Nick Cutter - The Deep

Luke gripped the wheel. The lock disengaged with a thunk . The hatch opened half an inch. For an instant, Luke swore that hell itself was breathing through that gap.

The feeling ebbed. He opened it and shone the flashlight into the storage tunnel. Nothing moved. Nothing appeared out of place.

He dragged Clayton around the gooseneck to the Challenger . The generator was making odd whirrs and clicks like a computer warming up.

He rested with his hands on his knees, centering himself. He felt okay. Dog tired, but okay. Things were falling into place. He had Clayton where he needed to be. He’d find Al—this sudden surety filled him with a bright gaiety that pushed the bleakness away a fraction. He would find her, or she would come to him. And LB, too. The world owed him, didn’t it? The world had taken, and now it would give back. That was the way things worked, wasn’t it? On a long enough time line, you paid what you owed—but you also got paid back . And hadn’t they all paid enough? Weren’t they owed , by God? Al, the dog, his brother. That was all Luke was asking for. A helping, fortuitous upward draft. Let a single beam of light in and let him follow it up, up, up out of the dark—

Click… click…

Luke trained the flashlight in the direction of this new noise—with the station swathed in darkness, sound had become his key sense. He slid one hand into his pocket and closed it around the scalpel.

Click… click…

A head appeared around the gooseneck. Two eyes shone like balls of mercury in the flashlight’s glare.

“LB?”

She woofed —a grating, jagged note. Her jaws widened, strings of saliva stretched between her teeth as she chewed anxiously on the air.

She’s scared. Totally terrified.

Luke swung the flashlight behind him. Nothing. When he swung it back, LB had emerged a little more—half of her body was now visible. Her fur was torn away in places, each spot almost perfectly round. Luke didn’t see any blood.

“Come on, girl. It’s okay. It’s only me.”

She whined plaintively, then ducked back behind the bend. The click-click of her nails retreated.

“LB!”

Luke scrambled after her. He ran the way he should have run after Zach that afternoon in the park—as if the devil himself was on his heels. She yelped someplace ahead, a harrowing note that stung Luke’s heart.

He reached the spot where LB had been. Drops of some viscid substance swayed from the floor grate. A smell rose to Luke’s nose: dank and vinegary, with an undernote he couldn’t name.

He rushed on. The flashlight lit the holes along the Trieste ’s hull. They bulged . Bubbles pushed up from their surfaces, shiny with tension.

“LB!”

He gritted his teeth and dove into the crawl-through chute, sliding for a few feet, then transitioning to his back and hauling himself over the final yards. He could hear LB barking not far ahead.

He ran into the main lab. Clayton’s lab hatch was open again; he could see something moving inside. Luke edged up to the hatchway and shone the flashlight inside.

LB’s head poked from behind Clay’s bench. She barked consumptively.

There was something off about that sound.

“You okay, girl?”

Luke trained the flashlight on the bench. LB rounded slowly into sight like a showgirl stepping into a spotlight. Her head, shoulders, chest—

“Oh, LB. Oh, Jesus. What happened to you?”

Something was wrong with the dog’s legs. They were sticks, winnowed and black like charred wood in a campfire. They made bonelike clicks as she came forward, her tongue—her long, seeping, cancerous tongue—dangling queerly from her mouth.

“What did this to you, girl?”

Luke beckoned her forward. I can fix her , he thought, although the chances of that were laughably remote. She’ll be all right…

She lurched toward him. Her front legs could not bend—the bones had been fused somehow; she tottered as if walking on pegs.

Click, click…

Her back legs looked even worse: they’d been compressed, the bones snapped and jellied, leaving her with the squat hind end of a much smaller dog. Her paws had been flattened into clownish disks that slapped the floor.

Click, click. Click-click .

Something projected from LB’s hind end. A red string unspooled from her anus. Jesus, what was that? Was something inside of her, trying to get out?

She staggered closer. Click-click-click . Her head sat weirdly on her neck, off-kilter like a doll’s head that had been cut off and clumsily glued back on…

Luke’s hands trembled. He didn’t want to touch her, and this fact shamed him. She needed someone to hold her, didn’t she? But he was terrified—the fear shot through his arteries like battery acid.

Her mouth opened in a too-big yawn. Her teeth were fearsomely long, crowded into sharp rows in her mouth. Her tongue was needled with holes where she’d bitten it…

…and what was that ?

He squinted. Something was skewered on LB’s teeth. Black and shiny and—

Plastic. A shred of plastic.

Spilled-out pieces of a complex puzzle slotted together in Luke’s mind, forming a picture of shocking, horrifying clarity.

He jerked the flashlight toward the cooler. It was open, as he knew it would be. The lid had been torn off its hinges. It was surrounded with shreds of thick plastic and rags of duct tape. The creature that had resided inside it, the thing wrapped in black plastic, was out.

Luke trained the beam back on the dog-thing. It seemed to be smiling at him now.

Oh, God, this isn’t LB , he thought. It’s the other one. Mushka. Little Fly.

THE DOG—SWEET CHRIST,was it in any way a dog anymore?—staggered closer. Luke wanted to pull away but he couldn’t: his limbs were frozen.

Everything was so clear now. Clayton. He’d shaved away disks of fur to attach monitoring electrodes. He’d put something up the poor dog’s anus, too: a device to measure heat or nerve stimulus; the wire was still sticking out.

Clayton had done all this, then he’d… he’d…

Pushed the dog through the fucking hole. Fed it into the rift, the same way Westlake had fed that microphone through…

Luke could picture it: the dog whining and kicking, its legs braced against the wall as his brother shoved it rudely through. Or else he’d drugged it and fed the poor thing through while it was narcotized.

He wanted to see how the thing or things on the other side would react, Luke realized. What they would do. The dog was an offering.

So it had gone into the hole and come back as… this . Clayton must’ve known immediately that something was wrong, so he’d killed it. Cut its head off, as he’d done to the guinea pig. But it had come back, hadn’t it? So he killed it again and again until it was dead enough, for long enough, that he could encase it in plastic, bind it with tape, and stuff it into the—

A feral, considering brightness entered the dog’s eyes. Its facial features were stretching. Rank foulness pumped from its pores. The flashlight picked up a faint glimmer over its coat. Its mouth stretched wide. Its eyes sunk back into its sockets.

Get out of here. RUN.

The tendons mooring its jaw snapped like overtaxed elastic bands. It issued the anxious mewls of a hungry baby. Luke stood in spellbound horror, transfixed as the dog’s mouth cantilevered open, wider and wider, so big it seemed capable of swallowing hearts, souls, entire worlds…