The Deep

by Nick Cutter

  “You can’t go inside the station,” he said, his breath knocking hollowly in his lungs. “It’s . . . it’s death in there.”

  She nodded—a bit oddly, he noted, her chin dipping to touch her chest like a marionette in the hands of a clumsy puppeteer.

  “You bet, Doc. We’re getting out of here. Clear seas above. We’re gonna bob right up like a cork. We’ll be eating broiled snapper al fresco in a few hours. You just sit tight, okay?”

  Luke nodded, puppyish in his desire to please her. He’d sit tight as a drum, he’d be quiet as a church mouse oh yes indeedy, everything would be just right as rain, neato torpedo as Zach used to say, wowee zowee and neato torpedo; Luke would do any goddamn fucking thing Alice wanted as long as she—

  “Huh,” she said in obvious puzzlement.

  “What is it?”

  She flicked a switch. A relay kicked over, shuddering the hull. The lights dimmed, then brightened again.

  Alice glanced down at him. She looked different.

  Her dark hair was thinner, with kinked gray threads shot through it. She smiled. Luke recoiled. Her teeth looked all wrong in her mouth, yellowed and rotten like shoepeg corn.

  “Everything’s fine,” she said in a queer singsong. “Fine as cherry wine.”

  She started whistling a familiar tune. Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.

  There was an unbuckling sensation inside Luke’s head, the feel of a hasp popping under extreme duress. With it came relief of a sort. His brain smoothed out, achieving a state of total unconcern. It felt good. Very good indeed.

  “You’re dead, Alice,” he said, his voice itself dead as a dial tone.

  The whistling stopped. In its place came a sucking, whispering exhale.

  “You’re dead, Al, and I’m very sorry. I wish . . . I wish you were here. I wish that so, so much. But you’re not. This is just another game.”

  “A game, a game, a game . . .”

  Alice’s voice had changed, too. Higher, reedier. A child’s voice.

  “. . . all the world’s a game . . .”

  Something slammed into the Challenger, rocking Luke in his seat. An alarm pealed; the emergency lights kicked on, bathing him in their blood-red glow.

  “Oh my child,” that voice said, “the game is only just beginning.”

  He looked up, unable to help himself. Alice’s eyes were melting.

  They puddled in her sockets as she stared down at him, smiling through her rotted mouth. The corneas liquefied to a jet-black fluid that flowed upward against gravity, over her forehead and hair, fanning out, crawling over the insides of the Challenger.

  “It’s fun, Daddy,” she said in perfect mimicry of Zachary’s voice. “The Fig Men have the very best games. Oh, it’s just the most fun you can possibly imagine.”

  The blackness unraveled from her eyes, black scarves fluttering over the submarine’s interior, coating the consoles and blotting out the lights. The Challenger rocked again, the metal squealing—please, Luke thought, please rupture—as something hammered at the hatchway, hard staccato beats like an enormous fist rapping on a door. Alice was laughing now, howling while the black fluid poured from her eye sockets and crept down the walls toward him.

  The power cut out. The Challenger plunged into total darkness.

  A voice spoke right next to Luke’s ear.

  “I’m so happy, Daddy. You’ve come home.”

  1.

  LIGHT. HIGH ABOVE HIM.

  Beautiful golden light.

  Luke stretched toward it. He was underwater. The light came from the sun. It shone upon the surface of the water, a plate of mellow gold.

  He kicked, surging toward it. His legs were strong, his strokes confident. A dark square rested atop the water. It was a floating dock. A rope trailed down from it. Thick nautical gauge, clung with algae. It hung down through the water and disappeared into the darkness below.

  His eyes hugged that darkness for a moment. Things thrashed and tilted down there, a few inches past the point where the light went bad.

  He looked away. Looked up.

  Two shapes jutted from that dark square. Shoulders, heads. Instinctively, he knew it was Abby and Zachary. The smaller shape dipped his hand into the water. The tips of his fingers sent out delicate ripples.

  Luke thought: Don’t touch the water, Zach. Don’t give yourself over to it, ever.

  His body speared toward them. His lungs burned. It felt good, necessary. You had to suffer to reach those you loved. To suffer was to care.

