eyes were drawn to the square of blackness housing the crawl space.

  All was silent, only the drumming of blood in his ears.

  But he may’ve seen something. Maybe not.

  Eyes? Black, ageless, regarding him from the dark.

  Some other time, Lucas. We have all the time in the world.

  The adrenaline curdled in his veins. Luke hurtled upstairs, bawling. His mother was too shocked to insist he go back down.

  But she got her hangdog husband to bring the trunk up. Luke sat on the front porch, chewing his fingernails to the quick as his father had hauled it up two flights of stairs, quiet as a church mouse. Afterward, he’d given Luke a sheepish grin, his shoulders sunk forward and his hands deep in his pockets. What are you gonna do? his expression said. Luke had never known his father any other way. He was broken by the time Luke had been born, and was beyond hope by the time he could’ve been of any use to either of his sons.

  Luke stayed away from his room until bedtime. He begged to stay up a half hour later to read his comics quietly in the family room, but his mother refused. Of course she refused.

  The Tickle Trunk sat in the corner of his room. He forced himself to open it. Empty. By then, the events in the crawl space had taken on the taint of absurdity. Nightmares get blown apart in the sane light of day, even in a boy’s mind. And Luke was a rational boy; eve
ryone said so. His knees were skinned and his palms scraped, but there was no cut on his ankle from the creature’s nails.

  No, it had been a silly episode. Luke was embarrassed to think about it.

  But . . .

  One corner of the trunk had been pried up. A triangle of that strange brown skin was peeled back from its interior, as if something had come out through there.

  A tiny rip, no more than an inch. Would that have been enough?

  A different boy, one more flighty than Luke, might’ve viewed it as a sign. Something wanting him to know it’d been inside the trunk. Not a figment of his imagination—no way, nohow. It wanted to show how it’d gotten in, and leave the hint that it could easily do it again. Any old time it wished.

  The next day Luke “accidentally” spilled fish oil over the trunk. God, that smell could gag a maggot, his father said when he got home. Why he’d been in the proximity of the trunk with a full bottle of fish oil was a fact Luke could never fully explain. But the deed had been done. The room had to be aired out; Luke slept on the sofa for two nights. The trunk was thrown away. His mother had her methods of making Luke pay for that, but at least it was gone. He never saw it again . . .

  . . . except for once, years later, in a dream.

  He dreamed that the Tickle Trunk sat at the city dump. The moon cast its pallid light over the windblown piles of trash. The trunk’s lid hung open like a cavernous, toothless mouth.

  A raccoon trundled through the stinking wasteland. It scrambled up a softening heap to the trunk. Nose twitching, it clawed up the bloated wood to squat on top of it. Next it screeched, having seen something inside the trunk that must’ve left it petrified. The lid levered up, snapping closed on its back. The sound of the raccoon’s spine breaking was as sharp as the report of a .22 cartridge.

  The raccoon slipped bonelessly inside. The lid closed. The trunk swayed slowly, the way a mother rocks a child in her arms. Inside, the raccoon started to scream. This had been the worst part of the dream—the way the animal had sounded very much like the squall of an infant.

  A substance resembling red pancake batter burped out of the trunk. The lid opened again. The moon shone down from its icy altar, the dump wrapped in stillness once again.

  14.

  THE BLACKNESS SLID AWAY as Luke floated up out of the dream-pool. This long-buried memory had flooded back to him whole cloth—the sights and smells and the fear that had filled his veins that afternoon in the crawl space, a terror as bright and sharp as lemon juice squirted on a paper cut.

  “Doc?” said Al, shaking him with her good hand. “You still with me?”

  He was back inside his own skin now. He stood in the Trieste with Alice, staring at a supply crate that rested in the deepest, most shadowed point of the purification room. How long had he been checked out? It didn’t feel like more than a few seconds—and maybe that was all it had been, each second stretching out inside his head.

  Eight miles above, all over the world, people were forgetting their pasts. Trapped down here in the charmless dark, Luke couldn’t escape his own.

  “I’m okay,” he said shakily. “My memories are so vibrant down here. I . . . I find that I’m getting a bit lost in them. Sorry.”

  Al said, “Good to have you back, then,” and turned her attention to the crate. It didn’t look like the Tickle Trunk, not one bit. It was plastic, and black, and ribbed. Its dimensions were roughly the same, but its lid was flat.

  No, it didn’t look anything like the Tickle Trunk, yet it held the aura of it.

  It’s like bullies, was Luke’s strangely apt thought. They can be hulking and potato fisted or weaselly and slender. It’s that cruel quality in their eyes that identifies them as part of the same tribe.

  Which was idiotic to think. This crate had no relation to his old trunk. Luke used to chastise his own son, often far too harshly, for his childish fears: the monster in the closet, the fanged thing under his bed.

  The Fig Men.

  But here he was, an adult, filled with dread at the sight of a crate that projected that same air of coy menace as his old childhood nemesis.

  Who, little ole me? the crate seemed to say in a cutesy-poo voice. Menacing? Noooo. I’m just a crate, Lukey-loo. I’m a tool that stores other tools—switching to a Popeye growl—I yam what I ams, and that’s all that I yams!

  Al stepped toward it. No! Luke wanted to say. But why? It was nothing but a crate. A tool that stored tools.

