Nick Cutter - The Deep

A childhood smell. The same one that would waft up from the white Styrofoam container with the perforated lid he’d buy at the local bait shop for two bucks. He’d put that container in his backpack and sling his fishing rod over his shoulder and head down to the river. On the banks he’d open the container and see them wriggling under a layer of sawdust. Maggots. The best bait for rock bass. Luke had always found them revolting—their fat, milky bodies so translucent you could see the weird workings of their guts through their skin. They wriggled delightedly, it seemed, when he pinched them between his thumb and fingers—just happy to be touched, even if it meant they’d shortly be skewered on a barbed hook. Their skin would dimple like a badly inflated balloon before the hook punched through their bodies—and their elated paroxysms would persist after they’d been skewered, these crazed squirms that would entice a fish to bite…

This was what filled Luke’s nose: that rancid, sawdust smell of maggots in a bait cup.

He snatched the flashlight and twisted onto his stomach. The beam flooded out of the crawl-through and hit a sheer wall of darkness where he’d just been. The light picked up a patina of dust—dead skin cells, it could only be, seeing as there was nothing else down here that could become dust.

Lubbaduuuuu… Loooooolubbaduuuu …

This sound came next, sluicing out of the dark. A slick and gooey noise, like a ball of Vaseline-smeared yarn squished in a fist.

Luke felt it out there now—pulsating and lewd, a giant maggot. A horrific white grub in search of its wormhole; the very hole Luke and Clayton were trapped inside.

The tunnel lights flickered on for a moment.

Luke saw it, or was certain he had. Enormous. It curled around the tunnel and out of sight, thirty feet of it visible, as thick around as an industrial trash can. Its pale ringed ugliness seared his eyeballs; its huge gelatinous body convulsed along the floor in a series of giddy, peristaltic flexes. The sight filled Luke with a narcotizing terror—a slow-acting nectar that oozed into his veins.

The lights went out again. The thing continued to suck and shudder itself forward.

…looolubbaaaaaduuuuu…

Frantically, Luke pushed himself backward. His hands slipped uselessly on the frictionless coating inside the tube: he may as well be trying to climb a greased pole. He reached up, spine bowed, and shoved desperately at the rungs with his palms.

The flashlight picked up an oily slab of chalk-white flesh no more than a yard away from the mouth of the crawl-through…

Loorblovvaducthhh…

Luke paused, trapped in a breathless bubble of panic. That noise, which he’d mistaken for the sound of the maggot’s body shucking across the floor, was something else.

It was a voice. A familiar one.

Looooordloveaducthhhhh…

A quivering mass of unctuous, marble-white flesh plugged the end of the crawl-through. The air turned dense; that stink rolled off the maggot in thick, drowsy waves.

The maggot’s face was not his mother’s—of course not; maggots didn’t have faces—and yet, this was exactly what Luke saw. Her visage stitched onto the maggot’s shuddering, enormous body. There was a porcine fleshiness, that flat-hanging sagginess his mother’s face had held at her heaviest. And its eyes—two of them, socked deep into the puddled sickliness of that sallow face—were black and empty, as his mother’s would get when she was angry. Its mouth was a puckered orifice like an anteater’s: a long, needlelike proboscis.

Looooordloveaductthhhh… it sputtered, putrid bits of goo flinging from its mouth. Looooordlovvvvaducthhhhh…

OhGodOhGodOhGodOhGod —this was the only thought Luke’s mind could summon, a brainless yawp of fright. He rammed his heels into his brother’s shoulders, trying to get them both moving again.

The Beth-maggot squelched deeper into the tube; Luke could hear its massive body drumming against the tunnel, coiling and bucking like agitated eels in a bucket. Its mouth opened with stunning elasticity, a rubbery O big enough to consume his entire head. Its insides resembled a huge intestine, a funnel of suffocating corrugated flesh.

He grabbed another rung and pushed. His brother’s body lurched as his feet dropped out of the crawl-through chute and hit the floor.

The maggot was a yard from Luke’s face. It shuddered over the flashlight, which lit up its body—it looked, Luke thought with paralyzing horror, like the vein-strung insides of an eyeball. The featureless white was strung with tiny veins and capillaries. Next, the flesh split raggedly down the middle of the maggot’s face. It made no sound, as its skin had the consistency of a waterlogged sponge.

It’s too big to fit , Luke thought frantically. It’s ripping itself apart.

He watched, horrified, as his mother’s face tore in half. A new face was pushing through the split, though, and this one was also all-too-familiar…

Nononononono —

Abby. White and gory as a newborn babe. Her eyes were wet jewels; her lips stretched across the canvas of her horridly misshapen features, pursed in a lascivious come-on.

Giveuttthhakistthhh, babbeeeee…

Luke knew that if those lips touched him, he would go insane.

Are you sure you’re not already? asked a frail voice in his head. At least a little?

Elbowing, squirming, he retreated down the chute in total desperation. The Abby-maggot squelched after him, hungering for a kiss. Just one little kiss, baby.

Its face split for a final time—just as Luke knew it would, in the deepest chambers of his heart. The crowning detail. Abby’s face tore apart, molting in wet, waxy rags, her mouth issuing a very human scream of pain and despair, and, bristling through her sundered face like a knotted fist… his son. It looked nothing like Zachary—a face so wizened and repellent that it could only belong to some terribly ancient and hateful thing that had never tasted sunlight on its flesh, its eyes peering with a cheery and mocking avarice—and yet it so clearly was Zachary. It was what this place had made of him, and Luke’s soul shuddered to see it.

Daaaaaddeeeee… it lisped through cracked, pus-weeping lips. Heeelp meee…

Luke’s feet slipped from the tube. With one convulsive shove, he propelled himself out. His feet got tangled with his brother, who was slumped gracelessly on the floor. Luke tripped backward, his son’s voice— Daddeeee —still ringing in his ears; his skull rung off the side of the tunnel and—

—he came to with a spastic jerk of his limbs. He squinted. The flashlight had rolled out of the crawl-through, pinning both him and Clayton in its beam.

The crawl-through chute was empty. He didn’t need to see that to know.

The maggot was gone. The station had had its fun and, for now, was satisfied.

He picked up the flashlight, hefted Clayton, and continued on.

LUKE REACHEDthe storage tunnel hatch and hesitated.

The station wants to keep you frightened so you’ll make mistakes, Luke. Make enough of them, take long enough, and it’s game over.

Clayton’s eyelids twitched. Was he waking up? Luke fingered the hypodermic in his pocket. He didn’t want to overdose his brother. But the last time he’d been conscious, he hadn’t behaved all that nicely.

He could leave Clayton right here at the hatchway. He was a lot closer, at least…

Fuck half measures, Luke. Dump his ass at the Challenger , then either wait for Al and the dog or go find them.