  An emotion bigger than joy, bigger than relief, bigger than hope ripped through his chest: bigger because it was all these emotions, concentrated and magnified.

  He arrowed upward. He was moments—a mere heartbeat—from breaking the surface.

  Their faces. He could remember their faces again. Soon he’d touch them, hug them both, never leave their sides, not for a moment. Not for anything or anyone.

  His hand stretched upward, fingers straining toward the surface—

  2.

  —LUKE SNAPPED AWAKE in the dark. Inside the Challenger.

  Calling his son’s name.

  How much time had gone by? He didn’t care. Something had broken inside his head. He lacked the ability to properly acknowledge this fact. His mind could no longer process the scale of its own ruin.

  He laughed. A cold, empty note. It dissolved into a hiccuping cough and petered out in a prolonged moan. He sat in the silence. Alone.

  A voice.

  “Daddy . . . Daddy . . .”

  Luke stirred. Sat up straight.

  “Daddy, where are you . . . ?”

  The voice came from outside the Challenger. Inside the Trieste.

  “I’m scared, Daddy . . .”

  Luke strained toward that voice. His son was inside the station. Zachary was cold and lost. And he needed his father.

  Luke crawled to the lip of the porthole. A chill crept over his flesh.

  “Daddy, please . . .”

  He went. Unthinkingly, he went.

  The storage tunnel was lit with an alien glow. The generator still partially hid the hole that had consumed Clayton, but its surface was placid now.

  “Daddy!”

  Luke broke into a run. He flashed around the gooseneck and spotted Zach in the hatchway wearing his favorite PJs, the ones with the fire trucks and police cars.

  “Zachary!”

  His son turned and fled. A spike of ice penetrated Luke’s chest. Was Zach scared of him? For God’s sake, he wasn’t the monster here. He was desperately trying to protect him from the monsters. He wanted to be a good father. The Human Shield. It was all he’d ever wanted.

  He followed Zach toward the main lab. The Trieste looked different. The walls were rusted and dull. A thick layer of dust had settled over everything.

  He glanced down. Hey! LB was there, trotting at his side. His heart swelled to see her . . . until he looked a little closer.

  “I thought you were dead, girl,” Luke said.

  LB’s eyes were two plugs of midnight stuffed into her sockets. Her jowls sagged and her fur was bone-white and hoary, like ancient corn silk. She opened her jaws in a canine grin; the inside of her mouth was a cottony white, the blood all leeched away. Her teeth had rotted to nothing, gums drooping inward.

  Nope, boss. I’m not dead. Wish I was some days, but what are you gonna do?

  Luke smiled sadly. “You look . . . you look real old, girl.”

  LB chuffed. It sounded painful, her insides rattling.

  Well, time works differently down here, boss. Sometimes I feel like I’ve lived a thousand lifetimes . . . it’s funny. The pain is a constant. Sometimes it’s so much that I can’t stand it. I bite at myself, tear my skin off, but I can never quite die. Like I said, funny. But to hurt is to love, right?

  “You bet,” Luke said companionably. “That’s just about the size of it.”

  He leaned down to pet her. LB bit him. It didn’t hurt. She had no teeth. But he could
tell that she wanted to hurt him—she wanted to hurt him real bad. He almost wished he could grant her that wish. He pulled his hand gently from her mouth.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t think I can be hurt anymore.”

  She chuffed again. You can’t blame a dog for trying, Doc.

  He reached the crawl-through chute. LB didn’t follow him through. He caught sight of Zach on the other side. His arms projected from his pajama sleeves as if they’d been pulled, the bones broken, the flesh stretched like gruesome taffy.

  Zach’s hands were very big indeed. His fingers trailed down and down, these long twitchy wires that, for all their gauntness, looked incredibly strong.

  His son’s face broke into a smile. Not a particularly nice one, Luke had to admit. He’d certainly never taught the boy to smile that way.

  Mind your manners, kiddo.

  Zachary lifted one arm. His index finger curled invitingly.

  My son, my son, what long fingers you have . . .

  All the better to beckon you with, Father . . .

