Nick Cutter - The Deep

Luke stayed away from his room until bedtime. He begged to stay up a half hour later to read his comics quietly in the family room, but his mother refused. Of course she refused.

The Tickle Trunk sat in the corner of his room. He forced himself to open it. Empty. By then, the events in the crawl space had taken on the taint of absurdity. Nightmares get blown apart in the sane light of day, even in a boy’s mind. And Luke was a rational boy; everyone said so. His knees were skinned and his palms scraped, but there was no cut on his ankle from the creature’s nails.

No, it had been a silly episode. Luke was embarrassed to think about it.

But…

One corner of the trunk had been pried up. A triangle of that strange brown skin was peeled back from its interior, as if something had come out through there.

A tiny rip, no more than an inch. Would that have been enough?

A different boy, one more flighty than Luke, might’ve viewed it as a sign. Something wanting him to know it’d been inside the trunk. Not a figment of his imagination—no way, nohow. It wanted to show how it’d gotten in, and leave the hint that it could easily do it again. Any old time it wished.

The next day Luke “accidentally” spilled fish oil over the trunk. God, that smell could gag a maggot , his father said when he got home. Why he’d been in the proximity of the trunk with a full bottle of fish oil was a fact Luke could never fully explain. But the deed had been done. The room had to be aired out; Luke slept on the sofa for two nights. The trunk was thrown away. His mother had her methods of making Luke pay for that, but at least it was gone. He never saw it again…

…except for once, years later, in a dream.

He dreamed that the Tickle Trunk sat at the city dump. The moon cast its pallid light over the windblown piles of trash. The trunk’s lid hung open like a cavernous, toothless mouth.

A raccoon trundled through the stinking wasteland. It scrambled up a softening heap to the trunk. Nose twitching, it clawed up the bloated wood to squat on top of it. Next it screeched, having seen something inside the trunk that must’ve left it petrified. The lid levered up, snapping closed on its back. The sound of the raccoon’s spine breaking was as sharp as the report of a .22 cartridge.

The raccoon slipped bonelessly inside. The lid closed. The trunk swayed slowly, the way a mother rocks a child in her arms. Inside, the raccoon started to scream. This had been the worst part of the dream—the way the animal had sounded very much like the squall of an infant.

A substance resembling red pancake batter burped out of the trunk. The lid opened again. The moon shone down from its icy altar, the dump wrapped in stillness once again.

THE BLACKNESS SLID AWAYas Luke floated up out of the dream-pool. This long-buried memory had flooded back to him whole cloth—the sights and smells and the fear that had filled his veins that afternoon in the crawl space, a terror as bright and sharp as lemon juice squirted on a paper cut.

“Doc?” said Al, shaking him with her good hand. “You still with me?”

He was back inside his own skin now. He stood in the Trieste with Alice, staring at a supply crate that rested in the deepest, most shadowed point of the purification room. How long had he been checked out? It didn’t feel like more than a few seconds—and maybe that was all it had been, each second stretching out inside his head.

Eight miles above, all over the world, people were forgetting their pasts. Trapped down here in the charmless dark, Luke couldn’t escape his own.

“I’m okay,” he said shakily. “My memories are so vibrant down here. I… I find that I’m getting a bit lost in them. Sorry.”

Al said, “Good to have you back, then,” and turned her attention to the crate. It didn’t look like the Tickle Trunk, not one bit. It was plastic, and black, and ribbed. Its dimensions were roughly the same, but its lid was flat.

No, it didn’t look anything like the Tickle Trunk, yet it held the aura of it.

It’s like bullies , was Luke’s strangely apt thought. They can be hulking and potato fisted or weaselly and slender. It’s that cruel quality in their eyes that identifies them as part of the same tribe .

Which was idiotic to think. This crate had no relation to his old trunk. Luke used to chastise his own son, often far too harshly, for his childish fears: the monster in the closet, the fanged thing under his bed.

The Fig Men.

But here he was, an adult, filled with dread at the sight of a crate that projected that same air of coy menace as his old childhood nemesis.

Who, little ole me? the crate seemed to say in a cutesy-poo voice. Menacing? Noooo. I’m just a crate, Lukey-loo. I’m a tool that stores other tools —switching to a Popeye growl— I yam what I ams, and that’s all that I yams!

Al stepped toward it. No! Luke wanted to say. But why? It was nothing but a crate. A tool that stored tools.

Al reached down and cracked the lid. A jumble of spare parts. Rooting through them, she found a plastic case. She opened it and shook out a small chip.

“Bingo.”

Al closed the lid and latched it. She gave it a final considering look, the skin tightening down her throat, before turning back the way they’d come.

The chip slotted neatly into the control panel. The air quality changed—where before it’d held a steely aftertaste that built up like plaque in the back of Luke’s throat, now it was… well, marginally better.

Al slumped against the wall.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “That chip just vanished. It wasn’t burned out, wasn’t busted. It was gone . Same thing would happen onboard a sub, too. Things would go missing. A guy’s books or personal photos, the little tchotchkes that tethered someone to the surface. In most cases, it was petty thievery. No reason aside from boredom and opportunity.”

A hollow knock emanated from the recesses of the purification room. Back where the crate sat.

Knock once for yes. Knock twice for no.

“A few times, though, things went missing and never did get found,” Al went on. “Was this one guy, Fields. A machinist. Carried a photograph of his dead mother in a locket. Wore it strung around his neck. Woke up one day, it’s gone. He tore that sub apart to find it. Peered in every cranny, even went through the trash. Nada. He figured someone stole it. Hooked it off his neck in the night. But sometimes things just go missing. Fall through cracks, you know?”

The knocking intensified.

Luke peered in that direction, but his view was walled off by an impenetrable expanse of gloom. The canisters glowed whitely, a clutch of huge insect eggs laid in the walls.

“Could be the system kicking over,” Al said, reading his thoughts. “Lots of weird noises in a sub, too. Knocks and clunks you can’t explain. Only pressure and the ocean’s currents, but it can sound a little like… like ghosts, uh?”

“Right. Booga-booga.”

Their laughter sounded both canned and forced, as if they were recording a laugh track on a soundstage.

“You ever had a man go missing, Al?”

“On a sub, you mean? That’d be the ultimate locked-door mystery, uh? I heard about something that went down on another vessel, the SS-228 Stickleback . A guy went missing. They turned that sub inside out, never found him. How do you vanish from a submarine, a thousand feet underwater?

“Turns out this guy got into an argument over a game of cards. Another guy, a sonar tech, hits him with a closed fist. Guy falls and hits the bulkhead all funny. Fractured skull. He dies. So the sonar tech and his buddy, a cook, chopped up the body and fed it into the garbage disposal. Those things could chew up cinder blocks. MPs dredged the disposal, found bits of the guy’s spine and rib cage.”