Nick Cutter - The Deep

“Very bad, my child. Oh yes-yes-yes, very bad indeed…”

Clayton’s eyes. Oh God, his eyes . They glimmered in the bloody red light. There was nothing in them—not hostility or hurt or lunatic rage. They looked like lead-colored marbles socked into the face of a stuffed animal.

Those eyes rolled from Luke’s face down to the hypodermic, which jutted straight from his calf, stiff as a diving board. Clayton’s mouth pursed in a wry smile.

“Clever boy.”

Luke crab-walked away. Clayton pursued sluggishly, dragging his leg.

“Clever, clever, clever…”

Luke’s back hit the wall. He spun, disoriented in the red light, and scuttled away as Clayton made a clumsy and almost playful lunge.

He moves like a child, Luke thought wildly. A baby learning how to walk.

Luke tripped awkwardly against the lab bench. Clayton spun like a happy drunk, a blankly joyous look on his face. His leaden eyes widened: the look of a predator whose prey had stumbled carelessly into its midst.

Clayton reached for Luke. His bandaged arm had elongated in some terrible way, his fingers stretching, each digit acquiring extra joints… a version of that terrible arm that had hu-thumped out of the Tickle Trunk.

LB charged at Clayton, snarling. With disturbing quickness, Clayton shifted his attention from Luke to the dog. He caught her deftly, almost lovingly. LB snapped and bit, her teeth tearing shallow grooves in Clayton’s neck—his flesh tore all too easily, like tissue paper.

“Good dog-gie.”

Luke scrambled up, hunting for the second hypo. The floor was scattered with bits of medical equipment.

Gauze, a box of Band-Aids, a scalpel…

Clayton’s hand tightened around LB’s ear flap. With one spastic movement, he tore it off. It came off the dog’s head with a gristly burr, kind of like an obstinate sleeve torn off an old letterman jacket. LB issued an electric yelp of pain.

The second hypo had fallen halfway through the floor grate; the plunger was hooked precariously on the saw-toothed metal. If the grate got rattled, the hypo could fall. Luke’s fingers weren’t long enough to reach it if that happened.

His brother’s fingers, however…

LB strained in Clayton’s grip, her legs scrabbling desperately. Clayton’s smile widened—a madcap leer that threatened to split his head in half.

Luke closed his thumb and forefinger around the hypo, pulling it carefully from the grate. He moved behind his brother—whose unearthly eyes seemed to track him from an impossible angle, telescoping like a snail’s eyes—then rose up and sunk the needle into his throat.

Clayton gargled and dropped the dog. The needle protruded from his neck. His bandaged arm flailed; Luke ducked as the limb swung over his skull like the unmoored boom on a sailboat.

Clayton staggered back and hit the wall and slid down, still clawing at the needle. He sat, legs splayed, toes pointed at the ceiling. His head dipped. His posture was that of a wino passed out in an alleyway.

LB had crawled to a corner and lay there whimpering.

Luke said, “It’s okay, girl.”

Gingerly, he pulled her paw away from the wound. A ragged tear, the flesh ripped unevenly to leave an inch or so of ear. Blood stained her golden coat.

“I’ll fix you up. You’ll be good as new.”

Clayton’s unbandaged hand still clutched LB’s ear. Luke knelt beside him, fearful that his brother’s eyes would pop open. He wrenched at Clayton’s fingers until he pried LB’s ear free. Staring at the blood-soaked flap, Luke was rocked by a wave of despondency and loneliness as profound as he’d ever known…

…the only time that came close to it was years ago, in that playground…

Luke’s mind heaved. Another chunk broke off the crumbling landmass of his psyche, drifting into the dark. The portion that remained could comprehend that madness—true, uncaring lunacy—was not far away. Madness had been there since he’d set foot on the station; it had been dogging him persistently, waiting for the cracks to develop so that it could slip painlessly inside. That’s exactly how it would happen, too: a quick little jab like a needle administered by an expert nurse. He’d barely feel the insanity take hold.

“You stuck your hand through the hole, Clayton. Couldn’t help yourself, could you?”

TWENTY MINUTES LATERLB’s ear was bandaged and the dog was curled up, resting. Clayton was strapped to the bench in the main lab.

Luke used a Tensor bandage to lash his brother’s heels together, then tied them to the bench. He hacked another Tensor in half and tied his wrists down. He could only hope that the restraints, plus the coldcocking dose of Telazol, would keep Clayton immobile while Luke inspected his arm.

“Let’s see what we’re dealing with, brother of mine.”

Luke found latex gloves and a pair of medical shears in the first-aid kit. He slit Clayton’s sweater up to his shoulder. Bandages covered Clayton’s entire arm. They were encrusted with some kind of paste that smelled faintly of honeysuckle.

Luke cut the bandages away, starting at Clayton’s shoulder. The flesh was pale and sweaty. But as Luke pulled the wrappings back, things began to change.

Pencil-thin threads of black appeared. They darkened Clay’s flesh like tattoos. These gradually knit into a band of solid black, roughly four inches above his elbow.

Luke touched that flesh with his finger. He had a lot of experience with frostbite, which could turn skin black, but this wasn’t it. Frostbite turned flesh pulpy and pestilent. The flesh of Clayton’s upper arm was firm, just terribly discolored.

“What the hell what the hell what the hell …”

He snipped and gingerly peeled the bandages away; they trailed strings of gummy translucence like strips of duct tape whose glue had softened in the sun. The flesh beyond the black layer—about two solid inches—was the chalky white of processed lard. No arm hairs, no freckles or blemishes.

“Jesus, Clay. What have you done?”

He’d cut around the elbow and a few inches down the forearm when Clay’s flesh became opaque. The sight reminded Luke of bacon grease stored in a glass: a top of hardened grease that gave way to clearer fat studded with burned bits of bacon. A few more snips and he was peering into Clayton’s arm: a gray, gelatinous sheath of flesh—was it even flesh anymore?—that displayed the blue tubes of his veins.

The shears were gummed with translucent ooze. The bandages came away much easier now, anyway. He could peel them off with his fingers.

LB poked her head around Luke’s hips. “Go on,” Luke warned her. “Scat.” The dog tucked her tail and retreated to a corner, watching him fearfully.

When Luke uncovered Clayton’s hand, black dots popped before his eyes.

He could see bones. That wasn’t the worst of it. Clayton’s flesh quivered like Jell-O fresh from the fridge… and yet it didn’t seem squishy, as Jell-O would be.

A chrysalis , he thought. I’m seeing the same process that happens inside a cocoon, when a caterpillar turns into a moth… or a pollywog turns into a frog. A transformation so intense that everything melts and is reborn .

Clayton’s swollen fingers ended in stubs. Strips of medical tape sloughed off each one… Why had Clay taped them? His finger bones appeared to overlap one another, like photographic negatives set slightly off-kilter—

Clayton’s arm tensed. His hand curled into a fist.

His eyes were still closed.

Was there a ghost of a smile on his face?

His hand uncurled. Then something perfectly awful happened.

With a gluey suck, Clayton’s fingers… unfolded .