Nick Cutter - The Deep

Thwwwiiiilllliiipppp…

—into a small collection vessel Clayton had affixed to the wall, which had also been hidden by the poster.

It was the first time since Luke had been down that he’d experienced something undeniably not of this world. Everything else could be fobbed off as the product of his overheated imagination, or of Westlake’s runaway psychosis. Even Dr. Toy’s death could have been a structural mishap. But this —the hole, the ambrosia sliming out of it—stood outside all earthly logic.

“Don’t look at it directly,” Luke heard Clayton say.

Luke was on his knees now, crawling toward the hole. He found this distressing in a distant kind of way.

Hey, Luke, your arms and legs are moving on their own. Isn’t that kind of freaky?

Some thing was drawing him forward, pulling him closer to the, the doorway . He was struck with the profound urge to touch it—reach into it. He imagined it would feel warm and embracing. It’d crawl lovingly up his flesh as some strong current drew him deeper, to the wrist and then the elbow and eventually the armpit.

And it would feel like home, wouldn’t it? Like the summer sunshine he remembered from childhood, slanting in golden abundance from a cornflower-blue Iowa sky, hot but not uncomfortably so— cockle-warming , as the old men at the Hawkeye barbershop would say. Yes, it would feel just glorious.

A hand closed over his wrist. Clayton gripped his arm fiercely. Luke wanted to rip out of his brother’s grasp and continue toward the door—it really was more of a door, wasn’t it? He’d open the door and see what was on the other side. It would be simply wonderful, he was certain of it.

“Look at me,” Clayton said. “For Christ’s sake, Lucas— look .”

It required an epic force of will for Luke to keep his eyes locked on Clayton’s. When he did, the pull of the doorway lessened the tiniest bit.

“I have to put the poster back up,” said Clayton, his voice solidifying. “Don’t look at it. I know it’s hard—it wants you to look.”

A relentless pressure in Luke’s skull was torquing his head toward the hole.

“Talk to me, Lucas. Sing a song. It helps.”

Luke hunted his mind for one of the silly kids’ songs he’d sung to Zach. There were dozens; their lyrics danced on the tip of his tongue. But something else inside his head, a persistent presence, had other ambitions.

Why not take a look, Lucas?

An insistent voice. The voice of the hole.

What’s the harm? Little door, little door, open me up! One quick peek. You know you want to. Or touch it, why not? I bet it feels just dandy.

The urge to look was almost sexual. Luke felt the need twisting in his groin with giddy excitement. His penis throbbed with it. There was an unpleasant burn high in his sinuses, as if he’d just dived into an overchlorinated pool. Except it was a dreamy feeling, too, vaguely childlike—the need to peer into a darkened closet, if only to assure himself nothing was inside.

But what if something was inside? And what if it could bite?

“The wheels on the bus go round and round,” Clayton sang. “Round and round, round and round.”

“The wheels on the bus go round and round,” Luke joined in. “All around the town.”

“The wipers on the bus go swish-swish-swish,” they sang together. “Swish-swish-swish, swish-swish-swish; the wipers on the bus go swish-swish-swish, all around the town.”

Clayton picked up the poster. He approached the hole, his posture that of a man walking into a gale-force wind.

“The horn on the bus goes beep-beep-beep,” he sang, “beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep…”

He hung the poster upside-down, punching the paper through the hooks. Einstein’s expression now appeared baleful, his tongue cocked at a lewd angle.

As soon as the hole was covered, Luke’s mind cleared. The brothers retreated to the far side of the room. They sat in silence, breathing heavily.

“I know this must be a lot to take in,” Clayton said finally.

“It’s just like Westlake said.” Luke’s voice was barely above a whisper. “His journals. You knew he wasn’t crazy. You knew all along.”

Clayton’s face, oddly compressed and sun starved, gave him the look of a man in the final stages of tuberculosis.

“He wasn’t crazy, Luke. He was just weak.”

“WHEN DID YOU FIRSTsee it?” Luke said.

Clayton leaned against the lab bench. He shot a furious glance at LB.

“Keep that dog away from me, you understand?”

Luke grasped his nose and gave it a wiggle; the cartilage crackled. He tasted blood, thick and ironlike. He felt no anger, only a dull shock. But the shock was tempered by the sense, deeply buried but sincere, that the holes did exist—he’d known it even without seeing them, so the adjustment now was easier. He wanted to hit Clayton but there was something about his brother, expressed in his sick pallor and swaddled arm, that indicated he was suffering in a serious way. And what would anger solve? It would only rip them further apart and reduce their chances of survival—which was just what the holes wanted, he was sure of it. So Luke would stow his childish hurts and stay calm.

“Just answer the question, Clay. When did you see it?”

“I don’t know,” Clayton said. “It’s tough keeping track of time. At first it was so small, the size of a penny. And it wasn’t so much that I even saw it at that point. It was that I… I felt it.”

Clayton clearly hadn’t hung the poster to stop anyone from seeing the hole—he’d hung it to stop the hole from seeing him .

That his brother had continued to work mere feet from it, collecting the ambrosia as it widened and grew, sucking ceaselessly at his psyche… Luke understood, not for the first time, that his brother’s mind was built to a different tolerance.

“How does the poster muffle that feeling?”

Clayton shrugged. “I don’t know the principles behind it. I only know it works.”

What if it only works because whatever’s behind the hole wants Clay to think it works? Luke wondered. Could be it’s slackening its pull, letting Clayton believe his flimsy poster is worth a tinker’s damn—and what if Clay’s too far gone to realize he’s being played in such a simplistic fashion?

It was conceivable. The smartest people were too often the stupidest—the most blind to manipulation, believing themselves immune to it.

“How much goo have you collected?”

Clayton’s face puckered with distaste at the word goo .

“A good deal,” he said. “At first we didn’t see any of it. Frankly, I’d begun to despair. We’d built this station already. A man had died to get it operational.”

“Not that you’d care about him,” Luke snapped.

“True,” Clayton said without rancor. “It was his job, as this is mine. But there was the expense to consider, too, in the trillions. And for days, weeks , there wasn’t hide or hair of the substance the Trieste had been built to study. But the sensors began to pick it up—scraps drifting lazily around.”

“Like iron filings to a magnet, huh?”

Clayton shrugged again. “I tried bait boxes filled with colorful shapes and reflecting mirrors, but it exhibited no attraction. It was there , Lucas, the ambrosia was there in tantalizing, taunting abundance, but I couldn’t lay my hands on it.”

“And then?”

“Then it invited itself inside. Problem solved.”

“In Westlake’s journal, he said that you collected a sample in a… a vaccu-trap, he said it was.”