Nick Cutter - The Deep

“Hold the door for a sec, Luke. I don’t want us getting locked in again.”

She hunted around until she found a used air-purification canister. “Okay, come on through.”

LB hesitated—she’d been locked in the tunnel for Lord knows how long—before resignedly slipping through the doorway. Al wedged the canister in and let the hatch close under its own weight; it crimped the canister slightly but left the door propped open a few inches.

“That’ll hold,” she said. “Unless someone kicks it loose.”

“Who would do that?”

Al tilted her head—an analytical insurance adjuster’s gaze.

“I spent a lot of time with Westlake,” she said. “We trained together. Eight, ten hours a day. Most eggheads have got their head in the clouds or up their own clueless asses. Westlake was different. On the level. Even keel.”

Al headed down the storage tunnel. Luke followed. The cold locked around his limbs almost immediately, as if it had been waiting to embrace him again.

“Point being,” she continued, “Westlake and I got on. Your brother and Dr. Toy were all business. Westlake was different— normal . And he was still pretty normal down here, at least at first. In fact he seemed better than normal.”

“Better how?”

Al shrugged as if to say it was hard to explain. But she tried.

“Training was intense, right? It ground us all down—all but your brother, who seems sorta cyborgish. I’d expected Westlake’s furlough down here to wear on him. Doctor Toy really struggled in training; he almost didn’t make it down, in fact. We nearly replaced him. And like I said before, you can’t do mental push-ups to prepare yourself—you’ve either got that tolerance or you don’t. So we were surprised to see that when Westlake first got down, he actually seemed brighter, stronger, healthier. I couldn’t pinpoint it, but it was a change. Maybe not a good one, either.”

“What do you mean?”

They’d made it around the gooseneck, forging down the tunnel toward the Challenger ’s entry hatch.

“I mean, just different . Something off in his eyes. His movements were weird, jerky, on the monitors. That is to say, before all the screens went blank. When we were topside, Westlake had a sense of what the ambrosia might be able to do… but he was skeptical. Once he got down, that changed. At his psych appointments—which were delivered remotely from a special room down here, every two days at the outset—it was all he’d talk about. The miracle agent , he called it. A kind of mania invaded him. And then he went AWOL. Stopped attending his psych appointments. Stopped being visible on the monitors. He just… poof. Vanished.”

Al shook her head. “And then you tell me Westlake was raving about holes in the station and other assorted bat-shittery. I’m not judging—I think I get it now. Luke, I need to ask: when you fell asleep down here, did you dream?”

Luke’s footsteps faltered. The phantom children raced overhead, their own footsteps keeping pace with the rapid beat of his heart.

“Did you?” she repeated.

“Yes,” he said finally. “A nightmare. The worst I can ever recall.”

Al nodded with a grim look of commiseration and of understanding. In the gloom, her teeth were gray: a row of tiny tombstones.

Luke told her about his dream. He trusted Al, and was emboldened by her forthrightness. He told her about Zach, the ambrosia, the eyes. He didn’t tell her what happened to his son that day in the park (which had been the reason the dream hadn’t just scared him—it hurt him, too), but it felt good, necessary , to disburden himself.

He kept the sleepwalking episode to himself. He needed her to trust him. She needed to trust that he had things on lockdown… because he did have things on lockdown, pretty much at least, and was going to keep it that way.

“I managed to catch a few minutes of shut-eye,” said Al. “I had a nightmare, same as you.”

She leaned against the tunnel. The wall seemed to belly inward around her body—opening up like a toothless mouth.

Stand up, quickly, Luke wanted to say. Get away from it.

But that would sound crazy. Like he didn’t have things on lockdown.

“I spent three years aboard the USS Kingfisher,” Al said. “A nuclear attack sub. We were on tactical maneuvers. Routine stuff. I was junior lieutenant, tactical armaments. We suffered an electrical malfunction. We lost power. Total blackness at three hundred feet underwater. Then we were hit with a power surge. One of the two main engines blew out. Exploded, more or less.”

Luke said, “God, I can barely imagine.”

“So when the engine blew, our team evacuated into the maneuvering room and locked the hatch. But there was this kid, Eldred Henke. Nineteen years old. He got trapped in the hallway. I tried to open the hatch, but the locks had engaged. The kid hammered his fists on the porthole until his knuckles broke. Another explosion rocked us as the turbine blew. The wall beside Eldred tore apart like a tin can. Bits of the superheated turbine, screws and rivets and what all, blew through the ripped steel and buried into him. He slammed into the far wall and reeled like a drunk. This thin metal rod was stuck through his throat. Bolts and whatever else had ripped his cheeks open. I could see inside his face, places nobody ought to see. Next the hull caved and the sea rushed in. I saw it all. I was safe. The current carried him out lickety-split. The kid disappeared like he’d been sucked out of an airplane cruising at twenty-five thousand feet.”

Luke digested this, then said: “Al, there’s nothing you could have done. Surely you understand that.”

“No, I get that.”

“I mean, if I nailed myself to the wall every time I couldn’t save someone’s dog or cat—”

“I think this is a little different, Doc.”

“I’m just saying that guilt carves you up, right? Things happen sometimes and there’s no way to fix it—in the moment, or any time after. But no creature is more adept at putting themselves up on that cross than human beings.”

She nodded, accepting Luke’s logic. “The thing is, I used to dream about that kid. But those dreams weren’t so bad, because in them I wrenched the hatch open and yanked him through just before the sea poured in. Those dreams were bittersweet, sure, because some part of my subconscious knew there was a cream-colored headstone in a cemetery in Eldred’s hometown with his name etched on it.”

“But the dream you had down here wasn’t like that, was it?” Luke said. “The dream you had here was worse.”

She nodded reluctantly—her face looked softer and almost girlish in the queer light of the tunnel.

“ Much worse,” she said.

The dream had the same setup, she told Luke. Eldred was trapped behind the hatch. Al was torqueing the hatch-wheel—and same as in real life, it wasn’t budging. Then the turbine blew and that shower of superheated rubble hit the kid. Except in the dream, Alice noticed something else. There was… stuff … mixed in with the rubble. A glittering patina in the air.

“The ambrosia,” Luke said softly. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

“Ding ding ding. Give the man a prize,” Al said.

Alice dreamed it in down to the tiniest detail—every pore on the kid’s face. He started to shriek. Why? Because of the bits of metal spiked in his flesh or the ambrosia? She could hear him screaming through the hatch. Fluttery, boyish screams.

“Which is impossible, right?” she said. “Those hatches are soundproof.”

“You don’t have to tell me any more,” Luke said.

“Don’t I?” Alice said wretchedly.