Nick Cutter - The Deep

“But Clayton doesn’t need me. He doesn’t need anyone. He never has.”

Except for those nights when the sleep terrors descended on him , he thought. The nights when you’d climb into bed with him until he settled down. But that was years ago, when they were only boys.

Yet Clayton had been saying We need you . We. WE. We who?

“Think of him as our pampered rock star whose rider calls for a big bowl of M&M’s, only the red ones,” said Al. “In this case, he’s asking for his brother. We give him what he wants—making every effort to preserve your safety, of course.”

“Why would he want me down there?”

Al cocked her head. “You put people’s minds and bodies under that kind of pressure… Things snap, right? We want to do everything possible to avoid that snap.”

“So that’s what I am, then? A bandage?”

“Think of yourself more as a key.”

Luke couldn’t imagine his brother needing a bandage, anyway. He was armor plated, titanium coated. But that voice… it hadn’t sounded entirely like Clayton. Granted, it had been years since they’d last spoken, but still, something was off about it. The difference wasn’t in the words themselves or the pitch of his voice—it lurked somewhere behind the obvious, sly and scuttling like rats in the walls.

Come home, Lucas. Come home come home come home…

“That’s not my home down there,” he said.

Al said: “It’s nobody’s home. Trust me.”

Two rights, a left, and they came to another dry dock. Three subs were cradled in hammocks. The numbers 2, 3, and 1 lay on their flanks. A workman was filling a seam in one of them with foam that pumped from a sophisticated caulking gun.

“That’s the secret ingredient,” Al told Luke. “Some kind of superfoam that expands or compresses depending on pressure. It can withstand fifty tons per square inch. The Trieste is held together with the stuff. Cost a billion-plus to develop, but it’s worth every dime.”

Luke followed Al across the tarmac. It was like being on the deck of an aircraft carrier—the sky was wide and trackless, the sun beating down from a cloudless sky. It was so hot that the patching tar had softened; it clung to the treads of their boots like Black Jack chewing gum.

Another sub was partially obscured by a pile of pallets; all Luke saw was its back end canted over the water. It sat in moody isolation, its stocky shape banded by yellow tape—the kind that ringed a crime scene.

“The MPs are still investigating,” Al said. “It seems worthless.” She laughed without mirth. “Like investigating a haunting or something.”

The Challenger 4 rounded into view. Luke’s lips curled in an instinctive expression of distaste.

It looked no different than the sub he’d seen earlier, and yet it repelled his gaze. There was something profoundly awful about it. He sensed that Al felt the same way about it—and he imagined it unnerved her just as it did him, because rational minds objected to unreasoned fear.

Perhaps it was because it had traveled so far below the sun’s reach. The pressure had warped it, giving its shape a madman’s hint of those depths. Or perhaps it was what happened within it—in Luke’s head, the sight of it melded with that of Westlake’s tortured corpse. The vessel was hateful in some way he could not accurately distill.

Al approached it, and Luke reluctantly followed. An awful coldness wept off the sub’s metal. Had it carried up that icy chill from the Challenger Deep itself?

Al wrenched the hatch wheel. The muscles trembled up her arms, as if a subconscious part of her rebelled at the act.

The hatch was circular, slightly smaller than a manhole cover, a solid foot of steel. Al let it clunk against the hull.

A smell wafted out. Luke had never inhaled its equal. Raw, adrenal, and profoundly human.

The stink of insanity, Edie, sharp as malt vinegar , as his mother once said.

Luke bent to peer inside. Several deflated bladders dangled down inside the cabin; he could only suppose that they were the equivalent of nautical air bags.

What he didn’t see yet was blood, which was incredible considering what had occurred inside. Maybe the MPs had swabbed it out already?

“You’re gonna need to crane your neck,” he heard Al say. “Look higher.”

He crouched, neck twisted at an uncomfortable angle. Something was written on the far wall. Rust-colored scratches. Messy, frantic.

He dipped lower, aware of the blood-beat in his ears. The scratches resolved themselves into… letters?

And that rusty discoloration.

Blood. There it was. Dried blood.

Letters, but he could make out only their undersides. The bulbous lower swoop of a C ; the jagged horizontal slash of an E .

Luke knelt until his knees hit the deck. It was the only way to contort his head enough to see what had been written inside.

Five words. All written in a crazed, spiky scrawl—written in the blood that had momentarily gushed from Westlake’s innumerable wounds. Five words in one string, seven in the other.

Crystals of ice gathered up Luke’s spine. The words were grotesque in the same way Westlake’s body had been: the letters were swollen and lewd, the blood dried thickly on their outer curves like paint slopped heavily on a fence slat. More unsettlingly, those words recalled Clayton’s voice, calling out to Luke from the icy depths of the sea.

We need you, Lucas. Come home.

THE EVENING DARKhung against a paling sky. Alice had left Luke to his own devices while she made the final preparations for their descent.

It seemed absurd: less than an hour from now, Luke would be inside a cramped sub, free-falling eight miles down through the Pacific. But then, was it absurd? The circumstances of his life made him the perfect candidate, if you looked closely.

Luke was a divorced veterinarian. He spayed calicos and repaired budgies’ split beaks. He still lived in the modest home he and his wife once shared with their son, not far from the university campus. On quiet Saturdays in September he could hear the roar from Kinnick Stadium.

His son, Zachary Henry Nelson, had vanished seven years ago. He had never been found. His bedroom was unchanged: the baseball motif wallpaper, dusty toys shoved underneath the bed. All waiting for him when he got back.

Luke’s life had stopped, fundamentally stopped , on a cool autumn evening seven years ago. As pitiful as it may be, he had no reason not to be here, accepting the task set before him. It gave his life a small but vital sense of purpose.

He sat on the edge of the Hesperus , his feet dipped in the sea. The water held cascading shades: a pure aquamarine deepening to more enveloping blues. A school of orange-and-pearl fish made lively darts at an algae-slick chain. The fish had curved, sickle-shaped jaws. They looked predatory, like midget piranhas.

Those fish would’ve scared Zach. There was a time in the boy’s life when he’d been scared of everything . Luke recalled how, at five, Zach (like many five-year-olds) had become convinced that a monster lurked in his closet. Luke reacted by flinging Zach’s closet door open and rattling the coat hangers.

“See, Zachy? No monster. You’re perfectly safe, I promise. Monsters aren’t real. They’re just figments of your imagination.”