Nick Cutter - The Deep

Luke rocked him, as he’d done every night since Zach was born.

“Husha baby. Husha, husha, sleep now.”

Sometimes when Zach was overtired, Luke would hold his eyelids shut. Very gently, rolling Zach’s eyelids down and keeping them shut with gentle pressure from his fingertips; he did so now. Zach’s eyelids strained as the muscles trembled under Luke’s fingertips, much like flies buzzing under Saran Wrap.

Luke pushed a little harder. Keep those eyes closed, my beautiful boy. Please .

Zach’s screams only intensified. The eyes inside his mouth rotated madly in their cups of flesh. The skin of Zach’s chin and cheeks and forehead was developing red throbbing cysts and Luke knew eyes would soon be sprouting there, too.

Luke felt around in Zach’s eyes just a little. Gray fluid the consistency of model glue squished between the eyelids.

“Shhhh, now. Sleep. What’s there to see? Nothing good.”

His son’s face was cracking open in a dozen places. Luke peered at these new eyes, each one offering a hateful, shriveling stare.

Luke’s fingers sunk into Zach’s eye sockets to the second knuckle. They punched into a pocket of curdled sludge that reminded him of the congealed porridge his mother used to eat. There came a hissing sound, but from where, Luke couldn’t tell. Stinking fluid the color of molten lead bubbled up from Zachary’s sockets.

Luke pushed until the webbing between his fingers touched the bridge of his son’s nose. Zach’s flesh offered no resistance. Luke’s fingertips passed through the grooved tangerine of Zach’s brain to touch the inner swell of his skull.

“It’ll be over soon,” he whispered, hoping his son could hear. “I’m so sorry…”

The fontanel on the top of Zach’s head pulsed ominously, as if something underneath was struggling to free itself.

Luke stared, trapped in the calm eye of his dread, as his son’s scalp split in a bloodless trench. Something pushed through the squandered flesh, horrid and spiky and flecked with white curds…

…and turned in Luke’s direction, staring not with eyes but with a sense of merciless curiosity mingled with furious intent.

LUKE STRUGGLED OUT OF SLEEPlike a man crawling out of a mine shaft. Gummy strings of the nightmare clung to his brain. He heard Zachary screaming somewhere as the dream continued to unravel; Luke reached for his lost son—but his fingers closed on empty air.

Luke’s brain felt unattached to his senses, the way it often felt following a bad dream. He blinked and stared around Westlake’s quarters.

The hatch was open. Just a hair.

Four small appendages were wrapped around the edge of the hatchway.

A child’s fingers.

Luke saw them… then he didn’t. They had slipped away.

Next came a series of excitable, clumsy footsteps trailing down the tunnel.

His son’s name passed over his lips before he could choke it down.

“Zach?”

Laughter bubbled up the tunnel. The sound grew fainter, threatening to vanish. Luke rolled off the cot and shoved the hatch open.

“Zach?”

That champagne-bubble laughter flooded the dim tunnel in reply—the kind of laughter Zach used to make when Luke hefted him under the arms and lobbed him into the air, catching him deftly as he came down.

This is not happening , chirped a voice in Luke’s head. Your son isn’t down here. You know that, Luke. In your heart, in your head .

But he didn’t, really. That was the thing—Zach was everywhere. Any where. That’s what tore you apart.

Unthinkingly, Luke followed the laughter.

The tunnel seemed to heave like an enormous pair of lungs, the walls constricting before expanding again… just a trick of the light. He stumbled forward heedlessly, borne on a bubbly foam of anxiety. Luke felt his boots sinking into the floor as if into some sort of weird metallic mud. He felt it sucking at his feet, a disturbing sensation, and told himself it wasn’t actually happening. His mind was playing a funny trick, was all. Ha, ha, real funny. Thanks, brain. You have a great sense of comedic timing. He glanced around in an attempt to moor himself. He noticed a string of pipes jutting upward along the wall like the flutes on a church organ, their curves winking dull bronze in the dim. A rhythmic churn emanated from behind the walls, the sound of motors pounding without cease in the center of the earth.

Ahead of him in the darkness, something moved.

“Who’s there?” Luke said, the tendons cabled down his neck.

No answer, only the watery echo of his voice.

…there… ere… ere…

When it faded Luke heard, or was certain he’d heard, the low rustle of breathing. He stood in the tunnel dark, the hairs quilling on his forearms. That rustling did not come again. He was set to reject it as a figment (Fig Men) of his imagination, conjured by the terrible pressure of this place…

A shape coalesced where his eyes were trained. He saw a pair of pajamas. Oh-so-familiar. They were Zachary’s favorites—his peejays , Abby used to call them; Zach it’s bedtime get into your peejays! —with a pattern of fire trucks and police cars, signifiers of law, order, and safety from harm. Small hands and feet jutted from the sleeves and leg holes, shining whitely in the gloom.

He could not see a face. The air above the neckline was dark and empty.

The headless pajamas turned—a coy movement that seemed to say follow me! follow me! —and scampered down the tunnel.

Luke obeyed the directive. The floor sucked greedily at his boots; the metal flowed over his ankles as his feet sunk into the chilly muck at the bottom of the sea.

Darkness closed in behind him, deeper and deeper shades. Zachary’s laughter pealed off the walls and rebounded all around Luke.

“Zach! Hold on—please, stop !”

Zach slipped around a bend in the tunnel up ahead. Luke let out a strangled cry.

Nonononono, not again please not again…

He tried to run but his boots were mired, making every step an ordeal. He finally rounded the turn only to see he’d reached a dead end. The blackness was absolute; it was no different than staring down a mine shaft.

Three words were written on the wall in wet letters. Instinctively, Luke knew they were written in blood.

Something tugged on his sleeve. A small hand, four small fingers gripping his overalls. He didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to see his headless son… or something far more horrible.

He tried to jerk his arm away. But the tugging was insistent.

Look at me Daddy—LOOK!

No , Luke thought. I don’t want to. You’re not my son.

Oh, but I am. I’m your little Zach Attack. Right here in the flesh!

The voice was not that of his son. It belonged to something ineffably older, more calculating, and worse beyond anything Luke could imagine.

A terrific jerk at his arm now.

YOU FUCKING LOOK AT ME NOW.

Luke snatched his arm back. He overbalanced and fell, hammering his skull on the wall—

…and came to slumped against the tunnel. The overhead lights burned. LB stood a few feet away, eyeing him with a canine version of concern. His sleeve was wet with her slobber.

His son was gone. He’d never been here, of course. There was no dead end, no bloody words on the wall. He’d dreamed it all. Of course he had. He thought he’d woken from a nightmare only to now discover that the nightmare hadn’t yet finished.

And yet he’d left Westlake’s room. He’d opened the hatch, never waking, and walked down the tunnel. He’d… sleepwalked ? Bullshit. He’d never done that in his life. LB must’ve followed him, then tugged on his sleeve to wake him.