  Luke followed Zach, but more reluctantly now. The ceiling lowered. He had to duck. He breathed shallowly, drawing the curious scent of the station into his lungs. He stepped over something that looked very much like a human rib cage. The ceiling abruptly rose to an apex he could no longer chart. He turned another corner, and his son was waiting no more than five feet away.

  Luke took an instinctive step back.

  Zach’s pajamas were torn and moldering, the clothes of a disinterred corpse. His hair was gone. His scalp was bare and frighteningly wrinkled, summoning images of a living apple doll.

  His fingers were enormous. Four dead snakes attached to his palms, their tips dangling to the floor. His face had stretched, too, becoming vulpine and weird. The flesh around his eyes sagged: the eyes of a sick beagle, the corneas jaundiced and incalculably ancient.

  His mouth was overstuffed with teeth—they jutted outward, slicing his lips and pushing them apart.

  My son, my son, what big teeth you have . . .

  All the better to bite you with, Daddy . . .

  Zachary thrust his chin forward, hurling bursts of laughter at him. Spittle jetted between his teeth to leave wet spots on Luke’s overalls.

  Luke held his arms out. “Zachary, please.”

  His son coyly turned away. Shapes thrashed and fretted, half glimpsed, as if his face had given birth to a nest of snakes.

  The tunnel plunged into darkness. When the lights came on again, Zach was gone.

  3.

  LUKE WALKED AIMLESSLY.

  Sometimes he laughed. Other times he wept. He made no conscious distinction between the two anymore.

  The tunnels split and meandered. His footsteps echoed into silence. The pressure welted down on him. The children no longer raced overhead. Perhaps they’d lost interest or had been scared away.

  The tunnel bellied into an alcove. The walls collapsed inward to create a perfect pocket of dark. Luke squinted until he saw what lay inside that darkness. A leaden wash of dread spread over his groin; he felt a sudden, dreadful urge to pee.

  The Tickle Trunk rested in the alcove. The clowns on its lid—Pit-Pat and Floppsy and the rest—leered and jested, their tongues flicking over teeth the color of old bone.

  Hello, Lukey-loo! So wonderful to see you!

  The latch sprung open. Luke took a step back, but the walls had pushed in all around him. There was nowhere to go. The lid creaked open. The air filled with tinny notes, the sort that play when you opened a music box.

  Tinka-tink-teeeee-ta-tinka-tink-teeeeee . . .

  A flesh-colored bowling ball spun around and around inside the trunk . . . no, not a ball. Hugo Toy’s severed, split-open head. It lay awkwardly on its side, gummy strings of blood vessels and nerve endings trailing from the stump of its raggedly hacked neck. The flesh had been peeled off his face, making his eyes look very big and round indeed. The head revolved in a slow circle, much like a ballerina pirouetting inside its music box.

  “I can hear the muh-music in my head.” Dr. Toy smiled. Flecks of brain shone on the flayed sinew of his cheeks. “It never ends, Lucas. Nuh-nuh-never, ever . . .”

  The Tickle Trunk shut. Luke could still hear those cold, jangling notes. The walls exhaled again. He left the alcove behind. In time, he rounded back into the main lab. It was empty. He glanced at Westlake’s lab. Alice’s face was framed in the porthole.

  “Oh hello, Al.”

  Hiya, Doc.

  Bees squirmed in and out of Alice’s eyes.

  “You don’t look so hot.”

  She opened her mouth and bees poured out, coiling around her neck in a yellow-and-black noose.

  I’ve seen better days, Doc.

  He turned away. He saw something beneath the lab bench. Had it been there all along? How had he not seen it before?

  He set his shoulder to the bench. Despite its size, it slid easily.

  There was a door in the floor. Solid wood with a ringbolt. The sort of door you’d find in old cabins and farmhouses, leading down to the . . .

  —basement—

  . . . root cellar.

  The wood was warm and faintly pulsating. The skin of a slumbering elephant.

  Luke gripped the bolt and pulled. Narrow stone steps sawed down.

  “. . . Daddy! . . .”

  Zach’s voice quivered up out of the dark, strained and fearful.

  “The Fig Men, Daddy!”

  “They’re only figments,” Luke croaked. “Figments of your imagination. They can’t hurt you if you don’t believe in them.”

