Nick Cutter - The Deep

What was your original face before you were born?

He willed himself to calm down. His calves were quivering; for all he knew he’d ripped the tendons clean off the bone.

Skrriiiiiiitch…

Nails on metal. The hand was inside the chute, scratching toward him. Tapping and feeling its way forward like a blind and hungry tarantula.

Luke stretched out, his fingers creeping, his toes muscling his aching body forward inch after painful inch. He pictured the chute elongating the same way the crawl space had years ago. An endless suffocating tunnel. The perfect kill zone.

No . It had an end, and he was reaching it. He could hear Al stumbling out someplace ahead. The air tasted a bit less polluted. It couldn’t be far now.

Skriiiiiitch…

On his boot now.

A fingernail scratching down the sole, gouging the rubber. Luke bit back a shriek— don’t fall through the trapdoor and into the snakepit now, sonny-boy; you fall now and it’s game over, no more tokens —and surged forward on a tide of adrenaline.

Another push, another, calf muscles twitching, sweat soaking his overalls, another push, mouth wide and gasping, fingers reaching—

The chute ended. Alice’s strong hand clutched his wrist and yanked him out.

They stood in the tunnel, panting. The hatch was ten feet away. A mellow coin of light shone through its porthole. LB would be out there, waiting.

They ran for it like kids fleeing the bogeyman—which, in a way, they absolutely were. Luke hazarded one last look back. He couldn’t help himself. He almost wanted to thumb his nose.

Nyah-nyah, missed me, missed me, now you’ve gotta kiss me.

The hand was visible at the end of the chute. Huge —even bigger than he remembered. Its five fingers— no no no it has eight fingers eight like a spider —its fingers rested on the swell of the tube, each a good five inches apart.

Luke’s mind performed a few lunatic calculations. What was the distance between the access chute’s mouth and the crate? A hundred feet, at least. That hand had crawled across the purification room and through the chute… how much farther could it reach? Perhaps that hand was attached to an arm that unspooled endlessly…

…no, it had to eventually attach to something, didn’t it? A body. A host.

When Luke tried to envision that body—an image flared briefly in his skull—his mind sprinted swiftly away from its nightmarish outline.

The hand raised up ever so slightly. Rocking side to side.

Waving good-bye.

Taa-taa, Lukey-loo. We’ll be seeing each other again real soon. We’ll be close by. We’ve always been close. Bye for now. TTFN.

LB YIPPED EXCITEDLYas they staggered out of the hatch. They looked to have aged half a decade since they’d stepped through it.

They were slick with the kind of adrenal perspiration that squeezes from the pores like the sweat off foreign cheese. Their overalls were stained with that unnameable oil coating the chute, the fabric ripped from their… escape? What had they been running from? Al’s overalls were torn across her belly, a slash like a sagging mouth that revealed her abdominal muscles.

They hunched, hands on knees, gathering their breath, unable to look each other in the eye. The fear Luke had felt—the nattering, mindless fear of a child—already seemed foolish… mostly. Were he to stare through the porthole into the cramped, dimly lit tunnel, he knew he’d see nothing. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to look.

He couldn’t convince himself that what he’d seen hadn’t been real, either—if not enough to hurt him physically, then at least to damage or even destroy his mind.

You’re being played, Luke .

It felt that way. Stupidly, he almost believed it, too. Every angle cut off, every attempt to escape thwarted. He felt much like a rat down a hole with the terriers chewing after him and the rat-catcher somewhere above, stomping his feet to make the ground thunder. As if some calculating force was funneling him toward a dire certainty, the contours of which Luke could only dimly grasp.

Let’s be serious here, brother. It’s probably a classic case of the sea-sillies.

Clayton’s voice.

You mustn’t discount that possibility, O brother of mine.

Luke hadn’t discounted it. Or that it could be the ’Gets taking hold. It could happen just this way. A person began to imagine things. That they are pursued by faceless hunters, their childhood nightmares come back to snatch them. The world warped and their brains warped right along with it.

And if two sad souls catch it at the same time? Clayton chimed in. Well, it can certainly accelerate their mutual deterioration. They both start grasping at the same straws; they’re plagued by the same phantoms. Wouldn’t you agree?

Luke glanced at Al. He didn’t see any sores on her face or hands—if she was spotting already, he couldn’t see it. As for Luke, he could feel a stress pimple beginning to hatch under his lip but that was about it.

LB rucked under his elbow, prodding him with her snout. She licked his palm, her head cocked at a quizzical angle.

I know this dog, Luke thought, scrupulously itemizing his surroundings. Her name is LB. She is a chocolate Lab, a bit small for her breed. We are eight miles below the surface of the Pacific. The woman beside me is Lieutenant Alice Sykes, U.S. Navy. I am Luke Nelson, a veterinarian. I live at 34 Cherryhill Lane in Iowa City. My wife’s name is Abby. My son has a chevron-shaped birthmark on his right arm.

He shook his head, angry at himself.

My ex -wife’s name is Abby. My son had a chevron-shaped birthmark.

“What do you think, Doc?” Al asked. “Are we going bugfuck nuts down here or what? What I saw in there”—pointing toward the purification room—“can’t exist. I know that. But I saw it. I saw that Henke kid crawl out of that fucking crate, scuttling like a crab with his wet flesh falling off his bones… and he never took his gaze off me, Doc. His eyes were clear and cold and so fucking angry . That can’t be , but it is. Down here it is.”

Luke lifted his foot to get a look at the sole of his boot. A ragged trench was gouged through the rubber. He was only mildly shocked to see it.

“We’ve got to find that generator, Al.”

Al nodded, content to have a plan. “We can do that.”

THEY RETURNEDto the main lab. Returned to the buzz behind the door marked LW—dulcet now, even harmonic. Al’s gaze flitted toward Westlake’s lab. Luke sensed it took a great effort for her to pry her eyes away from it.

Clayton was inside his lab. Luke saw him through the porthole and hammered his fist on the glass.

“Clay! Open up! We’ve got to talk!”

Clayton’s hand was bandaged to the wrist now. Viscid fluid leaked through the gauze—thick and translucent, the consistency of 5 Minute Epoxy. It had gummed to the sleeve of his overalls, forming a white crust like the stuff that forms at the edges of a horse’s mouth when it’s been run too hard.

Clayton approached the hatch, a strange smile pasted on his face. He draped that curtain over the porthole to shield his lab from view.

“Goddamn it, Clay!” Luke hit the glass hard enough to rake the skin off his knuckles. “We need your help! You need ours !”

“Screw it. Leave him in there,” Al said. “It’s where he can do the least harm. Think of how long we’ve been down here, Luke. Look at how it’s affecting us already. Look at what it did to Westlake, too. Your brother and Dr. Toy… we can’t trust anyone who’s been down here that long.”