Nick Cutter - The Deep

Hannah stood at the lip of the stairs. The darkness was such as I’ve never known.

My daughter said one word.

Nanna.

Nanna was her grandmother on my ex’s side. A narrow-shouldered, birdlike thing. But Hannah loved her, and fairly so: the woman doted on her.

Nanna.

One word, spoken clear as a bell. Hannah’s arms stretched toward the darkness.

I saw it then: some ineffably old thing dressed in the skin of Hannah’s grandmother, the bones showing through in spots, staring up at my daughter and smiling through a mouth of rotted teeth.

Come then, honeybug. Come hug your darling Nanna.

I caught Hannah at the last instant—my index finger slipped inside her diaper, between the cleft of her buttocks. I felt the terrible weight of her body straining against the diaper clips. She would have fallen headlong…

That, or something may have caught her.

My eyes fled down the steps, even though every muscle and nerve ending in my body fought it.

I saw nothing. Just the steps trailing into that twitching darkness.

But I felt something howling up the staircase as loud and clear as if a banshee had shrieked at me.

Not a sound but a sense. Of NEED. Of HUNGER.

Something was starving in that basement. Something that had been born starving, maybe. It was never full, would never be satisfied.

I grabbed Hannah tightly. There came a harsh snick ! like the jaws of a bear trap snapping shut. That, and perhaps a ringing note of laughter.

We moved out within a week. Shortly thereafter my wife and I divorced. The usual boring reasons: an accumulation of petty resentments and personal weaknesses. But a sentiment existed beneath those usual ones, unique to us: for two years we’d lived atop an unknown but festering horror that could’ve erased us.

Whatever had invaded the basement of that colonial home in leafy Belmont had been there a long time. Eventually it would’ve beaten me, outsmarted or out-quicked me, and as its prize would’ve claimed what I loved most. It was old, ageless maybe, and far more cunning than I.

How can a rational man run away from a basement ? How could he admit that he was illogically frightened of nothing? But that sense of threat never abated; it was akin to that taste you’ll get at the back of your throat before a big storm sweeps through—it’s imminent, it’s coming, all you can do is find safety.

Which brings me back to my recurring dream.

Which is this:

I am perched at the edge of those basement steps, about to fall. There is no preamble at all—I drift into sleep and that’s where the dream begins.

In this nightmare I am an adult, and I’m naked… all except for a diaper, the same as Hannah once wore. It should be funny, but in the nightmare it only adds to the terror: every trivial detail is precision calibrated for maximum horror.

I’m standing at the lip of the stairs with my arms windmilling for balance. I am about to fall—the nightmare seems endless and yet I am always just about to fall.

It is dark at the bottom of the stairs, incalculably so. Something down there is shuffling forward, about to broach that thinning light.

I’m staring down, wobbling, and see something. My waking self can’t even envision what it is—some things are confined to dreams, thank Christ.

But it is coming. I feel it. Its need. Its limitless, timeless hunger.

And then I wake up.

HA! I can’t believe I wrote all that. I’d be laughed out of every academy in the country if this were ever found. And look, I’ve dulled three pencils making a potential laughingstock of myself!

Who cares? I can’t sleep anyway. Why? Well, great galloping goose-shit, I’ve just told you, haven’t I?

No matter. This has been very cathartic. And it will all be burned tomorrow. Unreadable ashes.

Monday, June 23

Well, here we are again. I didn’t end up burning anything. Never found the time or, I suppose, the inclination.

I write to you from inside the Trieste. Belly of the beast.

The journey down was surreal. We are creatures of daylight. That a world might exist below our own—a world of permanent night—is unthinkable. It is akin to asking a man to live on the moon without a spacesuit.

Thank God for Al. The woman is armor-plated. She brought us down one by one: Clayton, then myself, then Hugo. The animals and insects came last.

The Trieste is horrible. My first thought upon glimpsing it in the Challenger’s spotlights was: a spider. Some hideous arachnid like the ones lurking in the basement of my Belmont home. Impervious to pressure, insensitive to light, its limbs spread across the ocean floor.

And we would be inside of it. In its twitching, repulsive guts.

The ceilings are low and ribbed—they truly did give the feel of an intestinal tract. Odd noises race overhead, the pattering of footsteps. The pressure is palpable. More than once I’ve run my hand over my head to assure myself the crown of my skull hasn’t been driven flat.

Each of us has our own private lab. We were shown to our cots and the bathroom quarters. Our waste goes into durable plastic bags, which were vacuum sealed; our deposits would be ferried to the surface for disposal. Alice made a crack about spending fifteen years in the navy only to end up a shit carrier. We laughed, but laughter holds a strange resonance down here. The acoustics rob the joy from it, making it sound spiteful and desperate.

When Alice ascended, a pall settled over the three of us. Now that I’m down here, I can see that humans should not exist in such a place.

The first night I dreamed of a squirrel. We used to have them around the yard of my childhood home in Ledyard, Connecticut. Big fat ones. They loved the peanuts my father would leave out for the jays and cardinals. He would shoot the squirrels with a pellet gun. A narrow-minded bastard, was my father.

One afternoon I found one of them beneath the chestnut tree. It lay faceup and appeared to be breathing. But then I saw the tiny scarlet star where one of its eyes should’ve sat—the spot where the pellet went through and smashed its brain.

The squirrel’s chest burst open and maggots spilled out. Wriggling and tumbling over its coarse dark fur. I’d never seen maggots; the closest I’d ever gotten is when I’d smashed a fly on a windowpane and spied a hundred white specks—fly eggs—streaking the glass. The maggots boiled out of the squirrel’s chest cavity, squiggling in the grass; I raced down the street, wanting to put as much distance as possible between me and that horrible sight.

So yes, I dreamed of that squirrel. And of the maggots, too… but within their squirming lay another sound, sly and febrile—the buzz of honeybees.

Everything is normal. Such dreams are to be expected.

LUKE PAUSED.LB had been resting on his lap; she stirred, looking up at him questioningly. He couldn’t hear anything down the tunnel.

“Hey, Al?” he called. “Everything okay?”

For a moment, nothing. Then her voice filtered back to him.

“S’okay. Trying to figure out this genny.”

“Need a hand?”

“Funny, Doc, real funny… I could use two good hands, but I’m managing with the one.”

Luke petted LB, giving her those long strokes down her back that every dog enjoys; she whimpered gratefully and settled her head against his stomach. Luke yawned so wide that his jaw cracked.

He picked the journal up and started to read again.

Thursday, June 26

As a child, I banged my thumb with a hammer. The thumbnail went black as a layer of blood formed between the nail plates. The entire nail peeled off. Underneath was a gummy residue of old blackened blood.