Nick Cutter - The Deep

Clayton Nelson’s face could hold this expression for hours. It was the very expression it held now, in fact, as he looked at Luke sprawled on the tunnel floor.

“Thanks for rolling out the welcome wagon,” said Luke, feeling stupid, which is how he frequently felt in his older brother’s presence.

Clayton was narrow-shouldered and thin-hipped, dressed in gray coveralls. A custodian’s uniform. His face was austerely handsome in a way particular to polar icecaps—flinty and remote. As he’d aged, Clayton had come to look more and more like a member of some fallen Eastern European aristocracy.

The only feature working against that perception was his hair, which hung down his neck in a ragged fringe—the beginnings of a mullet. It gave him the look of a Double-A middle-relief pitcher; an aging player who’d had a cup of coffee in the majors and was now playing out the string with the Tuscaloosa Mud Hens or Richmond Flying Squirrels.

The fingertips of his left hand were bandaged.

“Let me help you up,” Clayton said mechanically, offering Luke his unbandaged hand.

Luke glanced down the storage tunnel. Empty. No giant millipede. Of course not. He rubbed his head. A fresh goose egg parted the short hairs on the back of his skull. LB hunched behind him, her tail tucked between her hind legs.

“Ah. You located the specimen,” Clayton said.

Anger flared in Luke. It was partly the adrenaline burn-off, and the shame at his crazed imaginings, but primarily the familiar rage he’d too often felt toward his brilliant, careless brother.

“Why was she in there?” he said. “It’s freezing. It’s dark. She was alone.”

“I wasn’t aware. Hugo took it.”

Luke bristled at the pronoun. It . As if Dr. Toy had stolen office supplies instead of a living creature.

“He must’ve abandoned it in there,” Clayton said.

“Why would he do that?”

Clayton’s eyebrow arched. “Have you seen Hugo?”

When Luke nodded, Clayton said, “Then I don’t need to tell you why he might act irrationally. I don’t know why he locked the specimen—”

“ She , Clay. She’s not a specimen,” Luke said.

“Technically, yes, it is,” Clayton placidly replied.

“You named her Little Bee.”

“And? It’s just a name.”

“A stupid one.”

“Well, I’m sure the specimen appreciates your concern.”

Luke willed himself to calm down. What profit was there in arguing as they had as children? He wished Al would get her ass back. He needed a buffer.

“Clay… what the hell is happening down here?” he asked. “The monitors are out, you haven’t communicated for days. I get a phone call at three o’clock in the morning telling me to hightail my ass to Guam. They play me a recording where you’re telling me to come down—come home . After that, they took me into a chilly room, rolled out a slab, and showed me Dr. Westlake.”

“Hold on.” Clayton held up his unbandaged hand. “What’s this about a recording?”

Luke nodded. “The last transmission they received from you. You were saying come home, Lucas; we need you, Lucas . Stuff like that.”

Clayton scoffed. “Asking for you ? Why in God’s name would I do that?”

“Clay, I heard you. Clear as day. Come home, Lucas .”

Clayton’s features were fixed in that just-sniffed-shit expression, and again, Luke was left feeling that he was the dog shit on Clayton’s shoe, the foul muck that his brother was just now realizing he’d stepped in.

“Whatever you heard, it wasn’t me. I have no need of you here.” He gave Luke an are-you-serious? look. “What would you possibly add?”

Clayton was telling the truth; Luke knew him well enough to see that. Who the hell could have sent that transmission, then, and how? Had someone taped Clayton covertly and spliced a sound file together? Why would Westlake or Toy—the only possible culprits—do that?

“You said something about Westlake,” Clayton prodded.

Luke eyed his brother evenly. “Are you saying you don’t know what happened to him?”

“We’ve had no recent contact with the surface. Disturbances in the water have muddied our transmissions. I know Westlake took the sub. I have no idea how he managed it. None of us were taught how to…” He exhaled through his nostrils. “I hadn’t seen him in some time. He locked himself in his lab. He left in… I was about to say the dead of night, but it always feels like that down here. He certainly left without telling me.”

“He’s dead, Clay.” Luke paused to let it sink in. “I mean… not just dead.” The word failed to express what Luke had seen. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I never want to again.”

Clayton accepted the news stoically. Perhaps his upper lip twitched, but if so, it was barely noticeable.

“What the hell is going on down here?” Luke resisted the urge to punctuate each word with a poke to his brother’s chest—anything to pierce that Teflon exterior. “You’ve got Dr. Felz and everyone else in a flap, and that was before Westlake surfaced.”

“Our research. The tests are ongoing,” Clayton said. He had already accepted both Westlake’s death and Luke’s untimely arrival ; his mind had processed both phenomena, catalogued and dismissed them with typical Claytonian swiftness. “It’s remarkable. What we’ve discovered beggars description. There have been setbacks. Some expected, others less so. Dr. Toy isolated himself…” He glanced at his watch with a hint of perplexity. “I can’t say how long ago. Time has a funny way of behaving down here.”

“ Aaaand we’re in,” Al said, abruptly stepping in from the storage tunnel. “Nice work, guys.”

She offered her hand to Clayton, who shook it dryly.

“Sight for sore eyes, Doc. I was trying to get the door unlocked remotely, but I can’t pass a clear signal to the surface.”

“We’ve been having the same trouble,” said Clayton.

“Is that why the monitors are on the fritz, too?”

Clayton shrugged. “I don’t know why that might be. I assumed it was a breakdown on your end.”

Luke told Alice what Clay had said, about not sending the transmission.

“That seems unlikely,” said Al, turning to Clayton. “I’ve listened to that transmission two dozen times. It’s you, Dr. Nelson. It’s the reason Luke’s here.”

Clayton bristled. “It wasn’t me. Why on earth would I need a veterinarian?”

He spoke the word veterinarian with the same dismissive inflection others might accord the word moron .

“Well, isn’t this a touching family reunion,” Al said.

“Maybe you were sleeping, Clay,” Luke said. LB barked energetically, as if in support. “When you recorded it, I mean. You didn’t sound like yourself.”

Clayton wouldn’t dignify this possibility with an answer, but Al coaxed Luke to go on.

“You sounded… you sounded gone ,” Luke said. “Just, I don’t know, somewhere outside your own skin. Your voice had a floaty quality. Maybe you were sleepwalking. Maybe you sent the transmission without knowing it.”

“I’ve never sleepwalked in my life,” Clay said.

But Al was nodding. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen that. Happens a lot on submarines. Sailors getting out of bed, walking around and waking up in funny places. Guys who never had the habit before. Lots of lucid dreaming, too—talking in your sleep. Your brainwaves go a bit buggy down here. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Well,” Clayton said with a stagy eye-roll, “now that’s been sorted, perhaps you’d like to leave?”

Alice laughed without mirth. “You crack me up, Doc. I figure since we’ve come all this way—and factoring in what happened to Dr. Westlake—we best stay awhile, take a proper accounting of things.”