The Deep

by Nick Cutter

  Hugo hissed at me—truly hissed, like a vampire staked through the heart.

  “You fucking fool,” he said. “Why think of things you’ll never see again?”

  Unnerved, I retreated into my own lab. The honeybees droned comfortingly. They buzzed sluggishly around, ferrying sugar water from the feeders to their hives.

  Bees are the most mathematical creatures on earth. Their hives are marvels of geometric functionality. The drones map out their nectar-collecting routes better than a computer, calculating the shortest distance between pollinating buds.

  The bees were the first—and so far the only specimens in that phylum—to develop the condition we now recognize as the Disease. The G-word. CCD, or Colony Collapse Disorder, was noted many years ago. Entire hives were obliterated. Death in the billions. Imagine it: a population the equivalent of New York or Cairo decimated in days.

  How had it happened? Several possibilities were bandied about: parasite infestations, fungus, mold, the use of antibiotics by beekeepers. Then Dr. Curtis Smails at the University of Birmingham tendered the theory that the bees were simply forgetting to do the things bees always did, the tasks grafted into their genome.

  Life in a hive is perfect in the way things in nature often are. The drones collect nectar, build the combs, make honey, and defend the hive. The queens produce offspring and royal jelly. Dr. Smails noticed that the hives suffering from CCD were populated by bees that were no longer fulfilling their roles. The queens stopped giving birth or did so randomly. Drones flew miles from the hive, collecting no nectar, coming back empty-handed. They would fly into ponds and drown, sting other creatures for no reason, and die . . . They’d become fatalistic. Bees are ritualistic, and they were abandoning their rituals.

  No, we realized in time—not abandoning, but forgetting.

  Thus bees became the first bellwether of the Disease. The honeybee in the coal mine, you could say.

  My specimens were healthy when we arrived, but they are now displaying the initial symptoms of CCD. Honeycombs going untended, decreasing numbers of larvae. The bees fly without purpose, bumping into the lab walls. The floor is littered with expired specimens. If this continues, they’ll all be dead in a matter of days.

  The footsteps overhead. Racing along the ceiling. It sounds so much like the running of children . . . of Hannah’s own footsteps in our Belmont home.

  It’s disorienting, like so much of life down here. I don’t like it.

  June 32 (maybe, baby!)

  There is a hole in the station.

  Teeny-tiny, no bigger than a pinprick. It appeared on the wall nearest the hives. The hole is dark, nearly the color of the metal itself. I wouldn’t have noticed were it not for the strange pull it emits.

  It is not an unpleasant sensation. I can only liken it to a scalp massage . . . except the fingers are inside one’s skull, manipulating the gray matter.

  I covered the phenomenon with a long strip of duct tape. I didn’t want to touch the hole. It seems unwise.

  Having done so, the pull lessened.

  I confess, I missed the pull.

  July Something-Something (day/date immaterial)

  We were able to harvest a sample of ambrosia. Clayton did it. I wasn’t there. A tricky procedure, but Clayton (of course it had to be Clayton; nerves-of-steel Clayton) corralled it through the vaccu-trap. Good on him.

  We got less than a thimbleful. It was split between Clayton and myself. We did not speak while he portioned it out. We haven’t really spoken to one another for . . . days? A week? I couldn’t tell you. Silence is our element now. Silence and darkness. I have stopped attending my psychological counseling sessions, too. I suspect Clayton has done the same. And Hugo, of course.

  I have not told Clayton about the hole.

  I like to look at it, I must say. The ambrosia, I mean. It’s strangely entrancing.

  The hole is entrancing in much the same fashion.

  The hole has grown. It consumed the tape I placed over it. A slow suctioning, the tape stripping from the metal and tugged through the engorged opening . . . a sight, were you to watch from start to finish (I did not, being asleep for some of it), that would be reminiscent of an infant’s toothless mouth devouring a velvet ribbon.

  I’ve performed tests, captured on audio files knocking and howling sounds. Laughter, perhaps? There appears to be some rudimentary intellect at work . . . not the hole itself, I can’t imagine that, but whatever lays in the dark space beyond.

  My tests are ongoing. I perform them in secrecy. Clayton would only meddle.

