Nick Cutter - The Deep

The severed fingertips kept moving. Kept… squirming, like fat little grubs. The bees tried to spirit them away for their strange games. I shooed them off, picked the tips up with tweezers, and deposited them through the hole.

Have me, if you want. A small piece. A tribute. Won’t that be enough?

The voices seemed appreciative of my gift. But they are growing louder again.

Hungrier.

Hungry hungry hole…

· · ·

I dreamed I was drowning. Wanted to die very badly. Tried to take a breath, flood my lungs. Couldn’t. I washed up on the shores of an immense black ocean. The water was thick as molasses, sucking at my bare feet. Hannah was there, singing the song I’d once sung to put her to sleep as a baby.

Hannah’s eyes were huge ovals, dead black, stretching from her eyebrows to the base of her nose. A bee’s eyes. The flesh above her nose broke open and a pair of antennae pushed through like bean sprouts from a pot of dirt.

I awoke screaming… or laughing. So hard to tell now.

My bee-children are cruel. They grow impatient, which leads to mischief. There are a few of the old bees left. My children make terrible sport of one of the old queen-defenders. They’ve torn its legs and wings off. They pinch and slash it. I think they may have tried to copulate with it.

Bee rape? Is it possible? If they conceive, what will that baby look like?

The hole is much bigger now. The voices, louder. It’s as if lips are pressed to the other side of that dark, glittery sheen. If I put my ear to it, I’m sure I’d hear what those lips are saying.

I want to put my head through the hole. Want to kiss those lips.

Whose lips? WHAT’S LIPS?

Is that a bad thing to want?

I won’t put my head through.

I am trying very hard not to.

· · ·

put it

through

· · ·

Cut myself with the razor. Slashed my wrists vertically, not horizontally, the way you do when you’re dead serious and not just squalling for attention, MOMMY-DADDY PAY ATTENTION TO ME OR I’LL SWALLOW A HANDFUL OF KIDDIE ASPIRIN—no I slit right down the ulnar artery, deep deep slashes, serious as a fucking heart attack, you bet your ass, the best way to let out a whoa-nelly gusher of blood.

I healed. Almost immediately, I healed.

I wept. Cut again. Wept. Wept. Jesus fucking wept.

My children buzzed about my ears, stinging me.

Bad mother! Bad mother! Don’t hurt yourself, mother! Stay with us, love us, be with us forever!

Fucking things. Fucking fucking fuck fuck FUCH HUCH UG UG UUUUU

· · ·

Amazing. Simply amazing. It is beauty. The purest beauty imaginable.

· · ·

THE FIG MEN

ARE DRAWING NEAR

· · ·

THE FIG MEN

ARE HERE

· · ·

LUCAS. LUCAS COME HERE. LUCAS COME HOME. COME HOME LUCAS.

COME HOME SON

DADDY COME HOME

LUKE HURLED THE JOURNAL.Pages riffling, it struck the wall. He shook violently, gooseflesh pebbling his scalp. LB’s head popped out from underneath the cot where she’d been resting, her eyes darting restlessly.

DADDY COME HOME

Jesus. Jesus Christ.

He shouldn’t have read it. He knew that belatedly, the same way he’d known he shouldn’t watch a scary movie as a young boy—but Luke always had to watch, peeking through his fingers.

The final ten pages were partially glued with a rank-smelling substance; the honey produced by those bastardized bees, Luke could only guess. And the last few pages were dark with blood.

The journal’s final words seemed less written than etched. Each letter had torn through several sheets of paper, their impressions carving deep into the sheets below. The letters were huge slashes, horizontal or vertical, no curves—the O’s looked like crazed cubes. Westlake must’ve wielded his pen like a knife, slashing each stroke several times, ripping and gouging them onto the page.

DADDY COME HOME

It made no sense. Dr. Westlake had no idea who the hell Luke was. That he was a father, or Luke’s tortured history with his son. Christ, they’d never met. Had Clayton mentioned him? Even if so, what would compel Westlake to write that?

THE FIG MEN ARE HERE .

This cut even closer to the bone. How would Westlake know about the Fig Men, the monsters in Zachary’s closet? It made no sense. Luke thought about the words written in blood inside the Challenger : THE AG MEY ARE HERE . That’s how he’d read it. But Al thought the second word was Men , hadn’t she? Could the A Luke had seen actually have been the capital letter F and and a lowercase I combined? Could the blood from a letter F have dripped down, joining the top of that I to become what looked to be a sloppy, too-big A ?

Jesus, had Westlake actually written: THE FIG MEN ARE HERE ?

The Fig Men didn’t exist . There was no such thing. They were something his son’s fevered imagination had cooked up—something Luke himself had fixed, trapping the Fig Men in obsidian cocoons. He remembered how the act had made him feel like a minor superhero. The Human Shield.

Could the journal be a deeper manifestation of Dr. Westlake’s psychosis? Rantings and ravings divorced from truth? Luke wanted to believe so. The “honey” could be something he’d mixed up in his lab, boiled sugar and some manner of toxic chemical. Physically speaking, the gunk on its pages was the only thing that separated Westlake’s journal from your standard loony bin manifesto—it was full of the same delusional thinking, paper-shredding pen strokes, and yes, even blood.

Home. Come home. Luke had been home, safe if despondent in Iowa City. The Trieste , though, wasn’t anybody’s home. Not the home of anything human, anyway.

LB clambered onto the mattress and rested her head on Luke’s lap. As he massaged her ears, Luke felt the energy coursing through her bunched muscles. Did he really believe it? The bees, the hives, the madness lurking behind the hatch to Westlake’s lab? The hole ?

Westlake had gone insane. Succumbed to the same pressures that had consumed Dr. Toy—the mental erosion Luke himself had felt from the moment he’d set foot inside the station.

Could he possibly believe the journal? Would he do that up on the surface? Presented with those pages, wouldn’t he dismiss them as the ramblings of a madman?

You would, of course, he told himself. But you aren’t on the surface. You know what is on the surface? Westlake’s corpse. Do you remember what it looked like? Put that image in your mind, Luke, and ask yourself: What’s behind that hatch now?

Luke could answer that question easily: It doesn’t matter, as long as I don’t fucking open it.

But what if someone else opened it?

I believe Westlake , Luke realized with piercing clarity. Not all of what’s written, but I believe the ambrosia drove him insane. I believe him enough to realize we’re in very serious danger here.

“Let’s assess things,” he said to LB, who pricked up her ears. “We’ve got a broken communication link. We can’t contact the surface, and they can’t contact us. We’ve got an escape vehicle with no power, and a current ring that could rip it to shreds if we try to ascend. A crazy person who’s locked himself up. Another person, now deceased, who must’ve gone batshit, too. My brother, who’ll stay here out of pure stubbornness. We’ve got Al, and you and me. The sane ones.”