Nick Cutter - The Deep

The hatch closed with a satisfying thunk —the sound of a luxury car door slamming shut. A gassy hiss was followed by a volley of pressurized tinks!

Al said: “It’s a high-pressure vacuum, drawing out every bit of excess air. Then the seal will engage.”

A workman appeared in the porthole window. Luke couldn’t hear anything outside now. The sub must be noise-proof. The man’s hands clutched one of those high-tech caulking guns; a puffy crust of foam began to encircle the window.

“They’re foaming the seals,” said Al. “The entire vessel will get a coating, except for the bank of high-intensity spotlights running down each side. You okay?”

“Yeah,” Luke said. “Just… this is really happening.”

“Try to relax. I’m kicking on the air recycler.”

Cool air pumped around Luke’s feet from pinhole vents. It had the same chemical tang that puffed from the vault containing Westlake. Luke was worried that his lungs would lock up, refusing to inhale the foul stuff.

The crane lifted the sub and pinioned it over the water.

“Buckle up,” Al said. “The crane operator’s got a heavy hand.”

As soon as Luke’s belt clicked, they dropped. His stomach leapt as it would on a roller coaster. They hammered the sea’s surface. Water climbed the porthole. Luke’s breath came in shallow gulps.

Breathe , he chided himself. You’re safe, totally safe.

His final surface sight was of a new moon hovering in its eastern orbit: a waxen ball whose light plated the slack darkness of the sea.

Then they slipped under and were gone.

AL FLICKED SWITCHESand twisted knobs. Her hand entered Luke’s peripheral vision, toggling a joystick near his ear.

“This tub’s got three motors, but they’re strictly for stabilization and maneuvering,” she said. “We’re carrying three thousand pounds of lead weights. We just drop . When we want to surface, we’ll start shedding those lead plates bit by bit.”

“How fast are we falling?”

“About thirteen hundred meters per hour. I’ll increase that as the currents subside. Once we enter the Mariana Trench, three miles down, there’s no current at all. Then we’ll go faster—the proverbial hot knife through butter.”

Some part of the vessel whined. Al made a minute adjustment, and the unpleasant noise stopped. Air bubbles scrolled around the window, delicate as those in a glass of champagne. The darkness was as absolute as the bottom of a mine shaft.

Luke said, “Christ, that’s desolate.”

“That’s the sea at night,” Al said, laughing a little uneasily. “Don’t you worry, it’ll get even darker. You’ve never seen the kind of dark we’re gonna encounter.”

They were already beyond the point of the deepest free-dive; Luke figured it wouldn’t be long before they passed the point of the deepest scuba dive. After that they’d reach the depth where oxygen toxicity set in: the nitrogen levels change and the air in a scuba diver’s tank turns poisonous. Finally, they’d enter the lung-splintering depths where humans simply didn’t belong.

A fizzy pop shot through Luke’s veins. He felt a subtle expansion between his joints. It wasn’t painful—more like being tickled inside his bones.

Al modified their trajectory. The submarine stabilized.

“Nitrogen buildup. You feel it? We’ll hang out here a minute,” she said. “We’re in the ‘Midnight Zone,’ by the way. Complete darkness. We’ll stop again at twenty-five hundred meters—the ‘Abyssal Zone.’”

The tickle subsided. The sea was a solid wall of black through the porthole. There was nothing out there. The bleakness crawled inside Luke’s skull.

“Check it out,” Al said. “Light show coming off your starboard side in five, four, three, two—”

It started as tiny, vibrantly glowing specks. They accumulated slowly, drifting on the current. A hundred became a thousand became a numberless quantity. A swarm of neon creatures a hundred feet wide, giving a sense of depth to the ocean in the same way the sweep of a flashlight will reveal a huge cave.

Some were small as grains of sand; others were the size of no-see-ums; a precious few were the size of summer fireflies. They glowed warmest amber. Their bodies brightened and dimmed like embers in a fire.

“Phytoplankton,” Al said. “They’re bioluminescent. You’ll see more of this kind of thing the deeper we go. Until we get too deep… then you won’t see a damn thing.”

The plankton flurried like flakes of snow. Just like the night Luke met Abby.

In that moment, Luke was back in Iowa City with his ex-wife—except she wasn’t even his wife then. She was twenty-two-year-old Abigail Jeffries of Chicago, Illinois. He met her at an intra-faculty mixer for seniors at the U of I. It happened that very night. Luke fell madly in love with Abby Jeffries. All parts of her, even the parts that remained unknown to him then.

In time he’d come to love her chipped canine tooth, her snaggletooth as she called it, which she never bothered to get capped under the belief that a face without flaws was a face lacking character. He loved her habit of squeaking after she sneezed. He loved the way her skin sparkled after sex. He loved everything about her, indiscriminately.

That first night they left the mixer and hit a bar. When everyone got kicked out at last call, they’d staggered happily down East Jefferson hand in hand. Snow had been falling, big fat flakes swarming out of the sky like the plankton was doing right now…

The glowing flakes scattered as a monolithic shape passed by the Challenger . Luke glimpsed a pitted wall of blue-gray flesh. For a heart-stopping instant, he saw an eye the size of a dinner plate, a ring of shocking white banding a black pupil.

The Challenger rocked; the displacement of water felt roughly akin to a tractor-trailer flying past his car on the highway.

“Sperm whale,” Al said. “It’s the only creature that big that could exist down here. I’ve never spotted one this low.”

Al cut the motors. The descent continued.

Luke’s back was beginning to ache.

“Can I stand up?”

“Go right ahead.”

Luke managed to stretch a bit, taking the pressure off his hips.

He watched Al work. She piloted the Challenger with easy authority—it reminded Luke of observing an experienced veterinarian perform routine surgery. There was an air of practiced boredom to the way Al’s hands moved over the controls.

“You don’t seem too concerned about all this,” Luke said.

“If you’re talking about the dive, I’m okay,” she said. “I brought your brother and the others down. Supplies and food and scientific doodads after that, before the drones were operational. Hell, on my last descent I brought a poster of Albert Einstein. I’m a glorified delivery girl.

“The thing is—and I’m sorry if this doesn’t make you feel any better—at a certain depth, it doesn’t matter. Where we’re going, the pressure per square foot is the equivalent of twenty-seven jumbo jets. If we spring a pinhole leak, the water will come through with enough force to cut through three feet of solid steel. It’d slice us apart like flying Ginsu knives. This sub will crumple. It’ll happen in a fraction of a heartbeat. Imagine being crushed between panes of extrathick glass traveling toward impact at the speed of sound.” She thwapped her hands. “We’re talking flesh pâté. Say good night, Gracie.”

“Comforting image, that.”

Al exhaled, jiggling a joystick using a few deft strokes.

“Listen, Luke—dying that way, crushed in the blink of an eye… there are worse ways to go down here. We’ve only lost two men so far. But we’ve lost a bunch of drones and…” She bit down, her teeth making an audible click . “You ever hear the term short , Doc?”