  Silence. Then: thick, chortling laughter. The laughter of the Fig Men? The hairs stiffened on Luke’s arms. His son was down there somewhere. And he needed his father.

  The steps were worn smooth, as if subject to much traffic; the stone wept beads of moisture like the rock in a cave. Luke’s feet fit perfectly—the steps could have been built for him specifically. They carried him down under the lab to the bottommost place on earth. The true basement of the world.

  Darkness slipped up his calves and knees in sly tendrils. It coated his chest and filmed his eyes. Somewhere above—a few feet; a million miles—the wooden door slipped softly shut.

  He could see here in the dark. Not well, but enough to navigate by. Luke got the sense he was on an unsupported stairway spiraling down; if he slipped he’d fall forever, never hitting anything . . .

  . . . or perhaps something would catch him eventually.

  The air grew thicker. He inhaled the scent of ancient earth. He was beneath all things now. Beneath every pure element in life, beneath hope and joy and perhaps even love. None of that could touch him here.

  A rock wall materialized to his left. It ran sheer beneath his fingertips, as cold and featureless as iced steel. He heard a sharp thunk somewhere below. It sounded a little like a door sliding open.

  He followed the stairs until the rock vanished under his fingertips. He stared at the spot where it had been with dull shock.

  “Hello, Lucas.”

  Clayton was curled into a box carved out of the rock. A perfect square cut into the sheer rock face, barely big enough to hold his body. Luke stifled the moan that rose up in his throat. His brother was naked and skinnier than any human being should possibly be. A living skeleton. His joints bulged. His head was nothing but a skull covered in latex-thin skin. He was folded into the rock-box in a cross-legged swami pose, his head bowed to fit.

  “How . . . how long have you been here?” Luke whispered.

  Clayton cocked his terrible fleshless head, considering his brother’s question.

  “I can’t say exactly,” he said. “How long is forever?”

  Clayton’s hands fussed over his caved-in stomach. His fingers, tipped with sharp black nails, sunk into his belly. The flesh ripped with sickening ease. He tore and gouged at himself. The thinnest hint of a smile painted his lips.

  “Oh, Clay, really, I wish you wouldn’t . . .”

 
; Clayton’s innards spilled into his lap. They were chalky and dry, like sausage links coated in flour. He rummaged through the knotted loops, selecting the finest portion and raising it to his mouth. It made the lovely snap of a good Coney Island hot dog when he bit into it. Fine bluish powder spurted out. Robin’s egg blue: same color as the chemical inside the pot of tree killer.

  Clayton chewed thoughtfully, absorbed in the act. His lips were stained dark blue, like a child who’d eaten too many grape Popsicles.

  “I really shouldn’t,” he said shamefacedly, “but honestly, I can’t help myself.”

  He turned away, embarrassed. Luke was filled with an ineffable despair; he reached toward his brother—then the rocks slid over him in a solid sheet, shutting Clayton back inside his tiny box. The wall was solid again: not a seam, not a mark.

  He continued down until the stairway abruptly ended. Luke stumbled the way a man does when misjudging the number of steps in a darkened house, his arms outflung.

  The ground was spongy. He got the sense of standing atop a pair of lungs taking the shallowest breaths.

  Zachary was there. Luke saw him clearly. He looked the way Luke remembered him. His hands and fingers proportional again. Luke beheld the boy he and his wife had raised in a cheery sunlit house in Iowa. The boy who still held his plastic cups with both hands when he drank cherry Kool-Aid, which left a crimson mustache above his lip. The boy who would nestle his chin into the swell of his father’s throat at bedtime—the groove so perfect, two bodies locking together in flawless synchronicity—and whisper: I love you more than ice cream and pizza.

  It’s very nice to be loved, Luke thought. Is there anything nicer in life?

  He opened his arms. “Zachary. Please.”

  The space behind Zachary swelled with light. The darkness blew away; beyond that lay a new emptiness, illuminated by an aquifer of sickly light. A pair of arms filled that emptiness. Enormous, world swallowing. Flabby and wrinkled, sallow flesh draping the bones like proofing dough. Ghastly arms ending in huge, cruel hands. Thick knuckled, each finger curled into a sickle.

  Familiar hands. Those of his mother.