Nick Cutter - The Deep

Luke wiped the bloody tear on his overalls. “That will take some getting used to.”

They waited for those dreadful tinks! to resume. When they didn’t, Luke’s heartbeat settled into its normal rhythm. Al jimmied the controls and got the Challenger dropping again at a more leisurely rate. Water shushed against the hull, causing the foam to issue splintery popping sounds. Luke blinked and swiped a finger under his eye. A watery rill of blood tracked across his fingertip, warm and—

SWACK!

Luke jolted in his seat. Something entirely different was stuck to the glass now. A band of albino tissue, shockingly thick.

“What the—” Al said as the Challenger juddered. “Oh, are you shitting me?”

The band thinned out as it flexed across the glass. Eight inches across, with a vein running under its skin that was so black it could’ve been filled with ink. Studded all along it were disks—they reminded Luke of the plastic suction cups you’d use to stick sun-catchers to your kitchen windows.

“It’s a giant squid,” Al said, although Luke somehow knew that already. “I didn’t think we’d encounter one this far down.”

The Challenger rattled. An alarm shrilled.

“For the love of fuck!” said Al, the words exiting her mouth with a brittle snip. She flicked a switch and the vessel went dark.

Luke’s lungs locked up as an icy ball of terror crystallized in his chest. It was as if the sea itself had slid inside the Challenger , filling his eyes and throat and brain.

The squid’s tentacle sluuurp ed across the glass. A shape shot out— THACK! —snapping violently. It was the squid’s beak, which resembled that of an enormous parrot.

THACK! —harder this time.

Luke waited for the glass to crack and his life to end.

The lights flicked on.

“I thought it might leave us alone if we went dark,” Al said in a low voice. “Let’s try the opposite.”

She hit the spotlights. They didn’t illuminate much, despite their incredible intensity—a pall of sickly light picked up a patina of deep-sea sediment that swirled like dust in an enormous room.

The squid immediately detached and vanished with one convulsive flex. Luke got a split-second sense of its size: stunningly long, torsional and many limbed, whipping into the darkness like a bullet train speeding into a tunnel.

“Hold on,” Al said, and again they dropped.

They seemed to be falling even faster—the depth gauge near Luke’s head spun wildly, around and around like a cartoon clock. Al was busy with the readouts; thankfully, it appeared neither the squid nor viperfish had dealt the Challenger a terminal blow.

Shock-sweat had broken out all over Luke’s body. Tiny beads of moisture clung to the hull, too.

“The sub’s sweating,” he said.

“That’s normal,” Al said tersely. “Condensation. Our breath. Cold as a witch’s tit down here. Minus thirty or so.”

“Doesn’t the water freeze?”

“Never with saltwater. Not this deep.”

Al shut the spotlights off, plunging the sea into darkness again.

“Wow. That was the weirdest thing,” she said, exhaling heavily. “You have to understand—this is like the desert down here. It’s barren. Picture it this way: we’re a pin dropped into an Olympic swimming pool almost totally devoid of life. So why and how we’ve run across all these critters… it’s just weird . And that they’d attack us… The viperfish I get, but the squid? And back-to-back like that? No. Just no.”

“Not outside of a Jules Verne book, anyway.” Luke’s laughter held a glass-snap edge.

“Right, and then we’ve had that current ring the last week or so. Every possible disturbance you could encounter, we’ve been facing it lately,” Al said. “If I didn’t know any better I’d almost think…”

She trailed off, not saying the words. But Luke was thinking the same thing.

It’s as if something is trying to stop us from reaching the Trieste.

“THEY SHOULD’VE INSTALLED A RADIOin this thing,” said Al, “or a CD player or something.” She blew a raspberry. “They sunk a trillion bucks into this operation. A radio’s gonna bankrupt ’em?

“They spent hand over fist,” she went on. “Nobody had ever tried building anything like the Trieste before. Space shuttles, sure, but in space you’re dealing with an absence of pressure. You can put on a suit, step out, float around. Try and do that down here and…”

“Flesh pâté.”

“Bingo. They had to bring the station down in sections. Lots of trial and error, lots of problems. Dropped them with heavy weights, collected them with robotic dive craft. Every section came down encased in a protective shell, with a seam of foam sandwiched between. They got slotted together, riveted by the pressure-resistant robo-divers, foamed, then the shell was cracked away. The station was designed in the principles of orb physics; the egg was the designer’s blueprint. Push on the sides of an egg, right, and it’ll break. But if you press on the top and bottom, it’s nearly unbreakable. A miracle of nature, or so they tell me.

“Plus the material the station’s made out of… it’s metal but not metal. Some kind of high-tech, ultra-state-of-the-art polymer core—it allows the tunnels to flex and bend and … bubble, I guess you could say? Instead of cracking under pressure, the material will expand the way rubber does. The water can warp it, but it won’t burst through.

“Anyway, once the pieces of the station were all slotted together, someone had to go in and open it all up from the inside. There was this membrane linking each section that had to be cut and foamed simultaneously; if it sprung even one leak, the whole structure would flatten. Otto Railsback—that was the name of the guy. Wee scrap of a thing. A single man did the whole job. You want to talk about a real hero? I brought Otto down. He was the first man inside. I attached to the entry port, cracked the hatch, then he went inside.”

“So what happened?” asked Luke, now fascinated.

“Well… I remember the smell that came out at first,” Al said. “My family ran a ranch in Colorado. There was this cave system where I lived, Cave of the Winds. The main part was a tourist trap—drunk dudes wandering around with miner’s helmets, calling themselves spelunkers. But the whole thing sprawled twenty miles underground. You could enter it through a vent in the forest floor about a mile from my home. Just a dark cut into the rocks, right? I went down there one day, alone. I was thirteen, fourteen. Thought I was a badass. I had a flashlight and a sack lunch.

“Predictably, I got lost. Thought I knew where I was going. Didn’t. It got so deep and twisty that if it weren’t for gravity, I wouldn’t have known up from down. My flashlight went on the fritz. I sat in the dark with the rocks dripping around me.” She paused, wrapped in the memory. “That darkness had weight , Doc. As a kid, it seemed hostile —like it wanted to keep me right where I was. And I was scared for practical reasons, too. I could’ve missed a step, slid down a shaft, and busted a leg. I’d have died down there. But I’d gotten into it, right? I had to get out. So I just listened. The dripping water helped. I figured it had to be trickling down , so I just had to follow it up. It was way past my curfew when I reached the cut. My dad skinned my ass raw.”

She sipped water from a silver pouch that reminded Luke of a Capri Sun drink.

“Anyway… the smell in that cave was the same as what came out of the Trieste . This overwhelming reek of darkness. A raw mineral smell; it had presence, an aliveness, like in Cave of the Winds. It freaked me out—no good reason; just that old childish worry—but Otto went right in. He sealed the compartments, made the Trieste truly safe for habitation. After that, others came down to set up the gennies, the air purifiers. But Otto was the guy who got it all rolling. He was the only one who died in the Trieste , too.”