Nick Cutter - The Deep

“ No. Don’t ,” was all Clay said. His neck was flexed taut, as if he were fighting an insistent pair of hands that were trying to wrench his gaze back to the pipe. “Don’t look.”

They turned and ran until their lungs burned, until the standing pipe and its noises were well behind them.

The next morning, Luke wouldn’t believe what he’d seen. It had been a trick of the moonlight, nothing more.

But he never did return to the pipe. Neither did Clayton, who struck up a deal with the local pet shop owner to buy mice at a bulk discount, which he claimed were better specimens anyway.

SSSSSCHLLLIPPPPPTTZZ…

The sound broke Luke out of his reverie—except they had begun to feel less like reveries than waking dreams.

Lacuna was the term that leapt out at him: an old Latin word that meant an empty space, a missing part… a gap . His mind seemed to slip into those gaps much easier down here. Since he boarded the Challenger , he’d been tumbling into and out of these old memories—his past, trapped within these dream-pools, kept reaching out and pulling him into their murky depths.

Now he was back in his brother’s lab, where Clayton still held a pair of shears to that awful guinea pig’s throat. The sound coming from somewhere inside the lab— thwwwilliiiippp! —was almost the same sound those pollywogs had made falling into the swamp when they were boys.

Before Luke could figure out what was making that noise, the guinea pig’s leg twitched.

Impossible.

Clayton had injected it with enough Euthasol to stop a full-grown man’s heart. There’s no way it could come back from…

Its front legs stiffened. Its lungs inhaled reflexively. It unleashed a hellish squeal that sounded shockingly like the shriek of an infant. Its eyes burned, twin embers socked into the white fur of its face. It lunged—

Clayton brought the shears together.

SCCCHRIIK!

The sound was that of a bolt cutter snapping a brass Master Lock off a school locker. Luke’s eyes widened as the guinea pig’s head was snipped neatly off its neck.

No blood at first. Not a drop. The flesh and tendon and bone were clearly visible down the face of each wound, both head-stump and neck-stump—it was like sawing a tree in half.

None of this makes any sense, Luke thought stupidly. None of this can actually be happening…

Clayton pulled the guinea pig’s body and head apart, separating them by a foot. Belatedly, blood began to leak from its neck in thick strings that spread across the bench like fingers.

Blood-tentacles , was Luke’s thought.

These tentacles crept toward the guinea pig’s body, which was releasing tentacles of its own. They merged in the middle of the bench.

LB whined and buried her head against Luke’s thigh.

The tentacles began to constrict. With aching slowness, the split halves of the guinea pig began to inch back toward each other.

They’re trying to reattach. They want to make the guinea pig whole again.

Watching this, a small but essential part of Luke’s mind untethered itself from the whole. Luke actually heard it—a cartilaginous thok like a drumstick wrenched off a Thanksgiving turkey; he felt it go, too: a physical sensation that he could liken only to a lifeboat setting off from a sinking ship, taking some vital cargo with it.

The guinea pig’s sundered halves drew closer. The blood-tentacles sucked and squirmed. What would happen once the halves had linked up?

“Stop it, Clay. Please, just stop it.”

Clayton retrieved a plastic container with a snap-top lid. He put the gloves back on, grabbed a scalpel, and slit the bloody webbings. Luke heard a snakelike hiss as the blade severed the crimson tentacles.

Clayton picked up the guinea pig’s head gingerly, still trailing ribbons of blood, and set it inside the container. He snapped on the lid and left the box on the bench.

The tentacles from the guinea pig’s body crept over the container. Investigating, it would seem—sniffing it like a lonely hound at a porch door. They actually climbed the plastic and poked along the seal.

Their progress stymied, the tentacles sagged. A few moments later they surrendered their shape and collected into a pool of plasma. The guinea pig’s headless body relaxed, evacuating its contents in a stinking gout.

A tiny speck of ambrosia gathered on the guinea pig’s foot. Clayton lifted the ambrosia on the scalpel’s edge and crossed to the cage. The guinea pig with the torn privates lay in a pile of bloodied cedar shavings. Clayton set the scalpel near its head.

The ambrosia rolled off onto the wounded creature’s ear, then vanished.

The guinea pig bleated and went rigid… then it rolled over and scampered to the running wheel. It began to race as fast as its stubby legs would carry it, tearing around and around and around like a mad dervish.

Clayton reached in and withdrew it from the cage. He showed Luke its sex organs. They were whole and, for all Luke knew, functional.

“This is madness. Utter madness.”

“No,” Clayton said. “It only looks like madness. You don’t know what you’re seeing.”

Clayton carried the guinea pig to the cooler. Lifting the lid, he set the creature inside. Luke didn’t protest this treatment, putting a live animal in deep freeze. Was that thing really alive anymore?

“What use is it?” Luke had to ask. “This ambrosia? Look at what it does, Clay. It… perverted that animal. Am I wrong? That guinea pig was savage. There was…”

Something demonic about it , was the thought his mind spat out. He’d felt the creature’s awfulness in his hands, the clammy grossness of its body.

“There could be any number of reasons why it acted that way,” Clayton said. “Firstly, it likely had no conception of what was being done to it.”

“ ‘Being done to it.’ Interesting choice of words, brother of mine. So let me ask you—do you know what was being done to it?”

“I’m beginning to understand, yes. There may be pain or trauma associated with the assimilation. The ambrosia may trigger certain psychotropic side effects, leading to heightened aggression.”

“My God, Clay—do you realize what you’re saying? This substance you’re studying won’t allow a creature to die . Not by freezing it, not by pumping it with a lethal dose, not by hacking its fucking head off . There has to be some other intelligence at work here. I don’t mean some take me to your leader shit; just something we can’t possibly understand. The way that blood moved… it was smart . It had a purpose.”

Clayton’s expression didn’t indicate that he felt the same horror Luke did—rather, it seemed that the prospect of a purposeful intellect excited him immensely.

“How can you know it won’t function the same way when used on a human being?” said Luke. “That it won’t turn people into raving maniacs?”

“There’s only one answer to that, Lucas—we don’t know how it will work, because we haven’t tried it on a human subject yet.”

YET . Dear God.

“Clay. Think . What about Westlake?”

“What about him?” Clayton said, eyebrows innocently raised.

“You’ve calculated this angle already,” said Luke. “You realize Westlake must have come in contact with the ambrosia.”

“I think…” A grudging nod. “Yes. That’s likely accurate. He must’ve abandoned the necessary precautions. He forgot the risks.”

Or the fucking stuff crawled inside his head , Luke thought wildly. Or else…