  Al reached down and cracked the lid. A jumble of spare parts. Rooting through them, she found a plastic case. She opened it and shook out a small chip.

  “Bingo.”

  Al closed the lid and latched it. She gave it a final considering look, the skin tightening down her throat, before turning back the way they’d come.

  The chip slotted neatly into the control panel. The air quality changed—where before it’d held a steely aftertaste that built up like plaque in the back of Luke’s throat, now it was . . . well, marginally better.

  Al slumped against the wall.

  “I don’t get it,” she said. “That chip just vanished. It wasn’t burned out, wasn’t busted. It was gone. Same thing would happen onboard a sub, too. Things would go missing. A guy’s books or personal photos, the little tchotchkes that tethered someone to the surface. In most cases, it was petty thievery. No reason aside from boredom and opportunity.”

  A hollow knock emanated from the recesses of the purification room. Back where the crate sat.

  Knock once for yes. Knock twice for no.

  “A few times, though, things went missing and never did get found,” Al went on. “Was this one guy, Fields. A machinist. Carried a photograph of his dead mother in a locket. Wore it strung around his neck. Woke up one day, it’s gone. He tore that sub apart to find it. Peered in every cranny, even went through the trash. Nada. He figured someone stole it. Hooked it off his neck in the night. But sometimes things just go missing. Fall through cracks, you know?”

  The knocking intensified.

  Luke peered in that direction, but his view was walled off by an impenetrable expanse of gloom. The canisters glowed whitely, a clutch of huge insect eggs laid in the walls.

  “Could be the system kicking over,” Al said, reading his thoughts. “Lots of weird noises in a sub, too. Knocks and clunks you can’t explain. Only pressure and the ocean’s currents, but it can sound a little like . . . like ghosts, uh?”

  “Right. Booga-booga.”

  Their laughter sounded both canned and forced, as if they were recording a laugh track on a soundstage.

  “You ever had a man go missing, Al?”

  “On a sub, you mean? That’d be the ultimate locked-door mystery, uh? I heard about something that went down on another vessel, the SS-228 Stickleback. A guy went missing. They turned that sub inside out, never found him. How do you vanish from a submarine, a thousand feet underwater?

  “Turns out this guy got into an argument over a game of cards. Another guy, a sonar tech, hits him with a closed fist. Guy falls and hits the bulkhead all funny. Fractured skull. He dies. So the sonar tech and his buddy, a cook, chopped up the body and fed it into the garbage disposal. Those things could chew up cinder blocks. MPs dredged the disposal, found bits of the guy’s spine and rib cage.”

  A new noise floated to their ears. A crisp, somehow silvery sound . . .

  . . . the sound of a latch coming undone, maybe.

  15.

  LUKE SAW IT IN HIS mind: the crate’s hasp falling open just like the tongue lolling from a tired dog’s mouth. The lid opening the tiniest bit.

  Just a hair.

  “Al . . .”

  “I heard it, too.”

  Al had this what the fuck? look on her face. There wasn’t a soul back there. Only the crate.

  And whatever was inside the crate.

  Which was nothing, Luke told himself. He’d seen inside it, hadn’t he? Nothing but tools and—and an unnaturally long hand tipped with jetblack nails—and circui
ts and nothing else. Not a goddamn thing else.

  Al stood and moved toward the noise, her boots going tak on the steel grate. She took five steps, then ten.

  Tak. Tak. Tak. Tak.

  Her body knit with the darkness carpeting the deeper recesses of the room—that darkness seemed to drink at her body, sucking her in.

  Luke stood. “Al, why don’t we—?”

  But she’d already melted into the gloom.

  Tak. Tak. Tak. Ta—

  The silence stretched. Luke’s breath came out in whistling gasps.

  Al, get your dick-swinging ass back here. Let’s bug the fuck out.

  Tak. Tak. Ta—

  An enormity of silence.

  Then Al’s voice wafted out of the dim:

  “Jesus Christ. No. No. Jesus Chri—”

  Tak . . . tak . . . taktaktaktak

  Al flew out of the darkness and barreled into Luke, nearly knocking him down. Her face was set in a rictus of terror; her mouth, frozen open in fear, emitted a series of choked, hiccuping wheezes.

  Luke had never seen a grown person look so petrified. He couldn’t conceive what could have reduced Al—as sturdy a person as he’d ever met—to a twitching puddle of nerves.

  Hu-Thump!

  It came from the dark, where such sounds always germinated.

  From the crate, which in his mind’s eye no longer resembled a crate at all.

  It was wooden now, engraved with a pattern of leering clowns.

  Hyuk-hyuk-hyuk, coming to get you Lukey-loo! Hyuk-yuk, and we’re going to finish it this time!

  It wasn’t possible. It hadn’t been possible, all those years ago. It’d been a manifestation of his overburdened imagination. Something his own mother had planted, he’d often thought, to coldly chart the effect it would have on her younger son.

  The trunk was empty. The crate was empty. There was no—

  HuTHUMP.

  Closer now. Closing the distance.

  How could it get down here? Luke childishly asked himself.

  The answer was equally childlike in its logic: That’s a stupid question—it got here because it’s a monster. That’s what monsters do.