Nick Cutter - The Deep

Phloooopppp…

That dripping sound again, coming from somewhere inside the lab—

That old childhood memory Luke’s mind had been chasing entombed itself in his skull with a concussive thump…

THE STANDING PIPEon Old Langtree Road in Iowa City. A concrete tunnel with a grate over its mouth to prevent idiot kids from clambering into its damp, moss-crusted darkness. An overflow pipe—when the river rose, excess water jetted out of it to saturate the floodplain. But the river could go months at low ebb, meaning that the area ringing the pipe was most often a stagnant swamp that on high August days smelled like a pile of mildewed gym trunks.

Clayton visited the swamp often, as its microclimate hosted prize specimens. Unsurprisingly, he favored the most disgusting life-forms. If its body had the texture of a snot-filled bath bead, chances were that Clayton wanted it. Sometimes he’d let Luke tag along, needing an extra pair of hands.

One long-ago summer day, the young brothers had arrived at dusk, when the coolness brought the best specimens out of their hidey-holes. Luke never visited the standing pipe alone. Its wide, cavernous mouth jutting out of the gray caliche—which reminded him, disconcertingly, of elephant skin—sent an unpleasant shiver down his arms. The pipe’s interior was hung with rotting strands of moss that dangled down in stiff stalactites. Sunlight couldn’t penetrate it more than a few feet; after that it turned grainy, the shadows swimming with clever movements.

It was stupid to think. It was just a tunnel. Sure, it was dangerous; you wouldn’t want to squeeze past the grate and walk down it—not because there was something waiting for you in its gloomy guts, but because you could trip and fall and bust your fool skull wide open, as Luke’s mother was apt to say.

By the time the boys reached the pipe that day, the surrounding swampland was hovering with shadows. The inverted bells of the carnivorous pitcher plants lay bronzed in the dying sun. The creatures that had lain dormant during the day were slithering and spidering from their resting places.

Clayton forged into the swamp in a pair of hip waders, sending up swarms of no-see-ums. Luke’s sweatpants—he couldn’t bear wading through that bug-infested swamp barelegged—were soaked to his crotch. The fluffy tops of cotton grass poking out of the swamp reminded Luke of Peter Cottontail, the bunny, which led him to envision the grass-wads hiding a thousand drowned rabbits submerged in the brown muck with their tails sticking out of the water.

The brothers reached the mouth of the pipe. A new moon glossed its concrete lips, a silver O enclosing a solid pool of darkness.

Clustered along the pipe were translucent vein-strung sacs, each roughly the size of an oxblood marble. They were arranged in gooey clusters—bunches of albino grapes, or mutant fly eggs.

“They’re hatching,” Clayton said. “Perfect.”

The sacs were breaking open to disgorge tallowy creatures with flagellate tails. They squiggled to the edge of the pipe and—

Thhhwhooolloop…

Dropped into the water.

“Pollywogs are interesting creatures,” Clayton remarked. “No other amphibian undergoes such a massive change as it becomes an adult. Humans have a few more bones as babies, which fuse together as we grow, but we don’t grow new arms or legs or lose any part of our bodies as we mature. Humans,” he said with something approaching sadness, “are boring.”

Luke always felt unbelievably grateful for these moments when his brother treated him like a human being. In such moments Clayton seemed most like a human being himself, full of childlike wonder.

The mama bullfrogs croaked in protest as Clayton dragged a net and deposited pollywogs into the bucket Luke had brought. Luke heard something from inside the pipe—a sound that vibrated the sensitive hairs of his ear canal.

It came again. A gelatinous sliding like something coughed up from a kitchen drain… and what was the pipe, anyway, if not a drain? A huge, long drain. It stood to reason that the things coughed out of a pipe that size would be massive, as well.

Ghostly spiders scuttled up the back of Luke’s neck. His mouth filled with a dry wash of horror—the taste of mothballs covered in a choking film of dust.

The swamp stilled. The bullfrogs stopped croaking, even the insects seemed to stop buzzing. Only the sucking, slurping sound coming from the pipe.

The sound, or its maker, was drawing nearer in a stealthy kind of way… but not too stealthily. Maybe it wanted to be heard. The sucking sound was joined by an icy clickety-click reminiscent of cockroaches scuttling behind water-fattened drywall… or ragged claws dragged along mossy concrete.

The pipe’s mouth was covered with a checkerboard rebar grate to keep stupid kids out. Because kids were stupid sometimes. Even the smart ones, like Clayton. They would come to an isolated swamp past dark, say, to collect pollywogs. Far from the reliable streetlit world—hell, they may as well be on another planet. They could disappear and nobody would even know until morning. It was tragic, but it happened all the time…

Even a smart kid had to be stupid only that one time.

Clayton’s jaw was clenched tight, his eyes fixed above the tunnel’s mouth as if he couldn’t quite bear to stare directly into it.

The sound came again, closer now: a choked and mocking gurgle, an enormous mouth laughing around a wad of rotting meat.

Pollywogs fluttered against Luke’s sweatpants as they flicked past, racing away. He wished he could shrink somehow, become as small and insignificant as they were, and flee with them. He wished he had a minuscule and idiotic pollywog brain, because his own was an inferno of fearful images and possibilities.

The grate will stop it . It stopped dumb kids from getting in, and it will stop anything else from getting out .

But Luke knew this wasn’t true. Whatever it was—and he understood, in his lizard-brain cortex, that it was something real bad—it could snap the grate like matchsticks… or else ooze through the metal latticework like cancerous black taffy.

The brothers backed away slowly, the way you might from a slumbering bear. Clayton’s breath came in a flighty whistle like the whinny of a horse. Luke averted his eyes, didn’t dare look at the pipe. If he only heard it but didn’t see it, it wasn’t real. The sounds could be anything. The gurgle of sludgy water over ancient bottles and cans, or even over the water-bleached skeletons of drowned animals.

But if you saw it, made eye contact with it…

Their heels hit the dry wash. Once that happened, the boys turned and clawed up the pebbly incline, abandoning the bucket and net, hitting the moon-glossed road, and running as fast as their legs could carry them.

Some reckless urge made Luke glance back over his shoulder. Only once, and only for a second.

He saw something. He would swear to it. Something moving. A hand? No, not exactly. It was too elongated to be human. The fingers were twice as long as any he’d ever seen, the digits thin and witchy. Each finger was tipped with a cruel sickle that trapped the moonlight along its curve.

This enormous hand ticked delicately along the rusted rebar, back and forth, back and forth, as if plucking notes on an instrument. A soft and beckoning gesture.

Come baaaack, Lucas. Come baaaack. Bring your brother, too. Three is never a crowd. We’ll have… all the time in the world.

God help him, Luke felt himself turn around.

His hip, gripped by a compulsion he couldn’t fight, wrenched back—his feet would follow shortly, surely as two follows one … then Clayton jerked Luke’s arm so hard that it almost tore out of its socket. Come morning, the flesh of his collarbone would be a sullen mottle of bruises.