  We did visit Hugo recently, Clayton and I. We hadn’t heard from him in some time, other than a random banging that could’ve been Hugo bashing his fists on the tunnels. Clayton felt that he may have been roaming around while we slept—he claims to have seen shadows stretching across the walls where the tunnels bend out of sight.

  Hugo would not let us in. He is a fright. A gibbering ghoul. His mind has come unglued. He screamed at us through the porthole, refusing to unlock the hatch. He held up a piece of notebook paper that said: YOU ARE NOT WHO YOU SAY YOU ARE.

  Clayton has alerted topside operations. It may be best to have someone—perhaps Al, who Hugo trusts—come and take him away. He’s of no use to the mission now.

  Has Hugo encountered a hole, too?

  No, I don’t think so. The hole is meant for me and me alone.

  I took my ambrosia to the lab. The bees were very close to extinction; I’d swept up hundreds of carcasses. I introduced the lion’s share of the ambrosia into the sugar-water receptacle; my hope was that the unaffected specimens would ferry it back to the hive. I trapped a few other bees—the sick, baffled ones that buzzed aimlessly into the walls—dabbed their abdomens with red ink to identify them, and fed them ambrosia-fortified sugar water with a dropper.

  The footsteps. There they go again, pattering overhead as I write this.

  I see the shadows on the walls, too. Clayton is not alone in that.

  LUKE’S EYEBALLS ITCHED; his shoulders were tight.

  Westlake’s journal had developed a sinister momentum. The handwriting, which had started out neat and clinical, was starting to erode. Some of the pages were crumpled, as though Westlake had clenched his hand into a fist while writing.

  Most worryingly, it . . . it seemed to be speaking directly to Luke. A voice behind the printed words whispered softly into his ear. Fingers crawled up the back of his neck—Westlake’s scarified fingers racing ticklingly over his scalp . . .

  . . . what an idiotic notion.

  Nothing is idiotic now, he told himself. The worst mistake you can make is to think it’s idiotic.

  He could still hear Al down the tunnel, banging away. It held a rhythmic note, like the pump of a piston in a slow-running engine.

  Bang . . . bang . . . bang . . .

  His eyes snapped open. He’d let them slip shut, lulled by that banging, which matched the beat of his own heart. A shadow twisted across the wall where the tunnel bent. He watched the hatchway, thinking something—fingers, four small fingers, a boy’s small fingers—might wrap around the gray metal. When that didn’t happen, his eyes fell back upon the journal. The pages hooked his gaze, tugging insistently. Westlake’s voice—cold and raspy with death—said: You need to know, Lucas, because down here anything can happen. Anything at all.

  18.

  Science Day!

  This place repulses.

  There is nothing to nourish the soul. Nothing but man-made angles and inert materials. Nothing is cut from nature, holding the supple appeal of objects that God has touched. God’s finger doesn’t reach down this far.

  Today I wept while brushing my teeth. I wonder why I even do it now. I bought the toothbrush months ago, on a shopping trip with Hannah. She’d pirouetted down the aisles, flipping silly items into the cart. A piping bag, adult diapers . . . she thought it was hilarious when I’d take them out, sigh dramatically, and set them back on the shelves.

  The too
thbrush is old now, its bristles bent. But I bought it in a well-lit supermarket eight miles up and however-thousand miles distant, on a day when the sun shone brightly and I’d played foolish games with my daughter.

  And now I’m here, crouched in the loveless belly of this spider-station. Hannah is part of another world, one I have no grip on. And so I’d stared at my toothbrush with its sad dab of minty paste and I’d cried. The tears came effortlessly. Some days I cry without quite realizing it.

  The hole is growing. Days ago, it ate my microphone.

  Hungry, hungry hole.

  I hear voices. They are not made by anyone onboard the station.

  A bee stung me. On the arm. Who cares, right? You’re a scientist who works with bees, Westlake! Surely you’ve been stung before.

  And surely I have. But the pain was much sharper this time. The bee had a red-ink marking on its abdomen. I watched it fly away in the narcotized manner that all bees possess after they’ve stung—their guts are unraveling out of their bellies, which makes them fly wonky.

