Nick Cutter - The Deep

“I’ve got to keep an eye on things from this end, Doc.”

There isn’t anything on the other side of that hatch , said an unsteady voice in Luke’s head. Nothing but your brother and another wonk and a few dogs and bees.

Luke wondered: had Dr. Westlake told himself the very same thing the first time he stepped inside?

“Once you’re through and I’ve shut things down, I’ll follow,” said Al.

Luke laid his hands on the hatch. The metal thrummed with an odd tension, as if a heavy motor was running behind it. His biceps tensed in expectation—but after the slightest strain, the wheel turned easily.

“That’s good.” There was relief in Al’s voice. “The seal’s tight.”

The hatch swung open. The thinnest trickle of saltwater beaded along the upper curve of the hatch, a single drop falling— plip! —to splash the metal. The light inside the Challenger wept into that hole of darkness. A smell perfumed the air. Cavelike and slightly alkaline, as Al had mentioned. The foreign odor of the deep sea mixed with something else, something unnameable.

A high note of dread sang through Luke’s veins—a mocking aria that sent a shiver through his bones.

What are you so afraid of? said that same voice inside Luke’s head.

Everything , another voice answered.

There was no reason for his fear, other than the obvious ones: they were eight miles underwater, about to enter a station built on the structural principles of an egg.

“Go on,” Al said. “I’m right behind you.”

Luke could make out the insides of the Trieste : the dim slope of a wall, the dull wink of metal.

He reached out to anchor his hands on the hatch. Then he saw something. His breath caught.

What the hell was that?

WHEN THEY WERE BOYS,their father used to take Luke and Clayton for a haircut at the Hawkeye barbershop. Give ’em a high and tight , he’d tell Vince, the old Italian barber. That, or These boys are getting shaggy. Give ’em the ole whitewall. It was the only place in town Luke had ever seen his father get even a hint of respect, and even then it seemed grudging.

Luke remembered the ancient magazines with names like Men’s Adventure and Rage: For Men , their lurid covers featuring men wrestling bears or coldcocking alligators, their cover lines reading: “Swastika Slave Girls in Guatemala’s No-Escape Brothel Camp!” and “Rabid Weasels Ripped My Flesh!” He remembered how the barber’s scissors would snip around his ears with the speed of hummingbird wings.

After every haircut, the barber would show Luke the back of his neck in a mirror that telescoped from the wall on metal armatures. When he angled the mirror, sometimes Luke would see Clayton sitting silently, or catch his father with his nose stuck in a magazine. That mirror offered a hidden view, Luke used to think. The face of the world when it wasn’t aware you were looking at it.

His mind fled back to that childlike sensibility—a mirror that showed the world’s hidden face—when his gaze focused on the insides of the Trieste . It was as if his view had shifted, tilted , the way that barber’s mirror had, like a solid pane of glass. His body was suddenly awash in warmth. He stared closer, transfixed by that pitchlike black…

His breath gritted in his chest like steel wool. Were things moving in there?

Sly liquid shiftings, mincing suggestions of activity, all attended by a silky sound that made him think of sightless crabs shucking over one another in a shallow tide pool…

“What’s wrong, Doc?”

Luke tore his eyes from the hatch.

“Some trick of the light,” he croaked.

“That happens down here,” Al said. “The light reflects differently, gets absorbed in weird ways.”

Don’t go in there , shrilled the voice in Luke’s head.

What choice did he have? What could he say: Sorry, I couldn’t do my part to save humanity because I’m a teensy bit scared of the dark?

Anchoring his hands on the hatch, Luke bit back his fears and propelled himself into that funneling blackness.

HE TOPPLED THROUGH AWKWARDLY,having shoved himself hard enough to silence that inner voice that kept shrieking:

Don’t-don’t-don’tdon’tDON’T!

He’d expected some kind of crash pad, but there was nothing but steel gone frosty as the insides of a meat locker. He hit the floor; pain lanced down his collarbone and needled up his throat.

The Challenger ’s hatch swung shut.

Luke rolled up, knees tucked to his chest. A goose egg was already swelling on his forehead. Lights winked on the floor, much like those of an airport runway. They didn’t help much—he could barely see six feet in either direction.

Cold . God, it was bracingly cold. This couldn’t possibly be the temperature throughout the station—everyone would freeze to death.

Who’s to say they’re still alive? a new, maddening voice asked, joining the chorus in his head—this one sounded a lot like his mother’s voice. Who’s to say they didn’t die days ago, Lucas my dear?

Noise from directly overhead: dap-dap-dap-dap , a sound that could be mistaken for the footsteps of eager children. This image now entombed itself in Luke’s head: a pack of waterlogged youths with their eyes vacuumed from their skulls scampering clumsily above him.

Where the hell was Al?

Luke stood, his adrenaline spiking. His head slammed into the tunnel. He couldn’t stand at his full height; the ceiling was too low. Claustrophobia assaulted him; for a moment he was suffocating inside his own skin.

This is a tomb , he thought. Nothing but a vast undersea crypt, and I’m alone inside of it .

Laughter.

Luke’s blood seized. Dry, nerveless dust caked his veins, as if he’d been pumped full of fast-dry cement.

There it was again, unmistakable. This wasn’t that dap-dap-dap noise from above. Unmistakably, it had been laughter. And it was coming from deeper down the tunnel.

A boy’s laughter.

No way could it—

“…Zach?”

Luke clapped a hand over his mouth. He couldn’t believe he’d spoken the name, even now, disoriented at the bottom of the world. His lips burned with the shame of it.

Of course his lost son wasn’t down here. He wasn’t anywhere on earth—he was in heaven. He was safe from harm now.

You don’t know that .

His mother invading his head again, her voice honeyed and lacerating at once.

They never found him, did they? He could be anywhere, Lucas. Anywhere at all.

Sound from behind him. Luke spun on his heel. It came again. A tentative, staccato skittering. The urge struck to scurry back through the hatchway—a hatchway he feared was locked in any case—but instead Luke leaned into that sound, his eyes hunting desperately.

A rhythmic panting traveled through the dark. A shape carved itself out of the gloom twenty yards away, squatting motionlessly. Luke could just make out the wet jewels of its eyes and the whitened plume of its breath.

Come on, he thought, his hands balling into fists. Come on if you’re coming.

Which it did. Eagerly in fact, attended by a rapid clickety-click-click .

Luke swung at its mad approach, wondering in some fear-shrunk chamber of his mind if this was something you could fight in the conventional ways—with fists and feet and teeth. How did you fight a monster?

His fist passed harmlessly over the creature’s head, then it was on him—