Nick Cutter - The Deep

“Or if one of the scientists got sick with the ’Gets. We needed a spot where a person in that state could be put.”

“Who’s to say that person doesn’t lock the healthy ones in here?”

Al said, “An imperfect system, I’ll grant you that. Like a few other systems down here. Most of them we never expected to use.”

“So where does that leave us? How do we get out of here?”

“Short answer? We don’t, for now. Unless your brother’s waiting down at the other hatch.”

“Wait a second. You’re saying it never occurred to anybody that we’d be locked in?”

“It did, absolutely. But we had to get down here all the same. They might be able to work a manual override up on the Hesperus , pop one of the locks electronically.”

“ Might? Are you kidding?”

“Well, there could be technical issues.”

Luke couldn’t believe it. He’d been sent to a trillion-dollar deathtrap at the bottom of the sea without any surety he’d even be able to reach his brother. He and Al could roam this storage tunnel until they froze to death.

“So, are we just going to wait until Clayton opens the door?” he said. “What if he refuses to?”

“That’s what you’re here for. To sweet-talk him.”

“Oh my God. You obviously don’t know my brother.”

Al’s nose was running from the cold. “We’ll be okay. Look, we’ve got emergency blankets in the Challenger and a few days’ worth of MREs. This isn’t the best-case scenario, but it’s not the worst.”

“And what the hell was your worst-case scenario?”

“Well, look around you. The station’s still here. It’s all uphill from there.”

Luke managed to return Al’s cockeyed smile.

“Let’s check the other hatch,” said Al. “Maybe your brother—”

Just then, a face filled the porthole glass, flexing and seething and threatening to shatter right through.

The coppery, festering face of madness.

ITS FEATURES WERE WRENCHEDinto an expression of tortured hostility. Its eyes, threaded with broken capillaries, bulged from their sockets.

Luke flinched as he would from a vicious dog snapping at the end of a chain.

The man behind the glass screamed; flecks of spittle hit the glass.

He’s slipped a gear , Luke thought. A familiar phrase back home, used to describe someone who’d become addle-brained. But Luke figured this guy had done more than slip a gear—he’d fried his entire damn gearbox.

“It’s Dr. Toy,” Al said. “Hugo the Horrible.”

This then was Dr. Hugo Toy, the molecular biologist Felz had mentioned. The only one still down here other than Clayton.

“He doesn’t look so hot,” Al deadpanned.

Dr. Toy’s expression reconstituted itself into a mask of chilly observation. His hands drifted in front of his face, his fingers tapping and fidgeting. One hand stretched toward the porthole, two fingers knocking on the glass as a child might tap on a terrarium to rouse a pair of sluggish lizards.

His lips moved, repeating a simple phrase. His fingers tapped along in time.

You are not who you are… you are not who you are… you are not, you are not, you are NOT who you are…

One of his hands disappeared, then reappeared with a scalpel. Toy held the tip to his own throat and pulled it slowly across, not breaking the skin.

Is he threatening us , Luke wondered, or threatening to do it to himself?

Toy retreated down the tunnel with a scuttling crablike gait. He vanished around a bend and out of sight.

“Well,” Al said finally, “I don’t figure he’s letting us in, do you?”

THEY TREKKED BACKtoward the Challenger . The cold crept into their bones. Luke was getting used to the patter of footsteps overhead—they had a rhythm he found oddly comforting.

“Do you have any clue what that was all about?” he asked Al.

It didn’t look like the ’Gets. Toy wasn’t spotting.

“Down here, people… they go nuts,” Al said. “You see it a lot on subs. An extremely concentrated form of cabin fever. Even if you’re cooped up in a cabin in the woods in the middle of winter, you can still open the door and breathe fresh air. Inside a sub it’s the same gray walls, same cold lights, same smells of bearing grease and dust burning in control consoles.

“On a sub, if a bubblehead looked to be coming down with a case of the sea-sillies we’d give him a color wheel, same as you’d do with a grade-schooler. Or let him run his fingers through a book of carpet samples. I remember one guy carrying around a book of carpet rags, petting his favorite ones the way you pet a dog. But if you’re prone to the sillies, you’ll catch them eventually. The sea whittles at you like a sharp knife taking curls off a log until you just…”

Al mimed snapping a twig between her hands.

“So Dr. Toy’s gone batshit?” Luke said. “Didn’t you say everyone down here was under psychiatric examination?”

Al shrugged. “We had to go on what we could see through the monitors—were these guys eating properly and sleeping on a regular schedule, that kind of thing. Westlake, Toy, and your brother were supposed to report for a counseling session every few days; lately they’ve all been AWOL.”

Luke said: “Why did you call him that, anyway? Hugo the Horrible.”

“That’s everyone’s name for him. He embraces it. He’s not just a biologist—he’s a chaos theory wonk. You know much about that?”

When Luke shook his head, Al said: “Basically it’s a mathematical field based on trying to make sense out of random events—which seems in hindsight like a solid prescription for psychosis, wouldn’t you say? Apparently Toy was given to forecasting worst-case scenarios. Every silver cloud had a dark lining. And hey,” she asked, “did you make out what he was saying?”

“I’m pretty sure it was, You’re not who you are. Over and over.”

“Yeah. That’s what I was seeing, too.”

She made that stick-breaking gesture again.

You are not who you are .

They forged down the tunnel like parasites trapped in the guts of an organism so huge it was oblivious to their presence. The darkness closed in, running swiftly on their heels.

Luke wanted to tell Al about the laughter he’d heard. The singing laughter of a child…

…his son’s laughter?

He couldn’t. She’d think he’d gone nuts himself. He pictured the look of tolerant concern that would grace Alice’s face when she heard.

First Toy, and now this poor fuck’s gone around the bend already , she’d think.

More crucially, Luke didn’t want to associate the memory of his lost son with this unfriendly, unfeeling place. But that laughter continued to ring out in a recessed quadrant of his mind… maddening, so maddening.

LUKE’S SON HAD GONE MISSINGon a crisp fall day. He was six years old.

Missing… the word didn’t quite fit. Vanished was better.

And like a tight-lipped magician, the world would never tell Luke how it had performed this horrible trick.

It happened seven years ago, at a public park not far from home. They often stopped by after Zach’s first-grade class finished to let some steam off before meeting Abby. The park faced the road, the grass rolling out fifty feet in every direction until it hit a dense forested area to the west.

The afternoon was like any other. Luke took a late lunch, left the veterinary clinic, and picked Zach up. They walked home through the fallen leaves, holding hands; Zach made a point of stepping on the crinkliest leaves, loving the sound they made under his boots.