  I pursued it in a frenzy, knocked it down and stomped on it. Its body exploded under my boot with a satisfyingly gooey pop.

  There. Fucking thing. THERE YOU GO.

  I couldn’t find the stinger in my flesh. A terrifying thought came to me: it had burrowed into me. There was an inflamed red bump that itched awfully.

  I dressed it with ointment and a Band-Aid from the medical kit. I did not tell Clayton. We rarely speak. There is open hostility when we do. I believe he is spying on me and told him as much. Clayton labeled my accusation absurd—of course he would! Maybe it’s Hugo, he said; or maybe you’re losing it, Westlake. I nearly slugged him. I feel perpetually spied upon—eyes tiptoeing over my skin at all hours.

  As such, Clayton and I pass each other like submarines in the night. Haaaaa . . .

  Before our argument, I did run into Clayton in the main lab. I found him at the window. I, too, find myself staring, bewitched, over that carpet of marine snow. I envision it stretching out, lunarlike and lifeless, beyond the spotlights. The ambrosia drifts in far greater concentrations now. We’ve collected a good deal.

  Clayton’s aspect has changed. Gaunt, wan. Lack of sunlight, of course, but Clayton always seemed bizarrely luminous. I picture a huge insect under his overalls—a giant tick battened onto his back. Unbeknownst to him, this tick is sucking out his bodily juices. It’s growing, gaining strength while Clayton bows like a hunchback under its blood-bulged weight.

  “I haven’t been able to contact the surface for . . . a day,” he said somewhat falteringly. Neither of us are aware of time anymore. The minutes and hours and days blend, which inspires a certain gaiety of mind for men like us, who feel as though we’ve spent our adult lives in the shadow of a constantly ticking clock.

  “What’s happened?”

  “A storm of some sort,” he said. “Under the water. It’s interrupting the signal.”

  I took this in stride. Part of me was heartened. I was worried they might send a team down to round up Hugo. If so, they might snoop around my lab. I don’t want that.

  The ambrosia’s effect on the colony has been remarkable. Both hives are thriving. The drone can be heard outside the lab now; bees festoon the bench, the walls and roof.

  The question is—has the ambrosia cured the Disease, at least insofar as it manifests in honeybees? Cured it, or has it actually altered their basic cellular structure? Are they even bees anymore, as we commonly conceive them?

  The bastard bee that stung me . . . the itch is worsening. A painful, maddening sensation. I have not scratched it yet. I’m terrified to. The skin has swollen so badly that the Band-Aid has torn loose. A puffy, awful anthill throbs on my arm. The hole in its center is a deep and pestilent yellow.

  I will not scratch. I WILL NOT.

  Update: I scratched.

  Hah.

  Jul?

  Want to hear a story my mother told me? My mother was a Bible-basher. Bashy-bashy-bash that Bible, Ma! Ignorant dilettante scare-mongerer . . .

  This story wasn’t in any Bible. Don’t know where she got it. Her crazy-ass stepfather? Yes, so . . .

  Once there was a great exorcist. He saw demons in the waking world. They were everywhere. Perched on some poor fucker’s shoulder or wrapped around a sinner’s waist, its filthy hands down the man’s pants, inciting him to vice.

  Most of them were pests. Parasitic hellspawn who created havoc in the minds of weak men, leading them to cheat on their spouses, beat their kids, steal from their employers. But there were some very bad demons. They weren’t physically big, necessarily—one of the worst was no bigger than a fruit fly. It’d perch inside the ear of a victim, dripping poison into that person’s brain. The body of another was gauzy and fungoid. It wrapped around a man’s head like a cocoon—it looked like a tent caterpillar nest in an oak tree.

  Nobody could see them but the exorcist. He banished them. The same demons more than once, in some cases. And there was a place, my mom said, a nexus where they congregated. A deep, dark place. When the exorcist banished a demon from its host, it fled back to this spot. Sometimes the demon would remain down there a long time. It was difficult to get out, you see. The demons would swirl around, nipping and snarling, waiting for the opportunity to ascend to the human realm again.

