Nick Cutter - The Deep

Bang… bang… bang…

His eyes snapped open. He’d let them slip shut, lulled by that banging, which matched the beat of his own heart. A shadow twisted across the wall where the tunnel bent. He watched the hatchway, thinking something— fingers, four small fingers, a boy’s small fingers —might wrap around the gray metal. When that didn’t happen, his eyes fell back upon the journal. The pages hooked his gaze, tugging insistently. Westlake’s voice—cold and raspy with death—said: You need to know, Lucas, because down here anything can happen. Anything at all.

Science Day!

This place repulses.

There is nothing to nourish the soul. Nothing but man-made angles and inert materials. Nothing is cut from nature, holding the supple appeal of objects that God has touched. God’s finger doesn’t reach down this far.

Today I wept while brushing my teeth. I wonder why I even do it now. I bought the toothbrush months ago, on a shopping trip with Hannah. She’d pirouetted down the aisles, flipping silly items into the cart. A piping bag, adult diapers… she thought it was hilarious when I’d take them out, sigh dramatically, and set them back on the shelves.

The toothbrush is old now, its bristles bent. But I bought it in a well-lit supermarket eight miles up and however-thousand miles distant, on a day when the sun shone brightly and I’d played foolish games with my daughter.

And now I’m here, crouched in the loveless belly of this spider-station. Hannah is part of another world, one I have no grip on. And so I’d stared at my toothbrush with its sad dab of minty paste and I’d cried. The tears came effortlessly. Some days I cry without quite realizing it.

The hole is growing. Days ago, it ate my microphone.

Hungry, hungry hole.

I hear voices. They are not made by anyone onboard the station.

A bee stung me. On the arm. Who cares, right? You’re a scientist who works with bees, Westlake! Surely you’ve been stung before.

And surely I have. But the pain was much sharper this time. The bee had a red-ink marking on its abdomen. I watched it fly away in the narcotized manner that all bees possess after they’ve stung—their guts are unraveling out of their bellies, which makes them fly wonky.

I pursued it in a frenzy, knocked it down and stomped on it. Its body exploded under my boot with a satisfyingly gooey pop.

There. Fucking thing. THERE YOU GO.

I couldn’t find the stinger in my flesh. A terrifying thought came to me: it had burrowed into me. There was an inflamed red bump that itched awfully.

I dressed it with ointment and a Band-Aid from the medical kit. I did not tell Clayton. We rarely speak. There is open hostility when we do. I believe he is spying on me and told him as much. Clayton labeled my accusation absurd—of course he would! Maybe it’s Hugo, he said; or maybe you’re losing it, Westlake. I nearly slugged him. I feel perpetually spied upon—eyes tiptoeing over my skin at all hours.

As such, Clayton and I pass each other like submarines in the night. Haaaaa…

Before our argument, I did run into Clayton in the main lab. I found him at the window. I, too, find myself staring, bewitched, over that carpet of marine snow. I envision it stretching out, lunarlike and lifeless, beyond the spotlights. The ambrosia drifts in far greater concentrations now. We’ve collected a good deal.

Clayton’s aspect has changed. Gaunt, wan. Lack of sunlight, of course, but Clayton always seemed bizarrely luminous. I picture a huge insect under his overalls—a giant tick battened onto his back. Unbeknownst to him, this tick is sucking out his bodily juices. It’s growing, gaining strength while Clayton bows like a hunchback under its blood-bulged weight.

“I haven’t been able to contact the surface for… a day,” he said somewhat falteringly. Neither of us are aware of time anymore. The minutes and hours and days blend, which inspires a certain gaiety of mind for men like us, who feel as though we’ve spent our adult lives in the shadow of a constantly ticking clock.

“What’s happened?”

“A storm of some sort,” he said. “Under the water. It’s interrupting the signal.”

I took this in stride. Part of me was heartened. I was worried they might send a team down to round up Hugo. If so, they might snoop around my lab. I don’t want that.

The ambrosia’s effect on the colony has been remarkable. Both hives are thriving. The drone can be heard outside the lab now; bees festoon the bench, the walls and roof.

The question is—has the ambrosia cured the Disease, at least insofar as it manifests in honeybees? Cured it, or has it actually altered their basic cellular structure? Are they even bees anymore, as we commonly conceive them?

The bastard bee that stung me… the itch is worsening. A painful, maddening sensation. I have not scratched it yet. I’m terrified to. The skin has swollen so badly that the Band-Aid has torn loose. A puffy, awful anthill throbs on my arm. The hole in its center is a deep and pestilent yellow.

I will not scratch. I WILL NOT.

Update: I scratched.

Hah.

Jul?

Want to hear a story my mother told me? My mother was a Bible-basher. Bashy-bashy-bash that Bible, Ma! Ignorant dilettante scare-mongerer…

This story wasn’t in any Bible. Don’t know where she got it. Her crazy-ass stepfather? Yes, so…

Once there was a great exorcist. He saw demons in the waking world. They were everywhere. Perched on some poor fucker’s shoulder or wrapped around a sinner’s waist, its filthy hands down the man’s pants, inciting him to vice.

Most of them were pests. Parasitic hellspawn who created havoc in the minds of weak men, leading them to cheat on their spouses, beat their kids, steal from their employers. But there were some very bad demons. They weren’t physically big, necessarily—one of the worst was no bigger than a fruit fly. It’d perch inside the ear of a victim, dripping poison into that person’s brain. The body of another was gauzy and fungoid. It wrapped around a man’s head like a cocoon—it looked like a tent caterpillar nest in an oak tree.

Nobody could see them but the exorcist. He banished them. The same demons more than once, in some cases. And there was a place, my mom said, a nexus where they congregated. A deep, dark place. When the exorcist banished a demon from its host, it fled back to this spot. Sometimes the demon would remain down there a long time. It was difficult to get out, you see. The demons would swirl around, nipping and snarling, waiting for the opportunity to ascend to the human realm again.

These demons killed the exorcist. Eventually, inevitably. He didn’t fling himself out a window like old Father Karras. Each encounter left scars on the exorcist—not physical, but psychic. These powerful demons hacked at the exorcist’s brain, taking swipes like with a tiny razor, each fight wrecking him a little more, warping his reasoning until he couldn’t fight them any longer. His body was found in an alley behind a cathedral where he’d fled seeking sanctuary, his face torn off by feral dogs.

I think of my mother’s story now. That deep, dark place. If you had to hide something—if you were God, say, and could command it—if you wanted to hide the worst, most threatening things you could imagine… well, where better?

Answer me that. Where… BETTER?

Sunday Funday

The hole is bigger. I could fit my fist through, if I tried.

I confess that I want to try. Very badly, in fact.

The bees cluster around it. Buzzing, investigating. I keep waving them away. The hole is dark—much darker than the surrounding metal.