Nick Cutter - The Deep

Uncomprehendingly, Luke traversed this staggering kingdom with the flashlight. He couldn’t get a true measure of its size. The ceiling was out of sight and the walls had been blown back and out. Everyday notions of scale dissolved.

His eyes caught something. A ribbed tube, off-white, projecting through the honeycomb. It hung like an executioner’s noose. Heavy-bodied bees trundled over that tube, pasting it to the hive with the ichor that spurted from puckered orifices on their abdomens.

Luke could see stuff moving through the tube. Slowly, like sludge through a partially blocked pipe…

Get out of here, Luke . Before you see something that ruins you.

He almost laughed. Too late for that. Too late by far.

The beam swept the hive. Lab equipment was studded through it. He saw half of a beaker. A glass pipette…

…a trio of blunt twigs projected from the comb. They looked like hardy buds sprouting from a pot of dirt. The bees busied themselves about them, tending to each bud in the manner of patient gardeners.

The sticks twitched.

The bees took flight with an aggrieved buzzing of wings before settling again.

Fingers. Those are fingers they’re fingers they’re —

Luke’s hand operated of its own accord now. He saw things. Dreadful things.

A dusky loaf suspended from the hive on a strip of organ-meat…

A glint of bone that shone a delirious sapphire-blue…

A pinkly grooved ball that twitched when the light touched it…

Other things. Some worse, none better.

You wanted to see, my son. Do you like it? Does it please you?

Finally, horribly, the light fell upon a ball crawling with bees.

It projected from the hive a few feet above Luke’s head. At first Luke had no idea what he was seeing—it could have been the bottom of a wide-bellied beaker. The bees fretted lovingly over its surface. Perhaps an exhaled breath sent them off; whatever the cause, they lifted away to attend to other labors.

I’ll kiss it better .

That was the stupid thought that zipped through Luke’s mind while his eyes drank in this most sublime horror. Abby used to say it to Zach whenever he scraped his knee or stubbed a toe. As if something so simple as a kiss could salve all hurts.

Don’t worry, Alice, I’ll kiss it better. Just a kiss and it will all be okay…

Her neck bulged from the hive, webbed with syrup. Her face had been sliced open vertically and horizontally, the cuts intersecting at her nose; the flesh was skinned back from the center of her face in four triangular flaps, stretched out and stitched to the comb. Her scalp was split down the center, the skin peeled back in thick folds; each fold had been anchored to the hive on thin metal armatures that must have once been part of Westlake’s lab equipment. Her naked skull bone was dull as chalk.

Alice’s body had been teased apart and strung all through the hive. Luke understood that without actually seeing all the evidence. Every limb and vein and nerve stem woven throughout the comb, tended to by diligent drone bees. Luke could only hope that she’d been dead before any of this began. He could only—

Al’s eyelids snapped open. Her eyes were so very white in the flayed redness of her face. They rolled down languidly to meet Luke’s horrified gaze. She smiled, her teeth ripped out. The grin of a newborn.

Luke felt no fear at the sight. That emotion had burned out quite suddenly, like an overloaded electrical switch. He felt nothing but an ineffable hopelessness—which in its way was so much worse than fear.

The buzz grew louder— hungrier . The whispers drummed into Luke’s skull. Bees jigged nimbly around his head, alighting on his ears and hair. They returned to Alice, too, landing daintily on her skull, their antennae dancing lightly on the raw bone. Alice threw her head back, her mouth open as if in laughter; the flaps of her scalp strained threateningly against the metal armatures.

The scalpel was back in Luke’s hand. He took a step toward Alice. Sensing his intent, the bees darted at his face, their wings paper-cutting his flesh. He slapped at them and caught one solidly; it fell to the floor with a squeal and Luke stepped on it, enjoying the sound of it pulping under his boot. The hive came alive. Drones emptied out of it, their fat bodies squeezing from the comb.

Luke would kill Alice. Slash her throat open—one swift sideways swipe to let the blood out. If these putrid things killed him for that, so be it. But he’d kill her before they finished him.

Alice’s eyes filled with red as they hemorrhaged blood. They became the same color as the bees’ eyes. Her lips formed a single word.

“No.”

Luke’s hand stilled. Bees alit on his arms, friendly now, nuzzling his flesh with their furry abdomens.

Alice smiled—it was the same one he’d seen on Abby’s face at the hospital after Zachary was born.

The smile of a new mother.

The bees lifted off his arms, whirring into the dark. Luke followed them with the flashlight—

He saw it then. The final horror.

A huge translucent sac hung pendulant from the underside of the hive. It was the size of a trash bag—this was Luke’s first, incredibly domestic thought. The big orange ones he’d stuff with autumn leaves after Zachary had finished jumping in the piles Luke had so diligently raked.

Instead of orange, this sac was milky, strung with blooms of red and blue veins. The bees zipped around it in protective patterns, a thousand insect nursemaids. A few large bees tiptoed over its surface, which was convulsing with unnatural birth.

The sac hung in close proximity to the hole—which was far bigger than even the one in Clayton’s lab. Light poured around its edges.

By that light Luke could see something moving inside the sac. Limbs strained against its membrane the way stray elbows and knees will push against the canvas of a tent. Luke could barely glimpse the fearsome outline of whatever lay inside.

The sac ruptured. Thick, veiny broth gushed out. Luke shone the flashlight up to Alice. Her face was dented, her nose and cheeks forming a horrifying concavity—the pressure of this unnatural birth was caving her skull in.

But she was laughing. High, breathless screams of laughter.

Luke backed toward the hatch. There was no saving her. No saving LB. No saving no saving no saving—

The bees formed a corona around his head, their bodies beating at his back. Something breached the sac. Luke didn’t get a good look at it, which was a mercy. Only a sense of some gaunt and nightmarish limb slitting its own womb apart with mechanical ruthlessness, making a sound like a thousand knuckles cracking as it tore and gouged.

Luke’s heels hit the lip of the hatch, spilling him into the main lab.

The hatch swung shut on Alice’s deformed, gibbering laughter.

LUKE STARED DOWNat Clayton.

He did not know how he’d gotten here. Things had gone black after he’d left Westlake’s lab. The hands on the clock had melted, and next he’d found himself back here. He must have slipped into another dream-pool. All he remembered was this sense of having moved through a huge intestine. The walls flexing, pushing him through like a stubborn shred of last evening’s pot roast.

He’d lost the flashlight somewhere along the way. No matter: the station now pumped out a sick radiance all its own. The holes provided it.

His brother was propped awkwardly against the generator, which had been shoved almost flush to the wall. Had Clayton tried to sabotage it? Luke would kill him if he’d done that—that certainty rested easily in his mind. Kill him just as easy as breathing.