  These demons killed the exorcist. Eventually, inevitably. He didn’t fling himself out a window like old Father Karras. Each encounter left scars on the exorcist—not physical, but psychic. These powerful demons hacked at the exorcist’s brain, taking swipes like with a tiny razor, each fight wrecking him a little more, warping his reasoning until he couldn’t fight them any longer. His body was found in an alley behind a cathedral where he’d fled seeking sanctuary, his face torn off by feral dogs.

  I think of my mother’s story now. That deep, dark place. If you had to hide something—if you were God, say, and could command it—if you wanted to hide the worst, most threatening things you could imagine . . . well, where better?

  Answer me that. Where . . . BETTER?

  Sunday Funday

  The hole is bigger. I could fit my fist through, if I tried.

  I confess that I want to try. Very badly, in fact.

  The bees cluster around it. Buzzing, investigating. I keep waving them away. The hole is dark—much darker than the surrounding metal.

  The hole shimmers like water, is black as the water, but is not water.

  We’d all be dead. Wouldn’t we?

  Are we dead yet?

  Monna—Monnaday?

  It is inside me.

  ???

  I dreamed of a boa constrictor eating a naked infant. The baby made no sound as it was consumed, although its eyes were round and wide with horror.

  I haven’t left the lab in . . . ?

  Time scallops down here. Have I said that already? Days, weeks, months, minutes, seconds. Everything is liquid and ever shifting.

  It’s safe in the lab. Nobody can see me. What’s happened to me.

  The bee sting has multiplied, despite my never getting stung again. Instead of one inflamed anthill, dozens now festoon my flesh. Like giant, pulsating zits. I’ve squeezed them, too, hoping for a gout of yellow pus and with it, some relief. But the skin beneath each hill is hard, calcified, and it hurts immensely just to touch them.

  My arms, legs, chest, stomach, buttocks—all covered with these inflamed hills. Fresh hills have appeared on my armpits, and recently my big toes. So far they have not appeared on the soles of my feet or my hands; if so, I fear I’ll be immobile. The merest brush with any obstruction brings forth blinding pain. My palms are unmarked as yet, too, meaning I can still write.

  I haven’t seen anyone for some time. Every so often a staccato knocking sound will pierce the drone of the bees, but I don’t know if it’s Clayton or Hugo or something or someone else.

  One knock for yes. Two for no.

  I have no use of Clayton or Hugo anyway. To hell with them. I have my study. />
  I left the lab only once. I cleared the massing bees from the porthole window and saw the main lab was empty. I dashed out. Not a single bee fled my lab. Once out, I realized there was nothing I wanted. I wasn’t hungry; I haven’t wanted to eat for a long time. I needed no equipment.

  My gaze fell upon the window. Darkness pressed against the glass, an insistent swirling. Shreds of ambrosia sucked over its surface like remoras.

  The urge struck: find something heavy—a crowbar was the object that sprang to mind—and smash the window until it splintered and the sea rushed in.

  I retreated to my lab. To my colony. It is monstrous. It has tripled, quadrupled in size. The bees carpet the walls and bench and ceiling—a humming, droning, fuzzy black-and-yellow carpet.

  They do nothing but collect and build. I have provided the material: three sacks of refinery sugar, slit open with a scalpel.

  The bees have abandoned their hives—they are building new structures.

  A beehive is a marvel of mathematics. A home of hexagonal cells, the sides of each cell meeting at precisely 120 degrees. The hexagon is the perfect shape for storing the most honey while using the least beeswax. Every honeybee is born with the knowledge of how to build a honeycomb. They instinctively know that hexagons are the building blocks of their homes.

  But these bees are building something else entirely.

  Two hanging cathedrals. They descend inverted from the ceiling on opposite ends of the lab. Each is baffling to behold; the human eye can’t stare at them for too long, in the same way one cannot stare into the sun. Strange and frightening edifices. One almost resembles a stalactite, with bizarre corkscrews spiraling off at unnatural angles. The other dwindles in a cochlear swirl, with sharp jutting appendages that hold the articulation of robotic limbs.

  The bees build their hives night and day. Honey is produced, but not harvested. The honey—dark and thick as motor oil—drips ceaselessly from each hive, forming sticky pools on the floor.

  The queens lay somewhere within. I hear them sometimes: an angry, commanding buzz that rises above the general hum.