Nick Cutter - The Deep

Someone or some thing, Luke thought irrationally.

“Something else happened as Westlake came up. Happened to him. He could only have done it to himself.”

Al’s fingers were steady on the vault’s handle, but a fragile muscle fluttered next to her eye.

“You go ahead and open it,” Luke said.

Without another word, she did so.

AT FIRST LUKE COULDN’T TELLwhat he was looking at. His eyes rejected it, as it didn’t fit any prior conceptions of the human form.

Dr. Westlake’s naked body was a swollen mass of scar tissue. His body was all scars. A ballooned, inflated parody of the human form.

It appeared as if Westlake had been wrapped in pink elastic bands. Some were thick as garter snakes, others thin as copper wires. Some fibrous as canvas rigging, others frail as onionskin. They lapped over in gruesome profusion, each one nurtured to a sickening, sensuous bulbousity. It seemed as if at any moment they might burst open and thin ribbons of flesh would spool forth, covering the old scars in layers that further obscured the body trapped inside.

Westlake’s frame was bent, each limb wrenched at an unnatural angle. The bends. Nitrogen bubbles had built up in the blood, snapping Westlake’s bones as they expanded.

Luke wanted to look away. Couldn’t.

Sweet Christ, his face . The scars were the worst there. Elsewhere they seemed to have been laid down haphazardly, but the ones on his face had a more considered appearance. They had been delivered with special care. His eyes were trapped inside swollen bulbs of flesh—if Luke were to touch them, he imagined they would feel like India rubber balls—each so huge that they projected from the wrecked tapestry of his face like plums. His lips had been sliced and had healed until the flesh knit together, upper lip wedded to bottom, fused into a thick band that curved upward in a grisly rictus. His nostrils had a feathered look, the flesh slit back in fragile petals that revealed candle-white sinus cavities.

“Shut it.” Luke’s voice was a frail whisper. “Please.”

Al did so. Luke jackknifed at the waist, hands braced on his knees.

“How…?”

“I wish I had any idea,” Al said softly. “We found a scalpel in the sub. Its blade was gouged up, dull as a butter knife. We figure it’d been used to cut through flesh, tendon, cartilage. Eventually it went dull on the bone.”

“It’s not possible, Al. I mean, that kind of trauma… how long does it take to surface?”

“Eight or nine hours usually. Westlake came faster, which is why he got the bends. He decompressed too fast. Truth is, we were fully expecting that it wouldn’t be pretty. But no way could we have imagined this.”

“He did this to himself?”

“Who else? The submarine was empty.”

Totally empty? Luke wondered. What if Westlake had been carrying that goo?

“We didn’t find any ambrosia,” Al said before Luke could ask. “We tore the sub apart and found not a trace of the stuff. Just the scalpel, Westlake’s body, and one more thing.”

“What was that?”

“Luke,” Al said carefully, “Felz showed you the mouse video, right? You see what that stuff can do. A godsend? I can see that. But I can see other things, too.”

She didn’t need to finish. Luke had the same vision. Westlake rising up from Challenger Deep, hacking into himself—and every time he cut himself, he healed so fast that it was almost immediate. Luke pictured an endless zipper: Westlake’s flesh opening, only to close a few moments after the scalpel slit it, leaving very little blood and a ragged scar. Westlake could have sliced himself for hours, reducing himself in some exquisite way, laughing or shrieking or crying or who-knows-what, mindlessly—or mindfully ?—layering scar over scar until… what? How did he die? Had the ambrosia deserted him? Evanesced , as Felz said?

Luke closed his eyes. The absolute worst of all was the expression frozen on Westlake’s face. Luke was quite certain he died smiling.

“What else, Al? What was inside the submersible?”

She set a hand on Luke’s shoulder. Luke didn’t realize how badly he’d been shaking. It had nothing to do with how cold the room felt.

DR. FELZ WASN’T THEREwhen they returned to the deck of the Hesperus . They got into the cart, both of them sitting on the rear seat.

“Go,” Al told the driver.

Luke couldn’t inhale enough air to inflate his lungs. He couldn’t unsee Dr. Westlake’s horrible, twisted body. For the first time, doubt seeped into Luke’s mind. Why did he have to go down, anyway? He wasn’t saying he wouldn’t , but why him? He hadn’t asked this most elementary question when the phone had woken him two days ago. He’d flown to Guam unquestioningly, as many people might when their government made the request. He paid his taxes and renewed his license and never caught more fish than his limit, too. He wanted to help, to do something good, just as Leo Bathgate did. Governments approved of citizens like Luke Nelson.

Plus there was no one on the other side of his bed to tell Luke not to go. And the room down the hall that his son had once slept in was empty, too.

“Why me?” he said. “Clayton’s my brother, but we aren’t close. I don’t have any specific skills that might help you out down there.”

“We’ll make a motley pair then, won’t we?” said Al. “What you’re asking, I take it, is why don’t we send down a crew of Special Forces badasses and put things right? We considered it. Dismissed it. First, that current ring made it dangerous to get down until recently. Second, the two men still down there—your brother and Dr. Toy—wield the whip hand now. They’re inside, we’re outside. I’ll give you a full debriefing later, but suffice it to say, the Trieste is fragile. All it takes is one screwdriver—pierce any wall just a fraction and it’s pancake city. So if we head down cocked and locked, well, what do we stand to lose if things go sideways? Everything. Absolutely everything.”

“That’s a cheerful thought. Jesus.”

They passed down a row of low, black, flat-sided buildings connected by linked walkways; they made Luke feel like he was touring a medium-security prison.

“But why you ?” Al said. “Good question. You’re as green at deep dives as I am at neutering spaniels, right? The main reason, Luke, is that your brother asked for you.”

“Get out of here.”

She pulled an iPhone from her pocket and thumb-shuffled until she found what she was looking for. “This came through fifty hours ago. You received a call in Iowa City shortly thereafter. Sound file, no video. It stands as our last contact with your brother. We were debating whether to act on it, but the Westlake situation forced our hand.”

She pressed play . Clayton’s voice floated out of the speaker.

“Come home, Lucas. Come down, Lucas. We need you, Lucas. Come home.”

Clayton’s flat, monotone cadence was rendered tinny by the recording. Clayton sounded as if he was asleep; his voice was syrupy and water-warped, like a 45 rpm record playing at a relaxed 33 rpm. That could be a problem with the transmission itself, which had to carry through eight miles of water. Clayton repeated himself again before the message cut out abruptly.

“We need you, Lucas. Come ho—”

“It took a while to figure out who Lucas was,” said Al. “Your brother doesn’t speak about his family. We figured it could’ve been a research associate, a friend, a lover even. Our intel people dug around a bit and figured he must’ve been talking about you.”