Nick Cutter - The Deep

Your mom and my mom would’ve gotten on like bandits , Luke thought.

“Fecal matter,” Toy said. “Her term for it. Not doo-doo or poop-poo or even that old standby, shit . Fff-fuh-fecal… matter . Please understand—I wasn’t raised to be a man who’d shit in a corner. But good manners have a way of buh-buh-bleeding away down here.” Toy shook his head as if to dispel a troublesome thought. “What-whuh-what are you—I mean, what do you, do you do ? Your job.”

“I’m a veterinarian.”

“So Clayton Nelson’s brother is an animal sawbones. Faaa -scinating. Did you get your s-stuh-start fixing up his spuh-spuh-specimens? You’d have been at work all day.” When Luke didn’t reply, Toy said: “Chaos.” He swallowed as if to center himself. “That’s why I locked myself up. In case you were wondering.”

That’s right , Luke remembered. That’s one of Hugo the Horrible’s specialties, isn’t it? Chaos theory.

“Oh, uh, it started normally enough,” Toy said. “We set up shop. Three men, three labs. Instability systems was my role. Basically, uh, was it f-f-fuh-feasible? The ambrosia—did it cure anything, or did it simply create havoc under an illusion of cure?”

He picked up a crinkled sheet of paper and smoothed it over his knee.

“I was working with… theories, yes? Known thuh-theories that apply and have value on the”—pointing upward—“up there, yes? But, uh, down here, nothing b-b-behaves as it should. Theories and mathematics just dissolve. Even the most chaotic events, if you buh-buh-break them down, have a pattern and order—and if they don’t , then at least the level of chaos can be calculated, compartmentalized and uh, uh, understood .”

Dr. Toy grinned widely—he seemed manic, weirdly chipper. His demeanor struck Luke as that of a convict who’d been kept in solitary confinement for years, and now, finally given a chance to speak to another human being, he couldn’t help prattling on. He showed Luke what he’d written. A hen-scratched theorem, incredibly complex.

“Picture a rock rolling down a mountainside. Or a bead of mercury running down the back side of a spoon. Or skeins of fff -fruh-frost bristling across a windowpane. The movement would seem random, yes? But it’s not. If we could catalogue all the variables in the universe, we could know with utter certainty what happens next—the, uh, the… the next skip of that rock, the-the-the way the mercury will slip, the direction each skein will buh-branch. But we don’t, so, so… chaos.”

He stopped pacing and stared at Luke, his eyes wide as if seeing him—really seeing him —for the first time.

“What’s on the uh-uh-other side of the hole is chaos. But not like any I’ve ever known. Unorderable, unnameable, untheorizable. And that’s what pure evil looks like. A chaos whose v-vuh-variables are endless—so huge even the universe can’t contain them. Chaos incarnate.”

Luke had stopped listening by then. One word stuck in his head like a shard of polished glass.

Hole. The hole.

Westlake’s voice, ragged and covetous, as Luke remembered it from those sound files: I put it through…

Luke shifted in his chair. Sweat trickled down his back, soaking the duct tape.

“What hole, Hugo?”

Toy’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve seen one. Don’t tell me you haven’t.”

“I read Westlake’s journal.”

“How is Cooper?” Toy asked, genuinely interested.

Luke blinked. The man clearly didn’t know.

“I’m afraid he’s dead, Hugo. He took one of the Challenger s. He was dead by the time he surfaced.”

Toy’s face twitched. Weird voltages raced under his skin.

Luke said, “In his journals, Westlake mentioned a hole—”

Like magic, a blade appeared in Toy’s hand. A box cutter. He thumbed the mechanism. Two inches of blade slid out. Toy lunged forward, grabbed the matted hair atop Luke’s head, and pressed the blade to his neck.

“You’re luh-lying. You’ve seen a hole.”

Luke’s breath came in shallow heaves. “I haven’t.” He swallowed. The blade scraped his Adam’s apple. “But since I’ve been down here I’ve felt like… like something has been trying to crawl inside my head.”

The blade pressed harder. “Have you let it?”

Luke’s pulse shivered behind his eyes and at the root of his tongue.

“No.”

The blade withdrew.

“This chaos…” Toy went on as if he hadn’t threatened to slit Luke’s throat mere moments ago, “…it’s orderly . There’s the surface chaos, you could say, like a-a-a-a tangle of leaves and twigs laid over a ttt -truh-trap. A camouflage of chaos with something very logical and cunning beneath. A guiding principle or, uh, modus operandi. The real mmm-muh-master.”

Toy stood abruptly, kicking through drifts of paper to the nearest wall. Luke clenched his hands while Toy’s attention was elsewhere, trying to pull his wrists apart enough to slip a hand free.

“Protective runes.” He pointed at the duct-taped symbols, laughing stiffly. “I studied them as an undergraduate. Druids and, and, uh, that b-b-buh-bullshit. It’s all from memory. I don’t know if they have any effect at ah, at uh, at all .”

“I don’t see any holes.”

Toy smiled without humor. “I wonder if that’s because they don’t want me.”

They .

Luke said: “Westlake’s journal. I read it.”

“Oh, yes?” Then, almost as an afterthought but with genuine sympathy: “Westlake, my God. Poor Cooper. That poor, poor man.”

“Dr. Westlake said a hole appeared on his lab wall… He claimed he heard sounds coming out of it. Voices.”

“The voice in the sea, as your brother would claim,” Toy said acidly. “Some pressure-treated harpy wailing for Cooper to stick his head out and kiss her.”

Westlake’s voice again: I want to put my head through the hole. Want to kiss those lips …

“A hole ate into the wall of my lab, too,” Toy said. “Small at first, growing steadily b-b-bigger. I spoke to Clayton about it. Predictably, he called me a fuh- fff -fool. I told him to come into the goddamn lab, I’d show him. He refused. Of course, he probably had one blooming in his own lab. And Westlake too, as you say.” He shook his head. “Yet none of us acted. None of us told anyone—Felz, Alice, somebody on the suh-surface. Why? Because it was so horribly exciting .”

A hole in Dr. Toy’s lab? Luke had gotten a glimpse inside Toy’s lab when they arrived on the Trieste . Its porthole wasn’t coated in black ichor, like Westlake’s, or draped like his brother’s. Luke hadn’t seen a hole. Of course, it could be in a blind spot. It wasn’t worth challenging Toy on it. Luke worked his wrists, testing his bonds. The sweat oiled his skin. The tape was surrendering its hold in increments.

“Professionally, I’m never more alive than when I’m on the cusp ,” Toy went on. “With surgeons, it’s when they’re ‘in the cut,’ you know? Wrist-deep inside a-a-a chest cavity. For me, or for your bruh-bruh-brother and Westlake—poor man!—it’s wuh-when we’re on the verge of a breakthrough. Of, yes, yes, unlocking some previously uh-uh-unknown system that our world operates under.”

“And that’s how you’ve felt down here.”

“Yes! If only we can just, just, learn more. See how the stuff, the ambrosia, how it operates. But that’s the pruh-problem—it has no stable base. It’s always shifting. Worst of all, it knows . It understands our needs and desires. Knows how to d- duddd -dangle that carrot at the end of the stick. By the time we felt the noose around our necks, it was too duh-duh-damn late.