Nick Cutter - The Deep

Clayton’s face glowed in the dim. He looked even more horrible, as if some nightmare creature had gunged down the tunnel and sucked the blood out of Clayton’s throat. Luke pictured Clay’s neck winnowing and withering until it was no thicker than a pipe cleaner. This image made Luke smile.

“You killed it. The dog.” Luke’s voice was flat and toneless. Very much like his mother’s voice, he noted.

Clayton’s eyelids cracked. “Whu?”

“The dog. Little Fly. You pushed him through.”

Clayton’s head lolled. “That’s what it was for.”

Luke kicked him. Not hard, but not softly, either. “Get up.”

“No.”

“They’re all dead. Alice. Hugo. Westlake. The dogs. All killed, all taken. We’re the only ones left.”

Are you sure they’re really dead, Luke? Are you sure you’re really so alone?

Luke kicked his brother again, harder this time. “Get your ass up . We have to at least try to get out of here.”

“You try, Lucas. You always were the trier.”

Things nattered and clicked beyond the tunnel bend. Luke’s guts turned over—the fear had been replaced with a churning nausea.

“I want to see the sun again,” Luke said, disgusted at his petulance—he sounded just as he had as a boy, begging to be let into Clay’s lab. “I want to talk to Abby. Just one more time. Tell her how sorry I am. How much I miss her, and miss our boy.”

“Go, then.”

“There’s nothing down here, Clayton. Can’t you see that? There never was. This was all a trick. We chased it down here. We were tricked. You were tricked.”

Clayton hung his head. “I can’t go, Lucas.”

Luke didn’t feel anger—it would be as senseless as being angry at a dog for digging up a yard or a mallard for flying south for the winter. Genius or not, Clayton remained a creature of stupid instinct.

“You’ll die, then, you dumb bastard.”

Clayton shifted. Had the cap of bandages sloughed off his wound? The position of Clayton’s body shielded the stump from view.

“Please, Clay. I’ve never asked you for anything. Just this once.”

The clicks and scratches grew more insistent. Luke knelt beside Clayton. He’d pick him up and drag him into the Challenger if he had to. He’d wrestle and punch and choke and bite if it came to that; the sonofabitch only had one hand, anyway, and was drugged to the gills.

Luke gripped Clayton’s shoulders. His brother thrashed, suddenly furious.

“I said, I can’t. For Christ’s sake, Lucas, please don’t—”

But Luke wasn’t to be denied. His hands slipped lower, pinning Clayton’s arm to his side—Clayton issued a kittenish moan of protest—while his other hand brushed against the stump of his wrist…

Luke saw it then. No shock, no horror. His mind accepted the fact dully. In a way it made total sense.

The rope, the tube, the…

— umbilical cord —

…ran out of a fresh hole in the wall, a hole that had been obscured by the generator. The cord was bright red, same color as Alice’s eyes. It was attached to Clayton’s stump; thick bands wrapped the flesh of his forearm like tropical creepers.

Luke’s fingers had sunk into that livid, twitching rope. They’d gone in without resistance, as if into warm mud. He glanced at Clayton, terror leaping up his throat; Clayton stared back with a look of ineffable sorrow and perhaps, finally if too late, understanding.

“I’m sorry,” he said simply.

Luke tried to pull his fingers free. But he couldn’t; they were stuck in a warm, fleshy Chinese finger trap. He glanced at his brother, their eyes locking—

Luke felt his consciousness traveling into Clayton’s eyes, into his body, up his brainstem, and into his brain itself. His mind entered Clayton’s somehow; a hidden latch lifted, a secret trapdoor springing open. Luke’s mind was swallowed into Clayton’s own; a chilly metallic veneer settled over his thoughts—the way Clayton must see the world.

Next Luke was rocked by a vision of searing clarity that swept over him like a tidal wave, obliterating all consciousness.

A MEMORY.A shared one, but now Luke was seeing it from his brother’s perspective instead of his own.

They were kids again. Luke was eight years old—except he wasn’t Luke, not right now. He was Clayton, nestled inside Clayton’s body somehow, staring across the kitchen table at… well, himself. Their mother sat at the head of the table. It was night, blackness painted to the windows.

“I’ve got a job for you, my little soldiers,” she said slyly.

She put a small pot on the table. Beside it, a hacksaw and two paintbrushes.

Luke remembered this night. Oh yes, he remembered it well.

Clayton and Luke donned their boots and warm sweaters. It was so odd, watching the world through his brother’s eyes—a little like being strapped into an amusement park ride that he had no control over.

“You sure this is such a hot idea, Clay?” Luke heard his young self whisper once they were alone in the backyard, out of their mother’s earshot.

Luke felt the words forming in Clayton’s mouth before he spat them out.

“Shut up, dummy.”

They stole into their neighbor’s backyard. The branches of Mr. Rosewell’s crabapple tree stretched over the fence into their yard; its hard, inedible fruit always fell on their lawn. Their mother had asked—really, she’d ordered —Mr. Rosewell to trim its branches, or better yet hack the awful thing down. Mr. Rosewell, a retired mailman with a buzz cut who’d recently lost his wife, said to hell with that. They’d stared at each other over the fence; then their mother had spun, graceless in her bulk, and waddled back into the house.

The boys knelt at the base of the tree. Clayton spun the lid off the pot. Their mother had bought it at the local hardware store that afternoon; its label bore a picture of a wilted, cronelike tree.

Clayton notched thin cuts in the tree with the hacksaw. Luke watched his younger self cast worried glances toward Mr. Rosewell’s porch, as if in expectation the old mailman would step through the screen door, shotgun in hand.

The boys spat on the paintbrushes and painted the tree with whatever foul poison lay inside that pot. Then they dashed back to their house, eyes fairly shining with their deviltry.

“The two most precious boys in the whole world,” their mother said. She’d baked a “celebration pie.” Lemon meringue, Clayton’s favorite. Trapped inside his brother’s head, Luke could feel the sugary meringue dissolving on Clayton’s tongue.

The memory took a weird lurch forward. Suddenly it was daytime. Luke was staring at the crabapple tree through Clayton’s eyes. Its leaves were wilting. Gravity was treating it cruelly—punishing it, shoving it hard to the earth. Clayton picked up one of its fallen apples and took a bite. It was revolting, like sucking on a busted-open battery. Luke tried to get a grip on his brother’s mind, searching for something—a shred of pity for the tree, perhaps, which shouldn’t have had to die so horribly. He got nothing but a chilly backwash, as if he’d touched the insides of an industrial freezer.

The memory lurched again, the scene shifting. Clayton was in his basement lab now. A key rattled in the lock. He turned to see their mother filling the door frame. She wore her housecoat—the ratty one with the bleached-out stripes that gave her body the look of a moldering circus tent. The one she wore all day and night that stunk of her crazy sweat and bones.

“Go away.” Clayton’s voice was preternaturally calm, but Luke could feel an intense heat cooking at his brother’s temples. “Leave me alone.”